Glom of Nit #41 It's quite scary

London calling to the faraway towns, driving home for Christmas, abject terror

Photo credit: Alexis Dubus

In this email you’ll find

• The usual monthly musings on whatnot

• Upcoming tour dates

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

• An excerpt from my work-in-progress book

• Music and film recommendations.

BUT BEFORE THAT … Have you bought my new biography of NIRVANA yet?

Also PLEASE DO drop me a line by replying to this email, or the post on Substack or finding me on social media. Unless it’s to point out a typo. Don’t do that. No-one likes it when you do that.

Hello there.

Firstly, we’re just ONE MONTH away from the biggest show I’ve ever played — The Magic of Terry Pratchett at the Duchess Theatre, London on Terry Pratchett Day — what would have been Sir Terry’s 77th birthday: April 28th (it’s also just a few days after my birthday). There’s a few more dates later in the year, but this is really the capstone of two years of touring this project. There’s still tickets left, but they’re going fast and I’d LOVE it if you could be there. I’ll be joined in the second half by my old friend and podcasting legend Dan Schreiber (No Such Thing As A Fish, We Could Be Weirdos, The Criptid Factor) who will be interviewing me onstage alongside a SUPER SECRET SPECIAL GUEST, who I can’t reveal. However I really wouldn’t want to ROB you of the opportunity to see it. There’s also going to be a special hardback folio edition of the Tales from Roundworld book to mark the occasion, and a limited edition poster! Tickets here!

Right, on with this month’s musings.

I’ve really got to learn to drive. I’ve been saying that for a year now. 2024 was the first time i’ve ever properly toured as a solo stand up performer. I’ve been on tour lots of times as a musician, of course, starting with a couple of dashes up and down the country in 2002 and 2003 playing bass in a grotty punk band called The Pittstops. That was when I learned that I can sleep anywhere, and that a bootleg Foo Fighters hoodie I bought for a tenner at a festival was as good as sleeping bag. Or at least it was when I was 21 — these days I very much need a Premier Inn¹. Then there was a one-month tromp around the country flogging t-shirt for the beautiful, but now, alas, largely forgotten band GoodBooks in 2007 (good grief, that was … *counts on fingers* EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO. My god. The ceaseless, unending passage of time.) I loved that tour! I made friends on it that I still have now (Hi Max! Hi Danni! Hi Chris!) And then, of course, there’s The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Being Currently On Indefinite Hiatus, the band I played in for over a decade, which took me up and down this Sceptered Isle many times, plus on several adventures across the United States. And also, once, to Belgium. Many, many weary road miles. Many, many adventures of various levels of debauchery. I’ll write a book about it one day.

Anyway.

The one thing that all of those tours had in common was that someone else was doing the driving. Capable grown ups, like tour managers and roadies with names like “Steve-o”, “Pumpy”, “Swiss Toni” and “Welsh Paul” (and his brother, “Welsh Stuart”. ) At a push, the drummer does it. Touring musicians are pack animals, moving as one, sharing the load (and, indeed, the loading because touring in bands is about 80% carrying heavy things. Unless you’re the lead singer)². Touring comedians are very different beasts: lonely, wandering minstrels, living on Ginsters pasties and yelling at train wifi. Occasionally, like The Doctor, they have companions — friends, girlfriends, friends’ girlfriends, that keep them grounded and are also handy people to explain the plot to. They, the comedians, also, as a rule, tend to do their own driving. The problem is that I can’t.

I’ve never needed to learn before. Back when I turned 17, in that brief window after Tony Blair had become Prime Minister but before he’d disappointed everyone, I just assumed I’d be terrible at it and made a conscious decision not to learn. It was the right choice at the time. I was a slow learner at pretty much everything and terribly uncoordinated. My brother, who is eighteen months younger , got to all of the major developmental milestones like tying shoelaces and riding bikes well ahead of me (as an adult I’ve realised I’m almost certainly dyspraxic, but that sort of thing went unnoticed a lot in the 90s). It would have taken me years. Plus the idea of manoeuvring a ton of scrap metal powered by controlled explosions at lethal speeds scared the bejesus out of me. Then I went to university in Loughborough — campus-based and situated in a very walkable town (no, I didn’t do sport. Don’t be ridiculous). And then I moved to London and stayed there for seventeen years. And as Dylan Moran memorably says in Shaun of the Dead, “I don’t see the point of owning a car in London”. I’ve never had a family I needed to cart around, at least until I inherited one from my partner very recently, and never needed to travel extensively. Even when I started stand-up I managed to get by from cadging lifts off of other comics.

Then, last year I started doing proper stand-up tours with The Magic of Terry Pratchett and suddenly the ability to be able to drive myself would have become very useful indeed. It’s all very well paying a friend to do the hard miles but it doubles the hotel budget (alright, we could share but … I stay up late writing and I like my space), and though I genuinely love travelling by train, well … if you’re reading this in the UK then you don’t need me to tell you about the problems with our rail infrastructure. You also start to realise how many regional arts centres are nowhere near a train station. I’ve not yet been late for a gig due to a transport issue, but it’s only a matter time.

So this time last year I promised myself that, by the run of shows I had booked in for the Autumn, I’d be driving myself. I even got my provisional license sorted, and did some research on driving lessons for people who are almost certainly going to be terrible at driving, which as it turns out is A Thing. And then I just … didn’t. I couldn’t take the final step. I remember getting a callback from an intensive driving course I’d made an online enquiry with. The man on the phone was super helpful: “Let’s get you driving by the summer”. I arranged a call back and then, studiously, never answered them again. Eventually they gave up. When the Autumn tour began I was still taking trains or paying my mate Dave to drive me.

I’m not really sure what’s blocking me from learning this entirely useful skill. I just can’t seem to take the step. So. I’m putting it in a writing. Right here. To you, the lovely readers of Glom of Nit, who have been so supportive of what I do. I’m going to learn to drive. This year. I have more tour dates in the Autumn. And I will drive to them myself. Just watch me.

Please hold me to this.

See you on the road.

Marc x

Tour update

THE MAGIC OF TERRY PRATCHETT

28 APRIL Duchess Theatre LONDON TICKETS
30 MAY UK Games Expo BIRMINGHAM TICKETS*
01 JUNE UK Games Expo BIRMINGHAM TICKETS*
19-20 JUNE Sudely Castle FANTASY FOREST FESTIVAL TICKETS*
04 SEPT The Y Theatre LEICESTER TICKETS
05 SEPT The Civic STOURPORT TICKETS
21 SEPT Theatre Severn SHREWSBURY TICKETS
27 SEPT Komedia BRIGHTON TICKETS
02 OCT The Institute BRAINTREE details soon
04 OCT The Point EASTLEIGH TICKETS
19 OCT Phoenix EXETER TICKETS
26 OCT Spa Theatre SCARBOROUGH TICKETS
28 OCT The Stand NEWCASTLE TICKETS
31 OCT Little Theatre CHORLEY TICKETS

*Require event ticket

THE BRITPOP HOUR

Join award-winning writer-comedian Marc Burrows for a multi-media stand up celebration of one of British music's most iconic and enduring moments, marking 30 years since the Blur vs Oasis chart war.

Music journalist Marc (Guardian, The Quietus, Big Issue) dives into the stories, rivalries, OTT personalities and some of the finest music the UK has ever produced. Part nostalgic love letter, part send-up, part rock'n'roll party. DoyaknowwhatImean?

31 MARCH The Coach House TRING (work in Progress) TICKETS
8 JUNE Hen & Chickens LONDON (work in progress) TICKETS
17 JUNE The Albert Arms ESHER (work in progress, with Juliette Burton) TICKETS
18 JUNE The Cornerhouse SURBITON (work in progress, with Juliette Burton) TICKETS
26 JUNE West End Arts Centre ALDERSHOT (work in progress) TICKETS
10 JULY Forest Arts Centre NEW MILTON (work in progress) TICKETS
11 JULY Museum of Comedy LONDON (with Juliette Burton) (work in progress) TICKETS
19 JULY Norden Farm MAIDENHEAD (work in progress, tickets tba)
22 JULY Hen & Chickens LONDON (work in progress) TICKETS
24 JULY BRIGHTON Komedia (work in progress) TICKETS
30 JULY - 25th AUG Underbelly EDINBURGH FRINGE TICKETS

OTHER LIVE APPEARANCES

10 MAY - Get Your Geek On comedy night (with Juliette Burton, Sam See and Sooz Kempner) A&O Hostel Bar BRIGHTON TICKETS

24 MAY - Nirvana book talk, Chapter Two - CHESHAM TICKET

06 JUNE - Get Your Geek On comedy night (with Juliette Burton, Sam See and Sooz Kempner) Phoenix - LONDON TICKETS

Many more dates to be announced

Stuff I’ve written/done this month

In an age of open hostility, Terry Pratchett’s militant decency is more urgent than ever (Independent)

This is a Golden Age of Geek TV – Why are the fans so ungrateful? (HeyUGuys)

PODCAST APPEARANCE: The Bolan Glitch: Marc Burrows and the Shuffling Cemetery (We Can Be Weirdos)

Recommendations

Music

I am completely obsessed with Mae Martin’s new album. I’ve always loved their comedy, but good grief I never knew they had this in them. It snaps me straight back to 2010s indie, all Slow Club and Laura Marling’s first album and the Twee Underground. Utterly gorgeous. If it’s not my album of the year I’ll be stunned.

Speaking of Slow Club, that band’s Rebecca Lucy Taylor in her revelatory guise as queer core maximalist pop icon Self Esteem has more-than done it again. Seedy. Sexy. Funny. Dark. She hasn’t put a foot wrong.

I adored the first three Black Foxxes albums. To me they’re a very 90s band, in that they deserve to be written on your pencil case. If you love Smashing Pumpkins, Placebo, Jeff Buckley and generally being, ya know, sad, they’re for you:

TV

As I wrote in my HeyUGuys article TV is absolutely brilliant right now if you, like me, are a shamelessly popularist nerd.

Current obsessions.

Daredevil Born Again, bringing back everything I loved about the Netflix show and had, genuinely, been missing:

Wheel of Time. I can’t believe they’re pulling this off. If you’ve ever read Robert Jordan’s sprawling, multi-multi-multi-volume epic then you know what I mean. I genuinely think they’re improving Jordan’s occasionally stodgy storytelling, leaning into the camp ridiculousness of high fantasy in a way that’s far more knowing than, say, Rings of Power (which I also love), but also knowing when to show their teeth. Rand in the Aiel Wastes was PERFECT.

Side Quest. I loved Mythic Quest, and I was delighted when a surprise fourth season I’d somehow missed any news about turned up this month. It’s a solid season, although I think it may be the weakest they’ve done. They set a very high bar for themselves. The most enjoyable bit, though, is a run of four one-shot episodes under the title Side Quest, only very loosely connected to the main story. MQ has delivered a one-off disconnected episode in each season, and they’re usually the highlight (season one’s ‘A Dark Quiet Death’ and season two’s ‘Backstory’ especially). Season 4’s ‘Rebrand’ continued the trend beautifully, but the real delight was this bonus four-episode “expansion pack”, letting newer writers and directors shine. They’re all on Apple TV+ now. (What do you mean you don’t have Apple TV+?! Cancel literally any of your other streaming services and get this one. The quality is off the chain.)

Hopefully this time next month I’ll have caught up on Yellowjackets and will be evangelising about the new Doctor Who.

Work in progress book excerpt

This in an excerpt from the book I’m working on right now, due out this time next year. Please don’t share it, and remember this is a work in progress and could change hugely before publication.

Mistletoe & Vinyl: The Story of the Christmas Number One

Chapter 12: NOW! That’s What I Call …

The tail end of the decade generated precious few new songs to add to the annual list. The Pet Shop Boys, then in their imperial phase, snagged the 1987 win with a brilliant synth-pop cover of Elvis’ ‘Always On My Mind’ — a classic, yes, but despite its timing one that wouldn’t be attached to future Christmases at all. According to the bookies its’ stiffest competition was to be Rick Astley, who’d covered Nat King Coles’ chocolate-smooth ‘When I Fall In Love’ (William Hill reckoned over half of the £20,000 in bets they’d taken on that year’s Christmas number one had been for Rick Astley), and a forgettably silly cover of ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ by comedian Mel Smith and singer Kim Wylde, released to raise money for Comic Relief.³ As per usual, the bookmakers initially overlooked the real contender — a bittersweet duet by the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl called ‘Fairytale of New York’. It was probably the last true Christmas masterpiece to emerge from British pop.⁴

Formed in 1982 as Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for "kiss my arse"), The Pogues crawled out from London's punk scene, drawing some of its spittle-flecked urban aggression and blending it with traditional Irish folk. Their frontman, Shane MacGowan, was a walking contradiction — a once-pretty London-Irish boy with an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional music and a profound self-destructive streak. By 1987, his rotting teeth were becoming a music press punchline, and his on-stage performances could veer from transcendent to incoherent, often in the same song. The band's first three albums – Red Roses for Me (1984), Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and their then-forthcoming If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988)– established them as critical favourites and they had a ferocious live reputation, though they remained ever outside of the mainstream. They were the last act you'd expect to challenge for a Christmas number one.

And yet ‘Fairytale of New York’ is a little miracle — a booze-soaked Christmas hymn, intimate yet universal, bitterly realistic yet hopelessly romantic. The song had taken two years to complete, beginning life in 1985 as a bet between MacGowan and Elvis Costello, then producing them, who challenged him to write a proper Christmas duet. The initial version was shelved, but the idea lingered. MacGowan eventually reworked it with his bandmate Jem Finer into a story of Irish immigrants in New York — a drunk, reminiscing about a tumultuous relationship that began full of dreams on a Christmas Eve but deteriorated into recriminations and regret.

The band hit a snag when it came to the duet aspect. Originally the counterpoint part was sung by Pogues bass player Cait O'Riordan, but she’d quit the band late in 1986, leaving the all-important role of MacGowan’s partner up in the air until producer Steve Lillywhite suggested his wife, acerbic and criminally underrated singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl. Her clear, unsentimental voice, loaded with character and class, was the perfect foil to MacGowan's slurred, wounded delivery. The result was magical, enduring, heartbreaking — a song that's neither a straightforward celebration nor a rejection of Christmas sentiment, but something more complex. It's a Christmas song for adults — people for whom the shine has been knocked off the season by the realities of life and love. People who’ve been around a bit. What ‘Fairytale of New York’ understands better than almost any other seasonal song (save perhaps Joni Mitchell’s gorgeous ‘River’, which doesn't even identify itself as a Christmas song) is that the season is as much about what might have been as what is. It’s a new take on Miserable Christmas, a yearning not just for something lost, but something that never will be. The emotional heft of Christmas, once again, amplifies not just joy but loneliness. Separation, not togetherness. The Pogues captured that tension perfectly, with grand strings and Spider Stacy’s penny whistle clashing with MacGowan’s gutter poetry and MacColl’s kitchen-sink spite.

On its release in November 1987, the song was met with widespread acclaim from the UK music press. It was a comfortable ‘Single of the Week’ in Sounds, as it was in Record Mirror which dubbed it, with some justification, “the most wonderful Christmas record ever” and “staggeringly and drunkenly inspirational.” Future Loaded founder James Brown, writing in the NME, acknowledged the Pogues had “claimed the art of the ballad to be their own – on the strength of '… New York' they deserve it.” Even publications as far afield as The Vancouver Sun were calling it “the best Christmas song since John Lennon’s”, despite the single not even being released in Canada.

Though it went in low, as independent records tend to, debuting at number 40 in the week of release, a record this good, at Christmas of all times, couldn’t go unnoticed and it picked up speed quickly. This was never a single that was going to be stuck in the NME/John Peel indie ghetto. “As our technical staff just pointed out, [it’s] a bit Radio 2 really”, Peel himself said after premiering the song on his show that November, “but then again some of my best friends listen to Radio 2”. It took just a few weeks and an absolute peach of a Top of the Pops performance for ‘Fairytale of New York’ to become a genuine number one contender, which given that it began life with 50-1 odds is pretty remarkable. Ultimately, though, it didn’t have enough in the tank to take it all the way. The Pet Shop Boys were at the peak of their powers, were on a bigger label, and had a song that was not only an Elvis cover but handily free of the relatively fruity language to be found in the Pogues’ hit. It was a close run thing though, and of all of the post-Band Aid British Christmas hits, it’s ‘Fairytale of New York’ that has the most enduring legacy. It sold respectably in its first year, a UK number two and an Irish number one, and grew in stature with each passing December. It would re-enter the charts continuously, particularly after the advent of downloads and streaming. Its tale of love, loss and rancorous nostalgia grows as the years pass.

The aspects of the song that prevented it from going all the way are also the aspects that have given it longevity. It represented Christmas as many actually experienced it: messy, complicated, tinged with both sweetness and bitterness, a time for memories good and bad. In a season increasingly dominated by mechanical cheer, ‘Fairytale’ had an authenticity that made it stand out both as a seasonal song, and also in the turgid chart landscape of the era. “The temptation was to walk away from this thing called pop altogether and start listening to anything and everything else”, as The Guardian’s Adam Sweeting wrote in despair that Christmas, “a sentiment that may account for The Pogues selling so many copies of their excellent Christmas drinking song”.

By the mid-90s, ‘Fairytale’ had already ascended to classic status, joining the emerging Christmas canon that had been codified by the Now compilations. It had become as much a part of the British Christmas soundscape as Slade or Wham! — piped into pubs, supermarkets and Christmas parties, despite containing language that would have been bleeped from daytime radio any other time of year. Its inclusion on numerous compilations cemented its status. At the time of writing its official sales, incorporating streaming figures, stand at 3.5 million.

The song has so far outlived two of its creators — Kirsty MacColl died tragically in a boating accident in Mexico, just before Christmas 2000, adding another layer to its’ annual appearances. MacGowan himself, defying all medical probability, would continue to perform it each December, his health deteriorating but his legend growing, until his death in 2023, again just before Christmas. At his funeral in Nenagh, Tipperary the surviving Pogues were joined by Irish singers Glen Hansard and Lisa O'Neill for a suitably raw performance of ‘Fairytale of New York’ that raised both goosebumps and glasses. For a song about damaged dreamers, there was something oddly appropriate about its most enduring interpreter being so visibly ravaged by time and excess, yet still somehow so very present. And something equally but bitterly appropriate in the fact that both of its’ singers have now gone.

As popular tastes changed and reality shows began to dominate the Christmas chart, ‘Fairytale of New York’ came to represent something more authentic — annual and increasingly tedious culture war arguments about the use of the word “f*ggot” aside⁵, here was a Christmas song with dirt under its fingernails, whisky on its breath and romance in its heart, a song that defied easy categorisation and commercial calculation, yet spoke to the complex emotions of the season better than almost anything before or since. As far as Christmas pop songs go, it has yet to be bettered.

1. The Premier Inn did not pay me to say this, but I be very open to it if they wanted to. I’ve woken up in a Premier Inn almost as many times in the last year as I have in my own bed.

2. The one exception to this is Andy Heintz from The Men. The only lead singer I’ve ever met who pulled his weight with the load in.

3.  The whole project was conceived entirely off the back of a pun: there was a successful pop duo at the time called “Mel & Kim”.

4.  I am aware this is comfortably the most controversial statement in this whole book, but damn it, I will fight this corner and die on this hill.

5.  It’s a hateful term, of course, but in the context of a song sung entirely in character as homeless junkies in the docklands of New York in the mid 80s, it scrapes a pass … though it can be jarring to hear it on the radio. Neither Kirsty MacColl nor Shane McGowan were precious about omitting the word, which both accepted as problematic— MacColl often used “your cheap and your haggard” when she performed it, and McGowan had no time for the right wing commentators who would bang on year after year about politically correct censorship. In 2020, when tedious anti-woke agitator Lawrence Fox told his followers on Twitter to buy the uncensored version of the song in defiance of the BBC’s use of a tamer edit, the official Pogues account replied, brilliantly: “F*ck off you little herrenvolk shite”.