Back in February I caught up with Gareth Brookes from the Alternative Press to chat about what We Are Words + Pictures were up to. The interview’s now up after being broadcast on Resonance.fm, including my rambling about what comics can do for readers and where my head’s at with what I want to do with them too. I’ve got a lot of respect for Alternative Press, I think Jimi and the rest of the team are doing some fantastic things, so check them out. The podcast of their last radio session for Resonance can be found here (I’m there from about 4minutes in).
I also got profiled over at the Thought Bubble “Friends of Thought Bubble” blog, their home for Small Press profiles and previews. Besides some nice words about my work and biog they’ve republished Do Everything, and it’s great to see that out and about. Thought Bubble remains my favourite show, and it’s again a pleasure to be involved with this year’s event.
I root music in the personal. I can’t really pin tracks to times and places that don’t involve me, and that’s fine, but when I find myself scrabbling to make connections for an entry like this it fills me with a tremendous guilt. I read my friend Mark’s entry for this seventh post, and the compression around my chest made me feel very loved. It’s rare you ever really get that from friends, certainly just from words online. So strong was the emotion that I only fleetingly thought “What a shit song.”
And while the language of this meme is broad enough – deliberately – that I could write about how I ‘always think of Reading Festival when I hear Queen‘ that doesn’t feel enough. The problem with rooting my music writing in the deeply personal ‘I’ is that sometimes the only context that matters to me is me, which isn’t quite enough if I’m honest.
Realising things like that is, of course, part of why I’m doing this.
Someone else doing this meme, whose entries have been a pleasure and an insight, is Russell Davies. Russel’s someone who asked exactly the right question at exactly the wrong time, without realising quite the rolling effect it has had on me since. The first proper chat we had, in the surrounds of Rough Trade East, he asked “What would you like to do right now, ideally?” My subsequent answer was a fumble of words, relating to engagement and education and writing and I don’t even remember what. I felt I had to have an answer, even if it was a bad one, and about fifteen minutes later I was cursing myself for not just saying “I don’t know yet.”
I’ve done a lot of things in the last year, I’ve been ‘available for luck’, and I still haven’t really worked out what I’d do if money was no object. I’m okay with that. A lot of things probably; I’m learning to be more interested. People like Russell and Mark play a big part in that.
(When I met Russell in Rough Trade these guys were on the shop stereo)
If I look this up on Wikipedia I’ll find out the year of release. That will fill in details neither of us want – how old I was, what point of school I’d reached, how I should have known better, your age in relation to mine – so if you don’t look it up then I won’t either. Deal?
My Dad used to pick us up every other weekend, and when we weren’t playing Warhammer or going places then I’d be settled at a table in my Grandparents’ house doing my homework while he napped. It was a useful arrangement, because I didn’t want my work checked through and he really needed the sleep. I also got to use the time to write little notes, that would inevitably be passed around class soon afterwards.
The spirit of the notes fluctuated over time. Early on they were weird sci-fi plots, a theme I would later pick up again, or plans for how we might effect great change in the week ahead. Let’s do Goldeneye four player at Tom’s they might say, or Don’t pick on me if we play opposite teams in Perfect Dark. Through different phases the notes might refer to Star Wars Cards or Mordheim, for a lump of time it was 40K or bust, but the general point was Can we do something together this week guys?
Because, ultimately, I knew the other notes I was writing weren’t going anywhere. They were erratic, never more than one a month, always to different people, always with non-specific declarations of affection. Always rejected. I remain stunned that people write love letters, because in my experience they don’t get you anywhere.
A few days back I caught a snippet of this on the radio, and I was plunged into a living memory; crouched over that homework table, writing out the lyrics to this track from memory, waiting to give it to Debbie on Monday, who would give it Hannah…
It’s important to note that on reading this back to myself I realised what a creepy child I was. Ladies; I’m sorry. I knew not what I did.
Maybe four or five times I’ve seen this now, live, most often performed by James Yorkston but I did once see HMS Ginafore sing it. She performs with painful infrequency, seldom stepping south of the Scottish border. It’s upsetting. This is her song, which is to say that she wrote and she owns it, totally owns it, because when she sings it she blows you over.
I listened to an awful lot of Fence Collective records after my last break up, but the association with Fence and sadness – strangely – doesn’t revolve around that. It revolves around Scottishness.
My Dad’s parents are Scottish, but it’s fair to say that they’ve lived a much more international life than most since they first set out from Edinburgh. Somewhere between Iraq, Northern Ireland and California they lost their accents and gained a family, and while I’m sure they looked back it’s never something that’s given then cause to act.
And yet for years and years there are times when I’m sad when all I want to do is sit and watch the haar roll in on the docks of some remote Scottish port, wrapped to the chin in rough wool and humming through my beard. And so when Ginafore, or Yorkston, sing “let the north wind blow” I’m moments away from heading there. This song makes me sad because I don’t.
There’s a paranoia at the heart of a lot of the music I like. It swells up in repeated instances, although most often lyrically: Ian Curtis and Luke Haines study the world through windows, and approach the streets with caution. They hate and fear a lot of the things outside of their bedrooms, as well as inside, which makes for a fractious and spiky environment full of emotion. Even when they’re fun or funny they do it by speaking to sex and destruction, not by looking for better places.
Last Black Plastic – my new favourite club night – I found myself catching the drum thumps to this, bobbing instantly along to what I’m fairly sure is the closest rhythm to my heartbeat in my CD collection, urging people to come to the dancefloor with me. An age passed in a flicker, as they stared past me to the near empty floor before looking into my eyes. “We can’t do this,” their faces said to me “we have neither the primal urges nor the inebriation required for this music that charms you so.”
I muttered “fools” at them as I popped away, flicking and twitching erratically, bobbing about on lots of spots, hitting the perfect velocity to deal with ‘Atlas’ in little time at all.
I spent the whole track thinking about if the others would eventually come over to join the brave few strangers on the dancefloor/feeling concerned about how sweaty I was getting/hoping I wouldn’t fall over/wondering who these people were/trying to remember not to scream with joy. All of these thoughts and questions slammed through my brain, moving faster with each metronomic beat of the drums and accelerating with the garbled warble yammering through the track. I love this song because it remains so explosive, so destructive, so delightful.
As it stopped some girl turned to her friends with delight and said “I didn’t think I’d end up dancing to paranoid instrumentals!”
I was talking to Chal a few nights ago about writing my latest Global Comment article, and we strayed fairly close to a full on argument about Ellie Goulding. It wasn’t because I characterised her negatively, or because I compared her lifeless and emotionless presence to that of a bad porn actress. It was because I thought the sentiment of her song ‘The Writer’ managed to be one of the most hateful and gut-twisting things I’d heard in a long time.
‘The Writer’ is Goudling’s anthem to someone she’ll never really approach, and goes so far as to ask of this unrequited object of affection if they’ll dictate the thoughts and words and emotions that Goulding doesn’t want anymore. She wants to be their vessel, their flapping mouth, giving voice to language crafted by someone else. My argument, such as it was, went that ‘The Writer’ was a hateful piece of pop. More than just vacuous, it suggests that surrendering individuality and agency to the will of someone else is the best course, especially for a woman, and that Goulding gets away with selling out her sex by being so totally submissive.
Chal’s argument amounted to “If that’s the way she feels…”
Chal was right, but so am I; I wouldn’t want my friends or my family – my younger sisters especially – to think well of the song, because I want them to be people and have voices of their own, even when they are in love. But ultimately I can’t control that and shouldn’t try to.
And my least favourite song is this Nouvelle Vague cover of my favourite song, because if there’s anything that says nothing so loudly as their blank expressions and that fucking backing then I’ve not yet found it. But I still can’t stop it from being played at dinner parties.
Every Tuesday, right before my longest day of lectures, I would drink myself into a gyroscopic oblivion. If I hadn’t started drinking before my last seminar then my first would be in the Lyceum, followed by a bus ride or walk to my flat and a few shots of vodka (you can place these years with pinpoint precision, recent as they are, because I start to do this in 2005 and start having allergic reactions to vodka in 2007) while I crashed on my mattress and stared at the ceiling.
There would be a moment, just before the sun went down, when I’d stop gripping my mobile, scrabbling together another night out, and start to change. Trousers first, tighter than I’d like to admit, before jamming a shirt down the waistband and flipping the collar up. With achingly slow movements I would tie a skinny tie around my neck and tug it tight, as the final clashed chord of this song’s introduction rang through my room.
Right arm pumping, followed by left, feet jabbing up and down, slapping Converse laces onto worn thin carpet. Glass on side, never knocked, sound bouncing off lurid orange walls, futon near tripping me, drunk haze keeping me unruly but steady in a room that could barely contain me. Arms stretched – snap close – stretch again – thinking of girls that won’t be out, thinking of girls I won’t talk to, thinking of girls, mostly, and dancing.
I would later show up at Panic! There would be dancing.
Those nights I made it to the end, past songs that will – doubtless – appear on these notes later on, I would hear that klang spark up. Precious few left on the dancefloor now, just the ones who had drunk their way to sobriety or weren’t dancing close. A weekly ritual where, in the moments before the lights went up, the lurid red walls would bounce the sound around and prompt me, wild eyed, to pump right arm followed by left arm throwing head back, gutturally yelling that love, love would tear us apart and sure enough it did. Jabbing Converse lace slap down on stone floor ringing up my leg hollow spine connecting brain to nothing but rolling cymbals, synths and squeals, bass moving my hips like the girls who’d long since left me.
Live version above because, you know, I’d have danced to that too.
No surprises for guessing what comes tomorrow morning…
EDIT: I see Kieron’s doing it too. This is good for everyone, except his ex-girlfriends. Unlike him however I will be regular, in order and slightly more depressing… “…and in the game?” (etc etc).
Thanks for your recent email about the Digital Economy Bill. The subject is complex and the bill is proving to be hugely contentious; because of this it is crucial, more than ever, that Parliament fulfils its democratic duty and gives the bill proper debate and scrutiny.
Although it is imperative that jobs in the creative industries are protected, and it is right that artists be paid fairly for work they produce, the bill, as it stands, seems to be heavily weighted in favour of rich and powerful copyright holding companies.
Provisions to suspend file sharers’ connections and to require internet service providers to block access to websites hosting “substantial” amounts of copyrighted material are an over reaction, dangerously intrusive and will only prove to be counter productive.
You may be aware that the next significant stage for the bill will be its second reading in the House of Commons. Despite the front bench consensus there is significant back bench concern on all sides, and I and my colleagues will do all we can to ensure the bill is not rushed through the House without proper debate and scrutiny.
Yours sincerely
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Harriet Harman, MP, Leader of the House of Commons, will be presenting the bill on Thursday. This is your last chance to e-mail her and to directly address the strong possibility this could be rushed through Parliament during ‘wash up’. Once again, 38Degrees have a form that allows you to do just that.
ORG will be demonstrating tomorrow (24/03/10) afternoon at 17:30, protesting against disconnection and censorship on the internet. It will be held at Old Palace Yard (opposite Parliament, next to Westminster Abbey). After that The Indelicates, Akira The Don and Dan Bull will be playing a Stop Disconnection show at Camden’s Monarch. It should be a strong night.
