I like Ian Penman a lot

x-post: apparently so. But a scary one.

but I think its a bit more complicated: their coverage of clasical increased but there was some funny stuff (dizzee being high on the writers poll but not even getting a feature, or a proper review, in the mag).

x-post: yeah that was funny. i get it was the handover cover and it would be a bad sign.

(as well all know it can be hard to get hold of that kind of stuff)

x-post

Marcello got it right - Wire is becoming a magazine for 40 year old ex-Goths. Fuck Coil/ Current 93 and all that garbage.

I like Ian Penman too but he overdoes the punning and wordplay and he likes Coil.

maybe next month we can look forward to that long awaited alec empire reappraisal... total destruk-shun the only solu-shun la la la

(and current 93 can be marvellous).

x-post

x-post: which one tico? I have 'sleep has his house', mostly short songs, very pared down folk and the last track is palestine like minimalism (he of course cut the karenina double CD on david tibet's durtro label). Its my only one of theirs but its triffic!!!

mark s = Mark Sinker

Duh! How hilarious.

i've seen ip several times since his blog froze, and he wz fine, but only spoke once since j.balance died (which hit him v.hard) so what jerry said :(

hi dada! sorry i wz so taciturn on thur, i wz just v.tired and somewhat preoccupied

"Here we are again with the problems of producing music, hearing music writing about same. Here we are again with... on the one hand, a proposition such as The Fall, on the other such doleful music press hacks and cultural consumerist quacks as practice little more than daily breadwinning, more concerned with the width of a riff than the quality of language."

Ian Penman, NME, 1980

"And so we come to the business of constructing pop in 1986. Of tugging, tearing, forgetting, pretending. Of joy, despair, artifice. And still we find falling in love and saying "no" communicated in simply awful cyphers scraped on bright red plastic. The haircut appears to be mightier than the word."

Paul Mathur, Melody Maker, 1986

Mathur went on, of course, to write books about Oasis.

But I think Penman's style, the kind he still uses on his blog (and I see traces of it in Mark S's cryptic infoldings, showy opacities and loose grammar) has dated very badly. The surprise winner of 1980s UK rock writing's Posterity Awards is (for me, at least) the Smash Hits school pioneered by Neil Tennant, Chris Heath, Sylvia Patterson, Tom Hibbert. I have no idea whether any of these people have blogs. I hear Neil has a band, though.

When he does this he seems to me to be in thrall to a romantic / authenticist paradigm, in which the purpose of music is seen as a channel between those who are able to feel that bit more deeply than other people.

Even the "fun" involved sounds like hard work.

It's like a peculiarly rockist anti-rockism and I suspect that the trajectory that Paul Morley's writing has taken is in part inspired by a reaction against it.

Just noticed that his name is misspelt as Ian Menman on the back of the Wire/Scott Walker book

"Ian Penman, who started writing for the NME in 1977, is working on a novel about music and terror in 1970s Britain."

And I for one can't wait.

Not gonna happen

His stuff for the lrb has been really good

I like the idea of it.

Oh me too! But I remember that his byline always used to say he was "working on" books about Bryan Ferry and Billie Holiday (the latter even had a title, Pretty White Flowers)

His twitter is the best:

https://twitter.com/pawboy2

Charity shop finds, his reading, what he's watching on daytime 5USA, BBC2 etc. Pics of writers and their cats.

Thinking I might even get a twitter account now.

I was kidding btw..

yeah when I looked at twitter that was the main one I looked at

I see his contributing to the LRB at the moment.

oh look, someone already said that.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/ian-penman/wham-bang-teatime

This was good although some of these pieces (taken together over time and I'd need to re-read and check) begin to read like 'well I read every biog of (x) and this one from (y) year does the job'. A lot of reaction against the shape of 'legacy' and how that is being written-up.

The section on Morley was a nice lesson on writing about someone you are fond of when they don't do a good job.

Gently rips into Reynold's thing and fair with it.

I'm sorry he didn't acknowledge Bowie-scepticism more, and this detail is simply wrong (I think he's thinking of Al Jaffee's fold-ins, which appeared on the back cover of Mad) - It’s impossible to imagine something like Bowie’s masterpiece Low (1977) coming out now, an album split down the middle like an old Mad centrepiece

beautifully written and well-thought, one of the best things I've ever read about Bowie. absolutely agree with his assessment of the middling middle years and his frank/fair take on both Reynolds and Sheffield.

What a turn of phrase:

...golden youths picked up and polished then abandoned by Machiavellian gay managers. (One key difference between Mark Feld and David Jones was that the latter was maybe happier to go that extra inch.)

Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles aren't yacht rock ffs

xp: no, but I don't think it's a thorough study of Fassbinder?

Nitpicking but "Why Does Herr R Run Amok?" is not a "minimalist film noir set among the lowlife the Federal Republic".

Maybe he was thinking of “The American Soldier”?

Sorry my original post is how OH really reviews IP's book.

Of course

Maybe he was thinking of “The American Soldier”?

Well, there's three (interconnected) films that fit the description and Herr R isn't one of them.

Gotcha - I love OH and largely enjoyed the Penman book (and love Fassbinder too) so am excited to read, cheers for the heads up.