inkies remembered

When I were a lad I used to read the music press. This is the kind of thing I read:

“Andre Breton was a personal friend of Leon Trotsky, and Trotsky himself was very interested in the art of the time. Well of course when it went off in Russia, Dada happened at almost exactly the same time. Tristran Tzara, the fellow who sort of invented Dada poetry was writing in Geneva just as Lenin was leaving there for Russia. And with Trotsky, he wasn't just a propagandist, his work is creative writing in its own right.”

Truly, which is why it's surprising that most 'orthodox Trotskyists' are a pain in the harris. But if this conversation's baffling you and the nearest you've got to surrealism is Monty Python's or your own dreams, get hold of Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall, probably the best intro to rebel culture around (Che and Jimmy Dean are part of the same teen dream after all). Nuttall quotes a US surrealist group who defined rebel poetry and, incidentally, Johnny Clarke as “breathing like a machine gun, exterminating the blind flags of immediately reality...”

That’s John Cooper Clarke interviewed by Garry Bushell. Them times ain’t no more are they?

Anyway, here’s what you get in today’s music press:

Sir Cliff Richard has discussed his relationship with an ex-priest in an autobiography, which was excerpted in the Daily Express newspaper yesterday (September 4).

The veteran singer, who has had more chart-topping hits in the UK than The Beatles or Elvis Presley, said that he shares his home with former priest John McElynn, but insists that his sexuality is his own business

I’m not totally down on this: there was always a bit too much radical chic in the old inkies and a shortage of Cliff’s personal business. The two could have gone together quite well.