Psychocandy by Paula Mejia (Bloomsbury Academic 2016)

 

The pink-and-black skid mark Psychocandy left on culture is partially due to how utterly extreme this pop record sounds, from how it resonates with the body (and potentially shatters eardrums), to the dualities it forged into one album. It is at once the manic and the depressive, the sun covering the shadows, the life that distracts from the inevitability of death, the noise crashed against lilting pop: In other words, the psycho and the candy. Elements that shouldn’t work together somehow do on Psychocandy. “If Nancy Sinatra had Einsturzende Neubaten as a backing band, that’s how we wanted to sound,” Jim Reid recalled thirty years later. “We wanted to fuck with the genres.”

And they did. Dense clouds of psychedelia and drone, pummeling white noise, sugar-drenched pop harmonies, skittering proto-punk, galloping percussion, and the melodrama of Motown converge in Psychocandy, a cocktail of noise that shouldn’t even be palatable to our ears. It’s more than palatable, however. It’s desirable. One might say just like honey.

The Jangling Man: The Martin Newell Story (2022)

 

Fingers Crossed : How Music Saved Me from Success by Miki Berenyi (Nine Eight Books 2022)

 

At one of the Soho House soirĂ©es, while I order drinks from the bar, a drunk comedian slurs at me to either suck his cock or fuck off. As I stand chatting to friends, Alex from Blur is sprawled on the floor making ‘phwoarr’ noises and sinks his teeth into my arse. The Carry-On Sid James impersonations are a common theme. I fall into conversation with Keith Allen and try to ignore him sweeping his eyes around my body, twitching with overheating gestures and tugging at his collar to show he’s letting off steam. Another comedian sharing a cab ride for convenience suggests he come in for a bunk-up, despite having spent the entire night excitedly chatting about his imminent fatherhood. Liam Gallagher circles me, wondering aloud when I’ll be ready to fuck him in the toilets. Look, I know I’m hardly Mary Poppins, but this isn’t flirting, it’s harassment. It’s constant, relentless sexualisation. And there’s a nasty edge to it, implying that it’s me, not them, who is asking for it.

I recall Suzanne Vega once pointing out that Madonna may be breaking boundaries, but every teenage girl who dresses like her is still treated like a slut. I’m experiencing a similar uncomfortable side effect with the supposed androgyny of Britpop. While Justine from Elastica and Sonia from Echobelly and Louise from Sleeper, wearing ungendered suits or jeans and T-shirts, get treated as one of the boys, my long hair and short dresses are now a signal that I’m absolutely gagging for it. Sure, I could get a crop and stop wearing a skirt, but that’s no different to saying, ‘If you don’t want the grief, dress like a nun.’ I’ve been doing what I do for years and now I’m being reframed as happy to be objectified.

I’ve been reading feminist texts since college, however unfashionable that might be right now (and, to be fair, Chris has always found it a bit tiresome). My education, both at PNL and from the politicised bands I’ve followed, has taught me precisely to see through the ‘harmless fun’ to the misogyny that drives it. I’m not militant about it. I don’t crucify people for crossing a line, I just recognise there is one. And I need to know someone well enough to accept that they’re ‘just joking’; I’m not going to swallow it as a lame excuse from a bloke I’ve just met.

Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story by Richard Balls (Soundcheck Books 2015)

Prologue

32 Alexander Street, London, W2

1977. An office in a former house in Bayswater, now home to a small record label. Inside is a garrulous Dubliner with scruffy hair, a couple of women hard at work, and a boyish-looking singer called Wreckless lounging in a chair. The door opens and a bloke comes in carrying several large cardboard cut-outs of some of the label’s exciting new acts. One cut-out is of a nerdy, pigeon-toed singer with a sneer and a Fender Jazzmaster.

“Ah great, they’re here. Great,” says the Irishman. “Jesus, these are pretty good. I love the one of Elvis. These look all right.” Excitedly he picks them up and admires them, before grabbing a hammer from a drawer and climbing on a chair. “Hey Suzanne, would you pass me a nail? I want to put these up. These are gonna look great up here.” Bemused at this sudden burst of activity, the singer looks on as the giant shop displays are banged into place. “That’s the sort of stupid thing I’d do,” he thinks to himself.

As the hammering goes on, a wild-eyed, intimidating figure bursts in and looks up at the wall, horrified. “Yeah, we’ve got the displays,” says the Irishman. “They’re fucking great aren’t they? Great.”

 

“What the fuck?” yells the other guy. “What fucking moron did that?” “Well we’ve got to put ‘em up, Jake, you know?” he replies. “Put ‘em up? Do you want to see Elvis Costello with a fucking nail through his head? I fucking don’t”. Jake then storms out of the office, slamming the door behind him, and disappears along the busy London street.

A storm is brewing. Something is going to blow.

Excerpt From: Richard Balls. “Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story.” iBooks. 

Excerpt From: Richard Balls. “Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story.” iBooks. 

Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?: An Indie Odyssey by Nige Tassell (Nine Eight Books 2022)

When Malcolm returned to Essex from university in Sheffield, his ears full of a new band called the Smiths and his head full of Marxist theory, the three of them resumed making music together. This was the point at which the idea of fusing tuneful pop music with political lyrics was forged.

‘It was political almost from the start. “There’s no point writing love songs” became a thing because we couldn’t be as good as the Beatles. We could never hope to write something like “I Saw Her Standing There”. So Malcolm decided what he could do was write political songs because there hadn’t really been any particularly fantastic ones written in the way he was thinking about politics. There obviously had been political songs, but not from a real, properly thought-out Marxist perspective.’

The concept was sound. Pop tunes to get people over the threshold and then encourage them to think about the lyrics. Another iron fist in another velvet glove.

‘It made us stand out from everyone else. We weren’t marching around. We weren’t Stalinists or anything.’ At the time, Billy Bragg was the most conspicuous political songwriter. He was from their home patch, a few years ahead of them at the same comprehensive school. ‘We knew him as one of the big Jam fans in Barking. He was in that band Riff Raff who, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, played on the back of a lorry in Tim’s street.’

This top-floor office is level with a railway viaduct just outside the window, carrying trains back and forth between Clapham Junction and Richmond. They rumble past every couple of minutes, occasionally emitting a metallic screech. John is clearly used to it. He’s been at Domino now for fifteen years.

‘At the beginning, we always aimed for Top of the Pops,’ he explains. To some, being an anti-capitalist band aiming to work in an industry known for its rapaciousness and greed might seem a little contradictory. ‘My favourite quote about this is from John Cooper Clarke – “There’s no point being an island of Marxism in a sea of capitalism”.

John then cites McCarthy’s ‘Use a Bank I’d Rather Die’, a song written with heavy irony. ‘Just because you think a certain way, you’re not going to stop using the bank. You’re not necessarily going to cut things off.’ (The use of irony and sarcasm – those traits much enjoyed by the Manics – often led to the band being misunderstood. ‘Almost all of the McCarthy songs are sung by a “character”,’ Malcolm explained in a 2007 interview before he fell silent on the subject of the band, ‘like a character in a play. I often don’t agree with the sentiments expressed in the song. Quite the reverse.’)

The Greatest Living Englishman by Martin Newell (Autumn Girl Books 2020)

Young Jobless

I sat with a two-litre bottle of cider in one hand and a roll-up in the other, watching the video screen in my landlord Steve's living room. Roger Maynard, then a news presenter at BBC East in Norwich, was interviewing a young man. The young man, in his 20s, was dressed almost entirely in black, his thin face appearing more gaunt for a surfeit of smeared mascara. He lurched uneasily in his seat as he fielded the interviewer's questions. Did he think, asked Roger Maynard, that a record whose subject matter mentioned unemployment and drugs was relevant as an educational aid for youngsters? The young man stared vacantly at the camera: “Well it’s gotta be better than rock-climbing and Duke of Edinburgh Awards... annit?” he slurred. Then he laughed, lurching almost out of his seat.

Even I, by this time well-numbed with cider, was slightly shocked as I watched the video recording of my first live TV appearance.

Everyone, apparently, had seen it. The pub, so Steve said, had been a-buzz with it earlier. Even an uncle of mine in distant Buckinghamshire had witnessed it. Shortly afterwards, during the course of a telephone conversation, he told me quietly that he thought I’d let myself down. It hadn’t been the plan. I’d put a sharp black outfit together. A little bit rock’n’roll maybe, but smart-ish It was on the train to the Norwich studio that I noticed my throat was swollen, my head ached and I felt slightly other-worldly. The meet and greet person at the BBC showed me into the Green Room (which they still had in those days) pointed to a large drinks cabinet and gave me one of those, you-know-what-to-do gestures. No sooner had the door closed than I’d sprung briskly up and mixed myself a whisky mac. Then, quickly, another. Still no one came to collect me. So I had a third. I now felt confident, witty and erudite.

Thus began My So-Called Fucking TV Career. A few days earlier, my mum had telephoned me at 7.30am and said, “You’re in the Daily Mail. They say that a 'dole and drugs record’ written by a part-time washer-up has been sent out to hundreds of schools as an educational aid. And a Tory MP Nick Budgen, has condemned you publicly." She sounded rather more excited than alarmed about it. On Radio 1, the DJ Dave Lee Travis was playing ‘Young Jobless' at lunchtimes. The record company informed me that my disc had been C-listed, which meant ‘sporadic’ airplay. The drive-time DJ, Peter Powell, had played it too. For the next fortnight or so, I’d be washing up at the restaurant on a busy lunchtime session, and I’d suddenly hear Max Volume’s guitar riff chugging in, as my record came on. 

“Hey, that’s my record again!” I’d squeal. The whole shift would come to a halt until it was finished. I was getting Radio 1 airplay. One evening they played it on Radio 4’s PM news show. I never heard it of course. In those days I only ever listened to pop music stations. Because of that particular news item, some high-up at EMI Records had also heard it.

The next thing you know, along with Kris and Stuart from Offstreet Records, I’m sitting upstairs at EMI’s Manchester Square HQ, negotiating a one-off, piss-poor, four per cent record and distribution deal. The record was hurriedly re- released on EMI's Liberty label. Now we were motoring.

We sealed it with a lukewarm bottle of Chablis, which I'd found while nosing around in their broken fridge, when instead I should have been listening to what was being said. In the bogs later, just along the corridor, I met Mensi, cheerfully ebullient singer of the Angelic Upstarts. “Do some fookin work, yer lazy bastids!” he yelled in broad Geordie, as we passed back through the typing pool together. On the way back up to the meeting room, finding myself on the wrong staircase, I met a few glamorous- looking New Romantic types: tablecloths over shoulders, leather trousers and big ’80s hair. They all had flutes of cold fizzy in their hands. I was informed that it was some kind of reception for Dexys Midnight Runners. And there's me, Kris and Stuart, crammed upstairs in an office with a paper cup of warm Chablis each and a song about the plight of Our Unemployed Yoof. Every expense spared, then.