No one could quite remember who first said it - probably a botanist with a prosthetic leg and a mechanical toucan - but by the time we convened in the kitchen, the phrase was etched in chalk on the blackboard above the espresso machine: 'What is magic but science in a velvet jacket?'

Welcome to the first edition of Science and Magic, a fortnightly newsletter for the inquisitive, the defiant and the marginally unstable. Within these pages, you'll discover Jeff Young's poetic mapping of his own Liverpool's hidden geographies, Eimear Kavanagh's visual response to the question "What does stillness look like today?", my own excavation of Chad & Jeremy's forgotten masterpiece Of Cabbages and Kings, Tom Roberts' introduction to the raw poetry and thinking of Darby Hudson, a revealing ten-question exchange with Professor Yaffle's Lee Rogers, and documentary evidence of our latest Violette Società.

This isn't really a place for either/or, it's more of a place for the awkward, beautiful "and." Where thoughts and ideas are encouraged to get tangled in each other's shoelaces and fall down laughing. Where everything can happen in a strange, unnameable territory that most classification systems pretend doesn't exist - the blurry bit where most of us actually exist.

So whether you're reading this in your scratcher, on the Northern Line during signal failure, beside a hospital vending machine that dispenses only mints or while waiting for someone who is perpetually late, we trust it will leave you better confused than when you started.

Ten Questions...with Lee Rogers

Each edition of Science and Magic invites a guest to answer ten questions about music. For this inaugural instalment, we present Lee Rogers, songwriter and guitarist in Professor Yaffle, Liverpool's architects of a unique brand of pastoral-psych-folk and melody. They are currently preparing to release their new album with us here at Violette Records.

● What music makes you feel at home when you're not?

Radio Kaos by Roger Waters. I consider Snowdonia to be my spiritual home; I've spent a lot of time there, and my Dad was born in that neck of the woods. That album has been the soundtrack to countless happy days spent driving through the mountains with Joanne and the girls.

● What's your favourite sound that isn't music?

My daughters' laughter. The late, great David Crosby said in his masterpiece 'Laughing', a song written in response to George Harrison's belief that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had the answers to life's big questions, that he could learn more from a child laughing in the sun. I'm with Croz on that.

● What album would you press into the hands of an 18-year-old today, insisting they listen to it front-to-back right now?

Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. Jon Humphreys from our band passed it to me when I was about 17 or 18. It was on one side of a 90-minute cassette with Bryter Layter on the other side. I had a stereo with a cassette player that continuously looped. With the exception of breaks for eating and sleeping, I didn't stop listening to it for two whole days.

● If you could time-travel to witness one musical moment in history, when/where would you go?

The Beatles rooftop concert. No explanation needed.

● What album got you through your toughest time?

Neil Young's Harvest. I found out later that it was the number one album in America the week I was born.

● Which band from Liverpool deserved to be huge but wasn't?

Silent-K. Not deserved to be, but deserve to be. A fantastic, current Liverpool band who are the best live band around for me. Fingers crossed, their music will reach a much wider audience given time.

● Who's the person who gives you the best music tips today?

Probably Jon from our band again, but he set himself an impossibly high bar to live up to, recommending Nick Drake all those years ago!

●Which person most shaped your musical taste before you turned 18, and what specific record or gig did they introduce you to that changed everything?

Paul and Lee, my childhood friend Mark Penman's older brothers. They had every album you could ever need when you're growing up. I was already a fan of Pink Floyd, but I went to my first ever concert with Paul and Lee to see them at Maine Road in 1988. All three brothers feature in our song 'The Edge of Existence'. Sadly, Paul and Mark are no longer with us.

● What's your favourite song that is from a soundtrack to a film?

Almost an impossible choice between the Get Carter main theme by Roy Budd or 'Corn Rigs' by Paul Giovanni/Magnet from The Wicker Man. If I had a shotgun to my head or my neck placed in a ring of swords, I think I'd probably choose 'Corn Rigs'.

●What song should be the new national anthem?

'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' by Fairport Convention to chill everyone right out, something that seems to be badly needed at the moment.

Magnetic North

by Jeff Young

Sometimes I go back to the house where I was born. This is the beginning of everything, the place where memory begins. This is Magnetic North. I have lived in so many houses and yet this place I left sixty years ago is home. Preoccupation with the city’s soul starts here, in this wounded terraced house on Winslow Street. The unconscious, the memory vault, the haunted space of dreams. My heart is inside the house, the house is inside my heart.

I stand and look at the house and I see visions of ghosts. I am looking at a cinema I can’t enter. Perhaps all houses are Essoldos or Futurists, places of shadow and light, the cinematography of our lives projected onto walls. Trace memory of chalk drawing on the pavement, trace smell of tar bubbles, trace vision of a hand pulling back net curtains, spectral shadow. I can see mum and dad dancing in the parlour on Christmas Day, the four-year-old me on the doorstep, watching the canary man falling forever through time. I can hear ghost voices, birthday songs, lullabies...

The house looks forlorn, exhausted, a brokenness of the half-forgotten beloved. It falls to pieces, demolishing itself, but the mythologies remain. It is remembering its history. It is remembering me. Perhaps we all have a place where we honour our responsibility to memory. Perhaps we all have a place where we become old houses.

It’s time to start walking again, wandering without maps. I move off, into the city, looking for a way to slow time down to such a degree that past, present and future become one. I am going to walk through the city forever, beginning where it all began, at the house where I was born.

—

Jeff Young, author of the remarkable "Ghost Town," maps Liverpool's hidden geographies with unparalleled precision and heart. Few writers capture a city's soul with such tender honesty. Longlisted for the 2022 Portico Prize, his memoir has been celebrated for its "plangent beauty" and "sonorous, lyrical" prose. That one of our greatest living writers agreed to write for us here seems both impossible and exactly right. A playwright, essayist and lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, he reveals the extraordinary within the everyday. Each fortnight, he'll guide us through the threshold of a Liverpool both familiar and utterly transformed by his very singular vision.

What does stillness look like today?

by Eimear Kavanagh

Arriving into stillness is like an escape. A trip towards a more peaceful existance, one that's happy and free and can be cherished. A chance to open up to the more subtle world either around or within ourselves.

In stillness I fall. Deeper...deeper...deeper!

Love, Eimear

—

Eimear Kavanagh is an artist who collects questions the way some people collect antique magnifying glasses or discontinued breakfast cereals. Her studio contains three meticulously labelled drawers: one for questions with obvious but incorrect answers, another for questions that change their meaning when whispered, and a third - lined with velvet - for questions that have never been properly asked. Each fortnight, she selects one from this third drawer and responds not with just words (which she finds suspiciously cooperative) but with images that answer from a direction the question wasn't expecting. Her past work includes a series of paintings based on conversations overheard in elevators (lifts) that never reached their intended floors and a photographic study of objects that cast shadows unrelated to their actual shape. Eimear drinks precisely one cup of Ceylon tea each morning and has never owned a clock.

Something Old, Something New

by Matt Lockett

In the summer of 1967, two very different records were released. One of them, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was a cultural earthquake redefining what an album could be. The other, Of Cabbages and Kings by Chad & Jeremy, was not. It arrived quietly, sold modestly and slipped into obscurity.

To understand why, we have to start by forgetting everything we think we know about Chad & Jeremy. Yes, they had soft British accents. Yes, they made delicate, wistful folk-pop in the early 60s, songs like 'A Summer Song' that drifted gently through American AM radio. But by 1966 they were in a peculiar position. No longer teen idols, not quite rock innovators, with both artists spending as much time on sound stages as in studios. Jeremy Clyde was acting in American sitcoms. Chad Stuart was doing voiceover work. They were drifting from pop stardom toward something more ambiguous.

That ambiguity probably became their advantage. Without the commercial pressures facing their chart-topping peers, Chad & Jeremy found themselves with something increasingly rare in the music industry: freedom. And in Los Angeles, at the very same time The Beatles were locking themselves inside Abbey Road to record Sgt. Pepper, Chad & Jeremy began recording Of Cabbages and Kings.

Their producer, Gary Usher, was coming off Younger Than Yesterdaywith The Byrds. He was restless, ambitious and convinced Chad & Jeremy could be more than a pop footnote. Usher petitioned Columbia for more money, more studio time, more players. He got enough to push the album toward something strange and ambitious, but not quite enough to complete the transformation. The result is a record caught in transition, full of unresolved ideas and under-cooked genius.

The most fascinating part of the album is The Progress Suite, a 25 minute conceptual piece that takes up all of side two. It's not a song, exactly. It's a five-part suite that mixes orchestration, narration, sound collage and abstract commentary on industrial society, war and decline. It was Chad & Jeremy's attempt to do what few musicians dared - not just make art, but critique civilisation through art.

If that sounds really pretentious, it sometimes is. But pretension is the price of experimentation. What's important is that they tried. And that try, misfires and all, tells us something more interesting than a polished hit ever could. Because Of Cabbages and Kings isn't an answer to Sgt. Pepper. It's more of a question. What happens when two fading stars, freed from commercial expectation are given enough rope to experiment, but not quite enough to completely nail it and hang the establishment?

This is how cultural change often happens in the margins. A forgotten duo makes a concept album. A producer fights for a bigger budget. An idea begins to form, half-finished, under-funded, too late to catch the wave, too early to be properly understood.

And then, years later, someone listens again. And realises that the quiet ones were doing something extraordinary again.

—

Matt Lockett founded Violette Records in 2013 with the casual confidence of someone who hadn't realised what he was getting himself into. By day, he navigates the beige vocabulary of commercial consulting in construction, by night he transforms into a curator of dreams, navigating the delicate ecosystem of artists, tracklists, vinyl pressing delays and distribution spreadsheets with the focus of someone performing minor surgery. This section of the newsletter, 'Something Old, Something New,' chronicles a Johnny-come-lately style discovery of old records he blatantly missed until now, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believes he's actually stumbled upon a secret nobody else knows. He approaches music from the past apparently believing that 'release date' is just a suggestion and arguing that 'behind the curve' is the most interesting place to stand.

La Violette Società 55

Photographs documenting this week's La Violette Società featuring Brown Fang, Olivier Rocabois, Matthew Edwards and Saint Vespaluus. As with all our events since 2016, every artist received equal billing, equal stage time, and equal payment - no headliners, no hierarchy, just music, words and discovery.

Our next Liverpool gathering happens in two months' time. The lineup and audience remain, as always, part of the evening's revelation.

La Violette Società 55 — Artwork by Pascal Blua

Darby Hudson

by Tom Roberts

Sometimes, the right things arrive when they’re needed. The forces conspire, the stars align and something reminds you of useful and magical things. Either that, or my phone knows me better than I do. Anyway, I found this:

It’s taken from a poem called YOURE DANGEROUS WHEN YOU MAKE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL by an Australian called Darby Hudson.

You may have heard of him. I hadn’t. He has a collection called 'YOURE GOING TO BE OK (BECAUSE YOURE FUCKED NO MATTER WHAT)'.

Yes, things are fucked - but isn’t that always the case? Here, you’ll find divine realities and small mysteries we all know to be true. He finds the flowers in the ruins and his typewriter can’t do apostrophes. He says they’re not poems or thoughts—more like word boxes. I like him. I like his writing. You can see the human in there.

His latest book is called DARBY, LOVE…(ALIVE THINGS MUM SAID TO ME BEFORE SHE DIED). Each page begins with the phrase 'DARBY, LOVE…'. It’s the most perfect and revealing way to 'capture the spirit of the strangest, most poetic soul…'.

It’s beautiful, touching, funny and universal in the way only the most personal things can be. As Darby himself says ‘These days the best and only place to find art that is true and real is in wrong and fucked up texts between friends’

Hopefully this wrong and fucked up text between friends will do just that.

—

Tom Roberts is a songwriter and musician best known for his work with Beatowls and, before that, Cranebuilders. Between these bookends, he's quietly written and assembled an archive of beautiful songs, catalogued according to an archive system intelligible only to himself. Tom serves as our resident curator of treasures - cultural items new and old, all worthy of careful placement on your shelf.

Be A Part Of This...

Science and Magic seeks both established voices and those yet to be discovered.

Our collection of contributors - whether writers, musicians, visual artists, field recordists, filmmakers or photographers - grows not by accident but through deliberate action by them.

So whether you've published extensively or kept your best work carefully filed in leather portfolios, we invite your submissions and a brief bio to matt@violetterecords.com.

Your work will reach our dedicated audience of 5,000 subscribers who value meaningful creative work and interesting ideas.

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