Glom of Nit #23: It's you that I ADORE you will always be my [redacted]
Articles, recommendations, shamless plugs and whatnot
Hi all,
June. How in the hell is it June? It was September 2021, five minutes ago. I swear, time is a cursed ball of string. I fully expect it to be 2043 by this time next week and 1986 the following Tuesday.
Anyway. The summer is here, and the time is right for weeping quietly into your hands because you’ve got deadlines. But I do so while imagining Bowie and Mick Jagger dancing like this.
In fairness, I think about Bowie and Jagger dancing like that at least twice a day. It’s soothing. Try it.
ANYWAY, welcome to this month’s Glom of Nit, your monthly sojourn into the mind of Marc. Lots of stuff about upcoming shows and projects, the usual articles, the normal recommendations and some Nirvana goodness at the end.
Please come to all the things if you can. All of them. No, that’s not weird.
Love always
Marc
News & quick links
New dates announced! The last London preview of The Magic of Terry Pratchett sold out. I wanted to do it once more before the Fringe, so we have put one final London preview onsale, an afternoon matinee on Saturday July 29th at the Hen & Chickens in Islington. This will be the last chance to see the early version of the show in a tiny venue at a low price – I’d LOVE to see you there. Details here.
The delightful Andrew O’Neill & myself will be doing previews of our solo shows (i’ll be doing Marc Burrows in the Glom of Nit) in Leicester on Tuesday, July 4th. Details here.
My band BEFORE VICTORIA return to the stage in Leicester! Joined by FRENCHY & THE PUNK, long time tour colleagues of my other band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, all the way from New York, and FLESH TETRIS, Andy Heintz (from aforementioned TMTWNBBFN). Tickets onsale now.
Click here for Before Victoria music. You can also look us up in all the usual streaming places.
CLICK THE KITTEN BELOW👇to get signed books, including 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
I said at the start that time is a cursed ball of string. You blink and the world has zipped forward like a scene out of The Time Machine and you’ve barely noticed. As Terry Pratchett (yes, him again) once said – “inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened”. Which, while I admit I am an annoyingly youthful looking 42, is something I hard-related to this week when I realised it was the 25th anniversary of Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore.
So the summer of 1998, then. I was 17. I remember it as hot, glorious, long, I had a girlfriend for the first time and was discovering all the fun you could have with that. New Labour were getting their feet under the table of government and had only slightly started to disappoint people. It was a time of sunny optimism and hope and youth. Britain in the late 90s. Cool Brittania. All of that. And I remember being utterly miserable.
This was the summer of my parents divorce, and even at that almost-adult age, it hit me hard. My Dad chose to move into a little flat above a cake shop in our village, and asked me to go with him, leaving my younger siblings at home. He was a long-distance lorry driver, so I essentially had the place to myself. My own little pad to be miserable in. I was actually fine at first, like Roman Roy I thought I had “pre-grieved”. I'd felt it was coming, you could hardly miss it. On some level an extremely tedious mopey teenage part of me almost welcomed it – all the most interesting people, after all, came from broken homes.
Like Roman Roy, I was wrong. Over the course of that summer the tension between my parents and the weight of trying to support them was crushing. It was the first time in my life I remember being genuinely unhappy, despite the girlfriend, the bachelor pad and the fact I was allowed to eat cakes from downstairs in the middle of the night if I left some change on the side. On one memorable occasion, angry at my Dad’s actions,I decided to trash our flat and took great joy in smashing mugs, upending furniture and emptying drawers, reasoning that he’d come home and see the mess and understand how heartbroken I was. That would show him. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, Dad was a long-distance lorry driver and this was Tuesday. He wasn’t due back until the weekend. Rather than sit in a bomb-site for the next three days I decided to tidy up a bit. By the time he got home the evidence of my tantrum had vanished completely.
Into this maelstrom of hormonal misery dropped Adore, a sad, warm, sepia-toned electronic album, made in the wake of Billy Corgan’s mother’s death and his own divorce. A perfectly timed gift from my favourite band of all time. It had a curiously autumnal tone for an album released into what, in my memory at least, was a long, hot summer. A lot of fans hated it, missing the buzz-saw guitars and screaming of previous records. I loved it. It suited that summer perfectly. I felt like it had been made just for me.
1998 was a curious time for rock bands. All of the big alt-rock, grunge and britpop successes of the early/mid 90s had started to buckle under success none of them had ever really expected, and they all started to go a bit mad. You can hear it in lots of the records released 97-99: the Manics’ This is My Truth Tell Me Yours (another miserable gift to me released later that year), Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, Blur’s Blur, Ash’s Nu-Clear Sounds, Radiohead’s Ok Computer. The party was over – these groups of 20-something nerds were cracking under the pressure. Record companies demanded more of the same, which chimed against artistic instincts. Fans wanted one thing, critics another, the bands themselves torn between commercial and creative instincts. All of them seemed to split down the middle. Most of those bands had endured some internal trauma of one sort or another.
Adore is a perfect example. Smashing Pumpkins had become the biggest rock band in the world off the back of their masterpiece, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and had undergone a gruelling and seemingly endless world tour on which drummer Jimmy Chamberlin had fallen back into heroin abuse and OD’d in an incident that left touring keys player Johnathan Melvoin dead. A few months earlier a fan had been killed in a crowd crush in Dublin. The press were in full “knock-em-down” mode having built the Pumpkins up (not helped by Billy Corgan’s tendency to play games with them) and Corgan himself was watching his mother die from cancer and his marriage fall apart.
All of which informs Adore a gorgeous, sad record, sometimes dramatic (have you heard ‘Tear’? My god that song is good), sometimes simple and sad (‘To Sheila’, ‘Behold! The Nightmare’).
It entered my brain in exactly the right way. I was over the giddy hump of adolescence and settling into what I thought the future could, be when the rug had been ripped from under me. Things had changed so quickly it left me reeling, I was miserable, but also knew I shouldn’t be because on paper there was lots to enjoy. I was melodramatic. I took to literally carrying sheafs of paper with my bad teenage poetry written on it in my wallet. I was in love and I was grieving. Adore unfolded and curled around each of these feelings and impulses, and defined everything for me. Light a candle. Play Adore. That’s how I spent my days. Cry a little. Dream a little. Be angry. Love. Rinse and repeat. The spirit of the age.
25 years ago. That seems unthinkable. And yet here it is, a temporal reality. Gosh.
Stuff I’ve written this month
(little bit less than usual this month, because of working on shows and gigs)
Why, right now, there is no such thing as too much RuPaul’s Drag Race
Review: Smashing Pumpkins’ ATUM
As Willow and dozens of other shows leave Disney+, is our faith in streaming services misplaced?
Twitter HQ was once a paradise. It’s working with Elon that’s ‘morally wrong’
Royal Blood should know by now a bad gig is never the crowd’s fault
Upcoming live shows and tour dates
4th SURBITON - Whole Lotta Comedy @ Wagon & Horses (stand-up set). FREE ENTRY
6th DALSTON - We Are Funny -Farr’s School of Dancing (stand up set) INFO & TICKETS
7th CLEVEDON - Library, Clevedon Literary Festival - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
10th SHEFFIELD - Nexus Arts Hub - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
13th WINCANTON (3pm) - Library - The Magic of Terry Pratchett tickets available from the Library
14th LONDON - Angel Comedy Raw @ The Camden Head - (stand up set) free entry
16th LONDON - Queer Comedy Club, Archway - (book reading) details tba
17th CHIPPENHAM - Old Road Tavern (Chippenham Pride event - stand up set) INFO & TICKETS
21st GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL (5.45pm) - Greenpeace Stage - (stand up set) INFO & TICKETS
29th GUILDFORD - Electric Theatre - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
JULY
2nd CHIPPENHAM COMEDY FESTIVAL (afternoon) - Old Road Tavern - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
2nd CHIPPENHAM COMEDY FESTIVAL (evening) - Old Road Tavern - Marc Burrows in the Glom of Nit INFO & TICKETS
4th LEICESTER - Firebug - Andrew O’Neill & Marc Burrows & their new jokes (full performance of Marc Burrows in the Glom of Nit) INFO & TICKETS
6th BATH - Theatre Royal - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
7th LONDON - Queer Comedy Club, Archway - Marc Burrows in the Glom of Nit INFO & TICKETS
8th CAMBRIDGE - Junction - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
13th MERTON ABBERY - Colour House Theatre - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
14th LEICESTER - Firebug - Before Victoria + Frenchy & The Punk + Flesh Tetris INFO & TICKETS
24th Good Omens launch show with Andrew O’Neill and The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Details tba later.
27th SEATON - Gateway Theatre - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
29th LONDON - Hen & Chickens - The Magic of Terry Pratchett (matinee show) INFO & TICKETS
30th BEDFORD - Bedford Fringe @ Quarry Theatre - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
AUGUST
2-28 EDINBURGH FRINGE (5.30pm) - Gilded Balloon, Teviot - The Magic of Terry Pratchett INFO & TICKETS
2-28 EDINBURGH FRINGE (7pm) - Gilded Balloon, Teviot - BONUS SHOW The Magic of Terry Pratchett: The Footnotes INFO & TICKETS
4-27 EDINBURGH FRINGE (11.15pm) - City Cafe, 90s Room - Marc Burrows in The Glom of Nit Free entry (pay what you like after the show)
SEPTEMBER
Collapse and die.
OCTOBER
12th SPECIAL THING TBH (but oh my god)
23rd-24th - Irish Discworld Convention, CORK, IRELAND TICKETS & INFO
2024
August 2-5 International Discworld Convention, Birmingham INFO & TICKETS
Recommendations
I shouldn’t have to recommend Succession to you, everyone is talking about it, but my god – that is a TV Masterpiece, isn’t it? It’s on HBO MAX/NOW TV/SKY now in its entirety. Never going to be bettered. The peak of Peak TV.
Joy upon joy there is a NEW BLUR ALBUM coming next month. Blur are one of those bands I follow like a sports team. One of those that have always been there. I have framed Blur posters in my bedroom and the lyrics to ‘For Tomorrow’ as a tattoo. This came out of nowhere, they’d done an amazing job of keeping it quiet. Here’s the lead single. It’s, well, it’s Blur isn’t it?
I bloody love Girl Rey, and their new single is another summer bop from the indie pop funk machine in twee core clobber.
I’d normally not give them much time, except as a brilliant classic rock live band, but the new Foo Fighters album is utterly devastating. Can we stop anything bad happening to Dave Grohl ever again?
I was privileged enough to see my friend Catherine perform as The Anchoress as the gorgeous Queen Elizabeth Hall in London (the same venue where Bowie got booed by communists for performing a mime about the Chinese invasion of Tibet while supporting Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1969, fact fans). It was spine-tingling. She can rip your heart out while also having the finest shoulder-shimmy in the business. Her Autumn tour will be special, I promise:
Except from my upcoming book The Annotated Nirvana
This is my next book, due out at the end of the year. It’s a timeline of the career of Nirvana with hyper-detailed footnotes. This is a work in progress draft, so please don’t share it.
1988
January 23
Kurt and Krist, along with temp drummer Dale Crover, spend six hours working with Endino at Reciprocal, recording versions of ‘If You Must’, ‘Downer’, ‘Floyd The Barber’, ‘Paper Cuts’, ‘Spank Thru’, ‘Hairspray Queen’, ‘Aero Zeppelin’, ‘Beeswax’, ‘Mexican Seafood’ and ‘Pen Cap Chew’, though the tape reel runs out during the latter and Endino fades it mid-song since the band couldn’t afford more. A rough, desk mix is created on the fly by Endino and mixed down to cassette for the band. The producer is impressed by the trio’s professionalism, rattling through solid takes of ten tunes in less than a day’s work, as well as by Kurt’s unique and emotive voice. Most of the songs are recorded in a single take and the session is over by 6pm. Endino charges the group $152.44 (charging for only five hours as the band don’t have $30 for a new reel of tape to continue the session1). He is impressed enough by the recording to stay in the studio after the band departs to finesse the mixes and create a tape for himself.2 Kurt funds the session himself with money he makes from a part-time janitor job in Olympia.
Happy with the results of their day’s work, the band head to Tacoma to play a show at the Community Theatre, this time billed as Ted Ed Fred, supporting local agit-punks Moral Crux. The trio play all ten songs they had recorded earlier, plus the two they hadn’t had the time or money to get down on tape. Also on the bill that night is Happy Dead Juans Showtime, another local act whose drummer, Dave Foster, is impressed by the band and especially Dale’s powerhouse playing. After the show Kurt refuses to take money for the performance but is talked into it by a perplexed Dale Crover, who warns his friend not to let promoters take advantage of him.3
January 24
The band shoots a video at a Radio Shack store in Aberdeen, miming to the previous days recordings of ‘If You Must’ and ‘Paper Cuts’. Krist plays a child’s three-quarter size bass, making him appear even more comically oversized compared to his bandmates. ‘If You Must’ begins with a tight close up on Dale, before the shot widens to show Krist playing his bass part. When the guitar kicks in, Kurt jumps comically into the frame, launching himself from something high just out of the shot. The results are deemed too amateurish and cheesy and are never used.
Early 1988
Dale Crover moves to San Francisco to put the Melvins back together with Buzz Osborne, leaving proto-Nirvana once again drummer-less. 4
Kurt begins making copies of the Reciprocal recordings, which come to be known as ‘The Dale Demo’5 and passes them around to his friends, aso sending copies to local indie labels in Seattle, Olympia and further afield, including Touch ‘N’ Go, SST, Homestead, Dischord and K, with a covering letter talking up the ethos of his band.6 A note in Kurt’s journal reads ‘we are willing to pay for the majority of pressing of 1,000 copies of our LP, and all of the recording costs, we basically just want to be on your label. Do you think you could PLEASE! send a reply of F**k off, or not interested so we don’t have to waste more money sending more tapes?’ Friends like Slim Moon are impressed by the quality of his songwriting. Having Dale Crover on the demo attracts more interest.7
Local college radio station KCMU starts playing ‘Paper Cuts’ from the ‘Dale demo’.
February 20
Kurt Cobain’s 21st birthday.
At $20 an hour, Reciprocal might have been one of the cheapest studios available in Seattle, but there was more to the choice than that. Endino, a member of the Seattle band Skin Yard, had recorded both Green River’s Dry As a Bone EP and Soundgarden’s Screaming Life, both released in 1987 on Sub Pop, a local label, started by fanzine-writer and underground music critic Bruce Pavitt and his business partner, Jonathan Poneman, who were trying to forge a tangible identity for the city’s sound. The two records were seminal in the perception of Seattle’s rock scene, and the emerging sludgey punk/metal hybrid genre becoming known as ‘grunge’. Kurt had loved Screaming Life in particular and hoped Endino would be able to capture some of the primitive thump and excitement of the record. It’s worth noting here that some reports list the tape cost as $40 per reel. It doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but especially for a DIY punk band in 1988, ten dollars is ten dollars.
This was arguably the most important, and certainly the most profitable session Nirvana would ever do. Of the ten tracks they put down that day, three were included on their debut Bleach the following year, and a further four would feature on the 1992 rarities collection Incesticide. Since Bleach has sold over 2.3 million copies, and Incesticide a further 2 million, not to mention various box sets and compilations that feature these songs; that’s a hell of a return on $152 plus taxes and $30 for the tape. In retrospect, it would probably have been worth Endino springing them the cash for another roll so they could finish the session – they’d planned to record another two songs, ‘Anorexorcist’ and ‘Raunchola’. When the band came to compile Incesticide nearly five years later, they used the rough mixes from their own cassette copy, rather than the more finessed mixes done after they had departed the studio. This has bugged Jack Endino ever since.
Up to this point Kurt had felt that the band would get more shows if they played for free, which was more or less true. Tacoma Community Theatre promoter Jim May remembers Skid Row/Bliss/Ted Ed Fred being available at the drop of a hat and always refusing payment. It was Crover that convinced Kurt that punk principles didn’t have to be at odds with being paid fairly for your work. [CROSS] It’s a lesson he took to heart.
The most recent line up of The Melvins had fallen apart the previous year, though there are few different versions of why. According to Everett True’s Nirvana: The Truth, Buzz Osborne had decided to give up drinking and wanted his bandmates to do the same, aligning them with the notoriously ‘straight edge’ punk bands like Minor Threat; hellraising bass player (and former Kurt Cobain roommate) Matt Lukin was having absolutely none of it and the band disintegrated, with Osborne decamping to California. Eventually Crover joined him and they kick-started Melvins all over again with Osborne’s girlfriend, Lori Black (incidentally the daughter of 30s child star Shirley Temple) on bass. However, according to interviews conducted for Mark Yarm’s oral history of grunge, Everybody Loves Our Town, and published on his website, Osborne had already met Black in California and simply wanted to get out of the area for a fresh start, telling Lukin he was leaving town and the band was breaking up. Lukin believed it was a ruse to ditch him and bring Black in on bass, which in fairness is exactly what happened. The new Melvins lineup would survive into the 90s. Meanwhile, Matt Lukin remained in the North West and joined the newly formed Mudhoney, along with Green River’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner (the other members of Green River reformed themselves as Mother Lover Bone, then Temple of the Dog with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and, eventually, Pearl Jam). Mudhoney had been at Reciprocal just days before Nirvana, recording their debut Sub Pop single, ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’; probably the first genuinely brilliant record to come out of the emerging grunge scene. It was a tangled web in the Pacific NorthWest in those days.
Kurt’s title for it was apparently Safer Than Heaven, though this appears to have never been formerly used.
His clear target was Chicago's Touch ‘N’ Go Records, the home of Steve Albini’s utterly uncompromising Big Black and weirdo, acid-drenched noise pop slingers Butthole Surfers. The label was one of the touchstones of the 1980s underground. Kurt even refers to the ‘Dale Demo’ as the ‘Touch ‘N’ Go Demo’ in his journals. He was also eyeing SST records, the home of Black Flag, whose founding (and only consistent) member Greg Ginn was also one of the label’s owners. Ginn remembers receiving a demo but being unimpressed by it, feeling they were ‘by-the-numbers-alternative’ [CROSS]. Fortunately this feedback from a man who was practically the pope of the punk rock underground doesn’t seem to have made it back to Pear Street, Olympia.
It’s noteworthy that Kurt was so keen to get a label to put his band’s album out – a lot of his peers were content to go down the true DIY route and self-release their music, or create their own indie labels. Suffused as he was in Olympia’s college pop community, Kurt would have seen this in action. According to Krists’ Of Grunge and Government the band simply didn’t feel they had the business skills to pull off a DIY release. Other friends, like Slim Moon, have said that Kurt had ambitions to get an album released by someone who knew what they were doing from the very start. Later he would make compromises with his records to ensure they could be stocked in Kmart and Wal-Mart, because he knew that kids in small towns often had nowhere else to buy music. Kurt’s main ambition for his songs, above punk credibility, critical praise and even being paid, was for people to hear them. His whole career is defined by the moments he chose a path that would put his songs in front of as many people as possible, rather than the times he chose the purist option.
Sorry - hate to nitpick, but the dates of the Irish Discworld Convention are 20th-23rd October (you have them listed as 23rd-24th)