A Photographic Memory?

Of festivals, fanzines, memoirs, and the magic of life's unanticipated journeys.

A couple of months ago, after an unsuccessful attempt to contact her via Instagram, I got hold of Miki Berenyi’s e-mail address and, suggesting that she might know me from back in the 1980s but just as likely did not, politely asked if she would appear on my show The Fanzine Podcast.

Miki, for those who don’t know, was the former front person for the band Lush, who released three studio albums and a slew of EPs on 4AD Records in the early 1990s. They also opened the second Lollapalooza tour, had a big hit in the UK with ‘Ladykillers’ in 1996 at the height of Britpop, and broke up after their drummer Chris Acland, a former boyfriend of Miki’s, committed suicide towards the end of that year. (I have fond memories of seeing and hearing Lush – they were loud! - at the Ritz in New York City, on the site of the former Studio 54, in March 1992.) In part because of her striking looks – born to a Japanese mother and a  Hungarian father, she colored her hair bright pink throughout Lush – Miki was an icon of that whole shoegaze/Britpop period, something she addresses in her stunning memoir Fingers Crossed: How Music Save Me From Success, which has rightly won awards in the UK though wrongly, remains unavailable in the USA.

But I wasn’t looking to talk to Miki specifically about her book, and barely about Lush. Back in the mid-1980s, she and her best friend Emma Anderson – they met at one of Miki’s many schools, and went on to form Lush together – published a fanzine, Alphabet Soup. It was irreverent, acerbic, unforgiving, hilarious, a hell of a lot closer to Viz Comics than Spare Rib, and because of all that, and because I had heard her on other pods (including the wonderfully-premised My Unlived Life), I knew Miki would make for a great guest on my show.

Save The GLC, Brockwell Park, London, August 4 1984. Photo credit: Miki Berenyi.

Literally just 33 minutes after sending my polite enquiry, Miki replied, with an attached jpg, and an opening paragraph that read, “I think that’s you in the photograph, from Brockwell Park, August 1984, talking to James Brown.” (A familiar caveat: we are talking here of the former Attack On Bzag fanzine editor who went on to found loaded magazine, and now has an excellent memoir out of his own, Animal House. And yes, I have met the Godfather of Soul.)

I was floored, not least because I had never seen the photograph before. It was taken by Miki, at a time few of us had cameras, and it is precious. In the foreground, on the right, stands Emma, clutching a bag of fanzines that they plan to sell for cider money. Alongside Emma is a girl called Melissa, frequently mentioned in Fingers Crossed, who would go on to become a hip music publicist. Alongside Melissa is a boy called John Shaw, who Miki had been dating and who, so she informed me in that mail, went to my school, Archbishop Tenison’s, in the year below me.

And then in the background, facing away from the camera, to my right as you look at my peroxide-haired, Johnson’s-jacketed backside, is another John, who like many people from the fanzine era, was known by his fanzine title; as his was ‘Ha, Ha, I’m Drowning’ (from a song by The Teardrop Explodes), Miki knew him as John Ha-Ha. That just leaves, poking out just behind Emma’s head, the aforementioned James Brown, who looked very much like Tin Tin  back in those days.

Indeed, we all look like children. And that’s because, essentially, we were. Emma, Miki, Melissa, and James were not old enough to drink. By American standards, nor was I, nor John Shaw, and John Ha-Ha doesn’t look of age, either. (This wouldn’t have stopped any of us, as evidenced by Miki and Emma selling zines for cider money, but that’s another story!)

From Fanzine to Memoir: Miki Berenyi

None of us could have fully anticipated our impending life journeys. Emma and Miki were still a ways from forming Lush, gaining stardom, falling out with each other, losing Chris, and failing to make money. James had no idea that a decade later he would launch a magazine that would soon be selling 350,000 copies a month – in the UK! – at which point he would quit to become editor of British GQ, where he would make plenty money once he got away from his life of excess. (He is now 25 years sober.) 

As for me, I had no inkling – though alarm bells should have been ringing! - that within five months of this photograph, my so-called successful fanzine, Jamming!, which had been publishing bi-monthly for the last year and which I had been convinced by my distributors needed to turn monthly to really make its mark, would go bust, after which the magazine would only last a year under the auspices of a couple of Jewish South African businessmen before I packed it in and they followed suit. Moving to New York City, having kids there, DJing in big nightclubs, writing 650-page books on Keith Moon and The Smiths, being on my school board, becoming a decent long-distance runner, backpacking round the world with an 11-year old kid at the age of 51…? No effing concept.

I was additionally surprised by Miki’s photo because I couldn’t initially remember the event, and yet I thought I had a photographic memory of my youth. (It turned out to be a Save The GLC Festival, the GLC being the Greater London Council that was in the process of being dismantled by Margaret Thatcher as an act of revenge/spite against the left-ist London Mayor Ken Livingston.) Brockwell Park is in Herne Hill, South London; it was on my route to school (it’s in the video for ‘Blink Of An I’, the new single by the Dear Boys) and concerts and festivals in general were so thin on the ground in South London back then that I would attend almost anything in the vicinity and surely remember it for that reason if nothing else. Certainly, I had been at the second Carnival Against The Nazis/RAR festival there in late 1978, where local reggae giants Aswad headlined above Elvis Costello and Misty In Roots, and Sham 69 bailed because of the likely racial violence their presence would have attracted. And, researching my own (second) memoir, Teenage Blue, I’d had cause to revisit the live debut of the Style Council in 1983 at Brockwell Park where, appearing in-between Madness and the Damned, Paul Weller was relentlessly bottled by skins and punks alike, a sharp comedown from his invincible status when playing with The Jam just a few months earlier. I could only assume that at this period of my life, August 1984, my life was such a whirlwind of activity that I hadn’t logged the concert firmly in my memory bank. 

But most of all, I was surprised at the photograph because of the speed at which Miki sent it to me. She was the one who had been the pop star; I had only gone off and written some books. And while some of those books have been successful, my first memoir Boy About Town was but a brief chart entry compared to the acclaim rightly heaped on Fingers Crossed. Yet, as Miki, James, and many of my show’s other guests have told me, Jamming! was a big deal at the time, the fanzine that had grown up but not sold out; James says on the latest episode of my podcast that if Jamming! gave a zine a good write-up, it could be guaranteed 30 orders in the mail over the next week. I had also been appearing on The Tube, interviewing the likes of Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Roddy Frame, and yes, Wham! (so stop texting me about the Wham! documentary: I know!) In Miki’s photograph, it is me who is the success story. It’s disconcerting and comforting at the same time. I am barely 20 years old.

From Fanzine to Memoir: Tony Fletcher

I find the notion of memory endlessly fascinating. As a biographer, I am often dependent on other people’s recollections, and yet I have learned not to implicitly trust them. If an anecdote seems too perfectly told to be perfectly true, it’s usually because it is, so either I find other witnesses to the so-called event or I offer a caveat alongside its re-telling. As a memoir-ist, I have similarly found from checking in with friends that we each retain different details of the same event: for example, of walking the Manchester streets all through Halloween night, 1980, with my best friend from school Richard Heard, after attending a concert by The Jam from which there was no bus home until morning, Richard recently assured me that we had been granted entry  to the Piccadilly Hotel to have a beer with the band after the show (I thought we’d been turned away by the hotel bouncers); the group had then retired early and it was only at that point that we’d been kicked out on our arse (with the rest of the clowns). I in turn was able to remind Richard that part of our journey through the dark streets of Manchester that night entailed walking back to the Apollo in some vain, vague hope the road crew might still be there and take us in. (We each had no trouble recollecting that we eventually stumbled on an all-night café where we met hookers for the first time!)

It makes sense, then, that I am equally, endlessly fascinated by other people’s published memoirs, and that so many of my guests, across both my podcasts, seem to be subconsciously chosen for the fact that they are authors. Over at One Step Beyond, my podcast about “positively engaging with the world outside our door,” my second season has already included coach, athlete and nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald (whose incredibly powerful Life Is A Marathon is largely about marrying someone who turns out to be violently bipolar), Damian Hall (a champion trail runner whose first book In It For The Long Run detailed his later-life discovery of the sport), Michael Anthony (who has written two memoirs and a graphic novel dealing with his Army experiences in Iraq, and who leads workshops helping other veterans write their way out of PTSD), and Boff Whalley on his “I was there” biography of the 1980s Leeds punk/running scene Faster! Louder! focusing on local champion mohawked runner Gary Devine, who joined us for what has turned out to be the most popular episode across both seasons.

Over at the Fanzine Podcast, meanwhile,  my guests so far this year have included the co-authors of the excellent We Peaked At Paper: A History of British Zines, and several former zine editors who have published compendiums similar in fashion to my own, The Best of Jamming!: Selections and Stories from the Fanzine That Grew UP, 1977-86.

And then there’s the recent episode featuring Miki Berenyi. The reason Miki’s book Fingers Crossed is one of the most compelling I have read in recent years is in large part because its first half is not the telling of a nascent rock career but of a childhood and youth that would have begged belief in a novel. Like all the best memoir-ists, Miki pulls no punches, writing with just as much unabashed honesty of her own actions and attributes as she dresses down those who abused her (literally) along the way. And just like the best novels, there are twists to the tail beyond the awful suicide of Chris that Lush fans will be cagily reading towards for most of the book. As I had expected, Miki was a superb guest - but so was the other guest Clare Wadd, who had run her own zine, Kvtach, during that same early-mid 80s period when female zine editors were still far too thin on the ground, and  who went on to co-found and co-run the highly influential Sarah Records, which then frequently published her and her label partner’s independent zines with their own dedicated catalogue number. I loved that I could sit back and  let Miki and Clare chat to each other for part of our Zoom conversation; though the three of us had trodden much the same ground over the years, we had never been formally introduced to each other. Not even Miki and I at Brockwell Park, August 4, 1984.

Unlike myself, James Brown remembers that concert as if it was yesterday. That’s because, as he elaborates both in Animal House and on the latest episode of The Fanzine Podcast (on which he was joined by fellow former fanzine editor, football fanatic, author, memoirist, editor, publisher and Pennines-raised Mark Hodkinson), that was the day Steven Wells of the NME approached him, checked if he’d seen the opening acts Spear of Destiny, The Fall, and Strawberry Switchblade (who were followed by Benjamin Zephaniah, Jools, The Damned, and New Model Army) then offered James the chance to review them in the NME. It was the start of a freelance career that soon saw James abandon the excellent Attack On Bzag (and freelancing for the likes of Jamming!), though not before he sold a few copies of his zine to some policemen that day who came wondering over to the Fanzine Stall set up by Richard ‘Cool Notes’ Edwards, investigating their use of a megaphone.

James remains the only person I knew who could have pulled off a move like that, and it’s to his credit that, even after his own life journey took him to Condé Nast where he was invited to bask in a life of luxury, he never shied away from confrontation. One of the best anecdotes in Animal House comes when he is sat opposite Michael Heseltine in the Condé Nast boardroom and takes the former member of Thatcher’s cabinet to task for its all-out war on the working class, silencing everyone around him. (The former Tory minister had provoked the argument by saying of loaded that “Magazines like that wouldn’t exist if we still had conscription.” This is in 1998, people.)

After the episode with James and Mark was published, the latter wrote me, “I had the feeling that, next to James, I was Nick Drake tuning up in the back room of a pub in East Driffield, while he was Slayer playing Wembley Arena,” which is typical of both Mark’s modesty and his easy penchant for metaphors. As I wrote back, if that was indeed the case, I was very much James’ opening act at Wembley, like when my old band Apocalypse was first on the bill to The Jam and Big Country at that same venue. Could I have guessed back in 1982 when we played Wembley that I would be making music again with one of my band-mates 40 years down the line? Probably - but only if we went through fame and fortune, number one hits, our own excesses and forced interventions – all front-page news, hopefully – first. We didn’t. But isn’t that the magic of it all? That none of us know what lays ahead of us, however much we may plan?

From Fanzine to Memoir: James Brown

Mark Hodkinson has made his own amazing journey since first publishing the fanzine Untermensch with his teen mates from their band of the same name, as a kind of attack on Rochdale, their home town. It’s not much of a geographical voyage, given that Mark proudly still calls Rochdale home, but along the way he has written several music biographies, even more books about football (he is the original Trent Crimm, I inform him on the Podcast, for his no-strings-attached season-long access to Manchester City), written at least one excellent semi-autobiographical novel, and started (and recently ceased) a publishing company Pomona that put out books by an incredible array of talent including Barry Hines, Bill Nelson, Bob Stanley, the aforementioned Boff Whalley, and even Hunter Davies. It’s all the more impressive because Mark began his journey in a house with one book. He ended up with 3,500 of them.

That’s a story he details in his acclaimed memoir No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working Class Reader, published by Canongate and, like Animal House (published by Quercus) and Fingers Crossed (Nine Eight) now available in paperback. The praise James and I heap on Mark’s tome during our episode is absolutely sincere. It’s a magnificent book about reading and writing and an addiction to books.

From Fanzine to Memoir: Mark Hodkinson.

I feel equally positive about Teenage Blue, which deals with my later teenage years, the need to grow up and out from my status as Boy About Town, my occasional successes and frequent failures in attempting to do so, and the general transition of the early 1980s scene from post-punk DIY leftist culture to an almost collective embrace of me-too yuppie-dom, all from someone who was there, and can write. Unfortunately, it has not yet found a publisher, and not for lack of a known agent either. I am baffled.

But that, as I keep reinforcing upon my idealist, and overly perfectionist 18-year-old younger son, is how life goes. You win some, you lose some, you try and always ensure that emotionally at least you feel you’re at least one point or goal ahead, and to paraphrase Boff Whalley’s old anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba’s surprise global hit ‘Tubthumper’, when you get knocked down, you get up again. Teenage Blue is a great book, and it will see print when the universe aligns, and the right editor for it gets to read it in full. Nonetheless, I have always been open to pro-actively helping the universe align in my favour, and suggestions are welcome.

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[Episode 16 of The Fanzine Podcast, James Brown, Mark Hodkinson, & Tony, long-form.]

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As promised, I  am including, above, the unedited interview with James Brown and Mark Hodkinson. It has some extra material that I did not include in the actual podcast, including an early discussion about Barry Hines, and some inaccurate notions of my relationship with the aforementioned Mr. Weller, but it does not come with the intro and the outro, the theme music and all that; this is strictly for the die-hards. As with Miki and Clare and myself, James and Mark and I had never been in a room together, and “virtual” though a Zoom call might be, this is still most likely the closest we will ever get. It was a joy reconnecting in conversation with James, whose all-round enthusiasm remains as intact as his intellectual sharpness, and it was lovely to hear him heap praise on the significant publishing achievements of Mark, someone I have got to know well over recent years, meeting for lunches in York when our own calendars align.

But such occasions are inevitably rare and so these podcast conversations have become a necessary part of my social fabric; I’d like to believe they’re also informative, educational and entertaining for listeners or I wouldn’t take time to edit them for a podcast. That time is money, as are the subscriptions to software platforms. I will not be moving my podcasts over to Substack, but I will occasionally post further long-form interviews and maybe exclusive shows here too, and going forwards those will be for paid subscribers. So if you are not yet one already. I encourage you to become one. It’s the modern equivalent of, “Do you wanna buy a fanzine?”

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This week’s article is dedicated to the memory of Sinéad O’Connor. Her music meant so very much to me, in ways I am not yet capable of putting into words, because some of it is so damn personal. I admired her and I felt for her, and I felt a real stab of pain on the news of her death, which came via my ex-wife, a rare piece of correspondence that perhaps demonstrates the role Sinéad had played in our lives. (I wonder if I was the only one of us humming ‘The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance’ as our divorce date neared back in 2019?) I may write more another week, but for now, I am just registering my continued love for her music and her spirit, and maybe I should reflect and be glad that I didn’t find that level of fame and fortune with my own music after all. The fact that I have just found out, upon editing this post within Substack, that Sinéad passed away in a flat in Herne Hill, right by Brockwell Park, brings this week’s post strangely full circle. The universe sometimes aligns like that and I don’t question its motivation.

For now, let me leave you with a picture of her as I last remember her, on the cover of an incredible 2014 album I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss that was almost right up there with her best work, an album she toured and on which tour I saw her, at the City Winery in New York City, alongside my ex. I will also leave you with the words I was able to muster for IG on Wednesday evening. May we all find peace in this world. 

One of the greatest voices ever. Wrote some of the most powerful songs ever. Never shied from speaking truth to power. Wore her heart on her sleeve. Lived with pain and expressed it to the world. Will be gravely missed. RIP.