The Counterforce No. 48
Monty Python, Joy Division, Brooklyn Book Festival, Desperate Journalist, The Jesus & Mary Chain + Psychedelic Furs tour
If there’s two things I can always return to, two histories I never tire of hearing, they are those of Monty Python and Joy Division. Both seem a part of my DNA and over the years I have returned to them many, many times, especially when times are tough. Perhaps to be reminded that there are truly wonderful, truly exceptional things, in this crazy world of ours. I vividly remember being around 12 or 13 and experiencing Monty Python for the first time. My older cousins were into it but didn’t want to share it with the younger me. So at the video store one day I rented the Flying Circus Volume 4 on VHS. When I brought it home and saw the skit where Graham Chapman is wearing the huge prosthetic nose and goes to see John Cleese about having it removed, at the line “It’s spelled Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced Throatwarbler Mangrove” something resonated very deep inside me, a level of absurdity that was part of my very soul, and, looking back at that moment now, seemed to set the course for my entire life.
With my continuing insomnia from the concussion as well as this year just being really difficult, a couple weeks ago I found myself at 2AM putting on their Almost The Truth (Lawyer’s Cut) documentary series on Netflix, and loving hearing the history all over again. It all seemed new to me, which is odd because I own the DVDs, still do. And over the years I’ve read a lot of the books, starting from when I was 14. And when for my 33rd birthday I decided to go to Augsburg, Germany to get a t-shirt with my name on it, I brought along The Pythons Autobiography. This again brought great solace, being on my own in a foreign land and drinking a bit too much at the time. Over lockdown in 2020 I read Kim “Howard” Johnson’s Monty Python’s Tunisian Holiday, an excellent account of visiting the Life Of Brian set. And I’ve always been a big fan of Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography Volume VI. I’ve got a lot of love for Graham and one of my favourite stories is how - when asked to speak at a dinner at his old college - he showed up dressed as a giant carrot and just stood there, refusing to say anything.
And then Joy Division. I remember being 17 and seeing the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart on 120 Minutes and hearing some of the history. Well, that Ian Curtis had killed himself. And when you’re that age, you’re intrigued by stuff like that. Or at least some of us are. I don’t want to say you think it’s cool, but it is fascinating, that someone who made something so important could do something so final. But as you grow older and experience more of life, you come to learn just how fucking sad death is. And now when I hear Hooky, Bernard, and Stephen talk about it - the last time they saw him, and what they should’ve done - my heart breaks and my eyes well up with tears. But they were young, didn’t know any better. And what would’ve happened if they took a break and Ian went on to open a bookshop like he’d been talking about. Most seem to agree he would’ve gone on to write novels and oh how interesting those would’ve been. Delving into their story again recently, for the umpteenth time, it struck me that Ian Curtis is probably my favourite lyricist. How evocative, how special those lyrics are. Peter Saville makes a good point about Isolation, the absolute bleakness of those lyrics - “Mother, I tried, please believe me, I'm doing the best that I can, I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through, I'm ashamed of the person I am”. I realized this when I was 17 and have never been able to listen to the song since.
My latest spin through their story was Jon Savage’s This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History. A really great book. As I said in one of the first of these newsletters, I had put off reading Hooky’s books because I had read so much about them when I was a teenager I thought I knew the whole story, and oh how wrong I was. Hooky’s books are excellent, as is this. A ton of new (to me, at least) information from the people who were there.
After seeing that Love Will Tear Us Apart video back in May 1993, I went out and bought Substance. Listening to it for the first time was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I bought it on a Saturday night and after church the next day we were supposed to be going to a family friend’s picnic. I had about an hour to kill in between so I put on the cd and just sat there transfixed by what I heard, what was going on inside as a reaction to this music. It felt incredibly important, and important that this was now in my life. The music wasn’t so much simple as vital, stripped down to something essential and incredibly powerful for it. Warsaw, Digital, Dead Souls, Atmosphere, No Love Lost, and These Days all stood out. Especially No Love Lost. What a killer bassline. Though that can be said for almost every JD song. I was so moved by this experience that when in college a few years later I had to write a 20 page paper for an Existentialism class, I wrote about this first time I really heard Joy Division. On that morning I sat there in what seemed like a trance listening to No Love Lost over and over again until my mother was banging on the door that we had to go. I recently found some footage of my first band covering No Love Lost at The Espresso Bar, Worcester, MA in 1995
I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday to hang at the Sagging Meniscus table for the afternoon. Had a great time. Met my publisher Jacob for the first time in person, as well as Tyler C. Gore, and hung with Carla Spataro who organized the SM panel at Rosemont College earlier this year. Gave away some copies of Off-License To Kill. Met some of the publishers whose stuff I’ve been into recently. We were right next to Clash Books, I really dig what they’re doing, picked up Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel and Kyle Seibel’s Hey You Assholes from them, wandered down to hang with the very cool folks at Whiskey Tit Books, then further along to Akashic who put out Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir and We Are The Clash that I wrote about a few Counterforces ago. Akashic have put out a boxset of STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D which looks awesome. I’ve got a lot of time for Chuck D, I think he’s pretty right on, and these are his illustrated journals (drawn by him). I flipped it open and saw his entry about Public Enemy performing at a Bernie Sanders rally in Los Angeles in March 2020. I was there. What a different world it was then. And Jacob hooked me up with a bunch of cool-looking Sagging Meniscus books. I’ve read the first two stories in each of Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel and Tyler C. Gore’s My Life Of Crime and enjoyed both very much. Both are really funny and well-written, I’m looking forward to the rest
Jacob was doing a cool thing where if you read a passage from a book and he could film it, you got that book for free. There’s 25 up on YouTube including this chap reading from Sporting Moustaches:
And here’s me reading from John Patrick Higgins’ Fine, coming out in November. I finished it a couple weeks ago and a review will be coming out a little later but for now I really recommend it, lots of laughs, an ending that has stuck with me as being unexpected and pleasing, and this last line here is one of the funniest I’ve ever read. Certainly the funniest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe a penis
As mentioned last time, the new Desperate Journalist album is out, and I’ve been way into the track Underwater. Jo’s doing something a little different with her voice on this and it works really well. She has an amazing voice, one of my favourites, and here she’s not holding notes as long, as well as using subtle dynamics within these, and I think it’s great. The recording itself is really impressive too - this gnarly, insistent rhythmic figure. It’s like a post-punk Björk song, though this only occurred to me after several listens, for it’s very much it’s own thing
My sister took me to see The Jesus & Mary Chain/Psychedelic Furs tour last night in New Haven, and being the awesome sister that she is, even bought me a shirt. It was a really great night. I can highly recommend House Of Naan on Howe Street, and after that, as we were walking to the venue, we spotted William Reid hanging out in front of the Hotel Duncan. Cutting it a bit close there, heh.
The Mary Chain were my favourite band for many, many years, starting in 1992 when I was 16. I mentioned last Counterforce about the effect Jane’s Addiction had on a straight-laced, church-going shy young man. Well, when I bought Honey’s Dead, believing Far Gone & Out to be the song I’d been looking for my whole life - this gorgeous melody in the midst of a wondrous noise of chaotic guitars and driving beat, again resonating with something deep within my soul - and brought the tape home to hear Reverence as the first song, that really shook me up. ‘I wanna die just like Jesus Christ, I wanna die on a bed of spikes’ and a chorus of just ‘I wanna die’. This really had me rethink my relationship to religion. And of course I didn’t want to die but the sentiment, the anger and disgust it would provoke in all the small-minded small-town so-called authority around me, was strong. The anger and disgust right back at this world they were handing us. When the Mary Chain ended with this last night I felt those sentiments even more at this world we’re passing down to the next generations.
The Mary Chain setlist was awesome. So much I wanted to hear - Head On, April Skies, Far Gone & Out, Sidewalking, Darklands - but it was marred by William’s guitar being barely audible. Except for when he stomped on a certain fuzzbox, which was very infrequently, you could barely hear him. And let’s face it, the noisy guitars are half of what you want from the Mary Chain. Early on, I tried to go over and signal to the soundman but a bouncer started giving me aggro. I understood his point but it was upsetting. Tickets are not cheap these days and to have to sit through a bad sounding set of otherwise great songs was gonna be disappointing. There should be a way you can let venues know about something like this so it can be corrected and the ticket-buying public, the fans, don’t have to suffer. I mean hardly anyone’s going to complain but there should be a way to address this. Though with my experience with venues, most of them don’t care about what happens once you’ve bought a ticket, except for bar sales. Only In A Hole and Reverence really had the full Chain glory. These were at the end so maybe my message got through somehow.
The Furs on the other hand were excellent. Magnificent, even. Richard Butler is such a great front man. I was shocked the first time I saw them by a couple things - how much he interacted with the audience, and how much he seemed to be enjoying himself. They always had an air of archness to them but it was really nice to see, well, I guess the word would be ‘friendliness’ to the performance, welcoming. He was like that last night too and it really uplifts the experience. Combined with the gorgeous music, and much better sound, it was a great show
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please think about subscribing. It’s free. You can also support the cause by buying my books here