Louder Than Words festival 2019

Principal Hotel, Manchester by Jamie Wilson. Creative commons licence

Friday 8th November:

This evening was day one of Louder Than Words.

I only went to the middle event of the three, which was Edwyn Collins and Grace Maxwell in conversation with John Robb. It was a very funny, moving, gentle conversation between the three of them, with Grace not speaking over Edwyn, but with him. They clearly work as a team and it made for a slightly meandering, gentle interview, but one that was no less articulate than any other LTW opening night conversation.

After the interview and Q&A, Edwyn sang while a young guitarist, Patrick, played. I remember hearing Edwyn being interviewed on the radio a few years back when he was just starting to perform again, post brain haemorrhage, and I think he said then that he finds the singing easier than the speaking, and that's how it came across tonight too: He's much more fluid when he's singing, the years just drop away and you can see the young man from Orange Juice again. Needless to say, he got a standing ovation at the end.

It was Jo Wood afterwards, with her Rolling Stones memoir, Stoned, and what with not being interested in the Rolling Stones, I decided to leave and see how much of Podcast Radio Hour I could catch instead. I got on a 192 very quickly, and it was a fast moving one so we zipped along nicely. We got milkshaked in Ardwick and I had to explain to a young man who asked me how far we were from Reddish that he'd got on the wrong bus. Other than that, pretty uneventful really, save for the steady trickle of milk running down the windows on the other side of the top deck. They hit the window so hard I felt the thud and for one sickening moment thought we'd hit someone. But no, we'd been hit by a high velocity milkshake instead.

Saturday 9th December:

Day two of Louder Than Words began with Lucy O'Brien in conversation with John Robb about Dusty Springfield, the revised third edition of her biography having been published earlier this year. An evocative speaker, Lucy managed to bring both the book and the subject to life very satisfactorily. She also talked about the history of the book, and it's three editions, and how her perspective on Dusty has shifted from viewing her as a victim to a survivor, a battler. Someone asked a question I'd often thought about when reading the new edition, namely how did Lucy choose what to include and what not to include as regards Dusty's private life. There are other biographies of Dusty Springfield, all written after her death, and some of them do focus on her private life over her music. Similarly, we can all cite examples of overly salacious biographies, whether of Dusty or other stars.

Lucy did a good job of explaining about how her focus was always going to be on Dusty the artist, and that she chose to try and balance Dusty the artist with Dusty the private woman, but that she didn't want to write a book where the talent would be overshadowed by the life.

After seeing Lucy talk about Dusty I next went to see Matt Everitt talking about his book, The First Time, which is the book of the long running interview series on 6Music.

I have to confess that my interest was mainly piqued in this case because Matt has interviewed Florence Welch for the series, and she is in the book as well. Although she wasn't one of the interviewees he talked about, it was still an interesting and entertaining listen, with some really absorbing tips and hilarious anecdotes. He was very much the funny, slightly self-depreciating, debonair raconteur, and I enjoyed it very much. It was also, interestingly, a bit of a masterclass in interviewing, which I also appreciated.

After that, I nipped out for dinner at 8th Day, and had a particularly fine bangers and root veg mash with minted peas and mushroom gravy. I also had a Rasperry Dazzle smoothie, which I promptly spilled on myself. I think this has happened every single time I've ever ordered that particular smoothie at 8th Day, with fairly disastrous results. Fortunately I was wearing a pink jumper on this occasion.

Upon returning to the palatial halls and suites of the Principal, I went to see Lucy O'Brien again, this time interviewing Graham Duff about his book, Foreground Music. Graham is a comedian and writer but I hadn't come across his work before, probably because I don't watch TV. Foreground Music is a book of memoir structured around 15 gigs, and the bits he read made me want to read the book because he is very good and taking you back to a specific time and place, making you live it. This included the horror of a Cliff Richard gig he experienced aged 10, and a riot at a Joy Division show in Blackburn as a teenager. It's a simple but effective concept for a book, but it's one that seems to work well so I will read the book, and keep an eye out for his other work too.

'Is Extinction Rebellion A Return To The '60s' with Leslie Tate and Sue Hampton proved to be a bit of a puzzler, in that it actually felt like two talks sandwiched into one. I didn't find the first half un-interesting, but it did feel a bit like Leslie was labouring the point in terms of describing how the sixties were, and how he had experienced them. It felt a bit like being talked down to. I found Sue Hampton's half of the talk to be much more engaging as that was the half that dealt with Extinction Rebellion, and their involvement in it, and she is one of those people whose enthusiasm for a subject is infectious. If they do this talk again, I think they might want to re-think the structure a bit as it's a really interesting subject, but it didn't entirely come off for me.

The next event I attended was upstairs in the Directors Suite, and it was Steve Lamacq talking to Daryl Easlea about the re-issue of his memoir, Going Deaf For A Living. This proved to be an all absorbing conversation, the exuberance of Daryl complimenting the quieter personality and laconic, slightly deadpan, slightly self depreciating delivery of Steve.

He's a great raconteur, and while many dark moments were touched upon, there were also some amusing anecdotes and funny moments, including a suitably weird Nirvana interview and the discussion of early 1990s sub scenes - "Fraggle is definitely due a revival" - There was also the touching recollection of him and Jo Whiley jumping up and down in the lift across four floors of the building at Radio One after they found out they'd been given the  The Evening Session show on a permanent basis.

There were a number of harrowing moments, including his recounting of the Richey Edwards 4 Real interview incident, and what it was like to broadcast in John Peel's slot the night Peel died. I could tell in both cases that he was re-living it as he talked, and he came across as slightly haunted in both cases, and definitely upset when talking about Peel, which is understandable. If you listened to that show at the time, a show I seem to recall he did with Maryanne Hobbs, another child of Peel, it does sound like two very fragile orphans trying to hold it together.

He went downstairs to sign books immediately after talking about it and I thought I'd try and take his mind off this rather dark ending to the conversation by joining the queue at the signing table and taking the opportunity to remind him of the time me, Daniel (I'm Five fanzine) and Carl (Fancy Biscuits fanzine) once descended on him at an Angelica gig at the Roadhouse in about 1996 and he took away copies of all our fanzines plus a really rough live bootleg we'd made of Automatic playing at the Night & Day. Not the most scintillating of conversation gambits, but it was a nice memory for me and wanted to say thank you.

The queue for signings was massive so I mainly sat by some scenic foliage in a very comfy chair on the landing until most people had gone, then lurked at the end of the queue as he was finishing up. When I reminded him of the gig, his eyes lit up and we talked about Angelica and Manchester gig venues for a bit, which was really nice.

After that, it was time for the club cultures panel, which was themed around the idea of can, is, and should dance music be political? Because today marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and we had a German national and resident of Berlin on the panel, there was a lot of fascinating discussion about German techno and how the fall of the wall impacted the music scene, and access to music.

Alas there was also a very agitated gentleman in the audience who kept trying to ask questions thinly disguised as attempts to pick fights with people. He left after a while though, presumably because no one would play. A milder moment of conflict occurred when another man in the audience tried, a bit smugly, to claim that only real political action counted for anything, and that politics in music was a waste of time. His argument was thoroughly and decisively shot down in flames by a particularly combative Rhoda Dakar, which just goes to show that you should never mess with someone who's been involved with Red Wedge.

On the way home the bus was full of rowdy teenagers so I put my headphones in and listened to Innocence's 'Natural Thing' (apt) while watching a young girl with a delightful smile draw hearts and write in Arabic in the condensation on the bus windows.

Sunday 10th November:

Day three of Louder Than Words began with another early start, this time to see Lucy O'Brien in conversation with Amy Raphael about her new book, A seat at the table, a return to the world of women in rock she first visited with 1994's Never Mind The Bollocks: Women Re-Write Rock, but for a post #MeToo world.

Whereas Amy didn't have a lot of problems getting people to talk to her in 1994, for this book, she did. It seems that the main reason why she struggled this time is that the big stars are so much harder to reach these days. There are so many walls of protection, so many gatekeepers between star and journalist that it meant including the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, and Björk (who is included in Never Mind The Bollocks), was just impossible.

I can see that people who want to read about the big names, and what their take on music and feminism is, would be disappointed by this, but for me the books focus on less well known performers adds to the books charms. I'd rather hear Christine and the Queens, Georgia, Emmy The Great and Kate Tempest on feminism and music; it feels more fresh, and their views are unlikely to have been over reported.

The conversation itself was a fascinating one, both riveting in detail and supportive in nature. This was definitely my highlight of the weekend, and about the only thing that would have made it better would have been if there'd also been an event today that involved Hannah Ewens and her book Fangirls. I definitely feel that Hannah is doing for fans what Amy and Lucy are doing for artists and it would have been good to have both sides of the female music experience side by side.

Afterwards it was time for the music journalism panel in Clock Tower 7, which I enjoyed a lot. As was the case last year, it was more of a free form discussion between panel and audience around various themes and issues in music journalism than it was a formal panel discussion.

Interestingly, there was a lot this year on the virtues of working for free, despite Barney Hoskyns campaign. Also, a number of folk on the panel were people who'd started their own platforms and publications. There was a bit of a discussion around print vs online, but I don't think anyone came down firmly on one side or the other really.

I made the unusual decision to speak during this discussion as I've been thinking a lot about why paid music journalism is so hard to get and how, in the past year, I've found it much easier to get paid journalism that isn't music writing. Despite having much more experience as a music writer.

The answers that came back were the kind of thing I expected, but I felt better for saying it even if no one could come up with a solution for me.

I decided I wanted dinner afterwards so I ventured out along Oxford Road to Patisserie Valerie, where I discovered all of the sandwiches and bread based things were off limits as sourdough contains egg (I did not know this). On the bright side, I did discover a very fine burrito bar about two doors down, so it could have been much worse.

Next up was another journalism panel, albeit a slightly different one, with a much more historical angle. This one was Simon Frith, John McCready and Mark Sinker talking around the themes of Mark Sinker's book, A Hidden Landscape, which is a history of the music press from the 1960s to the 1980s. I was thinking that this must be an area of history that's been well covered already, but apparently there's only about five histories of the music press in book form - it just so happens I've read and own two of them.

There was a lot of noise next door in Clock Room 6 during this discussion, which made it hard to hear what was being said all the time as over the dulcet tones of messrs  Frith, McCready and Sinker, it basically sounded as though Monty Python were putting on a Punch and Judy show next door with some help from The Clangers and a troupe of clowns. In actual fact, it was Evil Blizzard in conversation.

Towards the end of the panel discussion there was a touching moment when the panel and the audience fell into reminiscing about ritual pilgrimages to distant shops to purchase the weekly, and monthly, music press. The panel were talking about the sixties, seventies and eighties, but I was doing the same thing in the nineties to buy NME, The Zine, Sun, Zoom, Spark and The Trigger. A woman in the audience said she'd had a similar ritual 16 years ago when her granny would buy her Kerrang! each week alongside a magazine for herself, and they'd sit together, reading their magazines.

My final event of Louder Than Words 2019 was Modzines, which was Daniel Rachel talking to Eddie Piller and Steve Rowland about their book Modzines: Fanzine culture from the mod revival. I could tell it was going to be a good event when, despite sparse attendance, a discussion broke out amongst the crowd as to the geographical origins of Fred Perry, with me and two guys who run a Stockport modzine maintaining he was from Stockport and no one believing us until Eddie Piller had googled it. I feel this set the tone for the event somehow, in that it was a small audience but everyone there was really interested and engaged. Both speakers were passionate about their subject and well informed, and Daniel is a skilled interviewer who successfully kept the conversation on track and brought out the best in them. It was a funny, engaging, informative and entertaining close to the weekend.

Louder Than Words 2018

2018 marks the sixth year of Manchester's annual Louder Than Words music literary festival, and my fourth year of attending. Whereas for the previous two years the opening night has clashed with leaving do's at work, this time there were no conflicting events scheduled for the Friday. Instead, I was torn to discover that the Saturday night of the festival would clash with the London premiere of Gina Birch and Helen McCookerybook's excellent punk women documentary, Stories from the She-Punks, at Doc'N'Roll Fest. I really hope they manage to tour the film, and that it comes to Manchester, because I really want to see it.

The Principal hotel on Oxford Road was observing it's annual ritual of office workers in black tie and evening dress on a festive works night out when I arrived. This can be quite unnerving to walk into if you're new to Louder Than Words but, thankfully, event volunteers are on hand in the foyer, ready to steer attendees through this bewilderingly posh hotel, and up to the Directors Suite on the 2nd floor for the evenings events.

Friday night:

Gemma Cairney from Radio One was our opening speaker. She was interviewed by two teams of 3rd year Journalism students from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) working in pairs. MMU and Louder Than Words having formed a partnership of sorts, which is helpful in terms of seeing that students get some industry experience as part of their degrees. The students were a little stiff, but that was probably due to nerves. They were certainly all very professional and clearly well prepared and, overall, they did a good job. Cairney came across as someone who's grown up in public, which might account in part for the sense I got of her being a bit of a wise old soul. It does seem as though millennials are doing their 30's well, and she is no exception to that, though her role as an agony aunt who's written a series of wellbeing related books might account for that as well. I found her to be very likeable.

Afterwards I got talking to two young women who'd been at the event. One of them had asked me to take a picture on her phone of them with Cairney, which I did quite badly unfortunately. They were sweet about it and we got talking by the lift in the corridor afterwards. They'd been to a poetry workshop and the tutor had given them tickets for the Cairney event. They were planning to attend the Slam poetry session on Sunday morning.

While waiting for Guy Pratt to come on I got speaking to Amy, one of the students who had interviewed Gemma Cairney, who was staying on to review the Pratt event. We'd both come along not really knowing much about him or what to expect, and we both ended up enjoying it. I'm not surprised that he was recommended to Louder Than Words after someone saw him performing in Edinburgh because his show (and it was very much A Show) felt a bit Edinburgh Fringe. It's quite an experimental concept in some ways in that he's telling rock'n'roll anecdotes, using guitar to demonstrate certain riffs and points, but he's doing it on his own as stand up essentially.

The show, and it's cultural references, are rooted very much in the Classic Rock oevre, which tends to attract a very particular demographic. It tends to be quite chin stroking and inclined to take itself very seriously. To have a wildly energetic, slightly manic, bass player running about doing impressions of David Coverdale and telling funny stories about Pink Floyd gigs is something of a surprise in that context. It was a marathon, high energy, two hour performance, with an impromptu interval we weren't expecting. Declaring ourselves tired afterwards, Amy and I went our separate ways for home, and bed.

Saturday:

I didn't fancy either of the 10am events on the Saturday but I had some errands to run before heading over to the Principal so stayed on the bus until Piccadilly then headed towards Market Street to finish my Christmas shopping, walking past the Piccadilly Rats in the process. They seemed to be on fine form, with a healthy crowd watching, and very much in rockabilly mode. I couldn't see how the Bez dancers were taking to that as I couldn't see them amidst the crowd watching.

I had two books to return to Central Library in St Peter's Square after that and decided to check out the Manchester music photo exhibition next to the music library while I was there. It is well worth a visit. I liked the punk and post punk images, though I had seen some of the Joy Division ones before, but the bit I liked the best was the montage of Manchester 2018 artists, a series of snapshots that really showcased the diversity of the current scene here. The closing images in the exhibition are two massive enlarged photos from 2017. The first is the One Love concert at Old Trafford in May 2017 and the final one is of the We Love Manchester concert at the re-opening of Manchester Arena in September 2017. Very powerful.

My first Louder Than Words event of the day was 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture: Music writing panel discussion'. It was a bloody big panel, but I think that was a strength in this case. Said panel was made up of a mix of students, academics, starting out and well established journalists. Martin James, Lucy O'Brien, Simon Morrison and Everett True represented the established journalists, and academia. Emily Oldfield from Louder Than War, Georgia Rawson (formerly of Kerrang!) and a woman who's more on the PR/copywriting side of things, and whose name I can't recall, represented the new. There was also a student from the Chester music journalism course.

My MMU student pal, Amy, from Friday night was there covering it and MMU's journalism department in general were well represented in the audience. It was a wide ranging discussion that took in many facets, including the craft of music journalism versus the perception of music journalism within journalism itself, how music journalism isn't taken seriously, the oppositional working environment of musician's vs journalists, the decline of rigorous, critical journalism*, whether music journalism can be taught at degree level, the blurring of the lines between PR and journalism... Some of these issues are industry wide in terms of journalism, some are specific to the music industry, but they're all important. Initially the discussion felt quite nervy, like everyone was holding their guard a bit, then people relaxed and it became a lot franker and the conversations flowed naturally.

A comment I found very interesting was the assertion that you can't be a music journalist unless you're out there at gigs several nights a week. It made me ask myself a question I've been pondering for a while now: Is what I'm doing music journalism? Increasingly I find myself writing about the stuff that goes on around the music as much as, or sometimes more than, the music itself. I do ingest a lot of new music, but my gig going declined sharply with the rise of the smartphone (and associated dickish behaviour at gigs) and is only really starting to recover in the past year or so. As such, I can go for weeks, or even months in a dry period of inspiration, without going to a single gig.

Even when I was a gig going fanzine writer in the 1990's I tended to prefer no more than two gigs a week and I think that's because I like to pick and savour my gigs, which possibly isn't that helpful an approach as a music journalist, even if it has some logic as a fan. Maybe it's because my access to gigs was slightly delayed and very hard won and, as such, I still tend to view a gig as an event. There is also the financial aspect, it has to be admitted.

My second event of the day was the Madonna: Like A Gay Icon panel discussion next door with Lucy O'Brien (Madonna: Like An Icon), Matt Cain (The Madonna of Bolton) and Darryl W. Bullock (David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 years of LGBT music). It felt very unusual to be attending a panel discussion that had, at it's heart, an unashamedly pop icon as opposed to an icon of rock or electronic music, let alone a panel discussing LGBT artists and allies.

I really liked this panel, not only because all three panellists were very well informed, likeable and funny, but also because while they may have started with Madonna, they didn't talk entirely about her.  Darryl W. Bullock's book seems to be building on John Gill's Queer Noises book of many years ago, and I was interested to hear how far back he'd been able to trace the LGBT trail of influence and representation in music. I also loved Matt Cain's anecdote about the customary opening conversation gambit at Attitude magazine when meeting new starters: 'Which Diva are you?' There was a Mariah camp, a Britney camp... This related to a discussion about gay men and diva's and the long term symbiotic relationship of.

I was flagging a bit after this so I went to 8th Day for a very late dinner and returned to the Principal with a vegan brownie in a box and a bottle of rose lemonade, feeling much, much better. It did mean that I ended up missing Jeanette Lee and Geoff Travis in conversation, but at least I got to people watch some of the attendees of the annual Doki Doki Fest (also in it's sixth year) as they made their way, in full lolita fashion and cosplay attire, to and from Sugden Sports Hall.

My next event was the excellent Jordan and Cathi Unsworth in conversation with John Robb upstairs in the Directors Suite. I was late to arrive to this event and, as such, got a crap view which I tried not to let spoil my enjoyment.  Jordan and Cathi Unsworth are two very intelligent, independent, likeable women, each with their own unique look and personality. Jordan's memoir, which she wrote with Unsworth, is due out in April 2019, and it sounds like it's going to be really, really good. Jordan has only recently re-engaged with punk, but she has a lot to say, and not just about punk. Both of them talked a lot about the pre-punk world and I liked the idea of overlapping worlds and scenes. It sounds as though the book will be quite analytical, but in a good way.

I could have gone to see the Arena: Punk And The Pistols film afterwards, which featured Jordan in it's cast, but I didn't in the end because I had it on video for years and have watched it so often that there's bits I can quote verbatim, even now. I also really, really dislike the ending, for reasons too long to discuss here. Instead I went to the annual club culture's panel: Do Ravers Dream of Electric Beats?

Although this panel discussion took me way outside my musical comfort zone, I really enjoyed it. The idea this year was to take a snapshot/health check of where the UK dance scene is in 2018, 30 years on from the UK's 'Second summer of love'. As the panellists were discussing where they had been in 1988, and what they were doing at the time, I had a flashback to 1990 and my 4th year juniors leaving do at primary school. Said do being an acid house homage done as badly as only well meaning teachers and eleven year old kids can do. We only had one acid house record anyway and, after we'd played it, it was back to Kylie and the 'Lambada'. Needless to say, the panel had far more interesting memories to import.

One of the panellists was Dr Beate Peter, an academic from Germany who now lives in Manchester, and it was really interesting to hear her talk about the cultural differences between Berlin techno and Manchester techno. There was also a guy who'd been DJing in Manchester in the 80s who talked of the three tiers of exposure that had once existed for DJ's whereas now you're either massive or minuscule, no in-between.

I didn't understand everything, but I broadened my understanding a bit.

Sunday:

I ended up going to bed very late on Saturday night/Sunday morning and, as such, was glad of a lie in. Clearly a veggie fried breakfast and a shower were called for.

Because I was leaving the flat later than usual on the Sunday, I'd forgotten that the buses on the A6 would be diverted for the Armistice Day Remembrance event at the town hall and war memorial in Stockport, and that this would impact on my getting into Manchester. It didn't help that all the 192's seemed to be travelling in pairs that morning, meaning there were quite long gaps between buses.

As such, I only just made it to the Principal in time for Stuart Cosgrove, who was talking about the third of his soul trilogy, Harlem 69: The Future of Soul, with Daryl Easlea. Easlea proved to be an adept interviewer who had a good rapport with Cosgrove, and being the master storyteller that he is, Cosgrove was on great form. He  mentioned the significant club heritage on Manchester's Whitworth Street, and ventured to suggest that the whole history of club culture is on that street (Twisted Wheel, The Ritz, Hacienda...) and that a book could be written about it. His knowledge of soul is absolutely forensic, but it's his passion for his subject and his storytelling capacity and interest in characters that's able to sweep an audience along, and hold them.

I went to part of Sheila Rock's conversation with Rudi Esch but left part way through because I wasn't feeling great and wasn't sure about the event itself. Not long after that I decided a sandwich and fresh air were both required.

As such, my final event of the weekend was punk fanzine editor Tony Drayton (Tony D of Ripped and Torn), who was being interviewed by John Robb. Tony D provided an introduction to a book of punk essays I contributed to earlier this year, so I felt inclined to go out of a sense of loyalty, but I also wanted to go because it was a fanzine related event and there haven't been so many of them at Louder Than Words this year. I enjoyed Tony D as much as I'd enjoyed Stuart Cosgrove earlier, albeit for very different reasons. Drayton is a good interviewee, candid and slightly self effacing, and he has really good stories, not just about punk but about the stuff going on around punk, such as squat culture in London.

When I did my British Library punk fanzine research a few years ago now, Ripped and Torn wasn't one of the fanzines that I felt a lot of affection for, but I would say that it served as a good document of the times. I think I like him (as a person) more now than I would have done at the time. It was certainly an absorbing conversation, giving a take on punk that felt fresh. Because John Robb is from a fanzine background as well, he knew to ask about production and distribution/sales, which I liked.

There was a real end of the event feel to things when I emerged from the room. Not as many people were about and there was a definite sense of post event fatigue and tidying going on. I headed back to Piccadilly and caught the bus home.

* - I am guilty of this: Because I don't get paid for most of my work I am considerably un-inclined to waste precious time on the chore of reviewing and writing about artists I don't like, especially when there is so much good stuff out there that I don't have time to write about.

Adventures in the capital

Travelling to London by train is a frequently disorientating experience, on a number of levels. It's not uncommon for me to find myself at Euston while my brain is still at Stockport train station.

Last night was the book launch for the new, updated edition of Lucy O'Brien's Madonna biography, Like an Icon. Because I am being a writer full time now, because I thought it would be fun to go, and - most remarkably of all - because the train fare was actually quite reasonable for a change, I went along.

The launch took place at Gay's The Word, an independent LGBTQI+ (I hope I got all the letters right...) bookshop in Kings Cross, a short ish walk from Euston station. I haven't actually been down that road before but it cuts through innumerable bits of Kings Cross that I've either stayed in hotels in, got lost in, or passed through in other ways so I was pretty confident of finding it.

Normally I find these kind of events incredibly nerve wracking, but I've had slightly more practice at speaking to people since I went to Lucy's last book launch in 2013, and I like to think I fared better this time. Lucy did a fantastic speech about Madonna, and about the book, which I think won round or at least whetted the appetite of a few skeptics. Enough to buy the book, which I would recommend you do, because it's a really good, intelligent read even if you aren't a Madonna fan.

I am part of the first generation of women to grow up with Madonna as a constant cultural presence in our lives. I wouldn't say I was a fan though. When I was seven I was obsessed with the song 'La Isla Bonita', to the extent that when we did, shortly after it's release, head into Stockport to WH Smith for a family music shopping trip to buy mine and my sisters first records, I believe I did intend to purchase the True Blue album.

I can't remember exactly why I didn't. I think now it might have been the case that WH Smith only had True Blue on CD at the time, and we didn't have a CD player. Either that or I was so turned off by the artwork that I insisted on going home with The First Album on LP instead. I think my sister went home with nothing, which speaks more to WH Smith's failure to provide than hers to choose I think.

We took it home and my dad put it on the record player. 'Lucky Star' began. We looked baffled, my dad equally as much as the rest of us. There was some discussion as to whether the record was on the right speed or not, followed by confirmation that it definitely was. We weren't used to early Madonna and her high, slightly squeaky, voice. But we did get used to the record, and learn to love it, quite quickly.

True Blue and Who's That Girl? period Madonna excited me musically but once the promotion period for both was over and Madonna wasn't releasing new material, I moved on musically. To Bananarama and Belinda Carlisle specifically, both of whom I formed a considerably longer, more enduring attachment to. Why was that? Was it because the Madonna of 1987 felt so remote? With her jogging routine, her minders, her very 'hard' Marilyn Monroe inspired blonde bombshell look? There was a girl next door accessibility to Bananarama and a mysterious, slightly tragic, glamour to the post Go-Go's Belinda Carlisle that Madonna didn't have. I couldn't achieve Carlisle's Veronica Lake inspired long red hair anymore than I could achieve Madonna's blondness, but it felt more attractive somehow.

Belinda Carlisle seemed a more fallible performer, I realise in retrospect, and I think I've almost always been attracted to that quality in my female performers. Even Siouxsie Sioux's ice queen exterior would melt if you got her on the subject of cats, equally as certain as Florence Welch can't go a single gig without, at least once, looking like a kid in a sweet shop. Madonna always felt like she wasn't quite human so that, when the inevitable evidence of humanity did emerge, it always felt like a shock.

I think Lucy's book works so well because it seeks to challenge that perceived lack of humanity, to get underneath the image, to interrogate and explore the myths.

I spoke to a number of people while I was there, mainly about punk and about writing. Not really much about Madonna. Helen McCookerybook was there and I spent a long time talking to her and a lady called Paula Wolf, who had lived in Manchester for twenty years and had a lot to say about the Manchester scene. Much of which corresponded with my own observations of it during my fanzine writer years. They had both seen David Wilkinson talking about City Fun at Porto and, by the sound of it, his enthusiasm has proved infectious. This is one of many strengths of David's approach to both academia and public speaking: His enthusiasm is very, very infectious. I know he enjoyed the academic conference at Porto as well because we talked about it last week when I went over to see him in Marple.

Helen was talking to us about the She Punks film and it was really inspiring hearing and watching her talk about it, because I could see how much it meant to her. I was really sorry to tear myself away to go back to Euston for my train.

They were making the final call for the Manchester train as I got onto the concourse at Euston and myself and a youngish guy immediately starting legging it towards platform 14, only to be stopped by the ticket inspectors at the entrance to the platform. They pretty much had to hold up their hands for us both and shout "WHOA!" We must have looked incredibly anxious because they were very quick to reassure us, after we'd showed them our tickets, that we were safe to walk to the train, not run, as it would be sitting there for "a few more minutes yet".

As I was walking towards the first class end of the train I heard a really loud bang and, out of the corner of my eye, saw an explosion of bright white sparks, like a firework, emerge from a train two platforms away. The experience made me jump and rattled me so much that I started running again and threw myself on the train in the next first class carriage. I briefly conversed with an, if anything, even more rattled passenger, who was convinced the explosion had come out of the roof of the train two platforms down. There didn't seem to be anything I could say or do, and events had clearly been witnessed by both Network Rail and Virgin staff in the station, so it wasn't like anyone needed telling it had happened.

I could feel the adrenaline surging through me as I walked all the way down the train to my seat. The train was moving by the time I got there and I sat down and closed my eyes for twenty minutes, wondering what the hell had just happened. One of the rare downsides of not having a smartphone is the fact that, whenever you are witness to something odd or upsetting, you can't immediately go online to research the incident in question and try and figure out what happened. For all I knew, they could be in the process of sealing off Euston station and combing the platforms for explosives. Not as alarmist as  it might sound really, given the time before last I went to London by train we were accompanied by a patrol of armed police up and down the train on the way home (I never found out why) and also that someone had seemingly had a go at Parliament Square again with a car earlier in the week. I tried to ensure my imagination didn't go into overdrive, but it was hard.

After twenty minutes the buffet car opened so I went and got a Limonata and tried to cool down a bit. I was still brooding about what had just happened and I found myself furtively watching the people around me to see if anyone looked upset or anxious. After a bit I gave it up as a bad job and, in a suitably dark mood, decided that if I was going to die I'd do it to Florence + The Machine and put my mp3 player on a Florence only shuffle.

Awhile later the driver, after what sounded like some difficulty with the PA, made an announcement. 'Ladies and Gentlemen, if you could all pay attention for a minute'.

Here it comes... I thought

'There has been a fatality...'

Oh no...

'...On the line north of Stoke - On - Trent'

Huh?

I can't remember all of what he said next as it was somewhat geographically complicated. The upshot being that anyone with a ticket for Macclesfield was out of luck as we weren't able to get there now and they'd have to get off at Stockport and double back. Further updates to follow.

I switched Florence back on.

After a ghostly trip through a series of dark and abandoned looking stations in Staffordshire and Cheshire, we finally got to Stockport at five to midnight, fifteen minutes late. Stockport station looked about as deserted as most of the stations we'd passed through in Staffordshire and Cheshire, but at least the lights were on.

I couldn't remember what the current state of play is with the 192 bus after midnight if it's not a Friday or a Saturday so I walked down to Grand Central with a vague tangent of hope. One that was gradually dampened, then extinguished altogether in the following fifteen minutes. Grand Central, despite the sterling efforts of Stockport Council and, at various times, Greater Manchester Police, has never been more than two steps away from lairy, and is definitely not a place to hang around if you can help it. Saving money is one thing but it looked increasingly unlikely that a bus would be coming any time soon and it would take me at least 45 minutes to walk home. I walked back up to the station and got a taxi instead.

I sat down at the kitchen table with a massive mug of hot chocolate and turned Radio 4 on. Their headline news items was the death of Aretha Franklin that afternoon so I quickly concluded that I hadn't witnessed an attempted terrorism attack at Euston and that maybe a signal box had blown up or something instead.

I hadn't realised that Aretha Franklin had died until her death was alluded to at the book launch ahead of Lucy's speech. I'd missed the announcement because I'd been on the train when it happened and, after that, mooching about at the British Library and on the plaza. And not having a smartphone again.

I came to Aretha Franklin's music very late. I was in my mid 20's before I really started to be interested in her and my introduction came via Brian Matthews Sounds Of The Sixties on Radio 2, which I used to listen to on Saturday mornings while getting ready for work. 'Think' had more impact on me than 'Respect' did. Not because 'Respect' was no good, but because I'd been overexposed to it before I was ready to be interested in it and hear it for what it really was.

I hadn't grown up being interested in soul music at all, and I realise now that it's because I'd been exposed to the wrong kind of soul music while I was growing up: That very diluted, bland, overly slick 1990s chart soul, which always left me totally cold. Hearing 1960s soul records, whether that be Aretha, Otis, some of the Motown and Stax rosters, and various Northern Soul records, made me understand the evangelical devoteeism of the soul scene. Even if I never became a soul girl, a window had been opened, an explanation provided, a piece of the puzzle located.

RIP Aretha, it is mightily clear that you are missed, and will continue to be missed. As for Madonna at 60, it proves her doubters wrong. To survive so long in that area of the music business takes guts, determination and sheer bloody mindedness. Qualities I don't think many thought Madonna had back in 1982. Hats off to her.

Louder Than Words, 2017

Friday:

For the second year in a row, I had a works leaving do immediately before Louder Than Words. As such, I headed into Manchester around quarter to five ish on the 191, got off at MMU, and headed over to Sand Bar for the leaving do. There then followed a quick pit stop at 8th Day for food at 6pm, then over to the Principal hotel for the festival.

Chandelier in the Principal hotel, near the post room

I had a slight mix up over where to collect my wristband from, but a lovely volunteer fetched it for me while I waited by the Directors Suite. The anteroom was filled with people drinking wine and I had a nice chat with Bob Follen of Bob Art Models and his partner. He showed me a new drawing he'd done of Siouxsie, which I really liked it.

Karren Ablaze! arrived and we went down the front to wait for Jah Wobble, who was running later having been discombobulated by the Oxford Road Bus gate and the fact that he can no longer drive his car down Oxford Road.

When he did arrive, he was on fine form. Roisin Dwyer was interviewing him but he's such a raconteur that all you really need to do is set him off then try, generally fruitlessly, to steer the conversation back to specific anchors. I found him very funny, and good at creating pictures in my head. He'd recently done a documentary on Sid Vicious in which he tried to get behind the myth and discover the real person, and he made a lot of amusing and pointed comments about Brexit. There was also a surreal but very funny anecdote about being in a Japanese restaurant with Ginger Baker, both eating English desserts, and Ginger Baker going postal because he'd been given treacle tart instead of rhubarb and custard. He also called Jools Holland a "wax faced cunt" which amused me out of all proportion to the original comment.

Karren and I really enjoyed it, and were enthusing to each other at the end. The school kids from Hull on the other side of the room seemed less enamoured. On the way out, I got stuck in the middle of a massing throng of them, and heard one of them exclaim, with the true frustration of someone who's had to sit still for too long, "That was so boring" before being frantically hushed by their teacher. I was trying to keep a straight face at this point because I could imagine the teenage Wobble, having been taken to see some speaker talking about a cultural moment that happened twenty five* years before he was born, being equally bored. Would I have been bored had I been taken to see Jah Wobble do a talk when I was 15? Possibly not because I was into seventies punk by then, even though it was the mid 1990s, plus I am only one generation away from punk, not two, so the experiences are more relatable to. That said, I bet a lot of my friends at the time would have been bored.

After Wobble, I stayed on to see John Robb interview Paul 'Smiler' Anderson about mod. I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy this talk as I don't have any special interest in mod, but I was pleasantly surprised. As someone very interested in cultural discussions around Britain's Lost Decade (1945-1955) and how the post war generation reacted against the social mores of the wartime generation (this applies to punk as well, incidentally, from what my interviewees have told me), he had a lot to say that interested me. He also touched on Brexit, pointing out that it symbolised the continuation of that cultural battle: A lot of people in their eighties voted Brexit. These are the people who, after WWII, had no truck with the French, Germans, Italians and Americans. Their children, meanwhile, were very happy to embrace French tailoring, Italian scooters and black American music. His thesis falls down a little given that a lot of people in their fifties and sixties also voted for Brexit, but it's an interesting point nonetheless and references what the Economist newspaper would term the new political divide: Not Left or Right but Open or Closed. Jah Wobble predicts a return to greyness, tedium, narrow horizons and spam after Brexit. Surely the definition of Closed.

Anderson was also good as regards discussing the long term view of mod, including the mod revival in the eighties via bands like The Jam. He really brought alive the precise, particular, exclusive nature of mod and the escapism of mod in 1984 under Thatcher when wearing three button suits and listening to rare groove was considerably more attractive to him than engaging with modern day realities or dancing to Wham!

Saturday:

The two 10am/10:15am events were a writing panel discussion, which I figured would be more aimed at popular music studies/journalism students than me, and an Unconvention discussion on the theme of good music/making the world a better place, which I had thought about going to but decided against. I did attend one of the Unconvention discussions two years ago and found it all a bit hardcore and, on a personal level, slightly frustrating in that that years discussion ('Is The Enemy Really Free' on the theme of unpaid work and being ripped off in the music industry) had gone in a different direction than I expected, leaving me with lots to say but no way of getting to say it. I wrote a blog post about it all in the end instead. On this occasion, I opted for a lie in.

It was 10am by the time I finally got out of the flat, and onto a 192 where the heating/air conditioning was making a noise like a whistling kettle and I had a bus mutterer on the seat in front. The combination of the two was a bit nails down a blackboard, to the extent that I considered getting off at the Apollo and taking the scenic route down Booth Street to the Principal, but somehow managed to hold on for three more stops. It was worth it for the moment when I was walking down Whitworth Street and someone threw open the windows of their tower block apartment and called out  in a light tenor: 'GOOD MORNING MANCHESTER!' in a tone somewhat nearer to the 'Who will buy?' musical sequence from Oliver! but with the overall spirit of Good Morning Vietnam.

I had originally intended to go to 'Vinyl Revival and the shops that made it happen' at 12:15 but I had an epiphany while sitting in the room that it wasn't going to be for me, and headed off to 'Eye Witness Punk Power' instead. This was David Nolan, Jonh Ingham and Mick O'Shea talking to John Robb about punk. I was feeling a bit punked out, but this was a good discussion - very funny at times and good on local scenes, outside London. I could tell that Ingham, as an Australian who had been at the heart of the London scene in 1976, was gently bemused by the whole area of discussion that boiled down to rest of the UK vs London, but he went along with it. As someone who has done a lot of research into punk, I didn't come away from this having really learnt anything, and if you want to learn about the Manchester punk scene then one of the best ways to find out about it is to put in the hours at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford with the (almost) entire run of City Fun (also available via MDMDA), but I did find the discussions around the whole area of authenticity interesting.

Old and new Oxford Road scenery, side by side

After the punk panel, I went to 8th Day and had dinner, passing, for the second year running, small but very noticeable groups of (mainly) young women dressed like female characters from Japanese anime/manga. Which begs the question: Is there an annual manga/anime convention that coincides with Louder Than Words each year? (Google says 'Yes, it is the Doki Doki festival which takes place at Sudden Sports Hall') If so, is there some kind of mash up event potential? In a Kamikaze Girls kind've style? No, just me then...

After that, I headed back to the Principal and met up with a seething Karren Ablaze! who was peeved that the women and subcultures panel clashed with Paul Morley, and that there was a distinct lack of women on panels at Louder Than Words. She'd been at the MDMA discussion on Black Female Voices vis a vis the Manchester scene, and while enjoying it, had come away with the horrible feeling that all of the black women at the festival had been gathered together in one room as a sort of ghettoization. It would be nice to think this had happened by accident rather than design, but it wasn't a good feeling.

Personally, I definitely feel that the women and subcultures panel discussion was a better choice than Paul Morley, and this was borne out for me by the fact that, despite taking place in the smallest room, venue wise, the room was so packed that volunteers had to keep on bringing in more and more chairs to seat everybody. Clearly this was an event, and a subject, people really wanted to see discussed. I spotted Daniel Rachel in the front row, and Maxine Peake a couple of rows back.

The discussion was chaired by Lucy O'Brien, and she had with her Chardine Taylor Stone of Big Joanie and Celeste Bell, Poly Styrene's daughter. Because female representation in subcultures gets so  little space or discussion, culturally, I feel that this was a very important moment, Louder Than Words wise, and I'd dearly love to see more of this kind of programming as I tend to get more out of events that I feel a personal connection to in terms of experience, as I did with this one. This doesn't mean I'm not capable of enjoying and listening to people talk about scenes and bands beyond my personal experience as well (and God knows, I'd go to precious few cultural events if that weren't the case), but it is nice to feel catered for all the same.

What I especially liked was that Chardine talked about her experiences as a black working class woman within the punk and rockabilly scenes in the 2000's, and that this dovetailed with the kind of battles Poly Styrene had faced in the 1970's. I liked this simply because I don't feel that these issues get discussed enough, God knows women and subcultures barely get discussed anywhere, so it's almost like every other variation and complication of the Woman Question doesn't even get a look in. There were some good examples provided by Chardine and Celeste of black punk activism and decolonisation, which I'd definitely check out. Afropunk and Decolonise Fest, along with Chardine's Black Girls Picnic (inspired by Ladyfest) particularly. I also felt Chardine handled the (these days inevitable) question about riot grrrl being too white and too middle class well, by pointing to Kathleen Hanna's love of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, and how it was weird for her, as a young black woman, to be being introduced to black feminism by white riot grrrls.

I probably should have joined in on the Q&A but I was enjoying the discussion too much to want to.

It was back to the world of seventies punk after this, and upstairs to the Directors Suite where Jordan (as I had to explain to Paul on the bus the other week, "No, not THAT Jordan!") was talking to John Robb. She is going to be writing her memoir soon, and she talked very sensitively about her relationship with Adam Ant, who she managed in the early day of Adam and the Ants, and with Derek Jarmon. I knew Jordan had been in Jubilee, but I hadn't realised she'd been in Sebastiane as well. I liked the bits where she was talking about ballet and how it had impacted not just in terms of how she carried herself, but also in terms of her style - she wore a lot of leotards and tights for example, and there was a great image on the screen of her wearing a tutu and block ballet shoes, but with her full punk makeup and hair, staring right at the camera in a nail you to the wall kind of way.

Celeste Bell was in the Directors Suite after Jordan, talking about the film and book she and Zoe Howe are making about Poly Styrene. I'd seen the trailer already, but it was still a lovely thrill to see it again. Unfortunately the talk was rather poorly attended, but Celeste talked very movingly about her mother and her life. There was a lot of interesting stuff around the theme of mother daughter relationships across three generations. Zoe had been originally intended to be Celeste's interviewer but she was ill so Roisin Dwyer stepped in and, despite being fairly last minute, did a wonderful job.

Sunday:

I dragged myself out of bed at half seven, had a prolonged fight with a bottle of cider vinegar while making honeygar, had my porridge, put my makeup on, and was out of the flat just after 9am. I stood at the bus stop crying involuntarily because I'd managed to get powder foundation in my eye. I had decided that morning, following on from a day and a half of listening to festival attendees and the occasional panel member bemoaning the state of modern music, that I was going to do a slight 'Fuck you' on this theme by wearing my Florence + The Machine t-shirt to Sunday's events. I don't think anyone noticed, but I felt better for dong so.

I got in relatively early as there wasn't much traffic, just a more or less empty bus and no interesting street theatre.

Pop and Politics was the first panel of the day, chaired by Roisin Dwyer and comprised of Daniel Rachel, Lucy O'Brien, Chardine Taylor Stone, and Dave Randall. I liked this panel a lot, it was like all my favourite people were in one room on one panel. I think the strength of this panel came from the four panellists having a wealth of different experiences across different eras, and that two of them (Rachel and Randall) had written books specifically about music and protest. It meant that a wide area of music and eras could be covered and discussed expertly, from a number of different perspectives, drawing on a range of different personal experiences.  Chardine Taylor Stone spoke about Solange's A seat at the table, Dave Randall spoke about the personal impact 'Free Nelson Mandela' had had on him, and about the debates around Beyoncé's nod to Black Lives Matter with 'Foundation'. The cultural boycotts of South Africa and Israel were discussed, in regard to the 1980s and Paul Simon's Graceland album, and more recently bands refusing, or not refusing, to play in Tel Aviv. Daniel Rachel spoke about Rock Against Racism, he, Dave Randall and Lucy O'Brien spoke about Red Wedge and Chardine Taylor Stone spoke about #GrimeforCorbyn. Lucy was asked about sexism in the music industry in the context of the Harvey Weinstein uncovering and fallout, which led on to brief mention of Kesha and the horrific situation she is in, work wise.

I had intended to ask a question about the re-invigoration of the protest song in the age of Donald Trump, but I didn't in the end, mainly because I could see Karren had a whole series of things she wanted to say about issues such as quotas, safe spaces, and how these issues related to Louder Than Words itself. It was noted at this point that this was a panel of two women and two men, with a female chair, which is very unusual.

I sympathise with Karren's take on it, and we discussed it at length throughout the weekend. I began to wonder why I wasn't angrier about feeling unrepresented at Louder Than Words and, having thought about it since, I've realised that part of it is that I've got used to moving in areas of the music industry where I'm thoroughly unrepresented and, while not at all happy about that state of affairs, I have a really long list of cultural battles that I'm fighting, some on my behalf, some on the behalf of women who have come before me, and I simply do not have the time or the mental resources to fight all of those really important battles all at the same time, continuously. As such, I do perhaps choose to pick my battles a bit more than I maybe feel I should. It is a compromise, and not necessarily a happy one. Some of the issues Karren raised relate to the music industry at large, also to academia (as another person at the music and protest Q&A pointed out, very eloquently) and I have, in a way, written about issues of gender, representation and the music industry at length a few times now, most notably in my piece for The F-Word on women and the UK music press in 2012, and more recently in summer 2017 on the theme of women and music festivals, an issue regular readers of my blog will know I did a lot of work on this summer. The whole range of related issues of hidden histories, cultural representation, and alternative cultural narratives are, inevitably, at the heart of a lot of my writing work. And will no doubt continue to drive it.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself for most of the rest of Sunday as there wasn't really anything else on the bill that day that I had strong feelings about attending. This worked out quite well in the end in that I spent a lot of time in conversation with various people and actually only attended two other events, the first of which was The Unsung.

For some reason, I'd got it into my head that The Unsung was going to be an Unthanks esque gentle folk affair, but it wasn't at all. Instead, this "funeral party for the forgotten fallen heroes of music" was a spoken word performance by Genevieve Carver and her band. The concept is brilliant: Poems celebrating the lives of those forgotten men and women who have died in music related circumstances. From Sandor Feher, a musician on the Costa Concordia ferry who helped passengers escape when it was sinking but drowned when he went back to try and rescue his violin, to Asumi Nagakiya, a steel pan player who was raped and murdered during or after Carnival in Trinidad, to Scott Johnson, a drum technician working for Radiohead in 2012 who died when the stage he was working on collapsed on top of him. I think the two strongest pieces, for me, were 'The Eagles of Death', for the 89 victims of the Bataclan concert attack in November 2015, and 'The Unsung' for the victims of the live music ban in Mali, 2012-13.

In a lot of ways, some of these pieces chimed quite nicely with both Dave Randall's book and with wider debates around music and protest, also with the treatment of women in music: 'The Lady In The Car' tells the story of Anne Naismith, a concert pianist who, much like Alan Bennett's Lady In The Van, fled her life to live in her car. Similarly, Lina Prokofiev, much mistreated wife of the composer, is the subject of 'The Fiery Angel'.

I was very impressed by The Unsung, it's a neat and innovative concept, beautifully executed and well researched.

My final talk of the day was Malcolm Boyle talking about Hoppy, aka John Hopkins of sixties counterculture and UFO fame. He is making a film about him, and showed lots of clips of the almost finished film to illustrate the talk, which is always a good way to add an extra vivid edge to a talk. The film does look really good and I found out quite a few things about the London countercultural scene that I hadn't known before, which is always nice.

I think I may have been the second youngest person in the room (there was a bloke there who looked younger than me), but I do have a gleaming of the counterculture, as I've read up on it at particular times, particularly recently as I had to do a lot of reading up on the underground press for my punk women and fanzines chapter for MUP. That said, neither of my parents were involved in the counterculture (though I suspect my mum might have quite liked to have been) and my main idea of UFO, I confess, probably comes from reading Jenny Fabian's Groupie when I was fifteen.

At the time, I thought that book was fiction, it was only about three years later when it was re-issued and Fabian was interviewed about the book that I realised it was thinly disguised fly on the wall. That said, even when I thought it was fiction, I still had enough awareness of the sixties counterculture to know it was based in fact, I just didn't appreciate how much. My friend Sara, who is much more clued up on that scene, got it immediately when she read it, and reported back at the end of chapter one "I just knew it was Syd Barrett". For the record, while I have since worked out who most of the cast of Groupie are, I still don't know who the pot bellied journalist she shags is. A quick google search seems to suggest Fabian is still with us and, while I'm hesitant to see women represented in cultural discussions purely as groupies, I do still really, really want to know who that bloke was, so maybe Louder Than Words could book Fabian to talk about her book and I could find out?

I could probably come up with a list of other suggestions for speakers and events, just as I could definitely compile a reading list as regards the whole massive issue of women and subcultures. I might do that. Off the top of my head, things I would have liked to have seen at Louder Than Words this year would have included a discussion of the nineties Glasgow scene, as documented in this years film Lost In France, and Helen McCookerybook and Gina Birch talking about their film Stories from the She Punks. I think both would have pulled in a big enough crowd, having seen Helen and Gina pack out the British Library conference centre last year for their talk on it, and Lost In France had a pretty sizeable Scottish premiere earlier this year, plus screenings around the country.

I'm not sure how much the literary link is enforced when booking people for Louder Than Words, and it's possible Lost In France may or may not qualify, but there's enough literary links to the She Punks project for that one to qualify.

*In my original posting, this said '40 years before he was born'. That would have made the kid 0 not 15, hence correction!