Glom of Nit Issue #19

Live gigs, book news, winner winner chicken Glinner

Well, here we are.

Welcome to the relaunched Glom of Nit, now on its third platform. Let’s hope this one works out and isn’t, for example, bought by a megalomaniac as a personal vanity project and closed down without warning.

For some background on why we’re now on Substack see Friday’s ancillary email.

And hello to new readers! Thanks to some very kind friends retweeting my pleas for new subscribers to replace those deleted, plus some online shenanigans I know this is the first time some will have received this. Please, god, don’t let them unsubscribe.

For the uninitiated, here’s the deal – about once a month (or occasionally more often if I’ve got a book or some music out) I’ll send one of these rambling missives, folding in some news, some ranting and links to pieces of published writing. I’ll plug some of my stuff and some other things I think you might like and I’ll usually chuck in a work-in-progress excerpt from my upcoming book, which you’ll find at the end of the newsletter.

Got that? Good.

Please drop me a line in the comments on Substack/the app or by reply to the email, or come find me on Twitter!

Now if you’re sitting comfortably, we’ll begin.

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Monthly Musings

Something I didn’t expect to happen to me in my 41st year on Earth

If you’d asked me in the late 90s how I thought my life would pan out in what I’m going to optimistically call my Middle Years, I don’t think you’d have got much of an answer out of me. I didn’t have enough self-confidence to say “I will have taken over the world as a rock-star author”, but equally I was too arrogant to believe I’d be, say, a Chartered Accountant or a solicitor or the manager of a local branch of Dixons. All of these are excellent careers, by the way, but like many creative teens I assumed I was too special to do something so mundane as to make-the-world-go-round, which is what “ordinary jobs” basically are for. Although if pushed, I’d probably admit that I was destined for Golgafrinchan Arc B.

Anyway. I’m pretty sure at no point would I have guessed “the writer of Father Ted will publish a badly written hit-piece on you, erasing your sexuality (that admittedly you have not yet admitted to) in order to justify their ongoing campaign to remove the rights of an oppressed minority.”

But that is what happened.

I don’t want to dwell on the whole thing after this, except to acknowledge the sheer, bewildering weirdness of the whole affair, and I’ll try and keep it brief. Oh, and incidentally, yes I did work at Twitter, but no I didn’t have anything to do with banning anyone. That was a totally different department. And Graham managed that on his own.

So. How did we get here? At the start of the year I wrote a blog for the Independent about Graham Linehan (for it is he) and his weird lurch from whimsical comedy writer and broad force-for-good-in-the-world to the uneasy champion-for-the-unoppressed and quasher of trans rights that he has become. I won’t rehash that here, but it’s all in the article, which I very much stand by (also, what kind of man bullies H from Steps?). Predictably, Linehan was not best pleased. I mean, you wouldn’t be would you? There was a small campaign of copy & paste letters to the editor to get the article taken down, but I’d sourced it well, backed up all of my claims and couched it as opinion where it needed to be. The Independent had also given it a thorough going over with a roll-on lawyer to make sure it wasn’t too whiffy. Basically, I know what I’m about with this stuff and there was ne’re a leg to stand on.

Instead Linehan and his cronies – and they are cronies; the more reasonable voices in the “Gender Critical” movement (if that’s not a tautology) have been backing away from him like he’s the mad kid at school who everyone thinks is a laugh, but now suspect is going to go spare in the playground and bite a dinner lady. I think they’re mostly quite embarrassed by him – unable or unwilling to argue with what I said, instead went for who I was with a poorly written attack piece on GL’s own Substack blog (his only from of income now, apparently). It’s not a great piece. Mostly it just screen grabs stuff I’ve said on Twitter (and still believe) and misrepresents my views in the captions. Unfortunately since my views are literally embedded in the same entry for all to read, I come out of it just fine. It’s a poor job. If they’d paid a decent writer to do a real take down of me there’s plenty to find. I’d have done it for them for two hundred quid.

What did bug me though, was the consistent referring to me as a “straight tourist”, because I’m in a relationship with a woman. I’m not straight. I’m openly, proudly and quite vocally bisexual. It’s something I kept quiet about for a long time, something I didn’t even admit to myself. I caused a lot of internal damage by denying that fundamental truth for so long (there’s a song about it on Moving Forward which I think might the best thing I’ve ever written).

This is a complicated subject, and it’s something I’m going to write more about in an article that should be published by The Big Issue next month. I admit I enjoy a certain amount of privilege because I’ve dated women – you don’t get thugs threatening you in the street (at least not as much), your life isn’t at risk because you’ve held hands in public. It’s easier. Without dwelling too much on it though, it’s not like my intimate history has ONLY been with women. Bisexuality isn’t something I’ve labelled myself to look cool. I have literally, ya know, done it with men. With willies and stuff (I am trying quite hard – stop it – to avoid the spam filters here). And not just once or twice to see. It’s not a phase or a fake label, it’s not something I’m a “tourist” in. It’s a fundamental part of who I am, and it upset me to have someone trying to take that away from me. I’ve worked hard on being okay with it myself. And I’ve spent a lot of my life, especially when I was younger being judged and picked on for my perceived “queerness” anyway, whether I admitted it or not.

It says a lot though, doesn’t it? Because it’s the same way this ghoul gang feel about trans people. It’s why they point and jeer at non-binary and openly trans folks all day on social media, why they insist on using deadnames and incorrect pronouns. It’s a lack of empathy and imagination. They can’t comprehend someone being something they don’t understand and can’t accept. They see it as just “woke” and labels and snowflakes and all those words people use to normalise their own bigotry. And they do it in the name of these pretend liberal values “I’m doing it for women”, “I’m doing it for LGB people” (are you mate? because the ‘B’ doesn’t feel very protected from where I’m sitting). That world isn’t the same shape as the version painted on the inside of their eyeballs, and they find that disorientating and it scares them. So they lash out. I couldn’t possibly be into men, it doesn’t fit their narrative. Someone who doesn’t align with either gender can’t seriously, really be non-binary, because that doesn’t work in their world. A trans woman wouldn’t want to use a women’s changing room because they’re uncomfortable and scared in the men’s (because they are actually a woman), and want to just be left alone – it must be a devious ruse to assault people. It’s male entitlement.

It’s horrible. It’s shrill. It's hate. Every day, it’s more and more hate. I tasted a little of it, and I’m a cisgendered white man, the most protected group of people in the world. I can’t begin to think how it must be for trans people, for people who are scared and bullied already and are seeing these very public figures trying to tell them that they shouldn’t exist. Awful.

Anyway. The whole thing was weird. The article was disingenuous and in bad faith – they picked a picture of me wearing eyeliner and looking “queer” because it fit their narrative of who they want me to be to make their argument work: performative, clownish. I don’t look like that most days; I’d played a gig in Bristol in the middle of summer with my punk band. Later on they say “funny thing but without eyeliner, he looks like what he in fact is, a bog-standard, straight Billy Bunter”. My friend, I am a bog standard Billy Bunter. I don’t spend every day goth-ed up to the nines. But straight? None of your beeswax, mister.

Still, there’s two things about that article I’m happy about. One is that the picture they used to humiliate me is one in which I think I look pretty good, thankyouverymuch, and two … those are my images. I own the copyright for them. Which gives me some options.

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Book News

I haven’t talked about this a great deal, because I’ve been extremely preoccupied with The London Boys, and also trying to get my head around being an actual full-time freelance writer, but … work on my next book is well underway. It’s going be called …

The Annotated Nirvana

The book takes my obsession with footnotes to hitherto unplumbed depths, at least for me. Those of you who have read Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album will be familiar with the timeline style I used in that book. This will have a similar timeline, done in the present tense and kept super factual, annotated with extremely detailed footnotes written in my usual voice, with all the trivia and jokes. The word count of the book is currently more footnote than it is timeline. At least half of every page will be footnotes. This will be an extremely comprehensive history of Nirvana, for my money the most perfect band that’s ever been, starting in 1985 (for reasons that will become clear in the book) and going year-by-year, month-by-month, week-by-week and even day-by-day into the events immediately following Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994.

This sort of research is basically my happy place. I’m ingesting a lot of stuff right now, my brain is sort of floating on a sea of Nirvana facts. I feel like if I burp it will come out as the intro to ‘Scentless Apprentice’. Have you ever read Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods? You know how Brutha feels when he’s retained the library? It’s a bit like that. (If you haven’t read Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, then you definitely should. It’s one of his absolute best). The below photo gives you an idea of what my brain is like right now.

The Annotated Nirvana is hopefully going to be out at the end of the year, which means I’m going to be CRAMMING IT in the next few months. I didn’t want it it released around the 30th anniversary of Kurt’s death in April next year, as it felt a bit ghoulish. On the other hand I didn’t want to wait much longer than that, which meant really it needed to be out in 2023. Besides, I want to keep my one-book-a-year streak alive.

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Upcoming gigs and appearances

February 9

I’ll be doing the Tortoise news/paper review in London, and streamable for members. More info here.

February 23

I'‘ll be discussing The London Boys: David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the Sixties Teenage Dream and doing a signing at the brilliant Chapter Two Community Bookshop in Chesham. Details on the Facebook event here.

February 25

Stand up set – The Old Pack Horse, Chiswick. (There’s going to be a LOT more comedy happening this year).

March 18

My band Before Victoria are playing our first ever proper headline show (at least in this incarnation) at Firebug in Leicester on Saturday March 18th. Tickets are only £5 and are available right now, right here.

We’re also recording a NEW EP of songs I originally demoed and recorded on my own a few years ago, this time done properly with the some of the polish of the Moving Forward album, which will be available at the show and on streaming services in plenty of time for the gig. I hope. We’ll be heading into the studio across the next few weekends.

One of the songs we’re recording …

October 20-23 - Irish Discworld Convention

I’ve got some extremely cool stuff planned for this! Details.

Articles I’ve written this month

Why do people like Graham Linehan keep choosing Twitter as their hill to die on? (THE INDEPENDENT)

Prince Andrew: The Musical – can you really make comedy out of anything? (NEW STATESMAN)

Netflix can’t stop cancelling its best shows – 1899 is proof (NEW STATESMAN)

No, JK Rowling isn’t being erased by a book-binder (NEW STATESMAN)

Why The Last of Us is the dystopian drama of the post-pandemic era (NEW STATESMAN)

Film review: Plane ★★★ (HEYUGUYS)

Sam Smith is an unequivocal force for good… by being brilliantly themselves (THE BIG ISSUE)

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Recommendations

Have you seen Extraordinary on Disney+? It might be my favourite thing I’ve seen in years. Funny, really fresh feeling, a little dark here and there with great performances and fantastic writing.

One for the Pratchett fans – the book-within-a-book from Amazing Maurice has been produced for-real. Go here to find out more about Mr Bunny Has An Adventure. The team have done a lovely job of finishing the revoltingly cute story Sir Terry began in his original book, and the proper story book they’ve created is a lovely thing. I also hear the audiobook, when it arrives, will be ace.

I’m totally obsessed with this new record by Boygenius and cannot wait for the album.

The new single from Billy Reeves is just gorgeous.

Finally, Tim Arnold’s ‘A Touch of the Screen’ couldn’t be more my jam if it was boiled with sugar and spread on a rivita.

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Excerpt from The Annotated Nirvana

Please note this is a WORK IN PROGRESS and subject to change. It’s copyright Marc Burrows and Pen & Sword Books (2023), PLEASE DO NOT SHARE IT.

Spring 1886

• Kurt has continued to write songs and hang out with the Melvins throughout the year. He also roadies for them as they play shows across the state. Matthew ‘Slim’ Moon, a musician and promoter based in the college town of Olympia, describes the Melvin’s entourage as ‘four or five really backwards kind of guys. Very much Deliverance-like. They would just sort of follow them around’. At first, Slim absolutely includes Krist and Kurt in this bracket.¹ Both Kurt and Krist are messing around in semi-serious and completely non-serious side-project bands with friends (usually members of the Melvins). Krist was the singer in a Melvins spin-off called The Meltors, exclusively covering songs by the tongue-in-cheek Seattle metal band, The Mentors², while Kurt sings in a short-term project called (probably) Brown Cow, in which he apparently recites poetry over Osborne and Crover’s ‘Minutemen-style tunes’.³ The scene around the Melvins is fun, party-heavy and fuelled by booze and drugs. Around this time Kurt is busted for vandalism and fined $180 for spray-painting ‘Homo Sex Rules’ and ‘God Is Gay’ on people’s cars.

May 3 (approx)

• Brown Cow perform their first and, as far as we know, only show at Olympia’s GESSCO Hall, a college space used by the city’s music community to put on all-ages gigs.⁴ The space is co-ran by Brett Lunsford of Olympia indie pop legends Beat Happening, who become one of Kurt’s favourite bands.⁵ The short-lived band opens for the Melvins, and due to a miscommunication (and much to the band’s delight) are billed as ‘Brown Towel’. No-one is especially blown away by the performance, but the show is notable as Kurt’s official stage debut and is enough to convince Slim Moon that Kurt is more than just ‘another one of those sort of inbred aberdeen retards that hung out with the Melvins … seeing that show made me think maybe that guy’s got something more going on’.⁶

• Kurt and Krist start to treat their musical career a little more seriously and work harder on Kurt’s songs, of which he has now amassed several. Krist decides to move from guitar to bass (‘in order to speed things up’ he will later write in his memoir Of Grunge And Government – Let’s Fix This Broken Democracy). The duo hook up with a local drummer, Bob McFadden, who had been playing in a covers band with Krist’s brother, Robert, performing at parties and weddings. The new trio starts to rehearse two or three times a week at Krist’s mother’s hair salon. Bob isn’t especially interested in the band’s direction, particularly as they’re playing some original songs – he was accustomed to the more lucrative covers band market. ‘I just didn’t get it,’ he would later say. ‘I didn’t get what they were trying to do’. ⁷ He later departs the band of his own accord, deciding to focus on his career and family rather than throw himself into the life of a committed punk road warrior.⁸

•  The band recruits Aaron Burckhard to play drums, a friend of Dale Crovers and another regular at the Melvins practice space.⁹ They go through various names over the coming year, including Pen Cap Chew, Ted Ed Fred, Throat Oyster, Windowpane, Ying Yang Valvestem¹⁰ and Bliss, and are probably most notably known at the time as Skid Row.¹¹

1987

Early 1987

• Ryan Aigner of another local band, Psychlodds, who would hang out at Nirvana rehearsals in the same way Nirvana would hang out at the Melvins’, becomes the bands first manager, a job he holds for a couple of months.

March

• The band plays their first ever show, at a house party in Raymond, Washington, thrown by Tony Poukkula of local band Black Ice, a mutual friend of Aigner who has apparently arranged the booking without Kurt’s approval. Krist would later say ‘we were just snotty and jumped around. We rocked though’. The set includes ‘Downer’, ‘Aero Zeppelin’, ‘Spank Thru’, ‘Mexican Seafood’ and ‘Hairspray Queen’, all of which will be recorded and released during the band’s lifetime. Someone (possibly Krist) requests Led Zeppelin's ‘Heartbreaker’ which the band jam on, segueing into Zep’s ‘How Many More Times’.¹² At one point Krist performs standing on a coffee table, and at another balancing on a television set with duct tape over his nipples and fake blood dripping down his chest. Krist is so busy investigating the fridge for signs of beer he misses the start of the gig. Later he urinates on a car from the roof of the band’s van. The trio consider the show a success.¹³

1.  Slim Moon is a hugely influential figure in the indie music scene of the Pacific NorthWest, though to begin with he was seen as one of The Melvins’ Hillbilly hangers on himself. Moving to Olympia to be closer to the city’s artsy college scene, he would go on to promote shows and play in several bands, including Earth alongside Dylan Carlson. Both would become close friends with Kurt and Nirvana. In 1991, he founded the kill rock stars [sic] label, eventually signing Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Elliot Smith and The Gossip. In the late 2000s, after a brief stint in major label A&R and then management, he quit music completely to work as a minister at a Unitarian Church in Portland, Orgegan.

2.  During a 1985 US Senate committee hearing, discussing obscene themes and language in music, the OTT lyrics to the Mentors’ ‘Golden Shower’ were recited as evidence of the sort of filth America’s young was exposed to (those opposing censorship, including Frank Zappa, claimed the song was so ridiculous it actually proved the opposite). After Kurt’s suicide, Mentors’ singer and professional wind-up merchant El Duce went on The Jerry Springer Show to claim he’d been offered money to kill Kurt himself, also selling his story to the National Enquiror. Appearances in such robustly reliable media outlets led the documentary maker Nick Broomfield to, astonishingly, take the claims seriously in his film Kurt & Courtney. The band later admitted that the whole thing was a publicity stunt, to the surprise of precisely no-one (except possibly Nick Broomfield). El Duce himself, rather horribly, was decapitated in a train accident in 1997. Mentors bass player Steve Broy eventually published a memoir about the band called Truth Is Funnier Than Fiction. Which says it all, really.

3.  This is according to an interview conducted for the Melvin’s Fanzine Matt Lukin’s Legs two years later.

4. According to Slim Moon GESCCO stood for Greater Evergreen State College Community Organization, and was ‘just a dumb acronym to impress the college into giving us some funding’.

5.  Beat Happening are, in their own way, every bit as important in the story of Nirvana, and certainly in the musical development of Kurt Cobain, as the Melvins. The trio, completed by Heather Lewis and K Records founder Calvin Johnson, formed in 1982 and have proven hugely influential. As Michael Azzerad says in his excellent Our Band Could Be Your Life, ‘they were resolutely unmacho and played melodic, downright quaint-sounding music. They could barely play or sing. Implicit in Beat Happening’s music was a dare: If you saw them and said, “even I could do better than that”, then the burden was on you to prove it.’ [CITATION: Azerrad]. This was the quintessential lofi indiepop band; cute, cultish and wilfully kind-of-rubbish – superficially childish lyrics with a sharp sense of humour, rudimentary musicianship and no bass player. Beneath the tweecore shambles, however, their songs were remarkably robust pop, as a 1986 review in the influential ‘Sub Pop’ (this name is going to come up again, by the way) column in Seattle’s The Rocket music paper said, ‘they … sing about love, affection, and intimacy without sounding like wimps … this totally rockin acoustic folk LP has more character, more genuine personality, than anything I’ve heard all month.’ Kurt adored them, and would become a paid-up devotee of Calvin Johnson’s K Records cult. You could argue that Beat Happening and The Melvins represented the two sides of his songwriting personality (equally, you could argue it was The Beatles and Black Sabbath) and that the tension between the two poles, and between Olympia’s indier-than-thou ethos and Seattle and Aberdeen’s thuggish belligerence was the motor that drove his creativity.

6.  Asked about the show later by the Matt Lukin’s Legs fanzine, Kurt said ‘I had a splendid time’.

7.  In an interview with Nick Soulsby’s Nirvana-Legacy website, McFadden confirmed that as well as Cobain originals the short-lived line up jammed on Cream’s ‘Sunshine of your Love’, Black Sabbath songs and, rather brilliantly, Wilson Pickett’s ‘Mustang Sally’, a favourite of Krist’s. According to McFadden tapes of the rehearsals have been acquired by the Cobain estate, which raises the prospect of Nirvana’s ‘Mustang Sally’ one day being made available; a sentence I never dreamed I’d get to type. 

8.  There’s a reference in Everett True’s excellent Nirvana:The Truth to McFadden being dismissed as ‘some jock guy’, but the quote isn’t sourced. It’s possibly Krist Novoselic.

9.  In a 1991 interview with Option Kurt would describe Burckhard as ‘this stoner guy, but he had a drum kit’. [Option, 1991] Which isn’t actually true; Aaron didn’t have a kit of his own at the time and the band had to cobble one together for him.

10.  I have only found references to ‘Ying Yang Valvesten’ once, in a 1989 interview with the Melvins fanzine Matt Lukin’s Legs. It doesn’t crop up in any biographies of the band. It’s possible Kurt is just throwing out random names at this point, although it’s hardly more absurd a phrase than any of the others.

11.  Absolutely not to be confused with the other Skid Row, the hard rock/glam band formed in New Jersey, also in 1986, though singer Sebastian Bach – probably their most recognisable member – didn’t join until the following year. On the harder end of hair metal, the other Skid Row were seen very much as part of the excessive and misogynistic rock that Nirvana and their peers were reacting against. Guitarist Dave Sabo had even, briefly, been a member of Bon Jovi and the band were the tour support of choice for Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Mr Big and Aerosmith. The difference between the two Skid Rows is pretty stark – Kurt Cobain wore dresses, was once arrested for spray painting ‘Homo Sex Rules’ on cars and made out with his bandmates on live TV. Sebastian Bach once went on stage wearing a bluntly homophobic t-shirt that said ‘AID kills Fags Dead’, for which he had to do a lot of grovelling in the press. In August of 1994, Bach wrote to Rolling Stone magazine to complain about comparisons made between Kurt’s death and John Lennon’s, saying ‘suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness. Megalomania. Cowardice’ and criticising Nivana for singing about ‘apathy [and] lithium’ and claiming that Kurt ‘just may have inspired a generation that suicide is the only way out’. Still, ‘Youth Gone Wild’ remains a banger. This Skid Row shouldn’t be confused with another Skid Row, an Irish blues rock band from the sixties which gave Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott and Gary Moore their first professional breaks. There was a lot of this around in a time before Google: Slim Moon would later form a band called Lush, unaware of the British shoegazers of the same name, and of course Nirvana themselves would face a similar issue. More of which later.  

12.  Remarkably, the whole show was taped, presumably on a boom box. The impromptu cover of ‘Heartbreaker’ was later released on 2004’s With The Lights Out rarities box set, and the rest of the set is available online if you poke around a little. It’s raucous, feedback strewn and unpolished, no-one claps after the opening ‘Downer’ (which is weird as it’s basically great) and the vocal is drowned out, but the band are undeniably tight and punchy. Even at this very early stage Nirvana sounds like Nirvana. They play ‘Spank Thru’ here to an audience of 20 or so in much the same form it would be played to an audience of 40,000 at the Reading Festival five years later. It also says a lot about the average American rock fan growing up in the 80s, that the Led Zep riff book was hard-coded into their DNA.

13.  Later Kurt would completely fabricate the story of this first show, telling Option magazine that they had played [San Francisco punk band] Flipper’s ‘Sex Bomb’ for ‘an hour’, while their girlfriend’s grabbed at their legs like obsessed groupies and made out with each other, vibing off the hate they generated from the ‘redneck’ audience.