Nothing short of a slight return

 

Research for a new work of fiction* commissioned for publication in 2012 to accompany forthcoming exhibitions by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson took me back to Leeds in September. I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-1980s, so it was good to have an excuse to visit now, even for a day. The nature of the research in question was consulting the archives of Leeds Other Paper, or LOP for short, an independent journal that was published in the city (first monthly, then fortnightly and finally weekly), by an evolving collective that itself took several forms, from 1974 until — after a final name-change — it closed down in 1994.

Former ‘Lopper’ Tony Harcup’s short but fascinating and comprehensive book, A Northern Star: Leeds Other Paper and the Alternative Press 1974-1994, quotes an introductory editorial from the first issue:

Leeds Other Paper exists to provide an alternative newspaper in Leeds, i.e. a newspaper not controlled by big business and other vested interests. It is our intention to support all groups active in industry and elsewhere for greater control of their own lives.

LOP is classified as a ‘serial/periodical’ by the British Library, so is not held in Colindale with the national newspaper archive proper, nor according to the British Library’s Integrated Catalogue do they hold any issues from the period that I wanted to look at. Hence my visit, and the pile of bound issues (right) that awaited my attention in Leeds Central Library’s local and family history section.

This scan of a photocopy from the original (above right) is a detail of a typical Leeds Other Paper cover and gives a good flavour of the design although it doesn’t quite do justice to the print quality that was achieved on very limited means. Another reason for reproducing this particular cover here is that having heard Ted Chippington on the John Peel show, a couple of us went along to the LOP benefit concert advertised. After Chippington’s set I bought a copy of the record that he’s holding in the photo and asked him to sign it. ‘Cheers Tony,’ he wrote in felt-tipped pen on the label of side one. ‘Ted.’

A short piece in the following week’s LOP thanks ‘top performer’ Chippington, as well as artists including Ginger John, Olulu Olulu, The Shee Hees and others. None of whom, apart from Ted, I’m sorry to say, I have any recollection of at all. Sixty pounds was raised on the night after costs had been covered, so the benefit was deemed ‘a success’. I may have misremembered, since he is not thanked here, but I’m pretty sure Seething Wells made a brief appearance on stage at the Trades Club that night, too. I could be wrong or maybe it was another time, and just because I remember it doesn’t mean it happened, but I would swear that I saw Swells doing his ‘Tetley Bittermen’ routine on stage there.

If you’re unfamiliar with Ted Chippington’s relatively small body of work, there’s a nice film about the influence of his contrarian stand-up routines that was made by comedian Stewart Lee for BBC TV’s The Culture Show a few years ago.

(Coincidentally, Stewart Lee is hosting and headlining a benefit for London community radio station Resonance 104.4fm at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 1st November 2011. I was going to give the benefit a late plug here, but it is now sold out!)

It is not quite the period that I went to Leeds to research, but these few editions of the Leeds Other Paper are a reminder that the spring and summer of 1985 was an eventful time in the UK, and not just in the north of England. The miners’ strike had only finished a month or two earlier in March of the same year, and the Conservative government of the time already seemed to be looking for another ‘enemy within’. It didn’t take them long to find one; another load of heads to crack. The same issue of LOP that reported on the takings at the Trades Club benefit carried an anonymous and eloquent ‘eye-witness account’ of what would later become known as the Battle of the Beanfield but here is referred to simply as ‘The Battle of Stonehenge June 1st 1985’ (click on the image for a larger version).

The riot police were unleashed on sleepy Wiltshire on Saturday 1st June, in a co-ordinated attempt to prevent the Stonehenge Free Festival from taking place. Bearing the brunt of the police assault was The Convoy — a travelling community who are frequently pilloried in the media.

Right into this interregnum between the Miners’ Strike and the Battle of the Beanfield, and either blithely missing the point or maybe kind of nailing it, or both, limped some other — unlikely — travellers in the form of the final, indeed terminal line-up of The Clash. There was no Mick Jones or Topper Headon. Instead Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were joined by drummer Pete Howard, ex-Cortina Nick Sheppard and Vince White.

If this is referred to at all it is usually called ‘The Clash busking tour’, although that seems like a bit of an overstatement because even by the media standards of the time this ‘tour’ was a low-key affair. There were no ads in the music press or the broadsheets, no announcements, no press releases or friendly music journalists tagging along with their photographers. There were no publicity campaigns or photo-ops and no daytime TV coverage. Neither were there tour T-shirts, posters or merchandise of any kind. On May 3 1985, the band set off from London to Nottingham on modes of transport that vary according to who is telling the story, and didn’t go back home for a fortnight. During this time they played up to about thirty-four more or less impromptu and almost all undocumented gigs of varying length in locations around Nottingham, Leeds, York, Sunderland, Newcastle, Gateshead, Edinburgh, Glasgow and possibly Manchester.

I saw two of their Leeds gigs; one by chance, the other not. The first was a short set they played for a couple of dozen people in the garden of the Royal Park Pub on 6 May. My own story of that afternoon — which involves me and a couple of friends, a late night watching Eek-A-Mouse at the Cosmo Club and a hair of the dog in the May sunshine the next day while The Clash play ‘La Bamba’ a few feet away — is no better or worse than any other of the handful of accounts posted on the Black Market Clash site. But I have been amazed, recently, to see this really great colour photo of the gig, [UPDATE: image archived here] and not least because it must have been taken from just a couple of feet to the right of where we were sitting.

There are a few other pictures of the tour on the Black Market Clash site, including this one (left) which is supposedly of their gig at The Station, Gateshead, but something about it looks naggingly familiar and I’m sure that this, too, is the garden of the Royal Park.

It’s odd to see these pictures. I don’t even remember one person among the handful of us at the Royal Park taking photos, let alone two. But there must have been, because just visible over Paul Simonon’s shoulder in the colour photo I’ve linked to above there is a man or woman (see detail, right) who is looking through their own single lens reflex camera. And this is where it gets complicated, uncanny even, because not only is she/he (let’s say) pointing the camera almost directly at the man taking the colour photo and therefore looking out at us who are looking at the photograph now, but she/he is also looking directly at us then.

I also saw The Clash play on the steps of the Leeds University Student Union the following day (photo on Vincent White’s site here). I don’t know where Black Market Clash got this set list from though. According to them: ‘The band played Cool Under Heat, Movers and Shakers, White Riot and Clash City Rockers to more than 500 fans.’ I would say five hundred to a thousand people, but that set list is wrong.

Blimey, what’s that saying about old punks becoming postmen? Perhaps it should be that the scantness of the archive forces them to become pedants: arguing the toss over ephemeral scraps, contesting the uncontested. More ‘slight return’ than ‘total war’, and frankly who cares? Today there would be no disputing something as simple as a set list, because a dozen videos of a gig like that would be tweeted in close to real time, or posted on Youtube within the hour, but in that almost unrecognisable media landscape of the mid-1980s all that’s left are a couple of photos and the stories that some of the people who were there have told and retold; my own version of events probably no less contingent than any other. If you asked me, though, I would tell you that they opened with a blinding version of Toots and the Maytals’ ‘Pressure Drop’, then went into ‘Garageland’. They might well have done ‘White Riot’, but I’m pretty certain they also did ‘Police on my Back’ and a cover of ‘Johnny Too Bad’ by The Slickers. The gig was broken up after just a few songs, and most people trudged around the corner to the Faversham pub, where they played a longer set. We thought about it, but figured that the Royal Park gig — a handful of us chancing upon The Clash in our local and then following them outside to watch them play live on a balmy May afternoon — would be a hard one to beat and we went home.

Here (right) is how the gig on the Union steps was reported in the Leeds Other Paper a week or so later.

No-one seems to have posted a set list for the Royal Park gig. I could be wrong, but the way I always told it is that they played around half a dozen songs which included ‘Stepping Stone’, ‘Jimmy Jazz’, ‘Brand New Cadillac’, ‘La Bamba’ and — most memorably — ‘Straight to Hell’.

There are a couple of recordings of ‘Straight to Hell’ from the busking tour, but this one (click on the player above) from Gateshead on 11 May seems to pick up Pete Howard’s fantastic drumstick work better than the more guitar-heavy York bootleg. One thing: I’m sticking to my guns here, but the fact that ‘La Bamba’ doesn’t appear on any other set lists nor the two live bootlegs from the tour does make me wonder if I completely imagined that. I’m sure they played a couple of crowd pleasers, too — ‘Bank Robber’? ‘I fought the Law’? — but just because it happened doesn’t mean I remember it.

I was right about the photo though.

That is definitely the garden of the Royal Park pub.

In the background of the picture between Nick Sheppard and Joe Strummer — as a quick cut-n-paste from Googlemaps Street View which matches perfectly shows — is the familiar, two-windowed gable-end of a Leeds back-to-back terrace, in this case the southern end of Elizabeth and John Streets, which is visible beyond a minicab parking lot that (unlike the garden, which has been built over) is there to this day; cars still parked on a triangle of wasteland on the opposite side of Royal Park Road.

UPDATE April 2019

* In fact this body of research contributed to two works of fiction. First the novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma, 2012), which is set in Leeds during April and May 1986 and was commissioned to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster of that year, and published to accompany Jane and Louise Wilson’s touring exhibition Nature Ahbors a Vacuum. ‘Dicky Star…’ (for short) which was written using an Oulipo-inspired ‘mandated vocabulary’ turned out to be a test piece for my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber and Faber, 2018), the first in a trilogy of novels that explore the legacy of that 90-day interregnum between the end of the Miners’ Strike and the Battle of the Beanfield on 1 June 1985.

The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White, out now in Faber paperback

When a brutally murdered man is found hanging in a Covent Garden theatre, Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case. Who is this anonymous corpse, and why has he been ritually mutilated? But as Rex explores the crime scene further, the mystery deepens, and he finds himself confronting his own secret history instead. Who, more importantly, is Rex King?

Shifting between Holborn Police Station, an abandoned village in rural 1980s France, and the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge, The Fountain in the Forest transforms the traditional crime narrative into something dizzyingly unique. At once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, thrilling police procedural, philosophical meditation on liberty, and counter-culture bildungsroman, this is an iconoclastic novel of unparalleled ambition.

Buy The Fountain in the Forest direct from publisher Faber and Faber

Read Sukhdev Sandhu’s review in The Guardian

‘Feeling the heat of the audience’ – a conversation with Matt Locke

Matt Locke is the founder of The Story conference. He has been commissioning work at the technological cutting edge of mass media and participation since the 1990s, initially for arts organisations like Huddersfield Media Centre, then as Head of Innovation for BBC New Media and for Channel 4, where after an influential spell as Commissioning Editor for Channel 4 Education he was until recently Acting Head of Cross-Platform for the station. Now he runs a new company called Storythings, and yesterday the first batch of early bird tickets for the third conference in the series, The Story 2012, sold out within minutes of going on sale.

I interviewed Matt for Arts Council England back in the spring, and I’m pleased to say that my article based on that conversation has now been published on the Arts Council website where you can access it as a downloadable PDF or Word Document.

Matt brings some fascinating and provocative insights to what turned out to be a very wide-ranging discussion. At one point he talks about how games are now often released as

a minimum viable product, so when you launch a new game it has about 20% of the total feature set of the game, just enough to get people interested, and then they’ll continually iterate features for the rest of that game’s life. And that’s a really fascinating way of looking at culture – you know rather than think about the finished product. What would the minimum viable product for a novel be? In some genres you can do that more obviously: look at feedback, see how a game is working on line, look at the stats and the tweets and change it. If you’re doing drama or film it’s really difficult, but it’s not about having the shortest possible iterative cycle, it’s understanding what that cycle is and how you can be creative with the results that you’re hearing from the audience.’ He turns the question back on me, ‘Do you think you’ll ever get to the point where you’d release a 2nd or 3rd version of a novel?’

You can download the article here (opens as PDF).

See also: a related interview with novelist and future publishing researcher Kate Pullinger.

‘A real reconfiguration’ – an interview with the writer Kate Pullinger

I went to the British Library the other day for a workshop — a small, invited group discussion — about digital transformations in and of literature and the publishing industry. The event was convened by novelist Kate Pullinger (whose 2009 novel, The Mistress of Nothing won the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada) together with Professor Janis Jefferies and Dr Sarah Kember, both of Goldsmiths. The workshop might lead to further conversations and research, which would be great because while there are currently quite a lot of events discussing these types of issues, the panels are almost always weighted towards publishers and it is not so often that writers are actually invited to speak, something that Kate herself has blogged about recently. This always feels like an oversight because writers can be quite active in exploring the kinds of innovation that new publishing models offer and some are pushing just as hard at boundaries of platform and format and engagements with readers to explore and shape what the futures of storytelling and publishing might be.

Maybe it is my experience of working at the Arts Council which has taught me that it is often artists – in the broadest sense – who lead the way in discovering and exploring the possibilities and implications of new media, and that it is a fundamental challenge for the slower-moving organisations and agencies, whether publishers or funders, to try to keep up. As a writer myself I’ve also been aware that although one might sign over ebook rights in a novel this doesn’t mean a publisher can or will do anything with those rights, and that one needs to use any opportunity to experiment with new ways of reaching readers. You can’t just sit back and wait for the next book to come out and see what a publisher might do for you at that point, as if it is something in which you have no agency yourself.

I met up with Kate Pullinger back in the spring to discuss some of these ideas. We’d both just been to The Story conference at London’s Conway Hall, so I started off by asking what impressions Kate had taken away from the event…

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‘I guess I came away with that it was a good day, because it goes in so many directions at the same time. And also unlike Book Camp and a huge number of these day-long conferences I go to, it was about story, it wasn’t about publishing, which I suppose they so often are. But also it was a slightly frustrating day, which I suppose is inevitable: there are bits that you want more of and bits that you want less of, and that’s quite subjective. I suppose the two talks that have lingered with me for the longest is the Adam Curtis which wound everybody up, but in an interesting way.’

For the benefit of readers who weren’t at The Story conference, Curtis had been previewing some of the ideas from his then still forthcoming documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, subsequently broadcast on TV in the UK by BBC 2 in May 2011. His suggestion in Conway Hall, that we’re all unaware of the power structures behind the internet, social media and the web 2.0, or that artists are somehow failing to deal with this, was treated as a revelation by some and as incredibly naïve by others; myself included. Speak for yourself, mate! I’d thought. Where have you been for the past two decades? Haven’t you heard of Heath Bunting?

‘It definitely provoked a divided response,’ says Kate. ‘But his work always makes me feel both those things. I always think, “Oh you’re a total lunatic,” but also I think, “Oh you’re absolutely right!” And then the other presentation that I thought was really revealing was Phil Gyford’s talk about his The Diary of Samuel Pepys online project, because of the extraordinary, multi-platform delivery that he’s gone for with that. And I was really interested in the whole business of the tweeting and all these people around the world tweeting back to him in character. Did you hear that one? And it’s been going on for years, and it’s got all these people passionately involved with it, which is extremely difficult to achieve. And I think he has done that in this slow methodical way but also that he’s been very clever in the way he’s added new platforms and new aspects to the project from it’s humble beginnings as a web-site, and he has taken his audience with him and found new audiences at the same time. Because I do think that that is the hardest thing to do. You know, you can attract a lot of attention by making a big splash, but then to actually keep it and keep it growing in a way that isn’t flashy is a real achievement.’

The network of relationships and conversations that have built up around The Diary of Samuel Pepys reflects something that’s also happened in a really big way with Inanimate Alice, a transmedia project, a kind of digital novel, that Kate and co-writer Chris Joseph have written for creator and producer Ian Harper. Kate tells me that the fourth and last episode of Inanimate Alice was published in around 2008, but that since then people have been making their own follow-ups.

‘This is largely pedagogically driven,’ she suggests. ‘Which was not anticipated, but there are the four episodes that we’ve published and then there is this absolute plethora of episode fives that have been created all over the world, usually in educational settings, but those settings range from primary secondary to higher education, as well as lots of people using it with learning disabled kids. So Inanimate Alice has got this very active life of its own which was definitely unanticipated initially, but from fairly early on while we were creating the episodes it became apparent that teachers were using it. And early on, sort of around the episode two stage, Ian commissioned a colleague of mine at De Montfort University to create some lesson plans that could be used in classrooms and were freely available to download, and which turned out to be exactly what teachers wanted. So that little bit of encouragement has led on to this really very large and active pedagogical community growing up around the project. The Facebook page and the twitter feed are just remarkable!’

So apart from that initial small investment in the lesson plans to support the work, this is all happening without additional funding? People are putting their own enthusiasms and passions into it?

‘Yes, exactly! At the moment there’s a librarian in the US called Lara Fleming who is very active in promoting it as a tool for digital literacy, and there are a couple of teachers in Scotland and a couple of educationalists in Australia and they’ve sort of formed a bit of an ad hoc team, and again with no funding, and that’s been very fascinating.’

There is a pause while one of Kate’s children texts her: ‘If they’re asking me a question I’d better answer.’ Then: ‘I wished I’d been at the first Story conference,’ she says, ‘because were there any writers this year?’

Well, there was Graham Linehan talking about his writing process. And Matt Adams of Blast Theory opened with the presentation about Ivy4evr, the interactive SMS drama we’d made for Channel 4 and which I’d written, but no you’re right, last year there was Tim Etchells, Cory Doctorow and myself on stage, so there were fewer writers in that sense.

‘Oh yeah, Matt explained Ivy4evr really well,’ says Kate. ‘The “story ladder” idea – which is a great term for that type of storytelling. He explained it really clearly.’

I always joke that I’m more intelligent when I’m in the same room as Blast Theory, but the collaboration really forced me to look at writing more closely and in a different way than I had before, and actually the kinds of notation that we had to develop to understand and work with the forms of interactivity at the heart of the project really were mind-expanding! Also fascinating were the huge amounts of data and feedback that were generated and we are able to access and draw upon at every stage of every exchange between the players and ‘Ivy’.

‘We were sitting there listening,’ says Kate, ‘Sue Thomas and I, and saying, “There has to be some kind of AI [artificial intelligence] here,” but Matt didn’t really discuss that aspect of the project.’

Maybe you’re right, I say, because thinking about it I noticed that people reviewing the presentation – who hadn’t played Ivy4evr – were saying things like, ‘Ivy4evr looks like it runs on rails‘, and I was thinking NO it doesn’t! It’s so interactive, that’s why it took so bloody long to write. You know, the script was this vast spreadsheet of different fields and fragments and possibilities – all of it completely automated – and what it absolutely was not was simply a succession of decision points that led you down different, branching pathways like those old style, ‘now-turn-to-page-36′, so-called interactive novels. Sometimes the interactivity might come from the engine/’Ivy’, remembering profile data about you, or remembering something that you’d said a few messages back, but mostly it was from the engine reading and parsing and understanding what you were saying back to her! And the script had to be open enough to accommodate the assemblage of messages composed from many different sources but which each still needed to feel like a ‘discrete’ unit of communication. However it was composed, each message had to function and be understood as a single, coherent text message of 160 characters that had been written by one person, by Ivy, in response to the user’s last message.

‘Is that project still “live”?’ Kate asks. ‘Will it have new iterations?’

Well, I would love it if it did, because it was so interesting for me as a writer: having the chance to test every sentence, you know, almost every word, with these ever larger user groups against all kinds of criteria: to test, rewrite, test, rewrite, and also to learn from the kinds of language that the players we were testing with were using. Matt Locke who commissioned Ivy4evr for Channel 4 talks about ‘call and response cycles’ in new kinds of storytelling, and what was amazing with Ivy… or certainly a revelation for me as a writer was that we were able to build that call and response not just into the way the finished work functions, but also into the actual development of the writing. So I think that next time I start a new novel — I’m just finishing a novel at the moment which I started before Ivy4evr — I’m really going to miss, you know, being able to test each paragraph on readers at such an early stage.

But also it’s interesting because Ivy4evr is a text message conversation. This means that each player writes half of their version of the story themselves, with the messages they send to Ivy, which is fascinating in terms of where you think any actual story is located, and as a writer setting up something like that it is not just about laying out tracks.

‘No, no,’ Kate quickly agrees, ‘it’s a much more meaningful form of interactivity.’

It’s about people having a direct engagement that sneaks in under the radar, and producing the work themselves in a way, which is a difficult thing to fit into a traditional idea of what publishing is.

‘Absolutely! It’s not difficult for you and I.’

Or for the people who are playing it!

‘But it is very difficult indeed,’ Kate picks up the thread, ‘for anyone in traditional publishing to get their head around. There are a lot of challenges. I think that when I first started working on digital fiction projects nearly a decade ago I had this assumption that these two worlds that I was inhabiting you know digital fiction and print – for want of a better term for it – were going to merge, and to me that seemed not only possible but desirable. But it’s not happening. It’s not really happening. And the ways in which the publishing industry think that it is happening are in fact false, so the whole business of the digitisation of publishing, from the digitisation of work-flow all the way through to the rapid rise of the ebook, and all the other stuff, you know, the enhanced versions of ebooks etc. that’s all still completely about traditional publishing, even though it’s digital. And the idea that I had, that people who were interested in writing and interested in stories, and interested in finding audiences and readers for stories, would be interested in using these new technologies to explore new ways of telling stories is not true, it’s just not true. And that’s because, there’s a lot of reasons for it I think one of them is that the publishing industry is an old industry and it’s about selling books, and for them to deviate from that in any way is a big thing. But there has been a real reconfiguration of the relationship that writers and readers can have, through social media, through book clubs and online versions of book clubs. I do think that is really happening, I mean you just have to look at someone like Ian Rankin or Margaret Atwood to see how they use those social media tools really effectively to communicate really directly.’

And some publishers, I say, like Faber, who have been quite quick to recognise that all of these other kinds of conversations which happen around the book, things like writing classes and retreats, archives (the courses that novelist Anna Davis is leading for the literary agency Curtis Brown is another example) can be commodified…

‘Curated and utilised in a commercial sense? Absolutely! I think that there are lots of clever things happening like that. I think World Book Night was an example of that. But when it comes to new forms, it is not happening. And whether or not it will I really have no clear idea about. I think I feel more pessimistic about it than I used to. But also I’m questioning whether or not it is actually a desirable thing to bring the two things together! Maybe I’ve just been misguided for the last decade, even thinking that was a good idea.’

So that old distinction between the writer working in print and the writer working in digital media still holds. From what you’re saying that is still very much the situation.

‘Yes and, say, the huge audience that Inanimate Alice has grown and which has remained loyal to it, has no interest to a traditional publisher, and that has continued to baffle me. And I think the other side of the story is that most writers aren’t driving it. Most writers aren’t interested in it either. Most writers in the traditional sense of a writer who writes books, they’re not interested. They’re fearful of it. Don’t you think that’s true?’

Well, a writer friend of mine who is otherwise very very engaged with the web and has been for the past decade, also keeps surprising me by coming out with ideas about piracy which are based on the same old ‘Home taping is killing music‘-type of arguments. But if traditional writers in the main are suspicious of the possibilities or the challenges that digital media presents to their understanding of what writing is and how writing functions and how they can earn their living as a writer and all of those things, then who are the people who are going to be telling the stories that rise to the challenge. Where is innovation coming from, Kate, as far as you see it?

‘I think it’s coming from a number of different directions really. I think there are lots of interesting writers who work in the digital realm who have nothing to do with book publishing. Maybe not lots and lots of them, but it’s definitely an emerging field and with emerging business models as well. Which has been the thing that has lagged but is now happening because of the App Store and things like that. It’s just simpler to sell stuff now than it used to be. And I think these people come from different directions. It’s quite common for them to come from a film background or the art world, with the cross over of net art and digital arts. But I think those people see themselves as entirely separate from the book publishing world. And then of course there’s a whole lot of people who are interesting in trying to get in to that realm who come from games and web design. The most successful are people like Six to Start and Enhanced Editions. And certainly in the UK at the moment there does seem to be a field that’s kind of bubbling at the moment and they seem to either not need writers or simply to find a writer if they need one. Probably using a model like you working with Blast Theory. Those kind of hybrid organisations seem to be doing really interesting things.’

Kate is currently Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester, so I ask what she thinks are some of the challenges that young artists, young writers, face with this kind of fragmentation of traditional book publishing, and where the infrastructure that it depends upon is shrinking and changing. You know, the amount of retail space available for books on the high street shrinking so rapidly. How if at all does she see young people, students, responding to the challenge?

‘I do think that it is finding new ways of publishing. I’m using the word publishing in a very broad sense and I’m reluctant to use the term “self-publishing” because of all the connotations that it brings with it, because it is what it is. Because that’s what Inanimate Alice is. Inanimate Alice is self-published, but to use the term “self-published” or even worse, a journalist I did an interview with in Canada last week described it as “fiction for free”!’

Free in a bad way?

‘Yeah, in the worst possible way. So side-stepping the connotations of those phrases, finding ways to publish that are meaningful and that work with what they’re trying to publish. And again I think I’ve been so interested to see for example there’s this poet called Jörg Piringer who has been on the digital poetry scene for a long time and he’s started publishing his work as apps. He recently published this very beautiful kind of poem-game that is called abcdefg… all the way to z; one word. And it costs like $1.99 and as of Christmas 2010 he’d sold 30,000 copies. So I think that those kinds of ways of collectively publishing or new ways of publishing are the things that that generation and younger are going to be looking at. Except you can’t just stick it out there, you have to have the networks to support it, don’t you. You have to be part of a complex network of connections in order for it to work. Which is why it worked for Jörg, through his being active in the e-poetry world.’

Which is not new.

‘No, that’s not new, Tony, no. It’s been like that for centuries.’

I tell Kate that I do occasional bits of teaching too, and that I often find students really hung up on the idea that, ‘I will get myself an agent and I will get myself a publisher’ and that’s what being a writer is, you know. That is the only model: novel, agent, publisher. So I’m always saying to them, you know, yes, maybe that will happen, yes maybe it will but don’t wait. If you can find a community now by doing open mic nights, live literature events, getting a short story published in a magazine, or selling a pamphlet or giving a pamphlet away or whatever suits your work, finding or building a community of interest around what you do, then you’re beginning to build a relationship with readers and that’s the key thing, to create spaces for those kinds of engagements.

‘Absolutely, and as you say there’s nothing new about it at all. I also think there’s something I often used to say that the book was an obstacle that prevented people thinking about the future of storytelling because people are so in love with the book, but I think that’s changing. But I also think that people are in love with the idea of the solitary author, the lone author in ‘his’ garret, and that all these kinds of projects that we’re talking about don’t fit with that model at all. They’re much more to do with collaborative networks and communities and it’s a kind of psychological barrier in a way you’ve got this object of the book and the person alone in there.’

So how do you see that changing, Kate, or do you think that’s too deeply ingrained?

‘I don’t know. I’ve just been trying to think about that lately but I haven’t come to any conclusions, because it does still exist as well: the lone artist in their garret who produces their first book and it turns out to be a huge best seller. It happens!’

Yeah, and that’s a great story in itself! People never get tired of hearing that… Zooming out slightly now: for a short story commission I’m working on at the moment I’ve been looking at photos that the artists Jane and Louise Wilson have been taking in Pripyat, the deserted town in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine. One interesting thing, to me, is that in these photos everything of any value, whether it’s floor boards, wiring, everything, has been stripped out of every building, everything with any scrap value, apart from books. So all the school rooms still have all the books on the shelves that were there when the town was evacuated. And I love this this idea of books being the things that have lasted there and the ambivalence of that. Does it say something about the persistence of books or does it say that they have absolutely no value? Or both things at once? Is that a useful metaphor?

‘I saw or read yesterday, someone was re-tweeting this story about one of the towns on the northern coast of Japan, a town that following the earth quake and the tsunami and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima has absolutely no infrastructure left, and how the local newspaper has been creating hand-written, hand-made copies of the paper, like four or five handmade copies that are posted in strategic places in the town.’

That sounds familiar. I just wrote a story for the Russian Club Gallery and while I was there I found a discarded copy of a one-page broadside edition of the Daily Express from the third day of the UK General Strike in 1926. And it is such a reduced idea of what a newspaper is — simply one foolscap page, printed on one side — and yet it still functioned. This one was printed on card, I guess so that it could be stuck on the wall in a pub. Similarly a few months ago I was writing about the Cartonera publishers, the really innovative street publishing movement that started during the economic crash in Argentina of 2003 and which has now spread to almost every major South American city. These are all developments in publishing that have nothing to do with technology but everything to do with the future.

‘Yeah, well, that’s why I was so interested and it was so appropriate that that tweet about the newspaper in Japan had come from Margaret Atwood, because that’s one of the things that she bangs on about, you know, that digital is completely fine with her, but what happens when the grid fails? — being the dystopian writer that she is. And so the Cartonera movement, or this example of these hand-written newspapers in Japan, is absolutely an example of just that: publishing when the grid fails.’

Actually I think that is a really optimistic note to end on!

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Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing, is published by Serpent’s Tail, £7.99

Ksenija Bilbija and Paloma Celis Carbajal (eds), Akademia Cartonera: A Primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers, is published by Parallel Press/University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, $40.00

As in free speech

Just back from a very enjoyable weekend of performing and compering at the Free University of Glastonbury. Here are a few photos…

On Friday I read from the satirical stream of filth consciousness sentience that is my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO.


Compering on Saturday I had a very interesting conversation with Dorian Lynskey about 33 Revolutions per Minute, his fascinating history of protest songs.


Also on the Saturday programme were Bad Science author Ben Goldacre, comedy writer Emma Kennedy, as well as comedian Marcus Brigstocke who spoke about his new book, but the highlight was interviewing the one and only Suggs for a heaving tentful of Madness fans.

Suggs is a lovely bloke and a great raconteur, so his forthcoming one-man show should be a blast. Keep your ears open for news of this in the autumn. Like me he is also a big fan of Resonance 104.4 fm and gave it a plug or two during our chat.

What I’d been looking forward to the most was performing my recently published short story ‘A Porky Prime Cut’, with live accompaniment from UK acid house pioneer Richard Norris on the Saturday evening. We didn’t get any photos of that, sadly, but it went so well that we’re going to do a studio version at some point very soon. More news on that as and when. In the meantime…

…to underline the Free University of Glastonbury’s belief in both freedom of speech AND free beer, we also gave away copies of a strictly limited print edition of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’. I’ve got a few spares of this to give away, so message me if you would like to lay your hands on one.

Free University of Glastonbury 2011

Lots of last minute preparations for this year’s Free University of Glastonbury which is the name of the festival’s literary strand (not quite as described by the Observer). I did an event for the Free University of Glastonbury for the first time last year and really enjoyed it, so I was delighted to be asked back. All of the Free University events take place in the hula-styled environs of the HMS Sweet Charity stage, in The Park area of the festival site. There are some great people involved this year, see the full programme just received from FUOG instigator Mathew Clayton below (which was definitive as of last night and which differs slightly from the info on the festival website).

I’m performing on Friday lunchtime around 12:15, compering the Saturday lunchtime session, and then in a special late addition to the bill I’m performing with UK acid house legend Richard Norris on Saturday afternoon at 17.30.

I’m really excited about this. Richard has composed a new backing track which he’ll be mixing live as an accompaniment to my story ‘A Porky Prime Cut’, which I first performed at my National Portrait Gallery gig (with bass player Simon Edwards) a month or two back.

In as much as it is about anything, ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ is a kind of collision between Throbbing Gristle’s design aesthetic and the Bournemouth funk, soul and zine scenes of the early ’80s – via vinyl obsession, the history of acid house, art school and the cryptic etched messages of UK record pressing maestro George Peckham a.k.a. the ‘Porky’ of the title. It’s fantastic to be doing this gig with Richard, not least because he is a real pioneer of the British acid house scene: as part of Psychic TV he co-produced their Jack the Tab ‘compilations’ in 1988.

To celebrate the Free University of Glastonbury gig with Richard, a strictly limited edition print version of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ will be available free on the night while stocks last.

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For the Friday gig I’m probably going to be rambling about various things like this,

and this,

as a kind of preamble to talking about this,

and reading from my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO (which I’ve blogged about here and here).

I’ve barely taken in the rest of the festival programme, although my friend Tim Etchells has just posted some amazing photos of his illuminated sign which was installed in the Shangri-La area last weekend (note the moody-looking sky).

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The 2011 Free University of Glastonbury programme (in order of appearance) :

Friday:

12:15 Tony White

13:00 Jon Ronson

14:00 Mark Thomas

Saturday

11:30 Dorian Lynskey

12:15 Suggs

13:00 Emma Kennedy

13:45 Ben Goldacre

Intermission

16:40 Marcus Brigstocke

17:30 Richard Norris/Tony White

Sunday

11:30 Gavin Knight

12:15 Richard King

13:00 Matthew De Abaitua

13:45 Edwyn Collins and Grace Maxwell

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Art in Ruins*

A couple of months ago I posted on here around the publication by the Russian Club Gallery of my short story ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ which was written to accompany the exhibition there by artists Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull. I was very pleased to see that their collaboration has just been reviewed in the current issue of Frieze, though also amused by the over-earnest reviewer taking me to task for trying (he says), ‘to reposition the show […] within the grubbier context of Arts Council funding cuts,’ and apparently dragging it needlessly, ‘into the UK’s somewhat fraught cultural-political landscape.’

Hilarious! As if that is not where it already is!

Anyone wanting to get an idea of what the UK’s cultural-political landscape might look like ‘in real terms’ (as the poets politicians say), when more and more arts organisations lose their funding, whether that comes from local authorities or from national agencies such as the Arts Council, and what kind of impact this might have on communities and the urban environment should visit Farnham in Surrey where such a scenario has been playing out for quite a few years now and the former Redgrave Theatre seems finally about to be demolished.

I grew up in Farnham so know these buildings well. The Redgrave Theatre opened in 1974 and closed down in 1998. There is (much, much) more on the history of the building and of theatre in Farnham here, here and here. It is enough to say here that the Redgrave was built — following a public fundraising campaign — as a red-brick and concrete addition to a listed building called Brightwells House, the grounds and surroundings of which had become from its public acquisition in the 1920s onwards the site of a number of other local civic and recreational facilities: a health centre, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a bowling club and gardens. In other words, it was a space dedicated to the public good.

However at some point Brightwells gardens also became known at local government level as ‘the East Street area of opportunity’. The opportunity in question, it would seem, no longer being for the furtherance of public health, leisure and education but for redevelopment. I was shocked when I visited the town recently for a friend’s wedding to see the widespread and cultivated dereliction of the whole site which this earmarking for redevelopment has created. Meticulous and sustained campaigns by the likes of the Farnham Theatre Association and the Farnham Society seem to have come to nothing or won only the most superficial concessions, so before too long it will be replaced by 239(!) homes in a high-density housing complex, a multiplex, an underground car park, shops and a simulated ‘town square’ — a piece of urban theatre in its own right. Located where it is or was, right in the middle of an ‘area of opportunity’ like this, something as awkward and unremunerative as a theatre would have never stood a chance. The listed part of the actual Redgrave Theatre — the former Brightwells House — will be turned into two restaurants.

The theatre was of course named after the acting family (I blogged about the Vanessa Redgrave film Wetherby (dir. David Hare, 1985) here) and there was a bust of Michael Redgrave in the foyer. Seeing all of this gone to waste, I was reminded that when I was at secondary school a group of us used to hang out there on Sundays, probably more for the fact that we got served at the bar than for the regular Sunday lunchtime jazz concerts in that same foyer, where I’m pretty sure I remember the likes of George Melly performing. There is a whole universe to be explored in the development of the UK Trad Jazz scene, which must have been nurtured by hundreds of such regular small gigs around the country. I was surprised to find that our local pub in Barnes, the Halfway House, hosted weekly gigs until only very recently by Brenda’s Boyfriends, one of the Trad bands founded by none other than artist and writer Jeff Nuttall. (There’s more on Nuttall including some audio here.)

Those Sunday lunchtime concerts at the Redgrave were made more interesting by the fact that our English teacher often sang with one of the regular bands. Her name was Eiri Thrasher and in the late 60s she had been in a band on the Welsh folk scene called Y Triban (that’s her in the centre on the cover of their 1969 ‘Dai Corduroy’ EP for the Welsh language label Cambrian). I don’t know how she ended up in Farnham, but I’m glad she did because she was a good teacher. She brought some of her singles into school one end of term — maybe the Triban stuff, certainly some later ones — and played them on the record player in class.

I met Eiri by chance on a train in the midlands a decade or so (and a lifetime) later by which time I was at art school in Sheffield. She’d left teaching and was working in the music industry again at the time.

Maybe it is not much of a story: theatre closes down! It happens all the time. But for me growing up, the town’s few cultural institutions even if they turned out to be as relatively short-lived as the Redgrave were a life saver, a way out; the route to an education and a livelihood. Places like the art school, the library, or The Maltings where as a hungry O or A Level student I sought out screenings organised by the Film Society or CND.

The importance of a place like the Redgrave, even if only for those half-seen Sunday lunchtime jazz gigs, was not least that it provided access to what now seems an increasingly radical idea, and certainly one that flies in the face of a commercial opportunity such as that offered by the East Street redevelopment area: that culture is something that you can make and not just something that you buy.

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P.S. I’m pleased to discover that some of Eiri Thrasher’s stuff, with Y Triban at least, is now on Youtube. Their version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’ was licensed to the recent-ish folk revival compilation Folk is not a Four Letter Word, Volume 2 (Delay 68 Records, 2006). It’s good.

* With apologies to Glynn Banks and Hannah Vowles.

In the BRUTE! style – OFFICIAL!

I’m looking forward to doing another reading with the mighty Malcolm Bennett of BRUTE! fame, and Melissa Mann, on Wednesday 25 May at The Gladstone Arms, off Borough High Street, London SE1. One of the perks of doing a gig with Malcolm — aside from the fact that he’s a great performer — is that I get an updated version of my flyer ‘in the BRUTE! style’ (right).

There is more on the ‘shocking’ early history of BRUTE! on Mally’s website, as well as information about more recent projects including his new book, I,BRUTE! 

I remember the original BRUTE! paperbacks well, but only met Malcolm relatively recently, via another great spoken word act of the early-1980s, the late great Steven Wells, a.k.a. Swells, a.k.a. Seething Wells, although sadly not until after Swells’s untimely death in June 2009.

BRUTE! had been a big influence on Swells’s ATTACK! Books project of the late 1990s and that’s… OFFICIAL!

(I’m not completely sure which of them first used this parodic exclamation of verbal authoritativeness. I associate ‘the O word’ with Swells’s pronouncements, but I would guess that it was originally part of Bennett’s brutal, tabloid-inspired lexicon.)

I think it is fair to say, too, that the exclamation mark on the title of my debut novel Road Rage! can probably be traced back to BRUTE!’s hard-boiled pulp appropriations.

For Swells, ‘Road Rage’ became my nickname. I could be walking down the street anywhere in London and hear: ‘Oi, Road Rage!’ It would be Swells — no-one else ever called me that — who would then moan about how many boxes of ATTACK! books he still had under his bed. In return I would probably have told him a line that Michael Moorcock once told me: that he hadn’t felt like a real writer until some of his books were available in remainder shops, ‘where real people could buy them.’

Buy Road Rage from the Piece of Paper Press shop using my verified PayPal account‘Oi, Road Rage!’ — the last time I saw him, down by Strutton Ground market in Westminster he was trying not to beam from ear to there with the news that he was moving to the US and getting married (and asking me if I wanted any more books).

Following the terrible news of Swells’s untimely death in June 2009, I was honoured to give brief presentations and readings at a couple of events that were held to celebrate his life and work. First was an ATTACK! Books tribute night organised by 3:am Magazine, where I read alongside fellow novelist and ATTACK! author Stewart Home (who had first switched Swells on to Road Rage! when it came out). Secondly at a much larger celebratory event put together by David Quantick and NME colleagues, at the Monarch Tavern, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1. Here’s a jpeg of the invite (left).

There were many, moving tributes from Swells’s friends and colleagues at the Monarch that night, including Atilla the Stockbroker and photographer Kevin Cummins, who told (via Quantick) how he’d flown to Miami to do the pictures on an interview with the lead singer of Deicide, but also to hire the car as Swells couldn’t drive. Cummins’ description of the ensuing road trip included, hilariously, the arsenal of imaginary heavy weapons — machine guns, bazookas and grenades — that Swells would fire in the direction of neighbouring cars at every stop light they hit during the 600 mile round trip.

I’ve scanned in the scribbled notes I used for those events below. At the Monarch I didn’t read from Satan! Satan! Satan!, my novel for ATTACK! Books, which Swells once gleefully described as ‘the worst-researched music book ever – OFFICIAL!’, but from a gloriously gratuitous motorway pile-up rant on p.38 of Swells’s own Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty. It’s a typical Swells piece, complete with jibes at everyone from New Labour to Loaded magazine and jingly-jangly indy bands. In that context it felt appropriate to hear Swells’s words spoken aloud — even though I had to apologise for reading his blistering prose at 33 and 1/3 rather than the original 45 RPM. My excuse was that I took breaths.

Actually, this was when I met Malcolm Bennett. At the Monarch. He came and introduced himself after I’d come off stage. It turned out that back when Swells had been raving about BRUTE! to me, he’d sent Mally Road Rage! and his manuscript copy of the opening chapter of my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO. It was remembering Swells’s enthusiasm and the prospect of doing a gig with Mally last year that made me look again at CHARLIEUNCLE… (see posts here, here and here). The novel has been out of print for a decade, so I’d stopped including it in any of my reading gigs.

Until now.

It is a measure of the very high regard in which Swells was held that when he was setting up ATTACK! he was granted access to the very highest echelons of the UK publishing industry to present his vision for ‘a NEW literature — writing that apes, matches, parodies and supercedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL!’

It would have been great to have been a fly on the wall as Swells preached the destruction of what he called the ‘self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the “literary scene”‘, to those self-same chief executives and publishing industry grandees.

He was calling for, ‘rock stars who think they’re writers,’ and promising that ATTACK! would, ‘make supernovas of […] stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed, drooling idiot-geek geniuses,’ but didn’t get very far. Or so it seemed at the time.

But looking now at the ghosted, celebrity garbage by a legion of slack-jawed idiots that has dominated publishing for the past decade, I think maybe some of them were listening after all.

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Malcolm Bennett, Melissa Mann and Tony White

The Gladstone Arms, Lant Street, London SE1.

Wednesday 25 May 2011, 19:00 – 22:30 — Admission free.

New feature – short story bibliography

I’ve added a new feature/page to the blog: a short story bibliography (click here or find it via the navigation bar above). The list begins with a story called ‘Title Track’ from 1994, and runs to what at time of writing is my most recent short, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, which was published a month or so ago. This bibliography is very much a work in progress and it will be tweaked and updated as needed. I’ve added a brief explanatory note (or list of excuses):

…basic bibliographical information about forty-odd editions of I think twenty-seven short stories published since 1994 […] in roughly chronological order. It does not yet include ISBNs (where these exist), links to publishers’ websites or places where the stories can be purchased, watched or listened to, nor (quite) every online or print edition of some stories. [Where] I can’t lay my hands on a particular physical edition I have been unable to provide page numbers. Asterisks denote that to the best of my knowledge a particular story or edition is definitely out of print.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but the information was so dispersed, the stories published in such varying editions and formats by numerous publishers, art galleries and museums, magazines and journals etc., that it has taken much longer than I thought to get to this stage.

More info as I find it…

There’s a place called London SW14

I went out to buy coffee this morning and found this, propped up against a wall in the Barnes/Mortlake area:

Initially I wondered if it might be a piece of folk art (a relic from a former community centre perhaps, or the conscious work of some Blackheart Man here in White Hart Lane), but while I was photographing it I had a short conversation with the person who lived there and they told me that the map had been a prop for some animation sequences in the 2010 feature film Africa United. But actually what it made me think of was that great Junior Byles song for Lee Perry, ‘A Place Called Africa’, which is featured in numerous reggae compilations including volume 3 of Trojan’s great old Creation Rockers series. The song is also very easy to find online, as is the version featuring toasting from Winston Prince, a.k.a. Dr Alimantado.

Auto-destructive Arts Policy #2 – Metzgervaizeymashup

I was surprised and honoured — and in the event, not a little moved — to be asked to speak at the 85th birthday celebration of the artist Gustav Metzger, which I attended in London recently.

Among the many other friends and colleagues who had gathered to celebrate this important day were Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson of London Fieldworks, Alastair Brotchie of Atlas Press, Alan Sutcliffe of the pioneering Computer Arts Society, composer Kaffe Matthews, The Arts Catalyst curator (and Performance Magazine founder) Rob La Frenais, Andrew Wilson, Curator of Modern & Contemporary British Art at Tate, Ingrid Swenson of Peer, and my former Arts Council colleague Bronac Ferran.

Following a short and eloquent speech (reminding us of absent friends) and toast by Andrew Wilson, it seemed apt that I should read an excerpt from my new short story, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, which is dedicated to Gustav Metzger. The title refers of course to Metzger’s 1st and 2nd Manifestos: Auto Destructive Art, 1959, and Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art, 1960.

As discussed in the previous post, this story was written partly to test the satirical potential of applying the ‘cut-up technique’ to two source texts: Metzger’s own 1974 call for an ‘art strike’ and the ‘Creative Ecologies’ speech made at the State of the Arts conference in February 2011 by the Right Honourable Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. I had wondered what kind of new text might be created by remixing these two originals, and whether that new text might reflect back critically on both sources as well as forming the basis of some sort of critical response to the work of artists Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull.

As well as being, you know, a good story… You can judge that for yourself, as the full text of ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ is reproduced in the previous post, but the cut-up sequence at the centre of the story ends with a couple of sentences that I found much more difficult to read aloud, in public, than I had expected. The words really caught in my throat:

The government is passionately committed to smothering art and the denial of labour is our chief weapon. To bring down the art system it is necessary that people who once practised art never regain their creative spirit; to eradicate it in every corner of the country.

‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ was commissioned by the Russian Club Gallery and published on 30 March 2011 to accompany the current exhibition by Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull, which runs until 7 May. The story is published as an A3 folded pamphlet which is available free to gallery visitors while stocks last.

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Rupert Ackroyd / Alison Turnbull, Russian Club Gallery, 340-344 Kingsland Road, London E8 until 7 May. Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday, midday to 5pm.