The Urban Spaceman

Volume Two, Issue Ten, April 2025

Hello. It's been a while. I hope you're all having a good Easter / spring celebration and are getting all of the chocolate / time off / promise of eternal life that you hoped for. I feel as though I've done hardly any serious writing over the winter. The novel has remained active in my mind: I've thought about it a lot, made notes, and rewritten some existing chapters, but it's felt as though I was barely treading water, just about keeping the project afloat, rather than making any useful progress.

Then last Sunday night I saw the full moon shining directly through the skylight of our lean-to, almost as if this late-60s terraced house was a prehistoric temple built to be aligned with the first full moon after the spring equinox. The moon, of course, has a mystical association in many traditions with imagination and creativity, and in my novel it also represents the counterculture as opposed to the more Apollonian, sun-worshipping mainstream. So I made a salutation and, speaking aloud, asked the Moon Goddess for the inspiration I needed to bring the book back to life.

It was a casual, spontaneous invocation, without ceremony, nothing considered or fancy. But over the next few days, almost immediately in fact, I found myself scribbling down a flow of new ideas for the novel, ways to connect the disparate parts better, insights into character and theme that excited and animated me. One revelation was that Savage Jubilee naturally divided into two parts, each one the length of a respectable short novel. Doing this helped me see the structure better and also made the whole sprawling mess seem more manageable.

By working in some of the new ideas, and cutting and pasting the first part into a new word doc, I now have a decent first/second draft (draft 1.5?) of Savage Jubilee book one: The Roses of Atlantis, ready to be added to, finessed, edited and generally knocked into shape, as well as a fair chunk of book two (working title: The Thorns of Mu) to build on. There's still a lot of work to do, but having a full beginning-to-end manuscript to develop is a major step forward. Thanks, Moon!

Why Atlantis? One of the themes of the whole American Underground novel sequence, which includes Electric Tibet as well as Savage Jubilee, is the power of myth, for good or ill. Atlantis feels like a dangerous ur-myth for western civilisation, with its problematic narrative of near-magical intellectual, cultural and technological superiority followed by inevitable destruction through either hubris, climate change, or the workings of black magicians within the Atlantean establishment.

The first mention of Atlantis is by Plato, one of the foundational figures of western philosophy. Western elites have always invoked the culture of Ancient Greece as a sign of their supposed superiority, and while most mythical lost lands and cities are located somewhere vague in the Far East, Atlantis firmly belongs in the West. There have always been many conflicting theories about where exactly it was meant to be, but the very name positions it somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and North America. This is Atlantis as in the Atlantic Treaty and Atlantic Monthly.

Of course, a writing project titled American Underground can't help but be influenced by current events, namely the USA's rapid descent, at the hands of an unholy alliance of accelerationist tech bros and right-wing Christian fundamentalists, both fixated on immanentizing an eschaton where only the elite will be saved, into actual overt fascism and terrifying ethnic cleansing. North America, as settled and dominated by white Europeans, was in some ways an attempt to create a New Atlantis, aiming for noble principles of progress and freedom but built on near-genocide, slavery and religious fanaticism. Maybe the myth of Atlantis is a program or engram that starts with a conscious drive towards equality and self-realisation, but inevitably switches to an even more powerful unconscious urge towards viciousness and self-destruction.

Book review

Speaking of myth, Crab & Bee's Matter of Britain: Mythlands of Albion by Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith, published recently by Peakrill Press, is a very loose retelling of the medieval story cycle generally known as The Matter of Britain, the central text of which is Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th Century History of The Kings of Britain, but which also includes the Welsh Book of Taliesin and Mabinogion, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the anonymously authored Gawain And The Green Knight and multiple other texts, most of which claim to be based on ancient myth if not actual history, but many of which were probably created largely from the imagination of the monks, scholars and poets who set them down in the Middle Ages. It's from the original Matter of Britain that we get our stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and they also provided rich source material for many of Shakespeare's plays.

With the British Isles having been continually settled by different immigrant groups throughout their history, each with their own stories, beliefs and traditions, the medieval Matter of Britain is as close as we get to an official shared mythology for the UK, and its transparent lack of authenticity is part of what makes it endure. What, after all, is an authentic myth? Disparate writers over hundreds of years took scraps of folklore, oral history, older ballads and poems, and reworked them into a form that suited their times and temperaments. The fact that these stories are able to be continually rewritten, that they come from multiple contradictory sources, that elements are added or taken away in different retellings, so that far from following any rational chronology they seem more like a jumbled symbolic dream sequence, is part of what keeps them alive and relevant.

This brings us to Crab & Bee's latest retelling, which is as silly, serious, wise and true as any other. Here, the beginning of the world is at Canley, near Coventry, because why not? Trees invent language and Syrian holy women hunt in the woods next to the Wrigley Factory in Plymouth, despite this being in the days before Albion was populated by human beings at all. The first war takes place between the people of Albion and the lions that then roamed the countryside, and The Waste Land is caused by a king who is also the CEO of an agrichemical corporation. Several chapters are narrated by Wookey Hole Cave, and no-one pays much attention to the prophecies of Merlin.

It's appropriate that this particular myth cycle begins and ends with snakes, because here there are rarely any straight lines (and when there are, it goes badly), only wriggling curves and circles. Binary-thinking Supreme Court judges may want to take note. The colour illustrations, by Helen Billinghurst, make this book worth buying alone, while the text is concise and combines a dry wit with a wisdom that feels both homespun and offbeat. Imagine if Tolkien's Silmarillion had been written by Kurt Vonnegut (and how much more readable it would be as a result).

Smith (mainly a writer) and Billinghurst (mainly an illustrator) use the name Crab & Bee for their combined artistic practise, which often involves site-specific creations and performances across the UK. Crab & Bee's Matter of Britain is available from Dan Sumption's proudly independent Peakrill Press imprint, and the book is being promoted with a number of events up and down the country throughout May and June.

A Perfect Match by Grayson Perry, 2015

Out & About

I've mostly been trying to earn money, save money and not spend money for, well, the past year really, so there's not a lot to report back on over the first few months of 2025. Also, your Urban Spaceman is realising that his current situation is actually pretty rural. I'm enjoying being closer to the countryside, in the shadow of the South Downs, and being able to see all of the stars more clearly at night. But it does mean that there are fewer interesting gigs and events on my doorstep than I was used to when living in Brighton.

Still, we made it to both days of Lewes Psych Fest back in January, where my highlights were Large Plants ' ambitious, successful cover of Pentangle's notoriously complex 'Light Flight', with guest vocalist Naomi Randall, and Gwennifer Raymond's spellbinding avant-primitive folk guitar playing. I wrote a full review for Shindig! Then in February, Tristwch y Fenywod wove their goth-folk magic at Brighton's Green Door Store, and the Electric Palace cinema in Hastings screened Little Eden, a film about The Bevis Frond, followed by a stripped-down. Semi-acoustic set by the band.

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Nick Saloman has played as The Bevis Frond for over forty years, releasing dozens of albums of blistering psychedelic rock and playing hundreds of shows, earning just enough of a loyal cult following for him to keep doing it and support himself and his family in a modest way, while never quite becoming what you might call successful or well-known. Saloman is a Hastings local these days, as is bassist Louis Wiggett (guitarist Paul Simmons lives in Brighton), so the 40-seat independent cinema was mostly filled with the band's friends, family and neighbours, and it almost felt like Nick was entertaining us in his own front room. When the film broke down halfway through, Nick filled in with self-deprecating chat, anecdotes and a new song, and afterwards it was hard to recall which stories were in the film and which came from Nick's commentary. It's a great little film on a great little band: catch it if you can. The full electric Bevis Frond are playing a few UK dates in May, including Lewes Con Club on the 16th.

We also caught a couple of excellent exhibitions. Grayson Perry's A Temple for Everyone was at the Charleston Gallery in Lewes, and included their series of paintings following the life of fictional Essex everywoman Julie Cope (no relation to a certain Archdrude, as far as I can tell). The themes were home and identity in modern Britain. I particularly enjoyed Perry's satirical annotated maps, such as the one laying out the various corners of social media as a small town.

The second exhibition was Drawing The Unspeakable at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, curated by artist Liza Dimbleby and her father, the broadcaster David Dimbleby. There were about 300 drawings by a wide range of artists, exploring the idea that drawing can be a more effective, nuanced and immediate form of communication than writing or even speaking. Many were of pretty grim subjects, from work created by refugees hoping to cross the channel from France to England's South Coast, to George Grosz's drawing of a Nazi interrogation in the 1930s and more recent sketches of police brutality leading to deaths in custody.

There were lighter contributions too: I loved Ray Ward's Whirly Garden, nine slowly rotating 3-D pictures that echoed children's pop-up books or stage sets for puppet theatres, made from cut-up cereal boxes and milk cartons with characters and scenes drawn on in marker pen. The erotic drawings of LS Lowry, Girls With Bows, were another revelation, closer to outfits Leigh Bowery might have worn at an 80s New Romantic fetish club than matchstalk men in clogs.

Finally, in March we went to the last East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club of the season, a special mystery event which turned out to be director Ben Wheatley (A Field in England, Kill List etc.) with a test screening of his new DIY film Bulk. How best to describe this mind-bending black-and-white science fiction thriller? Imagine Gerry Anderson making an early adaptation of Philip K Dick, or if Look-In's Sapphire And Steel comic strip had run in 2000AD instead and been scripted by a young Alan Moore. Afterwards, Wheatley and actor Noah Taylor were quizzed about the film by John Higgs, with co-stars Sam Riley and Alexandra Maria Lara joining in via video link-up from Berlin, before Wheatley returned to perform a live electronic music set.

On that note, I shall let you get back to your giant Easter Eggs, walks in the countryside, telly, pub, church or however you choose to spend the bank holiday weekend. Have fun, stay safe, and look after each other.

Ben x