audrey golden's shouting out loud

Picture of The Raincoats by Kevin Cummings, I believe, stolen from https://sheshreds.com/40-years-fairytales-retrospective-raincoats/ without permission

I've been a casual fan of the Raincoats for forty years or more (I bought their first EP when it came out; always enjoyed Moving and the 'No-one's Little Girl' single; for some bizarre reason never owned Odyshape; currently own the debut LP but for another or the same bizarre reason am not presently completely 'on top of' it and have the original version of Moving which I like a lot - gripe regarding this LP below). So - always aware of, often greatly enjoyed. I'm now about half-way through Audrey Golden's book about/with them. I was keen to read Golden's previous (first?) book, about the women who worked at Factory records, but only got about a third of the way through it because even though I loved the way it was done it soon reinforced for me how little I care about Factory records, aside from 'It's Hard to be an Egg'. 

Golden writes carefully and well about the minutiae of the Raincoats' late 70s London world, and seems to capture a slightly (or very) fractious, always engaged group of people (three main women, many guests, some of whom did not realise they were guests) producing work under The Raincoats banner. It seems the core group were very, very involved in the writing of this book which is presumably why so much is not explained (drummers keep getting thrown out of the band for meagrely outlined or just meagre reasons, for instance, and I have to assume the unexplainedness is something to do with either differing memories or disagreements leading to the tactical decision to just pump a bit of cloud into the room so no-one has to deal with mucky detail). 

Here is an example: when Golden explains the decision to drop three important songs from the third album, Moving, for the CD reissue the explanation is hazy, once again surely through the Raincoats' own hedging or eliding or something - ?! One of the removed songs is by Vicky Aspinall and she was, we are told, unwilling to see it perpetuate; the other two were by, and sung by, the original-incarnation-of-the-group's last drummer, Richard Dudanski, and he was not consulted about whether they would stay or go. This is very strange, and although we are told (I mean come on!) that the cover artwork was altered to fit only three women in silhouette rather than three women and a man as 'a design necessity in shifting from LP to CD' - someone better tell the people responsible for the 55 million album covers shrunk to CD size with no design change! - it must surely overall have been a decision calculated to present the Raincoats as a band of women rather than women and men. (In the book, Ana da Silva says that Dudanski's two songs 'didn't feel like The Raincoats' which is in one sense fair but in another sense, that's the record.) The weirdest part perhaps is Golden's editorial note: 'there's no digital whiteout for the past'. (pp. 193-4). Because firstly, remaking the album with one song added and three subtracted is using 'whiteout' - I suppose since it was a CD, that was 'digital whiteout'. Even if we take the group's explanation on face value, still surely the fact is that a Raincoats record including two songs with a man singing is not the kind of Raincoats record most people want to hear - and that's why they were dropped. The Dudanski songs are so 'digitally whiteout'-ed, that even an unofficial youtube sequence of songs ostensibly from the 'original vinyl' (using the CD cover art) eliminates them. OK I know it looks like I'm making a fuss because a man didn't get to be acknowledged for work with a women's band, so perhaps I should have picked another issue to get thingy about, but I do get a strong sense that - probably very justifiably - the last Raincoats standing, Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, are forever problem-solving the way they present or protect their historical decisions and their present existence. It is their story and they have the right to tell it, obviously, as they see fit. I am glad that Golden is in there to be referee and/or interpreter.  

There's a lot of pages spent on the revival of the group's fortunes/reputation by (particularly) Kurt Cobain claiming them as a personal favourite and also by the Riot Grrl movement (John Lydon has also said that their first album was the only real punk album and/or the only punk album he can tolerate - things like that). I know I have indulged in a bit of that kind of 'Blah Blah, a person millions adore and respect, adores and respects Thing X, therefore aiding the legitimising of Thing X' and I don't think AG goes there completely, though it's easy for the reader to drop into that mindset. As it transpired, a mooted Nirvana tour with the Raincoats as support didn't happen because of KC's suicide, but I can only imagine if it had happened it would have been a bit like when Tiny Tim went on tour with the Hoodoo Gurus - great for some in a IYKYK way, but awful for the support act whose fans were predominantly idiots out for a rockin' good time. I'm up to the bit where they're making their reunion album which for some reason Geffen continued to be committed to even though they no longer needed to curry favour with KC. 

So, so far, interesting enough book and certainly a band that deserves a careful, sensitive writer like AG who isn't prone to lazy hack writing and who puts in the work. I think I have about a hundred pages to go. 

sentimental jamboree

More stuff from under the house at Lorraine and more storage quandaries. Actually the storage quandaries come not from this tranche of drawing, which I can almost live with close to thirty years later (Clearly what I needed was just enough time to be a slightly more mature commentator on the very slightly younger people I was encountering as a mature age student at the University of Sydney). The real problems are with material older than this, when I just had no capacity to end anything. I would just break the fourth wall to finish the page. By this time I could at least come up with a kind of punchline, even if it was a bit non-secaturish. Winky Pinstripe never broke the fourth wall. This is half a random Winky comic strip that I suspect was never published anywhere, though who knows. The frame where Winky pushes Mal to the ground is pretty well-drawn for me. 

In the early-to-mid 90s I did a few Winky Pinstripe comic books (the best one was, I think, the fourth one which was very long and basically made for my grandmother Mavis, so it had no casual or coarse sexy stuff in it, not that she would have said anything if it did, indeed, she probably didn't even read the fourth one, who knows). Clearly in the story below I used some version of Ben-Day film, very inexpertly, to give the drawings a little bit of texture. This has now yellowed. I also cut and pasted bits out of magazines to suggest ambient background conversation snippets in the party scenes and it's so unclear that's what this was, that it took me a while today to realise it wasn't just random decoration. Obviously there was another version of this page, photocopied, which became the 'master', where I fixed whatever mistake I made in 'addressed' (frame 2 - looks like I spelt it with one D) and decided to change the music playing at the party in the last frame to 'Punky's dilemma' (as per margin note: 'If I were a 1st lieutenant').  

If you haven't seen any Winky Pinstripe comics before basically the idea is that he is a hipster of sorts a bit like Rik from The Young Ones I suppose though less consciously trying to break away from privileged roots. It was such an easy character to work with it was ridiculous, wrote itself. As I said above I encountered people like that all the time at university which was a slight eye-opener but of course also I was parodying myself, and not even myself at a younger age necessarily, though more myself at a younger age than my late twenties self. 

So, below, welcome to a conception of the internet, 26 years ago. The character Judy had a fanzine called Arsewipe thereby contriving the opportunity to write the line most authors dream of, 'Dear Judy I love your Arsewipe'. The thing that pleases me most about the Winky stories is that absolutely no-one has any redeemable qualities - Judy here for instance is absolutely the female Winky - and even  his friend Mal who appears superficially to be some kind of voice of reason is only a voice of reason insofar as he knows a little more stuff than Winky does. I feel a twinge about evoking 'Slim from Kill Rock Stars' (i.e. Matthew 'Slim' Moon who started and ran the record label) only because I have never met him and had nothing against him at all. That said a lot of the time I had an extra depth of deceptive/self-deceptive behaviour running with Winky - in this case either, 'he only thinks he was talking to Slim Moon', or, 'he thinks Judy would be impressed if he said he was talking to Slim Moon'. I also like how the next day he stumbles on her name, because he is only ever focused in the moment, and even then only barely. 

This (below) is in amongst the same stuff, so it's probably from roughly the same time, but it's a good example of not being able to finish anything. (I don't know what the last frame is/was, whether it was the beginning of an idea or what):

This below is also from the same bunch of drawings. I don't know what I intended for this but I am going to guess it's unfinished. 

This is in the Winky vein and pretty much a cheap shot, I think it's from 1995 and a time when it felt dangerous to be casually withering about Andy Warhol and Lou Reed though of course these characters are clearly not them. Creatively strange (inept?) use of Ben-Day in the fifth panel. When I see things like 'Arté Farté' (last panel) I just groan inwardly but you know, it's long ago and far away isn't it. 

I almost feel like republishing some of this material properly although to what end? Maybe I'll set up a website for it. It would seem less self-aggrandising if someone else did it but when other people put things I did online people assume it's me doing it anyway so what difference does it make.