The story ‘Little Brother Rifaat’s Lost Songs of Syd’ in Pop Heresiarchs features variations on the same motifs that appear in the other stories in the collection.
Pop star or rock band
Syd Barrett is the idol.
Duggie Fields on his flat-mate Syd
‘Syd was great company at one point - otherwise, I would not even have considered getting a flat with him. He was funny, witty, sparkling, creative and challenging, at first - for a long time, really. The decline was gradual, shocking, but not the worst going on around me at the time. I had one friend taken away from a neighbouring apartment in a strait-jacket.’
Long decade of the 1990s
Steve Beard first met Rifaat Samson in the year 1994.
(Source: Discogs)
Vice magazine remembers 1994
‘1994 was the best of times, the worst of times. Where the turn of the decade's symbolic story had been the fall of the Berlin wall, and with all the sense of possibility that opened up, now the news seemed to be all Bosnian war, Rwandan genocide and Fred West. It was the year the final vestiges of the peace-and-unity rhetoric were shed from the rave scene, and the splintering of underground dance music really began in earnest.’
Identity politics
The identity of Steve Beard’s heteronym in this story is Straight White Male.
Erol Alkan on the creative process
‘I like to have most of the track in my head before I start work. Some of the best remixes I’ve ever made have been finished in my head before I sat down in the studio. I’ll get sent the parts, listen to them, then go away and try and come up with an idea. A lot of the best stuff actually comes in dreams.’
British youth sub-culture
The Medway punks were Little Brother Rifaat’s scene.
(Picture: Eugene Doyen)
John Hodgson on the Medway scene
‘Billy Childish was part of the Kentish Medway Poets group which also included musician and artist Sexton Ming, Charles Thomson, Bill Lewis and Rob Earl. Punk-influenced, readings often included appearances alongside bands of the same ilk and, by the late-1970s, they were extremely prolific, putting out cut, paste and Xeroxed poetry pamphlets which (un-coincidentally) look very much like the music zines then appearing around Britain. This is where the small press tradition of publishing cheaply-made little poetry magazines connects with the burgeoning punk ethic of do-it-yourself culture – learn three chords, record a tune and put it out as a single on your own label, or type, photocopy and staple your pamphlet or zine. It’s immediate – write a poem and publish it in a matter of days without editorial interference or censorial judgement, using your own language to a developing readership in Billy’s case through what was initially the Phyroid Press which developed into Hangman.’
High theory
Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason delivered the idea of madness as a form of social exclusion.
(Picture: Jacques Haillot)
Madness in a nutshell
‘And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.’
Lost great work
Book of poems based on the idea of Syd Barrett’s abandoned third solo album.
Rob Chapman on Syd’s last gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange
‘That night was all about brief glimpses. It's what kept us all there to the bitter end. It's presumably what helped Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour persevere with the solo albums. A similar impulse guided Peter Jenner through Syd's final ill-fated sessions at Abbey Road in August 1974. Occasional glimpses of the old Syd would emerge and then it would all become enmeshed in indecision and untogetherness again. Anyone who thinks there was still anything left in the creative tank by this point should be allowed to hear those last sad sessions. It's a salutary experience to listen to Syd choogling his way through a series of backing tracks, his timing and technique all but shot, and sounding like a hamfisted busker.’
Counter public sphere #1
Medway College of Design in Chatham.
(Picture: Google Maps)
Medway College of Design Archive on the Rochester building
‘The current building at Fort Pitt was opened in September 1970, costing at that time almost £1 million to build. It was designed by architect Hugh Mollison, who also designed the Maidstone College of Art campus and a number of other buildings of note such as Mid-Kent College. Although the Rochester building is similar in shape to the previous fort situated here (according to a drawing by Turner in 1832), it was built to Mollinson’s own Functionalist design. He appreciated that the building needed to suit the local area; therefore he chose to follow the natural lines of the hillside, thus reducing the volume of the building that would jut into the skyline.’
Counter public sphere #2
Megatripolis under the arches at Charing Cross in London.
Terence McKenna speaking on the opening night of Megatripolis
‘So I believe that we are actually preparing to decamp from ordinary history. I don’t know exactly what that means, but the continuation of history for decades, centuries, millennia is inconceivable. That is the hallucination of the establishment, because it cannot imagine the actual truth of the situation, which is that the cascade of forces—set off by Greek science, by the phonetic alphabet, by monotheism—this cascade of social forces is now propelling the entire global social structure into another dimension. Literally another dimension.’
Atlantic archipelago
Sheppey is an island in the Thames Estuary.
(pic: Google Maps)
Wikipedia says…
‘Sheppey is one of few parts of what is now the United Kingdom to have been (temporarily) lost to a foreign power since William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066. This was in June 1667, when a Dutch fleet sailing up the Thames Estuary for the Medway captured the fort at Sheerness. The fort at the time was incomplete and the garrison underfed and unpaid, so resistance to the heavily armed Dutch Navy (which, according to Samuel Pepys’s diary, was also to a large extent composed of deserters from Britain’s Royal Navy) was hardly enthusiastic.’
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Johnny Aggro’s Brian Jones Shango Baptist Routine