Expectant Danorak
Marcus Berkmann
You have played all the new CDs you got for Christmas and you think, right, what next? Sometimes I worry that I have the attention span of a gnat, but fortunately I forget about it pretty quickly and start worrying about something else instead. New year, new records, exciting new young bands who sound a bit like other bands from long ago. Gnats and goldfish may not be too sure what their names are, but even they can remember the music of their youth. Trouble is, I prefer the musicians of my youth performing the music of my youth, and I am beginning to accept that I always will. A new record by a promising band? Yeah, well, fine. But a new record by one of my all-time heroes? Now you have my attention.
So this week I am indeed frothing with excitement, as a hero of mine is making one of his periodic comebacks. It has been three years since my favourite band Steely Dan released their last album. I have played it to within a micron of its life, and gone back to the old 1970s albums as usual. Nothing will now match the perfection of Aja (1977) and the flawed grandeur of Gaucho (1980), but we Danoraks don’t care about that: we’ll listen to anything that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen produce. There is an emotional connection here, even if it’s rather one-sided. I have two friends who feel the same about Richard Thompson (although they are currently incommunicado, as they have both just bought the new five-CD box set of live rarities and out-takes). For others it’s Elvis Costello, and for one it’s Roy Harper. Privately — or not so privately after a few drinks — we regard each other’s tastes as shockingly poor, even pitiable. Broadly, though, we sympathise with each other’s plight. We have to; no one else does.
Walter and Donald, meanwhile, have suspended Steely Dan activities for a while and started recording solo albums. I know this because, having been on an email list for Steely Dan’s newsletter, I suddenly got an email last week from Donald Fagen. Well, obviously it wasn’t from him personally, but I have to admit that my heart skipped a beat, and I can’t quite bring myself to delete it, even though I have read it a few times. Walter, it emerges, hasn’t finished his album yet, but Donald’s is out in early March. It’s his third solo album, after The Nightfly (1982) and Kamakiriad (1993). The first one was about youth, the second about middle-age, and this one is ‘about endings’. (By the way, I hope you like the casual way I put ‘early March’. The release date is actually in my diary, underlined.) And in a way, I know that this is the best bit. Looking forward to the album is almost certain to be more fun than playing the damn thing. I played Kamakiriad maybe 30 times before I concluded, with tearful reluctance, that Donald’s muse had flown off and was now lying on a beach somewhere, slurping cocktails. A friend who has heard it says that the new one is looser and ‘less noodly’, but he is not really a fan, so he has less riding on it. We Danoraks, by contrast, are holding our breath. We are not hoping for anything terribly different from what we have heard before. We are hoping for something rather like what we have heard before, but somehow different, and astoundingly, lifeaffirmingly brilliant. We don’t seek the shock of the new. It’s the very mild surprise of the old we want.
And we will stretch this pleasurable fantasy until the last possible moment. On 7 March we shall go out, buy the CD, walk home rather more swiftly than usual, make a cup of tea (deferment of gratification, or possibly nerves), switch on the CD player. And press play.
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