These Boxes Represent My Past…
Collection Day
On Monday November 8th 2021, my boxes of archive – 25 of them, plus some framed posters - finally exited the building. Thanks for the friendly and incredibly efficient work by Phil and Matt from specialist removals firm Harrow Green, who left me with what looks like a lifetime’s supply of Sellotape and bubble-wrap. Much of the archive comprises of recordings – tapes of interviews and radio programmes, in every format imaginable (see above). It took up a lot of space, and weighed a lot! But I was sad to part with much of the printed stuff I’d collected over the years, especially my fanzines and copies of publications I wrote for in the 1970s and 80s (again, see above). And now, they’ve gone - to John Rylands Library, where the more fragile items - especially one or two posters and some of the psychedelic magazines from the ‘60s, can be properly conserved. Many of those alternative and underground publications and the stories behind them I wrote about in Imprinting the Sticks, my Master’s thesis from the mid-1990s. I’m hoping to get it republished in the future – I’ll keep you posted. So, for now, the boxes have gone, my past obsessions have gone somewhere else, and who knows what the future archivists - or anyone who discovers them - will make of it all.
One of my articles for New Manchester Review magazine. Photography by Alice Red
So, how come you’ve been living with all these boxes for so long?
Well, I didn’t intend to accumulate so much. I mean, a certain amount of what ended up inside those boxes was the result of years going by without throwing selected objects away. Printed paper, magnetic plastic, all slightly trashy, all ultimately disposable. But I didn’t dispose of them. Only later did I start to collect anything consciously - alternative magazines, fanzines, and so on. And everything went into boxes. They got moved around from flat to house, from house to flat. Accumulating dust, and possibly/probably to the annoyance of my family - and definitely to me, at times.
Why hold on to all this stuff? And how did the habit begin? It started with underground magazines when I was a teenager - a copy of Oz being the first. I bought it from Mike Don, when he ran a bookstall in the foyer of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, one night in 1970. I was there for a gig - a great one, as it turned out - by Rory Gallagher’s band, Taste. Then I regularly bought copies of magazines like Let It Rock, and Blues & Soul, plus some odd imports from the States like Creem. By 1977 I was actually writing for magazines and I saved copies of the ones I worked for, notably. New Manchester Review, and not long after, fanzines like City Fun. I didn’t collect every known issue of anything - I was never a completist. But during the same period, I also recorded many interviews, on my Mum’s cassette recorder. And, inevitably, I kept the tapes. The first was a chaotic recording of a conversation I tried to have with a bunch of teenagers standing outside a club in Crewe, in 1974. They were rock fans. One of them was my brother, Andrew, the others were mostly his friends and associates, and everyone wanted to talk at once. A lovely, opinionated, youthful cacophony. I tried writing it up for Let It Rock, but they sent me a letter in reply, telling me they’d just gone bust. So the tape remains a documentary fragment of the past.
A small selection from my archive: my collection of City Fun, New Manchester Review, and other fanzines. Includes some of my previous articles.
Photography by Alice Red
But in time, I started getting interviews published, and I recorded a lot more. Some famous names, but many forgotten ones. The ones I kept in those boxes included Marianne Faithfull, from 1978, Joy Division from 1979, Thin Lizzy - backstage at Trentham Gardens, from 1979, The Pop Group, recorded in Bristol in 1979, The Clash, backstage in Leicester DeMontford Hall, in 1980, The Slits, in Hyde Park, in 1979, and several others from the same year: Hugh Cornwell , Jimmy Pursey, Punishment of Luxury , Siouxsie backstage at Manchester Apollo, Linton Kwesi Johnson at home in Brixton, The Jam in the recording studio, There were later ones…Wilko Johnson at Salford University in 1981, and Ben E. King and Johnny Moore, from the Drifters, in 1984. Interviewing and taping became my job - in TV and radio during the 80s and 90s - and I started keeping reel-to-reel tapes, DATS, and minidiscs of the interviews I’d made for Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 4 - mainly because the BBC didn’t have the space to keep uncut interviews, only finished programmes. There’s plenty more I want to say about interviewing, and maybe I’ll explore the subject in later blogs. But for now, it’s goodbye boxes, hello empty space - in which to put, what? Bookshelves? Well, yes, I need more space for my books….
Photography by Alicia Nudler
John Rylands Archive
John Rylands is not just a beautiful, neo-gothic buildingon Deansgate, Manchester. And inside, it’s not just a library. There’s a sizeable archive section, housing collections that the library have acquired. A few years ago, I visited the archive to look at just one of these collections - that of a Chinese artist called Li Yuan Chia, who came to live in London in the 1960s and built and ran an amazing arts centre on Hadrian’s Wall, in Cumbria, during the 70s and 80s. I made a radio documentary about him. His archive is fantastic - as well as notes, drawings and photos it includes a collection of cameras, and another of toy pianos. Near to Li Yuan Chia’s collection, I was shown another that had belonged to another artist and poet - Dom Syvester de Houedard, a constructionist poet from the 1960s who was also a monk - someone I’d love to make a documentary about, maybe, one day. This is what an archive does - it preserves collections, for future generations to use and learn from.
Find out more about John Rylands Research Institute and Library by visiting their website.
