'jamming' was the start for Tony Fletcher, a 6 page hand written fanzine to a glossy magazine sold in WH Smiths, along the way an association with Paul Weller and involvement in a record label also called Jamming. But since then there has been so much more, a string of fantastically well written and easily readable books from a biography on Keith Moon to his latest book on the history of music in new york.
This is an e-mail interview that I conducted with Tony, he's also done a mixtape, the answers are just what you'd expect from him (if you've visited his website ijamming - link below), considered and in depth but most of all interesting. Enjoy!
How did you come about starting the ‘jamming’ magazine?
Sitting in a Maths lesson at school – Archbishop Tenison’s at Kennington Oval – reading Jon Savage’s centre-page spread on the new “fanzine” culture in Sounds, October 1977. (Reading it under the desk, of course.) I wasn’t old enough to go to gigs yet, though I’d been to a few “concerts” (including The Who at Charlton in 1976), but running a fanzine looked like fun, like something I could do. Like many kids in the 4th Form, I was into “punk,” via the “new wave” acts that were on Top of the Pops, Capital Radio and in the charts. Starting a fanzine turned out to be a wonderful way of quickly getting beneath the surface and learning of all the great music that was waiting to be written about.
Any chance of a ‘best of’ book?
I’ve tried putting this idea out there a few times, and it’s never come off. I’d still like to do it, considering that you can pick up similar books on Sniffin’ Glue and other magazines.
How did you go about getting some of your big name interviews? Did you do them ‘face to face’ i.e. get to meet them?
I went about getting them the same way you have to go about doing anything in this world: by hustling. For the most part, this meant writing letters to those I wished to interview at whatever address I thought was likely to work best. (Funnily enough, for my book research, I’m still doing exactly the same thing, albeit by e-mail.) Just about every interview was conducted face to face, with one exception: Tom Robinson, a pretty big rock star in 1977-78, asked me to send a cassette with questions on it, which he would send back in the mail with his answers on it, and then when he lost that tape, he asked me to send another, with the questions on a sheet of paper this time. Eventually he did send me back a cassette with his answers on it, but by then Paul Weller had replied to a letter I wrote months later, had asked me up to the RAK studios where the Jam were finishing off All Mod Cons, and I had already printed the interview. That process lowered Tom Robinson in my esteem and clarified why Paul Weller was already my icon: he didn’t fuck about in those days. For the most part, I found all the musicians I interviewed very friendly, quite conscientious and eager to encourage a 14-15 year old in his endeavours. I wonder if I’d have been so lucky had I started out at an older age!
Any comments about the current state of fanzines, they seemed to have died a death and sadly gone onto the internet?
Well, yes, generally speaking they have done, although, just like the vinyl record, they are far from extinct and, if anything, are having something of a comeback. I’m frequently surprised by how many fanzines I see on sale at small book stores/magazine/comic shops. (Admittedly, not many of these fanzines are pure music fanzines like I used to run.) I absolutely love the idea of being able to disseminate information instantly on the Net, the way that music files can be shared around the world and that someone (like the teenage me) no longer has to save up money to print a fanzine, then take it round the stores and send copies in the mail, all the while worried that that the concert reviews are three months old and counting. But just as there was a glut of fanzines in the early 1980s, there are simply too many blogs and independent music web sites out there to make sense. We’ve reached saturation point. In addition, I’ve never felt like the online format really encourages in-depth reading and so, though reviews are still a decent length, there’s a genuine lack of in-depth features and interviews, the kind that used to run over several pages of a fanzine. The web doesn’t lend itself so well to cut-and-paste artwork or hand-drawn graphics either; perhaps the iPad and iPhone are a better format for that kind of independent thinking. There are also way too many ads and sidebars and other distractions on the web. This is a shame as the potential is enormous. But I believe we have no choice but to go with the technological flow and that the cream will continue to rise to the top. In that sense, I remain something of an incurable optimist.
The record label seemed like a natural progression, how did it start? What was Paul Weller’s involvement, and where are the cd re-issues?
It wasn’t really my idea: Paul Weller put the seed in my mind the day I was doing the last of my O Levels (summer of 1980), after which, for the next several months, we talked and talked about it until our heads almost exploded. Eventually, in the summer of 1981, we got it up and running, with a release by the band Rudi, from Belfast, “When I Was Dead.” At the time, getting an office in the same building as the Jam and being given a record label of my own seemed like a dream come true, but quite seriously, if my own teenage son was presented with a similar “opportunity,” I’d be straight over to his patron to discuss how he was going to get paid for his time. There was no business plan for Jamming! Records and no sensible financing. I was “given” 40% of the label (Paul had the other 60%), but didn’t get a penny in wages above my dole allowance and when Weller shut down the label after breaking up the Jam, I was left with 40% of the debts. None of this has ever affected the incredible love and fondness I have for the Jam’s music and the most brilliant memories of following them round the country, nor indeed the fun that I had working the records we put on Jamming!, being in the recording studio, learning how records got hyped into the charts and what VAT stood for and so on. But it was a bad business experience and almost destroyed me at a very young age.
Rudi’s releases and those by Apocalypse (my own band) are each available as part of bigger compilation CDs for those bands on Cherry Red Records. Big Time: The Best of Rudi and Going Up In The World: Apocalypse 1982-83 are the CDs in question. We have not gotten round to re-releasing Zeitgeist’s music. Putting together the Apocalypse CD was a massive deal; the band was also formed at school and almost right until we broke up, in 1984, I figured the band would be my life, my future, my art, my work. I then didn’t talk to my (former) best friend and songwriting partner for about 20 years. Nobody gives a flying fuck about Apocalypse, I realise that, but the music meant the world to us at the time and when we put the CD together, mainly from demos along with the Jamming! Records release, it felt like the songs told a story of our own youths. And of course, it provided “closure.” We’re all best friends again now.
You’ve written some great books, the Keith Moon one (Dear Boy) is a great read, was the progression from the fanzine to a book author a natural one?
Yes it was, though actually, just like the label, I really wasn’t looking for it. When Jamming! magazine folded in 1986 – it had gotten too big for itself and was losing money hand over fist and this time I take full responsibility! – I figured I’d go into the freelance journalism world, but a really good friend hooked me up with the former Melody Maker writer and Who fanatic Chris Charlesworth at Omnibus Press. He was trying to get an Echo & The Bunnymen book together without great success. I managed to make it work – it was an official biography, working with the band - and I found that I really and truly enjoyed the book writing process, much more so than I did being a freelance journalist (although I continued in that role for another ten or fifteen years anyway). I’ve always been very much my own person, very self-motivated by my own projects and rather anti-authoritarian. This means I don’t get on well with magazine editors who mess with my written work, often delaying it from publication or altering it or, worse yet, “killing it” after commissioning it (there’s no other business I know of that puts up with this concept), but I am willing to spend up to five years on a book project because at the end of the day, it has my name on it and I’m responsible for it more or less from start to finish. That means I have to stand by it which also, hopefully, means it has some merit and the potential for a long-term shelf life. In theory, there’s also the notion of earning royalties on it, but really, it’s a matter of the artistry, the ownership of the project, that motivates me. I’m proud of all my books and for the most part, I think I’ve become a better writer as I’ve gone along. I recognize that the Keith Moon biography (“Dear Boy” in the UK and “Moon” in the USA) touched a nerve and reached a wider audience that simply Who fans and it was a major piece of work. But I am equally fond of my NYC history, All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77, of my novel set in the New York nightclub scene (Hedonism), and my mini-book on the music of the Clash. It’s just that none of these other books are 600 pages long!
Ijamming – your website is a great resource, you obviously use twitter and facebook too, what do you think the young man who started a handwritten, photocopied, 6 page fanzine would have made of this?
Well, I am that “young man” so I don’t have to think as much as to state: he’s just doing what comes naturally. In 1977 it was the printed fanzine; in 2011 it’s Twitter and (to a much lesser extent, as I actually dislike it quite intensely) Facebook. I did go through a period of writing for iJamming! on a daily basis but that was back in the early 2000s, when “blogging” was still a novelty and I wasn’t competing with everyone else in the world for your 15 seconds of attention. Now I look on iJamming! as more of an archiving resource, and Twitter as this year’s model for getting my views out quickly (and minimally). As a parent, I have a real aversion to the youth’s addiction to computers and Facebook accounts and in that regard, was glad to hear Weller shout “Get your face out of Facebook” on Wake up the Nation.
Does being on the net give you a wider canvas as to what you write about?
Yes and no. There’s no doubt that you’re more successful if you have a “niche.” A web site that writes exclusively about wine OR music OR running is going to be more successful and get more ad dollars than one that writes about wine AND music AND running. And the nature of the Net, and the proliferation of digital TV channels, means that more and more of us are getting less and less of a worldview and only choosing to receive information on that which we already know about. This is my greatest fear about the perceived death of print media and the spread of the net; there’s simply no substitute for picking up a quality newspaper or magazine and finding yourself reading about something you didn’t expect to be reading about. It’s called education. For my part though, I didn’t set up iJamming! as a magazine – I learned my mistake from the original Jamming! that once you do so, you turn into an editor and a business person and the joy of writing is forced to take a back seat. I figured I would just use iJamming! as my soapbox and archive centre and try and make a living from my writing elsewhere. So though I don’t write for the site quite as much as I used to, I enjoy that I can write about ANYTHING when I do so.
As a fellow runner, do you get your best ideas whilst pounding the streets?
Good question, and I know many people who would answer “yes.” For me, though, the answer is no. I listen to a lot of music and to a lot of talk-show podcasts while running, and then I tend to zone out. My favourite runs are the ones where all my thoughts drop away; this can be particularly powerful on the trails and mountains. The same is true of skiing, by the way: I’m lucky to have ended up in the Catskills, where I’m only 20 minutes from a great ski mountain and can get 2 hours of skiing in and still be at my desk by midday. As a youth in London, I never stopped thinking and doing, and I have now determined to carve out a part of my life where I can just “be.”
‘serving popular culture since 1977’ – what did you listen and read then?
I went to two concerts in 1977: Pink Floyd at Wembley in February, The Jam at Hammersmith Odeon in December. As you can probably tell from that, there was something of an epiphany in the middle. But while I would love to say that in the second half of 1977, I was listening purely to the better parts of the punk/new wave movement, the reality is that I was only 13 and that it took many years to shake off the remnants of hard rock and prog rock music that I had been convinced made me credible with older kids prior to punk. So, while doing my homework (i.e.. Jamming!) I was probably listening to the Jam and the Who, the Stranglers and the Clash, Be-Bop Deluxe and Queen. By late 1978 going into early 1979, Jamming! had become less a school publication and more of a fanzine, and my tastes were much hipper, a result of hanging out at Rough Trade, Better Badges and 5th Column, and being sent free records in the mail. As for what I read back then, I don’t know! Probably football programmes and music weeklies. I can’t think of novels or non-fiction books that had a major impact on me at that age the way I know that music did.
What are you listening to and reading now?
My top 10 albums last year included Vampire Weekend, Hot Chip, Arcade Fire, and, for the first time in about 15 years at least, Paul Weller. I still love the band James, and grooved on other artists like Four Tet and Matthew Dear through to John Grant and Tame Impala. This year has already delivered incredible albums from Elbow, PJ Harvey, Tim Booth, and Lykke Li. Music is fantastic right now, it’s so varied and the underground/indie scene is thriving. The last major show I went to, just 3 weeks back, was LCD Soundsystem’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden; tonight I’m off to Roseland in NYC to see the reformed Big Audio Dynamite, having nothing but admiration for Mick Jones. In between these big shows I also saw a Brooklyn electro-clash style singer called MNDR, and a performance here in Woodstock of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. For reading, too much of my time is taken up with research for books, which I enjoy greatly but truly does cut into other reading opportunities. I’ve done a ton of research on Manchester of late, and have had Jon Savage’s book “Teenage” out of the local library so long I’m expecting to be billed for it any day. I support local authors, especially fiction writers, and am constantly knocked out by the quality of their prose. (Good example: Jana Martin.) I read a shitload of magazines, especially in the toilet: the New Yorker remains the benchmark of quality journalism and I was thrilled last year that they gave a writer free rein to wax lyrical about Keith Moon (and quote extensively from Dear Boy in the process). I’m also on the school board here and there is never any ending to the amount of material we’re expected to read; as someone who believes that the British education system failed him and his generation, I’m determined that our kids here in the Hudson Valley get a fair shot at the future. When I get time to kick back, I enjoy memoir, be it musical or otherwise; I just finished Jim White’s book “You’ll Win Nothing With Kids: Fathers, Sons and Football” which would sadly have to be renamed “Fathers, Sons and Soccer” in my adopted country! For fiction, I like hard-hitting, unapologetically violent and sexual work: I loved Irvine Welsh for more books than may have been good for me and am currently enjoying the plot (if not all the execution) of John Niven’s “The Second Coming.” I really liked some of the stories in Punk Fiction, an anthology that came out last year or so, with an intro by Johnny Marr. That was a nice way of balancing my musical past with a fictional present – if that makes sense.
What are you up to now? Any plans for the future?
There will be plans for the future even on the day I die! I am about to start the writing process of ‘A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths.’ I’ve been on the research stage for well over a year and am both dreading and keenly looking forward to locking myself and writing the actual biography. I’ve had a lot of help on this from a lot of key people and feel I have the opportunity to write the Smiths book we’ve all been waiting for. Publication will be late 2012.
I’m also thrilled to say that my next book is also already done and dusted. It’s called “Boy About Town” and it’s a memoir of my early teenage years, basically from when I entered secondary school in 1975 through the early days of Jamming! up until the summer of 1980, when I was 16 and left school. While it is, essentially, a memoir, it’s written as a Top 50 countdown, and it serves as a musical and social history of those years, featuring a motley crew of school friends and other bad influences, alongside several major pop and rock stars that I was lucky enough to meet and interview. “Boy About Town” won’t be out until after the Smiths biography, in other words until 2013. It seems a long ways away but I truly believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever written and as such, it will surely be worth the wait.
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