Conform to Deform

Wesley Doyle Conform to Deform (2023)
It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare given the endless eulogisation of lesser musical entities and occurrences - jangly C86 bollocks, Britpop and here—have another fifty fucking essays about sodding Joy Division while we're on the subject. The Some Bizzare label tapped into something of which I was once very much a part, albeit at the molecular level, and was therefore of great importance to me when I was at the age of finding such things important.

Doyle avoids all the major problems of editorial bias by allowing those involved to speak for themselves, and so the story is told entirely as a series of quotations transcribed without additional comment. It could be argued that the book has been compiled rather than written, for what that may be worth, and given the flaring of tempers and associated drama which came to surround the label, it's easy to see why this was perhaps necessary. There may well be two sides to every story, and Stevo sure made a lot of people angry. On the other hand, I recognise many of the tantrums from hanging around at the World Serpent offices in the nineties, so I'm entirely familiar with noise weirdos getting the hump over unpaid royalties on a record that no fucker actually bought.

Anyway, this is a fascinating story of which I knew very little, despite owning more or less everything the label put out during its first decade; and it's also strangely depressing. I couldn't get enough of the book, and yet it was a massive relief when I came to the final page. I'm not sure I enjoy finding myself quite so immersed in the past, and in something to which I had such an intense connection; and it's uncomfortable reading nearly four-hundred pages of quotes, not least because the book doesn't appear to have been proofread at all and features more typos than your average print on demand magnum opus. In a sense, this seems ironically fitting given Some Bizzare's haphazard progress - one entertaining fuck up after another, albeit with the best of intentions.

It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare, but it's kind of a shame it had to be this.