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’.

Apathy for the Devil

Back in 1998 – while studying at Goldsmiths College – I was desperately trying to earn money for a summer travelling across the South of America. I had a terrible job working for a ‘bar & catering agency’ that involved being sent to the worst pubs you can imagine – usually in the city, or Docklands – to cover the shifts no-one else wanted.

Still, it paid an ok rate and I needed the money, so I stuck it out for the best part of a year, until shortly before I was due to fly to the US. That particular day, I was booked for an eight-hour shift, but when that was done, the manager, one of the least pleasant women I’ve ever met, insisted I was booked for a twelve-hour shift. I pointed out that the only way I could get back from West India Quay to Deptford at midnight was by cab, which would wipe out about half of my day’s earnings. A row followed in front of a busy pub and, in one of those rare moments, I got to stick it to the man (!) and walk out on someone who was being totally unreasonable.

It felt good and empowering. The down-side though was that I didn’t get paid, and two days later I was summoned to the agency’s grim office off Tottenham Court Road and given my marching orders by a pale man called Warren.

But, strangely, one good thing did happen that day … as I grabbed my bag from the depressing staff room I saw lying on the floor a battered copy of a grimly alluring looking paperback, Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff. Now some might call it stealing, but in that moment, in my aggrieved state of mind, I decided it was wholly reasonable to slip it into my bag and make my escape.

Ten years later and my friend Richard Thomas told me that Penguin had let The Dark Stuff go out of print and that Nick wondered if Faber would want to re-do it. So, with a smart new cover and some extra chapters (Sly Stone, Eminem, Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Cash) we re-issued one of the classic books of rock journalism – the best book I never bought – and once again it was hailed as the seminal work it is. Even better, we contracted Nick’s follow up at the same time, his memoir of the 1970s.

Publishing this week – some 16 years after The Dark Stuff first appeared – Apathy for the Devil is a very different book, a personal, no-holds barred account of Nick’s rise and fall as the most celebrated and attacked music writer of his generation. A fascinating look into a very different musical era, and a genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a troubled young man, it was also more than worth the unpaid eight hours bar work I put in that day.

Catch Nick Kent at the following events:

3rd March – Q & A, reading and signing at free Rough Trade East event

7th April – at the Roundhouse in London

9th April – at the Laugharne Festival

15th May – at the Brighton Festival

31st May – at the Hay Festival