• ‘Rare Singles’ by Benjamin Myers. •
• Review by Wendy Erskine •
Imagine for a minute that you’re at Leeds-Bradford Airport, just off an early flight. As you file through arrivals with everyone else, a few people are waiting. You half-notice the taxi drivers in their livery, holding up the names of their pre-booked passengers. You walk past reunited family members hugging each other. But then, you see a woman, about fifty years of age, shifting from one foot to the other. She’s holding a piece of paper in front of her and it bears the words ‘EARLON ‘BUCKY’ BRONCO: KING OF SOUL.’ Well, I know what I’m doing. I’ll be hanging around surreptitiously until I can witness this particular meeting.
This is Bucky from Chicago, invited, in the world of the novel Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers, all the way across the Atlantic to play for an audience at a northern soul night. And it will be his first performance in near fifty years. Bucky’s received an unexpected invitation from someone he’s never met, to come somewhere he has never heard of. England, to him, seemed a place as distant as an enchanted land, ‘an ancient kingdom, swirling in mists.’ But it’s destination Scarborough, where northern soul aficionados regard his 1960s singles on Sweet Chariot Records – ‘Until the Wheels Come Off’, ‘The Bees & the Birds’ and the holy grail, super-rare ‘All the Way Through to the Morning’ as masterpieces. Until recently, they didn’t even know he was alive. Was he in a religious cult? Had he OD’d or been killed in Vietnam? Had he lost a leg in a bank robbery? No: all along this king of soul had simply been languishing in obscurity, if that’s how we can describe actually trying to get by in life. And now, Dinah Shore, who greeted him at the airport, is whisking Bucky off to the Majestic Hotel, a place where the windows are nailed shut and phantasmagoric sea-gulls circle outside. ‘Sorry, but come on,’ she says, incredulously. ‘There’s an actual legend of soul sitting in my crappy little banger.’
Dinah’s husband is a blueprint of the obnoxious boor and her lazy disaffected son’s idea of tidying up is a bit of bong maintenance. The transcendental experience of a northern soul night is for her a magical escape. What is important as well, Myers points out, is the camaraderie of the scene. Dinah explains how a weekender is communal in nature: ‘Bodies perspiring together is not something that can be experienced at home.’ For her it’s not all about record swapping and gossip: ‘it’s about the lasting friendships that are formed – real, lifelong friendships, sometimes.’
In some ways, I do think Benjamin Myers can be seen as a kind of laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection between quite disparate people, such as Robert and Dulcie in The Offing, or Calvert and Redbone in The Perfect Golden Circle. Friendship as a thematic concern runs risks. It can lack the physical charge of the romantic relationship. Sometimes, stories with this focus can be as wholesome and twee as a story in The People’s Friend. But, done well, a consideration of friendship feels so totally adult – and Benjamin Myers handles it better than pretty much anyone. Dinah and Bucky, in the days leading up to Bucky’s performance, develop a profound, unshowy connection. He’s not just the king of soul. She’s not just the woman who picks him up. Dinah divines that Bucky requires from her ‘support and something else, something deeper.’ And, in turn, it’s obvious that Bucky too has a reciprocal response to Dinah, this layered, complex woman who at night stared into the darkness until it ‘came alive in colours that danced behind her closed lids.’
Bucky also, it has to be said, requires drugs. He is addicted to the opioids which he uses to numb the pain in his hip sockets, which burn ‘as if molten metal has been poured into them.’ An important driver of the novel is our speculation on whether Bucky will be able to procure the kind of medication that will allow him to perform on stage. Is he actually going to be able to do it? After all these years and after finally finding adoring crowd, can he actually sing these songs? But his addiction isn’t used simply as a means of ratcheting up tension. Dinah, as she surveys those around her, wonders if in fact we aren’t all addicted to something: booze, weed, betting, whatever. Her conclusion is that everyone is to some extent screwed up, from the top Northern Soul DJ who did a stretch for armed robbery to Stevie Simms, at twenty years of age digging up IEDs in Helmand Province and now walking around the town shouting at lamp posts. Dinah and Bucky talk about grief. A while ago, Bucky lost his wife, Maybellene. Vocabulary, he reasons, has not yet caught up with death: the feeling is too expansive and unexplainable. ‘Grief is the price of love,’ Dinah says. The novel is quietly, resolutely insistent in its observation that people’s lives are full of sadness and complication.
And connection and love, music and dancing.
On the dancers’ shirts are ‘sweat drenched Rorschach patterns’ as they go ‘knee-dropping the pains of ageing away.’ There’s energy and glow and joy. Nostalgia for the music of the past is seen as temporary emancipation from the trials of the present, whatever they might be. A little confession here: I once wrote a story about someone not dissimilar to Bucky, a crooner called Drew Earl Haig, now working in IT, who gets a call to sing at a celebration in mid-Ulster. It’s nostalgic too for sure, but that’s because Drew’s song has ended up as the theme tune for a paramilitary death squad for whom it brings back the ‘glories’ of their killing sprees. (What can I say? I’m doomy by nature!) So how beautiful here to read something so much more affirming and full of light, and to have music, ephemeral as it might be, presented as precious and transformational. Soul music, Dinah says, is grounded in the expression of pure emotion. It’s a comfort for some and utterly essential for others. ‘Three minutes of joy,’ she says.
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‘Rare Singles’ is published by Bloomsbury Circus on 1 August. Signed copies can be found in the Heavenly Recordings Bandcamp store.
Benjamin Myers is an award-winning writer, whose work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry and journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages. Myers has received support from the K Blundell Trust, the Royal Society Of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and Arts Council England. He is a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature.He was born in Durham, UK, in 1976 and currently lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.
Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her debut collection, Sweet Home, was published by The Stinging Fly Press in Sept 2018 and Picador in 2019, and has been translated into Italian and Arabic and optioned for TV. It won the 2020 Butler Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2019 and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019. Wendy’s second collection of stories, ‘Dance Move’, was published in February 2022.