by Anwyn Crawford

Two very different books about what we might call British voyeurism have caught my attention over the past while. The first is Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s Dial M For Murdoch (Allen Lane, $29.95), an account of the phone hacking scandal that brought down The News of the World and exposed a deep (though not-so-secret) vein of corruption running through the British establishment, from parliament to police to the Murdoch press. Given that the Levenson enquiry is still up and running, it’s rather too early in many respects to be writing a book about the whole unseemly mess; on the other hand, this book serves as both a clear introduction for the curious, and fills in some gaps for those who have been following the story more closely.

From a trivial gossip column in 2005 about Prince William’s injured knee, which tipped off the royals to the fact that their phones were being hacked, to Rebekah Brooks’ arrest early this year for perverting the course of justice, Dial M For Murdoch covers all the pertinent developments in the story up until April 2012. It’s easy to read, though the authors’ decision to refer to themselves in the third person is a little jarring, particularly when ‘Tom Watson’ keeps popping up on various parliamentary cross committees. But he, along with The Guardian’s Nick Davies, has proved one of Murdoch’s more indefatigable and fearless opponents, and until Davies writes his own book about the scandal—probably several years away yet—this one will serve.

And so to a very different British figure, one who rose to prominence during the Blair years when the cosy relationship between parliament and press seemed unlikely to ever end. A regular customer at the Blackheath store recently asked me who I would have lunch with, if I could choose anyone, and I immediately answered ‘Jarvis Cocker’. That’s because I’m quite shallow and just want to spend time with the idols of my youth, but for those of you unfamiliar with his talents, Jarvis Cocker fronted the truly great Pulp, has more recently helmed an outré Sunday radio program on BBC Radio 6, and appears regularly in my dreams. Ahem. Cocker’s Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics (Faber & Faber, $29.99) gathers together some of the wittiest, most socially observant lines in pop music—this side of Morrissey, at least—into a hardcover book as tasty as a chocolate orange. With lines like ‘I saw you waiting at the stop in your crochet halter top and your sky-blue trainer bra’, Jarvis is a teenage malcontent turned unlikely sex symbol, like all the best pop stars. As he writes in his introduction, ‘I was struck by the massive discrepancy between the way relationships were depicted in the songs I’d heard on the radio and the way I was experiencing them in real life (could have been my technique, I suppose). So I decided… to put in all the awkward bits.’ Not to mention that genuinely angry lyrics like Common People (the best song of the 1990s, in my humble opinion) and Cocaine Socialism skewered the prevailing mood of Blairite/Murdoch mutual congratulation long before anyone else thought to. My hero.