I first met Jeremy very soon after going up to Oxford. Within a very few
minuts, he had persuaded me to become the editor of a critical review broadsheet
he wanted to set up - largely, I suspect with hindsight, so that he could write
witty and learned reviews of artistic events in Oxford.
I remember clearly
one of these reviews. He had gone to cover a rock musical based on the life of a
second century prophet. The review covered two sides of A4 in Jeremy's tiny,
meticulous handwriting. Attached to the front was a note:
"If you are short of space this week, you can cut all but the last
five words."
Fascinated, I turned over and read:
"Oh dear, dear, dear, dear."
He carried on reviewing, on a rather more prestigious scale, throughout
his life. At his Memorial Service, on April 28th, two of his editors, Peter
Burton of Gay Times and Rob Ainsley of Classic CD,
spoke with awe, admiration, and considerable affection of Jeremy's ability to
deliver perfect copy, full of wit and erudition, always to length and always on
time. As Rob put it:
"If I asked Jeremy for a two thousand word review of the latest
Shostakovich CD, with a joke about Dickens in the second-to-last paragraph, by
Friday, there on Friday would be the review, 2,000 words, with a joke about
Dickens in the second-to-last paragraph."
I can do no better than quote in full the wonderful obituary of Jeremy
that appeared in The Independent, written by another very old
friend of Jeremy's, Tony Sellars.
Jeremy J. Beadle was an oustanding example of a breed of cultural critic
which has become more common over the last decade, able to cross the barrier
between serious and popular culture. A polynmath, he wrote on literature,
classical music and popular culture, and his expertise extended from intricacies
of the novels of Henry James to sport and television soaps.
Beadle could recall vast amounts of detail on any subject that took his
interest. This was most evident in his third book, Will Pop Eat Itself?
(1993), a compendium of fact so detailed and various that one might assume that
thousands of card indices and preliminary sifting went into its preparation.
This was not the case: Beadle's memory was so capacious that and his powers of
mental organisation so direct, he could draft the entire book with only a few
sparse pages of notes in front of him.
Beadle published a book on each of his interests. There were two
thrillers, both set in the seedy London underworld. His knowledge of popular
music was encyclopaedic (he could tell you every no 1 hit for the last thirty
five years) and it enabled him to confront a subject like post-modernism in what
has become the standard work on the subject, Will Pop Eat Itself?
His knowledge of classical music was equally great; as well as writing for
Classic CD since its inception, he wrote The Virgin Guide to
Classical Music (1993), which covers the entire gamut of classical music.
His greatest love, however, was the music of the German symphonic tradition, and
Wagner in particular, and this he wrote on in his book The Age of
Romanticism (1995), and talked about frequently on Radio 3. His radio play
The Gates of the Underworld (1990), also broadcast on Radio 3, was`about
the German writer and music critic E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose themes of music, love
and death fascinated Beadle.
Jeremy John Beadle was born in York in 1956, and educated first at the
cathedral choir scholl, and then at St.Peter's, York. By the age of 18 he had
written seven novels and a good deal of poetry, but he nevertheless went to
Oriel College, Oxford, to study Classics. This interest was to bear fruit later
in a series of talks for Radio 3 on mythological subjects, but at the time he
found it frustrating, as his real love was English Literature. Having changed to
this subject he took a First Class degree, and followed it with an MPhil
specialising in the novels of Anthony Powell. One of his last appearances on
Radio 3 was to talk about musical references in Powell's work.
After teaching at Oxford, Beadle moved to London to work for the GLC and
then for the Home Office, before setting out alone as a freelance writer and
broadcaster. He published six books and many hundreds of articles and was a
frequent voice on Radio 3. He was also a wonderful conversationalist. He had
been planning a new work, which would draw together the threads of all his
interests, before his untimely death.
Anthony Sellars in The Independent
When he was in hospital in the summer of 1995, a friend remarked that he'd
take Jeremy some Derrida he'd been meaning to read. Freed from his hectic
schedule, Jeremy would have time to catch up. I responded that I was taking him
two teenage pop magazines, a football magazine and the latest edition of the
Fortean Times (Jeremy was a lifelong TV SF fan, particularly of
Dr.Who, Blake's Seven and - latterly - The
X-Files). The point about Jeremy was that he would read and love them
all! Even at the end of his life he was acquiring fresh enthusiasms and
sharing them with his friends. Persuading everyone to listen to and enjoy Pulp
was one of the latest of these.
There seemed to be no end to his interests and enjoyments. He was a keen
football and cricket fan - and he knew all the statistiucs. Indeed he had such a
mind for data of all kinds that he used to supplement his income in his early
days in London by touring the pubs and winning a handsome profit on the quiz
machines.
I shall miss Jeremy for many things, the jokes and games we shared over
the years since the days when we shared a flat together in North Oxford. I shall
miss having someone who shares my enthusiasm for truly bad soap operas, weepy
films, scandalous gossip about people in high places - and low places. But
everyone who knew Jeremy will miss him for different things - often things that
surprised even old friends. Unlike several of these, I was aware that he was a
Churchwarden and so the staff of office that decorated his coffin was not such a
surprise to me. But I was fascinated to learn at the funeral that he had
entertained the young daughters of another friend of his by teaching them all
the pop music dances from the 1970s onwards!