This week I telekinetically winged ten questions over to the force of mouthture that is Caitlin Moran. Caitlin used to write for Melody Maker and now writes for The Times and appears on TV spouting rubbish about crap. I first met her in Dublin at the beginning of 1994; I was trying to eat my dinner without interrupting an almost perpetual influx of beer and cigarettes and she was standing on the table, on the table mind, shouting her damn fool head off. I thought she was a nob, Queen Nob, but within hours of that we were best friends and I love her to bits. She has done much for me and my family but despite earning over a million pounds a year and living in a castle she still can’t beat me in a Beatles quiz, not even the ones where she writes the questions (her favourite kind of quiz). She can talk on any subject for at least ten minutes, makes a mean Victoria Sponge and has trained her youngest child to torment me, possibly into an early grave. Beautiful, funny and clever, it’s the only thing we both agree on.
1. Where are you? Describe your surroundings.
I am in my kitchen, which is based around the themes of RED, CAFFIENE and ORANGES SLOWLY ROTTING IN THE FRUIT BOWL MAKING A BAD SMELL. On the fridge there’s a torn-out picture of Michael Sheen looking sexy as Brian Clough. All the women of the house are enjoying how confusing this is.
2. Which childhood experience has had the biggest effect on your writing?
At the age of thirteen, through long and tortuous events too tedious to go into, I believed that I had brought about the downfall of my family, who were very poor, and in a precarious situation. For the first month after my indiscretion, I would run an answer the doorbell whenever it rang, believing that if it were the bailiffs, I might be able to simply talk them out of it, using my considerable charm, before my parents found out. When I realised that I might occasionally have to leave the house – thus leaving the entire family in peril – I decided I would simply have to earn enough money to save us all, so I started writing a minimum of 2000 words every day, until I’d finished a book. I couldn’t believe I’d finished a book at the age of fourteen! And then, when it was accepted for publication, I couldn’t believe that my desperate desire to save my family with a humourous childrens’ novel had succeeded! Then they told me I’d only get £1600 for it, and I realised I might need to switch to Plan B. Ponzi schemes.
3. Yesterday, Sonny and I explored a few back alleys in Grangetown with my camera, looking for peeling paint and arcane graffiti.
On one wall somebody had sprayed, in blue paint, ‘1996 The Year of Progressive House’. Is that how you remember that year?
I spent all of 1996 extremely stoned, in the first year of the relationship with the man who is now my husband. We became so indolent with marijuana that we used to lower a basket out of the window when the pizza-man came, so we didn’t have to go down two flights of stairs. He would put the pizzas and the change from £20 in the basket, and we would haul it back up again. As a consequence, 1996 was the year I became so fat I spent all summer wearing a nightie and a pair of Nike hi-tops, because I thought a chunky shoe would make my legs look thinner, by contrast.
4. In the style of Twitter (104 words max). What are you most afraid of?
The kind of insanity where you become very fat and shit yrself every time you make a joke.
5. Cheese or Chocolate?
CHEESE. This week - Comte. Waxy yet slightly crunchy, with salt crystals. And a celery-salt biscuit on the side. The Moran family is famous for having invented the dish “Cheese on Cheese.” It even has a theme-song (singing the words “cheese on cheese” to the tune of “Girls On Film” by Duran Duran.)
6. “Man, these things are instant imagination” Says Winston in Paul Beatty’s ‘Tuff’ as he polishes his gun on the stoop
“It’s like having a good idea, but you don’t know exactly what it is yet”
Do you have a single muse or totem, an object/idea/memory/person that inspires all your work?
Yes. Russell Crowe in Master and Commander, shouting “Never mind the manouvres – just go straight at them!” Alan Coren’s advice: “The first idea that occurs to you, will have occurred to everyone. The second idea that occurs to you, will have already also occurred to the clever people. But your third idea – only you will have had that one.”
7. Your first book was published when you were only fifteen. You’re thirty four now , how is the second one coming on?
*pious face* I’ve written three of the most important stories of my life: my marriage, and the early years of my two children, Dora and Eavie. You cheeky fuck. Anyway I’m turning out pissing 5000 words a week for Rupert Murdoch – I haven’t got time to menstruate, let alone write a book. Get off my fucking back. Holy mother of God.
8. Ok, here’s your big shitty stick. Who you going to beat with it?
All the people Ben Goldacre is annoyed with in Bad Science. He seems to have researched their shitness very thoroughly.
9. What happens after we die?
When I was seven, I used to think you might get your own planet, and be God of it. Now I suspect you just rot in the ground like an old dog, but I haven’t told the kids yet. They think they’re off to Disneyland.
10. I think everybody is aware that it was totally your fault Kurt Cobain killed himself. What other pivotal roles have you played in era defining moments of popular culture?
I guess that, reading the above on the day between Friday and Sunday, it would appear to be obvious, immutable even, that today was a Saturday but having been a freelance musician/illustrator (or whatever it is I do nowadays) for the past eighteen years every day is Saturday, every night is Friday night. That’s not necessarily a good thing. The weeks and months slip beneath one’s feet, blurring and drifting without the weekend anchor to root you to any kind of calender. The body clock is fucked, birthdays are forgotten and whole seasons are missed. Do we have seasons anymore? Yesterday was warm and sunny, I was waiting for Mary after swimming last night and people were out in short sleeves and the tiny skirts and yet there are Christmas Trees in the windows of many of the bars around Cardiff.
Christmas Trees? Wasn’t it August three weeks ago?
The reason today feels different is because we’ve had so much work this week. As well as the whole Bandstocks thing, I’ve had my illustration for the Times, a commissioned illustration to finish and a design/layout job for Los Campesinos that we accepted even though we’ve never done any layout work before and it meant having to put ourselves through intensive crash course lessons in various software we’ve never used. we did it though, finished last night which is why I feel light as a feather this morning. That’s not to say I don’t work hard normally, it’s just that my brain was having to work in a different way. We need as much work as we can at the minute, we’re about to go from being a freewheelin’ couple to being a family on low income. It’s exciting though, I remember trudging to work in Birkenhead,twenty years ago, thinking that my entire life was mapped out in front of me in a dismal grey, formless sludge. I was determined to find the escape hatch and I did, not having to go into that office every day, to work for people and concepts that were alien to me, is the single greatest victory of my life and even if I have to go back, if things don’t work out, then at least I have tasted the air on a weekday morning in February, with nowhere to go, no-one to see, no bells to ring and no buttons to push. Somedays I would alight at Hamilton Square Station and walk in the opposite direction, take the ferry over to Liverpool and wander the streets, looking in windows and dreaming in Squares. Is that what I want from my son? I have no idea what I want for him. To be safe, warm and happy, that’ll do for now.
I worked in the red building (top). A place so dull that this was the only image of it I could find on the web.
So this week I’ve been staring at my computer for twelve hours a day, I’ve got a permanent headache and I’m crazier than a shithouse rat but I know things that I didn’t know at the beginning of the week and that’s what it’s all about. I forgot to mention in my last post that I’d seen my friend Adam last week. Adam used to be in a band called Swervedriver who were one of my favourites at the time (’Ravedown’ still sounds amazing) and we are good mates. He’s lived in the States for the last few years and we haven’t seen much of each other but he was in Cardiff to mix his album with Charlie Francis and Mary and I drove over to Roath to hang out for a while and listen to some of the (ace) tracks he was working on. He invited us to the Swervie reform gig at the Scala on Tuesday but, despite us having been in London that day, we didn’t make it. We went back to Cait’s to pick up the last of our stuff and I had a meeting with my manager. We left Cardiff at about six thirty am, got to Cait’s around ten and then I spent three hours packing and loading the van. After tubing it to Farringdon and then Hackney Wick (to view a not very nice flat) we got back to Caits around seven thirty, completely fucked. Cait made us some dinner -she is such a great lady- and then I drove back to Cardiff getting in around eleven. I slept well that night.
Mary had some breastfeeding workshops this week which was good practice for driving to the hospital. Her belly is huge now and she’s uncomfortable but she’s working hard and I’m immensely proud of her. It’s her birthday on Monday and I have no money to take her out of buy her anything nice, that’s not a great feeling. I’ll have to put a ribbon around the cat.
Gareth from Los Campesinos came over on Thursday to go through the DVD booklet that we’re working on. He’s a lovely lad, he was telling us that he’d been watching old Top of The Pops clips on youtube which brought visions of The Regents, Tourists and Pan’s People to my mind but he was talking about Blur and Oasis! Eh? I’m more than twice his age, fuck. He was lamenting the fact that there has been no real credible scene since Britpop which I had always considered a laughable concept. Bad music with no positive or maverick agenda, an establishment scene. But he would have been seven or eight at the time and I was in my mid to late twenties and the whole thing felt very silly. Mind you, I think that Two Tone was a worldwide revolution when in fact it was probably two or three records and some fucking great badges.
A friend of mine is pitching for some monument sculpture thing in the Valleys somewhere and he’s asked me to come up with a six note melody for bells. I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. I said yes though, of course I did. Always say YES!
My friend Miki sent me a couple fo great youtube things this week.
Marylou and I spent thursday morning at Akira’s house singing and playing guitar on this big song he has called ‘The Answer to the Anti-life Equation’ a composition that veers from melancholic introspection to big beat hip hop and a strange bit that I haven’t got me head round yet. Sounds like something off ‘OK Computer’ which is not what you’d expect from Adam which is always what you can expect from Adam. Jeres came round to work on his Son of King Rebel album and we sang harmonies on ‘I Don’t Love Jesus No More’ which has an ace chorus, I can’t wait to hear the finished thing. Adam works hard, I think he had three or four sessions going on that day. Respect. I made everyone breakfast and Adam poured scalding coffee all over his hand and cooker. Sweet.
Then Mary and I drove over to Clapton to see Stacey and he kids and show them the DVD we got from the 4D scan place which freaked the kids out and bored me to tears. When Penny told us she had seventeen minutes of footage what she meant was that she had three minutes of footage repeated six times. Poor. He’s a lovely wee orange blob though, I think we’re going to like him. I’ve known Stacey’s kids since the day they were born and I love them even though Betsi is always trying to get me involved in dollhouse games and Hank doesn’t appear to own any clothes.
Cait and Pete are away so a couple of her younger siblings threw a party which was still going when we got up the next morning. It was full of Cambridge nobs and the music was intensely bad. If you’re trying to sleep at four in the morning and the Stereophonics are grating away at punishing volumes then pray there is no shotgun in the house because if there is somebody is going down. Nobody died and the police didn’t come so it wasn’t really a party, more of a debate with booze. There was a serious amount of alcohol being consumed, they are that age where it doesn’t touch the sides. I get giddy on a couple of Kronies nowadays so hats off to ‘em. Apparently Jimmy, Cait’s teenage brother, got his fruity little leather satchel on at 7am, announced he was an important banker and set off down the hill towards Crouch End. Now that’s class. Jimmy is studying Theology at Cambridge and has spent his whole summer holidays studying the Bible so a breakdown was deffo on the cards. He calls me ‘lad’. When he’s speaking to me I can never work out if he thinks that I’m his Grandad or if he thinks that he’s my Grandad.
I was up until three doing this weeks illustration for the Times which involved a Tory MP seated at a kitchen table with his family with his head blown off in front of a depiction of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus (ahh) in her arms only I’d put Thatchers face on her and Cameron’s face on him. There is no way they’re going to accept it but I submitted it anyway because I’m a curly haired sleepy rebel.
So after not much sleep I had to climb into the back of a BBC cab which picked it’s way through the morning traffic before arriving at White City and the home of the British Broadcasting Company where I was to talk about Bandstocks on Radio 5’s Victoria Derbyshire’s show. I was there early and I had downed two huge coffees by the time I, Bandstocks founder, Andrew Lewis and fellow Bandstocks artist, Jersey Budd were ushered into the studio a good half an hour after we were due on. We then had to listen to the news, weather, sport and traffic before being introduced. With precious little time left to explain something relatively simple but new (new is hard to explain to most people it seems) we were interrupted almost immediately by Derbyshire reading out the breaking news story that was this year contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. After she had read it out she asked me why I had had my head in my hands throughout. What I wanted to say was that in doing what she had just done, interrupted a discussion on a new way of presenting music that benefits both the Artist and the music lover to read out a list of low rent ‘celebrities’ that are appearing on some reality tv show she had shone a light on what is so badly wrong with our culture, or lack therof, today. But I didn’t. I dunno, maybe I bottled it, maybe I didn’t want to waste precious time arguing but I mumbled something about not recognising most of the names (not true) and holding a torch for Cherie Lunghi (I’m afraid that is true).
So finally we were on, I don’t remember much about it. They played a couple of Boo Radleys songs which was absurd and some woman texted in to say that good music will always win through and why should she pay for our recording costs. I don’t know who she thinks pays for recording costs now but it sure ain’t the bands or the labels. That one question worried me, are people really that dumb? Are they happy to fund record company execs coke habits rather than be a part of the whole experience. She’s happy to pay a tenner for a record that won’t make money for her or the band but won’t countenance paying a tenner for a record where both she and the band could make money, where owning the record and having her name on the sleeve is the very least she could expect. i don’t want to get evangelical about this, that was never my attention but complacency and fear of the unknown are two things I cannot abide so I might have to start standing on mountaintops wrapped in a sheet, wielding a mighty shitty stick and chucking about lightening bolts of righteous fury. I’ll need to rethink my hair though, it’s not being taken seriously for the artistic statement that it immutably is.
Afterwards, still angry, which surprised me, I met up with Marylou. Her embrace chased my dark thoughts down Great Portland Street and kicked the shit out of them in some dark alley full of cardboard boxes and fire escapes. Then we met up with my old friend Keefo and his lovely wife Jen. We had lunch in the Clachan where Keefo and I have been going since the mid nineties. We talked about babies (they have a young boy named Hamish who, at the advanced age of two, is a sturdy and handsome wee chap) and Joy Division and Bandstocks and Queen and Fleet Foxes and the Creation book (not the Bible) and babies again. Once home I checked my mail and my illustration had been accepted without further comment which saved me some time which we used by passing out cold on the bed for a couple of hours.
Then to Hackney for dinner at a friend’s house. Nicki is an interior designer and a friend of Mary’s from Cardiff. She cooked a lovely meal and we met some ace people and I’m afraid I got drunk and had to be taken home and put to bed. Amen.
This week I’m going to sign the contract with Bandstocks. Thanks to all those who responded with advice, warnings, love and threats, it will all be taken on board. I think I would regret it if I didn’t do it, if I signed with another label and went through all the same old shit once more. For those who don’t know what I’m on about it’s all here. I will post a F.A.Q about it soon. I’ve never done one before, do I wait until they are F.A.Q’s or do I second guess what people will want to know and put them up first? I’m leaning towards the latter.
So, two months to earn fifty grand. Two months to raise more money than I’ve managed in ten years. I guess it’s down to whether or not people are as tired of the industry ’system’ as the people involved in Bandstocks are and if so, whether they are prepared to commit to and contribute towards some kind of change or are happy merely download their music for free. I have never worried too much about illegal downloading, I’ve nabbed the odd thing or two myself when my patience won’t countenance a two day wait from Amazon, Eil or Ebay. I’m not proud and I make sure to buy whatever it is if I like it but that’s a whole other issue and I’ll write about it some other time. For me, personally, it’s an ideal setup. Everything is transparent, you know exactly, down to the last penny, where your money has gone and hopefully you may even make it back whereas I get to continue making music without having to go cap in hand to the suits. I can release stuff on vinyl, include handwritten lyric sheets, include artwork etc so that when you buy an album from me you won’t feel ripped off. I sound like a bloody door to door salesman now don’t I? I was one once, for two dismal weeks in back in the late eighties when I was about eighteen. I was unemployed, unemployable, and answered an ad in the paper for one of those ‘Travel the country and earn £100 a week’ (a fortune then) ads. There was nothing happening jobwise, Sice and I would go to the job centre regularly and stare at the solitary card on the wall advertising a post for a panel beater at something like ten grand a day (or so it seemed). We resolved to find out what the hell a panel beater was and how we would go about becoming one but always ended up back in on of our bedrooms, trying to work out the chords to ‘Jean’s Not Happening’ by The Pale Fountains.
I got an interview for the job, it was in Southport. My dad drove me up there and I said I’d see him back home the following day (the company were putting us up in a hotel, things were looking good). My interview lasted about five minutes, I think they just wanted to see if I could speak English and I was given a room that I was to share with three or four other lads. That night they took us to a nightclub and got us hammered, it was the best job I’d ever had and I still didn’t know what it was. The next day though, instead of going home we were driven to Banbury near Oxford and given an intensive training course in door to door sales or, as it turned out, bullying old women and pressurising the vulnerable into buying our smoke alarms. I was useless, utterly useless. I would knock at a door, after seven hours of traipsing the freezing streets of Oxford, some old dear would answer and I could smell dinner cooking and hear Coronation St starting somewhere behind her and I would feel dreadfully homesick. I’d give some half hearted pitch and then be on my way down the path before she could say ‘Sorry son, I can’t afford…’. I hated myself for even asking. I sold two in two weeks, to a couple of insane people who would have bought whatever it was I had in my pocket.
We stayed in a small compound in Banbury, after the first week we were told that our £100 pounds would be minus the cost of the Southport Hotel, the Banbury rooms, food and kit leaving us with practically nothing. We had to shoplift food the week after and I had had enough. A few of us were planning on doing a runner but they caught wind of it, finally agreeing to drive us back to Liverpool where they dropped us as far away from the city centre as they could and that was that. I arrived home, skint and depressed, the future seemed so bleak back then. I borrowed a couple of quid from my brother, Calum, called at Sice’s and went to the pub.
I think I’m doing alright at the Times. Last week they rang and asked me illustrate Ken Russell’s column which will appear tomorrow and when Caitlin went on holiday they asked me to illustrate her replacements column. This week she wrote about the English and their bicycles.
I’m trying to animate a video for one of the songs from the album but I’m absolutely clueless. I’m trying animate photoshop layers in Premiere. Any ideas?
Marylou and I are moving back to Cardiff this week. We haven’t been able to find somewhere to live that we really like and we’re desperate for some time alone and so going to have the baby in our lovely house in Canton. We’ve been so lucky here, living with Cait and her family and we’re going to miss them very much. We’re putting the Cardiff house up for sale at Christmas and hopefully we’ll be back in London as soon as possible. Mary is well and full of energy, she’s working on a new website at the minute. It was a mistake to try and combine our business site with my music one so all of this will be far less confusing within the next few weeks.
I’ve been reading Adam Ant’s biography over the last couple of days. I’m astounded by how driven that man was. As a kid I loved his records from ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’ onwards. I might be meeting him to talk about songwriting soon. Even if nothing comes of it, and I’ve never met anyone who I’ve wanted to write with before (except Akira the Don), at least I’ll be able to talk about music for an hour or so with somebody who was a big part of my childhood.
