Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate
Our journey into our magazine-publishing past concludes with The fire triangle, which is now live over at Alistair’s Unpopular. Incendiary comments positively welcomed!
The three printed issues of Fire Raisers can be downloaded in PDF format there or here:
In case you’re coming to the conversation late, here are the previous parts:
What a spread. If you’re a fan of Shack, Michael Head & the Strands, the Pale Fountains, or John Head as a slowly emerging and wonderful songwriter in his own right, then accept the Captain’s invitation and sit down for a dinner that would have satisfied Admiral Lord Nelson himself – downloads of live performances, sessions, and demos dating from this year all the way back to a live performance by the Paleys in 1981. I’m working my way through them from either end, and there are treats aplenty. That Paleys show – at Plato’s Ballroom in Liverpool – is as gloriously ropey as it is historic (they dared to start with a flute solo! In 1981! Five years after punk!); Mick bellows like a bull at times.
John Head’s solo performance from the Port Eliot Festival earlier this year shows that sooner or later he is going to produce a solo LP to match all the wonderful albums of song writing assembled by his brother over the years. It includes a great song, ‘1967’, reversing the usual point of view about meeting your hero – in John’s case, Arthur Lee of Love.
Then – now somewhere in the middle of the story, and the downloads page – there are the legendary Shack Kitchen demos (more accurately recordings or run-throughs, I would say), throughout which the Head brothers prove themselves just as adept as XTC at donning sixties garb, and – most exciting of all – the demos for The magical world of the Strands. Inevitably somewhat plainer than in their final, perfected forms, the demos nevertheless exert a fascination of their own. You can see why the man behind Megaphone was willing to risk his money on a musician who in 1996 had fallen out of favour.
It’s like Andy Partridge’s Fuzzy warbles, except online and gratis. Shacknet, we salute you.
While we’re on the subject, here’s a 2003 Stylus article by Nick Southall about The magical world of the Strands which pretty much perfectly captures what makes it one of the greatest records ever made.
Here’s the third part of a series of four reflecting on Fire Raisers, the magazine that Alistair and I co-edited in the early nineties. The last part will be appearing over at Unpopular before long.
All three issues are available as PDFs via either of the links below or as paper copies for purchase. Do feel free to comment, whether as a contributor, a reader from back in the day, or on the basis of coming upon the magazines for the first time.
Daniel: Was it a pain having a co-editor? Would you have preferred absolute power?
Alistair: As a self-acknowledged control freak, I suppose I should answer yes to that. But actually no, it was fine. It was good to have someone else make some decisions about content etc, and of course your proof reading skills have always far outshone mine! Looking back though, I don’t actually remember how much real editing was needed. Did we turn down any contributions? Did we actually do any physical editing of other writers’ work?
I think the sense that we were properly collaborating was novel to us both, and exciting, and of course it never lasted long enough for serious issues to arise.
D: I think we took the ‘produced naturally’ approach to editing (analogous to groups recording without direction from an ‘auteur’ producer, leading to an end product whose audio quality is diminished but has greater charm). I’m sure that stemmed (a) from how sensitive we personally would have been at that time to editorial suggestion or interference, and (b) because we were a long way from having the skills you need to be an editor (some might say still are, if they’re wading through this!).
We did however turn down several proposed contributions, including one by a member of a certain pop group of whom we were fans. I meanly decreed in my mind that he should stick to music and leave the writing to us! I’ve always felt bad about that since.
But yes, I totally agree that the experience of working together on something was exciting – and instructive to two habitual loners like ourselves. Our chief obstacle as co-editors was of course one of us being in Scotland and the other in London in the days before email.
D: What reactions do you recall the magazine getting?
A: I don’t remember a huge amount, but then it was so long ago and many things have sunk into the depths of lost memories. I do recall the feedback from Richey, as noted previously. That would have been around the time of the Manic’s first Heavenly singles I think. I also remember doing a phone interview with David Belcher at the Glasgow Herald. Belcher was something of an iconic figure in the Scottish broadsheets at the time, championing lots of music and culture that the English broadsheets wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole. I sent him a copy of Fire Raisers on the off-chance he might like it, and then he phoned wanting to do a short feature. I’m sure I have the cutting somewhere in the vaults… The thing is, I remember thinking at the time that the article was a great coup and that it would surely increase sales. The truth was that it had an almost no impact at all. Except possibly to have the Scottish Library write to me and demand copies of all issues for their collection. They never paid, either.
Some years later, however, I sold a copy of my third Melody Haunts My Reverie fanzine to a bloke in The Cavern in Exeter. He came to be a good friend (even published my book of Pop witterings!) and it turned out he remembered buying copies of Fire Raisers at the local small press outlet and being impressed. So you know, people did take notice.
D: Having been tipped off by you, I made a special trip to King’s Cross early on the morning that particular edition of the Glasgow Herald was published to get hold of a copy – feeling somewhat like a playwright on the morning after press night, or Kerouac buying the New York papers the day On The Road was reviewed when I read: ‘Fire Raisers fits in somewhere between Granta and Sniffin’ Glue’!
That’s quite heartening, that Rupert had encountered Fire Raisers before he’d encountered you. It’s a perennial concern when you’re sending out writing into the world in no matter what form: are your words connecting with people and having an effect? Or are people completely disinterested? How can you know?
Being the hoarding type, I’ve kept a file of letters that first my fanzines and later Fire Raisers generated, and there are a fair few. There’s a great one from a Shaun Johnson of Melton Mowbray, who tried to get his local radical bookshop to stock the second or third issue of Fire Raisers only for them to refuse because ‘it didn’t sell well last time’! Shaun went on to say that Fire Raisers ‘is the best literary magazine on the market’, which may not be that far from the truth, given that the lifetime of literary magazines then as now tended to be brief, leaving plenty of windows where there wasn’t much or even any competition.
Other radical concerns were keener – a publication called the Exeter Flying Post got in touch to ask for ‘a statement of our aims’, which I presume I gave them.
And it was through Fire Raisers that we made contact with folk like Robin Tomens, who would later go on to write for Tangents. He bought the first issue in Rough Trade and wrote recognising Fire Raisers and his Ego were kindred spirits. Balancing up Richey’s verdict, Robin said he loved Carrie’s ‘Snowboots’ story, and Sam Matthew’s piece in the first issue. And that Fire Raisers was ‘beautifully produced’.
A: Although I would say it, I also liked Snowboots. Not sure what Carrie would think of it now, though perhaps she will let us know in the comments.
D: I think the tale of the beach shelter needs to be retold.
A: Oh gosh, the beach shelter… This was for the cover photo for FR 3, for which we wanted to borrow Paul Morley’s infamous ‘boredom or Fire Engines, you can’t have both’ line. I had this idea of painting the slogan (with ‘Raisers’ in place of ‘Engines’ of course!) on a beach shelter in my then hometown of Troon. I did the painting on the wall at around midnight after a night at my friend Stephen’s ‘Subculture’ club (I spent the night with a paintbrush and a small jar of white paint in my pocket) and then we went down the following day to take the photos. The cover star was a Subculture regular called Rozlyn, who I barely remember now. I think we asked her because she had a parka, though you can’t really tell that from the photo. There is also a photo from a few weeks later when you hitched up to Troon, I think. I’m standing beside my artwork, dressed in anorak and desert boots. Height of fashion.
The real interest in the story though is from several years later, when I had left Troon and was living in Devon. My mum mentioned on the phone that there had been a story on the front page of the local paper about an arson attack on a beach shelter in town. Seems the paper thought that the graffiti on what remained of the torched shelter (touched up just a few weeks earlier by our friends Andrea and Suzy) suggested that there were a group of arsonists at work in the town… naturally my mother was anxious about a visit from the local constabulary! I suspect the truth was that a bunch of glue-sniffing casuals got bored and cold on the front one night and decided to warm themselves.
The shelter was rebuilt, and these days the only graffiti you’ll find on it is of the ‘Baz 4 Shaz’ type. No imagination in the young people these days…
The Wild Swans’ unfinished business continues with a seven inch single and download, ‘Liquid mercury’ / ‘The wickedest man in the world’ (Occultation) and it sounds like the past is still preoccupying Paul Simpson. While neither track has the epic grandeur of ‘English electric lightning’, each is still bedecked with a rare degree of grace and great swoops of guitar – classic Scouse pop. And pop poetry, for ‘The wickedest man’ is another spoken word piece in the same gloriously melancholic vein as ‘The coldest winter for a hundred years’: ‘For me each year gets just a little tougher to get through / the regime just a little tighter / and the stars a little more distant’.
And, as I’m sure you’ll agree, another fabulous cover.
Alistair has posted the second of our four-part reflection on Fire Raisers, in which we get our teeth stuck into taking risks, stylistic tics, and graphic design. Part one is here, and part three will appear on this blog next week. All three issues are available as PDFs or paper copies for purchase via either link. Do feel free to comment, whether as a contributor, a reader from back in the day, or on the basis of coming upon the magazines for the first time.
Everything here has a place and a time
We’re only passing through
It’s no longer allowed in this country, no doubt for good reason, but back when I was a boy working on a farm over the summer, great excitement met the days when we would burn the stubble in recently harvested wheat and barley fields. There was an art to it, setting the fire according to wind direction, pitchforking the discarded stems to keep the fire moving along the harvested lines – and making sure that the fire didn’t jump up trees or into neighbouring fields or properties. Scorched by sun and fire, we youngsters – authorised fire raisers! – couldn’t get enough of it. The old boys would come down to lean on their pitchforks, quiet satisfaction in their eyes. I suspect that even before it was banned, farmers knew it didn’t add that much more to the soil than you would get by ploughing the stubble back in; but it was a seasonal ritual and joy to observe the leaping flames and, once they’d moved on, the blackened, smouldering earth left behind.
It’s one of the images I hold in mind as I listen to Bonfires on the heath, the new Clientele album, a personal conflation of its themes of harvest and bonfires. You have to hand it to Alasdair MacLean and the Clientele. For the fourth time in a row, they have written a set of songs and unified them across an album so that a discarded image or sound in one song is taken up and explored in greater detail in another. This time around it’s a return to nature, a reconnection with the seasons. Bats flit across moonlit skies, and from ‘Harvest time’ to ‘Share the night’; bonfires burn orange against the black of a moonless November night. Summer comes and goes, harvest festival marking its end, mostly unobserved, though in Alasdair’s lyrics and themes there is perhaps a tacit recognition of a secularist’s debt to an Anglican upbringing mixed in with the ghosts and pagan celebration. All that’s missing is pumpkins.
The opening trio of songs form the album’s core, leaving it a little top heavy. For ‘I wonder who we are’, they have infused the lightness and deliberately banal joy of a Tropicália-era Caetano Veloso song with their hallmark shot of estrangement. Then come those hues of autumn. ‘Bonfires on the heath’, as languid as anything the Clientele have recorded, though again, not without an underlying edge of restlessness – ‘how’m I going to get myself to sleep?’ ‘Harvest time’ is the dreamy psychedelic folk equal of the haunting song of more or less the same name on Michael Head’s The magical world of the Strands. The Clientele’s song searches for the point at which the impermanent – us human beings – meet with the permanent (or the more permanent) – the soil and the seasons – a point encapsulated in Alasdair’s image of watching scarecrows.
Beyond these three, ‘Sketch’ allows you to construct your own connections out of a whispered lyric of 25 apparently random words; the Clientele’s version of the tarot, perhaps. It’s a pity the music is so obviously redolent of sixties Hammond groove – with less archetypal musical accompaniment, we might have had a defining moment in the Clientele’s discography. ‘Three month summers’ is on the other hand gloriously archetypal Clientele, shot through with suburban light, the mood of the violet hour and plenty of strange geometry.
Bonfires on the heath has been billed as a return to the Clientele’s roots, which to some extent is true. Here’s ‘Graven Wood’, an early song written by Innes Phillips while he was still in the band, recast with added drone. The lyrics throughout are simpler, more youthful, less inclined to the abstract than Strange geometry. The closing song even begins ‘I’ve been walking in the park…’ which is to Alasdair MacLean as ‘Woke up this morning…’ is the to the blues. But this is a group who’ve written strings of musically rounded songs, and they cannot replicate the narrowness nor the edge of the three piece as it was when it first came to musical maturity. So the songs are softened by musical and lived experience – and by the presence of the member who wasn’t there at the outset. Mel’s teardrop piano, gently bowed violin and backing vocals soften the sound, and make it impossible for the Clientele to rediscover their jagged edge. The vast improvement in the way they have recorded their music over the years has allowed us to enter a sound world of compensating and rarely matched distinction, so that I tend not to miss Alasdair’s guitar heroics. Yet while this is again a beautifully recorded as well as perfectly autumnal record, it’s not one I feel quite able to set it alongside XTC’s Mummer, or The magical world of the Strands.
Alasdair has spoken of his doubts about the future of the Clientele. Despite the heights it reaches, Bonfires on the heath as a whole is slighter than the group’s previous albums. Maybe they have run out of ideas, and steam – a cover and the return to two earlier songs suggests that’s the case. I applaud any group who re-record an earlier song in an attempt to get something more or different out of it, but I don’t think the Clientele have succeeded with their second go at ‘Share the night’. Problem is, they nailed it first time around. I find myself wishing that they’d kept back the other songs from the That night, a forest grew EP for this LP, rather than nobly honouring their promise of three discs for Acuarela.
The last words of that closing song, ‘Walking in the park’, are: ‘With the darkness coming down / I don’t know what more I can say / what I can say’.
I’m not quite sure why Massive Attack chose to hide the light of ‘Pray for rain’ under the bushel of ‘Splitting the atom’; both seem to be state of the world addresses, but the lead track is understated even by Massive’s laidback standards. Musically, ‘Pray for rain’ is something else, a looping, better-late-than-never millennial lament with a silver lining of hope. Cross the brooding presence of New Order’s ‘In a lonely place’ with the majestically reflective moods of Palm Skin Productions’ ‘The sunlight on the garden’ and you arrive somewhere close by. Featuring a near-perfect vocal from Tunde Adebimpe of TV On The Radio, whose records have never quite managed to do for me what this does, ‘Pray for rain’ is also a reminder of Massive’s genius for bringing out the best in their contributors.
A stream of the Splitting the atom EP is available here; download it from here.
Always a pleasure to hear long-time Massive associate Horace Andy, as we do on ‘Splitting the atom’. His collaboration with Alpha, Two phazed people – no less than eight years in the making – has finally been released. Often over the years the sweet to Massive’s sour, Alpha are well-placed to frame that angelic voice.
Downloads and details of dontTouch Recordings’ interesting business model are available here.
About twenty years ago, having respectively produced a fair quantity of solo publications, Alistair Fitchett and I joined forces to co-edit a new magazine that for many and various reasons we stopped short of calling literary or cultural, though in truth it had aspirations to be both. In the first of four parts which will alternate across this blog and Alistair’s Unpopular, we discuss our motivations and the place in the world of such a magazine back then. We are making all three issues of Fire Raisers available in PDF format, so that you can make sense of the conversation, and perhaps enjoy the magazines in their own right.
We also have a few paper copies of each issue left; click here to purchase these perfect early Christmas presents for the literary fanzine fetishist in your life. Or for yourself, of course.
Oh, and if there do happen to be any Fire Raisers contributors or readers lurking out there, feel free to pitch in your comments as we go along.
Daniel: Was the motivation behind Fire Raisers the same as that which led us to produce our solo fanzines? What do you think we were we aiming to achieve?
Alistair: After so many years it is difficult to recall exactly what motivations might have been driving me personally, yet I suspect they were very much the same as they were when making the solo fanzines in so much as they were about fulfilling a need to communicate and to share enthusiasms. Indeed that motivation is one that has been largely unaltered in what I’ve done myself since, with other solo fanzines, through Tangents and blogs etc. Having said that, I also concede that the motivation for Fire Raisers was probably subtly different, given that it was a shared idea. Perhaps we felt that Fire Raisers was a step up from the solo fanzines, a sense of getting a bit more serious and grown up about things. Certainly looking back at them now there is a sense of that, I think.
That said, I also think in many ways we didn’t raise our sights high enough, didn’t get anywhere serious enough. In retrospect that sense of refusing to compete in the traditional market place and staying resolutely underground held it back, I think. Looking back on the premise of Fire Raisers, I wonder if that had been a pitch for a more mainstream magazine with advertising and so on, it might have worked. Maybe not at the time, but certainly in the later ’90s and early noughties perhaps.
But then, that idea of being a ‘proper’ magazine was not really what we were trying to achieve anyway, so it seems a moot point. And actually it seems telling that we probably defined our aims in terms of what we DIDN’T want as opposed to what we did. And whilst the ‘manifesto’ editorial inserts still seem stirring and passionate, I’m not sure it’s exactly clear where those manifestos intended to lead. In short, I’m not sure we really had the slightest clue about what we intended to achieve! I’m not sure that we particularly cared either…
D: Yes, there was that sense of ‘Oh my god! We’re doing it… we’re fuckin’ doing it’, as the caption we used from a cartoon showing a subverted, rioting version of Tintin had it. It almost didn’t matter what exactly it was that we were doing. My hazy recollection is however that we were actually collectively quite sure about we thought the magazine should be, but I don’t think we were at that point quite able to articulate it with any great subtlety in print, especially when we tried to produce text co-operatively – to my mind it reads as a particularly contrived and diluted Alistair-Dan hybrid.
We were certainly totally clueless about marketing and selling the ‘concept’, as well as antagonistic towards the compromise inherent in giving over time and energy to those practices; it was all about the words and pictures, and putting them together. Still, each issue shows a marked progression in terms of making the magazine more accessible, at least in a superficial sense – the cover got more inviting with each outing. That came about partly because of the dressing down I got from the man in Compendium bookshop in Camden, who took it upon himself to critique the cover and contents in forensic detail one day when I dropped in to see how issue one was selling (not very well). I didn’t fancy that happening again so we took on board his suggestions!
Had we persisted beyond three issues – had desktop publishing been accessible to us then; had I not disappeared off to France – I think the penny might have dropped, and we would have tried to put the magazine on a more professional footing. The notion that it was a step up from our solo efforts suggests that too.
A: Ah, isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Really though it’s impossible to consider those ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ isn’t it? Because the needs that drove you to France, and the impending (or eventual) arrival of affordable publishing technologies were very real and, one could argue, equally undeniable. Our collective fiercely held opinions on commercialisation and almost OCD level obsession with not ‘selling out’ would also have inevitably hampered much forward movement for some time too, I fear. Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily, but nevertheless I think it would have been a very real barrier to making progress in terms of creating a product with much of a potential audience.
Interestingly I met with an old colleague from Art school the other week. We had not seen each other in twenty years, but he told me that he sometimes uses my old fanzine experiences as an analogy in business coaching situations. It all hinges on that sense of micro-conflicts between otherwise apparently similar people, or at least people with similar interests and roles. So that whilst as a fanzine writer I might have been arguing openly and heatedly with another fanzine writer about, say, which Talulah Gosh single is the best, to an observer it appears an illogical source of conflict. To the outsider it seems like, ‘hey, both these people love this group I’ve never heard of! Why don’t they use that shared love to make something great happen?’ So the micro-conflicts are damaging and holding back potential growth or positive development. Of course you can argue that those very micro-conflicts are at the heart of obsessive pop-cultural consumption, and that they are indeed desirable in that media and age context, which means that maybe the analogy doesn’t cross-contextual boundaries. Nevertheless I think it’s very useful, and I think helps to explain why I don’t think Fire Raisers could have grown beyond what it was within the context it found itself.
D: I was party back then to more micro-conflicts than I care to think about! Politics is of course also largely about micro-conflicts, with the same resulting positives and negatives.
D: Who or what were our inspirations, and our enemies?
A: I’m struggling to think of inspirations. Didn’t we think we were very much out on a limb, doing something different? I like to think so. And I like to think that we were fairly true to that. Certainly there were lots of dire small press fanzines that were doing fiction and other such things, but were they mixing it up like we intended? I’m not sure. Certainly I suspect things like Debris were a reference point, and to some extent people like i-D and The Face perhaps, at least in terms of those publications’ original ethos. Though by the time of Fire Raisers i-D and The Face were probably seen as much as enemies as anything else. I think perhaps the idea of the ’60s underground press was a reference point. IT and such like. Also, I would guess the more politically minded situationist publications were in your mind Daniel?
But yes, there was a lot of importance put on the idea of enemies in those days, wasn’t there? I am not sure if that was a reflection of the age, or of ours. I am not sure if people of that age now feel the same sense of having to take sides, of being for this and against that. I suspect in reality things are not much different and that the percentage of any given generation that really cares about such things at a given age remains roughly the same. But as for who our enemies were? Is ‘everyone else’ too flippant an answer? Perhaps so, and yet it feels honest and indicative of our glorious naiveté.
D: Oh yes, I don’t think it was until a while after the ashes of Fire Raisers had cooled that I finally got myself out of that situationist straitjacket. It was an unfortunate part of the baggage that stopped us from trying to sell or market the magazine. Situationism’s critique of capitalism was so devastating, and its political aspirations so remote, that for a long time I felt bleakly trapped by it. That came out in what I wrote for Fire Raisers. Having Guy Debord and Mark Eitzel as chief inspirations is not a great combination if you’re after producing happy text, or for that matter, a happy bunny writing it.
The fact that we felt unable to name more than a couple of even vaguely like-minded enterprises in the first issue – both in any case the projects of people who contributed or went on to contribute to the magazine – suggests that what you say is right. We did feel out on a limb. Debris was great, but it was more properly journalistic in its approach than we ever envisaged being. I never really bought into The Face and i-D thing, though later, when I lived in Bristol and started going to clubs , I bought them out of curiosity (and a lack of anything else to go for) in terms of that culture.
I think I was hoping to elicit from you particular individuals who inspired us as well as publications, whether that was personally or in a literary sense. As well as Debord and Eitzel, I was big on Georges Perec at the time; an excellent stylistic corrective to all the Kerouac I’d read. And personally Ross Reid (Cornish fanzine writer and sports journalist) was also a huge inspiration for me – in fact (now it can be told) he was the subject of ‘Spike’, the opening article in issue one. In February 1990 – in a classic example of micro-conflict! – he sent out a circular called ‘Anger the angels’ to certain friends and two of the Esurient groups with one of the classic photos from the May ’68 riots on the front, telling us all to ‘wake up!’ and issuing me with an injunction about getting on with Fire Raisers: ‘don’t fiddle with matchsticks while you can/could blowtorch the fucking lot.’ He demanded – alongside what I now see is an isolated and ever-so-slightly paranoid plea for contact – that we think big. We tried.
And of course we should direct a nod of appreciation in Max Frisch’s direction, for it was his play’s title that we appropriated for the magazine. Likewise a nod to Fiona of our Devonian contingent of friends (and contributors), who originally passed it our way. I haven’t reread the play since, but what I recall is a blend of Brecht, anarchism and something more conservative, the end result being not dissimilar to the recent German film The Edukators.
Anyone else you would add to the list?
A: Well, as you were perhaps moving on from the Kerouac obsession, perhaps I was moving into it. Hence the large photo of the man himself accompanying my new Orleans missive. I think there was something of the stream of consciousness prose in the Big Flame extracts too, although that was tempered with some conscious stylistic editing too. I suspect my Sylvia Plath obsession came slightly later…
Like you, I had never particularly bought into the i-D magazine culture, although as an Art student perhaps I was more inclined to dabble. Certainly I had loved The Face since the early ‘80s, and Blitz (which was run partly by Paul Morley, yes?) was a regular on my desk, although by the time of around ’86 into ’87 I’d had my head turned by things that would shortly coagulate into the dreaded ‘indie’ style, and this was very much seen to be in opposition to the glossy ‘style’ magazines.
I always thought it was funny that several of the images that were in my first (handwritten!) fanzine Delight In The New Wonderland were from fashion spreads in The Face. And I liked that the image we used to accompany the ‘Helsinki’ piece in Fire Raisers 3 about clubs came from i-D.
D: Was there a place in the world at the time for the kind of magazine we were aiming to produce? Is there one now?
A: This is something I’ve thought about often over the years, not specifically in reference to Fire Raisers, but in general. And I must admit that it is with something of a resigned sigh when I conclude that no, there isn’t and no, there wasn’t. Not if one wanted to make a living out of it at least.
I think if you drew a Venn diagram of potential markets for the things that ‘we’ like(d), then you are left with a tiny area that, globally, may never amount to any more than a few thousand people. Which in real terms is less than negligible. Our disinterest in pretty much anything remotely approaching ‘mainstream’ (or that our interest in anything remotely mainstream is placed in unfamiliar contexts) also precludes the potential marketplace for anything we might produce.
That’s not a criticism though, and nor is it a reason for not doing something. It’s just an observation and an acknowledgement.
D: I suppose it depends upon how much ground we might have conceded to the mainstream, or, to put it less grudgingly, how hard we might have worked to bring what we liked in a cultural sense to a readership that might be less familiar with it. Certainly we were never going to make a living from the magazine itself, but it might have led more directly to the chance of making a living from freelancing. But we were actively engaged in the enrichment of our own cultural lives, if no-one else’s. A salary, food and a roof were never going to be enough, with all due admission that we were and are lucky enough to be living in a time and place when we can say that.
If the cultural blend had been suitably varied – and I think it was well on the way to becoming so – we might have generated interest in and – to use your analogy – shaded a fair number of those intersections at the centre of that Venn diagram. If the way the internet has evolved proves anything, it’s that there are an almost infinite number of overlapping or interlinked musical and cultural localities; in our own small way, with our contributors’ collection of varied interests, we anticipated this – and contributed to that evolution itself when it began to happen.
A: There’s a symbiotic relationship, isn’t there, between our understanding of those cultural connections and the media through which we exploit the links. So without the possibilities offered by the Internet, for example, would our sense of connectedness be lessened? Or increased? Does the physical size of those distributed networks impact on that? So for example, is there any less a sense of belonging to a group when the membership is measured in the millions as opposed to the hundreds? And how ‘real’ is the sense of belonging? And how do you measure or judge the ‘reality’ anyway?
Sorry, that’s a lot of questions and thoughts starting to get up their own arses, but I do think it’s interesting. And I don’t think that Fire Raisers could have increased its audience without changing its fundamental form. Which ties in to what we were saying about contexts.
Bringing – at last – this whole exercise of republishing my solo fanzines to a close, here is the cartoon supplement for Pantry For The World, where we once again enter a portal on floor 7½ of the Mertin Flemmer Building in Melbourne and emerge into the mind of David Nichols circa twenty years ago.
David’s work from the previous issues of my fanzine can be seen here.
If anyone would care for Pantry For The World in unexpurgated PDF form, you can help yourself below; the advantage being that you don’t have to squint as much as you may have been doing at the jpegs I’ve been posting. Thanks for sticking with it.
Next up – Fire Raisers.
A piece about the Hellfire Sermons, which became the starting point of an article for Tangents, which itself was reworked as sleeve notes for Hymns: ancient and modern, the collection of singles and unreleased recordings issued by Bus Stop in 2002. It’s a great shame that the Hellfires never recorded an LP either for Esurient or Dishy – but at least Hymns helps fill that absence.
‘Not nailed down’ was the 1990 highpoint of their first phase as a fantastically melodic and incisive guitar pop group. And in ‘Covered in love’ you hear the precise moment at which singer Colin Pennington apparently comes unhinged, with the group following suit. It’s a thrilling record, crazed and dangerous but deliciously catchy. They even managed to pull off the same trick with their next single for Dishy, ‘Sarasine’, which was equally blood-curdling. In their guise as supreme melodists, they were another fab group from Liverpool to set alongside the Teardrop Explodes, Shack and the La’s. And as scary dramatists, they out-Pixied the Pixies.
I was struggling to articulate all sorts of things in this excerpt from Pantry For The World, and Sarah Records got caught in the crossfire. A less violent, retrospective assessment of the label was delivered as part of B/w 42 on St. Christopher.
The sky blue colour of the cover of Pantry For The World was partly chosen in tribute to the covers of the first two Another Sunny Day singles. It’s great to see Harvey’s early work available again in the form of London Weekend (Cherry Red). I still love the contrast between the focussed musical rush of ‘What’s happened to you, my dearest friend?’ and its bewildered lyric, and the way the sound comes together with the words to create the yearning tug of ‘Green’.
The Orchids were definitely one of the more accomplished groups to record for Sarah. They were consistent too, and the LP Striving for the lazy perfection lived up to its own billing. It wouldn’t be quite true to say the same of the single ‘Thaumaturgy’ – miracle-working – but it’s not far off, and full marks to the Scots for helping to extend our vocabularies back in those days.
You’ll probably not be able to make out that the much reduced photo in the top left-hand corner of this latest page from Pantry For The World is of a model revealing herself from behind a Margaret Thatcher mask on a stick. I kid you not.
Never less than engaging as a lyricist, Simon Rivers’ songs piled (and via the Bitter Springs continue to pile) ridiculous images on top of comic ones in an unsparing assault on the people – himself included – that populate his corner of south west London.
More on Last Party over at Backed with, but here for your enjoyment:
I completely concur with Vic – the Claim were bloody marvellous on Saturday night in Rochester. Not better than I remember, as I said in the immediate aftermath, but simply as great as I made out in words written about them many years ago. So it’s pleasing to know that my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, that it wasn’t all a dream, and that the Claim were – and are – worth raving about.
Phil Dillon’s photos of the night are infinitely better than mine.
September is turning out to be a quite a month for reissues of significance to the Pantry boy – and, I would wager, a fair few other folk.
Domino (and Bar/None in the US) do the honours in re-presenting the Feelies, with both The good earth and the 1980 debut LP for Stiff Crazy rhythms now back in circulation. I know and love every twitch and twang of the latter, having bought the vinyl for peanuts on a visit to Sidmouth in what I recall was a shop that majored in goods other than records. I’m not sure about other retailers, but buy the CDs direct from Domino and you get codes for bonus downloads.
Although you could argue that vinyl scratches and crackles only add extra detail and percussive effect to the Crazy rhythms experience, it’s great to hear the album in all its virgin glory; for the Feelies it ‘was the culmination of four years of fantasizing about how they were going to record those songs’. They executed the dream so meticulously that, as well as being a fantastic journey, the LP has a high count of fabulous pop moments. After patiently crafted build-ups, the points at which both ‘Loveless love’ and ‘Forces at work’ take off are top ten contenders in that hotly disputed category.
Downloads of ‘Crazy rhythms’ (the song) and ‘Slipping (into something)’ from The good earth are available over at Aquarium drunkard, as is their cover of ‘Paint it black’.
Meanwhile Cherry Red offer what appears on first sight to be a slightly puzzling expanded edition of Hurrah!’s Tell God I’m here, adding a second disc of earlier singles and later cuts from subsequent LP The beautiful – which is itself reissued in October – but not the B sides of singles drawn from the Tell God album itself.
Those still searching for the Holy Grail of perfect guitar pop may find themselves more excited by the appearance of download editions of The sound of Philadelphia (collecting pre-Tell God singles and demos) and Way ahead, the live LP originally issued by Esurient more or less in protest at the version of Hurrah! presented on Tell god I’m here. Read up on the full-ish story of those recordings over at Backed with, complete in the comments with testimony from fans and the thoughts of the Very Reverend Paul Handyside.
28th September 2009. Set your faces to stunned and make a note of the date in your diaries, for that’s the day on which the Claim finally make it onto CD with the release of Black path: retrospective 1985-1992. Who’d have thought that in 2009 they would be releasing a record within eight days of the Clientele, whose Bonfires of the heath is out on 6th October; another astonishing preview track (‘Harvest time’) is available here. (I first hitched the two groups together for this 2001 piece for Tangents.)
To celebrate, here – courtesy of the Right Honorable Vic Templar – is a link to a YouTube outing of one of the previously unreleased songs on the retrospective, the not entirely typical ‘Between heaven and Woolworths’.
And here are the pages from Pantry For The World which celebrated the Claim’s Boomy Tella (‘the best LP of 1988’) and their subsequent singles for Esurient. The quote about the Claim live came from a letter written by one Richey Edwards, whose group had just made their London debut supporting the Claim.
Here also is one half of the Pantry For The World supplement, featuring a piece about the Claim by Kevin Pearce, who wrote about them with the appreciation and bias appropriate to the man who was releasing their records.
Black path tracklisting:
Picking up the bitter little pieces
Birth Of A Teenager
Plastic Grip
Say So
Mike The Bike (Featuring Vic Templar)
Sunday
Being A Minor
Between Heaven And Woolworths (For Brian Patten)
Gullible’s travels
Not So Simple Sharon Says
Christopher
God, Cliffe And Me
Ernestine
Sporting Life
Dear
Mrs Shepherd
Treasurehunting
Do You Still Feel?
Down By The Chimney
Lonely Tarts
Love Letter
Wait And See
Mary Stavin
Seen And Done It All
Loser’s Corner
That’s one half of Boomy Tella by my reckoning, and sadly means no room for the trombone-fuelled knees-up of ‘Beneath the reach’ or ‘All about hope’, on which the Claim were at their most exquisitely pastoral. Fingers crossed Boomy will before long get a release in its own right. Neither ‘This pencil…’ nor ‘Another yesterday’ feature – they can be downloaded here.
There is also at least one live date confirmed at the Royal Function Rooms in Rochester on Saturday 19th September with the possibility of a London appearance.
Backed with A wild slim alien