This is a lightly edited extract from a piece I wrote for Frank Kogan’s fanzine WHY MUSIC SUCKS (#11, pub.June 1997). The topic was “My First Record”; some of the tone is me not quite sure at that time who I am as a writer any more, especially in this context. All the square-bracket interpolations and footnoted annotations are new.

[…] The first LP I bought was almost certainly Slapp Happy’s Slapp Happy [in 1976]. It was on bargain offer in a local shop, and I remember the grins on the faces of the shop girls when I took it off their hands. But it was very nearly – which would have been hilarious – Metal Machine Music, which was in the same bargain bin. For some reason I decided against MMM. I think that I decided it was too popular: or – since this makes no sense – that someone I knew would have bought it, so I didn’t need to.

Between these points [i.e. 1967-76], ten years of what? [Footnote 1] Growing up in the depths of England’s rural midlands, isolated from kids my own age [2]. My parents aren’t puritans; I was forbidden nothing [3]; but living in the deep country I had no access, except to books, and no idea of what I was missing. I spent my time reading reading reading, till places like Narnia and Moominvalley seemed real and familiar, and the outside world grey, pale, without energy.

[When I got to secondary school] and began to hang out with kids who talked about rock, my solution to not being up to speed was straight out of Alien Nation [4]. The off-worlder studies the host culture’s ways diligently, committing all trivia to memory, just in case. Soon he can pass as human: or will some ridiculous detail be his downfall?

I bought a book in 1977: The NME Book of Rock, a chubby little pulp-encyclopaedia of pop [5], and read it cover to cover, committed it to memory, and turned myself into a little book-based expert [i.e. on records and in music I wouldn’t actually hear for years]. More importantly, though, I read in it that a man called Tony Palmer (a British TV director in the 60s) who’d heard no rock until 1967, when he read about Sgt Pepper in The (London) Times, had asked a friend for Ten Essential Albums, and become a professional national rock critic within the year. [6]

I decided to do the same. But I went further, polling maybe 30 people. NOT all in my immediate gang, and several not even close to being friends. I ended up with a list of maybe 100 records [7]: all LPs (a fact of significance, though I didn’t yet know this). I had no record player, but my sister did have a little tape-recorder/cassette player. Everyone played tapes then anyway – it was the era of the portable cassette-machine. I borrowed tape after tape, writing careful critical notes — subjective? ignorant? innocent? pure? — marking everything out of five. When they played stuff at school on their little machines, it had to be quiet (it was school). At home, I played things even more quietly. Some of this rock stuff sounded very nice; very little hit me particularly hard (all those touches of classical imitation). Three exceptions: Patti’s Horses, 666 by Aphrodite’s Child, Camembert Electrique by Gong.

Mainly there was a central cluster of Progressive Rock: the gang’s median taste, its mainstream: Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Purple, Rainbow, ELP, Barclay James Harvest, Wishbone Ash. I was also now listening to John Peel – very very quietly – every night (on a tiny little radio, under the bedcovers), and reading the weekly rock papers, as assiduously as Talmud. There were then four in the UK: NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, and Record Mirror [8].

[From the four weeklies and Peel] I learnt that prog rock had gone out of fashion, very suddenly, about six months before I began this project. Just as I began my big daft quest, punk had invaded. Though mostly younger than me, the gang I had till then imagined hipper than me were already beached by history — and I was beginning to exchange this briefly desired companionship, of those to hand at my school, for the idea of a gang I knew was better. A virtual gang, an imagined community: a mass movement without local representatives (except for me, of course). This was easier than it may sound. [9]

Rock-paper language was just then full of praise for punk because it spoke “ordinary language” about “everyday, relevant things”. But urban rage wasn’t ordinary or relevant to my initial gang — nor to me [10]. This was a rhetoric my to-hand gang resisted: you could even say they saw through it. ’ But I loved it for its non-ordinariness, and bought straight into it. I entirely convinced myself that, as Simon Frith would say, reality was what happened elsewhere. [11]

My secret reason for finding punk both comforting and alluring was its yen for absolute moral conflict: when I gazed at grainy photos of dark rooms full of odd-looking people and occasional shiny gleaming things (guitars, mike stands, Siouxsie Sioux’s eyes), I was thrown straight back into a world I was already perfectly familiar with, and happy in. Children’s books are thick with absolute moral conflict, odd-looking people, occasional shiny gleaming things (swords, stars, Lúthien Tinúviel’s eyes).

I loved the idea that somewhere in the world, far away, were people whose “ordinary everyday” shared tone and texture with my utterly personal totally bookish world of moral quest and the innocent but determined defeat of evil, of small bands of small folks against the dark forces. Goblins didn’t exist, but Johnny Rotten did. I might even meet him [12].

However this gang-transfer did not happen immediately. [13] It was preceded, or in fact accompanied, by a failed transfer into a rival virtual community. One established less by reading than by listening; but again one that demanded I gravitate to the real, familiar energy of the imagined, and retreat from the pale grey failure of my immediate surroundings. [14]

The poll returns that intrigued me most even then were the ones that failed to fall into any pattern, the replies of those without group allegiance, the bands who the rock papers seemed to have little or no [current] attitude towards. Lone votes for Sabbath, Tull, Bethnal [15], Rory Gallagher, the Groundhogs. And beyond this, the eccentric – because so casual and so ill-considered – votes of a guy called Peter, who everyone called Tool. [16] He’d voted for the only three records he knew. He brought them to school, but he didn’t own them; they were his sister Nora’s: In Hearing of by Atomic Rooster, 100 Ton Chicken by Stan Webb’s Chicken Shack, Camembert Electrique by Gong. The first two were very minor BritBluesBoom groups, just as it began shading into Prog Rock (Christine Mcvie, then Christine Perfect, later of Fleetwood Mac, sang for Shack; co-founded by Carl Palmer, Rooster were an offshoot of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, though Palmer had left for ELP by Hearing-time).

But Gong were completely different. For a while (c. 1971-72) France’s most popular avant-garde free-rock group, they were pluperfect Euro-hippy anarchists, playing disorderly spacerock that would have been jazz-rock if they hadn’t been so out of it. (Indeed, the more time passed, the duller and more jazzrocky Gong became.) They lived in a chateau-commune in rural France (there was a picture on the sleeve: it looked like a shabby mountain farm). They gave themselves cartoon names (sax and fluteplayer Didier Malherbe was Bloomdido Bad de Grasse: the only one I can remember), and there was some elaborate though never-explained mythology involving the moon, Tantric sex, weed, teapots, pixies, and the poet John Donne. Their bossman was an already aging Australian ur-beatnik called Daevid Allen, who had been buddies with minimalist tape-looper Terry Riley and also a founder of Soft Machine. This particular record you could find all over the place in those days: it sold for 99p only, when LPs were £3.99 or £4.99. I didn’t buy it at the time: we just played Pete’s copy (including playing frisbee with it and walking on it).

I never met Pete’s sister Nora. Her taste intrigues me.

With its black-and-white hand-drawn sleeve, handwritten song titles, fuzz of marginal jokes, Camembert Electrique was a fabulous detailed microworld to me: an explosive little 1968 in my own heart. It wasn’t the drug references, which meant nothing to me: it was the sense that this cartoon world was extended and internally consistent (as subsequent exploration proved it wasn’t) [17], that you could leave the beckoning dreary straight world, and make off into this alternative space. I wanted to hang around and do nothing and grow my hair really long and have a funny cartoon name in a Chateau in France. Under the paving stones, the Chateau.

Most of the record was formless, shapeless, draggy wandering, with funny little sound effects (a sort of chuggy clockwork object panned slowly across the stereo-image at one point). Allen couldn’t sing – he kind of spoke ‘poetry’ in a mimsy way. But there was also this one perfectly simple, hypnotic, unforgettable bassline, which I loved then, and love now (everyone loved it who heard it). I gave the record five out of five. No one seemed to understand why. (Even Pete didn’t like it that much. He voted for it because it was his, not because it was good.) I know why, now: I knew that one day I would love and understand as much as I did that bassline all the bits of the record that irritated and puzzled me. I wasn’t ready: but with study this understanding would come.

If people thought this polling project was weird at the time, they never said so. Of course, for years, I thought it was: I never spoke about it, never liked to think about it. It was proof that my rock roots were none too deep, and startlingly inauthentic. [18] The getting of wisdom demands that the mechanism of its attainment be rejected. […]

FOOTNOTES:

1: The 10-ish years covered the time from the first LP that mattered to me, though bought by my dad for my mum: Sergeant Pepper. Here’s a post on that.

2: Isolated by geography, not temperament: welcome to the countryside, where your closest schoolfriend lives 10 miles away.

3: This seems an odd thing to say: like they always inatantly bought me a pony and a sportscar and every double album I desired. What I mainly meant was they they didn’t at any point seem to disapprove of my interests and sense of life-direction as a writer. (And for “aren’t” read “weren’t”: mum died in 2005, dad in 2010, and I miss them.)

4: lol does anyone even remember this TV series, once salient and much-discussed? Probably a more exact reference for the thing I’m talking about is The Man Who Fell to Earth — at least people have actually seen it in living memory.

5: There were three editions of the NME Book of Rock: 1975 (Star Books, ed.Nick Logan and Bob Finnis); Feb.1977 (Star, ed.Logan and Bob Woffinden); Nov.1977 (Salamander, large format, ed.Logan and Woffinden). I own the second and third, now in terrible condition (no covers, some outer pages vanished). The late Bob Woffinden had a fascinating and exemplary second act to his career as a rock journalist.

6: Tony graciously agreed to participate in my Birkbeck conference in 2015, on an entertaining panel with Jonathon Green and Mark Pringle about how well or badly mainstream media tackled rock culture in the 1960s.

7: I wish I still had the documentation that went with this poll, not to mention the results, but it went missing long ago. A hundred seems a lot!

8: Those four weeklies in order of my engagement with them:

A: NME every week from August 1977 — I ended up writing for it and only stopped when I angrily quit in 1988 (a story I’ll tell properly another time) .

B: Sounds most weeks 1977-79: I was driven off by reviewers who seemed not to get post-punk, as it wasn’t yet called: mainly Garry Bushell and his quasi-political thuggishness, then still nominally leftwing, but also Dave McCullough’s bad review of the first Raincoats LP (grrrr). McCullough was actually an interesting writer, generally simpatico with things I liked then — The Fall — and I often wonder what became of him.

C: Melody Maker: dipped in for a while in 1977, only very occasionally thereafter. It was regarded as the most grown-up and serious, but to be honest (aged 17) I found it a bit of a chore, and its page design was pretty terrible. Bascially it had a bad punk wars and I largely missed its late 70s reflowering under Richard Williams.

D: Record Mirror: this by contrast I felt at the time was a little young for me and hardly ever looked at, which I now regret.

9: If this essay has a moral, it’s that this kind of identification can be much deeper, and more life-shaping, than the impact of the seemingly more immediate world around you (your school, your town).

10: We were rural or small-town middle-class kids. Not all my friends were middle-class — but the ones that weren’t mostly weren’t at that school.

11: This phrase was from memory, and as a result misquoted in this piece. It’s the final sentence of Simon Frith’s ‘Playing with Real Feeling: Making Sense of Jazz in Britain’ (collected in both Music for Pleasure and Taking Popular Music Seriously). The full passage is worth quoting: “To understand why (and how) the worlds of jazz (and rock) are young men’s worlds we have, for example, to understand what it means to grow up male and middle-class; the understand the urgency to ‘authenticity’ we have to understand the strange fear of being ‘inauthentic’. In this world, American music — black American music — stands for a simple idea: that everything real is happening elsewhere.” I knew this quote (and was alluding to it, even if I got it slightly wrong) because Frank Kogan had explored it in an earlier issue of Why Music Sucks. Versions of this discussion can be found in his book Real Punks Don’t Wear Black: Music Writing by Frank Kogan, in the three-page essay ‘The Trouble with the Sociology of Pop’ but also at the start of the epic 47-page (nearing 30,000-word) essay-memoir ‘Roger Williams in America / The What Thing’. Where too many present-day music-writers jump to scorn the notion of authenticity (as risible goal and reliable index of bad music), Kogan explores how the fear could be social and artistically useful and fruitful, and hence not “strange” all. There’s a reason we can’t shed it as a topic, and a reason it seems constantly to return in new form (see also footnote 18).

12: So far I never met him.

13: Since age 10 I had been a member on the distant edges of the Puffin Club. If I now began scouring NME and Sounds for details of how punk worked as group I belonged to, I was simply switching my habit away from Puffin Post, a magazine run by a children’s publisher, a monthly full of interviews and stories and competitions you could enter, and club picnics for members (which never took place in Shropshire). There was an extensive reviews section, in which insider kids got to detail in print the upcoming paperbacks they’d been given to enthuse about. I very badly wanted to be one of these insiders, and tell the world why a book I liked was good.

14: “pale grey failure…” With hindsight I’m a bit out of sympathy with this back-projecting sorry-for-myself flourish. I didn’t feel a failure as a teenager at all — I was excited and stubborn and quietly driven — and now I distrust this attempt at self-deprecation. I want to say that the late 90s is when I most felt a failure: certainly much more than the mid-70s. Probably I’ll change my mind about this too though.

15: Bethnal were a low-tier, now-forgotten pop-punk band, featuring one George Csapo on vocals and violin. Pete Townshend-approved, they made two LPs, Dangerous Times and Crash Landing. The voter in my poll also played violin.

16: This sounds mean, and how I continued it in the original makes it worse: “(because he was one”). In fact he was a sweet friendly somewhat dozy kid whose main defence mechanism was playing the clown. He was teased ruthlessly and seemed not to mind. I hope he actually genuinely didn’t mind.

17: In other words the kind of conceptual continuity that pulls people into Zappa’s world, or Pedro Bell’s cartoons on the Parliament and Funkadelic sleeves — though I never warmed to Zappaworld when I later encountered it.

18: “Startlingly inauthentic”. But startling to who? Inauthentic how? Looking back — halfway across my writing life, I guess — it’s maybe telling that this is the phrase I wave uneasily: “lol authenticity, lol young me?” What exactly is bundled up into it? What was the “unrealness” of musical and/or writerly understanding that I was claiming to find about my early anxious self, in this late-90s stab at describing my mid-80s anxieties about my 70s (teenage) self.

To wander off into a minefield of thinking aloud, it’s two things: the extent of my knowledge, and the mode of its arrival — as in, do writers ever actually understand anyone else?

(A): Was I the kind of obsessive record-collecting scholar I was surrounded by in the mid-80s? Well, no (impostor syndrome klaxon): I knew a lot, almost all gained by reading.

(B): how was this way into and what it means not just entirely at odds with the world of the cap-p Proper pop or rock or soul or jazz fan (black or white). Who had surely somehow directly absorbed the relevant language from their own local community or anyway their older siblings, or else from some bewitched engagement with “the music itself” on radio or (sometimes) TV? Or via obsessive gathering of 45s and 33s (despite 33s at this juncture being somewhat deprecated) 33?

In fact, of course (C): most strong music writers come to writing by reading. By my late teens something about it — the access it gave to something, something I still haven’t quite worked out — it had evolved into a passion, a commitment I couldn’t and didn’t sidestep. Aged 20 or so, it seemed all too belated, but being slow to get things (or to accept things?) isn’t something I’m faking, that’s for sure. In small doses with big gaps and often poor access, I’ve been listening to pop all my life.

As a teen, I wanted to know what it was about music that bound my acquaintances into groups, and could it work for me? In retrospect running a poll seems to me like a pretty smart way of tackling the not-knowing-much aspect — and as a one-off also not the worst stab at critical practice. Evidence if any were needed that being some sort of analyst of matters pop-cultural was already baked in — that it was actually what I was always meant to be. If I felt I was the wrong kind of person from the wrong kind of place back then, I stopped thinking this long ago: this is just who I am.

(D): The key for me here and now is the degree to which music-listening (and collecting and whatever other interaction is involved) bumps sideways into a world shaped by words and refashions it. A lot, a little? Does it challenge it or firm it up? Thee days I prefer always to argue for the former — the disjunction is what a critic shd be hunting for — but the latter remains common (because it seems more normal?) and this (for non-writers?) functions as “the real”. Of course Kogan’s argument here would be the value of the feeling of fakeness — the worry that as a rockwriter I’m not a real rockwriter — is that wrestling with it is what helps drive you towards superior work.

How real is “superior work” though?

No amount of politics or philosophy or theory or backstory or practical musical experience — knowing how to play the changes for ‘Giant Step’s, knowing what they “mean” — are going to resolve the issue of the Correctness the Mix you hit on realness (the genuine emotional or intellectual effects) versus imagined cosplay potential, in yr stance or method or self-presentation. After all punk really did exist, albeit not as I hoped, and ditto Gong and the puffineers. And they’d gone by the time I arrived on any relevant scene. But my dream version stuck around long after, affecting all kinds of other stuff. The abiding panic that you’re getting the mix WRONG is what helps the writer to be smarter or better or deeper or more _ or more _

(Puffin Club artwork and lettering is largely and very memorably by the late Jill MacDonald… )

[If you like this post, please support my PATREON which will help me write more! Also let other people know that you think might enjoy it… ]

“During the Conservative government of Edward Heath there were five declarations of emergency under this Act [viz the Emergency Powers Act 1920], by far the most any government. The first was in July 1970 over a dockers strike, the second in December 1970 over an electricians strike, the third in February 1972 over a miners strike, the fourth in August 1972 over another dockers strike and the fifth time in October 1973, which lasted for four months”

So for last 18 months, my plan had been to launch the kickstarter for the book of the conference I ran at Birkbeck on the politics of UK rockwriting (1968-85). That’s a mock-up of the cover on the left (illustrations by the marvellous Savage Pencil): you can click on it to see a larger version, but if you don’t the title and subtitle read A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK: how UK music-writing became a space for unruly curiousity, in the words of those who made it happen. Originally I had the kickstarter launch scheduled for May, exactly 12 months on from the symposium itself — but there were a lot of things to get ready, and, well, events intervened (it went live on Monday 27 June, just four days after the results of the eurovote sent everything in the UK into spiralling chaos). No one’s said so directly — most people have been very supportive — but if someone were to suggest it was frivolous or decadent or impertinent to be promoting such a project during such a crisis, well, I wouldn’t be entirely startled. And I wouldn’t feel they were entirely wrong.

Despite this, I still think it’s right to carry on: and here’s why. The book will be an anthology — meaning that a variety of voices will speak (it will contain extracts from the panels on the day, with additional essays from those involved). It is a regathering of people involved in an informal, improvised cultural space that came into being at some point in the 60s (perhaps even earlier), coalescing around 1970 out the counterculture and other existing sources, some radical, some fannish — which existed in real time for some years, with ripples that continued to travel long after that. In its multiform, provocative, naive way, it was something that stood somewhat athwart the grim turbulences of the 70s, even if (from time to time) it also reacted to them and expressed them. It was about possibility, and about community: about how a community gets to define itself and to move out into the wider world.

The kickstarter is here: and what I say about it on that page is this (click through for further detail, and to support it to make it happen):

Once upon a time — for a surprisingly long time— the UK music-press was a lot more than just the place to catch up with singles or album release news, with interviews with chart-topping figures and the antics of gobby rockstars. Week on week in its heyday — the mid 60s to the early 80s — a young reader could also go to it to find out about everything from comics to cult films to radical politics, as well as an extremely wide range of non-chart musics from all over the world. Hiding in plain sight, it was the communal improvisation of ways to process an unprecedented tumult from every quarter, of new sounds and dances, startling ideas and visions all battling for attention. It took place in such high-street titles as NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, Echoes, Street Life, Let It Rock, Zigzag, Black Music; but it had fermented in the undergrounds — Oz, IT, Frendz, Ink — and a significant alt/free/listings press including Time Out, City Limits, the anti-racist agit-prop paper Temporary Hoarding, and the redoubtable feminist magazine Spare Rib. As well, from the mid-70s, there was a burgeoning underfelt of fanzines, notably Nick Kimberley and Penny Reel’s legendary reggae zine Pressure Drop, plus Bam Balam, Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped and Torn, London’s Burning, London’s Outrage, Out There, and many many more.

It would be absurd to argue that its ideals — insofar as it even understood them clearly — have come to be irrevocably enacted: incorrect, if sometimes tempting, in the late 90s; simply fatuous in the light of recent weeks, when everything that it was not has broken back hard against it. It was always fragile: a serendipity, a moment. I want to argue that it was something more. That something useful to us right now can be drawn out of it. I’m not even sure yet what this is — I have ideas, which I might write more about, but for now I just want to make it possible to re-open the conversation.

“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger… The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”

Quite apart from anything else, the past — even the very recent past, maybe especially the very recent present — is a mass of detail that’s hard to take in and process (not least because you have to push away the immediate present to do so). My conference produced a little over 12 hours of conversation in one large (often quite hot, by the end quite airless) room, and the discussion has continued elsewhere, in nearby pubs or bars after the two days of debates; also here at ilm, here at Freaky Trigger, and here and here on tumblr. Resonance 104.4FM broadcast it nearly in full on 25 May and have put the eight extracts up on their mixcloud site here (I don’t know how long for).

If I say the commentaries so far have been partial, I mean three things. First, that several of the commentators (Tom Ewing and Hazel Southwell in particular) are very good friends, co-conspirators even; they’re partial to me! Second, that with a couple of exceptions, almost no one commenting attended the whole thing: I actually agree with plenty Laura Snapes says, but she was only in attendance for her own session; purely as a description her account can only reflect that final 100 or so minutes (and the fact that she definitely had the pointy end of the Q&A, in the jaded final minutes of a long tiring day). And third, so much seemed to be touched on over the two days that wasn’t pursued, as is the nature of these events; certainly it’s going to take me a long time to dig down into what I actually now feel, less about the conference than about the era it claimed to explore, what this era meant and means, and why (or indeed if) it still matters at all. On the whole, I’m enormously pleased with how it turned out, just because I think such a lot has been gathered together and set down for future scholars and scoundrels to play with. (Transcripts of the panels are to be gathered into a book along with further memoir and commentary by those who attended and those who couldn’t: this is the plan, anyway. Though I’m taking a bit of a break first.)

Here’s an extract from the report I wrote for Birkbeck:

Underground/Overground:
The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85

This was a two-day symposium (15-16 May) at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As. Run by Mark Sinker, former editor of The Wire, it brought together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s, to explore their own experiences academics and other media commentators. The first day looked at the period when UK rockwriting emerged out of the conflict between a rising generation’s counterculture and the embattled establishment in the late 60s and early 70s. Through the witness testimony of participants, and the overview of historians of the era, panels examined the evolution of a critical outsider voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. We learned what the underground press felt like to write for, how the mainstream press responded to rock music and its social penumbra, and how the trade press reached out for some of these writers — notably Charles Shaar Murray, who had written for the notorious schoolkids issue of Oz as a schoolkid — and what it was like moving over to the trade press. We heard from those in the editorial backroom about what it felt like being on a weekly responding to stories in pop and politics, how decisions were made and what the pressures were: Cynthia Rose noted that this was a time when striking miners’ wives from Kent came to the NME office to discuss stories run on them.

On day two, we heard more from voices outside these offices and these times, as a kind of counterpoint to the more canonic stance perhaps established on the first day. Val Wilmer, a veteran of the music papers in the 60s, recounted what it was like as a woman — in the very male milieu of jazz writing— bringing back stories from the radical black underground. There was a panel exploring punk’s often difficult relationship to the underground that helped birth it, and another on those constituencies not so well served by the music papers at this time, looking at black music and dance music especially. Finally a somewhat turbulent panel attempted to answer the tricky question of legacy — how much does this history help or even affect writers today?

In the course of the two days, we heard from well known voices but also from people who have not often had the chance to enlarge on their perspective. An enormous amount was touched on that will be of interest to scholars in various fields, from popular music and media studies to sociology and political aesthetics. Some myths were exploded, others perhaps further entrenched.

One thing I always hoped to do as an editor — and it turns out being a conference runner is not dissimilar, in its joys as well as its frustrations — is to bring voices together that didn’t normally get converse in the same space: as at The Wire in the early 90s for a couple of years, so at Birkbeck in mid-May 2015 for a couple of days. In both cases, I was especially keen — as discussed in this earlier post — that the past and the present creatively encounter one another, perhaps on slightly different terms than they do ordinarily, in music-writing or anywhere else. So as well on critical writing on the various contemporary streams, rock and pop and soul and rap and dance and the electronic avant-garde, blah blah blah, I following my predecessor Richard Cook in deliberately encouraging contributions from the best voices from the old guard, voices talking about (at that point) some 70 years of jazz, and some nine centuries of composed music.

Did I succeed? At the time I thought no: I felt that this particular exchange, between the best of the present and the best of the past, was still a dialogue of the deaf. Few in the various territories I was yoking together seemed at that time curious enough to explore the interests of rivals sympathetically or insightfully. And of course in practice The Wire had a super-tiny budget, and our bat-signal was primarily attended to by those with nowhere else to go when they wrote on x or y, the high quality of their commentary notwithstanding. Writers who are experts in their own specific (sometimes small and embattled) fields tend to hunker down and play defence when they encounter enthusiasts for very different fields and tendencies and perspectives.

Then again — for this or other reasons — I wasn’t editor for very long. Because the ways to combine the perspectives, or use them creatively against one another, are generally worked out by readers, not least when or if they in turn become writers a few years down the line. An editor’s job is ultimately — in various different ways — to be a kind of idealised reader. And one element of this ideal is the plain fact that readers can enjoy a piece by one writer, and get a lot from — then turn the page and do the same with the first writer’s mortal scornful foe. From the thread discussion that hangs from Tom’s FT review, a theme emerges that I absolutely recognise, summed up by a useful word that hadn’t occurred to me: “oscillation”. Just in the territory the conference covers (but also in my conception of the role of The Wire in the early 90s), there seem to be a proliferation of essential oscillations between this or that or the other opposed cultural ethos*. Not just the way rock rubs against jazz on one side and pop on the other, and punk likewise; not just (as Frank Kogan notes on the FT comments thread) the way critical journalism rubs against investigative journalism, or the way that both rub against history; not just my overall theme of underground and overground, and how inside track and outside pressure work against one another; but the ancient uneasy dances of music with noise, and of order with desire; and of course of age with youth… If “1968-85” is my shorthand for the era of the self-consciously all-encompassing ‘outsider’ magazine [adding: in the UK] — “1968-94” only if you include Richard’s and my time at The Wire — then this is the era when technology and happenstance combined to fashion a clustered territory where readers were encouraged to enjoy and think about conflicting things; to move backwards and forwards between stances and traditions, in and out of close-read trust as they turned pages.

The potential of this world arose from the richness of this dividedness: and the refusal of any of the divisions to map simply onto the economic or racial or gender seperations and hierarchies that structure the larger world. And underneath — or above? — all these is the refusal of the not-quite division of music from the spoken or written world to settle into anything easily summarised, whatever the fashionable pressures of niche-marketing at target demographics. On one hand, all the splintered and shifting currents of music present a map of the real in its infolded complexity; on the other, there’s no music that doesn’t also manifest as a rhetoric of potential utopian togetherness: on one hand, there’s just the fact of the unpredictable constituent shape of any gathered crowd at any show; on the other, the potentially mutable readability of music itself, its last-instance combination of concrete sensuous quiddity and, well, untranslateability. We may occasionally agree what the words of a song mean, but all we can actually agree we agree on in the bits of music that aren’t words (i.e. re the meaning of this harmony, that chord change, this blue note, that grace note, this fill, that grunt…) is that we likely don’t agree. That’s the point: we’re gathered here together in part because we like that we won’t read it the same, and that’s the fun and the risk.

(Unlikely and probably unsustainable analogy: the Bible shared in a shared language you mostly didn’t understand enabled religious unity; however — and Lollardry notwithstanding — the Bible translated into a shared language you DID understand meant a splintering into warring sects…)

The panel I was secretly most pleased to have convened — because it dug into the kinds of backroom work that people who never worked in print-age newspaper or magazine offices rarely understand, however closely they’ve read the output — was the final one on Friday, which Tom ran: The encroachment of professionalisation on a generational playpen — What were the pressures in a music paper’s editorial office, and what was the potential? Half-joking about the working conditions, Cynthia Rose used the term “plantation journalism”: the papers themselves were really make a LOT of money, but little of it reached the editors and stringers, hired to deliver a Stakhanovite output day after day (these were cheaper times to live, for sure, but there was still no margin to put by even a penny of every pound you earned). Tom reaches for a rather different metaphor: “… [T]he sense of the work on an underground or weekly mag – the circus of sheer effort involved in bringing the bastard to land each week, that was grand to hear about, like a hundred years ago you might have heard men talk about life on a whaler…” This was a small, shared world, baffling and perhaps worse to those who come long after, beleaguered by surging pressures but united by task into intense group loyalty, its reward mainly a very local prestige, with (lurking at once just over the horizon but also, unmentionable, within the crowded quarters) the terrific Moby-Dick shaped leviathan of, well, what, exactly? The implicit politics of the craft of this long-vanished music-writing worldlet?

There are plenty of other very smart things that could be quoted in that thread. But this is me writing, so right now instead I’m going to quote myself, because I think this is relevant: “We live in a time of extremes of proximity, not just between cultural blocs formerly more safely distanced (or so it seemed, in the metropole), but also between present and strong representation of elements of the past […]: I think negotiating these proximities has become a *lot* more perilous, but we actually do have to negotiate this situation (and not just wish it away as a symptom); which inevitably means become expert in far more things than we perhaps formerly believed we signed up for.” The internet has collapsed distances, and not just between the many militant faiths and political stances as they exist in the once-wide world today: we are more than ever, every day, hard up against idealised echoes of the past, and more than this echoes of various rival idealised pasts, making very strong demands on us. We castigate those who wish to return us to such-as-such a point in the past — arguing (generally correctly) that they have no strong sense of what it was actually like — and then we turn round and lament that such-and-such an organisation or institution is not what it was, and will only return to relevance when it rediscovers and reanimates its earlier principles and purpose. At which moment, others naturally castigate us. In other words, how we address and draw from the past is as live and tricky an issue as it’s ever been: even “where’s that jetpack I was promised!?” is an appeal to a past mode of futurism. As time passes, revolutionary purists more and more become original-intent reactionaries: one thing we ought to have learned from punk is the inextricable tangle that year-zero vanguardists get themselves into as they thrust us to the future: “rip it up to start again” is an intrinsically conflicted demand…

A conference organised to cover 1968-85 can (just about) get away with being eight panels and roughly 30 people: probably not representative of those involved, but not quite out of sight of it. As Hazel said to me at some point, how would you even begin to select people represent the last 15-odd years? You’d need 20 panels with 50 people on each. An ocean so full of vessels, and indeed wrecks of vessels… In their physical and structural make-up, the seas we sail have changed utterly. To quote myself again (this time from a 2009 essay for a collection on Afrofuturism that rather irritatingly still hasn’t appeared: A Splendidly Elaborate Living Orrery: Transplanetary Jazz: Further Thoughts on Black Science Fiction and Transplanetary Jazz):

With the internet, the discursive cosmos can seem inverted, matter for emptiness, emptiness for matter: a multitude of isolated geocentric bubbleworlds, planets and asteroids dragged into their neutron gravity, the heavens become a dense, grinding press of shattered astral matter… Encounters are still possible: to tunnel to this or that bubble isn’t rocket-science. But no gorgeous sunflare or night glow through velvet dark to call us, magnets to the romantic eye all broiled to cinders. And history — that painstaking reconstitution of real-time fragments — seems harder than ever. Stargazing has become a shuttered archeology of the hardscrabble crystalline sky.

A friend who sat though the whole thing, both days, described it afterwards as being the tale of a long battle utterly lost. And half of me sadly says yes to that; and half of me stubbornly thinks no. In practical terms, of course we can’t reinvent the music-press of the 70s and early 80s: it was never less than a curious serendipity, a confluence of a great many unrepeatable things; it was rooted in technologies that no longer exist and a society that has very much mutated. As a format, it was as highly unstable as it was path dependent: it didn’t make much economic sense, and very few writers made their fortune from it (a few made their fortunes escaping from it). Maybe for a while it was possible for a select few, with the right gifts but also the correct attributes, to make an inexpensive living from it (which I never did; my entire working life I’ve made my living basically correcting other people’s spelling). Many many people were unable to break into that select few — I made a point of inviting some people who were outsiders at the time, even if they momentarily had their foot in the door; who don’t ordinarily get to join in the retrospectives. There’s no dearth of good writers today, that’s not the problem at all (OK don’t get me started on good editors). But we haven’t found a way of making the current set-up pay for itself, in a way that’s remotely fair to the majority of the writers battling their way through it.

But it was also always after all a tale of the belief in the benefits that accrue by unleashing the unlettered urchin glee of the young on the wider world — on cultural legacies till then beyond their ken — and then battling with the problem of how things fell out when this wider world, as it always did and always will, began (a) to return the not-unpoisoned compliment, and (b) to include the past. As for (a), the urchin cheek now flows both ways, and now and then respectful tact flows with it also, and the two are needed, going in both directions, for adult relationships to survive that that aren’t lifeless or toxic reverence.

But (b) is much tougher to trust in — the past only ever has unbiddable parity when it manifests as a stony unchanging weight, the return of the dead as a forbidding monument. Yes, perhaps the designated crew can journey out to it the way we did with Afropop in the 80s or KPop over the last few years, with care as well as insolence, with fannish fascination as well as straightforward well intentioned inquisitive ignorance — but with Afropop and with KPop at least there was potentially a case that a similar counterflow might push back, to challenge the errors and rude liberties taken. That the implicit problem of “who’s this WE, white man?” could one day dissolve or transform in the encounter, to everyone’s benefit. But how can the past push usefully back in like fashion?

Journalism, including cultural journalism, is of course primarily about the now — it’s called NEWS for a reason. And part of working out what’s actually significant now includes a recognition of the relevant force and quality of the various flows. I’ve paid tribute to these music-magazine and weekly paper offices of long ago because — by the serendipity of the times — they saw a coming together of writers and editors from very different backgrounds, responding to very different calls. And that’s part of the complex, contradictory weave that I value, or mourn, if that’s the appropriate word. But now I think of it, the best of the writing exhibited the same characteristic: every writer’s indiviudal style that I admire from then (and also now, because this hasn’t vanished) was and is a crackling codeshifting weave also, of threads that come from very different sources. (Because good writers are always readers, and these were always wideranging readers, and listeners too…)**

And as codeshifters get older, their involvement to history — the one I’m obscurely worrying at throughout this rambing post — of course grows in and out of their relationship to their own youth; to their memory; to the values they set out with long ago; all this is bound into what they do and who they are. And some people settle into this badly, because they can shift themselves into a place of comfort and shallow complaisance. And others, well, others find they’re always already been embedded in a world that has cultured such negotiations and such oscillations reasonably effectively: they maintain curiosity, self-awareness, self-irony, amusement, kindness, anger, the ability to manage simultaneous contradictory status and pressure and pull. The trapdoors and the timebombs, they’re coded right into us, if we know how to listen — and of course we learn to listen to our inner pirate crew by learning to listen to others; others often not at all like us, insofar as we’re even like ourselves. How we address the popular, how we prioritise the semi-popular, how we respond to the unpopular or the plain unknown, these are ever-more linked into our relationship to the past, recent or deep: and this is not going to change; if anything it’s going to intensify.***

*The world seems to be divided on what a correct plural of the noun ethos is: ethe or ethea or (the incorrect but greeky) ethoi or (the anglicised but silly) ethoses. In the mood of the moment, I choose to take this to be telling…
**I’m going to defend the mixedness of this overall metaphor as further evidence of what it is I value: gallimaufry, salmagundy, macaronics: pie itself gets its name from the mixed jumble of items found in a magpie’s nest…
***There’s a peril in dredging up the carcasses of the vessels of the past, and probably more than one, especially if you do it collectively. Collapsed across the treasures you hoped to re-acquaint yourself with is the bony evidence of crimes you’d hoped perhaps to forget, and so on. But the discussion of all that is for the future, now, when the book starts to be made. For now, I want once again to say a powerful and heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who participated and attended, and advised or helped in ways large and small. It was what it was, and what it’s going to be, who can say?

via jamie kenny, yr go-to source for the chinese underbelly

Little essay for FT on art, class and autodidacts: featuring Oasis, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Scargill and Richard Jobson, among others. Tom Ewing and Frank Kogan are already arrived in the comments on excellent form: my fantasy thread would eventually also include Mark E. Smith, Robin Carmody and Robert Christgau duking it out with Liam and Noel Gallagher and maybe even one of the Appleton sisters…

(we are very close, except she’s not on the internet much at all and i’m never off it) (possibly this helps us stay so close!)

[Sharpen the silliness, and the contradictions will sharpen themselves: this is the point I failed to make this morning as I hurried out of the house…]

Adding: I say the piece discusses Meltzer, but (I’m a bit disappointed to have to note) really all it does is mention him. He’s introduced as a symptom of the failure of the critical conversation round classical music and the compositional avant-garde to interest or excite the best minds of the 60s generation. But Taruskin doesn’t give much sense of what might be interesting about Meltzer as a writer or thinker, which is a pity — or (which is surely relevant) that he was clearly in the process of wriggling out from under Hegel and Quine (both mentioned at best fleetingly in book-version of The Aesthetics of Rock; Quine just once, in the same sentence as one of the Hegels). Over to Frank Kogan for an all-too-brief primer.

Faintly recall from student days long ago that N.Malcolm was hard work and unrewarding as a philosopher (trans.: I was a confused and unsatisfactory philosophy student, esp.as far as Anglo-Am Analytical etc goes). But this is a good story, and — whether or not LW drew the correct conclusions at length — Sraffa’s intervention was strong, and Wittgenstein was right to be impressed and unsettled. I’m tempted to argue that music — all music, from Blobby to Boulez — is making much the same gesture to all other intellectual activity: here’s something you can’t do. That might be too strong — other things are always going on in music (including rapprochement, or attempts at same), and of course the various forces and layers never aggregate to a single decisive intent or content anyway — but it’s definitely an element I value in music, and don’t see well grasped in its discussion.