Pop fandom has always been about communion; about the hope that, as you crane your face towards the star on stage, you might meet their gaze and see that you are as precious to them as they are to you. Usually, of course, you’re not. But Earlon “Bucky” Bronco is not your average performer, and his newfound fans might just turn his life around.
Chicago native Bucky wrote and recorded a handful of glorious soul tracks as a schoolboy in 1967. With a band of tight session musicians behind him, a great voice and muscular good looks, his career looked set to soar. But after a James Brown concert in Detroit the following year, Bucky and his college-age brother Sess were assaulted. Sess was wrongfully imprisoned and a distraught Bucky retreated into “a little bit of prizefighting and a lot of drugs”, finding love with the sweetly pragmatic Maybellene.
When Maybellene dies in the 2020s, Bucky slumps, his life punctuated by pain from his failing hips and the release of the “golden hour”, when his prescription opioids kick in. Then comes a phone call. A group of English music fans want him to headline a Scarborough soul weekender.
Against his better judgment, Bucky flies to Yorkshire, accidentally leaving his entire pill stash in the elasticated flap of the seat in front of him, and meets longtime fan and festival administrator Dinah. She sees “a big old man with a limp that he disguised as an easygoing rolling shamble”; he sees a resolute fiftysomething with striking green eyes. Can Bucky push through his pain and withdrawal pangs to put on his first show in half a century? Will Dinah ever leave her oafish husband? And might romance spark between the longsuffering pair?
Myers has been on the rise in recent years, winning praise and awards for The Gallows Pole, a tale of crime and social change in 18th-century Yorkshire, and Cuddy, a time-shifting four-parter inspired by the seventh-century St Cuthbert. Rare Singles may be more contemporary, but, like 2022’s The Perfect Golden Circle, it shares a deep sense of place with Myers’s previous works. Scarborough looms large, with its thriving seagulls, mostly downbeat inhabitants and “rugged, ragged” surroundings. Myers is a former music journalist, and his descriptions of the northern soul scene, in which soul music has enjoyed a second life in the dancehalls and secondhand record shops of the north and Midlands, carry the passion of a true believer.
These themes give the novel’s human drama a rich backdrop. Myers has fun with the transatlantic culture clash: Bucky is perplexed by cold-water swimming and Bovril, but falls hard for roast potatoes. It’s not all successful; the narration shifts sometimes jarringly between registers, with Britishisms such as “queue” and “candy floss” cropping up in Bucky’s thoughts, alongside words like “maelstrom” and “substratum” that sit awkwardly with his avowed lack of book learning. Expository dialogue about music, Yorkshire or the way chimps mourn their dead sometimes feels as naturalistic as a Wikipedia entry.
But Myers can also write with vivid ease. He’s good on the numbing ecstasy of opioids (“like sinking in silk”), the trials of ageing and the “throaty whelp” of Scarborough’s army of seagulls. He evokes the shift in energy as Friday evening comes around and scents of perfume, aftershave and hot oil rise above the harbour’s “foundational fishy base note of decay”. There’s an enjoyable immediacy throughout, much of it provided by the thoroughly decent but desperate Bucky who, abroad for the first time and going cold turkey on the anniversary of his beloved wife’s death, is metaphorically – and eventually literally – all at sea.
The result is a book of affection and frustration that takes joy in its main characters and their passions while bemoaning economic and social stagnation. Yet, by the end, thanks to their own determination, a fictional rapper called Lil’ Widowmaker and the power of a good tune, things are looking up for Dinah and Bucky. Soul music, muses Dinah, is “entirely built around the notion that men are bad, and women know them to be bad, yet somehow can’t bring themselves to leave them”. It’s also about pain, loss and the possibility of redemption, and while Rare Singles doesn’t soar as high as Bucky’s still-pristine voice, it hits some fine notes.
• Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
