Showing posts with label neil spencer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neil spencer. Show all posts

15 Jul 2025

Diary Snippets, Faded Memories, and Missed Opportunities from July 1985

Portrait of the Artist ... (1985)
 
 
Monday 1 July
 
Sent my proposal for a Malcolm McLaren biography to another 13 publishers. [1]
 
 
Tues 2 July
 
Virgin have decided to pay me £500 a month: £100 less than expected; £250 less than hoped. Pissed off. [2]
 
 
Weds 3 July 
 
Met with a Greek woman called Versa Manos from Arista Records. Offered me a job as a press officer: £9000 a year, expenses, and a car. I told her I didn't drive and would prefer a horse. Everyone says it's a great opportunity and I should take it. But do I really want a career in the music business ...? Thinking of moving to a remote cottage in Scotland instead. [3] 
 
 
Sat 6 July
 
Lee Ellen [4] begged me to go and see Bruce Springsteen at Wembley with her. The problem is, whilst he was born in the USA, I belong to a generation that professes boredom with the USA. After an hour, therefore, I'd had more than enough, so left. He's good at what he does, but I don't care for it. 
 
 
Fri 12 July 
 
Carrolle came over with a (very) belated birthday present: a copy of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Kind of her. Love the cover of the book, but don't really understand a word of it. Perhaps I can get Roadent to explain it to me one day! [5]
 
Later, I met up with Keith and David Gedge of the Wedding Present: they gave me 35 copies of their excellent debut single ('Go Out and Get 'Em Boy!') and some press cuttings. Agreed to help promote the record, even if Charisma won't be offering them a recording contract. [6] 
 
 
Tues 16 July
 
Went to a party at the NME: a leaving do for the editor, Neil Spencer. Listened in to his conversation with Lee Ellen: he's a boring socialist - just like Billy Bragg, who was also banging on about what a great bloke Neil Kinnock was and how he was proud to support the Labour Party, etc. [7] 
 
 
Fri 19 July
 
My fascination with Mozart continues: decided to investigate the practicalities of having a suit of clothes made in late 18th century style and went to a tiny tailor's shop off Carnaby Street which, apparently, has dressed all the stars in its time. 
      The strange little man with the measuring tape said he could do whatever I wanted and that the entire ensemble would cost £610 (including buckled shoes for £85 and a cape for £150; but not including a wig or cocked hat which would be extra). 
 
 
Sat 20 July  
 
Deciding the Amadeus costume might be a bit much, I went to Hyper Hyper to see if I could find an interesting new outfit there: I couldn't. Hated everything and everyone. Felt much happier in Kensington Market, although the mass-produced punk style clothing now feels very regressive and is worn by people who having arrived Nowhere now fully intend to stay there.   
      On the tube home, some idiot gave me a hard time about the book I was reading; Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil - told me I was a fascist. 
 
 
Fri 26 July  
 
To the Savoy for a press conference announcing a new musical project by Dave Clark called Time, featuring various artists including Freddie Mercury, Stevie Wonder, and Julian Lennon (thus the reason Lee Ellen and I were there, as Julian's a Charisma act). 
      Apparently, Time would be both a stage show and a concept album that combined a rock soundtrack with a science fiction narrative (groan). Cliff Richard had also been roped in and he was there alongside Dave Clark at the press conference, answering questions: I DO NOT LIKE HIM.  
 
 
Weds 31 July 

All packed and ready for my trip to France (leaving tomorrow - train and ferry). Ticket £42.80 rtn. Bought 1800 francs (ex. rate = 12 to the pound, so cost £150). Very excited to be getting out of England for the first time and, of course, to be meeting Sophie. Qui sait comment les choses vont évoluer? [8] 
 
 
Notes 
 
[1] Rejected by all - including Virgin Books.
 
[2] I don't know what the average wage for a 22-year-old working in London in the music business was in 1985, but I suspect it was more than the £125 a week Virgin paid me. The offer made by Arista of £9000 a year (see the snippet that follows dated 3 July) was, I suspect, closer to a typical entry level salary at this time.     
 
[3] I didn't. In fact, three months later and I decided to quit London and have nothing further to do with the music business; fleeing south to Madrid with the intention of writing a novel beneath the radiation of new skies.  
 
[4] Lee Ellen Newman, Head of Press at Charisma Records. 
 
[5] Carrolle Payne, McLaren's PA / office manager at Moulin Rouge Ltd. Roadent was her boyfriend and the one who got her the job with Malcolm, whom he had known since the old days with the Sex Pistols. 

[6] Keith Gregory, bass player with the Wedding Present, was someone I knew from my time in Leeds as a student. The view at Charisma was that the Wedding Present's jangly guitar style of indie rock was passé. The band, however, went on to have great success, including eighteen singles charting in the top 40. Can't really say I had any role in this, although I did manage to get them an interview with someone from Sounds in July '85. 
      To play the band's self-financed single 'Go Out and Get 'Em Boy!', released on their own label (Reception Records, 1985), click here.    
 
[7] In November 1985, Spencer helped found Red Wedge with British musicians Paul Weller and Billy Bragg. The collective aimed to engage young people politically and garner support for the Labour Party in the lead-up to the 1987 general election. All of the usual suspects gave support, including Jerry Dammers, Tom Robinson, Jimmy Somerville, and alternative comedians such as Lenny Henry and Ben Elton. 
      After the 1987 election produced a third consecutive victory for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party, many of the participants drifted away and funding eventually dried up. Red Wedge was formally disbanded in 1990. 
 
[8] Actually, things turned out very well and I'm pleased to say that Sophie and I are still in touch forty years on. 
      For those who might be interested, 19 year-old Mlle. Stas and I had agreed to meet up having exchanged a few letters and phone calls after she contacted the Charisma press office with a query about Julian Lennon. 
      The photo at the top of this post was taken by Sophie on my first night in France (1 August 1985).   
 
 

21 Jan 2025

On the Art of Destruction and the Creative Potential Within Chaos

Agents of Chaos: Messrs. Rotten and Lawrence
 
 
I. 
 
If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of his texts that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his introduction to Harry Crosby's volume of poetry Chariot of the Sun [1]
 
Entitled 'Chaos in Poetry', this short text develops the idea not merely of creative disorder that Malcolm McLaren and his young punk protégés will later inject into the moribund UK music scene of the mid-1970s, but of chaos as a realm of infinite possibilities and strange becomings [2].  

According to Lawrence, poetry is not merely a matter of words: essentially, it is an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world. 
 
But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the Umbrella and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the sheer intensity of lived experience (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description) [3]
 
The poet, then, as Lawrence understands them, is also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort. One whose concern is not with safeguarding the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or merely experimenting with form and technique, but who wishes rather to unleash the inhuman and forever-surging chaos that punks, animals, and flowers all live within [4]
 
 
II. 
 
On 12 February 1976, the Sex Pistols were due to play at the famed Soho music venue the Marquee, supporting the pub rock band Eddie & the Hot Rods. 
 
Shortly before the gig took place, they were interviewed by Neil Spencer from the NME and extracts from this accompanied a review of the above performance, including what has since become a famous quote from guitarist Steve Jones: 
 
"Actually, we're not into music. We're into chaos." [5]    

As Bill Grundy later discovered, Jones always did have a nice turn of phrase. However, I think we can safely assume that he'd picked up this particular term - chaos - from Malcolm, as - along with the word ruins - it had a privileged place within McLaren's thinking.
 
For McLaren, as for Nietzsche, one must always retain a little chaos in one's character if one wishes to give birth to a dancing star [6]; and for McLaren, as for Lawrence, an originary chaos is what lies beneath the ruins of culture and its fixed forms erected to keep us safe and secure, though which in the long run cause us to become deadened. 
 
 
III. 
 
In sum: of course we require "a little order to protect us from chaos" [7], as Deleuze and Guattari recognise. 
 
But so too do we need a little chaos to protect us from the monumental dead weight of civilisation. 
 
And so we need our agents of chaos and angels of destruction - whether they come with red beards like D. H. Lawrence, or spiky red hair like Johnny Rotten.   
 
Sous les pavés, la plage!
 
And surely that's not simply a cry for freedom, so much as for the joy that comes when we smash those structures and systems, narratives and networks, that enframe us within a highly-ordered (and boring) world of discipline, convention, and common sense and get back to chaos.  
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Lawrence wrote the introduction in 1928. A revised version was published under the title 'Chaos in Poetry' in the magazine Echanges in December 1929 (the same month in which Crosby committed suicide). Another version was used for the Black Sun Press edition of Chariot of the Sun (1931). 
      The text can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116. 
 
[2] I am, of course, indebted to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari who, in their final work together, argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of confronting chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating. 
      If philosophy adventures into chaos via a plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition; indeed, this, for Deleuze and Guattari is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition, but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos, which, whilst related to science and philosophy, should not be thought of as merely an aestheticisation of these practices. 
      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, 1994). And see also my post on this book dated 23 May 2013: click here.   
 
[3] See the post entitled 'On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.
 
[4] Unfortunately, unlike animals and flowers, even punks can't live within chaos for very long and that is why they soon topple into cliché and become stereotypical; why they parade up and down the King's Road pretending that they are revolutionaries breathing the wild air of chaos, when they are all the while living and dying beneath the Great Umbrella.
 
[5] Neil Spencer's piece in the New Musical Express (21 Feb 1976) was entitled 'Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming'. It was reproduced in The Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication in 2006: click here
      Readers will note that no mention is given to the headlining Eddie & the Hot Rods, who had some of their equipment smashed by the Sex Pistols when the night descended (appropriately and not atypically) into chaos (they, the Sex Pistols, were booed off stage and subsequently banned from playing at the Marquee in future).
 
[6] See section 5 of the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
 
[7] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 201.
 
 
For related posts to this one, please click here, here, and here.