They don't know what love is - I know what love is

Hold on to your gag reflex; I write in the throes of a serious case of hero worship.

Last night I went to see Randy Newman. I was sitting just 6 rows from the stage and the Steinway and the shambling man himself with his bespectacled 'froggish' face. You could not have come across a happier camper than me when he started on the first bars of 'Birmingham'. You could not have.


This was the crowning moment in a long history of devotion. As a teenager I was enthralled by the eerie 'In Germany Before the War', and tickled by the inscrutable 'You Can't Fool the Fat Man'. Randy Newman's music has always sat cleverly beyond my grasp. And here I was, sitting almost within grasping distance of someone I'd always imagined I would just admire from across the sea (especially after a thwarted attempt to see him in Berlin). The man who, after 16 nominations, famously began his first Oscar acceptance speech with the words, 'I don't want your pity.' In person he was as amiable, self-deprecating and cynical as he is in his music. Introducing 'In Germany Before the War', he wondered that his record label had not seen the hit potential in a song about a child murderer.  And then, before 'Sail Away': 'This is a song about a recruiter for the slave trade. It is the best song ever written on the subject.' 

After a few songs, I noticed that the man next to me, when chuckling, sounded a little like Jon Ronson. This led to the wild surmise that this could actually be Jon Ronson, sitting next to me at a Randy Newman concert, and wouldn't that just be an amazing sycophantic coincidence? Reason being, I first came across Ronson through his documentary Unfortunately, I am Randy Newman, and admired both his subject matter and his yarn-spinning, subjective style. Then he popped up in one of the best This American Life episodes ever, with his incredible story about a man who pretended to be insane in order to escape a lengthy prison sentence, but then ended up stuck in the hospital previously known as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (it's worth listening to the episode just to hear Ronson repeating the word 'Broadmoor' in his smiling Welsh accent). This man has spent years trying to convince people he is sane, and the ones who accept this story still believe him to be a psychopath for pretending to be insane - so he has really shot himself in the foot.

Jon Ronson ended up writing a book about psychopaths, which I will read as soon as I can either afford it or afford to pay off my library fines. It is called The Psychopath Test, and he read part of it on a later episode of This American Life. And, in the same vein as Newman, it sounds just delightful.

photo courtesy of Ronson's flickr page