Buy The Magic of Terry Pratchett (last few first edition hardbacks in stock!)
Buy Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album
Hi!
A couple of months since my last newsletter, which means you’ll be disappointed by this in one of three ways:
1) You enjoy it and it’s a reminder of how slack I have been in writing it
2) You don’t really like newsletters and deeply regret signing up for this one and had been lulled into a false sense of security by its absence
3) You have completely forgotten you signed up to this newsletter and have no idea who I am and why I’m polluting your inbox, on Black Friday of all times, when you’re trying to buy that new telly for your Dad for Christmas.
In response to all three viewpoints, all I can say is that I am sorry. It’s been a bit hectic. The big news is that the book I edited on the Manic Street Preachers, Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album is now out. A HUGE amount of work went into this, which developed from something that should have been a relatively easy project, into what I’m fairly sure is the most comprehensive book about the band ever written. It also, surprisingly, contains my first ever piece of published fiction, which I am terrified about. I’ll explain more later, but do please do check it out. Attention now turns to my next book, about David Bowie and Marc Bolan – the focus of which has changed massively in the telling. More on that in the Book Updates section.
ANYWAY, this is something of a bumper issue as there’s rather a lot to catch up on. If you fancy dropping me a line about anything here, or anything else really, then absolutely please do, you can find me on Twittermore often than is probably healthy, but emails are also nice.
Marc
In this issue:
Stuff I’ve written this month
Book updates (Pratchett/Manics/Bowie N Bolan)
Recommendations
Excerpt from The London Boys: The Teenage Dreams of David Bowie and Marc Bolan
Get books and records wot I've done
From this new improved website and online store
Stuff I've written since the last newsletter
Movie Review: Oasis Knebworth 1996 ★★★★
Oasis Knebworth 1996 captures the two biggest UK gigs of the ‘90s and is a perfect crystallisation of the moment. Marc Burrows reviews.
Column: Why Labyrinth’s goblin king is the most important role David Bowie played
Without Jim Henson’s muppetry masterpiece, Bowie could have remained a mortal man. Instead, his legacy is one of ethereal weirdness.
Alan Moore, the genius writer who revolutionised comics with Watchmen, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has had to sit by – for years – while various multi-million dollar Hollywood corporations bled money out of his creations by butchering them for the big screen. Moore now refuses to accept either a credit or […]
Column: Men like me have been waiting our whole lives for a bisexual Superman
It is not wokeism gone mad to finally have a superhero who is like us.
Premiering in the US on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, last year, The Sit In is that rare and beautiful thing: a documentary that tells you a story you (probably) don’t know. Yoruba Richen’s film zaps us back to a week in 1968 in which the suave African American entertainer Harry Belanfonte hosted the Tonight Show […]
No-one ever said that horror has to be fun. Some of the best horrors are fun, of course, but they don’t have to be. Sometimes they need to be, well … horrible. Gruelling. Relentless. Sometimes that’s just the story you need to tell. But if you’re going to put your audience through the ringer like […]
TV review: The Beatles: Get Back ★★★★
How much do you love The Beatles? Because your enjoyment of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s mammoth exploration of a month in the band’s life, is going to very, very much depend on your interest in the band. For some it’s going to be a revelatory experience, in which they soak in the company and creativity […]
Book updates
The Magic of Terry Pratchett
Almost eighteen months on from the release of Magic of Terry Pratchett (did I mention it won an award? It won an award. I don’t know if I mentioned that) the book continues to have a lot of life, I suppose because (despite the obvious) so does Terry. We continue to speak his name. This month I appeared at Liverpool ComicCon, where I met tons of Discworld fans (and also answered the question “so who is Terry Pratchett?” more often than I expected. I’ll be doing a few talks on the book next week’s Steampunk Christmas Weymouth weekender where I’ll also performing some music and comedy at an evening event.
Terry’s first novel, The Carpet People celebrated its 50th anniversary this month, so to celebrate I tweeted (just about) 50 facts about the book - check out the thread starting below:
It's the 50th anniversary of Terry Pratchett's debut novel The Carpet People being published today. To celebrate here are FIFTY FACTS!
I also attended a talk with Colin Smythe, Terry’s agent and first publisher about the book at the Senate House Library, appropriately enough since it was probably the place I spent most time when I was researching the book (Colin’s archive is based there). Colin has been helpful in the extreme in the research of the book, and though we have spoken many times we hadn’t actually me – so it was genuinely lovely to say hello properly. He was kind enough to sign my first edition of The Colour of Magic!
Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album
As I said back at the top of the show, Album by Album is finally out, and already getting some pretty lovely write ups. If you did buy and enjoy the book, then please do leave us a review on Amazon and GoodReads, because as annoying as it is that kind of thing is, ahem, lifeblood for a new author.
This is a special book for me, not just because it’s on my favourite band (or at least one of my favourite bands), and because it was just a genuine labour of love for all involved, but because it also includes my first piece of published fiction. Due to a last-minute drop-out, I found myself needing to write two of the album essays, covering This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours and Rewind The Film. As what I wanted to say about both albums would have been fairly similar I opted to distil the themes of the latter down into a piece of short fiction, and levelling with you it terrifies me that it’s now out in the world – please do let me know if you enjoy it, God knows I need the validation.
You can buy it directly from me here, OR basically anywhere online that normally sells books. It’s probably in some book shops too, although I have no idea which ones – but any will be able to order it in for you.
I’ve also appeared on a couple of podcasts to promote it! You can find me chatting on Manic Street Speakers here and doing an especially in-depth dive with Adam Scott Glasspool (who contributed to the book) on the excellent What Is Music? podcast here.
I’ve done a special edition of the book, available from my website, which comes with a fanzine compiling basically everything I’ve ever written about the band, starting with my contemporary review of the Millenium Stadium show in 1999, printed in my university student magazine back when I was a scrawny fresher, and going right up to a deep dive I wrote for Louder Than War on 2018’s Resistance Is Futile. Putting that together has been something of an adventure because I realised that I didn’t have a lot of the stuff I’d written in the early-2000s when I was doing student press, so went on a mission back to my old student union at Loughborough Uni to scan as many of my old articles as I could (I came away with around 150!) You know that bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide about the council plans for demolishing Arthur’s house being on display “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard”? Well, this is where I eventually found my 20-year-old back copies of Loughborough SU’s Label magazine, a publication I basically sacrificed getting a decent degree to create:
Half of the magazines I needed were in a filing cabinet immediately behind this one. I’m glad I did the trip though, because about five years of my creative life is in those filing cabinets and at some point they are surely going to be thrown away. I should write about my student writer days at some point, because it was a ride. Anyway, it all worked out and I was able to create this:
I hesitated about including this stuff in the fanzine because although it’s, ya know, fine, it’s not, ya know, brilliant. I was happier with some of the later pieces, but I wrote that Millenium show review when I was 19 (I’m 40 now) and I’d hadn’t quite found my rhythm. I’m still trying to write like I think rock reviews should sound like, still showing off my vocabulary and trying to prove my fan credentials. I’m probably still guilty of all of those, but they’re better hidden now. I was impressed with how quickly student-me improved though. In the end it felt like an interesting document of the band’s fandom – one fan’s (my) journey from teenage enthusiast to seasoned sort-of-pro. It told a story even in how badly it told its story. It does, in the end, comprise a body of work, and I thought it was interesting to present it like that. Later there’s proper writing and actual interviews with the band, so I don’t feel like i’m shortchanging anyone by including the amateur bits. The fanzine is available on its own, and I might put it up as a free PDF at some point.
Anyway. Book about the Manics? Completed it mate.
David Bowie and Marc Bolan book UPDATE
This book, provisionally called The London Boys, has been my main focus this year. It’s a pretty daunting project, with a level of research that even dwarfs what I did with The Magic of Terry Pratchett. There is so much out there, and you basically have to read all of it or you miss that one crucial detail. For example, I spent almost a week trying to detangle which year Marc and David actually met in, because all the Bowie biographies said it was 1964 and all the Bolan ones said 1965. Somewhere along the line someone had claimed something, and everyone else had just followed along. Breaking the two timelines down to their bare bones and seeing how they linked together took diligence and time, and as a biographer it’s a level of attention you have to commit to consistently. And this book isn’t just a biography, either – it’s a social history, the gradual dialling up of colour contrast as freezing, blasted post war London evolves through the sixties into the pansexual glam revolution.
Originally the book was to start in 1947, the year that Marc and David are born, and end in 1977, the year of Bolan’s death, telling the story of British youth culture through the eyes of these two young men in the right place at the right time. It meant detours into the history of mods, the impact of rock n roll, the absurd reactions to men’s hair cuts and much more. It was contracted to be around 75,000 words and I’d planned each chapter meticulously. Then, of course, you start writing the thing and it takes on a life of its own. I spent ten days this month enjoying the splendid isolation of rainy Orkney off the coast of Scotland, dedicating myself entirely to writing and it gave me an opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day research and scribbling and look at the bigger picture. I was writing more or less chronologically, I’d reached 1965 and I’d already covered 55,000 words. If was going to continue in that level of detail I was never going to make my January 2022 deadline, and the book was going to be an epic. The solution has been to split it in half. It’s now TWO books!
Book one, due summer 2022, will be called The London Boys: Bowie, Bolan and the sixties teenage dream. It will take the story up to the release of ‘Ride A White Swan’, the song that turns Marc Bolan into a superstar, in 1970.
Book two, due a year later, will be called 20th Century Boys: Bowie, Bolan and the glam rock revolution, which will deal with David Bowie’s ascent to cultural godhead, Bolan’s decline and end with Marc’s death in 1977.
Between the two books, we’ll tell the full story of the evolution of British youth culture and the pop explosion from the front lines. It really, really excites me.
It’s going well, I think. No one has really looked at this subject in this way, with all of its little asides and strange corners, and I’m really happy with how it’s turning out. There’s an excerpt at the bottom of the newsletter, let me know what you think!
PS: if you’re wondering, Orkney is basically like this:
Recommendations
I can’t not start with this one. My wonderful wife Nicoletta Wylde has just published her debut poetry collection, and it’s absolutely phenomenal. We held the launch party last week, and it’s been getting rave responses. Even better is the companion book, Those Nine Days, which documents her experience finding out she was to be published while a patient a psychiatric hospital. It’s absolutely compelling.
Get The Direction of Greater Courage and Those Nine Days here
Grab your pre-order of the debut poetry collection ‘The Direction of Greater Courage’ NOW! (Out 29/7)
My friend, the wonderful Catherine Anne Davies, ie The Anchoress, has announced her 2022 tour supporting what I believe is the album of the year, the superb The Art of Losing. Catherine also provided the foreword for the new Manics book.
Catch her here:
2022 LIVE DATES ON SALE!
I cannot wait to finally be able to play songs from ‘The Art of Losing’ for you all on my first proper tour 🙏🏻
📆 Join me in 2022 for all this and more…
Tickets are on sale NOW here ⬇️
https://t.co/P6HIKmj7JB https://t.co/DM42nOytIG
I’ve been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift, and I don’t care who knows it.
I honestly can't believe Taylor Swift released one of the best albums of 2021 nine years ago.
You probably know this, but there’s a new series of What We Do In The Shadows out, and honestly is there a better show on TV right now?
BBC iPlayer - What We Do in the Shadows
Following four vampires who have been roommates for hundreds and hundreds of years.
My dear friend Andrew O'Neill has been uploading more content from their excellent Black Magic Fun Hour show! Check it out here:
Andrew O'Neill - The First Time Anyone Told A Knock-Knock Joke - (Black Magick Fun Hour Episode 5)
Finally, my friend Wil creates what is surely the most niche fanzine ever – a hand-drawn cartoon porn mag about curvy, 40-something sapphic former skinheads. I love that it exists.
So, the launch date for this is going to be Thursday. I’ll have copies with me for sale at Chippenham Comedy Club and it’ll be on Etsy too https://t.co/SgiSjrGjsv
Excerpt from THE LONDON BOYS: Bowie, Bolan and the Sixties Teenage Dream
Please bear in mind that this is a WORK IN PROGRESS. Much of this will change, a lot of it might even go. Please please don’t share it.
Chapter Eight: Young Dudes
‘So there’s me and this mod whitewashing Les’s office,’ Bowie explained in a lengthy interview with Mojo in 2002, ‘And he goes, “Where d'you get those shoes, man?” … We immediately started talking about clothes and sewing machines.
“Oh I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it, man.”
“Well I’ll probably write a musical for you one day then, ‘cos I’m gonna be the greatest writer ever.”
“No, no, man, you’ve gotta hear my stuff 'cos I write great things. And I knew a wizard in Paris,” and it was all this. Just whitewashing walls in our manager’s office!’
For fans of both artists, the day the pair spent painting Les Conn’s new gaff (‘a shitty green colour’ according to the man himself) has achieved the status of modern myth, to the point that it was even the subject of an episode of Sky Comedy’s Urban Myths in 2018, an entertaining half hour comedy-drama starring comedian Jack Whitehall as (a suspiciously tall) Mark Feld, Luke Treadway as David Jones and the Young Ones’ Ade Edmondson as Les Conn. It’s decent enough as a bit of speculation, with a script regurgitating some of the better known anecdotes from both stars’ lives, though it very definitely shouldn’t be taken as gospel.
We only really have David’s account of that day to go by, however, and David is not always the most reliable narrator of his own story – for example, in the 2002 Mojo article he describes his 1965 self as ‘a sort of neo-beat-hippy,’ which is a fairly accurate description of the Bowie of 1967 but not really of 1964 or 65, when he was still very much in his sharp-suited mod phase, having just left the Mannish Boys and joined his next band, the Lower Third. In this case, however, the account is probably not a million miles from the truth. The two boys were both obsessed with style, and they were both absolutely certain of their abilities to quite a remarkable extent. Allan Warren remembers Marc talking about himself endlessly; ‘Marc was one of those people that would say, “I’ve had enough of talking about me. Now, what do you think of me?” I’d think, God, another three hours talking about him!’ David, meanwhile, had walked out on two bands because his bandmates didn’t match his ambitions, and a third for not properly crediting him on a single – not the actions of a man lacking either entitlement or self-belief. They’d both started to pick up steam in their career too, and would certainly have compared notes and engaged in a game of industry top trumps. Marc was working with Mike Pruskin at this point, and was likely already in talks with Decca, while David had released two singles (glossing over the fact that both had flopped), toured with Gene Pitney and the Kinks and played the Marquee. David was probably the one winning on bragging rights, but both would have been in full peacock mode. The fact that Bowie references Marc’s preposterous ‘wizard’ story suggests his new friend was laying it on thick with the self-mythology already. ‘They were very similar’, Les Conn is quoted as saying in Paul Trynka’s Starman, ‘they totally believed in themselves, both of them. It was me that brought them together, and they both had exactly the same attitude which was “we are going to make it”’.
When did this famous meeting take place? And was this really the first time the pair had met? The answer to the second question is ‘probably’, though there are some claims that they have been in each other’s company before. An old school friend of Marc’s, Richard Young, reckons he and Marc met David with Geoff McCormack in a soul and R&B club called Le Bataclan in Soho, in ‘61 or 62’, a favourite hangout when bunking off from school trips. It’s possible that the intervening half a decade has muddled some of these memories however – La Bataclan didn’t open until 1963, by which time Marc had moved away from the school he shared with Young. Young also claims they were both expelled on the same day for bunking off, which doesn’t quite work – Marc was expelled from an entirely different school. It does tell us, however, that the two young mods were orbiting the same venues and people.
Les Conn, meanwhile, told Bowie biographers Peter and Leni Gillman that he took both Marc and David, together, to see his boss, Dick James, only to have them roundly rejected, with James apparently telling Conn ‘you’re wasting your time’. An obituary of Conn printed in the Independent in 2009 goes further, claiming that James had called the two young hopeful’s ‘long-haired gits’. This is interesting, because it was Dick James’ rejection of Bowie that prompted Conn to strike out on his own – the very reason he had a new office that needed painting in the first place. If true, the doomed introduction to Dick James would have been the lads’ actual first meeting. Of course, what we have to bear in mind here is that literally every person involved in this story was a yarn spinner with a knack for self mythology on a fairly grand scale; never knowingly delivering a story unpolished. The only calm voice involved in the whole affair is that of the genial Kenneth Pitt, who would assume Bowie’s managerial duties within a year, who says in his book The Pitt Report ‘it was in Conn’s office that Jones-Bowie first met Feld-Bolan’ and that, juicy stories and mythologising aside, is all we can say for sure.
As for the ‘when?’; we can be relatively confident that the painting incident happened in the late spring or early summer of 1965. The very latest it could have taken place would be July 27 – one of the few absolutely solid markers that we have. It was on July 27 that a fan of David’s spotted him on Denmark Street in the company of Marc and asked for an autograph – creating one of the very few pieces of paper in existence to bear the signature of both London Boys. We also know that one of the songs Pruskin approached Les Conn with was ‘The Wizard’, which wasn’t written until after Marc’s famous trip to Paris with Riggs O’Hara in the Spring of 1965. David would have been most in need of the money and willing to pull on some overalls after the breakup of the Mannish Boys in late April/early May. We can, just about, with a bit of wiggle room, put a pin in the timeline for that day of painting and decorating as being in May or June of 1965.
© Marc Burrows/ Pen & Sword Books 2021
Have you made it to the end of this newsletter? WELL DONE. First person to tell me so on Twitter gets a free copy of Manic Street Preachers:Album by Album.
That’s all folks
Marc x