MIDWEEK UPDATE 42: The Physical Edition
Culture you can clutch: Books, Magazines, Vinyl, CDs, Fanzines... and a Trojan tee.
Yes, I know that using a digital platform to deliver a “physical edition” is a contradiction in terms, but I am not about to restart a paper-and-ink fanzine to prove a point: I kind of like this here platform.
That said, I’m the kind of person who leaves clothes behind at their mother’s house in England so they can pack all the books they’ve acquired on their trip into their backpack and its duffel bag instead (and then carries that duffel bag over their damn shoulder for painful miles because trains break down on the way to the airport, because… Britain and trains).
You see, books can’t be beat: they’re portals into other worlds, they’re poetry in linear motion, they’re stories and history and they have pages that you can turn and then forget to bookmark so you read them again, and you can keep lots of them on the go, unfinished, because just as with music, you have different tastes on different days. They’re also great for getting off to sleep with – unlike bright computer/phone screens and their admittedly convenient but soulless eBooks.
I’m also that person who goes to the WH Smiths at the airport not to buy expensive plastic bottles of water or overpriced cheese sandwiches, but magazines. Lots of them. £33.73 worth of them ($42.36) last Wednesday, according to my credit card statement. You see, magazines are still cool – like newspapers but more colourful, they bring you stories you didn’t know you were interested in, introduce you to culture you didn’t know you were looking for, tell you about places and concepts you want to know more about, offer opinions you decide never to seek again, and more. They’re also great for “quick takes” on the toilet.
And while I’m as much of a sucker for the convenience of streaming music as anyone, there are times when only an LP or a CD will do. So, here goes…
Thank you for taking the time to read this latest Midweek Update; these alternate on Wordsmith with a longer weekend read, the occasional archive from the interview vaults, and the Crossed Channels podcast. If you have not done so already, please consider subscribing, and if you know of someone you feel would also enjoy Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, please do pass this along.
NOVEL
I ordered the graphic travelogue Hot Dog Diary from Boatwhistle Books because publisher Hamish Ironside had co-authored and bankrolled We Peaked At Paper, the superb oral history of British fanzines (featured on The Fanzine Podcast here), and I wanted to support him. He really wanted me to read Lucas Aggerton’s novel tell me when my light turns green so he included it in the package as a bonus, and although I have not yet finished it, I am so glad he did. Named after the fantastic Dexys Midnight Runners song from Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, it’s not a music saga – though there are some lovely quick side-references to pop culture moments that help date this as a 1980s-into-the-90s story – but a narrator’s tale of mental health issues met with increasing doses of prescribed drugs that only serve to exacerbate the mental health issues. And not just narrator Jacob’s mental health issues but those that led to his big sister and evident mentor’s death.
Heavy shit? Yes, but comically, absurdly so: Aggerton understands the thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, rides it with wit and wisdom, and confesses to a knowledge of what he is about to semi-fictionalize in a hilarious preface that lists more drugs than at a Happy Mondays recording session in the Bahamas. Being immersed in non-fiction writing, I don’t read enough novels; tell me when my light turns green has helped remind me to correct that imbalance. Order it here.
MUSIC MAGAZINES
What do Shindig! and The Wire have in common – other than being British monthly music magazines of the same size that are both evidently on sale at WH Smiths? Well, unlike their more established and, frankly, better-selling rivals Mojo and Uncut, and especially unlike all those “Classic…” magazines that have turned every style from prog to punk into a sort of model-trainspotting-anorak-obessive’s-retro-nerd side hustle, they’re about interesting music. Not all of it new, to be clear, as certain names on each of these front covers can confirm, but most of it underground, or cult, or leftfield, just generally and sufficiently off-the-beaten-path to make for perpetually fascinating reading.
And if you think you can pigeonhole either of these publications, think again: the “Lisbon-based aggregation” known as Beautify Junkyards, currently immersed in “synths, samples and electronic drums” are featured in what you might think is the guitars-based Shindig!, while “the London avant folk ensemble” Shovel Dance Collective is profiled in the presumably electronics-heavy The Wire. The only downside is that there is so much music here clearly worth digging out, but only The Wire has a free CD and it includes very little by the featured artists. But hey, that’s why we love our streaming platforms, right? Because we search on them rather than wait for them to lead us somewhere… Don’t we?
Bonus point to Shindig! for charging one penny less than The Wire, a poignant insistence on change that rather like James Murphy before he got hip singing about it, loses its edge in the cashless British society.
ZINE
Is Spinners a literary journal? Not really: most of its contributors come from the Irvine Welsh school of punctuation and grammar. A fanzine? Not as such: there’s little of the familiar interviews, reviews or collage art that typifies most peoples’ definitions of that subculture.
But wait, could it be a “literary fanzine”? Editor Roual Galloway calls Spinners exactly that in his “gyratorial” (your guess is as good as mine) of Issue 1. In Issue 2, he defines the contents a little further, citing a “collection of loveable rogues who garnish their prose with panache, guile and menace.” Most of these rogues are now grown men mostly sobering up and coming to terms with rough-and-tumble pasts that involved some combination of football, festivals, and fighting (and occasionally all three) by writing about it. But there is poetry here as well – like, sonnets and free-form and the like, a couple of them even by non-males – and all of it is set in a fondly nostalgic typewriter font. Quite where an authorized reprint of my Substack article “Waking Up To Tinnitus” fits into all this – literarily that is, rather than literally between the pages – I am not sure, but I’m happy that Roual, who also hosts a podcast called “Spinner of Yarns,” wanted to share it. If you didn’t notice, the cost of Spinners is absolutely nothing, and you can place your order and figure out the necessary postage by writing to Roual at 5767production@gmail.com
CD
You may know that I’m a James fan(atic). And I’m happy to say I’m not alone: their new, musically upbeat, 18th studio album Yummy just became their first ever studio set to top the UK album charts. But though I balked at the exorbitant cost of Yummy on vinyl, I was instantly sold on the double CD package available at Sister Ray on Berwick Street for £13 the week of release. In this rare case, the bonus CD Pudding (and yes, there are truly terrible titles) is exclusive, a not-on-streaming services (yet) collection of “unreleased tracks & demos” that, though they “didn’t make it to the next stage” (i.e. the dozen cuts on Yummy), are arguably all the more interesting for sounding somewhere between unfinished and unpolished.
In fact, a very persuasive argument can be made that Pudding is a necessary B-side to Yummy’s radio-friendly A-side, the flip nature of a band that hasn’t always put its most commercial side forward the way it has done on the current release. Special shout-out to “Activist Song” with its reference to “these motherfucking assholes taking their profits from destroying our world,” but frankly, the whole CD sits comfortably with me, and several of these songs (let’s add in “Tell Me Something” and “Won’t Be The Same”) would have done just fine peppering CD1 as is. And yes, I did hear about James’ long overdue American tour alongside Johnny Marr, and yes, I do have the dates in my calendar already.
WEB SITE
“Wait, hang on, I thought this was a ‘physical edition’?” I hear you splutter. It is, and with his newsletter Fanzine Hemorrhage, Jay Hinman writes about actual printed pages from the (usually Stateside) punk and post-punk fanzine golden age with a knowledge and enthusiasm that I guess is needed when you’re digging into about three back issues a week. This last seven days alone has found Jay waxing lyrical about 1979’s Surfin’ Bird #3 (“my only punk-era Canadian fanzine”), David Sprague’s Sense of Purpose #1 from 1983 (Hinman admires “how dogmatically locked-in (Sprague) was on only the defined contours of the rock music underground he cared about”), and 1981’s Op #5 (“Their zeal to link freaks with freaks is messianic and all-encompassing”). Considering that Hinman writes only about fanzines that he owns, one must assume that collection is worthy of a museum. Subscribe from https://fanzinehemorrhage.com/ where you can also read these reviews on a good old-fashioned printed, I mean, web page. And expect to hear Jay talking more about his fanzine hemorrhage on an upcoming episode of The Fanzine Podcast.
Wordsmith welcomes feedback from subscribers. If you have any opinion on any of these recommendations, or suggestions of your own, fire away…
PODCAST
On subject of which, Marc Masters performs valiant yeoman’s service on The Music Book Podcast, digging deep into conversations with authors who, for the most part, are chipping away at the edges of popular culture. On a run in England, harking subconsciously perhaps for some American voices of interest, I listened to John Szwed explain his biography of Harry Smith (the quintessential beatnik fringe artist, best known for compiling the seismically influential Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, and who recently had a posthumous exhibition at the Whitney, as also covered on a previous Midweek Update), and Lily Hirsch talk passionately and compassionately about her much-needed study, Can't Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono. (Hirsch has previously written about Jewish music in the Nazi era and understandably, between these projects sought some relief with a biography of Weird Al Yankowicz.)
The audio quality is not always great - I had to strain to follow Szwed - but Masters is a good interviewer, and I really admire how he mostly promotes books that are guaranteed non-best sellers, as per his latest episode, an interview with Laina Daws on “Black Women in Heavy Metal.” Subscribe via your podcast platform; the excellent interview with Hirsch follows below.
LP
My friend Chris Mellor – Chris Coco to his adoring public – is one of those “doers” I referred to in Thick As Thieves Part 2. I’d call him a label boss and club promoter as well as an esteemed musician and DJ and sometimes writer (we met back when he was editing DJ magazine in the acid house/rave heyday), but really, he does all of this in minimalist style out of his minimalist home in Brixton, vibing off his immersion in an electronic/chill/dance/ambient music scene whose financial heyday is long behind it, but from which his multiple endeavors allow him to eke out enough of a living to keep him at it.
Chris was determined to gift me a copy of his new LP Daydream Utopia on my trip, and we were finally able to meet up properly on the eve of my birthday for some Nepali food in Balham (as you do these days). I am thrilled to have this typically rewarding new album on vinyl because, other than a sticker on the shrinkwrap, the entire package is entirely devoid of words – by which I don’t mean the album is completely instrumental (it’s not: “Leap Year” for example features what I presume to be the Japanese vocals of co-credited Yoshiharu Tokeda) but that all titles and credits are in hieroglyphics. Though visually beautiful, this is surely the long way round, requiring far more design effort than the use of common text for titles as he has had to do for streaming platforms.
This particular concept speaks not just to Coco’s minimalist nature, but his sense of artistry: Chris knows that a project worth pursuing is worth pursuing well, but he’s smart enough to know when to let go. For my part, I’ll be holding onto Daydream Utopia a while yet – and likely with that sticker staying put lest the day arrive when I pop my clogs and some poor sod otherwise has to figure how to Discog the thing! In the meantime, you can listen - and order your very own vinyl - from Chris’s Bandcamp page.
MUSIC BOOKS
Every time I go into Omnibus Press, who have published many of my books, I’m asked if I’d like to take anything away with me. My internal answer is always, “Yes, everything!” My external answer tends to be, “What’s new in paperback that won’t weigh down my bags even further?” This time I successfully limited myself to Richard Balls’ A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan, and Richard Evans’ Listening To The Music The Machines Make: Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983.
Being new to paperback means neither book is actually brand new, but it does allow for me to be impressed by their good reviews – and intrigued by the latter book’s decision to rely on “original source material” rather than set about interviewing everyone 40 years after the event what with the inevitable hazy - and malleable - memories that come with the passage of decades. In the old days, we’d have called this “cut-and-paste” but on initial inspection, Listening To The Music The Machines Make looks a cut above.
Stopping in at Resident Records in Brighton and Foyle’s in London, I saw so many more music books I wanted to come home with, especially those by Paul Simpson and Will Sergeant and Ian Broudie, all stemming from the Liverpool scene around Eric’s. I also want to read This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan (check my review of the one-man player here), which is fictional though based on a believable post-punk band of the same era. The size and weight limitations of a backpack prevented me from stocking up on these books, though I did check that all would be available to me – in print, and at a price I can afford - this side of the pond. Of course, I have to get through some of these others first.
EDUCATIONAL MAGAZINES
Positive.News is up to Issue 117. And somehow it still comes across with all the enthusiasm of a brand new concept imagined during a Friday night booze-up at the local workers-owned environmentally conscious pub. As a the-cup-is-half-full person myself, I’m all for the concept, especially if the majority of short items here serve to demonstrate that we can make change for the good – of the environment, for example – with the unstated caveat that we have to do so because there is so much out there that is bad.
Indeed, if you too occasionally despair at the state of the world – and especially that global warming seems unstoppable – Positive.News may help you feel better about it all, while making it clear without literally saying so, that it’s up to you to do your part too.
As for the one on the left, everyone who’s ever picked up a Mojo special knows all too well, successful magazines like to put out one-offs. New Scientist would appear to have put out 21 of their Essential Guides, judging by the cover of The Dawn of Civilisation. As a student of anthropology, I’m perpetually intrigued by new information about the oldest of times, endlessly fascinated by where we came from and how we ended up being such a burden on the only planet we know of to harbour this form of life. So while I have yet to dig into these particular “Secrets of our Ancient Past” I certainly plan to have done so by the start of next semester. You’re never too old to learn, right?
FAVE SHIRT
Last but certainly not least because we all need some of it: clothing. At the end of a lively day perusing the Brighton Laines in the pouring rain, and with a pair of lovely Jump The Gun trousers - pants you Yanks! - in the bag for my birthday, Paula suggested I might want to stop into a shop called The Modfather. I thought its name was so stupid the contents were bound to follow (cheap) suit, but seeing certain brand names prominently named in the window forced me inside all the same.
Within 30 seconds I had fallen in love with a hi-quality Trojan tee, one that feels more like a solid cotton footie shirt of the 19th Century than your standard modern wear-it-twice-and-it-falls-apart modern cheap-foreign-labour fast-fashion. The football shirt comparison is apt as this Spirit of ‘69 shirt is in good old claret-and-blue, an especially attractive colour combo once favoured by my Crystal Palace (alongside West Ham, Burnley and Aston Villa, none of whom have ever seen fit to drop it - though with one of those teams dropping out of the EPL this season, it makes me wonder when they were all last in the same division together).
While I like Palace playing in Barcelona colours, I’m as prone to the old-fashioned strip as anyone else who remembers seeing it in the flesh, and the Trojan shirt succeeded in completing a claret-and-blue outfit from shoes to cap, including a sweater, with only the cap being official Palace wear. Per Positive.news’ current cover story I no longer believe in spending a fortune on brand new clothes to construct a good wardrobe and at £30 the Trojan shirt is in fact the most expensive item in this particular outfit. But it appears to be of quality, and confirms that there are times when something (or someone?) calls to you from across the room and you have to act on that love at first sight. And in a world where almost everything is available digitally, clothing, like the roof over your head and the partner in your bed, remains a last bastion of tangible reality. Cheers!
Hope you enjoy Hot Dog Diaries - I think it's a wonderful read deserving a wider audience. The preclse detail of the memories animate the journey's retelling and it's the perfect way to cycle across the USA without leaving your sofa.