Subcultures Interest Group: Kevin Quinn interviews Jim Fry

Your book covers a lot of ground and appears to be both a lament and a call to arms. Who are these challenges aimed at and what prompted it?

The initial idea was like many of our great ideas was, ‘pub talk made real’.

A long, long time ago, me and Gordon (King) Tony Ogden and Andy Hobson from World of Twist went to a corny ‘60s Weekender’ [mid 1990s] and as the cabaret expanded, we openly fantasised and laughed about the idea of Phil Oakey’s Human League, the Toyah revival, Carol Decker’s T’Pau and a recycled Go West at the 80’s Pop Jumble Sale.

Half a decade later there were quite a lot of 80s refugees wandering around who were drawn to Earl Brutus like a magnet, we were a safer harbour for them to moor up in for a while. Then sometime later there was this ongoing joke about having to retake or reprove to everyone that you’re valuable in an everchanging pop future, not unlike a pensioner having to retake their driving test to prove they were still safe on the roads.

The book idea was hatched in my head and I went away and got into it, the actual writing bit.

Nick Sanderson close friend and ClockDVA / WoT drummer, Earl Brutus front man died from lung cancer, a very difficult time for all of us that were close to him, so as the writing took shape it became a cry for help.

It has for many reasons become sort of literary ‘New York Dolls’ in its journey, though tragedy, birth, life, death and trash along the way, so it does very much come ‘from the heart’ but without pity included.

I hope it’s not received as smug and ironic, there is an element of ‘where have all the good times gone?’ … “whatever happened to our rock and roll?” … but only about 22% of it maybe.

As a youth I bought ‘School’s Out’ by Alice Cooper, ‘Virginia Plain’ by Roxy Music around 1972 and they were really profound records, really avant-garde even though that word didn’t exist in my 72 word vocabulary at the time.

No wonder people were scared of what Top of the Pops might do to their teenagers back then, make us put make-up on? self-gratification in public? inject us with homosexuality and deviancy? and poison us with leftie, Communist ideals?  But it didn’t. It was kind of normal for a suburban kid to just soak this glitter trashy stuff up so this book is an autobiographical piece of work in many respects, it’s my imprint on the present day through the prism of Hot Chocolate and Roxy Music and the New York Dolls and The Ramones and all those people that mean a lot to me.

Me and my friends went through the functional 1970s, going to school, leaving school, and then being told; you might, if you get enough ‘O’ Levels’ just get lucky with the assistant’s job at Allied Carpets in Stockport, but instead the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks came along in 76 to warp our 15-year-old minds.

The most important part of the book is the questionnaire, it all about the reader. You are your own reaction.

While I was writing the book I’d read; How to give up smoking by Alan Carr (it worked) and it runs in very much a similar way, you’re not allowed to stop smoking until you’ve finished the book and you have to read it in order.

… And this idea of people telling you what to do and think, it’s very much in sync with the modern world

The book was never targeted with anyone in particular in mind, but I can’t help imagining the singer from the Kaiser Chiefs reading a book like this one. Once, by accident, I saw that band in Barcelona and they were very very bad indeed, so bad they were inspiring, it still bothers me today, and the bass player was wearing a Trilby for fucks sake, I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible.

There are of course better people out there, Kevin Rowland is probably my favourite [Dexys Midnight Runners], he’s speaks the language of Roxy Music, and before him there was obviously Bryan Ferry

We know that Bryan Ferry was a huge Bob Dylan fan, but he didn’t want or need to dress like Bob Dylan to get his message across.

My parents’ generation had very vacuous old singers … Cilla Black, Vince Hill, and Matt Monro the singing bus driver, we were dealt a much better hand with performers like, Alison Godfrapp, Marc Almond, Jarvis Cocker, Bjork, they are the ones who should have ‘shiny floor’ Saturday night TV shows now.

I don’t think Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys) would need this book, Alex Turner’s is a rock star and he acts like one, publicly he behaves like one and when he goes on the Brit Awards © he confuses people, that’s his job… and he puts a leotard on when he’s at Glastonbury

Lizzo is someone who has that ability to turn up the heat and in turn fire you up, she gives it loads when she goes on-stage, and I like that very much.

Disco Beauty is beyond make-up and hair and I like Goldfrapp for that, high quality content masquerading as trash.

Portishead:  [Beth Gibbons] just wears an anorak, she sings about the sharp edge of the everyday, I guess that she sets you in a new time and place, she takes you somewhere, on some new kind of adventure.

Dexys Midnight Runners didn’t need to wear make-up, they went and got donkey jackets and then cycling gear. Clothes were reimagined as the sound shifted … they kept you on your feet. Never dull.

But …the short answer to your question would be that the book is aimed at the mundane.

Isn’t there some kind of coordinated anti-style going on, conscious or not?

Yeah. One of the questions you should always ask the week before the tour begins is “What clothes are we packing?” … with some people you should have asked it at the beginning before they unpacked their instruments (ha ha).

For me the anti-style, it’s an intoxicating and exotic part of pop music.

I’ve just read Helen O’Hara’s [Dexys] book and she talks about the group’s obsessive attention to detail, and how the fake Irish persona she embraced help authentically project their signal.

On a similar level I appreciate that ‘Love Missile F1-11’ [Sigue Sigue Sputnik] probably took about 25 minutes to make yet it’s as important as a Salvador Dali painting that took years to complete.

So the book is not only a lament to certain figures or certain provocations and the ways in which music used to be consumed and produced?

My book is about learning from history I guess, same as you would look at all the important figures in War, Art, Design and Architecture.

Pop music is as important as all of those and I think they are some proper show-offs out there, as far as I’m concerned Ian Brown = Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

There’s also that homemade, photocopying fanzine thing that is going on inside the book. The fanzine thing was a magical tool, it was creative and without being corny.

You could take the things that are in front of you and you galvanize them into to a tangible piece of work, it’s from you, the viewer and its down to you to become the viewed.

Through a fresh semiotic reappraisal of established icons/images (e.g., The Ramones; David Bowie, Prince) you also cast light on what appears/feels to be lacking in today’s pop cultural (b)landscape. Namely, all costume no chaos, in your words a mass of ‘artists’ who seek ‘approval’ from gatekeepers and custodians of taste, the performance of timid transgressive which arguably results in a sedate state of affairs.  A fair summary?

That question is a bit of a handful, but I’ll try …

I’d had a Brian Sewell [renowned art critic] type ‘camp intellectual’ voice in my head when I was writing this book. That level of pompous authority was needed to drive it though. you know someone who sounded like they knew what they were on about.

Brian Sewell could unpack a Caravaggio or Titian in the Evening Standard, but I imagined him looking at that Hot Chocolate album and wondering what it meant and looking at Roxy Music’s album cover for Country Life.

Brian could you please explain Hot Chocolate Hottest Hits and the meaning of the milk chocolate Malteser between the Girl’s lips.

For me writing a book was uncharted territory, so I ran out about 80 test copies in 2015, soft publishing whatever you want to call it, and a few people including Bob Stanley (Saint Etienne / Music writer) got it and it gave me confidence to take it further.

So, during the Covid season I met a publishers Slim Volume and they also got into it, not for all those reasons I did though. They realised it sat perfectly with this culture of approval, you know … ‘there’s a pottery throw down, am I good enough? is my cake good enough Mrs Berry?  Please Please publicly humiliate me Lord Sugar.

Even those so called cuddly warm programmes like The Repair Shop there is hidden approval, even more sinister. You’ve got to have had a real shit time with your family, had some kind of Holocaustic trauma for them to repair your clock or your old teddy-bear and this creates competitiveness where ‘my background’s even more of a disaster than your background’, there’s a sort of sporting spirit that makes you want to puke.

Most importantly, the book is there for the reader to get what they want out of it, make what they will.

Talking about something doesn’t mean you endorse anything, does it?

I’m not really into blocking, people’s opinions or subject matter. I don’t agree with a million different issues out there in the world, but I don’t think they should be erased from our surroundings.

I guess the cancel culture originates from living with Facebook all your life. The blocking of so-called Facebook friends is modern idea and not one I fully understand.

Would you shoot Charles Dickens or George Orwell for talking about corruption in society and how everything’s f*cked? I’m glad we didn’t cancel them.

I also don’t think its really working either (a bit like Brexit isn’t working) … but even saying it is almost handing yourself over for sacrifice to those people who instigate it.

Anyway, cancel culture is just pushing things underground, and I like the idea of an underground in the cultural sense, but politically you should always be able to see the enemy in clear view.

But … I’m talking here to you today about Pop aren’t I, and in pop music doing something rebellious or against the grain for the sake of it is the point. It’s a basic rite of passage.

There is no real wrong in the ‘pop’ sense, rebellion is a big part of the pop landscape and the rebellion doesn’t seem to be there now, and that’s worth worrying about.

And with cancel culture it’s very easy to casually write off whole communities and generations as some virtue signalling exercise.

No one is perfect I know, but there were plenty of us who were awake in the first place. I may have grown up in the 70s, but I didn’t sit there for the whole decade watching The Black and White Minstrel Show and Love Thy Neighbour, we always thought those shows were crap, we always knew Jimmy Saville was a twat.

It’s very very easy now to dispense with my whole generation claiming they were a bunch of paedophiles and racist wife-beaters, and that’s it’s all been stamped out by someone virtue signalling on social media, but it doesn’t work like that does it? They were torrid times yes, not unlike today, but not all of us were in on the horror of it all.

That said, the modern world is not so bad, there’s a lot that has been achieved in recent times, and we have moved on to a better place, I hope. The so-called Smart Phone Generation have a lot they should be proud of, but cancelling the past isn’t what they would want to be remembered by is it?

I don’t want to see a gap or void in terms of creative history 100 years from now. There’s been a lot of unravelling and a lot of undoing, but there could be a kind of hole where you’ll go ‘where was the new thinking, the new stuff’ Imagine being part of a generation that will be remembered for getting rid of other people’s stuff and not for generating their own creativity.

Subject matter in songs or interviews is being vetted which I don’t like, but I take the old view that if I don’t like the sound of something whether its words or music, I switch it off, ignore it, but I won’t cancel it.

I’m also surprised when someone gets closed down for a singular stupid comment. Given the infinite breadth and width of research that modern tech can bring to the individual, but the paradox is that they zone in on a single comment or incident and judge a whole lifetime’s work on it.

Think Ken Livingstone or Morrissey. They’ve been around for years doing stuff that most of us have got something out of, but now both casually written off because of a couple of words they’ve used. I would hope I see the wider value of the work they have done.

You’ve described your book as a bit of Marshall McLuhan, some of John Berger, what is it about those pair’s work in particular that inspires you (historically and presently)?

The Medium is the Massage is so visual and so direct and very accessible to get your head around, it’s an art book for the uninitiated and without the snobbery and pompousness that Fine Art can sometimes include.

Everything in it comes as bite-sized pieces of graphic information, a small directory, and we just pilfered from it if we were doing a gig flyer or a fanzine when we were young.

I was a late starter and did an art degree when I was 39, I was given Ways of Seeing the week the course began. I read it straight away and immediately it made total sense to me, for example the stuff where he explains how advertising works, how all it does is present you with a problem and then offer you the solution, when you didn’t have the problem in the first place.

It also has image only chapters and I thought “What a unpatronizing way to engage with art”. It can all seem a bit overwhelming or elite, but Ways of Seeing was another accessible piece of work and a doorway into another world.

So, in that respect I hope A Licence to Rock and Pop has the same kind of effect! ….  anyway on the back of the book writer Michael Bracewell says I’m the next Marshall McLuhan … so it must be true.

It was very important this [the book] became a paperback manual so you can carry it around in your jacket pocket like Ways and Medium it’s a handbook and a means of reference every so often. I think it was vital to make it accessible.

The book is laid out in easy to digest chapters, wherever you are you can reference Your background, Your hair, Your attitude, they’re aspects of the jigsaw that makes a great performer or a great spectacle.

Of which, there’s also a Situationist/Malcom McLaren ‘spectacular-prankster’ feel to your provocations.  Agree?

I don’t think McLaren would have been anything special without the Sex Pistols. There’s not really one without the other, together they became a lethal combination.

Steve Jones and Paul Cook from a Shepherd’s Bush estate, Glen Matlock who could write a tune and Johnny [Rotten] who was just full of attitude and inflicted by his own intelligence. they were the perfect recipe really weren’t they.

In hindsight McLaren goes “This all happened because of me”, but a lot of it just happened just because, it was a magical thing and him and Vivian Westwood were part of that, they were able to articulate it fully, with their great sense of history.

I don’t think he’s quite as clever as he made out, but it didn’t hurt to have an intellectual in the mix. Tony Wilson at Factory Records is another and Bill Drummond with the Bunnymen and KLF.

I went to the second Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976 when I was 15 and I didn’t know that it was the site of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, which basically invented the working-class Trade Union movement and workers’ rights. The Free Trade Hall was also the venue where Bob Dylan was called ‘Judas’ [in 1966]

So, did McClaren go “We want the Sex Pistols to play on the site of the Peterloo Massacre” if he did you think; That is genius, it’s about new revolution coming in” or did they attach the history to the gig later?

Either way McLaren and Tony Wilson know their s*hit, and they brought that sense of history to the occasion that elevated the whole thing.

McLaren connecting dots? Or was it because the venue was simply bookable and a case of myth-chief making in his scheming?

Because it was probably cheap, yeah, it was central and you wouldn’t get you head kicked in for dressing like that in that part of town? but you’re right, McClaren comes along and states that Cook and Jones only stole equipment from bands they respected (Bowie/Roxy Music/Dr Feelgood) I’m guessing this is McLaren sitting at home joining the dots and that elevates a group from pub rock to the UK’s greatest musical adventure.

Manchester has always been very good at creating its own myths, I love that about Manchester bands, there is a sense of glory about it all that has been passed down. Morrissey knew how to invent, he was a great picture editor, an art director even, and he knew his British and Mancunian history and the romance of those films set in the North of England, so he took the Smiths from just being a band to become a way of life.

There’s a concept, a greater structure that supports everything?

Yeah, but you can’t have one without the other, you can’t have the intellectual sitting in the office going “We’re gonna do this …”  you also need the guy thrashing out on bass in a basement, between them you’ve got something very beautiful.

It goes back to the book and how a prosaic band can just be elevated into something altogether different.

And pop culture definitely used to a lot, maybe less so now, it used to instigate and inspire these portals and channels to go down and investigate.

A great pop star or artist opens the door don’t they, Bowie was the greatest art lecturer of them all, these people take you on a journey somewhere into a new world.  Mark E. Smith was singing about the Pendle Witches, this is 17^th Century  Lancashire folklore. You’ve got the band, you’ve got the music, but, if you’re really intrigued you dig deeper, you go further, there’s buried treasure in the greatest artists.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik led us to Blade Runner Japanese Graphic Art and Rollerball,they weren’t just a group.

We’ve got to be careful we don’t write off Morrissey (and those confusing artists), because for all the sh*t he spouts and he does spout some sh*t, but he can lead the fan into an exciting literary world of Oscar Wilde, Anthony Burgess etc. He’d read loads of feminist literature, hadn’t he? His words are taken from more than one perspective, so it’d be pretty stupid to write him off because he said a few dumb things about I dunno UKIP ?

I just think it would be very narrow to cancel him.

In The Quietus last year you cited subversives such as Sigue Sigue Sputnik and their sci-fi dystopic immaculate conceptions, Hot Chocolate’s profound artistry (visually, sonically, socio-culturally) and celebrate the accessibility of pop culture. Does Pop culture send out codes?

It goes without saying that pop music is the greatest art form, but the pop world in my book we don’t really talk about music we talk about pop culture, the pop idea, the pop vision.

Codes is a good word, refers to the signals that we’re receiving, and people are transmitting ideas to you, it’s like you’re learning without really being educated.

If you listen to Hot Chocolate’s records, when you listen to ‘Emma’ [which deals with suicide] and ‘Brother Louie’ [interracial love affair] I love the way that that they cut right through intellectualism and a band as casual and relaxed as Hot Chocolate were dealing with sh*t like that in the youth clubs of Britain.

Just like The Specials with ‘Too Much Too Young’, or ‘A Message to you, Rudy’, sending a very positive message in a difficult place like “Calm down, relax a bit, there’s a better life for you”.

It’s not all about the information you’re receiving, it’s also about the signals you choose to send out ….

My interpretation of ‘Girl Power’ was when L7 were playing live on The Word and that guitarist ripped her tampon out and threw it into the audience, that was great, I mean forget the Spice Girls, Riot Grrrl was much more exciting than the Spice Girls’ Top Shop version, I’m not sure their shouting ‘Girl Power’ really meant anything did it?

As a visual artist who, where and what do/have you derive(d) inspiration from?

William Klein is one of my great photographers, look at his New York book (1956), I like him because I like his photos, it’s as simple as that, black and black and white, full frame, full breed.

Traditionally photography books followed one rule, you know, photo on the right-hand side a line of text about the photo on the left, but Klein, he cropped things, he blew them up, used out of focus photographs. He kind of broke the rules of a photographer, he was a graphic designer by trade. And he was also present at the May riots in Paris in 1968 which makes him very cool indeed.

William Eggleston is another photographer that I always got. He broke the rules of colour, he once had an exhibition in at the MoMA in 1970 and he blew up big, bright, crude colour photographs and the NY Art world really struggled with that.

I think Primal Scream picked up on his work for the ‘Dixie Narco’ E.P. in 1992 and before that he might have been involved with Big Star.

He also influenced David Byrne [Talking Heads] especially round the time of True Stories the album and film (1986).

William Eggleston’s images echo Instagram before it was invented and I wouldn’t be surprised if he influenced Wolfgang Tillmans who like Eggleston dismiss’ traditional ideas about photography, the rule of the third and all that, they let things happen in the pictures, I think they’re colourists at heart.

I also follow that line of appropriation from that tracks from Marcel Duchamp though Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons. This is art that finds its target and assassinates, beating the art world at its own game.

Our band The Pre New name comes from The Jeff Koons Handbook, we stole from him heavily in ideas and lyrics. He would have made the perfect pop manager.

Is it a critique on vulgarity?

What is wrong with being vulgar, What does that mean?

It’s all subjective isn’t it?

There’s a clip of Robert Hughes in the Shock of the New TV show asking Koons “What’s this, it’s a kitten in a sock …?!” and Jeff Koons goes “It’s not just a kitten in a sock, it’s spiritual, it’s warmth, look at his eyes there’s a spiritual message that comes with that.”

Anyone in particular who ought to have their ‘licence revoked’?  What are their crimes?

I don’t think it’s about revoking, the crime would be not committing one.

I can’t help thinking that Live Aid (in 1985) kind of ruined pop music in many ways, not in the way money that was raised, (as long as it got to the people it was meant to), but the way that these people were using their position to do something that was good in inverted commers.

All those bands (Queen; Duran Duran; U2] grovelling to Princess Diana and seeing Live Aid as a career opportunity, using it as a means to an end.

It was an industry thing really and it became a good way to sell an album or peddle an old band, and revive Bob Geldof’s flagging career.

Should the Internet be unplugged, rethought and reworked and started again? The fact that it’s called either the ‘net’ or the ‘web’ suggests there’s a trap?

No, definitely not. it’s our child, it the monster we asked for and we created.

It’s a great piece of kit, it’s only like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it’s gone even more insane that that did, the Internet is too arrogant and deluded right now, that thing, but it needs to relax and grow up a bit and we shouldn’t be scared of it.

It’s just a massive library really, but people are taking it too seriously, taking its every word as fact.

I mean you do have to laugh at this notion that the web is somehow bringing us all together. Whenever they talk about a smart phone in an advert, (John Berger would probably have something good to say about this), there’s always a shot of some middle-class couple waving their phone in the air at a badly attended sunny music festival, in fact the new definition of ‘people coming together’ now is = couple at music festival smiling.

Let’s face it, you shouldn’t even bother taking your phone to a music festival, you should get wasted and bump into new people, be exposed to new music you didn’t know existed and come home and switch your phone back on and text everyone to tell them you have a fucking hangover.

Being connected by technology is being sold to us as ‘the happiest place on earth’ and anything claiming that must be deeply flawed.

Related Links

• Jim Fry’s essential thought-provoking book can be purchased here
• Jim Fry Radio
• Subcultures Interest Group
• Post-Grad Community Interest Groups

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