Hello, friends, I hope you’re keeping well. Autumn blew in overnight a few weeks ago and winter can’t be far away. I always say that this is my favourite season, but it does involve riding an emotional rollercoaster alongside the renewed creativity and energy that I always feel around now. Savage Jubilee, the second book of the American Underground sequence, is coming together nicely, and I’m hoping to put book one, Electric Tibet, out as a limited-run physical book and limited-time e-book early next year. This will be a low-key release to keep the momentum and interest going, as the plan is still for all five books to be combined as one novel eventually. Interested agents or publishers, or those with recommendations for the same, please get in touch!
Strange Things
We virtually sold out the Rose Hill on the night of Festival 23’s Hot Dog 2: Let’s Make It A Hero Sandwich at the end of September. Among a range of talks and performances, God’s Teeth & The Interstellar Tropics played a heavily psychedelic set that reminded me of early ’70s Pink Floyd around the time of Echoes and Ummagumma. Then Richard Norris and Kermit provided sounds for the soul and feet.
Earlier in the evening, I’d chatted with Richard live on stage about his life and career, from self-releasing his first single aged 15 with schoolboy post-punk band The Innocent Vicars, to working with seminal psych reissue label Bam Caruso, collaborating with Genesis P Orridge on the Jack The Tab mutant acid house album in 1987 and then forming ’90s dance act The Grid with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball. We didn’t have time to go on to his collaborations with Joe Strummer, Timothy Leary, Sky Saxon and many others.
Richard’s current work includes his ‘Music For Healing’ project and self-releasing ambient electronica on his own Group Mind label. His memoir, Strange Things Are Happening, is published by White Rabbit Books in April and can be preordered at https://geni.us/StrangeThings Note the signed limited edition that comes with a bonus CD!
Get Lost
The main thing I wanted to write to you about though is The Lost Doctor Annual. Some of you may know that a few friends, who found each other primarily through the Cosmic Trigger, Festival 23, Toxteth Day Of The Dead milieu, have been writing and producing full-length audio plays imagining what it might have been like if maverick writer, theatre director and actor Ken Campbell had got the part of Doctor Who in 1987 instead of his friend and protégé, Sylvester McCoy. The thing is, he nearly did: Ken auditioned, reciting Dr Manhattan’s monologue from Alan Moore’s then-current Watchmen comic, and ultimately it was down to a shortlist of Campbell or McCoy for the part. But at the time, the producers wanted to take the show in a lighter direction, and Campbell was judged to be “too scary” for the young audience they wanted to appeal to.
But what if…? As well as being a great British eccentric and cult figure making regular, intriguing forays into the mainstream throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century, Ken was an intellectual seeker, a provocateur, and perhaps most relevant to our shared interests, the man who put Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus on the stage, directly inspiring the future career of his set designer Bill Drummond, who went on to manage Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, before forming The KLF.
Campbell’s theatrical production of Illuminatus blew the minds and changed the lives of so many people that saw it in the mid-1970s, and in 2014 his daughter Daisy made a similar impact with her production of another Robert Anton Wilson classic, Cosmic Trigger. The ‘Lost Doctor’ project is one of the many outgrowths of that moment. I’ve written a yet-to-be-produced script for it and I’ve also contributed an imaginary interview with Ken (who in our universe, died in 2008) to the Lost Doctor Annual.
This is going to be a sumptuous hardback book in the tradition of all those beloved children’s annuals of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, packed with stories, scripts, features and artwork. And the reason I’m pushing it so hard is that it’s currently in the Kickstarter stage. Your backing is needed, so go to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dansumption/the-lost-doctor-annual-2023 to read more and pre-order yourself a Christmas present from the Universe Next Door!
That’s all for this time,
Ben