Your author at this year’s Supernormal Festival. Photo by Lisa Jayne.
Given how much I look forward to it throughout the winter, and how fleeting it can seem once it arrives, I'm never sorry to see the end of summer. August in particular can be a drag: that peculiarly enervating type of heat, when you just feel exhausted all the time and everything smells of burning meat. And anyway, I love autumn: the revitalizing freshness of it, tinged by melancholy, the chance to wear the kind of clothes I like best, the sense (instilled by school days) of new beginnings and work to be getting on with.
August had its moments, though. At the start of the month I returned to the Supernormal Festival at Brazier's Park in Oxfordshire, a real home from home and a chance to forget about the moving-house stresses (we're still in Brighton at the time of writing, by the way) for a weekend and just wander about in a field watching bands and catching up with friends. My musical highlight was Welsh-language goth-folk trio Tristwch Y Fenywod playing to a packed barn. They're actually from Leeds, featuring members of Guttersnipe and Hawthonn, and I think tap into West Yorkshire's gothic tradition as much as any mystical Welsh heritage with their flanged basslines, syn-drums and two Russian zithers taped together around a contact mic as lead instrument.
Other highlights included youthful wyrd-folk collective Scops, who have a whole self-invented pagan mythology, complete with explanatory zines, that they seem to take very seriously; Jayne-County-esque punk cabaret performer Midgitte Bardot; Senegalese master kora player Jali Fily Cissokho; post-punk dub engineer Soborgnost; fun pop-punk from Sniffany & The Nits; and in Supernormal's equivalent of Glastonbury's Legends slot, Lydia Lunch performing a spoken word set and in conversation with Natalie Sharp.
At the other end of the month, I made it up to the far more modest, free one-day Clerkenwell Festival in London's Spa Fields, which combines live bands and DJs with a rock n' roll jumble sale that's a great place to pick up interesting old books, records, clothes and jewellery at bargain prices. I also went to the inaugural Brighton Psych Fest, which was one of those multi-venue, rushing around town, missing half the bands you want to see due to clashes and queues affairs. With a couple of exceptions though I stayed put in the Komedia theatre where Stewart Lee was curating a stage that was a kind of festival-in-opposition within the wider event which, it has to be said, stretched the definition of psychedelia (or "psych") to breaking point. Lee's hand-picked line-up was probably the most genuinely psychedelic of the festival, even though it also strayed the furthest from the "psych" template. "No ersatz indie-rock here!" Lee crowed, while introducing Alison Cotton's powerfully moving set of dark, vocal-led drones inspired by the story of Sunderland's Cook sisters and their work helping Jewish refugees during the war.
Earlier we'd had the eccentric, experimental absurdism of Secluded Bronte, featuring improv legends the Bowman brothers, who would've equally fitted in at UFO in ’67 and on Rough Trade in ’78 (alongside Swell Maps and This Heat) but stood out like a beacon of originality among the shoegaze-lite psych wannabes. Eliza Skelton transformed her folk-adjacent The Lookerer album of last year into maximalist art-rock with a six-piece band who felt like the British equivalent of US psych-folk supergroup Heron Oblivion. That band paired Meg Baird of Espers with members of Comets on Fire; Skelton's band featured members of The Bevis Frond, who played after Alison Cotton. Led by 71-year-old Nick Saloman, The Frond have been going for nearly forty years ("and I wasn't that young when we started!" Nick jokes), but I've only really discovered them in the last six or seven years and they've become firm favourites for their ferocious, melodic, plaintive psychedelic rock which sounds like Dinosaur Jr, The Byrds, Hendrix, Neil Young & Crazy Horse all thrown into a blender and spat out with a punkish, English, self-deprecating melancholy and grace.
Finally: The Dreamstop Implodes!
Frequently mentioned in this newsletter, The Lost Doctor is a long-running project, initiated by Tommy Calderbank, based on the proposition "what if Ken Campbell had been the sixth Doctor Who?" He nearly was, you see, but in the end Campbell's protégé Sylvester McCoy was chosen for the part instead, as the producers thought that Ken would be too scary for children. From this launching pad, Tommy and a regular crew of collaborators have created a series of audio plays, available on SoundCloud and YouTube, which feature Campbell's Doctor (voiced by Tom "not that one" Baker) in a series of increasingly improbable and arcane situations, the series gradually building up its own unique convoluted mythology.
I think it was about six years ago that I agreed to write a script for them, and January 2022 when I turned in my first draft, so it's been a long time coming. My initial inspiration was the McCoy-era story Delta and the Bannermen, or rather just the title, which was clearly a pun on Echo & The Bunnymen (something that's never referenced in the story itself, although it does feature fellow Liverpudlian legend Ken Dodd). As you may know, I'm a massive fan of Julian Cope and The Teardrop Explodes, and back when both bands were signed to Bill Drummond's Zoo record label, The Bunnymen and The Teardrops were arch rivals. Therefore, it seemed necessary to me that the Teardrop Explodes should have their own punning Doctor Who title: hence, I called my story The Dreamstop Implodes.
My second inspiration dated back to my visit to the incredible, spiritual intentional community of Damanhur as part of the Cerne to CERN pilgrimage in 2019. I bought back a couple of books on Damanhur's own complex mythology, and it struck me how much it sounded like something out of Doctor Who. The Damanhurians even have their own time machine (and an in-depth theory of how time travel works). Our visit to Damanhur was enabled by the relationship of mutual respect that Ken Campbell had developed with the place years before. So I tried to dovetail Damanhurian mythology with Doctor Who. The Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey; in contrast, I created the planet Damanhar, whose inhabitants are the Dream Lords.
A lot of other stuff went into the script too, from a meta criticism of Doctor Who's own premise to references to early ’80s BBC science fiction kids' game show The Adventure Game. But mainly I wanted to try to write a fast-moving radio play that worked as an entertaining story even if you didn't get all of the nods and winks. Last month it was finally finished, recorded, produced and released, and you can hear it here. I'm thrilled that in addition to the regular cast, proper actors Kate Alderton played the dreamer and Andrew O' Neill played a talking aspidistra plant (a major character, honestly). Please give it a listen!
I think that's all for this issue. Have a great autumn. I'll write again soon.
Ben
Thanks Ben! I rarely ever read blogs, not because they aren't good, but because of dyslexia and ADHD conspiring against focussed attention (no, please don't do anything audio version - they send me to sleep).
Yours though cuts through - we were both at Supernormal and, clearly I was doing things all the time and saw lots.. I'm glad one of us has a functioning memory.
Can't wait to hear Andrew as Uncle! What a show 🪴