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Falling Angels
Picture the 80s, what comes into your mind? Riots, coalminers striking, Thatcher standing up in parliament looking like the heartless bitch she was? Or maybe it was barrow boys from Essex who’d suddenly turned into millionaires snorting cocaine off the bum cheeks of some high class escort. Might even be Live Aid, the rich and famous finding a conscience, or trying to sell records, depends if you’re a cynic or not. A decade which had a cloud of grey hanging over it, playing out to a background of synthesisers and the shouts of an unemployed, disaffected youth.
The 90s began with that cloud still hanging over it. Thatcher went and people cheered, jobs began to turn up. The sun was beginning to shine through those clouds, ecstasy was all the rage, kids dancing the nights away in the fields of the home counties while the Old Bill were led on a merry dance. We’d forgotten about Africa as well, that charity thing was all a bit too 80s. Perms were no more, shoulder pads dispensed with. By the middle of the decade the sky was blue, Britain was cool again, Oasis, Blur, even the prime minister was cool, he hadn’t bombed another country yet. It’s amazing how a person can go from a saviour to a liar in the space of a few years.
When you’re a kid a lot passes you by, growing up in the 80s you didn’t care that the Russians might be coming. They were far away behind that imaginary curtain the teacher was telling you about in history. The miners were too far away, you didn’t really care what they thought about. Some would say that about sums up Londoners, lost in their own world, all outside it irrelevant because the closest you’ve been to coal mines and green fields is the time your old man tried to take you away on holiday but the car broke down somewhere just past Watford so you spent the summer kicking a ball about in the concrete jungle you called home.
If you’re like me, you’ll have the piss taken out of you for having a bit about you, wanting to go to university. Not that you know why you’re going to university because you have no idea what you’ll do after, but it sounds like fun. Getting stoned while discussing Sartre in some flat in Brixton, thinking you’re cool with your Che Guevara t-shirt and Bob Marely flag draped across the wall. None of you are any more revolutionaries or capable of finding hidden meanings in music than the average person but you like to think you can change the world. It’s the drugs ain’t it?
People are transient, they drift in and out of your life, forgotten until some event, a piece of music or a glimpse of a stranger triggers your memory. You look back with happiness, anger, longing, sadness, nostalgia. And then some other thing in a world over saturated with stimulation diverts your attention. An advert with a load of ‘lads’ in a pub putting a bet on, a fat geezer shouting at the screen telling you to be responsible while you contemplate putting your weeks wages on United to win at home because they would never lose. See, that memory has gone.
Falling Angels, the story of four friends in the summer of 1997, love, drugs, crime, mockneys, cockneys and Roscoe Ocean.
The 90s began with that cloud still hanging over it. Thatcher went and people cheered, jobs began to turn up. The sun was beginning to shine through those clouds, ecstasy was all the rage, kids dancing the nights away in the fields of the home counties while the Old Bill were led on a merry dance. We’d forgotten about Africa as well, that charity thing was all a bit too 80s. Perms were no more, shoulder pads dispensed with. By the middle of the decade the sky was blue, Britain was cool again, Oasis, Blur, even the prime minister was cool, he hadn’t bombed another country yet. It’s amazing how a person can go from a saviour to a liar in the space of a few years.
When you’re a kid a lot passes you by, growing up in the 80s you didn’t care that the Russians might be coming. They were far away behind that imaginary curtain the teacher was telling you about in history. The miners were too far away, you didn’t really care what they thought about. Some would say that about sums up Londoners, lost in their own world, all outside it irrelevant because the closest you’ve been to coal mines and green fields is the time your old man tried to take you away on holiday but the car broke down somewhere just past Watford so you spent the summer kicking a ball about in the concrete jungle you called home.
If you’re like me, you’ll have the piss taken out of you for having a bit about you, wanting to go to university. Not that you know why you’re going to university because you have no idea what you’ll do after, but it sounds like fun. Getting stoned while discussing Sartre in some flat in Brixton, thinking you’re cool with your Che Guevara t-shirt and Bob Marely flag draped across the wall. None of you are any more revolutionaries or capable of finding hidden meanings in music than the average person but you like to think you can change the world. It’s the drugs ain’t it?
People are transient, they drift in and out of your life, forgotten until some event, a piece of music or a glimpse of a stranger triggers your memory. You look back with happiness, anger, longing, sadness, nostalgia. And then some other thing in a world over saturated with stimulation diverts your attention. An advert with a load of ‘lads’ in a pub putting a bet on, a fat geezer shouting at the screen telling you to be responsible while you contemplate putting your weeks wages on United to win at home because they would never lose. See, that memory has gone.
Falling Angels, the story of four friends in the summer of 1997, love, drugs, crime, mockneys, cockneys and Roscoe Ocean.
436 pages, Paperback
Published March 28, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 20, 2021
My Favourite Author!
This is the fourth book from Sean Hogan I have read and I think it's perhaps my favourite, this one or Queens Park to the Elephant. The thing I love so much about this writer is the way he creates and develops his character s and the interwoven relationships they develop throughout the course of the story. Really speaks to me on a deeper level than most other literature. He writes for me in a beautiful way about human nature. There is great integrity and empathy for life in these pages. It reminds me of a modern day of John Steinbeck if Steinbeck was to write about the council estates of London. Absolutely timeless work.
This is the fourth book from Sean Hogan I have read and I think it's perhaps my favourite, this one or Queens Park to the Elephant. The thing I love so much about this writer is the way he creates and develops his character s and the interwoven relationships they develop throughout the course of the story. Really speaks to me on a deeper level than most other literature. He writes for me in a beautiful way about human nature. There is great integrity and empathy for life in these pages. It reminds me of a modern day of John Steinbeck if Steinbeck was to write about the council estates of London. Absolutely timeless work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review