Sukhdev Sandhu enjoys Ben Watt's moving memoir of his parents' love story
Ben Watt, best known as one half of Everything But the Girl, says that one of the reasons he chose to study at Hull University at the start of the 1980s was because Philip Larkin was a librarian there. The melancholic poet's voice can be heard in the very first line of Romany and Tom: "We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives – the downhill part." And indeed the book begins with Watt's octogenarian father, Tom, in hospital, bronchial and leaking memories, reliant – if not always gratefully – on Romany, his ever more infirm wife.
This is a love affair told in reverse. Romany's great-grandfather was a horse-dealer and deer-stealer, a member of one of England's biggest Roma families. Her father was a Methodist minister who, under the name "Romany of the BBC", recorded a Children's Hour nature show that won many fans including the young Richard Attenborough and Terry Waite. She started out as a stage actor, and later became a celebrity interviewer and writer for Katie Boyle's hugely popular TV Times agony column. ("All black dogs, love rats and adult virgins," was how she once described it to her son. "And tips on how to keep your china sparkling.")
Tommy Watt, from working-class Glasgow, was a composer and bandleader who won an Ivor Novello award in 1957, was briefly leader of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra, and a prominent figure in Centre 42, an experimental alliance between trade unions and leftwing artists. He recorded for George Martin's Parlophone label, but pop music's ascendancy destroyed the market for jazz big bands. By the early 1970s he was a jobbing arranger for the likes of the Beverley Sisters, before giving that up to become a decorator. Romany would be watching TV when she spotted someone they both knew: "Oh, look, Tom, Honor Blackman: you made a nice job of her downstairs loo."
Watt draws on his mother's notes and letters for much of the back story to their relationship. Romany and Tom were both married when they first met – she had four young children, including triplets. One of her diary entries, typically sharp and funny, records an adulterous encounter: "March 3: Prelims. Scones for tea … Unromantic humorous musical medley on out-of-tune piano. Offer of gin. Offer of another gin. Shoes off. The rest is history." She also kept her first husband's letters, and it's hard not to be moved reading the one he sent on the eve of their divorce that apologises "for the pain and boredom I have caused you".
Although modern pop stars, in Britain at least, seem to be getting posher, they tend to go to some lengths to obscure that fact. Watt's parents, settled in leafy Barnes and later Oxford, are probably more bohemian than bourgeois. Nevertheless, Romany and Tom is full of references to such anti-rock'n'roll places as Fernhill and Tockington, memories of trestle tables and earwigs found in bucolic pub gardens, and stories about the great and the good who lived nearby – arts broadcaster Humphrey Burton (his wife Gretel "scared me with a spaghetti carbonara"), radical historian of Africa Basil Davidson ("I repeatedly damaged his fruit netting with my football"), and Lord Woolf, Master of the Rolls ("I lost a shuttlecock over his garden fence").
Watt admits to wishing he could winch his parents from their bickering lives and transform them into "well-rounded and contented members of the imaginary happy middle class". But with their tics and disappointments, their frustrations and their drinking, they're as happy as the characters in a Mike Leigh film. One childhood memory he recounts may well be both the saddest and most English thing I've ever read: "We went down to the seafront one afternoon and my parents had a big row in public near the crazy golf. Then my mum walked off, and my dad took me for sausage and beans in the theatre canteen, and I ate while he smoked and stared out of the window."
Watt portrays himself, sometimes deliberately, as worried, an earnest striver. The book is about him almost as much as his parents, and gradually he begins to disclose what he regards as his own fatherly failings. All the same, this book reveals him as a comic writer of rare talent. A scene in which his father, a blind man and a chef break out of their care home on Finchley Road to get some drinks in at a nearby pub could have found its way into Edgar Wright's film The World's End. Romany asks him what the notices had been for an Everything But the Girl show: "Notices were what you got for performing in the theatre after the war, Mum."
Throughout he displays the same almost forensic attention to detail as he did in Patient (1996), his memoir of a life-threatening illness, at one point describing tumblers and mugs that had "the frosted rings brought on by dishwashers used without rinsing agent and salt". More tenderly he recalls his grandmother's "thick nylon stockings the colour of strong tea, the sugar-dusted travel sweets in her handbag, how she always spread her marmalade to the very outer edges of her toast".
Watt's earliest records – including his 1983 LP North Marine Drive – are neglected classics of the post-punk era. It's a shame he doesn't discuss them because when he does write about music he's consistently excellent. His description of jazz musician Don Weller – "a vast vagabond of a man with a dishevelled beard and a tenor saxophone that spat splinters"– could be straight out of But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer's 1991 superlative jazz study.
A latter-day house DJ and record-label boss, he's also terrific at evoking club culture: "Two or three hours of indulgence and escape; glass-rattling bass and air-punching exuberance, burnished with moments of pathos and blurred melancholy; and all the time the drum, the drum; a ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it; a fire that gets stoked then self-sustains."
"A ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it" actually sounds like a good description of a family. Neither sentimental nor savage, yet often wise, moving and entertaining within the same paragraph, Romany and Tom is a major achievement to rival any of Watt's recordings. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
Ben Watt, best known as one half of Everything But the Girl, says that one of the reasons he chose to study at Hull University at the start of the 1980s was because Philip Larkin was a librarian there. The melancholic poet's voice can be heard in the very first line of Romany and Tom: "We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives – the downhill part." And indeed the book begins with Watt's octogenarian father, Tom, in hospital, bronchial and leaking memories, reliant – if not always gratefully – on Romany, his ever more infirm wife.
This is a love affair told in reverse. Romany's great-grandfather was a horse-dealer and deer-stealer, a member of one of England's biggest Roma families. Her father was a Methodist minister who, under the name "Romany of the BBC", recorded a Children's Hour nature show that won many fans including the young Richard Attenborough and Terry Waite. She started out as a stage actor, and later became a celebrity interviewer and writer for Katie Boyle's hugely popular TV Times agony column. ("All black dogs, love rats and adult virgins," was how she once described it to her son. "And tips on how to keep your china sparkling.")
Tommy Watt, from working-class Glasgow, was a composer and bandleader who won an Ivor Novello award in 1957, was briefly leader of the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra, and a prominent figure in Centre 42, an experimental alliance between trade unions and leftwing artists. He recorded for George Martin's Parlophone label, but pop music's ascendancy destroyed the market for jazz big bands. By the early 1970s he was a jobbing arranger for the likes of the Beverley Sisters, before giving that up to become a decorator. Romany would be watching TV when she spotted someone they both knew: "Oh, look, Tom, Honor Blackman: you made a nice job of her downstairs loo."
Watt draws on his mother's notes and letters for much of the back story to their relationship. Romany and Tom were both married when they first met – she had four young children, including triplets. One of her diary entries, typically sharp and funny, records an adulterous encounter: "March 3: Prelims. Scones for tea … Unromantic humorous musical medley on out-of-tune piano. Offer of gin. Offer of another gin. Shoes off. The rest is history." She also kept her first husband's letters, and it's hard not to be moved reading the one he sent on the eve of their divorce that apologises "for the pain and boredom I have caused you".
Although modern pop stars, in Britain at least, seem to be getting posher, they tend to go to some lengths to obscure that fact. Watt's parents, settled in leafy Barnes and later Oxford, are probably more bohemian than bourgeois. Nevertheless, Romany and Tom is full of references to such anti-rock'n'roll places as Fernhill and Tockington, memories of trestle tables and earwigs found in bucolic pub gardens, and stories about the great and the good who lived nearby – arts broadcaster Humphrey Burton (his wife Gretel "scared me with a spaghetti carbonara"), radical historian of Africa Basil Davidson ("I repeatedly damaged his fruit netting with my football"), and Lord Woolf, Master of the Rolls ("I lost a shuttlecock over his garden fence").
Watt admits to wishing he could winch his parents from their bickering lives and transform them into "well-rounded and contented members of the imaginary happy middle class". But with their tics and disappointments, their frustrations and their drinking, they're as happy as the characters in a Mike Leigh film. One childhood memory he recounts may well be both the saddest and most English thing I've ever read: "We went down to the seafront one afternoon and my parents had a big row in public near the crazy golf. Then my mum walked off, and my dad took me for sausage and beans in the theatre canteen, and I ate while he smoked and stared out of the window."
Watt portrays himself, sometimes deliberately, as worried, an earnest striver. The book is about him almost as much as his parents, and gradually he begins to disclose what he regards as his own fatherly failings. All the same, this book reveals him as a comic writer of rare talent. A scene in which his father, a blind man and a chef break out of their care home on Finchley Road to get some drinks in at a nearby pub could have found its way into Edgar Wright's film The World's End. Romany asks him what the notices had been for an Everything But the Girl show: "Notices were what you got for performing in the theatre after the war, Mum."
Throughout he displays the same almost forensic attention to detail as he did in Patient (1996), his memoir of a life-threatening illness, at one point describing tumblers and mugs that had "the frosted rings brought on by dishwashers used without rinsing agent and salt". More tenderly he recalls his grandmother's "thick nylon stockings the colour of strong tea, the sugar-dusted travel sweets in her handbag, how she always spread her marmalade to the very outer edges of her toast".
Watt's earliest records – including his 1983 LP North Marine Drive – are neglected classics of the post-punk era. It's a shame he doesn't discuss them because when he does write about music he's consistently excellent. His description of jazz musician Don Weller – "a vast vagabond of a man with a dishevelled beard and a tenor saxophone that spat splinters"– could be straight out of But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer's 1991 superlative jazz study.
A latter-day house DJ and record-label boss, he's also terrific at evoking club culture: "Two or three hours of indulgence and escape; glass-rattling bass and air-punching exuberance, burnished with moments of pathos and blurred melancholy; and all the time the drum, the drum; a ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it; a fire that gets stoked then self-sustains."
"A ritual where the room is bigger than any one individual within it" actually sounds like a good description of a family. Neither sentimental nor savage, yet often wise, moving and entertaining within the same paragraph, Romany and Tom is a major achievement to rival any of Watt's recordings. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
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