Reviewing “Clean –– One woman’s story of addiction, recovery and the removal of stubborn stains”, by Michele Kirsch (Short Books, ISBN 978-78072-381-5)

Several years back I was grousing to a pal about a new book by a clever and successful mutual acquaintance, a history that encroaches on territory I had one day hoped to stake out (but of course I have done nothing about this, since my pop timing is always terrible). My gripe is this: music writers endlessly re-interview the wrong people — or more precisely, never enough of the right people. Revisit the original moves and shakers and they mainly double down on what went over well the first the time, especially conceptually. Which is the way a moment of open possibility get congealed back into cliché. “If you want to know what a radical scene’s actually about,” I airily declared to my chum, “you should talk to the club’s hat-check girl.”

(The book in question did extremely well critically and commercially –– presumably because its targeted readers knew better than me what they wanted to read about this particular radical scene… )

Anyway, what’s valuable and lovely about Michele Kirsch’s Clean, I think, is how little attention it pays to the various movers and shakers she’s encountered, as a music writer in the 80s and after –– and how quite early on it turns out she WAS a hat-check girl, at a happening Boston punk club. As well as working in shops, on a switchboard, as a supply teacher, and latterly (per one meaning of the title) cleaning the flats and houses of exactly the kinds of comfortably successful people that pop stars and music writers mostly aspire to be (and now and then succeed). They stay largely off-stage as Michele tackles the grime in their very varied bathrooms, as anonymised sketches punctuating the narrative.

Which is instead an unsettling tale, deceptively wittily told, of unremitting anxiety since childhood, of grief as an unreliable lodestar, of industrial quantities of prescription Valium sometimes amplified by alcohol and other drugs –– and how (per another meaning of the title) you should quit all this, if you can. Since I first knew her 30-odd years ago, Michele has been a writer from her core to her fingertips –– and yet as an autobiography it’s not really about this at all. It begins with her childhood and youth, but says nothing of what she was reading then, or when she first picked up a pen, always pushing back into messier spaces, the ones often kept tidied away behind the pleasant nods to inspiration and aspiration. Around the time of the London Olympics, her decades as an addict had finally pulled both her chosen profession and a pleasant family domesticity out of her reach –– and the book’s framework is her learning to make a minimally liveable living as a cleaner.

At the NME in the mid-late 80s, Michele wrote funny, lively stories that arrived from odd angles –– odd because (to get them placed at all) they generally began life as this week’s promo pretext: pop stars (amusing, difficult, even –– whisper it –– dull) and what as writers we could make our tales of time spent with them. There was a tension here, and thus the chance to discover something about the forces shaping our world. And NME then still just about held a space open for anomaly, for curiosity, for voices and approaches not yet professionalised or routinised or market-narrowed out of their own sense of the shape of the world.

But this space was closing. Magazines were increasingly run by badly formed surveys about what readers felt they liked to read. And as writers and editors we had little idea, most of us, how to resist the pressures this created. By the late 80s, Michele was writing a column called ‘Mama K’s True Stories’ and it was of course terrific. And not like anything else at the time, at least in the UK (somewhere I have a folder full of cuttings from it). This was in the London listings magazine City Limits, a haven for the denizens of the closing space –– if anything under even more pressure to submit to market forces, to be more saleable than awkward, to drop what it had been (which had mattered so much) and to become what idiots thought it had to become.

Jump now to 1992: I’m re-fashioning The Wire from my predecessor Richard Cook’s template, into the kind of magazine I felt could survive without losing what had been so valuable. I got some things right –– the magazine did survive, and still does –– but why did I not see that ‘True Stories’ (which I loved!) fitted perfectly into this ambit and project? I wanted a greater diversity of writers! City Limits was in death spiral, there was much personnel overlap –– why didn’t I pick up the phone and ask Michele if she wanted to relocate? (We likely paid even less than CL, mind you… ) [Footnote 1]

Thinking this through (rueful and shamefaced that I didn’t realise before beginning this review) I realise it’s still a matter of what’s so good about this book, which was then much harder to see clearly (certainly harder for me, but surely not just me). And it goes back to congealment and concealment, who does what in the undiscussed spaces, what gets foregrounded and what gets left out when you’re making an argument in favour of something. Music is something Michele loves and knows about and finds invaluable in her life, and so what she writes about is her life. I was at that time mainly gathering writers who approached music as a series of battles (or as some would say, a history) of competing theories of value, popular vs vanguard vs past vs future vs rock vs rap vs jazz vs noise vs niche vs vector to the totality blah blah blah. Michele seemed untroubled by the routinised feuds and grand historical-definitional UK music-mag controversies of those times, at least in the usual feuding-freelancer-elbows-for-mannerist-space kind of a way — and this is exactly why I loved her writing. I wanted a mini-world in which less armoured voices could hold their own course, to thrive as an irreplaceable part of the whole, as respite from all the dramas of the central cultural cockpit and the theory-divas fighting for the largest slice of the attention available…

But such spaces and such voices are by nature and inclination tricky to weaponise, which is to say tricky to monetise –– and back then I wanted the battles at The Wire on the page (because I felt many of them were being crowded off everyone else’s pages) and also I wanted The Wire not to be losing so much money (lol). Obviously I’m delighted and gratified the magazine still with us — not least as a platform for small scenes that also just scrape by, as times get ever-tougher and spaces elsewhere just carry on blinking out. But all the available media models back then were flawed and flimsy, precarious and unsustainable, and they were all also about to get worse –- three accelerating decades of worse, seriously. The settlement some of us made with this –- the names some of us made -– came at a cost. There was no safety net and there were casualties…

… and by the time of the 2012 Olympics the comfortably successful people mostly left off-stage in this book are having their houses cleaned by those without voices, mostly, and without page-count. Those who found themselves slipping away back downwards after all [2], and those who never saw a way they’d be allowed up: who, trapped from the outset, never entertained ambitions professional or artistic, or set themselves transformative goals. There’s a tension often unexplored in the more stridently meritocratic versions of the tale of those who make it out (or back out, for rehab lit): that to reach the best realisations of yourself as author or artist, you’ve had to leave something behind and lock someone out. And so there’s a guilt alongside the relief –- and in fact a guilt either way. Because if your own flight is unsuccessful, you’re a failure too. These are the corrosive dooms we are constantly asked to internalise, the ideological impositions few entirely free themselves from.

What makes Kirsch such a funny writer is that just these conflicts play out as a kind of lucidly evasive dizziness, a constant misapprehension that’s very (as the internet would put it) “relatable”. She blames no one but herself for how things turned out, and makes a terrific comedy of self-deprecation: spaces left looking worse for her attempts to clean them, things she turned her hand to (professional journalism, parenting) as an obstacle race of absurdist unsuccess. It’s all often also an apology — to family and friends, most of them unnamed — and it’s charming and it makes you laugh, even the tough parts, and her voice remains light and clear, and this is excellent. But not everything in it needs any apology.

As one of the most readable of narrative forms, the classic puritan autobiography sees the present coinciding with the redemption, the means of rescue: we move through and down into the catastrophe, and back up out again. But despite a lightly skirted 12-steppish pass into religion, the redemptive circle in Clean doesn’t quite close — this is not that kind of autobiography. The most rewarding community way-station in her quest towards sobriety is when she becomes a cook in a little local East End café: the fond way this is described lets us know that Kirsch knows that re-arriving as a cap-W Writer is not going to be on a par with this, reward-wise.

The shadow-side of Kirsch’s journey has been a succession of jobs that mostly can’t be careers: hat-check girl, shopgirl, switchboard girl. And there’s a dismissive feel to this list (as I make it) precisely because they’re jobs that often go unnoticed, the stories historians too often don’t ask about. In this book, they take place within hat-checking distance of the movers and shakers we pay most of our attention to, to write about and argue about — and when youth and tactical dizziness hadn’t shut off any of Kirsch’s future mobility, across the counter as it were. You can line them up as “girlish” — as if this means impermanent or ornamental or frivolous — even as you conspire not to spot when they become the whole of the hard livings some have to make, and much too much of the life some have always to live. Even in the late 80s, such mobility still seemed plausible –– and writers still shared an impulse to be keeping doors open, or anyway to share glimpses of what this might still mean. But what if personal transformational achievement only takes decisive shape when the doors are closed? Your inspirational, aspirational triumph is only a broader political or a moral triumph if you can bring with you the best of what made you. The gentle strength of this book is the sense it leaves us with, of the caked-on dirt behind our sense of lifesaving self-rescue, of where the slamming doors may be, of what’s on the other side that we should never be forgetting…

FOOTNOTES:

1: For a recent reboot of Mama K’s True Stories, go here

2: At the book launch for Clean, I was told — to my great sadness — of the likely death last year of another colleague from back in the still-open days. I won’t name them because the internet doesn’t yet confirm the news, and I very much hope it’s untrue. The fact they’re more or less invisible on the internet is part of the story, though.

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“The blues are beautiful because it’s simpler and because it’s real. It’s not perverted or thought about: It’s not a concept, it is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music.” (John Lennon to Jann Wenner, 21 January 1971)

When Jack Hutton quit Melody Maker in 1970, to set up what became Sounds, he told Richard Williams, who stayed behind, that it would be a “left-wing Melody Maker”. Hutton’s no longer with us, so I suppose if I get the chance I’ll have to ask Williams one day what exactly was meant by “left-wing” here. My guess — based on what Sounds actually turned out like — is that Hutton meant the new paper would be centred on rock. Even though both papers covered rock and pop and everything else, MM’s moral centre was arguably still jazz at that point. Even though the jazz fan-base always had a left-wing in the UK, with old-school communists solid among its supporters and chroniclers, it was a music (or so many seemed to feel) whose time was past. Rock was new and rock was now, the very voice of youth — but beyond this, rock had had, for a while by then, a tangled relationship with politics, radical left politics in particular.

This tangle reached to the very top of the charts. In 1968, as the tremors spread from the May insurrection in Paris — when everything turned upside down, and pop became art and vice versa — three versions of the Beatles song ‘Revolution’ were recorded. The first and last (the long musique concrète Bonzo-skit sound poem ‘Revolution #9’) were on the White Album, which came out in November. The re-recorded version of the first came out a little earlier, in August, as the B-side of ‘Hey Jude’. Perfect for exploring street politics as a fact and a possibility, and post-split the song was still being picked over three years on, in editor Jann Wenner’s gargantuan two-part interview with John Lennon for Rolling Stone (some 36,000 words long in toto) and in Tariq Ali’s Red Mole. The former was exactly what “the Stone” had been devised to do. The existence of the latter, a serious-minded conference with actual frontline radical activists (Robin Blackburn joining Ali for the occasion) is more surprising, an index at the very least of how wild and mixed up the times actually were.

Wenner always saw his role as chief courtier to the big new voices in music, less cautious investigator than loyal amplifier : which means Lennon is nowhere pushed or tested. It also means he’s comfortable: he unwinds deep into confessional mode, hinting at the worst of the group’s untold stories. Clean-cut to all the world, the real Beatles on the rise were “bastards”, he says — “you can’t be anything else in such a pressurised situation” — and the tours were “like the Fellini film Satyricon”, orgies and “junk and whores and who-the-fuck-knows-what…”

This is no longer virgin terrain, of course. Freighted with his huge authority for rock-readers at this complicated, confusing moment, swathes of this much-cited interview have simply entered pop history’s DNA. “The dream is over,” he sang on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, his disenchantment with the counterculture at large growing as much anything out of his own personal exhaustion, and how we all feel when a relationship fails and a fellowship breaks. With Rolling Stone at the centre of how the music was started to understand itself critically and politically, Lennon’s many stances in this conversation were a deep permission as well a disenchanted retrenchment. Pre-Beatles rock and roll is the truest, best music, he now appeared to insist, and if we followed his charismatic lead, we’d be shunning McCartneyish Pepperish pop artifice on one side, proto-prog jazz-muso virtuosity on the other, ideally so as to re-enter a space of of undeluded unadorned therapeutic naturalism.

The most immediately startling thing about the Red Mole piece, from today’s perspective, is that it happened at all: startling that Lennon agreed to it, even more startling that the revolutionary organ of the International Marxist Group — a Trotskyist splinter maybe 1,000 strong at its peak — decided so publicly to engage with the thoughts of a colossally well off former frontman of a recently dissolved boyband-stroke-chartband. It’s a clue to how tiny and village-like the London scene still was, of course (despite Lennon’s recent relocation to New York) — but it’s also a clue to how much music and changes in the music mattered to the underground then, political or otherwise. Quotes from Beatles, Stones and Dylan songs routinely supplied headlines and speed-read slogans: this was a lingua franca and a badge of identity; not just a shared backdrop but a speed-read signal where you thought things were at, and the ways you belonged — or didn’t — to any relevant micro-constituency.

The Red Mole encounter began in late 1968 with anti-war activist John Hoyland’s disgruntled Beatles fan-letter (scroll down) to Black Dwarf (the paper Ali had helmed before Mole, which is to say before a micro-sectarian split in the relevant editorial). As a Beatles B-side. ‘Revolution’ was sour and suspicious and not at all in step with the movement: “if you’re talking about destruction/minds that hate/Chairman Mao… count me OUT!” Fanboy Hoyland was dismayed: a former idol was misperforming, the song closer to Mrs Dale’s Diary than to the Rolling Stones [Footnote 1]. Hitching from Keele to interview Lennon a few weeks later, students Maurice Hindle and Daniel Wiles show Lennon this letter, which clearly nettles him. He reads and rereads it more than once, shows it crossly to Ono, and in early 1969, he sends an angry reply (scroll down)…

That set the stage: in the wake of the final two-year Beatles meltdown and then the Wenner juggernaut — which is cited in the opening Red Mole question — the showdown. No fireworks, though: Lennon handwaves his way around current world politics unchallenged (Ali earnestly corrects him on Yugoslavia and Tito, but tolerates his apparent renewed enthusiasm for Mao’s Cultural Revolution). As for shifts and values in music in recent years, Blackburn in particular pads gamely through the critical nostra of the day, and – as the seasoned professional in this area — Lennon doesn’t challenge him. Much of it is commonplace stuff, but — in among all the busted myths, unmoored generalisations, snap judgments, settled scores and dick moves — these two conversations platform a wounded musician busy quilting a revised aesthetic from the rubble.

How to sum it up? Pop is bad and you should feel bad: let’s get naked and rock and roll! Naked emotionally, naked intellectually and politically, naked, well, yes, kit off for the LP sleeves lads, and fuck the squares if this bothers them… Rock and roll, especially black rock and roll, speaks urgently to the white working classes precisely because it comes from a soulful place of unrepressed, undiluted honesty and self-knowledge free of all possible bullshit. We have forgotten to know ourselves and act accordingly; this music is revolutionary for teaching us to turn once more to both — and this is happening and that’s the way forward.

(Narrator’s voice: it was not and it was not.)

And yes, it’s very easy to mock all this now! And to read it as early mass-cultural steps — disguised as urgent critical recalibration — down the long road to centrist dadrock and the present-day so-called authentocrat hegemony blah blah. Blackburn’s and Ali’s credulity seems a bit of a shocker, from our wised-up times — but Amiri Baraka had not yet published his rueful tales of the Black Arts Movement, and the contradictions within cultural nationalism were still confusedly working themselves out in 1971. Black Power was still a concept that amazed and enthused people, white and black — and of course “Black is beautiful” remains a counterstrike today against disabling self-hatreds and self-erasures.

The excitement of the encounter with rock and roll had begun with the shock of realisation that you can learn as much or more from people far outside your own neighbourhoods: that cultures not your own are not by dint of this lesser than your own — a valuable discovery — and that it’s good to choose to be encouraged to enjoy life more and to be a better deeper person in your understanding and actions. But the inspiration had gradually congealed into a habit and even a religion, of the projection of the desired angelic image (of pleasure and depth and goodness) onto these same cultural others. It’s no fun at all to be trapped at the other end of this projection— made a cultural-political saviour without being asked — and doubly grim when the projection insists that being your natural self is the only acceptable forward-looking politics. This was the high era of the method-acting delusion, in which — unless truth comes from deep within your own personal pain— everything is just lies and fantasy.

Some of the time, Lennon knew better. And so, as long-time operators in the flyspeck viper-pit of far left politics, did Ali and Blackburn now and then. They knew that performative ambiguities are essential to coalition-making and keeping different interest groups onside together. But 60s revolutionary socialism was still very much under the moral spell of Sartre’s existentialism, a philosophy never especially smart about the value of drama and of fiction beyond simple agit-prop. Besides, British class identification in the borderlands between lower and middle class is the murkiest of kaleidoscopes at the best of time, and neither Blackburn nor Ali was well placed to gauge this, let alone push back [2]. When Lennon titles a song ‘Working Class Hero’ (and despite things he casually claims in both interviews), it’s as much angry disavowal as self-declaration, and in any case it’s ambiguous: is he a hero who’s working class himself, or a pop-star hero to the working class? (Ans acc.him = combination neither and both…)

Either way — despite his unimaginable wealth — it’s allowed to stand both times. And yet there’s so much here to ask hard questions about. As Wenner allows him to demonstrate, letting him talk on at such length without interruption, he’s anything but a natural soulful authentic angel undivided from himself and free of bullshit, but rather a torn and hurting mess of complexity, contradiction, evasive cunning, irony, play-acting and, well, self-misdirection. Free to explain himself, to present a self-portrait, he’s at once bolshy and timid, arrogant and bewildered, confident in his snap-summaries yet still beguiled by curiosity — and, like every bright pop-star, unendingly caught between the will to rile and the will to please (including pleasing revolutionaries who should be quicker to spot this).

And stripped of all this, he might have been happier — except he’d also be unknown, not to mention poor. In an era when more people of working class background were entering tertiary education than ever, the Beatles counter-narrative was by contrast one of ferocious self-education and mastered expertise, very much an alternative and anti-official model for intellectual self-mobilisation. His dismissal of almost the entire trajectory as myth — we were best on-stage, he says, before we ever came into the studio — is also a kind of a disavowal of any of this possibility. And — as upper middleclass college kids themselves —his interlocutors seem to embrace it, though it’s surely strangely antipathetic to the politics of possibility they want him to sign on to, to manifest and broadcast. Again — profoundly unsure of what they want from the exchange — they decline to challenge him, to follow through where he’s half-pointing.

The Lennon/Ono LP ends, or nearly ends [3] with a list of things he no longer believes in — Jesus, Buddha, Elvis, Beatles — and the plain declaration: “I believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.” It’s like coming home, he tells Wenner: “I’ll never change much from this.” The leisure of space and time to become uncomplicatedly yourself, to feel and and believe in and know home this way, is afforded very few people — and this, if you like, is how a mark of how far his stratospheric wealth has taken him from his birth-town, his roots, his class. Meeting Yoko as the breakthrough key to self-discovery in this best of matching companionships — of course it’s a tell that she’ was from the other side of the world, the other side of the arts, from a comfortable Japanese family, well travelled, well schooled. The many claims don’t add up — and neither interview presses him on any of this.

Epilogue: An LP a year until 1975, and his collection of rock and roll standards, then a five-year sabbatical — long aeons in 70s pop time — before Lennon returned to recording in 1980. By now the conversation that began when Sounds split off from Melody Maker in 1970 had changed deeply (not least as a consequence of these exchanges). There’d been wide revolt against the the leisured, over-wealthy aristocrat entertainers who’d shaped the recent past and seemed to clog up the present: punk rock, the revolt was called. Radical politics still had a toe-hold in the pop press — but the critical factions closest to it mostly took the line rock is now bad and you should feel bad. The lingua franca was increasingly contested. Lennon was still welcome, unconfronted, in the pages of Rolling Stone, but his long absence from the UK conversation ensured few was overawed by his re-emergence. In the post-punk and new pop years, almost everything he had seemed in the early 70s to stand for would be questioned.

And then of course in December 1980 he was shot dead, by someone deep-lost in the labyrinth of a megastar’s unkeepable promises. Suddenly changeless in death and embalmed in grief-stricken nostalgia, he was removed from all useful reassessment, as everything round him went cold and congealed. Home, he’d said, but just as he set out once more, he was stopped. There are clues where he might have gone; how he might have evolved. His recording with Bowie, for instance — because he too was always a kind of proto-glam quick-change artist, forever negotiating the obstacle course his own throwaway comments had strewn before him. As for the blues, its potency was never of course a function of its unadorned primitive simplicity. Quite the opposite: it always involved reflection, and its energy and value came from the sheer layered density of all competing histories hurtling through it.

And of course there was the work Yoko had made with him in the late 60s, the be-ins and the bed-ins and the bag-ins, these high-visibility celebrity stunts whose purpose was to import go-slow bafflement and blockage into the flow of mass-media communication: the spectacle, but discursively on strike. The most heartening surprise twist in the Wenner conversation — in both conversations — is his belief in Yoko as artist-musician, his commitment to the idea that everyone should take proper note of her. Besides Warhol, that ineffable blank, he celebrates Fluxus and nods to Ornette Coleman as two unimpeachable stages in Yoko’s past, her rock and roll.

Warhol aside, the prankish avant garde before 1968 had seemed an individualised, out-of-reach luxury, supported by and therefore aimed at the wealthy and the over-educated. Pre-Beatles rock and roll is the truest, best music, he may have been arguing — but to say so and to foreground her, he has also to argue that she’s rock and roll — which complicates and expands the definition, to say the least. By refashioning the story to include her — even in a sense to re-begin with her — Lennon was quietly re-weaponising his art-school inventiveness and tossing it out into the wider world, the widest world thinkable, in topsyturvied form. He opened the doors of imagination and possibility even in the pop music trade press: no intellectual luxury is too good for the working class… this would after all be a pretty good motto for the toughest strands of post-punk…

Footnotes 1: It’s weird to recall how much of a free pass the Stones still had with the most rigorous 68-ers. Though of course they were carefully solicitous of this touchy part of the market: the song ‘Street Fighting Man’, about the May riots in Paris, was widely enough thought to refer to Tariq Ali himself that he brazenly named his memoirs for it.

2: Ali is from the higher-born Pakistani aristocracy, and extremely engaging and perceptive about it (subscription needed).

3: Actual closing song: 52 seconds of ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ sung down a telephone to a nursery-rhyme style tune (which isn’t ‘Three Blind Mice’ even though everyone for some reason says it is).

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It began in 1977, at second-hand: I knew before I heard a note of it that I’d love Cecil Taylor’s music. In a jazz encyclopaedia I’d already read of a pianist “zipping and unzipping the keyboard” — but first contact came from a sideways leap out of bent chartpop. Across Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Mike Garson’s cocktail piano clichés mutate towards cancerous splinters, which rock reviewer Charles Shaar Murray approvingly compared to Taylor. I needed to know more.

With other princes of the Utterly Out — Ornette, Coltrane, Beefheart — I was, I confess it, puzzled by how tame they seemed against the buzz of advance promo. But Cecil — on Black Lion/Freedom’s 1975 Silent Tongues, his 1974 Montreux Festival solo performance — did not disappoint. Perversely, far more subsequent time was spent addressing Coleman and the good Captain, battling to discover ways to hear their sound as deranged delight, learning tolerance for the well-meant overreactions of enthusiasts. And so my response to these others to this day sometimes seems suspect, post-fabricated out of a need to be wowed, or to seem weird; the pianoman, by contrast, I always knew I could trust, to swoop in, connect instantly, and transfigure. With Cecil, no need to fake it.

So I didn’t visit often, though I dallied with his less demanding children — Von Schlippenbach, Tippett, Crispell, Shipp — and all too soon I was taking him for granted. The affair turned second-hand again, and stalled. Modernism’s dirty secret: avant-garde work requires the survival of the order it first flared against, or its full radicalism no longer properly registers. Mind switched to low, just like those Black Cultural Nationalists who voiced concern about Taylor’s ‘European’ influences — because deep, deep beneath their political bluster, they doubted an African-American artform could wrestle white tradition and win — I projected my own baffled timidity, and even dismay, onto an oeuvre I was no longer regularly checking.

The counter-force epiphany for me came with a CD full of what Stefan Jaworzyn has described as “Teletubbies-style verbal gibberish”: Chinampas (Leo, 1987). At which point, things I’d known for years – but been too nervous to accept – came suddenly clear. Like so many sympathetic yet humour-free interviewers down the years, catching the edge of a Cecil tease but missed its meaning, I’d overlooked countless clues. The cover to Silent Tongues — featuring Cecil, winsome in glasses and woolly hat – I’ve now felt joy towards for some 20 years: in retrospect, the gulf between this absurdly cute sad-little-boy mugshot and the record itself expresses nothing if not irreverent glee. In the sleevenotes to Blue Note’s Unit Structures (1966), dry crypto-Darmstadt analysis mutates into cut-ups, and wicked Burroughsian war on grammar. On Soul Note’s small-orchestra set Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants) (1985), on A&M’s impishly superb In Florescence (1990), on Chinampas, Taylor invokes Aztec gods — gorgeous, jagged, murderous deities more outrageously unsuited to worship even than the much-bothered Egyptian pantheon. Their presence among the grunts, rumbles and oblique exclamations punctuating In Florescence suggest a musician whose absolute confidence in his work frees him to kid, to plant the worry that it’s a giant joke. Indeed, this is more than just flirtation — again and again he soars, eagle-god turned trickster gremlin, way out over the abyss of the possible put-on, and never more gloriously than with the high-fired aztèque concrète that makes up the piano-free Chinampas.

Of course, the ‘whitest’ concert-hall piano virtuosos – and the composers that encouraged them – have courted official unrespectability when they became too flamboyant, too romantically individual, too inhumanly extreme or unplayable, from Liszt to Xenakis, from robot-lover Nancarrow to Glenn übernerd Gould. But when piano-play turns into self-absorbed callisthenic work-outs, when the musician presents as some superfit but otherwise daffy street-person, mazed into his own asides, gestures and solo dances, when the compositions are like architectural design-brainstorm sessions for the living city-of-the-future, and this unlikely idiot-savant dervish is busily, dizzily solving every urban conundrum there could ever be, we may begin to realise why most orthodox Cecil-crit favours lulling solemnity. For art-fraud on so titanic a scale – so vastly vivid, so elaborately detailed, so whirlingly learned – is no less startling than the ‘straight’ work it seems to send up. Indeed, it’s far more staggering, and even scary, in its implications — what kind of madman devotes his entire life-energies to the merely unserious? For me, the only works in the avant-garde canon that match Taylor’s serene, omniscient cheek are Finnegans Wake, and Vexations, Satie’s vast day-long hymn to absolute simpleton repetition.

As it was, Coltrane, all bruised earnestness and cosmic quest, became the poster-child for the New Thing, the model for what ‘being taken seriously’ would come to mean. Nobility? Self-denial? Avant-garde transformation as a solemn, lonely, painful, search? Well, yes — yet a glance at the lives of most known questers (knights errant, polar explorers) reveals quests as monuments to anti-domestic panic, with most seekers fleeing as much personal duty as they’re pursuing. All across the slopes of art’s Everests, a great deal of immature selfishness continues to mistake itself for the austere sublime. Much celebrated (rightly celebrated), Coltrane’s natural grace of spirit and vast generosity served mostly to obscure (A) how little imitated this was in Cultural Nationalist circles, and (B) how repressed, repressive and reactionary the CultNat version of radicalism quickly became.

By temperament, Taylor had chosen Out before Ayler, Coltrane or even Coleman, playing free years before this became the term for the play, his example encouraging each of them to take similar steps. He was always already Out; it was always already Play. His work — in its mischief-making badboy totality — has from the outset been not a quest but a masque, wherein the daunting modernist massif and its pervasively silly, naughty, niggling parody coincide. I love this music because it makes me happy — and it makes me happy because it refuses to sidestep, to underrate or even to disrespect the tireless teasing perversity at the core of human behaviour, because even if it wanted to shill for pompous fraudulence, self-seriousness or fast-track fake enlightenment, it just couldn’t.

… and we both agreed it’s bad and here’s why

it does the usual documentary thing, of hunting out a bunch of talking heads — family, professional, the commentatative pundit — and then merely stitching them together with stills and live footage into the same version of the story we always already know… anything odd or interesting that pops out of someone’s mouth is not returned to or dwelt on or even apparently noticed

the shape it offers is utterly conventional: beginning times (where from, where first played); times with miles (interrupted by drugs); GIANT STEPS; break-up of marriage; A LOVE SUPREME; final tour of japan and sad early death

these mounting avant-garde milestones are all routinely invoked, but really no attempt is made to say what made them milestones — nearly a dozen musicians are present yabbing away, but nearly none of them say anything whatever about the changing content of the music, coltrane’s technique, his approach, what was concretely at stake in the choices being made, on-stage or in the studio. there was no glimpse AT ALL abt what it is that JC actually did, that was new to and impressed other musicians — or bothered them. wayne shorter for example, a shrewd and highly intelligent man (as well as player), is on-screen for a little. I interviewed him once and got him to talk abt the effect the arrival of the beatles had on the scene in c.1964: he was funny and interesting abt how much they divided jazzers, how some pricked their ears up and others just said “more nonsense from whitey”. we know that jazz in the early 60s wasn’t a collegiate love-in, anything but… but JC has undergone retrospective MLK-ification, and the fights and fears are forgotten in the haze of blissed-in pro forma sanctification

(i’m not really dissing shorter, sonny rollins, mccoy tyner, benny golson or jimmy heath here — the latter two, as perhaps not-stellar-musicians who were JC’s friends and colleagues in the early days, did give good backstage anecdote, even if mainly abt the junk-ambience everyone was battling with, and the first three were either asked dull questions or — as likely? — had their interesting answers consigned to the cutting-room floor)

(here’s who I am somewhat dissing however: carlos santana, wynton marsalis, cornel west, BILL fkn CLINTON)

(tho west clearly knows little abt music in the sense I’m thinking abt, and somewhat gave that away in a performance of twinkly down-with-the-streets bullshitting that was at least somewhat signalling that he knew this doc was trash and was playing along, for you to spot and the director not to)

(and santana and also john densmore were at least talking as fans responding to something on the way to their own music and sensibility: the former a notorious spiritual-hat guitarwank bore after his early records, the latter apparently a massive elvin jones nut as a teen)

(cue for santana, the claim — do I believe this, I am not sure — that when he’s on tour he “purifies” every hotel room by burning incense and playing the whole of a love supreme) (cue for densmore lots of stills of JIM MORRISON, surely coltrane’s purest equivalent in the rock universe)

(also there were some historian-biographers and some embarrassed-seeming family members, who obviously love their dad but feel somewhat squinky abt this tin-eared project — their dad who I am happy to continue to believe was an unusually lovely and generous man, especially for a working musician) (scope for an ingenious approach: present JC as the anti-miles, and deal w/their journeys in compare-contrast parallel)

so yes, i was hoping at least to learn something or see or hear something that that wd help inch me in a little past my long-term JC-sceptic status: I get that people adore him and that he is considered important, but this very highly important contribution that none of us can put into words bores me, I find his tone entirely unappealing, and ditto the fetishisation of granite-hard everests of effort in the journey, like some kind of saxophonic rich piana. PEOPLE ONLY EVER TALK LIKE THIS ABOUT HIM — or if they don’t, they either weren’t selected for this doc or the relevant passages ending up unused

and I have no yen to push back on ppl’s veneration (much), but NOBODY TALKS ABOUT HIM WELL and I wish that could change: huckster-pundits clinton west and WYNTON FKN MARSALIS worst offenders in this respect. until the peerlessly maddening moment — my friend and and I p much turned to each other and shouted #SMDH — when EINSTEIN no less was wheeled out to explain and explore what GENIUS is, what it does and and how it work, completely with equations and everything floating past in the edit-collage.

of course they didn’t actually deploy the equations in any coherent or speculative or provocatising way, but they DID display them. the publisher’s motto is: every equation included in a popular science-writing book halves the readership…

well, here we do get THIS —->> but nothing abt chords or scales or what gitler meant by “sheets of sound” or the west african sound of JC’s soprano in “naima”, or the various things (political, “spiritual”) that the search for FREE actually meant to ppl, to coltrane or to anyone else…

(minor side issue: has relativity special or general even been used intelligibly to illuminate music? I think likely NO: i’d kind of love to see it pulled off somewhere, if only in the form of trolling, but — as an actual semi-credentialed mathematician w/a degree and everything, this was just halfwit piffle)

in general — and the einstein moment entirely fits here — the interstitial work was just lazy garbage. it was an era of strong photography, so it could hardly help looking OK from the stills angle, despite very few pictures you hadn’t seen 30 times before (and every photo was panned and zoomed in the same dull way): some of the live footage was genuinely new (at least to me; tho I very much doubt to an actual hard-seeking fan). it rested a lot too on some (I thought) quite bad mystical afro-futurist art as the backdrop point of rest. whenever they recreated a newspaper splash w/headline and photo, if you looked carefully you could see that the paragraphs of text too small to read were ALL just lorem ipsum fkn dolor, which wtf you half-measures cheapskates (obviously the recent TSwift hommage to same was witty and cheeky in comparison)

(scope for a second ingenious approach: shape the whole thing round lorem ipsum dolor, and the idea that the blow-the-top-of-yr-head-off playing of ascension is designed — lol like metal machine music — to reach a plateau of buzzing calm… )

and a final bad decision: denzel washington reading as coltrane’s actual voice, which just took away any quirky sense of the man himself and replaced it with humbug hollywood gravitas

(tbf this^^^ is a super-tough ask for any actor I think: but I’d almost have preferred — since we’re anyway in wynton-propinquity — something more outrageously ken burnsy as a v/o. something that gave a sense of past times and lost sensibilities: a courteous gentlemanly black north carolinan at sea in the turbulent city) (one of the takeaways from the stream of stills is how melancholy and also how gawky he often looked; his ungainly country-boy goofiness: he was no dapper hipster, quite the opposite)

so the move ppl use to dodge talking abt the music is donning the spiritual hat by proxy: and then — having invoked spirituality — say nothing whatever about it, what it means, how coltrane deployed it (as mask, as weapon, as balm, as what the fuck ever). closest to achieving actual concrete comment is sonny rollins, gnomic as ever and resplendent in an amazing crimson suit: for a start he substitutes the word “celestial” for the word “spiritual”, and does so in a context that implies the JC’s self-constructed pan-faith religiosity was a way to step away — away away far far away — from planet earth’s grief and crimes and conflict, and explore how to see and sketch and perhaps fashion shared samenesses among the belief-systems and cultural sonics of the many warring clans. “the big picture,” rollins calls it, simply and directly enough: and of course the doc sweeps past this and makes no connections, and hints at no sense that they just heard what they heard…

of course the word celestial (as slyboots rollins well knows) takes us to the jazz einstein who could (IMO) crack open all these issues, but we sweep past him entirely: this would be sun ra, whose chief sideman john gilmore is said to have inspired JC to exclaim “he’s got it! John’s got the concept!” ra is dead and so is gilmore, but marshall allen is (at time of posting) still alive and well and active!! why not get him in front of the camera? this film is after all clumsily named for a piece inspired by gilmore’s sound. “space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity,” says ra. “it is a order of sounds synchronised to the different order of being”

yes this is opaque and riddling — hallo and welcome to the heliocentric worlds! — but ra’s sense of vaster hierarchies or orders and layered geometries as a recalibration of mere mundane perspective is at least a well enough trod approach to see coltrane’s journey somewhat from a side elevation: and ra’s bleak pessimism is also a help I think. instead of the somewhat numbing glad-hand positivity of (allegedly) achieved lovely oneness — which is what I’m most allergic to in the backward-looking coltrane discourse — there’s SR’s often-stated belief that the human race haven’t got the concept and won’t get it and it’s already after the end of the world, brother. i don’t believe JC believed this — or anyway couldn’t bear to concede it to himself — and all of his sound is a FIGHT against it, on the exact same battle, and a fight (I assume) against the elements in himself which were drawn to ra’s scornful (and invigorating) anti-humanism.

instead of course we get wynton, riding the reverence trane with total chutzpah, given his known views on free: and — despite his endless ability to grab up his horn and demonstrate the rhythms of a king oliver joint — again saying nothing (good OR bad) abt the musical choices trane was making [EDIT: no, he says that the earliest recording of trane’s playing, from the late 40s, while he was still in the army i think, demonstrates he couldn’t really play yet — but we’re just supposed to be able to hear why they’re saying so, nobody stops to say “this bit is why it’s bad”]. It somewhat occurred to me to wonder whether his condition of involvement was the non-discussion of ra (who his mentor stanley crouch has dismissed as a pure charlatan). at least — speaking of charlatans, or anyway trickster-figures enjoying playing them on TV — cornel west has the grace to say of ASCENSION that he has no idea what the fuck is going on, but he’s happy to be long for the ride bcz no doubt one day he will (in other words, I’m kinda glad someone voice this sentiment and that it was someone embracing it not denouncing it) (I might as well say here that west is someone I’m super-ambivalent about, as observer and as troll)

(plus I quite like imagining how grumpy CW probably was at the screening to find himself alongside fellow huckster-pundit clinton, doing his own — different but equal — version of a similar hustle for would-be-woke but unwakaeble northern urban whitey)

so anyway it ends in a crazily aggravating place which (A) exactly — if timidly — approaches the pan-cultural sense of mourning and bearing witness, JC in japan on his final tour, visiting the temples at hiroshima and so on: and hunting for a celestial language that translates the feels and the meaning of this for him to lie interweaved with every other mode cultural expression, and then (B) inflects the entire story through the self-regarding narrative of an insane japanese collector-fan who lives in a room that’s a cave-shrine to the commodity god coltrane, just jam-packed with every single gatherable object. the fact of this guy at all is a tell; a symptom: except he of all people is the worst person to be telling it

(i mean, imaginably not: he might have had insightful perspective, it’s just that he very evidently — after just a few moments in his presence — doesn’t. meanwhile we’re watching JC touring and already — tho it’s not clear if he knows it yet — mortally ill: which is simultaneously moving and maddening)

two last points (good moments thrown away):
• there was a colour shoot from the early 60s I’d never seen before where the photographer had directed him to look about in portentous male-model style in some backstage space full of ropes and ladders, which made me grin, bcz you can see his ugh-this-is-dumb look as he does it (this may be why the pictures aren’t well known of course)
• the tale of trane and miles feels thrice-told and yet the evident interesting friction of it feels to me endless sidestepped and elided: so of course the “how do you stop? just take the horn our of your mouth!” story is trotted out, but of course it’s also referred to as joke and in-studio banter, miles being incrutable his non-corny self, and not at all explored as an actual real aesthetic flashpoint between the two. there’s even revealing live 1959 footage of miles side of stage while trane solos in (apt title) “so what” and you can absolutely tell he’s thinking GET ON WITH IT JOHN

(originally created on THIS ILX POST. cross-posted at freaky trigger)

(I wrote this up to place somewhere grown-up and get some traction, but no joy for one reason or another — the Camelot theme not entirely inapposite, esp.if you’ve read The Once and Future King. Kickstarter is still and closes Wednesday 27 July at 4.26pm UK time.)

We have an idea of the UK music press in the 70s — a notion of great names engaged in earthy debate about rock and pop, of fearless mockery of foolish or pretentious stars, of a generation of self-taught giants walking the earth in those golden black-and-white days. We can list names: Murray and Kent, Parsons and Burchill, Penman and Morley, Danny Baker, Garry Bushell, Jon Savage… With satisfaction (or amusement), we note that some of them have clambered up to the sustainably rewarded end of public chatter — which if nothing else suggests that their first professional gigs must have been an effective proving ground.

It’s a picture distorted with hindsight, though. At the time, it was for the most part a much wider, quieter, almost invisible world. A cluster of titles that you engaged with as an intense subcultural doorway away from the routines of life: yes, there’d be a pop-star on the cover, major or rising or weird, but inside… well, inside you found all kinds of things. It reached a lot of people — sometimes as many as a million a week — and, unlike official culture, it didn’t shut them out. As writer-agitator and one-time label boss Liz Naylor puts it on one of the promo vids, “It was very difficult to access information in the 70s! The music press was my education…”

The four weeklies were NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror. Echoes (sometimes Black Echoes) was a bi-weekly for black music — especially good on soul and reggae. There were several monthlies: Zigzag and Let It Rock and the superb, short-lived, much-lamented Street Life: precursors of Q or Mojo, you could say, but much much more than just this. Because — aside from the endless underfelt of free and alt.listings magazines — the music press had been where the spirit of the underground press had ended up: the brief strange countercultural spark of Oz, IT, Frendz, Ink, when late 60s youth had revolted against war and the technocracy, against racism, against timidity and prudishness, and for unfettered (yes chaotic, yes naive) expression. Writers and editors and designers — some extremely talented, but without a hope of rising far in the then-mainstream media — had crossed over out of this fervid, para-political subculture into the music press, partly because rock was the soundtrack of the counterculture, so that to make sense of rock you had to grasp the language and ideals and utopias of this teenage revolt, if only to wrangle with them, to rescue the good from the bad. And as a consequence this was a world full of curiosity about comics and cult films, liminal and radical politics, about musics and activities of communities and undergrounds from all over the world, America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa — about everything in the world you couldn’t routinely access, which television skimped and normal newspapers didn’t remotely understand.

Last year I ran a conference at Birkbeck, to explore some of this crossover and how it turned out, called Underground Overground: The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85 (scroll down for more). This year I’m running a kickstarter for a book called A Hidden Landscape Once a Week (subtitle “How UK music-writing became a space for unruly curiosity, in the words of those who made it happen”), which will anthologise extracts from last year’s panels with critical essays exploring issues raised — including the day-to-day practical backroom aspect of putting such a paper together. Panellists and contributors include Charles Shaar Murray, Val Wilmer, Richard Williams, Paul Gilroy, Paul Morley, Simon Frith, David Toop, Cynthia Rose and Penny Reel — people from a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives and obsessions, which bohemian mix was key to the sensibility in question; “a conversation,” to quote the kickstarter blurb, “that musician, writer and reading fan all joined… a cheerful collective wrangling that echoes the crackles of dissent and tension in the songs it explores: the disputatiousness as well as the joy.” Alongside the hype and silliness, there was always a care and a fascination with possibility, with portals into all manner of other spaces hinted at in the music, and beyond it. For a decade and more, in a wider culture of stifled parochialism, this was a world of serendipity and surprise encounter. This will be a book that explores this world’s values and flaws, how it was established and maintained, and where its echoes can be found today — or rebuilt, in a very different, noisier, information-saturated context.

[ADDING: the “warring flaws” sub-head wasn’t on the piece I submitted — it didn’t have a heading at all — and only popped into my mind as I was fiddling with a framing to go here. What exactly do I mean by it (since it probably changes the tone and even the meaning of what follows)? Something like this: that what I think became dispersed — by all kinds of pressures, some extremely hard to fight — was a cast of mind in editing, which was, for a while, able to corral the impatience and rivalry and cattiness and worse that you always find among talented writers, into something unexpectedly collectively rich and generous. The mystery of where this came from — whose the design was, if design there was, and what the accident was, if it was accident — is one of the mysteries that brings me back to the subject. The Arthurian image implies that its virtues and its flaws are intextricably tangled: but I don’t know that this is actually so… ]

“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?

A few weeks back, Marcello asked if I had any thoughts on this TPL post (about, among other things, Johnny Hates Jazz and The Wire as it was in 1986/87). Well, I did and I didn’t: I did because this era of my mentor Richard Cook’s project is very much the making of me, and I absorbed an enormous amount of his sensibility and thought a lot how to advance it best (whether or not I did is for others to judge; sadly he’s no longer with us for his perspective). But I didn’t (at least tactically, for now) because I have for most of this year been organising a conference on UK music-writing in the 60s, 70s and early 80s, trying to focus on how things had evolved from roughly 1968 (and the discussion of rock in the underground press) through to maybe 1985, when (in my judgment) Live Aid hit the inkies hard sideways, and changed their political ecology for good (Geldof’s revenge, you could call it). The serious social potential of pop began to be more and more of a topic for the tabloids and the broadsheets: the inkies began more and more to fold in into their own niche, exploring less and less. In this they were reflecting changes in the world, to be sure — but they were also amplifying and accepting these changes.

Richard’s was (to me, then) the smartest part of the counter-response to these shifts — The Wire considered as a magazine about all possible music and indeed all possible ways to write and think about music, including the free play of the most scholarly anti-philistines against pop’s and punk’s cheerful teenage school’s-out yawp (not to mention a phalanx of more studied anti-music and anti-art stances). Max Harrison alongside Val Wilmer alongside Biba Kopf alongside, well, me.*

Anyway, looking too long and hard at (meaning reassessing) all this right now means not just distracting me from a rolling reassessment of the earlier era — as I chat to the various likely participants in my conference, and recalibrate my understanding of how things were — but probably undermining my entire current provisional grasp of what I need to be grasping. So for now**, you should be boiling what I am (possibly) thinking out of here (where I outline the purpose of the conference and name the participants) or here (a Facebook page you can like and also share) (share it!) or here ( tumblr with some nice pictures and also rolling thoughts on what organising a conference entails) (grief! also joy! so far much more joy luckily… )

Here’s who’s confirmed (reverse alphabetical): Val Wilmer, Richard Williams, Mark Williams, Simon Warner, David Toop, Bob Stanley, Hazel Southwell (nee Robinson), Laura Snapes, Mark Sinker, Cynthia Rose, Penny Reel, Mark Pringle, Tony Palmer, Charles Shaar Murray, Paul Morley, Toby Litt, Esther Leslie, John (aka Jonh) Ingham, Barney Hoskyns, Jonathon Green, Beverly Glick (aka Betty Page), Paul Gilroy, Adam Gearey, Simon Frith, Nigel Fountain, Tom Ewing, Kodwo Eshun.

(Not quite confirmed but definite interest shown: Tony Stewart)

Panel topics not entirely coalesced yet but will likely include: what the undergrounds knew that the mainstream was missing; rhetorics of outsider style; the changing make-up of bohemia; handling pressures on the playpen, professional and commercial; the rock press as a species of agit-prop samizdat; and legacy and lessons today…

You’ll need to register/book here but it’s free!

*Me (that is) as in the me just today delighted to be in receipt of the intelligence that (OMG LOL) Daphne & Celeste (@Daphne_Celeste) is now following you on Twitter!
**My rule-of-thumb back in the late 80s and early 90s, on ways to ensure The Wire really actually did have the widest possible scope, was to think of it as the mini-arena in early 80s NME jostled with mid-70s MM, allowing strategic space for sensibilities like Musics and Collusion, the late 80s Village Voice (a revelation to me) and even (bcz I have never not been a bit of a goth) Zigzag.