Book review: A Casual Life in Six T-shirts by Euron Griffith

Julie Brominicks

I read most of this scintillating book last Sunday on the National Express to London where I met two of my sisters (Linda and Hazel) for a Manu Chao gig in Brixton.

Manu Chao was our soundtrack once so this was significant, particularly for Linda, who had tickets for their last UK gig fourteen years ago; tickets which (being on childcare duty) she quietly gave away when Hazel’s waters broke.

On Sunday, Linda queued for merch. She wanted the T-shirt that marked this marriage of moment and music. This book is precisely about such communion (and Linda will be getting one for Christmas).

This is the memoir of Euron Griffith, native of Bethel. Euron is a poet, bi-lingual author and ex-Radio Wales employee, but this book is about him as music fan and musician. Advancing from an Eryri childhood through student life in Canterbury to Caerdydd (Cardiff) where he settled, A Casual Life charts his life pertaining to music, each chapter neatly – sometimes exquisitely obliquely – relating to a T-shirt.

In 1970s Bethel we find Euron flattening his hair to look like David Cassidy and waiting for a T-shirt that took so long to arrive he’d moved onto T-Rex.

‘I ripped open the packet and unfurled the T-shirt. On the front was a grainy and rather squashed black and white photo of David Cassidy. His head was the wrong shape, as if someone had projected it onto a potato.’

Magnificent

I was somewhat envious of Euron who was scouring Eryri for music by niche bands (like Led Zeppelin) he’d read about in NME, whereas I was only sometimes allowed to watch Top of the Pops.

When I finally got my first single (Kirsty MacColl’s ‘New England’) I didn’t dare play it because of the swearword but Euron had a dangerous Sex Pistols T-shirt. There’s even a photo of him wearing it next to his Mum, who is smiling. Euron’s childhood was magnificent. He was in a band. He was bright. He was set on Oxford University. He was going to be a star.

Things didn’t work out. Essentially and quite wonderfully, this memoir is a homage to not quite making it. He doesn’t get into Oxford. His band The Third Uncles does get a deal with Chrysalis Records; where they are given copies of their recording taped onto cassettes retrieved from a huge wheelie bin of discarded demo tapes.

‘I imagined being in one of those poor bands whose demos were now piled up like executed bodies in the bin. Were they waiting anxiously for the post every day for a response? In their dreams did they imagine the crack A&R team at Chrysalis were nodding their heads in appreciation at the genius of their tunes?’

Glastonbury

The big time eludes him, even though Liam from Hothouse Flowers agrees to wear a Third Uncles T-shirt on stage at Glastonbury. He sports it wrapped around his head before flinging it like a dying seagull into the crowd where it is torn in two and trampled into the dirt.

Anyone who has tried to sell anything they’ve made will recognise the humiliation of waiting, closed doors and false assumption from mates that you’re loaded. The Third Uncles split up in the end; they just got tired of trying. Leaving the reader to muse on success. Are enduring ebullient blooms more valuable than flowers that last but an hour?

This book is for fans of music and memoir. For anyone interested in Cymru (here we find the Eryri mountains as frontier to music beyond; though I did wonder how Euron never found Cob Records) and for anyone who appreciates good writing.

Up-tempo when all is exciting, rallentando when dreams begin to evaporate, and with sentences short and percussive as his university life unravels, it is clear we’re in the hands of a musician. Poet too. ‘Silence slithered into that little studio like a snake.’ ‘When Rob’s kit was fully miked up and fed through these monsters, he smashed his snare and the subsequent sonic shock caused three houses on the adjoining street to collapse.’

Pathos

And a comedian, whose wit is never cruel but always intelligent. Euron weaves stories with garrets and passages that return to the point and delivers a rich trove of observations that like all life’s funniest moments, teeter on the brink of pathos. David Cassidy groping under the sofa to retrieve a missing tape spool. The hamburger nailed to Euron’s door by his room-mate’s spurned lover.

I sat down to write this review after meeting my friend Jane Powell. I said I like to find books their rightful readership. Jane (who is as imaginative as she is intelligent) said the author constructs a beautiful scaffold that the reviewer can climb to see where the book came from and where it might go.

From this beautiful scaffold I can (courtesy of the internet) see that the real tricksy charm of A Casual Life is what Euron has chosen to omit. How close he got.

The Third Uncles supported The Las, Jesus Jones and Pulp. Record Collector Magazine described their anthology as ‘long on quality and surprisingly cohesive.’ Youtube footage reveals an earnest and erudite Euron (wearing an ‘Enjoy God’ T-shirt that doesn’t make this book) explaining the lyrics of Skint Jesus to Mark Goodier, and then there’s the music itself. Sniper in Your Heart. Blue Dress Day. Stay Together. It is really good.

In the acknowledgements, Euron credits Mick Felton of Seren Books who believed in his writing.

Before retiring, Mick wanted to turn the book I wrote into an audiobook. Seren. If ever there was good reason to venture into audio, this book; with its compelling narrative and actual musical soundtrack, is the one.

I can see where this book might go. Radio play, podcasts, Guardian Top Ten, Christmas bestseller, film rights. Of course it also might not, the big time being so elusive. Either way it’s rather brilliant.

A Casual Life in Six T-shirts by Euron Griffiths is published by Seren and is available from all good bookshops.