A favorite band from 1996, where their very American Radio-friendly sound (they’re British) stood out amongst all the Britpop debris still flying around. I remember loving their harmonies – which, yes, they could easily reproduce live – and being amused to discover that the opening line to the song is apparently “And I/Fucking/Give/Up” stretched to avoid getting edited for the radio. There’s a joy in this, and a defiant lack of cool, that there was no way that I could fail to listen when it first came on the radio. Power Pop with ridiculous lyrics and violent choppy guitars? I’m in.
My First Attempt At A Public Debut
After thinking about zines and early days of writing yesterday, I’ve been thinking about my public writing debut. Years before Fanboy Rampage!!! or professional (paid!) writing, or even Tears Before Bedtime – the blog that introduced me to my wife and brought me to America, fact fans – I wrote for the student newspaper of the university my art school was attached to. I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea, or how it all came together; all of that has disappeared in the mists of my memory. All I remember was that Andy Barnett, my best friend and partner in many many crimes at the time, and I somehow ended up in the situation of writing multiple things for the monthly newspaper for a couple of years. There was a column that was pretty much a collection of odds-and-ends, a tongue-in-cheek horoscope column, a comic strip about some event or other that either Andy or myself had attended at some point in the previous month (Something very clearly indebted on my part to Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin’s Critics At Large strip from Reflex magazine in the ’90s, looking back on it – Andy had never seen those strips, I don’t think? – Like, embarrassingly indebted) and a “How To Dance Like A Britpop Celebrity” guide, too. Looking back, a bunch of material to come up with on a regular basis, but I remember loving the whole thing, especially the knowledge that people read what we were doing. Weirder, people recognized Andy (and, very occasionally, myself) because of the self-portraits in the strips; it was like being a very minor celebrity, and very compelling for an early 20-something as I was then.
Somewhere, I’m sure, I have copies of this stuff. I should scan some in and put it up on here, to embarrass myself.
Sun Sun Sun Sun
A Pox On Your Sales And Your Novels!
[I]f you fail to keep our promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.
That’s part of the initiation ceremony British mystery writers had to go through in order to join the wonderfully named Detection Club in the 1930s, written by Dorothy Sayers and available here. You can learn more about the Detection Club here.
Made By Hand, Made With Heart
A reason for me to go visit Floating World sometime soon: David Brothers has a zine of his fiction available there. I’ve been thinking a lot about zines and zine culture recently – I often train a lot of my wanting to be a writer to being zine-culture-adjacent back when I was in art school, and have found myself thinking about digital books as modern zines and what to do with that over the last few days – and found David writing about the experience of physically putting the zines together to be weirdly nostalgic:
At this point, I’ve got the cover, I’ve got the guts, I’ve got a stapler, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take to put this thing together. Luckily, I’d been slacking on watching TV, so I just caught up on Louie
, Black Dynamite
, and Children’s Hospital while I folded. 25 doesn’t sound like a lot, but boy does it feel like a lot of work when you’re in the middle of it and half done.
For the degree show part of my bachelors’ degree, I made up 100 copies of five different booklets of me writing and illustrating stories (I wrote and illustrated a bunch throughout the final year of that course, and then picked five to mass produce for the final show, with the idea of selling them for… crap, I can’t remember how much. Cheap, anyway); I remember having to trim and staple all of the books over a couple of nights as the show approached, with everything lying on the floor of my bedroom and me staring at it all as the night went on and my deadline-driven insanity only got worse.
One day, I should see if I have any of those booklets left. I know I brought a bunch with me when I moved to the US a decade ago, but I’ve moved around a lot since, and have lost a lot of stuff across that time.
366 Songs 262: I’m Dreaming
I was thinking about Mitt Romney’s latest, jaw-dropping, gaffe this morning when I found Randy Newman’s contribution to the 2012 political season, and… Well, it fits, somehow. Musically, it’s later-period Newman, definitely (Listen to the way he starts to rip himself off in terms of melody on the piano in the bridge), but lyrically, it’s spot-on in terms of parodying the mindset of voters who’d rather have any President as long as he’s not black: “I’m dreaming of a white President/Just like the ones we’ve always had/A real live white man/Who knows the score/How to handle money or start a war/Wouldn’t even have to tell me what we were fighting for.”
I like it when musicians take advantage of technology to rush-release music as social commentary. More big-name musicians should do this more often, if you ask me.
Relaxation Looks Like This
366 Songs 261: Why Not Your Baby
I found this song by accident, pretty much; Velvet Crush were an unknown quantity to me in the 1990s when this came out, and I picked it up as much for the title of the album (Teenage Symphonies To God, a Brian Wilson quote) and producer (Matthew Sweet, whom I was heavily into at the time) as anything else. The album itself was agreeable, but nothing too special beyond this cover of a Gene Clark song, which entirely won me over through the aching melody, simplicity of the lyrical plea “Come tell your friend what’s wrong with you?” and arrangement that reminded me, of all things, of Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell doing “Wichita Lineman” or “Galveston” or something. Looking back, it’s pretty much the kind of thing that would entirely win over the twenty-year-old who was me at the time, but I still can’t hear it honestly now due to all the nostalgia attached to it.
Hearing the 43-year-old original for the first time, the song almost sounds comic with the finger-picking and seemingly rushed vocals. But, goodness and gracious, anyone who doesn’t find a lovely sadness in a chorus that goes “Why don’t you call me your baby anymore?/Am I so changed from some strange love that went before?” may need to check with a doctor to ensure that they still have a heart.
366 Songs 260: Ain’t That Enough
If ever there was a song for the dying days of summer, it’s this 1997 Byrds-inspired song from Teenage Fanclub that celebrates apathy and accepting your meager lot in the prettiest fashion imaginable. “Here is a sunrise/Ain’t that enough?” But those harmonies! That most-jangly of all guitars! The way the entire thing feels like a pop song lullaby! This is almost irresistible to listen to, and when Gerard Love, Norman Blake et al sing “Who’s gonna argue?” you realize that sometimes it really does just feel good to surrender.
366 Songs 259: He’d Be A Diamond
I love love songs that aren’t actually love songs. Does that make sense? Songs that are filled with affection and adoration and love but which don’t profess “I love you” or speak to traditional romantic relationships. “He’d Be A Diamond” is one of those for me, and one of my favorite songs of all time, a warning between friends about a boyfriend who may not be the best, with everything both intimate and ambiguous. Is the singer warning the listener away from getting back with an ex – “Is he lying/To get what he wants/Or does he mean it this time?” – or trying to persuade them to give it one more chance? “And though you feel like shit/He says you look beautiful,” after all.
The version I heard first was the Teenage Fanclub cover – It’s originally a Beavis Frond song, as heard at the top of the post – but my favorite version is probably Mary Lou Lord’s, who manages to make the intimacy and friendliness of the whole thing even more apparent. Plus, for some reason, the line about “Is he running/Low on affection/And beer and dope/And an ironing board/And an unpaid analyst who shags?” seems so much funnier coming from her.