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How do you announce your return after a ten year break from releasing records?  Why naturally, you spray your every willing listener with a hail of metaphorical bullets.  Predictably spiky and unpredictably basic, as minimal as early Detroit techno and as compelling as ‘Blue Monday’ – Portishead’s ‘Machine gun’ does much more than its nominal job of whetting appetites for Third.

There are fourteen pieces of puff on the covers or inside the British paperback edition of David Peace’s The damned Utd (Faber), a fictional recreation of Brian Clough’s short tenure at the helm of Leeds United.  All of them are by men.

It’s safe to say that not many women are going to feel any pull to immerse themselves in the all-male world of a top-ranking football club in 1974.  For legal and no doubt more honourable reasons, Clough’s wife is a necessarily neutral figure, an adumbration against the flesh and blood portrayal of football’s greatest-ever motivator.  There is therefore nothing to leaven the weight of masculinity in the book, no Sam Tyler to challenge Gene Hunt with 21st century values, as in Life on Mars.  Instead – inevitably, unavoidably – the reader is fed a non-stop diet of ciggies, brandy, swearing and enmity (though it strikes me that I may just have listed the chief ingredients of a girls’ night out in the Leeds of 2008).

The hellfire and damnation of Clough’s six weeks at Leeds are cleverly intertwined with the glories and troubles of his career to that point, and a convincing portrayal of a monomaniacal manager emerges, one that lives up to the originality and simplicity of the idea – that a novel focussing on those forty-four days could be written from inside the head of the man at the centre of the whirlwind.  The episode, and Brian Clough’s subsequent achievements with Nottingham Forest, must have coloured the young David Peace’s understanding of the game, beautiful or otherwise, as much as it did not only mine, but a whole generation of technically undernourished football lovers and players.  I envy him the moment of inspiration in which the idea crystallised.

Now I’m off to read some chick-lit so that my feminine side can reassert itself.

While discussing ‘Phenomenal cat’ in his balanced and context-embracing take on The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (Continuum), Andy Miller excavates the following quote by Kinks’ bassist Pete Quaife:

‘I just let the whole flower people, L.S.D., love thing flow over my head.  I just laughed at it.  The trouble is it changed a lot of good blokes, who everybody rated, into creeps.  Instead of expanding minds, L.S.D. seemed to close minds into little boxes and made a lot of people very unhappy.  You still can’t beat going to the pictures, a couple of pints and a fag.  The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realisation of heaven.’

Which might be thought a somewhat passé thing to declare but for the fact that Pete was saying it in November 1967, directly after the Summer of Love.

Miller’s exploration of Ray Davies’ idealised village green is mind-expanding in the non-chemically induced sense, showing just how out of step with the times the Kinks became in the space of a few short months.  Evidently it didn’t help that the Kinks’ record label, Pye, were also at odds with the times.  Together with last minute changes of heart by the perfectionist Davies, the mockers were put on the record at the moment of its release, and only the passing of time has corrected the silence that greeted it.

Still I wish that ‘Mr. Songbird’ had made the Preservation Society’s final cut, and not the throwaway floweriness of that minor concession to the times, ‘Phenomenal cat’.  But the songs were up against the shifting preferences and inner conflicts of Ray Davies, and so, rather than a perfect LP, we are left with an almost perfect one.