Word: spiv
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...tempestuous saga is fairly accurately chronicled in the production at off-Broadway's La Mama Theater. The play is flawed, but it is amazing that British Playwright Hampton (The Philanthropist) wrote it when he was only 18. He was obviously drawn to Rimbaud as a fin-de-sicle spiv, and Silver plays him that way. Markay's Verlaine is the more richly shaded portrayal, ranging from voracious sensual appetite to a discernment of the gemlike flame with which Rimbaud's poetry would burn in posterity's eyes...
...primal scream opens the record, and from then on, Jackson emerges as a more affected and effective persona than the "Spiv" of his first two efforts. Those concentrated on a poppy guitar, steady beat, and musical hooks, with songs about women, the working class, and the media. Suddenly, Jackson's oft-avowed affection for reggae has taken over. Graham Maby, one of rock's most melodic and dextrous bassists, assumes center stage, as Jackson acknowledges by allowing him to sing the title track. And Maby holds it well--the bass lines are entrancing, polished, and danceable...
...FIRST two albums made this one possible. A group could not start out this tight or knowledgeable, and the power pop background enabled the band to delve into the new syncopations and melodies. Jackson now tries to write off his days as a "Spiv" rocker, but they remain at the core of the layered sound and cynical vision he now emotes...
...discovers he is no good at it. His only true emotion is self-pity; his agony is that he must endure all the chic, swinging, semihighbrow parties before one of the nubile feathery birds will sing for him. A brisk, no-nonsense sort of novelist, Glanville catches wonderfully the spiv tone of conversation in swinging London. As a study in frustration, The Artist Type succeeds in making the reader sad for the hero, but not nearly so sad as the hero is for himself...
...from his point of view. In every town he knows the jails, the madhouses, the cantinas and the churches. He wears rags sewn with tiny bells, each of which tinkles a note that in his mind symbolizes the special vice of each place he has visited. He is a spiv, and his roguish capacity for survival unites him with Ulysses, Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn. Yet Pito remains the faithful son of both Catholicism and the anticlerical tenets of the Mexican Revolution. At his most sacrilegious, he testifies to the faith; at his antisocial worst, he demonstrates that the republic...