Guest Blog!.......BBC Pics of Scotland…..
by Bernie Bell - 12:05 on 04 January 2025
Guest Blog!.......
Old friend and much-published writer Ian Marchant posted on his FB page about something he’s weaving his mind round….
https://imarchant.substack.com/p/sex-and-drugs-and-village-halls
Substack is a new one on me – there are so many rabbit-holes to go wandering down on t’Internet, that I’m wary. But Ian is a good writer…
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16286
……so I thought I’d have a look, and signed up to receive missives from the Smokestack. Here’s what I said to Ian about what I read..…
“It piques the reader’s interest – more power to your elbow - or should that be your fingers?
Is it OK for me to post this text in m’blog as a Guest Blog or Smokestack or whatever it is?
What’s the usual disclaimer about names being changed – definitely in play here I think? I like Kurt Vonnegut’s version……. ‘No names have been changed in order to protect the innocent since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine’. ”
I hope it piques your interest too….
“We were children, man. We were fourteen.
If you’re writing a book about an Eighties rocky jazzy soul-boy dole-boy free-industrial Uk-pop-reggae group, perhaps the coming together of the band, it’s dawning, needs telling early. So I’ve written that bit.
The band began as the imaginings of a 15 year old lad from suburban Stockport, called Nigel Parkin. He liked Krautrock, which he’d come across on John Peel during the miners strikes of 1972, when he was allowed to sit up and listen by candlelight to a battery powered transistor radio.
He thought it would be great to have a British Krautrock band, which he would call Biro Biro.
This is why yesterdays soundtrack was ‘HalloGallo’, by Neu!
In October 1976, young Nigel and his new wife Maud started as students at Warwick University. He was reading computer science and electronics, she theatre and media Studies.
They had met two years earlier, in the rain, aged 16, hanging around Strawberry Studios in Stockport, hoping to get to chat to 10cc. Now, they had a baby, called Mark, who travelled everywhere with them in an old fashioned pram, painted by Maud to look like a pirate ship, an ideal place both for babies and your stash.
At the start of the second term of their first year, in January 1977, Nigel Parkin put a sign up on the Student Union noticeboard. ‘Wanted. Musicians for new band. Influences Velvets Roxy Krautrock Monkees Throbbing Gristle etc. Leave a note in the pigeonholes for Nigel Parkin.’
Two people answered, bassist Frank Wilson, and guitarist Nicholas Knox. Thus was Biro Biro born, with Nigel on synth and tenor sax. At their first rehearsal, in February 1977, Knox called Nigel Parkin’s home made-modular synth Sparky’s Magic Piano. So Nigel became Sparky, and was pleased of the change.
Almost fifty years later, Sparky and Maud’s granddaughter Poppy, at a dinner with the reunited band, asked Nick Knox what had attracted him to answer the advert…
(… and this next bit, be warned, is a bit of the actual first draft…)
‘There was a lot of dull old shit in the early seventies,’ said Nick, ‘Dark Side was to me what Coldplay is to you – you know, I never ever want to hear this bollocks again, kind of thing. But Roxy… you listen to that first album, and you are tapping into the first transfer of energy, from wind to wave to surf, that is at the root of The Breaking Wave. There’s nothing in that first album that isn’t still us now; great tunes, beautiful people, top players, tight as you like, and a large amount of very very weird shit. Prog, really. Listen to it. Like, the VU and Iggy as prog artists. And, just think, what had we seen? What had we heard? Just ‘Virginia Plain’ on Top of the Pops. And that was fantastic enough. So when the first album came out, with that lady on the cover, we went and bought it. And what was the first track? The first thing we’d heard other than ‘Virginia Plain’ by this band we already worshipped? Fucking ‘Remake/Remodel’. You know? CPL593H! What the fuck did that mean? We were children, man. We were fourteen. How was this not supposed to change everything?’
Well, I don’t want to give too much away, other than the book’s title, which Nick Knox blurted out, but I am trying to remember, and take account of, all the fiction writing advice I’ve ever been given. Write your first draft longhand, I’m doing that, and its great.
But putting up a few paragraphs here has changed it from pure first draft to something towards a second draft. And here’s the thing; my first creative writing teacher at Lancaster, Ailsa Cox, said that we should write our first drafts before researching. Good advice this, for fiction writers, but a bit of a nightmare as you start to move it from longhand to computer, and you begin fact-checking, and start worrying about things that hadn’t needed worrying about before.
So, several of the dates don’t quite work out. The Roxy Music album was released before Virginia Plain, so for some lucky souls, ‘Remake/Remodel’ was the first thing they’d heard. Perhaps Nick Knox has just got the release dates mixed up in his 67 year old memory. After all, people only really bought the album after the legendary TOTP performance in August 1972.
And it would have been hard, though not impossible, for Nigel Parkin to have encountered Throbbing Gristle in time to mention them on a postcard in January 1977. It will involve some sleight of hand, and will make Maud and Nigel Parkin quite astoundingly hip; maybe they were, I don’t know yet. If they had heard TG before January 1977, and were therefore very painfully hip, does that shape their characters for the rest of the book?
Pop music anchors things in time. It’s like trains. If you don’t want letters, you have to get the times right.
Today’s soundtrack: Remake/Remodel, by Roxy Music. CPL593H!
Today’s writing tip ‘If the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form.’ - Martin Amis
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© 2025 Ian Marchant
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BBC Pics of Scotland…..
27th of December 2024 – 3rd of January 2025….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxd5knwzpwo
Iain Fyfe’s celestial Saltire brought to mind….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2021/05/20/the-peoples-flag/
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