Junk Mail

Will Self Junk Mail (2006)
I'm still not quite able to process some of the opprobrium levelled at this guy, much of which seemingly amounts to he ain't one of us, he's from a posh school and he uses all those big words to look clever but he ain't. The most coherent version of this argument, at least that I've found, seems to be something about how we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as a dangerous anti-establishment figure when actually he writes for the Observer and once consumed heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; ergo what mugs we are! I suppose it's an argument of sorts, although it prompts the question of just who you do regard as a dangerous anti-establishment figure - Alan Moore? Stewart Home? Doctor Who? Some guy in a fucking band? Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? One might just as well argue that we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as Batman's nemesis and the scourge of Gotham City for all the sense it makes.

Failure to creep into the Houses of Parliament clutching a large sphere of black metal with a fuse and BOMB printed on the side notwithstanding, Self's writing, even with all of those long, difficult to understand words, is rarely less than astonishing, illuminating whatever subject he's chosen to pick apart with such high definition focus of intent and meaning as to make the journalistic norm appear somewhat impressionist; which is what makes him such a delight to read, almost regardless of subject. It's rare to come across arguments so well defined. Junk Mail assembles journalistic pieces from newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and even British Airways' slightly ludicrous High Life freebie, but the themes benefit from a similar focus to that which informs Self's fiction, or at least his satire given that it doesn't seem entirely fair to call it fiction considering the escapist connotations of the term. The only major difference is that the writing in Junk Mail is less one layer of allegory compared to My Idea of Fun, How the Dead Live and so on, and here we actually get to meet Traci Emin, Morrissey, Andrea Dworkin and others in person, and get to understand them a little better than we might have done otherwise. He even somehow manages to make Liam Gallagher and Damien Hirst seem marginally less twatty.

Anyway, while it's debatable whether or not Self cuts a dangerous anti-establishment figure - pretending for the sake of argument that it's even a meaningful term - he nevertheless succeeds in seeing through the bullshit of modern existence, and communicating what he's seen in a form which reaches a wide audience, even if it's maybe not quite so wide an audience as dangerous anti-establishment rebel leader Luke Skywalker in all those Star Wars samizdat movies. Even if you have to look up a few long-haired words here and there, Self's writing will always reward anyone making the effort, and for something vaguely amounting to cuttings swept up from the studio floor, this may even be one of his best. Additionally there's the bewildering accusation of arrogance, presumably once again founded on the use of words we might have to look up in a dictionary; and it's bewildering because Junk Mail is nothing if not self-effacing - literally, come to think of it - and the fact of the man's writing having personality is never allowed to obscure whatever he's writing about. Even where dark and harrowing, the clarity of this man's testimony is, as always, a joy to read.

I Thought Solihull Was For Snobs

Paul Panic I Thought Solihull Was For Snobs (2015)
I'll always have room for one more punky history book, despite having read some fairly shitty efforts over the years. This effort comes from some bloke who was singer for the Accused. You may not have heard of the Accused and I suppose they might be deemed insignificant in the great scheme of things. They failed to tickle the grown-up charts, but Peel played them, and it sounds like anyone who ever saw them live probably had a decent time, or failing that a memorable one. I myself had heard of them, although I can't quite remember where; but this looked interesting, not least because it details what was going on at the edge of my world, Shipston-on-Stour where I lived when I was growing up as the seventies turned into the eighties. I was about three years behind this lot but there's plenty of common ground.

Could have used an editor, I thought flicking through as it turned up in the mail, picking up on a certain tone and some wacky punctuation of a kind which normally gets on my tits; but it was just a fleeting impression, and is revealed as redundant by firstly the disclaimer of the book having been written in true DIY punk spirit with the author making no apologies for bad grammar, slang, self-indulgence, attitude, bad memory recall, or lack of writing skills; and secondly by the book itself. It's always a pleasure to read any history of any aspect of punk which doesn't waste either pages or brain cells on idiots like Malcolm McLaren, or banging on about Situationism or the sodding Sex Pistols boat trip or boring New York poetry circles; so this one scores highly with me because it really gets to what it was all about, right there on the shop floor with the sheer excitement of forming a band regardless of playing ability, of staying up to catch Peel, of being young and realising there's more to life than the shite Dave Lee sodding Travis was playing on the radio. In fact, this is probably one of the better books I've seen written about punk - at least up there with Stewart Home's Cranked Up Really High, and at the opposite end of the scale to the pointless photographic paving slab written by that knob from Blue Rondo a la Twat.

On a more personal note, it's also kind of thrilling to read something making intimate reference to so many parts of my own teenage landscape - Birmingham and Solihull having been the big bad city for me, Look Hear presented by a young Toyah Willcox, Coventry's Alternative Sounds fanzine, gigs at the Mermaid and Fighting Cocks, bands such as the Photos getting noticed; and there's even a couple of more direct connections - as a paper boy I used to deliver the Daily Telegraph to the home of one of the Ideal Husbands, and then I used to write to David from Urge when he moved to Holland and started recording as Scram Ju Ju, and Jesus - the fanzines I used to churn out back in the nineties were even printed at the same place that did this book. The list could go on but probably shouldn't, and doesn't really even relate to why I found this such a cracking read.

It probably doesn't matter if you weren't there, because Paul Panic was, and he communicates the whole thing as a sort of universal experience which probably wouldn't work half so well had he adopted a more formal tone. What you get has the conversational rhythm of tales related in the pub by a natural wit, so even when he wanders off on some peculiar tangent, it all seems to work and hold together. The account of stuffing forty or fifty friends, fans, and band members in the back of a tiny van and driving them down to Weymouth for a disastrous gig is probably worth the cover price alone, and should be savoured before someone turns it into a self-consciously cute film with Bandersnatch Cucumber and gets it all hopelessly wrong.

Network News

Nigel Ayers Network News (2009)
Fourteen issues of Network News appeared between 1990 and 1999, an A5 newsletter of twenty or so pages on average and featuring whatever Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions had fixated on at the time - essays he'd written, or just incoherent notes, jokes, observations, letters he'd been sent, occasionally dismissive one sentence reviews of fanzines and tapes, and a few postal interviews conducted with pals. This probably won't make Network News sound particularly promising, and even in its day it seemed a slim, variable effort, something appearing sporadically in one's mailbox prompting raised eyebrows rather than unalloyed excitement. It looked like a parish magazine or something run off on a duplicator, and even the newspaper cuttings had been retyped so as to blend with the rest of the text. Most of this can be attributed to Nigel Ayers most likely not giving a shit about competing with Re/Search or Music from the Empty Quarter or whatever, and to Network News being compiled in accordance with his fairly singular vision.

And now here they all are again for anyone who might be interested, collected as a lavish Lulu paperback preserving the original tiny and not always legible print, all the obsolete contact information, and the parish magazine aesthetic of the original newsletters. Woohoo, I hear you say.

Well, as it happens, Nigel Ayers has long been one of the more interesting figures loosely associated with weirdy music, and he's never been lacking in wacky ideas even if his methods of communicating those ideas may sometimes seem wilfully obscure. Consequently I'm pleasantly surprised at how well this material communicates something or other in this collected format, at least in comparison to the original sporadic drip of material. I say something or other because I feel neither sufficiently knowledgeable nor pompous to invoke the term psychogeography with impunity, although for the sake of argument, that is more or less the thrust of what we have here. Much of Ayers concerns throughout the nineties seem to have been to do with the reinvestment of humanity as connected to the land it inhabits, physically, culturally, and spiritually - and specifically as something in opposition to the forces of law, order, capital, and tedium. These concerns were expressed as lengthy and occasionally confusing articles about the Beast of Bodmin, geological zodiacs, symbolism, art, Cornish antiquity, Lady Diana Spencer, and generally causing trouble; and it is possibly due to the strength of Ayers occasionally wandering focus that Network News can be read as a more or less single body of work with consistent themes. Although the last two issues - let's call them chapters thirteen and fourteen for the sake of argument - are overtly written as either fictional or autobiographical accounts, they also seem to draw upon and summarise much of what what has gone before; so if it's not quite like reading a novel, it's not that far off, and is actually a little closer than at least a few of the things Burroughs labelled as such. I suppose it would be at least fair to say that we're in Stewart Home territory, roughly speaking, which is weird for me because I know a few of the people in here; in fact, even some of my own self-published crap gets a mention, and I'm pretty sure none of us were aware of being fiction at the time, excepting possibly the Muslimgauze bloke who comes across as a bit of a nutcase, quite frankly.

I suppose what you have here - and this results in part from even the newspaper cuttings having been retyped so as to present everything in the same font - are big blocks of raw, seemingly disparate information jammed together in sequence without much to differentiate one from the other, no preamble or justification, and certainly nothing along the lines of how this week our Nigel takes a wry look at ancient brewery lore in the Peak District. One subject switches rapidly to another, even ending mid-sentence or recurring as a previous page is duplicated - possibly not on purpose - thus creating a sort of information texture with interference formed from the conflicting patterns of an article about McDonalds jammed up against one about stone circles, for one example. What this amounts to is that the collected Network News presents a surprisingly rewarding and often very funny read, certainly more so than one might expect of a title probably doomed to sit on shelves next to tedious histories of industrial music written by people who weren't there. On the strength of this, I sort of wish he'd have a go at something which is more obviously a novel.

Stop yourself and buy one here.

Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle (1967)
This one has been on my mind for a few months now, but it was re-reading Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go which brought it to the top of the pile, there being some major themes shared by the two.

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by intangible as well as tangible things, which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

Which might be deemed to account for:

'I just think it's dangerous, that's all,' Valentine tried to explain, although he suspected he wasn't going to make much of an impression. 'You know there are kids now who grow up copying the TV ads? That's just, you know... how they see themselves. They don't want to be like people, they just want to be like the characters in the ad breaks. That's how they want to look and dress and... everything.'

Debord and the Situationist International came to my attention through a series of articles in Vague magazine, way back whenever the hell that was - not particularly engrossing articles, and Vague spent way too much time banging on about the sodding Sex Pistols Jubilee boat trip and Genesis P. Orrible, but I apparently absorbed enough for a few of the basic ideas to sink in; at least enough for connections to be made when The Apostles released their Smash the Spectacle EP - possibly the greatest punk rock record ever committed to vinyl - and when Will Self, Alan Moore, and Stewart Home all began dabbling in psychogeography.

Society of the Spectacle is, I suppose, an expansion of certain ideas generally associated with Karl Marx, although it could be argued that the Situationist International itself was as much about art as politics, or at least philosophy. Marx himself developed a fairly profound understanding of the mechanism by which society works to the point that ideology may seem a slightly limited term when applied to the larger body of his ideas. Marxist analysis might itself be deemed to go beyond politics, or at least party politics, and in many cases serves to explain the mechanism of society, and particularly capitalist society, and as such may as well be regarded as a soft science. Debord expands and refines Marxist analysis as it applies to the increasingly media-driven world of the 1960s and beyond; and for the most part it seems so well observed as to be alarming in so much as it's hardly a rosy picture which is painted; but then it is almost certainly better to understand a problem than not, particularly if we are ourselves a part of that problem.

Debord suggests that human society, with so few exceptions as to make no difference, must be viewed as spectacle, the spectacle being a representation of that society, specifically not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images - consensus reality, if you prefer, in which everything is defined as commodity. As consumers of commodity, we are separated by the spectacle, deprived the possibility of the common experience which would allow for contemplation of anything external to the spectacle. It's a fairly simple idea, and yet it's surprising how difficult it can be to truly express all of its subtleties. Debord did well, although Society of the Spectacle does require that one pay attention. I found some of the later points mystifying, although online testimonials seem to suggest this edition printed by Black & Red of Detroit might not be the best translation available.

The Situationist International could be viewed as an artistic response to the spectacle, a sort of derailing through acts falling somewhere between the Dadaist and the revolutionary which, distancing themselves from established and traditionally rational artistic narratives, defy commodification and strive to expose the spectacle for what it is, or summink. Debord's book is therefore a description of the territory, or even the canvas, and is as such an analytical rather than creative tool in respect to the more definably artistic currents of the movement.

The problem with all this is of course that the spectacle by its inherent nature reduces everything to commodity, including that which sets itself against the spectacle; and so the revolution is televised, and probably on pay-per-view, and thus rendered as sterile as that against which it was initially opposed:

Spectacular consumption which preserves congealed past culture, including the recuperated repetition of its negative manifestations, openly becomes in the cultural sector what it is implicitly in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable. The flagrant destruction of language is flatly acknowledged as an officially positive value because the point is to advertise reconciliation with the dominant state of affairs - and here all communication is joyously proclaimed absent. The critical truth of this destruction - the real life of modern poetry and art - is obviously hidden, since the spectacle, whose function is to make history forgotten within culture, applies, in the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means, the very strategy which constitutes its core. Thus a school of neo-literature, which simply admits that it contemplates the written word for its own sake, can present itself as something new.

It has been pointed out by its critics that the Situationist International is itself only a commodity and Situationism now amounts to flash mobs and hidden camera shows. This reduction of signal to noise can be seen in examples like that of psychochronography, the invention of a Doctor Who fan and self-published author who presumably decided that the Situationist concept of psychogeography held just the right sort of pseudo-intellectual weight to be applied to analysis of a children's television serial. Psychogeography being the deduction of narrative from physical space, the premise of psychochronography is therefore inherently absurd, purporting to deduce meaning from that which already exists exclusively as meaning, which not only leaves us with yet more overreaching spectacular juvenilia we really don't need, but serves to further clog up cultural bandwidth by the reduction of analysis itself to mere packaging.

None of this should make any difference to that which is observed in the Society of the Spectacle providing one is able to read without too much crosstalk of the kind described above; and I would suggest that as analysis it remains as relevant as ever; and whilst I see no value in placing Debord's book on a pedestal, it should be read, and it deserves better than to be remembered as a footnote to lesser works.

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Michael Moorcock The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)
I spent several 1970s summers biking around to my friend Sean's house in the neighbouring village. We would have been about eleven or twelve and I can't recall what we got up to, although I'm fairly certain it involved the duck pond, nicking sweets from the local shop, swapping things, and taking the piss out of Sean's little sister because she was a girl. For an entire summer our soundtrack was Sean's Wombles album, Remember You're A Womble played over and over until we'd ground it down into a flexidisc; the next summer it was 'Something Else' by Sid Vicious, which appealed to me because I had a hunch I probably wasn't supposed to like it, and just like Orinoco and Wellington, the artist was an animated character, or so it seemed from the cover - actually a still from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

The story doesn't really add up due to the five years dividing  The Wombles' heyday and Sid's posthumous career, but I guess that's childhood memories for you. The important point, if there is one, would be something in the vague direction of the assertion made by Stewart Home in Cranked Up Really High that punk at its best was novelty rock. This is why, three decades later, even squares remember the Sex Pistols whilst the more worthy snarlers of songs about Thatcher and bombs tend to have been forgotten, at least in so much as anything is ever forgotten in the twenty-first century.

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was a somewhat misjudged and enormously cynical film spun off from the brief career of the Sex Pistols, a supposedly post-modern commentary upon their success which missed the point that, beyond the somewhat clueless and entirely extraneous bullshit of one particularly talentless manager, the band and their music were just about the least cynical ripple to pass across the music industry pond for some time. The confusion may arise from a misconception of cynicism and pointing out when something is a bit shit as necessarily being the same thing; and I doubt it helped that this one band was so heavily mythologised in its day, all that banging on about Situationism and the sodding boat trip: sure the Sex Pistols were significant, and Never Mind The Bollocks is still my year zero, the point at which pop music became self aware and thus conscious of sometimes having turned up to school in the nude - a theory that admittedly probably doesn't stand up to close inspection; but significant or not, they hardly deserved all the smart-arsed conceptual baggage.

In the presumed spirit of Sue Catwoman action figures, Fatty Jones chocolates, and the Sid Vicious Family Album, someone noticed an unscraped patch at the bottom of the barrel and asked Michael Moorcock to write the book of the film, bizarrely resulting in just about the only good thing to come out of the whole mess, at least until Julien Temple decided it was time he said sorry.

Moorcock being Moorcock recycles some of the script, pasting in Jerry Cornelius and a few of his own regulars to come up with something new, a trick akin to a pretty decent beef bourguignon somehow cobbled together from leftover turkey twizzlers and tomato ketchup. The original structure appears more or less intact, or at least there's something resembling the original structure with Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Helen of Troy, Tenpole Tudor, Irene Handl and Lemmy from Motorhead scurrying around inside the workings; plus there's post-mortem cameos from Sid Vicious, Nestor Makhno, Oscar Wilde, and Jesus Christ himself all shooting the heavenly breeze. The story is impressionistic, suggesting narrative rather than actively following it, but nevertheless making all the points the film aspired to make but didn't due to the taint of Gingerbollocks, the failed art student hanging around like a creepy uncle at a wedding proclaiming  something to be Dickensian every five fucking seconds and explaining how it had all been part of his wearyingly chaotic plan, little realising that he's been telling all this to the one guest who doesn't actually speak English or give a shit.

Moorcock's Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, unlike McLaren's, is short, sweet, funny, and doesn't treat anyone like an idiot.