Glom of Nit #34: Don't believe everything you read

Live TV, Autumn Tour, Nirvana book extract and a plague of lies

Before you go any further — if you’re one of those people who has been waiting for new tour dates where I visit Wales, Ireland, the North of England and LOTS of other places … GO HERE NOW.

In this email you’ll find

• Some news about my various exploits

• Info on upcoming Magic of Terry Pratchett tour dates

• Links to articles ands reviews I’ve written this month

• An excerpt from my upcoming book, Nirvana: A Detailed Guide to the Band that Changed Everything

• Music and TV recommendations.

Hello there.

I was on TV today. OR WAS I? Yes, I was. I was asked by the BBC to appear on their Sunday Morning Live show, on BBC One, to discuss the dangers of online misinformation (OR WAS I? Yes). Curiously this was spurred by a study from The Church of England that claims that our reliance on Social Media meant that we, collectively, were “in danger of becoming stupid in our judgement of where to place our trust” and that people are “becoming lax in our scrutiny of whether the very information or source we are accessing to underpin judgements is accurate or reliable”. And when The Church of England is telling you to stop taking things on faith, then you know things have gotten serious.

You can watch it below (it’s at 36 mins)

I’m glad I got to speak about it, although not in the depth I’d have preferred. It’s a true public service announcement. We really don’t, as a people, give the things we share on social media anywhere close to the scrutiny they need, especially if they agree with our biases. We like easy-to-understand stories. We like narratives that make sense of the world. Sometimes we just want something to be true so badly that we don’t bother to check if it really, truly is. Those of us who are bit politically spicy and on the left of politics tend to assume this is a right-wing issue. We’ve all seen the anti-trans, anti-vax, anti-climate change, anti-immigration lot sharing obviously fake, bias-confirming news, often in the form of poor quality memes, and we role our eyes at them. It happens on the “good” team as well though. Sometimes we’re so desperate to believe that some absurd, bigoted figure, Tr*mp say, or F*rage or P*tin has done something incalculably stupid that we’ll share it without really giving it any thought.

The thing is, this misinformation (things that are wrong) and disinformation (actual lies) crisis isn’t going anywhere, and it’s about to get a thousand times worse because AI is going to let us easily manipulate video so it shows, well, pretty much anything. And we believe our eyes. We’re trained to, from birth. We believe the evidence in front of us. And we share nice, easy to understand stories that ignore nuance and fit our world view. Terry Pratchett, by the way, predicted that this would happen thirty years ago, because he understood both technology and human nature.

I’m not saying that everything is false. That the world is a lie. Unless it turns out that we really are living in a simulation, in which case go nuts, I guess (Elon Musk, of all people, thinks we might be. Which explains a lot about him). I’m not suggesting that you believe all the conspiracy weirdos who tell you that the moon landings didn’t happen, or that the world is flat or that Finland doesn’t exist. The media isn’t controlled by a Zionist/Jewish cabal. The ruling elite isn’t part of a global New World Order of paedophile satanists (Qanon believers really think this is true by the way). The climate crisis is definitely real. Vaccines are definitely a good thing. 5G isn’t going to melt your brain. I promise. But that doesn’t mean you have to take everything you see at face value. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people who desperately want you to believe lies that are in their interests.

There are elections everywhere this year. It’s a vital year in the US, the UK, France and elsewhere. It’s why this stuff is valid. It’s why the World Economic Forum rated online misinformation as the single greatest threat to global peace. We’re living in an era of toxic divisions and people trying hard to drive wedges between us. And they rely on us being so comfortable in our biases and so desperate for something to be true that we don’t question the fakes.

Obviously there’s only so much you can do. You can’t assume every news item is planted, every tweet posted by bots and every internet rumour is part of a conspiracy. What you can do is to keep your wits about you. If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is. When you see something shared question its original source and the bias/agenda of the people that shared or created it. If you’re going to share a political meme, or something that purports to either prove or disprove something else, investigate its source. Be suspicious of info-graphics presented as locked JPG images with no credited source. It’s important. I promise.

News News News News

Here’s some news that I promise is 100% true. Though I would say that, wouldn’t I? First of all, and most exciting for me, is that I have finished my Nirvana book. Which, believe me, felt a long way off at some points. I’ve been writing it for well over a year. The last two months (you’ll notice I skipped the May Glom of Nit - too busy!) I have thought of almost nothing else. I tracked my progress since May 1 on Twitter (you can read the thread here). Somehow I managed to write almost 80,000 words in two months which is … well, absurd. I think they're good words too. Though I would say that, too, wouldn’t I? My editor, the effervescent Melanie (who handily shares a bedroom with me) is in the process of giving it a spit and shine. I hope it’ll be out later this year, in time for Christmas.

The last month or so of writing that book has been surprisingly emotional. Which, actually, shouldn’t have been surprising at all. It’s not like I didn’t know how the story of Nirvana ended. Somehow, though, I hadn’t really considered that the end of Kurt Cobain’s life, and the two years of addiction that preceded it would be difficult to write about. I’d gotten too involved in going deep on the music, and the excitement of the band’s rise, changing the world as they went. In truth I wanted to shy away from the more horrible extracurricular aspects of Kurt’s story and focus on the music. What I realised as I went along, frustratingly, is that you simply can’t gloss over that stuff. It was too intertwined. I hope I’ve handled it sensitively. I’ve done my best. The book is available to pre-order over on Amazon already, but hopefully by my next update I’ll have a pre-order link to buy singed copies directly. I’ll try and think of some cool extra stuff I can do for a personalised edition.

Over in performing world, I’m in a well-earned lull after pretty much five straight months of touring The Magic of Terry Pratchett across the UK. I worked out that I’ve played to something like 4,000 people just this year, and we are far, far, far from done. I’ll be at the Latitude Festival in a few weeks, which I’m hugely excited about, if only because it’s going to be fun watching my girlfriend wandering around backstage trying to meet and seduce David Duchovny, whose performing stuff from his new album. I have no idea how that show is going to go (mine, not Duchovny’s) so if you’re attending I’d LOVE it if you came to say hi. I’ll also be doing a signing afterwards in the festival book shop. After that it’s on to the Discworld Convention, where I’ll be doing the show in front of 700 rabid smart arses who already know everything about Terry’s life. It might be the most nervous I am about any show this year. Then off to Edinburgh to reprise the show at the Fringe for two weeks, then the Asylum Steampunk Festival, before settling into another set of tour dates in September, with a few more dappled across the rest of the year. I think it’ll be close to 66 performances in the end, one for every year of Terry’s life. Satisfyingly, the final show of the year will be in December, in Salisbury — the city closest to Terry’s home in Broade Chalk, and somewhere he truly loved. Details of the upcoming dates are below.

Tour update

The Magic of Terry Pratchett 2024 Tour

25-28 JULY Latitude Festival TICKETS *
2-5 AUG International Discworld Convention BIRMINGHAM INFO *
5-18 AUG EDINBURGH FRINGE – Assembly at George Square Studios TICKETS
23-25 AUG Asylum Steampunk Weekend LINCOLN TICKETS*
5 SEPT Brewery Arts KENDALL TICKETS
7 SEPT City Varieties LEEDS TICKETS
8 SEPT Leadmill SHEFFIELD TICKETS
12 SEPT Queens Hall, NARBERTH, WALES TICKETS
13 SEPT The Grand SWANSEA, WALES TICKETS
18 SEPT The Savoy MONMOUTH, WALES TICKETS
19 SEPT Redgrave Theatre BRISTOL TICKETS
20 SEPT The Maltings FARNHAM TICKETS
22 SEPT Chequermead Theatre EAST GRINSTEAD TICKETS
25 SEPT Town Hall CHELTENHAM TICKETS
28 SEPT Arts Centre WARWICK TICKETS
3 OCT The Witham BARNARD CASTLE TICKETS
4 OCT Waterside Arts SALE TICKETS
7 NOV Laughter Lounge DUBLIN TICKETS
20 OCT Chelmsford Theatre CHELMSFORD TICKETS
12 DEC Arts Centre SALISBURY TICKETS

Stuff I’ve written this month

Fake news on social media is the crisis we’ve all been ignoring (The Independent)

Scott Helland on Deep Wound, Dinosaur Jr, Outpatients, Hardcore and Frenchy & The Punk (Louder Than War)

Review — Bernard Butler, Good Grief (Super Deluxe Edition)

Work in Progress

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Nirvana: A Detailed Guide to the Band that Changed Everything, available later this year through White Owl Books. The book is a detailed timeline of Nirvana’s career with footnotes that give EXTREMELY detailed context on the era. This all may change, of course … as ever, please don’t share this or copy it.

Cover image: Andrea C. White.

This is the footnote¹ that accompanies Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set.

Unplugged In New York, as the recording of that night’s performance would ultimately be titled, has, of course, become a classic and beloved album in its own right. Kurt’s songs work beautifully stripped down, of course they do, the choice of covers feel like genius — new content for the band to release showcasing overlooked artists they loved, of course that’s a brilliant idea. The warm and intimate environment absolutely suiting a raw but good humoured performance. Obviously. Except … at the time, none of that was apparent and no-one was sure the set would work at all. Nirvana didn’t want this to look and sound like any other Unplugged show, while the producers at MTV wanted it to look and sound exactly like their previous entires in the series, and it was creating tensions that could wobble the whole thing off a cliff. Aaron Stauffer of New York band Seaweed remembers running into Dave Grohl before the show. ‘He kind of gave this face and groaned’, he told Mark Yarm in his book Everybody Loves Our Town. ‘“It’s not going to be good”.’ Rehearsals had been stilted, awkward and rambling to the point that Nirvana guitar tech Ernie Bailey was convinced the band were making a terrible mistake. ‘By the end of the second day I was left thinking at this point it could be a mistake to proceed with the show,’ he told The Ringer in 2018. ‘The rehearsals were so loose, I don’t remember them making it through a full set.’ The Meat Puppets’ Kirkwood brothers remember Kurt continually arriving at rehearsals late and obviously high, and if he’d been stoned for the rehearsals, the opposite problem was true of the day of recording — he turned up in withdrawal. MTV’s Amy Finnerty, the band’s biggest champion at the network, went out of her mind trying to track down valium to take the edge off Kurt’s symptoms. Worse, his stomach problems had returned, and he was vomiting blood and bile on the morning of the show. Even the Unplugged format itself strained against Nirvana’s instincts — Kurt’s Martin DB-18 acoustic guitar had a pick-up fitted, essentially making it an electric guitar, which to producer Alex Coletti’s annoyance needed to be ran through effects pedals and into a Fender amplifier disguised as a stage monitor. Krist didn’t even own an acoustic bass and had to be leant one by producers, and Dave struggled to play his drums at anything like the level of delicacy necessary to give the performance the stripped-back feel the format demanded (presumably fuelling Kurt’s view that he was ‘unsubtle’). ‘Kurt would turn to me and say, “Can you play quieter?”’ he told Rolling Stone in 2007. ‘Eventually I said, “Do you want me to just split?” I was barely touching the drums.’ The worry was that his sheer volume would drive everyone else to play harder, completely undermining the intended vibe of the music. At one point there was talk of Dave sitting the show out altogether.

The biggest issue, though, was that the band were terrified. Even after a month of playing mid-show acoustic sets on tour, specifically intended to prepare them for Unplugged, they weren’t used to their music and performances being this exposed. It’s one thing to busk some acoustic numbers at a gig; it’s quite another to do it on TV with every wobble and mistake obvious for all to hear. If the taping was nothing but a succession of retakes and fuck ups then the show was going to be a frustrating experience for the live audience and the band alike — Stone Temple Pilots, who had recorded their own Unplugged session just the day before, had taken hours to get it right, re-recording every song. Most of the press attending Nirvana’s show had also been in that recording as well, and no-one was looking forward to sitting through more endless do-overs. Suddenly, the idea of including four songs the band had never played live seemed less smart. Throw into that a combustible lead singer with a newly-developed tendency to turn full-on rock star diva when things didn’t go his way, and a media hanging on his every move, waiting for him to mess up, and it was a recipe for disaster. The only blessing was that Courtney wasn’t there to rock the boat (she and Cali DeWitt had intended to fly over from Seattle, but at the last minute decided to stay home and do drugs).

In the end, none of that mattered. Although it was a close run thing. Some problems turned out to have easy solutions — producer Coletti was no novice when it came to this acoustic thing, and provided Dave with a selection of alternative drum sticks, notably brushes and hot rods. The latter, which are comprised of dowling rods taped together, gave the feel of standard drum sticks while diffusing a lot of the power of the hits. Dave uses them on nearly every song and has gone on record as saying they’re what saved the performance. Nerves were countered by hard rehearsal. Krist sat up late in his hotel room working out a bass part to Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ (Tony Visconti’s original, intricate line was a little beyond him, at least at short notice) and invited the Kirkwood brothers over to work on the Meat Puppets songs they planned to cover. Amy Finnerty ensured the front row was full of people Kurt knew and loved, herself included. Also in attendance were members of Sonic Youth, old friend turned manager Janet Billig, members of the band’s touring entourage like Bobcat Goldthwait and Half Japanese singer Jad Fair, familiar faces like Seattle journalist Gillian G. Gaar and, curiously, British supermodel Kate Moss. Kurt also asked to meet the audience queuing for the show, and knowing he had a crowd of genuine, appreciative fans in attendance seemed to bolster his confidence.

More than any of that, though, Nirvana – and especially Kurt – simply rose to the occasion, something which was by no means a given. The band were quite capable of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory; they had always been messy and on their worst day often felt on the verge of collapsing mid-set. They could also be stunning, however. When the stars aligned. When everything was in the right place. When everyone’s moods were good. When it mattered, Nirvana could be absolutely magnificent. This was one of those times. Kurt was on wonderful form — belying his nerves, he seemed calm, relaxed, even enjoying himself. The stage setting might have felt funereal, but the performance itself had a lightness of touch that runs counter to the misery-and-addiction narrative often attached to the band. There’s between-song jokes and endless self-deprecation (‘the reason we don’t like to play these two songs back to back is that they’re exactly the same song’ says Kurt of ‘Dumb’ and ‘On A Plain’, ‘if this doesn’t work, well, these people are just going to have to wait’ he says before ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, ‘I don’t think MTV would let us play that’, is his response to a frenzied request for ‘Rape Me’), the show feels fun. And when it doesn’t feel fun, it’s because it’s devastating: Kurt’s solo rendition of ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ is absolutely shattering. It’s his definitive performance of the song, his voice cracking, ringing the raw emotion out of every note. Before the final verse it almost, almost falls apart, Kurt seeming to hesitate just for a second before descending into the song’s final movement and raising goosebumps. The three numbers with the Meat Puppets are brilliant, the songs comfortably taking their place in the Nirvana canon and sitting shoulder to shoulder with the Cobain originals. Probably best of all is the closing ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, a song Kurt had been playing on and off since 1989, when he and Krist recorded it with Mark Lanegan and Mike Pickeral from Screaming Trees. That version featured on Lanegan’s The Winding Sheet and is one of that album’s highlights, but it’s edged out as the definitive take (outside of Lead Belly’s own) by the harrowing performance that capped Nirvana’s Unplugged set. It’s too easy, in retrospect, knowing what was happening in the background, knowing where Kurt was heading, to project any number of emotional resonances and unecessary context onto that rendition. You can insert your own interpretation of Kurt’s pain onto his howls and screams as the song hits its climax. It’s hard to deny that he’s channeling something in those moments. He seems to put his entire soul into that vocal, absolutely losing himself. Maybe he really was interpreting an ocean of pain. Maybe he just really, really loved that song. Either way, as he howl’s that final ‘the whole … night … through’ it brings absolute chills. An incredible moment. Beauty. Pain. Catharsis. Whatever — insert your own interpretation here. It’s the capstone on a fantastic, definitive Nirvana performance that, thanks to its release as live album the following year, has taken a place in the band’s body of work that it absolutely deserves. Truly one of their finest moments. And they didn’t have to do a second take of a single song.

Mind how you go

Marc B x

1. Yes, I wrote a 1,700-word footnote. No, it’s not even the longest one in the book. What of it?