Did you know that there were two Batman movies released this summer? If you judge whether something is a success by a combination of box office receipts, critical plaudits and the number of column inches generated, then Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, is the final word on all things Batman. Certainly, if you were to run through a basic checklist of what ought to appear within a Batman movie - everything from the scowling becowled hero through to the demonic cartoon supervillain and a seething underworld thronging with surly outcasts from bad pulp fiction - you'd have to admit, on a superficial level, Nolan (or rather the brothers Nolan - Christopher's brother Jonathan was responsible for the script) did a good job.

And yet and yet and yet - pretty much since creators Bob Kane and Jerry Finger departed the strip cartoon way back when - it seems like Batman is more the mirror of its creators than an actual entity in his own right. What's more, he is quite possibly the most reactive (and, sadly, easily damaged) of superheroes - and that's got nothing to do with the fact that Batman isn't strictly speaking a superhero (he has no super power, he's a self-appointed vigilante/guardian, powered by technology, technology he's able to afford thanks to his millionaire alter ego, Bruce Wayne). No. Batman is the most reactive and easily damaged of heroes because, throughout his almost eighty-year long career he has long been scapegoat and whipping boy - and, unfortunately, Batman rarely has anyone in his corner. In the early 40s when Batman wasn't afraid of killing his enemies (the first edition of the solo spin-off introduced the Joker and Catwoman and saw the Batman dispatch a clutch of monstrous giants), editor Whitney Ellsworth reined the shadowy Dark Knight in and forbade any such deaths in the future. When Frederic Wertham published his book, Seduction of the Innocent, in 1954, he was scandalised by the apparent homo-eroticism between Batman and the Boy Wonder. The answer? Bat-woman. Bat-girl. The answer to the public outcry in the late 50s that led to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority? Dilute the Batman, dilute the Batman, dilute the Batman. And what happened? Sales fell. Sales fell so dramatically, Batman nearly didn't make it out of the 50s alive. We all know what happened next. TV. One camp as Christmas Bat-show later and sales went through the roof. For a bit. When the TV show was cancelled, however, the first attempt was made to return Batman (or 'the Bat-man' as Kane originally christened him) to his roots: in 1969, writer Dennis O'Neill and Neal Adams tried to revive 'the grim avenger of the night' - artist Neal establishing a Bat-look (the long flowing cape, the pointy ears) we can still see today. But there is always a pulsing anemone-like movement between the true vision (of the artists and wordsmiths) and the watering down that occurs whenever business-people poke their uncreative noses in. So, as far as comic are concerned, roughly every ten years there is the need to return the Batman to his roots (ten years after O'Neill and Adams, you had Englehart and Rogers, roughly ten years after Englehart and Rogers you had Frank Miller and his Dark Knight Returns). But what is the 'true vision' these artists want to return to?

The first Batman story (called, Conan-Doyle-like, 'The Case of the Chemical Syndicate') appeared in Detective Comics 27 in May 1939. He was created, collaboratively (although, as with the creation of Spiderman, the creative kudos were heavily weighted one way and long, vengeful decades passed before the real collaboration was recognised) by Bob Kane and Jerry Fingers (Kane came up with the name, Fingers the look) and, from the beginning, Batman was a hero borne of the movies: both the 1920 version of The Mark of Zorro and Roland West's The Bat Whispers (itself a remake of an earlier, silent movie called The Bat) are said to have been influences. Here was a hero made of pulp: Doc Savage, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow. The Batman was one of their own. What's more, as the origin story first published in November 1939 illustrated, Batman was a creature driven by the need for revenge. As a child, Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down in cold blood - the Batman was Wayne's opportunity to get his own back. Batman is no Superman. He isn't doing it for the (so-called) 'right reasons'. As far as Batman is concerned, there is a great cosmic reckoning and he is judge, jury and - at least in those early days - executioner. Curiously, the 'true vision' that film-makers hark back to is often cited as being Frank Miller's aforementioned The Dark Knight Returns, a bleak (horrible word this, but) 'dystopian' Batman set in the near future, with Batman as a flabby 50 year old, pursued through creaking tenements by crack SWAT teams out for his blood, a Batman of 'wild obsession' according to Superman, himself a political pawn and not much more in Miller's view (which is still infinitely preferable to the weak-kneed Superman we got in Bryan Singer's feeble Superman Returns). 'Every year they grow smaller,' Superman tells Batman, towards the end of the book. 'Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the Earth.'

But there are other seminal Bat-works that deserve at least equal prominence when it comes to trying to understand what we mean when we try and ascertain what the hell the 'real' Batman is. Frank Miller also had a hand in Batman: Year One (a graphic novel that Requiem for a Dream director Darren Arenofsky was keen to adapt just before Nolan sank his teeth into the franchise) - a reimagining of the origin story that casts a long shadow over Batman Begins only to be largely ignored by the sequel (in Batman: Year One, a young Lieutenant Gordon goes up against corruption in his department, he's a good man willing to risk his life in the name of all that's true; in The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman's Gordon seeks to make do, putting up with corruption for seemingly no other reason than to justify Harvey Dent's revenge as Two-Face - Nolan also commits a cardinal comic sin by finkifying Officer Ramirez, one of Gordon's most upstanding officers...). For me, though, there is one comic more than any other that has written in erosion-proof stone the idea of the Batman that each film-maker has sought (in his, admittedly, own way) to recreate. That comic is The Killing Joke by Watchman creator Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. You want to know where Heath Ledger's Joker started out? Read The Killing Joke. You want to see the Batman and the Joker go head to head, exploring their vicious dance of death in ferocious, pounding glory? Read The Killing Joke. You want to see how Gotham should look, you want to stare menacing lunacy in the face, you want to dip your hands in blood and jerk back in horror at the sheer, bloody-minded nastiness on display? Read The Killing Joke. Oh yes, and in case I haven't made the case enough, read The Killing Joke. Everything that is good about Nolan's The Dark Knight originates in The Killing Joke. Unfortunately (and for reasons that baffle me as much as the changes to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy), it isn't enough to adapt a great book and make a great movie. Books become reference points along a road that leads to finished product.

But we were talking about Batman, weren't we? We were talking about how - at least as far as films are concerned - the Batman becomes a cypher for whatever it is about the Batman a particular film-director likes. For Tim Burton, it was the nasty neo-Gothic. For Joel Schumacher... well, arguably the big bucks generated by a power-house franchise but we'll be kind and say 'kitschiness and camp'. And for Christopher Nolan it is the man at the centre of Batman, the man who is (arguably) a reflection of the characters Nolan has explored in Memento, Insomnia and The Prestige. For Nolan, Batman is a haunted character, a driven character, a (for me, sadly) Manichean character, a moralist whose most obvious flaw can be seen from a mile off by a loon like the Joker. Nolan's Batman isn't truly menacing (the only time the powers that be fear him is when he loses his rag with the Joker and sticks a chair under the interrogation room door). We fear the Joker because he has no rules; Batman is hidebound by the moral paradigm the brothers Nolan have set him within.

All of which may sound like I'm writing The Dark Knight off. Far from it. There's much to like: people have cited the influence of Heat but it's The Wire that dominates the way the film is put together (political intrigue and shots of the dockyards juxtaposed with criminal get-togethers and angry lowlifes huddled on street corners); the Japanese segment that many cite as the most obvious cut to have made in a two and a half hour movie is (for me) both a brilliant episode in its own right as well as a genius (if, albeit, potentially unwitting) nod to Kia Asamiya's barnstorming Japanese graphic novel, Batman: Child of Dreams; the Joker, of course (it's a great performance, perhaps even too great a performance, overwhelming The Dark Knight as much as Daniel Day-Lewis overwhelmed Gangs of New York); the central chase with its obvious nods to The French Connection; the last stand-off between the Batman and the Joker (even if it is largely filched from The Killing Joke); and, of course, the climax which leaves the Batman as a genuine outlaw and paves the way for a third outing in which the Batman is the villain trying to stay alive in a city that wants him dead. What is not so good? The fact that the Gotham of Batman Begins has been ditched in favour of the shiny glass everycity of The Dark Knight. The whole Harvey Dent storyline (if only these people - the people responsible for blockbusters - had the iron balls to just make an hour and a half film!?). And, perhaps worst of all, the fact that the Batman isn't frightening enough. This last is especially galling when you think that Nolan is the only film-maker to so far have got it absolutely spot on: you remember the scene towards the end of Batman Begins, when the Scarecrow is given a dose of his own medicine and starts hallucinating a vicious demon seed, a black, leather-lipped Batman whose fury has no limit, whose threat is not all bark, who might maybe just... you know... freak out! Go on a killing rampage! Confuse us! (Another weak point in The Dark Knight? At all times, we know what he is doing. There is no point at which we the audience question Batman. We don't worry. We don't have to. All signs as to the moral rectitude of Batman are clearly signposted. Yawn...)

But I said that there were two Batman films released this summer, didn't I? You may not have been aware (it hasn't quite slipped below the radar but it has been damned with the 'it's a bit like what the Wachowski Brothers did with The Animatrix' brush), a portmanteau cartoon entitled Batman: Gotham Knight was released directly to DVD a wee while ago and - yes! - it's a smasher and gets Batman exactly right, in a variety of ways. Batman: Gotham Knight comprises six short cartoons, each of which take Batman from a different viewpoint. Opener (and my favourite) 'Have I Got A Story For You' sees a small gang of skater kids recounting their various run-ins with Batman (who is, variously, shadowy demon, pirouetting man-beast-bird, robot and frail, easily cut man); 'Crossfire' has Ramirez (the upstanding cop of comix history) partnering Crispus Allen (a cop who is critical of the Dark Knight's vigilante stance) on their way to drop off a perp at Arkham Asylum; 'Field Test' is perhaps the closest to the world Nolan has fashioned but is worth watching for the groovy bullet-deflecting vest Lucien Fox comes up with; 'In Darkness Dwells' (which arguably looks the best and features words from Batman Begins' own David S Goyer) and its immediate sequel 'Working Through Pain' (fashioned by Batman Year One's Brian Azzarello) deal with pain and hallucinations and various learnings - even as Batman is called on to righteously whale on a whole horde of criminal ass; 'Deadshot' concludes things by re-evaluating both the origin story and the death of Bruce Wayne's parents, thereby setting the precedent (for maybe the hundredth time) that Batman is all about reinvention, both harping back to what has gone before whilst at the same time trying to view it from yet another perspective.

If I had to take your arm and gently urge you to see just one Batman film this year, I'd gently urge you in the direction of Batman: Gotham Knight. I know that my words are likely to fall on mostly deaf ears (because The Dark Knight is one of those films everyone has to see and have an opinion on), but my hope is, having seen The Dark Knight and felt about it howsoever you felt about it, you chance your arm for one more Batman movie. Believe me: Batman: Gotham Knight does not disappoint... and, for once, all of the people involved get Batman just right.

*

'Look around you, at today's world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what's left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relived of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would or could the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?'

This is the premise upon which author Alan Weisman built his book, The World Without Us, a sturdy piece of nonfiction that is at once thought experiment and rallying cry. Thought experiment because Weisman traverses the globe wondering what would happen if we were to suddenly disappear from the face of the planet, taking in everything from nuclear power plants in Russia to the 39th parallel in Korea and the subway system in New York. Rallying cry because the book is as much about where we are, figuratively speaking, in the history of the world and how we got here as it is about where we're inevitably going.

Of course the book describes the immediate effect of humanity's disappearance too – primarily, without us around to provide maintenance and upkeep, things start to fall apart. Powerful ailanthus roots work their way into the pavements and sewers. Plastic bags and litter clog up drains and find their way into the oceans eventually where all kinds of marine life attempt to digest what just won't be digested ('Just from what's already present,' University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson tells Alan Weisman midway through the book, 'given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. Thousands of years possibly. Or more.'). Without people burning fossil fuels, the surface of the oceans will absorb CO2 more rapidly, for a while (although it will take in the region of a 1,000 years for the oceans of the Earth to reach pre-industrial purity). Mosquitoes will thrive, as will many other wild and feral creatures currently held in check by what Weisman calls 'our lethal traffic' in pesticides and poisons. Curiously, though, at least as far as mosquitoes are concerned, the increase in pests is good news for freshwater fish (for whom mosquito larvae are big eats) and flowers (when mosquitoes aren't sucking blood, they're sipping nectar which makes them important pollinators – especially in a human-less world where the wilderness will be reclaiming all of our previously swept-clean streets). It may be we will lurch into 'a tropical, super-heated future'. Or perhaps a return to 'temperate foliage' beckons. Europe's 'meticulous, mechanized farmlands would, without humans, fill with brom and fescue grass, lupine, plumed thistle, flowering rapeseed and wild mustard. Within a few decades, oak shoots would sprout from the acidic former fields of wheat, rye and barley. Boars, hedgehogs, lynx, bison and beaver would spread, with wolves moving up from Romania and, if Europe is indeed cooler, reindeer coming down from Norway.' What about mankind's greatest achievements? The Great Wall of China, say – 'a pastiche of rammed earth, stones, fired brick, timbers and even glutinous rice used as mortar paste'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Great wall would be defenseless against tree roots, water and 'the highly acidic rain produced by an industrializing Chinese society.' Birds, who perish in their tens of millions each year on power lines and against high rise windows, would thrive. 'If everyone on Earth disappeared,' Weisman writes, '441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated.' The melted cores would not (as some believe) bore clean through the Earth – 'radioactive lava melds with the surrounding steel and concrete' where 'it would finally cool – if that's the term for a lump of slag that would remain mortally hot thereafter.' And that's not to mention 30,000 in tact nuclear warheads (although 'the chance of any exploding with us gone is effectively zero') – warheads that will corrode and leak plutonium-239, plutonium-239 that gives off alpha particles, one millionth of a gram of which will give you lung cancer – it will take something like 250,000 years before the Earth will get back to how it was before nuclear energy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg (as you'd no doubt expect, a cram-packed 324 page book resists abbreviation in a couple of paragraphs). The biggest surprise contained within the pages of The World Without Us – and certainly the message that you take away from reading – is just how resilient the planet upon which we reside is. I spoke to Alan over the phone, me in Manchester and him in Massachusetts, and he said that was very much what he wanted readers to take away from the book. 'I didn't write the book because I wanted humans to disappear. Of course I was interested as to how nature would cope without us – and it was pleasing to find that, wow!, nature would cope magnificently. But I was more interested in the question of whether there was anything we could learn. Isn't there a way we could still be a part of this? There are many, many environmental books and the majority of them are not read because potential readers are overwhelmed by the scale of the calamity they seem to be faced with as inhabitants of the planet. I wanted to find a way to talk about this stuff that was fun – taking people out of the equation seemed to be the ideal way to go…'

Originally starting out as an article Alan was commissioned to write, the book maps out his changing response to what he found out. 'In the beginning,' he told me, 'I took on the book because I was deeply, deeply concerned for the planet. I'm grieving for a lot of what I've seen. Interestingly, though, as I wrote and thought about what I needed to write, about former extinctions and the like, I stated to become more and more hopeful.' This is nowhere more apparent than in the three sections devoted to Chernobyl (home of the – to this day – world's worst nuclear disaster), the 39^{th parallel in Korea (a 151 mile long and 2.5 mile wide area of forest divided by Russia and America at the end of the Korean War in 1953) and Varosha in Cyprus (home of an up-market hotel resort abandoned over twenty years ago in a brief war between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots). Each of these places has been without 'us' for years – and yet life flourishes. In Chernobyl, skylarks can be seen within the 30-kilometre Zone of Alienation, pines flourish in 'elongated, irregular runs' just north of the former reactor, as do roe deer, lynx, wild boar, moose and wolves. The 39th parallel is home to the rarest birds on Earth, red-crowned cranes, and Siberian tigers, another creature on the verge of extinction, but guaranteed safety as long as the 39th parallel exists. And in Varosha, amid abandoned Toyota dealerships and empty hotels, 'feral geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down exterior walls. Flame trees, chinaberries and thickets of hibiscus, oleander and passion lilac sprout from nooks where indoors and outdoors now blend. Houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillea. Lizards and whip snakes skitter through strands of wild asparagus, prickly pear and six-foot grasses. A spreading cover of lemon grass sweetens the air. At night, the darkened beachfront, free of moonlight bathers, crawls with nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles.' Such is the world without us.}

^{Alan continued, 'No matter how badly we bang the Earth, it comes back. There are fields in Herefordshire full of fertilizers and heavy metals – eventually there will be a weed that flourishes in that environment. I spoke to a Texan ecologist who was concerned about the petrol industry – he told me that eventually there would be microbes that live on the residues of the petrol industry. Life is incredibly powerful and resilient. There is something tremendously comforting in that, I find.'}

Peter Wild

*

'Any external or social action, unless it's based on expanded consciousness, is robot behaviour.'

It takes five seconds, brothers and sisters.

One…

Alfie Vedder became untethered shortly after stepping out of the highland green Ford Mustang parked askance, motor running, on Warren and Forest.

Two…

He looked up once at the nearest streetlight, which wasn't a streetlight anymore given that it'd been smashed out in the riots, and he shook his head, even as he fumbled in his pocket for the Zippo.

Three…

He retrieved the bottle from the interior of the car, his partner Tuck saying Getonwithit from the shadows on the driver's side, sparked up the lighter and lit the rag shoved like a gag in the bottle's neck.

Four…

Rag lit, he stepped and he jogged and he stepped and he jogged and he grunted and he hurled the flaming bottle across the street, a glorious clumsy parabola that he didn't stay to watch, too busy was he climbing back into the Mustang, sense drowned out in the engine roar.

Five…

The bottle struck the window of the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, bottle and window shattering as one, the petrol igniting with the whoomph of a shaggy, jowly dog, the office lit, momentarily, as if it was day-time, only for the sudden lick and tickle of flame to dispel any such misconception.

Four…

He steps and he jogs, his head and his shoulders moving backwards even as he jerked forwards, building momentum, ready to throw but not yet, one more step and one more jog and still one more step and still one more jog – but then, there he was, left behind like a shoe sucked up in the mud, his socked foot still moving forwards even as he remained behind.

And there he stood, if he could be said to stand, rooted in the middle of Warren and Forest, untethered in the heart of Detroit, sometime approximately ten-ish, on this, the 31^{st of December in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty eight.}

He was aware of himself, splinters of himself, moving off in different directions as if it was he who had suddenly shattered and not the window. Where once there had been a single highland green Ford Mustang, there were now two: one leaving north and one reversing south, both departing, albeit one into the future and one into the past.

His future self, his future self and Tuck, his partner of 13 years, were on their way to the Grande Ballroom, on the corner of Boulevard and Joy, the intention being to plant evidence in the car of John Sinclair, poet, firebrand and MC5 manager, to implicate him in the firing of the office on Warren and Forest, the idea being that if Sinclair were seen as someone who was looking to creating dissent from within, if Sinclair was discredited, all the better for the forces of law and order, dissenting voice that Sinclair was, thorn in their side. The MC5 were playing the Grande Ballroom that evening and Sinclair was bound to be there. Sinclair and all of his White Panther cronies, all of the radicals, all of the Motherfuckers, all of the Weathermen, all of the students, all of the hippies and the deadbeats and the bikers and the losers, they would all be there, in the Grande Ballroom when they took Sinclair down. The plan was to plant incriminating evidence in his car and then, as soon as that was done, take him down, through fair means or foul, whatever it took. So they were driving, his future self and Tuck and Tuck was talking about how he planned to ask Josie, his girlfriend of eight years, to marry him, how he was going to go ask his father in law for her hand at the weekend, on Sunday, he had it all planned out, what he was going to say, how the old man would take it, everything. The old man was a cancerous bastard, so Tuck said, but it didn't hurt to do things right, now, did it? You did things right, you set yourself in good stead for the future. That was how he saw it. His future self didn't speak, felt nauseous, kept repeating, in his mind, what he'd done, firebombing the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam; was surprised by himself, because he'd done much worse in his time, much worse, but for some reason he was troubled, felt like there was a line and he'd just stepped over it. He was over the line now and, as they moved further and further away from Warren and Forest so he, the future self, drew further and further away from the line and thereby further and further into uncharted, uncomfortable territory.

His previous, historical self grew happier the further the car receded from Warren and Forest. Could be his previous self wasn't looking forward to firebombing the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The greater the distance between where he was and Warren and Forest, the greater the weight that appeared to lift off the shoulders of his previous self. Back at the field office on Michigan Ave, the two of them zipped through a briefing, just the two of them at first but then they were joined by various members of the team, other agents and operatives, the head of their team, briefly, in and out, flitting like a summer fly, the group of them immersed in various slides and files and tape recordings running backwards through a history of supposed insurrection, from the obvious solution through a counter-intuitive list of the various challenges and obstacles they all faced, as a team, as a department, as a function of the United States federal Government. Earlier and still earlier, he was eating a PB&J at his desk, transcribing surveillance tapes wearing the cushiony cans, catching up with Sinclair's movements for the previous week and not just Sinclair, Kramer and Tyner too. Sinclair, Kramer and Tyner and all their little girlfriends and all their White Panther cronies, they were all being watched and followed and photographed and recorded and spied on and discussed, at the most senior levels, in intimate detail. He was sitting there, his previous self, at his desk in the office where everyone was dressed like it was 1955 despite the fact that out there, in the street that he could glimpse from the window besides his desk, it was 1968. The thirteen-year lag between where he sat and where he could see, the lag he spent much of his life considering when he wasn't considering right and wrong, right and wrong occupying him both in the office and at home, when he got home, which wasn't often, hiked out on jobs until late most evenings, relaxing in bars as much as he ever could relax, sleeping in his car when he could sleep or on Tuck's couch, avoiding his narrow kitchenette when he could, denying the life he spent there, the loneliness, the silly mistakes.

Three…

The future self arrived, parking on Boulevard, shuffling along Joy past the line of black and whites, the Detroit police out in force, so many penguins huffing and chuckling, bristling as they went by, the two of them, his future self and Tuck, wanting to lay in and start something but knowing they couldn't, wanting to lay everything from Belle Isle through to the riots at their door, at the door of the FBI, but not one of them having the guts to say anything. Russ Gibb, the proprietor of the Grande Ballroom, was poised in the doorway talking to the doorman, poised like he'd been waiting for them in his Harold Lloyd rims and his ridiculous pith helmet. Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, Gibb said stepping toward them, arms outstretched like a confused dancer. Gentlemen. His shaken future self replied, stately, said Mr Gibb, as if that was enough. Will you be partaking of our entertainment this evening? Gibb asked them. A look flashed between Vedder and Tuck. Something along the lines of: reconnoitre now, plant evidence later. Tuck nodded and wondered aloud if the Ballroom was busy. Gibb clapped his hand like a sugared-up child and cooed, said oh yes oh yes oh yes, very definitely, very definitely. Very busy indeed. At which point Tuck and his future self pushed by, Gibb raising his voice a notch to ensure they heard: You've missed The Psychedelic Stooges, I'm afraid, but you're still in plenty of time for the main attraction…

Jolted from wakefulness to sleep, plunging into gunpowder dreams, gunpowder dreams haunted by the face of Viola Liuzza and the voice of Hoover saying THE PURPOSE OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IS DISRUPTION; IT IS IMMATERIAL WHETHER FACTS EXIST TO SUBSTANTIATE CHARGES. His historical self grew lighter the greater the distance between the different versions of himself but still heaviness persisted. The gunpowder dreams offered a nightly record: a day here spent retrieving libel about the Republic of New Africa, a day there spent dismantling forged correspondence from the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Campaign; his mouth enlarged, warm and wet against a telephone receiver, sucking back whispered treachery from the ears of parents and landlords, strong-arming police so they wouldn't perjure themselves against dissidents, destroying fabricated evidence, confirming activists in their actions, repealing every push and shove, yanking words offof arrest sheets, freeing people from the grinding machine of law, driving them away and plunging them, often violently, into the melee of protest; disorganising younger operatives, masterminding plots to dissipate infiltration in the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers; stirring up peace and social order, making sure activists were free to speak their minds, deleting hours of tape, blanking hundreds of pages of transcribed conversation, so many photographs dissolving, images whitening out in the darkroom glare. For days and weeks and months he rarely set foot in his home, putting in the hours to dilute the Government's case, listening excitedly through crackles and whispers for the report of revolution, for the threat and the promise, for the date and the time. But doubting. All the while doubting. Maintaining a strong front through all of the hours of daylight, through all of the hours of wakefulness and then sleeping and dreaming gunpowder dreams.

Inside the Ballroom, tugging, someone tugging at his hand, stopping, easing him around, a grinning girl, couldn't be more than eighteen, looked like she'd fallen off the cover to In Watermelon Sugar. He who has no faith, she said, eyes afire and hands raised as if offering invisible fruit, and no wisdom and whose soul is in doubt – is lost. His future self blinked slowly like a cow. He noticed the music blaring, some furious, honking harmonica goose. A Jagger-not-Jagger singing FROM YOUR SWIMMING POOL TO YOUR BIG CAR TO THAT SENSELESS BOMB SHELTER IN YOUR BACK YARD. For neither this world, the girl continued, nor the world to come nor joy is ever for the man who doubts. He almost but not quite placed his face in her upturned palms. Her expression mutated like candle-flame: her smile fading and sparking, her eyes flaring, malevolent, beatific, thrilling, her bright white teeth shining in the dark. The music changed – a voice THE UNIVERSE IS PERMEATED WITH THE ODOUR OF KEROSENE, a scream, a crunching, crunching guitar riff that sounded like some kid seesawing abuse at his mother. Kill therefore, she spoke over the noise with a clarity that was angelic, kill with the sword of wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in thy heart. He wanted to speak but the words died in his throat. The girl saw, both the effort and the failure, and placed her hands gently against his cheeks, intent, a mother searching her child's face for the bee-sting left in the skin. He who has faith has wisdom, she said, who lives in self-harmony, whose faith is in life; and he who finds wisdom soon finds the peace supreme. He dry swallowed again, and then again. The peace supreme. That was what he wanted. Had the song changed? I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE TO GO. I CAN'T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. I CAN'T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. I CAN'T SEE A THING TILL YOU OPEN MY EYES. The girl raised her bare arms in the air, her eyes and her smile pure rapture. Be one in self-harmony, she yelled, and arise, great warrior, arise!...

The process by which his historical self grew lighter and more carefree continued, through 1966 and into 1965. He was involved with the campaign to save Viola Liuzza. There were things being said, information that was being released to the press, about how Viola was a member of the Communist Party of America, about how Viola enjoyed sexual relations with African American men despite the fact that she was married and a mother. She was a civil rights activist. That was the story. All of these other things were lies and it was his job to go out into the world and scoop them up, that was his job, to scoop up all of the lies. There he was talking on the telephone, scooping all of the words up. There he was typing, snick-snick-snick, removing ink from letters and stories and memos that were not distributed or stored on-file. He sucked them all up until there was nothing left, until Viola was just an activist who was killed by Klansmen in Wayne State. In the weeks following all of his hard work dismantling the smear campaign, he was discouraged because it turned out that one of the men who had shot Viola Liuzza as she drove local marchers home in her 1963 Oldsmobile, one of the Klansmen who put a bullet in her head, worked for the FBI. One of his own men had let him down. It was terrible. But then Viola wasn't dead anymore. She was just one of many people horrified by images of the aborted march on Edmund Pettus Bridge, one of a vocal minority, but then she wasn't even that. She disappeared from his radar and he felt much better, was much happier in his work, was exonerated, felt like, as the days and the nights drew in on themselves and the winter of 1965 gave way to the autumn of 1964. Happier. Happier than he'd ever been. Working alongside cryptographers as part of the VENONA decrypts, infiltrating the CPUSA, working for the good of the country against those no-good commie bastards, a hero, he was a hero again, he wasn't contaminated, life was good, he worked the side of right, was a good man, had a wife, had a future, spent evenings talking about children, worked but kept work and home life separate, had a home life, was happy, was a good man, was a good, happy man...

Two…

His future self was anxiously scanning the crowd for Tuck, they'd got split up, the two of them, somehow, and so he was looking, roaming, another Jagger-not-Jagger singing about THE BANKS OF THE RIVER CHARLES, AW THAT'S WHAT'S HAPPENIN' BABY, OH THAT'S WHERE YOU'LL FIND ME, ALONG WITH THE LOVERS,THE FUGGERS AND THIEVES, AW BUT THEY'RE COOL PEOPLE. There were gangs and clusters and cliques amid the milling patchouli throng. Young girls with ironed hair in patchwork dresses with bare legs and bare feet and beads. Hairy Raskolnikoffs with open shirts and velvet jackets and flowers. Guys in leather with greasy hair and tattoos stalking women with snake-eyes and snake lips and snake hips. Groovy, freakish could-be boys, could-be girls in gold and silver shirts and trousers dancing, spinning with their hands outstretched like fluttering fanatic butterflies. The light show on the stage was becoming frantic, gulls swooping, missiles flying, freaks and pigs clashing in the streets, flowering tapestries of intersecting purple and red diamonds, red and white circles and oily blobs of yellow and orange, cosmic lightbeams lurching drunkenly over the faces of those nearby, transforming stupid, vacant looking hippy kids into phantoms and spectres and hobgoblins, the Grande Ballroom a shabby haunted house, host to the end of the world. Vedder thought he saw silver-bearded John Sinclair pointing at him over the heads of the crowd, laughing like a demented iron fox from the future. He saw Tuck the instant the music cut, over by the fire exit, waylaid by Panthers. A short guy in a leather jacket with wild hair and sunglasses, arms outstretched like a lay preacher, advanced on the stage, the crowd roaring, a short history of white noise, people clapping, clapping, clapping. BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!! he yelled. BROTHERS AND SISTERS! I WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS OUT THERE, WANT TO SEE YOU, SEE YOUR HANDS. Tuck was trying to assert some control of the situation, had his badge out, but the Panthers, one of the Panthers at least, slapped at his hand and the badge disappeared. I WANT EVERYONE TO KICK UP SOME NOISE! I WANT TO HEAR SOME REVOLUTION OUT THERE, BROTHERS. I WANT TO HAVE A LITTLE REVOLUTION! Vedder stood there, watching Tuck as the crowd roared and jeered, shouting and screaming. BROTHERS AND SISTERS! THE TIME HAS COME FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU TO DECIDE WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE PROBLEM OR WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE SOLUTION. Thasss right, someone close by hissed. YOU MUST CHOOSE, BROTHERS, YOU MUST CHOOSE! Vedder could feel it, what the man on the stage was saying, could feel it in his own heart and in his own chest. Arise, great warrior, arise! IT TAKES FIVE SECONDS, he yelled. FIVE SECONDS OF DECISION! FIVE SECONDS TO REALISE YOUR PURPOSE HERE ON THE PLANET. Tuck was wheeling about, same time as he scanned the crowd, wanting Vedder to emerge out of the dark like the goddamned cavalry or something only he had no intention of saving the day. He was watching. He was listening. He was feeling it, man. IT'S TIME TO MOVE. IT'S TIME TO GET DOWN WITH IT. BROTHERS, IT'S TIME TO TESTIFY. Someone almost standing on his shoulder yelled, Oh Yeah! Oh Yeah! THE DAY IS GOING TO COME WHEN WE ARE ALL GOING TO HAVE TO TESTIFY. More people were yelling now. Yeah! Oh Yeah! I KNOW I'M READY TO TESTIFY AND I WANT TO KNOW ARE YOU READY TO TESTIFY? THE GOLDEN ARMS OF ZENTA ARE GOING TO REACH DOWN – he jabbed a finger into the crowd, pointed right at Vedder, it seemed – AMONG EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU AND YOU'LL HAVE TO GET DOWN AND TESTIFY THEN! Vedder was shivering. Rooted to the spot. ARE YOU READY? Vedder nodded. Ignoring Tuck. Tuck a million miles away from where he was. Tuck lost. Tuck gone for ever. People mounted the stage, men in shiny silver jackets with big hair strapping instruments to themselves like explosives. I OFFER TO YOU RIGHT NOW! A TESTIMONIAL!!! THE MC5!!!

Centred on Warren and Forest, his arrested self felt the heat, the heat of the crowd and the heat of the historical self burning with righteousness and devotion even as the petrol bomb struck and restruck the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, fire and flame, the whoomph over and over again, his historical self burning brighter and still brighter as his future self stood transfixed, pending, on the edge, MC5 errupting, JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG, their noise and volume like fifty electrical storms, his future self charred and burned as if sheet lightning were intersecting him at fifty different points on his body simultaneously JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG. Within their deep infinity he saw ingathered and bound by love in one volume the scattered leaves of all the universe. The light of a thousand suns suddenly arose in the sky. JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG. MY LOVE IS LIKE A RAMBLING RO-OSE. JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNG. His historical self obliterating even as his future self exploded, divided and dividing, taking all of the paths not taken, plunging headlong into the future even as MC5 THE MORE YOU FEEL IT THE MORE IT GROWS JUNG-JUNG-JUNG-JUNGED. His future self disgraced before the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI. His future self disgraced before the Church Committee. His future self up to his eyes in the Keith case. And all of the radicalism for nothing. No civil war. No end to the war. Not for years. War and strife and civil unrest for years, for decades, but stripped of all of its effectiveness. No winners. No believers. Just war and his part in it. RAMBLIN' ROSE. RAMBLIN ROSE. I'M GONNA PUT YOU DOWN. JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-A-JUNG, JUNG-JUNG-AJUNG. The petrol bomb striking the window, blooming and flowering, blooming and flowering, even as the light show behind the band bloomed and flowered, even as the noise shook his bones, scouring him, carving him hollow even as the historical self black to calmed, the exploding exploding exploding exploding like spiders across the stars –

One…

And then, suddenly, it was so simple. Everything was laid out before him, everything that was and everything that would be. He saw it all, he held all within him and he was, momentarily, everything. An offer was made, an offer he wanted no part of, and his refusal cancelled all that had been, nullified the diffusion, restored him once more – but he was changed and, rather than complete the arc and throw the petrol bomb at the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he stopped, paused, turned about and returned to the car, Tuck instantly crazy, asking him whattthehellyou – even as the rag's flame caught the bottle and the highland green Ford Mustang split like a cheap joke cigar.

Maybe ten or so years ago, the NME letter's page was a hotbed of Morrissey-fixated debate. The debate had raged in The Smiths' life-time but it seemed to increase in fervour as Morrissey's solo career progressed (and, at that time, seemingly declined). There were those, of course, who didn't get the Morrissey thing and didn't get The Smiths thing. Kids who rated Faith No More, say, or Henry Rollins. The Smiths was for pussies and Morrissey was King Pussy of PussyLand. And there were those who worshipped at the shrine of La Moz and could hardly see their idol over the glare of his genius. Unfortunately the latter camp were far harder to bear than the former. Clucking like dyspeptic mothers watching their first-borns struggle to float in the teeming diaspora of the schoolyard, they sought to defend Morrissey (and occasionally The Smiths but more often than not just Morrissey on his todd) from the slings and outrageous arrows of every Tom, Dick and Harry who dared to lay a blemish at the door of the God that was Morrissey. It was a horrible sight to behold, week after week. It got so I couldn't read the NME any more. I just couldn't face it. But there was worse to come. I realised - as I sat down to write this very piece for the ever-excellent Pen Pusher magazine - that all of those clucking hens had made writing about The Smiths nigh on impossible. More than any other band, The Smiths forbid contemporary examination. If you even attempt to write a sentence that attempts to include The Smiths alongside words like literary or poetic, your thrust, your parry, is lost, derailed, hostage to a welterweight world championship bout of pretention. It doesn't matter how clever you think you are. In fact, the more clever you think you are, the worse it gets. Writing about The Smiths is like fighting it out with a tar baby. There aint no way you can come out of the contest with your hands clean.

Still and all, maybe enough time has elapsed since those heady days to give it the old boxer's one-two and see where we get to, eh? Can we talk about The Smiths in terms of the words and the music (and the concomitant influence of the words and the music)? We'll see, my friends. We'll see.

*

Almost two decades have gone by since the hey-day of The Smiths and, in that time, the songs have been played and played and played and played and played, until it's almost impossible to hear them as they were once heard. The Smiths were an unsettling revelation. They upset people. Either you got The Smiths (and championed the wry wordplay and mordant guitar arpeggios) or you thought they were miserable as fuck. Nowadays, though, you could listen to the tunes and maybe even sing along as you get ready for work without actually hearing what it is that you're singing. Think about This Charming Man for a minute:

I want to write Has e'er a pop singer aspired to poesy quite so well as here? But I'll resist the urge. Instead, I'll merely wonder: Has anyone ever considered whether This Charming Man is to Morrissey as Daffodils is to Wordsworth? Both of them are widely taken to be synonyms for the rest of the work (ie This Charming Man represents The Smiths just as Daffodils, these days, represents Wordsworth). Certainly Daffodils is largely remembered for its opening lines (I wandered lonely etc etc etc) - with the nugget of solipsistic introspection present at the poem's close (when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood etc etc etc) often overlooked in case it detracts from the popular view of things. And yet (surely) while Wordsworth is lying vacant or pensive on his couch, Morrissey is busy asking us: Why pamper life's complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?

And - if This Charming Man is to Daffodils - is Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now The Smiths' Jerusalem? These days, the great unwashed know Jerusalem because of its hymn status (whether it's Last Night of the Proms or the bloody rugby, you can be sure to expect a rousing chorus of And did those feet... In ancient time... Walk upon blah blah blah...) - but the hymn is in fact an excerpt (and a very small excerpt, at that) from Blake's Milton. The most interesting thing about Jerusalem is, however, the fact that it has been taken up as an alternative national anthem when it is in fact a thinly veiled assault on the church and the establishment. God bless William Blake, I say. The subversive bastard. What's that got to do with Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now you might ask? Well, you could allude to those feet (those feet we were wondering about, from ancient time), trudging the pavements in search of work:

But it's much more interesting if you look at the way in which the song itself is now perceived. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now now looms largely in the great 'are they miserable / no! they're hilarious!' debate. Every time someone moans and groans about how miserable The Smiths are, this song is run up the flagpole. Look at the wit, the self-parody. Morrissey knows that you think he is miserable - and he has written a song about it! Have at you, varlet! But to dismiss the song as nothing more than a riposte to those people who don't like The Smiths does it no favours. Like Jerusalem, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now is a song that has been misdirected by those who profess to sing its praises. There is scalding meanness here (the kind of acerbic vitriol you'd find in Larkin):

This is a song about what Raymond Carver called 'quiet desperation'. We've all felt it. We've all been there. That's life. You walk along and you live your life and you have to deal with a heck of a lot of shit, usually on a daily basis, and sometimes - sometimes - it can get you down and leave you feeling abject and lonely and worthless. To say 'look at the wit!' is a little like having a tailor say, 'Never mind the quality, feel the width.' (Saying that, however, you can't understate how funny The Smiths were. John Peel said they were one of the few bands able to make him laugh out loud. And that's true. They are funny as all Hell. Which just goes to show that what I said at the beginning of this wee piece - vis-a-vis how difficult it is to write about The Smiths - is as true as true can be.)

I could go on (if I haven't already) but the point is - unlike any significant pop star before or since - Morrissey was a reader. The Smiths' songs are full of lines pilfered from other sources. Just take Reel Around the Fountain as an example. Whether it's Shelagh Delagney (I dreamed about you last night / And I fell out of bed twice is verbatim from A Taste of Honey), M Haskell (Take me and mount me like a butterfly is culled From Reverence to Rape) or Elizabeth Smart (whose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down & Wept has entered the canon of 'books all Smiths' fans should read') they are all present and correct in the song. But that is besides the point. (After all, what did Morrissey choose to scratch into the run-out groove of the vinyl Queen is Dead? Why, Oscar Wilde, of course: Talent borrows / genius steals...' Indeed.) Just as any consideration of Morrissey as a 'poet' is besides the point. What Morrissey was (at least during his time with The Smiths) is a reader, a reader who just happens to front a band. (You could say that he followed the Joycian dictum to 'work it all in' - but, of course, where Joyce was saying 'work all of life into what you do', Morrissey took all that he read. Which probably goes some way toward explaining There's more to life than books, you know - but not much more...)

Morrissey is not a poet. He's a singer in a band. There's a difference, a difference that is well worth remembering. We could hypothesise all we like (what would've happened if Morrissey's writing career had taken off after his watery James Dean book?) but, like all 'what if?' hypotheses, it deserves to stay in the realm of the unexamined. We have what we have - and for good reason. The Smiths were a band. Four people, each of whom contributed to the songs that were produced. The words take you in one direction and the music serves to flesh out and combat and complicate and make ambiguous the images and tales that the words suggest.

As far as their influence goes - The Smiths were fairly recently nominated the most influential band ever (!!!!) by that vanguard of reasoned discourse, the NME. Influence, for me, though, suggests a complex lineage. You could, for example, say that the Blues were influential because you can still hear their influence being picked over today (in the music of people as diverse as Michael Franti, M Ward, White Stripes and Eric Clapton). As far as The Smiths were concerned, their influence seemed to repeat the hoary old Marxist theory of history - it was repeated, first as tragedy and then as farce. When The Smiths were still around and still performing, you had a dozen or more bands who tried to sound like The Smiths (your Railway Children and your James and any of the shambling, self-conscious, cardigan-wearing C86/Sarah crowd) - all of whom were, for the most part, tragic. They were, however, infinitely preferable to the diabolical shower that appeared about a decade later (your Shed 7s and Echobellies) - all of whom seemed to think attaching the words 'my dear' to any old doggerel made them Smithsian. Strangely, however, your Shed 7s and your Echobellies did infinitely better than your Railway Children et al. What a farce!

Much is made of the influence of The Smiths on everyone from The Stone Roses through Radiohead to The Libertines (to which I'll say, The Byrds were more of an influence on The Stone Roses, Pink Floyd were more of an influence on Radiohead and The Clash were more of an influence on The Libertines). Now that a bit of time has gone by, however, a third wave of influence is starting to make its presence felt over the pond. Bands like The Dears, for example, or even The Shins (much of the new Shins record, Wincing the Night Away, finds vocalist James Mercer coming over all Morrissey, both in his choice of words and in the way he chooses to sing said words) are demonstrating what you can do when you take an influence and do something interesting with it. And, lest we forget, Johnny Marr has himself joined an underground American band, Modest Mouse - and their new album (called We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank) is chock-a-block with the kind of guitar-playing we haven't heard out of yr man Marr for a good few years now...

*

Reviewing Mark Simpson's Saint Morrissey and Simon Goddard's Songs That Saved Your Life in the London Review of Books in 2004, author Andrew O'Hagan wrote:

The fact that The Smiths are no more (and have been no more for a couple of decades, very nearly) means that they themselves now exist the way that all of the things Morrissey held dear exist - preserved as if in aspic, beyond criticism or comparison. All we can do now is doodle on the grave.