Posts Tagged ‘Earth Island Books’

James Christie – The Dark Chronicles: THE PUNK ROCK YEARS 1988-2006: MUSIC, RACISM & SNOGGING BIRDS

Posted: 20 June 2024 in Reviews, Books
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Earth Island Books – 8th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When it comes to what has become the divisive issue of wokeness, I’m absolutely with Kathy Burke all the way: “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things, basically. If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.” She tells it straight. Ironically, many of those who position themselves as anti-woke will claim that they’re the ones telling it like it is, instead of pandering to pussies.

As many sources will inform, the term “woke” originally comes from African-American culture, meaning being alert to racial prejudice.

So, just as Trump says that ‘antifa’ are the enemy – and to unpack that, antifa is anti-fascism, so to be opposed to antifa is to align oneself as pro-fa, or a fascist, to use ‘woke’ – a position critical of racism, sexism, homophobia – as a pejorative, is to essentially state that you’re a racist, sexist homophobe. As such, there are reasons I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the pitch for James Christie’s memoir.

He is 100% “anti woke, anti snowflake and 100% anti f***ing politically correct” as he puts it (“Hell, if you can’t poke fun at yourself and then poke fun at the shit people that blight society, there’s no point in having fun at all”). It’s a biography. It’s a diary. It’s a music history lesson. It’s all three things wrapped up and more. Added with savage, sarcastic humour, this is the story of a former punk as told from a non-Caucasian alternative point of view, his time involved in London’s punk rock scene and abroad throughout the entire 1990’s and up to the early Noughties. How there was, despite the fun and laughs, a more sinister side which is never mentioned, along with the hypocrisy and the occasional violence that tagged along with it. No holds barred. Warts an’ all. It will shock. It will be disgusting. It will make you laugh and then it will leave you emotionally detached. WARNING – some material will be likely to offend.

Again, ironically, the biggest snowflakes tend to be the right-wing defenders of free speech who will defend free speech to the hilt until they don’t like the speech they’re hearing because it’s critical of their position, at which point they’ll take their ball and go home, like Lee Anderson abstaining from voting on the Rwanda bill because he heard some Labour MPs ‘sniggering’. For a tough-talker who reckons asylum seekers should fuck off back to France, he’s clearly not so tough when it comes to standing by his own principles.

I don’t truly believe that Christie is that anti-woke or anti-PC, given how his book regales us with countless instances of casual – and not so casual – racism, having been born in South London in 1969, raised by a mum and dad who’d both met there in the early 60’s, and ‘says, when some twat asks him “Where do you really come from?” or even “Where do your parents come from?” his answer is still London.’ James’ book is an account of the strife, trials, and tribulations of being a black, British-born adherent to a predominantly white scene, and it’s harrowing at times, to read of the abuse he’s endured over the years. It’s also – and this is where his strength of character shines through – remarkable to observe his strength in saying ‘fuck you’ to all the twats and placing his love of the music above all that.

What we’re really looking at is a book that tells it like it is – not so much calling a spade a space, but calling a cunt a cunt. And there are plenty of them around. In chronicling a long and challenging battle against racism – being a part of a scene that’s supposed to be a broad church, inclusive, but evidently isn’t all that inclusive – this book is arguably the definition of woke. But Christie isn’t into that position.

I think it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t had to endure racism to fully appreciate just how prevalent it is, and how much it can impact the daily lives of those on the receiving end. I’m fortunate being a middle-class white guy living in an affluent part of an affluent and extremely white city, and for this reason, reading Dark Chronicles: Punk Rock Years did shock me, and frequently.

The Dark Chronicles has its moments, and I really did want to like and get behind this book. But I simply can’t get on board with its wrongheaded and frankly bizarre anti-woke agenda, and the trouble is that it comes to dominate the narrative to the point that many of the anecdotes are shifted to one side to make room for anti-woke ranting. It’s not so much an opportunity missed as a massive misfire.

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Paul Wainright – The Resurrection of The Crazed

Posted: 4 December 2023 in Books
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Earth Island Books – 7th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The blurb is a list of things that exist on the peripheries of my knowledge: bands I’ve heard of but barely heard, like Demented are Go, Long Tall Texans, and bands ‘’ve heard a bit but never paid much attention to: The Meteors (whose album with Screaming Lord Sutch hung on the wall of the secondhand record shop I worked at weekends, with a hefty price tag), and King Kurt (a guy in my school year was a massive fan and, at fifteen, was developing his quiff), and the legendary Klub Foot, which I was aware of from reading the music press (and seeing adverts in the back pages) from the mid-80s to the early 90s.

These were such different times. It’s likely hard to convince for those born post-1990 what a pre-internet world was like. The music press was the primary gateway and existed in printed tabloid format, but only touched the fringes of so many scenes. And so it was that no-budget fanzines not only existed but thrived. These weren’t slick efforts – usually one guy using cut-‘n’ paste and a wonky typewriter, stapling the Xeroxed pages together in a bedroom or basement or at work during a lunch break. They didn’t look they way they did in some attempt to look punk and adhere to some DIOY aesthetic: they were punk and DIY out of necessity, tossed together and banged out, typos and all because there was no other means of producing and circulating these things.

For better or worse, The Resurrection of The Crazed doesn’t replicate the original publications visually, but contains a typeset version of the text only, with a substantial selection of photographs and flyers, posters, tickets, and sketches, as well as the cover art from each issue. It may not have the same visual impact, but is no doubt easier on the eye, particularly with its generous font size which people of an age to have been there will likely appreciate.

For those who weren’t, it was The Meteors who are credited with being the progenitors of Psychobilly, with their amalgamation of punk and rockabilly, and, as Wikipedia notes, ‘fans of the Meteors, known as “the Crazies”, (a reference to the band’s 1981 single ‘The Crazed) are often attributed with inventing the style of slam dancing known as “wrecking”, which became synonymous with the psychobilly. And as such, the inspiration for the title, The Crazed. Fanzines tended not to stray too far from the obvious.

The Crazed may have only run for four issues, but like so many short-lived DIY publications, is fondly remembered and considered vital to the scene it represented, and this offers a neat alternative to scouring eBay to pay through the nose for dog-eared original copies – although I suspect many who will buy this book have already done that, and will be pleased to be able to put those into storage along with their various other tatty ticket stubs and the like.

What this compendium gives as an added bonus is a bunch of more recent interviews, and the benefit of hindsight. In addition to snippets of commentary, this comes in the form of a reflective piece which sits between the original zine material and the new, previously unpublished stuff, which Wainwright proffers essentially makes the fifth issue that never was. In it, he reflects on how the fourth issue was a slender tome with as little in terms of design as content, as well as being the smallest run. He writes, ‘I was still happy with the content of it, but no longer wanted to produce it as the initial enthusiasm I had when I started the fanzine had dissipated just like the Psychobilly scene that I had so loved. Looking back, it was a mistake as quite a few of the bands continued and some great records were to be released the scene where I left had virtually gone people had moved or were no longer into it.’

Enthusiasm is the essence of fanzines. Paul Wainright’s prose is not high literature: in fact, some of the writing is rough, amateurish – because that’s precisely the nature of such publications: by fans, for fans. But what Wainright published was a zine with original interviews, some of which are noteworthy for their stabs at greater depth, asking the kind of questions only a fan would ask – bringing knowledge and insight music journalists, notorious for going into interviews with either the most superficial of research, or otherwise proving themselves to be pretentious wankers – with the results often being vibrant exchanges, although this isn’t always the case, with some of the interviews, particularly the earlier ones, being fairly stilted and standard Q&As.

But for all the fandom, Wainright wasn’t entirely uncritical – slamming Demented Are Go’s performance at Dendermonde Psycho Festival in 1987 as a shambles. Although perhaps putting the ‘psycho’ into Psychobilly probably wasn’t the worst they could have done.

For Wainright, at least at the time, the story ended with the end of Klub Foot, and while this proved not to be the case in the longer term, it’s easy to relate to how it must have felt as the end of an era, akin to the closure of The Hacienda, or Stoke’s classic Northern Soul venue The Golden Torch – because every scene has its hub. And people grow up, move on, move out. But as The Resurrection of The Crazed shows us, nostalgia has significant currency, and what goes around comes around. Sure, most of those who were there are approaching retirement now, but that means they have time to reminisce at last, but also to spread the seed to younger generations, and The Resurrection of The Crazed captures the essence and energy of its time.

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(Click image to go to Earth Island Books site)

Andrea Janov – Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots: Tales of Nights I Shouldn’t Have Made it Home Alive

Posted: 17 August 2023 in Books
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Earth Island Books – July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ordinarily, any book reviews published here on Aural Aggravation are music-related – although admittedly, the inclusion of Stewart Home’s most recent outing, Art School Orgy made it here by virtue of being punk in ethos and published by a record label instead of a conventional publisher. It doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive. And so it is with Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots, the collection of poetry by Andrea Janov, which follows Mix Tapes and Photo Albums, described as ‘a coming-of-age poetry collection about a small town punk rock scene’.

Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots is pitched as a book which ‘captures that liminal part of our lives, that time past adolescence, yet before adulthood.’ It’s not really a book about music. In fact, it’s not remotely a book about music. It’s a book about New York, and a book about finding yourself while being lost in a lifestyle. Yet at the same time, music is there, in the background.

Although the visual formatting and typography (set in a very small font – presumably to maintain the shape of the lines and verses on the pages rather than for cost in this instance) is poetical, the pieces themselves are simple, straightforward prose narrative, and the 24 pieces which make up ‘A Fifth Floor Walk-In’ provide a neat linear scene-setting, sketching succinctly sights and sounds, people and places. The brush strokes are broad, with just the most cursory of details fleshing things out. The titles in this first section are all locations (if ‘7B’ feels rather tenuous compared to ‘10th Street and Avenue B’, we learn later that it’s a bar that plays punk rock), and this theme is continued, albeit less strictly, throughout the book. You couldn’t call it psychogeography, but it does serve to pin each reflection to a place, and sometimes a time, too, and in doing to explores the nature of memory and how places become evocative of moments in time, however fleeting, which reverberate in our recollections further down the line.

Amidst the array of sights, sounds, smells, and the general ambience of chatter and bustling subways, the weather is a prominent and recurring feature of these poems. While we British have a global reputation for our obsession with the weather, it equally seems to be an American thing, particularly when it comes to New York: Ed McBain’s novels always place great emphasis on the heat or the cold or the rain, a s from these readings it does seem as if NY has its own quite specific climate conditions which are an integral part of the experience of life in the city. In these early pieces, she captures the contradictory sense of community – or perhaps scene – and isolation, the distance that comes from living in such densely-packed proximity where people avoid eye contact and rarely even meet their neighbours, let alone reach speaking terms (‘NY, NY’).

As the book progresses, so the pace quickens and the details become less sharply defined, as long shifts in clubs and after-shift drinks melt onto an overall sensation of perpetual movement rather than specifics, and if the backdrop references to punk rock and the Beats on the surface feel somewhat cliché, given that Janov is recounting life in her early 20s finding herself in New York, it’s wholly credible, because it’s simply how it goes: these are the gateways to all things ‘alternative’, a rite of passage, almost. While few here in England use the term ‘punk rock’, its broad meaning in American parlance means it has a universal understanding of music that exists outside of the mainstream. Only a handful of bands are mentioned by name, and if anything, this vagueness imbues the writing with a greater relatability because it ‘despecifies’ and thus broadens the scope for understanding that general musical backdrop.

There are darker moments which remind us of the reason for the book’s subtitle, as in ‘Twenty First and Sixth Avenue, Please’ (the formatting I’m unable to replicate here)

Wake up / Suffocated by the sun / Disoriented and groggy / Chin throbbing / Hand caked in blood

[…]

Stand up. / One shoe on. / Sock in my pocket. / Grope around for other injuries. / No other spot of pain. / No cuts or bruises or contusions. / The chin probably needs stitches. / A skull and crossbones bandage will have to do.

There’s nothing dewy-eyed – and perhaps more significantly and more appealing, nothing dramatic about her narrations of living a life without fear simply because being young and immersed in living life, the risks of walking home through parks at 3am blurry with booze simply weren’t a factor for consideration.

There are a number of scenes and recollections which are replayed in only subtly different ways throughout the collection, but the repetition, rather than being frustrating, recreates the experience of lived memory, how things echo back at us variously, how our minds will return to certain times, certain places.

There’s a melancholy intermingled with fond nostalgia in ‘The East Village’, where on returning she reflects on the process of gentrification: the way the few places which remain have changed.

The sequencing of the poems does have a clear overarching linearity: first, the buzz of arriving and discovering New York, followed by the relentless whirlwind of life, before winding down to a more reflective place on revisiting and remembering. It makes for a short but satisfying work.

(Click on image for link to purchase)

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