reading matters 2: keeping it in the Family

Our Kid with a Rabbit Holed about the wacky world of the Young Wikipedians who are frenziedly  writing the second draft of music history.  (The first draft being the journalism that these shadowy aliased individuals cite and source).  Kieran's piece takes you inside the sausage-making process of how decisions get made on what is "real" and who deserves an entry.....

This reminded me of my own peek behind the curtain, when I was tipped off about in camera deliberations on whether hauntology was a real music genre or not: a discussion led, unbelievably, by someone whose Wiki-editor moniker was PhantomSteve, and who steered the cabal towards "consensus is to delete". 

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Over at the sporadic L.S. Trackhead, the mysterious blogger takes a rich 'n' ripe delve through the dense discography of Family. 

First time I ever did hear the group's name was from the lips of a recently acquired friend. Quite a bit older than me, Martin was incredulous - perhaps perturbed, or maybe offended -  that I had never heard of Family. Probably it felt like a whole world that he'd once inhabited as a young man and that was super-important  to him - it was disappearing, thanks to a new generation of ignoramuses indoctrinated to believe unquestioningly that the early '70s had been a virtual wasteland. 

So Martin snorted something scornful along the lines of "only one of the most important U.K. Underground bands of the late '60s,'early 70s'".  This was 1987, though, and I wonder now how could I have come across the name? Family =  surely one of the most spectacular examples of Dropped Away Syndrome, even more so than The Edgar Broughton Band, who in the Eighties still trod the boards and flickered in the corner of your eye as you perused the gig guide with its adverts for upcoming concerts. 

I promptly forgot about Family again until about a year later, when a musician friend made me a cassette, a guide to the lost treasures of the pre-punk era. And there they were: Family, represented by the off-kilter boogie of "Burlesque", which had actually been a modest chart hit I discovered much later (no doubt thanks to Wikipedia). 

I loved it and picked up the parent album Bandstand...  and then a few other records. 

But I never found anything quite as appealing as the hairy-palmed lurch of "Burlesque". Roger Chapman's voice is an acquired taste and especially in its psychedelic-era incarnation on Music In A  Doll's House, the phlegm-y rattle of that juddering vibrato is too pungent for my palate. L.S. Trackhead does write alluringly -  almost aromatically -  about the records, though. Enough to make me entertain another attempt on the urrrrv. 

This got to #4 in the hit parade during that pre-glam lull 

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Another post from "abstract cinema" fan John Coulthart of { feuilleton }, this one pointing to Doodlin', an old documentary that's resurfaced on YouTube about "visual music" pioneer Len Lye. 

Visual Music being a subject I recently posted on at Dreams, Built By Hand - resurfacing a lecture I did at the Tate Modern wouldyafuckinbelieve (a mixed anointing, in the event)

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Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has further reflections on the work of Mark Fisher - now turning to the big fat K-punk collection of bloggige, and looking initially at my preface and Darren Ambrose's introduction.

Stephen has just added another post about how, with some of the central writers in K-Punk's Pantheon, he's never read them or doesn't get on with them - and then the mystery of why some books touch us, some writers attract us, and but others don't. (Same here re. some Markfaves:  never read Spinoza, only read about 10 pages of Kafka, and am currently reading for the first time Margaret Atwood (specifically her Fisher-favored Oryx and Crake). (Which is  really absorbing but I'm not quite seeing as yet how it fits the K-punkian vision. Will have to go back to his chapter on it in The Weird and the Eerie, after I've finished the novel).  (I've also never quite seen the Kubrick-worship thing, despite the excellence of specific films. The Shining in particular elicits a big shrug from me. But each to their own god, eh?).

Earlier in the year, Stephen extended a similarly generous gaze towards Retromania, starting here. I always meant to blog some annotations to his annotations, but the moment escaped me.

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Circling back within the extended family to my own scribblings.... I did a liner note for the Superior Viaduct vinyl reissue of Flipper's debut album Generic Flipper. 

Despite buying the record at the time and playing it a great deal, I had never noticed the running joke of the pharmaceutical packaging until doing the essay....

Here's a review I did of the second album Gone Fishin' in 1987... I think the record had already been out a year or two by this point, but perhaps had only just become available in the U.K. for the first time as a domestic release. Who knows, and who cared - I certainly was not going to miss the opportunity to rave on account of a technicality like the record's release date. 

(Several months after the Flipper review I gushed about Saint Vitus's Born Too Late, unaware that it had come out a couple of years earlier - Reviewed Too Late, more like! . Except it was totally timely, given the massive surge in Sabbath-influence within underground rock.). 

Again, talk about not seeing what is right in front of your eyes, but I never fully clocked that the album packaging is designed so that you can cut out and assemble a cardboard model of Flipper's tour van, along with figures of each band member.  

Yes myopia aside, I was pretty fucking keen on Flipper. On my first visit to America, earlier in '87, I picked up a Flipper T-shirt. Here I am wearing it to that year's Melody Maker Party. 

I still have the T-shirt somewhere but alas am no longer skinny enough to wear it. 

Years later I finally saw Flipper in the flesh, when they played New York during the tour for their Def American comeback album American Grafishy. 

reading matters: bloggige roundup

Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs. 

At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle.  Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on YouTube that Matt recommends.

At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour. 

And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I didn't even know was a blog - Matt has a lovely recollection of favorite animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film).  

Fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard. 

Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Firmin and Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine. 

Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other cartoons-for-kids that Matt rates, such as Paddington. 

Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation lead to  outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology: 

"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination."

The old skool animators understood "the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life."

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And here's some more notable bits of recent reading:

Michaelangelo Matos at Beat Connection has a cool post on the New Romantics (which I blog about here)

Mark Richardson at Beauty Blew A Fuse has some sweet thoughts about Erik Satie, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin. 

Geeta Dayal gives the Adele Bertei book No New York an interesting mixed review at 4Columns. 

Doubling back to animation, John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about an animator I love, Piotr Kamler 

Me own flesh-and-blood, Kieran Press-Reynolds the Remorseless Writin' Machine has written about  twenty things since I last posted about their output.... But their most recent effort is this Rabbit Holed column on a genre that rejoices in the name Hardtekk and is all bound up with looksmaxxing and edits on TikTok etc. 

Over at The Quietus, Tim Burrows has a nice piece about the film he and Simon Poulter have made about Mark Fisher, titled We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (in which I appear briefly as a disembodied voice) 

Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has a post amusingly titled You Are Reading a Post About Making A Film About Mark Fisher - although at the time of writing he had yet to see the film, it's triggered by an article on Fisher and the doc at The Guardian. 

Promising new blogger Mister Magpie with a bunch of essays worth checking out, especially the one on Grouper. 

Neat post by musicologist Ethan Hein on The Band's "The Weight" - a song I loved as a child, oh-so-precociously recognised as different in atmosphere and gait from everything else on the radio (it was a medium-sized hit single in the UK, would you believe!). 

Talking about Canadians... as already noted at the Retromania blog, Split Infinities has a very interesting and evocative piece about Boards of Canada - written and posted shortly before, but now uncannily in synch with, the "are they returning or not" hoo-ha of recent days...  which deploys concepts like "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious".

Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates 

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Good lord, talking about nostalgia, as BoC inevitably involves...  this post is itself some kind of flashback to the olden golden days of blogging, when people linked each other and commented and kept the whole collective enterprise bubbling onwards in synergistic-symbiotic incestuous group-mind fashion... 

Well, not quite: I haven't coughed up much in the way of substantive commentary on most of these blogposts, but.... it's the thought that counts, eh? 

Books of Note

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... 

But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. 

There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. 

About which I offered: 

"Adele Bertei rips up the history of No Wave and starts again, recentering the women: fearless artists and confrontational performers who put body and psyche on the line. Written with feral elegance and a keen cinematic eye, this mash-up of memoir and cultural history feels like time travel: an entire era of the New York underground brought back to vivid life." 

No New York is out now on Faber & Faber,

Here is Bertei being interviewed by The Quietus's Elizabeth Wiet. 

Another is Daniel Dylan Wray's  Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty: A History of Independent Music in Sheffield 

About which I offered:

"From '70s postpunk through '80s synthpop to ‘90s bleep techno and beyond,  Sheffield has long been the U.K.’s unacknowledged capital for futurist pop.  Finally the city finds the champion it deserves in Daniel Dylan Wray. A rich blend of urban history and music chronicle, Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty tells in vivid detail the story of a place, a people, and a succession of innovative sounds that would change pop again and again."  

Groovy, Laidback, & Nasty is out in early May on White Rabbit 

And there is a third book deserving of your attention: Ben Cardew's Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs

That's out in late April on Jawbone Press

Here's an extract from Space Age Bachelor Pad Music at The Quietus to whet your appetite. 

Goodness me, I almost forgot - I have a book out that isn't called Still In A Dream, or at least, the paperback edition has just come out    

Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s

Still In A Dream - my new book, out June 18

 

"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'"

- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect

'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'

- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer

‘The alternative guitar rock of the late 80s was imaginative, expansive, experimental, and ultimately - and perhaps unexpectedly - proved to have a lasting impact on the way pop sounds in the 21st Century. Simon Reynolds was there, filing dispatches from rock's cutting edge: part-memoir of a lost world of music journalism, part critical analysis, Still In A Dream brings an important and exhilarating era vividly to life’

- Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynold's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity"

- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror

Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. On White Rabbit Books. 

It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's my most personal book and the one I had the most fun writing

The Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Lost Treasure from the Lost Generation: Fifty Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.

UK pre-order here. 

US edition out January 2027.

Spanish language version due from Caja Negra Editora. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

German version from  Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Turkish edition from Ayrıntı. Date TBA

Here's a Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

Here's more information / hype in the form of the official White Rabbit catalogue copy: 

Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.

Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.

A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly and lovingly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.

As is now traditional, there is a dedicated blog for the book, which will include footnotes and bonus material, as well as news about events and so forth. 

"Well you know my name is Simon"

Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. 

As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to early '70s, such that you could throw a stone in my school playground and it would likely bounce off two or three "Simons".

Apparently this is no longer the case, as Stephen reveals: Simon has dropped out of the Top 500 names in the UK for newborns. 

But once upon a time it was a defining Britboy's name. And made even more so by its incredible rarity as a first name in America. So when Mike Myers wanted to show off his command of English idiom and accent with a Saturday Night Live sketch about a little British boy, there was really only one name that the character could have *.

"Draw-rings" - immaculate pronunciation!

"Don't look at my bum! I don't look at your bum! Bum-looker ! Cheeky monkey!"

Didn't realise the theme tune for the sketch is based on this 1974 cartoon series whose existence I have no recollection of... 

*  Actually, there's a probably a few other contender names: Toby. Gary...  

Update 1/19: Stephen Alexander with a Mary Shelley-like fantasy about "the Monstrous Creation of the Fourth Simon"