Stairway To Nowhere by Luke James

$15.75

Paperback

“And another thing,” I ask Annette, “Is there any danger whatsoever of some sod from the press actually turning up and reviewing a show. I mean for U2 as much as for us.”

I know her well enough by now to see that she’s hiding something.

“What? “ I ask.

“Well, you’d probably have seen it sooner or later.” She hands me a copy of New Music News.

“Moonlight Club review,” she says, “page 23.”

FASHION/U2
Moonlight Club
London
May 23

There are plenty of medals for bravery but how many of these daring rocky types deserve them?
Not a lot, of course. Heroism usually comes cheap these days and all manner of glib entertainers can easily disguise their ordinariness with an array of manufactured noises, manipulated sufficiently to claim a noble art of implication, depth and, above all else, a boldness truly deserving to be treated as something very special. Indeed.
The two groups here tonight make a neat distinction between an honest integrity and this habitual conceit – U2, being former occupants of s desert Ireland but now future suppliers of Island discs, and Fashion, still at sea but doing quite “well”. (Pardon? Miles Copeland).
And why not! Fashion’s grim greyness has been perfected to reflect an ugly moderne world and yet it’s these decaying standards which ultimately permit such soulless garbage to be effective. There are always enough wallies around just waiting and wanting to trust pseudo pretence.
This Fashion show is a bald front really, a hollow conceit of implausible monotony by three stubbornly indifferent posers wandering in their own empty mystery of dressed up assumptions as to some kind of outrageous supple subtlety. Reward inevitably follows such inanity.

I ball the paper up and throw it on the floor.

“I mean it’s not even written in English, is it!” I yell.

“Course not,” Dik says, “It was written by a sodding journalist wasn’t it.”

“Who hires these people?” I demand.

“Other hacks who can’t write.” Mulligan says. “So they can write bollocks for people who can’t read.”

“Ah come on now lads," says Bono. "you shouldn’t be believing everything you read in the papers. It’s just someone’s opinion. What is it your man says, it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right, eh?”

I stare down at the crumpled review and notice that the band name has none of the accents or umlauts so strictly speaking they haven’t even spelled it right.