Cormorant.jpg)
Before we delve deep into the contents of Folklore, the tenth issue of Your Heart Out, here's some background colour courtesy of our comrade PC. It's an archive of cuttings from The Face relating to Postcard Records, The Sound of Young Scotland, its satellites, tributaries and repercussions.There are a number of reasons I begged PC to allow us to include this archive in our library. One is that the archive is a quite valuable part of pop history, shedding as it does light on some overlooked corners of familiar rooms. Among the many things the archive proves is that the 'official' post-punk/new pop histories that established this hegemony of Morley/Savage/Penman are so wrong.
Secondly, on a personal level, my teenage self knew many of these articles pretty much off by heart. And many is the time I have regretted losing my back numbers of The Face. Seeing these cuttings again is quite eerie, and a little like having one's own youth revalidated and restored to life.
Thirdly, in these cuttings you see the seeds of Your Heart Out, and how beyond punk an interest in jazz, folk, bossa, to add to the soul and funk and reggae, may have been propogated. Not just that. In Postcard's contrariness lay the inspiration to challenge orthodoxies. Some things you can't give up!
I have no idea about what happened to Glenn Gibson, or many of the writers who helped shape me (Dave McCullough, Chris Westwood, Chris Burkham, Leila Sanai, etc ...) but here's a toast to them. And to PC. We owe him. So I suggest a quick visit to his Sad Gnome home and supporting the splendid Remodel.
Fantastic! Who knew the Face gave so much space to Postcard et al? More than I remember.
ReplyDeleteAh you see that's my point exactly. History (or the people writing it) leaves us with a particular notion of what was said where and when. But all along I kept saying to people (and in Tangents) about The Face featuring articles on the Jazzateers and Cormorant etc. Thankfully PC has provided the evidence.
ReplyDeleteThe above post more or less reflects my own reasons for hanging on to these old issues. Other periodicals have long since been lost, given away or simply binned; I've never quite had the heart to part with my copies of The Face. It was one of the few easy to find (in Norway) magazines writing about and expanding upon the musical trends I had at the time recently discovered and was emerging myself in, and it was the only one to set me off on new voyages of discovery - I'm pretty sure my interest in jazz and Brazilian music was initially piqued by articles in The Face.
ReplyDeleteSo a toast too then, to still-going-strong writers who continue to explore different musical territories, who refuse to walk well-trodden paths, who (through necessity as much as anything I imagine) are contrary and above all inspiring.