Category Archive

XTC managed to interpolate themselves among the indie-popsters in the pages of my second fanzine.  But I was extremely harsh on (a) Colin Moulding – why I didn’t have time for ‘Grass’ back then is a mystery to me now; (b) Todd Rundgren, whose music a friend subsequently converted me to with a tape entitled ‘Todd is God’, and who – though his interpersonal skills were evidently lacking – can hardly be blamed for wanting to get XTC to make a great record; and (c) Skylarking in general – only half of it of value?  A letter Mark Fisher was good enough to publish in his excellent XTC fanzine Limelight the same year (1987) was much kinder, though I still had it in for Colin.  I also suggested that ‘Dear God’ – the subject of the latest Backed with - ‘could well be my favourite XTC song… mmm… ever!’ and that it should have been on the LP instead of ‘Earn enough for us’, contradicting what I wrote in my own fanzine about that song.  Teenagers, eh?

Graphically a good idea inexpertly executed.  I would get better at this kind of textual shaping later on.

The Brilliant Corners have not loomed large in my life since those times – whereas hip-hop has.

This excellent piece of (self-)analysis over at Unpopular rather neatly kicks off with a reference to XTC and then moves on to my other subject here: fanzines of the 1980s.  My fanzines, too, were ‘written out of some desperate need to communicate and make connections’, and Alistair was, of course, one of those with whom I connected.

From the deliberately saccharine sweetness of ‘An MP speaks’ to the Byrdsian jangle and drone of ‘Write to your MP today’, McCarthy held firm conceptually.  Across their three LPs and nine singles or EPs, the music jangled and the words jarred.  And then that was that, the concept perhaps inevitably exhausted.  Malcolm Eden resurfaced briefly as Herzfeld while Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier went on to form Stereolab, staying true to McCarthy’s melodic foundations but introducing Germanic rhythmic influences and a more abstract lyrical palette.  Which is not to say that McCarthy did not progress, for they were always trying out new settings and subjects.

For the second issue of my fanzine, before the release of I am a wallet, Malcolm sent me three sides of foolscap in answer to some deliberately vague prompts – you could hardly call them questions.  All I gave my readers of this was half an A4 page.  Twenty-one years later, it’s time to put this injustice right and, for the benefit of McCarthy fans and anyone who happens to be researching eighties indie-pop and left-wing militancy, reveal more of the contents of that ‘interview’.  In contrast to their image, the letter found them in light-hearted mode.

‘Thank you for your note.  Tim did buy your fanzine at the Razorcuts gig, so we’d read it before.  I’m glad you liked ‘Something wrong somewhere’.  Maybe you think, like some people we’ve met, that everything we do afterwards is a falling off.  It’s unfortunate that a song we wrote in 1966 in two minutes should be praised so highly.

Here are our loves and hates:-

GARY (he refuses to say which he loves or hates.  But he will say that 5 are likes, 5 are dislikes, and 5 depend on his mood.  What a difficult boy.): McCarthy, White Rabbit, Dogmatism, 1969, Blood simple, Jane, John, Malcolm, Tim, money, success, peanut butter, adverts, Five Star.

MALCOLM (Loves): Shelley, Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Joe Orton, Primal Scream, Shakespeare, The importance of being Earnest, the RCP, Cubism, Trotsky, Liz Fraser’s singing, ‘Panic’.

(Hates) Religion, mystification, bad P.A.s, moral panics, pop stars, landlords.

JOHN: (Loves): With the Beatles, The Jam: A beat concerto, William H. Cosby (comedian, dancer, doctor), the United States of America (the country), the Temptations, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, J.D. Salinger, Colin MacInnes, Harpo Marx, Stephen King.

(Hates): White rock historians (the Presley, Beatles, Velvets, Joy Division theory), Jean-Luc Godard, designer violence (i.e. films Gary likes).

TIM: (Loves): The Byrds, David Lynch films, existentialism, Syd Barrett, Pop Art and art pop, ALF, Richard Dadd, absurdism, illogic and surreality, Dylan’s 3 electric LPs 1965-66, 1960s Rolling Stones and Beatles, green suede jackets, criminal history, Josef K, Felt, Primal Scream, Terry Thomas, Peter Cook, Psychocandy.

(Hates): work, rationality, computers, illness, logic and practicality, justifying your own actions, triviality, predictability, patriotism, insurance, meat, flares, bad haircuts, exercise, (most) comedians, religion, reactionaries, conservatism.

Q. ‘Sometimes bitter words’: [Malcolm] I don’t feel in the least bit bitter as a person, in fact I’m quite optimistic generally.  But there are a lot of ideas, viewpoints and arguments around that I object to strenuously, and in many of our lyrics I’m trying to combat them, ridicule them, do them down.  The nastiness of the lyrics isn’t I think attributable to me, to my being a horrible person, but to the nastiness of bourgeois, reactionary ideas.

Q. ‘Red sleeping beauty’: [Malcolm] The chords are E and A, and the odd F.  It’s a very old song, two or three years old.  It’s the only one of our old songs that we are willing to play nowadays, we’re sick to death of the others.  I was reasonably happy with the way the song turned out on the record.  The only thing is that, being on an independent label, we can’t afford to record in a very good studio.  We’re not intending to bung synthesizers and horn sections on our records if we signed to a major, but the overall sound of an expensive studio improves the quality of the record dramatically.  I think the songs we recorded in the BBC studios (the John Peel session) came out much better than anything we’ve done before or since, simply because they were better studios.  Those songs sound more or less how I imagined our songs should sound, whereas the songs on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and on the next 12” [‘Frans Hals’], although fab, were not exactly as I’d imagined them.

Q. ‘Gary’s drumming’: [Gary] I have found drumming to be a singularly unrewarding pastime, mainly because songwriters in general think drummer = lobotomy.  However I must admit that nature has seen fit to bless most drummers with a below average intelligence just as it blesses guitarists and songwriters with an above average ego, and bassists with a very average style of dressing.  Anyhow for influences I cite Cesare Borgia on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and Ruth Ellis on the forthcoming ‘Frans Hals’.

Q. ‘Big live sound’ [Tim] None of us weigh more than ten stone.

Q. ‘Wolfhounds’ [Tim] Currently recording their first LP for Decca.  ‘More songs about shrikes and warblers’.  A savage exposé of trash ornithology produced by former Tweets’ (‘The birdy song’) bassist. (True!)  ‘… makes the Byrds sound like the Eagles.’

Q. ‘Next’: [Malcolm] John buys all his jumpers there.  That’s a fact.

[Malcolm] The gigs you’ve seen us at we think were awful I should warn you.  Every ten years we deliver a stunning performance.

Barking is ugly ugly ugly.  We attended Billy Bragg’s school.  And the Tremeloes’.  Not at the same time of course.  It is a miracle that such a nice bunch of lads should have been produced by such a rat hole.  (The Tremeloes I mean.)’

• More substantial 21st century interviews with Malcolm Eden and Tim Gane, conducted by Tommy Gunnarsson for Penny Black Music
• An unreleased McCarthy song (‘Who will rid me of these turbulent proles?’) and several live Wolfhounds tracks
• McCarthy live mp3s
• McCarthy lyrics archive
• McCarthy MySpace
• Backed with on the Manic Street Preachers’ cover of ‘Red sleeping beauty’

As you will have divined from the cover of Too Much Hanky Pantry, the second issue of my fanzine came with a flexi disc by the McTells and Rig Veeda and the Twins.  Paul McTell and his Bi-Joopiter partner in crime Gillian very nobly put up the money for the flexi, despite being not that much less impoverished than I was.  It was also distributed with The Hip Priest and Escape From Bereznik fanzines and was played by John Peel, resulting in a deluge of SAEs and a trickle of demo tapes.  I singularly failed to do anything with these, which is a great shame as I might well have beaten Sha-la-la to Exeter’s Visitors and subsequently gone on to found an extremely successful independent record label, rubbed shoulders with Alan and Noel at the infamous 10 Downing Street party in ’97, stuck the knife into Blair when it all went sour, and blew my ill-gotten gains on a habit which mollified the disappointment of losing out to fresher and more entrepreneurially astute labels on all the groups who might previously have wished to associate themselves with me.  Rehab, gradual dwindling of activity, retirement, death.

In an extremely unlikely conjunction of old and new formats and technology, one of the tracks on the flexi, ‘Virginia M.C.’ is available in video form on YouTube.  The suitably sepia-toned and murky footage (from a compilation video for the housing and homelessness charity Shelter) looks like something from the dawn of cinema, but clearly audible is the electroconvulsive racket made by these pioneers of the international pop underground.

Amazing.  Someone has been moved to make use of the same bad pun that I employed two decades previously.  Perhaps the marketing department at Royston Pickles is headed up by a one-time indie kid who bought my fanzine at a Bodines gig and, if nothing else, its title stuck with him or her.

My thanks go out to Tim Hopkins, who not content with being this blog’s chief chutney scout, is also the singing half of the First Division.  Their ‘On the city’ mini-CD has just been released by Cloudberry (‘Downriver’ mp3 here).  Its three songs offer a celebration of London life which manages to be both impassioned and ambivalent – not an easy trick to pull off.  ‘We don’t need espresso round here / everybody’s wired on the fear’ indeed.

And so in this slow serial presentation of juvenilia as cultural artefact, we come to the second issue of my fanzine.  This variant on the Pantry title was suggested by Mark Fisher, then the editor of Limelight, a fanzine dedicated to XTC, who featured inside Too Much Hanky Pantry, as a subsequent scan will reveal.

It’s evident from the unholy alliance of imagery on the cover that this issue’s battle for my soul was between the situationist interpretation of the world as spectacle and the cutie interpretation of throwaway pop as spectacular.  I thought myself a natural soixante-huitard, for that was the year I was born.  Eighteen in 1986, I was also a natural proponent of throwaway pop.  It’s not giving much away to say that in the end neither won, as you will eventually see if you stick with this cut-and-paste feature.

I networked hard in the first issue of Pantry, 1986-style, reviewing – linking to – twenty-odd fanzines, all of which I would have laboriously written off for enclosing the obligatory SAE and coinage, following up reviews in other fanzines, the music press, and John Peel’s frequent plugs on his Radio One show.  The graphic limitations of the page itself stop me from offering it as a scan here, but the names are a treat:

Are You Scared To Get Happy?
Anarchy In Wonderland
Adventure In Bereznik
Baby Honey
Bandits 1-5
Big And Bouncy
Bludgeoned
Coca Cola Cowboy
Cursing This Audacity
Debris
Diana Rigg
Hand On Heart
Hello! Good Evening, And Welcome
The Hip Priest
Hungry Beat
The Legend!
1965 Kitchen
Pure Popcorn
Repose
Simply Thrilled
Skipping Kitten
Snipe
Trout Fishing In Leytonstone
When Saturday Comes

It wasn’t always the case that a fanzine’s name was the best thing about it.

Among the editors of these mostly forgotten screeds I can count:

One editor of Smoke: a London peculiar
One publisher of Plan B
One member of Teenage Fanclub
One Soup Dragon (as I recall)
One June Bride
One transvestite
At least one anarchist, possibly three or more
One Mancunian cultural commentator
One reviewer of computer games
One freelance sportswriter
And two folk with Kentish connections who remain very good friends to this day.

As for the others… I wonder what became of them all.

Again from Lemon Meringue Pantry, a page which as it emerges blinking into the bright light of the digital age should now become a primary source for all historians of the flexi disc.

See also ‘Disposable pop: a history of the flexi disc’.

You’ll have to excuse the embarrassing assertion about the Pastels.  The affair didn’t last long, but I confess I did play the ‘Million tears’ 12 inch half a million times.

Shame the Shamen didn’t make the flexi chart that featured on the following page.  Their Wayward Wednesday in May affair dates from well before they encountered ‘Ebeneezer Goode’; both ‘Four letter girl’ and ‘Stay in Bed’ are classic examples of moody eighties psychedelia which at the time made them seem like the negative to the positive of the Jasmine Minks.  Acid or mushrooms rather than ecstasy, I guess.

Let’s give you that all-important flexi top ten:

1. The Oinklettes – The Oink song (Marc Riley in disguise and as part of a team launching a new comic called Oink!)
2. The Chesterfields – Nose out of joint
3. The Jam – Boy about town
4. The Pastels – I wonder why
5. The Soup Dragons – If you were the only girl in the world…
6. The Laughing Apple – Wouldn’t you
7. A Riot Of Colour – Skink (‘While you were out, I changed my address…’)
8. The Shop Assistants – Home again
9. Laugh – Take your time yeah!
10. XTC – Looking for footprints

As per usual, I’m turning up for the match just as everyone is streaming away from the ground.  In fact I am almost certainly the night watchman, employed to keep an eye on the stadium when no-one else is around.  Nevertheless, I should capture my responses to these questions now, more or less at the outset of my blogging life, particularly as the answers have a bearing on this blog’s chronological reproduction of pages from my fanzines of twenty years ago.  I’m keen to map the common impulse which led to both forms of activity.  In terms of blogging per se, I’m answering without having read in detail the responses of others or subsequent commentary – that I’ll do when I’ve finished, and maybe signal which thoughts most and least accord with my own.

These questions appeared on rockcritics.com as a sort of a symposium.  I have never thought of myself as a rock critic, even during the brief spell that I could realistically have been described myself.  Both words in the term are limiting.  I prefer to think of myself as a music writer, or rather a writer about music.  Or perhaps to refine further, I’m a writer who happens to spend a fair amount of time on the subject of music, often more time than I think I ought.

1. Talk about your blog and how it has evolved over time. Why did you start to blog? What sorts of things do you do on your blog?

Evolution is obviously a question for the future.  I started to blog in anticipation of the end of Tangents, specifically to continue my Backed with series but also guessing that I’d need a space to let loose whatever seemed to have some letting-loose merit and potential.  Having written for Tangents since it was a paper-based entity, I had come to depend on it as a means of writing about the music I loved, but increasingly I was taking that means for granted and not being moved to file copy.  I very quickly came to feel liberated by Alistair’s decision to burn Tangents down, and would admit to having felt a little hemmed in there by the voracious tastes of the prodigious talents more regularly pouring forth their words.  I thank him both for the ten plus years of web space and for giving me the (unintentional) gentle shunt / kick up the arse.

I definitely need a space in which to express myself.  I’ve more or less always had one.  I would have felt lost and defeated without my three blogs, whose inception coincides with a surge of creative energy that for personal reasons had gone astray for two or three years.What I seem to be doing both with A jumped-up pantry boy and B/w is capturing the musical past and looking at it from the perspective of now.  Allied to this are the scans from my fanzines, which inevitably set me thinking about how I was then and what I think today.  My eighteen or nineteen year old self would be aghast at some of the things I’m saying about him.

With three blogs, I worry about not spending enough time on each, and losing momentum with one or other of them.  But each has a different purpose, and keeping each plate spinning prevents any of them from becoming boring (at least to their writer).

Here at A jumped-up pantry boy, I would like to be spending more time writing about contemporary music (of as many persuasions as I can muster, certainly beyond the independent guitar pop I major in) than I currently do, and increasingly I hope that I will, though it’s so easy to be nostalgically seduced by a reissue from twenty years ago.  But I like to think that it’s not impossible for a new group to better the songs of, say, the Go-Betweens and the pleasure they have given me.  In this I may be deluding myself, because of the crust that taste and age build up around you.  It is no longer possible for me to empathise completely with the worldview of twenty-somethings, but it is only (on an ongoing basis) this yet-to-be-jaded generation who stand a chance of besting Forster and McLennan.  Yet to be jaded, yet to be set in stone, yet to allow reality to diminish their creative ambition and belief.

Much as I admired John Peel and his never diminishing appetite for the new, I always had the sense that it was possible for him to continue as he did because he never became emotionally or intellectually attached to the vast majority of the music he played on the radio.  Had I ever become as thorough a DJ as John, I’m sure I would have given up in the face of the weight of it all and in the blink of a broadcasting eye, in comparison with his longevity.

So although I spend a lot of time listening to the new, it takes something really special to tear me away from the past and write about the present – The Clientele, Rachael Dadd and the Wraiths convince me to do so, while, for example, Battles, Burial, Cold War Kids and Candie Payne do not quite.

2. Is your blogging voice or the material you cover in your blog different than the voice you use or the material you cover in your professional music writing? If so, how?

I can’t describe myself as a professional for the reasons given in the preamble.  If we stretched the notion of professional writing to include what I did for Tangents, then as yet the voice and material has altered only slightly and not significantly.

On the other hand the blogging form does not seem to me to sit easily with the kind of in-depth writing I’m undertaking over at B/w and in particular the competing distraction provided by seductive links off to other more glamorous, entertaining or provocative worldviews.  I think I am still working my way to a finished blogging style.  I hope my posts will become more judiciously concise and frequent.

3. What are your thoughts on comments boxes in blogs? Do you or don’t you allow them, and why?

I positively welcome them, and at this early stage they are sufficient to create little flurries of excitement.  It doesn’t happen here yet – possibly because stylistically I close posts and argument off too readily – but the refinement that can be arrived at when comments don’t simply comprise of winks and in-jokes (fair enough in itself if the blog acts as a place to have pub-banter when not in the pub) is often impressive.  I wish I had more time to respond to what I read on the blogs of others – so much of it merits engagement, encouragement, hair-splitting, stand-taking.

4. Is your blog a forum to converse with or critique other writers? If so, please recount one (or some) of your more memorable blog dialogs or critiques.

It may become so.  More conversation than critique, I guess, although I welcomed the linking nod I got from Simon Reynolds having appraised Rip it up and start again.  Because I also write fiction, I don’t spend my whole creative life celebrating or dissecting music, and I think I would tend to bow to those that do on matters of critical principle.  I mostly want to share thoughts about great music and would agree with anyone who suggests that is a problematic endeavour in a world packed to the gills with music-makers, listeners and writers.  No-one should care that I have anything to say, but I aspire to saying it in a way which for the reader contains elements of idiosyncrasy, recognition, empathy, neurone-sparking potential.

5. Would you agree that the back and forth conversational aspect of the music blogosphere has died down somewhat in the last few years? Any theories as to why?

I don’t think I can answer the first part of the question having only followed it sufficiently closely since so recently becoming a music blogger myself.  Can anyone keep track of everything that’s going on?  At every moment a new young, middle- or old-aged blogger is starting out on their monologues or conversations.  Like most things, there will surely be waves of activity – some spurred by creative developments, others by technological advances – with certain relative constants.  I suppose for me Freaky trigger and the ILX boards provide a sense of those constants, even though I have never participated in either and rarely have a moment to look beyond the FT blogs to the boards.

6. A lot of music bloggers tend to start out with a lot of energy, then drop out altogether. You have kept at this for a while–what keeps you going, and are you ever tempted to just throw in the towel?

Obviously six months is not long, but when I start something I tend to want to see it through to the end of its natural life.  And as music has no end, and nor does writing about it, I reckon on keeping on keeping on, subject to occasional bouts of futility-induced depression.

I am definitely also subject to the (obsessive-) compulsive quality of blogging but my life aside from writing is sufficiently forceful that I’m obliged to do less than I otherwise might.  The addiction contains in it both noble and ignoble cravings (rather like fanzine writing, hence the reproductions) – you just have to try to obey the noble drive and resist as far as possible the ignoble.  So I don’t envisage needing to wean myself off of it anytime soon.  If I can keep blogs and life in balance, I think I’m here to stay.  The only thing I can see outside of war or apocalypse that that would make me reappraise the worth of continuing would be if the stats dropped to zero.  I need to do it, but I also need to feel that I am not simply speaking to myself, a straightjacketed madman in a white cell.  I take on board the risk that how I express myself may be turned by the existence of an audience greater than one.  I still have some small belief that writing ultimately attains the readership it deserves.

7. Do you think music blogs have any serious impact on record sales, or on how music is covered in newsstand publications?

I suspect negative impact on record sales as far as the influence of this blog is concerned!  I’m not sure I care about this as an issue, beyond wishing the groups that I write about well, in the sense that they make enough money both to support themselves and continue recording.

It must be next to impossible now to disentangle the various strands of increasingly viral marketing strategies, let alone distinguish between or even determine what is a genuine appreciative reaction and one which is tied to or compromised by the buzz.  But in terms of coverage it would seem to be the case that the mainstream media has taken on board the self-publishing revolution, and encouraged a greater level of reader participation, at least in an online sense.  You can see that with the music blog and Comment is free areas of the Guardian.  But perhaps other newsstand publications have not been so enlightened – or prepared to adapt to the changing balance of power in the name of self-preservation and self-interest.

8. What would you like to see more of in the world of music blogs?

Allowing that I probably have an incomplete or distorted sense of what the world of music blogs is, I would wish to see more imaginative responses to music which not only accept the contexts in which songs or pieces are written and recorded, but that give them their head as works of art as well as cultural artefacts.  I suppose I mean that everything is so heavily loaded; if it’s possible, I’d like writers to strip as much of that away as they can (or at least momentarily get past it) and look at the bones, the guts of the thing.  If I am being overly Romantic and culturally naïve about anyone’s ability to do this in the 21st century, carrying the weight of critical baggage that we do, then I suppose I that is deliberate.

9. What blogs, music or otherwise, do you most highly recommend?

In addition to the ones I link to on the left under what WordPress unfortunately insists on calling ‘blogroll’ (the ones that aren’t me in other guises are friends – though this shouldn’t discount how highly I rate what they do), I like An unreliable witness for prose which chases itself as might a plump dog following its strangely wiry tail, photography which blends idiosyncrasy with something you might find in a glossy product brochure, subversion of the post-it note, and all-round imaginative engagement with the blogging form.  Skyberries and voidmelons or voidberries and skymelons for Squirmelia’s photographic eye and diary-like interrogation of the oddities of natural and urban worlds.  The police diver’s notebook for Nick Talbot’s sharp political commentary on the state of the nation.  And I like La terrasse for its old-school literary range and flâneur erudition.

Music features prominently in only the last of these.  If the Guardian is right and there are now 4 million bloggers in Britain alone, then I suspect there are one or two more music blogs out there which I would wish to read on a post-by-post basis if I had the time to stumble across and stay with them.  As it is, I aim to write the blog I would wish to read if I were me, but I don’t doubt that there are people out there doing what I do better and more intensively.  They just don’t have my taste…

I admire those few blogs who don’t care to network the blogosphere by linking to a myriad of others in what can either be viewed as back-scratching or patting, or construction of a tapestry of interwoven concerns and cultural identification.  The problem is, they are extremely difficult to trace.  Perhaps there’s a Strange map of them to be found somewhere…

10. Anything else you care to add?

I have been struck at how much like starting a fanzine starting a blog has been.  It’s been a process of learning on the job, finding out both in terms of design and content what works and what doesn’t, reawakening friendships with people whose friendship was awakened in the first place by the fact that we exchanged fanzines.  There has been an element of what we might crudely term marketing with each; I’ve discovered that there really is a virtual equivalent of the (occasionally quite productive) madness of attempting to sell fanzines cold and off the cuff to people who attended the same gigs as me.  Making links to people – I can see how this would lead to real-world friendships in the same way fanzine connections did, were I not the age I am.  Those connections shot off in so many directions, and travelled so far from the initial musical meeting of minds, with letters as a testing ground for ideas, relationships, issues and ambitions.  It would be stretching the truth to call my entry into the world of blogging a creative renaissance, but it’s not far off that, and not far off the creative act of discovery that producing fanzines was.

I have also re-learnt the art of completion; towards the end of the Tangents decade, my ideas were mouldering, and for every article I sent through to Alistair, another nine remained unfinished.

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.

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.)

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?

There was a time when I would have point-blank refused to let pages from my fanzines see the light of day for a second time, as looking back on my efforts has routinely induced a muscle-wearying degree of wincing embarrassment.  But it’s the distant past now and I offer what will be an ongoing selection in the spirit of cultural archivism and with lately-found affectionate amusement at my eighteen year old self.

So this was the cover of my first fanzine, published in the autumn of 1986.  Bear in mind it was printed on a shade of yellow considerably brighter than the curd of the titular pie.

An Ivor Cutler song supplied the line ‘I’m happy and I’ll punch the man who says I’m not!’  John Peel would have been playing lots of Ivor around that time and I would have been listening most evenings to John.

That’s Cathal Coughlan of Microdisney in the top-right hand corner, showing that already there was a battle for my soul going on between the forces of throwaway pop and the serious, literate, built to last stuff.