Glom of Nit #24: Glastonbury Nights Are Alright For Fighting
Articles, recommendations, shamless plugs and whatnot
Hello hello hello
I’m writing this still getting over Glastonbury, which was exhausting and enjoyable in equal measure as it always is. Not quite as exhausting as this time last year, when I came away from it with COVID (thank the gods), but exhausting all the same. I’m still trying to process it. I performed on the Greenpeace Stage on the Wednesday, in glorious, blazing sunshine, and had a whale of a time.
Last year I came away quite agitated and annoyed by everyone around me, and not really able to explain why. I wrote this about it for The Quietus, and it went quietly viral. This year I didn’t have the same reaction. The same people were there, and they annoyed me all over again (OH MY GOD WILL YOU SORT THE FLAGS OUT?!) but it didn’t penetrate on the same level. I actually think writing that blog, which I did before the COVID knocked me out for about three weeks, helped me process how I felt. That’s what writing is for, after all. Amongst other things. Maybe I’m just in a better place – last year I had just separated from my partner, I felt like I was treading water in my job (or possibly drowning) and was broadly speaking not a chipper individual. I’m in a much better place now, professionally personally and emotionally. Maybe it’s because I dropped acid for the first time ever on the final evening and spent the journey home pondering why all the purple in the landscape was an incandescent violet and the fields were warping in and out of focus (it didn’t kick in until six hours after I took it, by which time I was at Castle Cary station waiting for a train. I looked down at my phone and realised the screen was suddenly in 3D. Rookie error), which perhaps meant I was less concerned with petty human irritants. “How was the trip home Marc?” WELL.
I love Glastonbury, anyway. There is nothing on this Earth quite like it, and I know that makes me a tired old Glastovangelist cliche. But I am tired. I am old. So what do you expect? Show me another festival that has the biggest artists in the world but zero commercial advertising and ubiquitous radical climate messages? Show me another festival where you can learn to carve avocado stones into little sculptures instead of watching the bands? Show me another festival that lets you bring your own booze into the main areas rather than forcing you to spend a fortune at the bar? Just think about that last one for a second, because it represents everything that’s right about Glastonbury.
Show me another festival where one of the most important songwriters of his generation can be performing on the Pyramid Stage, giving the gig of their life, a couple of hundred feet away, while you’re in a tent that can house 500 people with just eight other punters watching a Neil Diamond tribute act? (I was there with my friend Andrew who was performing next and I felt I had to show loyalty. Special mention to Andrew btw, who got around the Elton Problem by inviting the entire audience, some city odd punters, ON TO THE STAGE and performing the gig there rather than having them spread across the massive tent). You can’t. There aren’t any. I hope Glastonbury lasts forever and never compromises. I hope I can always go there and see a talk about the future of AI in a teepee on the same day I see Dave Grohl and Johnny Marr jamming with The Pretenders and a bunch of teenagers being baffled by Guns N’ Roses covering the UK Subs. Where else will book Elton John, Blondie, Lizzo, Ho99o9, Billy Bragg, Bimini and ME? It’s so special, honestly.
Anyway - onwards.
Love always
Marc
PS please do leave comments and replies, it really helps to make me feel like people are paying attention!
News & quick links
We have put one final London preview of the Magic of Terry Pratchett 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.
More excitingly …
I’ll be performing the show in October at the Bloomsbury Theatre. This is a huge deal for me - for a start it’ll be marking almost 40 years since The Colour of Magic kicked off the Discworld, I’ll be doing both halves of the show: The Edinburgh version, in the first half and then a second half where I’ll interview some VERY special guests about Terry’s live. It’s going to be AMAZING. Tickets are already onsale! When I first moved to London, one of the first things I did was attend a recording of Russell Howard’s first DVD at the Bloomsbury … now I’m playing it myself! Get em while they’re hot.
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.
Stuff I’ve written this month
(little bit less than usual this month, because of working on shows and gigs)
Look, I made it onto a movie poster like a real film journalist!
Citroën Ami: the tiny electric vehicle driving change with The Big Issue (this was an advertorial, but I had quite a lot of fun writing it)
Upcoming live shows and tour dates
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 LEICESTER 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 LONDON - The Magic of Terry Pratchett - Bloomsbury Theatre, London TICKETS & INFO
23rd-24th - Irish Discworld Convention, CORK, IRELAND TICKETS & INFO
2024
August 2-5 International Discworld Convention, Birmingham INFO & TICKETS
Recommendations
I know i’m a predictable old nerd, but I am SO excited to have Strange New Worlds back. This is pure distilled, undiluted, amazing, as-it-should be Star Trek. And it has the hottest cast ever assembled.
I interviewed Avenged Sevenfold this month for the next edition of Marvin magazine. Not a band I’d spent a great deal of time thinking about, but I dug into their new record Life is But a Dream and found it to be pretty extraordinary. Progressive, ridiculous, catchy, OTT, absurdist. It’s great stuff. Really interesting guys too.
Wandering back through Glastonbury after seeing The Pretenders this UNHOLY NOISE drifted out of the Leftfield tent and drew us in like sorcery. We caught the end of an astonishingly powerful set. If you can see Benefits live, GO.
It’s copped some criticism (someone in the screening I saw literally yelled “Booooooo! What a terrible film!” when the credits rolled. Because they were a prick.) But I really enjoyed it. It’s a bit of a greatest hits, some of it doesn’t make sense and there’s some iffy uncanny valley CG, but Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge carry it off. It’s fun. It’s a new Indiana Jones film!
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.
1989
January 1
Nirvana’s new, three-album deal with Sub Pop records comes into force. It promises the band an advance of $6,000 in their first year with the label, with options for $12,000 for their second and $24,000 for their third if extended. According to the terms of the contract the band must deliver an album’s worth of material to the label for each year they are signed.1 ‘Three LPs and three long years’, Kurt will later say in a note to a journalist at Current, the student newspaper at Green River College. ‘I feel like I just signed my life away’.
January 2
A Nirvana song is played on British radio for the first time. Influential DJ John Peel, whose late-night show on BBC Radio 1 is a must-listen for UK music fans, had discovered Sub Pop via Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’ and has just received the Sub Pop 200 album, from which he is enthusiastically playing cuts. Despite this, it isn’t ‘Spank Thru’ that debuts on Peel’s show that night, nor is it even ‘Love Buzz’. Instead, Peel opts to flip the band’s debut single and Nirvana make their international radio debut with ‘Big Cheese’, introduced as from ‘a new band on Sub Pop records’. After the song ends Peel mentions that ‘older viewers will know there was an earlier Nirvana ... and back in 1967, when I used to do a programme called Top Gear on Radio One (pre-FM of course), this used to get played a great deal’, before playing ‘Pentecost Hotel’, a 1967 folk-rock song by an Anglo-Irish-Greek duo also called Nirvana.2
January 6
Nirvana open for Mudhoney at the Satyricon club in Portland, Oregon, both their first gig outside of their home state and their first show with their more high-profile labelmates.3 4
January 24
The final day recording and mixing on the album that would become Bleach.
January 30
John Peel gives ‘Spank Thru’ its UK radio debut.
February
Nirvana decide to expand their line up with an additional guitarist, mainly to take the pressure off of Kurt, who is self-conscious about having to sing and play at the same time. At Chad’s suggestion the job is offered to Jason Everman, who had recently helped out with the loan that funded the recording sessions for the album.
At the suggestion of Anton Brookes, who handled PR for Sup Pop’s UK distributors, Poneman and Pavitt pay for a Melody Maker journalist, Everett True, to fly to Seattle with a photographer to experience the city’s scene, get exposed to some of the bands on the label and interview Mudhoney.5 They send him Sub Pop 200 and a stack of 7”s – he is completely smitten and develops a close relationship with the Sub Pop team and many of the label’s acts.6
February 7
Jason Everman makes his debut with Nirvana at a dorm party at Evergreen in Olympia, later that night he is formally invited to join the band.
February 10
Nirvana play their first California show, opening for The Melvins at the covered wagon in San Francisco. While looking for a pharmacy for flu medicine in the city’s Haight Ashbury district they spot an AIDS awareness poster advising heroin users to ‘Bleach your works’. Kurt is fascinated that a substance as common as household bleach might become a valuable, life-saving resource. Bruce Pavitt, who is along for the ride, suggests they name their forthcoming album, originally to be called Too Many Humans, simply; Bleach.
February 11
The band open for Mudhoney in San Jose. Despite everyone being sick and the show being poorly attended, Mudhoney’s Steve Turner rates this as his all-time favourite Nirvana performance. At one point Kurt plays guitar standing on his head.
February 18
Melody Maker’s Everett True gives Nirvana their first mention in the British press, reviewing ‘Love Buzz’ alongside two other singles, U-Men’s ‘Solid Action’ and Some Velvet Sidewalk’s ‘I Know’, all underground Seattle and Olympia bands. His write up of ‘Love Buzz’ is delirious. ‘Nirvana are beauty incarnate’ he writes, describing the song as ‘a relentless two-chord garage beat which lays down some serious foundations for a sheer monster of a guitar force to howl over. The volume control ain’t been built yet which can do justice to this three-piece!’ True, who is completely smitten with the sounds emerging from the Pacific NorthWest. Concludes his piece by asking ‘WHAT IS GOING DOWN OVER THERE?’
Though the contract is dated for January 1 1989, it’s very likely that it is backdated. Poneman and Pavitt, neither of whom were exactly experts in contract law, and who certainly couldn’t afford a lawyer, assembled the document by photocopying examples out of library books. It also made out in the names of all four members of the band – which we’ll come to shortly. A decision to recruit a fourth member wasn’t taken until February of 1989. The label certainly couldn’t afford to give Nirvana their $6,000 advance yet – in fact, shortly afterwards Bruce Pavitt would attempt to borrow $5,000 from Kurt in order to get Bleach produced. Kurt Cobain, living off his girlfriend and money he was earning from a part time job as a janitor, hung up on him. The fact Pavitt thought that Kurt might have that kind of money, especially given the state of his guitars and amps, is a little surprising. In the end, Sub Pop borrowed the cash from someone else.
It’s not known at which point Kurt and Krist became aware that a previous band had shared their name, but it obviously didn’t trouble them too much. In a draft press release found in Kurt’s journals, which dates from early 1989, he writes ‘we realise that there was once a 60s band called NIRVANA but don’t get us confused with them because they totally suck Big F*cking Dick’. Which is a bit harsh, because the original Nirvana were actually pretty good. Their debut album, The Story of Simon Simopath, released on Island records in 1967, is one of the first true concept records to come out of the London psych pop scene and had been released to reasonable acclaim (not least from John Peel). Nirvana #1 disbanded in 1971 after the failure of their third album, though founding member Patrick Cambell-Lyons continued to record under the name into 1972. The original Nirvana reformed in 1985 to tour Europe, releasing a best-of compilation in 1987, thus their reunion shadows the emergence of their nascent namesakes across the Atlantic, neither presumably aware of the other just yet. It’s rather satisfying that John Peel had a hand in popularising both bands.
Nirvana would play Portland so often that they were practically counted as a local band. Only Olympia and Seattle accrued more Nirvana shows.
Mudhoney, at this point, were the revolting jewel in the Sup Pop crown. The quartet had formed from the ashes of Green River, singer Mark Arm’s sleaze-rock-tinged previous group. Commercial ambition had driven a wedge straight through the heart of the band, with Arm and guitarist Steve Turner drawn to the ethos of the underground scene, while guitarist Stone Gossard and bass player Jeff Ament wanted commercial success on a major label. It was an ideological split that couldn’t be resolved. Gossard and Ament, along with guitarist Bruce Fairweather who had replaced Turner after he jumped first, would go on to form Mother Love Bone with Andrew Wood, a band with clear rock star ambition, while Turner and Arm hooked up with Bundle of Hiss drummer Dan Peters and former Melvins bass player Matt Lukin to form the willfully grimier and much less commercial Mudhoney. The band recorded their debut EP Superfuzz BigMuff with Jack Endino in 1988 and its lead single, ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’, became Sup Pop’s signature release, helping gain exposure for the Seattle scene. It perfectly encapsulates the label and the first wave of grunge – noisy and uncompromising but with a belting pop heart, folding in The Stooges, Sex Pistols, underground punk rock like Black Flag and classic rock like Aerosmith and Black Sabbath, with guitars played through fuzz pedals (favoured brands of which lend their name to the group’s debut EP). It was the first Sup Pop record to really get noticed by the influential British music press, leading to a Melody Maker cover for the band in early 1989 and a European tour (and a split 7” via the Sub Pop Singles Club) with Sonic Youth. Kurt put Superfuzz Bigmuff in a 1993 list of the best albums of all time. Courtney Love (more of whom later) says she was inspired to start her own band after hearing ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’. Later she sent records by Mudhoney and Nirvana to her friend Jennifer Finch, who would go on to form L7. Finch says she played both and her first reaction was ‘wow, Mudhoney could really make some money’.
It’s difficult for modern audiences, especially modern British audiences, to understand how vastly different the music press was in the UK and US in the 80s and early 90s. The only really mainstream, national US music magazine was Rolling Stone, which certainly didn’t cater to the underground (its alternative rival Spin had only got a few years under its belt at this point and wasn’t a major player). Smaller, regional and specialist magazines like Chicago’s Maximumrocknroll and Seattle’s Rocket, fanzines like Suburban Punk or college-focussed publications like CMJ New Music Report and Rockpool didn’t have huge, national footprints. The UK was blessed with a truly national music press that was focussed on cooler, independent music, notably the big three of NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, plus rock-focussed weekly Kerrang! These magazines, of which only NME and Kerrang! now survive (and those in online form) were genuine tastemakers that wielded real clout. The music press in the US actually took its cues from the UK, so a good tactic was to break US bands in Britain first and let the American press pick up the scent from across the pond.
True is probably the journalist most associated with Nirvana and his memoir, Nirvana: The Truth, despite its tabloidy title is, for my money, the best book on the band yet written.
Thanks Marc, always enjoy reading your newsletters and marvelling at how productive you've been x
I promise you're not shouting into the void, we are here and reading! Glad you had a better Glastonbury this time round 🙂