Loops 02

What is Loops? Launched last year, Loops is the collaboration between Faber and Domino Records – two independents who have combined forces with the aim of bringing together the best in music and writing, providing an outlet for longer-form music journalism and an alternative to the dwindling offerings found elsewhere in print form.

Issue One launched last July, and included pieces by Nick Kent, Hari Kunzru, Nick Cave, David Shrigley, Pitchfork’s Amanda Petrusich, to name just a few. We put together a website too – www.loopsjournal.com is the place to go if you only want to read a few extracts. Look out for the link to a free sampler from Domino, and also the link to subscribing via Exact Editions – yours, in digital format, for a year for £9.99.

Enough of the plugging. Loops is co-edited by Faber’s Lee Brackstone and Domino’s Richard King. Below is their Introduction to the second edition, which will give you a flavour of the subsequent 200-plus pages. It’s fair to say that Loops 02 is dominated by Michael Jackson, but there’s space too for the likes of Prince, Serge Gainsbourg, The Cramps, Thom Yorke, and writers of the calibre of Nick Kent, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. Here’s what they say:

Much, too much, far far too much, has been written about the premature passing of Michael Jackson. King of Pop or King of Plop, aprés Michael le deluge, but it seemed obvious to us that Morley would cut through the hagiographical crap and yet still see the chronic pity of the man at the heart of the myth. We encouraged him to write fearlessly and at length. The essay featured here in issue two of Loops clocks in at 36,000 words and offers perhaps the first sober perspective on those sixty-nine days between Jackson’s death and burial.

Jackson dominates our cover but another diminutive figure is unmistakable. Prince, as Jackson’s immediate peer, rival, sometime nemesis, has unsurprisingly offered no comment on Jackson’s death, his legacy and his posthumous deification. But in his own sweet way Prince has been paying tribute: listening to a bootleg of a recent Paris show some four tracks in we were surprised to hear a loose and happy jam through ‘I Want You Back’ led by Prince on rhythm guitar. A tribute of sorts. But then again, it’s intriguing and amusing to notice Prince doesn’t sing a note of the song himself …

Matt Thorne is engaged in an epic survey of Prince’s thirty-year output (the first of its kind) and the essay featured here examines, uncovers and celebrates a half-decade of lunatic levels of song-writing, producing and performing. In 1983 Jackson shared a stage with Prince for the only time at a James Brown gig at the Apollo (watch it on YouTube). Jackson’s performance is slick and sublime. Prince responds with sick squeals and a guitar solo so awful it has prompted debate about his psychotropic intake at the time.

Perhaps the crowning irony of these parallel, yin-yang careers is that Jackson crumbled and finally expired in preparation for an improbable fifty-night residency at O2. Prince’s legendary twenty-one nights and aftershows in 2007 live on in bootleg form; those looking forward to Jackson’s response must make do with an unspoiled, redeemable-on-eBay-only ticket stub for a show bathetically titled, ‘This is It’.

Dear Morrissey,

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot, I am posting this letter on the Faber website. Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.

I have been trying to persuade you of the virtues and wisdom of this for some years now. You probably won’t remember. We even corresponded at one point via a friend of yours, an author of mine, most famous for his biography of Roxy Music which ends just as the band are getting together. You see, we love the perverse and the contrary at Faber. And we also like to think we are the custodians of twentieth-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that’s just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. To me (and to many of my colleagues) you are already in this company. It would be the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream to see that ‘ff’ sewn into the spine of your Life. Just any other publisher won’t do. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it.

I did receive a fax from you once to my invitation. And you responded with interest. I don’t know if at that stage you had embarked on your project but I have recently heard again that ‘it is on’.

Morrissey, the doors of our Georgian Bloomsbury-based publishing house are open to you wherever you may be: Rome, LA, Manchester. We recently published a book of Kevin Cummins’ photographs of Manchester pop which you may have seen. If you read this and would like a copy I will gladly send one to you. Perhaps it could mark the start of a beautiful friendship.

With warm wishes,

Lee Brackstone

Last weekend we made our annual pilgrimage to The Hague (and for the first time, Antwerp) for the pioneering festival dedicated to Music and Literature, Crossing Border. This year Loops hosted a series of events, readings and performances. Wild Beasts played a predictably brilliant set, confirming their burgeoning reputation as one of the most stimulating British bands since The Smiths. Check out one of the great albums of the year here.

Richard Milward at Crossing Border

Elsewhere Graham Massey of 808 State provided a unique soundtrack to preface Kevin Cummins’ conversation with Paul Morley about Manchester’s pop iconography and James Yorkston played an intimate and memorable set.

The highlight, for me, was Richard Milward’s classic meeting and interview with psychedelic legend, Sonic Boom, of Spectrum and Spacemen 3. An interview in the true gonzo spirit of Hunter Thompson, Milward was largely unfazed by Sonic’s benign reticence and Louis Behre, founder of Crossing Border, was impressed enough to proclaim the performance one of his personal highlights of the festival’s 15 years.

Richard Milward & Sonic Boom

A joy to behold! Steve Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Natalie Merchant, Monsters of Folk, The Low Anthem, Mumford and Sons, Jay McInnerney, James Kelman, and the editorial presence of the most vital journal of the day, The Believer – yet again Crossing Border confirmed its reputation for quality, innovation and passionate commitment to music and spoken-word performance.

Nick Kent & Faber's Lee Brackstone

It has now become commonplace at festivals like Latitude, Camp Bestival and Green Man to mix music with literary performance in the same space; Crossing Border was the original and still the best. No mud or tents either. What’s not to like?

www.loopsjournal.com – Issue Two out in March 2010.