Glom of Nit #28: Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Articles, recommendations, shamless plugs and whatnot

In a minute I’m going to tell you about the wonder of Christmas music, and some funny stuff about Wham! and then there’s articles and tour dates and a bit from my Nirvana book. But first, these messages …

There’s actual content below this, I promise. Please read on. I just moved house and it’s Christmas and this is a capitalistic necessity:

My book The Magic of Terry Pratchett is BACK ON STOCK. Signed editions are available here:

I also have a few copies of the book I produced for The Guardian back in another lifetime, it’s called I Think I Can See Where You’re Going Wrong. It’s an EXCELLENT Christmas present for the well-meaning middle class pillock in your life. I had a lot of fun writing it.

Right. Down to the action.

Hello there.

It’s December. Whamageddon has begun. I disapprove. If you’ve not come across it before, it’s the annual game by which you try to avoid hearing Wham!’s seminal ‘Last Christmas’ between the 1-24 of December. Presumably, you can allow yourself a listen on Christmas Day itself, as, as my girlfriend would say, a treat. I played along for the first few years because it seemed interesting to test the cultural ubiquity of Yuletide playlisting. Normally, I fell within a few days. I then gave some money to charity, as you do.

I abandoned the game last year because I realised that I actually really like hearing ‘Last Christmas’ out in the wild. It feels like an old friend. Christmas songs often do. It also felt weird to deliberately snub a certified banger by an out Gay man (one of the few of his era in pop) and one who literally died on Christmas Day. Besides, I love that song. I used to perform a melancholic acoustic version of it based on the one James Dean Bradfied did on TFI Friday in 1997. Typical teenage indie snop behaviour — when you get older, you realise the JDB version works so well because it was already a brilliant song.

So now I do Whamhunter! where you gain points whenever you hear the song by chance. I never liked giving this gorgeous pop slice a sour taste.

You may have worked out that Christmas music means a lot to me. I’m one of those people who really like this time of year, which I’m aware is by no means a universal experience. It’s probably a byproduct of an inconveniently happy childhood. As such, it’s entirely possible that the following will make me sound simply weird.

That said, these things need to be done in moderation. That’s the entire reason people got sick of ‘Last Christmas’ to the point that avoiding it became a game. If you splurge all the Baileys cream too early, then everything gets rather sticky. There are people who put their trees up in November. Such people are lunatics. As far I’m concerned, they’re up there with those nutters you got on Eurotrash who opened presents and ate a Christmas dinner every day.

For me, it has to start on December 1st, and then it has to go up in gradients. You can’t go all in straight away. I don’t put up a tree on December 1st, for example. You’ve got to wait until somewhere around the second weekend. The longer you have a Christmas tree up, the sadder it looks by New Year’s Day. January is looming like bleak, bleak iceberg on the horizon. One the colour of exhaust-fume-grey slush. Don’t make that inevitable post-festive crash worse. The gap where the Christmas tree was looks bleaker the longer you have it in place for.

Music is a big deal, but again, you’ve got to ration this stuff out. Go full Mariah by choice on Dec 1st and you’ll end up as one of those people who hates hearing Wham! in public. Spoon-feed it. Choose your songs carefully. Then, when you’re assaulted by Mike Oldfield’s ‘In dulci Jubilo’ in Tescos it won’t feel as hateful. You’ll greet it like the old friend it is.

I’ve developed a three-stage Christmas music plan. Christmas Stage one is your indie/alternative/low-key Christmas songs. Yes of course, I have a playlist ready. (It’s about 80% Sufjan Stevens because he recorded, literally, a hundred Christmas songs. Most of which are wonderful.) This is where you can enjoy your She & Hims, your XFM Christmas Compilations, and less obvious stuff like Nick Lowe’s completely wonderful Quality Street, or Low’s absolutely devastating 1999 album Christmas, or that time Emmy & The Great and Tim Wheeler from Ash recorded an absolute gem This Is Christmas. Remember when International Pop Sensation Self-Esteem was in an indie duo and wrote the most painfully acute Christmas break-up song of all time?

That goes here.

Once you get about two weeks into December, you can move onto Christmas Stage 2. Now this is an interesting one, because the Stage Two playlist is all about what isn’t there. Essentially, there is a holy canon of Christmas songs that are the sound of Christmas, and most of them need to be held back. Stage two is the “almost but not quite” everything stage. It’s an art not a science, so your stage two may well be different to mine. Stage 2 for me is Springsteen’s version of ‘Santa Claus is Coming To Town’, Mariah can go here, so can Lennon & McCartney’s respective Christmas classics. It’s a place for great but underplayed stuff like James Brown’s Funky Christmas, the Motown Christmas hits like Stevie Wonder’s ‘What Christmas Means to Me’ and the Jackson 5’s ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Solid stuff. Technically everything from Christmas Stage One is actually in Christmas Stage two as well, although by this point I’m usually ready to abandon the arch, cooler-than-thou stuff.

The Stage Three playlist is the most personal. Stage three is for Christmas week itself, and it’s the songs that you most preciously associate with the season. When I was little we had a compilation called The Christmas Tape, and it was probably the first album I ever really loved. It was coded with magic and possibility … and also glam rock. It was by the people who did the Now That’s What I Call Music compilations (and indeed they’d soon rebrand it as Now That’s What I Call Christmas, which has been periodically updated ever since.) For me this is the holy canon. This is the official list of proper Christmas. Here is Wham!, here is Slade. I’d also put the classic Phil Spector Christmas Album here and all the old crooner stuff. Elvis. Sinatra. ‘White Christmas’, obviously. These are the songs that are most played by everyone else, and while it’s nice to encounter them in the wild, it’s best not to over-do them. Make them feel special. Most of them are great songs that are worn down by overuse. Honestly, Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could be Christmas Everyday’? The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’? These are incredible pieces of music. ‘Silent Night’ is the one of the most beuaitful melodies ever written. Savour the songs. They’re your continuity and tradition. They’re your oldest friends.

And if you want a recommendation of a Christmas song you might not know? Every year I get evangelical over The Hives feat. Cyndi Lauper. Do yourself a favour:

I’m consistently baffled that no-one knows this one.

God bless them, everyone.

Marc

Upcoming live shows and tour dates

2024 TOUR

More dates to be announced

14 JAN The Black Box (Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival)  BELFAST TICKETS
1 FEB Hanger Farm Arts Centre  TOTTON TICKETS
2 FEB Tacchi Morris Arts Centre  TAUNTON (tickets tba)
8 FEB Mill Arts Centre  BANBURY TICKETS
10 FEB The Stables  MILTON KEYNES (tickets tba)
15 FEB Arts Centre  SWINDON TICKETS
17 FEB Royal & Derngate Studio NORTHAMPTON TICKETS
18 FEB Glee BIRMINGHAM TICKETS
20 FEB Arts Centre  COLCHESTER TICKETS
29 FEB Komedia, BRIGHTON TICKETS
3 MARCH The Stand NEWCASTLE (TICKETS)
14 MARCH The Theatre CHIPPING NORTON (TICKETS)
15 MARCH ANDOVER The Lights (TICKETS)
22 MARCH Trinity Theatre TUNBRIDGE WELLS (TICKETS)
23 MARCH Churchill Theatre BROMLEY (tickets tba)
12 APRIL Dixon Studio SOUTHEND (tickets tba)
20 APRIL The Stand  EDINBURGH (TICKETS)
21 APRIL The Stand  GLASGOW (TICKETS)
31 MAY UK Games Expo BIRMINGHAM
1 JUNE UK Games Expo BIRMINGHAM
2-5 AUG International Discworld Convention BIRMINGHAM

Want to put the show on? Email Corrie Maguire Management.

LEICESTER COMEDY FESTIVAL
23 FEB Phoenix LEICESTER - performing hour of stand-up (not Terry Pratchett related) TICKETS

Stuff I’ve written & done this month

REVIEW: Doctor Who – The Star Beast (HeyUGuys)

The LadBaby nightmare is finally over: What’s next for the Christmas number one single race? (Big Issue)

Deck the halls with hits and follies: The greatest Christmas albums of 2023, ranked (Big Issue)

PODCAST APPEARANCE: How did Discworld get the 40? (PratChat)

PODCAST APPEARANCE: Edinburgh debrief and interviewing John Culshaw (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret)

PODCAST APPEARANCE: Al Kennedy & The Shepherd’s Crown (Desert Island Discworld)

Recommendations (FESTIVE SPECIAL)

Daniel Kitson’s A Story For Christmas is impossibly beautiful and funny and sweet and full of heart and wisdom. I’ve seen it as a one-man show twice over the years, the first time almost a decade ago in what feels like another life. He’s finally made a version available. I listened to it while cycling around in the frost a few days ago and it’s lost none of its magic. When people talk about Kitson being one of the best of the best, this is what they mean.

You know when things are so bad they’re good. East 17’s single isn’t that. It’s awful by absolutely any measure. But I’m kind of obsessed with it. I think it involves Santa dying from lung cancer. There’s an Ed Sheeran and Elton John lookalike. A bit where a Cliff Richard lookalike prays. There’s only Terry left of the original line up, and he’s drafted in one of the Artful Dodger and … someone else? I love that it exists. It’s utterly dreadful.

Brilliant stuff from the Southampton skifflers (featuring one Dr Mark Kermode on double bass). Witty and rocking. One of three Christmas songs they’ve done.

I did not see this coming, but Wheatus’ christmas EP is actually great. The title track will make you roll your eyes for about 5 seconds and then smile ear-to-ear, and the new songs are properly brilliant. The world has turned upside down.

That’s all folks

Marc B

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WORK IN PROGRESS SNIPPET

From my upcoming book Nirvana: A Detailed Guide To The Band That Changed Everything, due out in 2024 through Pen & Sword. The book is a detailed timeline of Nirvana from 1985 to 1994, with elaborate footnotes giving context. You know I love a footnote.

Please note, this is a work-in-progress book, and as such may completely change. Obviously please don’t copy or share it.

1989

June 9

The first of Sub Pop’s ‘Lamefest’ shows takes place at the 1,400-capacity Moore Theatre, Seattle¹ —a substantially bigger venue than any of the bands are used to. On the bill are Nirvana, TAD and Mudhoney², billed as ‘Seattle’s lamest bands in a one-night orgy of sweat and insanity’. The event doubles as a release party for Bleach, which is available to buy for the first time at the merch table. Expectations are low, with TAD’s Tad Doyle and Mark Arm, of headliners Mudhoney, both feeling that the label has bitten off more than it could chew with such a large venue. Promoters at the Moore Theatre itself feel very much the same and book less security than they habitually would have. The show sells out. ³

June 10

Contrasting the previous evening’s successes, Nirvana play a last-minute show opening for Cat Butt in Portland. The gig is virtually empty, and the band spend the show taking requests.

June 15

Bleach is officially released, with a 1,000 copies pressed on white vinyl and a further 2,000 on more traditional black vinyl but with a free poster.⁴ The press blurb, written by Poneman and Pavitt, reads ‘hypnotic and righteous heaviness from these Olympia pop stars.⁵ They’re young, they own their own van and they’re going to make us rich.’ ⁶

June 16

Kurt and Krist open for Lush, the band featuring their friend’s Slim Moon and Greg Barbior, at a show in Olympia promoted by local noisemaker Kathleen Hanna. Billed as ‘Industrial Nirvana’, the two-piece version of the band improvises (badly) over a drum machine. At one point they are joined by The Go Team’s Tobi Vail for a ‘noise jam’ .⁷

June 21

Nirvana return to The Vogue in Seattle to play a warm up for their upcoming tour. They debut two new songs, ‘Dive’ (as demoed at Evergreen State earlier that month) and ‘Polly’.⁸

June 22

Nirvana’s extensive tour in support of Bleach (their first ever tour) begins at The Covered Wagon in San Francisco, a venue they’d played earlier in the year with the Melvins. Despite this ostensibly being Nirvana’s tour, they will actually be the opening act for a local band at many of these gigs – in San Francisco it’s the improbably named punk-funk crossover band Bad Mutha Goose. The tour is planned to run for 26 shows and will take Nirvana from the West Coast to Arizona and Texas, through the midwest, on to Philadelphia and New Jersey and across to Boston before finishing in New York City. The quartet will do the whole thing with no road crew or tour manager, taking it in turns to drive their white Dodge van⁹ across the vast stretches of highway that criss-cross the United States. The aim for most shows will be to make enough money for motels, food and gas through ticket and t-shirt money.¹⁰

¹¹

©Marc Burrows, 2023

1.  ‘Lamefest’ was, of course, a genius title for the label’s annual ‘big gig’. It played wholesale to the mythology of what would become known as ‘Generation X’ (although not until after Douglas Copeland’s book of that name had been published in 1991) as the ‘slacker generation’.  Sub Pop made disaffection and miserablist self-deprecation part of its brand. Around this time the label started printing t-shirts that simply said ‘loser’ in giant letters. They sold incredibly well. It's the same thinking that was behind the quote Jonathan Poneman fed Everett True about how Nirvana would be chopping wood, fixing cars or stacking shelves if they weren’t playing music, or how Tad Doyle was portrayed as a hulking, barely literate brute rather than, as was actually the case, a whip-smart polymath who had once played jazz drums at the White House for President Nixon. Like the English punks of the 70s, Sub Pop learned to celebrate anti-intellectualism, boredom and anti-fashion as branding. As an added bonus, if you were already calling your gigs “lame” and your fans “losers”, you were stopping anyone else from getting those insults in first. Pavitt and Poneman would later say that these marketing ticks were all instinctive rather than thought-through. Nevertheless, they were effective.

2.  One account also lists another Sub Pop band, Blood Circus, but I can’t find any evidence of that from any other source.

3.  Bruce Pavitt would later say that Lamefest was ‘the moment that grunge blew up’. As with everything the Sub Pop bosses throw around, it’s a sentiment that should be taken with far more than a pinch of salt —Lamefest wasn’t a catalyst in itself, but it was a very public example of how popular the local scene had become. A lot of people needed to see that to believe it —including many of the bands themselves. As Mudhoney’s Steve Turner comments, ‘wow! Who are all these people and where were they a year ago?’. A review in the Seattle Times read ‘The whole point of this show seems to be based on the perverse, reverse idea that grungy, foul-mouthed, self-despising meatheads who grind out undifferentiated noise and awing [sic] around their long hair are good—and ‘honest’—by virtue of their not being “rock stars.” How confounded this primitivism is, which defines bands in the reverse image of someone else’s market position, instead of music… If this is the future of rock n’ roll, I hope I die before I get much older.’ As bad reviews go, Sub Pop couldn’t have asked for a better one.

4.  Nirvana’s Bleach is the best selling album Sub Pop has released in its (at the time of writing) nearly-forty year history. Obviously that has a lot to do with how famous Nirvana would become. Kurt Cobain was a globally recognised household name in the way that Mark Arm of Mudhoney or even someone like bone-fide rockstar Chris Cornell of Soundgarden never would be. And that was before his death elevated him to rock-icon hood. It was more than just the celebrity and major label success, however (I’m assuming you know that’s what’s coming, right?) Bleach is a genuinely great record, though it took a while for people to notice it. One story goes that when the band played an in-store at LA’s Rhino Records while on tour, the shop only had five copies in stock. Whether or not they sold them all that day, history does not record. Anyone that did buy a copy would find themselves in possession of something of an unpolished gem. Jack Endino managed to capture something really primitive and inject it with a lot of space and clarity without compromising the punk assault. There are incredible riffs on here as well — ‘Blew’, ‘School’ and ‘Negative Creep’ especially. There’s ‘About A Girl’, the shiny sixpence in the chimney sweep’s ear, instantly disproving anyone who dismissed the record, and the band in general, with the usual adjectives that plagued the grunge groups: ‘dirge’, ‘lumpen’, ‘tuneless’ ect. There’s pop hooks all over the place, even something super heavy like ‘Floyd The Barber’ sparkles in the choruses. There’s obvious musical chemistry, especially on the breakouts and solos (which notably, and presumably to Jason Everman’s discomfort, often feature no rhythm guitar at all – Endino captures a three piece band who then went on tour pretending they’d made it as a quartet). ‘Love Buzz’ is a great example. Even the tracks recorded with Dale Crover back at the start of 1988, predating the name ‘Nirvana’ itself, still sound great. And there’s that voice. No-one, honestly no-one, sounds like Kurt Cobain. There’s all sorts of cliches and superlatives that you can hurl at that howl, and many have; it has a quality that’s hard to nail down. The other Seattle screamers didn’t sound like this. There is something utterly and uniquely captivating about that voice. Nirvana would make better records than Bleach with more mature songwriting, better fidelity recording and more finessed performances, but there’s an argument that it captures the band in an unspoilt, pure form that they would never quite find again. There’s a purist hardcore of Nirvana fans for whom it remains their best record. 

5.  Categorising the band as ‘Olympia pop stars’ is an odd choice, as it intentionally goes against Sub Pop’s usual mythologising of Seattle as a punk rock mecca with a tight scene. In truth Nirvana were as much of an Olympia band as they were a Seattle one (neither is completely accurate), but the term ‘Olympia pop band’ conjures very different vibes to ‘Seattle punks’. The band and label were already trying to distance themselves from a pigeonhole that was unarguably doing them some favours.

6.  It is extremely unlikely that anyone believed this at the time. It turned out to be more or less true, though.

7.  According to witnesses this never-to-be-repeated version of the band was absolutely awful, which was fine as they weren’t taking it in the least bit seriously. Kathleen Hanna and Toby Vail would, of course, go on to form the genre-defining Riot Grrrl band, Bikini Kill.

8.  It’s worth noting here that, just a week after the release of Bleach, Nirvana debuted a song Nevermind for the first time. Kurt claims in several interviews, both around this time and around the release of Nevermind two years later, that the band had several more melodic songs in the mould of ‘About A Girl’ which they had opted to leave off of Bleach in order to give that record a specific sonic identity. Aside from maybe ‘Clean Up Before She Comes’, which never appears to have been in serious consideration for release, ‘Polly’ and the as-yet-unaired ‘Sappy’ (which date back to 1988) are the only possible examples that we know of, suggesting this is probably more exaggerated myth-making from Kurt regarding his own band’s depth, distancing himself from the grunge crowd. Neither song was attempted in the studio by the band until well after Bleach was put to bed. That said, across the second half of 1989 Nirvana would accrue a stack of extremely hummable tunes, notably ‘Dive’, ‘Stain’, ‘Even In His Youth’ and ‘Been A Son’, so they could have theoretically rehearsed some of these earlier in the year. It does beg the question ‘if you have songs that good, why not perform them?’

9.  The “official” Nirvana biography, Come As You Are, by Rolling Stone’s Michael Azerrad, states that this van was ‘soon nicknamed “The Van”’. Which is a fairly preposterous thing to say. Literally all vans are nicknamed ‘The Van’.

10.  Nirvana’s sole shirt on this tour has become something of a classic. Known as the ‘Vestibule’ shirt, it featured a diagram of the upper circles of hell as depicted in Dante Aligheri’s 14th-century poem Divine Comedy, which Kurt had found in a book. Recently, the grand-daughter of British artist C.W Scott-Giles attempted to sue Nirvana and their representatives over the image, which was claimed was identical to the Dante’s Inferno artwork Scott-Giles had created back in the 1940s. The case was thrown out of a California court by a judge who told the plaintiff to try again in the UK, where the image is actually copyrighted. Which is all a lot of fuss over nothing, really. Most people buying that shirt in 1989 weren’t doing so because of Dante’s Inferno. They were buying it because the back of the shirt bore the legend ‘Fudge Packin’ Crack Smokin’ Satan Worshippin’ Motherf*ckers’. Kurt would later tell NME that each member of the band was represented by one of the four statements, though in truth it was just something Krist Novoselic had graffitied on a wall once.

11.  Nirvana’s first tour was pretty successful, all things considered. Obviously, they weren’t selling out every night and playing to fanatical crowds and obsessive fans —that would come soon enough. But they were on the road, doing it properly. They were doing what rock bands were supposed to do. Crashing with friends. Playing shows. Eating up the miles. ‘God, we were seeing the United States for the first time,’ Kurt told Michael Azerrad. ‘And we were in a band and we were making enough money to survive. It was awesome. It was just great.’ By the time the tour hit the midwest, the album had started to get some traction on college radio and word of mouth was starting to spread to the point that audiences were picking up. The band were, more or less, on form. Most night’s ended with an orgy of destruction on stage, especially if the gig had been very good or very bad, which meant a lot of the limited funds available went on instrument repairs. In Boston Kurt failed to get his guitar in fixed in time and let Jason Everman take sole duties for the night, with Kurt just handling the vocals. There were adventures and scrapes galore – the time Krist smashed into a dresser full of croquery belonging to Lori Barbero from Babes in Toyland. The time they ended up helping someone move house in New York City. The time they slept with baseball bats in the van in case of alligators. They were very young men, on the road for the first time, with a record to sell. Life was good.