Andrew Oldham

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”.

Tags: 2Stoned, Andrew Loog Oldham, Andrew Oldham, Google, Immediate Records, Producer, Rolling Stones, Stoned

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….

Tags: digg it, Facebook, Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or The Hairy Bikers, Stig of the Dump, twitter

Music and Writing

I have always had a love of music, in my teen years I saw myself as the prog rock kid. A blending of Rick Wakeman, Richard Wright and Peter Gabriel. I was mad on Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Rush. The latter was my guilty secret for many years as was a raft of analog keyboards. At one point I had stacks of them, everything for the magic of moog to the warmth of the Juno 60. At school I had to build a case for that keyboard, I built it from oak, and the guys in the band I was in called it the coffin. Such was the fame and fear of the coffin (it weighed more than the Juno 60) that when a cyclist whose brakes failed going down hill near our rehearsal room, prefered to hit the bassist of the band I was in rather than roll over me and the coffin. That oak case is still out there, so is the bassist, they are built of things that make them survive.

I always thought I was alone in my love Rush. I do recommend anyone to listen to 2112 or Tom Sawyer. In the last few years, I have since discovered their are many poets of my generation who love Rush. The poet, John Siddique is one of those Rush lovers, and I have sneaking suspicion that Floyd and early Genesis may make him smile. I know as he reads this he will be too busy playing air guitar to 2112.

I am not surprised that many poets and writers are more influenced by music rather than a literary tradition that is often alien to them.  When I was growing up we had two ice cream parlours in my run down hometown of Horwich, both parlours were called Ferrettis. The story goes that they were owned by two brothers that had fallen out with each other over ice cream. They moved to opposite ends of the main road that run through the town, infact one moved so far, he dog legged around the crown and onto the new road. These ice cream parlours were dens of inquity as my Mum would say. Here bad boys, bad girls, bad teenagers, bad bikers and drugs hung out.

It is no surprise to anyone that I was drawn into these marginalised figures and with them came the music. I did not come for a town that waxed lyrical about poetry or fiction or even knew what literary tradition. They didn’t need to, the poetry and stories where in their blood. I came from a dying town of cotton, engineering and blast furnaces. The people there told stories of the dead and drank to them. Horwich once boasted having the most pubs for a town of its size. There was even a game where you tried to drink your way through the 60+ pubs, most never made it past the Station park. 

In that town gossip ran from ginnel to ginnel, tales of bad boys, bad girls and bikes that did drugs. Here is Coffin Ginnel, the ghost streets of spring, summer, autumn and winter, the story of the loco works hid during the war from the Lufftewaffe by painting the roofs to look like tennis courts. Except they just painted the one court which was a mile long, end to end, a place for giants to lose their balls.

There is one song though that always reminds me of those dens of inquity, it isn’t prog rock but each time it makes my blood pulse. That one song drives my writing, my stories. That song is Louie Louie by The Kingsmen (which is a cover of a Richard Berry track from 1955). The song makes no sense, but it pulses and it was on a juke box tucked in a corner of one of those ice cream parlours, it had probably been there since 1963 (the year The Kingsmen released their version) and I found it in the summer of 1984. I can still see myself, slightly pudgy, a cheap baseball cap to keep off the sun, the tips of my ears burnt from the summer sun and the old guy behind the counter, fag in mouth, lip hanging down, arms drooling over the counter, who told me to bugger or buy something.

That is the heart of my writing, bugger off or write.

Tags: Bad, Coffin ginnel, dens of iniquity, Genesis, Horwich, John Siddique, Louie Louie, Peter Gabriel, Rush, Tennis, The Kingsman

ARCHIVE: Hunter S. Thompson – Loathing and Fear for a Nation 1939-2005

Andrew wrote this obituary in 2005. ‘It was an awful few months in 2005,’ says Andrew, ‘A number of poets, writers and personal friends died. I had a spate of obituaries to write for a number of magazines. This is one of many I did on Hunter S. Thompson, it was written 24 hours after his suicide. He would have hated this obituary’.

Hunter S. Thompson: Loathing and Fear for a Nation 1939-2005. Article by Andrew Oldham

Hunter S. Thompson was much more than drink, drugs, guns and motorcycles, he was a million miles from the paranoid Doonesbury character, he was a continent away from the media portrayal of him in his latter years. This was a writer trying to make sense of not just a country but a home; and in many ways coming to terms with a growing right wing government and his own impending old age. Unafraid to view his thoughts and ideas, he did seem more and more afraid that he was unable to stop the tide, that the America he loved, the America he celebrated, the America he admonished had changed so rapidly.

This was not a liberal hippie or rebel without clue crying out with anger against apathy, this was not Howard Stern, he wasn’t climbing on any old band wagon. Thompson had seen the blooming and inevitable death of the American Dream in favour of money, control and mass paranoia. The America he would grow old in wasn’t the America of his youth or aspirations. Thompson had and was coming to terms with modern America, the puzzle that became the USA.

Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky on the 18th July 1939. His father, an insurance agent died from a rare immune disorder whilst the young Thompson was at High School. The young Thompson up till then had grown up in a comfortable, affluent home. Thompson was everything middle America wanted, a member of prestigious club called the Athenaeum Literary Association, he ran with rich, socially elite young people of Louisville and would have inevitably become a Republican but the death of his father forced his mother to take a job as a librarian to support the family. Suddenly he was the poor kid amongst his friends, the dreams of an Ivy League school were now beyond him. With increasing frustration and anger, the young Thompson rebelled against the Athenaeum Literary Association and became famous for outrageous pranks; flooding the ground floor of his high school with three inches of water, dumping a truckload of pumpkins in front of a downtown hotel. During this period he turned to writing and began to publish bitter and sarcastic essays for the literary association’s newsletter, including one called, Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation, signed John J. Righteous-Hypocrite: “Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future. Do you realize you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation?”

During his senior year, Thompson was arrested several times for vandalism and attempted robbery. He was eventually barred from the literary association, and spent thirty days in jail. When released, he joined the United States Air Force as a provision of his parole. He was honourably discharged in 1958 and began writing for any small newspaper that would take him. 1964 would be turning point for the young Thompson. During that year the California attorney general issued a report on a dangerous new motorcycle gang known as the Hell’s Angels, and the national media picked up the story.

Thompson was hired by The Nation magazine to write a brief article about the gang. A book followed: “For fifteen hundred dollars I would have done the definitive text on hammerhead sharks and stayed in the water with them for three months!”. With the advance Thompson bought a motorcycle and began his investigative journey; for several months he followed Hell’s Angels gangs across the States, until five Hell’s Angels suddenly turned on him and beat him senseless. In 1967, he published his book, Hell’s Angels. The first edition sold out immediately and broke onto the New York Times bestseller list. Thompson had a few problems with the sudden fame and the ensuing book tour; he showed up drunk for most of his interviews. By 1969 Thompson was one of the most prominent journalists of his generation. Writing for Playboy magazine, Thompson developed his first true piece of Gonzo literature, The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy. Playboy turned it down because the editors felt that it was too meanspirited. In reality, Thompson had stepped beyond the who, what, where, when, and why of mainstream journalism and delivered something quite different: a piece where the writer was not objective but subjective, allowing his own personality and impressions of his subject to emerge. Thompson had created and coined the phrase: Gonzo Journalism.

In 1971, Thompson published his most famous book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, later made into a film by Terry Gilliam. Now firmly immersed in writing the life he lived, Thompson would become embroiled in the drug culture: “I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.” This sense of ‘fleeting’ would always be part of Thompson’s psyche, to him politics, history, countries and journalism would come and go, but the ride was worth grabbing hold of.

Thompson once wrote to his friend Susan Haselden: “In brief, I find that I’ve never channeled my energy long enough to send it in any one direction. I’m all but completely devoid of a sense of values: psychologically unable to base my actions on any firm beliefs. I seem to be unable to act consistently or effectively, because I have no values on hich to base my decisions. As I look back, I find that I’ve been taught to believe in nothing. I have no god and I find it impossible to believe in man. On every side of me, I see thousands engaged in the worship of money, security, prestige symbols, and even snakes”.

Hunter S. Thompson was found dead on Sunday the 20th February 2005 in his Aspen-area home. He died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 67.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Hunter S Thompson, Obituary

Love Reading

I have been writing now for more years than I care to say. I am fortunate to be able to write most of the time and make a living from it, I have over the year been a journalist, poet, short story writer, columnist, fiction writer, script writer, film writer, script editor, script supervisor, magazine editor, publisher. Working for myself and  for a number of publishers and production companies.

I hope by now that I am respected and that organisations like Incwriters, have shown my continued support of independent publishers in the UK and abroad and my desire to drum home the importance of reading.

I am still amazed that even today our own Government do so little to support libraries and reading within education. They don’t seem to see the importance of reading as a way to bolster communities, instil pride and give a vital skill to those seeking to learn. I come from a working class background, my parents where not rich, I never grew up with everything (and even now I care little for the latest want it now product). For me, the library, the library that my Mum took me to, helped me join, encouraged me to use opened up a world beyond the industrial landscape and suburban landscape I grew up in.  To me the library was Enid Blyton, Tove Jansson, Roald Dahl, Alan Ahlberg and Harry Harrison. It was the Famous Five on a mad journey with Moomin Papa in a Chocolate Factory with the fantastical Jeremiah Obediah Jacknory Jones fighting the might and cunning of the Stainless Steel Rat. God, that was brilliant!

My love of books remains, I have shelves of them. They warm me, they remind me of worlds beyond my own.

So, I am confused when I meet poets who do not read poety, script writers who do not watch theatre, listen to radio, go to the cinema or fiction writers who simply do not read – ever. Many of you know that for me this is a major bug bear, how the hell can you write when you simply do not read? It is like asking a surgeon who has never studied medicine to remove your ruptured spleen. Mine is about to rupture with anger.

Now, I know there are many novelists who do not read when they are writing – this is different – but I do not know any succesful novelist that doesn’t read. I know a vast amount that only read non-fiction (which is still reading).

Every successful poet, writer and journalist I know, read. Why? Because it inspires them, because it interests them, because it is an important part of actually being a writer. Writers write but they read a hell of alot more.

Tags: Famous Five on a mad journey with Moomin Papa in a Chocolate Factory with the fantastical Jeremiah Obediah Jacknory Jones fighting the might and cunning of the Stainless Steel Rat, Love Books, Read Something

ARCHIVE: Hovis Has Risen and Left The Building

Andrew wrote this article in 2005. ‘I always found it hard to interview Hovis,’ says Andrew, ‘He would ask to see copy before it was submitted to the editor. I was new to journalism back then and stupidly, I always said yes. Hovis would inevitably return my copy with revisions galore. Mainly, he would tighten up jokes, move around sentences and make suggestions. When I was in my early twenties, cutting my teeth, I hated that. Now, I am much older, and I miss those notes from Hovis, I miss those suggestions’.

Hovis Has Risen and Left The Building. Article by Andrew Oldham

The first time I met Hovis Presley I was signing on and being forced to go through a soul destroying programme of back to work sessions, learn how to type, learn how to do your accounts, learn how to do just what we say. They were the kind of sessions run by middle-aged men who wore Burton suits, drove away in a saloon car as you stood at the bus stop in the rain and who had no problem in informing you that ‘they knew your pain, your lack of confidence’, and how they thought about this every time they took to the beach or the ski slopes. I remember telling Hovis this in a Bolton pub (it was raining outside and I could see his bicycle tethered outside to a railing), he replied that everyone has to do something with their life, he personally preferred a bicycle. He then asked me what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer and he was happy to give me some advice – ‘just write and don’t buy into believing your better than everyone else’. I’m paraphrasing, but it was a truth about Hovis, no matter how big he got, no matter how many times he appeared on stage, radio and television (he had a few plans for documentaries involving his Irish heritage, he mentioned a boat once and the coast of Ireland in one of our later interviews), he never gave up that bloody push bike or forgot who he was and what he wanted. To me he wasn’t just a comedian, or a performance poet, he was a giant of a man full of warmth and understated charm, the master of the pun, the flat delivery and the drole.

I kept bumping into Hovis over the following decade, both in my role as a journalist and as a writer. He was always laconic about why he took to the stage and why he wrote; “If I weren’t doing this I’d be looking for chewing gum under shop window ledges”. He cited his interests back then as postal ker-plunk and choosing eight sandwiches to take to a desert island (seven cheese and one egg). I interview Hovis for many people, The Big Issue in the North, Flux, BBC GMR, Manchester Evening News, Bolton Evening News and always enjoyed meeting up with him and talking with him about his work (he would always bring a friend that he felt I should interview as well, via Hovis I met many comedians, Pete Kay, Justin Moorhouse and Smug Roberts).

Years later, Peter Kay would offer Hovis a role in Phoenix Nights but he turned it down (he feared that this role would typecast him). He never bought into his celebrity, he influenced comedians across the country but he would only ever take gigs where he could get back to Bolton before the trains stopped. “The only place in the country where broken biscuits are still legal tender,” he once quipped. However, he was man of integrity and would often do charity gigs wherever and whenever he could, regardless of distance.

That first time I interviewed him was my favourite meeting, he gave me a hand made copy of Poetic Off-License, made in his kitchen. A friend had done the art, someone else had typed it up and Hovis had stapled them together (I still have it now on my shelf along with other copies that surfaced over the next three years, the re-editions and the holiday annual – before I moved from Bolton, he would phone me up and ask me to gigs or would say that he had a new book for me). He was generous and I will miss his presence in this world.

Hovis died on the 9th June 2005.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Bolton, Hovis Presley, Obituary, Peter Kay, Phoenix Nights, Poetic Off-Licence, Smug Roberts

Paston Letters

Just a gentle reminder for 2010 that Ian Parks new pamphlet collection is coming out from Rack Press. A Paston Letter is a great return for Ian Parks longer sequence poetry. The pamphlet collection deals with Margery Paston’s thwarted love for Richard Calle. Hopefully, I will get around to reviewing it this year.

Tags: A Paston Letter, Ian Parks, Rack Press

ARCHIVE: The Truth With A Line – Esther Morgan

Andrew interviewed Esther Morgan in 2006 via email. ‘In that year,’ Andrew says, ‘I interviewed quite a few female poets, it seemed to be a year when Bloodaxe came to the fore and what Bloodaxe does well is strong female voices. Esther has become a friend since this interview and has even given me feedback on my own poetry. When I interviewed her she was happy to receive additional questions and discuss the darker elements of her work and talk about the glass ceiling in Literature. This kind of question would have enraged many poets but Esther’s answer is honest, truthful and shows the changing face of English Literature’.

The Truth With A Line: Esther Morgan. Interview by Andrew Oldham

Esther Morgan was born in 1970 in Kidderminster, After reading English at Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. She took an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and has since taught on its under-graduate creative writing programme, editing the UEA new poetry anthology,Reactions. In 1998, she won an Eric Gregory Award, and taught at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Beyond Calling Distance was her first book of poems from Bloodaxe, followed up be her recent collection The Silence Living in Houses.

In your new collection The Silence Living in Houses you deal with unsettling themes of ghosts, sisters who come to a macabre end and servant girls that vanish. Why did you want to tackle such themes and what drew you to the characters, their tales and the language or their poetry?

“I’ve always been interested in themes of absence, silence and erasure. My first collection contained a lot of poems that touched on silences between people who are failing to communicate in some way. But the feel of the second collection was prompted in particular by a move to an old house in Oxfordshire about three years ago. The circumstances are unusual: my partner and I don’t own this house, but are in effect care-taking it for the owner. The house isn’t that old – only Edwardian – but it hasn’t been renovated for half a century. There is, consequently, a powerful sense of history in the place – a lot of the furniture is of the period and details like the servants’ bells remain, along with antiquated plumbing and no central heating (there’s a lot of wintry imagery in the book). It’s got a magical atmosphere – surrounded by trees with an overgrown garden that backs on to fields and woods. It’s the house that time forgot and living there has been a powerful imaginative experience – the past is so palpable it’s as if the former inhabitants are sometimes more real than ourselves, as if we are the transient presences. But whilst the rooms are redolent of former lives, these remain in the realm of hint and suggestion so it’s natural for the mind to start inventing stories from the fragments that remain, like the broken china we occasionally unearth in the garden which surfaced in the story of the disappearing maid in ‘Bone China’. In a way the house has provided a setting and a different slant on subjects I’ve always been interested in: the hidden lives of women, the secrets within families, what happens behind closed doors”.

This collection is infused with a rich tapestry of language and intrigue. What do you enjoy about this medium of poetry? What is about poetic language that drives you to write?

“Because the poems were written in a shorter period of time than those in the first collection, the book has a stronger sense of cohesion, something that is often the case, I think, with a second collection. But I’ve always been drawn to poetry that modulates language through the course of a book. I’m also more interested in poems that proceed through suggestion, that are ambiguous in some way. In writing a poem I’m struggling to express something which may be ultimately incommunicable and that tends to lead to a strategy of implication. I don’t set out to be deliberately mysterious but I am fascinated by how little we know about other human beings, even those we profess to be close to, sometimes them most of all. We all wander through life like icebergs with nine tenths of us hidden beneath the surface – that’s the bit most writers are interested in exploring. As far as what drives me to write, I think it’s a sense of territory. When I’m engaged on a poem and it’s going well I feel like I did as a child making a den at the bottom of the garden, a place where I could think and dream away from the adult world. Writing a poem is like making a den out of words. I also feel I’m deeply inarticulate much of the time – I’m not someone who is good at arguing or particularly confident in my own opinions – I often only know what I think or feel about a given situation after it’s passed and I can talk to myself through writing. I feel very cut adrift when I’m not writing, because I’m reduced to reacting to the world rather than thinking about it”.

Poetry is often seen as a personal medium, that themes tackled on the page are often drawn from the poet’s background. At the heart of your new collection there is dark menace of violence, and the question arises of whether the poet has first hand knowledge of this or if not how did they perpetuate ‘the truth’ of the collection?

“I agree there can be a problem with the ‘I’ in poetry and the assumption that this equates with the person of the poet in a very direct way. I’m interested in the implications of using the first person and the construction of identities that are tangential to the poet. This was an issue for me in writing the poems in the second section of ‘The Silence Living in Houses’ (the book’s split into three sections altogether, each of which is linked through the idea of interiors). The second section was problematic because it deals with domestic violence, albeit in an oblique way. I haven’t, thank God, ever experienced physical violence myself, though I think I have an understanding of emotional intimidation which often goes hand in hand with violence. The immediate context of these poems though, stemmed from my work as a Case Conference Administrator for Oxford Social Services, taking the minutes of Child Protection conferences where domestic violence was often a factor within families where the children were having problems. Some of the stories really got under my skin: I was already writing poems about what happens inside houses and this subject started to creep in, particularly the sense of secrecy and isolation these women were suffering. I was struck by a remark one Social Worker made, that in the right context domestic violence can be a raised eyebrow, because of the threat the gesture implies. I found I was writing poems where it was this threat of violence that’s more frightening and controlling than the violence itself. But to get back to the issue of using ‘I’, this was a real problem in these particular poems – though I was careful not to use any real details from the cases I heard I still felt that adopting the first person was an appropriation of others’ experiences. The last thing I wanted to do was suggest that I was a victim of this kind of situation. I therefore switched early on to using the second person, ‘You’, in these poems which is more inclusive, though readers may still may make assumptions about autobiographical elements even so. Of course, I believe writers are entitled to write about any subject but with the proviso that if it’s not your own direct experience you have a bigger responsibility to get it right, to try and inhabit the material as fully as possible. I didn’t have this issue with the other two sections of the book – the first being largely free invention, and the third drawing on personal childhood memories”.

The poetry in the collection is haunting and disturbing, how hard was it to delve into such areas?

“Some of the poems about home life were tricky as well – you may feel you own your personal memories but they are also the stuff of the memories of others who are close to you. This presents a different challenge from the one discussed above. I don’t want to imply there are any terrible family skeletons which I reveal in the book – there aren’t – but nevertheless the public narrative a family tells about itself can be rather different from the secret one which rumbles on beneath the surface of everyday life. In my case it was the relationship between my grandmother, her daughter (my mother) and myself. There were plenty of hidden tensions – nothing out of the ordinary but powerful nevertheless, particularly as I spent a great deal of time with both of them growing up. Children are very sensitive to emotional atmosphere and this is the territory that these poems explore – but investigating this can be unnerving and I did worry about the reaction they’d get. In the end I gave them to my mother to read before publishing them – my grandmother died a couple of years ago – as I wanted her to absorb them before they appeared in public. I felt I owed her that as a courtesy – after all it’s her past as well – and fortunately she thought they were good and didn’t have a problem with them”.

Poets are illusionists that the poet can create as well as draw from reality. But how much do real events on a personal and global level affect you? And how, if you do, do you tie these into fictional event that reenforce what you are trying to say?

“‘The Silence Living in Houses’ is a pretty internalised collection, claustrophobic even. There’s plenty of autobiographical material in it, especially in the third section which re-examines the interiors of houses from my childhood. However, I don’t feel I’m a nakedly personal writer in the way someone like Sharon Olds is, whose work I very much admire for its combination of honesty and technical skill. However, whilst I draw on personal memory a great deal it’s often transformed into material which feels more like folk or fairy tale. For instance, my grandmother is a key figure in my life and writing – she was both deeply ordinary and quite remarkable – but in the poems in the third section she becomes more like a figure from a childhood story, part nurturing, part frightening. So her old-fashioned way of laying a fire becomes a kind of ancestral haunting in the poem ‘Firelighter’. She played cards a lot to pass the time, different kinds of patience in particular, and this found its way into a poem called ‘La Patience, 1943’ which is based on a painting by the French artist, Balthus, but is transformed into a gothic tableau. Elsewhere there are poems which come from sources external to memory and family life. For instance ‘Half Sister’ was triggered by watching the film The Others starring Nicole Kidman (not a great film to watch alone in an old house where there are rooms which aren’t used!) One of the most haunting details in the film was the child who can’t be exposed to daylight otherwise they’ll burn. This image of someone trapped in a twilight world was very powerful to me and became a kind of doppelganger in the poem, an image of an alternative life which is ghosting the present. Another poem, ‘Fast’ is from a shocking true event in which three sisters and their aunt deliberately starved themselves to death in an act of religious fervour in the midst of an ordinary housing estate in Dublin. So external events are an important inspiration but the distance between poems based on these and more personal memories is often not that big, in that I use a similar approach in both cases. If by global events you mean more overtly political or environmental concerns, these inform my view of the world but they don’t often enter directly into the poems – I can’t just choose to write about something, be it the Iraq war or the Asian tsunami, unless it connects to some inner poetic impulse. Perhaps this sounds selfish or remote from real life, but I don’t feel this is so – I can’t write a successful poem from the head, it has to be more than an intellectual articulation and to do otherwise would result in false writing. However, some of the ideas that obsess me, particularly silence and the voice connect to repression in a wider sense – it’s so hard to speak freely even if your culture, at least on the surface, allows this. I’m interested in the power mechanisms, personal and political and sometimes a combination of the two, that prevent people from speaking. And in my first book there are poems about isolation which touch on environmental degradation – Beyond Calling Distance begins and ends with fables of landscapes which have ceased to be fertile and the psychological impact of this on a community. So yes, what is happening out there finds its way into the work, but usually in quite a roundabout way that takes time to mesh with my poetic voice”.

How did you edit your latest collection? And how important do you think the skill of editing is to a writer and poet?

“This collection actually fell into place quite quickly. It became apparent that I was writing about three main subjects: the old house, domestic violence and childhood memories and once the idea of interiors had taken hold as a unifying theme, the different sections were clear-cut. I do think editing skills in terms of a whole collection are important – thinking about the shape of a book and also considering on a smaller scale how the juxtaposition of different poems affects the way a reader interprets them seems to me an extra resource at the poet’s disposal. I know readers won’t always begin with poem one and read straight through, but I often read several poems in a row, or once I’ve dipped into a collection several times, may then read the book in a linear way. Arranging poems in a book is a bit like arranging stanzas in a poem: I enjoy the process and the way surprising connections can reveal themselves along the way. For example, the second section of the book moves from stifling confinement and oppression towards some possibility of release; this wasn’t pre-planned but as I wrote more poems I began to see a subsumed narrative was possible and that it would be good to progress towards the idea of escape”.

Until recently, you were the editor of Reactions, what did you learn from this time and how had it improved/detracted from your view of poetry and your own work?

“Editing Reactions was a very positive experience and a continual reminder of how many different kinds of poetry there are. I dislike anthologies that try to spin a party line or are only interested in promoting one kind of poetics. No single book can be comprehensive and taste will always be subjective, but I was determined to adopt as broad-minded approach as possible to the editing task. Any submission that seemed to offer anything at all was always read more than once and I’d bring in other colleagues as readers in trying to make the final selection. In terms of my own work it showed me different possibilities exist: there’s always a danger as a writer that you start reading only material which confirms your own taste, that a kind of narrowing will occur over time. As an editor it’s impossible to remain insular – every now and then I’d read a poet whose work really jolted me awake, that I was surprised I liked. On the other hand I gave up editing as I moved more deeply into writing the second collection. I needed the solitude, to focus the energy inwards and that’s hard to do if you’ve got fifty other voices competing for attention inside your head. I find this tends to be my writing rhythm – that I need alternating periods of busy engagement in the wider world, followed by bouts of introspection”.

Do you feel that in the UK poetry scene that there is a glass ceiling for female poets and what do you feel perpetuates this?

“I feel personally I’ve been very fortunate in the opportunities that have come my way, not least of which was editing Reactions. Also my instinct as a writer is to be very private – I’m not comfortable in pursuing a particularly public role in the poetry world, competing for editorships or review space. For me this is detrimental to the writing process as I find myself worrying about what other people think of my poetry and my judgement – feeling self-conscious just makes me and my writing awkward! Having said that I think it’s absolutely vital that a wider range of the poetry community has access to the most powerful jobs in poetry, not just women but poets from different ethnic backgrounds as well. I’m glad that Poetry Review now has a woman editor in Fiona Sampson, and there are plenty of examples of women making headway in this respect, such as Pascale Petit and now Martha Kapos’ editing role for the wonderful Poetry London. But still the major poetry publishers are male-dominated and I think that does need to change – that’s not to imply that the existing male editors aren’t doing a good job but there should just be greater representation across the board. It’s far too easy for a situation to become self-perpetuating in a small world like that of poetry publishing where a relatively small group of people becomes comfortable with each other and the status quo – that’s true of any field and needs a good shaking up from time to time”.

What kind of problems have you had as a poet in the UK and abroad?

“The enduring problems are with myself, the endless battle to give myself permission to write. Laziness and lack of confidence are formidable foes and need watching carefully. I thought the writing process would get easier with experience but I’m not finding that – perhaps this is a bad time to ask as I’m searching for a new direction and haven’t yet picked up the thread! A friend just sent me the following poem by Elaine Feinstein which I’m finding very inspiring – so I thought I’d pass it on: ‘MUSE/ for E.T./ “Write something every day, she said”,/ “even if it’s only a line, / it will protect you”./ How should this be?/ Poetry opens no cell,/ heals no hurt body,/ brings back no lover,/ altogether, poetry is/ powerless as grass./ How then should it defend us?/ Only by strengthening/ our fierce and obstinate centres.’ I love that last line – I often feel I lose my ‘fierce and obstinate centre’ amongst the demands of everyday life and that’s precisely why I write, to fight against a tendency to acquiesce or just drift along without questioning things. I think reading as well as writing poetry can help strengthen this too; that’s why it remains important”.

What do you think of the UK Poetry Scene today? If you could change it anyway what would you do?

“This connects to some of the thoughts I express in answer to question above – since I became interested in contemporary poetry in the late 80s I think it has become a more vibrant and open-minded place but there’s a way to go. Healthy debate is good, bitchy faction-fighting isn’t and I sometimes think there’s a fine line between the two as far as the poetry world is concerned. For example the concerted campaign against Bloodaxe’s Being Alive and Staying Alive anthologies in some quarters of the specialist poetry press enraged me and flew in the face of the books’ reception in the general review pages of newspapers and magazines, and the overwhelmingly positive reception the books got from the public, perfectly intelligent and sophisticated reading public I might add. That struck me as intellectual snobbery, the squeals of an elite faced by an external threat beyond their control. It reminded me of certain tutors and fellow students I came across at Cambridge who were intent on using knowledge to bully and undermine the intellectual confidence of others – it’s something I’ve no time for. On the other hand, I know from personal experience how very generous poets can be to one another – my own creative journey wouldn’t have been possible without the unselfish support and encouragement that I’ve come across. There’s often a lot of coverage of spats and feuds in the poetry press but not much attention paid to the quiet, ongoing sharing of work and resources amongst practitioners. If there’s one thing I could change it would be to somehow get poetry reviewed more extensively and substantially in the broadsheet press; my sense from speaking to literate friends of mine who are avid fiction readers is that poetry remains too much of a mystery, that they don’t know where to start when it comes to contemporary poetry. The prizes and gongs of recent decades have done something to publicise poetry beyond it’s ghetto, but so much more needs to be done. I know from my experience as a teacher that students who are initially suspicious of contemporary poetry are converted very quickly when good examples are placed before them week after week. That’s all it takes – here’s a poem, and another one and here’s another – what do you think of them? And then they’re away. But that only happens in small pockets, not across the culture as a whole”.

How important do you feel it is that writers and poets should be readers?

“Absolutely 100% vital. Any breakthroughs in my own work have come from reading others and absorbing approaches, ideas, techniques and then trying them out for myself”.

What are you reading now? And what is your favourite piece of work?

“A great deal of my reading recently has been bound up with my involvement in a project called The Poetry Archive. It’s an online resource of poets reading their own work, both contemporary and historic. I’ve been working on both elements, researching recordings, writing introductions and amalgamating all the bibliographical info etc. So my reading has really been listening and that’s been a powerful experience, to get back to the voices of poets and their different intonations and accents. It’s made me re-assess the relationship between the spoken and the written voice and how the two might influence each other. Particular favourites include Margaret Atwood’s laconic tones which suit her dry-eyed, sometimes acerbic poems, Christopher Logue’s impassioned reading of a section from All Day Permanent Red and Roy Fisher’s quietly ruminative and witty meditations on art and our industrial heritage. It’s a different experience from going to a reading where poets tend to stick to their tried and tested favourites and the performance element can dominate. These are largely studio recordings and have a personal, more reflective quality as if the poet is speaking quietly to you alone – and that can be a very charged experience. The Archive’s an ongoing, inclusive project (everyone from Betjeman through Heaney to Denise Riley) with many more poets due to be added over the coming months – www.poetryarchive.org”

What are you working on at the moment?

“As I mentioned above, I’m casting around for the next book, the next idea. Work commitments meant an enforced break last year so I’m experiencing an uncomfortable rustiness at the moment. But I know I want a more open collection this time – whether in style or subject matter or both”.

Many poets and writers are drawn to academia, why do you think writers and poets end up in a HE environment?

“By accident! I think with the proliferation of creative writing courses there are more teaching opportunities than ever, however these are mainly part-time and insecure posts, so it’s not a bed of roses. However, it does provide some flexibility I guess and the lure of the holidays to get some writing done, though in my experience these are often taken up with planning for the next academic year”.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Bloodaxe, Esther Morgan, Reactions, The Silence Living in Houses