Last week marked the release of Debsey Wykes’ new book, Teenage Daydream: We Are the Girls Who Play in a Band, and we were lucky enough to publish an excerpt from it on our site. If you’re reading chickfactor, you probably already know that Debsey is one of the greatest living singers. In addition to forming Dolly Mixture with Rachel Bor and Hester Smith, she also sang with Saint Etienne and made fantastic music with Paul Kelly as Birdie. Here is a new interview with Debs about the book-writing process.
Dolly Mixture, 1982: Debsey, Hester and Rachel. Photo by Elizabeth Hollingsworth
chickfactor: What made you want to write a book/publish your diaries?
Debsey Wykes: When I was twelve years old, everyone in my class was given a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank to read. It was 1972 and the Second World War was still fairly recent history, especially for our parents who would constantly reference it, so the story felt fairly tangible and everyone was captivated. We all began our own diaries in earnest but I suspect most of the other girls gave up after a few weeks. I loved filling up notebooks and no doubt dreamt of one day being published. By the time we had formed Dolly Mixture the idea of sharing any part of my diaries would have been unthinkable!
It was only years later, as other people began to reference the band as an influence or ask me about the group, that I began to re-visit that part of my life. I had reached an age where I felt very strongly that I needed to try and make sense of my formative years. It was time to make sure we didn’t end up as a footnote in someone else’s story. Other female bands who had formed in our wake seemed to be getting a lot of attention and I was determined that we should not be overlooked.
Debs by Paul Kelly
How did it make you feel to go back and read them when you first did?
Debsey: The diaries had been living in a battered old suitcase for years, and each time I moved house I would have to haul this ever expanding monster around with me, literally carrying around the baggage of my youth. I had never bothered to read them before but when I finally decided to write the book and confront my younger self I was often mortified! There were a couple of times I threw the diary against the wall in exasperation. Having already committed to the ‘project’ however, I decided to press on, and after cringing my way through endless stories about school, exams, parties, boys, gigs and arguments with my mother, I eventually began to accept that younger self.
What are some examples of how you might have remembered something differently from Rachel or Hester?
Debsey: I’m sure the three of us have completely different versions of the Dolly Mixture story. It’s a long time ago and we’re bound to see shared events from our own personal perspective. Luckily, for the book, I had the diaries to lean on and jog memories but some do fall between the pages. Several years ago I was chatting with Hester and Rachel about how we were lucky not to have been on the end of any physical harassment. We certainly faced a lot of verbal abuse and spitting but I felt we had managed to avoid too much lairy behaviour. Hester then pulled out a polaroid of the three of us – taken in the late 70s – grinning at the camera as a middle aged man attempts to grope me! It seems I must have blocked out some of the more unpleasant aspects of male behaviour while growing up in the late seventies and early eighties.
Debs at the Hope and Anchor, 1979, photo: Rich Gunter
What are some of the most meaningful connections you made back then? Lifelong friends?
Debsey: Almost everyone important in my life I have met through music. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs first came to see Dolly Mixture support Orange Juice in London in 1982 and instantly became fans. It was their love of Dolly Mixture that eventually led to me joining the Saint Etienne live set up where I met Paul and we formed our own band Birdie and ended up having children. Hester and Rachel are still two of my closest friends. Amongst others, I am still in contact with Captain Sensible, and some of our original fans. Over 40 years on, Dolly Mixture continues to bring us new fans and friends. It’s incredible to think the band can still have such a positive effect on our lives after all this time.
Anything you feel you may have left out of the book about your story?
Debsey: The original version of the book came in at about 120k words. The final version is around 90k so yes, some stories didn’t make it in but I think the book is probably better for it. From 1981 we were playing over 200 gigs a year and there are only so many times you can talk about touring without repeating yourself. If I started to write the book again now it would probably be completely different, the whole process has been so alien to me and in some ways this feels like a dry run. It’s just impossible to cram everything in, but I can always do another one!
How do you see the band’s legacy now?
Debsey: It would be nice to think that some young people completely unaware of the band might pick up the book or listen to the records and be inspired to do something themselves. I personally would have loved to read a story about an all girl band when I was a teenager.
Is the book available in the US and elsewhere outside the UK?
Debsey: Hopefully a US publisher will pick up the book and take it to a wider audience. At the moment it is available on import from Rough Trade and Monorail Music in Glasgow.
Will you be doing any events?
Debsey: As well as a couple of things in London, I’ve been invited to Monorail in Glasgow and will be in Manchester for the Louder than Words festival in November. I would love to have events in the States, Japan or Europe. In fact anywhere that will have me or we never managed to visit with the band.
Top ten records the Dolly Mixture were listening to while an active band
If you know us, you know we adore Debsey Wykes! So we are super-chuffed to present a brand-new excerpt from her book (out today!) Teenage Daydream: We are the Girls Who Play in a Band (New Modern, hardback, ebook, audio):
Debsey Wykes formed her first band Dolly Mixture in Cambridge in 1978 with friends Rachel Bor and Hester Smith while still at school. Championed by John Peel the girls were soon playing regularly in London where they attracted lots of attention from the music press and toured extensively for the next few years both as headliners and as support for groups including Dexy’s Midnight Runners, The Undertones, The Beat, Bad Manners and The Jam.
Debsey went onto greater prominence with Saint Etienne with whom she has performed since 1992, whilst in 2025, desirable Dolly Mixture reissues sell out around the world as quickly as they are printed.
She currently sings with her group Birdie and lives in London.
This excerpt is from Chapter 2: Fist-Fumbled Power Chords
Monday 22nd May 1978
Dolly Mixture progress report.
I am a bassist in Dolly Mixture.
Rachel Bor – guitar, has done vocals
Hester Smith – drums
Debsey Wykes – bass guitar
The vocalist is an unknown quantity …
We’ve played 3 gigs, all successful for us on the whole.
St. George’s Hall – vocalist was Chriz stepping in.
Churchill College – Rachel sang.
Union Society – Rachel sang again.
Our original repertoire
1) Dolly Mixture Theme Song *
2) Dizzy
3) Nobody to You *
4) Honky Honda
5) One Way Street *
6) While My Guitar Gently Weeps
7) We all Fall Down
*absolutely original songs
Debsey, Photo Booth, 1983
As the gigs had gone so well, we agreed that it would be easier to stay as a three-piece and tackle the vocals ourselves. The line-up was complete.
I began to feel that we were on our way when we were rung up on a Saturday morning and asked if we would play that very night at the Corn Exchange. This was going to be gig number four. Only our fourth gig. At the legendary Corn Exchange. It was to celebrate Raw Records’ first anniversary, with Kevin Rowland’s band the Killjoys headlining, plus the Unwanted, Lockjaw and Some Chicken, along with some surprise guests, including Johnny Thunders who didn’t surprise anyone by not actually turning up
In the wake of punk, every town in Britain seemed to have spawned its own independent record label: Zoo in Liverpool, Factory in Manchester, Good Vibrations in Belfast, and so on. Cambridge’s own Raw Records was set up by Lee Wood, a dead ringer for Van Morrison who ran a second-hand record shop called Remember
Those Oldies with his wife Liz. I first ventured into the small shop in King Street to buy my copy of the Users’ ‘Sick of You’ – the debut release on Raw – the day it came out in May 1977. ‘Good taste,’ quipped Lee as he rang up yet another 49p.
Dolly Mixture polaroid: Hester, Rachel, Debsey
Never having met any bands from outside Cambridge, let alone played with them, it was a daunting experience turning up at the cavernous Corn Exchange for a soundcheck with just a bass and two drumsticks (the only items we actually owned) and having to ask if we could possibly borrow someone else’s gear. We received a fairly frosty reception from the Raw Records roster with the only other band not billed, the Nipple Erectors, more than happy to help – ‘Of course you can!’ They looked amazing with a punky rockabilly style and, having seemed so cool and moody as they trooped into the building earlier, we couldn’t believe that they were actually smiling and talking to us, as well as being graciously generous with their equipment. We would meet Shane and Shanne from the Nipple Erectors again in the months to come and I’m glad to say that they were easily the best band on that night.
We were first up. I can’t remember playing, but I do remember looking out at the enormous, dark auditorium, hardly daring to believe that we were on this very stage playing a gig. Rachel had to run off home with school books in hand immediately after our set as she had told her parents that she was just popping round to a friend’s house to do some revision for their O-Levels. She did eventually get found out and was duly grounded.
Debsey with a Bay City Rollers poster, 1975
Back at school less than two weeks later, I was in a classroom at the beginning of the day waiting for English to start when I heard a voice from the staircase shouting ‘Debsey Debsey!’ Hester ran in. ‘Debsey Debsey, we’re in the NME!’ She spread the paper out across a couple of desks and we read out the live review together. Others gathered round, intrigued. The piece began by criticising the crazy organisation of the whole evening, decrying the fact that the Killjoys were only able to spit out one number before the plugs were pulled at midnight. However …
The first band to play were Dolly Mixture. A trio of schoolgirls (they claim an average age of 16½ but look far younger), they come from Cambridge and have been together ‘two terms’. At present they only have a bass and two drumsticks to their name, but tonight’s gig, their fourth ever, was one of the weirdest I’ve seen. During their delicate 15-minute set they played, all more or less at the same halting pace, five soft-pop originals, and covers of Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy” and The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, so how’s that for extremes? At the moment they can barely play, and often it was only the sheer volume of Debsie’s bass that prevented the whole thing falling apart. Be that as it may, everyone was impressed by their bravado, and they were granted fairly rapt attention. Whenever they made a mistake, which in retrospect wasn’t all that often, they simply stopped and began the piece again. Rachel the guitarist also sang lead, and in places her voice bore a remarkable resemblance to Patti Smith’s, although the quavering uncertainty was probably due more to nerves than lack of talent.
Dolly Mixture, 1981
Life could be so exciting. It was very hard to concentrate on English composition now. I just sat there glowing and dreaming as if my future was assured. Later on that summer term, headmaster Mr Hill advised me to leave school. It was generally agreed that I should just go away and do whatever it was I wanted to do.
Obviously, that wasn’t going to be A-Levels.
Debs by Paul KellyDebs at the Hope and Anchor, 1979, photo: Rich Gunter
Audrey holding Ana’s 1979 Raincoats tour diary. Photo: Shirley O’Loughlin
Just a few days before the U.S. publication date of Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats, we caught up with the New York writer-editor-journalist and cat mom Audrey Golden to ask about her process, the music she loves and her life. She also wrote the great oral history I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records, which finally unearthed the stories from the women behind the famed Manchester label. Scroll all the way down to see where some upcoming book events are and read our excerpt as well. (Photographs courtesy of Audrey Golden)
chickfactor: What are you up to today? Audrey Golden: I’m listening to a new Lung Leg song that’ll be out in October, and I LOVE it. It’s so powerful, and so fun and cathartic to sing along to. I’m writing a piece about them and the music scene in Glasgow, and I’m trying to finish that up today.
I’m getting ready for the publication of and a lot of upcoming book events for Shouting Out Loud! I’m getting ready to head to Seattle and Portland next week (for events on July 17 and 18), then some events on the east coast (Rough Trade NYC on July 25 and Mass MoCA on July 31) before I head to Europe, where I’ll be joined by The Raincoats for events. Since the book is out really soon, I’ve also been doing interviews and some publicity for it. I’m so excited for it to finally get into readers’ hands! And really hoping it’s what all the lovers of The Raincoats are hoping it’ll be.
Where all have you lived? I’ve lived in a lot of places, actually! I grew up on the east coast, in Connecticut and Florida, mostly. I went to college back in CT (at Wesleyan), law school in North Carolina (at Wake Forest U), and grad school in Charlottesville, Virginia at UVA, where I got my PhD. Being in academia, I also ended up in some places I didn’t expect but loved living, including Iowa City. I’ve spent the most time living in New York – both the city and the Hudson Valley, where I live now.
Inside cover of Audrey’s own Raincoats book notebook: “I start a new notebook for each project I work on,” she says
What was your family like? What were you like as a teenager? Oh, man. There is so much I could say here but won’t (haha). My family was a little dysfunctional, and I’m the oldest of four kids who are all sort of close in age. Like any dysfunctional family, though, there were good aspects, too. I grew up in a family of readers, and I’m really grateful for that. Even when we barely had any money, my parents made sure we had books, and always let us pick out new books. It made me a person who values books and reading immensely. (I’ve definitely long been a believer in that John Waters quote, “if you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them!” I think I’m getting that mostly right.)
I had a lot of responsibilities that a teenager probably shouldn’t have, and I felt really discouraged by what I saw as a really sexist world around me that just wouldn’t budge no matter what I did. I listened to a LOT of music and I loved making mixed-media art. I generally did really well in school academically (and I was lucky that I could do that without putting in very much effort), but I also hated high school so much — all the social bullshit, all the sexist, racist crap from the school administrators and teachers. I must have forged maybe 100 notes from my mom so I could have “excused” absences — there were so many days where I’d let my younger brother out of the car in the student parking lot, and as soon as I saw him go through the doors, I’d drive off and bring a note the next day that “explained” I had period cramps and had to stay home. None of those idiot administrators wanted to get into a conversation with me about that! Always worked like a charm. I listened to so much Nirvana, Veruca Salt, Soundgarden, Bikini Kill, Team Dresch, Screaming Trees, Letters to Cleo, Mudhoney, REM, Velvet Underground, NIN… and I took myself to so many movies when I skipped school. I got a lot of my music knowledge from film soundtracks, and I loved sitting alone in those theaters seeing Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous and dreaming of another life.
A notebook page from when she was working on Shouting Out Loud
Do you play music? Karaoke? I started playing piano when I was 3 years old, and violin a few years later. I really hated taking lessons and playing classical music, but it was good training for being able to play different kinds of music later on. I’ve only recently gotten back into thinking about the violin, decades later (after playing up to college, with a symphony) because I recently bought a Fender electric violin that I can plug into pedals and really mess around with (I mean that in the best possible way!). I’ve never really stopped playing piano and keyboards/synths, and it’s a mix of just messing around in my music room and playing covers, playing a little bit on some of my partner’s music, and writing a little bit of my own (under the pseudonym Warm Druid). I also love playing ukulele, and I have way too many ukuleles depending on who you ask (haha!). Every time I see one that sounds just a little bit different, or has a cool design, I can’t help myself!
Tell us about your radio show — is it still going? It’s on a little bit of a hiatus right this moment (largely because of time I just can’t seem to find!), but it’ll be back up and running very soon. The show is called “Breaking Glass,” and it highlights women in music — as musicians, obviously, but also women doing “behind the scenes” work that often doesn’t get recognized. And there are a lot more women doing that kind of work than I imagine most people suspect. We should be celebrating them more, and really encouraging younger women to get into some of those roles that are still dominated by men. I have a pipe dream of opening a small studio to train women as sound engineers, and at some point, I really want that to become more than just a pipe dream!
Did you always want to be a storyteller? Yeah, I did, I think. Does everyone say this? I was constantly writing stories as a kid and making my own books. The latter is something I’ve actually continued to do, too — I make my own artist books and archival clamshell boxes. I really love the detail and precision work these require, and I especially love making miniature hardcover books and books with various Japanese bindings. But yes, back to the question, I think I’ve wanted to be a storyteller since a very young age because of how much I loved reading stories, and I’m on a constant search for books that make me sort of stop in my reading tracks, if you will. It feels like an incredible kind of thing to be able to contribute to the world. And my dad was also a wild storyteller (orally though, not in print), and maybe I’ve inherited a little bit of that, too.
Do you have any stories about hilarious/difficult/standout interviews you’ve done? In terms of standout and hilarious interviews, and Shouting Out Loud-related, I LOVE interviewing Liz Naylor. I’ve talked to her now for three different projects (I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women At Factory Records; Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats; and a draft a just finished, QUEERCORE for Bloomsbury’s new 33 ⅓ “Genre Series”), and she’s always such an incredible storyteller. She often will say she doesn’t have a great memory for X, Y, or Z thing, and then she ends up having a really fantastic and detailed memory. She’s also witty and hilarious. I hope I end up interviewing her for every book I write!
As for a sort of difficult one: I interviewed Mark Arm of Mudhoney several years ago for an article in advance of their first European tour after the pandemic lockdowns. I’m a really big Mudhoney fan, and I was very nervous to talk to him. I felt really self-conscious during the whole thing (over zoom), so I probably wasn’t at my best. Anyway, I got the sense he wasn’t having a good time talking to me, and I think I was getting a little flustered. At some point, I made a comment about my having been “around for grunge” (argh, I regretted it as soon as I said it), but yes said it, and he ran with it a little. I still feel sort of stupid about the whole thing, if I’m being honest. It feels good to let my embarrassment out here, ha!
Do you have any rituals or do’s and don’ts regarding interviews? Tips or advice? In terms of do’s, always do research in advance, and as much as you can. Especially when you’re doing oral history research, it’s really crucial to have a lot of background information so you can ask the kinds of questions that are going to produce information that’s helpful to you. As for don’ts, this is probably obvious, but yes-or-no questions are rarely useful unless you’re really just trying to clarify a point or get someone to confirm some sort of “fact.” I really like oral history research — regardless of whether you’re ultimately gonna write a book in an oral history format — because of the way it creates a dialogic process of storytelling. So my techniques and approaches are always about trying to develop the kind of rapport with a speaker where they know they can trust you (and I hope most of the people I’ve interviewed for oral history research feel that way!), and where you’re able to actually engage in a kind of dialogue through which you can dig deeper into their responses with the knowledge that’s necessary to do that.
A tip/advice that I always like to do whenever I’m doing any kind of oral history interview research: give your interviewee the option (within reason) to come back and tell you that something they said is off the record, and that you’ll agree to keep this private. I think this is really crucial if you want to get as full a story as you can, and to ensure that you’ve attended to your interviewee’s emotional and psychological needs, and their own comfort, as well. I don’t ever want to be in the business of telling something that someone wants to keep private, and I feel like that’s a good rule for anyone doing oral history work to follow. It’s different, of course, if you’re interviewing an artist for an article about an upcoming record or tour, and you’ve gotta get the piece out in a couple of days. Essentially, use your good judgment, and always think of the ethics of the work you’re doing.
Why did you decide on the oral history format for I Thought I Heard You Speak? What are some of the challenges and benefits of doing an oral history? I knew that book needed to be in an oral history format because of the stark exclusion of so many women’s voices from the history of Factory Records. I wanted their voices to be the thing in that book and to really shine — especially those women who did so much work to make that label work and weren’t even mentioned once by name, or were mentioned once in existing books and got their names misspelled.
You know, I originally wasn’t going to name him, but after some recent stuff, I feel like I really should. Can I do it here? I heard from one of the women I interviewed for that book (and who’s in the book), that she’d mentioned to James Nice she was interviewing with me, probably back in 2020 or 2021. She’d told him about my book and relayed to me that he’d replied with something to her like, “who’d want to read that book?” and I thought UGH. Up to that point, I’d loved reading his book on Factory, and loved knowing a lot of those stories. I’d hoped I Thought I Heard You Speak would be something that he and anyone else who’d written on Factory would see as this wonderful thing that enlivened the music history they loved so much, too. Anyway, on top of that comment, I saw Faber just reissued his Factory Records book, and in all the marketing and announcements, he’s doubling down on calling his book the “definitive history” of the label while adding stuff about how, essentially, everyone who is anyone agrees with that description. And people wonder how certain voices get marginalized from histories? It’s because of that insistence on the “definitive” label (as I’ve said a million times, I suspect, and in so many places, no history is EVER definitive), and the refusal of anyone to just own something and say “wow, can’t believe I missed some of these voices. So glad there’s something out there that really makes this history fuller!” Honestly, it only makes me want to break down all this male gatekeeping even more. For fuck’s sake. It bums me out, but I’m also not that surprised in the end. Sad about it, and demoralized, but not that surprised.
But let me also say a couple more good things about the oral history format and its challenges!!! Because this is also how I did a lot of the research for Shouting Out Loud. I knew I wasn’t going to write this book as an oral history (which Mojo got really wrong after reading it, which made me sad!) because there was a lot more research going into the book beyond those oral history interviews, but I also really wanted this to be a book with my narrative voice telling the story.
Oral history research can be really challenging because it can be REALLY difficult to track some people down, and it can be difficult to connect with people in interviews sometimes — no matter how much background research and work you do before the interview (so my advice about this is, give yourself a little grace if you’re doing this kind of research and an interview just doesn’t feel like it clicked, or that you got anything great out of it — it’s not always you!). And when you’re planning a book in an oral history format — like I Thought I Heard You Speak — you can feel a real need to get ALL of the voices you want in there, but if you can’t track someone down, or just can’t convince someone to speak, you can feel this sense of incompleteness. Ultimately, I think you’ve got to just live with that, and I like to provide a note about who I really wanted to talk with but couldn’t for whatever reason. One of the great joys of oral history work is that you become this interlocutor in the collation of a narrative and oral archive, even if it never leaves your own hard drive, and even if a lot of the material doesn’t end up in the book you’re writing. You become a collector of stories, and the histories alongside them, and I adore that aspect and find it really meaningful.
Audrey with Shirley, Ana, and Gina at a London pub dinner one night after she had been archiving their stuff
How did the political moment the Raincoats formed in shape their character? So much, I think. They were thinking about the DIY rise of punk, the anti-racism and anti-sexism of the political moment in London (especially coinciding with Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Sexism), and I think they took all of that to heart and did something distinctive with it.
What are some classic Raincoats lessons we can apply to the current moment? They saw that these converging moments (that I noted above) meant it was possible to truly make something your own way, and do it on your own terms. I love this quote Ana had when we were talking for the book, which I used in Shouting Out Loud, and it had to do with a fan coming up to her and Anne Wood at a 2010s show in Japan. The fan, a young girl, said she wanted to be like The Raincoats, and Anne essentially told her that you can be like The Raincoats by being yourself! What a great life lesson, and it reflects (to me) the line in “Fairytale,” that “no one teaches you how to live.” I wish I’d had that advice when I was a lot younger. I probably would have had a lot more self-confidence, and it wouldn’t have taken me until I was in my 40s to feel like I had a true sense of myself and what it means to really exist as yourself in the world. But I do now, I think. Thanks, Raincoats!
Audrey at a book event in Austin
The Raincoats’ music seems like one element in their life’s work. They also show us that art is something you do into your older years, and many get better at it. Why do you think they have stayed relevant and what’s the secret to their longevity? You know, I was just telling a friend something my grandmother said to me a few years before she died (and she lived a very long life in terms of years!). She said something like, “I always feel 25 yrs old when I’m just sitting here thinking, or watching something, and we all mostly do, until we try to stand up (she was having mobility issues at the time).” And, she added, “it all goes by like lightning.” What she meant, or at least how I took it, was that we don’t feel like older versions of ourselves (or oneself) at any given point in time. It’s still possible to have so many of the feelings we had a long time ago — sitting in an art classroom, and dreaming about the future, for example, or sitting in a park with a walkman while listening to Nirvana — time collapses in that way, and we still have access to the senses of wonder and possibility that are so characteristic of being young. I don’t know for sure about The Raincoats, but I think this is one of the things that makes it possible to feel like there’s no expiration date on creativity. And especially for women — that idea is such a product of a misogynist culture.
I think The Raincoats would also say that artists of varying generations becoming interested in their music has sort of re-catalyzed them, in turn, to come back to their own music and to want to make more art anew. They’re constantly inspiring, and being inspired — this circular process that’s really lovely to be able to track and to witness across time and space.
And, of course, in terms of the longevity of their music, there’s just absolutely NOTHING that’s tethered to a particular temporal moment in any of their songs or albums, and that is something that’s so amazing to me about their work. It feels like it could have been written at the same time the Fluxus artists started dipping into sonic expression, or just recorded yesterday. That’s one of the ways their music lives outside time (in addition to their intentionally arrhythmic time signatures), which is something that I really wanted to come across in Shouting Out Loud, and something that I think is so special about their music.
Audrey in a grizzly bear mask she sculpted with some ‘found’ grizzly jaws
The Raincoats had their community in the UK in the early days but seemed to fit in with the NYC scene more when it comes to music. It seems like a common theme with women musicians of that era – they were not taken seriously even though they turned out to be legends. Why was that? Yeah, as I hope anyone who reads Shouting Out Loud will see, there’s a really indelible connection between The Raincoats and NYC. Their sound fit in (not by being similar to sonically, but by having a similar experimental approach to) so many of the no wave bands coming out of the downtown scene at the time. And so many of those artists were women! And as to the women-musicians-not-being-taken-seriously, argh, it’s so true, and I think it’s so much a result of women just not being taken seriously in general. I think a lot of that is because the gatekeepers were men — and by gatekeepers, I mean the ones writing the music journalism, running labels, overseeing venues, etc etc. I talked to Vivien Goldman about this for Shouting Out Loud, and in more detail for a profile I just did of her for Gusher magazine, but she was among the only women in this crucial role. For the most part, I think, you just weren’t getting male music journalists and A&R guys (and yes, they were mostly guys) celebrating female artists. I think that’s changing a little, but not as much as it could. I mean, look at the data coming out from UCLA’s Gender in Popular Music project. Female-fronted bands are still few and far between on major festival lineups, at the controls in sound booths, and on. And the same goes for so many artists of color, and women of color. There are still a lot of gatekeepers with ideas that don’t seem to have progressed from the 1970s and 1980s, at least when it comes to a lot of music stuff that isn’t in indie spheres.
What is it about the word feminism that many people have a hard time with, even feminist trailblazers. Is there a different word we should use? I think there are different issues surrounding its use. Within The Raincoats, the band members who didn’t want to explicitly call themselves feminist definitely shared a belief in female equality and power but didn’t want to be pigeonholed. There’s also the question about (or lack of) intersectionality that became prominent in riot grrrl communities, and that’s quite obviously a significant and salient point — the way the term feminism was imagined was often a very white one. Even if there wasn’t an intentional exclusion of women of color, there was often a de facto one in terms of issues addressed and the way in which a “feminist” was envisioned.
I go back and forth myself about how I think of the term, and I think there are pros and cons of its use (but NOT pros and cons to the idea that women, including women of color, are equal to men). I don’t know if there’s a better word for that… EqualRightsist doesn’t quite have the same ring to it! Sort of pathetic we have to even think about defining ourselves in ways that make clear we believe women are equal, but that is indeed where we (still) are, and perhaps more than we even were a couple of decades ago, in some ways given the current political situation in the US.
Audrey with a Peruvian street dog
Since we are facing a democracy crisis in the U.S., tell us how the idea of democracy worked for the band. I think, like a lot of bands, The Raincoats really wanted to be a democracy, and it was their ideal. But, in practice, nothing ever really quite works that way, right? There were shared ideas that were always brought to the group, and they shared royalties very equally and fairly — everything to do with money was absolutely equal, no matter who wrote a particular song or came up with the bass line or whatever — and that’s something that remains really important to them. But I think when you put several very strong-willed and powerful women together in a group, a true democracy isn’t necessarily possible. Ongoing friendship and compromise, certainly! But true democracy, probably not really in the end (but perhaps it’s true to say they came closer than many other bands trying to get there!).
Tell us a story you had to leave out of the book for whatever reason. I learned from The Raincoats that Anton Fier (of The Feelies, Lounge Lizards, Pere Ubu, and more) had auditioned to be their drummer at one point in the early 80s. I’m a HUGE fan of The Feelies, so I wanted to explore this a lot more. It turned out it wasn’t something that had stuck in the memories of The Raincoats as much as other things had, and unfortunately, Anton Fier had already left this realm, so I couldn’t get in touch with him to hear more.
Audrey’s hands at a 1/4″ tape reel to reel
What part of NYC do you live in? I actually live in the Hudson Valley now! I was one of the NYC departers during COVID. I honestly love living near a train and being pretty close to the city now but having a backyard with a garden, and more wall space to hang more art! I feel really lucky to live in such a cool old house where I can still have access to NYC in all the best ways.
What are you working on now? Any other books in the pipeline? Yes! I have a book for Bloomsbury’s relatively new “Genre Series” coming out in the nearish future on QUEERCORE, which was a total dream to write. I turned that manuscript in not too long ago, so I’ve now completely immersed myself (research and writing-wise) in my next big project, which is a biography of Mark Lanegan. I’m doing oral history research for this one, too, but unlike other books I’ve written, I’m planning to really craft this one in the form of a novel for all kinds of reasons that are constantly running through my head.
Audrey in a Guerrilla Girls paper cutout mask while sewing
What are you reading, watching, eating? I’m one of those people who is always reading several different books at once, and in little spurts. I’ll go from one to another without finishing one, is what I mean. I’m currently revisiting Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game, and I’m in the middle of Markus Werner’s The Frog in the Throat, Karen Russell’s The Antidote, and Nick Cave’s book of interviews with Seán O’Hagan. I’m also always going back to and reading new little portions of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, or rereading portions that I’d forgotten I’d read. There’s always something in there that brings meaning to me at some random moment.
Watching: I’m such a sucker for British detective shows, so that’s usually what I’m watching if I’m looking for something to interest me for a given 50 minutes or so! I especially love the detective shows with female leads.
I also recently watched Andrew Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers and loved it so intensely. And I also just saw The Ballad of Wallis Island, which warmed my heart like no other film has in recent memory — I loved it.
As for food, I’m always eating pasta and desserts… haha, maybe that doesn’t sound too great. I’m especially a sucker for really delicious pies.
Audrey combing through 7-inches
Day jobs, pets, hobbies? I work a regular 9-5 day job as an editor at Bard College. Writing books would be totally impossible, financially speaking, otherwise! I was on university faculty for a long time at a few different institutions, but I ultimately decided to leave academia in 2021 after a lot of careful thought, and I’m honestly really glad I did, although I miss teaching some of the great students I had over the years!
As for pets, I am a really ardent animal lover. Currently, we have three cats (two newly adopted 2-yr-old bonded siblings, Ozzy and Augustus Pablo, who are super sweet). Our third cat is Marguerite, a 13-yr-old weirdo, who we’ve had since she was a kitten, and who I love for who she is! I recently lost my sweetest boy, Matin, a 13-yr-old tabby cat who we’d also had since he was a kitten (some friends found him, along with his sister Marguerite, in pretty bad shape in the woods, and we rescued them). He was the best animal, and I miss him every day, honestly. I’ve also had and fostered dogs in the past, and I’m constantly pestering my partner about adopting another dog (he’s sort of agreed to move forward with that plan in January, after my book travel settles down). I’ve also been trying to convince a couple of local farmers to let me “invest” in two sheep on their farm (meaning, basically, I’d have two sheep of my own at their farm). I’d honestly have a whole menagerie of rescue creatures if I had the space and finances to do it.
And hobbies! I’m a book and art and record collector, and I play a lot of music in my spare time. I also love fashion design and try to work on my own clothes when I find cool new textiles, or something at a thrift store I can dye and repurpose.
Upcoming book events for Shouting Out Loud:
July 17, Seattle, Hex Enduction Books and Records, 6pm (part of Art Walk, and there will be a singalong!)
July 18, Portland OR, Powell’s, with Gail O’Hara, Corin Tucker, and Sheri Hood, 7pm
July 25, NYC, Rough Trade NYC, with Evan “Funk” Davies of WFMU, 6pm
July 31, North Adams MA, Mass MoCA, 5pm
August 30, Dorset UK, End of the Road Festival, In-convo with Gina Birch, 10:30am, signing 12pm
August 31, Bristol UK, Rough Trade Bristol, with Ana Calderon of Digital Resistance, 5pm
September 3, Glasgow UK, Glad Cafe, with The Raincoats, 7pm
September 6, London UK, Rough Trade East, with The Raincoats, 7pm
October 14, Porto PT, Termita bookstore, with Ana da Silva
October 18, Lisbon PT, Well Read Lisbon, with Ana da Silva
TBD:
Los Angeles
Boston
Records Audrey cannot live without
New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies
Ramones, Rocket to Russia
Hole, Live Through This
Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter
Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room
Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
The Feelies, Crazy Rhythms
Mark Lanegan, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
The Raincoats, Odyshape
Bikini Kill, Pussy Whipped
Nirvana, Unplugged in New York
Velvet Underground, Loaded
Team Dresch, Personal Best
Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
Audrey with Ana and Shirley, leaning over a record label in their living room, trying to help them figure out if that was an original 1979 The Raincoats vinyl label or a 1993 reprint for Rough Trade (it was in a folder of Ana’s stuff)Audrey looking at a color photo slide while cataloguing the Raincoats archive in Ana and Shirley’s kitchen. Photo: Gina Birch
Ana da Silva by Joe Dilworth, 1995, courtesy of the RaincoatsGina Birch by Joe Dilworth, 1995, courtesy of the Raincoats
We are thrilled to present an excerpt from Audrey Golden’s new book SHOUTING OUT LOUD: LIVES OF THE RAINCOATS: Read three sections from the book’s midsection about the impact the Raincoats’ music had on Olympia, Washington, in particular. It’s a wonderful snapshot of how we all discovered music in the pre-internet (basically) era and it shows how bands like the Raincoats exploded the notion of what it means to be punk.
Or come get a book at one of Audrey’s book events next week: July 17 Seattle: a book reading and a Raincoats sing-a-long at Hex Enduction Records in Seattle as part of Art Walk! July 18 Portland: Come to Powell’s Books for a book launch event featuring Audrey, Corin Tucker, former Raincoats U.S. manager Sheri Hood and Gail O July 25 NYC: Book talk and signing at Rough Trade Below in NYC July 31: MassMoca book event
U.S. edition of Shouting Out Loud
LIFE NUMBER 2
“We realized eventually that in the United States, that’s where we had the most people interested in what we do, and where we had the biggest influence,” Ana says. And so, in the rainy musical wilds of America’s Pacific Northwest, The Raincoats’ second life began.
Beautiful KAOS at 89.3 FM
Unbeknownst to the band, their second life was germinating well before they’d even broken up and their first life came to a somewhat unceremonious end. It all began at KAOS, Olympia, Washington’s independent public radio station operating in partnership with the gloriously radical Evergreen State College.
Bruce Pavitt, who’s perhaps best known as a cofounder of Sub Pop Records in Seattle, developed a lifelong interest in hyperlocal music communities once he made it out to Olympia in 1979. As he saw it, the scene in Washington’s small capital city was a place shaped by the influence of The Raincoats. When Bruce left his hometown of Chicago to attend Evergreen and joined the slate of presenters at KAOS, he discovered “the most progressive music policy in America,” and what he emphasizes is “an unexplored impact.” That story actually starts with John Foster, Bruce explains.
“John was the music director at KAOS, and his feeling was that a community radio station should play music that prioritizes music made by members of the community,” Bruce says. “So he instituted a policy that stated eighty percent of what got played at KAOS had to be on an indie label. This is where I got my real education.” Bruce started his KAOS show and zine of the same name, Subterranean Pop, out of which he eventually formed Sub Pop Records to the north, “and all this flowed out of the KAOS music policy.” Bruce got a quick introduction to the Rough Trade bands, which were central at KAOS. “Rough Trade happened to be an indie DIY, of course, but what’s also crucial contextually is that they were supporting so much music made by women.” In Bruce’s KAOS show, he pulled from the station’s vast collection that included The Raincoats, Delta 5, Young Marble Giants, and others. “‘Lola’ by The Raincoats was getting a lot of airplay,” Bruce says, “and it influenced the culture of the whole community.”
As John reflects, “The one thing I can say about Olympia in the late seventies and early eighties is that it was not a bunch of snobby scenesters; folks were very nice. Everyone who participated in the scene, playing or observing, was welcome and accepted for whatever they brought. The Raincoats embodied that ethos to us.”
Bruce cites Calvin Johnson and his band Beat Happening as particularly influenced by The Raincoats, thanks to KAOS. Calvin was playing The Raincoats on his KAOS Olympia Community Radio show Boy Meets Girl. Fellow Olympia artist and musician Lois Maffeo also draws a connection between The Raincoats and Beat Happening: “It would be pure speculation to say that Beat Happening found inspiration in The Raincoats’ music, although sonically, I can see a parallel in the skronky songs of Supreme Cool Beings, whose cassette was the first release on K Records [the label Calvin would later establish in Olympia].” Referring to Calvin specifically, Lois says, “His anti-corporate philosophy and esthetic of both music-making and music-listening are central to the Northwest scene.”
Slim Moon, who’d go on to found another influential Olympia label, Kill Rock Stars, remembers Lois’s own KAOS show Your Dream Girl as a constant source of Raincoats songs. It created a dialogue among a wide and diverse range of female artists, and there was rarely a Your Dream Girl show, if there even was one, that didn’t feature at least one Raincoats track. Lois frequently drew from The Kitchen Tapes, playing “Puberty Song,” “Rainstorm,” and “No Side to Fall In.” As for the latter, Lois was completely taken in by the sound of the electric violin on that track, explaining, “‘No Side to Fall In’ just starts with that ripping scratch sound and then matches it at the end with the bare chorus of voices singing along with, what, a stick and a can? That combination of wild sound and plain sound was catnip to me! Today!” She also loved “In Love,” the first Raincoats song she ever heard when she bought a copy of Wanna Buy a Bridge? on vinyl in a Seattle record shop.
Lois’ playlist from January 1985, courtesy of Lois Maffeo
Lois regularly featured tracks from The Kitchen Tapes for a simple reason: “I was proud to own it,” she says. “I’m not a record collector/nerd/jerk in general, but I think I was bragging a little with that. I loved that tape because it was authentic-sounding. It had all the mistakes and out-of-tune moments that only happen on live recordings and I found that really invigorating.” For Lois, the cassette was also a prized possession because it “shared songs from my absolute favorite record by The Raincoats—the ‘Animal Rhapsody’ 12-inch with ‘No One’s Little Girl’ and ‘Honey Mad Woman’ on the B-side,” so she was “delighted to hear live versions of beloved tracks.” Lois loves that single so much that, she says, “It’s the only record I have two copies of. I wanted to make sure that if I wore the first one out, I’d have a backup!”
As a KAOS presenter, Lois’s show was crucial not only in cementing the significance of The Raincoats in Olympia, but illuminating a sonic lineage of which The Raincoats were a crucial part. On Your Dream Girl shows, The Raincoats played alongside artists who came long before like Eartha Kitt, contemporaries such as Kleenex/LiLiPUT [due to legal issues, the band initially called Kleenex changed its name to LiLiPUT in late 1979] and Crass, as well as more recent hip-hop and disco artists like Taana Gardner. Lois describes her playlists as “genre-busting.” That term, she says, also emerges if you listen solely to Raincoats records. “If you hear The Roches, African electric guitars, eighties NYC hip-hop, nursery rhymes, British pop,” Lois reflects, “yep, it’s there but it’s re-patterned and made into something new. Radically different from pastiche.”
Bruce is certain: “KAOS came to shape the culture of Olympia,” and “KAOS is ultimately the roots of Raincoats appreciation in Olympia and ultimately the Northwest.”
The Pacific Northwest became ground zero for the birth of The Raincoats’ second life, centered on a vibrant new generation of feminist, anarchic, queer musicians. After KAOS playlists had enough airtime to shape the cultural framework of the small Washington city, connections to The Raincoats really became apparent. Fellow West Coaster and drummer extraordinaire Patty Schemel declares, “Olympians revere The Raincoats.”
According to Lois Maffeo, the “ethos of the music and art scene” in Olympia at that point in time was akin to what The Raincoats revealed was possible: “Make do and make magic out of nothing.” Simple enough, right? But as Lois emphasizes, “The scene in Olympia was aware that simplicity wasn’t simple”—they recognized the trick of The Raincoats’ music.
The Raincoats’ songs became part of the fabric of the city and the culture it (re)produced. “The acts of making music and making art were liberating,” Lois says. “What were we liberated from? Corporate culture. Patriarchy. Religion. Military. Expectations. And many of us heard the sound of those expectations being dissected and the sound of that freedom being enacted in the music of The Raincoats. The arrow flies from ‘No One’s Little Girl’ to Riot Grrrl pretty swiftly.”
Like Lois, Jean Smith of the Vancouver band Mecca Normal was also taking cues from The Raincoats. Although Jean was based in a city a few hours north of Olympia, her two-piece band with David Lester would, like Beat Happening and so many of the Riot Grrrl artists to come, become abidingly linked to Olympia and K Records. “Listening to The Raincoats freed me from many previously held limitations,” Jean says. “That they were women made that freedom tangible. Visceral. I could hear their like-minded affinities and encouragement, yet their approaches were all very different. They seemed to be functioning based on working fully with what they had at hand, giving it everything in terms of creativity, confidence, and vulnerability.” Jean underscores that she and David are a bit older than the Riot Grrrls who emerged out of Olympia in the early nineties; Mecca Normal’s music was important, like Lois’s KAOS show, in making Riot Grrrl possible. “The Raincoats allowed me to take inspiration, to build and maintain confidence, and some years later, to inspire the cofounders of Riot Grrrl,” says Jean, “along with The Raincoats and all those other women-fronted bands that energized a social movement that, to this day, still shows signs of being ongoing as opposed to over, in the way that rock historians like to nail things down.”
Corin Tucker during the time Olympia was discovering the Raincoats. Courtesy of Corin
Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney, who were some of those original Riot Grrrls in Olympia (with the bands Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy), confirm Jean’s words. “I always liked how The Raincoats felt deliberately and dangerously strange,” Corin says, “and that gave license to a lot of bands in Olympia, including Sleater-Kinney, to forgo traditional instrumentation. We didn’t have a bass, and often we were playing dueling melodies. The Raincoats deconstructed all these entrenched, codified ideas about music and yet remained very appealing and clever.” Carrie agrees: “I love the artiness of The Raincoats combined with this intellectual quality. The music showed a real openness to experiment within the band that I really related to, and that avant-garde element was something that really influenced Sleater-Kinney.”
As any fan knows, the band name Sleater-Kinney originates from Sleater Kinney Road that runs through Lacey, Washington, adjacent to Olympia. “We didn’t relate to that meat-and-potatoes punk rock and were always striving for something more experimental,” Carrie says, “so The Raincoats were very influential to us in that way.” Corin adds, “I don’t know if they were trying to be ugly, with a sort of dissonance, but to us, there was something so charming about that, and that charm had teeth to it. It was a kind of cloaked weaponry that Sleater-Kinney was really into.” She continues, “With Sleater-Kinney, we wanted to say, ‘Come a little closer, and out come those teeth,’ and The Raincoats did that, too. I feel like bands in Olympia wouldn’t dare be as weird as they actually were without The Raincoats, because otherwise people are too afraid to do that stuff. But The Raincoats sounded fearless.”
In 1983, Calvin wrote one of the first US Raincoats cover stories and interviews in OP magazine, in which he asked Ana what she liked to have for breakfast (she wasn’t keen to answer). John Foster of KAOS was a cofounder of OP with Toni Holm, Dana Squires, and David Rauh. The magazine was short-lived—only twenty-six issues, one for each letter of the alphabet—and the founders wanted more Raincoats. Dana, who also served as art director for the magazine, says: “They were an influence, as they sounded like they were doing what they needed to do . . . sounded natural.” Bruce Pavitt remembers Dana’s love of The Raincoats in particular. “I very specifically remember her reproducing the Odyshape cover,” he smiled. He also describes OP as an influential magazine that did in print what KAOS did in sound, ultimately reaching a bigger audience. “KAOS DJs wrote for OP,” he explains, and, “Both KAOS and OP began getting international recognition.”
Kathi Wilcox and Ana da Silva, 1993. Courtesy of Kathi Wilcox
As a fan and interviewer of The Raincoats, Calvin would ultimately be the one to introduce The Raincoats to one of the artists who permanently put Olympia on the feminist map. Tobi Vail, cofounder and drummer of Bikini Kill, “first heard The Raincoats in September 1984 because Calvin put them on a mixtape for me,” she says. She was fifteen years old.
She knew Beat Happening as a local band and had gone to see a few of their shows, but she also associated Calvin with his day job: He drove a shuttle from Evergreen State College to downtown, and that’s how Tobi got to a lot of gigs. She’d also listened to Calvin’s KAOS show and was eager to know more about some of the female artists he’d been playing. Tobi spotted him one day in downtown Olympia. “I ran up to him on the street and said, ‘You just played this song on the radio, and you said the band was all girls, and they weren’t singing in English. Who was it?!’” Calvin assumed it was Shonen Knife (an all-female Japanese pop-punk band from Osaka, who’d ultimately be released in America on K Records), but Tobi insisted it wasn’t and that she needed a mixtape. It turned out the band was the female-fronted French group The Calamities, who recorded a single eponymous LP on Posh Boy Records (a Hollywood label linked to the rise of the early-eighties punk scene in Orange County). Calvin’s mixtape included The Raincoats’ “In Love.” Tobi fell in love with The Raincoats.
She started hanging out at Calvin’s apartment where she could listen to his Raincoats records, and a couple years later got her own KAOS show. “The reason I did it was because, that way, I wouldn’t have to bother other people to tape me records,” she remembers. “I could hear all the music I wanted and listen to The Raincoats [album].” KAOS was the only place in town besides Calvin’s apartment with an original copy. “I immediately started listening to that record. It got stuck in my head, it lasted, and there was more and more to discover,” Tobi says. The song “The Void” would become her anthem of sorts, shaping her musical sensibilities as she formed bands that included the Go Team (with Calvin) and, soon after, Bikini Kill. “I was obsessed,” she admits.
Tobi didn’t actually own the record herself for several more years—British import copies from 1979 were extremely hard to come by. “I’d never seen it in a record store here ever,” she remembers, initially assuming it was because Olympia was “pretty isolated, and the record stores here had a limited selection of punk and post-punk.” When she went on tour to San Francisco in 1987, she thought she’d find it, but nothing. “As a kid in the United States, it turned out you could only have that record if you happened to be alive and buying music when it came out in 1979.” Tobi introduced her friend Kurt Cobain, who was about to become known worldwide as the frontman of Nirvana, to The Raincoats. They’d listen to them together on the cassettes they’d recorded from Calvin’s vast collection. She eventually got her own copy when Kurt and Nirvana went over to Europe. “He brought me some Wipers records from Germany, too,” Tobi recalls.
A manifesto from Ana and Gina for @wepresent
Meanwhile, in a more roundabout way, Calvin was also the link between Kathi Wilcox of Bikini Kill and The Raincoats. Around 1984 or ’85, Kathi’s stepbrother gave her the Fairytale 7-inch EP. He was a student at Evergreen and lived across the hall from Calvin, so “he was familiar with the music scene and bought all these records,” Kathi remembers. She wasn’t even in high school yet. Eventually, her stepbrother wanted to listen to his vinyl on cassette, so he brought the goods to her and asked if she’d make cassettes of them all; the upshot was she could keep the vinyl. Fairytale was in that stack. “Suddenly I had the Raincoats!” Kathi says. “I didn’t have any frame or reference for understanding their music, but that record hit me the hardest when I got into high school and was really trying to wrap my mind around what music was.” It gave Kathi a way to completely recalibrate her thinking about songs—how they’re made and what they can do. When she eventually met Tobi, they came to one another as Raincoats fans. Kathi didn’t have the self-titled LP The Raincoats, and Tobi didn’t have the Fairytale EP, so they shared their records.
Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney confirms that the apartment complex where Calvin and Kathi’s stepbrother were living was a Raincoats hotbed. “I definitely first heard The Raincoats in the Martin Apartments in Olympia, around 1994. Everyone was looking for those records,” she says. “They were just something you were searching for. And if you had a Raincoats record, you definitely showed it off in your apartment!”
“I didn’t know then, but it seems like lots of encounters people were having with our music was through tapes, and people making tapes of tapes of tapes,” Ana says. “In Portland, Olympia, I heard from Calvin of K Records that he was doing that kind of thing, and Rob Sheffield in New York, as well.”
Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill eventually made her way to Olympia to attend Evergreen State College. It was there—thanks in large part to the ethos of a city inspired by The Raincoats—that she learned without a doubt “punk is NOT a genre,” Kathleen declares. “I was already open to the idea that punk wasn’t a genre—it’s an idea!—but listening to the bands on K Records, and listening to The Raincoats, made me know that punk doesn’t have to be this in-your-face aggressive, fuck-you music. It can be this really complicated, nuanced thing.” What punk meant, Kathleen learned from The Raincoats, “was that we could do whatever the fuck we wanted, and what felt important was making the kind of music we wanted to make.”
ON THE PASSAGE OF A FEW PEOPLE THROUGH A RATHER BRIEF MOMENT IN TIME: él RECORDS
40 years since the start of él Records there is now a burst of activities commemorating Mike Alway’s pop-art label él Records. Stefan Zachrisson talks to Mark Goodall about his new book Bright Young Things. The Art and Philosophy of él Records.
”If él wasn’t a label it would be a restaurant or a bar, one of those old barswhere there’s no music at all, loads of good conversation, where you have thisspecial relationship with the barman – though not too pally – the idea ofsomething private and delicately euphoric.” A very Buñuel influenced MikeAlway quote from a lengthy Sounds feature on él Records in 1986.
The people hanging around at this metaphorical bar during five years in themid to late 1980s would other than Alway be such eccentric aesthetes asPhilippe Auclair, Nick Currie, Simon Fisher Turner, Bid, Nick Wesolowski, Cat Rees, Julia Gilbert, Matt Lipsey, Jessica Griffin, Vic Godard, Richard Preston, Karl Blake, Jim Phelan and Kevin Wright, to name just a few. During that brief time this group of people contributed to what became a reallyspecial record label.
Would-Be-Goods by Nick Wesolowski
él founder Mike Alway loved 1960s pop culture but, like many of the él musicians, cameout of the post-punk era; an environment where pretentiousness and curiosityreally could thrive. He was a&r for Cherry Red in the early 1980s, releasing the classic Pillows & Prayers compilation, introducing Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt to each other, and generally introducing ”light music” as a way forward.
Many of the él influences came from film; the name is from a Buñuel movieand directors Powell & Pressburger and Orson Welles were constantlymentioned as influences by Alway. When ”indie” was at itsmost mundande in the late 1980s Alway instead used él to create a kind ofparallel fantasy world – in an admittedly low-budget way – suggesting personas,concepts and titles for the musicians. Some of the results were gloriousfailures but mostly it really did work.
What is the legacy of él today? Most people cannot name one record that élreleased. But like many of the best independent record labels of yore él wasabout more than actual music, even though a lot of great records came out ofit. It’s a kind of fleeting spirit, which for me, regarding él, has lived on not only through a great influence on Japanese pop but also with the stylish playfulnessof someone like Tyler, the Creator.
Louis Philippe by Nick Wesolowski
So él may seem obscure but it’s not completely forgotten: Spring of 2025 seesthe release of two major retrospectives: Mark Goodall’s book Bright Young Things. The Art and Philosophy of él Records and the compilation The Rubens Room. Él Records: In Camera. Furthermore, several former él artists arereleasing new music and doing concerts (Louis Philippe, Momus, HotelArtesia, The Monochrome Set, Would-Be-Goods), while él as a name has forsome time been re-activated as an archival/reissue label.
To highlight these happenings I interviewed Mark Goodall about his book.Goodall’s also the author of Sweet and Savage, a book about mondo films,and Gathering of the Tribe about music and the occult. He co-produced anddirected the film Holy Terrors based on the stories of Arthur Machen, and is the singer/guitarist in the group Rudolf Rocker. (Text and inteview: Stefan Zachrisson)
Bid from the Monochrome Set; courtesy of Tapete Records
Chickfactor: It’s a book about él – how would you describe your relation to the label and its music?
Mark Goodall: It was only through conceptualising the book that I realised the scope of él records. Up to that point I had loved bits and pieces of their output – the first Momus LP, the Flair 89 LP, The World in Winter – and of course The Monochrome Set before that. I loved the post-punk/new wave scene and thought it was the most innovative period in pop music history since the 1960s.
What was your main motivation writing the book, the point you wanted tomake?
With the book I wanted to explore the unique qualities of the label. There were lot of indie labels, but only one él. To me, the label had a ‘philosophy’ rather than just a modus operandi that stood it apart. That came of course from Mike Alway.
él records founder Mike Alway
How would you, in short, describe that kind of “philosophy”?
The él philosophy to me seems to be:
1. The aim to create great (musical) art by synthesising other art forms, especially film, fashion and graphic design
2. The idea of creating new music by re-inventing 1960 pop sounds into a new wave
3. To combine the hit factories of the 1960s with Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ into a creative form of collaborative practice
This is kind of what my book is trying to explore.
Was there something surprising that you realized while writing the book, some new insight/understanding?
Through interviewing almost everyone involved in the label, I learned more about the working methods of the label and the artists. The collaborative nature came across in a way that was not evident. Through assembling the records as a distinct body of work, the beauty of the visual aspect of the label became more apparent.
How was it for those involved to look back and talk about their él past?Did anyone say no to being interviewed?
It was forty years ago so memories were somewhat frayed! I think the timing was right – not so long that those involved were no longer around, but long enough for any resentments to have mellowed. I think it was mostly an enjoyable experience and a confirmation of the excellence of the work that they did. The only person who did not respond to an interview was Julia Gilbert (Anthony Adverse).
If you’d pick one él artefact – a song, a record, a cover, a lyric, an image,etc – as the pivotal one, what would it be and why?
Difficult to choose as there are so many classic LPs of course – The CameraLoves Me, Choirboys Gas, Royal Bastard – but probably for me the Marden Hill Cadaquez LP is the most extraordinary combination of originality, variety and skill. In short form, the 7-inch and 10-inch sets are incredible.
Marden Hill
él was influenced by things like the past, art, movies etc and created something new. Is there anything going on culturally today that you’dsay function a bit like él did?
No, it was totally original, unique, because of that combination you mention, and while the spirit is evident in other labels and artists there is nothing like it today and probably never will be. The world has changed and could certainly do with another ‘él’ but I can’t see it. It was a product of particular historical moment…
Stefan Zachrisson is a librarian in Stockholm, Sweden, who’s also the administrator of Adeste Fideles, a Facebook group about él and writes the CORRESPONDENCE newsletter. Previously he’s been involved in the international pop underground through BCNVT, Friendly Noise and Benno.
We are thrilled to present an excerpt from the new visual history of Pulp edited by Mark Webber, who started out as a teenage fan of the band before becoming their fan club president and tour manager and then joining the band in 1995 (fan dream come true!) In addition to music, Webber is a curator of artists’ film and video and has edited and published several books on cinema.The bookgathers material from Mark’s extensive collection of ephemera and objects accumulated over the past 40 years. His memories, images, photographs, flyers, record covers, set lists, stickers, posters, press clippings, merchandise, and promo items help tell the story of the band. I’m With Pulp, Are You? also features a foreword by Jarvis Cocker, and newly commissioned essays by music writer Simon Reynolds and TheQuietus co-founder Luke Turner.
Hardcover, 288 pages, Hat and Beard Press
Text/edited by Mark Webber
Foreword by Jarvis Cocker
Additional texts by Simon Reynolds and Luke Turner Designed byMark El-Khatib
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
Here is the excerpt, reprinted with permission from the author and publisher:
The World Was Going On Outside: Sex, Pulp & Teenage Fandom
Luke Turner
“Intake, Manor Park, The Wicker, Norton …” I’m transported back to an evening after school in the mid- 1990s, Jarvis Cocker’s deep, breathy vocals in my ear; “Wombwell, Catcliffe, Brincliffe, Attercliffe, Ecclesall …” This was the sort of stuff you found on ads for premium telephone numbers in the back of magazines, then hovered over the family telephone desperate to dial but terrified of it showing up on the bill. “… Pitsmoor, Badger, Wincobank, Crookes.” At that point, Sheffield Sex City was like nothing else I’d ever heard, miles from the increasingly bland Br*tpop on the radio: eight-and-a-half-minutes long, a pulsing bassline, Candida’s spiralling keyboards and deadpan monologue contrasting with Jarvis’ more unhinged voice describing a city consumed by sex (literally, when, at the moment of climax, the Brutalist Park Hill estate is floored by a synchronised orgasm), its inhabitants led this way and that by desperation, trying to grope their way towards one another in the pre-smartphone booty call era. It was Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood via South Yorkshire and a discarded copy of Readers Wives found in a bush by the roadside.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
The local branch of Our Price Records had been the conduit to this uncanny erotica of the built environment as, in the spring of 1995, I made my way backwards through Pulp’s discography from the release of Common People. Intro, a 1993 compilation of singles released on the Gift label, was a transitional record for the band, but a revolutionary one for me. It made the band seem impossibly exotic; unravelling (like a pair of nylons) what it was to be British, to expose an urgent, seamy energy underneath. “I’d rather get my kicks down below …” – I wiggled in front of the mirror to Space, twink-minced through the park with O.U., thought of my crushes to Babies, and so on. But most of all it was Sheffield Sex City that had me reaching for the family AA Road Atlas to look up these exotic place names as if I were hunting in the dictionary for dirty words. The music papers that I stood reading in WH Smiths every Wednesday might have been going on and on about Camden, but for a while Pulp made Sheffield sound like a place where Babylon pulsed behind net curtains. I dreamed of moving there and used the excuse of a university open day to bunk off school and head north for a spot of sex tourism.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
I can even remember the Pulp uniform that I put on that morning: fading moleskin trousers, Dr Martens boots, a battered brown velvet jacket over a grey charity shop shirt ribbed with a synthetic material that was as itchy as wire wool, but I didn’t care because the collars were just the right side of ludicrous. At Sheffield station I disembarked in a fug of British Rail diesel fumes, bought a pack of 10 Bennies from the newsagent, and wandered out into the streets, Intro playing in my Walkman’s headphones, eyes up, getting the horn from the place names on municipal street signs amid the traffic and grime of the pre-gentrification city centre: “Woodhouse, Wybourn, Pitsmoor, Badger …”
It’s funny how quickly things change when you’re a teenager. Maybe Pulp were there for the late developers like me who got into music aged 14 or 15. For us, pop was never a sugary childhood infatuation, but oozed into our ears, tickled the pituitary gland, forever and only about hormones and sex. When Pulp released Razzmatazz and Lipgloss, I was still collecting tokens from cornflakes packets to post off in exchange for the model Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes that would populate my cardboard cut-out RAF base. Two years later, I was wanting to cop off with the promotional cardboard cut-out of Jarvis in the local record shop. Or perhaps that’s not strictly true. I was more of a Steve man myself, with his louche floppy hair, or Russell, with his indescribable weirdness. (I’d have gone round to look at his sunglasses collection, alright!) Jarvis was different. I didn’t want to kiss him, didn’t even want to try and be him, but he offered a design for being, a space into which me and those others who I was sure were out there in Pulp-land could learn to fit our awkward limbs.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
Discovering Pulp’s libidinous energy unlocked the heterosexual side of myself, even if confronted by the homophobia of school and 1990s British culture more generally. I always sung along with that line “Jesus, it must be great to be straight” with a different meaning than that with which it had been written.
Pulp’s dissection of the British libido was confrontational and explicit. The other boys at school didn’t get it at all, calling Jarvis a ‘freak’ and the band ‘shit,’ but who were they to throw insults, with their generic lad culture? Copies of Loaded magazine, Game On, Men Behaving Badly and Fantasy Football on the telly, tedious banter and boasts about what they’d done with girls at parties to which I was not invited. I never had any male friends who loved Pulp as much as I did. Back then and largely since, it was mostly women, all of whom burned a fairly intense and lustful flame for various members of the group, especially Cocker. At that age, it’s so easy to get your infatuations in the real world muddled up with feelings for the distant stars. Pulp even became the means of a hopeless attempt at flirtation at my Saturday job at Argos, where I desperately hoped to be put on shifts on the Elizabeth Duke jewellery counter with a girl who had an Italian surname and artfully smudged eyes. I made her a mixtape and invited her to a gig I was organising at a local rugby club, only for her to disappear out onto the pitch with one of the popular boys from school, her silver dress floating ghostly above him in the headlights of parental cars. Now my narrative is starting to sound like a bad attempt at writing a Pulp song of my own, but that’s why we fell in love with them – these songs of lust and failure were about our lives.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
“Do you remember the first time?” the lyrics asked, but not many of us were yet at the point where we could sing the reply “I can’t remember a worst time.” The moment of fumbling awkwardness was still in the future, part of the adult world of unfortunate sex that was laid out so invitingly before us. The masculinity in Pulp countered the then dominant cult of the lad, but it wasn’t a faux- sensitive and wheedling pretence to be ‘one of the nice guys’ where sentiment is never backed up by action, the sort of behaviour that has lately acquired the soubriquet ‘beta male misogyny.’ Instead, it was unflinching and honest: the bitterness and anger that comes with sex was always present, but the power went in all directions – the stories in Pulp songs were from voyeur and exhibitionist, top and bottom, both subject and object of lust and desire. There was an acceptance that sex wasn’t going to be perfect, but a promise that it could be fascinating, complicated, funny and sometimes transcendent even in its seedy banality.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
There’s often a sense, when looking at press cuttings of the day, that all this shagging meant that the media never really took Pulp quite as seriously as those of us who truly loved them did, writing about the band as if they were a Carry On film in pop form. Even in 2022, when reviewing Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop, the New Statesman claimed that during the 1990s, he “was the face of ironic detachment.” This came as a surprise to me, for whom there was nothing ironic whatsoever about Pulp. They understood the words of Oscar Wilde, that “everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Pulp knew how the teenage frustrations that we were fast outgrowing also applied to the unfriendly world outside. There was nothing ironic about how they gave so many of us so much to live by.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
Common People was all over the radio that spring. It was the soundtrack to not-really-revising for my GCSEs, to my first kiss with a girl, to that heady maelstrom of excitement, arrogance and terror that is being 16 years old. On May 22nd I went straight from school to buy the CD single the day it came out. Took it home, ripped off the cellophane, and put it on repeat for weeks. I loved the cover photo of the band in the sort of café I dreamed of haunting one day, if I could ever get out of the dull town I lived in and make it to the city. Left to right, Nick, Candida, Jarvis, Steve, Russell – five very different people who didn’t fit in, except with each other. It looked like a friendship to aspire to, a unit against the world and, given that Mark had just joined after years as a huge fan himself, it seemed not that remote from us either. Four lines of text on the back confirmed my infatuation: “There is a war in progress – Don’t be a casual(ty). The time to decide whose side you’re on is here. Choose wisely. Stay alive in ’95.” I loved that almost as much as the song, read it over and over and took it as a mantra. It didn’t feel like snobbery, back then, to be disdainful of the blokes in Ben Shermans who made Friday night pub trips more like running the gauntlet for me and my long-haired, ear-pierced, ladies- blouse-wearing friends. It felt glorious that a band who were all over the radio were sticking up for me, saying that actually I was right, that it was okay to defy mass culture, to not turn the other cheek only for it to be smashed into pissy town centre pavements at closing time.
Images from I’m With Pulp, Are You? courtesy of the author and publisher
It happened again with the next single a few months later. The tabloids might have fumed over the drug wrap pattern on the sleeve of Sorted For E’s & Wizz, but it was the text on Mis-Shapes that I read over and over: “We shall fight them in The Beaches – and The Stag and The King’s Head if it comes to that. You know the score – ten blokes with ’taches in short-sleeved shirts telling you that you’re the weirdo. Fear not brothers and sisters – we shall prevail. Live on.” The ten blokes might not have had moustaches, but they were familiar to us nonetheless, and Pulp gave us the psychic armour to withstand them. There was a lot of angry music available to teenagers at the time, from metal to skate punk and rap, but none of it really channelled that rage like Pulp did in a way that was familiar to our daily lives. From the “Pearly king of the Isle of Dogs” who “feels up children in the bogs” in Mile End, to ham-fisted geezers down the local pubs, brandy-drinking denizens of the commuter belt and, of course, a self-entitled Greek sculpture student, Pulp’s anger was for equal opportunities, aimed across British society and class structures.
Luke Turner writes about music, sexuality, nature, gender and history, is the co-founder of music and culture magazine The Quietus and the author of Men At War and Out Of The Woods, published in the USA and Canada by Greystone Books.
Happy publication day to These Things Happen: The Sarah Records Story by Jane Duffus (on Tangent Books). Jane says that “Sarah’s co-founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes were both very involved with the production of the book, which also features almost 130 interviews with band members, fans, fanzine writers, journalists etc, and very much takes a feminist and fan’s approach to the label. The book is 450+ pages, 250+ pictures, hardback, and was three years in the making.”
Author Jane Duffus says: “It’s been a long three years creating this book but, once you hold that beautiful new book in your hands, you instantly forget all the blood, sweat and tears that cropped up along the way. This may be my sixth book but the excitement never lessens when you open that initial box of books and pick one up for the first time. I always knew that this would be a big book but it just kept growing and growing. There was so much to say about this inspirational indie record label, and so many stories from the interviewees that I wanted to share, and to finally see them on the page is very rewarding. I just hope, now that the book is out in the world, that other people also enjoy it. It’s a bit nerve wracking, to be honest!” Please scroll down to read part of the chapter on something we care deeply about…
Collection of fanzines. Photo by Jon Craig
This is an excerpt from the book These Things Happen
Chapter 5: Fanzine Culture In the olden days, when the internet and email were just twinkles in the sky, the best way for music fans to share their love of the things that rocked their world was via self-published fanzines. The modern equivalent of a fanzine would be a blog but the ephemeral nature of them – and the changed means of production – creates an entirely different dynamic, so it’s not a perfect comparison.
The origin of music fanzines is commonly dated to the punk heyday of the 1970s, although fan magazines go back to the 1930s. The thinking is that fanzine writers typically have an opinion that is in opposition to that expressed in the mainstream media, hence the need to self-publish. Fanzines also enable fans of a particular thing to find and communicate with each other, thereby opening up a dialogue that would never otherwise have been possible.
The famous There and Back Again Lane sign. Photo by Sarah Records.
To buy a music fanzine, you would tape coins to bits of card and post these all around the country. You might hear about fanzines through adverts in things like NME or Melody Maker, or more commonly from the tiny slips of paper that fell like colourful inky snow from inside your most recent mail-order fanzine delivery. It was the habit of fanzine writers and flexi producers to create these tiny ads, squeeze as many as possible onto a sheet of A4, and photocopy this onto coloured paper. Then cut these sheets up and send batches of the ads to other fanzine writers to distribute. This, along with reviews in more established titles, was how we heard of other people’s fanzines. It was a very successful and introverted network of quiet people making silent contact with one another. Most of us would never meet face to face and were quite happy about that.
Heavenly. Photo by Alison Wonderland.
The other tried and tested method for selling fanzines was at gigs, so long as you lived in a town that put on gigs and you had the courage to go up to strangers and demand they hand over 30p in exchange for your photocopied musings. Mark Taylor was the editor of the popular Smiths Indeed fanzine, which he ran from his parents’ home in Bristol and sold all over the country. However, he remembers one of the pitfalls of having a successful fanzine: “I didn’t think about the weight of coins after selling 100 or 200 fanzines. I’d have to try and get through the gig without my jeans falling down!” Although this level of success wasn’t something most fanzine writers needed to worry about.
Jane Duffus and Matt Haynes at the Bristol, UK, book launch last week. Photo by Neil Phillips.
Chris Tighe and Robert McTaggart mostly sold their fanzine Far Out And Fishy at gigs and, according to Chris, would “just walk up to hundreds of total strangers, butting into their conversations, sticking a piece of printed paper under their noses, saying ‘Hey, would you like to buy a fanzine? It’s only 25p!’ and getting told to ‘fuck off’ once in a while.” He adds: “I wasn’t exactly an outgoing person and I’ve got a slight stammer, so it baffles me that I was able to do it.”
Rob Sekula of 14 Iced Bears tells me: “It was great to see fanzines being sold at gigs, they added to the excitement. Similar to how football programmes added to the sense of occasion when I went to Tottenham as a kid. They were a more immediate, less industry way to find out about good new bands and discover things like great records and bands from the past, from people who had similar tastes. Along with John Peel they were pretty useful in the days before the internet.”
Davey Woodward from The Brilliant Corners adds: “I always thought fanzines were a great thing to happen because I felt we were very close to going back to a time where big multinational labels just ruled the roost in terms of what happened. And I think, in those Thatcherite 1980s, there was a definite reaction against that. People thought, ‘No, I am going to do my own thing, I’m going to make it the way I want to make it.’ It was important in the wider scheme of things to create a scene for a group of people.”
Temple Meads postcards. Photo by Sarah Records.
Simon Barber, bassist with The Chesterfields, agrees: “Fanzines were so important. The difference between fanzines and the music press is you only write about something in a fanzine if you love it. If there’s a good review in the music press, you don’t know if it’s been paid for.” He adds: “I bought every fanzine going. If someone was going round a gig selling a fanzine, I’d buy it, those guys were the best.” Simon still has all his fanzines and kindly loaned me two enormous boxes of them while I was researching this book.
Ric Menck of The Springfields was based in Illinois and says: “The fanzine network meant everything to me back then. I was more interested in fanzines than the British weeklies. The fanzine writers weren’t trying to be cool. They just wrote about what they loved. Before computers came around, fanzines were the way to hear about cool new stuff. The fanzine network was always crucially important to underground music.”
Collection of fanzines. Photo by Jon Craig.
Influential fanzines that came in the years immediately preceding Sarah included the following three, all of which certainly made an impact on readers and bands. Their editors also all went on to make their mark on the world of pop culture in one way or another. Tellingly, these are all by men.
Attack on Bzag was run by James Brown from Leeds, who would go on to write for NME and Sounds, edit troublesome lads’ mag Loaded and men’s monthly GQ. He later become editor-in-chief for the Sport Newspaper Group which, despite the name, has nothing to do with football but everything to do with topless women and absurd sex stories.
Meanwhile, John Robb from Lancashire was running Rox when he wasn’t in punk band The Membranes. John told online magazine JSNTGM: “The best fanzines were out of control, quite literally out of control! They wrote in their own style about their own music and were not filtered by the music business … I love cut and paste artwork which very much matched the cut and paste nature of the punk and post punk music.” John went on to write for Sounds, Melody Maker and various national newspapers. These days he runs the music website Louder Than War.
Jerry Thackray launched a fanzine that was called The Legend! and – bizarrely – he also put out the first single on Creation. After his fanzine finished, Jerry wrote for NME (as The Legend!), before moving to Melody Maker and adopting the pen name of Everett True. “I guess I was quite idealistic,” says Jerry now. “But maybe that’s what separated some of the fanzine writers apart. Some of us really did believe that passionately in what we wrote about.” Talking about the way that he adopted a different approach to many of his contemporaries, Jerry says: “I saw all these post-punk fanzines and they all had interviews in. And I was like, ‘These interviews are fucking crap, they’re just really bad versions of the music press’. I couldn’t speak to people and it just so happened that music was easily the thing I was most passionate about so I wrote about music, and that’s all I’ve ever done my entire life.” He still writes about music and teaches music journalism in London.
To continue reading the section called Fanzine Culture, order the book via Tangents in the UK or Rough Trade in the U.S.
Blueboy performing at the Bristol, UK, book launch last week. Photo by Neil Phillips.Even As We Speak meeting radio DJ John Peel. Photo by Even As We Speak.Secret Shine at the Bristol, UK, book launch last week. Photo by Neil Phillips.
Like this zine’s founders, Richard Houghton knows a thing or two about being a fan of the Wedding Present. Published last Friday, The Wedding Present: All the Songs Sound the Same collects more than 300 stories from fans, friends and current/former members of TWP, all of whom discuss favorite recordings, along with loads of previously unseen images from bandleader David Gedge’s archive. Gedge even coedited the 336-page hardcover book along with Houghton.
Photographer unknown / courtesy of the Wedding Present
Gedge says: ‘When I’m asked to choose my favourite of the songs I’ve written, I never know what to say. It’s like asking who your favourite child is! How could I pick just one? However, I did think it would be interesting to see which songs fans would select, and why. There’s quite a few from which to choose … When an audience member requests one of the 280-plus songs that we haven’t rehearsed for that particular evening’s set I usually sympathise with them by saying, “I know, I know… there are just too many classics, aren’t there?!”’
Photo by Jessica McMillan
The songs are discussed, explicated and championed by all the superfans in the book, including Sir Keir Starmer, Peter Solowka, and Mark Beaumont, along with CF editor me (Gail), who discusses the origins of the Pavement Boy comic (it’s Wedding Present related) and road trips to NYC with Pam Berry, Mike Slumberland and Dan Searing where we were listening to Seamonsters. We asked Richard a few questions about the new book.
How did this book come about? David Gedge and I worked together on a book called Sometimes These Words Just Don’t Have To Be Said which was published in 2017. That was fans talking about seeing The Wedding Present in concert. But lots of people mentioned songs that were favourites of theirs, and I thought a book of people writing about their favourite Wedding Present songs would be a fun idea. I pitched it to David and he agreed to give it a go.
Gedge in the studio / photo by Jessica McMillan
How long has it taken to get made? I started compiling the book in 2018, so it’s been five years. It took a while to gather together all the material. I also had access to David’s personal archive and scanning in images and getting clearance to use some of those (including David deciding which ones he was happy to see in print) also took a while. And then we had to find a slot in David’s busy schedule, as he’s been publishing his autobiography in comic strip form, and we needed to avoid launching the book when it might clash with the release of one of those volumes.
Photographer unknown / courtesy of the Wedding Present
Where can people get it? In the US? Europe/rest of world? The book is available in hardback via Amazon and also via Spenwood Books (who ship worldwide). The hardback is also available in the UK and Ireland via your local bookshop, although you may have to ask them to order it in for you. But the book is also available in paperback via Barnes & Noble in the US, meaning fans only have to pay domestic shipping.
Will there be any book events? David and his bass player, Melanie Howard, are doing a semi-acoustic gig at Resident Music in Brighton on Friday May 5 at 6.30pm BST. More details are available here:
All The Songs Sound The Same is published on 28 April 2023 and available to order now from Spenwood Books.
2013 with Marc Riley
David Lewis Gedge lives in Brighton and is the founding member, lead singer and guitarist for the semi-legendary indie band The Wedding Present, who were founded in 1985, and his ‘other’ band, Cinerama. He is also the author of several books, including two volumes (so far) of his illustrated autobiography, Tales from the Wedding Present.
Richard Houghton lives in Manchester and is the author of 20 music books, including authorised titles on The Wedding Present, The Stranglers, Simple Minds, OMD, Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention. His People’s History series of music books is published by Spenwood Books.
David Gedge with Sean HughesPhoto by Jessica McMillanPhoto by Jessica McMillan
If you’re reading this, you probably already know who Michael Galinsky is. We interviewed him back in 2021 (and also in our paper zine) when he was putting together an art show, and he posts zillions of photos of all your favorite bands from the olden days in NYC and Hoboken on his socials. He makes films and TV shows and was in Sleepyhead. He was 20 years old when he drove across the U.S. making these images. He originally made a book called Malls Across America (Steidl, 2010), which is out of print. So he made his own new mall book, The Decline of Mall Civilization, in 2011. He is in the midst of crowdfunding the second edition of The Decline of Mall Civilization, so we wanted to share some of his 1989 photographs shot in malls across America, which have gone viral umpteen times. Interview by Gail / Photos by Michael Galinsky
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Chickfactor: Let’s start with the basics about the book(s). Michael Galinsky: I created this project when I took a color printing class in 1989. It was at NYU, but it was not in the art school. It was in the education school. I didn’t feel like I was an art student. I had this idea that I wasn’t that kind of creative person and the way that I took photos was more observational, which didn’t seem like art, but it also didn’t feel like journalism. I was going to a photo bookstore a few times a week, going through all these books and figuring out what I liked. What I found I liked was mostly stuff that was documentary in style but wasn’t really a documentary—so it was folks like Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand. People who were observing the world, but from kind of a specific and interesting point of view that wasn’t so specific and interesting that it drew attention to their prowess as a technical shooter. I was really annoyed by technical stuff. It almost always ended up feeling like advertising copy or something, or drawing attention to this precision stuff that I wasn’t interested in. There was this connection between photography and music, and what I was mostly photographing at the time was shows. I was just trying to figure out what it was to be a photographer. a friend who was a photo student looked my photos, and he was like, “you should be trying to figure out what you’re shooting.” That was such great advice, to be thinking of the frame as a frame. My photo education was this bookstore where I looked at stuff, and then the first class I had was this color photography class and the teacher was awesome. Her first assignment was to watch River’s Edge and think about the color, the way it’s used and what it’s trying to say. Keanu’s best work probably. By far. It’s just a weird, crazy movie but it made me think, how are the images being used, and how is the camera being used? So even in photography, it started making me think about storytelling. I had to have a project. My girlfriend went to college on Long Island. I was visiting her, and we went to the mall, and I was like, “Oh my God, I have my project.” I shot like a roll that week. I went back the next week. My teacher was like, “this is great, you should continue this project.” So, I drove across the country, I took pictures all over the place. No idea what the fuck I was doing.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Which route did you take? I went with my friend Sebastian; first we drove from Chapel Hill to Columbus, OH, because my aunt lived there. Then we went to Chicago, where we stayed with Gene Booth, and he took us to some malls and then we went to Detroit, where we met my friend Tom, and he took us to some malls. Then we just hightailed it across the country. I think we stopped in Wisconsin, but we didn’t find a mall. We just kind of stumbled upon places. We got to San Francisco after going up through Seattle and down and then our car got broken into; thankfully, we’d camped on the side of the road the night before and the car was a fucking mess. I had a bag with the film in it and the ones that were shot had not been separated from the unshot ones. That night I separated them out and I stuck that (shot) bag under the front seat. The other film got stolen. My friend was like, “I’m done.” It’s hard to travel, so we drove from San Francisco 40 hours straight to Saint Louis, shot a couple malls there. We did stop once near Denver, in a mall in Aurora, Colorado, but literally didn’t sleep. One of us slept, the other drove. What kind of chemicals were in your body to be able to do that? Just caffeine? A lot of coffee and cokes. When you got tired of driving, you just switch seats. If you can’t keep your eyes open, you can’t keep your eyes open. Originally there was no interest in the project. I had no concept of how you do something with work when you have it. I went to one gallery where they literally laughed at me. They’re like, “these are pictures of people in malls. Yeah, it’s not really for us.” I just felt ashamed and weird, and I never did anything with them. I showed them once when we (Sleepyhead) played with Guided By Voices at Threadwaxing. I set up a projector and I projected them on the back wall. And then they went back into the box.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
In 2010 I put them online and they went crazy. I found a box of the slides. I had two boxes, which I thought were the best ones. I started scanning those. Some of the other ones, all the rejects, are the best ones. They didn’t used to mean anything, but now they do. They’re the wide shots and stuff. I didn’t think those were important at the time. I brought them back to New York. I did a Kickstarter and that ended up being a book called Malls Across America, which went viral again when it came out and sold out. It’s hard to get now and what happened was because they didn’t reprint it. When it was going viral, this designer came to me and said, “hey, I have this imprint on Steidl or Rizzoli, would you like to do one of those?” He wanted to look at the slides. He wasn’t even a guy who’s ever on the Internet, but so many people contacted him. He was like, “OK, let’s do a book.” We could do it on Rizzoli. It will be in the malls, or we could do it on Steidl and then you could make this amazing book. You probably won’t get paid, but it’ll be the most beautiful book ever. I knew who Steidl was because I’d filmed a conversation between him and Robert Frank at the New York Public Library. So I was like Rizzoli, it should be in the malls. He’s like, OK. The next day I was at Hot Docs film festival and this guy I was with says, “let’s go see this movie: How to Make a Book with Steidl.” I was like, “you’re kidding.” The first movie there was him making books with Robert Frank. I was like, “OK, let’s do it on Steidl,” which ended up being a nightmare. They took forever; they printed a beautiful book. They didn’t see me as the artist, they saw the designer, Peter Miles, as the artist. It was his project to them. So, they didn’t let me come to help make it. Then I had 300 books to send to backers, and they charged me like $25 a book. But at that point, Kickstarter, you didn’t add in shipping. So, I had to ship these books all over the world. It cost me more to do this than I raised for making the books. So, it was kind of a nightmare.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Malls Across America was all double page spreads and it was meant to be lay flat, but they didn’t. The printing itself is unbelievable. You can’t believe that this is a printed book. I mean, it looks so beautiful. The paper is so thick. I was told it was going to lay flat. I wasn’t there and it didn’t happen. People still appreciate that book. It was like The Times top ten list and stuff like that. It’s out of print. And if they want to reprint it, I will let them. But they did also destroy a bunch of my slides because they wet plate scanned them, and I was like, it’s Steidl, I don’t need to check them. And then when I replied to rescan them for this book, I found some of them are all covered in mold. Steidl wouldn’t give me their scans until I explained that to them. They did it as a wet plate scan, meaning they got wet and then didn’t dry them properly so when they put them back in, they were moldy. I would have them do the book again if they wanted to because I’d like it to be out. I’d like them to do a second printing. But they didn’t and it’s fine. What I’m going to do next is make a book that combines the best of both books.
I didn’t feel like I had the agency to like kind of reprint the book that they designed. So I made an entirely new book with entirely new images, and that book was called The Decline of Mall Civilization, which, as anybody in your audience knows, is a reference to the Penelope Spheeris series. I was really into those movies. It made sense that I was documenting in the same way as maybe she did, in an observational way that wasn’t judgmental and was open to whatever it was, even if some of it seemed a little silly. And so I made that book, I did a Kickstarter and that sold out immediately. So that book now goes for $500 like the first one. Then I met with a publicist in Brooklyn, and I was like, “listen, I’m going to make this go viral.” And she was like, “Yes, everybody believes that.” I’m like, no, no, really. I was like, please make sure they print enough. She was like, “OK.” The Kickstarter was 2011 and this was 2013, so I had a bunch of really angry backers, and I got them to all them. But here’s the thing: The book also, because it was priced pretty cheap, actually they priced it at like $36, even though they charged me $25. One article in Gizmodo had a like an Amazon clicker, it sold well over 600 copies. It also talked about The Americans; it sold 75 copies of that. It sold out so fast that it didn’t even go to stores. It never went to stores in the US, like no stores were able to get it. And then they said, “OK, yeah, yeah, we’ll reprint it but then they didn’t.” So that’s why it costs so much now (from $500 to $4000). A few years later, I made a new book, which is entirely my own. All new images, laid out differently, Tae (Won Yu) designed it.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Recently, this website called Chasing the 80s made a reel of the book, and it just went crazy. It got like 600,000 views. So, I was getting crushed with requests for The Decline, and I don’t have it. And the price was going up even more. I was like, OK, I already have the printer, I already have the drop shipper. I’m just going to do another Kickstarter because these people want it so badly and it doesn’t seem fair to kind of be like “you can’t have it.” I spent a lot of time looking at older books of older photos that resonated with me, even though I hadn’t been in that time. I was really into music at the time and reading about old music. I was aware that if you’re looking at Television pictures, someone was there, and they were taking those pictures and nobody else was. I started to go to shows and take pictures of bands that I liked but I wouldn’t do it if anybody else was taking pictures because film was expensive and I was in my head, it was like, this is important, it needs to be documented. That’s how I felt about the malls. You never saw anybody in the mall with a camera and I knew they would go away, and I thought, this is going to be interesting in a while. Now, 30 years later, it has a much deeper resonance.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
What was it about that original mall that made you think this was a good idea? Generally, people didn’t know you were photographing them. Right. I was shooting from the hip, and I was doing it like as if I was … quite immediately it felt like this is what America is. I was thinking about Robert Frank’s The Americans and he shot so much in diners and honkytonks, like if he was going across America now he would be shooting in malls. But I also thought of William Eggleston, if he was doing it in malls, he would be doing it in color like William Eggleston because photography expands, and color had become possible and had become an art form. I was kind of combining those two elements in my head and I didn’t have a lot of great technical prowess, but I was also taking a lot of anthropology, religious studies classes, sociology. So, I was thinking like the way you want to do this is without judgment, even though was a judgmental punk rock motherfucker and I hated the mall, I was like, that’s not the way to make this work.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
A lot of people in places with malls didn’t have other options. They don’t live near cafes or pubs. It’s where I worked as a teenager. Has anyone in the photos contacted you? Tell us a story about any of those people. There’s a picture of two couples, like an old couple looking one way and a young couple looking another way on a bench. And it’s almost like kind of mirror images of these couples. And I was like, oh, that’s great. I was on my Facebook page for 10 years and just before the book came out, someone was like, “hey, that’s me.” She came to the opening and we started talking at a signing at Dashwood Books in New York. Mike McGonigal was there. Tae was there. My friend Jimmy was there. Suki was there. The woman I had photographed was like “Oh my God, like two years before that, I had a pink liberty Mohawk.” She said her favorite band was the Butthole Surfers, and half the people at the opening realized we had all been at the same Butthole Surfers show at the Ritz in 1987.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Once I studied all the Top 40s and Billboard 100s from every year of my lifetime and the late 80s had the worst popular music. What did these malls had in common, what was the vibe? The malls all had a sense of placelessness. I took a couple pictures outside a mall, but they all look the same outside and they all look the same inside. When I got back, I tried to write down the names of all the malls. Like I could kind of tell from a set where it was. Sometimes I couldn’t even and so I’d write that. But then when I had to scan them, I had to take all the images out. So now I don’t know where they’re from, but I can usually tell by the floors is the most telling sign. Woodfield Mall had amazing architecture. Southdale Mall in Minneapolis was one of the very first malls. So that was kind of lucky. I stumbled upon that, and it was designed by Victor Gruen, who designed the first malls. But also, what was weird is there’s a mall in Vancouver, WA, looked just like one in Columbia, MO, it was literally the same with all the same places in the food court. It was such a weird, shocking thing.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Have you ever had a problem with somebody you photographed asking you to remove it? Once or twice, someone didn’t like the way they looked. Most people are happy to have it documented. I haven’t had any issues with this project, but I’ve had it with other things. It’s confusing because one of the important aspects of a free culture is that we should be free to make images in a public space. I mean, that’s the law. No one has the right to say “you can’t take my picture” if you’re out in public. You can’t then turn around and like use it to sell something, but you can make art out of it. And that’s important. But it’s also important to be respectful of what other people desire but trying to balance that out with public needs. there are people who do it problematically. At the same time, if you look at what’s so important to our culture, if we didn’t have Vivian Maier and Robert Frank, these things are important for understanding our culture in the future.
Photographs by Michael Galinsky, 1989.
Things are so much more politicized now. People have often said to me, “hey, don’t take my picture” and I’ll try to honor that. But when it’s violent and they grab your camera, they get in the way of you photographing or talking to someone else, and they’ll disrupt it, they also don’t want to be seen. It’s complicated and important for the free flow of information that we allow these things to happen. We are in such a weirdly politicized moment that I’m less interested in doing anything political anymore, and it’s hard to find the value in a lot of this stuff.
Do you have any tips for photographers who want to make their own book or crowdfund? Number one, be patient. Shoot a lot. Be Organized. Double back everything up and take the time to put them in a folder with a date and some keywords so that you can find stuff later, which I didn’t do. I did kind of organize my negatives back in the day, but not that well. The main power of photography is it captures something that will be gone. It captures a moment that will not be repeated. Don’t launch until you’ve already created a lot of connectivity, so people who will share it, websites that will share it because without networks, without people sharing the work, it’s difficult. There was so much demand for this that I set up a sign up for an e-mail. So, the first day of this campaign we already made 50% of the money. So, it relies on having people willing to share and want to back what you’re doing. Someone will share it; I’ll see it get shared and then there’s two sales. So, it really does impact it. So, make sure that the people you have as allies are going to step up and be an ally.
Many of you already know Jude Rogers for her wonderful music writing in the Guardian, the Quietus, the NME, and formerly Word and Smoke fanzine. Her 2022 memoir, The Sound of Being Human, is excerpted here on our very site: Read some of her chapter about being a super-fan of R.E.M. as a teenager. Her book is the rare memoir that manages to tell her story and teach us about the science of how music impacts our brains in a way that is both personal and universal. Here she talks about the book, which is just out in the U.S. and a perfect holiday gift for everyone you know, her own music history, her new podcast Songbook, which dissects music books, and tons more! Interview by Gail O’Hara / photographs courtesy of Jude Rogers
Jude watching Neneh Cherry at the Big Chill Fest, 2011
chickfactor: Tell us about your childhood and teen years. What music sources were you finding back then? Jude Rogers: I was a big pop fan when I was really little, graduating to being a bit of an indie kid essentially at the exclusion of everything else for a while like a typical teenager, before I fell in love with all kinds of electronic music, back in love with pop, then in love with folk, et cetera et cetera. My first favorite band were R.E.M., who I talk about in very—what’s the word I’m looking for?—gushing teenage detail. From when I first bought Out of Time, that little trip to a huge Virgin Megastore and seeing this prized object on the shelves, and unfurling the concertina of liner notes, to my absolute love of Michael Stipe, I loved writing about that journey of fandom, when you’re watching videos and replaying them and listening to songs and the lyrics are just for you. How you’re sort of controlling that narrative in a way and the power that you have is really interesting, especially for teenage girls. You’re accessing other worlds and shaping your future along with that.
I found a lot of music through TV when I was a young kid, through Saturday morning British television and pop stars that would appear there for interviews, people like Adam Ant, George Michael, Neneh Cherry—who I found through Top of the Pops, the big British Top 40 chart show—and Kylie Minogue. I grew up in the ’80s, which was the time when the pop video became obviously gargantuan in its importance, its relevance, its budgets. Then in the ’90s, I fell forradio, which I write about with much love in my book too. Taping off the radio, especially taping cassettes off my friend Dan, whose Scottish sailor dad got a job parking ships in the United Arab Emirates, of all things, after he left the navy, and he’d bring us back dodgy pirate copies of PJ Harvey albums, Tori Amos albums, loads of stuff. I was quite into CDs in the mid-’90s too. Any way I could find music I’d find it. Oh, and buying 7-inches from Sullivans Record Shop in Gorseinon, the tiny town next to the village where I lived—it was my local tiny record shop, where I bought loads of singles and albums. I remember buying Come on, Feel the Lemonheads there and Elastica’s first album the week they came out and being very excited.
Sticker of Neneh Cherry on her high school maths book (she was 12)
Tell us about the book. The book is out just in the US and published by Hachette. It came out in November in the U.S. It’s been out in the UK since April. Yeah, it’s got some really great press. Ann Powers loves it, hurray! And lots of other American people too, which is cool. It’s about how songs shape our lives in so many ways, taking me through the story of my life, from my first memory to the death of my father when I was five, through childhood, adolescence, crushes, falling in love, becoming a journalist, parenthood, grief and growing up—all soundtracked by songs. I speak to neuroscientists, psychologists, fandom experts and so many other people to find out why songs shape us so intrinsically, comforting us, enthralling us, propelling us back to the distant past, and into different future lives.
Jude, age 15, in her R.E.M./Evan Dando/Nirvana/Britpop bedroom
Tell us about the teenage brain on music (or your teenage brain on music). Which pop stars stayed with you and are you still fans of today? I talk about this in detail in my book with the amazing neuroscientist Catherine Loveday. I love the part where she talks about another neuroscientist who went into an fMRI scanner to see what happened to her brain when she had an orgasm—she made herself have an orgasm—and the same bits of the brain get activated when we listen to our favorite parts of music. I think that says a lot! We really respond to music in that way when we’re teenagers because our brain is developing at this incredible rate—and we still remember that intensity when we’re older. I can listen to Automatic for the People and I’m in some sort of mad, beautiful reverie still. I love it.
What is the essence of the relationship between musician and fan? It can be all kinds of things, but at its best it can be a love story, can’t it? You fall in love with a band or artist’s way of expressing themselves, their delivery, their lyrics, the way they craft music. It’s quite extraordinary. It’s not really with them as a person, it’s with this abstract but incredibly concrete thing that they have created. To share that with people is quite something. It’s funny having written a book and I’ve had lots of people at festivals come up to me and say, “God, I loved your book, it was great” and that’s wonderful, but it is weird thinking that people get really moved by something that you’ve made. What must that be like for a massive musician or somebody who’s engaged with a larger community of fans? And music works differently to words—it activates more parts of the brain and it encourages your sense of personal identity aside from your family, as well as your social sense when you’re interacting with others. Music is very strange and magical because our reaction to it is emotional and it’s profound and worth sharing. It’s the stuff of life for people. It’s intense. The essence of the relationship between music and fan, musician and fan, is intensity.
What is your favorite anecdote or quote from a scientist you interviewed in your book? Definitely the orgasm one, although I still love the experiment about “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in the chapter about babies in utero and how some babies remembered specific versions of the song after they were born. For my UK launch party for the book back in April, the amazing DJ and musician Richard Norris—who I interview in the book elsewhere about music and healing and how music can comfort us in times of trauma—did this amazing mix of me reading a part of the book with versions of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in the background. I also did a reading from the last chapter about “I Trawl the Megahertz” against an instrumental mix of the song that was structured the way that the rises and falls of the song could have met with my chapters. It was magical doing that. I really want to do that again. Richard and I are thinking we might record it actually, cause it just works so perfectly.
I had a relative with Alzheimer’s years ago who seemed to respond to music more than anything else. What did you learn about how music stimulates memory? I love the chapter about music in later life, in which my main interviewees are two of my best friends, for whom music and memory is hugely important. One is the wonderful writer Kat Lister, who wrote an amazing book called The Elements about being her first year being a widow. She was married to the wonderful music writer Pat Long, who many chickfactor readers will know from the NME and other places. Wonderful guy. I talked to her about music and funerals. Pat knew he was dying, he had cancer, and he chose the songs for his funeral. In that chapter I interviewed her along with my friend Jess George, one of my very best friends, who works in dementia care as an occupational therapist—she talked to me about her working experience of music and memory with her patients, how music is absolutely one of the last things to go from your mind. And I also talked to an amazing palliative care doctor called Mark Taubert, who in 2016 wrote this amazing letter to David Bowie after David Bowie’s death thanking Bowie for his album, Black Star, which stimulated conversations in his palliative care practice with patients. A song kind of gets timestamped really into a lot of other sensory information in our heads. My chapter about “Only You” performed by the Flying Pickets talks about this as well. I wanted to know how and why it is that when I hear that song, I don’t just remember my father, I remember the last time I saw my father, where we were, the doorway, our whole world—and I do a lot of digging into research and doing interviews to find out why.
Jude and her best pal Dan C at Pulp in 2011
How did you start out as a music writer? Who are some other folks you learned from along the way? Literally? I used to pick up the Top 40 charts from a shop called Woolworths in Llanelli, the small Welsh town nearest to where I grew up, where I used to work at the weekly newspaper on Saturday mornings. I was in my mid-teens and one of my tasks was to go to Woolworths, pick up the charts and type it up. So, if that counts as music writing, then there! Otherwise, it was through starting a fanzine when I was 24 with a friend of mine I had got to know through going to gigs—a guy called Matt Haynes, who I’m sure indie fans and chickfactor readers know. Matt was one of the cofounders of Sarah Records and later Shinkansen. I’d become a fan of a Shinkansen compilation, Lights on a Darkening Shore, not long after moving to London in my early 20s, met Matt at a gig at a merch table and started chatting about my new hometown. I was new to London and a bit obsessed with weird little secret stories about the city and he was born in London and knew lots of odd, geeky things. We thought, let’s make a fanzine about London (Smoke)—like a love-letter to it—and we did that in 2003, and it ran for years. I sent a copy to a music, film and books magazine called Word, where it was featured, then they asked me if I wanted to write for them, and six months later, in September 2003, I’d given up my horrible job, taken a pay cut of half my salary to go make tea, open envelopes, and hang around in the Word offices. I quickly got loads of reviewing work and started learning a bit more, but yeah, that’s how it started. I was with these amazing journalists, UK editors Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who had been TV hosts in Britain of Live Aid and used to present a show called the Old Grey Whistle Test. They’re a really funny double act. There was an amazing guy called Andrew Harrison, still a really good friend, who is one of the best editors I’ve ever had. He was editor of the brilliant Select magazine in the UK in the mid-1990s, my period of reading it, and at Word he was my features editor. I couldn’t quite believe it. Paul Du Noyer, who I write a lot about in my book, was the reviews editor, an amazing quiet, clever, incredibly funny Liverpudlian who mentored me. Plus, lots of other great colleagues including the art director Bad Keith and ’70s Mike, the production editor. There were all these characters. It was amazing.
What are some funny stories from interviewing musicians or engaging with music you’re writing about or seeing live? Lady Gaga once danced over my lap in her pants, bra and leather jacket while filling my glass with whisky—this was backstage in the London O2 Arena in 2010, and she was previewing her new album to me and a few other broadsheet journalists like Caitlin Moran. The next day I was working as a lecturer, and the kids couldn’t believe where I’d been! When I interviewed Kylie Minogue, I asked her about her Welsh roots—I’m from Wales—and we ended up talking about her grandma who still lived in the Welsh valleys, and Kylie tried to say this incredibly long place name in Wales from North Wales, which I won’t say into the tape, but she did it brilliantly. That was funny. Then there was the whole meeting your heroes, not sleeping before the interview scenario that I had with Michael Stipe, my teenage hero. That’s chapter five of my book! Did it go horribly wrong? It didn’t go horribly wrong, but the buildup to it was absolutely terrifying. I loved writing about that. ¶ I didn’t write in the book about my crowdsurfing fingernail-down-the-arm injury that lasted for 10 years after seeing Sonic Youth at Reading 1996 but maybe that’s one for the US paperback!
Did you ever receive a mixtape from someone and spend hours deciphering its meaning?Of course. I’m a woman who grew up in the ’90s!
R.E.M. superfan Jude and Michael Stipe
Was there a time when you had a demystification moment, where you saw a musician you admired turn out to be a not-great person? Do tell. This isn’t quite what you’re asking, but before I was a journalist, when I saw Michael Stipe live on a stage and he was a human being—which I also write about in the book—that was such a weird thing to me. It also didn’t help that this was R.E.M. in the Monster album phase, which did not fit in really with my love of the mysterious R.E.M. of Automatic for the People! Also my hero was being shared with lots of other people—but he’s mine!—and there were those people there just singing and not really listening … that was a weird demystification moment. Meeting people, I’ve been pleasantly surprised, to be honest, most of the time. I guess I haven’t met anybody who’s that unpleasant. Marianne Faithfull was as amazing as you’d hope she’d be, quite formidable, but also quite wonderful. Chrissie Hynde is somebody I thought was fantastic. I was a bit scared beforehand, but we got on really well and she did a painting of me! And at the end, she just took me into her little studio in her surprisingly modest home in a not particularly lovely part of London. And yeah, she did a painting of me, which is now on the side of my office behind some books because I don’t know what to do with it! My husband keeps saying I should have it like behind my desk like a big boss in a film—you know, like an oil painting of a tyrant! He’s joking, obviously. But it’ll probably end up, you know, in the loo, where it will have to be stared at people while they’re having some downtime!
I didn’t have a great time interviewing Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys, who wasn’t having a great day—so much so that I told him off. He clearly didn’t want to be interviewed—I was speaking to him for the NME—and the interview ended with me saying, “Alex, come on, you know, you didn’t have to do this interview.” I gave him a proper Welsh mum dressing down, told him off! But it’s probably not great being interviewed by 10,000 music journalists every day when you’re having a bad day, is it? I’m getting more sympathetic in my dotage.
You grew up when the internet was changing the way we interacted with music as fans. How do you see kids (your own?) now engaging in new ways that are completely different from your experience as a young fan? I sent my first e-mail when I was 18 and didn’t get an e-mail address until I was 20, so I’m probably in the last age group of Western people to have a childhood and adolescence without the internet. I’m fascinated by how kids engage in new ways with music today. My son is 8 1/2. I write about him a lot in my book. Being his mom made me think about music in lots of new ways and very much inspired writing this book in many respects. But he’s now at the age where he has his own playlist—it’s called “110% best ever songs,” which I love. And I’m just profoundly jealous that he can hear the radio and say “put this on my playlist” and instantly any piece of music from the past 50, 60, 70 years he can put on it. If you told me that when I was 8, it would have just been the most space age cosmic idea. His favorite song is “Come On, Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners—not encouraged by me although I do love that song—which he heard on the radio, and there’s stuff like Dr. Feelgood’s “Roxette” next to Ed Sheeran’s “Shivers”, Olivia Rodrigo and loads of modern pop. I’ve been quite enjoying getting into chart pop with him now. We now listen to Radio 1, the UK’s chart pop station. It’s been really fun. But yeah, just talking to him about the way I’d spend loads of money to get music when I was young makes me feel so ancient. CDs were like 15 pounds when I was at university. That’s where my student loans went! But kids still engage with music—just in a much more instant way. I know anecdotally from friends with older kids that many of them aren’t as tied to albums as we used to be. But if the world of music was at your fingertips, I’m not surprised!
What are the tools you use now to engage with or find new music? Apps or analog? I do a lot of rummaging around Bandcamp and SoundCloud to find stuff, which especially helps me write my folk music column for the Guardian. I also have friends who make playlists. My best friend Dan Cuthill, who I mentioned earlier, still has a playlist of new stuff that he updates all the time and I dip into that. My friend Kathryn who I mention in the Prefab Sprout chapter who does the same. And my friend Ian Wade, who I used to DJ with … you know, trusted friends are my guides. But reading The Guardian, Pitchfork, specialist sites like Tradfolk, blogs, listening to Radio 1 and Radio 6/BBC 6 Music over here is what I usually do. And Radio 3, which is classical and newer classical plus experimental as well.
The Q with Jude’s McCartney interview. She interviewed him minutes after she realized she was miscarrying.
What are some reactions or stories you got from people who read your book and wanted to share their tales with you? I was very excited by getting responses from people saying, yes, I get this, I understand this! I’ll get the famous people out of the way first. Ian Rankin, the thriller writer, loved it and was very moved by my chapter when I talk about my miscarriage. That part seems to have affected a lot of people, especially when I talk about literally where it happened and how it started to happen when I was just about to interview Paul McCartney, the biggest interviewee of my life. And also there’s an actor over here and brilliant writer Ruth Jones. I don’t know if the show Gavin & Stacey has got any traction in the US but it was a massive sitcom here in the UK. She’s a brilliant screenwriter and has written lots of stuff for TV. She sent me a long message with all the things that the book reminded her of from her life, including a Kate Bush obsession in her early teens. That was wonderful.
I’ve also had lots of emails from people I’ve never known who’ve somehow found my address or sent me tweets. I had a man in his 70s, a retired head teacher who had read the book and didn’t know much of the music but was very moved by the experiences and identified with how music shaped his childhood and adolescence and adult years and later life, just from his different experience of being into classical music and different kinds of music. I found that very affecting. Also, recently I had an amazing message from somebody who had gone on holiday with some old friends. This was a bunch of people in their 60s and they all read and enjoyed my book and had made playlists for their holiday based on ideas from my book. And then they sent me the spreadsheet!
Tell us about some songs not in the book that you have strong feelings about. What I haven’t put in and I’m still kicking myself I didn’t put it in the paperback is a song called “The Scarecrow” by Mike Waterson, which is an amazing song from 1972. Mike was one of the Waterson family, this amazing British folk-singing family from the northeast of England who had these tough, stark voices and learned lots of songs from their grandmother who brought them up when they were little because their parents died when they were all quite small. “The Scarecrow” is from an album called Bright Phoebus, and it was written by Lal, but adapted by Mike. I’ve written a huge piece about the Watersons recently for the Quietus website, and I talk in detail about “The Scarecrow” there. I’ll leave you to read that! It’s such an amazing song.
Jude, age 3, with her dad
Is there a song you can’t listen to ever again? I think I’ve got past that stage. There was a long period where I used to find “Fairytale of New York” very tough because it reminded me of a boy that I’d dumped at a bus station shortly before Christmas in 1998 who for a while thought I shouldn’t have dumped! And that song always took me back to him for a while. It doesn’t anymore. And obviously “Only You” by the Flying Pickets is a song that I have found difficult over the years because it takes me back to my last moments with my dad, which I talk about my book. My dad asked me, age 5, to find out—just before going to the hospital to have a hip operation—what was No. 1 and it had been “Only You.” Originally it was a song by Yazoo, who were called Yaz in the states (Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke), but it was covered by a Welsh band called the Flying Pickets. They had been No. 1 over Christmas 1983, then my dad went into hospital in early January. The No. 1 became “Pipes of Peace” by Paul McCartney, but I never had a chance to tell my dad because my dad died in hospital. And I used to find it very hard hearing “Only You,” especially as it was a Christmas No. 1, so a song that generally just pops up once a year at Christmas, and caught me unawares in quite a sudden, shocking way. I haven’t heard it yet this year.
Jude dancing at her 40th bday
What’s something that makes you jump up to dance? Recently, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston randomly came on the radio, and that is the ultimate, isn’t it? What a song! In my teens, I started to kind of sneer the things I’d liked when I was a bit younger – hating the high notes of Whitney Houston, and the melisma of Mariah Carey. Fantasy, that’s another one! What an idiot I was. I soon grew out of that. I love dancing to “Heat Wave” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, which I write about in the context of love songs in my book, that was the second song at my and my husband’s wedding party. Oh and “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is such a fantastic song to dance to with friends, although that’s an interesting song for me now because it reminds me of the first COVID lockdown in 2020—it’s the song that really got me through the early days of that. It makes me feel quite sad hearing it now, but hopefully that will pass.
Jude just after dancing to “Heat Wave” at her wedding
If you were a song, what song would you be? Probably something ridiculous. You know, I would like to be “Heat Wave” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas or “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama or “Venus” by Shocking Blue, but I’d probably be something far less cool.
What is the best TV or movie soundtrack ever made? Twin Peaks, probably. I’m probably just saying that because Angela Badalamenti just died but that had a massive effect on me when I was 12. I watched that on a black and white television—a tiny television—in my room and didn’t see it in color until the DVD reissue. It was quite scary seeing scary Bob in black and white! But that music is so incredible. Other movie soundtracks…does West Side Story count? Probably not, but I’m having it! Those songs are so beautifully structured. I studied music at school until I was 18 and I’d love to look at the score and pick apart the movement of the melodies and harmonies.
What are some other music books you have loved in recent years? There’s so many. There’s been such an explosion. From this year, I really love Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop Bad Pop and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s book, Re-Sisters, but there’s been so many more. PP Arnold’s book I found really interesting about growing up and becoming a backing singer for the Ikettes in the ’60s with a background of a terrible marriage. There’s a Pauline Oliveros reissue I adored too. In recent years, I’ve loved Tracey Thorn’s books, which are wonderful. One of hers that’s less talked about is Naked at the Albert Hall, which is a great book about singing. I loved Viv Albertine’s book like every right-minded person, but I’ve also started this year doing a podcast called Songbook, where I explore great music books with my guests and there’s all sorts in that. For example, I revisited Fred & Judy Vermorel’s Starlust with Brett Anderson, a book of filthy fan letters, which was lots of fun, especially as I’ve been a fan of Suede since my teens. I discovered a great slim academic book called The Folk by a guy called Ross Coles thanks to the brilliant broadcaster Zakia Sewell, and got Vashti Bunyan to read Marianne Faithfull’s memoir, and went to Shirley Collins’ house to talk about her old boyfriend Alan Lomax’s The Land Where the Blues Began. I often review books too. I love so many!
Folk legend Shirley Collins (left) with Jude; Collins inspired Chapter 8 in the book
What are your plans for the book over here? Events? No events yet. But I would absolutely love to do stuff over the US at some point. If you want me out there, get me out there. I’ve got friends in LA and extended family in Colorado and New York. I’ll get a mattress on the floor, a sleeping bag. I’ll be out there.
What are five or ten records you cannot live without? The 12 tracks that make up my chapters of the book are my way of trying to do this, I guess, but there are some songs toward the end of it which I include which I’d missed out. In recent years there are songs like “You Forever” by Self Esteem, I can’t imagine living without that. She is so brilliant. I can’t imagine living without “Freedom” by Wham!, who I managed to sneak into Chapter 3. The ones that make up my book, though, I think it would be them, because they’re the ones I chose to tell my story and they’ve got even deeper meaning for me now. When you pick records about your life, like the Desert Island Discs radio show here in the UK, you don’t think just about the songs. You think about all the places those songs take you to, the people they take you to, the worlds wrapped up in that. So, I’d have to go with them. I think the 12 of my book are a pretty good soundtrack to my life.
