Glom of Nit #35: Peeling paint and creaking knees
Aging disgracefully, music music music and why my girlfriend's books are brilliant.
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
A little musing on aging and nostalgia
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
Books, Music and TV recommendations.
Hello there.
Greetings from *checks notes*, Birmingham? I’m writing this from my hotel room at the International Discworld Convention, the biannual nerdapolooza for Terry Pratchett fans. I’m here to perform The Magic of Terry Pratchett tomorrow night in front of what will probably be the most rabid audience I will play to. Savage they are. Heckling smartarses the lot of them. Will I survive? I guess I’ll let you know. Being here is a sharp reminder that time absolutely flys. At a million miles per second. One minute you’re looking at your watch and it’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and then you blink and it’s Tuesday. I was here two years ago … it was here, more or less, that the idea of doing a live show based on my biography started to really solidify, as Rob Wilkins and I chatted on stage and wrung laughs out of the audience. On Sunday I head up to Edinburgh for the Fringe; a two-week victory lap of The Magic… in a larger room than last year. It feels like the 2023 Fringe was a few weeks ago. And yet, good grief, so much has happened since. Time. It’s odd.
I’ve been reflecting on that a lot, lately. A few weeks ago I went to see my beloved Manic Street Preachers playing at Dreamland in Margate, the venerable fairground space on the seafront, as a co-headline with my almost-as-beloved Suede. The stage both bands played on was painted for the fairground, all reds and yellows and bold shapes. The paint was chipped, peeling, fading. I don’t know if that was an intentional shabbiness, creating some sort of halo of seaside nostalgia, or whether it was simply … an old paint job.
Either way, it felt oddly appropriate. Here was this band I’d loved since I was 14 years old. They’re in their fifties, playing songs they wrote when they were barely out of their teens, songs of such vivid pain and introspection, though familiarity has given them something of a blunt edge. Still, they’re glorious, glorious songs. ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, ‘Little Baby Nothing’, ‘This Is Yesterday’, ‘A Design For Life’. The band were playing it deliberately broad, knowing that this crowd was surfing on a 90s nostalgia wave and keeping it safe and familiar for them. The Manics have much odder, creepier, chillier corners of their lengthy catalogue, but on this tour they’re keeping it bright and big. The paint work is still vivid, bolshy reds and yellows, and if you squint in the sunshine the cracks and blisters disappear. But my knees hurt and my back aches and I’m stood too near the speakers and it’s making my ears buzz because 20 years of playing in bands and Djing and 30 years of constant listening to music on headphones has finally, inevitably pushed me into tinnitus. Nicky Wire, Manics’ mouth-on-legs bass player, released an excellent solo album last year that included the line “Nicky Wire is no more, he’s lying face down on the floor, his knees are f*cked his back his sore …”. The paint peels.
I thought about that again last week, watching the excellent Blur documentary To The End, about the band’s reunion and run up to their Wembley Stadium shows last year. The once preposterously youthful pioneers are all knackered knees and bad backs. Ice baths before and after the show. Two of them recovering alcoholics, the other two still pushing it. Damon sounds drunk on stage, but then he always does with Blur. Listen to any of their gigs. Like the Manics they still deliver, probably more so to be honest, though it feels like treachery to say it. Wembley Stadium has only fresh paint. Blur, though, are also cracked and peeling. What the hell. It gives them character.
Tonight my other favourite band, Smashing Pumpkins, (I have four music-based tattoos … Blur, Manics, Smashing Pumpkins and Bowie. That should tell you a lot.) release a new album. By the time I send this it will probably be out. I get to feel the thrill of pressing play for the first time. Hearing songs that I’m sure will become deeply familiar to me but right now exist only in potential. Schrödinger songs. Billy Corgan, like Damon, like Nicky, is in his 50s. I discovered all three bands at around the same time, as they smashed out classic album after classic album across the span of the 90s, especially deployed for teenage me to take to my heart. Teenage me was skinny and stupid, and emotional and weird. He was a mess, but kind of a glorious one. I’ve grown wth these bands, as they’ve grown with me. Our paint is cracked. Our knees are f*cked. Our backs are sore. But we’re still here. For each other.
Tour update
The Magic of Terry Pratchett 2024 Tour
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
17 OCT Arts Centre POCKLINGTON 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
The Misinformation Crisis is upon us and “fake” reform candidates are the least of our worries (Independent)
Tenacious D’s Trump gag may not have been the best joke in the world, but that’s what comedy is all about (Independent)
Recommendations
I’m not proud to say that in the years since I’ve been seeing my wonderful girlfriend, Melanie I haven’t actually gotten around to reading her books. She’s a brilliant historian with several critically praised biographies to her name. It’s not that I didn’t want to read them, it’s just that there was always something else I felt like I should be reading first, usually research for my own books. This month, having finished my book on Nirvana finally and with less pressing reading to do, I decided to dive in. And my GOSH, they’re SO good. I devoured three in two weeks and I am famously quite a slow reader. She’s got a wonderful way of peppering delightfully vivid details, hooky little nuggets that bring her books to life. Marie De Guise: Scourge of Henry VIII is fantastic, sliding from Game of Thronesy battlefield manoeuvring to moments of intimacy. I read it like a novel. The Life of Henrietta Anne: Daughter of Charles I, meanwhile, is honestly a hoot. A teen romance with a backdrop of intrigue and courtly manoeuvrings. It’s a delight. And then there’s Empress Alexandra: The Special Relationship Between Russia's Last Tsarina and Queen Victoria, a light-touch but fascinating look at Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughter that it packed with terrific one-liners and deft characterisation. It’s a delight. I’m, genuinely, so proud of her. She can write rings around me. The three books between them show three very different sides of royal intrigue covering several countries and about 400 years. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
I mentioned the Blur documentary To The End earlier, which I adored. It’s not a career-retrospective, so don’t go in expecting one — Blur have done documentaries for all three of their reunions (the other two, No Distance Left To Run and New World Towers, as well as their classic 1993 boozer tour film Starshaped are all worth hunting down). This one is more melancholy than the previous two, ruminating on aging and distance. You feel the sore backs and knackered knees. But the music, my gosh. I love that silly band so much.
The live album recording of their Wembley Stadium shows from last year is also now available and worth your time. Listening to it now I was struck by how gloriously messy Blur are as a live band. There’s nothing pristine about them, it’s all noise and energy. Same as it ever was, really.
I’m completely obsessed with Aurora’s ‘When The Dark Dresses Lightly’, which is the Kate Bushiest thing I’ve heard in many a year. The album it comes from, What Happened To The Heart is absolutely gorgeous, as well as quite quite mad.
And a final movie recommendation … I’d heard a lot about Longlegs and it more or less lives up to its hype. Sure the plot hangs together a little too vaguely and leaves a lot of “wait a minute, hang on” moments once you start to think about it, but as a tone piece it’s exceptional. Like Wes Anderson has gone off his meds and on to mescaline. Nick Cage is delightfully barmy as well. And if nothing else, watch it at the cinema to hear Marc Bolan’s glorious ‘Jewel’ and ‘Get It On’ over a big sound system!
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 footnote for the incident in 1993 when Dave Grohl briefly quit Nirvana.
There would be a tension between Dave and Kurt for the rest of the band’s lifetime, partly fuelled by Courtney Love, who seemed to dislike him greatly at this point — the fact she was openly bad-mouthing him for all to hear at Nirvana’s New York showcase is pretty telling (and as it was caught on a bootleg of the show, all did hear). What’s surprising, though, is Kurt’s reported attitude that he somehow didn’t need Dave and that any drummer could do the job. ‘Kurt was really unhappy with the way I played drums,’ Dave told Rolling Stone in 2005. ‘I could hear him talking about how much he thought I sucked. But he’d never say it to me. If I’d confront him about it – “Is there a problem? If you want me to leave, just ask” – he’d say “No, no, no”.’ Kurt, however, would continue to complain about his drummer to his friends. ‘Once, I stopped by Kurt’s hotel room when he started yelling that he wanted to fire Dave for being an unsubtle and unspontaneous musician,’ remembers Michael Azerrad in a 2021 article in The New Yorker. ‘The thing was, Dave was staying in the room right next door.’ ‘Unsubtle and unspontaneous’? Dave Grohl? You could possibly, just about, make an argument for ‘unsubtle’ as Grohl, after all, is an animal behind the drums, belting the daylights out of his skins on every beat. This was the drummer who caused the only noise complaint in Seattle’s Word of Mouth/Reciprical studio’s eight-year history and whose battered and busted snare skin Kurt had proudly held aloft at the line-up’s first show together. So subtle? Maybe not. But Dave was incredibly dextrous and creative; his disco flams are what makes ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ work — no other drummer would have approached that song in that way, and without ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ everything is different for Nirvana, and alternative rock in general. Listen to his choices on ‘Heart Shaped Box’, the way way he accents Kurt’s riff with the high-hats at the end of each third bar of the verse; that’s not obvious phrasing. Listen to how he holds ‘Milk It’ together, how his kick drum responds to and accents Krist’s basslines. Few drummers play with that sort of character. And as for ‘unspontaneous’? Nirvana with Grohl were an incredibly improvisational band, able to pivot on a sixpence in the middle of lengthy, almost telepathic jam sessions in the studio and on stage. Dave had made himself a cornerstone of Nirvana’s sound, and to talk of replacing him with someone ‘along the lines of Dan Peters’, a drummer they’d specifically passed over to get Grohl in, seems odd in the extreme. ‘He was just saying that you should get a smaller drum set and play more like Danny or something,’ was Krist’s rather lame explanation, according to the interview Dave gave biographer Paul Brannigan.
In truth the differences were beyond music — musically Nirvana were in great shape. They’d delivered an amazing album that had moved the band forward in exactly the way they needed to, and shown that, despite how dysfunctional they could seem, they could knuckle down and put the work in. The problem was personal. By this point, Nirvana had split into two camps. On the one side was Krist, Dave and the band’s entourage and road crew. On the other was Kurt, Courtney and their friends, including the members of Hole. ‘You know, there were drugs around, and there was, like, the people who did the drugs, and then there were the people who didn't do the drugs,’ Dave told The Howard Stern Show in 2011. ‘And I didn't do the drugs, so I was just out of that world, you know. If you're in it you're in it. If you're not, you're out.’ A decade or so earlier, Courtney had addressed the issue on Howard Stern herself — ‘He [Kurt] hated his guts,’ she told the host in 1999. ‘Kurt loved him at first because he was sweet, funny and lovely. And then he turned into such a dick … he really turned his back on Kurt.’ Courtney, who would feud with Dave and Krist through the next decade or so, elaborated further on her MySpace blog, years later: ‘Kurt loathed HIM more than anyone else (except a journalist). In his will he made a codicil that Grohl was no longer a member of Nirvana.’ Which is depressing to read, though it’s tricky to know how seriously to take any decisions Kurt made in those dark, final months.
Mind how you go
Marc B x