Sweet Serendipity

One of the Your Heart Out research projects is Anywhere Else But Here Today ... and fittingly the phrase The Same Sky crops up in a song by one of the featured artists Vladimir Vysotsky, called He Did Not Return. I kept thinking I recognised the name Vysotsky from somewhere. Then the other day I found a secondhand copy of Nik Cohn's The Heart of the World and there it was. And here's the song ...


Everything is like it used to be:
the same sky, blue again.
The same forest, the same air, and the same water;
just that he didn't come back from the battle.

The Same Sky

Watching ancient videos of the Happy Mondays recently reminded me how jawdroppingly brilliant they could be. I'm talking here about 1986 into 1987. I was lucky enough to see them a handful of times then. Firstly at the Rock Garden, just after Freaky Dancin' came out, then Jeff Barrett put them on at Bay 63. On both occasions there were probably less than a dozen people in the audience but everyone knew there was something special. Then I think Jeff put them on Portlands, and I remember Bobby Gillespie being there. Then the Mondays played with the Jasmine Minks when Jeff set up home at the Black Horse in Camden. That was the night some kid got up and did a rap during Little Matchstick Owen, and then when 24 Hour Party People came out the Mondays got to headline at the Black Horse and Shaun was handing out cans of lager to the people at the front. I didn't even drink but took one all the same. It's called courtesy. At the time I wrote rather enthusiastically about the group in a fanzine I called The Same Sky. So in a spirit of sharing (with big thanks to Daniel) here is the whole thing, or you can find it in the library on your left. Very much of its time (early 1987), but at least it had Julie Christie on the cover ...

"Write your heart out ..."

A very personal tribute to J.D. Salinger can be read at the home of Caught By The River ...

Rewrite the script

As Beryl Marsden sang: "The language of music is known around the world ..." So here to celebrate that is a special edition of Your Heart Out, called Rewrite The Script, which can be downloaded for free in the library on your left. It is a story about discovering wonderful pop sounds from the Eastern Europe of the 1960s and ‘70s. In other places it might be billed as a journey of discovery where myths are shattered, lies exposed, ignorance laid bare, injustices set right. That sort of thing. It is written with great enthusiasm, if from a position of relative ignorance. It is openly acknowledged that there are plenty of people out there who will know much more about all this than me. But who cares?

If this piques your curiosity, you can see and hear more at Anywhere Else But Here Today, one of the ongoing Your Heart Out research projects.

The struggle continues ...

The struggle continues ... Your Heart Out activities are still very much alive and thriving. Two research projects are underway, and findings being shared on a daily basis.
The London Nobody Sings is a year-long project to collect together great songs about or related to London. You can read more about the thinking behind this here, and at the present time you can hear more here.
The other project is Anywhere Else But Here Today. This is an attempt to share some sounds from around the world which will hopefully challenge conceptions. At a time when popular culture is presented as a stark choice between X-Factor and Rage Against The Machine, and people retreat into their comfort zones in despair, it’s a joyous task to feature fantastic things which are out there and freely available thanks to the liberating effect of technology whereby we no longer need to rely on critics to inform us of options, and we can instead seek and chance upon things which will make us punch the air with joy.
The journey very deliberately starts in Eastern Europe. Messing around on YouTube one thing led to another, and more and more brilliant pop emerged which with the exceptions of outfits like Finders Keepers and VampiSoul was not being celebrated. The new site provided the perfect opportunity to collect together some of the wonderful clips/sounds. Here are two examples which are not featured in the project but which make you believe in the magic of pop in a way the official media chooses not to. It’s no wonder we’d rather be anywhere else but here today ....

A South London Story ... part three

And it’s almost a year since Your Heart Out began to take shape. Just trying to remember the reasons and aims at the time of starting out ....

Well, there was an enforced amount of leisure time, a lack of money, a growing frustration at not finding a music magazine worth reading or if there was one worth reading (Wax Poetics) it would be a little too specialist. I wanted the Mo-Dettes, Marcos Valle and the Soulful Strings together. There was also something about giving something back. Over the preceding months I’d been totally inspired by the time and trouble bloggers were taking to share their passions, to give new life to lost musics. They had opened up so many new vistas, and I owed them.

So it was the old punk impulse of get up and do it for yourself. On a practical note, historically I’d been hopeless at IT, but I’d taken some free courses and acquired the rudimentary skills to enable me to create a magazine of sorts. It had to be a magazine too, as I loved reading in odd places away from computers, and liked the idea of something that had structure as opposed to the randomness of blogs. I liked structure, and the discipline of doing something regularly. I had a bit of a track record with previous projects (as John Carney) kindly published by the Tangents site where I’d been providing weekly instalments as part of a year-long series or three.

So, the aim with Your Heart Out was to produce something monthly. And for ten issues this challenge was met. It even expanded into a blog, with regular posts that gave a little more detail and colour in a lopsided way. The feedback on YHO has been fantastic, which has meant a lot, but overall for something ‘freely’ available the download stats are not encouraging. It was easier to reach people with cumbersome fanzines. Work that one out! Anyway, circulation figures aside, and that doesn’t really matter because if you’ve got something to say you’ll say it anyway, the real point is all this YHO activity became ridiculously time consuming, and took over many aspects of daily life.

I think a point has been made with YHO. It’s been proven that pop writing can be fun, passionate, informative, that you don’t have to write about the usual suspects, and so on. It’s been shown it’s possible to do something a little different. Thus, for now, it’s time to take a breather, park YHO, and get some other things up and running. Perhaps not quite ‘stop the world I want to get back on’ but along those lines. In the meantime, the London songs project will continue relentlessly. So, please support that and spread the word. And participate!
The infamous YHO library on the left will remain open. And that just leaves me to thank all the people, new friends and old comrades, who have stood up and waved a clenched fist in support of YHO. Oh, and in case you wondered, the name came about because I had this song on my brain ...

A South London Story ... part two

It's 20 years ago today-ish that the Manic Street Preachers played their first London show, which was at the Horse and Groom in Great Portland Street. I've read quite a lot about this, including the group's own account, but I don't remember being asked about it. Odd really.

At the time I was running a small record label called Esurient, with a fantastic roster featuring The Claim, Hellfire Sermons, and Emily. Richey from the Manics had made contact in his inimitable and persuasive way, saying he'd loved Hungry Beat, loved The Claim, hoped I'd love the group he was involved with, that their name had come from the Jasmine Minks' All Good Preachers mini-LP. A passionate correspondence ensued, with lots and lots of quotes from Kevin Rowland and Paul Weller and William Wharton and Jack Kerouac. I don't remember him mentioning Guns 'n' Roses or Public Enemy. He sent rehearsal tapes, photos, poems, diatribes. All of which led to this show, with the Manics supporting The Claim in this quaint upstairs function room, where once mod/soul nights had been held. It cost £10 or so to hire. The West End at that time was dead on a Friday night, strange as it now seems.

It had been booked as a jazz night, which I'd forgotten to tell the Manics. So they were a bit confused when they got there, and were waiting outside in the van when I rolled up. I wish I'd taken some photos. They looked brilliant. They had these matching blue jackets, with arrows stencilled on, like prison uniforms. Very short hair. Tight, white Cavern jeans. The shirts were the infamous slogan ones. They were overwhelmed at the response, and refused to take any money saying it should be put towards a new Claim single as the world needed more of their sense of attack. And the rest is history, or is it?

I doubt if there was anyone in the room that night who doubted that of the two groups playing The Claim were the ones who were gifted and special. But the Manics, lovely lads and all that, were shockingly determined and driven. They wanted to be heard and to get on. They wanted to play an Esurient show every week, to be noticed, but the whole point of these events was to create a sense of occasion. To do something different. The best shows were at the Covent Garden Community Centre. One had The Claim, and a play by Vic Templar, and northern soul disco. The other had The Claim plus Billy Childish reading some of his poetry, though I thought he'd never shut up and we were as a consequence running dangerously to going over the allotted time and losing our deposit though the day was saved when the whole audience pitched in to help clean up the hall. Punk rock eh?

I guess I could have done a Manics single on Esurient. I had a sense it would have sold well. But it didn't really seem the thing to do. Instead they did a record with Damaged Goods, because it would lead to more gigs, and in time signed with Heavenly. Me, I never got the hang of pragmatism or expediency.

Esurient had started with ridiculously rough recordings of Hurrah! and the Jasmine Minks. This was a political protest, or strop, because the Hurrah! on Arista was not the Hurrah! I'd fought for, and because Creation was not agreeing to put out a Jasmine Minks 7" to go with the Another Age LP. In fairness, despite my stroppiness, both Kitchenware and Creation gave their permissions, and it all seemed very neat. A protest against gloss and polish, but with quite beautiful sleeves to make up for the 'organic' straight-from-tape recordings.

Then all hell broke loose. The music weeklies all ran big stories about Esurient putting out this illegal Hurrah! bootleg, and there were suitably mortified quotes from Keith Armstrong at Kitchenware. I couldn't work out what was happening. I had a letter from Keith giving his consent, and suggesting it should be an LP rather than the cassette I had proposed. The original idea had been along the lines of The Fall's Chaos tape or ACR's Graveyard and the Ballroom. Anyway a few days later Keith rang up to apologise, and explained he'd simply stirred things up to generate publicity for me. Oddly Alan McGee had suggested that this was what was going on. I couldn't get my head 'round it. The nedia had taken Keith's words at face value, not even contacted me, had no interest in seeing the letter, didn't apologise afterwards or print a retraction as it was old news. Then while this was going on James Brown asked if I fancied doing some writing for the NME. Hmmm ...

Anyway, Keith was right. The records sold like hot cakes, and we made enough money to be able to release an LP by The Claim, which was called Boomy Tella. Listening to it again after many years, I still feel proud to have been part of something so special. Anyway, the deal was that Rough Trade and The Cartel paid for manufacturing then distributed the records and claimed back their money through sales. The only trouble is they didn't actually get any records into the shops, because they were concentrating on the records that would sell well. The Smiths, Creation, etc. Fantastic logic. So piles of records languished in warehouses. The Stockholm Monsters wrote a song about all this. Personally I called it censorship. People deciding what others could buy. If my records were in shops and people didn't buy them, then fair enough. But when they're not making it to the shops because of a policy decision, that can't be right.

So future Esurient releases were self-funded and self-distributed. Unintentionally the process of putting out records had again become something of a political act or protest, when really all I'd wanted to do was be as special as Postcard. Somehow Esurient put out another six or so singles over the next few years. Initially this was through money I got as a grant for going to the London College of Printing to do their prestigious journalism course. Don't ask me what I lived on. The groups all paid for their own recordings, and never got a penny in royalties. I am amzed they still speak highly about being a part of something significant. They weren't very good at compromising themselves though so I suppose the major label thing would never have worked for them either. I do still have nightmares about not doing enough for the groups involved. They deserved to be heard, and our contrariness can't have helped that cause.

To cut a long story short, I called it a day with Esurient for an accumulation of reasons. One of these was a desire to pursue my own writing projects. This in turn led to a book, Something Beginning With O, which Heavenly published. The book was intended as a sort of blueprint, primer, or something for an imaginary group that was part of a continuum. That group may just have been what I'd desperately hoped the Manic Street Preachers would become. The book dealt with my own feelings of betrayal by an industry that had turned its back on things I'd believed in. It was originally far longer in length, but using skills learned on the journalism course I'd stripped it down to the bare bones because I hated all the drooling over Jon Savage and Greil Marcus. I wanted it to be more like the Terry Rawlings Small Faces book Paul Weller put out on Riot Stories. A pop single as opposed to a concept LP. Ironically the Jon Savage edited Faber Book of Pop features a quote from my book about pop being all about singles ...

So those Esurient singles. Well, when you're emotionally close to something you can get to a stage where you become estranged from something you love. So for years I didn't listen to any of the Esurient releases. A friend then posted on his blog a track by Emily, and I thought wow! Then by chance I was able to introduce The Claim to the Cherry Red salvage empire, which has resulted in a compilation which is all but out. Caught up in the excitement about this, I came across a YouTube clip of the final Esurient single from The Claim. Well, one side of it, and it was on the sort of day when you doubt yourself, and I played this clip and thought well it was worth it ...