Some album reviews from memory: ELO ‘Greatest Hits’ (Jet Records, Cassette, UK 1979)

 

cw: mental anguish, dementia, suicidal ideation

 

The last time I saw my dad alive he was begging me, my mum and his social worker to be allowed home. His room overlooked a walled garden, the window directly facing a shed containing bright coloured plastic furniture.

He sat there pleading, confused and contrite over what he’d done. He’d done nothing really other than be the unfortunate recipient of dementia. He had the air of a chastised child as he cried, pleading that he’d behave himself from now on. I put my arm around him to comfort him even while I was his prosecuting witness. The following week the care homes went into lockdown ensuring that the only people allowed in were nursing staff and untested outpatients from hospitals already buckling under pressure from Covid. I think you can guess where this is going.

Evil Woman was a minor hit for ELO in the late 1970s. I was never too fussed by the song that reminded me of the Bee-Gees, although I preferred it to ‘Rockaria’ which I always fast-forwarded past or ‘Ma Ma Belle’ which scared me – I guess Jeff Lynne’s raw sexual potency is a scary thing for a child to be confronted by. The cassette was one of the four cassettes my dad kept in his car (the others being Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits, The Manhattan Transfer’s Greatest Hits and Adge Cutler and The Wurzels). 

Anyway this is a weak opening track: by rote 70s rock misogyny fed through the most expensive studio by the least imaginative hack. 

I’d just turned four when my dad went into hospital with his brain tumour. I was unaware of the unfolding drama except by his absence and the occasional replacement of mum by grandma. I learned later that they did by all accounts some pretty hardcore experimental surgery on him at Kings College Hospital. My only memory of it all is of waiting with my mum at the bottom of this stark, sleek stairwell in an open plaza as he was guided towards us like a returning cosmonaut. Dazed and bald. I wasn’t sure why he didn’t come home with us but a visit to the Wimpy in Brunswick Square quelled any concerns I might've had.

It’s fair to say the ELO’s Greatest Hits is poorly sequenced, “Livin’ Thing” feels like an even more lame retread of the preceding number – the only lyrics I can remember are the main refrain “It’s a livin’ thing… It’s a terrible thing…” and I’m not sure if the post-ironic recontextualization of the song as either period colour or guilty pleasure has coloured my memories of this song which are chiefly those of childhood boredom and longing for escape.

When I went mental in 2018, tried to kill myself and got myself sectioned I was convinced that my dad was a diddler. Despite this having as much basis as the other conviction that preoccupied me: that my girlfriend had been hand-picked by Thetans to destroy all human life (my own first), having been recruited by the Brighton branch of the Temple Ov Psychic Youth who were a Scientologist front and thereby also controlled the upper echelons of the NHS and psychiatric establishment. I wasn’t very well.

I think the idea came from this person who kept on telling me that my gender transition was my way of acting out the repressed trauma of having been abused as a child. Prior to my admission I was receiving upwards of fifty whatsapp messages a day, either very predictably calling me a groomer or trying to convince me that - since I was really just a regular male pervert - why could I not just accustom to being a 'feminine man'. This was among the most benign correspondence I received from them and cumulatively it contributed substantially to my losing my shit.

I don’t know if you can imagine this, but a single-sex psychiatric institution can be a tricky place to navigate as a trans woman, and I recommend you avoid it unless you really _really_ need it (don’t worry, you won’t have the option to be there unless you do really _really_ need it, and most likely won't be admitted however desperately you do). 

Safeguarding protocol means you are automatically put on one-to-one care if you are trans no matter what you're in there for. While this would normally be annoying and invasive, what this also does is make every other patient in the facility alert that they’ve got a wrongun on the ward.

“Pedo”, Diego coughed under his breath; “Ahem - is there anything you’d like to talk to me about, for my PERVERT records”. He’s been waiting outside my room; I think he just switched onto his shift covering me. “Excuse me?” I ask, knowing that despite being evidently mental I’m not at this point experiencing auditory hallucinations.

“Is there anything you’re like to talk about” he reassures me, safe in the knowledge that it’s very easy to gaslight an inmate at a psychiatric unit. I know better than to protest and I rattle off everything that’s on my mind in a veritable stream of deranged consciousness. Bits of it join up I’m sure but fundamentally I was trying to reassure him - and myself - that I’m really not a pervert, not at all: I was touched up when I was a kid and that’s what made me think I'm a woman. I think part of me believed it, seared as it had been across the media, drilled into me by my stalker, and desperate to appease this diminutive authoritarian in the hope that cooperation and constructing the right narrative might get me out sooner.

All but two of the other patients were sweet to me; Nicky took me under her wing and gave me roll ups. One of the most peaceful moments in my life I was sitting in the blazing sun in the sports court, woozy as fuck as the nicotine amplified the pregabalin, olanzapine and diazepam cocktail. This evanescent minute cushioned me and let me hold on to some misguided reassurance that there was benevolence in the universe. Mr Blue Sky played: the baroque choral bit. 

Nicky was a regular patient – her boyfriend was violent and she sliced herself to ease the pain. She had three kids with him. I hope she’s okay.

I don’t recall what other songs were on ELO’s greatest hits. My dad was a strange figure to me – for too long I resented him when in retrospect I think what I really resented was the general assumption that I was a male like he was and how I felt he expected me to be. I probably shouldn't have assumed. Like it or not, I inherited many of his traits – chiefly the disdain for authority that made him seethe with resentment at his bosses in the Civil Service and the impetuousness that made him quit his job and take the meagre early retirement deal he could negotiate despite the consequences. 

I miss his obstinacy, his pomposity and the opportunities it presented me to wind him up. Apparently he'd wanted a daughter and I just feel sorry that by the time I’d seen fit to grant that wish his dementia had advanced enough that I’m not sure he had the capacity to compute it. 

Vascular dementia isn’t a quick decline. I mean, he’d not really been right since his brain tumour some forty years earlier, but it was clear at least that there was something wrong when, in one of our perennial debates he opined how Thatcher did the country a favour by taming the unions. Incidents happened since then: erratic outbursts, grandiose delusions, 'disinhibition' (habitually knocking one out in the back garden). A few years later these would become more pronounced, more ongoing, constricting his mobility, losing control of his bodily functions until he couldn't swallow, viral pneumonia finishing the job in April 2020.