Glom of Nit: Bowie, Bolan, mournography and turtles all the way down
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Dear friends, curious observers. unbalanced weirdos and my Mum,
Welcome to this months missives, and also hello to new subscribers of which there are quite a few this month. PLEASEDONTUNSBSCRIBEPLEASEOHGOD. Ahem. It's interesting trying to pitch the tone of this newsletter these days — it started out as a way to update people on the progress of my Terry Pratchett biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, but that's been out for nearly a year. My latest next two books are about the Manic Street Preachers (out this year, hopefully) and the relationship between Bowie and Bolan (out next year), so there are fans of all three subscribing for updates there, plus fans of my band and my comedy. I'm extremely grateful for this digital gathering of the tribes, and will try and keep the newsletters content-rich and interesting if I can. Please do reply with any suggestions or questions.
STUFF I'VE WRITTEN THIS MONTH
I reviewed what I'm fairly sure will be my favourite album of the year (you've got nine months to impress me, but it'll take a real doozy to top this), The Art of Losing by The Anchoress, for The Quietus.
Over in movie corner I reviewed Tom & Jerry The Movie (★★★), The Banishing (★★★) and The Affair (★★) for HeyUGuys. I also wrote this feature on why high school romances are about far more than high school and romance.
PROJECT UPDATES
They say there's no rest for the wicked, which is why Idina Menzel always looks so tired.* I don't know if I'm "wicked" by any of the accepted definitions, but there's plenty going on, and I am, indeed, not getting enough rest:
Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album (coming 2021)
This is shaping up nicely now; in fact it's already pretty much written. The book will contain an essay on each MSP album, written by a notable Manics fan, some of which are proper in-depth critiques, while others focused on personal experiences. The foreword will be written by Manics collaborator Catherine Anne Davies (who you may remember from being award Album of the Year earlier in the newsletter), and the essays will be linked by a detailed timeline of the band's movement and development, starting in 1985 and continuing up to the release of Resistance Is Futile in 2018. That's the bit I'm working on now. I've written two of the essays myself, a deep dive on the social context around This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours and a short story built around the themes in Rewind The Film.
The other writers:
Rhian E Jones on Generation Terrorists (Author of the book Clampdown, a deep dive into class and gender in 90s music, and co-author of Tryptich, an examination of The Holy Bible. She also edits the left wing magazine Red Pepper and writes for The Tribune).
Laura Kelly on Gold Against The Soul (Digital Producer and contributor to The Big Issue and columnist at Hollyrood and former director of the Edinburgh International Magazine Festival)
Emma O'Brien on The Holy Bible (Contributor to The Skinny, mental health worker, and playwright)
Phoenix Andrews on Everything Must Go (Author of an upcoming book on fandoms in politics for Atlantic, contributor to The Times and The Independent and the author of several published academic works on culture and politics)
Marc Burrows on This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours (That's me, obviously)
Andrzej Łukowski on Know Your Enemy (Theatre Editor at Time Out London and former Reviews Editor at Drowned In Sound)
Dom Gourlay on Lipstick Traces (Live Editor at Under The Radar, and former Drowned In Sound contributor)
Adam Scott Glasspool on Lifeblood (Ambient musician and co-host of Do You Love Us? a deep-dive Manics podcast, which having covered the band's entire discography has now moved on to Muse.)
Mayer Nissim on Send Away The Tigers (Longstanding contributor at Digital Spy who has also written for Yahoo, Cosmopolitan and Elle )
Erica Viola on Journal for Plague Lovers (US-born professional copywriter for various commercial sites like Right Pet, Food & Spirits and D&X)
Tracey Wise on Postcards For A Young Man (Founder of the amazing campaign group Safe Gigs For Women)
Marc Burrows on Rewind The Film (Also me. This piece is a short story based around the themes of the record)
Claire Biddles on Futurology (Zine creator and writer for Line Of Best Fit, The Skinny and The Wire)
Laura K Williams on Resistance Is Futile (Bristol-based contributor to Louder Than War, eFestivals, Classic Pop, Closer and more)
There's an excerpt from my This Is My Truth piece included at the end of the newsletter!
The London Boys: The Teenage Dreams of Marc Bolan and David Bowie (Coming 2022)
This remains my main project right now. This month I did interviews with Generation X drummer Mark Laff about his appearance with both Bowie and Bolan during their only TV appearance together, in 1977, I spoke to Allen Warren about his time as a sixteen-year-old manager with a young Mark Feld sleeping his bed, and with a cousin of Marc's who had some AMAZING stories about their time growing up together. All three of these interviews included nuggets not published before, so the book is feeling really exciting.
I also made this (filmed by my wonderful wife Nicoletta) about the process of research and some of the books I've found useful. It has finally convinced me to go to the gym when they open tomorrow, because those lockdown pounds are starting to show. Click below to watch!
The Magic of Terry Pratchett (out now)
I've sold out of my stash of copies at home, so please go to your usual book-buying space if you haven't yet bought my Extremely Well Reviewed Pratchett biog. All being well, the paperback will be out in September. You an still buy the companion book, Turtles All The Way Down (featuring full interview transcripts, deleted jokes, new essays and a guide to every Sir Terry book) and signed bookplates made from old library cards from my web store here.
I also found this lovely review, from back in February, which I'd previously missed.
Finally, the Irish Discworld Convention has announced that the event will be moving online due to the pandemic, which is a shame as I was really looking forward to attending in person. I'll still be appearing at the event, albeit remotely.
Other bits and bobs
I appeared on the brilliant Comedy Arcade podcast, hosted by Vix Leyton, alongside comedy legend Ian Stone and the musician and podcaster Sean Smith. That'll be out in a few weeks, I dare say. I like to think I had the most interesting backdrop on the call.
MONTHLY MUSINGS
Just when you think the world can't get any stranger, the news goes and takes another twist. It's not so much Prince Philip dying this week that I found unusual; the old bugger was pushing a hundred, and has quite famously looked like he'd been huffing Podling juice off the Dark Crystal for some time now**. The reaction has taken me by surprise though. I'm a journalist by trade, and as a profession we've been preparing for this for quite some time. Most of the TV packages you saw on Friday and newspaper extracts on Saturday and Sunday (The Daily Mail has 144 pages of coverage. ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY FOUR.) will have been prepared years in advance. Possibly decades. I was working at The Guardian when Margaret Thatcher passed in 2013 and was both shocked and impressed to find out that one contributor to her pre-written obituary actually died before her subject did. I was expecting there to be major coverage of course, and that's only fitting for such a definitively (if reluctantly) public figure. I didn't expect everything else to stop though. The BBC literally cancelled all non-Philip based shows. EastEnders fans found themselves watching entirely the wrong sort of soap opera about entirely the wrong Phil. Anyone tuning into Radio 1Xtra was faced with tasteful instrumentals. They pulled Masterchef, presumably because the way Gregg Wallace eats could be legitimately considered disrespectful. Instead, a parade of boring middle-aged men in sombre suits took us through the same details of the near-century's worth of the Duke O'Ed's days over and over again; tangentially related figures reminisced about the time Phil had been rude to them at a horse race. Royal Correspondents sprang to life, realizing it was time to stop throwing darts at their poster of Meghan Markle and get out there and shine. They will accomplish nothing else useful this year.
It felt oddly outdated. I'd expect this for someone like Princess Diana, when the events were shocking and unexpected (and I'm old enough to remember the ballad-fest Radio One pulled out that fateful morning), and obviously when her Majesty politely waves her last ("and how long have you been Grim Reaping for? Jolly good.") I'm already prepared for the media's inevitable mournographic orgy. We mark eras based on the monarch, when one dies it's as if the century turns again. But Philip? For anyone under the age of forty he was more of a figure of fun than anything else – a comedy grumpy old man, who's wizened face poked about from behind the queen on important occasions, and whose occasional politically incorrect gaffs caused an eye-roll. I didn't expect the nation to stop all the clocks and cut off the telephones. It seemed weirdly outdated.
Of course, not every part of the British media still lives in the 1956; Channel 4 quite rightly interrupted their regular programming to bring viewers the news and some analysis when the death was announced, but after an hour or so, someone quite also-rightly worked out that nothing else was actually going to happen and popped Find It, Fix It, Flog It back on. This led to the strange sight of one faction of society yelling that a channel was being recklessly insensitive, while elsewhere so many people complained that their telly was full of Nicholas Witchell and Jenny Bond when they wanted Match of the Day and Pointless, that the BBC had to set up a special dedicated complaint form. Pensioners must have been massively conflicted. As a rule they tend to go for the Royals, but most of them also really love Homes Under the Hammer.
Look, I'm realistic about the Royal family. On the one hand I hate the idea that anyone is more special than anyone else. Inherited privilege holds us back. Also, there's Prince Andrew. On the other, I genuinely like the connection having a Royal Family gives us to our history; allowing us to be part of a chain that stretches back a thousand years. I don't mind that. Prince Philip was a complicated man, someone who was once too modern for the role he took on (I've seen the first season of The Crown so I know what I'm on about), but eventually became a relic, out-of-step with the world his institution existed within. But then, that will tend to happen when you're nearly a hundred. If I live that long and I'm not baffled by society then society isn't doing its job. It baffles me now, and I'm not even forty.
So I acknowledge that someone important has passed on, and that has meaning. On the other hand, a crotchety, occasionally racist old bugger who I never met is not someone whom I'm going to spend much time mourning or thinking about***. What I'm saying is, I suppose, Channel 4 got it spot-on, and the BBC's move into state-broadcaster mode on every single channel and radio station made me uncomfortable. It highlighted that for all of the complaints certain people make about the "Lefty, woke, biased BBC", many of this country's key establishments are still reactionary and outdated at their core. Prince Philip was, in quite a lot of ways, a pretty perfect representation of a certain version of Britain. As his generation sails off, I'm hoping change comes.
SOUND & VISION: Recommendations
My amazing wife Nicoletta Wylde has announced her debut poetry collection, The Direction of Greater Courage, coming via Sweat Drenched Press later in the year. It's an incredible achievment and I'm so proud of her. You can pre-order it here! Also available is a special edition including a whole extra book telling the extremely compelling story of her time in psychiatric care earlier this year. I'll be hosting the launch party, featuring some amazing guest performers, on August 14 at Brewdog Dalston, in London.
There's a trailer featuring on her pieces from the book here:
I reviewed Ed Dowie's new album for The Quietus, although the review hasn't run yet. If you have decent headphones I suspect this record will become your new way of testing them out.
I really enjoyed Words On Bathroom Walls, the new film based on Julia Walton's novel. It's been out in the US for a while and finally gets a UK release this month, in all the usual digital spaces (I'm not the only one who has started renting films in lockdown far, far more often, right?)
I was also absolutely glued to The Flight Attendant, currently showing on Sky and NOW; a perfectly done mystery box drama that finally, finally lets The Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco play a character with more than two dimensions. She's brilliant in this.
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Okay, this has been rather a monster this month, hasn't it? Sorry about that! If you have managed to read to the end do please reply to the email or Tweet me to let me know, because I'm genuinely never sure.
Stay safe, stay cool, Stay Beautiful,
Marc
x
* Sorry.
** This is quite a niche, if somewhat disrespectful reference, but I'm quite proud of it all the same.
*** Apart from here, obviously.
AN EXCEPT FROM MANIC STREET PREACHERS: ALBUM BY ALBUM
This is © the author, and obviously is a first draught/work in progress that may change, so please don't splash it about!
From: This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, an analysis by Marc Burrows:
No-one looking at indie rock landscape of 1994 could have predicted the way 1996 and 1998, the respective years of the next two Manic Street Preachers records, would play out. Alternative rock and Britpop, the yin and yang of transatlantic populaist guitar bands, began to twitch and contract. In America it was probably The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness that did it; the category-defying double album released in 1995 that showed one of the biggest post Nirvana alt rockers breaking out of genre conventions. In the UK the fault was with Oasis who actually did the opposite; doubling down on the classic rock wing of the indie rock n roll boom. With their second album, 1995’s What’s The Story? (Morning Glory), Oasis became comfortably one of the biggest bands the UK had ever seen. They transcended genre – maybe not in musical style (Oasis had less sonic variety than most of their peers), but certainly in popularity: What’s The Story was one of those albums almost everyone seemed to own. You’d hear it on Eastenders and at football matches. They played it in the hairdressers. The effect on the music industry was predictable; Britpop still ruled the roost, but the focus was now on solid, button-shirted everymen: Ocean Colour Scene, Hurricane #1, The Verve. The spiky fun seemed to drip away. Instead there was an emphasis on ‘classic’ songwriting, ‘proper’ guitar music that could be stripped back to acoustic guitars, mid-paced classic rock, veneration for The Beatles (which largely ignored their experimental edge) and epic-sounding string sections. Everyone sounded a bit like Wings. The music your Dad liked was now cool. Some wag at the NME nicknamed it ‘Noelrock’ after the senior Gallagher brother, whose workmanlike songwriting had, somehow, defined an era.
The metamorphosis in the Manic Street Preachers was happening independently of, but concurrently with Britpop. Richey had wanted to take the band in a darker, heavier direction, but Richey was no longer around to steer the ship, and after the intensity of the last few years, of touring a brutally punk album, becoming a byword for self-destructive angsty intellectualism and the utter despair of losing a friend, the remaining band members wanted room to breathe. The result was Everything Must Go and ‘A Design For Life’, music full of space and clarity with lyrics that actually scanned. The music called for some orchestral oomph, too, as well as some mid-paced, straight forward drive-time indie rock. Working largely without a manifesto for once, the glamourpuss provocateurs-turned-militant-post-punk-existentialists had released a record that could sit comfortably next to What’s The Story (Morning Glory?), and sell to the same audience. Which it did. In droves. The band toured with Oasis on and off throughout 1995 and 96, appearing at their giant shows at Maine Road and Knebworth, and following the Gallagher circus (which occasionally took place without one or the other Gallagher brother) around the US. Everything Must Go went to number two and would hang around the top five for over a year, while the band graduated to arena shows of their own for the first time, and triumphantly headlined 1997’s Reading Festival. By accident or by design – and in all honesty it was a bit of both – the band had caught the zeitgeist at the right time, abandoning their military chic or DIY punky glamour in favour of sensible shirts and hair cuts, and releasing a classic sounding, accessible rock record at the exact point classic sounding, accessible rock records made by ordinary looking blokes in shirts were selling. The Manics had gone NoelRock. They had also, alongside Blur, Oasis, The Verve, Pulp and Radiohead, re-formed the UK’s indie rock front line.
And that’s where 1998 comes in. Four of the biggest bands of the alternative rock/Britpop era would drop new albums that year: Ash, Pulp, Smashing Pumpkins and Manic Street Preachers, while Blur and Oasis had released new records in 1997. All of them, to one extent or another, had felt the extraordinary pressure of following up a giant global hit, of balancing the needs of a newly acquired mainstream fanbase with a cultish hardcore that had come with their earlier success; of the demands of major record labels keen to capitalise on their latest cash cows with the instincts to drive forward that had gotten them into this position in the first place. And they had to do it in the intense glare of the media, and in many cases while dealing with internal trauma. Of the bands listed, only Oasis made an obvious attempts to remain commercial, making their overblown cocaine classic Be Here Now, which in its own way is quite, quite mad. The others all stamped down deliberately on any expectations to produce cookie-cutter hits. Ash’s Nu-Clear Sounds was a harsh-sounding alt-rock record, fairly uncompromising and uncomfortable, from a band scared of being typecast as Britrock’s pretty boys; Jarvis Cocker drove Pulp to new levels of seediness with the downbeat This Is Hardcore; its title track one of the finest singles of the era, but at six minutes and 23 seconds hardly a sure-fire radio hit. The album is an introspective, somewhat decadent response to getting everything you ever wanted and being expected to give more. As Cocker said on ‘The Fear’, it was ‘the sound of someone losing the plot’. Blur were working hard at scaring their teenybop audience off altogether with their self-titled fifth record, which owed far more to American college circuit bands like Pavement than it did to The Kinks and Bowie. Its lead singles were the drugged-up, slurred ‘Beetlebum’ and the Nirvana-aping punk rush of ‘Song 2’. To their label, Parlephone/EMI, it was the sound of commercial suicide, which just goes to show what record execs know – ‘Song 2’ was the biggest hit Blur ever had. It was Smashing Pumpkins and the Manics that went all in on the anti-commercial misery, though. Their 1998 records Adore and This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, were musical left turns from earlier work, replacing big guitars and anthemic choruses with downbeat electronica; channeling tragedy and pain (the Pumpkins’ had lost their drummer, Jimmy Chamberlin, after a heroin binge that nearly killed him and left their touring keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin, dead, while the Manics had lost Richey) into the most interesting and patently uncommercial music of their career. Both records have commercial moments (‘Ava Adore’, ‘You Stole The Sun From My Heart’) but such cracks in the clouds never define their parent albums in the way earlier hit singles (‘Tonight Tonight’, ‘A Design For Life’) had. The Manics managed something else though, something that Pulp, Smashing Pumpkins and Ash couldn’t manage – their existential crisis actually made them bigger than they had been to begin with.