For the life of me, I cannot believe you have the gall to ask us for free publicity. I guess corporations like yours simply have no shame and certainly no sense of community beyond taking the dollar bills from them.
“Bowie Has Saved More Lives Than Batman”: An Interview with the Creators of The Wicked + the Divine
“Bowie Has Saved More Lives Than Batman”: An Interview with the Creators of The Wicked + the Divine
I had a chat with Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie in a Peruvian cocktail bar in Soho about their comic. The vibe was, consciously, late 80s NME interview – the kind where Ian Brown is full of troll-the-world confidence*, not – sadly! – the kind where an IPC freelancer takes Neds Atomic Dustbin go-karting in the rain. The full version of this will be up on FT soon, when I have actually finished transcribing it.
*and at 16, that’s all I assumed it was.
Must read because (a) The Wicked + The Divine is amazing, but also because (b) Tom Ewing is amazing as well.
May 1977, I was back in Liverpool forming a band called Big in Japan. At that time, punk rock was at its most potent. But as we struggled to write songs for our new band, I became aware that punk rock was already a formula. If I used certain chords, in a certain order, with a certain attitude, one could mimic the sound of punk rock. But as soon as I did, it sounded rubbish. The instant a music can be defined as a genre and thus copied, it’s dead. Only make music when you don’t know what it is that you’re doing or even trying to do. Apply this commandment to all artforms and remember: don’t join the dots.
(Bill Drummond is one of the few “heroes” I’ve been afraid to meet, and one of the few who turned out to be exactly as charming and gracious as I could’ve hoped.)
Is there any chance of a Phonogram story (I’ll even take a b-side) focussing on hip-hop? Or should I just fan-fic that up myself?
I approve of this behaviour. Phonogram is a device to re-imagine your world.
While we’ve referenced Hip-Hop a little, we’ve never done a story. If I did one, due to Phonogram being Autobiographic, would have to be through that filter. I could certainly see a story about how it felt to discover Hip-Hop when living in an isolated, provincial Midlands town. “real” Kwk got into Hip Hop when he was 7 or something, which is interesting. The whole period where the Wu-Tang Clan was my favourite band had a lot of fun stuff. The image of Kwk and Kohl playing chess in a Wu-Tang tribute with a shitty 1 quid set they got from a Toy-shop is probably useable, y’know?
If I did a story, it’d be like that. And I’d like to do one, and hopefully will work it in somewhere.
Jamie and I always had the desire that, after we’d done the series, we’d like to do an anthology of other people’s PG stories – our friends, critics, whoever. They’d take the metaphor and apply it to their own music history. Some of the people I’ve talked to, growing up in America and active in the culture, would certainly be doing those stories.
Reblogging because I love the idea of a Phonogram anthology filled with other people’s take on the concept.
