Pete Ashton’s Blog

Watched part one of The Power of Nightmares this evening thanks to the marvels of BitTorrent. It managed to impress on two levels. Firstly it taught me something new about the origins of al-Qaeda and the Neo-Conservatives while tying together various facts and ideas about these dangerous groups into a coherent analysis. Secondly it was incredibly well produced, feeling more like a piece of classic factual television than something coming out of the modern BBC. The narrator was calm, clear and educated, there were no unnecessary flashy graphics and above all it wasn’t dumbed down. The only point I felt uneasy was when Henry Kissinger was made out to be the good guy, but then if Hunter Thompson can paint Nixon as a liberal compared to Bush then maybe it’s not so far fetched. If you can see it, do so.

I’ve found myself somewhat obsessed with the US election, which is no surprise as I tend to be something of an election junky, but this time it all feels somewhat critical, so much so that writing about it seems pointless. Everyone with a brain knows this is make or break . Even if they can’t articulate exactly why there a palpable sense that if Bush gets back in we’re all, in some way, fucked. In darker moments I reckon even if Kerry wins we’re still equally fucked as the neo-cons will stop at nothing to undermine him. The only ray of hope is that should Bush loose the Republicans, who are on the whole decent people, will excise this cancer in their midst and get back to actual politics. I have, however, my sincere doubts this will happen while Fox News and the fundamentalist Christian right continue to be in ascendence.

One final blurt of obviousness into the ether: despite being a Guardian reading anti-consumerist lefty Brit I do feel an affinity with the US. Most of my culture comes from there, be it comics, books, movies, the net. A fair chunk of the people I admire are American. As I’ve said before, a good percentage of my immediate family have roots there. I get pissed off when people unthinkingly criticise the US or say all Americans are stupid. Yes, there are a large number of really stupid Yanks but then there are a large number of really stupid Brits too. The problem is there are proportionally more of them than there are of us so the stupidity seems more endemic. It’s said that the world is scared of America hence the kid gloves and animosity prevalent through Europe and the Arab world, and this may well be true. Personally, though, I’m scared for America, like a good friend who’s having serious mental problems bordering on the clinically psychotic. This friend has done great things but right now he’s in danger of hurting himself and everyone around him unless he gets some help. And yet I’m powerless to do anything about it other than sit here and watch, hoping against hope that it’ll get better before it gets worse.

It occurred to me tonight that this is my first proper Halloween for quite a while. Last year it fell on a Saturday and I was in the pub and previous to that I was living in areas where there aren’t many families, and if there are they tend not to let their kids out after dark to go knocking on strangers front door. Currently I’m living in suburbia, real suburbia with families and everything. They do things differently here.

At about 7pm there’s the first knock on the door. I open it to see three short people in masks wailing “trick or treat”. Rather surprised I pop into the kitchen, realise we have nothing resembling candy, and drop some shrapnel from my pocket into their bags. Ten minutes later another knock on the door, another three short people in masks and the rest of my shrapnel has gone. Total outlay: about 67p. And it’s kinda cute, bringing back memories of when I used to do this as a kid. But I now have no money (I doubt they’d change a tenner) and no sweets. I could give them some mini-comics but I suspect their parents wouldn’t really approve so I’m a little stuck.

I pop up to Sam’s room to inform her of my dilemma and am slightly taken aback by her hostile, somewhat Scrooge-like approach to the whole event. As the evening progresses I start to understand why as our door is knocked again and again. We don’t answer, Sam on principle, me because I have nothing to placate these tiny demons and the implicit threat of a “trick” seems best dealt with by the illusion of absence rather than a pleading of poverty. Added to this the knocks are getting heavier, the murmuring voices deeper. These are not sweet little kids any more - these are the teenagers, the morally lost, socially dispossessed gits who hang outside the off license letting off fireworks.

I’m reminded again that I generally want nothing to do with the local community of Sun reading idiots and their cold-eyed offspring. I’m reminded that while my house is decent, my housemate cool and my rent cheap I really don’t like living in this area, not so much that I feel the need to leave any time soon, just in the way that I feel I have nothing in common with the residents.

In other news the first absurd Christmas decorations went up on our street last week. Come December every other house will be plastered in the tackiest of tacky flashing lights and Sam and I will laugh, regaling each other with sightings of aesthetic atrocities. But the laughter disguises a fear that there is no irony here, no knowing winks. There’s something else afoot, something I will never understand or comprehend.

Photos from my weekend in London are up on Flickr. You can go to my photostream and scroll back, or just look at photos tagged London. If you’re after photos from the Comics Festival only you can look for the relevant tag or check the Small Press Folks set which will collect pics from Caption and other events as well.

You might also be interested in the set Blob featuring, as it does, a blob.

And I just love this photo:

Flickr doth rock.

From the SL records newsletter (though nothing on the site yet) I notice Ballboy are playing at Bar Academy in Birmingham on December 2nd (that’s a Thursday) which is keen news indeed and I will endeavour to be there. There’s a single of theirs available to download from the SL Records site so go listen. (They’re also playing Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Brighton, London and Glasgow.)

I’ve started playing with Audioscrobbler which has caught my attention. It’s kinda like a Flickr for music. Kinda. Actually not at all like a Flickr for music, but sorta, maybe. What prompted me was seeing a link on Blogjam’s sidebar for “Blogjam Radio” which produces a popup from Last.FM, a side-service from Audioscrobbler which takes its interpretation of Fraser’s music tastes and turns it into a streaming radio station. That’s cool, I thought. I want one of those. So I installed the Audioscrobbler plugin and let iTunes roll, feeding the titles of songs I’d played up to their database.

At time of writing my user page is pretty scant but in a week or so it’ll have scraped enough information to have a decent profile for a decent radio station. It’ll be interesting also to see who Audioscrobbler matches me with and what music I can discover from them.

Of course I’m also thinking about the Gmail experiment. It’d be really cool if we could feed songs posted there into the system but I suspect syncing Gmail and Audioscrobbler would just be too much work and break a few too many rules (though I could be wrong - Jez?).

In the meanwhile though, is anyone else using this service? It does seem incredibly unobtrusive - just sits there in the background gathering data. Let me know, either by email or in the comments.

For my own record as much as anything else, a few weblog posts that, well, I want to keep to hand. I’ll no doubt update this as folk move from stunned to babbling.

Andy R: “Just because the bands I wanted to hear weren’t necessarily among them didn’t mean I thought any less of him for playing what he wanted to and believed in.”

Jenni: “One last unoriginal thought — by gum, before it was said elsewhere, I’d thought to myself, yes, this is my peer group’s Diana Death. Only without all the shops being closed.”

Mo: “The point is that it’s the done thing - when you go to paint woodwork, you sand the existing paintwork before you start: most of the time it makes very little difference and nobody notices either way, but it’s just what you do. When you make an album, you have it pressed and sent to Peel, it’s just what you do.”

Simon S: “I thought it would be always there, mucked about by the schedulers, of course, but always there. And now it isn’t.”

Vaughan: “It was the way he talked between the records - the dry, laconic wit; the side-swipe comments he would make after some playing some particularly ear-shattering noise only available on limited edition 7″ single from one second-hand record shop in Uzbekistan; the endearing incompetence which would see him play an entire track at the wrong speed and, more importantly, prefer it that way.”

Fraser: “For a start, he was probably the only person in the World to be a fan of The Bhundu Boys and Bum Gravy.”

City of Sound: “A personal memory is regularly driving back from football on Wednesday nights in my friend Paul Morgan’s car, listening to his show and hearing the darkest of darkcore jungle, or some insanely brutal thudding techno, followed by some scratchy Charley Patton-style delta blue from the 1920s, segued from one into the other without a care in the world about musical pigeonholes or the narrowmindedness of others. Gives a vague sense of the range of the man.”

Jonathan: “I found it hard dismissing music in the way I had before. I couldn’t hate reggae or techno anymore. Suddenly, it all sounded good. Vainly, I think that John Peel taught me something very important, and made me somehow better.”

Momus: Long and excellent tribute. “Peel, in my personal cosmology, is an angel and a devil, a friend and an enemy, a favourite uncle and a resented, oppressive boss.”

Stuart Hg: “Yet beyond this temporary, self-indulgent pining for the irretrievable lies a long-term respect and fierce admiration for what he represented and what he achieved. He was unique and he will be irreplaceable, but I keep reminding myself that these are reasons for celebration rather than sorrow.”

Tom has loads of links, including the thread on Metafilter which brings home how international he had become.

No Rock&Roll Fun which I somehow forgot to check until Thursday, has buckets of links to all the major and minor press plus newspaper covers.

And some from the newspapers:

Paul Moreley’s tribute: “I don’t think there is anyone interested in music, or broadcasting, or the splendid absurdity of life, who doesn’t owe John Peel something.”

Mark Radcliffe’s tribute: “John showed that it was possible to be a broadcaster on a national radio station and still be yourself.”

Annie Nightingale’s tribute: “His latest discovery, he said, was a band called Steveless. ‘They make an LP [John never said album] every week. They’re called Steveless because there’s no one in the band called Steve.’”

Andy Kershaw’s tribute: “His legacy is far bigger than just having been a veteran DJ. It’s not the longevity - it’s what he did.”

Appreciation in the Independent: “I have never met a regular John Peel Show listener I didn’t like.”

Apprecation in the Guardian: “Oh, god. The sound of a heart being torn open in the best, most jubilant way. Rapture so intense it must surely be forbidden, heard under the covers, in the dark, alone.”

The Sun has a surprisingly good feature - good for them anyway. I was expecting it to slip under their radar but I guess there are some secret listeners on the editorial team.

Caitlin Moran in the Times: “It wasn’t a club one could join without some manner of initiation, however. The very first time I “found” John Peel, late at night in the dark, he played a song that consisted of three people screaming “There’s a man outside/THERE’S A MAN OUTSIDE” over a terrifying speed-metal accompaniment. And when I looked out of the window, standing outside out house at midnight, there was a man outside! I couldn’t sleep for two hours, from the terror. I’d only ever listened to The Hollies and Tears for Fears before. I thought Peel might actually be channelling the Devil.”

Guardian interview from 1997

Non-music based interview from 1995: “Denied any opportunities to be shown how to use their energies creatively, obviously they’re going to be destructive. I remember a record I used to play in the punk days about vandalism being a creative instinct - if you wreck something you can go passed it the next day and say “I did that”.”

I’m loading a pallet onto the shrink-wrapping machine and the radio news catches my ear. I turn to the guy in the booth. You what? “Some people are going to be pretty upset about this” he says. Yeah, me being one of them. As Teenage Kicks starts it’s unexpected stint as most playlisted song of the day I find myself slightly stunned, unable to compute this information. He’ll never broadcast again. I’ll never hear his show live again. Kids discovering music now and in the future will not have his guiding voice. It’s over and it’s too early, far too early.

I continued my work in a daze, making little mistakes and bumping my pallet truck into things, as it sunk in. I sent a couple of text messages to people I guessed hadn’t heard and got bemused replies. Is this a wind up? A little later some guy is singing raucously along to Teenage Kicks obviously oblivious to why it’s being played. That phrase, “some people are going to be pretty upset about this” is flowing through my mind. I’m probably the only person in this warehouse who’s affected by the news.

I can’t remember when I first heard his show. It was probably around 1989. I was 17, had just discovered The Pixies and was making up for some seriously lost time music-wise. Up until then my music taste had been pretty terrible, growing up in Croydon and listening to Capital Radio. As I moved to Winchester Radio One moved to FM and became my chosen station. At the time he was playing music in trios. A guitar track, a dance track, a world track, a guitar track and so on. I loved the guitar stuff, hated the dance stuff and was bemused by the world stuff, but I stuck with it. Soon I came to tolerate and eventually love the whole show, which is kind of the point.

Throughout the 90s I tended to be the only person in my immediate group of friends that listened to him. As time has progressed this has changed as when that identification is made one tends to have made a friend for life and this evening nearly every weblog I read has a post like this on it. I don’t think he has fans as such or followers. Rather he made a certain frame of mind acceptable and this, I think, is his real legacy.

In fact I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you’d accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.

On the whole fans (for want of a better word) of him tend to be sensitive folk who just want things to be nice, who feel beaten down by the relentless enforcement of mediocrity. He not only provided a place on the radio for us to retreat to, his spirit encouraged others to do the same. Every small club, fanzine, website, setup of any description that implicitly encourages people to just do stuff owes him a debt, and they know it. The generation, generations really, that grew up with him learned something important and it stuck with them. We’re the ones who smile when we see enthusiasm, who know that there is so much more to life. We’re the ones who get it.

John Peel, thank you.

Comic festival - very enjoyable. Was expecting to spend a couple of hours there and then go to the pub but turned out to be well worth it. Loads of small press and indy folk including many new to me or known but met for the first time. Less frenetic than usual but still busy.

Of course it was actually crap if your conception of UK comics is that was inclined, and I get that. A chum who’s drawing sheeroo stuff for the yanks took one look at the hall, shrugged and left. I took one look at the hall and realised I was going to have to make many trips back and still not talk to everyone I wanted to. It’s a perception thing and a confirmation that my idea about comics is somewhat different to certain others, specifically those who are somewhat blinkered in their idea of what comics are. Fuller report to hopefully follow.

Bought more small press comics that I was intending to and could have bought more funds allowing. Quality is high at the moment, which is very encouraging. The SP scene seems to be in one of its periodic highs right now - everything’s gelling together nicely. Of course it’s all going to fall apart into shit in within the next couple of years but let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

One nice shock of the day was going into the bar and seeing a familiar but out of context face. My old Uni chum Craig (who until very recently has had nothing to do with the wacky world of comics) was there who I haven’t seen for bloody ages. Big “fuckin’ hell mate!” hugging session followed by much reminiscing. I’ve really lost touch with my friends from that period but he hasn’t and a fair few of them are still in Birmingham, which will be cool.

Stayed at Andy KK’s artists garret (top floor, no heating, no hot water, 20,000,000,000 books and comics) which is always a pleasure. On the Sunday we went to the Whitechapel gallery to see the Paul Nobel exhibit with Sacha Mardou and John Chandler. It was good but not as stunning as I would have hoped. He suffers from the fact that he’s doing comics but not really doing comics, so I look at them as comics and can see that they’re not really comics, and that kinda spoils it for me. The giant egg (with a comic/not-comic drawn on it) was cool though. The giant projection of an egg coming out of a woman’s arse was just silly though. Worth going to if only because of the detail allowing many long minutes studying each huge drawing. (on the Whitechapel site they look kinda small - they’re in fact 10ft+ tall.) And you have to take your shoes off for no discernible reason which is always fun.

Then onto Tate Modern to check out the new big turbine hall thing, which turned out to be a big letdown. I realised quite soon on that I’d seen Bruce Nauman’s video works before and not liked them, finding them too easy, too obvious and really annoying. This show is a selection of samples from said works out of context played through speakers along the hall. For five minutes the conceit is cool and it’s really interesting walking around as the voices morph into each other, but when you realise how bland and dull the actual content is it just gets annoying. It could have been so much better, maybe by putting random mikes around London and feeding the sounds into the gallery or something. Such a waste. I saw it’s running until March next year and I pity the poor staff.

Met up with Craig Smith, poet, musician, novelist, O’Reilly rep and general good egg (who comments on this blog as “smithylad”) and we went for a pint which was nice. He was interested in the whole small press comics thing which Andy and myself were all charged up by and it was interesting to compare it with his excursions in the world of poetry. Then a nice slow walk along the south bank including a stretch of the beach before heading off to Anna’s for food, chats and a comfy sofa.

Monday I was supposed to be meeting up with chum Kath but she’d gone and gotten a new job meaning she wasn’t free on Mondays anymore and neglected to tell me. Cue one exasperated phone call. I love her to pieces but… Still, all was not lost and spent a nice day wondering around the west end with Anna checking out the kooky shops of Soho and drinking much tea.

Many photos were taken and are on their way to Flickrland.