Matthew Sheret.com

or How I Should Have Written Something Like This For Phonogram vs The Fans But Couldn’t.

There’s definitely a few points, in over ninety minutes of conversation I have recorded, where Kieron and I lose interest in one another and just get lost in background music. There’s an enormous gulped pause he makes mid-sentence during Prince’s ’1999′ that I remain convinced was caused by him swallowing the lyrics to the chorus, and even when transcribing the interview I find my head swaying to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ instead of actually listening to him. Both now and then my focus swings back into play when I hear him say “So yeah, is that your take on it?” and I flush with embarrassment. Luckily he bought me a drink as a follow up.

“You know I went through a phase where I didn’t wear black?”

Image, as any Phonogram reader knows, is everything. In the back room of the re-opened pub around the corner from his house the two of us try and cut iconic figures: Gillen’s reasonably sharp in a suit, certainly a shade more respectable than my sub-Shoreditch jeans-and-Uniqlo t-shirt combo. The space is too clean though, too new, geared up for the media-savvy North Londoners that took advantage of the cheap housing that sprung up in the area just shy of a decade ago and we look a touch out of place.

“When I was first getting into music seriously as a young adult I was… scared. I was very aware of my ignorance, in fact I’m still very aware of my ignorance now. But look back, say it’s ’93, and you’ve got about thirty years of Pop-culture to be aware of. Now that’s a big big body of stuff, however it’s almost manageable. If I’d really tried, and I was never methodical enough to, then I could have got that, I could have understood that… I often talk about Britpop as the end of that, a group of kids who had been very into or aware of Hip-Hop and sampling becoming almost parasitic. People talk about it being respectful to the material, but it wasn’t at all, it was completely disrespectful. It wasn’t about saying ‘We like The Beatles’ it was about saying ‘We can be better than The Beatles, by choosing their best riffs’. The arrogance and the cocaine was very important to it. But still, they understood the history of Pop and how all of the influences came about.

Let’s say I was a 16 year old kid now, with almost 50 years of it, I couldn’t even try to do that.”

If they tried today they’d probably start with Michael Jackson. Sarah Jaffe broke the news to me over coffee, twelve hours ago, not long after Swells passing was announced. Strange thing is I’m hearing my voice, recorded about a month ago now, uttering the words “Pete Doherty should have died, to be the figure we all wanted him to be.” and it’s chilling. The context is buried deep in discussion about the ‘canon’ of ‘great’ music, about the power of revivals and the weakness of musicians who don’t know when to quit. But it’s also a conversation about how earnest I am, how I need to get out of London, even for a second, to mellow.

That’s the problem with conversations with Kieron: they go everywhere. To try and tell you how I got to that point is too fiddly. To try and I write the interview that took place would be impossible. We’re here for Phonogram vs The Fans… but I can’t bring myself to write about that just yet…

“How’s it all coming together man?”

“Yeah, really nicely. Haven’t heard from Fraction since that first message-”

“-yeah, he’s pretty swamped. He’s just come back from the Marvel creator retreat so he’s kind of been off. Don’t think he’ll have time.”

“I figured. Obviously you saw Ellis was too busy for it. But things have come together, just a couple outstanding. I was worried at the start that I might not get enough, but there’s definitely too much. Some are excellent – I’ve re-read Dickon’s a few times now. Beautiful!”

“Yeah, Dickon’s a good bloke.”

‘Good, decent people’ and ‘Phonogram’ make strange bed fellows on the surface. Rue Brittania‘s motley collection of protagonists seem on the surface to be addicted to dark rituals rooted in disposable sounds resulting in equally disposable trysts, and – despite the glossary – the frequent criticism it suffers is that it posses a wealth of impenetrable references.

Which entirely misses several points. Rue Brittania uses cultural specificity to be honest, to come from a place that Kieron identifies with almost wholly to play with history and fiction in equal measure to give a reasonably straightforward quest narrative the emotional complexity it demanded. He knew it would put some people off, but there are enough readers whose response was “I understand why he feels connected to that like this, I feel it about _______”, and an even narrower subset who could identify totally, references and all. The Singles Club treats that specificity even more casually: Yes, Marc’s got CSS cursing him, but haven’t we all got those songs? Lloyd’s got a hang up on Dexy’s Midnight Runners, but fandom’s net is a wide-ranging one, isn’t it? (So, um, Joy Division?)

The emotional core – the important, human part – remains the same: music is just background noise.

“Reading Phonogram, for me anyway, I found this emotional core not in Kohl but in Beth, the almost reverse exorcism she goes through at the end.”

“Pushing the ghost back into her, hahahahaha, that’s an excellent way of putting it!”

“Right! Because of that moment it almost doesn’t matter what happens to Brittania, that’s the moment that matters. Now, given how personal bits of the narrative were for you was there any kind of similar process that took place?”

“Um… There’s a lot things I would do differently with Rue Brittania now I think, which is understandable. If you want to look at the core of why Rue Brittania had to be a plot then obviously it’s about me processing hitting thirty – or about to hit thirty, as in I wasn’t thirty when I started thinking about it but was once it was all published. The final essay in Careless Talk Costs Lives I did was called ‘Rue Brittania’, and I was talking about Britpop revisionism… and it’s harsh… and, what’s the line I use… “There’ll never be a Britpop revival, in the same way there will never be Hiroshima theme parties”. Yes it was important as a shared thing, but no, there’s nothing there anymore. And Rue Brittania the comic is kind of me getting past that.

So CTCL leads to Plan B… to Miss AMP, to Dave Macnamee… to Everett True: The Legend (The Myth?). There’s an editorial in an issue of Careless Talk Costs Lives where you’ll find a description of content that includes the phrase “some pretension from Kieron”. For those who don’t know Plan B magazine is – was – a British monthly magazine that provided a home for alternative music: not just the bands and labels but also the distributors, retailers and, importantly, writers on the fringes of the musical spectrum. Both magazines looked beautiful, a crisp house style that favoured white space and let the incredibly diverse selection of writing speak for itself.

Kieron and I attended a Plan B club night together in a Highbury basement venue, and the very words that escaped his mouth were “A night by Phonomancers, for Phonomancers”. Creating the structure around which he would base The Coven, CTCL and Plan B allowed Kieron to vent some of the language that welled up inside of him whenever sound got stuck in his head, something he almost pursued full time before becoming a games journalist.

We’re both mis-speaking by this point, getting a bit too excited in a tumble of words and music while packing in strong drinks a little too quickly. Twice my mp3 recorder gets caught in a melee of hand gestures and chair movement, clunking down with what later turns out to be a deafening crash while I transcribe.

“I tell you what, Plan B closing has changed issue three-”

“-series three?”

“Yeah, series three. I think it has. Not sure how yet. But the wedding I went to on Saturday night made me think of a different way to twist channel four, I mean series four, and it would make it more kind of the end of Phonogram… but, you know, series four is a long long way away… this is off the record, but…”

We talk out 1) the social and careerist ramifications for projects not yet announced, 2) fragments of plots on post-it-notes, 3) why I’ve stopped wearing skinny ties… The latter is easy enough: I started wearing them as a visual hook, a motif, one I just stopped needing. Now a third-tier Phonogram character riffs off of that look, a fictional take on an identity once adopted and since shed, an Asterism looping like a Gavin Bryers composition.

And that spins my head. I remember being a fan of Phonogram, but that seems a lifetime ago. I’m a participant now, writing this on a train somewhere in New York State, between the couch of McKelviefriend Nikki Cook and the sofabed of Quintin Smith and Aanand Prasad, Gillenites via New Games Journalism. Typing, repeat-playing these snapped shards of chatter, but still and all a participant too close to step outside and write this interview in the way I want to.

Phonogram is the background music now. It’s a template that conversations and connections can hang off of but very rarely do. Sure, sometimes both parties get much more focused on it than the matter/meal/drinks at hand, but only because it’s snapped the panel borders and touched them. The rest is magic. It’s Sarah admitting “I’m not writing these reviews for Newsarama readers, but for the creators”; It’s Julia Scheele finding herself working as Jamie’s assistant; it’s Matt Jones gathering dice and stamps and Morely and chance and thaumaturgy while suggesting I’m dungeon mastering a fandom; it’s …vs The Fans contributor Jesse Bowline and I swapping stories and getting endlessly sidetracked in Manhattan coffee shop for a few hours having exchanged only the sparsest of e-mails. It’s this rattling intellectual and social whirlwind that I felt I could wrangle into an interview, but couldn’t.

“…I guess that was probably a bit off topic wasn’t it?”