This stickered CD turned up in some forgotten corner of the house the other day, and it seemed so striking that I had to share it. A relic of another era perhaps, but one that is worth looking at again, especially when analogies between the music industry and book publishing seem to have been popping up everywhere recently.
In light of this, and when the figures about the cost to the music industry of file sharing are revealed to be occasionally ‘dodgy’, it is interesting to see these kind of inflated figures again too: five CDs for £50!
This is what buying music looked like in July 2001, and that promotional sticker is real.
The significance of the date is not that we’re looking at this from the vantage point of the current recession, when the thought of spending £50 in a record shop in one go might pinch a little for most of us. It is rather that this was produced a few months before the launch of the iPod, at a time when even though the MP3 format had been around for the best part of a decade, there was still no easy, mainstream way to legally obtain music online, and there wouldn’t be for another couple of years.
That’s why I found this sticker so surprising, because I’d forgotten how bad things were. The contrast in scale between this last gasp of how the industry wanted us to buy our music — the model they were clinging to, and no wonder — and how we do it now, mostly it would seem via the online purchase of single tracks for pennies, relatively speaking. Even when we do have to buy an album at full price it’s more likely to cost a vinyl-LP-reminiscent £6.99 for either the CD or the download, although the latter will often be packed with extra material.
So it is with a re-issue of the reggae classic Come Back Darling by the mighty Johnny Osbourne (produced of course by the late, great Winston Riley) that has been knocking around for a while. The downloadable version of Come Back Darling weighs in with an impressive sixty-one tracks instead of the original twelve, and even then it doesn’t quite squeeze in all the ground-breaking music produced by Riley in those Techniques sessions. So while Johnny Osbourne’s boisterous classic ‘See and Blind’ is there, Dennis Alcapone’s even more exuberant version of the same track is missing. Luckily for me I’ve had both singles on vinyl since I was a kid. Luckily for you, ‘Look into Yourself’ by Dennis Alcapone is on Youtube, which also didn’t exist back in 2001 when this CD was stickered.
‘O Brother,’ indeed. Fifty quid for five CDs? Blimey! It’s a reminder, if one were needed, that extending copyright and strengthening copyright protection cannot retrospectively protect a monopoly industry from shooting itself in the foot, or from its own past greed and complacency.
—
For more on the riveting subject of copyright extension in books and film respectively, you may also be interested in Adrian Hon’s gently satirical ‘Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal’ for the Telegraph:
(adjective) 3. (Publishing/Literature) designating the kind of experimental, sometimes (but not exclusively) lower-budget productions, non-traditional collaborations and commissioning partnerships, innovative distribution models and prototyping associated with literature published outside of ‘traditional model’ publishing by the mainstream houses.
With apologies for taking what is a very specific set of criteria relating to theatrical productions in Manhattan and applying them to literary publishing in the UK, but I’ve noticed that ‘Off-Broadway’ is becoming a useful metaphor, an easily understood shorthand when talking about my more experimental literary projects; particularly stories or books that allow me to explore future publishing-type scenarios.
So, for example, when someone asks — as they did last night — what I’m working on or what I’ve got coming up next, I will thank my interlocutor for their kind interest and tell him or her that I have a new work of fiction coming out on 26 April which is called Dicky Star and the garden rule.
If their curiosity remains unsated, as was the case yesterday evening, I will continue. Telling them that this book was commissioned alongside new works by the brilliant artists Jane and Louise Wilson as a kind of open-brief, arm’s-length collaboration, that this will be on general release in both print and ebook editions as well as being on sale at Jane and Louise’s exhibitions over the coming year, and that it will be launched with events in London and later (we hope) in Leeds and Manchester and more.
Should I be pressed to expand further, as indeed I was, I may add that review copies are going out this week, and that a limited number of pre-publication copies are also exclusively available from the DCA Bookshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where Jane and Louise Wilson’s exhibition is on until 25 March.
‘Sounds great,’ they will say. ‘Is that with [name of usual/previous publisher]?’
‘No,’ I will reply. ‘It’s kind of Off-Broadway.’
—
Tony White, Dicky Star and the garden rule. Forma Arts and Media Ltd. Publication date: 26 April 2012. Extent: 49pp. Size: 210 x 148 mm. Distribution: Cornerhouse http://www.cornerhouse.org/books ISBN 978-0-9548288-6-8. Price: £5.00
February 4 is National Libraries Day: ‘a free-to-join gathering of people who believe in the importance of libraries.’
Well, count me in, because libraries of one kind or another are places in which I seem to spend a lot of time, although my use of them has changed over the years. When I was a child I went to the library to borrow books, and I’ve encouraged the same as a parent. Now when I go to libraries it is most often as part of the process of writing them, because of course there is more to libraries than the lending and borrowing of books, vitally important though that is.
Libraries can also be both a repository for and a gateway to archives of all kinds, many of which are simply unavailable anywhere else. For example, I was researching for a forthcoming fiction title among bound archive copies of the now defunct alternative news weekly Leeds Other Paper in Leeds Central Library recently. Most UK newspapers are held in the British Library’s Newspaper Collection in Colindale, London, but not the Leeds Other Paper. These copies of the LOP in Leeds Central Library may well constitute the only complete collection that exists of this important alternative newspaper.
While waiting to access the LOP archive I also happened across the Leodis project, a fantastic photographic archive of the city that was established by Leeds Library & Information Service as part of a Yorkshire-wide Lottery-funded photography archive digitization project in 2003. The Leodis site is a bit clunky in many ways, but not bad for something that launched in 2003. Back then, even now-familiar approaches to copyright and licensing and the ways that we access and interact with content online like Creative Commons were still more or less part of a creative, legal and publishing avant garde, so e.g. there is no obvious notice on the Leodis site about whether, how or under what terms one can use the photos, beyond the options to leave comments or (and I’m resisting the urge to put an exclamation mark at the end of this sentence) to buy a print.
It is well worth digging around — well, wading through — the Leodis site however as there is some really great material on there, not least of which for a bibliophile are the many pictures of the Library itself, which has gone through various transformations over the years including the recent excavation of a magnificent tiled hall, originally the reading room and now a visually stunning cafe. Browsing through the photos, I found myself particularly drawn to some images of the Music Library, the very shelves and false ceiling of which it was in fact that had needed to be removed to reveal the spectacular tiled hall beneath. The Music Library still exists, it has simply been moved upstairs.
In light of popular myths about the supposedly recent so-called ‘dumbing down’ of libraries to accommodate music, DVDs and other media, it was interesting to read in the text accompanying this great image that
The [Leeds] Music Library was started in 1950, as part of policy to establish subject departments, rather than keeping all stock as a vast collection. Originally music scores and books were available, in 1957 a record lending library service began. This cost £2,500 for which 1,837 records were purchased.
The work of fiction that I was in Leeds to research is set in the city in the mid-1980s. Many of the LPs in the Music Library’s loan collections at that time could well have been purchased as part of that same late-1950s job lot, but they were still in good condition and still being loaned out nearly thirty years later. The Music Library’s vinyl loan collection is now long gone of course, but I was pleased when trawling some secondhand dealers recently to find for sale one mint vinyl copy of an LP that had been a Music Library favourite when I lived in Leeds, and which now I thought about it I was keen to hear again: Follow the Drinking Gourd by Alex Foster and Michel Larue.
Foster and Larue’s album was released in 1958 by a New York record label called Counterpoint who up until the previous year had traded as Esoteric Records, a willfully obscure jazz and art-house label started by Jerry Newman which operated out of 75 Greenwich Avenue (now the Bar-B-Que restaurant). As a student in the early 1940s, Newman had cut live recordings of jazz gigs direct to disc. He set up the label after WWII, in part at least to release those early bebop recordings. Newman’s interest in live recording continued, too. For a fantastic example of this, see the Ghostcapital music blog, which has a great rip of Newman’s live recording of the Toraia Orchestra of Algiers that was released on Esoteric in 1952, plus high quality scans of cover art, record labels etc.
According to Bill Morgan’s The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (City Lights Books, 1997), Kerouac hung out in the back room of Esoteric because a school mate worked for Newman. Supposedly he cut some recordings in Newman’s studio, but a 1955 plan to record On the Road with live accompaniment from saxophonist Allen Eager never happened.
In a foreword on the back cover of their 1958 long-player for Newman, Michel Larue and Alex Foster suggest that ‘American Negro Folk Music has been too long neglected […] Here is music created years ago, yet [it] is the source of the present American trend in music.’ According to a short biographical note, their ‘new approach in Folk Music’ was the result of Foster and Larue wanting to collaborate and perform in night clubs, not just for the theatre and concert hall audiences to whom they’d each been playing up to that point.
I don’t know how many copies of Michel Larue and Alex Foster’s vinyl LP are still floating around, but — and I can’t say this clearly enough — if you see it, buy it. The production of Foster and Larue’s sparse arrangements is clear and spacious, and there’s a stagey kind of rockabilly-funk to their percussion-and-bass-propelled versions of Blues, gospel and folk standards that include a masterful and probably definitive ‘John Henry’.
If you can’t get hold of the vinyl, the record has also recently been reissued for CD and MP3 (albeit under another name — ‘American Negro Slave Music’ — and with a slightly reduced track listing) by the Essential Media Group label. Here is their page on the Myspace player.
The title-track of Foster and Larue’s original vinyl release — Follow the Drinking Gourd — is of course a folk classic in its own right, with a long and complex if not to say contested heritage. See the website of Joel Bresler’s fascinating Follow the Drinking Gourd: A Cultural History project for more on this. Bresler reveals that Foster and Larue were the first Black artists to record the song, but among the numerous versions of ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd’ that are collated and discussed in his wide-ranging commentary I was particularly delighted to see one by the Welsh folk and country act Triban, who recorded the song in both Welsh (as ‘Dilyn y Sêr‘) and English languages.
Regular readers may recall that I’ve written about Triban here before, in connection with the destruction over the past decade of the former Redgrave Theatre in Farnham, Surrey (a connection that is both too slight and too convoluted to repeat here). However, that single emblematic act of cultural vandalism pales in comparison with what could be about to happen to public libraries all over the country: a century or more of work for education, literacy and the public good swept away with no thought for the consequences.
The bad news in this new cultural and educational emergency is that there is of course no one simple way to raise the alarm.
If you are on Twitter, follow @NatLibrariesDay and the hashtag #NLD12.
Further listening:
Alex Foster and Michel Larue, American Negro Slave Songs (Digitally Remastered), Essential Media Group, 2009. (Possibly MP3 only), £7.49
Michel Larue, Songs of the American Negro Slaves, Folkways/Smithsonian Institute, 2009 (Original Release Date: 1 Jan 1960). CD £21.59, MP3 £5.99.
Triban, Harmony: Y Casgliad/The Collection, 1968-1978, Sain Records, 2011. SAIN SCD 2637 CD bocs set £16.99 (also available as 64-track MP3 download)
Forthcoming fiction:
Tony White, DICKY STAR AND THE GARDEN RULE, Forma Arts and Media Limited, publication date: 26 April 2012, 49pp, size: 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-0-9548288-6-8 Price: £5.00
I will be in Dundee, Scotland this weekend to do a live reading from, and to talk about my forthcoming work of fiction Dicky Star and the garden rule. I will also be attending the opening of the exhibition by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson. The two things are connected, and not only because both will be taking place at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
Jane and Louise Wilson’s works were commissioned by Forma Arts and Media to coincide with the anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union on 26 April 1986. I was commissioned by Forma in turn to respond to all of this in a work of fiction that could be published as a standalone edition alongside this DCA show and at subsequent exhibitions of Jane and Louise’s work, notably at the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester in September of this year, as well as for general sale.
Dicky Starand the garden rule will be published on the anniversary of the disaster on 26 April, when it will be launched with events in London and (I hope) Leeds — and there are some exciting plans afoot for Manchester — but some early pre-publication copies will be available on Saturday and then from DCA throughout Jane and Louise Wilson’s show, which runs until 25 March. Review copies will be going out in February.*
I have blogged some background during the research process: here and here. Dicky Star and the garden rule is set in Leeds, where I was living in 1986, but I wanted to draw on new research rather than old stories: new research which took in amongst other things the archive of alternative news weekly Leeds Other Paper, home of the extraordinary headline above, from their cover for 9 May 1986 (right). These blog-posts were then partly a means of thinking aloud about the project, but also a way of divesting myself of — or throwing off — some of my existing stories about the period; ridding myself of biographical anecdotes. I wanted to be able to start from scratch: to respond both to Jane and Louise Wilson’s work, and to the Chernobyl disaster itself in a completely new way.
Here (left) is a shot of the front cover design, and the following is an extract of the back cover blurb:
Dicky Star and the garden rule follows Laura Morris and her boyfriend Jeremy through the turbulent days at the end of April 1986 when the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union.
Dicky Star and the garden rule is published to accompany Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, a series of works that were commissioned to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Novelist Tony White reveals Jeremy and Laura’s story in vivid daily chapters that follow the disaster’s impact in the UK, but are also each determined by their own quixotic puzzle…
More on all of this in Dundee on Saturday, and on here and elsewhere anon. In the meantime, I’ll paste in the booking info for this Saturday’s event at DCA below. If you can get to Dundee it would be great to see you there.
*N.B. If you are a book blogger and not already on my press list but you would like a review copy of Dicky Star and the garden rule, please message me your contacts and a link to your blog on tonywhite [dot] popp [at] gmail [dot] com and we’ll do what we can – thank you!
§
Tony White reading from Dicky Star and the garden rule and other works
As the players in the new 21st century race for the Moon line up – the USA rejoining China, India and Russia and jostling with private corporations interested in exploiting the Moon’s resources – a group of artists are declaring a Republic of the Moon: a ‘micronation’ for alternative visions of lunar life. Republic of the Moon challenges utilitarian plans of lunar mines and military bases with artists’ imaginings and interventions. Combining beguiling fantasies, personal encounters, and playful appropriations of space habitats and scientific technologies, Republic of the Moon reclaims the Moon for artists, idealists, and dreamers. The last race to the Moon was driven by the political impulses of the Cold War, but shaped by extraordinary visions of space created by writers, film-makers, and artists, from Jules Verne, Lucien Rudaux, and Vasily Levshin, to HG Wells, Stanislav Lem and Stanley Kubrick. Can artists’ quixotic visions reconcile our romantic notions of the Moon with its colonised future, and help us to reimagine our relationship with our natural satellite in the new space age?
Liliane’s work for the exhibition is called ‘moonmeme’ and it explores the possibility of projecting a word on to the lunar surface that might be read from the Earth. It is an evocative idea — ‘celestial signage, interplanetary publication’ — that I put at the centre of my story. While I was writing the piece I needed to check a few technical matters with Liliane, and she sent me over a couple of beautiful napkin sketches (as in, they were drawn over lunch) thinking around this projection idea. I’ve reproduced one here with permission.
Talking of moon-related memes, though, it is interesting to see that an ‘Occupy the Moon’ meme — unconnected with my story — has been proliferating in the form of rightish-leaning and barely satirical spoilers of other Occupy-generated or related web-based material. In that context it is a reductive one-liner and a fairly toothless joke: a Facebook group with no friends, a kind of lame, ‘we’re-the-99.99999%-who-haven’t-been-to-space’ schtick.
The work in the Republic of the Moon show is the opposite: subversive, generative and illuminating.
I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ ‘The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility’. Meyer-Brandis’ work has a charm and wit that belies its thoroughness and rigour. ‘The Moon Goose Analogue…’ is inspired by a late 16th, early 17th century work of science fiction entitled The Man in the Moone, that was written by the English Bishop Francis Godwin and published posthumously. A new edition of Godwin’s extraordinary text was recently put together by William Poole, and published by Broadview Editions. In Godwin’s story, which includes the first descriptions of weightlessness in space, a traveller named Domingo Gonsales harnesses a flock of migratory geese to make the journey. An idea which reappears of course in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
The Arts Catalyst have recently posted an excellent short video interview with Agnes Meyer-Brandis about her project and the flock of Moon Geese that she, just like the fictional Domingo Gonsales, has raised from the egg for the purpose.
Research in the newspaper archives for a short story that I’m writing for publication next year to accompany exhibitions by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson is turning up some very rich material, including interesting ephemera, such as a launch ad from 1986 for ‘Paladin Fiction’ (see detail below), a new paperback list from one of the then Grafton Books paperback imprints (all long ago subsumed into the modern Harper Collins).
The 1986 Paladin launch list of four titles included books by Jonathan Meades, Thomas M. Disch and Don Bloch, and the ad promised that new Paladin Fiction titles would be published monthly.
The most exciting book on the list by far, though, is Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. The figure (right) who appears at the foot of the ad is not Joan of Arc, but a female Quixote, extracted in fact from the front cover illustration.
I’d been thinking about Kathy Acker, because a week or two ago Ubuweb tweeted a link to the fantastic Kathy Acker audio archive that they host. This is really well worth exploring: I can’t recommend it highly enough. Among the gems on offer are audio files of her collaboration with The Mekons on Pussy, King of the Pirates, which was recorded in Leeds and Chicago in 1995. Mekon co-founder (and former Three John) Jon Langford, describes Pussy… as being,
One thing that is striking about this mid-’80s book advertisement is that a Kathy Acker novel is being marketed at all, let alone that — called ‘exciting’ — it is being published on a literary list by a mainstream, mass-market publisher, and that she is being described as a writer ‘with style, wit and narrative drive.’ All of which is absolutely true, amongst other things, but even if Paladin were still an extant paperback imprint, it is almost impossible to imagine the same thing happening today in a mainstream that often seems obsessed rather with ubiquitous celebrity and/or proximity to power.
Perhaps it is just as well that a host, or (to quote Charles Boyle in the progamme of the recent Free Verse poetry fair in Exmouth Market), ‘a disarray’ of small publishers is emerging, who may be better equipped to survive than were many of the small and independent publishers active when I first started finding readers for my fiction in the mid-late-1990s.
The Free Verse fair was put together by Charles Boyle of the excellent CB editions (or CBe for short). Charles is a poet and novelist, and a former in-house editor at Faber and Faber where in fact he brilliantly copy-edited my novel Foxy-T. He writes a very entertaining and informative blog about the contemporary challenges of being a small publisher: ‘We can work around rather than within the system […] I never set out to be a dissident, but it seems it comes with the job.’
Back when CB editions were launched, Guardian paperback reviewer Nicholas Lezard wrote an influential review of Boyle’s pseudonymously-published first novel, the charming and intelligent 24 for 3 by ‘Jenny Walker’. CBe, he suggested, had been set up to support, ‘works which might otherwise fall through the cracks between the big publishers.’
britpulp! is urban, nervy, agressive. Fast-twitch prose that fizzes and spits. Narrative with a kick. Jump-cuts that hurt like a knuckle in the eye. Here are the improper (and therefore reliable) tales of the city. Here are stars who glory in their anonymity. Here too, in Michael Moorcock, Ted Lewis and Jack Trevor Story, are the best of the reforgotten (they’ve never gone away, although it has taken someone with Tony White’s sharp eye for history to acknowledge a proper debt). Pulp has always been a secret. Read by millions, remembered by few. There is no room for prima donnas in a world where gaudy-covered shockers have the lifespan of a fruitfly. There is only one rule: keep the pages turning. Get your retaliation in early, and often. Let this book read you.
With hindsight, I think Sinclair got something wrong here: it was no longer titles that had ‘the lifespan of a fruitfly,’ nor the writers who were ‘reforgotten,’ but the publishers, who were struggling at best to get coverage in the broadsheet review sections, hard-pressed to get books in to the bigger shops and unable to survive the closure of destination independents like Compendium in Camden Town. Small publishers such as Pulp Books, Low Life, Codex and Attack, to name only a few — just the ones that published me — are all long gone; ancient history, like Paladin.
In an interview I did recently with Matt Locke for Arts Council England, he stressed the importance of networks and, ‘relationships with audiences that are more than just the accidental monopoly of a big distribution infrastructure.’ Matt was talking about challenges facing arts venues, museums and galleries, and the kinds of ‘call and response’ relationships and the spaces and opportunities for emotional engagement that have been created by things like Twitter — issues that apply just as much, of course, to publishers and to the book trade.
Among Boyle’s contemporary ‘disarray’ of small publishers emerging in this past year — in precisely those ‘cracks between the big publishers’ — it has been interesting to see former-Idler colleague Dan Kieran and friends’ Unbound, which uses social networks and crowd-funding to pre-fund new titles by writers including — funnily enough, a quarter of a century later — Jonathan Meades, again. Of course it is not just small independent publishers using such strategies to create a connection with their readers, but an interesting aspect of something like Twitter is its leveling function (which I first noticed when I was writer in residence at the Science Museum two or three years ago, when a blog like the Londonist was tweeting London news and cultural stories with more authority and a clearer London-based identity than the Evening Standard), and that larger organisations have been slower to use it effectively, often mistaking Twitter, in Matt Locke’s words, ‘for a broadcast medium’ rather than a conversation among effective equals.
Meanwhile, And Other Stories have developed their own stylishly subversive and boutique variation of the subscription model. Depending how you look at it, And Other Stories‘ offer of four books a year for thirty-odd-quid may represent slightly better value for the reader than Unbound’s scale of support. Like Unbound it offers subscribers a printed thank you in the pages of the books they support, but while And Other… subscribers can participate in acquisition and other meetings, the ultimate editorial say-so is wielded, the website says, by the publisher, rather than a per-title subscriber threshold being reached.
But whither Paladin’s 1986 promise of style and wit? I recently went along to the Large Glass Gallery in London, for And Other Stories’ launch of Swimming Home, the immensely, yes, stylish and witty new novel by Deborah Levy, which opens with a very narrative drive — too fast on a mountain road in the South of France at midnight.
Maybe we can turn to Kathy Acker again for a preemptive answer to Nicholas Lezard’s anxiety about works falling through the cracks, or one that turns it slightly on its head. Maybe the cracks are the place to be. Not falling through them, but crawling! In a good way. ‘The whole rotten world come down and break,’ as Kathy Acker puts it, in the brilliantly scatological and anthemic, ‘Ange’s Song After She Crawled Through London’, track two of the musical version of Pussy, King of the Pirates. If you don’t know ‘Ange’s Song…’ I would urge you to listen to it here, but be warned, it is also a gloriously revolutionary and obscene earworm, a song that I guarantee you’ll be singing for days.
Stop and think about this for a second. How would you tell a story by SMS? How would you engage in one-to-one dialogue at scale?
[Ivy4evr] was an exploration: a project that genuinely sought to use new technology for an entirely new storytelling experience.
While the program was surely a creative success, its limited pilot nature meant that it only reached 5,000 kids. But that’s beside the point. So often, our tendency is to use new technology to do the same old thing in a slightly different format. We use electronic “folders” instead of manila ones, read ebooks that look identical to the ones on paper, and watch television on-demand that is indistinguishable from broadcast. The folks at Blast Theory and Channel 4 deserve a round of applause for being brave enough to truly push the boundaries of digital storytelling, to ask themselves how new media creates an opportunity for interaction that simply didn’t exist before. [Read the whole review here]
It’s all a good excuse to post Ju Row-Farr of Blast Theory’s brilliant drawing of Ivy (right).
Matt and Nick from Blast Theory are currently in Taipei doing a Mandarin translation of A Machine to See With, their Sundance commission from this year, but a bunch of us will be going along to the BIMAs tonight.
In the context of various future-publishing-type conversations that I have been involved in recently (including my conversations with Matt Locke for the Arts Council and with Kate Pullinger for this blog, and last year’s event with Stewart Home for Westminster Libraries, etc) it will be interesting to dodge the canapes and try to get a flavour of some of the other work being showcased, especially as most of the projects on the various BIMA shortlists are unfamiliar and not from the worlds of literature and publishing that I’m most in touch with. I’m hoping there will be some gems amongst the bigger-budget corporate stuff, and as ever I’ll be keeping a particular eye out for good writing.
Michael Moorcock happened to be visiting the UK in the May or June of 1999, shortly before publication of my Britpulp! short story anthology for Sceptre. He had contributed a new Jerry Cornelius story called ‘The Spencer Inheritance’ to the collection, and had also made available some beautiful and never-before-published writing by the legendary Jack Trevor Story. Mike’s presence in the UK seemed a good excuse to pull together a photo shoot of as many of the other, living contributors as I could assemble in one place. We shot some interviews for Channel 4’s then late night TV book show Pulped in the Golden Hart on Commercial Street and then walked around the corner to the Brick Lane entrance of the lower levels of the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard (now demolished) where I’d arranged an hour or two’s access to this incredible space. A few of the writers just couldn’t make it, including Victor Headley and Simon Lewis, who I think must both have been out of the country. Photographer and friend Hugo Glendinning did the honours, producing this amazing panoramic shot, here newly digitized from 35mm slide, and which as far as I know never appeared in print at the time, except as reportage in Iain Sinclair’s review of Moorcock’s King of the City for the LRB. ‘When he makes one of his brief returns to England,’ Sinclair writes:
L-R: Stewart Home, Steve Aylett, J.J.Connolly, Nicholas Blincoe, Stella Duffy, Michael Moorcock, Steve Beard, Tim Etchells, Billy Childish, Jenny Knight, China Miéville, me, Darren Francis.
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.
(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 novellaDicky 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.
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?’
This stickered CD turned up in some forgotten corner of the house the other day, and it seemed so striking that I had to share it. A relic of another era perhaps, but one that is worth looking at again, especially when analogies between the music industry and book publishing seem to have been popping up everywhere recently.
That’s why I found this sticker so surprising, because I’d forgotten how bad things were. The contrast in scale between this last gasp of how the industry wanted us to buy our music — the model they were clinging to, and no wonder — and how we do it now, mostly it would seem via the online purchase of single tracks for pennies, relatively speaking. Even when we do have to buy an album at full price it’s more likely to cost a vinyl-LP-reminiscent £6.99 for either the CD or the download, although the latter will often be packed with extra material.
Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london 
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