This Is A Souvenir
by Matt Sheret
Panel from Marc Ellerby’s ‘I Went Away’
A couple of friends have pieces in the new Spearmint anthology from Image Comics, well worth checking out, but mention it as I’m very amused by this on Marc Ellerby’s lj:
…not that many people have actually heard of Spearmint and I must admit to being one of them. I popped into Gosh! yesterday and chatted to a clerk and they’re all convinced that Spearmint don’t actually exist and they’re made up. Which, sounds like something Matt Sheret would put together – an anthology based on song lyrics by a band that doesn’t actually exist.
See, the thing is, I actually have a whole folder of those. I wrote lyrics for band called onemillionjones for a couple of years, and have since kept them, edited them and added to them, building up a store of material I can dip in and out of when I’m writing.
On top of that something I’d love to do in the future is run a record label without any actual music, just beautiful sleeve designs, posters and t-shirts and some amazing press releases.
Madness.
Doesn’t every young man of a certain level of music-geekery do this?
(Or… or is it just us?)
Factory Records allocated many of their FAC catalogue nos to non-musical things like posters, press releases, front doors, menstrual egg timers, cats, dental records, law suits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Records_Catalogue
Miles – I hope it’s more than just the pair of us, haha.
Dickon – That’s probably one of my favourite things about Wilson’s aesthetic. He was motioning towards the completists in the act of numbering the FAC catalogue as he did, but pissing them off simultaneously by ensuring you had to be wrapped up in the narrative/life of Factory to actually complete it. I imagine that as applied to a fiction, a narrative you can track down most of, but might miss out on fragments because you weren’t given a flyer at a tube station on one particular date. You might read the PDF, but how much more would it mean to hold the thing?
[...] a writer and photographer with an intriguing list of projects. I am fascinated by his recent post This is a Souvenir, in which he details writing songs for an imaginary band, and how he’d like to take it a step [...]