Many years ago, when we had shiny complexions, Simon Reynolds and I arrived in the same college of the same university. We got chatting in the first few weeks when he was setting up Monitor, his first publication, with his friend David Stubbs. He’d already marked himself down as more adventurous than most of us by getting a friend from another college. From memory I wrote reviews of Josef K’s The Only Fun In Town and Wire’s 154. He chose the latter for publication.
It was a rubbish review, most likely. Just a suburban lad who’d been reading the music papers and listening to John Peel in the evenings. Mind you, that applied to Simon too. But he’d decided that he really did want to be a writer. It wasn’t long before he moved on from the Paul Morley phase that assailed many of us in our writing then and forged his own unique voice.
I recall a few more chats we had when we were students. One when he’d heard Kitchen Person by The Associates coming out of my room as he walked by. Then life took over and we went our separate ways. Now he’s in Pasadena and I’m in Melbourne.
Since then, Simon’s career has soared – I know many of you have read his books. He’s got his own Wikipedia page and here’s an extract from it:
Reynolds' writing has blended cultural criticism with music journalism. He has written extensively on gender, class, race and sexuality in relation to music and culture. Early in his career, Reynolds often made use of critical theory and philosophy in his analysis of music, deriving particular influence from thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. He has on occasion used the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and false consciousness to describe attitudes prevalent in hip hop music. In the 2000s … Reynolds made use of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to describe a strain of music and popular art preoccupied with the disjointed temporality and "lost futures" of contemporary culture.
There are some people who, to quote Alexander Pope, “drink deep of the Pierian spring” and Simon is clearly one of them.
But at the end of the longest chat we had in fact ever had together, we discovered that Simon had recently been unearthing the joys of English folk music, following a similar pattern to another old college friend we had on the show, Guy Haslam. And then that our favourite contemporary band is the same one: Dry Cleaning. As I compared them to Mark Corrigan from Peep Show and Simon settled on the adjective ‘mordant’, we were back in the bar at university.
So, thank you to the music for bringing us all back together, as it always does sooner or later.
Cracking and eclectic choice of tracks from Simon, as you’d expect.
Tracklist:
My old man, Ian Dury
Ping pong affair, The Slits
Bibbly-o-tek, Scritti Politti
Everybody’s been burned, The Byrds
Kite dance, Jan Garbarek
Asbestos lead asbestos, World Domination Enterprises
I believe, My Bloody Valentine
Clonk’s coming, Sweet Exorcist
Menace, Rufige Cru
Top down on the nawf, Migos
Heather down the moor, June Tabor with Martin Simpson
Leafy, Dry Cleaning