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At the foot of Pantry For The World’s editorial page, I wrote ‘Some days I listen to but one song, once. That song is “Stumble”…’ That song, as regular readers of Backed with will know, is by Emily, and is available for download here. The words led into the next page, which reported on ‘Doing it for the Kids’, the Creation all dayer at the Town and Country Club (as the Forum in Kentish Town was then known).
‘That day, six minutes stood apart from the other six hours…’ This hyperbole is a bit harsh on Felt and the Jasmine Minks, who also played that day, and on Momus, whose thing was in no way comparable with anyone else’s. But I was right about Emily, and I’m glad I captured my excitement in print around the time they were taking off.
I was heading for a fall, pooh-poohing high pitch bleat-squealing sax. It wasn’t long before I was listening to Coltrane, Coleman and, in Archie Shepp, the high priest of high pitch bleat-squealing sax.
With surprisingly neat sequencing, the ‘Doing it for the kids’ piece was followed by one called ‘Doing it for God’, which compared and contrasted Momus and McCarthy, about whose second album, The enraged will inherit the earth, I was incorrigibly harsh. There’s just no pleasing some people.
My innovative design feature for Pantry For The World was to insert a portrait A5 page between the A4-sized pages 2 and 3, with the same layout at the other end of the magazine. The two photos of Emily were positioned one above the other so as to create a flick-book effect if you quickly raised and lowered the A5 page: see Emily play!
Has Alan McGee ever given us his considered thoughts about his group Biff Bang Pow! from the vantage point of the 21st century? Some essential and usually hidden core of modesty has probably prevented him from ever mentioning them in his Guardian dispatches. My suspicion is that he reckons his own records aren’t up to much when set alongside those multi-million selling Oasis albums, but I still beg to differ. His voice may have lacked the kind of rock’n’roll character he heard in Liam Gallagher’s, but Alan, Dick Green and the group’s rhythm section made up for this by juxtaposing fragility and attack, and by recording some memorably desperate songs. The fierceness of the feeling comes from the commitment to the attitudes of love and hate, a punk rock credo developed out of pulpit sermons from the Clash and the Jam but significantly strengthened by the antagonisms of the Thatcher years. In Alan McGee’s case it gave rise in to a perverse puritanism, or a puritan perversity. He had both the youthful, arrogant chutzpah to declaim ‘there’s no love in this town except for me’ and the self-loathing to sing ‘I don’t matter I don’t matter I don’t matter much’.
Alan was good enough to write me an encouraging note after I sent him a copy of Pot Plant Pantry, nobly overlooking my carping in favour of the positive noises I was making, and signing off ‘Keep the faith’. It got tested a few times over the years, but I like to think that I did.
So here are the opening and closing songs from Oblivion, whose green marble cover remains a favourite; the sweet – ‘In a mourning town’ and the sour – ‘I’m still waiting for my time’. Though I warm to it much more than I used to, the psychedelic – ‘I see the sun’ – will have to wait for another occasion.
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?
The latest Shivers Inside takes as its cue the Jasmine Minks 1985 single, ‘What’s happening’, one of the most attacking, celebratory, anxious slices of vinyl released by Alan McGee. A perfect gem of sixties garage pop meeting punk rock at the grass roots of Creation, I took this record as a seventeen year old to my home town’s one ghastly niteclub on a night when for some forgotten and improbable reason they were letting in the likes of me, and twisted the DJ’s arm. None of my friends had heard the record before, but they all followed me on to the dance floor and orbited the glitter ball like exultant, fiery comets. Suffolk then was a little further away from the centre of things, and I never saw the Jasmines play while Adam Sanderson was in the group, but this remains for me a rarely matched moment of dance floor joy.
John Carney’s tale recreates those very moments of Creation, giving a unique perspective on the ‘riot’ during the Jesus & Mary Chain performance at North London Poly and the recording of what became the Minks’ ‘Cold heart’ twelve inch.
From Alphabet Soup to E-Z Rollers, the sheer range of the Shivers Inside series (and Fifty Thousand Reasons before it) is dazzling. One a week without fail or columnist’s holiday, it’s like it used to be listening to John Peel: you never know what’s coming next. The narrative tone varies from characters who are clearly inhabited to crafted memoir conflated with the vox pop oral history of youth first proposed in the original Generation X. I’d love to see both series in book form, with two front covers, readable both ways – that would be a double A side to match Shena MacKay’s debut Dust falls on Eugene Schlumberger / Toddler on the run. What chance of that, John?
As ever with Momus, the plot is a woman, but you also get his take on Tony Wilson:
‘It infuriates me when people say (as some have, even on the day he died) that Tony was a bad businessman. He was an amazing – and influential – businessman. Or should we say “anti-businessman”? His contract was a verbal one based on trust. He split profits with the band 50/50. I didn’t sign to Factory in 1982, but in 1986 I signed to Creation and Alan McGee was operating the same deal with his artists, directly inspired by Tony Wilson. No paper contract, a handshake deal, 50/50 profit split. I recorded cheaply, and made profits almost immediately. True to our deal, Creation split them. All my Creation releases made profits. It was enough for me to live on. I signed off the dole in 1989. Thanks, Tony!’
