Glom of Nit #20 New EP, Sir Terry live, lots of writing
Discworld! Nirvana! Gigs! Books! KIttens! Imposter syndrome! The unceasing grind of linear reality!
Hi friends,
Welcome to this month’s Glom of Nit – a big hello to the newbies, and to those who have been cleaving on since the start: thank you for your support and endurance. LOTS to get into this month. As usual, if you’re interested, there’s an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, The Annotated Nirvana to be found at the end of the book. You can read more about that in last month’s edition. I won’t blame you for skipping straight to that.
If you enjoy this please share it and shout about my work, because it makes a massive difference – also reply in the comments or email me back or Tweet me or send me a carrier pigeon, because it’s always nice to hear from people. Unless you’re pointing out a typo. Don’t do that. Never do that.
Anyhoo – ONWARD.
Quick links
See my band in Leicester on Sat March 18th
Buy tickets to work-in-progress previews of my Terry Pratchett comic lecture in London, April 23 and May 25
CLICK THE KITTEN BELOW👇to get signed copies of The Magic of Terry Pratchett, The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the 60s Teenage Dream, Complete Music Writing 1999-2022 and Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album, and a few other bits and bobs.
Right. ADMIN DONE.
Monthly Musings
Most people hate February, and with good reason. The only things it has going for it is that it’s short, it’s not January and it has valentines day and on this last, your tolerance will quite rightly vary depending on inclination and status. Otherwise, it’s a cold, dull, stopgap before the hope of Spring lifts our spirits. It is the Time Before The Daffodils. If you’re lucky it snows charmingly. But that didn’t happen here.
That said, I’ve barely noticed the passage of time due to being quite astonishingly busy (as you’ll see in the stuff I’ve written this month). When I first went freelance I genuinely wasn’t sure if I could make it work. It was more a desperate fling into the unknown to remove myself from a situation that had become intolerably miserable. But, honestly … it’s working? I have “clients” to write important, businesslike things for. I write blogs and features for actual, respectable publications. I have been working on the culture desk for the Big Issue. The only downside is that everything still feels too precarious to turn down. I’ve constantly got my eye on next month’s rent, it doesn’t give me the opportunity to work on books, music and comedy that I would like. Still. It’s a good feeling. I’m proud of myself, and that is an astonishingly rare thing for me. I feel like I’m doing something I’m good at. I almost, almost don’t have imposter syndrome which is, to say the least, an unfamiliar state of mind.
So here’s the message: take the jump. Close your eyes and leap into the sky and, you know what? Just sometimes the hand of God will catch you and you’ll find you can stay afloat on the currents. Like a massive bird. Of course, you also might plummet to your death, so it’s also worth doing some research vis-a-vis safety nets, combat rolls or those massive airbags they use for stunts, like at the end of Die Hard.
Equally, this time next month I could be destitute and miserable. That’s the joy of the freelancing.
It’s led to something of an existential crisis. A friend of mine sent me a link to a job the other day with a note saying “this is perfect for you”, and he was right. And I’d enjoy it too. But it’s a full-time job, like the olden days. Security and more money, but no freedom. It’s a job I’d have stabbed someone for a couple of years back. Now … do I want to give up the new life of doing the thing? Or, and hear me out here, am I just scared of rejection, or throwing myself into an idea that I no longer control? Tune in next week for more first-world problems from the whitest man alive.
Before Victoria - new old EP!
My band Before Victoria recorded our first proper EP as a trio. I did an album under the name last year, which I’m incredibly proud of, but that was entirely a solo affair. Since I invited Amie and Craig to join the band properly, we decided to go back and re-do some of the songs I demoed years ago as a three-piece, in a proper studio. The result is the Carry On Up The Chartists EP, a little four-track concept record about early 19th-century politics, plus one song about a long-dead princess that, for my money, is the best thing I’ve ever written. We’re really, really, really, really chuffed with how it’s turned out. It’s exactly how these songs were always meant to sound. Properly chunky and satisfying. Nirvana meets the Stooges. I’m thrilled. The EP should hit all the usual streaming services in the coming days, but you can listen to it and get the download or CD right now from Bandcamp (which is the best way to support any independent artist).
LISTEN NOW AND GET IT RIGHT THE HELL HERE! CLICK THE THING👇
We’re playing a show in LEICESTER, alongside my other-band-mate and platonic life partner, that Andrew O’Neill, on Saturday, March 18th. Tickets are available here.
The Magic of Terry Pratchett – Live
An announcement! I’m going to be taking a show to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe! Actually, I’m taking two (possibly three?), more of which later, but for now this is the one you need to be concerned with. I’m turning my award-winning book The Magic of Terry Pratchett into a one-man show/comic lecture. It will be a celebration of Terry’s life and writing, to mark the 40th anniversary of the first Discworld novel. Unlike the book, it’s fully sanctioned and supported (and produced in association with) the Terry Pratchett estate. It’s going to be in a proper, prime time slot in a proper pay-for-a-ticket-in-advance, Big Four Edinburgh venue1.
I’ve done the Fringe before – this will be my eighth run I think, and my fifth “solo” show. It’s by far the biggest thing I’ve ever done though. Previously I’ve only ever done by one-man shows on the punky pay-what-you-like free fringe, in back rooms of pubs and basements of restaurants. This is a very different thing. Peak time. Proper venue. A sound tech. A marketing budget. People are going to come to this expecting to get their money’s worth, rather than taking a chance on something they think looks interesting with nothing to lose.
What’s more, I’m representing Sir Terry. I have been given permission to tell his story. His friends and family will know it’s happening. Maybe they’ll even come and see. This is all a hell of a responsibility. I cannot mess it up. I’m trying not to think about it too much while, of course, thinking about it all the time.
I’ll be doing some work-in-progress previews between now and the Fringe (Aug 4-28), where the show will run across 25 nights. There’ll be more to come, but currently, you can come and see the early version of the show at:
APRIL 23, Hen & Chickens, LONDON. TICKETS
APRIL 28-MAY 1, Die Scheibenwelt Convention, Castle Ludwigstein, GERMANY TICKETS
MAY (The Glorious) 25, Hen & Chickens, LONDON. TICKETS
There’ll be plenty more, hopefully, between now and August, and if all goes well I’m hoping to tour the show extensively next year.
Stuff I’ve written this month
Seventeen articles over four different publications makes this officially my most prolific month ever! Pratchett fans should check out the history of unmade movie adaptions I wrote for Den of Geek. I was also very proud of this celebration of quitting I wrote for New Statesman and this very silly but quietly angry piece I wrote for The Big Issue about the “Coronation Playlist” the government published.
Here’s the full list:
Louis CK’s sold-out show at Madison Square Garden proves there’s no such thing as cancel culture
Grammys 2023: Why Harry Styles beating Beyoncé isn’t really a surprise
The Coronation Celebration Playlist is the worst possible representation of Britain
Sam Smith’s Brit Awards look is part of a long tradition of brilliant pop ‘attention seeking’
DC’s The Flash, starring Ezra Miller, is coming and it looks… quite good?
Three cheers for Nicola Sturgeon for knowing when to walk away
Why BAFTA was wrong to omit Bernard Cribbins from awards tributes
The Unmade Terry Pratchett Movies (and Why They Didn’t Happen)
Excited about Cocaine Bear? Here are 10 more ridiculous, high-concept movies to try
Why Everything Everywhere All At Once should win all the Oscars
The Mandalorian is back, and there’s never been a better time for Star Wars fans
“Our goal is to challenge negative expectations”: turning the spotlight on Big Issue’s frontline
Stand up gigs this month (all London)
March 10th: TROY CLUB, Aces & Eights, TUFNELL PARK
March 15th: UPSTAIRS AT THE ADAM AND EVE, Adam & Eve, MILL HILL
March 20th: HAPPY MONDAYS, Amersham Arms, NEW CROSS
Recommendations
My honourable friend, the aforementioned Andrew O’Neill, has a new podcast out – The Inadvisble Trapdoor. It is AMAZING. If you’re a fan of Andrew’s comedy, the woozy disorientation of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam and true crime podcasts about Jack The Ripper then please give it a go.
The brilliant Tim Arnold has announced the pre-order for his 25th(!) album, Super Connected. Have a butchers.
After months of waiting for it to broadcast in the UK, I gave up and just bought the new Interview With The Vampire series on download (available on Amazon, iTunes Store etc). I adored these books when I was younger, and I’m a huge fan of the original move too. You can hear me waxing lyrical about it here. The show is absolutely incredible. They’ve not only improved on the first movie, they’ve improved on the book. It’s so rich, so decadent and so very, very, very gay.
I also binged Shrinking on Apple TV recently, which I absolutely adore. It’s the best Harrison Ford has been in anything for years, although it also begs the question “Does Star Wars exist in this universe, and if so, who plays Han Solo?” which frankly took me right out of the show. Anyway, it has real warmth and humanity and it’s very funny and you should watch it.
My friend Laura’s (aka
)new project, Obey Robots, frankly doesn’t need my help, they're currently at number one in the independent album charts, but even so – if you've not checked out their great album yet, it's well worth it.If you’ve been sleeping on the new Smashing Pumpkins material, honestly it’s well worth giving it a try. They’re one of those bands I follow like other people follow football teams, so frankly my opinion isn’t always to be trusted. I’ll still be there for them when they’re playing in League One (approx 2010) just as much as when they’re in the Champions League2 (1996). Seriously though, check out this banger.
Work in Progress Excerpt
Please remember this is a work in progress. Don’t share it! It’s also very subject to change.
The Annotated Nirvana
Below, replicated in its entirety is the footnote/annotation for the first real mention in the book of Sub Pop Records.
We should spend some time discussing Sub Pop, because it’s absolutely crucial in understanding how one city in the Pacific Northwest became the capital of alternative rock in the early 90s, with Nirvana as the jewel in its crown. Sub Pop as a record label had grown out of Bruce Pavitt’s column of the same name in The Rocket, which in turn had grown out of Pavitt’s fanzine, Subterranean Pop. Pavitt, an underground music fanatic from Park Forest, Illinois, a couple of hours south of Chicago, had started his fanzine while studying at Olympia’s Evergreen College in May of 1980, doing it partly for extra credits (Beat Happening and K Records’ Calvin Johnson also contributed and the two had a radio show at KAOS) but with the primary aim of championing underground music – the same sort of bands that were being played on college radio and basically nowhere else. By his fifth issue, published in 1982, he’d shortened the name to Sub/Pop and was also putting out cassette compilations of bands hand-picked from regional scenes across the US (specifically the US: destroying British indie music’s stranglehold on what was considered to be cool and credible was part of his manifesto) with the fanzine printed to fit into the cassette case. ‘I always maintained’, he later wrote, ‘that culture starts at home, in local communities, through creative interaction. Revolutions always come up from the grassroots, not top-down through corporate hierarchies. Sub/Pop’s coverage was highly regionalised, concentrating on each area’s local scene. The music industry operated out of LA and New York, so Pavitt mostly ignored the coasts, considering them well served, and focussed on the MidWest, the Pacific Northwest and the South. A contact address was printed for each featured artist. The Sub/Pop #5 cassette zine sold over 2,000 copies – Pavitt claims the proceeds covered his rent for the next year and a half. The Zine was having a genuine impact; major record labels would write to request the latest edition (‘I really got a kick out of this one’, noted the director of talent acquisition at Columbia Records’ East Coast office). ‘SUB/POP IS AMERICAN. WE ALTERNATE BETWEEN A C-60 CASSETTE AND A PUBLICATION’ proclaimed the cover of Sub/Pop #6. ‘WE ARE INTERESTED IN A DECENTRALIZED NETWORK OF REGIONAL AND LOCAL BUMS WHO REFUSE TO GET AN HONEST JOB. SEND US YOUR INDEPENDENT RECORDS, TAPES AND MAGAZINES. WRITE SUB/POP C / O LOST MUSIC NETWORK, BOX 2391, OLYMPIA, WA 98507.’ [Sub/Pop #6]
Pavitt eventually left Olympia for Seattle, and from April 1983 Sup/Pop was upgraded from a fanzine to a column in the city’s music paper The Rocket, focussing on underground scenes. The column ran until July 1988, when Pavitt retired from journalism with a very good reason – by now he was running a record label, also called Sub Pop. Writing about his own artists (the last edition features Mudhoney heavily) was becoming something of a conflict of interest.
Seattle’s music scene had not been especially exciting during the 80s; only soft-rock megastars Heart had really broken into any kind of mainstream success. As Rocket editor and future Kurt Cobain biographer Charles R Cross, writes, ‘most clubs were taverns … bands could make their living only by playing covers. A few outlying punk clubs opened up, but they’d usually be shut down within weeks … many people got the idea that Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden were typical representatives of a healthy music mecca. They were not’. What eventually caused Seattle’s now-legendary ‘grunge’ scene to coalesce was a combination of dire need – zero support and terrible gigs meant bands clung together to release their own DIY records – and soft drugs; by the mid-80s MDMA was running through Seattle like turpentine through a donkey. It created a sense of togetherness and empathy. In the industrial cities of Chicago, Detroit, Manchester and London the popularity of ecstasy and MDMA was accompanied by a boom in mesmeric and repetitive dance music. In Seattle, everyone played super-heavy, dirge-like, slowed-down punk rock. A small, local label called C/Z crystalised the scene when it put out the Deep Six compilation in 1986, featuring Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, Skin Yard, Soundgarden and the U-Men. The groups all turned up to see each other play, and were bound together not so much by musical similarity but by their difference to everyone else: neither hard rock, nor hardcore punk nor college rock indie, nor English-influence post punk. These were odd sounding bands. (Only Soundgarden had a singer with a conventional ‘rock’ voice in Chris Cornell, who was eyed with suspicion by peers lest he accidentally became a rock star. Originally he was their drummer.) It created a sense of community in the city. Olympia had its tweecore underground, with its crushes on cute, obscure pop acts and weird prejudice against bass players, while Seattle had … whatever that music was. Bruce Pavitt was paying attention. ‘It’s slow SLOW and heavy HEAVY’ he wrote of Deep Six in the April 1986 ‘Sub Pop’ column in The Rocket, ‘and it’s the predominant sound of underground Seattle in ‘86 … proving that you don’t have to live in the suburbs and have a low IQ to do some serious headbanging’. At roughly the same time as Deep Six was released (and sold very slowly, mostly because the primary audience for the record was all featured on it), Pavitt put out his first vinyl compilation, Sub Pop 100, with the same ethos as his fanzine cassettes and his column: celebrating regional, underground music from across the USA. It featured Scratch Acid, The Wipers, Naked Ragan and Big Black’s Steve Albini delivering a spoken word monologue. 5,000 copies were pressed and they sold out in a few months.
A defining moment for Pavitt was realising that he could apply the savvy and contacts he’d used for Sub Pop 100 to the unique scene showcased on Deep Six. It took him another year to manifest Sub Pop as a record label proper, eventually releasing Green River’s Dry As A Bone EP. With that release, he combined three elements that would give an audio, visual and snappy media-sound-byte identity to the new scene. Firstly it was recorded by Jack Endino at Reciprocal, who had an astonishing ability to harness the sludge and chaos and bring out the soul beneath without compromising the sound. Secondly, the cover art was a black and white still by local photographer Charles Peterson, who had been covering gigs in the city. Peterson is an incredible documentary photographer who used wide-angle lenses to capture the energy of Seattle’s live scene, with sparsely attended but completely devoted crowds and chaotic performances. According to Pavitt, it was seeing Peterson’s photographer that convinced him that the city’s scene had an identity and energy all of its own, calling the pictures a ‘visual unification’ that ‘totally captured the essence of the music’. Finally, in the marketing Pavitt described the EP as ‘ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation’. It was a perfect word to describe the music. To ram the point home, it had been written in capital letters. The scene and the genre now had its name. And from the very beginning ‘grunge’ had Sub Pop’s soon-to-be-iconic black and white logo attached to it,
Meanwhile, another local music critic and DJ, Jonathan Poneman, was falling in love with the city's rock scene. More specifically he was falling in love with Soundgarden, the most conventionally hard rock of the grunge gang. The band had formed in 1984 and were fronted by full-throated, rock dreamboat Cornell, whose rich voice echoed around half-empty clubs like the sound of God. Catching a Soundgarden show in 85 was enough to make Poneman give up any aspirations he had as a performer himself – he had seen greatness and didn’t see the point in competing with it. Instead, he decided to amplify it. Poneman was from Toledo, Ohio, another underground music fanatic hailing from off-the-beaten tracks who had drifted into Seattle’s melting pot of outsiders and weirdos. With $15,000 of savings burning a hole in his bank account (not chump change in the mid-80s) he decided to release a Soundgarden record himself. There was, however, a problem: Soundgarden were already discussing a release with Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop. It was guitarist Kim Thayil, who had known Pavitt since they were children, that suggested the two pool their resources: Pavitt’s brand, Poneman’s money. In 1987 the two worked together on the debut Soundgarden single, ‘Hunted Down’, and the following EP, Screaming Life, again featuring Endino behind the mixing desk and Peterson behind the camera for the cover shot. The record was successful, with the band making the cover of both CMJ New Music Report and Rockpool, two of the biggest national magazines covering underground music. The two men realised they had something incredible on their hands – a thriving local scene with baked-in stars and the platform to showcase it. Between them, they had the smarts, contacts and funds to run a record label (to an extent – money would always be a problem for the label and its tagline, proudly displayed on its website even at the time of writing, would come to be ‘going out of business since 1988’). Sub Pop became a fifty-fifty partnership. By the following spring, both Poneman and Pavitt had quit their day jobs and rented an office. It was time to look for some more bands.
© 2023 Marc Burrows and Pen & Sword Books.
The Big Four in this case refers to the four main Edinburgh Fringe theatre organisations, not, as you might thing, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax.
Yes, a football reference. I don’t know where that came from either.
I'm glad you retained at least one bit of sports knowledge