SUNDAY 17 MAY 2020 - Hachette UK

ISSUE 7                           SUNDAY 17 MAY 2020
                                          IN THIS ISSUE
                                          • The view from Blackburn
                                          • Telling secrets to
What do you miss the most?                 strangers
                                          • Jon Savage on Little
                                           Richard
This was the week I’ve found myself
                                          • Sophie Green stays alert
wondering where we’re actually            • Listening to Scorpions
going, and what might be there at
                                          + more
the end. And I’ve started to wonder
what I’d do if I was given my freedom
again. Like so many people, the thing I’ve missed the most during
lockdown has been the pub. Or more pointedly, a mythical idea of a
pub. Something like Orwell’s Moon Under Water only with glorious
flowing pales instead of milds or Wallop. But then, the only pubs
threatening to reopen right now are the Wetherspoons. At that point,
how desperate would you have to be to step inside? Is it worth crossing
that particular rubicon to place your pint of cooking lager down on a
deranged Leave EU beermat and survey a room full of half mad super-
spreaders?

In New South Wales, they’re allowing pubs to open with a maximum
of ten people, all with a safe distance of four square metres around
them, all of them eating. I’ve been trying to comprehend this, and flit
between thinking it’s the worst idea ever (like Russ Abbot, I love a
party with a happy atmosphere) and the best (imagine getting there
early, with nine mates, and having the place to yourself - a perfect
daylight lock-in). That approach has made me question that nature of
the pub itself. What is it I’m missing? I really like getting pissed but
maybe I like the people I’m doing it with more? That infectious sound
of the conviviality as the community comes together for a common
pursuit. Add to that a bowl of roast potatoes on the bar on Sunday
afternoon, a garden where I can leave the kids for a few hours before
we all sway home and flake out in front of the telly… as Zoolander’s
Maury Ballstein was wont to say, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Anyway, even though some people have clearly given up on lockdown,
it feels like we’ve got a fair few more weeks of dreaming left to do.
Weeks where temptation will be strong, in the form of putri-carpeted
hellholes run by that mulleted fart faced bloke who always seems to
pop up when you least want him to. That same bastard who co-opted

the title and spirit of Orwell’s evocative essay and used it as the name
of a proper shithole in Leicester Square. I’m really not sure how strong
my resolve is - it’s never been tested like this before. If you hear me
beginning to talk about shunning EU goods and extolling the virtues
of South African Jagermeister, you know I’ve crumbled.

Just know that I really tried.

WHERE DO WE LIVE NOW? #2
WILL BURNS

Will Burns ruminates from an empty pub about the effects of
lockdown on his father, 9-11 truthers, ponytailed racists and a
nation addicted to celebrating the past.

Somehow it becomes a Friday again. A bank holiday. Last year the
government announced they would move the early May bank holiday
from the 4th to the 8th, to honour the 75th Anniversary of VE Day.
God forbid an extra day off for the worker-ants. Now the nation sits
around in a perpetual state of bank holiday. I read that the chancellor
is worried we’ve become ‘addicted’ to the financial aid the government
have provided while people can’t work. I’d ask him to check with the
aristocratic class on that. They seem to have found it hard to wean
themselves off state-aid for the last thousand or so years.

Click here to read Will’s column in full

THE VIEW FROM HERE:
MOVE FORWARD
FERGAL KINNEY

So what’s the view from Blackburn? It’s one of hope, writes Fergal
Kinney

At the start of March, I became quite quickly aware that the pillars of my
precarious but cherished income – writing, café work, DJing – would
be the first to vanish. With numb efficiency, I packed a bag and got on
the train from Manchester to stay with my parents in Blackburn, and
wait for the inevitable announcement of lockdown. I packed my bags
with a lot of books, most of them still staring at me untouched. I’d sat
in the kitchen, finding pretty simple text resembling a Rubik’s Cube.

I couldn’t take things in, my mind was sharpening its limits for the
future, brokering the terms by which I’d be able to find what comes
next tolerable. An empty town square, it’s inhabitants dispatched to
far-off battles. I got used to this quite quickly; a habitual procrastinator,
it can be a good get-out clause suddenly finding everyone telling you
that you don’t have to be productive. I learnt to be happy just sitting in
the kitchen drinking and listening to music, or making the genuinely
psychedelic leap to enjoying music on the tinny stereo in my childhood
bedroom.

Read in full HERE
Artwork by Caio Wheelhouse

LIFE BEYOND THE NEUTRAL
ZONE #5
LIAS SAOUDI

Lias Saoudi writes about losing and rebuilding friendships, the
birth of a band and how heroin seeps in from nowhere and takes
over.

Heroin exploded over my social group sometime after I finished
college, the usual progression from cocaine and liquor and upwards.
One minute I’d never even seen the stuff, not at parties, squats,
people’s houses, or anywhere. Then, as if by magic, it was not just
the only drug anyone was interested in, but the only thing they talked
about as well. Can you imagine, humble reader, the sheer tedium of
a world like that? At least the weather changes, but smack is almost
always the same, give or take how much it makes you throw up.

Head to thesocial.com to read the rest of this week’s column

ISOLATION
  OBSERVATIONS
  SOPHIE GREEN

  Sophie Green’s brilliant documenting of the weekly
  wanderings of a locked down mind…

  Stayed alert – well as alert as you can be in a soporific
  stupor, muscles atrophied through never leaving the house,
  weighed down by 1500 superfluous calories a day sourced
  mainly from butter and carbohydrates, senses dulled by a
  steady stream of Italian white wine from the top shelf of
  Marks and Spencer’s, vision impaired from 7 zoom hours
  a day, all noises to notify you of any threat drowned out by
  the constant sound of “mummy, mummy! MUMMY!”

  Considered that while my “anything goes in a crisis”
  approach was entirely warranted, if I’m going to work from
  home for the next 6 months it’s possible that I might have
  to make some changes. I’ll give that some good thought
  tomorrow.

  Listened to the people in the flats behind my house
  celebrating VE Day by doing a communal sing and dance
  to The Macarena.

  This week has been a deep struggle. Creative stasis has set
  in. Along with all the other forms of stasis. I’ll ask for your
  understanding and forgiveness now, before we get too far
  in, for the fact that this week’s update mainly involves me
  talking about all the things I watched while I sat in a slump,
  gently inebriated, feeling entirely uninspired.

                                               SOPHIE GREEN
               Click here to read all of this week’s observations
Follow her @fishlill on Instagram for daily Isolation Observations

TELLING SECRETS
TO STRANGERS
WILL ASHON

As lockdown began, Will Ashon decided to try to ask people to
privately share their intimacies with him. We will if you will…
you go first though.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last month or so, it’s that
people are nervous about telling secrets to strangers. You might
consider that to be a fairly self-evident kind of truth and you’d
probably be right. But when I get an idea I tend to think about the
technicalities, the ways to do it and what it might mean if I could
do it, rather than whether anyone else would want to do it (or read
it). Which is, all things considered, pretty dumb.

Early on in this lockdown I started asking people to record
themselves telling me a secret. I was at least vaguely aware that
there was something transgressive involved as I followed up by
saying that it didn’t really have to be a secret. I said it could “just”
be an intimacy, which only made things worse. I mean, if you don’t
want to tell a stranger a secret, you certainly won’t want to get
intimate with them. Well, you might, but not like this. And to be
honest, it’s the hint of transgression that makes the whole thing
work.

The results of this request, though, have been pretty revelatory.
Every word of what people tell me is charged with significance, with
an immediacy that’s hard to fake. Starting out without much idea
of what I was doing, I’m now determined to get enough material
together to make some sort of book. But to do that I need more
strangers to take the plunge and tell me something that, as a whole,
they’d prefer to keep to themselves.

I’ve tried to make it as easy as I can. You go to my website at www.
yourwordsnevermine.net/secrets and there you can listen to me
telling a secret, then you can click a button to record your own.
You have five minutes for starters, but if you need more you can
record a second chunk. After you’ve finished there’s an option
to leave a name and an email address but you don’t have to. And
you’re done.

Click here for more from Will about the project, some reasons
why you should get involved, and to take part. Do it! You won’t
regret it...

SCRUB TRANSMISSIONS #3:
DEMON
LONELADY

Manchester musician/producer LoneLady introduces the third of
her occasional installation projects in which she cements an MP3
player into the fabric of a structure, somewhere in that city or its
outskirts.

It is a rumination on the built environment and the psyche. This edition
takes place in another nebulous landscape where regions overlap –
Ardwick, Beswick, Gorton – leylines stretching out towards East
Manchester, occult citadel of my childhood and youth.

If you’re in the area, follow the clues and seek it out whilst on your
daily, state-sanctioned pounding of the pavements. Find out more here

DOWN TO GORKY PARK
ROBIN TURNER
When the first episode of a podcast about
whether the CIA wrote Scorpions soft
rock ballad Wind of Change dropped on
Monday, Robin Turner thought he’s give
it a spin. Eight episodes in twelve hours
later, he’d gunned the lost and experienced
something like a past life regression.

My love of Wind of Change has seen me actually play it out whilst
DJing. Twice. The first was – ironically – as part of the first ever Guilty
Pleasures night (held at The Social in the mid ’00s). The second was
over ten years later at Spiritland during a Halloween themed metal
night (the debut of mine and Michael Hann’s very occasional tag team
duo The London Leatherboys). Each time I played it, something
strange occurred. Someone randomly came up to tell me that they
had produced the record. Both times, the person accosting me was a
European man of a certain age, gloriously pissed and properly stunned
to hear that track out, and out of context. Memory tells me it wasn’t
the same guy, but then my memory is shot to bits, what do I know. I
do remember a confused expression on each of their faces that read
something like, “Why the fuck am I hearing this now, in a cool bar
in central London?” As I said, it was strange: strange enough that I
didn’t take it up with them. Despite my love of the track, I was still
sober enough to think, I’m not going there. It’s too damn weird.

Click here to read more and get damn weird

ALL THE FRUITS
JON SAVAGE

Very honoured to have one of rock’n’roll’s greatest thinkers Jon
Savage share exclusive thoughts on the death of one of the all-time
greats.

On February the 18th 1956, Tutti Frutti hit #21, its highest position
in the US top 100. Or rather, the original version did. It’s so hard to
recapture Little Richard’s explosive impact, but listen to Tutti Frutti
in the chart of the time and you get the idea. It’s obvious that nothing
like it had ever been heard before.

In early 1956, Rock’n’Roll hadn’t yet hit with full force. No Elvis on
the charts yet. To be sure, Bill Haley and Comets already had several
big hits, the biggest of which was We’re Gonna Rock Around The Clock
– number one for eight weeks throughout the summer. Sounds like a
takeover, but it wasn’t: Haley’s band was basically a Western Swing
outfit with a heavier beat, while the Black American originators of the
style found it difficult to cross over to the mainstream or, even worse,
found their progress stymied by whitebread covers by Georgia Gibbs,
Pat Boone and the like. Chuck Berry had a top 5 hit with Maybelline,
but that was pretty much it until Richard came along.

At any given moment, there is The Pop Sound of the day. In February
1956, it was easy listening: songs that began with a brief, sweet choral
or orchestral sequence, moving into standard romantic scenarios
delivered by ‘good’, recognisably adult singers with adult themes. A
tune like Go On With The Wedding by Patti Page is a typical example,
developing the loser persona of The Tennessee Waltz into a strange,
war-haunted recitative. Dean Martin’s Memories Are Made of This is
surprisingly sparse, featuring just an acoustic guitar and bass, a soft
back up chorus, and Martin’s mellifluous voice taking the listener
through the addictive melody.

There are travelogues – Nelson Riddle’s Lisbon Antigua – and close
harmony groups: the Dreamweavers, the Four Lads, the Crew Cuts.
The number one of the day was the more authentic doo wop number,
the Platters’ The Great Pretender, but even that fit within the close
harmony template, albeit with more depth. Even the more teenage
styled records, moving ever closer to Rock’n’Roll, lack a basic fire:
Gale Storm’s cute cover of Smiley Lewis’ I Hear You Knocking, Kay
Starr’s Rock’n’Roll Waltz, and, yes Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti,
sitting at #12 – a force of nature turned into a polite novelty.

But Richard was not to be denied. With its famous opening chant, Tutti
Frutti arrives as a rude rupture in this collective swoon. His voice is as
abrasive and rough as the production, a thick, muddy sound from the
Deep South – New Orleans – with Richard’s obsessively pounding
piano and Earl Palmer’s pounding drums. Richard makes short work of
the necessarily bowdlerised lyrics and then lets rip with a few screams
and hollers – ‘woooooo!’ – and you can hear the fifties dreamscape
beginning to fade. The whole effect is abandon, of something that had
been suppressed but had been suddenly permitted to be released into
the population.

We now know that Richard was, if not gay, then bisexual, that he
had worked selling snake oil, that he had toured the South as a drag
act, that he used to hang out at the public toilets at the Greyhound
Bus Station in Macon looking at men’s cocks. We know now that the
original lyrics of Tutti Frutti were about anal sex. We know that he
influenced all the greats in white pop music – the Beatles, the Rolling
Stones, Bob Dylan et al down the line – and we know that his mass
success with such libidinous material troubled him to the extent that
he gave it all up to join the ministry.

But in 1956, Tutti Frutti was an explosion, a record that opened the
floodgates. And Richard had his revenge. In early May, Elvis was at
#1 with his first RCA record, Heartbreak Hotel. Carl Perkins was at
#4 with Blue Suede Shoes, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers #11
with Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Teenage music was here to stay.
Richard’s second record, Long Tall Sally, had been recorded with
deliberately garbled lyrics to stymie Pat
Boone, to make him look stupid. The proof
was in the pudding: Richard at #14, Boone
at #23. Let us never forget, Richard was
determined beyond all apparent reason to
be heard, to be the star above all stars. God
bless him.

Painting by Marta Morientes – find out
more about the painting here; it’s being
auctioned now to raise funds for London
venues by the artist

ESCAPE FROM THE ICE:
THE SOCIAL GATHERING PODCAST
STEVE MASON

We’re very proud to share the second episode of our podcast
series, where things are getting heavy down in the South Pole.
Steve Mason writes about the story here…

At this point, it’s worthwhile taking a step back and looking at a short
timeline of how Shackleton and his expedition arrived where we find
them in Chapter 9 of South.

November 1913. News breaks that Robert Scott (Scott of the Antarctic)
and his party have perished in their attempt to reach the South Pole.
In December of that year Lloyd George – the Chancellor of the
Exchequer – promises Shackleton £10,000 towards funding the
Imperial Transarctic Expedition. Shackleton, who still has quite a large
amount of funds still to raise, announces the expedition on January
13th 1914. 5000 men apply to join and he picks 56. Fund raising
continues but on July 28th, the First World War is declared.

Shackleton immediately contacts the Admiralty and offers his ship and
men for the War effort.

He receives a one word telegram back.“Proceed”.

Click HERE to listen to the podcast
Reading and sound design by Steve Mason
Illustrations by Peter Turner

IMAGINE AN ISLAND
DESTINATION 2:
SURRENDER TO THE VOID
IMAGES BY MARK JAMES,
WORDS BY ROBIN TURNER

“What started out as physical distancing has now become an isolation
mindset. We’ve quickly become programmed to step aside, to cross
the road, to retreat. Thousands of years of bullish, alpha behaviour
replaced by a shyness, a patience, a fear. The meek have inherited the
Earth, or at the very least, their own side of the pavement.”

A few weeks back, The Social Gathering opened the doors on its
daydream travel agency. Imagine An Island is here to transport you
out of the here and now, away from this reality to lands beyond the
lockdown as yet undiscovered. Each new destination is visualised by
a different artist. This time we head towards a peaceful hidden high-
rise nirvana. Thoughts and images are by Mark James (the legend who
created the Social Gathering logos); words by Robin Turner.

Serenity Now: Click here to experience it

WEAR THE SOCIAL HOME
                              The best way to dress as The Social
                              short of stitching beer mats together
                              and pouring a pint over your head. A
                              strictly limited edition, this beautiful,
                              summer ready t shirt features the bar’s
                              logo on the front and the lockdown
                              mantra ‘Because No One Should Drink
                              Alone’ (designed by Raissa Pardini) on
                              the back.
                              £23.00

                              Order from thesocial.com
                              Available in black, white and mango

                              Pre-order available until 23 May, starts
                              shipping 25 May.

MAKING LOCKDOWN BEARABLE...
Gunning all 8 episodes of the Wind of Change podcast
in a day / Sophie Green’s eggs / Sherelle and Naina’s
Hooversound / my KLF coffee cup / extra baggy YMC
tops / Blake Mills - It’ll All Work Out / an unexpected
PPI refund / Ogmios School of Zen Motoring / my beard
coming back / is that code / denim jacket weather /
Richard Norris’ Group Mind pieces / new IDLES /
Lost & Grounded Bingo Night Tell
Your Friends / Ron Swanson talking
about psychedelics on that Netflix
documentary / Avalanches & Jamie XX
B2B on NTS / Jane’s Addiction / the
last of the wild garlic / Treason / Man
Parrish Stories on YouTube / Polly’s
Brew Co West Coast Pale / drinks with
Chris Frantz...

 This week’s Social Gathering was put together by Brackstone,
 Gosling, Noble and Turner. Massive thanks to Mark James
 for the new logo – we fucking love it – and, as always, to all
 out contributors and readers. We raise a glass to you all.

 And join us (online) for drinks, Monday-Saturday, 6pm.