It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track by Ian Penman Review

Ian Penman is a music critic and this book collects several of his most brilliant essays on such musical titans as Charlie Parker, Elvis and Prince, looking at their rollercoaster lives and legacies. I’ve never heard of or read anything by Penman before but I was really taken with It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (which is a line from Auden’s poem Walks).

One of the things I like about essay collections is that I can, and do, jump straight to the essay that interests me the most, then jump around reading the ones that appeal to me, until I end up with the remainder, which - as it does here - usually turn out to be the worst in the collection. So let’s start at the bottom and end on a high.

The first essay in the book is the worst - glad I didn’t start with this (I went straight to the James Brown essay) as it might’ve put me off reading the rest! It’s about Mods, who were dorks in the ‘60s obsessed with clothes and scooters. The Who are associated with them, not least because they made a movie about that clique, Quadrophenia - one of the crummiest movies I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing about Penman’s essay that interested me in that subculture, informative though it was.

The only other two essays I didn’t totally love were about John Fahey and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. Never heard of Fahey before but he was apparently a ‘60s folk singer who did good work early on in his career before turning into a bitter old man - a fate that also happened to Fagen. I only know the band Steely Dan by name and still remained not intrigued enough to listen to their music. Neither artists’ lives were all that compelling to read about either.

Ok: onto the gold! Which is basically everything else. These essays’ subjects are James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and Prince. Barring Charlie Parker (I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy jazz - it just sounds like drivel to me), I like some of these artists’ songs but I wouldn’t say I was a fan of any of them. And while Penman is often brilliant at describing their music on paper, it’s reading about their lives that really grabbed me.

Like Parker’s insane heroin intake over the years, ending in an overdose at 34; Brown’s despicable behaviour to his nearest and dearest for decades; how Parker, Sinatra and Elvis all had strong mothers who played a massive part in their lives; how Brown, Elvis and Prince seemed to stave off drug abuse for a large part of their careers before getting into it full-on in their later years (culminating in death for both the king and Prince).

That’s the benefit of a good review (these essays were all commissioned articles reviewing books on these artists, buoyed up by Penman’s extensive musical knowledge): you can learn quite a bit about the subjects being reviewed without having to read an entire book on them. It helps that I didn’t know much about any of them either, so a lot of the details were new to me and made the essays that much more captivating.

It also helps that a lot of the subjects were utter bastards - Brown and Prince were especially heartless - because there’s nothing more fun to read about than a real villain. And also trying to understand how they became that way (rotten childhoods, usually).

Penman isn’t just a great writer who relates stories and information on his subjects in a riveting way - he incorporates other fascinating subjects into his essays. Like Herculine Barbin, the 19th century French intersex person, or the growing conservativeness of feted jazz critic Stanley Crouch and its impact on his musical judgments as he got older, or the seedy high society drug den run by a rogue Rothschild, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. You end up learning more than just about the advertised figures and gain a broader cultural understanding through this vivid context as well.

Besides three of the (thankfully) shorter essays, the majority of the pieces collected here are so high quality and enjoyable - consistently informative and interesting, even if you’re a casual fan of the artists covered, like I am, and written in this very smooth, beguiling, and erudite, yet accessible, prose. Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track is a marvellous collection of musical essays - definitely worth checking out.