Hey Joe
Galia Admoni, Somebody Should Have Pressed Record
Strange Region, 102pp, £13.00, ISBN 9781739784041
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Joe Gilgun came towards the light in Shane Meadows' period-piece film This is England (2006) as Woody, the good-natured leader of a skinhead gang in the era when such a collective might, without contradiction, be a unifying force for black and white, male and female. He was kind-hearted enough to open the group's arms to a troubled, bullied boy with a struggling widowed mother, hot enough to be Vicky McClure's love interest, and funny enough to let us believe that the menace of fascist manipulators preying on youthful energies might not be terminal.
He had done the rounds of the soaps — Corrie, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale — and would go on to create for himself the role of Vinnie O'Neill, chancer-in-chief of a band of amateur small-town criminals in Sky One's Brassic (2019-25), a part deepened by the character's bipolar disorder and other mental health tussles. In his youth, Gilgun had an austere, angular, pallid look, the kind of complexion for which sunlight could be dangerous, and a nervy intensity leavened by reflexive piss-taking. Born in Lancashire, he had gone to theatre school early, working as a plasterer until the breaks came. Now in his early forties, he still looks put together from varying parts of unimpressed brooding and reassuring glint, moody without thuggery, someone who could talk to you without making you feel self-conscious — or only a little.
In something like this guise, he appears on the opening page of Galia Admoni's new book-length poetic work, Somebody Should Have Pressed Record. From a passing reference in a message exchange ('you know who's weirdly hot?'), and a clip from Brassic on phone loop, he grows like the genie from the lamp into a three-dimensional presence in the narrator's home. 'By Friday, he's in your kitchen, shirtless, elbow-deep in a pan of burnt onions. He does not comment on your outfit, but you feel seen.' He will spend the next hundred pages there, talking back, smirking, smarming, as obliging as a fantasy friend has a duty to be, including those moments where he is disobliging, exasperating, enough to feel real.
Without needing to be told, he already knows how much consciousness of inadequacy, of disappointment, the speaker feels for herself. He understands the wearily easy metaphor — 'the vintage denim jacket that fits like failure' — and even when he says things that could be so ominous, such as 'I'm your bastard', he says them because she has licensed him to say them. A parallel with the auto-destructive work of the conceptual artist Gustav Metzger, who died in 2017, occurs to her. Like Metzger's output, Joe is 'an artwork that is precisely yours because it's built to erode'. He has the dignity of ephemerality, the fantasy that vaporises when no longer needed.
Joe could be a transference strategy. Those can work, drawing off the venom from the partly processed griefs. Or he could be someone who makes useful nice things happen, ordering the playlist, lighting the candle, graciously acknowledging the applause the narrator offers every time he wins an award. 'He thanks you in a voice he's stolen from someone you loved once.' He is also helpful enough to let her know what he thinks of a real-life date, Barnaby, who shows up late to a Hampstead pub and talks about himself and his podcast. The more she tries to see the unobjectionable, minimally acceptable aspect of this guy in his buttoned-down shirt, the more Joe fumes. 'He thinks he's so fucking clever, doesn't he?' He's fine, Joe, nice even. But Joe doubles down. 'He's unbuttered toast in human form.' In the unpromising circumstances, his jealousy is nourishing. Best of all, he is as right about this as she needs herself to be.
A third of the way through the volume, Admoni draws an architectural plan of the flat for us, so we can orient ourselves in its active empty spaces. Flow diagrams follow, with the structure of those symptom check pathways on medical advice websites. Are you feeling faint? Yes. Drink some water. If symptoms persist, try sitting in a phone queue. That usually helps clear them up. These practical measures are good for clarifying. Does she tell her friends she is seeing someone, even though he isn't real? If yes, they'll think she's joking. If no, she won't get invited out for weeks. In any case, he is nearly real. 'He smells like smoke and citrus.' What could be more real than that?
The POV pivots between I and You throughout the book, depending on whether the speaker is willing to assume the fantasy fully, or hold it at the one remove that feels psychologically safer. In due course, love rolls up, that species of love that one can start to feel for someone known only through an Instagram account. When it fails and falls apart, she can tell herself that it's probably for the best, which seems another way of saying, 'I'm not good enough for him to be real'. And again, in the second person: 'You look like someone who lost before she began'. Saying his name out loud, she gets no reply. She drops into a desperate whisper: 'Please . . . I was there . . . Why didn't you see me?' This is beginning to sound like Robyn dancing on her own, falling into despair, left with only 'the shadow of a sentence that was never written'.
At the end of the text, there are frantic erasures, deletions, the corrupted file from which memory is made. Joe has served his purpose, been there for her (up to a point that only he could see), been 'a mirror / and a mouth / and a myth'. Like the recipient at an awards ceremony, she concludes by declaring, 'I'd like to thank him / for finally leaving'. Someone, less than helpfully, puts the whole episode down to a simple case of loneliness. Imagine the sneer that would have prompted from Joe, wherever he is.
Galia Admoni is a writer, musician and crafter, and she is Head of English, media and film at a secondary school in north London. It isn't difficult to imagine that many of her readers might wish she had been their Head of English. Her writing is spare but lingering in its suggestiveness, in the exorbitant honesty of its emotional repertoire. Even in the acknowledgements she adds at the end of this volume, she writes acerbically, 'This feels like the part where I'm supposed to sound stable. I'll try not to overperform it.'
There will be readers whose eyes will roll at what used to be called the confessional tone, as though emotions were no more to be scrutinised than trash not fit for recycling, as though there were any poetry that wasn't confessional (perhaps Edward Lear?). But modern life, if you hadn't noticed, is rubbish. It has many more layers than it used to have, which multiply through screens and messages and fantasies that somebody else has scripted for us, but that has failed to make it comfortable. Somebody should have pressed Reset. That's what Admoni's work confronts, and the hope in this latest work is that boldly appropriating the presence and persona of a media star will project and clarify, and even defang, the mordant impress of everything. You'd hope somebody has sent Joe Gilgun a signed copy.
He had done the rounds of the soaps — Corrie, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale — and would go on to create for himself the role of Vinnie O'Neill, chancer-in-chief of a band of amateur small-town criminals in Sky One's Brassic (2019-25), a part deepened by the character's bipolar disorder and other mental health tussles. In his youth, Gilgun had an austere, angular, pallid look, the kind of complexion for which sunlight could be dangerous, and a nervy intensity leavened by reflexive piss-taking. Born in Lancashire, he had gone to theatre school early, working as a plasterer until the breaks came. Now in his early forties, he still looks put together from varying parts of unimpressed brooding and reassuring glint, moody without thuggery, someone who could talk to you without making you feel self-conscious — or only a little.
In something like this guise, he appears on the opening page of Galia Admoni's new book-length poetic work, Somebody Should Have Pressed Record. From a passing reference in a message exchange ('you know who's weirdly hot?'), and a clip from Brassic on phone loop, he grows like the genie from the lamp into a three-dimensional presence in the narrator's home. 'By Friday, he's in your kitchen, shirtless, elbow-deep in a pan of burnt onions. He does not comment on your outfit, but you feel seen.' He will spend the next hundred pages there, talking back, smirking, smarming, as obliging as a fantasy friend has a duty to be, including those moments where he is disobliging, exasperating, enough to feel real.
Without needing to be told, he already knows how much consciousness of inadequacy, of disappointment, the speaker feels for herself. He understands the wearily easy metaphor — 'the vintage denim jacket that fits like failure' — and even when he says things that could be so ominous, such as 'I'm your bastard', he says them because she has licensed him to say them. A parallel with the auto-destructive work of the conceptual artist Gustav Metzger, who died in 2017, occurs to her. Like Metzger's output, Joe is 'an artwork that is precisely yours because it's built to erode'. He has the dignity of ephemerality, the fantasy that vaporises when no longer needed.
Joe could be a transference strategy. Those can work, drawing off the venom from the partly processed griefs. Or he could be someone who makes useful nice things happen, ordering the playlist, lighting the candle, graciously acknowledging the applause the narrator offers every time he wins an award. 'He thanks you in a voice he's stolen from someone you loved once.' He is also helpful enough to let her know what he thinks of a real-life date, Barnaby, who shows up late to a Hampstead pub and talks about himself and his podcast. The more she tries to see the unobjectionable, minimally acceptable aspect of this guy in his buttoned-down shirt, the more Joe fumes. 'He thinks he's so fucking clever, doesn't he?' He's fine, Joe, nice even. But Joe doubles down. 'He's unbuttered toast in human form.' In the unpromising circumstances, his jealousy is nourishing. Best of all, he is as right about this as she needs herself to be.
Barnaby had hands like supermarket bags,
not cheap, but not built to last.
He smelled like conditioner and unpaid parking tickets.
He said ‘vibe check’ unironically.
Maybe
he could’ve been good at holding you
if you were better at being held.
Joe laughs in the kitchen,
stirring your doubt with a wooden spoon.
A third of the way through the volume, Admoni draws an architectural plan of the flat for us, so we can orient ourselves in its active empty spaces. Flow diagrams follow, with the structure of those symptom check pathways on medical advice websites. Are you feeling faint? Yes. Drink some water. If symptoms persist, try sitting in a phone queue. That usually helps clear them up. These practical measures are good for clarifying. Does she tell her friends she is seeing someone, even though he isn't real? If yes, they'll think she's joking. If no, she won't get invited out for weeks. In any case, he is nearly real. 'He smells like smoke and citrus.' What could be more real than that?
The POV pivots between I and You throughout the book, depending on whether the speaker is willing to assume the fantasy fully, or hold it at the one remove that feels psychologically safer. In due course, love rolls up, that species of love that one can start to feel for someone known only through an Instagram account. When it fails and falls apart, she can tell herself that it's probably for the best, which seems another way of saying, 'I'm not good enough for him to be real'. And again, in the second person: 'You look like someone who lost before she began'. Saying his name out loud, she gets no reply. She drops into a desperate whisper: 'Please . . . I was there . . . Why didn't you see me?' This is beginning to sound like Robyn dancing on her own, falling into despair, left with only 'the shadow of a sentence that was never written'.
At the end of the text, there are frantic erasures, deletions, the corrupted file from which memory is made. Joe has served his purpose, been there for her (up to a point that only he could see), been 'a mirror / and a mouth / and a myth'. Like the recipient at an awards ceremony, she concludes by declaring, 'I'd like to thank him / for finally leaving'. Someone, less than helpfully, puts the whole episode down to a simple case of loneliness. Imagine the sneer that would have prompted from Joe, wherever he is.
Galia Admoni is a writer, musician and crafter, and she is Head of English, media and film at a secondary school in north London. It isn't difficult to imagine that many of her readers might wish she had been their Head of English. Her writing is spare but lingering in its suggestiveness, in the exorbitant honesty of its emotional repertoire. Even in the acknowledgements she adds at the end of this volume, she writes acerbically, 'This feels like the part where I'm supposed to sound stable. I'll try not to overperform it.'
There will be readers whose eyes will roll at what used to be called the confessional tone, as though emotions were no more to be scrutinised than trash not fit for recycling, as though there were any poetry that wasn't confessional (perhaps Edward Lear?). But modern life, if you hadn't noticed, is rubbish. It has many more layers than it used to have, which multiply through screens and messages and fantasies that somebody else has scripted for us, but that has failed to make it comfortable. Somebody should have pressed Reset. That's what Admoni's work confronts, and the hope in this latest work is that boldly appropriating the presence and persona of a media star will project and clarify, and even defang, the mordant impress of everything. You'd hope somebody has sent Joe Gilgun a signed copy.