One Day I Plan To Eat My κάκτος

There is a cactus hanging lopsided in a pot. The four inch trunk is dry and pale green, if you beam light through it you can see veins thin and dead. On the top of the cactus is a bauble of some ten other baubles out of which sprout tentacles which want to bloom with flowers, but are too drained of life to persist. Each green bauble is covered with pinpricks, dots from which grow fine hairs, white wisps that act as feeble armour for what should be the predator of the plant kingdom.

One day, when the rent is two months due and cupboards are bare, I will eat my cactus. It will taste great. But more it will give me powers to be even more cold and impassive to the rigours in chaos which take place outside my rented room's door.

Maybe, just maybe, the cactus will give me the insight to see even further under the surface of things than I think I can see. I may drizzle some oil over it once chopped into one centimetre segments, and fry it up for a Sunday lunch, wash it down with the roots distilled for a good cuppa tea.

Sentimental Maggot Story (Part 1)

A friendless maggot called Qwertyman awoke at 3pm as darkness edged through a slanted window in his one-room garret. He coughed and wanted to stay in the fetid air under his quilt. Damp spores had infested his chest. Last night he’d heard rat claws scuttle in the walls, before next doors bleeping house-alarm scared them away. It may have been a dream though.

Ginger-tipped bristles grew out his cheeks, which he plucked and flicked onto the bitty carpet while sat coil legged on the sofa, cup of coffee in one claw, cig in the other. He knew it was killing him, but the maidens’ were a crutch he needed to clear the crap, grey gunk he called it, or useless mucus, the mood which deadened his brain the second his eyes opened to the damp on his walls and grey outside the window. By 3:30pm the caffeine hit pupa-deep and he wanted distraction. So he switched on the laptop and clicked online, but not for Sasha Knox and a tongue twirling around her ass. Instead he wanted fairytales, something unreal to take his mind from four stained walls and dullness.

He placed the cursor over a link flashing ‘poeta de soledad’, clicked through the text and up on the screen flashed an old man’s face in a black and white photo. Bushy moustache covering his upper lip and three wise lines etched across his forehead, he blinked at Qwertyman who noticed a rooster slouched upon the man’s head. He knew those eyes have seen humanity crumble and rebuild itself, and hold insights to unearth meaning below the surface of faces, animals, technology and words. How many deaths have those eyes shed tears for? How many jilts? Eyes, which even constructed as pixels on a laptop screen, made Qwertyman feel obliged to shed the negative thoughts he’d been wallowing in since his mother’s death; beside other recent events which initiated his maggothood.

Inspired by the poets face, Qwertyman mustered his energy to squirm down stairs and into Mayfield Road, on what was a wet Friday evening in Whalley Range. His cylindrical shape ruffled puddles, on which yellow street lights glinted around each watery edge, as he looked at street corners for a chance prostitute. Just to see if she was worth a down-to-earth moment, when he’d find a dark wall in a corner, mechanically fuck her, and then go home for a shower. It’s the stuff maggots do when in need. Besides, nobody else other than drug addicted women needing money for heroin would have sex with him. He slid his card into the ATM though, to see a one and three zeroes glaring in bright digits. He’d forgotten about the grand which had been snugly placed into his account, and upon seeing such an amount, his bored lowlife lust for a prostitute shrivelled.

Qwertyman rolled across wet pavements covered in putrefied leaves, streets desolate of that entity known as the general public, the blobby mass of legs, eyes and smiley teeth from who he wriggled clear. Raindrops trickled down his face to hang from his chin for a second; as he calculated how he’d use the money to obtain an experience in a faraway place and, and as the poet’s eyes told him to, to search for beautiful but terrifying nuances in solitude. He wanted to sit on a train while reading an endless novel, and so while street walking he set the plan to catch an immediate train to London that evening. I want to experience a picaresque and scribble my journey in a notepad. And he looked at his face in a parked jeep window and saw not a maggot but a strange man, with money and life possibilities opening before him. Except while he squirmed in the dark, the rest of the male universe snuggled against softened bosoms, suckled Friday night treats for warmth. Yet even with money in his bank, his maggoty mouth was banished from the orifice, teat and lip of not just beautiful women, but all of them.

He chanced the bright lights in Tesco Metro, picked up a lamb’s liver he wanted to rip at for supper. Maybe it was the money in his account, because even though he was still subhuman, a till-assistant flashed her blue eyelashes at him, a fluttering he decoded to mean she wanted his maggothood. Yet no wonder in his own observation he was dead from his posterior spiracles upwards, because even though he’d have crawled deserts bestrewn with clattering mousetraps to twist limb and bedsheet with her, he did nothing to accept her silent sex-message other than coil up at the counter and key her into his memory-bank for when languidly masturbating in the dank chrysalis of his bedsit.

Slouched in front of his laptop, a raw flush rouged his cheeks as he typed the phrase ‘train tickets to’ into a search box. His hand hung limp in the air like a ballroom crab, when, about to place his forth hooklet onto the L key and order his ticket - one click of the laptop and he’d be heading on a Pendolino to the densest six hundred square mile of living flesh upon this neurotic isle, dank London. But a spasm in his brain moved his hooklet one centimetre higher and so he pressed the P key to which ‘train tickets to Paris’ flashed before him. His heartbeat picked up a steady rhythm and sounded like a distant nightclub full of hyperventilating cattle, the bass faraway pumping in his ears as he fell into robotic motion and the phrase in the search box sold it to him. He tapped at keys to set the booking process for a return train to the French centre, the city where some of his heroes resided as ghosts in the masonry. Laptop rested on his cylindrical stomach, held in place by his fleshy maggot hooks for fingers, surprisingly dexterous as he keyed in number 3, the final digit, embossed on his card. Now all that was left was for his index hooklet to press Enter.

And squirm into the street again to get the tickets printed, which meant crawling to Grime Net in Whalley Range, paying for 30 minutes online to find computers didn’t have the software needed to print the train tickets. So a human-sized maggot haunted the streets some more by wriggling his segmented frame through Moss Side into Rusholme, to look for an internet cafe who’d print the fucking tickets. Up until a bespectacled till assistant, with glossy black tosh under which hid a buckled smile, handed him the printed tickets, Qwertyman felt his chest plate heat up and crack like ceramic. Paris of Myth here I crawl, he said in relief and his ears almost oozed out steam. A squirm through wet streets under a low moon and rhombus stars whose beams turned the maggot back into a man again. He negotiated the stairs to his garret, and from midnight he pruned, bathed, poked his spindle fingers between three shelves worth of laminated paperbacks’ to look for which book to take. At 04:45 he stubbed a spliff in an ashtray, nimbly packed his leather sack and the taxi beeped outside.

His mind bent back into maggot shape, a tired Qwertyman slouched on Antonio’s counter and ran his eyes down a felt-tip written menu scrawled on fat-splattered grey card. To get in the continental mood he asked for latte, but the guy with dark eyebrows rebuked him in a Middle Eastern tongue and force-handed him instant coffee in a plastic cup, which he paid for and drank half and decided it tasted of stale, yet recently boiled, ferret piss. Such were the tastebuds, sprouted but decayed, on the tongue of pupa manbeast.

The train pulled out of Piccadilly at 05:25. At the first jolt of wheels turning he had inkling he could hide his maggotness better in front of the transient people he was due to meet on his journey. He scribbled in his notebook a four page tract about the rolling motion of horses which he compared to the train wheels, hundreds galloping, thousands of hooves in plumes of speed and dust thundering in his blood between Manchester and Paris.

Sat on the train, a machine inactive yet hissing out thin jets of steam along Crewe platform, Qwertyman scribbled that he’d ‘stream through Polesworth in 30 minutes, the place I grew up. And the village where in the last four months I’d travelled twice, once to see my mother’s funeral, the other to send off an old friend. Crabby, who I knew when I had a body people didn’t loathe, who faded from my life, and then I had a text he’d faded from his own with a blow to his head. The guy who once told me my soul is what people know me for, or the indelible effect I have upon them. I never got my chance to dispute that with him again.’ How strange it must be, seeing your birthplace speed by at seventy miles per hour in the half-dark of an autumnal morning, knowing the ghosts of his bloodline and past were present in shadows, or the very dust of the village, sleeping beyond the window. And in the above passage we read what could be the origins, the paranoid crux of his alien craw which set him so far apart from crowds and other people.

The idea of a maggot, packing a leather satchel with Time Regained before trekking on a train from Whalley Range to Paris, is highly implausible. It is Kafkaesque at least. Yet without wanting to cross further boundaries of the believable and pastiche, it has to be told that it was the Upper Eye, and not the body, of this thirty-five year old bachelor that made him think he was a gigantic maggot. Exactly the type you find wriggling on a fish hook, but human sized and somehow managing to have a head, and hands and feet and eyes that told other people he wasn’t like them. A soul wasn’t so forthcoming amidst all that excessive skin, fluffy like dried tripe. Imagine a person rolled inside a rug made of pupa flesh which is divided into puffy segments by tight rope, circular swellings with one end flattened and bedaubed with squiggly-shaped lines delineating what could be a face or anus. This is what Qwertyman saw as he looked in the mirror when jolted from wall to shit-smeared wall in the train toilet. He sat and squeezed into the steel pan lamb kidneys he’d ripped at hours earlier, and wrote a tract in his notebook on how it took fifteen hours to grow from mammal into maggot, and an eternity to revert back into human form again. A quick transformation compared to the seven months since he’d visited the same city in human skin, accompanied by a woman. He rummaged with his groin to secure a package of marijuana he’d strapped onto his scrotum using a cock-ring.

Three toddlers screamed at the pink, fleshy thing after he’d opened the toilet door and was squirming back to his seat. Dust-balls on the tips of his cartilaginous claws was a minor grotesquery in the buckled flesh which arrested passengers silent attention, as two parents were too embarrassed to acknowledge while one explained to the hysterical offspring about cruel fate of human’s who suffer metamorphic deformity. It was a lonely life being a maggot, wriggling into crowds within which everyone at hand gawked, but just never via the eyes of a lusting woman. Yet this sufferer shuffled back into his seat with adrenalin fizzing through the odd ventricle due to the destination being Paris, his favourite city.

He filled the window seat with his imagined flesh for the rest of the trip, and snuggled up close to an Oriental commuter (who glanced at our protagonist so swiftly our maggot was unable to obtain eye contact), resting his Proustcrieff novel onto his elongated torso to snooze between reading how memory and time adds variable texture to a pumping human brain.

Tony Wilson Interview

Here is an interview I conducted with Manchester music supremo, Tony Wilson. The great man died in 2007, and had already achieved rock and roll immortality. It's a well known story, yet here was a man who wasn't scared of killing cliches.

'Wilson ya wanker!' is a statement that has been bandied around Northern England for thirty years now. The Wilson in question, the original media facilitator Anthony H.Wilson, is a self-proclaimed wanker, but he don't care. One of the most important record label bosses to grace the history of rock and roll, his story has been told on countless occasions. From regional television news presenter where he sported a punk-green streaked barnet , via his discovery of Joy Division, the Hacienda nightclub, New Order through to acid house and Happy Mondays, Wilson's been a powerful catalyst within many great pop-cultural moments in the last 25 years. He's been part of a story that's involved the birth of post-punk, suicide, insanity, liquidation, narcotic excess and converting football thugs to the rebellious French thought of Situationism and dancing. By creating Factory records on Palatine Road, Manchester in the late 1970s, signing bands he saw and thought were important to the progress of rock and roll, he's always promoted an unequalled passion and energy for music, culture, the dynamic city of Manchester and British youth culture. He may be a bit of a wanker, but he's also played a part in changing modern music forever.

Way back in 1978 at the Rusel Club in Moss Side, Wilson organised a spectacle where Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire shaped the sound of post-punk. Ever since he's been a magnet for creative expression, with a truly survivalist instinct, gusto and resolute desire to find the next important thing. Fast forward nearly thirty years and a new band have been found with an even newer sound of British hip-hop in the form of Raw-T. Signed to the latest instalment of his mythical record label Factory Records, now entitled F4, the Mancunian collective have the element of danger and experimentation that has always attracted Wilson. Listening to their debut album one is confronted by deep digital shuffles, slick raps that talk of a British urban way of life that is sometimes tragic, always real and other times amusing. The point is that Wilson has found another gem and he's not resting on the laurels of his glory years; the man of passion is still searching and using his media clout to highlight what he feels to be important to music and life. Great rock and fucking roll kids!

Asking Tony Wilson a question is easy, extracting information even easier. Ask him something as simple as the time and you'd receive a cultural pontification about the lines of the Meridian and the way it effects the Northern psyche. Respectively finding himself lost in Swindon and taking his nutcase New Order dog for a walk on the two occasions we spoke, he was distracted many times during the conversation. But due to the sharp thinking of the man, he managed to keep a solid thread through out and spouted long, detailed soliloquies about his iconic past, his hip-hop present and things that'll kick off in the future.

What do you say to people that shout "Wilson you wanker!"?

I just keep walking and have always ignored it. Funnily enough I've got to go to Chorlton in about an hour, because Harry Goodwin the original rock and roll photographer of the Sixties has a show which he asked me to go to. But Chorlton I despise with a passion. I come from Salford, then lived in Marple, went to school in Salford, went to university when I was 18, went to London when I was 21 and aged 23 came back home. I'm on television as a local reporter and putting music on television, just soundtracks really. I thought my generation will love this, we children of the Sixties, but who in the early Seventies were all solicitors, young teachers and trainee accountants in Chorlton and it turned out they utterly despised me. Just like all those people who shout "wanker".

I remember going to a Rory Gallagher gig in 1975 at the Free Trade Hall and there was two thousand people and one thousand one hundred and ninety-nine people fucking hated me. And I just thought 'What the fuck have I done to these fuckin people? What shits they are.' And then about a year and a half later along came punk and suddenly I'm at The Circus and all these kids are like 'Hey Tone, thanks for putting Costello on, thanks for putting Iggy Pop on.' I realised I found my generation and they weren't my fucking generation. So people shouting abuse has happened for a very long time and I find it kind of amusing and irrelevant.

What sort of bands are you looking for to add to the F4 roster?

A band that's going to sell a lot of records because they're important. The most innovative is always the most commercial at the end. The Mondays did sell a lot of albums, they sold a couple of million albums which I think is reasonably good, but if they hadn't had the self-destruction they might of sold some more.



What made you want to start a new label?

I'd never really stopped I suppose. I had a two year layoff between the bankruptcy which led to London Records buying Factory, that awful period of Factory Too ended and I had to walk away, and when I finally got tired of the Space Monkeys we stopped again. It was always a question of the next time we sign a good band we'll start again. We started again with King Rib and they found a wonderful lead singer, but they became Simian which are not my cup of tea. I went to see The Music in Leeds: I was taken out by their manager and fell in love with them and I spent six months arranging the new label around The Music, and at the last minute their two managers who were friends of mine brought a third manager in who was a complete twat, he wanted a bidding war and in the end signed for lots of money to Hut. It was very depressing and I was outraged for about two years. [The Music weren't that good though Tony]. No, The Music were that good and they had that potential, but the way their managers took them was completely fucking wrong and ended up taking them nowhere. If we'd have put them in the right environment then they'd have created a far more important second album. So the wrong environment has just fucked them. In fact I heard someone within their camp say that to some one the other week, so yes that's what I think about them.

And as I say it's never stopped, it's always if I ever see a great band.When I saw Raw-T live at In The City I was blown away, there were several major labels there who were also blown away. I presumed that my job with Raw-T would be to bash them around the head when they started behaving like twats, and instead the majors all offered them crap singles deals, no one offered them a real album deal and suddenly the rest is history.

Who's designing the imagery for F4?

I have a graphic designer who I'm very fond of called Jason Nichols who does In The City's stuff and in it's great having him move on from that to do the record sleeves. He did the F4 thing and I'm very happy with that. We were originally going to be called Red Cellars and there was a very clever designer called John Walsh designed a Red Cellars logo and was doing the whole thing. I took him to meet Raw-T and he met them and experienced them and got a logo from one of their boys, took it away to work on and a month later had been too busy to do it because he had more important work on. To which after a few days I exploded in a very unpleasant manner and said, 'Fine, the most important thing in the fucking world is Raw-T so you can fuck off!'

Strangely the reason it's not called Red Cellars is not just that my partner thinks it's a good idea cos it relates to Factory and it avoids a fifteen minute explanation of why it's called Red Cellars. But it was when I was lying in my bunk in the Amazon rainforest doing drugs, the very night Raw-T's first single had to go to press, and I thought if I call it Red Cellars I'm going to have to use John's logo and I'm so angry at John for being too busy to do Raw-T, and so utterly outraged I refused to use his logo. So I needed to think up a new name, and finally thought F4. That was out of a fit of anger at one of Manchester's best designers for having been too busy to do Raw-T. I always say to people that the portrayal of me by Coogan as an affable fool is very sweet but in fact my daughter who is next to me will testify, I'm a truly horrible person. And you have to be to get things done.

Would you ever start a new nightclub again?

Yes I would but it'd be very difficult. I'd love to have somewhere like The Castle in Oldham where Raw-T go and play, it's like a cross between an Oldham pub and 8Mile by Eminem. I'd love something like that, but then again that's a fucking nightmare anyway, so maybe not. I'd love to do that personally but I can't imagine it happening, I now have so many other little jobs in my life and it gets complicated but who knows maybe one day.

What band in musical history do you wish you could have signed?

Everyone wishes they could have signed their own Velvet Underground; that's the history of the interesting side of rock and roll. We all would have liked to have our own Velvet Underground and that's about it really. I got Joy Division, I got the Mondays and now I've got Raw-T and I wouldn't complain for one moment.

What were you talking about when you mentioned that music culture was based around 13 year revolutionary cycles?

I used to think that there was a thirteen year cycle, but then the revolution I expected in 2002 didn't happen. I always think that what happens is that English kids absorb American rock and roll and regurgitate it with English irony and sell it back to them. But this time it didn't happen, it was Welsh kids, one could argue that Lost Prophets and Funeral For A Friend were in some way that kinda thing I was hoping for, but it didn't happen so I'm quite happy to accept that.

But at the moment I'm very lucky to be involved with Raw-T who are following in the footsteps of Dizzee Rascal, Wylie and Mike Skinner, in that British hip-hop has found its own voice which is a pretty peculiar thing to happen. I got accused on The Culture Show of jumping on a band wagon that was already happening, this was from Q magazine or N.M.E. Whereas the guy from Hip-Hop Connection was fantastic, as in someone who actually knew what he was talking about. It hasn't really happened yet, it's just beginning I think.

How important has Situationism been to you?

I was just a fan having been introduced to it by my acid dealer who happened to be the main translator of The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem in Britain. I was a fan and therefore referred to it a lot in terms of naming things and various bits and pieces. Although when you look back on it in the end I think the way we did it, by, as Peter Saville once said, in the entire fourteen years of Factory not one decision was ever taken, EVER with an eye to profit. And that was entirely true actually! So in some way we behaved properly. There was a contract and the contract said we own nothing, the musicians own everything, That was a mistake, but it was very nice at the time and very idealistic, but looking back on it fuck the musicians I say.

We actually I'd say, were responsible for removing the world's greatest rock and roll writer for about fifteen years, which is Greil Marcus, from rock'n'roll. He got a copy of our first record and stuck a Durutti Column sticker on his deck and looked at it for two years thinking "What the fuck is this?', and finally discovered it was a Strasbourg (Andre Bertrand) political cartoon at the end of which he got completely involved in it and became buried in it and became the world expert on Situationism. Which is bit of a shame because it took him away from writing until he wrote his Elvis Presley/Bill Clinton book which I adore that he really came back to the fold. The greatest book on rock and roll is Mystery Train by Greil Marcus by a million miles.

What's your involvement in the upcoming Joy Division film?

I'm a producer on the movie and in a way I think that's because it makes it more official having me involved, (stupidly) and it does reflect to a degree what was their concern about the rival film. The rival film has now completely fucking gone, thank god. There's always only been one project, the film which is based on Debbie Curtis's book (Touching From A Distance) and that always been how it's approached. The people making the film are two American guys; there was an American man and woman from New York that were making the film called Double A Films, however they fell out and also the woman fell out with Debbie Curtis. An option on a book has to be renewed, and they didn't renew the option otherwise they'd be still be making the film, but I presume they kept promising Debbie they were renewing it. Some of these Americans have so much money they don't know what it's like for us over here. No money was paid, the option ceased at which point these two guys Todd Eckert and Orian Williams, who had been friends from school years decided to step in and take up the option. Todd is a Pittsburgh guy, and Orian works out of Los Angeles, so it's a Pittsburgh/Los Angeles pairing that are doing this. They had actually talked to Sophia Coppola who is a Joy Division fan, there was interest from her, but in the end they chose Anton Corbijn which I think is a great idea.

So their choice of Anton mirrored my own choice because I realised that when I had to make a video for Atmosphere in 1988 I would have to use the old photographs, and therefore it seemed logical to use either Kevin Cummins or Anton. There was only two photographers who took the great photographs of Ian and for whatever reason I chose Anton even though I've just recently done a photo shoot with the beloved Mr Cummins, who moaned at me. He said 'If I do a photoshoot for you, will you stop bad mouthing me? At the press conference for the Ian Curtis film you were bad mouthing me.' I said 'I wasn't bad mouthing you. I said you're a miserable twat Kevin. You are a miserable fuckin twat.' To which he laughed and accepted it, because he is totally a miserable twat.

Anton's lovely, and I've met Anton a few times and obviously he did that video, and the strange thing about that video is, Greton hated it and told me the whole fucking group hated it. For 15 years I was under the impression that the group hated it, but it turned out the group loved it, only Rob fuckin hated it. So if they hadn't have brought Anton in to do this I'd have never have found that out. It's my double revenge on Rob really. "Atmosphere"'s a perfect video, but you can see where Rob comes from, who though it was over-egging the legend of blah-blah-blah. Fuck that anyway, to me anyone else touching it who wasn't there at the time, it would have been immoral. Whereas because Anton had taken the photographs, he was fucking around with his own pictures and to me there was always going to be integrity. So now choosing Anton for the film is a great great move. And secondly choosing writer Matt Greenhalgh (Burn It) who is number three in the Red Productions school of rock and roll, the top T.V. drama company in Britain. Its number one writer is Russell T. Davies (Dr Who), number two writer is Paul Abbot (Shameless), number three writer is Matt Greenhalgh. So as far as I'm concerned at the moment these two American boys have done a fantastic job of choosing the right director and writer. Obviously the casting will be something of an issue, but I have nothing to do with it.

I did recommend one actor who could play the part he played in 24 Hour Party People, he could play me, he could play Ian, he could play Martin, he could play anybody in this film and I was with him the other night when he won best actor at The Empire Awards. He's Britain's best actor he's called Paddy Considine who played Rob in the film. I kept going to London going "Fuckin hell man, there's a guy playing Rob!', and they'd go 'Didn't you know that John Simm is the second best young actor in Britain?' As in everybody who works in movies knows that Paddy Considine is the best actor in Britain. His first film that made him famous was Romeo Brass, obviously he was amazing as Gretton. My only input on actors is that Paddy could play anybody.

Martin Hannett; tell me about his genius.

I could talk about Martin Hannett for days so don't start me. What's very strange I think is that most great producers go mad because they only ever find one sound. Whereas groups can find two or three sounds in their career and go through various changes. William! Sorry beg your pardon. William! [Interlude of Tony sorting out his puppy that is trying to play with another dog. Sounds of apologies to another dog owner]- Every interview I do these days is interspersed with this. You stupid dog!! He's a "Blue Monday" dog. The dog from the New Order video. I have no time for dogs whatsoever, but my partner knew that many years ago I worked with Bill Wegman on the Blue Monday '88 video and fell in love with Wegman and his Weimaraner dog.

Last November my partner said two things: Number one you should sign Raw-T, number two I'm buying you a dog for Christmas. They are obviously the most beautiful dogs in the world, but no one told me that in the dog world they are famous for being the most loopy, fucking stupid off-their-head nutcases, so I've got this complete idiot dog now! He's actually had the snip but that would never calm him down, and has got me in a lot of trouble with Peter Saville because his girlfriend used to think she was a wolf when she was a teenager, loves dogs and wolves, and I got into a lot of trouble from Peter for having giving William the snip and it's made no fucking difference whatsoever.

Back to Hannett. All producers go mad because they normally only find one sound in their life. In fact Martin Hannett found two sounds, and he even came back a third time when he was just having a laugh with the Mondays, so I think he did pretty fucking well. If you want to go through the history of Martin very simply. The early phase where he was learning about the studio with Manchester Animation company, which he did the soundtrack for. Then he pioneered punk with "Spiral Scratch" and "Cranked Up Really High" [Buzzcocks]. Then unbeknown to me until I found out years later, he goes and meets these guys in a carpark on the moors above Burnley and tells them the sound he's imagining in his head, off his head on fucking drugs and he drives back to Manchester at midnight, they drive back to their shed in Burnley and they build the world's first digital delay machine, the AMF digital delay which is the most important outboard equipment of the last fifty years. And it was fifteen years later when some guy stopped me and said, 'I want to thank you, one of your partners changed my life.' When I realised it was AMF I went 'No, you changed his life by giving him that equipment.' He said, 'Don't you know where it came from?' And I had no idea it came out of Martin's head. The first time he ever worked with that Digital delay machine was on the song Digital. And that was on the Factory Sample, his first day with Joy Division. And then of course he used it on Unknown Pleasures and it changed the way drums sound forever, he used it on ESG and everything else. So the first thing is he changed the drum sound of the world forever by the Digital Delay.

But then what he's not given credit for, because "Blue Monday" is given the credit for being the first great modern music track which uses computers. In fact although I would never try and cross Bernard because he's extremely clever, (well New Order got the credit), but if you look at Bernard's production of Marcel King at the same time, and the 52nd Street band, Section 25 then it's obviously Bernard who was doing that. But Bernard learnt it all by watching Martin. In fact the most important track of all is "Everything's Gone Green". If you listen to it, is the beginning of modern music, and "Temptation" takes it one stage further. And then Martin and New Order break up and they go off to do "Blue Monday" as the next record, that's the one that quiet rightly is seen as this incredible break through, but nevertheless the important song is "Everything's Gone Green".

So Martin created that music and then were it not for the utter stupidity of Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson he would have created the next music because he was desperate to get a Fairlight. It was a synthesiser computer keyboard, and basically what Martin, Stephen and Bernard were doing with soldering irons in 1980, suddenly by 1983 there was a machine that did it called a Fairlight. We had no idea what one was, what we knew was that it cost thirty fuckin grand and we were running the Hacienda and you could fuck off. So we used to row about this all the time. 'I want a Fairlight. You can't have a Fairlight. What's this piece of shit you're building? Where's my Fairlight?' He never got a Fairlight, Trevor Horn got a Fairlight and the rest is Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the rest is history. I've very recently begun to claim that we created Trevor Horn, by stopping Martin getting a fucking Fairlight. And then the big fight and they go and fall out with each other and it's the lawsuit and stuff, and suddenly the genius of Erasmus and Nathan, the Mondays manager, getting him to produce the Mondays' Bummed album which was fantastic."

****

And yes, Bummed is a fucking fantastic album. Along with Unknown Pleasures, Technique, the first singles from New York's early 1980s all sister rap band ESG and other great works of A.H. Wilson Associated. It could be said that Mr Wilson likes the sound of his own voice. It could be said he's arrogant. It has been said he's a twat. And he probably is. Who gives a fuck? The point to Wilson apart from the usual record mogul/twat tag is that he's added spice and swaggering art to the British music scene, he's that way because of that drive to spread his gospel on what he likes about music and culture. A question I forgot to ask him was: has it all been down to luck? What has been his secret, if there has been any? It will be interesting to see where Raw-T and his record label F4 end up in the grand scheme of musical things.

I am a Maggot

I am a Maggot, Midlands born.


I am a maggot, Midlands born -the West Midlands, that sombre region- and go at things as I have taught myself, lowstyle. From here on inwards I'm on my own and that's nearly always as it has been.

Welcome to my blog. Who am I? I'm a human maggot who feels the need to write. You can see me below, click on my face and it takes you to another place where I write, and that's my Twitter page. I suppose I see this as harking back to the pamphlet ere of the days when Defoe and Swift would whip out their quill to scrawl an attack upon an issue in their heart.

From time to time I will publish my scribblings: interviews, stories, hate mail I send to people who populate my nightmares. At this moment in time, I have no manifesto. Apart from releasing more words into the electronic ether; as if there needed to be any more blogs, each ejaculating their cliched opinions. In fact, that will be Maggot Manifesto point number one: No cliche's. Which is in itself a tired old cliche. And so forth. I have a fear of cliche, yet can't escape the one in which I live.

Otherwise, what else do I have to say which will benefit the world? Nothing much. My life is just a dot on a beach full of other dots, falling in between the many grains of sand. Whereas most people will be sunbathing on that promontory, I'm sifting under the beach, in the crab-slime. I'm a maggot, and so will write what I know.

My object is to observe. To pick over the streets, to gaze into people's faces and catch a momentary glimpse into their life. And then I retract back to my hole, my little burrow/garret in a place called Whalley Range. Which is where I wonder, you may see me from time to time, the guy with the maggot growing out his brow. Every night I scurry past the green neon chemist sign flashing open, having been into that establishment earlier no doubt, so to collect my medicine. Maggots need pills.

Click the image below to visit my Twitter page. My name is Thersites Quertyman, but most of the people populating my mind will know me as the Maggot Man, Maggot Street, which is a region of Exile. Drop me a line if you're a fellow larva, and we can suck some rotten corpse if you like.