Pick a Side, Pitchfork
Pitchfork is putting on a festival in London this week. It’s massive. It runs from 2 to 8 November across a load of venues, from the Roundhouse to the Royal Festival Hall. The Avalanches headline the Roundhouse on Friday night.
This isn’t criticism (I also genuinely like The Avalanches. I’m sure they’ll be relieved to hear that.) But Pitchfork made its name handing out 2.3s and acting like the last honest man in music. Plenty of bands and labels learnt to hate it for that. Taste and objectivity is the job it claimed for itself. A critic is meant to stand outside a room and tell you whether it’s worth going in. This weekend Pitchfork is standing on the door taking your money. That’s the restaurant critic running the kitchen, then popping out front to tell you the soup’s lovely. Yes, you bet I’ve got a problem with that.
So let’s consider how this all works in practice shall we? Pitchfork books The Avalanches and Noname and the rest of them and needs to shift a load of tickets to make a buck and keep the lights on. Then later one of these bands puts out a record and somebody at Pitchfork is supposed to sit down and tell you honestly whether it’s any good. Hey, maybe they will. But hey, maybe they won’t. Mind you, it’s a brave writer who gives a 3.1 to the act paying for the Christmas party. But we’ll never know and neither will they, and so it’s this doubt that’s my problem. No review is worth a tap when you can’t trust that nobody’s leaning on it.
Let’s dig a bit deeper. Back in 2024, Condé Nast (Pitchfork’s owners) folded Pitchfork into GQ, which tells you exactly where it thinks music belongs: somewhere between the grooming tips and the watch adverts. It also laid off a good chunk of its writers. The people left have to earn their keep somehow. Events make the serious money and reviews don’t, so when they’re side by side and profit is clearly on the agenda, the reviews will naturally end up as the brochure for the events. Best New Music, Best New Wristband. It’s how the world turns and you don’t get to keep calling it criticism once the sums are running the show. Quite literally.
When you’re running a small record label, all you want is a fair crack and honest reviews. A decent write-up from somebody with nothing to gain is worth more than most promotion can ever buy. A good write-up from people selling tickets to the gig is advertising, and readers can smell it a mile off. And a good record overlooked for a lesser record by a band on the bill for their festival, that’s not credible.
If Pitchfork wants to be a promoter, fine, plenty of decent people promote gigs. But it should stop selling itself as the honest broker. You can be the critic or you can be the promoter but the moment you try to be both, nobody believes a word you write. Pick one. Take your time. We’re not selling tickets.
A boy spills his Maltesers in a cinema foyer and pays for it for decades, right up until an Ewok walks into a speed-dating night. Somebody comes second to last in the 400 metres and hears ‘Spirit in the Sky’ for the first time straight afterwards. Tea trays fly down a snowy hill in Essex and a stolen ice cream van plays ‘Bat Out of Hell’ all the way to Lime Street. And a shadow walks on ahead of the man it belongs to.
Welcome to Issue 36. Nobody here is selling you a wristband. A record or two maybe…
Matt
i
Seven Questions
The Room started in Liverpool in 1979, recorded four sessions for John Peel, made it onto The Old Grey Whistle Test and called it a day in 1985. Dave Jackson sang and wrote the words. He and Becky Stringer, who’d started the band with him, went on to Benny Profane with our own Joe McKechnie. These days Dave lectures at Liverpool John Moores and The Room are back together. Their new album Doom Pop! came out on 9x9 Records on 4 September and Dave co-produced it with Steve Powell, our Ten Questions guest back in Issue 9.
We sent Dave the usual ten. Seven came back, with an apology for the delay and three reasons: the band, the new semester and “a deep mistrust of my recollections and opinions when I see them written down”. Being asked for ten, answering seven and drawing a line under it is arguably very Dave Jackson. And it’s to be admired. So this week it’s Seven Questions.
What song instantly takes you back to your school disco?
We didn’t really have school discos as such at Hillfoot Hey, it being an all-boys school. However, the first time I heard Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ throbbing its proto-glam spell under makeshift disco lights, was during a school sports day, open to the public. Older boys and their girlfriends had set up a makeshift daytime disco in our assembly hall. It was 1970, and the first and only time I foolishly entered an athletic event. Why I chose the 400 metres, which took place on the school’s massive running track – now buried under a 1980s housing estate – is lost, like the school itself, to the mists of time.
My dad, an early adopter of the jogging craze, got wind of my sporting intentions and decided to coach me, whether I liked it or not. He dragged me up at 6am every morning the week prior, for a run that included a lap of Camp Hill, a jog along Menlove Avenue, a lap of Calderstones Park, and a jog back along Menlove to our house off Manor Road. He even gifted me a pair of adidas for the big event, hoping to inculcate me into his mad hobby. It was fucking knackering.
Did the crash course in distance running work?
Not really. I came second to last.
But, after shame-facedly changing back into my weekend clothes, I joined my jeering friends in the ‘disco’ and first heard Norman’s ace song. It’s odd the way certain things stick in your memory – the smell of summer, that pulsating guitar sound, lights playing across the stage curtains and wooden assembly room floor, where a few older kids in flares and mini-skirts danced as if it were night rather than the middle of the afternoon. But the sense that those daft lyrics were sung, tongue in cheek, over that chugging boogie beat made the song seem even more powerful. The line, ‘I’ve never been a sinner, I’ve never sinned’ completely contradicted the Christian message that we’re born in sin and was compounded by the daft chorus rhyme of ‘When I die and they lay me to rest/ Gonna go to the place that’s the best.’ I loved it.
In 1986, the year that our school was buried under a soulless self-build estate, Doctor and the Medics buried the song’s joke in equally soulless ‘ironic’ excess.
Which song lives in your memory word-for-word that would raise eyebrows if you suddenly performed it flawlessly at karaoke?
There was a collection of old 78s at my Nan’s in Garston. Whenever I visited as an infant, the two records I wanted to hear on repeat were Frankie Laine’s ‘Cool Water’, and Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. When I was about 3 years-old, I remember my dad recounting the scene from The Magnificent Seven where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen escort a hearse to Boot Hill to bury a dead Native American against the wishes of bigoted gun-toting townspeople.
He loved his Westerns and in the early 60s TV was full of cowboy stuff – series like Bonanza, Rawhide, Laramie, Sugarfoot, and Wagon Train with their twangy melodramatic theme tunes.
I learnt the lyrics to ‘Riders in the Sky’ by heart, singing along with my dad on car journeys to places like Chester Zoo and Beeston Castle. I even remember my other Nan getting me to sing it down the phone to my mum and her workmates, while I wore a New Brighton fairground cowboy hat. It’s where I got my love of storytelling songs from. The image of a ‘herd of red-eyed cows ploughing through the ragged skies’ with ‘brands still on fire and hooves made of steel’ made an indelible impression on my young imagination and rides with me still.
What’s the first record you saved up to buy with your own money?
After my cowboy song obsession, it was The Beatles. I remember going to see A Hard Day’s Night at either the Scala or the Futurist on Lime Street with my 78-record-owning Nan. I also developed a fascination with the rock ‘n’ roll version of Elvis. The same Nan bought me an Elvis single in 1969. Unfortunately, it was ‘Suspicious Minds’, which was nothing like the rockabilly Elvis I liked.
The first single I bought with my own money from the small record shop in Woolton village was ‘Travelin’ Band’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I had no idea who they were, but I’d heard the song on Top of the Pops and absolutely loved its r n r aggression. The other side, ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain?’ was equally good. A moodily elegiac revelation in contrast. Apparently about Vietnam.
Other records I bought from that shop that year were Dave Edmunds’ ‘I Hear You Knocking’, The Supremes’ ‘Stoned Love’, Mungo Jerry’s ‘Baby Jump’, and the fabulous ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T. Rex. I remember sitting next to the phonogram with a pen and paper, trying to figure the lyrics out and wondering what the hell ‘the people of the Beltane’ were supposed to be.
What’s your favourite song from a film soundtrack?
Lee Marvin’s ‘Wanderin’ Star’ from Paint Your Wagon instantly springs to mind. When it was in the charts, I had no real clue about the film except for the footage of Lee strolling down a muddy western town main street shown on Top of the Pops. ‘Do I know where Hell is? Hell is in Hello. Heaven is goodbye forever. It’s time for me to go.’
What’s your favourite album to listen to alone in the dark?
For listening in the dark, The Black Heart Procession’s 2 is a beautifully mournful album that sounds like a gothic Neil Young singing under cascades of heartbroken piano and guitar. There’s even a musical saw on the lonesome, creaky grandeur of ‘Outside the Glass’.
Having said that, I’m torn between 2 and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F♯ A♯ ∞ with its post-apocalyptic soundscapes. No wonder it inspired Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
I also had that album in mind when I was developing a subsequently unproduced screenplay called Trespassing. It was set in the Camber Sands holiday camp where I first saw Godspeed at Steve Albini’s All Tomorrow’s Parties. The Film Council’s brief was for a low-budget SF film, and I imagined a deserted Pontins where the rich go to have their psyches projected into the bodies of underclass youths who are unaware that they’re being used as joyriding vehicles.
When I saw Boyle’s film, the extract from ‘Dead Flag Blues’ over the scene where Cillian Murphy wanders around an empty London gave me shivers.
What’s a single line from a song that has stuck with you like a mantra or piece of life-changing advice?
‘I curse the self-copulation of your lousy record collection’ from ‘New Puritan’, first heard in The Fall’s 1980 John Peel session, stuck out like a sort of truth above the lyrical introspection of much of the post-punk scene. The other songs from that broadcast – ‘New Face in Hell’, ‘Jawbone and the Air Rifle’, and ‘Container Drivers’, also hit with a raw hypnotic power. I’d only recently seen The Fall live and was instantly won over by their ramshackle authority and what I, at first, thought was a stream of free-associated lyrics that fused a type of Northern dirty realism with images of Lovecraftian horror. Lyrically, Smith’s sneering disavowal of music business protocol with lines like ‘bands send tapes to famous apes – male slags – male slates’ and ‘deep down, everybody wants to like big companies’ really struck a chord. I remember Peel asking, ‘Do they mean me?’ after playing that version of ‘New Puritan’.
It’s possible, of course, to hold two contradictory opinions at once concerning the self-copulation line. On the one hand, while certain self-proclaimed tastemakers with their encyclopaedic pop knowledge can sometimes irritate, on the other, without those musical trainspotters, we might miss out on brilliant gems from the past or fail to discover new and exciting artists. As with a lot of Smith’s lyrics, the line provokes a certain ambivalence in the listener as well as a wry smile.
What music do you play when you’re cooking?
Early Hawkwind, recent Wire, Stereolab, Blue Orchids’ The Greatest Hit, Rose City Band, Dehd, Goldfrapp, Hank Williams. I think.
Play Dave Jackson’s Seven Questions Playlistii
Magnetic North · Thirty-Six
Shadowplay
‘And so, I went to where I always go, into the shadowplay of memory where I might find an echo, a reflection, the wild twin that always runs on ahead over the edge, into the beyond. The part of me that wants to disappear, to become mist, invisible, to be elsewhere.’
— Wild Twin
Into the city, into the invisible…
I’m walking in the city for the first time in a while, at the end of a month of illness, and the early November light on Paradise Street has stretched my shadow into the beyond. Despite its beautiful name it’s fair to say that Paradise Street lacks poetry. Malcolm Lowry’s ghost doesn’t even bother coming here these days. The poetry is away from here but if you’re looking for it you’ll find it in the alleys and nooks, in the shadows of old churches, beneath old oaks. Liverpool One’s soul – if it ever had one – is dead.
All those things I’ve been looking for lately – the silence and stillness, the trembling hearts of acorns, the technologies of the sacred, the talking crows, the primitive radios made from shells and feathers – are clustered, perhaps in my elongated shadow, just ahead of me in the dancing autumn light. Perhaps the shadow is where the quiet thoughts are, the contemplative and fugitive. Perhaps the shadow is where we go to get away from the noise.
I recently sat with 90 people in the Scandinavian Seamen’s Church listening to the songs of our own Hallelujah Trial. To sit beneath the octagonal lantern roof of the church, in the silence and not-quite-silence, (because even the songs possess that atmosphere) was a kind of communion with stillness and meditation, with the collective breath and heartbeat of the gathering. You could sit in the silence between the songs, and you could feel the atmosphere shifting, an almost imperceptible sense of levitation, as if the church was breathing too and we were about to leave the ground.
In November light, walking slowly, enjoying the feeling of being lonely in the city – the aloneness of the quiet drift through the crowd, a solitary drifter, invisible to everyone, a ghost that’s still alive, a shadow with a shadow, within the shadows. And here, in the city, my shadow walking ahead of me is like a portal into my own secret invisibility and silence.
If I can catch my shadow in my hands, then I will disappear…
— Jeff Young, 4 November 2026
—
Jeff Young’s negotiations with his own shadow have reached the stage where it walks in front. The terms and conditions are chalked on a lamppost in Wolstenholme Square in a hand nobody else can read and they’re renewed at every equinox. Since the Hallelujah Trial gig the shadow answers him only in Norwegian. He holds that the sun sits low in November so the dead can find their way along Paradise Street. And so each night he leaves an acorn on the windowsill for that version of himself that disappears at noon.
iii
The Paphides Principle
Young and Dumb
on Everything But The Girl
Pete Paphides has a theory that a song can become a standard long before anybody gets round to saying it is. This fortnight he’s brought us ‘Young and Dumb’, the new single from Everything But The Girl, and a video shot in an empty Moth Club that he reckons cost a lot less than it’s worth.
Almost all videos cost more money than you think they do, and I don’t suppose Everything But The Girl’s new single is any exception. Nonetheless, I feel I can confidently say that the expense incurred is inversely proportionate to its effect. Shot in The Moth Club, scene of Ben and Tracey’s occasional residencies over the past couple of years, the venue is empty, and on the space in front of the stage, two young stagehands set up two microphones to which Ben and Tracey (still out of shot at this point) will walk up and, in time for the second verse, start to perform the song.
As has always been Tracey’s wont, there’s no excessive emoting – that’s the work of the song. And because of what this song is, what it’s here to tell you, that’s the right decision. ‘Young and Dumb’ is a song about the fearlessness of youth; about how you’re liberated by ignorance. It’s a throwback to the suburban saudade of the duo’s earliest recordings, a song about how you’re born brave but fear is learned.
It has some of my all-time favourite lines to emerge, either collectively or individually, from the pens of Ben and Tracey: “I swam in a raging sea,” she sings, “Climbed a mountain in bad shoes/Took mysterious pills/Swore I’d always love you.” Once they’re stood at their mics, performing the song, you think that’ll be it, but not quite. At 1 min, 45 secs, the mic stands are taken away, the young stagehands return, and we’re now watching a de facto dance troupe enacting the sentiment of the chorus. Because there’s wisdom in youth too. So let’s not throw out the baby of living with the bathwater of experience.
Standards don’t just become standards overnight. From the first time I heard ‘Young and Dumb’, it felt like a very special song in Everything But The Girl’s canon. Looking at their Spotify rankings, I see that their top four most streamed songs are all versions of ‘Missing’. But if Spotify even exists in 30 years’ time, and if we even exist in 30 years’ time, ‘Young and Dumb’ will be right among them.
— Pete Paphides, 5 November 2026
iv
Part 3
What Remains
Part three of Amy Collins’s summer notebook puts her on a National Express coach for eight hours to Par in Cornwall. Her host has left scones, jam and clotted cream on the table and there’s a mug in the kitchen that seems to know her.
I’m on the National Express now. 7.5 hrs to Par. It’s harder to write on the bus than the train.
TRAIN OF THOUGHT…
I’m thinking that there are many things in my life that mimic conversation or rather go some way towards satisfying my desire to share myself with another. This writing for a start. Talking to my cats. Posting to social media. Listening to podcasts. Podcasts can help combat loneliness, I learned this during Covid.
I thought about capitalism as a pure distraction this morning. Whilst brushing my teeth, an exercise that often induces excellent musings, I found myself going,
“Ah, must be the baking soda.”
Aren’t our brains just filled with catchphrases and songs from ads. Maybe pop culture is just as bad. Never better evidenced than a trip to London, where you can’t even travel on the underground without humming about 12 different London related tunes. Is it harmless or is it keeping original ideas out?
I’m gonna pop a Kwells. Already feeling travel sick. Jesus.
I’m very out of practice writing with a pen. My hand is sore.
The coach was half an hour late, so 8 hours in total. I was ready to get off.
The weather was moody. Reality kicking in. I’ve been checking the forecast, so I don’t know why I’ve been in denial.
My host came to collect me in the rain, so kind, and then I got to Bay Cottage (Par) and she’d left scones, jam, clotted cream & a pint of semi. Perfect. It’s like Race Across the World, this. I imagine declaring my appreciation of the kindness of strangers to the film crew.
I nipped out to see the sea in the rain last night. I was having a little “What would JoBo Nuthead do?” moment. It was fresh and full of birdsong. The sea was too choppy but I’m itching to get in. Maybe today.
I’m feeling quite hopeful right now as I drink a black coffee from a mug I found in the kitchen that says,
“I’m still hot, it just comes in flushes now!”
The sun is fighting to come out. I’m starting to see just how cute and perfectly ramshackle my cottage garden is. I’ve struck gold here. The sleep was deep and comfy, the kind I find I only get on holiday. Even when I just go to Penrhynside to see Ade. Lovely deep slumber.
The slight pilgrimage element of my trip dawned on me last night and I missed my dad. He would have loved the fog over the sea and pointing out the jackdaws, rooks and chaffinch going mad in the rain.
Whenever I have a lovely thought or memory of my dad, my mind immediately counterbalances that with something painful/negative.
It’s kind of tiring, but perhaps it’s a safety feature. Keeping me wary.
I once spent three days painting a stormy, moody seascape for Dad as a birthday gift. I couldn’t wait to show him my artwork depicting his favourite type of weather and scenery. He looked it up and down, then looked around my room and pointed to the wall at another abstract painting I’d made with no real love or intention.
“Can I have that one instead?”
I was crushed.
That might sound like an unwittingly insensitive moment, but I know better than that. It was a flex. There was a weird post-war attitude, inherited from my nana’s generation that nobody should ever feel too pleased with themselves. Pride was something to be taken down a peg or two. Utterly annoying. I can draw a straight line from moments like that to the critical voice I carry around.
Right, the pilgrimage…
—
Amy Collins only paints the sea when it’s in a bad mood. The fair-weather ones she does in her head and gives away. A rook has been watching her kitchen window on the Wirral since June and she’s decided it’s on her side. Gary Chapatti is allowed to sit on any painting in the house except the stormy ones.
v
May the Fourth
The young man frowned, his lips moving as he read the information printed on the posters he had flattened against the countertop. ‘Bit on the nose,’ he said.
Gavin Mercer squinted at the name tag on the assistant’s polo shirt. ‘Is there a problem, Brady?’ He tapped his watch. ‘I’m in a bit of a…’
‘Choosing that date. And also, you should have added A New Hope, to make it clear.’ Brady raised his eyebrows.
If he says, ‘just saying,’ Gavin thought, I’m walking out without the posters. Should have had them printed online. This is what you got for supporting a local business. Customer service, like bin collections and buses, had gone downhill in Kirkhill.
‘Who’ll know?’
‘The members of the club.’
‘It says Appreciation Society here.’
‘Which is why they’ll know which film we’re talking about.’
Gavin moved forward to press his point. Brady took two steps away from the counter. He picked up a long cardboard tube with both hands, swished it in front of him, and made a lengthy buzzing sound. Gavin flinched as one end of the tube whistled past his ear.
‘You’re the customer.’ Brady brought the tube to rest on the counter. He rolled the posters and slipped them into the tube, sealing the ends with plastic lids and a flick of tape.
Gavin paid in silence and rushed to his car, already fifteen minutes late back from lunch. Arwel Jones, had he not been on long-term sick leave, would have voiced his disappointment at Gavin’s timekeeping in front of the whole shop. During his tenure as Acting Manager at UBet on Ladysmith Row, Gavin had worked hard to set an example and maintain the exacting standards his ailing boss favoured so vocally. Gavin recognised the everyday punters, and the ones that came in on Saturdays; he knew those who had worked out how to spend less than a pound on multiple bets, and the high rollers who lumped wads of cash on sure-fire favourites; and he was on first-name terms with most of them. He liked to keep things informal with his staff, but made sure to employ the appropriate gravitas and deference in his dealings with Marilyn Finch, the Area Manager who had extended his temporary position twice. Recently, Gavin had decided to press his case for a permanent appointment at the earliest possible opportunity, which he felt sure would present itself at some point.
It was a regular Wednesday night when those good intentions went awry. Racing at Kempton and Wolverhampton, and greyhounds from Kilkenny had kept the shop busy. It emptied out ten minutes after the final dog crossed the line in Ireland, and Gavin was left alone with Frankie Marquez. He sent Frankie into the back office to cash up her till, and let himself onto the shop floor to straighten the chairs and empty the bins. UBet official policy would have him do this while his colleague was behind the counter, but Gavin was keen to get home to prepare his submission for Ms Finch. His mind wandered to unlucky punters licking their wounds in the pub, where those with winning slips would be sharing stories of success with drinkers on the scrounge for a refill. Frankie’s father might turn up to give his daughter a lift home, and with a bit of luck he’d offer to do the same for her boss. Gavin’s back was to the door when he heard the mechanism click.
‘Evening Mr Marquez,’ he said, bending down to rescue a pen from the carpet.
‘What?’
Gavin straightened up, feeling a weakness in his lower back and sensing trouble from his stomach. That voice … no, it couldn’t be.
‘Apologies,’ Gavin said, ‘I thought you were someone…’
‘What the fuck you talking about, you fat lump?’
Gavin turned towards the voice and froze, transfixed by the teeth shooting from the lips at an angle more freakish than jaunty. It was a face only a mother could love – at a push – and one that a victim would never forget; a face that snarled and mocked as you were relieved of your dinner money, your sweets, your homework and your shoes; a face that brought with it the memory of a voice that had taunted you with crude and unoriginal insults, calling into question your status, health, parentage, and right to exist. It had been decades, but the hulk of a man that stood before him – Colin bastard Kane – had coined a nickname that had haunted Gavin for years. And even if he had managed to bury the memories, Kane’s teeth were a grisly reminder of past horrors.
‘I said what the fuck are you talking about?’ Colin Kane lurched towards Gavin, launching a finger in his direction. He stumbled, but corrected himself. Rolling his head from shoulder to shoulder, he let his tongue settle on his teeth and sneered.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Gavin felt his toes retract like claws.
‘Where’s your pisser?’
Gavin pointed to a door where a poster dangled the possibility of yachts and fast cars for one lucky Kirkhill punter. He watched Kane make his way towards the toilet, and let his breath escape when the door clicked shut. There hadn’t been the tiniest flicker of memory in those malevolent eyes. Perhaps he would leave as soon as he had emptied his bladder. Gavin shook his head: he rarely, if ever, had such luck. Recognition, he feared, was as inevitable as the end of days. It was a matter of time before Kane recalled the boy who had humiliated him in the foyer of the Kirkhill ABC on the day of the Star Wars release decades ago. One stupid accident: one little boy celebrating his birthday and running into one big bully and spilling his Maltesers in the process. That was all it had taken for Gavin to suffer years of torment. It would come back to Kane because that was how Gavin’s luck went.
He reversed the sign on the shop door and was hurrying to the safety of the counter when Kane emerged from the toilet, fiddling with his belt.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I know you.’ As Kane looked down to his buckle, Gavin swerved towards safety behind the glass.
‘We’re closing now, sir,’ said Gavin, testing the Perspex with an index finger.
‘I said I know you.’ Kane moved his face towards the screen, gripping the counter as though ready to rip it from the floor.
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Gavin’s finger hovered over an alarm button.
‘It’ll come to me.’
‘I’ve got to lock up.’
‘Customer,’ Kane slammed a fist on the counter, ‘is always right. Let me get a look at you. Lift your face up. Lift it up!’
Gavin could do no more than look at his shoes. So many years had passed, and yet he knew the form: as soon as you caught his eye, he struck. Keep your eyes on your shoes to postpone the pain. The Perspex was supposed to be bulletproof.
‘Show me your fucking face.’ Kane pressed a sweating palm to the screen, leaving a huge paw print which Gavin would point out to the cleaner in the morning.
Gavin considered the possibility of violence. The shop could be wrecked before the police had time to respond. His face puckered in terror, and he shivered. He heard a noise behind him, and Frankie Marquez appeared at his side carrying an anorak in the crook of an arm.
‘We have to shut the shop now, sir. No more bets, I’m afraid. My brothers will be waiting outside.’ She offered Kane a huge smile. Kane blew a stream of air through his nose and was at the door in three strides. He pointed one finger into the air, tapping the side of his head with another. ‘It’ll come to me,’ he said, waggling the airborne finger at Gavin.
When Kane returned the following week, Frankie was at work behind the counter. Gavin had taken to retreating to the office on the late shift, urgent paperwork his consistent excuse; and while there was indeed admin to be addressed, there was also a bank of screens above the desk from which he could not avert his eyes for more than a few seconds. This was how he observed the bully take in his surroundings on this second visit. He was puzzled when Frankie covered her mouth and nose with a hand. Later, he encountered the sour aroma of beer and cigarettes that Kane had bequeathed the shop, but at that moment he assumed it was the bully’s threatening presence that had caused her to recoil. A punter playing digital roulette turned from the machine for a second, fished a coin from his pocket, and continued on his streak. Kane negotiated the furniture blocking his way to the toilet, mouthing something imperceptible as he did so. Two minutes later, Gavin cracked open the door between his office and the shop, allowing him to hear whatever words accompanied Kane’s clumsy passage to the counter.
‘Where’s your boss?’ Kane righted himself with the aid of a tall stool.
‘Just me tonight.’ Frankie had locked another smile into place. How could she be so cool?
‘Get him out here,’ said Kane, rolling on his heels. He leered at a camera trained on the spot where he swayed. ‘Out the back is he?’
‘No. Just me, like I said.’
‘Skywanker,’ he shouted, ‘get out here.’
‘What’s the problem?’ said Frankie.
‘No problem. I just want a word with Mercer.’
‘Mr Mercer isn’t here.’
‘I fucking knew it was him!’ Kane put a finger to his temple.
Gavin held his breath as the roulette player appeared next to Kane and leaned forward to shove a note under the glass. Kane lifted his arms and moved aside. He watched the man return to the machine, and ran his tongue across his teeth.
‘Back next week,’ he promised.
Gavin watched Frankie watch Kane exit. She turned to the camera and smiled. Thirty seconds later, Gavin nudged his face around the office doorway.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked. The roulette guy sneezed, and muttered something about a stink.
‘Absolutely fine, Gavin. You carry on. I can manage,’ she said.
Gavin returned to his desk and checked the rota for the Wednesday to come.
Kane failed to appear the following week and the one after that. Gavin relaxed, returned to the message boards and re-opened the fan site which had lain dormant since his nemesis had reappeared. Members of Jedi Nation (UK), who had been lobbying via private messaging services, were relieved to discover that the long-promised speed-dating event would go ahead. This event was Gavin’s brainchild, the result of a pre-Kane determination to open himself up to the possibility of romance for the first time since his divorce. Having had no success in persuading colleagues to swap shifts on the night in question, he had been relieved when Frankie Marquez had come to the rescue, agreeing to cover the shift alone. He drove his car to work that day, the boot laden with posters and costumes. The upstairs room in the Crow’s Nest was booked for seven-thirty, with permission to go in half an hour early to set up. As he walked towards his car, he whistled a tune, striding in step with The Imperial March and cursing his brain for choosing such an obvious and ominous melody. He opened the boot to check he had packed everything he needed, and shook the contents from a cardboard tube. Unfurling the posters like a town crier on the cusp of an announcement, he leaned back to admire his design; but as he did so, he was rocked by a sharp jab in his shoulder blade. He lurched forward, his head connecting with the lid of the boot. He felt the sting of blood seeping from a cut above his right eye.
‘Oops.’
Gavin turned and pressed his body to the car, ducking as Colin Kane put his hand to the gash, his face creased with a poor imitation of concern.
‘You’ve cut yourself. Come here.’ Kane produced a grubby tissue and tried to dab at the wound.
‘I’ll be fine.’ Gavin felt the blood rise to his cheeks as the bully moved towards him.
‘Sorry ’bout that, mate. Just a friendly dig.’
Gavin shook his head. They were playing that mates game now: the one in which Kane pretended he was horsing around and in reality you were bosom buddies. They had been there before, and it had never ended well.
‘What’s this shite, anyway?’ Kane tugged the posters from Gavin’s hand. ‘May the Fourth Be with You? Jedi Nation? Speed dating? Nice one. I might come along.’
‘Sold out.’
‘I bet you’ve got a spare ticket for an old mate.’
Gavin shook his head again.
‘Unless you can help me out with something else?’ Kane turned out an empty pocket. Gavin reached for his wallet.
In school, Kane took your lunch money and whatever else was in your pockets. Twenty pounds would have paid for a lot of school dinners, but on May the Fourth it met the cost of safe passage to the Crow’s Nest. Gavin arrived in time to rearrange the furniture and change into costume. He ignored the murmurs of the queue that had formed in the corridor at the bottom of the stairs, inconveniencing local drinkers who were forced to squeeze past a man who had presumed that he could carry off Han Solo, two Chewbaccas, nine Jedi knights, a C-3PO and numerous stormtroopers of indeterminate gender. On any other occasion, Gavin would have been disappointed to see no Darth Vaders, but for once he embraced his relief and took it as a good omen; and what were the chances of him being the only Luke? Could it be that things were on the up at last? Detecting a bolshy element among the queue, he let them in. He was miffed, however, when an Ewok arrived as he closed the door: had he not made it clear that it was OFO? When the Ewok spoke, however, Gavin felt the tip of Cupid’s arrow pierce his Jedi garb.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, grabbing a furry ear and removing the head. Her voice was soft but confident, a little cheeky. It was enough to weaken his knees.
‘Not a problem,’ said Gavin, ‘although strictly speaking…’
‘I know: Original Film Only,’ she said, with a chuckle. ‘I ran out of time to get anything else. And you’ve got to admit, Ewoks are cute.’
‘Well, this one is.’ Gavin slapped the side of his leg. In these situations, silence was his usual strategy. What had possessed him to go off-piste?
‘Beth,’ she said.
‘Gavin,’ he replied, offering her a handshake. A bit formal, but it was the best he could offer.
She took his hand in both of hers. ‘What have you done to your eye, young Skywalker? Have you had a run-in with the Empire?’
Before Gavin could answer, Han Solo interrupted with a demand that all stormtroopers remove their helmets before the start of the session. Gavin cleared his throat, clapped his hands three times and announced that the speed dating would begin in ten minutes. He confirmed that all male guests should sit at a table as the ladies visited each one in five-minute bursts. A no-show forced him to choose a table and write his name on a card, muttering that as the organiser he should not be a participant. He set a timer on his phone for five minutes, blew a whistle and announced – to cheers and groans – ‘Let battle commence.’
Gavin blustered through fifteen minutes with a stormtrooper and two late-arriving Leias. His cheeks flushed and he squirmed in his seat, wondering, not that it would help tonight, if the outfit was available in one size up. The Ewok, alas, did not get as far as his table. Blowing the whistle mid-session, he took to his feet to remind a demonstrative Chewbacca to remain in his chair. At the interval, the Ewok – minus head once more – delivered a bottle of lager to Gavin’s table.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Beth.
‘Not so good.’ Gavin stared at the outsized teddy bear’s head balanced under her arm.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think this costume would be so hot.’
‘Oh, it’s hot,’ he replied.
‘I let you have that one earlier,’ she said, dumping the head on the table, ‘but I won’t let you get away with corny patter all night.’
Gavin rubbed his hands together and stared at his palms. He closed his eyes and grabbed his chin. Beth pushed at his shoulder.
‘Hey mister,’ she said. ‘Don’t stop. You’re doing fine.’
‘I think that’s all I’ve got.’ He looked at his watch and sighed. ‘Better get things moving again.’
‘I might sit this half out. I think I’ll get changed,’ she said.
‘Hey ho,’ said Gavin.
‘You can buy me a drink afterwards. And I’ll give you more than five minutes, if you can bear sitting with someone who came as an Ewok.’
Two stormtroopers who had refused to remove their headgear were the last to leave, arms linked and waving their blasters in farewell. By the way they were acting, they must have had a few drinks, but how? Gavin guessed straws, which would have ruined the look. If it were him, he would have gone thirsty in the cause of authenticity. He changed out of his costume, stacked the tables and filled a bin with rubbish. He had watched Beth leave after the interval and had not seen her since. Four couples thanked him for his efforts, and one of the tardy Princesses informed him that she had three new numbers stored in her phone and he needn’t bother asking to be the fourth. He removed the posters from the walls, fed them into the tube and switched off the lights. He paused on the threshold of the car park and turned into the lounge bar. She wouldn’t be there: what she had said was just her being kind and letting him down without too much of a bump, for which he was grateful. Might as well have a quick one for the road and take a moment to assess the evening. He stowed his belongings in an alcove in the hallway and walked into the bar.
‘I thought you weren’t coming.’ Beth looked up from a book – Le Morte D’Arthur – she was reading at a corner table.
‘I thought you’d have gone.’ He pointed at the book. ‘Classic. Another drink?’
He bought drinks and sat beside her. She put the book in her bag. In half an hour they learned that each of them lived alone, both were in full-time employment, and they shared a passion for the Science Fiction and Fantasy sections of bookshops and libraries. She did something in sales, but to her a job was a job. It was what you did outside of work that defined you. For once everything Gavin said came out fine; or if it hadn’t, she didn’t let on. The bell rang for last orders.
‘End of round one,’ said Gavin as Beth sat back and laughed. He waved his glass at her. ‘One more? I’d better have a Coke this time.’
He rushed to the bar, wondering if he shouldn’t give Return of the Jedi another chance; perhaps he had been a little harsh on the Ewoks. He leaned over the bar top, looking for the landlord. On the other side, pressed against a jukebox, Colin Kane waved a pint glass. He was through the door before Gavin could return to their table. Kane took the seat next to Beth and sneered.
‘Lager.’ He necked three quarters of a pint in two gulps.
‘Colin, we’re having a private conversation,’ said Beth.
‘You know… him?’ Gavin asked, pointing his empty glass at Kane.
‘Old friends,’ said Kane, ‘like me and you. Well, not exactly.’
‘Once,’ said Beth. ‘Everyone is entitled to a mistake.’
Gavin shook his head, backed away and collected his stuff from the hallway. He ran through heavy rain to his car, threw the posters and costume into the back and fastened his seat belt. He locked the doors, started the engine, and dropped his hands to his thighs. He stared through the windscreen and counted the bricks on the wall in front of him. He knew why Kane had singled him out all those years ago, and when he thought about it, perhaps it was understandable. Not forgivable, but you could see how it had happened. It was the kind of thing that occurred every day and everywhere: one boy making a victim of another who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was something that had to be endured until it ended. Because these things did end – isn’t that what parents tell their children? – when the bullies got bored and moved on to someone else. Still, you carried it with you, unable to shake it off; and the tormentor was a regular in your dreams. Even so, you’d never predict he would resurface decades later, ready to pick up where he had left off.
A fist rapped on the passenger window.
‘Open the door!’ Beth shouted. ‘Let me in before he comes out.’
Gavin flicked a button. She jumped into the car, cradling a black bag dripping with rain. Gavin flicked the button again.
‘Get moving,’ she said.
‘Where is he?’ Gavin checked his rear-view mirror.
‘He’ll be out as soon as he’s mopped his trousers.’
‘What?’
‘It was one drink. I was new in a job, and nobody warned me about him. I thought he was being kind. For God’s sake, get moving.’
‘Where to?’
‘Anywhere,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you left me in there. What happened to chivalry?’
‘Me and him have history. I’m a useless, bloody coward.’
‘Everyone’s got history with that bastard. Just drive.’
Gavin put the car into gear and let his foot off the clutch. The car shot backwards, and the engine stalled. He started the engine, reversed five metres, and moved off. Through his mirror, he saw Kane steam out of the pub, legs and arms a tangled mess. As he ran out into the road, his ankle gave way in a pothole. He dropped to the pavement, the back of his head thwacking the tarmac. His arms betrayed him as he tried to get up, and he collapsed a second time. Gavin slowed the car, but thirty seconds had elapsed before he pulled on the handbrake and got out. He tiptoed towards the inert body. Kneeling at the side of Kane’s head, he leaned in to check for breathing. This could not be how it ended.
‘Get off!’ Kane pushed Gavin aside.
‘You’re alive,’ said Gavin.
‘What are you fucking talking about? Help me up.’
Gavin scrambled backwards, pointing at Kane’s groin. ‘You’ve wet yourself.’
‘That bitch is mad,’ Kane sat up and rubbed his head. ‘Threw her fucking drink at me. Help me up.’
‘Don’t talk about her like that.’ Ignoring Kane’s outstretched hand, he got to his feet and looked up in time to see Beth disappear around a corner. Gavin abandoned Kane to the rain and ran after her, kicking the car door shut as he passed. At the end of the street, he watched a bus pull away. She had taken a seat by a window, but didn’t look back. Gavin returned to his car, where Kane was sprawled on the bonnet.
‘Give me a lift,’ he said.
‘Not now,’ said Gavin, feeling for his keys.
‘What?’
‘Not this time. Not ever.’ He stood on his toes, bringing his face as close to Kane as he could manage. It was useless wishing he had kept fit, taken up boxing, and learned to throw a punch. Useless, but the thought passed through his mind.
‘You’re giving me a lift.’ Kane grimaced and felt the back of his head with one of his huge hands. He reached the other to the door handle.
‘No.’ Gavin pressed the button on his key fob to lock the doors. As he did so he spotted a Post-it stuck to the steering wheel. She’d written a number and two words: call me.
‘Are we going to do this now?’ Kane stood tall, widening his stance.
‘If we must,’ said Gavin, inching backwards. ‘But even if we do, that’s it. You’re not getting in the car.’
Kane took a step forward. Gavin stood his ground, balling his fists.
‘I liked her. I like her,’ said Gavin.
‘Who?’
‘The woman who has just disappeared. Another one.’
‘For fuck’s sake. Open the car.’
‘No. I’ve told you. We’re done.’
Kane gripped Gavin’s shoulders, pulling him onto his toes. Their noses touched as Gavin strained to keep his eyes from blinking. He drew his head back and stared into the sky above Kirkhill. ‘Go on, Kane,’ he said through his lips, ‘…do your worst.’
—
Rob Schofield knows the price of everything in Kirkhill. A meat and potato pie at Dooley’s costs two pounds ten and has done since the town was invented. The bus out to the Fitzgerald costs whatever the driver decides that morning. He chalks up the odds for the Wednesday dogs from Kilkenny in the window of the UBet on Ladysmith Row. Nobody in Kirkhill has ever paid for a Malteser. They come down like hail outside the old ABC every fourth of May and the children gather them up in their hoods.
vi
The Star, Thaxted
Lately, I’ve found myself in need of a séance. The pub is the best place to commune with the dead. History lies closer to the surface and memory is tangible. I have come to The Star in Thaxted, Essex. The building dates back to around 1380; it is one of the oldest buildings in the medieval town. It has been a pub since at least the 1780s: a pub in which the exposed eaves are reassuringly low.
Thaxted has been home to many important people through its history: the 14th-century church was once presided over by Conrad Noel – the so-called Red Vicar of Thaxted – who felt that socialism was a necessary part of Christianity; Gustav Holst wrote his Planets suite here; a young Dick Turpin got his start rustling cattle in this area; artist and Colony Room regular Isabel Rawsthorne is buried here and Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed part of his Canterbury Tales at the 19th-century windmill.
None of these people will be contacted today.
I lived in Thaxted from around the ages three until I was fourteen. It was a good place to spend the innocent years of childhood, inventing parallel realities to chase through town. Even the first clumsy forays into drugs and girls seem paradoxically wholesome through the cataract of Essex village twee. I had a close group of friends from the first year of primary school until I left in year nine: me, Vito, Michael, Sam and my best friend, Harry. In the intervening two decades, we stayed in touch and arranged many reunions. None of them ever happened.
When Harry died, it was completely unexpected. I was teaching a class on advanced grammar. A text from Michael: I hate to be the bearer of bad news… The window of my classroom looked down into the playground of a primary school. Two little boys behind a tree, hiding from their P.E. lesson. Their innocence stung. Harry was dead, and with him, that hagioptasic vision of my own childhood. The next morning, on the walk to work, two children at opposite ends of the road dropped their bags and left their parents’ sides to run to each other. I remembered doing the same with Harry. The remaining four of us arranged a reunion in The Star.
Grammatical tenses, as we all know, are the linguistic propaganda mechanism through which the bullshit agenda of linear time is propagated. But they also hold clues to linear time’s own ontological instability: using conditional constructions, we are able to break through the tyranny of chronological singularity and create alternative, even simultaneous, versions of the past, present or future. As I taught this to my class, I saw its potential as a means of conjuring an alternative present in which Harry could sit alongside us.
Now, in The Star, we are not here for a memorial. We would have been here for the reunion that we never got around to. We would have been sitting at the round table under the TV, where there would have been fake brick-patterned wallpaper covering the real ancient brickwork, or – as this is imagined – there wouldn’t have been. We would have drunk five or six pints and then a double whiskey and then another double whiskey and the conversation would have gone from jobs and houses, to marriage, to our children, dips into the paranormal and regrets and traumatic experiences and confession and nostalgia before we would have ridden the drink to the full inhabitation of our own childhood selves. Now we are – we would have been – occupying multiple temporalities. Sam’s 10-year-old dimples would have returned to his cheeks; Harry would have scratched the eczema that had reappeared on the back of his knee. We would have left the pub and stood under the orange streetlight – a surviving Victorian relic, I would run my fingers across its gloss black paint as a child – in the car park. We would have all given up smoking when we had children, or not started yet because we were 10, but someone would have had a pouch of Amber Leaf nonetheless & we would have stood in the orange light passing tobacco & filters & Rizlas across & around & lighting & smoking & a shudder & tug of nausea & we’d have found ourselves floating across the road, up the hill, to our old primary school where we’d have remembered the animal smell of temporary classrooms in the heat & round the corner to the Green where Harry & Sam lived & the deep ridges of motorbike tyres across a frozen common & down the alley behind the school where me & Harry once hid from our parents on the walk home & pushed the joke so far the police were called & we’d be following our own ghosts, watching the trails they left like migraine auras two little boys as they ran across the main road & down to the hill where the whole town would flock like a Bruegel painting when it snowed: some would have toboggans, metal & wood & lifted from the floor; some would have plastic sleds where your belly was a few centimetres from the snow, but we would have watched the ghosts of two little boys who had tea trays taken from their kitchens which would fly down the sheet of compressed snow like skimmed pebbles until they shot into the syrupy darkness at the bottom of the hill & out of sight into memory & I’d go to say to Harry do you remember & do you remember & I’d be outside The Star with the dawning of a hangover.
—
Dan Melling lives in Liverpool but most evenings he walks home from a primary school in Thaxted. He crosses Smithdown Road where the main road ought to be and takes the jigger behind Lawrence Road because that’s where the alley was. Near Wavertree Playground the hill turns up under his feet and he lets it carry him to the bottom. He’s home by ten to six. In August there’s frost on his coat.
vii
Other People’s Windows
I think quite a lot about what it is that gives certain words elevated status. What makes practice different from something that regularly or repeatedly occurs in everyday life. Is it the intention or perhaps an element of transformation that occurs that confers the state, the status? Arguably both of these things though can happen in either state. Either way this is the start of me telling you that my dog died.
I’ve always looked at other people’s windows, now though I do it here with some form of stated purpose of art. That’s not why I look though, I can’t imagine anything more banal than the everyday (or we could say QUOTIDIAN, but we won’t) habit cultivated with the sole intention of positioning it as art. I mean I do in fact do things on a regular basis for the purposes of making stuff that you might call art or that I then position as art but that is a very different proposition from thinking I must walk down my street today in order to look at other people’s windows. Really in telling you about my dog I am trying to explain to you what I do and what it means because that is easier perhaps than thinking about what he means. Maybe even it is the same thing because both are necessary layers of living.
I use other people’s windows as maps, as rhythm. I can tell you how to get around the city of Medellin in Colombia, for example, by my mind’s window map and other ancient land markers of bins, mattresses, twin toilets in the street, trees and people who I chatted with as I went. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, which let’s be honest, they usually are, then windows are the eyes of time and percussion of the unknown. Necessary parts of the soul you might say. Or not obviously, we should all have our own ideas.
I use other people’s windows as punctuated points of wondering.
You could call my habitual practice of documenting place – which includes many layers, only some of which are people – a place based or site specific or site responsive practice. Or you could just call me nosey or it a habit. Personally, I don’t mind. What it really all comes down to is time, transformation and glimpses of known and unknown. The fine line between choices, circumstances and decisions of life and death. Self and other. Sudden or prolonged movements of change. Unrequited expectations of perception. When I am dead someone will have the burden of trawling through the layers until the only option is wondering.
Long before he died, before he was my dog even, I anticipated his death. Similarly, every time I look at a window, shop front or a bus stop or building site, I am assessing the small change/that got rained on. That is the dog contract. The terms of life.
My dog went suddenly blind last Christmas. Then they discovered he was terminally ill. I was in Peru at the time and got a phone call from the vet saying that if I could get home she would try and keep him alive for me for three weeks. I was home within ten days. Numbers of death are a formula I’m familiar with. This time though, all bets were off as he outlived them all. The problem with expecting death that does not happen is that you start to believe it never will.
You worry about the right circumstances, the timing, the good death. That perhaps is why I am always looking. Just in case. And, also, let’s be honest, human beings perform a strange dance of spectate.
My dog could no longer see but he still looked. Often with comical or unnerving accuracy and directness. Yet to navigate his changes he had to adopt blind faith. He always had super sensory powers; he would start barking at the window 10 minutes before one of us arrived home and had an instinctive 100% accurate record for advance prediction of pizza delivery. When blind he relied more on hearing and smell but more than anything he depended upon trust and his own leap in the dark. Maybe that is the difference between habit and art. Art shared is a leap of trust. People talk about art that is brave or fearless, I recommend they look again at those who can look but not see, with no choice.
Yet there are different types of seeing, all perception is unstable and mutable. So when we are looking at other people’s windows we never really know. On the way to pick up my dog’s ashes, we stopped in Hull for the night and went to see the smallest window in England. I’ll admit I was disappointed. Yet windows are never really disappointing because they are full of possibilities. They are my preferred method alongside repetition, my favourite mode of camera filter of something that is just already there.
From thinking about his death before sharing his life I progressed to writing a text score to make sound art or music from after he was gone. I called it Dialogue of Dog, and it was my offering to anyone who has ever been loved by a dog. Who has known the deep listening on both sides. Dogs are everywhere in ways that humans cannot be. In Peru I recorded the gangs of street dogs who took over the streets and the airwaves like clockwork every morning and night and on special occasions when something was going down and communicated collectively. Time and transformation. Except of course I didn’t make all the necessary recordings because that means accepting the future. Which is now the past, so I’ll have to improvise on the all encompassing.
Is this a new form of artist statement obituary I hear you cry as publishers rush to commission this new trend. No, it’s just me telling you that my dog died and our living room window will never be the same again, even though it was always the same but different anyway.
NB The first image is the title page drawing from my 2023 zine that is not a zine those times bill callahan came to fife and hung out in scotland and is me and Flake roadtripping in my imaginary van.
10-4 good buddy, I’ll keep on looking at other people’s windows and wondering.
viii
What a Debacle
—
Victoria Raftery keeps the family secrets in a Silver Jubilee biscuit tin from 1977 with Windsor Castle on the lid. She’s never opened it and she polishes the lid every Sunday after lunch. Her letters to the in-laws run to one side of one page and say absolutely nothing in the most beautiful handwriting. On the first of every month she relabels the tin in a slightly different shade of blue biro. The current label says ‘Miscellaneous’.
ix
Anfield Road by Chris Shepherd: Two Years On
Shut That Noise Up
Near the end of Anfield Road, Danny gets his son to Lime Street in a stolen ice cream van. The chimes have been swapped for ‘Bat Out of Hell’. Chris Shepherd draws the lyrics pouring out of the speaker in a long ribbon that unrolls over the wasteland and the tower blocks and follows the van all the way into town. It’s the loudest page I’ve read in years and it doesn’t make a sound.
The book came out on 29 October 2024 from Titan Comics, 272 pages in full colour. It’s 1989. Conor Sterling is nearly eighteen, he draws all the time and he wants to get to art college in London with his girlfriend Maureen. He lives with his gran Mary on Anfield Road, right in the shadow of the ground, which is a shame because he can’t stand football. His dad Danny drifts in and out of the house like weather. The first caption tells you what you’re in for: “What follows is a Northern fantasy.”
Chris wrote it as a feature film first and couldn’t get it funded. In lockdown he started drawing it instead, with no publisher and no deal. Four years later it was the Observer’s graphic novel of the month, with a foreword by Alexei Sayle, who grew up round the corner. It’s on its second print run now and he’s said the next one is set in London.
You don’t need to be a Liverpool fan to read it, because Conor isn’t one either. What it’s about is noise and who gets to make it. Mary runs the house on rules and in Conor’s sketchbook she turns into Granny Ogre, shouting at him to shut that noise up. The Kop drowns out everything on a Saturday, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ rolls across the rooftops from the ground and the posters on Conor’s bedroom wall are Echo & the Bunnymen. Chris busked in the city centre through the eighties and played in bands, so every track in the book was chosen on purpose. As he puts it below, the music is always playing between the lines. He’s put the soundtrack on Spotify too, forty tracks that open with The La’s and ‘There She Goes’ and close on ‘Bat Out of Hell’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.
The other thing he does is rebuild a city that’s mostly gone. He drew it from photographs he’d taken in the eighties and nineties and from a memory that seems to have kept every flagstone. The Las Vegas slots on Lime Street are there and so is TJ Hughes. One page is just tower blocks and bins against an orange sky, captioned “The sun rises over the dustbins. It’s a new day.” He squeezes more landmarks into a frame than you could ever fit, because that’s how he remembers it. He puts the sunset where it looks best rather than where it actually goes down. If you’ve walked Liverpool with Jeff Young in these pages you’ll know the place, a city drawn from memory as much as from life and better for it.
The book walks towards 15 April 1989. I’m not going to say much about Hillsborough here, because Chris says it better below than a review could and he handles it with a care I’d rather not paraphrase.
Two years on, the thing that’s stayed with me is the drawing of Lime Street, with the Radio City sign over the concourse and a speech bubble that says there’s only five minutes to the train. Conor gets on it. Chris, it turns out, keeps coming back.
I sent Chris nine questions in October and he answered every one of them.
You once called yourself the arty Scouser who liked to draw pictures and play music. Where does the music sit in Anfield Road?
Music felt like the pulse of the whole book. As an arty Scouser who spent the 80s busking in the city centre and gigging in bands, music is practically written into my DNA. Every single track was a deliberate choice to drop the reader straight into the mood, time and atmosphere of the era. I wanted to rebuild the world of my youth, which meant including legendary Liverpool haunts like Probe Records and sticking Echo & the Bunnymen posters back on the bedroom walls where they belong. Music is always playing between the lines in the book.
Play the Anfield Road PlaylistIt’s a silent book (as books are!) about arguably the loudest city in England. When you drew Danny’s stolen ice cream van blasting music all the way to Lime Street, how did you get that noise onto a page that can’t actually make a sound?
If you’re not making noise on the page, are you even doing it right? Hearing that you felt the sound in the book means the world to me. The use of ‘Bat Out of Hell’ in the stolen ice cream van section was pure, unadulterated liberation for Conor. I wanted that moment to feel like a joyous explosion. I had a great time playing with perspective in the image. Literally turning the lyrics into a physical force that floats and crashes across the panels. In the scene with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ we have the song drifting across the ground all the way from Anfield Road. Growing up, hearing that anthem echo across the city was pure magic, and I wanted readers to feel that soundwave in their bones.
You found Tardi in Paris in 1998. What did a Frenchman drawing Paris teach you about drawing Liverpool?
French cartoonist Tardi is a complete master of the comic craft. I first stumbled across his work back in the 90s, and it blew me away. What’s unbelievable about him is his range. He can give you mind-boggling, razor-sharp detail on one panel, and in the very next, go completely impressionistic. A few bold ink strokes and a dark shape, and suddenly you’re standing on a cold, soaking-wet Parisian street feeling the drizzle on your face. That ability to turn ink into atmosphere is pure genius, and it’s been a massive influence on how I approach the page.
A lot of what you drew has since been knocked down. Did you work from photographs or from memory, and has anyone been in touch to tell you you’ve got a street wrong?
I had taken a lot of photos in the ’80s and ’90s, which I used for reference, though I also drew a lot from memory. Sometimes I would squeeze more landmarks into a shot than is actually possible, but in an odd sort of way, that’s how I remember the city. A more stylised version of what was. Nobody has ever told me I got a street wrong, though someone did point out that the sun doesn’t set over that part of the city. Which, of course, it doesn’t, but it looked better that way. At times I would use a lot of artistic licence.
You wrote it as a feature film first and nobody would fund it. After years of drawing later, is there a scene in the book you’re glad no producer ever got their hands on?
Filmmaking is full of compromises. Making a movie can mean working by committee. Changing script details, bending to casting lists or realising you don’t have the budget to rebuild 80s Liverpool. I had one producer tell me to set Anfield Road in the present day. That would’ve stripped out the cultural references that make the story what it is. There’s immense power in the specific details; audiences anywhere in the world connect with genuine authenticity. I’m really proud that Anfield Road is a book. I would still love it to be a film. It would be really exciting to see a different interpretation of the book.
The book opens on “What follows is a Northern fantasy.” Which parts are the fantasy and which have you had to convince people really happened?
It’s an author’s prerogative not to reveal what is fantasy, the reader will just have to figure that one out. At its heart, the book is more of a Sliding Doors story: a ‘what if’ set in a parallel universe.
Alexei Sayle grew up in Anfield too and wrote the foreword. What did he see in the book that you hadn’t?
You’d have to ask Alexei that question. I can’t answer that one. But the foreword for the book that Alexei wrote really pulls out the affection I feel for Liverpool too.
The book walks towards 15 April 1989, and you’re no more a football man than Conor is. How did you decide how much of that day the book could carry? Was there a drawing you finished and then took out?
I thought long and hard about how to portray Hillsborough in the book. I wanted to capture how, in the face of the tragedy, the city came together—something truly beautiful. That made it a fitting setting for Mary’s battle with her illness.
The process of drawing these sections was more about redrawing rather than taking things out. I had taken a lot of photos of Anfield when it became the memorial to Hillsborough, so I used those for reference. It was so amazing to see the entire pitch covered in flowers, an image that has stayed with me all these years. I really hope that we get true justice for the 97.
Conor wants London and you went and you’ve taught there for years and yet the book reads as if it was drawn from a front room on Anfield Road with the curtains wide open. Who was right about leaving, you now or Conor at 17?
I have a bit of a photographic memory and can see the city very clearly the way it was before I left in the late 1980s. Every old pub and paved flagstone is in my mind. I drew upon this for Anfield Road. I tried to capture many locations that are long gone, places that were not so glamorous. Like Las Vegas slots on Lime Street or TJ Hughes. I like the idea of the ordinary being beautiful.
For Conor it’s good that he leaves Liverpool as it will help him deal with his grief. While with me since writing the book I’ve been back in Liverpool more and feel very close to the city and that is a beautiful thing.
Buy Anfield Roadx
Album Review
Hallelujah Trial
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it” – George Orwell
Returning to intimacy, to whispers, to slowing the pace of a stressful existence, without losing sight of reality. This can and must be achieved through the lens of consciousness, which probes and shifts everything towards a meaning that becomes complete.
Music succeeds in this; one need only listen to this stratospheric debut, of mind-boggling beauty – at once unsettling and comforting, slow, very slow – with nocturnal breaths that bestow life without one being able to fathom how. Songs that penetrate deep within, healing the soul through stories steeped in toil, hardship and tension, as if the working class still existed – the intellectual working class, to be precise – and through their writing deposited dreams and dramas to create a distant, non-parallel circuit.
This is where English folk music comes into its own, with a view of the ocean and thoughts turning towards the distant American continent… In the tranquillity of these stripped-back compositions, devoid of sonic embellishments, there is no need for any intervention, for the genius lies in the DNA of simplicity – in this piano, in the guitar and in the voice through which it all unfolds, slamming the door in the face of any devilry that might seek to take root within this earthly hellish paradise.
Yes, certainly, to this apparent serenity created by melodies that feel like caresses, we must add lyrics that turn the soul inside out, that confide in you, that prove their strength through honesty and credibility – until, in the end, you realise just how many mirrors lie within them…
The two Liverpool musicians unwittingly pick up the trail left by Jacqui and Bridie, two teachers who gave voice to the hidden realities of a city so shaken by the Beatles’ success. Those two women brought current issues back to the fore, without hesitation, and so too do Tom Roberts and John Canning Yates, who, after twenty years of friendship, have unleashed the purity, the breeze of songs that travel slowly so they may be savoured, allowing every infinite part of them to be appreciated and cherished for eternity. The moods shift between folk and country, with a baritone voice reminiscent of Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks, when a semblance of cheerfulness visits the night…
These are stories that seek to become sound; they break free from the pages and soar into the evocative realms of simple chord progressions, refined arpeggios, and rhythms that caress the sand and mud, into the medley of colours that envelops it all to become a secular, incorruptible prayer, for this is what defines the evident maturity of pieces born to be an oil lamp against the storms of modernity. This duo is not afraid of appearing anachronistic; it does not seek crowds, tributes or acclaim, but rather prefers to let art do what it has historically done: to look after us by presenting a different path and approach, offering reflections and inspiration, whilst never denying that fiction and reality always go hand in hand.
All moods tending towards melancholy, sadness, unease and much more are captured, whilst taking care to leave kilos upon kilos of positivity hidden between the lines – where there is room for true joy, the kind that makes a person balanced and honest. These are compositions that do not deceive; they plunge into everyday life, into dense afternoons, into nights where thoughts take the place of physicality, in which the narrative is always direct and makes no excuses.
Love, the first setback of dreams, in this debut album is above all self-respect, the need to stake out boundaries within which the freedom to act on one’s own needs is deemed unquestionable.
Their musical score is a whisper of nature, the almost silent flapping of birds’ wings, and it’s incredible how the two musicians have managed to balance the excesses of what they depict with soundscapes that never detract from a sense of relaxation and contentment.
When the music enters the 1970s (in the track ‘While We May All’), one gets the feeling that Leonard Cohen has found the perfect grandchildren who let him sleep peacefully in his eternity: and it is pure emotion, a stream of tears travelling through the listening room to sow love and gratitude, in a bed of wet roses.
They decide to explore every season (the winter of ‘On Each Branch’, ‘Truth & Consequences’, ‘Joy Is the Aim’ and ‘Together We Lost’), moving on to spring (‘Flowers in the Ruin’, ‘Rain for Roses’ and ‘Days’), the summer of ‘Ever Treat You Cruel Again’ – sung a cappella – and the autumn of the remaining tracks.
But it is not just the seasons (and therefore time…), but also constant explorations of the silences, the pauses, the dark corners of the mind, as if they were social workers on a mission to strip away adversity with songs capable of absorbing the darkness.
One experiences the pleasant sensation of exploring the roots of truth, of returning to school desks, attentive and well-behaved, of having, in these tracks, books to study, to bind carefully and to which to provide the necessary means to withstand any wear and tear.
When tomorrow arrives (‘Days’), we are reminded of who we are, of our time on earth, and all fear melts away; the darkness truly vanishes, as they say, and we reconnect with ourselves.
Tom and his distinctive voice act as the glue, whilst John anchors the encounter with ancient sirens that never cease to enchant and draw us in with movements inclined not towards noise but towards its opposite, like a rock that plunges from the city into the River Mersey to begin a long pilgrimage. Sonic gems like a ship, like waves, like rain, like bonds between poverty and dignity – here the protagonists of journeys where one finds solidarity through modesty, dispelling any impulse towards intolerance or violence.
It is an album that transforms an identity card into a passport to personal growth, leaving echoes of decades now overtaken by modernity – so as not to lose touch with one’s roots, and to offer solace to those (themselves foremost among them) who are entirely unfamiliar with these overwhelming lights and the chaos that obscures the true nature of humanity.
There will certainly be those who do not appreciate this old-fashioned approach, those who find it tedious, and those who will hasten to listen to something else: well, that’s fine; we have no need for people incapable of recognising that it is precisely these examples of musical art that can refresh us, bring us to our senses, and have the power to restore our passion and hope, whilst passing through X-rays that spare us none of the cruelty of behavioural and mental illness.
Hallelujah Trial is an unexpected gift, a rainbow of the mind that arcs over the mist, the clouds and through the rain: it contains evocative, authentic tracks, with their own effervescence that is meant to be encountered, experienced and savoured whilst sipping a glass of red wine.
A gentle rocking, a mantra, a constant embrace that leaves no part of us alone: this is the power of this work, perfect for reminding us where we come from, whilst pointing out new lands to conquer on our map – first and foremost, the lightness that comes from knowing what to let go of within ourselves.
Songs for the bedroom, the pub, the garden and parties – with a guitar and people eager to sing about life without fear of judgement, with emotions like stamps that validate every possible feeling, because the two minstrels from Liverpool hold the key to what really matters within their creative minds…
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The Fortnight
The Fortnight is our soundtrack to the last two weeks. It saves me keeping a diary.
There You Go Again / Sam and Louise Sullivan
Heaven Is a Truck / Pavement
True Misery / Willie J Healey
Higher Taste / Champion Trees
Bag of Hammers / Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
Loser’s Prize / Greg Freeman
Overthinker / Sen Morimoto
Jack-Ass / Beck
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