I took on the industry and it won

In this bloated world of pop culture excess I find myself caring less for the mindless operations of capitalist music companies and more so about the endless betrayal of the working class and all we could have amounted to. This exercise in eradicating our common collectiveness and sense of equality for all galls me somewhat. I was watching Upside Down the other night –the documentary about Creation records. I started a record label when I was younger [in my mind it was going to become a pure egalitarian operation – with no strings attached – a Factory [records] for the future.]

I think it mattered to us all once. Taking a stance against the man.

You see vinyl mattered – it was bound to – it was all we knew. There wasn’t CD, mp3, download it straight away from i-tunes without the sweat of the wait to see if it had arrived on its day of release. Those trawls to Record Village, invariably with Paul to see if the Chain with no name reps had offloaded the latest independent release we’d set our heart on that week.

And then there were the floppy bits of plastic – that scratched and buckled in an instant. This was music for the masses. The flexi disc was a part of my youth – a disposable pop aesthetic – we did not need the industry – we would be our own industry – without the hang ups of capitalism – we just wanted to distribute sounds – cheaply and quickly. In some ways if we had had the internet then we would have invented myspace.

I still have most of these ephemeral pieces of pop. Sold a few and lost a few along the way. But that’s the nature of disposal pop. Except this writing is setting it all in stone – elevating this group over that group and rolling around memories of past musical exploits and placing it all in rank order. There is no rank order and there is no hierarchy.

It is all music.

Some of it good and some of it bad. And I guess that all of it is really an attempt to extract the cash from the masses – through feel good times and sounds that puncture the mundane. I remember getting all the Are You Scared to get Happy fanzines and Trout Fishing in Leytonstone, Simply Thrilled, Sowing Seeds, Woosh all sorts of stuff – you’d buy them at gigs – 50p and a free flexi – how could that be wrong? That fizz and pop as you placed the needle – wating for the next sha lal la experience. I seriously fell in love with the Baby Lemonade one and The Clouds [a seriously underrated band if there ever was one] But now I’m thinking about them there was Remember Fun, Emily, the Sea Urchins all were special and brilliant in there way. I still play Summershine in the car – it’s on a compact disc full of sounds for journeys and trips to the Thames Barrier. It’s that kind of tune.

Fanzines got me through my teenage years. They just summed up stuff at the time.

I started my own fanzine Get That Anorak Off when I was 15 – Paul and I alongside Darryl and chris had been following The Primitives around the north in Hillman Imps and rented cars and I wanted to tell the world that we kind of knew them – it’s always been a vanity thing – a fame thang. So I just wrote up the experience – sowing the seeds right there for this – there wasn’t a great deal inside it - I remember Paul did a review of The Fall’s new album and there was stuff about other groups – what I was listening to– I got it photocopied in the steelworks office where my dad worked – he did it when the foreman wasn’t there and then I tried selling it round Scunthorpe and gigs I was going to at the time.

It sold – so I did another one – this was more indie based – I started interviewing more bands – a kind of Smash Hits meets Record Mirror type approach – banal questions recorded on mini tapes or the trusty Phillips tape deck. By the second one I was getting professional in my eyes I had interviewed The Brilliant Corners, The Chesterfields, Razorcuts and bands that made true independent music. It came with a crayoned cover sold out fairly quickly and basically I kept producing them until I started university. The final one [I think there were five in all] was finished at university [it had Dinosaur/ Spacemen 3/ The Telescopes/ Primal Scream in it] and by then I was drifting into the whole acid house culture and the indie scene felt a little backward looking – I know now it wasn’t but I was getting my energy from other sources – so fanzine culture wasn’t a big part of it and all that writing got lost in the warehouses and repetitive beats of the late late eighties.

However, I think the whole thing about fanzines and the culture that goes with it was/ is the sense that you can put your thoughts down – you don’t mediate the same way as a newspaper – you have values and ideologies but they really are your own. You end up getting letters from Singapore from Collin – or Australia from like minded people who are into the same scene – it was about having a voice and during that period I felt I could express it – on the most part in a clumsy, inarticulate manner – but it was my voice nonetheless. And this is my voice again. Not dictating this time and with a readership in single figures – but the writing is better believe me. In that way I think blogging is the way forward, I’m not always sure that it reaches the audience in the same way – but young kids are fairly hip and tell each other about what’s going on all the time. I’m the paper generation but the blogging community is keeping that independent spirit alive – more power to it.

But that bedroom writing led to bedroom recording – led to connections coming out the boredom and ideas and ambitions above my station. As I said before you do lots of thinking in small rooms as a teenager – small rooms and big ideas. Sort of. So why not start a record label. If McGee could or Martin Whitehead or Matt and Clare – why couldn’t I?

So a record label was born – and promptly closed – but it felt good getting it started. Deciding to release tunes for others. A flexi disc – a cheap, convenient and disposal way to share ART maaan.

Suffice to say my band was going on it – so in some ways it was a vanity press sort of thing - recorded on the strangest 4-track recorder in our bedroom. I’d met Jo in Leeds- a true independent spirit – she was writing fanzines promoting gigs – living the scene dream - she sold me her fanzine ‘What’s it like to be Scottish’ and introduced me to pale saints – we hit it off and discussed the possibility of doing a joint flexi together. Through letters and telephone calls on phones joined to walls we would hatch out a plan. She knew a band from Leeds called Esmerelda’s Kite – of whom the singer would go on to become The Gentle Despite who released some fragile and beautiful songs on Sarah records. At the time finding the money to do it was difficult – but we made it back from the sales – she sold out [of the flexis – not to the man – if you get me] – by now her fanzine had changed its name – mutated to Shoot the Tulips instead. Whether this was a veiled reference to killing the Fat Tulips I do not know – although there where times I had a seething animosity towards them – borne out of no reason at all – but that was the independent scene. And I sold all of mine.

Jo hated the fact that I called the label Sunshine [in retrospect she was right] and when we got it back from the manufacturers it had three tracks as opposed to the two listed – so it was even better value for money. And then John Peel played it on the radio – Jo rang and said he was going to play the flexi – and we thought he’d play Esmerelda’s Kite – it sounded more garage – well to be honest it sounded much better – it had been recorded properly but we had forgotten that he had a son named William. I remember him introducing it and Paul and I just trying to tape it – it was weird to hear it on the radio. So we were walking tall the week after – indie giants of Brumby corner. After that it got picked up by some other European stations and even ended up in some charts.

Having John Peel play your record means he had to listen to it – make a decision and put in the show – those two hours a night when he put out the sounds of the underground for the fringed mass(ive).

I listened to him every night. Still he never gave us a session – despite the hundred of tapes we gave him.

But getting back to some sense of where I began. I wanted to take on ‘the man’ – and for a brief moment it felt like I could break him. Perhaps because I was yet to read to Marx and hadn’t quite understood that when you think you want a revolution – you can count me in but most people out. Because they want curfews and long sentences and quiet nights of compliance and restraint. They want to take fucking brooms to the streets and be state cleaners.

And watching McGee discuss the creation of Creation – it reminded me why some things mattered then.

But ultimately even McGee with all the right intentions killed it all.

The industry wins every time and I haven’t got the energy to become an industry. The Man don’t give a fuck. So here’s to fizzing and popping and warping and cracking – let’s start a flexi disc revival.

There are many things I would like to say to you [and you and you and you]

There have been thousands of words written about sounds. That imminent response to the music. That desire to share our thoughts with others. Or sell our thoughts. When I started my fanzine – I was 16 years old – feeling the world was ready to listen to my voice. There were those that read ‘em and those that writ ‘em. I in my youthful zeal wanted the world to know about the bands I liked – I wanted those bands to know that they were liked and in all of that came correspondence and shared dreams.

I remember putting the first ‘Get that Anorak Off’ together – not certain it would ever see the light of day but writing it nonetheless – because when you’re holed up in a dark northern world perhaps the primitives can add some brighter times to it all. And from that grew all this. The writing now I guess is a throwback to typed evenings about The Nivens or The Impossibles.

I would receive letters – tenfold through the box – from Sheffield, Rotherham, London and Derby. And sometimes a letter would wind its way to our Scunthorpe address postmarked New Zealand or Singapore. Those anoraks get worn around the world- and to have someone request a fanzine from another country felt exotic – we weren’t global connected by the technology – only by the pen and our shared understanding of The Brilliant Corners – Collin communicating from other worlds through a communal love of cheap guitars. I let him down to be honest – Collin was a charming, exciting, energetic young man – who ventured to these very shores – to study – to swallow the independent vibes. He rang me up – several times – and I was so far inside my love of the self – this club scene maaaan – that I never met the bloke. You know he’d taken time to write me a letter – about music and I never took the time to get on a bus and visit him in Huddersfield – it’s not on really. We could have talked about music for hours.

And I didn’t bother.

And one from a girl named Lucy. I let her down. And this post is the one where I say sorry – we’d communicated about this and that – about music that touched our hearts and fanzine writing and reading. She ventured to China – you can do that when you’re confident – or you do that to make you confident. And she sent me a fanzine – her fanzine – in a padded envelope – hand written – typed in places – and I still have it.

Our correspondence dry and fading.

I wish I could give it back to her – I don’t know where she is – but I should have made it up and put it out there – but the London life had curtailed friendship – as I fell in love with acid house. It isn’t a good enough excuse – it’s running away from responsibility. If only I had had a little more conviction back then instead of filling my poise with arrogance and wishful dreams of teenage romance. It takes guts to be gentle and kind and I was full of barbarism [it had most likely began at home] and that is not a state to be repeated, treated or re-heated.

So it still resides – in the envelope – all her expressions of excitement – locked down and going nowhere [fast]. I feel guilty about that – I feel guilty about lots of things but that one resonates at times. Because she trusted me to do it – and I didn’t.

I didn’t do it clean – I didn’t do it at all.

Aggi was another – all swirls and ink. She could write her heart on a page – all open and honest and beating to the sounds of the underground. I let her down too. All London trains and shared rooms as we made our way to The Pastels at the ULU. Where Ride played their first ever gig in London and she’s dragging me in from the bar to make me listen – and I’m talking rock n roll with Bobby G and being a shit host – I feel bad about that too. Perhaps I never professed to be a jingle jangle fey pop lover – but a little bit of common decency wouldn’t have gone amiss. Too much Thunderbird and fawning over myself.

You see gigs like the pastels united the fray. That simple response to rock n roll – without the posturing and posing. We weren’t looking for heroes – we just liked music. We like guitars that fed back, twanged and jangled. We liked singers who sang about simple things – but simple things that mattered. There was simply nothing else to be done. It was the love of the sounds and our fanzines allowed the magical connections to keep on firing. Music unites like that – so here’s to simple responses. I first heard The Pastels in the 1980s – this Scottish drawl over repetitive guitars. This DIY approach to POP – The Pastels were never twee – they often get held up as this overly fey group – but Stephen Pastel was a PuNK as the rest of ‘em. Their brand of pop – fizzed and chugged – it fell apart and fed back. It was independent.

And so was fanzine writing.

Fanzine writing was about connections – making friends through words and sometimes we were all looking for friends. So what has any of this to do with the music? I suppose that music whilst a solitary act of appreciation and aesthetics is a shared understanding – it’s a glance or a look – a smile or cheer in the right [wrong] direction.

And sometimes you should look people right in the face – right in their eyes.

I would now

And I would say sorry

And hopefully a tune would be playing that made everything that little bit easier.