Rub Me Out

The Shend Rub Me Out (2021)
Legend has it that the Cravats originally had eighteen or nineteen members, and the Shend was formed by welding them all together, or at least the ones which weren't either Rob or Yehudi Storage-Heater. I'm here assuming that you know who the Cravats are, but if not I'm sure there must be some way by which you might fill this comically massive fucking gap in the apparently miniscule storehouse of your knowledge; although there's also a chance you'll recognise the Shend from almost every British TV show ever made. He's menaced both Alan Partridge and Robin Hood, delivered washing machines in The Bill, shared cheese and onion crisps with Gary Lineker - the whole gamut. I actually know a family who sit down in front of the telly to play spot the Shend of an evening. I'm not even joking.

I wasn't going to bother with this because it's a collection of lyrics and I have all the records, and the lyrics are clearly enunciated on those records, and song lyrics don't need to be reproduced in a book because printing them in a book doesn't turn them into poetry - even before we take into consideration that most poetry is wank. Happily, it turns out that the Shend seems to share this view, and even says as much in Rub Me Out, which is itself justified by incorporating a wealth of observations and semi-autobiographical material to accompany each song. So it's sort of like one of those Simon Morris tomes comprising anecdotal lists of favourite hair metal acts copied and pasted from his facebook page, but without either the sneering, the copying, the pasting, or attendant claims of having been the greatest living writer.

The Shend, for those who don't know and who didn't scurry off to Google during the first paragraph, is - for the sake of argument - a sort of Star Trek transporter accident involving Frank Sidebottom, Vivian Stanshall and Tristan Tzara, or at least these are names brought to mind by his characteristically peculiar narrative voice which belongs to the grand English tradition of surrealist subversion whilst taking in Midlands schoolboy slang. This means he's massively entertaining on record, wireless, and social media, but approaching three-hundred pages of this stuff - admittedly with pictures and guest contributions - is initially unsettling, like it doesn't quite sit right on the page. Well, it does, but it took me a while to get used to turns of phrase which would seem twee coming from almost anyone else, combined with a certain tendency to apologise for having failed to write a proper book. The term rufty-tufty is used a number of times, and stonkathon appears on page 239. It's the sort of phraseology I associate with the legacy of Richard Stilgoe; except, this being the Shend, I doubt he actually gives a flying one and is simply keeping himself amused, which is what saves the enterprise. Simon Morris wouldn't have been caught dead describing anything as rufty-tufty, which is sort of why the Shend gets away with it, and why this book - shambolic though it may be in certain respects - does nothing but underscore the potency of his candidacy for the title of greatest living Englishman. As with all his works, you just have to hang on and assume it will make some sort of sense by the time the needle lifts from the centre of the record, which it kind of does, even with Jam Rabbits.

It's probably not the autobiography that at least some of us have been waiting for without quite realising it, but it does something in that direction, at least explaining the mystery of Grimetime and why a few of those songs turned up on subsequent Cravats albums. I liked Grimetime, but they felt a bit ordinary for anything featuring the Shend, and it turns out that it wasn't just me after all.

Rub Me Out is an odd book, not quite like anything else I've read - which could be said of much of the Shend's body of work - which is its great strength. Therefore hoorah, as the man says.

The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis The Rachel Papers (1973)
It's a coming of age novel, according to someone or other, probably the late Simon Morris. Our teenager is Charles Highway, and the title refers to a folder full of notes he compiles in preparation for seducing someone called Rachel. I assume the compilation of said notes is therefore an immature enterprise from which Charles is liberated once he gets to knob the aforementioned Rachel; and it's a load of musings on paper, just like a book - so that's all a bit postmodern, I guess.

The thing is, nice idea though it may well be, it's difficult to say whether the correlation of Charles' presumably creepy notebook actually makes much difference to the subsequent penetration of Rachel, or even to anything at all. Whilst I violently reject the insipid notion that a novel should include sympathetic characters, it usually helps if you don't actively hate those featured, and Charles just seemed like your average over-moneyed Oxford-bound Hooray Henry, inhabitant of a world of braying wankers to which I have never been granted access. I found it not only difficult to care what happens to the twat, but even to be amused, or to find much of a point to this novel having been written in the first place. Everyone drifts through their slightly privileged existence, from cradle to grave without consequence, idly marvelling at their own progress from time to time as though lacking any idea as to why any of it is happening; all seasoned with descriptions of it going in and out, complete with smells, which I'm sure impressed the hell out of Simon but did bugger all for me.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. It's about fifty billion miles from being the best. It's just there, keeping you busy for a couple of hours with its underwhelming and ever so slightly smartarsed wisecracks.

Dead Babies

 

Martin Amis Dead Babies (1975)
I'm still trying to work out who or what the title refers to. So far I have the possibility that these babies are all, like, dead inside, man; or it's Keith Whitehead who, being a chubby dwarf, may be seen to have the appearance of a baby; or it's the emotional neoteny of everybody concerned; or it's something to do with the spunk flying in all directions, not many of which are conducive to procreation - shorthand, I suppose, for wank, inadvertently suggesting that the book reviews itself; or it's all of these. Nobody fucking knows. I seem to recall a couple of actual dead babies and the term is used as a slightly bewildering expletive by a couple of the characters, but that seems too obvious a correlation given these being of no greater consequence than any of the other routinely transgressive occurrences passing along on Brucie's literary conveyor belt without anybody really caring one way or the other.

Dead Babies describes a house full of Hooray Henries and prototype Sloane Rangers, mostly over-moneyed sixties burnouts, getting shitfaced and screwing each other in a variety of increasingly baroque configurations with no clear separation as to how much of it is hallucinatory. They're all irredeemably horrible, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Keith, and much of the novel reminds me of dismal eighties parties where I spent most of the evening trying to avoid the attentions of some speeding fucknugget determined to lecture anyone who would listen about either Jim Morrison or William sodding Blake. Also, there's gratuitous animal abuse for some reason or other.

Of course, it's beautifully written and is as such sort of compelling, but I still have no idea as to what end or what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I can see why the late Simon Morris was a fan to the point that I found myself unconsciously awaiting narrative punctuation from a list of Dr. Hook's ten greatest albums, but it left me as cold as almost all J.G. Ballard I've ever tried to read, and I get the impression ol' Jimmy may have been an influence to some extent. The aforementioned Simon Morris described Amis' London Fields as a pointless narrative that's like a joke without a punchline, while London Fields strikes me as the much better book, like Dead Babies done right, written by someone who wanted to write a book rather than just wave his dobber in your face for a couple of hundred pages. I expect Kenneth Clark would have described Dead Babies as absolutely ghastly - due to that doubtless being Marty's intention - and I'm inclined to share that view. In televisual terms it's Abigail's Party repopulated with the cast of Lindsay Anderson's If… without the nuance of either, the written equivalent of those bloody awful Allen Jones paintings of boobs squozen forth between rubber straps.

The tragedy is that I can't even bring myself to hate it. I've read much, much worse, and Dead Babies is just kind of dull but for the poetry of its composition. I suppose it would be a very boring world if we all liked the same thing.

Spring Rain, Summer Heat

Josh Peterson Spring Rain, Summer Heat (2020)
To kick off with a characteristically self-indulgent preamble, some time ago I painted a provisional cover for one of my own efforts. The novel is called Early Morning and features, among other things, a couple of patchwork men made from bits of other people and thus loosely resembling the Universal Pictures version of the Frankenstein monster. The cover painting depicted the two of them posed in arbitrary homage to David Bailey's well known portrait of the Kray twins. Some writer was asking me about Early Morning, so I showed him the painting.

'Duality,' he said. 'Interesting.'

It struck me as one of the most gormless observations which has ever been made about anything I've done; and I have an uncomfortable suspicion that my reaction to Josh Peterson's two previous works may amount to more or less the same thing, words offered in the hope of it seeming as though you've understood something when actually you don't have the first fucking clue.

Duality, my arse.

So I suspect I may be guilty of overthinking my response to Peterson's writing, where it isn't actually anything like so complicated as I apparently believed. Spring Rain, Summer Heat, much like the other two, is a memoir formed from Josh Peterson slicing open his own brain, pressing it against the scanning screen of a photocopier, hitting copy, and the book is what came out of the slot - memories scattered in order of significance - or something non-linear at any rate, mashed up together with their own analysis, then typeset in a sequence which makes emotional sense but specifically as a book, rather than anything subscribing to the usual logic of mind as a movie screen; which is why it's a book, obviously.

As to what the memoir is about - sex, drugs, rock and roll but not in any of the conventionally spectacular senses. It's more to do with communicating the experience than that which is experienced - if that's even an actual fucking sentence.

I've destroyed and deleted so many photographs, pictures and keepsakes as if they were evidence. Gone to a ridiculous length to ensure there were no backups and no trace was left in cases of items being burned et cetera. Not just to suppress those particular narratives, but to prevent myself from living vicariously through the past. And then compensating for this tic by writing about it.

Unless I'm still tipping my head to one side and smarming, duality - interesting, without even realising it, this seems to amount to an unapologetic self-portrait on the part of the author, answering how did I get here? and determinedly reluctant to fall for even his own bullshit. Some of the sex will doubtless trouble the squeamish, but everything here is more or less real by any definition that matters.

For some reason I got a lot more out of this one than Granite City Blues or Missing, although it could be that I've just become acclimated to how Josh Peterson writes, which is nice because he writes beautifully, and certainly more beautiful than you might expect given the drugs, the surgery, the piss, the bodily fluids, and impassive reportage of the same. Spring Rain, Summer Heat hints fairly heavily at the influence of Simon Morris - an association I'd apparently forgotten since the previous book - but, with apologies in advance to anyone who is likely to get the hump here, now does it much better for my money; or at least made me work harder for what has seemed greater reward. Additionally, it's massively refreshing - illuminating  even - to read about gender dysphoria as it occurs out here in the real world without having to wade through the usual rainbow unicorn bullshit and cult jargon; and if it isn't obvious, I'm saying this is a great book and that you need to read it.

Granite City Blues

Josh Peterson Granite City Blues (2019)
It took me a while to get settled with this one, if settled is really an appropriate term here. Josh Peterson writes the dense autobiographical narrative of an existence which endures despite poverty, degradation, meth, and kiddy fiddlers. It's transgressive literature if anything is transgressive literature, although I doubt Peterson - or indeed anyone with a brain - would be entirely happy with the categorisation. I have the impression that, having set up shop, Amphetamine Sulphate have become subject to all manner of unsolicited submissions from persons actively setting out to write transgressive literature, and I recall Mr. Best himself darkly muttering something about bad copies of Sotos. Anyway, Granite City Blues gets off to what initially seemed a poor start blending Peterson's somewhat forensic analysis with references to or quotations from Whitehouse, Burroughs, Sotos - your basic transgressive box ticking, then a run through of certain books or records - which Simon Morris did to better effect in his books; and it isn't that any of this is without value, or a point, or that snippets of insight don't come as part of the collage, but it feels somehow obvious - at least initially. The references are the sort of thing which, as I say, have worked for Simon Morris, possibly because Morris' narrative voice is a little more conversational with his motives better communicated. Here they are distracting, particularly embedded within such a dense monologue delivered with a cadence approaching that of a medical textbook. I was struggling, and if it's any indication of why, I found a 204 word sentence on page eighty-four.

That said, this opening section yields a fairly satisfying summary of two inspirational authors whom I assume to be respectively Peter Sotos and New Juche - neither directly identified presumably through Peterson wishing to avoid ticking boxes on the transgressive reading list which, if so, suggests that he's at least aware of the pitfalls. I've never read Sotos, so I'm not getting into that fucking argument, but for what it may be worth...

The former exudes a consistent acknowledgement of the pain of a life lived where the latter seemed to have found a natural talent at soothing it. The former has my respect more for being true to who they are (or were), rather than any boastful suppression of instinct; without which we'd lack the society from which these men allegedly transgress.

Anyway, as I say, such instances of anonymity seem to suggest a need to maintain a certain thematic purity, or at least that Peterson wasn't sat in some darkened room with just a candle and a Maurizio Bianchi album, frantically scribbling his descriptions of sexual acts previously seen only in Johnny Ryan comics, occasionally pausing to throw back his head and cackle, 'Just wait until those fools read this!' Indeed, when it comes to self-image, self-mythologisation, or any of that shite, Josh Peterson seems refreshingly lacking in ego.

There are some reading who may still be in possession of some of those trash samizdat that I self-published. I'm inviting you to piss on them. To photograph yourself or your girlfriends or your female friends or really whomever, pissing on them, so that I can clearly see both the person urinating and the target and the stream of urine.

Given this last point, I'm inclined to wonder whether the opening pages might not represent some kind of test, something to separate the wheat from the chaff; although it probably isn't anything quite so deliberate.

People act as if you actually want or choose to be whomever you are, when rather only a very small percentage of us ever accept and decide to enjoy the lack of options.

References to obscure authors, noise gigs and so on, tend to present an impression of an author speaking directly to a limited audience of personal acquaintances, maybe a circle limited to those who liked the last one on Goodreads; which is fine but makes it a frustrating, even pointless read for those of us outside the circle. However, once we're past the references to Whitehouse, the tone seems to shift towards something broader and which communicates one hell of a lot more, even if it isn't necessarily anything we're going to enjoy hearing. The sentences reduce to double figures, and Granite City Blues draws closer to the thing promised by its title as Peterson picks apart his own existence and attempts to make sense of it in moderately less clinical terms than I recall from Missing, or even from the first twenty or thirty pages of this one. He's thus far had an interesting life - in the Japanese sense of interesting - and one I'm fairly happy to read about as having occurred to someone other than me; and, as is probably obvious, adversity is nothing if not educational and so you could probably learn one hell of a lot from this book.

Peterson is almost the New Juche of shitty urban America in terms of understanding his environment and in being equipped to analyse it without arbitrary moralising; and there's even a brittle sort of poetry to his analysis. Regardless of the opening bars, this is a great book, possibly with greater to come, going by his present trajectory.

Sea of Love

Simon Morris Sea of Love (2019)
As lead singer of the Ceramic Hobs, I'm very happy to report that adventures and escapades are part of my daily routine, and I just had to write and tell your readers what happened to me the other day. We had just played a pop concert, and I was heading to the dressing room in happy anticipation of the usual entourage of leggy lovelies who follow us up and down the country. I opened the door, and imagine my surprise when…

Relax.

I'm joking, although I suppose that's how it will read to someone, somewhere. Whilst repeating certain themes - not least being the shagging - Sea of Love marks the continuing development of Simon Morris's writing. I wouldn't say there's necessarily more structure here, but the flow is more organic, more confident, and with less of the weird sticky out bits. He's always had plenty to say and he's getting better at saying it with each new title, to the point that this one approaches mainstream writing, although keeping in mind here that by mainstream I'm not really talking Da Vinci Code. We still have the incongruous listing of product as a springboard for memory, but at a reduced level of focus. My understanding of the work of Guns N' Roses was increased quite considerably by Civil War, whereas I'm still pretty much in the dark about the novels of James Herbert after reading this, which I mention so as to indicate shifting emphasis rather than as a criticism.

Sea of Love deals with relationships and is, again, loosely autobiographical. Vaguely knowing Simon, I think I know a few of the names tactfully omitted, although the knowledge doesn't make much difference to my understanding, such as it is, because this isn't Confessions of a Ceramic Hob.

My guess, or at least what I take from this book, is that it's about memory. The novels of James Herbert spark memories of youth and, by association, formative sexual fumblings, the sort of details which still blaze in the memory for having been recorded in such primary colours; and the history is echoed in the present day to the point of the past and present becoming the same thing, sort of. Once beyond a certain age, our early years come to resemble a foreign country and so require a more intense form of scrutiny through having sunk below the background noise of daily existence; and in being subjected to a much harder form of recall, they inhabit the present.

At least that's what I think is happening here, along with Morris's efforts to make something useful from the process.

Some children, maybe not all of us but many, do experience very strong and intense sexual feelings during childhood and one thing I cannot stand is any interference in this from adults. It is for children of a roughly similar age only. Attempted interference with it by generation after generation of bullying adult puritans on one side and the fucking paedophiles on the other. If we can even remember it properly it's almost impossible to talk about rationally. The memories come back and we push them away. 'My dreams are low and sick and must be addressed: they're a young girl's dreams.'

Despite elements which might preclude Sea of Love from publication as an extended letter to Fiesta, never mind anything with a gentle pink cover, the tone of the book is profoundly compassionate, much as it is with a good few of the other Amphetamine Sulphate books; which is something I'm not sure anyone could have predicted this time two or three years ago. This imprint has transcended the horror and novelty we might have anticipated and is becoming something quite vital, and something which at least suggests the history of literature is far from over; and Simon Morris's books - admittedly possibly by virtue of numbers as much as anything - seem to exemplify this most. His progression has been such that I can hardly wait to see where he ends up next.

Specialist Fabricator

Gary Mundy Specialist Fabricator (2018)
With the publication of Specialist Fabricator, I noticed a tiny nagging voice in the back of my head pointing out how it sure looked a whole lot like Philip Best had taken to squeezing books out of all his old power electronics pals, logically implying that we probably wouldn't have too much of a wait for Merzbow's debut novella; it's an amusing idea, but one which is somewhat undermined by the quality of material which has issued forth from Amphetamine Sulphate over the last twelve months or so. Thus far we've had writings from members of Sleaford Mods, Ceramic Hobs, Pure, Skullflower, and of course Best has himself been known to tickle the ivories from time to time. Gary Mundy is the man behind Kleistwahr, Ramleh, and others, and Specialist Fabricator is fucking exceptional. I still find this correlation of literary ability with having been in noisy bands slightly puzzling, so I assume it's significant that we're talking about parallel creative avenues pursued by members of Ramleh, Pure and so on, as opposed to members of Ned's Atomic Dustbin or Coldplay. The sort of music we're talking about has always been way outside the mainstream, more about mood than notes, and extreme moods bound up in the kind of reactions rarely provoked by more traditional forms of art; so what I'm trying to say is that maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that power electronics - for want of a better term - translates so well into the written word, because it was always about more than summer fun and getting laid.

To start at the beginning, Ramleh always seemed to have some dimension beyond pure shock, a scrabbling at something which couldn't really be expressed by any other means, with horror and revulsion as an element of the whole - just one of the colours - more than an end in itself. Specialist Fabricator somehow maps the same territory by describing everything around the edge of the hole, and with particular veracity due to being sort of autobiographical, at least from one angle. Except it reads a little like the work of someone who hadn't really considered writing a book, and isn't quite sure how to go about it, which seems to be acknowledged in the apparent unreliability of the narrator. It's the kind of experiment which could have fallen to pieces, being a ponderous narrative weaving a path around a number of traumatic incidents which may or may not have occurred as described, but which at the end are revealed as integral to a profoundly solid text which only appears otherwise due to the exploratory theme of the whole. He's trying to make some sense of it all too. As with certain bits of Ramleh, it's never quite clear as to whether the noise is a scream, tinnitus, or simply deafening silence.

Amphetamine Sulphate have been at it for about a year, and their output has been astonishing - prolific whilst nevertheless maintaining the highest standards, no fuck ups or typos, no also-rans so far as I see; and Specialist Fabricator may even be the best yet, at least up there with Stupid Baby in going places you may not necessarily want to go, and breaking your heart in the process.

All this and only just into the second year.

Civil War

Simon Morris Civil War (2018)
Where Creepshots seemed to ramble, following its own train of thought while expecting the rest of us to keep up, Simon Morris' Civil War is a more obviously structured affair. Peculiarly, the structure is a sequential assessment of the work of Guns N' Roses, track by track, album by album considered in more depth than I thought possible. Sweet Child o' Mine was okay, although otherwise I never really warmed to Guns N' Roses. His vocals always made me think of some over the top caricature you might see on the Muppet Show, epitomised by that bloody awful version of knock knock knocking on heaven's dowowowowowowaaarrrrrrrgh; but it doesn't matter because their back catalogue provides the perfect structural backbone across which Morris has pinned a forensic dissection of his own destructive and doomed relationship with a recent partner. It probably wouldn't have worked so well nailed to the discography of someone a bit more bleeding obvious, a bit more likely to appeal to persons such as myself.

The Civil War of the title seems to occur on all fronts, author against girl, audience, himself, readership, human civilisation - sad, violent, inevitable, but educational on some level, or at least it makes for a weird and fascinating read because even if the rest of us haven't been there, we've probably been somewhere similar whether or not we have the honesty to admit as much. There are a lot of raw nerves here, and at one point the book even describes itself as revenge pornography, which seems a little masochistic given that no-one comes out of it too bad and there are no names mentioned - although it probably wouldn't take too much detective work to deduce who Morris is writing about. As for pornography, Civil War occasionally invokes the subject without actually being pornography as I would recognise it, and while this aspect may make for uneasy reading in certain respects, it's really only the dark stuff we all have tucked away somewhere but choose not to express; and there's a refreshing honesty about the reportage of squelchier, weirder, occasionally more stomach-churning acts mentioned in passing and serving as markers defining the boundaries of the ordinary rather than as anything over which you might be expected to squeeze one out - and I offer that sentence on the assumption of it actually meaning something. I don't think he's necessarily expecting the rest of us to get turned on by the more aggressive material.

Civil War is a fucking powerful book, not least because this time it's very clear that Morris is in charge of the flow of images, that he knows what he's doing rather than simply channelling; and it's therefore probably his best yet. If you want to see what the world really looks like, walk right to the edge and turn around - and that's exactly what he's done here. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn something.

While we're here, initial orders of the above came with a copy of Personal Ads, an Amphetamine Sulphate title available only to mail order subscribers and not actually for sale. No author is credited but it's clearly a collaboration between Simon Morris and Gabi Losoncy and is as such mentioned in passing in Civil War. It's a game of consequences or exquisite corpses, roughly speaking, played with personal ads written in the style of those found in swinging mags - so I'm told - reading in parts like a peculiar mash up of Chris Morris and William Burroughs. My favourite sentence begins, Nasty uncle forgot to buy toilet paper again…
 

Personal Ads probably isn't essential, but if you happen to see a copy anywhere, grab it.

Slabs from Paradise

Jason Williamson Slabs from Paradise (2017)
This is the third I've read from Amphetamine Sulphate - arguably the star turn in so much as that it's the work of himself of international hitmakers, the Sleaford Mods, but feeling strangely mainstream after Captagon and Creepshots. Both books felt as though there was a lot going on just behind the narrative, whereas Paradise is very much up front and direct by comparison. In fact, these five short tales - although I'm not sure tales is quite the word given its invocation of something cosy experienced whilst drinking cocoa - these five short tales would be kitchen sink drama in the tradition of Sillitoe were it not for the coke and dogging.

It probably won't come as much of a surprise that these stories exude the same gleeful desperation as you hear on any Sleaford Mods record, and only the emphasis is slightly different. There's a lot more sex, a bit more violence - at least spiritually - and roughly the same quota of slate grey romance. Williamson expertly captures those aspects of working class existence which resist shoehorning into tastefully distressed high definition television shows - the stench, the endless disappointment, and having to get on with it despite daily punches in the face. Not for the first time, his writing reminds me of several decades spent working for Royal Mail and Parcel Force - which wasn't so much fun as you might think - minus the coke and dogging in my case. Slabs from Paradise speeds up all the misery and the futile wanking to breakneck pace, which isn't pretty, but probably needs to be recorded for the sake of posterity so that future generations looking back don't end up with the impression that it was all probably a bit like one of those shows which tries too hard on Channel 4. It's painful and intense, and very much in your face, which is probably why it's a good thing that these Amphetamine Sulphate books are all so short. Any more would be too much.

Creepshots

Simon Morris Creepshots (2017)
For anyone who didn't notice, Simon Morris has been the driving force behind the Ceramic Hobs for the last couple of decades, and in case that doesn't help much*, the Ceramic Hobs were described as the last true punk band - although I can't remember where or by whom, possibly Robert Dellar - beyond which there's probably not much point trying to quantify them or even describe their sound. The Oz Oz Alice album sounded like ELO fed into a blender, or at least it did to me, a simile which I offer as a recommendation for both the record and as a means of preventing further crimes against music on the part of Jeff Lynne.

I mention this principally as an indication of where Simon Morris is coming from, because otherwise this isn't one of those guy in a band writes book deals. He's not fucking about here.

Creepshots takes the form of a lengthy letter addressed to someone called Ecka, rambling autobiographically from one train of thought to another in the manner of a stream of consciousness, but more lucid and with a greater sense of purpose even if the thrust of that purpose isn't exactly clear. He's following strands of memory around the inside of his head, trying to make sense of them, and so there's a strong element of the confessional, and not so much a sense of regret as reassessment, almost of disbelief at having been through all this and come out in one piece without turning into an arsehole; and not turning into an arsehole means something given the history of death, shit, madness, betrayal, drugs, and squelchy transactions in bondage clubs reported without the sensational tone you might get from someone who was just making this stuff up. Without having any particular mission, Creepshots seems to be mostly about the gap between that to which we aspire and the unfortunate sweaty reality, expressed most vividly in the middle section contrasting self-involved art gallery bullshit with grinding homelessness. Without having any particular mission, at least not so far as I can tell, Creepshots gives you one fuck of a lot to think about - as opposed to just making the right sort of noises - being written with the kind of intimacy which sucks the reader right into the author's head and has us looking out upon the most awkward and uncomfortable parts through his eyes; then concluding with a prelude to its own publication which nails everything to the real world, as in the one we're all lounging around in at this very moment.

That made sense in my head, but some of the content appears to have settled during transposition from brain to page. Easier just to read the thing, I suppose. Ecka may be some vaguely Biblical recipient of important letters, although Google's identification seems unusually vague, and for something which spends quite a lot of its page count getting drunk with minor members of the Fall, Creepshots feels similarly important because such graphic honesty is rare and is seldom expressed so well, and with so little vanity or showboating. Yes, I liked it a lot.

Available yonder.

*: There's an interview with himself on this very subject in the latest issue of The Derek 'chucking a guitar down a fire escape' Bailey Appreciation Charivari the Wire (issue 408, February 2018) which - coincidentally - used one of my photos without asking, cheeky fuckers.

Consumer Guide

Simon Morris Consumer Guide (2016)
Simon Morris is the vocalist and - so far as I can tell - principal creative drive behind the Ceramic Hobs, a sort of Dadaist rockabilly band with whom you will be familiar if you've ever come into contact with the Mad Pride movement. I suppose you might also call him a raconteur, at least based on Bang Out of Order - a novella as fanzine about an imaginary version of the power electronics scene which I now deeply regret having sold on eBay - and the material he regularly secretes upon facebook and the like. Anyway, we may as well call him a writer because someone at Tegenaria Press enjoyed his writing enough to commission this, which is nice.

I've actually already read about half of the essays assembled here, but it's not a problem as there's something quite different about reading them as part of this collection. Aside from the obvious aesthetic appeal - just one hundred numbered copies of this lovingly produced hardback - the assemblage of this material brings out a personal quality I never noticed whilst picking this stuff out from amongst the digital detritus of Donald Trump, Kanye West and dresses which might be black or possibly blue.

Consumer Guide is autobiographical, although the lion's share of the page count is taken up by a series of annotated lists. The lists include overviews of the oeuvre of various bands, writers, film makers, artists, and so on, then lists of favourite pubs, drinks, and even just relationship tips. There's no really obvious progression or logic beyond these subjects being what Morris felt like writing about at the time. Some of it I skipped - although I should probably stress that I refer here to a page count in single figures - due to it seemingly having derived from a period during which Morris was channelling Mojo magazine - Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Morrissey, Jimi Hendrix, Sonic Youth, Lou bastard Reed - almost surprised that he missed out Rod Stewart and ELfuckingO; although to be fair, he finds something interesting to say about even the most militantly beige of their brethren. He also writes on Skullflower, Consumer Electronics, and his own band, most of which is fairly engrossing. Then there's the air-punchingly cathartic Your Favourite Band Are Shit which correctly identifies Billy Bragg, Primal Scream and other deserving sacred cows as the irredeemably useless wankers they are, and for which I happily forgive the author his banging on about Morrissey and Sonic Youth elsewhere.

This probably makes Consumer Guide sound a little like Steve Lowe and Alan MacArthur's Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? - nice try but still just one of those books you keep next to the toilet - but it really, really isn't. Whether dissecting obscure noise albums or comparing books written about the Moors murderers, the Morris testimony feels a lot like autobiography, something akin to mapping a room by describing its contents. It feels very much like a complete work, despite the scattered origination of the material, and might even be read as though we're following some kind of narrative. You might even call it educational.

There's not be much point trying to find a copy of this now as I understand the limited run to have sold out, but hopefully this spring will yield more of its like.

Follow this link for Tegenaria Press.