Girls invented L.A. punk. Punk photographer Theresa Kereakes interviews punk photographer Melanie Nissen

Jane Wiedlin and Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s, photograph by Melanie Nissen

HARD + FAST, a collection of Melanie Nissen’s photographs from the period 1977-1980 in Los Angeles as punk was forming, is the book my OG LA punk friends and I have always wanted to exist. We all knew that we were living in a special time when you could see culture and society changing, and we couldn’t wait to document it ourselves. It was an era rich with samizdat—independently published zines about our scene, shown and told in our own words and pictures. Mainstream media were not covering the epochal change in pop music, art, and fashion, save for the occasional “look at this crazy new teen fad” filler on tv or in print. ¶ Our subculture took it upon themselves to document our own lives, much like a high-school yearbook does. Melanie, together with her then-partner, Steve Samiof, created SLASH, an era and genre-defining magazine with such an imprimatur that it organically grew into an avatar branding first wave punk.  Melanie’s book of photographs overflows with the love and friendships that we LA punks shared, and yearbook/time capsule references to this important documentation is a recurring Proustian theme in this 2022 chat between two zine photographers. Intro and interview by Theresa Kereakes (who was also documenting the scene back then) / Photographs by Melanie Nissen

Alice Bag of the Bags, photograph by Melanie Nissen

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
CF: A lot of the things that I like about the book have nothing to do with punk rock, but everything to do with presenting a chapter of our lives that we lived at the same time. There are buildings that you photographed that are no longer there.
Melanie Nissen: I have to say that’s what the book has become for me. I look at it the same way. It’s become documentary to me. You don’t see people on the street selling LA Times newspapers anymore [p 98, with Tommy Gear/Screamers]. You don’t see people on phone booths anymore in Hollywood [p 108/Tomata duPlenty/Screamers]. You don’t see old pool halls where you could just go into, or old eating places that were on the street, and old bars that existed that don’t exist anymore. For me, it’s like a time capsule. I think I really appreciate it on that level. And I’m really sentimental about it on that level, because I felt the same way that you did. You just don’t see this stuff anymore.
CF: It’s like a yearbook.
Melanie: Exactly. That’s how I feel about it now. I can look at the photos and it’s so funny, and you’ll probably relate to this—I can feel when I took that picture. I remember. I remember where I was. I remember how I felt. I remember taking the photo. I remember everybody’s face. I had a hard time with everybody’s name for the book, but I never forgot their faces. Ever. Everybody was, I think, really open to me taking photos and I really appreciate it.

The Avengers photograph by Melanie Nissen

ART FOR ART’S SAKE
CF: Did you know when you were in the midst of it, that punk was going to be the transformative movement that it became? 
Melanie: Not at all. It was a very unusual time. It was like this big art group that all decided to pitch in and work together. It wasn’t really about anything else except the music. It was very unique that way. It’s so seldom that you get to have freedom in art, and that’s what it was to us—to show anything we wanted, say anything we wanted in the magazine. That’s a luxury in art. Those opportunities don’t come around a lot when there really aren’t any politics there, there’s nothing, money’s not involved, it becomes just a real art project. But no, I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t even take very good care of my negatives to be really honest with you.
CF: I’ve talked to a couple of other people from the scene who just really put this stuff in the garage and it’s like, “Well, this is my stuff from the ’70s.”
Melanie: That’s what it was. Except unfortunately, I had three really bad floods in garages.
CF: So have I.
Melanie: Did you, too?
CF: Yes. I lost a lot of stuff in Hurricane Sandy. I moved to New York in the ’80s.
Melanie: Yikes.
CF: I was really devastated then I heard an interview with Laurie Anderson on NPR, where she was talking about the album she recorded with the Kronos Quartet, called Landfall, which was about everything that happened in Hurricane Sandy. And she had lost basically, her entire professional life: staging, work, all of her props and a lot of notes and stuff.
Melanie: Oh, God.
CF: But her voice was so calm. And I thought, “Well, if Laurie Anderson can get past this, then I can.”
Melanie: Well, I did too. But at the time, it’s like you think, “Oh, what a bummer.” Then you just get over it and I think, “Well, that’s it.” Because I didn’t even really know if I would be using my photos again. Do you know what I mean? They were in bags. I didn’t really know I would be actively using them. I didn’t want them to get ruined and it was disappointing when I looked at them, but it’s like, okay, well, so this is what I have left. You move on.

The Cramps photograph by Melanie Nissan

CF: Right. In the spirit of that, is it astonishing for you to see the legacy and the influence of Slash, just from the graphic style to the writing style?
Melanie: It is. Steve Samiof was my partner at the time and we started it together. I think the very first issue, I really think it was the consciousness that we’re going to do a one-off art magazine. I really didn’t think we thought we would do more issues. I don’t know if we really thought it would go further than that. So it was a big surprise. We had read all about all the punk stuff happening in London and we were fascinated, because there wasn’t much of it here yet. So we went to record stores and bought every single we could possibly buy, and had to come home and listen to everything over and over. ¶ It’s like we both fell in love with the music, with everything about it. Everything about it was appealing; the fashion, the politics, everything. But did I think it was going to go on and on? No, I didn’t.
CF: Yeah. We were just not like other people and we didn’t fit in anywhere, but we all fit in with each other.
Melanie: Well, it’s funny. I have to say, everybody asks “Oh, what was it like?” And really, everybody for those three years that I worked with, was on the same wavelength. Everybody was generous with their work. Everybody helped everybody else. Every band helped each other. Everybody gave free work away for the bands to use.
CF: I read a quote of you saying, “The first three years were magic, but by 1980, Orange County bands started taking the scene in a direction I didn’t love.” I related to that so much because I felt the same way. I don’t know if you doom-scroll Wikipedia, but the entry for Slash in Wikipedia, have you read it?
Melanie: No. 
CF: It’s like a paragraph, but it conjectures that Slash just stopped because punk was considered dead anyway. But I relate to your quote, “the bands started taking the scene in a direction I didn’t love.” That makes sense to me.
Melanie: Yeah. I also didn’t know them. I really didn’t know who they were. I can’t think that I have photographed a lot of them. It’s like I had spent three years with the same bands and all the beginning bands. It’s like it becomes a weird family in a weird way. Nobody cared about me with my camera. Everybody was used to seeing it. We would do photo sessions on the street. We’d never get permits or anything like that. It was very spontaneous. I don’t know. I just think after three years, all my favorite bands were going away. They weren’t really playing anymore. They all were off in different directions. ¶ Then you had the Orange County stuff, and I just didn’t know it. I just thought it was time to move on. I had been in it a lot and it was just time to do something else for me.
CF: Do you agree with this: Slash as a magazine is a finite set, it’s like it’s a box set of LA punk rock being born, it’s almost like you inadvertently created LA punk. So, your book is its title. It’s just 1977 to 1980. Hard and Fast, in and out. This is a box set of that period.
Melanie: Yes.
CF: Did you intend to do it, or did you set the book up that way because that’s what you had?
Melanie: I only was in it for those three years, so that’s really all I have to talk about. I don’t have anything to really say about punk. Your life moves in a different direction sometimes, and that’s what mine did. I had a full-time job.

Photographer Melanie Nissen in 1977

CF: I was just going to ask you that. Did you and Steve and everyone else for the core of Slash, did you keep your day jobs?
Melanie: Well, I had to. Steve’s day job was Slash, which it needed to be, because it needed one really strong leader that was there every minute. And he was that person. I worked full-time and I have a daughter. It was a lot. I used to go in the dark room and print all my own prints on the weekend. Yeah. It was a lot of work.
CF: You bring back all these memories for me, flipping through your book; that image of the envelope from Richard’s Photo Lab [p 217] !
Melanie: I know. Do you love that?
CF: I love that because I have boxes full of the same thing.
Melanie: It’s like everything was at Richard’s in the beginning. It was all at Richard’s. He’d develop it, and then I had access to a really great darkroom, which I was lucky enough to get on the weekends. So I’d have Richard develop it and then I would go print it. But that is funny, Richard. That’s where you went.
CF: One thing I really appreciate about your book that I haven’t seen in too many other punk photo books is that you’ve included Black Randy [p 62], The Screamers [pp 18-31], and The Kipper Kids [pp 112-113]. The Screamers were just so unique. And Tomata, before The Screamers, had quite a track record as a performer.
Melanie: Yeah. Yeah. How good was he to photograph?
CF: He was a living art project, right?
Melanie: He had the best body language and the best space and the best tattoo. I could have just looked at him forever. I could have photographed him forever. Luckily, a lot of that stuff of him didn’t get wrecked, and I’m so glad I have so much of that early stuff.  He was really great to work with. ¶ And Black Randy was such an underground star in the scene. He got up and performed in his underwear and a cowboy hat. It’s like, who are you? Then I became one of his backup go-go dancers at one of his live shows with Belinda from the Go-Go’s, Alice Bag from The Bags, Connie. And myself. We all had wigs on and all this makeup somebody did for us and we had dashikis on. We were his backup dancers. ¶ Black Randy was in our bed while Steve and I were designing the magazine in our bedroom. He just got in bed and just talked to us. He was so weird.
CF: That’s this unique thing that only other people who were in that scene would understand. If you tried to tell someone Darby Crash was in your dorm, it’s like, well, they don’t understand. He was just a guy who I knew. And I had a TV and he didn’t. It was just that.
Melanie: I thought he had a very sweet side to him. Am I right or wrong?
CF: Yes, and I just thought he was really smart.
Melanie: I thought he was smart and I thought he was always … I don’t know. I thought he seemed like a really kind person to me.¶ Yeah. Everybody asks, “Oh, and what about Darby Crash? What was that like?” And I’m thinking he was really nice.

Darby Crash & Lorna Doom (Germs), outtake from (GI) photo shoot 1979.  From Hard + Fast photographs by Melanie Nissen

CF: You could tell that you were friends in the pictures of him and Pat and Lorna. There’s not a menacing glance. And the young Don Bolles, he looks like a little angel. [pp 12-17]
Melanie: I know. I know. I know. No, they’re pretty raw photos. It’s very more documentary than I thought it would be.
CF: Is that what got you the most? Is that when you went back 40 years later and you thought “this is a documentary”?
Melanie: Yeah. I thought it was a time capsule. I thought here is this one unique period of time in my life and everybody else’s life that was involved in that. And I’ll probably never see it again. This is not going to happen again. And there was that part of me that realized that part, that this was something very unique and wasn’t ordinary. I really appreciate it from that point of view. It was really fun and interesting and creative. ¶ The one thing that I find really interesting, is that it’s true, punk never dies. It never dies. It reincarnates itself. You see it in young bands. You see it in fashion. You see it in hair. You see it in jewelry. You see it in everything. Right now, it’s like hot pink and hot green DAYGLO, and black are the colors of the season. Well, that was punk. Those were the punk colors. And every once in a while, you see photos of chokers with big spikes on them, and then you have Marc Jacobs who’s looking at all the punk stuff. It just gets created over and over and over again, and I don’t really think that time’s ever going to go away, musically or fashion. It’s like Vivienne Westwood. She’s still making clothes. ¶ There’s a little band, a little punk band that was out there… Fidlar. I don’t know if you know them. They’re really good. They remind me a little of The Ramones. They were a very fun little band. You could just see it. And they knew all the people from the punk things. They’re really and they were totally into Slash. And I think, “Wow.”
CF: I’m glad to hear things like this, and like you publishing the punk rock yearbook, time capsule. And it brings everyone back together to say hello and wow, wasn’t that something?
Melanie: Well, and this is it for me. You know what I mean? I don’t have anymore. I don’t have a lot of punk to show anybody anymore. This is what’s left, or what I have.
CF: You know what? It’s still definitive. It’s the foundational visuals of LA punk rock. It really is.
Melanie: I don’t know. I hope that people get to see themselves in the book because it’ll be so fun for them.

Penelope Houston (Avengers), San Francisco, 16 September 1977 (the day Marc Bolan died). From Hard + Fast photographs by Melanie Nissen

CF: I think that they will, people will bring it up to them. They’re going to get a call from someone like, “Oh, my God, you’re in this book!”

DIY
Melanie: If I never have to go through another box again, I’ll be really happy. I’ll tell you, the hardest part of this whole project was just digging stuff out and editing. It was really, really hard. And getting stuff scanned. Nothing was scanned, at all. ¶ I wound up too, and I hope it’s not boring for people, I put a lot of fan photos in there, fans and people that hung out. They’re not stars or anything.
CF: I was so excited when I saw Cheri the Penguin [p 85] !
Melanie: I know. This was so part of the scene that I documented. It wasn’t just the bands. There hardly was anybody that I didn’t take photos of. And I thought, “Well, I’m going to put them in the book, even though nobody is probably going to know who they were unless you were there.” ¶ And is that going to appeal to people? Because basically, a lot of younger people would just be looking at strange people they don’t know. So I was a little concerned about that, but it’s like, how can you do the scene if you don’t do the people in the scene?
CF: It’s like you just said earlier. It’s a documentary. It’s how people dressed.
Melanie: Yes.
CF: What’s so great is that everybody had their own unique style. It wasn’t like they could go to a Hot Topic and say, “I would like the punk uniform for Saturday night.”
Melanie: Yeah. But you know what was great? They all made their own outfits. It’s like they had to plan. They had to make something. That was half the fun of looking at everybody, is to see what they came up with and what they created. It was really interesting, and everybody really made an effort for the most part.
CF: Yes. Do you think that has anything to do with because it was the analog era? You literally couldn’t phone it in. You had to make a commitment.
Melanie: Yeah. You did. There was nothing technical at all, right?
CF: Right, there wasn’t. I was envious of people who had motor-driven cameras.
Melanie: Yeah. And I was so happy to have access to a darkroom. I thought that was the height of luxury because there was nothing like being in the darkroom and seeing that image first come up. It’s so exciting, whether the photo is good or bad or whatever. It’s just thrilling.
CF: The smell of the chemicals.
Melanie: Yeah, which people don’t even use anymore. That’s why they really don’t want to develop black and white, because you have to get rid of those chemicals in a certain way now.
CF: Oh no, I know. But it’s just they’re gorgeous. And I like the way you printed your photos with the carved out negative carriers. You could see the edges.
Melanie: That was fun. I didn’t do that with everything, but I don’t know. I think for me at my age now and everything and from what I have left, this is like doing the last issue of Slash for me. Do you know what I mean?
CF: Well, what is the future? What do you want to do? What would you like to do?
Melanie: I don’t know. Well, I still take photos. Not a lot of people anymore, but I do a lot of abstracts and landscapes and all that kind of stuff. It’s different now. There are still artists that I work with because I went into the music business for the rest of my career and life. So I always wound up working with musicians, forever, which I felt really well-suited for after Slash. And that I get it and I get them, and they get me. 

Hard + Fast by Melanie Nissen

CF: How did the book come into being, finally? 
Melanie: I have a friend who designed the book. His name is Mike Lohr. We have been friends for like 20 years, and we have a wonderful friendship and rapport. When we thought about doing this book and was asked to do the book, I said, “There’s only one person who I’ll do this with. And it’s Mike, because he’s such a beautiful designer.” ¶ We did a series of weird punk T-shirts at one point and tote bags. We never did anything big. It was all little and nothing ever made any money, but we liked working together.  So when this book came along, we had a chance to do a book together. ¶ Half of the project was that for me, that I got to work with Mike. And we worked together for almost, I don’t know, three, four years on it because he has a full-time job as an art director. We were limited to maybe two weekends a month, one weekend a month, so it took a long time. But I was so happy I got to work with him. It’s like our culmination together, and it’s really nice.

PARTING GIFT
Melanie: I’ll tell you one thing that I had to learn that was very interesting for me. I had never shot concerts before. I had never shot music, and I had to learn how to shoot the bands live. I had to learn how to get up front, no matter what was happening or who was shoving who or pushing who. I was very fast. I shoot very fast, and I think you have to if you’re shooting live. I don’t know how else you get it, really. It was really a great challenge for me to have to do something new like that, and learn something new like that, and practice. I got better as time went on, but it’s something that I really valued that I thought, Oh, I have a split second to take a photo up here. Everybody’s shoving me and I have to do this. I have to get a good photo. I have to get something. And I loved learning that. That was a very good learning experience for me.
CF: I think it’s all in the learning.
Melanie: It is. Everything.

Photographer Melanie Nissen. Photo: Kenny MacPherson

Plus 1 Athens: Interview with Chunklet Editor Henry Owings

I carried a gun in college (a staple gun, silly!) and I made fliers for everything from my radio show to newspaper meetings and I made collages for fun. We even folded, collated and stapled chickfactor zine during the first few years. Before the internet, you had to use whatever you could find to make fliers: old magazines and newspapers, magic markers and Letraset, paper, staples, gluesticks, clip art. The art of the flier is long lost though we do have a culture that has taken band show posters to a high level. Henry Owings, editor of Chunklet zine, who also makes lots of other stuff, has made a new book called Plus 1 Athens: Show Fliers from a Legendary Scene that collects loads of fliers and ephemera and memories. We asked him a few Qs… (interview by gail / images courtesy Henry/Chunklet)

What time period did you live in Athens? How long have you lived in Atlanta? Where else have you lived? 
I moved to Athens in the fall of 1991 after a lifetime of being the new guy everywhere I lived. Before I moved to Athens, I was born out on the Maryland coast, then lived there, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Texas, Colorado and Alabama until my mom left my dad and we moved back to her hometown of York, Pennsylvania. I went to college there, then grad school in Pittsburgh, moved to Athens after I graduated. I lived in Athens from 1991 until (vaguely) 1997. I was on tour a lot towards the end. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Atlanta and have been here ever since.
How many fliers did you consider for publication in the Athens book? 
Oh god. I can only say that I currently am holding onto 13,000+ flyers that are primarily from Georgia. As far as how many were specifically from Athens? If I were to guess, it would be a few thousand.
How do you even begin the process of selection? 
I kinda wanted to hit everything, so I just took a lot of mental notes. Clubs, bands. I wanted to make sure everybody of some note were mentioned. I know I missed some bands, but whatever. I did my absolute best.

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

When did you get the idea for the book and how long did it take? 
So during the pandemic, which fittingly coincided with my divorce, I decided to try new things. Or perhaps just flex muscles I never flexed before. One of those activities I pursued in earnest was painting my house. Influenced by my dear pal Will Hart from the Olivia Tremor Control and cubist art of the early 20th century, I decided to paint my house. And I had a lot of fun. Like, a LOT of fun. ¶ At some point (May 2021 to be specific), I asked the folks at club called 529 at the end of the street if I could do a painting on the outside of the building. They politely declined, but they offered me the dressing room. Now, anybody that’s been in a backstage dressing room can tell you, it’s covered in more dicks and shitty graffiti than you could imagine, but I thought it would be cool to make a color study in the green room out of old Georgia flyers. ¶ While I was going through flyers I had found on line and was doctoring so they would print correctly, a little voice in my head said “Hey, somebody should do a book of these.” And well, the rest kind of happened quickly. ¶ I tend not to dawdle, and also I just have a lot of friends who opened their collections to me, and it just kinda took off from there. ¶ So yeah, time line hasn’t even been a year yet. ¶ I used to make fliers in college and walk around with a staple gun. Our tools were clip art, collage scraps, magic markers, etc. What are some of the weirdest show fliers you came across in this process?  ¶ Oh god, my favorites are always risographs which are early color copies. They’re almost like their own genre of flyers. So beautiful. ¶ I think my favorite flyers have been the most ephemeral. I have a flyer for Athens band Melted Men where it’s written on a cocktail napkin.

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

You say in the book kiosks were the way people found out what was going on in Athens. Describe how that felt compared with the way we discover shows now. 
I dunno. I can only speak for myself which is I was, am and will always be a guy that relies on word of mouth. Flyers are fun to do and after Tr*mp won the White House, I mostly stayed off Facebook. I’ve edged back into it exclusively for this project, but yeah, I find most sources of “internet journalism” quite dubious, but then again, so were most magazines back in the 1980s.
Tell us about watching the Athens documentary in 1987. I also remember being blown away by the Bar-B-Q Killers when I saw it. What kind of impact did the doc have on you? 
Athens GA Inside/Out had a profound effect on me. At the time I first saw it, I was living in York, PA, with no friends and just lurking at the local college radio station and just diving into music with all vigor. The scene in Athens just spoke to me. I don’t know how else to put it. The BBQ Killers were the punch in the neck that made me go “I need to move there.” Within a couple years, I had an Athens mailing address. Funny how that stuff works.

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

I lived in Richmond in the ’80s and it seemed like the SE indie scene had a big LGBTQ element to it (Now Explosion, B52s, etc.). What is the music scene in Athens like now and is that still the case? 
God, can I just take a second to say that Pen Rollings is probably the coolest queer in Richmond? He and I have been pals for a long time and when I published an interview with him in Chunklet about 20 years ago, it just showed me how silly the fuss over sex/gender politics have become. ¶ As far as the queer scene in Georgia goes, in a word, it’s “fertile.” I love it. Then again, I’m a heteronormative male, so consider the source, am I right? ¶ As far as the contemporary scene goes, I don’t feel like I’m an authority on the subject, but I do love that whoever you want to kiss or fall in love is no more important than the color of your eyes. Life is to live. I love to be in a community where everybody is allowed to just be who they are. Hard stop. 
Were there particular flier makers or bands that excelled at this art form? Like Ron Liberti in the Triangle, kind of like a signature person behind many? 
Man, that’s a tricky question to answer succinctly, but I’ll try. I’m cursed with being a designer, so of course I look at the general information hierarchy of a flyer, but I am also very infatuated with Dada and outsider art. If a flyer is good, it’s good. If a flyer sucks, it sucks. I fancy myself a lower case “c” collector of records, and that has afforded me an ability to size up a band or flyer based on their work. ¶ As far as proper designers go, I really tried to avoid using their work as it really fell outside of what was attractive to me. Not a single designer’s work is used seen more than three times in the entire book. That was a challenge, but also an opportunity to show even that much more instead of keeping things somewhat monochromatic.
Are there shows or exhibitions that go along with this book? 
I’d love to, but nobody has asked!
Is it true there is another one on the way about Atlanta? How is that progressing? 
Dude, it’s in proofing! Goes to print next week! Cranking out two books in five months. That’s not too bad.

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

There are some libraries around the country, such as DCPL, that really take good care of music history, using it in a way that the public can interact with it. What is your goal with these documents, not that you own them? 
Y’see, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I can say definitively that my goal is to have all of this material live eternally. I’ve been in touch with GSU, Emory and UGA about migrating the assets I’ve already scanned. My biggest aversion is that of bureaucracy and Zoom meetings. I just want to do the work. If some grad student wants everything I’ve digitized to make a database or whatever? By all means! I just am finding that to be brass tacks stuff.
What are some fliers that you personally own and are prize possessions? 
God, before this project I had few. Seriously. 
However, there’s some people that have been unbelievably generous and given me just gem after gem. The stuff I am most attracted to isn’t the big names, but those that I just love. For instance, Athens band Limbo District’s flyers are my favorite and I think I own one! And I cherish it! I have so many folders of this stuff, but my goal for all of this is to have it in museums. Not today, but eventually.
Is that your daughter listed as an editor of the book? How did you involve her in the whole process? 
God damn right! Look, I did Chunklet. I can say anybody is involved. Shit, I am doing this to have fun, and my 10-year-old daughter has been a good sport so yeah, I’m giving her an associate editor credit. Although she doesn’t do much except put books in padded envelopes, I do love involving her in my life. 

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

What’s your favorite Athens band from 1992 and now? 
From 1992? Oh god, that would be Harvey Milk. Maybe the JackONuts. Synthetic Flying Machine (which became Neutral Milk Hotel and the Olivia Tremor Control) didn’t figure into my life until 1993, but they’re another top favorite. ¶ From now? God, tough question. So many to choose from. I’m an enormous fan of Linqua Franqa. She’s like the MC5, but a one-person badass.
How long has/was Chunklet been around? 
Chunklet started in 1993. Modestly. And it crept forward until issue 20. Cranked out some books. Kept doing stuff under the Chunklet moniker out of laziness. And so here we are 29 years later and yeah, I’ve put out over 100 records, 20 issues of a magazine, four books, several DVDs, probably put on 1000 shows. What was the question again?
What’s going on with your label? 
I really don’t know. It’s just a hobby that just keeps going forward. I just haven’t met many people who have told me “no” when I ask if I can put out a record with them. I’m like a kid in a candy store.

Image from the book Plus 1 Athens

Are you a trained designer or self-taught? 
Never took a single class. Entirely self-taught.
How did the internet help you make the book? 
I used the internet (and social media specifically) exclusively as a tool. Finding people with the material is the biggest challenge and those people are usually one degree of separation away from somebody on Facebook or whatever. I just fucking loathe looking at Facebook as the final resting place for any of this stuff. Fuck that. I just have been using it to find people. That’s it.
Where can we get the book? 
Either the Chunklet website or my bandcamp site. A few stores carry it, but the vast majority of the 500 copies of Plus 1 Athens’s first printing were sold direct to customers.
Any other books you’d like to mention you’re working on? Or future plans? 
I think the Atlanta book is it. As you’ve become aware of over the past year, I’m a designer of the impending Steve Keene Art Book we both worked on. I’m quite delighted with it. But then again, I’m a working designer. And I work! ¶ As far as future plans…..a lot has kind of been popping up. I’m going to do a book of Georgia flyers once the Atlanta book is done only because I have so goddamned many, and all these podunk towns have one or two flyers and I think it a beautiful love letter to the state I call home. ¶ Otherwise, I’ve been in the preliminary stages of doing similar books on Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Both are cities near and dear to my heart. I’ve also been doing some work on a similar book on Alabama because again, it’s very near and dear to me. Cut me some slack, I started this eight months ago! It’s a work in progress! CF

Henry in the aforementioned green room (Photo: Stephanie Jackson)

Excavate! Book Review

Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall 
Edited by Tessa Norton & Bob Stanley (Faber Books)

The Fall were the first so-called ‘indie’ band I ever liked. I would love to be able to say that I came across them on John Peel or on a cool mixtape. In fact, it is on Top of the Pops, or more likely its rival, The Chart Show, that I catch the video for “There’s a Ghost in My House”first encountering the Mark E. Smith sneer as he dodges china hurled at him by Brix, playing the eponymous grinning sprite. This isn’t early Fall of course, although perhaps that’s relative, given that the band still has more than thirty prolific years ahead of it. But in April 1987, the pop sensibility that Smith’s Californian wife has brought to the band’s abrasive sound is paying dividends. The Fall have never sounded more conventional, but they are still like nothing I have come across before.

Mark E. Smith photograph by Pam Vander

“There’s a Ghost in My House” doesn’t feature prominently in Excavate!, Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley’s engrossing new collection of writing and ephemera on The Fall. In fact, the editors have little interest in providing a comprehensive account of the band’s long and turbulent history at all. Instead, with an approach more philosophical than biographical, each contributor to the text comes at the band according to their own interests and expertise, less interested in what the band did than at getting to the heart of who they were. Architectural historian Elain Harwood introduces us to Mark E. Smith the psycho-geographer via a tour of Prestwich, the North Manchester town where Smith lived all his life. Designer Paul Wilson explores the Northern Working Men’s Clubs in which the band played their early shows and ponders the influence that these venues may have exerted on their text heavy artwork. Bob Stanley, whose own band happens to be named after a football team, uses the football leagues as an avenue to discuss The Fall as amateurs (and, circa “TaGiMH,” as professionals).

Image courtesy of Excavate!

A real pleasure of the book, one that speaks to the care of its editors, is how the varied contributions combine to unfold as a cohesive and satisfying whole. Occasionally the book format provides an avenue for writers to interact directly. Michael Bracewell & Jon Wilde’s essay on Mark E. Smith and Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey’s on Vorticist co-founder Wyndham Lewis playfully mirror one another. Continuing on the subject of Smith’s literary influences, a reprint of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s Memorex for the Kraken considers the group’s early output alongside modernist and horror literature. Fisher’s essay quotes Mark Sinker repeatedly, and the latter writer here continues the conversation, responding to Fisher with a new essay of his own. Through these and other entries, we are guided from Smith, voracious reader and autodidact, to the group as an education in its own right. Tessa Norton considers The Fall as a curriculum, situated within a lineage of artist-led alternative educational establishments that include the Black Mountain College and Joseph Beuys’ Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research.

Image courtesy of Excavate!

Of course, The Fall’s outsider status is never in doubt. There is Mark E. Smith the personality, who disliked the company of musicians socially and kept them on a tight rein within his band, who at the height of Madchester famously claimed Salford as his home, while decamping to Edinburgh until the fuss died down. Then we have Smith the visionary, who “when the Fall began,” quotes Ian Penman “was picking up the past and the future on different frequencies to everybody else.” And no one else ever quite matched their wavelength. In the essay most concerned with the Fall’s influence, Adelle Stripe doesn’t discuss Pavement or Prolapse, instead focusing on a mixed-media art project. For his part, Mark Fisher locates a shared essence between The Fall and the black comedy series League of Gentlemen in their predilection for “grotesque humour.”

Image courtesy of Excavate!

A second form of excavation bookends each of the essays. A cornucopia of Fall ephemera has been unearthed for the book, all drawn from the collections of fans. There are posters, press releases and fan communiques, song lyrics and notes on album track listings (“From the book, don’t read it,” Smith comments on Dice Man, a useful reminder not to read all inspiration as endorsement, especially from a writer so fond of the third person). The concert program for The Fall’s ballet collaboration with Michael Clark is included, as is an excerpt from Mark E. Smith’s original script for his play, Hey! Luciani. This is not written on beer mats, as sometimes rumored, although a scrawled-on beer mat is found elsewhere. It has all been lovingly cared for and is beautifully reproduced, along with the artwork for all thirty-one of the band’s studio albums. There is ample material here to reward the serious fan’s careful attention, but its handsome presentation within this hardcover edition also makes the book ripe for the coffee table, a designation that might have prompted some wry amusement from its subject matter.

Image courtesy of Excavate!

I never had a big breakup with The Fall. I considered them my favorite group for a few years, and I always considered myself a fan. They were the first band that I ventured to see twice in a single week. One show was thrilling, the second a chaotic mess, the difference itself feeling very much in keeping with this group. At some point in the mid-nineties my attention began to falter, I still had my old records, but I barely noticed as new albums arrived. Inevitably, reading Excavate! has encouraged new excavations of my own, discovering Fall songs that I’ve missed, and breathing fresh connections into old favorites. “There’s a Ghost in My House”: An entwining of Smith’s embrace of Arthur Machen and America music, a Motown cover from a band whose signing to a Motown subsidiary was scuppered by a regrettable lyric in the 1982 song “The Classical.” A music book like none I’ve encountered before, Norton and Stanley have assembled a fine tribute to one of British culture’s most idiosyncratic voices. Excavate-ah!

—Chris Phillips

Image courtesy of Excavate!

Pete Paphides talks about Broken Greek one year after publication

We’ve been big fans of Pete Paphides since the 1990s when both of us worked for the Time Out media family. One year ago today he published a memoir called Broken Greek — a warm, funny, relatable and charming tale. It captures the thrill of discovery for a young record shopper, the brutality and wonder of childhood, the split identity people from two different cultures often feel, and the euphoria of great pop songs in general. If you haven’t read it, now would be a good time to burrow back in time to Birmingham 1982, where Pete fumbled his way into adulthood to a mighty mighty soundtrack. We caught up with him again(!) to chat about the book. (You can also follow him on Twitter and listen to his Soho Radio show

chickfactor: so how did it feel to put yourself out there?
pete paphides: it didn’t really feel like that. First of all, I started writing the book without knowing if I would finish it. Secondly, when I finished it, I had no idea if it would find a publisher. And then, when we found a publisher, I didn’t know if anyone would want to buy it. So those are three pretty big provisos! The amount of green lights required for me to get to a position where I’m “putting myself out there” was quite a lot. It was only when the book was finally out and I read the reviews that I realised what I’d done was quite exposing. But by then, it was too late. And because the reviews were nice, that softened the impact. The worst thing would be to reveal something personal about your life and for total strangers to say, “This has no real value”… that would have been a bit embarrassing.

Tell us about the process – how long it took to write, were your editors heavy or light, any sort of details about where you write/how you best go about focusing on writing? 
I started work on Broken Greek at the beginning of 2017. I wanted to write a book that felt as much like a history of music during a particular period as it did a memoir – and the connecting tissue between those two things was the way that music gave me an identity that was different to that of my parents. They were Greek and Greek-Cypriot, but I could never wholly identify as Greek because I was born in England. And pop was the engine of that realisation.

There were no editors, because I didn’t show it to any until it was finished. My friend Bob Stanley was invaluable throughout this time – he read every chapter, and when it started to become clear that this was going to be a lengthy book, he told me to hold my nerve and believe that it needed to be this long. And he was right. We only showed the book to one publisher – Katy Follain at Quercus, who first approached me about 20 years ago, when I was still at Time Out. She asked me if I had any ideas for a book. I told her that I was probably never going to write a book. And she just said, “Well, I hope you don’t mind me calling you up once every couple of years, because I think that one day you might – and when you do, I’d love to see it.” So, after all these years, I thought it was only correct that if I did write a book, Katy should be the first editor who sees it. That said, imagine how embarrassing it would have been if she thought it was awful…

Pete in London, 2012. Photo by Gail O’Hara

The book was mostly written in cafés in North London. I find that the best place to write is in a café, surrounded by the everyday background bustle of people going about their business. At the beginning of the process, I’d drop my youngest daughter off at school in Golders Green (about five miles from our house) and make a short walk to a café called Bar Linda, which is right next to the tube station and coach terminus. It was pretty perfect in there: large windows, plenty of light and clay-coloured tea, poured out of huge stainless-steel teapots for tube train and coach drivers on their lunch breaks. I wrote the section about Sound Affects by The Jam in there; and at Bar Linda, I also wrote the early section where I heard The Rubettes’ Sugar Baby Love for the first time. Most of the final half of the book though, was written in another cafe The Palace (now renamed The Breakfast Hub) in Crouch End. It’s run by a young Turkish guy called Efe – they were so good to me in there. Ida who works there is Lithuanian. Every morning I’d go straight into the Palace from the YMCA gym across the road and, without even having to ask me, Ida would deposit a frothy coffee on my table. Nescafé on formica in a bustling caff – that’s my happy place. When the first hardbacks were ready, I went straight to the Palace and handed one to Efe and Ida. It’s now sitting on a shelf above the chilled display counter. 

Efe and Ida at the Breakfast Hub in Crouch End

What kind of response did the book get from your family and friends?
Generally, lovely. It seemed to affect my mother quite deeply. I think it made her feel like someone had borne witness to some of the unpleasant things that had happened to her. And that in turn made me realise that, as you get older, it does help you to achieve some measure of closure to have gone through some sort of adversity and feel like someone was watching as was able to help tell your story. Some of the most touching responses have been from musicians whose records I love – some of whom were even featured in the book: Helen O’Hara and Billy Adams from Dexys were both so lovely. Two of my favourite bands, Crowded House and The Trashcan Sinatras, made videos for singles and deliberately placed the book in background shots without telling me. Even when I watched them, I somehow didn’t notice – other fans had to pointed them out to me! I interviewed Elton John for a Record Collectorfeature and he had been reading the book in the days preceding the interview – he said that me in the book reminded him of himself at that age. Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens was lovely about it too. You can imagine how that felt – I was 15 when I bought my first Go-Betweens single (“Bachelor Kisses,” swiftly followed by “Part Company”). I love that band so much.

And from strangers? 
Way, way, way beyond my wildest expectations. I get messages via Twitter every day – people from all sorts of backgrounds who saw something of their own childhoods reflected in the book.

And the critics? 
Again, just great. The first review to appear was by the former Labour MP Alan Johnson in The New Statesman. I’ve never met him; I had no idea he’d even been given the book. 

Pete’s parents Chris and Victoria at the Great Western

Was your family upset by it at all? Did they read it in advance? 
I didn’t show them the book in advance because I wanted them to read everything in its correct context. My dad is a complex character and you can’t really sugar-coat that. But if he didn’t also come across as a loving, conscientious father to his kids, then I haven’t done my job properly. That said my parents’ marriage isn’t what you would call – by the modern expectations – a harmonious one. I think we forget the degree to which notions of duty and expedience were once soaked into the definition of marriage. People didn’t expect their marriages to be like the fairytale idea of marriage. That’s why I wanted to mention Fiddler On The Roof in the book – because in some ways, that corresponds more closely to my parents’ notion of what a marriage might be. I think it was a bit of a shock for my dad to see how much I had remembered and to read about how his marriage had seemed to me as a child observing it. I didn’t think my mum and dad were particularly well-suited to each other, and those differences were compounded by their decision to leave behind their support systems, their extended families and run a succession of fish and chip shop in Birmingham for 25 years. I still feel that way, but I have to respect their belief in the sanctity of marriage to the exclusion of almost all other considerations. I don’t quite see it that way. A successful marriage can last for five years if those five years are happy ones. And conversely, if marriage lasts a lifetime, that alone doesn’t make it a success. So, yes, some of the details about their marriage would have been upsetting for him to read, but if I’d chosen not to include them, there would have been a gaping vacuum in the book. He wasn’t always the easiest person to be around, but he was under a lot of pressure, trying to keep a business going in a country that he only stayed in because his kids wanted to be here – and I wouldn’t have swapped him for any of the other Cypriot dads. And I have to say, after the initial surprise, he’s been great about it. We phone each other every couple of days. In fact, the first thing I’ll probably do after this is call him.

What did your daughters think of it? 
They’re too busy creating source material for their own memoirs to read mine!

What is the funniest response about the book that you got? 
I stopped reading the Amazon reviews quite early, but one of the first negative ones suggested that I might be autistic. It was the combination of disdain for the book and concern for my well-being that stuck in my memory.

Tell us a bit about the launch. When was it? Who attended? 
March 6, 2020 – the day of publication, a fortnight before lockdown. One of the most surreal days of my life. The basement of the Heavenly Social in central London. On the ground floor, Cornershop were hosting the launch party for their album England Is A Garden. I arranged for a ‘house’ band of some friends to play a few songs – covers of songs that were mentioned in the book. That came about after my friend Mike Batt (who was the guy behind the Wombles records in the early 70s) offered to play a couple of songs at the launch. Obviously, when Mike Batt offers to play at your launch, you bite his hand off. Then after that, things snowballed. Mike and I are both friends with David Arnold and Eos Counsell. David is, of course, a brilliant soundtrack composer and all-round lovely human; his partner is Eos who is a member of the popular classical quartet Bond, and a brilliant funny human being. Then David said, “I do a pretty good version of E.L.O.’s Livin’ Thing, on which Eos can play violin. Then somewhere along the way, Helen O’Hara from Dexys Midnight Runners, Sean Read (Dexys, The Rockingbirds), Dan Gillespie Sells (The Feeling), Kate St. John (The Dream Academy), Andy Lewis (Paul Weller, Pimlico) and James Walbourne (The Rails, The Pretenders) got involved. What James didn’t tell me was that, for the version of “Back On The Chain Gang,” he asked Chrissie Hynde if she fancied coming along and taking the lead. So suddenly, I’m at my own launch party watching Chrissie Hynde singing my favourite Pretenders song, and one of my favourite songs of all time. Then, a few minutes later, there’s Darren Hayman a.k.a. the world’s biggest Wombles fan, losing his mind because his childhood hero is up there doing “Remember You’re A Womble.” Being an exceptionally lovely man, Mike then offered to appear at the Rough Trade event to perform two songs with Stevie Jackson – who had primarily agreed to come along for the reading. Instead of my reading out extracts from Orange Juice songs, I figured it’d be much more fun to have Stevie actually singing and playing them in person. He also did a magnificent version of “Silver Lady” by David Soul. You know how much I adore Belle & Sebastian, so imagine how it felt to have him agree to do that, and to be up there on stage next to him.

You clearly have met some of the pop titans from your childhood via being a music writer – can you tell us a bit more about who/when/how it went? 
I met The Bee Gees in 1997, when I was still working for Time Out. That was a big deal for me, because these were people who I adored from a distance, watching them on TV when I was still in my pre-teens. They were promoting the release of their album Still Waters, and the three of them were gathered in Barry Gibb’s house, which was a mansion a short drive outside London. I walked into Barry’s house and he was on the phone to someone from The Brit Awards, where The Bee Gees were shortly due to receive a lifetime achievement award. He was berating them for suggesting that they receive their award from Jarvis Cocker. Barry objected on the basis that, during the previous year’s ceremony, Jarvis had “invaded” the stage during Michael Jackson’s performance of “Earth Song” – he’d been unamused by that. Anyway, the interview – once it had gotten underway – went so well that, at the very end, I summoned up the courage to ask the Bee Gees if they might be willing to sing an outgoing answerphone message to the tune of “I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You.” I asked them if they could sing, “If you want to leave a message for Pete/Hold on, hold on/Leave your name and number after the beep/Hold on, hold on.” To my amazement, they did it – two attempts to get it as good as they wanted it to be! When I got home and played it to my then-girlfriend Caitlin, she dropped to the floor in amazement. Twenty-four years later, she still insists that’s the thing that made her decide that we should be married.

The Bruce Forsyth pose at Pete’s 8th bday party

This is clearly the first chunk of your life. Are there various other sequels to come, in a Tracey Thorn sort of way? 
Too early to say. I work pretty slowly – even more so while lockdown is ongoing and there are no cafés to work in…

What are the plans for putting Broken Greek on the screen? 
It’s been optioned for TV by Andrew Eaton (The Crown, 24-Hour Party People) and we’ve found a writer to adapt it, but whether it’ll ultimately happen, who knows? Lots of things get optioned but never made.

What other autobiographies have you loved to bits? 
Julian Cope: Head On/Repossessed; Robert Forster: Grant & I; Chrissie Hynde: Reckless; Katie Puckrik: Shooting From The Lip. Those are the four standouts for me.

Whose autobiography that hasn’t been written yet do you long to read? 
Linda Thompson. 

What music from the book do you still play a ton? 
Loads. When I’m writing, I tend to listen to music that I know inside-out, so any MOR, soul, disco, New Wave and synth-pop megahits from the late 70s will serve that purpose.

What is your favorite Greek music of all time? 
Manos Hadjidakis’s work runs the gamut of soundtracks, pop, popular folk songs and classical. I listen to his music a lot. Nikos Xylouris is someone I mention in the book – he was a Cretan singer who rose to become something of a folk hero in the late ’60s and ’70s up to the time of his death in 1980. My parents reacted to his death the way most people of their age reacted to John Lennon’s death.

What snacks from your childhood are the most comforting in 2021? 
Primula Cheese Spread that comes straight out of a tube – that’s been a dramatic rediscovery for me lately. Also McVities Ginger Cake: thirty seconds in the microwave with a blob of tinned custard added to it. A bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes with hot milk just before bedtime is pretty hard to beat. 

Do you know what’s become of the characters from your book apart from your family and rockstars? 
One of my teachers has been in touch – my German teacher. For legal reasons, I had to change most of the names in the book. His real name was Mr Thomas, but I didn’t try too hard to change his name. I just removed the ‘a’ and called him Mr Thoms because he was tall and had a moustache, just like Peter Thoms, the keyboard player and trombonist from Landscape, who had a hit in 1981 with a song called “Einstein A-Go-Go.” When Mr Thomas got in touch after reading the book, he thought it might have been a typo. One name I didn’t change was that of Ged, the older girl who lived next door because we’re still in touch—she’s a librarian these days—so she was able to give her approval. In fact, one of the nicest things about the response to the book has been the affection that people feel for Ged—she’s like the surrogate older sister that everyone would like to have had. When we hosted one of Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Parties for a Broken Greek–themed playlist, I got to introduce everyone to Ged. I can’t tell you how surreal it felt to have Tim Burgess from The Charlatans tweeting Ged because he knew her from the book.

Here is a little promo film we made for the book. We didn’t have an advertising budget, so I got my friend Johnny Daukes to record a version of Brotherhood Of Man’s 1976 hit Save Your Kisses For Me (the winning song in the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest and mentioned extensively in the book) in the style of Subterranean’s Homesick Blues. Johnny is a genius. Not only did he record the song, but he made the video. 

What films/TV/music/whatnot have gotten you thru the past year? Or the past four or five for that matter? 
Caitlin and I hadn’t watched The Sopranos prior to December 2020. We can now concur with the popular view that it’s the all-time greatest televised work of fiction. We also binge-watch any programmes hosted by Cornish TV chef Rick Stein. We’re strangely comforted by what an awkwardly on-camera presence he has. He also doesn’t know how to end and on-screen conversation. The forced smile at the end of the exchange is almost unbearable. And yet also, as a participant in that moment of awfulness, I feel like I’ve been propelled to the essence of something of great existential significance. So much of life feels like that moment fleetingly captured in Rick’s pained grimace. Obviously, Seinfeld and Cheers FOREVER. We’re also big fans of Best Home Cook. Claudia Winkleman can do no wrong in my book. The fact that, ultimately, none of this really matters is the complicit unsayable bond between her and the viewer. Finally, can I also mention Queer Eye, which is the one show that will never fail to envelope our family in feelings of warmth and well-being? We encounter way too much wanton cruelty in our everyday lives, and so it’s more important than ever – to misquote The Chills – look for the good in others so that they can see the good in you. If we were all a bit more like Jonathan, Karamo, Antoni, Bobby and Tan, the world would be a much healthier place.

Can Brexit be reversed? 
I think so. But not the damage to the lives of all the small businesspeople who were duped into believing the lies on which it was predicated. This country – or, more specifically, the level of political discourse – needs to grow up a little.

What’s the first thing you’re going to do once we’re all allowed total freedom? 
My local YMCA gym – in particular, the perfumed hair and body wash that comes out of the pump-action dispenser in the shower. Working in cafés. Record shops. All of these things, in any order.

Do you have any future plans/books/etc.? 
I co-run a small reissue label called Needle Mythology. We’ve put out records by Stephen Duffy, Ian Broudie, Tanita Tikaram, Bernard Butler & Catherine Anne Davies and Robert Forster. They sound as brilliant as they look, and we’re putting out some more this year, by Whipping Boy, Neil & Tim Finn and Butcher Boy. We’re also about to put out our first brand-new album, The Obvious I, by Ed Dowie. I don’t know if there’ll be a sequel to Broken Greek. I’m proceeding slowly, much as I did with the first one. And if it turns out to be a book, then great. If not, well I’ve still written one more than I ever thought I would.

Thanks for chatting with us, Pete!! 
Thank you. It’s a continuing honour to have the chickfactor stamp of approval. 

Read these two excerpts from Pete’s book here and here.

we made a book.

belle-epoque-cover

I am very excited about this — my first monograph! Designed by graphic design master LD Beghtol, with liner notes by renowned critic / NYU professor / indie nerd Sukhdev Sandhu, it is shaped like a 7″ single. There will be a few copies for sale at my Reading Frenzy photo opening on June 7, and then we will do a larger press run if funding permits. cover girl: Lisa Levy. Inside are black-and-white photographs from 1985 to 2010 of musicians, writers, artists, actors, etc. Many that you are familiar with!

cf interview: travis elborough, vinyl fetishist and author

travis elborough is famous for a few things: dressing snappily, writing very funny and entertaining text and being able to talk about pretty much anything. his 2005 book, the bus we loved, about london’s routemaster buses (the kind you could jump out the back of), did phenomenally well. people still hate the bendy buses that replaced them, or the airless double deckers that you cannot exit in terrible traffic unless you have a sympathetic driver. his brand-new book, the long-player goodbye, pays tribute to our most treasured musical format. the book will be available for purchase in the united kingdom on july 10, while soft skull will publish it in the U.S. in 2009. bob stanley recently mentioned it in the london times in an article about vinyl fetishists. we caught up with our man travis via email. of course, if I were still living in london, I would be able to ask him these things in person…
chickfactor: what ebay find are you most proud of?
travis elborough: Too many to list but a phrenology head, an olive green olivetti typewriter and a signed photograph of Jo, one of the Doctor Who assistants from the 1970s, posing in the nude with a dalek would have to be up there somewhere.
what shopping experience do you miss the most?
As I am sure you remember, there used to be a fantastic, if admittedly rather overpriced, vintage clothing shop in Covent Garden in London called Cenci. It closed down probably five years ago now. It was chock full of old Italian deadstock suits from the 1950s and 1960s, and similarly period ski jumpers and golfing caps, none of which were ever in my size. Even the hats seemed to have been crafted for a special race of human beings, very possibly rendered extinct since by substantial changes in diet, whose heads were either vast or tiny. But while I bought very little from there (one of those striped yachting jumpers and a single suit, at the most, I think) I loved visiting it simply to witness its manager, Massimo, in action. He didn’t so much practise the hardsell, as look heartbroken if you chose not to purchase whatever garment he was convinced you should buy. ‘It’s a tad on the snug size’, you might say, while struggling to do up the buttons on a pea coat whose arms were a foot shorter than your own. ‘Nonsense, it fits you like a glove, feel the weave. You don’t get that kind of quality today’, he’d reply, shaking his head in a motion intended to convey a certain dispair with the modern world, and you in particular. ‘Well, I was really looking for a slightly narrow cut of trouser’, you could venture, having found yourself in a pair of strides that could easily have provided the sails for the Mayflower. ‘Honestly’, Massimo would respond, clutching, demonstratively, the leg of his own — and infinitely narrower — trousers, ‘once you get used to them, you’ll never wear anything else.’

describe a typical day of you researching this book.
I suppose, the most typical day consisted of hitting the British Library, and then idling away about seven hours flicking through ancient issues of Gramophone, Billboard, High Fidelity, Downbeat, Disc and the NME, and raiding their excellent sound archives. I spent some days, some weeks, actually, just listening to albums. And I did buy a small battery-operated turntable specifically to perch on the corner of the desk in my office so that I could spin discs while tapping away.
any tragic loss of an LP that’s still breaking your heart?
For purely sentimental reasons, I mourn the loss of, what was most likely a terrible, sound-not-alike Beach Boys LP, I had as a child. It was one of those session musician jobs that were sold in wire racks in Woolworths and local newsagents, something like The Surf Men Pay Tribute to the Beach Boys By Playing Their Hits Quite Badly. I think I bought it with a voucher I’d received for my sixth birthday. It had “California Girls,” “Good Vibrations,” etc. on it and, from what I can only dimly recall, an image of a suitably sun-drenched beach on the cover. The LP vanished years ago, and the original versions of the songs, which I didn’t know then, have long since supplanted any real memory of it but I seem to miss it all the same. And, as I have no idea what it was really called, ebay, Gemm and so on are no use. Which might be just as well.
will there be a turntable at the launch?
Oh yes. Two I think. And prizes for the most amazing, interesting and awful album anyone brings along.
your last book, the bus we loved, turned you into the “bus man” at parties. you got really sick of talking about those damn phased-out routemasters. any chance you’ll ever tire of LP chatter? are you already?
I am still talking about the Routemaster, it’s the Bela Lugosi of buses — blood red and undead! The LP book, came in a way, out of responses to The Bus We Loved. I did genuinely love the Routemaster. For anyone who doesn’t know, they were the last London buses to be built with open platform at the back and were staffed by a conductor as well as a driver and were taken off the streets after nearly fifty years in December 2005. I used to catch them every day, and when I first moved to London and was living in bus-bound Dalston, their routes really shaped my impressions of the city as a resident. I liked them enormously, aesthetically, and when I learned they were being phased out, I just started taking photographs of them with my Lomo camera and I gradually began to dig into their history. The book grew out of that. I wasn’t a bus fan as such, I was a writer who happened to be fond of this particular bus. While I was researching the book, I did, however, meet people who were absolutely fanatical about the Routemaster and buses in general. These people tend to get a raw deal, they are mocked as anoraks and the like. But I have to say, though some were a touch odd, I thought there was something rather admirable about their enthusiasm. Meeting them made me wonder, why it was that certain hobbies, bus-spotting for example, are deemed less socially acceptable than others, record collecting, say. Which in turn, led me to think about all the hours I’d personally wasted in record shops… and you can see where this is heading… Will I tire of talking about LPs? I hope not. But ask me again in six months…
are there any movie scenes featuring vinyl fetishists like the likes of our gang?
Well, I am excited about a new documentary by Emma Pettit about independent record shops. I think it’s still in production at the moment, but Emma’s also edited an accompanying book just out called Old Rare New, that has some great pieces by Byron Coley and Bob Stanley and interviews with Billy Childish, Rob Da Bank, Simon Reynolds and Joe Boyd, that’s magnificent so… buy that and look out for the film in due course.
is there any real evidence that it will come back?
There is some. Wandering about shops in central London, I do find myself thinking, God I can remember when all of this was CDs. Certainly shops like Mister CD have gone. And last October even Amazon.com began selling LPs and a range of players. So sales of vinyl are up, but they still represent a small percentage — and it tends to be a niche interest. Singles have taken off again among the hip and young, apparently. Hayes, the plant in Middlesex immortalised on the Beatles sleeves and mothballed by EMI in 2000, and now in private hands, currently turns out something like 20,000 records a week. A far cry from the 250,000 a day it produced in the early 1970s, but not bad for a format supposedly consigned to the dustbin by its digital successors over a quarter of a century ago.
click here to buy the book

photographs: travis elborough, london, 2005; and some vinyl in a paris shop window, 2004; both by gail o’hara.