Monthly Archive

It gives me great pleasure to report that David Nichols’ sense of humour is well and truly intact.

And if (among other things) photos of dilapidated Australian railway stations tickle your fancy, as they do mine, then check out the rest of David’s blog.

I think David (and you) might like Nothing to see here.

The second contributed page to Lemon Meringue Pantry, split in two.  The cartoonist is David Nichols, who produced comics and a fanzine called Distant Violins.  The comic that came my way was Soon, featuring strips such as ‘Pebbles of the dead’ and ‘The day the world caught fire’; David’s extraterrestrial humour emboldened me to ask for more of the same for my fanzine.  He also drummed – or rather percussed – for the Cannanes, whose Bored, angry and jealous EP was released the following year (1987).  Its rough acoustics and heavy dose of sarcasm in the form of ‘You’re so groovy’ bear up well after all these years.  They’re still going, albeit without David, who went on to write and then revise a history of the Go-Betweens (Verse Chorus Press, 2003), a book which in giving an affectionate but not reverential account of the group very much does them justice.

David’s humour – at least as it stood twenty years ago – comes from a not dissimilar well to that drawn upon by Nicholas Gurewitch for the Perry Bible Fellowship.  The execution, of course, is different, with David offering something akin to the early Cannanes’ sound – rough, ready and spontaneous – while Gurewitch varies his style and colouring to suit his absurdist ideas, more often than not finessing them to perfection.

Has anyone noticed the similarity between Róisín Murphy’s video for ‘Let me know’ and the Clientele’s for ‘Bookshop Casanova’?

While Róisín wins on the hat front, the Clientele are the better dancers, obviously.

The two pages by other contributors were easily the best thing about Lemon Meringue Pantry.  Here is the first of them – a masterpiece of provocative politico-aesthetics by Chris Jones, who under the pseudonym Tintin was editor of Bullfrog fanzine.  At the point I met him he had recently come up with the AAAA tag.  If you crane your neck and squint carefully, you’ll see from the scan that AAAA’s merchandising arm was Jesus – The Products.  I still have a piece of toast in a nicely labelled Jesus – The Products bag which Chris sold me at a later exhibition of what could loosely be described as his work.  Chris was one of the influences moving me to become increasingly politically active, and it was  largely through him that I got into the situationists – a more culturally satisfying route than via Malcolm McLaren.  Debord and Vaneigem made a lot of sense to me in those days, with theory and proposed practice that turned the world upside-down and inside out, but the demands an involved reading of them placed on the human psyche were cult-like in their intolerability.  What do I think of them now?  I would need the prompts provided by a re-reading The society of the spectacle and The revolution of everyday life to tell you that.

Chris later made music with groups called the Gore Vidals, Use and Pre-dog, put out creative writing in a publication called Fast Hard and reinvented himself as X-Chris before I lost touch with him.  Having often wondered what he might be up to in a world whose virtual or online versions has to some extent caught up with the kind of approach he espoused, I did battle with everyone’s search engine of choice and eventually found video footage of him in among the background material for the Tate’s displays marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.  Chris argues – as I half-suspected and hoped he might still be doing – that resistance is not futile.  (He’s at 3:16, sandwiched between Mike Phillips and Mark Wallinger.)

Damn – you write a piece banging on about how surprisingly little poetry is set to pop music, then along comes a whole album full of the stuff.  These are the Wraiths, and they hail from – where else? – Bristol.

Theirs is just about the perfect moniker, given the poetry the duo set on This is Charing Cross.  Ford Maddox Ford’s title poem has the bereaved widows of First World War soldiers gathering at the station for trains which will never disgorge their husbands.  The women’s faces, and those of their children, are dead.  Living ghosts.  All of the poems the Wraiths set seem carefully chosen for their resonance, their timeless and lyrical beauty, and capture moments – ghosts of moments – that but for poets would go unrecorded, uncelebrated.  They set them to music which is decidedly more corporeal, more substantial, Elizabethan folk blended with the kind of acoustic instrumentation and guitar play that might have graced work at the literate end of eighties and nineties indie-pop (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mog Fry and Jon Hunt turned out to have form in this respect).  It’s a winning combination, as a listen to ‘The curlews’ on their MySpace site will bear out.

Mog comes across as a warmer Trish Keenan, trading the latter’s icy distinction for a far greater range, so that she’ll sing ‘The junk of many pearls’ with appropriate aquamarine ethereality and then go to town belting out ‘Movers and shakers of the world’ (Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Ode’).  And having been captivated initially by these more immediate songs, I’ve found myself returning to the softer settings.  ‘The darkness’ (D.H. Lawrence’s ‘At the window’) is as gently evocative of weather, season and mood as, say, ‘Saturday’ by the Clientele.  The Wraiths have the same lightness of touch and This is Charing Cross bears repeated listening.

Thanks are once again due to Tim, who increasingly seems to be this blog’s eyes and ears on the ground.  I really should get out more, as the Wraiths prove.

An inside page from Lemon Meringue Pantry.

500 print run, paid for out of my student grant, and sold at a loss on every copy – very Tony Wilson.  And yet, at gigs, in record shops and through the post – people bought the thing.  As my writing and layout improved with each subsequent fanzine, so sales decreased.  Had I carried on past four issues, I would have created the perfect, readerless fanzine.

Not sure why I had it in for Pete Astor, pasting him up as a crotchety old character from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.  I loved the Loft, particularly the songs on the Creation compilations Alive in the Living Room and Wow! Wild summer; ‘Why does the rain’ and ‘Your door shines like gold’ being more mysterious beasts than the bull in a china shop charge of ‘Up the hill and down the slope’.  Perhaps it was the transition from the elemental but intimate punk rock of the Loft to mature artiste and Weather Prophet that got my goat.  Anyway, a few years later I spent a very pleasant evening with Pete, drinking Leffe at a bar on Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris till the early hours.  He set me to reading The sportswriter by Richard Ford, which was no bad recommendation for an aspiring writer.

Following the tone set by the bright yellow cover, the inside pages of Lemon Meringue were alternately salmon and light green.  What was I thinking?