ARCHIVE: From Pulp to Aylett Interview
Andrew interviewed Steve Aylett twice in the last five years, this second interview appeared in 2008. ‘I admire Steve’s work,’ says Andrew, ‘Interviewing him though is a strange experience because you can never predict what Steve is going to do next. I love that about him’.
From Pulp to Aylett. Interview by Andrew Oldham
Certainly in the design and content of your new book, Lint, there is a feel that Pulp Fiction of the 20th Century has had an imposing effect on your work. But what does Pulp mean to you as a reader and a writer?
‘The colourful and kitsch presentation is definitely there. But in terms of pulp writing I tend to think of it as writing quite quickly and disposably, neither of which are me. And a concentration on narrative rather than ideas, maybe. Again, not like my writing – there’ll be a lot of story in my books but it’s mainly something for the ideas and gags to live in. LINT was a great housing for thousands of ideas because it contains hundreds of books in summary plus what was said about them, and the stupid things the author got up to. So there are several juicy idea-shapes on every page. It’s interesting to start with a familiar-looking genre and take it somewhere else immediately. A lot of people have done their own take on the hardboiled detective genre, for instance, and used it for their own various purposes. Even Bukowski did it, with PULP. SF pulp stories were a bit more idea-oriented than the crime stuff but would tend to have only one idea per story, and they were still written at quite a rush – and, as I said in LINT, many of them really were written to fit an already-painted cover image. So it would be, ‘We’ve got a cover picture of a green kangaroo emerging from a storm drain holding some sort of thermos – write a story for it.’ Then – as writing teacher Natalie Goldberg would say – go! But that’s not how I do it’.
Which writers did you admire when you first set out to write your first novel?
‘JP Donleavy, Voltaire, Kerouac, Greg Egan, Dostoevsky, Brautigan, Raymond Chandler, Robert Crais, Billy Childish, Ray Bradbury, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, Rudy Rucker, John Wyndham, Bruno Schultz. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately’.
What piece of advice would you give someone who wanted to write a novel?
‘I’d suggest that they write something original, but that would be a cruel thing to tell them if they’re hoping to get published. Publishers tend to publish the sort of thing that’s been published before, unless someone gets in by fluke or masquerade, as I’ve done. Real creativity is originality. By definition creativity is the making of something which didn’t exist before you produced it. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for expression or therapy rather than real creativity, but it’ll almost certainly have been said before by someone, so it’s like inadvertent duplication. And that stuff does get published by the bucket load, unfortunately. Originality, though, is gold dust. I’m sure I can’t be the only person in the world who’s into it. I’m still clinging to the hope that there are enough people into genuine originality to make a market for it’.
LINT is your present novel, concerning Jeff Lint, ‘author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century’. Where did this character come from and what does SF mean to Steve Aylett and why did you choose to create a character akin to Phillip K. Dick?
‘Jeff Lint more or less arrived fully-formed, as this obliviously creative character. He’s the sort of vividly rampaging author I wished existed. I could put hundreds of book and story ideas into the book. In the other Lint book I did, “And Your Point Is?” I finally wrote a story that had been in a holding pattern for a long time, called “The Retrial”. It was done as a critical review of Jeff Lint’s story ‘The Retrial’, which we get to see through my ‘essay’. The same thing with ‘Rise of the Swans’. They’re beautiful Voltairian satire, really juicy with controlled, justified resentment. Books and stories want to be a certain way, and it’s good to be patient until you see what that is, so that you can make them that way. Sometimes it’s even a case of waiting until you’re a better writer. Speaking of which, Alan Moore wrote a blurby thing for the back of LINT and mentioned a writer called Harry Stephen Keeler, who I hadn’t heard of. I asked him who this was and he told me about Keeler. It turns out he was a prolific pulp author in the 20s-50s, and very like Jeff Lint, though a worse writer I had portrayed Lint to be. Keeler actually had brilliant ideas for stories, but his execution was usually terrible. He didn’t know what to leave out, so he just included everything. He was obsessed with skulls, clowns and midgets. One of his books was called ‘The Skull of the Waltzing Clown’. Another was ‘The Riddle of the Travelling Skull.’ Loads of these things got published somehow, and he kept writing them even when the publishers stopped publishing him. I can’t read Keeler’s stuff, but I like the idea that he existed, as a figure. The New York Times said about him: “We are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.” That’s beautiful isn’t it? That oblivious, unstoppable quality’.
The worlds you create in your books are often alternative and I’m thinking of David Barett’s early quote on your work in the New Statesman, that, “Steve Aylett’s distorting lenses are crueller than most”. How much do you feel this is true of you now and why do you think your books often look at the surreal, cruel side of life?
‘I don’t think I ‘distort’ at all. But I don’t see the point of writing something that just ‘blends in’ with life either, because that’s like doing nothing at all. I’ll tend to enhance and heighten things, exaggerate and take things to their natural conclusion. It’s easy to see the hole in an argument and then use that hole to worry it in half – but satire will tend to use a mechanism of sort of disingenuously taking the argument seriously and running it to its conclusion, leading to surreal absurdities. It’s extreme stress-testing of the position. Also when presented with a justification you can reverse the equation and see if you wind up at the first cause that people claim. Most often you’ll either arrive at a different origin of motivation or go down a false trail that doesn’t honestly reconnect. I write a lot about power manipulation, right up to’Rebel at the End of Time’ which I finished recently. If you’re good at pattern recognition as regards power and powerlessness, it’s like watching people going around with unencrypted motivations. Especially people who are powerless, and the amazing contortions they go through to avoid admitting they’ve been screwed over. The tendency to deny the reality of victimhood is a widespread coping mechanism, and it prevents real justice. I said somewhere that ‘You should be careful when asking people to repay their debt to society: you invite revenge’. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug’.
What draws you to writing this kind of material?
‘I’m writing the sort of books I want to read but couldn’t find anywhere’.
How do your ideas start?
‘They show up whole & entire, the whole book, as a sort of colourful mind sculpture with a particular feeling and flavour, which can be used as a schematic for the book. I then create the book that has that shape when extruded up into 3D or 4D. It may take time for the detail to gather that will make that shape. I think this is the way most writers get their ideas, but because I’m a bit synaesthetic I’m probably a bit more conscious of the strange mechanism of it’.
Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English Literature or do you feel yourself to be something new? A new kind of writer and if so, how and why?
‘The main tradition would be as a real old-time satirist, sneaking little mind-bombs into people the way Voltaire did. That alone would make something like Casey Maddox’s brilliant “The Day Philosophy Dies”. But I also have a tendency toward a very concentrated colourfulness, a specific-rich thing, which comes from not wanting to waste people’s time for even a moment and also to provide an antidote to the general vacuum of the times. Culture usually levels out at fairly dull and mediocre but especially so at times like this ‘1980s Part 2’ period that we’re living in at the moment, and it’s good to make something that’s its opposite. A sort of gleeful density like a drug. Also as you go through the book the pages previously read don’t rot down and so the effect is cumulative. Because my writing is a lot more than just narrative and description it’s more or less the opposite of pulp, in fact. But it’s fun to use pulp fixtures and fittings. I don’t know what category this kind of writing will be called when people work it out but so far it’s been called Slipstream, Offbeat, Chemical Gen, Bizarro, and so on’.
You seem to be a prolific writer but what drives you to write?
‘See above, and writing the kind of books I’d like to find in bookshops etc. But I don’t think I’m prolific. I’m a very slow writer’.
Where will Steve Aylett be in another ten years?
‘I will have finished the four books I’ve decided to focus on next – the first couple won’t be so difficult, but then there’s two difficult ones that really challenge what I can do, what I’m able to do – that’s why I’m allowing them time to pull together. I’m not a good enough writer to do them yet. So anyway, that’ll be 20 or so books out there, finally, and I’ll either withdraw and basically disappear at that point or, depending on the way the world goes, become more visible but in a different capacity. And hopefully I would have got the hell out of England, obviously. This is all assuming I’m still alive and haven’t done myself in or died in a dismal fireball with the rest of the human race’.
What does Steve Aylett the writer mean to you, Steve Aylett, the average man in the street?
‘Steve Aylett the man in the street is just this thing that walks around like a wishbone in a coat, looking gormless. You wouldn’t think it was a genius, and you’d be right’.
In the tradition of Pulp lazy assed journalism that frequented many of the magazines in the 80s and 90s. If I would only allow you to have five things on a desert island, what would they be?
‘I’d probably be hysterical with happiness at the absence of people. Then lonely at the absence of female people. I’d only need a few basics though, plus maybe some music. I probably wouldn’t last long but I’d die fairly happy’.
Now, what would they be if you were in a housing estate in 2011, Boris Johnson has just banned all participants of the Olympics and London had been overrun by cats with bad attitude?
‘In the long run I try not to be swerved too much by arbitrary circumstance – meaning circumstance decided by other people – so I’d be doing what I’d already planned to do at that point – writing, resenting, weeping, eating, sleeping. So, again, I’d need just a few basics’.
What’s your favourite pulp?
‘I don’t know whether he qualifies as pulp except in regard to his publishing history, but the SF/fantasy writer Jack Vance is an amazing thing. There’s a very particular flavour to his books, and people who are into him will know what I mean. There’s a humour and intelligence there, a sort of sensible individuality, and amazing worlds he describes. His aliens are, for the most part, genuinely alien and unknowable. Most of his books – including some of the best ones – are out of print, and there are seemingly hundreds of the damn things’.
There is no one else in UK Literature who blends the cyber-surreal with a distinctly British humour. What the hell did this to you?
‘It was probably growing up in that vacuum I mentioned, and wanting to generate an antidote to it for myself to feed on, because that vacuum is just nightmarish. So, richness in the face of vacuity, meaning in the face of incoherence, honesty in the face of wall-to-wall lies and evasion, real humour in the face of crap jokes. The result, when it works, is this rich surreal satire. And it’s nice to do something really stupid occasionally, too, so long as it’s still colourful and interesting. I once wrote a book that didn’t mean anything, ‘The Inflatable Volunteer’, which I think is hilarious. And I recently made a comic called ‘Get That Thing Away From Me’, about a pig who feels generally overwhelmed. Also it’s great to do stuff in the wrong order, disengaged from time and fashion. Why wait until a world event happens before writing about it? These things are pretty obvious several years ahead, so long as you don’t have any motivation not to see them, such as optimism’.
ARCHIVE: Editorial on Pulp
I’ve just purchased forty-eight battered and bruised SF magazines from a dotty old woman who spent twenty minutes looking for them before wheeling them out before me in an old M & S shopping trolley. She was soon joined by an equally barmy old man who declared that they where worth between $1 and $7.50 each – I don’t know where the odd latter price comes from but it always seems to be the kind of numbers that volunteers pull out of the hat in every charity shop I visit. I offer them £20 for the lot and confusion reins as they try to load the magazines along with the shopping trolley into my car. I try to tell them that I don’t want it and another forty minutes of bartering ensue and now I’m a proud owner of a shopping trolley and they own my car. I got $7.50 for it. So, now I’m sat in my lounge and the rain has returned to the world beyond my window and I am dancing as I have found a Napoleonic coin amongst the pages of Weird Tales.
Amazing Stories surfaces from the pile of old magazines, there amongst the musty pages that gleam with bright artwork is a name I’ve not seen in print for a long while, Poul Anderson. Then other names drift up, Burroughs, Bradbury, Asimov, Leigh and for a moment, my guilty secret threatens to erupt as the child inside me giggles. These are the names that kept me sane as a child, that gave me hope and taught me to dream and to make that impossible leap into the great void of SF. Back then I did not know or care about the fact that they were classed as Pulp. For God sakes, I watched A Team and Magnum PI on television, was forced to sit down on a Saturday evening and watch Metal Mickey with the family – the gayest robot ever to come out of the 80s – there was no surprise that I took great joy in staring at those brash SF covers that promised horror, danger and worlds of mystery. Metal Mickey merely gave us a man in a dustbin and ALF was surely a alcoholic by season two.
Many of the Amazing Stories and Weird Tales are adorned with gruesome aliens, buxom women fainting and men who stare wistfully at the horizon. Even in the magazines, men were escaping and so were women. They were a world away from the drab streets of my childhood, the cold winters, the wet days and the tiresome rehashing of Star Wars on TV and in film. These magazines were my escape, my guilty secret whilst my friends ran around playing army and football, I kept them in my duffel coat pocket, under the maths book in my desk and dreamt of a gateway to Mars, shining red and dangerous in the dark.
As I grew older, the cover art of many of these magazine where seen as inferior or sexist, and ultimately as a distraction to real Literature. A term I have never understood, writers do not write Literature, they tell stories and it is beyond me why anyone would want to use that term – Literature can kill a good book dead, I have seen many reviewers toss books into bins when they are told that it is the next great Literary work of the twenty-first century. I have seen writers paralysed with fear when they think they have to produce a tome to hold up the word ‘Literature’. An example is Margaret Atwood, is she (a) A Feminist Writer? (b) A Literary Writer? Or; (c) A Fiction writer who tells stories and doesn’t care what they are? I plump for the latter, The Handmaid’s Tale, is SF and so is Oryx and Crake and in some way all her work touches on Fantasy but I doubt she’d give a damn about the word ‘Literature’. Yet, Margaret is classed under the A’s in the Literary section and SF is tucked away and anything that resembles Pulp is shipped out to dusty areas around the shop. Poul Anderson should be in the A’s alongside Margaret but poor old Poul is relugated to a distant land called SF, Jeff Noon should be in the N’s but is also sent to the back of the class for not being Literary and poor old, misunderstood Mickey Spillane should be in S’s but he is somewhere in crime. In a shop in Cambridge I found poor old Mickey in the comedy section and the shop keeper just sneered at me and said, “Well, it’s not exactly great Literature”. ‘Literature’ a buzz word that is the kiss of death for any great story. Pulp is at the other end of the spectrum, it kills too.
Ian Parks Love Poems 1979 – 2009, Review by David Cooke
Where I can, I like to share reviews that I think capture a collection, this is one from David Cooke on Love Poems 1979 – 2009 Ian Parks, Flux Gallery Press, Leeds, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-9560688-2-8. £7.95
Ian Parks’ Love Poems is a substantial gathering of more than seventy pieces, many of which have appeared in earlier collections. It also contains previously uncollected poems and more recent work which appears here for the first time. The volume brings together all the love poems that the poet wishes to keep in print so that in some ways it has the feel of a ‘collected’ edition. However, it is actually a ‘selected poems’ because it omits much fine work on unrelated themes. In fact, in his interesting Preface to the new book Parks explains how he never really set out to be a ‘love poet’ at all and that over the years these poems simply accumulated, seeming ‘almost an afterthought’, whilst he was working on things which at the time seemed ‘more important.’ They are poems, then, that were written because they needed to be and this sense of being taken by surprise is not dissimilar to the way in which they work upon the reader.
Typically, the poems consist of brief narratives where the reader’s attention is first attracted by the understated evocation of some landscape: ‘Think back: remember the lighthouse / poised on the windswept head’; or an interior as here in ‘The Gallery’:
A wedge-shaped room with windows to the street
and branches agitating the cold pane.
That’s where I met you, where I let you go…
The reader is then drawn in by details which build up in a way that is cinematic: ‘Each object / bore your imprint and your name…introspective photographs / that lined the whitewashed walls; / dead leaves in the doorway…candles, pillows, sheets askew…’ until in this poem we reach the marvellous closing lines: ‘Last night I entered cautiously…Someone had thrown a stone and smashed the glass, / let in the winter and the world.’ In another poem ‘The Mirrored Room’ two lovers are haunted by the ghosts of WW2 fighter pilots who ‘etched their names / and the names of their new lovers / with penknives in the bright / reflective glass.’ Many of these pilots of course had simply passed through the room before dying ‘above the Channel / France or Germany…’ The two worlds evoked are then brought together in a breathtaking final stanza that is deeply felt and eloquent:
I don’t know what it meant to you
but what it meant for me
was sudden recognition:
of how love looks
when circumstance
has stripped it cold and bare
and how those random pairings
made tenable by war
were overlaid across your searching eyes,
rewritten in your raised, enquiring face.
Not long ago the Irish poet, Michael Longley, took to task poets who have little respect for basic technique and no ear for cadence, whilst recently in Poetry Review Don Paterson lamented the too-pervasive influence of the ‘show me, don’t tell me’ orthodoxy. Both men would, I suspect, find much to admire in the work of Ian Parks who, whilst he understands the importance of imagery in a poem, knows also that plain speech and statement have their part to play when they are heightened by cadence and that innate feeling for the musicality of language that is part and parcel of it. In a brief review it is difficult to do justice to work of such substance and quality. However, mention must be made of ‘A Last Love Poem’, the superb lyric which brings the collection to a close:
I was thinking how the daylight disappears,
how one thing blends into another thing
as over river, rooftops, silent park
time slips away without our noticing:
the wave collapses and a cold wind veers
through all the public places where we loved.
That’s what it feels like these years on:
you were quite unexpected, and it seems
I’ve used up all the images I know –
midnight stations, coastal roads,
red wine, high windows, lace and sudden snow.
Don’t be surprised if language fails me now.
I turn to the sunlight. Let it go.
This is a poetry which is universal, profound, and as natural as breathing. Love Poems is one of the best collections of poetry I have read in a long time. It is to be hoped that it will gain for Parks the wider audience that his work deserves.
ARCHIVE: Editorial on Travel
I abhor travel. Maybe that is a little harsh but trust me when you’ve landed sideways in an air plane at O’Hare, buffeted by one of the worst hurricanes the USA has ever seen, it tends to put you off the act of travelling. I love to go places though, so I am in a Catch 22 situation. Many of us now baulk as we face the new guru catch word – carbon footprint; a catchphrase dreamt up in some PR company, to make us all feel guilty that the planet is indeed warming up, whilst human compassion, trust and love amongst fellow men and women is distinctly dropping down the temperature scale. Let’s face it, we’re stuffed.
So, how big is your carbon footprint? Is it so big that you can now actively brag to male friends about it? Is it big enough to make even China go weak at the knees? Let’s face it, this is how the whole travel problem is being pitched at us – we are being made to feel incredibly stupid and guilty but there is no real mention of the companies that are also to blame or even the governments.
Yet, our lust for travel and the throwaway lifestyle is contagious. Come on, who hasn’t amongst you told friends that you went to somewhere warm and sat by the pool for a fortnight, drinking bad wine and reading equally bad literature? And felt good about it? Openly braggedabout fucking up the country you holidayed in? And we all do it, we go to gems hidden amongst the lapping waves of some undiscovered place. These solitary hideaways where we find ourselves, find peace, discover beauty and feel at one with the world. And, a fortnight after returning home, we have told all our friends, family, colleagues, lovers and any passing stranger or old school friend what a great place we’ve just holidayed in. What do they do? They go there! The cheek. The sheer bravado! What happens then? They tell all their friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances of their pets about a great place they’ve just been too. Oh, the beaches! Oh, the people! The culture, the food, the warmth! – LOOK AT OUR TANS – and what happens then? They go! And then more people go there, then actually live there. Four years later, you meet the first person you recommended the gem to and say quite calmly and in that innocent voice, “I went back on holiday there, but I wouldn’t go again – it’s so commercial, there’s no culture left. There was even a burger bar next to a temple! The people have sold out”
What do you expect? You waved great fistfuls of dirty money in their faces. Sure, beauty is wonderful, empty tranquil beaches that stretch off to the blue horizon are great but you don’t live there all the time. You don’t realise how poor some of these countries are and how much the humble tourist has them over a barrel. Money or poverty? Money or starvation? The irony is though, that England too is becoming a tourist trap. It’s the fastest growing market in the UK at the moment. Will we adapt though to being the one’s accepting the money and bending backwards over a barrel to do it? Could we, after so many decades of package holidays, shouting for food in slow and clear English in the Costa del Sol, Lyon, Delhi, Rhodes and Paris actually welcome the same back? Package holidays are coming back to roost, and I wait with baited breath for the first Spanish Man to shout slow and clear in some greasy spoon, in Spanish of course, that he wants paella.
ARCHIVE: Sex Editorial
You switch on the television, sex, you open the pages of a newspaper, sex, you tune into the Archers, sex. It seems that Benny Hill became so ingrained in our minds in the 1980s that his ghost has risen from the grave and he is being chased through every medium accompanied by a bevvy of scantily clad women. And now men are getting in on the act. Once there was the bimbo, now there is the himbo and years from now they will have populated the planet with good looking chavs. I know that last one is hard to imagine but trust me, they have devolved to a point where they can only go up or else dig holes in the ground and changed their names to Morlock. Which makes the rest of us the Eloi. For those of you unaware of H.G. Wells classic, The Time Machine, the Eloi where the good looking ones who fed from the Earth. They where apathetic, watched others drown as they sat on the perfect bums on a perfect riverbank and ate fruit. God, that sounds awfully familiar, does it remind anyone of celebrity culture? Where vacuous talentless Z list stars, whose only claim to fame is being racist or so talentless that they’ve come out the otherside in a post ironic thingy that they don’t understand but ain’t their Mum a bitch? And look at the new boobs they gave her. Ten grand they cost, so they can’t be a racist, can they? I pray for one of the new hybrid cars to run them over. At least it will cut down on polution. It angers me that they spill their pointless philosophy (which they could write on the side of a match) to every tabloid that can hold a crayon. I’m digressing, in fact it’s not a good idea to think of celebrity culture.
Really, when did putting people in a house for several weeks, with little food, little chance to wash their clothes become sexy? It wasn’t when you flat shared. We should just take ALL Big Brother contestants (they’re not stars) and just shit them into space. Brian and the twins could boldly go and piss off. Poor Davina, her soul has been sucked dry by endless line of mincemeat and suckers.
And that’s what sex is really about. At its essence, sex in the media is making a fool our of you. It preys on your base instincts, from every ad to every soap – come on, Hollyoaks, you didn’t think it was written? It’s just a group of images for frustrated teens – turn the sound off and you’ll see it’s just top shelf fodder not very well disguised.
But why shouldn’t we revel in sex? Let’s face it, it’s programmed into our DNA. I tell you all those stars who have been caught over the years, all those wives and husbands, and partners couldn’t help it. It’s bad enough that it’s our primal drive but when they start putting it on the back of buses and on mobile phones and in music videos, who stands a chance?
ARCHIVE: In the City – Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud
Andrew interviewed Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud in 2005. ‘I remember this interview well,’ says Andrew, ‘It was an experiment, for weeks I had tried to arrange meeting all three writers together but our diaries wouldn’t marry up. In the end I interviewed them all by email and then created the location. It is common practice amongst journalists to do this, to add or subtract material after a meeting, via phone or email. I took it one step further, there was no pub but I created it! The writers in question where rather bemused by the interview. It just shows that all journalism is only one viewpoint of the truth. I wrote up the interview in a pub’.
In the City: Anthony Cropper, James Nash and Dee Rimbaud. Interview by Andrew Oldham
With the release of Naked City I took the opportunity to catch up with the editor of the collection, Anthony Cropper and two of the writers in an undisclosed location in the city.
I ask Dee Rimbaud and James Nash about their short stories, The Model Woman and Father and Sons which make an appearance in the new collection from Route, Naked City. Can you both tell us a little about the story?
“It was a bit of a tease really…” starts James.
“The Model Woman…” adds Dee, “Is about a waitress who works in an Italian Restaurant in Glasgow. Her world revolves around the restaurant, as she is engaged to one of the owner’s sons; and it would appear the trajectory of her life is already mapped out. Then, one day, she is confronted with the apparition of her fantasy-self in the flesh; an encounter that shakes her confidence and makes her doubt her chosen path.
“I’ve always been interested in the father and sons relationship, and that we have real and ‘pretend’ ones throughout our life. Some fathers are looking for sons, and some sons are looking for fathers, perhaps because they have lost their own, or theirs were unsatisfactory. I also wanted to show how some of these ‘pretend’ relationship can be pathological,” finishes James.
I turn my attention to the editor of the collection, the award winning writer, Anthony Cropper and ask the million dollar question that all writers want to know. What made you think ‘yes, this is good story’ when you read tDee Rimbaud’s The Model Woman and James Nash’s Fathers and Sons?
“Both were engaging right from the start. Both were detailed, close pieces with a strong sense of place and reality. Father and Sons offered much by way of suggestion, whereas Model Woman seemed more direct, more forceful in its prose”.
Where did the ideas for your stories come from?
“I knew someone once who sacked all his friends from time to time, and made new ones. He had been seriously damaged as a child, and his adult relationships reflected this. Brendan was loosely based on this person,” answers James.
“I was having a late lunch in Dino’s Restaurant in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. I was watching staff taking lunch, relaxing in between rush periods, and I just let my imagination take off from there” is Dee’s response.
Cropper watches them both as the two writers take a sip from their respective drinks. I have to ask them. How did you find Anthony as an editor? James nearly chokes and Dee smirks. Anthony sighs and looks out the window.
“He was a sympathetic and subtle editor, never intrusive, and always intelligent. Whenever he made a suggestion, it was a good one,” starts James.
“He and Ian Daley have done a fine job in putting together Naked City, and I am very pleased to have my story included in this collection,” answers Dee. They both watch Anthony, wait for his response, he sighs, laughs a little, reaches for his own drink – they wait – all writers crave praise, because their parents never actually figured out what they did and therefore couldn’t actually praise it.
“I can’t con myself. If I think something’s good, then I say so. Whether that’s objective or subjective I don’t know. I read stories, any stories, and I always think about how the writer has done things and how I do things. I’m pretty critical, but realise you’ve got to let writers have their own space. The main thing in this collection was getting a cohesive set of stories together, ones that would work as a whole to illustrate some aspects of life in these changing cities. The nit-picking wasn’t that important”.
Anthony, How hard was the editing process?
“It’s great to read some good stories. The surprises are well worth the effort, and seeing the collection come together as a whole is satisfying. The lows, well, reading through a lot of stories can be tiring, but I can’t complain too much. Again, the main thing was getting the stories together, getting them to fit, putting some sort of structure to the book. That’s the thing that took a lot of doing. Mostly, the stories needed minor changes, just some inconsistencies, but there were some which I thought could be made stronger with tightening them up, paring them down. When it comes down to it, you can only make suggestions. Reading a piece of work and seeing where it could be chopped and changed isn’t that hard. I’d pass on suggestions and wait to see what the writers made of them”.
If James and Dee could change anything in the stories, re-edit them, what would they choose to change? James whistles, Dee looks up at the ceiling starts to hum as Anthony sits back relieved of being the editor.
“I might spend more time on the relationship between the narrator and Brendan. It could be part of a much longer piece,” replies James.
Dee is more confident in his response, he knows what he wants and what he wants to write.
“There is nothing I would want to change in this story”.
Anthony, How do you feel the process of editing has helped you as an author?
“I think anything to do with working with writing is a help, whether it’s editing or running workshops or just reading. Anything that makes you think about your own work must be good. I’m very critical of my own material. I’ll write quickly but will chop and change a lot when I’ve pages to work with”.
And, what was the oddest submission you received?
“Nothing specific springs to mind, but there were a couple of stories which were way too long, more like novellas”.
What ‘drew’ you to edit the Naked City collection?
“The initial idea was Ian Daley’s. He’d discussed it with me some time ago and even then I thought it was a good idea. I’ve lived in a fair few cities, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Chester, Bristol… and the rapid and dramatic changes were evident. I’d wanted to be involved, even before reading the stories. When I did get to go through them it was easy to see it would be a very good collection”.
James and Dee, when and how did you first start to write?
“First started to write as child,” says James, “I loved reading, and I used to tell my brother and sister stories while we were lying in bed with our bedroom doors open. Turned to poetry about ten years ago, and from there to short stories”.
And Dee?
“Really, as soon as I learned the alphabet,” he chuckles, “Prior to that, I used to act out elaborate stories with my toys. That said, a good Scottish comprehensive education soon knocked the stuffing out of the creative impulse; and I may never have written again, had it not been for the encouragement my third year English teacher, Maurice Cox. Initially, I wrote only poetry, as it more immediately served my need for instant gratification. I didn’t tackle fiction and its demands until I was in my early thirties”.
The process of writing is often seen as a lonely, isolated occurrence. Can you both take us through, blow by blow, how the story first came to you, how you wrote it and where, how you resolved problems and crafted the final piece? James nods, opens his mouth to reply but Dee starts.
“The story first came to me in a restaurant. It was some time ago now, so I can’t remember the writing process in detail. However I can tell you that, in general, when the ‘muse’ comes to me, I will write the poem or story down without pausing for breath. After that, I’ll read it through, decide it’s ‘crap’ and then put it away in a folder for future revision. These first drafts can languish forgotten for months, years or even decades (I’m not exaggerating). On a semi-regular basis, I will look through all my folders, and re-read these first drafts. Usually, one story or poem will strike me, and I will be able to see the way forward with it. So I’ll work on a second draft, and the piece won’t seem so ‘crap’, but I know it’s still got some way to go, so I put it back in its folder… and so it goes, on and on, until I consider the piece to be finished. If memory serves me right, I wrote the first draft of The Model Woman somewhere between 1995 and 1998″.
James?
“I had an idea about a man, still mourning the death of his son, his marriage collapsed through the strain of mourning for the lost son. I also saw the man as someone who saw images of children and particularly boy children everywhere. He was unconsciously drawn to them. With a surviving younger son, and a demanding job, he takes time out at lunchtime to browse in a junkshop and he finds two Chinese figures, one perfect, the other with subtle internal damage. He meets a charming stranger in the shop who reminds him of his dead son. There follows a strange and uncomfortable ‘flirtation’ which ends in discomfort as he realises that this young man is not his son, and is very damaged. I have the two Chinese figures at home, and built the story around them. There may be something of my broken marriage in the story. But I have never had sons. The problem was all to do with indicating the themes but not shouting them out aloud. I kept removing and removing all the stuff which seemed to be too obvious. I wanted to allude to the issues, not tell my reader what to think”.
Before I can ask Anthony, he moves from his seat and heads for the bar. We all put in order before he’s five yards away and we turn back to the interview in hand, secure in the knowledge that vocal chords and vowels will soon flow easier.
How do you overcome the feeling of isolation as a writer?
“I work as a freelancer in schools, libraries, theatres, writing groups all the time. I wish there was more isolation,” bemoans James.
Dee laughs.
“Is isolation something that should be overcome? There is so much emphasis placed on the gregarious nature of humans and animals, that isolation is seen as a negative state of being. Gregariousness is, I believe, a primitive instinct that belongs to an era when we could only survive in a herd. This herd instinct requires that its members have a common purpose and, by extension, a common thought process (often dictated by the Alpha male). Gregariousness gives birth to monsters, be they crowds of football supporters or xenophobic Nazis. In truth, I believe we are all isolated, but some of us succumb to our loneliness and are willing to sacrifice our individuality for the warm, dangerous arms of the crowd”.
What do you both do for day to day job?
“Teacher, presenter, journalist, facilitator. Completely freelance,” answers James.
“I have done so many different day-to-day jobs I’ve lost count. My last working stint, as a propsman for film and television, came to an abrupt end when I suffered a brain haemorrhage and nearly died, back in 2001. Since then I have been mainly a house-husband and dad (although I do earn some ‘pin money’ through my writing, art, illustration and graphic design). Incidentally, my daughter, Rosie Sunshine, was born only two weeks after I had my brain haemorrhage,” adds Dee.
We watch Anthony at the bar for awhile, a debate has sprung up between the barman and the writer, none of us can make out what the two are arguing about. After much semaphore action by Anthony we move on.
Do you think a writer draws from their experiences or creates fantasy? If so, how do you do this?
“I think writers do both,” starts James, “consciously and unconsciously. I sometimes draw directly from experience or stories people have told me. My second poetry collection seemed to have nothing to do with my own life. I read it now and see the end of my second marriage”.
“Where does experience end and fantasy begin?,” asks Dee, “Everything we experience is registered and processed in the brain, which is a fantastically elaborate organic computer, made up of millions of hard drives, connected together by kazillions of USB cables. No-one knows how this network of mini super-computers is made up, or exactly how it processes information, but one thing I can say, without any hesitation, is that all fiction, even the wildest kind, has its origins in experience. All fiction and all fantasies (even extreme paranoid schizophrenic delusions) are by-products of experiences. Imagine, if our brains were made by Microsoft – we’d be safe from delusions and fantasies. We’d be safe from fiction too!”
If you could have received one piece of advice before you started writing what would it have been?
“Just keep doing it!!” barks James.
“Persevere,” adds Dee.
“Keep it simple,” says Anthony as he returns burgeoned with drinks, trays and a bar towel, “And read it through a number of times before submitting. And then there’s the old chestnut; stick a tenner in to oil the works”.
James and Dee you 20 words, in which to sell your story to potential readers, what would those 20 words be?
James?
“Does a loss or relationship nag at you daily? In this story one man transcends his bereavement through time”.
“‘Whatever you do, do NOT read this story!’ (this tactic always works with my 3 year old daughter). Seriously though, I don’t know what to say in response to this question. I don’t know how to sell a story, in twenty words or a hundred”.
And where next?
“I’m writing a novel. That takes up all my attention,” replies James reaching for his drink.
There is confusion between James and Anthony, something about the towel which is thankfully drowned out by Dee.
“I feel I’m coming to the end of a cycle with my writing. My novel, Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God has just recently been published, and my third collection of poetry is nearly complete. Where I go after that, I’m not sure. I’ve got a lot of projects bubbling away on the back burner, but I can’t think about them until the poetry collection is under wraps”.
Thanks James, Dee and Anthony, and now to drink and writing.
ARCHIVE: Formal Values – an interview with Ian Parks
Andrew interviewed Ian in 2004. ‘I have been friends with Ian for many years,’ says Andrew, ‘I do find it hard to interview friends and when I do I always go off script. What I remember of this interview is not the questions or the answers but the location. I interviewed Ian in a pub in Mexborough and a man was playing a fruit machine in the background, which can be heard on the original tape. The man in question halfway through a bet asked the barman for a spoon, which he started to jab into the fruit machine in a vain bid to get his money back. No one batted an eyelid. I have always wondered why he chose a spoon to attack a machine’.
Formal Values: an interview with Ian Parks. Interview by Andrew Oldham
Ian Parks is a unique poet with the skill and craft of Auden and the heart of Shelley. Parks has been published worldwide in such magazines as Agenda, The Observer, Oxford Poetry, New Welsh Review, Poetry (Chicago) and Cascando. His collections include, Gargoyles in Winter (Littlewood, 1985), A Climb Through Altered Landscapes (Blackwater 1998), The Angel of the North (Tarantula CD 2000). Parks has been described as “the finest love poet of his generation” (Chiron Review, USA) and is part of the collective of poets known as inc. I caught up with him on the eve of his new publication Shell Island (Waywiser Press) in a quiet pub in South Yorkshire where a young tattooed man was jamming a fork in a slot machine and old men were putting the world to right.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a poet. My first exposure to poetry came from hearing my father recite it. He’d learned reams of it by heart at school and would repeat it when he was getting ready to go out. At school I discovered poems I liked and copied them into an exercise book, making a personal anthology”.
The thought arises of how much these early books would be worth now.
“My first poems were mainly imitations of the Victorian poets I was reading at the time. Then I came to Ted Hughes…,” Parks attended the same school as Hughes, “…and Thom Gunn via the First World War poets and realised that poetry could be written in what Wordsworth referred to as ‘a language really used by men’. That was a liberating experience. One of the first poems I had published was in the Poetry Review”.
In 2002, the poetry world was hit hard when Waterstones decided to stop stocking literary magazines, cutting the voices of a generation of poets dead. Many magazines are now fighting for survival as are poets trying to reach out to audiences that don’t know they’re there.
“I don’t think any poet can work in isolation. I was running a workshop once and this bloke came in and I asked him which poets he read and he replied by saying he wasn’t interested in reading poetry, only in writing it. It’s a view you come across quite often and it never fails to surprise me with its arrogance and stupidity”.
Now shelves are stocked with poets long dead or modern poets who have been writing for forty years and have only just been discovered but who will replace them in another forty years with no outlets.
“From a purely common sense point of view it seems counter productive to ignore what’s been done so well in the past, or to refuse to learn from it”
Ian Parks voice drips with South Yorkshire vowels, drawn out across the backwater of disused colliery fields.
“As far as my voice is concerned, I’m not sure where the idiosyncrasies of a poet’s voice come from. I guess they lie very close to the rhythms of the poet’s own speaking voice and that, in turn, interacts with a subject. What we call a poet’s voice arises from the tensions implicit in this situation. I think you have to be true to that voice. I think there’s a danger, with the proliferation of free verse, for poetry to end up as nothing more then chopped up prose”.
Who are the next generation of living poets?
“The poets I admire who are writing today: Thom Gunn, David Constantine, T.F. Griffin, Pauline Stainer, all have recognisable voices. They all seem to have an ear for the difference between poetry and prose”.
Parks’ poetry is born of the twentieth century and the upheaval of social changes of the 70s and 80s. The fleeting nature of the changing relationships in the home and workplace transferred to the page as he redefined love poetry for a new generation while learning from the past.
“I think Auden occupies a central place in the poetry of the last century. You can’t get around him. He is the first poet to feel at home in the twentieth century. The main thing I learned from Auden was that you can write love poetry that also has other dimensions. Auden understood that every love relationship has a social context of some kind and was therefore able to extend considerations usually confined to the private realm into the public realm of politics. In “Lay Your Sleeping Head”, for instance, he uses the very intimate form of address to say something about the ‘fashionable madmen’ who were at large in Europe during the 1930’s”.
Ian Parks is born from this tradition, marrying political and social image to a modern world.
“We’re living at a time when freedom and democracy are at threat – but this time from within. Except that this time around the very language of freedom is being appropriated by the powers that be in order to persuade us that what they’re doing is right. One of the main functions of poetry today, as I see it, is to defend the language of the heart from such blatant misappropriation”.
Ian Parks’ work breaks the stereotype of what most of think love poetry is.
“Even though people talk about me as a love poet I’d say the main theme running through everything is time. The apparent interest in history is really an interest in time and how it affects us at both a personal and collective level. At their deepest level, all the poems are about this. I think a very fine membrane exists between the present and what we call the past. Hardy understood this; he knew that a thin tissue separates us from what’s gone before. To be on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pressure exerted by the past on the present moment is there in my poem ‘Towton’; about a particularly bloody battle during the Wars of the Roses. It’s really an attempt to articulate the obsession with time and the fact that it has no linear properties as such. I was over in the USA on a Travelling Fellowship and came to the conclusion that the American Civil War is very much a living issue for the descendants of those who fought in it. You can visit any one of those battle sights and feel the tangible presence of the past. I wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to mention Robert Graves. A little out of fashion now, Graves was probably the greatest love poet of the last century. I admire his unswerving dedication to poetry – and to his belief – encapsulated in ‘The White Goddess’ – that poetry is essentially a miraculous activity, the processes of which we can neither understand nor quantify”.
Poets are often seen as private people with public love lives. The work often reflects this but the argument still rages: when should the private become part of the public realm?
“There comes a time when the poem ceases to be the exclusive property of the poet and takes on a life of its own. I get people coming up to me at poetry readings describing a certain poem of mine, which I don’t recognise. When they tell me the title I know the poem they’re referring to, but their experience of it has been so unique, they’ve brought so much of themselves to it, that I have difficulty relating their description to the poem I wrote. There is, after all, no ‘correct’ reading of a poem. We’re not talking about maths where two and two will always make four. We’re in a highly subjective area where the poet’s intentions – such as they are – become secondary to the experience of the reader”.
Modern Literature has now spiralled away in packaging, making money and the cult of celebrity with poetry being wheeled out for Valentine’s Day, Christmas and the ubiquitous National Poetry Day. Are we seeing the death throes of poetry? Is Seamus Heaney right in his assumption that the likes of Eminem are the new face of verse and where does that leave love?
“The difference now is that we have a different set of ethics to the ones that existed when, say, Tennyson wrote his love poems. Then people were expected to marry for life and love poems tended to limit themselves to either praising the attributes of the loved one or dealing with the painful process of loss. People now expect to have several relationships in a lifetime and this effects how they think and feel about love. The love poet has to be in tune with this change. If the cultural atmosphere presents a less naive, more analytic approach to love then the love poet ought to reflect that. I guess I’m interested in transitory states; how one thing becomes another thing. Poetry seems to me to have the flexibility I require to explore all this. Love poetry provides us with a powerful continuum. It connects us by a very strong thread to the poetry of the past while, at the same time, acting as a sort of spirit level for our deepest feelings”.
Editors often have nightmares about working with poets, as they are often seen as temperamental. The poetry market in the UK is an incredibly small one and many of the big publishing houses no longer touch poetry for financial reasons. What are the processes you went through to select work for your new collected love poems?
“My first love poem was published in 1983 when I was twenty-four and the most recent earlier this year. Twenty years seemed like a nice round number. In a way, the selection process was complete before the collection was put together, in that I only sent out poems that I felt happy with at the time. So, in a sense, I’d made my mind up about them already. The problem wasn’t so much in selection as in deciding what, strictly speaking, constituted what should be in Shell Island – and how the collection should be organised. A couple of poems didn’t make it because they weren’t good enough; a couple more because they seemed to repeat what was done better in other pieces. You don’t want to keep writing the same poem forever. The temptation to do that is quite strong. Shell Island breaks from this”.
As we’ve talked about history, what one poem do you give up to it, which one do you think will stand the test of time?
“I’d have to opt for ‘The Mirrored Room’. It’s about the experience of visiting a tea-room in York and finding a wall of mirrors etched with the names of airmen from World War Two, and the names of their girlfriends, and knowing that they probably went off to die. Seeing those names imposed over your own features somehow provides an objective correlative for what I was saying earlier about the pressure of the past on the present”.
And with that the evening turns cold, the rain rattles against the glass panes, the young man jams a spoon in with the fork lodged in the slot machine, the old men order another round, and Ian Parks watches this, marking the moment he selected the one poem to stand up and take on history.
ARCHIVE: Louise Rennison Felt My Face
Andrew interviewed Louise in 2005. ‘This is one of the most fun interviews I’ve conducted,‘ says Andrew, ‘As we talked to each other we began to realise that we had met before. I was 17 and Louise was feeling Stevie Wonders face in Wigan and that was just the start of our laughter. You may not get that reference but it doesn’t matter, it makes me laugh’.
Louise Rennison Felt My Face. Interview by Andrew Oldham
Louise Rennison lives in Brighton, a place that she likes to think of as the San Francisco of the South Coast. Which is sad as it is nothing like San Francisco, being mainly pebbles and large people in tiny swimming knickers who have gone bright red in the sun. Although she lives in Brighton in reality, in her mind she lives somewhere exotic with a manservant called Juan. This is because she lost her mind after Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging catapulted her into the spotlight of fame.
Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging is the first book in the Georgia Nicolson series, written in a diary style. Georgia is fourteen and lives with her annoying parents, a three-year-old sister, who says things like, “Georgia did a big poo this morning” to prospective boyfriends, her half Scottish wildcat, Angus and has to wear a beret to school. She would, however, rather be blond, have a smaller nose, slimmer eyebrows and a have a Sex-God for a boyfriend.
The second book following Georgia’s exploits is It’s OK I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers, the third Knocked Out by My Nunga Nungas and the fourth Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants. Sales in the UK for the series have already topped 400,000. Sales in the US have passed the million mark and have reached Number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Louise based several episodes in the books on her own childhood in Leeds, where she was bought up in a three-bedroomed council house with her mum, dad, grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin. When Louise was 15, her parents decided to emigrate to Wairakei in New Zealand. Its main claim to fame is that it had some of the most violent geothermal activity in the world. In her twenties, Louise lived in Notting Hill Gate. Louise rekindled a childhood dream and enrolled on a Performing Arts course in Brighton Her first one-woman autobiographical show, Stevie Wonder Felt My Face, won great acclaim and awards at the Edinburgh Festival in the 80s and millions watched the subsequent BBC2 special. Since then, Louise has continued to perform her own shows (Bob Marley’s Gardener Sold My Friend and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.) She works frequently for Radio 4.
In Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging you deal with the angst of being a teenager through your character Georgia Nicolson. How much is Georgia based on you or people you know?
“I’ve had a warning from my mother this morning. She knows I’m doing this interview and told me to say that the book has nothing to do with me or my family. Actually, it’s highly based on me and also what’s even worse is when I wrote Angus, Thongs I didn’t actually know how to write a book, you know. I just got asked to do it, so I actually put real people’s names in and I thought, ‘oh I’ll change it before it gets published’ but I forgot. So, in addition to my family being featured. Also, all my teachers are too”.
What were you like as a teenager?
“Like Georgia actually, rather prone to accidents. I used to think I was very amusing; I’m not that sure that everyone else would agree with me. I went to an all girls’ school and it creates a very different atmosphere, somehow. And I think there’s a lot of the things in the book that come from this, there’s a bit in it, based on me going to a party dressed as a stuffed olive. I just thought that was a hilarious idea, it was only when I got to the party and I mixed with some boys that I realised that it was an utterly crap idea. The lads laughed along for a bit and then they completely ignored me for the rest of the night”.
Would you say that you were a bit naïve at that age?
“Yes, I think I probably was. I was quite excitable. I know when I see girls at signings; they do this thing that I remember doing, vividly. You know, that sort of mad laughing, when they get a joke between them and they start laughing and they can’t stop and they know they should stop because people are going to kill them, if they don’t stop laughing, but they still can’t. You just can’t stop. I think I was like that, excitable”.
Georgia could be seen as a bit naïve compared to other characters targeted at teenagers in literature.
“I think teenagers are a bit naïve. I think teenagers are if injured in someway, if something happens that forces them to face stuff. Generally speaking though, whoever thinks it’s a good idea to give them the vote at sixteen is just an arse. It’s stupid”.
Do you feel modern teenagers are bit more jaded and world-weary?
“I saw a very funny Dylan Moran thing about disenchanted people, oh god another party, no one looks at you, they’re just looking at your clothes and all that. Well, it’s difficult because I know a lot of teenagers. I think they’ve got more choice, definitely more choice and that’s a bit confusing, actually. As a grown up if I’m offered fifty different kinds of credit card it makes me go insane with choice and I think this is what they do. It’s a source of deep unhappiness I think in a way, and we didn’t have that. You know there was no bloody question of getting stuff off my parents. I used to try, god love me, but it was kind of ‘err, err, no’. Mum and Dad used to tease me, drove them insane, ‘so how much money do you think you’ll be getting to take away, pocket money wise on holiday?’ And, I’d go, ‘oh I don’t know, about fifty quid’ and they’d go, ‘You see, you see the world we live in?’ So I think on that level that parents found it easier to say, ‘err no’. They weren’t too transfixed with wanted to get on with you, I see parents now trying much more desperately to be nice to teenagers than mine were to me”.
That’s a big mistake.
“It is actually, you can’t be their mates”.
In On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God our heroine is now dating the sex god, Robbie. But who did you have a crush on when you were a teenager and who would you love to date now?
“It was him. He actually was a sex god, and in fact I saw him last weekend, he was my very first boyfriend and we went out. And I went back to Yorkshire, and I saw him”.
What was that like?
“It was weird actually. You realise that there’s a bit of you that is forever fifteen. He was very nice, I would have probably have killed him if I’d have married him, you know because he is a real Yorkshire bloke”.
Of course you had a crush on this guy, but if you could date anyone now. Who would that be?
“Oh no, that’s an impossible question. Let me think, I went to the Brian Wilson gig last night and I was thinking about the pop stars. I used to like a couple of the Motown singers because they used to wear really fantastic clothes. I used to really like that. I tell you who was there last night at that gig, who I did use to fancy, Roger Daltrey from The Who. He looked brilliant last night, dancing around to Brian. Oh, and Brian Ferry I used to fancy. The readers won’t be satisfied with that, they’ll want me to say someone from bloody Busted”
Or Justin Timberlake or Orlando Bloom?
“Oh no not Justin! And Orlando? I can’t get over the big ears (Lord of the Rings), I know they’re not his that they were moulded but I suspect that they might grow back. I quite like that Ben Affleck bloke”.
How hard is it to write for teenagers?
“It’s really easy. Actually when I start writing, which I am now, all my friends go, ‘oh god, here we go’. Because you can’t help but get into the mood of it and I was doing that the other day. I was sort of re-reading one of my books and my Mum said to me, she said, ‘Are you laughing at your own books?’ I write in this quite eccentric place in Brighton, it’s called ‘The Natural Health Centre’ and it has all kinds of alternative practices, and I’ve worked there for years because I know the owner. He used to let me rehearse there when I was at college, when I did comedy and everything. So, there’s all sorts of different things going on, like belly dancing and five rhythms, where middle aged blokes fling themselves around like loons. And I work right at the top of the building and I come down if I get a bit bored or restless, and snigger through the windows at what people are doing, childish. No, I just really look forward to it”.
What books did you read when you were a teenager?
“You know this another real big difference, there weren’t teenage books around really. There were a couple; I remember a series called Anna the Air Hostess, really the career choices! Like an Air Hostess and that’s it! I used to read a lot of magazines, it’s peculiar, I know her now, but do you know Jacqueline Wilson? She started a magazine called Jackie and we all used to read that and there was another one, the girls will really snigger about this one, called Bunty”
With the cut out clothes?
“Yes! These were all very weird images for a working class schoolgirl from Yorkshire. To have the four Mary’s for Mallory Towers, that was one of them. So, I had a very dislocated view of the world. I think, on one hand it was full of posh people and then there was me and my mates on the council estate. I used to do a lot of reading from school stuff”.
And what do you read now?
“I was just thinking if someone comes in, I’m lying in bed at the minute, if someone came in to my bedroom they’d have a very odd idea of me. Let me just tell you what I’ve got, I’ve got How To Be A Goddess, it’s one of those self help book things, Three Men in a Boat, Zen Questions. Janet Evanovich, do you know her? I like her a lot. I read Agatha Christie and just whatever’s near. I do like thrillers. Actually, I have got a childhood book here which is called, Naughty Princess, which I think is the funniest book ever written, it’s by…hangon, there used to be a magazine in the nineteen forties called Strand Magazine, do you remember it? I must find out more about this author, he’s called Anthony Armstrong, and he wrote the Naughty Princess. It’s got those fantastic ink etchings. I love all that stuff. It’s a bizarre thing, just by the by, I was talking to, I can’t remember his name, but he’s the bloke who wrote a book called The Books That Build A Child, or something like that and he’s a very erudite bloke and I had to be in a sort of debate with him. They usually wheel me in for the superficial viewpoint, but he was very bright, we had to say what books had influenced us as children and I’d brought along this Anthony Armstrong, Naughty Princess book and he said, ‘Why did you like it?’ and I said, ‘There’s a drawing, an ink drawing of this fairy at this christening party but she’s had too much nectar and she’s slumped at the bar’, and apparently in the same story the fairies get so pissed on nectar and everything that they think the baby’s twins. But it’s marvelous, and this bloke said, ‘Oh I see you like,’ what did he call it? ‘Ecstatic chaos’”.
How long do you take to write a novel?
“I’m hoping it’s going to be about four months because my deadline is looming but normally I sit down by myself, for about twelve weeks and generally I turn the first draft over to the editors and they come back with questions and stuff like that. I’ll do a couple of rewrites after that. So maybe all in all, five months. When I settle down to it, but I take a lot of settling down. I have what I call my research period, which everyone sniggers at, which mainly means I watch comedy and you know read anything, joke books and I count that as research. So that probably goes on for a month”.
Georgia Nicholson is pretty much a love/hate character (typical teenager) but who/what do you love and hate at the moment?
“Tricky isn’t it? I’ve sort of got a love/hate relationship with those reality shows, I suppose. That Celebrity Love Island, I really really vowed I wouldn’t watch that, I was so bored with the people and everything, and yet, inevitably I ended up watching it. You get a fascination with people, just to see what they’re going to do. I’m less of a love/hate person and more of a love/love or hate/hate person. I just like people or I don’t and I tend not to bother with them if I don’t like them”.
Do you feel that Georgia Nicholson is a Bridget Jones in waiting? What can we learn from Georgia?
“I don’t think she’s middle-class enough really. You can learn a lot from her sense of humour. I honestly think if you’re a teenager, in particular, I think humour keeps you safe. It keeps you from being too stupid as well”.
In Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas we see a more mature Georgia dealing with being ignored by her boyfriend and starting to have feelings about her ex. What annoys you about men?
“Everything used to annoy me about men, honestly. But now I’ve got a bit more philosophical, I’m quite fascinated; I just think, ‘My goodness!’. My brain just doesn’t work like mens. I’ve got much more tolerant, I think and also much better at guessing, you know. I’ve got this boyfriend at the minute who said something, like, ‘How are you?’ in a text and I sent back, ‘Oh well, you know, today I mostly did my eyebrows…’ and just rambling on which took me about fifty years to write, I’m so crap at texting. And then I just didn’t hear from him! And I thought, ‘What’s happened?’ and then a bit later on I thought, ‘He was just asking a question, I answered it, end of story!’ He’s probably thinking, ‘Fine’, would have been good because he’s just checking in with me. I asked my very first boyfriend, I asked him because he went to an all boys’ school, can you imagine the planning of this? I went to an all girls school and there were two all boys schools directly up the road and down the road…why? I put this in the book actually, why did the boys run into our legs with their bikes? And I said to this boyfriend, ‘Why would they do that?’ and he said, ‘Oh cos they fancy you’ and I said, ‘Why do they cripple us? Why don’t they just say?’. But I did ask him what did they all talk about at break time? And he went, ‘Err we don’t talk at break time’. He said, ‘We play football or occasionally have a fight’”. That’s why I live in Brighton because down here the boys actually really talk to you, sometimes you think, ‘Shut up and talk about football’”.
The use of slang is important in your books, what are your favourite sayings? And what slang words do you miss?
“The thing is they are around because I have personally made it my mission to reintroduce them into the language. It’s terribly catching, everyone I know uses the word ‘fab’, I am singly responsible for that one. Even in America, I’m influencing them, I get letters, ‘Dear Ms Rennison, please could you send us some more British words?’ They’re practising being British! They have their little clubs, their little café clubs, and they go and speak British together, so they sign their letters, ‘pip, pip’. I’ve even managed to introduce First World War slang to their vocabulary now, ‘toodle pip’”.
They’re going to be using ‘whizzer’ next.
“I haven’t used ‘whizzer’, just for you I’m going to put that in. ‘Chocks away,’ I say quite a lot, I remember saying that to Douglas Barder, when I live in Notting Hill, he’d lost his legs and everything. He was driving his car, at the traffic lights and it was summer so he had the windows down and when the lights changed, I shouted, ‘Chocks away!’. I tell you who uses a lot of those expressions, Terry Wogan, and he an absolute font of those old expressions, he’s cracking, he’s got them all in his brain”.
Can you take us through the early days of your career, what did you do before writing novels and how long did it take to get published?
“I actually have a lucky story really, I went to Art College and did performing arts, and I started writing my own show and that’s what I did for a long time. At first, I was in a cabaret group called ‘Women With Beards’ which was a bit of a legend in its own lunchtime actually. Essentially, there was four of us wearing false beards and I think we literally went on stage and said, ‘All men are crap, thank you,’ and then left the stage to massive lesbian applause”.
Was this the eighties?
“Yes! You know, honestly, it was a very big thing, why?”
Thatcher?
“Yes, we used to do performances against Margaret Thatcher. I used to dress up in a ball gown, with a union jack on my head and go down to Brighton Conservative Headquarters and there’d be all these terribly old Tories. Poor sods really, and they’d becoming in for just a drink, probably with their mates and I’d hurl myself in front of them and say, ‘Be what you were born to be, be a nobody,’ sort of thing and they’d step over me. I’d like to think it brought the Thatcher government down. Then I did a one person show called Stevie Wonder Felt My Face which was again, based on my life”.
I’ve seen you! I’ve got the poster still, beehive, mascara, little checked dressed, you were one of my first reviews!
“Really, you should have come and said hello, reviews meant so much”.
I saw you in Wigan!
“I remember Wigan so vividly. I’ll tell you why, I don’t know if you remember…”
It was Wigan’s only Art Festival. Thank God. You and the Graeae Theatre Company where the only highlights, it was a real mess of a festival.
“…Yes, I think this was the venue and I tell people when I do shows now. I arrived there and the technician, you know I’ve been on the road a long time, and you get to know the signs of imminent disaster. And the technician went through my lighting spec and sound cues, and then he went, ‘yeah okay, lights up bish bosh and all done’. See you on the night sort of thing and I’m thinking, ‘hmmmmmmm’. So he went off, and I didn’t see him, I came on to the sound of the music from my second half and I looked up into the lighting box, and he was there, pissed, waved at me cheerily and then fell off his stool and I didn’t see him again. I didn’t know if it was the night but I had to get the audience to sing Pink Floyd songs, I had no music. People think I make this up but thankfully you’re here to prove it. I actually did make a living from it. It was hard work; I used to have to do four or five gigs a week. Someone said to me, ‘do you miss doing performance?’ and when I finished, I didn’t because I was so tired going around by myself, it’s quite tough but just lately there’s been some talk of me doing a one person show of Georgia. I can’t believe you were there”.
You had a beehive and a little checked dress with thigh boots.
“That dress was pornographic, I can’t believe you were there. It’s a small world”.
What compels you to write?
“Actually that’s interesting, I think probably would do it even if I wasn’t paid. I’m just very fascinated with people. I just love people’s conversation, I’m a bit like Alan Bennett. When I go to Yorkshire I go and stay in this hotel called The Majestic Hotel in Harrogate and I just sit in foyer there and I piss myself. The amount of funny stories people inadvertently tell, and I always want to record them. The Georgia books are like that, they’re recordings of incidents and pictures of life and things, and that’s why I like to do it. I’ve done it all my life really. I used to work with the late John Peel on Home Truths, he was very instrumental really, he used to let me have free range. I’d tell him a story and he’d say, ‘Please tell that story on the air’. So I learnt how to tell stories in sort of three minutes and I think I learnt a lot about dialogue doing that. If I was proud of anything, it would be the way I write conversations because I think it’s true, that’s how people speak. Especially in the North, in this foyer, only last week, I’d been out an brought a beret, it was quite a fancy sort of thing and I came in and this woman said, ‘Ohh, I admire your confidence’. A complete stranger! Nothing to do with me and it had nothing to do with her what I was wearing on my head. If there’s someone pretending to be an ambulance siren, they’ll be the one to sit next to me”.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
“So many. Actually some cheeky pig said to me the other day, ‘Oh, you’ve never had a job’. I have! I worked for a bank in New Zealand because that’s all the jobs there was. I was so unsuited to it and the banks in New Zealand open late on Friday nights or they used to, to nine o’clock and the pubs closed at ten. So it meant you only had an hour of fun, really. But we had a tea break, so I decided in my tea break that I’d go home and I’d have a bottle of wine to sort of set me off for the evening. So, by the time I got back to work, to the bank, I was quite drunk and this woman came in and she didn’t have any money in her account, so I gave her some money. This old woman. I remember clearly thinking in my head, ‘Well, that doesn’t seem fair, I know lots of people who have lots and lots of money in their accounts, and they never use it’. So, I gave her this money and then of course I got found out, about two days later and I thought, ‘Good. They’ll deport me back to England because I don’t want to stay in scummy New Zealand anyway,’ but they didn’t. They made me stay on in the bank and pay it off! That was my worst job really”.
If you couldn’t write what would you do?
“I tell you, strangely, this takes us full circle. When I started work, I used to work with teenagers. I used to work in Brixton in the really rough housing estates, we’d build all those jungle gyms, the kids would watch us put them up and then take them back down. Someone should have written ‘cunts’ on our forehead with an indelible marker. But I really enjoyed it, in a strange kind of way and last night I was talking to mate of mine at the Brian Wilson gig, and he said, ‘I saw Graeme something or other’, ‘Oh what’s he doing?’, ‘He’s out in Africa setting up playgrounds for kids,’ and I had they just real, ‘God I’d like to do that’ moment. The other thing that’s happened to me, which came right out of the blue, is the Holiday Show, they’ve asked me to guest present and I really want to do it! I don’t know why, I don’t fly; it will be good fun if I can write it myself. I won’t fly and nor should anyone else. They said, ‘For your first assignment you can go round a South African vineyards on the back of Harley Davidson’”.
To which you said?
“No! I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to show myself up that way. I would like to do that show though and be the anti-Judith Charmers, I’m going for the pasty look”.
ARCHIVE: The Internal Cool – An Interview with Andrew Loog Oldham
Andrew interviewed Loog in 2005. ‘When I was a roadie, I was nicknamed Loog,’ says Andrew, ‘I was vaguely aware of the real Loog. Though we share the same name, I wasn’t named after him. I interviewed him on a plane and we bounced emails back and forth, in the end we discussed the possibility of the Andrew Oldham appreciation society. A society devoted to anyone called Andrew Oldham. I remember we made a pact, I would stay out of music and he would stay out of fiction writing, that way we wouldn’t confuse anyone. It’s nice to see though then when Andrew Oldham is Googled, Loog is first and I am second’.
The Internal Cool: An Interview with Andrew Loog Oldham. Interview by Andrew Oldham
Andrew Loog Oldham was born in January 1944. His mother a nurse; his father, Andrew Loog, an American pilot from Texas. Andrew was raised in London and wanted to be in show business from the age of eight. From the moment he first went on the London underground and saw a movie poster he knew where he wanted to be. At 16 he got his wish when he was asked to leave school. His first job was with mod fashion designer Mary Quant. As gofer extraordinaire he poured drinks for the journalists, walked the models dogs and was able to hang with the likes of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Vidal Sassoon – all part of the fraternity that was the first British pop business – fashion. After a spell bumming around France “begging, being involved in innocent kidnappings and running errands at the jazz festivals” Oldham drifted into the world of pop music publicity via early ‘ 60’s pop singers Mark Wynter and Kenny Lynch. He handled the publicity for the UK tours of Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Chris Montez, Bob Dylan and in 1963 met the Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein at a TV show in Birmingham, England and handled the group’s PR from “Please, Please Me” through “From Me To You”. In late April of that year following a suggestion from music writer Peter Jones, Andrew and The Rolling Stones met each other and they became his way of life. He became the group’s co-manager through the end of 1967. The groups first golden run that produced such standards as “The Last Time”, “Play With Fire”, “Not Fade Away”, “Satisfaction”, “Paint It, Black”, “Get Off Of My Cloud” and “Ruby Tuesday”. In 1964 at a London party, Oldham discovered Marianne Faithfull. He produced and co-wrote her first hit “As Tears Go By”.
In 1965 Oldham formed Immediate Records, the first UK indie record label. In five short years Immediate produced the early recordings of the Small Faces, Rod Stewart, Amen Corner, Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and the Nice. More than slightly burnt out at the age of 25 in 1969, Andrew started roaming the world, finally settling in Bogota, Colombia in 1983. During this time he recorded Italian stars Francesco di Gregori, Lucio Dalia and Anna Oxa ; plus Donovan in the UK and, Texas blues group The Werewolves, reggae star Jimmy Cliff and soulman Bobby Womack in the USA. Oldham then worked in Colombia and Argentina from 1986 to 1996 with Colombia’s Compania Limitada and Oxygeno; and Argentina’s los Ratones Paranoicos and Charly Garcia. In 1996 he decided to quit life and near-death on the highwire and just live. From 1996 to 2002 he produced two volumes of acclaimed biography, Stoned and 2Stoned. He may write a third. 2003 found Andrew back in the studio with Glasgow group v-twin and in 2004 he’s back in Buenos Aires producing new band los Otres and showing The Rolling Stones documentary “charlie is my darling” at selected film festivals. Andrew divides his time between Bogota, Colombia and Vancouver B.C. he still believes in the power of song and performance and is happy to be here to share his never-ending love of the game – hustle and the rhythm of life….music.
With unusual, sardonic and uncanny recall, Oldham’s presentation brings the listener in touch with the reality of the British invasion, the relationship between The Rolling Stones themselves and the Beatles; the effects of fame, money and drugs upon the musicians and the music made; the ability of The Rolling Stones to create, create again and survive and the whole wonderful history of how great Britain both won and lost world war 2 and gained it back through style, fashion, passion and music.
Let’s deal with your early part of your career, your time as the Beatles and Bob Dylan’s Press Agent and then your time as the Rolling Stones Manager and Producer. How did this era for you define Andrew Loog Oldham?
“In the late 50’s a couple of movies, Expresso Bongo and Sweet Smell of Success defined for me what I wanted to be and what world I wanted to be a part of. I became exactly that. Working for Brian Epstein and the Beatles was a defining time because I saw the new potential of music; the same applies to the four or five days I spent with Bob Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman where I saw the potential of conspiracy in management, wherein you can divine your artist into being a part of a lot of people’s world. That’s what I saw and felt anyway, and it was directly linked to the manager role played by Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo and the combination of the Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis roles in Sweet Smell of Success. I had first got the message when I saw Paul Scofield in Expresso Bongo on stage when I was 13 in 1957. That’s when I knew I was not alone and what was already in my mind was a reality out there in some strange wonderful world”.
You have always been involved in not just the music scene but film and now writing. I’m thinking particularly of the 1966 documentary film, Charlie Is My Darling. How did this film come about? And, if you could re-edit it today, what would you change?
“All the top groups were making movies, it was part of the result of the new success. Even Gerry & the Pacemakers had a movie; the Dave Clark Five as well, directed by John Boorman. I made ‘Charlie’ with the Stones to get them in the mood for meeting all the types of people they’d have to meet to get a movie going. Ironically, a ‘real movie’ never happened, and ‘Charlie Is My Darling’ remains the only document of that part of the 60’s. I wouldn’t change a thing. You have to be true to the time both behind and in front of the camera. I might improve the quality of the sound … all the Stones mumble except Brian Jones; and the Irish participants all need subtitles”.
The Stones were always seen as the bad boys of the British 60s scene; often portrayed as violent, which was misfortunately backed up with Altamont disaster (something the late Hunter S. Thompson spoke about in an interview with us late last year). But how much of this image was implied rather than on the surface? How much of that was natural, and how much came from you pulling the strings?
“You are talking about two different times. The early 60’s when the violence was non-existent, perceived and manufactured by us and condoned and promoted by the press; the Micky Mouse end of the 60’s if you will. And then the post – 68 section when the 60’s had changed, or started, depending upon your point of view, when the public had started taking drugs and the violence was real, and that’s how you get Altamont”.
What impact did Brian Jones death have on you?
“At the time, not much. I was too wrapped up in my own pain, my own possible demise and what remained of my invincibility. Later, in the 70’s, when I had managed to find the personal life here in Bogota that had eluded me, or I had eluded, in London in the 60’s I looked up from our 8000 feet plateau here in Bogota on a very happy occasion re-inforced by coca leaves towards Brian, and said, ‘Brian, you fool, why did you have to take it all so seriously. It’s all turned out all right. There’s nothing to be scared of ‘. I feel the same way today with the coca replaced by tea”.
How do you feel about The Stones today?
“Not often. But when I do, I have a smile in my heart at how they have secured their very own game that continues to repel all boarders and maintain it’s kingdom of fans”.
You seem to be an individual who loves to seize upon a moment, an idea rather than inventing life. What moments in your career where you happiest to grab and which just slipped out of reach?
“In the 60’s I was happy to grab success as sanity became elusive. I was 19 you’ll remember”.
I want to talk about The Andrew Oldham Orchestra. How we have seen the influence of your work, I’m thinking of ‘The Last Time’ becoming the basis for the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, extend to a new generation, but what music ultimately influenced you to produce such work?
“Jack Nitzsche’s 1963 Reprise LP ‘The Lonely Surfer’”.
You spent time as a producer in Italy – you produced albums for both De Gregori and Lucio Dalla. How difficult was it to produce in a language you were unfamiliar with?
“No, I did my homework, espresso and grappa…. no, seriously I did do my homework. I asked for the top 50 singles and albums; had RCA in Rome detail for me which recordings had succeeded solely as singles and which were double-headers, your actual career artists as opposed to the one-offs. The main difference was the meter and the importance, and how everything grouped around the words. The words had their own time, their own mission that you could adhere it from a wider birth than in English, unless you were dealing with a show tune, but even then I found the space allocated reflected the different way we and the Italians view and pace life”.
You founded Immediate Records, early home to acts like the Small Faces, Rod Stewart, Amen Corner, Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and the Nice. You produced albums for Donovan, Jimmy Cliff, Bobby Womack, and Italian stars Francesco De Gregori, Lucio Dalla, and Anna Oxa. But for you what were the defining moments of this part of your life?
“Whatever I’m doing next. I’m not avoiding your question. I have a healthy but distant respect for my body of work but what’s done is done and what’s next is what engages me. OK, looking at the list in your question. I only ever managed the Rolling Stones because you just cannot follow that energy and accomplishment – anything that follows has to be compared, and compare itself to the work I did with the Stones; and that just wouldn’t have been good for the artist or their career … or mine. Once I’d stopped working with the Stones in 67 and Immediate was over in 1970 I sort of glided between unemployment and self-employment and just kept my hand in by recording music with all these wonderfully diverse talents. I’d record Donovan and have an incredible experience then the next year I’d get the opportunity to record Jimmy Cliff live in concert in America which was just so completely different and such a learning curve on how different cultures and forms put together songs, recorded them and viewed their art and the business. Later I worked in Italy and later in Argentina with the Ratones Paranoicos and Charly Garcia. It was almost like going from one film, one script, one location to another; suffice to say I never got bored. Bobby Womack, whom I recorded in 1983 was another different occasion and forum. I’ve kinda covered the map. Womack was nuts but oh so talented and to work with his rhythm section who were just so cool about how the tracks got laid down was an experience I wish upon you all”.
What drove you to write Stoned and 2Stoned and why did you choose to write them in voices?
“I stopped dying and doing drugs in 1995. I took stock of my life and decided to see if I could write more than liner notes that copied Anthony Burgess and ‘A Clockwork Orange’. I studied the writers whom I admired and had not necessarily read; I read start to finish all of the Paris Reviews and the interviews with all those wonderful writers on how they did the work. I read both of Graham Greene’s memoirs which I admired so much for their economy and thoroughness and flight of description you find with him and in different degrees with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and to a different extent David Mamet. In other words I had built a vault of what I liked for my own reasons, I decided who I liked and made conveniences of why I liked them to suit my upcoming tasks. I devoured the lot until I was full and then I closed the vault and sat down and wrote from 1997 until 2000 and the two books were done. I had always admired Edie by Jean Stein about the life of Edie Sedgewick, the Warhol girl. That book used voices and was edited by George Plimpton who also edited the Paris Review for many, many years. Edie came out in around 1982, I remember making a mental note to use that mode should I ever be fit enough to write. I need to be entertained whilst I entertain, so hearing from old 50’s and 60’s pals and colluders helped me and helped the book. You must remember we came from a virgin time in communication. You did not play Bedford one night and see how the reviews were the next day; you were already in Leicester and the only way you’d see that review might be forty years later on the internet via some serial fan. So to hear Mickie Most’s point of view as he entered the game was as fresh for me as it was for the reader”.
Reading Graham Greene inspired you to write, you’ve said. What is it about Greene in particular that you admire?
“The manners and the laconicity”.
You had a great admiration for Anthony Burgess – what was it about A Clockwork Orange in particular that you connected with?
“The madness, the speed and the language”.
You’re an intensely private man but are in a very public industry? How do you deal with this conflict?
“I don’t. I live in Bogota and Vancouver and that keeps me far from the competitive rub. I dive into London, New York and L.A. on occasion. I just had a great ‘Busman’s holiday’, went up to Mexico City to meet for the first time Alan McGhee. Focused bloke. We eat crickets and went to Nine Inch Nails concerts”.
You have been described as the ‘coolest person of all time’. In your opinion, what makes a person cool?
“Cool is internal positioning at one with a healthy affection of the exterior self”.
Why do you think people think you are cool?
“Because of what they perceive as an actuality that supports their path”.
What pisses you off?
“Chairs scraping the floor whilst being moved”.
Drawing from an extensive backlog, what to you makes a good song and/or a good read?
“Transportment. A phrase, a hum or an idea that engages your mind and your body and for that while improves you”.
Tell me one thing that will surprise people about ALO?
“People is too plural for me to be able to respond to that one”.
With the success of Stoned and 2Stoned have you been encouraged to pursue a career in fiction writing?
“No. It’s a different bird and a gift I have not got a handle on thus far. I’d like to. I still look at its meat and potatoes with a jump at it in mind”.
What’s in the pipeline for ALO?
“I am A DJ for the US satellite station Sirius. A mate, Little Steven Van Zandt, who you’ll know from ‘The Sopranos’ and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, has a channel with Sirius called the Underground Garage, and he invited me to DJ. I do it from wherever I am in the world and it has been fun. I get to listen to all the music I missed in the 70’s and 80’s and my mother would have been proud. It’s nearly like a regular job and I’m good at it. I’m also writing a book three which is a dissertation on entrepreneurs and hustlers; from Diaghilev to Albert Grossman to Malcolm McLaren to Alan McGhee. It’s in the tradition of Nik Cohn from the David Mamet side of the control room”.
If you could travel in time and give the 18 year old you one piece of advice what would it be?
“I would not attempt to give advice from the structured to the invincible. Example leads, legend and myth inspire, qualifications bore”.
You now live in Bogota. There is saying that goes that during life you must live in London, Paris and Bogota but do Bogota first because you’ll need the time and your health. What drew you to Bogota?
“Never heard that saying. I did Bogota last. I met a Colombian actress, Esther Farfan, in London in 1974; we lived in Paris in 1975 and 76. We married in 77. She saved my life and gave me one I did not have and I’m happy to be in love and on probation daily. How’s that for order?”
Finally, how do you want people to remember you?
“I’ve managed to refurbish my CV by not dying and leaving a disgraceful legacy to my family and my work. I work at that and life daily. That does not include attempting to control your question though I do admit to feeding it’s potential”.
The future of Facebook could be the Wombles
Social tools are changing and I am starting to wonder at whether they will get broader in their scope, linking to every point in our lives, so that one day a single chip in your brain will relay your conscious and unconscious thoughts to a twitter account. Raises some issues of what the unconscious mind gets up to and whether it could be used in a court of law against you at a later date.
I wonder if social tools will start to specialise, going for those niche markets. If these social tools where logical, then Facebook would be an online book club and twitter would discuss birds, and digg it would be for undertakers or gardeners.
Last night, my wife and I came up with a series of these niche names and these are just a few that made us roar:
1. Facecluck – for chickens to get together and discuss all things chicken. You wouldn’t prod anyone you bok them and you’d have to be a chicken to join.
2. Faceschmuck – takes all your money, takes your house and adds you to application that steals your identity.
3. Facepuck – for injured hockey players or fictional Shakespearean characters.
4. Facecook - for cannibals, a place away from home to eat Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or The Hairy Bikers.
5. Facehook – for pirates and piercings.
6. Facetruck – for people who look like the back end of a bus.
7. Facestuck – for the accident prone or for parents with embarrassing kids.
8. Facestruck – for stalkers.
9. Faceyuck - for really, really ugly people who couldn’t get on Facetruck.
And in the interests in being fair and impartial and not just selecting one social tool:
1. Pigg It – for farmers and pigs who want farmers.
2. Wigg It – for people who are balding or judges.
3. Stigg It – for Stig of the Dump fans.
4. Tigg It - for the ultimate online schoolyard game.
5. Rigg It – for Politicians and card sharks.
6. Bigg It – the new home for men who just want to brag about it.
7. Figg It - for Greek farmers.
8. Frigg It - x-rated site or for sea men.
9. Leg It – for career criminals on the run.
And one last time for the ultimate social tool:
1. Witter – for the old and generally forgetful.
2. Litter – a place to share rubbish and Womble anecdotes.
3. Quitter - no one uses it because they can’t be bothered.
I would like to hear yours and yes it is a Sunday night and there is nothing on the television. Fuck It, for people who really like to….
Register for Updates/Log in
Twitter News
- left with his baby son for two hours. In two hours it developed cradle cap, threw up, drenched itself, and is wanted for acts of terror 4 days ago
- says today was supposed be statistically the most depressing day of the year. I bucked the trend and had a simply lovely day full of madness 2010-01-18
- wants a decent DVD player. Mine always die around the 6 month mark. Looking for one that is good but not a fortune, suggestions? 2010-01-10
- More updates...
Posting tweet...
Powered by Twitter Tools
Archives
Categories
Blogroll
- Alhama Creative Holidays
- Brando’s Hat
- Cadaverine
- Comma Press
- Flux Gallery Press
- Incorporating Writing
- Incwriters
- London Magazine
- Manchester Lit List
- Max Dunbar
- North American Review
- Peony Moon
- Poet Casting
- Poetry Magazines
- Richard Winston
- Route
- Stones From Other Mountains
- The Hesistant Scribe
- Transmission Magazine
