Poem: "Slits In Aerosol Green"

SLITS IN AEROSOL GREEN /

‘DES INTERNATIONALE

POETIQUE AT STRASBOURG’

There’s a skill to

making a clean incision

symmetrically around the scalp,

then inserting thumbnails

beneath the layers of skin

and folding it carefully back

from the exposed porous flesh.

Shaping the scalp from

a convex to a concave,

until the contours of the

dome of head correspond exactly

with the contours of the

inverted scalp poised above it.

The effect thus produced

is aesthetically pleasing,

the intersection of

mathematically precise curves

and segments of damply gleaming

hemispheres…

the hollow formed

by the inverse scalp is

also convenient for the

storage of half-written poems,

cigarette ends, biscuits,

and pieces of string…

Published in:
‘SEPIA no.1’ (UK – July 1977)
‘EMPIRE no.15’ (USA – May 1979)
also in collection:
‘SUBVERSIVE ART AT POPULAR PRICES’
(Purple Heather Publications) (UK – January 1988)
on cassette:
‘DREAMS OF REALITY: BROKEN SKULL TAPES’
(UK – C60 – September 1981)

The recent discorporation of Ari Up of wonderful Punky-Reggae iconoclasts The Slits (Ariane Daniele Forster 17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010), suggests maybe I should divulge the secret history of this poem’s title, which was attacked by a certain Feminist critic as gratuitously violent. The story goes thus. Driving the trans-Pennine M62, at the highest point of Britain’s highest motorway there’s the breathtaking arc of a bridge like a knife-cut across the sky, and there, on the visible underside of this soaring structure, someone had managed to graffiti the name of Ari Up’s band, there it was ‘Slits’ in green aerosol. I felt such heroic fan-dedication deserved some small tribute. Later, when this poem formed the title of a DIY-Indie C30 cassette collection, it was reviewed in ‘New Musical Express (NME)’ as ‘poems from a twisted mind’. Recommendation seldom came better…!

Charlie Parker: 'Blues For Bird'

‘ODE TO A

HIGH-FLYING BIRD…’

Book Review of:

‘BLUES FOR BIRD’ by MARTIN GRAY

(Santa Monica Press - $16.95 -

ISBN 1-891661-20-5)

We argue jazz. I map a connection direct from intuition to expression without the filtering of intellect or literal articulacy. Steve Sneyd says no, musicians – like everyone else, rely on an accumulation of technique and phrases they randomly permutate on whim or inspiration. We’re both right. On a sliding scale from one extreme to the other. Sometimes within the same musician. Sometimes within the space of a single phrase of breath.

During the mid-to-late 1940’s, using only an alto sax – ‘a metal pipe / with keys to him’, Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker created a spontaneous warp-speed fluidity that derailed all jazz since, yet his mission-statement claims he was merely looking for the ‘pretty notes’. While – incidentally, a mission that wordlessly achieves what poetry aspires to, but never comes close, so that ‘what he thought and played / was instantaneous’. An (in)articulate speech of the heart. Via the gut. Harmonies in the head. Sonics that bend space-time. On the Dial record-label. In ‘Anthropology’. ‘Ornithology’. On The West Coast. On 52nd Street. With Dizzy Gillespie. In Paris. In the Yardbird Suite. On Verve. With Strings. He introduces an ‘architecture of strange voices new to jazz’ by playing anthems for fleeting moments. Celebrations of the dispossessed.

His saxophone is ‘moist, / warm like the human voice, / yet also it is cool / supremely logical’, breaking out beyond the diatonic-scale using complex harmonic changes, grace notes and an obliquely accented relationship to the beat, into a chromaticism that seems angular and unsettling to ears of the day, yet has a nightmarish beauty of infinite elasticity. Where squares hear only cacophony, hipsters peak with epiphany. ‘Music is a game / private, intimate / individual, yet / a conversation with / each person in the crowd’. Beat-writers try to catch those Bop cadences with a kind of free-scat jazzetry, tracing Bird improvisations by distorting vocabulary into a deliberately disconnected dance of cracked syllables.

Even Charlie Watts – Rolling Stones’ drummer, and no mean jazz-slouch, writes his own ‘Ode To A High-Flying Bird’ in percussive stanzas. While Ross Russell’s biog ‘Bird Lives’ remains essential. And – coming later, Martin Gray acknowledges its ‘infectious enthusiasm’, but while developing his own verse-biography form (through earlier shots at Modigliani and Pollock), he ducks any attempt at catching Bird’s sound, with no attempted mood-enhancing through experimental typography or Wow-mad incendiary ruptured texts to give his words flight, preferring technically well-researched fact-oids line-cut into narrative chapters interspersed with etched-sketches, middle-eights and a useful glossary-of-terms cadenza (‘appoggiatura’, dig, fix, cat, horse, lick, tea/grass, gruppetto). In fact, he deliberately chooses ‘the neglected’ iambic trimeter and syncopated hexameter, a regular – and predictable sliced-text form. Yet one uniquely suited to the re-telling of anecdotes, myths, one-liners, and reported-conversation speech-patterns, and he uses this dramatic directness to its full potential. His is a narrative that prefers an anatomical scalpel-exactness – ‘Bird’s little finger was long as the others were’, located more to Steve’s cool technique than my hyper-physical extemporisation. Charlie Mingus called Parker ‘King Spook’.

And Bird – Yardbird, was a Goof Demigod, a human contradiction, as capable of selfless generosity – with no concept of value, as he was of pawning a borrowed sax to raise drug-dollars. Whatever, he accelerated, revolutionised and evolved tonal possibilities through immaculately stoned flesh, vomit, sadistic games with heroin, syringes, sex, food and piss. Until, with references outside of jazz – to Debussy, Toscanini, Varese, Heinrich Heine and elsewhere, Martin Gray finally talks of Bird talking of working with Hindemith, or Yehudi Menuhin, while he was too juiced to even play the horn that was his last true friend. Feeling ‘what men at war must feel, / a love tinged with despair... his stellar music gifts / disrupted by his need / to tamper with his flesh... till drink and drugs combined / to quiet his instrument’. The dissonance of speeding highways. Kinetic galaxies spattering. He made it cerebral by smashing it. Poets envy it. Dream of doing the same. But must always fail. Now’s The Time...

For further details contact:

SANTA MONICA PRESS LLC

PO Box 1076, Santa Monica, CA 90406, USA www.santamonicapress.com

or MARTIN GRAY, 918 Collinson Street #305, Victoria BC, Canada V8V 4V5

email: grayandamartin@hotmail.com

(Tel: 0171-420-5555 Fax: 0171-240-7261)

Published in:

‘THE PENNILESS PRESS no.18’ (Nov 2003 – UK)

Miles Davis: The Autobiography

‘MILES AHEAD...’

Book Review of:

‘MILES: THE AUTOBOGRAPHY’

by MILES DAVIS (with QUINCY TROUPE)

(Simon & Schuster 1989, Picador 1990

- £6.99 - ISBN 0-330-31382-7)

Today, John Coltrane is seen as the most spiritual performer in jazz history, with his visionary ‘A Love Supreme’ viewed as a transcendental vindication of the purest epiphany music can aspire to. Yet back then, Miles was forced to fire him from the group for nodding out between solos, picking his nose on stage and sometimes eating it. At the end of one Café Bohemia club set Miles allowed young gun Kenny Dorham up on stage to jam and was mortified when the guest’s playing proceeded to blow the group to shreds. ‘Man, was I pissed’. Fuming and nursing his hurt pride Miles schemed revenge. The following night he purposefully invited Dorham to join them earlier in the set, immediately following his solo by ramming into top gear, pulling every slick trick and maximising every technique from his not-inconsiderable resources of virtuosity, to wreak visceral havoc on the ‘hippest audience in the city’, and establish once and for all his supremacy in the pecking order.

Miles mistrusted and resented the white man, with good reason. ‘Racist to the bone’, segregation was still enforced, with lynchings used as a means of control and intimidation in the southern states, while even in more liberal NY whitey controlled every aspect of the music industry, radio, records, touring, deciding on arbitrary whim who would and would not achieve stardom. He respected and admired Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, but despised what he saw as their wide-grin capitulation to minstrelsy white show-biz preconceptions. ‘I wasn’t about to kiss anybody’s ass and do that grinning shit for nobody’. Yet, in a way unique to jazz, beyond wealth, popular status – or colour, cutting contests such as the one at the Café Bohemia, established respect. The one thing that set you apart was your improvisational skills. You could do it, or you were nowhere. When the more militant brothers protested to Miles why did he employ white musicians in his group when there were black players who needed the work?, his retaliation was instant, ‘I’m hiring a motherfucker to play, not for what colour he is… if they’re cool, they’re cool, no matter what colour they are’.

Miles could be considered arrogant. Part of that was defensive. The press branded him difficult, aloof. He refused to announce the titles of the numbers he played on-stage. If the people were hip to what he was doing, they knew the titles already, if they weren’t hip to it, they didn’t matter. He extended his silence to deleting liner notes from his albums. Miles Dewey Davis III never condescended to anyone, and ‘didn’t take no shit off nobody’. He was not born poor-black. The son of a middle-class East St Louis dentist, he’d never come up through the impoverished blues tradition. He had absolute conviction in his ability, and that was enough. He knew his own value, and would accept nothing less. Supposedly at Julliard, he was taken in and adopted by the bop pantheon of 1940’s New York, through whom he accelerated his chops, and picked up a heroin-habit. But neither drugs nor sex were as vital stimulants as music.

The eighteen-year-old Miles was ‘sucking in everything. Man, it was something’, with ‘music all up in my body’. Chief among those ‘scientists of sound’, Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker was a genius musician, but a failed human being. ‘I loved Charlie Parker as a musician – maybe not as a person’. Sharing a downtown cab on 52nd Street, Miles protested that Bird’s gargantuan fried-chicken eating habit – not to mention the white girl down there fellating him, were unsettling. Bird suggested Miles stick his head out the window if he was offended. He did, but could still hear every damned chomp and slurp. ‘Bird did more weird shit than anybody I ever met’. Later, dressed sharper than ‘a broke-dick dog’, Miles was hitting the first of his own multiple musical peaks with his ‘classic sextet’ (’Trane, Cannonball Adderley, drummer Philly Joe Jones, bassist Paul Chambers, with pianist Bill Evans replacing Red Garland). Each member playing ‘above what he knows’. Miles was stripping the complexities of bop down into a new modal melodic simplicity named ‘Birth Of The Cool’ (1957), while collaborating on the new LP ‘long-playing format’ with Canadian arranger Gil Evans.

Yet by then, jazz was well into being relegated as the world’s music of choice by the crude upstart Rock ‘n’ Roll. Miles never accepted such demotion. He evolved his clean unadorned style into the greatest jazz of the second half of the century through a series of audaciously inventive albums that did much to retain the profile and relevance of jazz itself. Later, hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and snorting coke with Sly Stone, he was intrigued as much by their musical innovations as by their access to the kind of mass sales-figures he felt he deserved. The results, the spacily electric million-selling psychedelia of ‘Bitches Brew’ (1970) and the ghetto-funkified ‘On The Corner’ (1972) spun the genre almost single-handedly into what became known as ‘fusion’. Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, and Weather Reporters Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul all perfected their art as part of the Miles Davis group, through his inspired tutelage. Miles died 28th September 1991, aged 65, soon after taping this autobiography. In (largely) his own words he’s every bit as confrontationally extreme as his music, and as his spikily bristling reputation would suggest (while recalling exact detailed personnel lists from obscure sessions he’d played even in the depths of addiction). Much of what is now considered edgily cutting, he was doing back then, clear down to the hip-hop vocabulary. Everything is ‘motherfucking’. Whether that means good or bad depends on context. As does good or bad. He lays out the evidence. The story as he lived it. Then leaves you to draw your own conclusions. He’d expect no less.
www.milesdavis.co.uk

Originally Featured on the website:

‘SOUNDCHECKS MUSIC REVIEW’

www.soundchecks.co.uk/books

(UK - July 2007)

Eric Burdon & The New Animals 'Live'

ERIC BURDON &

THE NEW ANIMALS…

AT BEVERLEY ROAD BATHS,

HULL, 1966

I hadn’t even intended seeing them.

I’d already seen the Animals,

and this 15th December 1966 night

the Yardbirds were advertised.

But ERIC BURDON’S NEW ANIMALS

stepped in as last-minute replacements.

I was less than best pleased….

There’s a cat-fight directly in front of the stage. Two teenage trollops punching, slapping hair-pulling and eye-gouging each other, tippling to the floor in a fury of bouffant hair and up-ended micro mini-skirts. An errant boyfriend? Or maybe they’re competing for the post-gig attentions of the band? If so, Burdon barely smiles as he glances sidewise down at it all. Me, I watch, even though I hadn’t intended being here. I’ve already seen the original Animals, at Bridlington Spa Theatre, what seemed like not so long since. They were great, but yes, I’ve seen them already. This December 1966 night the Yardbirds were advertised. Eric Burdon & The New Animals stepping in as last-minute replacements. I was less than best pleased. Admittedly they look different, they sound different too. In fact, they are different. Things had changed pretty radically.

After the implosion of the original group Burdon hadn’t even intended to continue using the name. It was label pressure to stick with the ‘known brand’ that led to the ‘new Animals’ billing. No smart suits. They’re gone. Only drummer Barry Jenkins had survived as a hang-over from the final line-up of the old Animals. His world is a drum-kit (Gretsch) says Eric. Danny McCulloch had been drafted in on bass, and Vic Briggs from the Brian Auger band on guitar. The old hits are buried too, in Eric’s radical new ‘Wind Of Change’. Instead, there’s “Crying Time”, a slow country-ish Ray Charles hit done harmony-style, with an effective yearning edge. They never recorded it, but Ray Charles was a long-time fixture, credited on the album dedication as ‘from whom I learnt so much’. Then he jokes the intro to an Ike & Tina Turner cover as “A Face Like Yours Don’t Come Door-Knocking Every Day”, which lurches and oozes smoothly soulful. The Stones “Paint It Black” too, radically rewired. It opens with John Weider’s haunting violin redrawn in high wide scrawls unravelling from deep Judaic roots through acid-improvisation. Before developing at an angle, with Eric in robust vocal-form inserting a talking break about tripping and falling. He knew something about tripping at the time. It was providing the catalyst for a lot of the transitions, to Eric more than most.

The ‘Winds Of Change’ LP which would arrive the following year (November 1967) came as a confusing reconfiguration to those expecting the regular Chuck Berry John Lee Hooker covers. His new ambitions resulting in, among other diversions, a bleak tone-poem extracted from Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’. Walls move, minds do too. “When I Was Young” reflects those cerebral somersaults, opening with a plunging burr of guitar distortion. From his newly enlightened vantage point he’s looking back to ‘pain more painful, laughter much louder’, before lifting the Dylan metaphor – maybe via witnessing the Byrds version at ‘Monterey’? about being ‘so much older then, when I was young’. The instant-surrealism of its ‘B’-side – “A Girl Named Sandoz” forms a direct LSD reference in itself, ‘very strange things, my mind has wings’. The first of three singles through 1967 it reached no.45 in May, the confessional “Good Times” following all the way up to no.20 in September, then there was “San Franciscan Nights”, led-in with the cod-‘Dragnet’ voice-over, climbing to no.7 in October 1967.

But this night is almost a year earlier, a try-out for the new line-up, a trial-run for the new ideas, and Beverley Road Baths is a long way from Haight-Ashbury. Teenage trollops punching, slapping hair-pulling and eye-gouging each other are a long way from Love Generation consciousness. I’d come expecting the Yardbirds. But it was a time of change, growth, evolution, metamorphosis, new butterflies emerging from old chrysalises. Burdon was already a continuity link, a familiar short stocky fixture in a shifting constellation. As Eric the Head, the Voice of Frisco, he was uniquely positioned to act the interpreter of swirling counter-culture wonders rumoured to be happening on the West Coast. A hippie Marco Polo come back to tell strange and luring tales of far-off psychedelic Cathay. Of course, we knew he’d sweated and drunk with the heavy gang of the North Eastern Electricity Board at Fossway, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. You could kind-of relate to that. He’d been on ‘Top Of The Pops’ too as an integral leading-edge of the first British R&B-wave, and you’d bought the hits. Now he was upgrading into new worlds. A known reference point to help navigate the new cartography by. If this beery Geordie bruiser could turn his life around, just maybe anyone could. I was in there somewhere, keeping up. Making sense, and sometimes contra-sense of it all. It could be argued that Eric was temporarily cut loose from his grounding in R&B, which had provided his gritty authenticity. If so, on the album Eric argues back that Blues is ‘from the whole wide world, deep within the souls of men’, listing his old heroes alongside his new music gurus – Muddy Waters, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Reed, Miles Davis, with Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and ‘when Muhammad Ali gets mad’ – ‘with love, till eternity’. This was an update on “The Story Of Bo Diddley”, which he’d done with the original Animals. I bought the ‘Winds Of Change’ album. Played it quite a lot. Oddly, playing it again now, there are more strikingly impressive moments than I recall. And I remember the cat-fight directly in front of the stage. The two teenage trollops punching, slapping hair-pulling and eye-gouging each other, tippling to the floor in a fury of bouffant hair and up-ended micro mini-skirts. Funny to think those two feuding slappers will be in their sixties now. Wonder if they remember this night as I remember?

'Escalator To Andromeda' for EC Tubb

ESCALATOR TO ANDROMEDA

: FOR A 1950’s SF WRITER

(to Edwin Charles Tubb

15 October 1919 -

10 September 2010)

he types

"LIFT-OFF:

within 4:42

minutes, no

blue sky"

leans back,

drinks coffee,

exhales nebulae

of cigarette smoke,

stares at the wall and

out beyond the wall

as far as

Andromeda

then,

4:42 minutes

later, he

returns to

the typewriter

Published in:
‘ODYSSEY no.12 (Winter 1992)’ (UK - Jan 1993)
‘THREADS no.4’ (UK - August 1994)
‘MISNOMER Vol.2 no.1’ (USA - July 1994)
‘FANTASY COMMENTATOR no.45/46’ (USA - December 1994)
‘MENTOR no.90’ (Australia - August 1996)
and in the collections:-
‘EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR’ Hilltop Press (UK-Oct 2000)
‘JINGLES FOR DISCORD’ (Bound-into ‘MINOTAUR no.42 vol.9 no.3’)
(USA – September 2004)

EC Tubb: Interview Part 1

E. C. TUBB:

CONVERSATIONS WITH

THE TALL ADVENTURER

(Part one)

E.C. Tubb was Britain’s most prolific and highly-rated

Science Fiction author of the 1950’s, a writer who dominated the SF

magazine scene in the 1960’s, and whose linked Space Operas established

new generations of fans throughout the 1970’s and into the 1980’s.... until now,

it’s the 2000’s, ‘EARL DUMAREST’ has finally came home

to Earth – leaving Tubb with new projects to write...!

Andrew Darlington meets the Man who invented worlds

“Reading can be a dangerous pursuit, Sam. Men have

ideas, and they write them down so that other men can

absorb them. Some men even act upon them.

Revolutions have been caused that way…”

(“The Captain’s Dog” in ‘Nebula no.35’, October 1958)

Supposedly, health problems mean that E.C. Tubb has now finally and absolutely retired from writing. This event-horizon was supposedly crossed during the early months of 2003. As if. It’s difficult to imagine any circumstances capable of conspiring to staunch the irrepressible flood of this unique fictioneer’s word-flow. Ever. But even if this date is to be considered some kind of last hurrah, it is significant in that it provides a precise punctuation to a half-century of stories. Five decades of fabulous tales unequalled in their compulsively accessible readability.

Born in London, on Wednesday 15th October 1919, Edwin Charles Tubb can be amazing. He not so much hit the ground running, as impacted the fictional space-time continuum at a striding lope the speed of light, and just kept accelerating. Finding his feet in the indiscriminating ‘Mushroom Jungle’ of the post-war ‘Pocket Book’ and Pulp magazine proliferations, a volatile and devious market, an incandescent, grubby, intermittent and ever-shifting phenomenon, his writing was always far less formulaic than it needed to be to achieve such a readership. And he rapidly outgrew its decline – riding, and occasionally influencing the changes, to dominate the late 1950’s and early 1960’s generation of Science Fiction magazines, ‘New Worlds’, ‘Science Fantasy’, and ‘Nebula’, while editing eighteen months of ‘Authentic SF’ himself, black text punched out on cheap white paper between garishly alluring covers. Yet each issue – to its readers, unleashing new Tubb starburst configurations of future imperfects, changing voices and personalities mutating into golden spirals of sweeping comet trails, flickering implosions illuminating dark worlds, the black void remaining fixed but the planetary action never stops, aggressively paced, tense, expansive, ecstatic, yearning, and poignant.

Graduating into novels in the 1970’s, and beyond. Space Operatics set in constellations of bewildering brightness. Old-School lack of pretensions. But he’s never less than a natural story-teller. And each phase of this apparently chaotic career across those convulsive decades is also one of a seamless and immaculately articulated progression. So many visions. So many sensations. Yet somehow sustained with a single coherence.

Now – here, seeking explanations, invited to investigate his stories as brain-teasers to be solved, he eloquently sets out the ground-rules of his technique. No secrets. No guile. Some self-deprecation. The technology is limited to a battered typewriter and a supply of cigarettes, the discipline extreme – with little to no revision-time, and a two-fisted action-methodology that could scarcely seem more pellucid. Plots constructed by genre mix ‘n’ match, but put through their paces like cosmic dancers. It’s tempting to assume that – through closer scrutiny, you can deduce the operative principles on which Tubb’s stories work, given time. But for all their apparent clarity, the more you analyse, the more they yield something deeply elusive. There in black and white, yet so mysterious a process.

You can explain it so far. The routine operation of ideas, the predictable behaviour of narrative. But no further. None of this can ever begin to define or traduce the lure of his words. Or the sureness of touch he brings to everything he creates. And it’s difficult to think of another writer of his generation responsible for so many astonishing new experiences for the reader’s eye, or one who is capable of evoking such a range of reactions. Cleverness or intelligence, artifice or style doesn’t come close.

Going back to the beginnings of your career – in the early 1950’s, there were two elements influencing novice genre voices. Firstly, emerging as a new writer, there was a ready market for people like you to sell to… but second, they were low-prestige low-paid publications. They were indeed. They didn’t pay. I was lucky when I came into writing because it was a time when – shall we say, those who could write, could sell. Because there was suddenly a tremendous demand for ‘Pocket Books’. This probably came about because it followed the period of paper shortage during the war. So first, there was the lack – combined with an affection for this stuff. Then publishers saw a chance, and started new launches. Now, there was I – without attainments or achievements of any kind, I had nothing to sell the public. I was a lorry driver, then I became a shop manager. No – I didn’t become a ‘shop manager’, but I worked in a shop. Then I sold this story. I wrote my first short story in 1950. It was published in 1951. That was for ‘New Worlds’ (“No Short Cuts”, in issue no.10, Summer 1951). And that changed my life. I suppose I’d written about thirteen stories before I sold that one. I was writing for a hobby. Then I found that I could sell. I won’t go into the economics of it because by today’s standards it sounds pathetic. Ted Carnell bought the story, and alright, this isn’t saying very much, he was starving for material, and everything was – shall we say? on a low level of acceptance. I think I got about £7 for it, something like that. But don’t forget – that was a week’s wages! So it wasn’t to be sneered at. I bought my oldest daughter a tricycle out of it. But that wasn’t the most important thing. I’d found something. I suppose it was the ego-boost of being accepted, that I’d actually been taken, actually been printed. And what I’d done once I could do again… although it didn’t quite work out like that immediately. I began to sell Ted a few things. And then, other shops opened up. The ‘Pocket Book’ market blew up. Longer stories. More money. I’m not saying those early stories are bad, but there were few other genres of publishing that would have taken them. Most other markets were – y’know, ‘literary’…

It’s a confusing period to research, because writers were working under numerous pseudonyms, complicated by crooked contracts through many devious over-night publishers. Tubb’s first novel was ‘Saturn Patrol’ – published under the alias ‘King Lang’, it was followed by ‘Planetfall’ as by ‘Gill Hunt’ (both 1951). Yes, you did turn them out fast. Because, like everything else – in a very miniscule way, you’ve got the reputation. It’s like the films, you know. ‘Cos your name’s there, they want you. So I branched out. ‘Scion Books’, and after that ‘Milestone’. And I used to churn them out. Basically, they were valueless. They were just something to get down on paper, it didn’t really matter what you put down – I was going to say ‘what kind of crap you put down,’ but that’s a little bit too strong perhaps? But you did have that attitude that it didn’t matter. That it was quite transient. It would never last. I suppose a journalist on a newspaper must feel like this – the story of the day, you know? Tomorrow it’s fish ‘n’ chip paper, it’s never going to last. So it’s a shock to go to today’s ‘Pulp Conventions’ and find all of these old things there, so highly priced, so highly valued. Well, not exactly a shock because by then, of course, I was aware that the whole ‘Collector’s items’ thing was going on. But they were great fun to write – those pocketbooks, because your critical faculty was very low. You didn’t worry about what you were doing. Nobody else worried about what you were doing. They were taken. So you just take the old cork out of the subconscious and it flows. But it was speed that was essential then, because – well, you weren’t earning enough, you had to earn more than you were making normally, more than you could earn by driving a truck or whatever, otherwise there was no point in doing it. It wasn’t greed. And I’ve said it before – there’s no reason why I shouldn’t mention Dave Griffiths because he’s well known. He was the reader for the ‘Curtis Warren’ imprint. And he came into the pub where we were. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just write it. I’ll submit it as one of mine. They’re bound to take everything I write. And you’ll get your money – £27 10s’. So I did it. I did one, he took it, and it got accepted, and I got paid. Didn’t get paid for the next two, mind. Sucker. So – I learned, I learned. Oddly enough, some years later when I was the editor of ‘Authentic SF’ I received a story from – guess who? David Griffiths. Which I read, and sent back with a note saying ‘I enjoyed your story and I would love to take it, but first could you please settle the attached invoice for £54 which you owe me?’ And there was another off-shoot of that because around that same time Ken Bulmer apparently went to a local typewriter shop and the chap was saying ‘we’ve just had a fine machine come in, sir, used to belong to an author like yourself – chap called Dave Griffiths’. Poor Dave. The secret, I suppose, is to be careful who you’re dealing with, but anyway, that was that.

‘Shit has its own integrity’ says Gore Vidal. Meaning that even low-profile genre-fiction must have a degree of commitment. Just because a writer writes between formula-restrictions doesn’t mean he doesn’t also believe entirely in his own characters and stories. At least on one level. And Tubb’s very prolific production tends to obscure the fact that some of the material he produced at this time was also very good – like “Kalgan the Golden” which wasn’t even published under his own name (it was published in the ‘Vargo Statten British Space Fiction Magazine’ August 1955 as by ‘George Holt’). One of the best things I did – when I say good, the story was called “Sword of Tormain”. Now, I didn’t think this was any good at the timel, so I sent it off to the American ‘Planet Stories’ under the name ‘Eric Storm’. Stupid. ‘Cos they bought it. So I got no credit for it, no nothing. There it is – “Sword of Tormain”, not under my own name, but by ‘Eric Storm’ (‘Planet Stories’ March 1954). And – I didn’t really sell enough in America. I don’t know if I blame the agent for that, or blame me. You just wanted the money, and you wanted it quick. You couldn’t mess around. You couldn’t wait. To send stuff out to the States was heavy on postage, and it took a long time, especially thick manuscripts. I remember Bryan Berry (1930 – 1955, author of ‘The Immortals’) saying to me that he had done a couple of good things, and I said ‘what did you do?’ ‘I air-mailed them to the States.’ And I said ‘air-mailed?’ – I mean, it was expensive in those days. He said ‘well, if it’s something good I think it’s worth it!’ I don’t know if he sold them or not, he didn’t live long enough to make his mark. And – like the rest of us, he got ripped off. Another way the ‘Pocket Books’ worked was – you signed up, they took it all, and then they sold it to the States for ten times what they’d paid for it. And when he protested about this they said ‘look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do about this, we’ll be fair, we’ll give you a contract for two more novels on the old terms! – another two!’ And he got a bit disenchanted with it. It’s a shame. But that was the way it went.

Of course, writers were ripped off. But no-one was making huge profits from it, all the magazines and publishing imprints were low-budget shoestring operations one step away from bankruptcy. Certainly. And Alistair Patterson – who was also running around at the time, he was a helpful man to me. He was the editor of ‘Scion’, a sort-of old-time editor. He’d take you out and buy you a drink. Get you three parts cut and say ‘I’ll give you something. I’ll give you a commission, Ted. I want a 21,000-word three-part serial for whatever it was – the ‘Vargo Statten (British Space Fiction) Magazine’ . Which turned out to be “Ultimate Conflict”. (I jog his memory) No “Inevitable Conflict” (from the Jan 1954 issue). Things like that, you know. So I liked the man. I think he eventually got the chop and he was scraping the barrel one way or another, and oddly enough in a reverse kind of way, I did to him what Dave Griffiths had done to me. I didn’t rob him, don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t rob him. But he knew I was selling to – not the ‘Badger Books’ people, I forget the name, the title – Phil (Harbottle, SF archivist) would know. ‘Spencer’, that was it! they did my ‘Supernatural Stories’ in one bundle like that (issue no.9, published April 1957, is entirely made up of Tubb stories under six different aliases – Edward Richards, John Mason, Richard D. Ennis, L.C. Powers, Andrew Sutton, and Raymond L. Burton!). So old Patterson gave me his Detective manuscript and said ‘can you put this in for me?’ He was giving me something to sell to them. So I said ‘yeah, I’ll do it under the ‘Charles Grey’ house-alias, it’ll see you through.’ So I delivered it for him, they accepted it, but soon he was complaining ‘cos they took their time paying. Alistair couldn’t wait. I said to him ‘look, I haven’t received the cash myself yet.’ ‘Well, why can’t you give me an advance?’ ‘I haven’t got the money! We’re all a bit strapped around here.’ ‘Well, who’s publishing it?’ I made the mistake of telling him. ‘Spencer’ – I said, ‘they’ve got it’. So he goes down to ‘Spencer’ and demands ‘can you pay me for my novel?’ – which, as you recall, had been submitted by me, their author, under my alias. I have a feeling that’s why they didn’t take any more from me after that. He got paid though. That was Alistair, a nice person, a funny man, but he was fun.

There was an over-lap of genres, especially in those ‘Pulp’ days of the ‘Pocket Books’. His story “Spawn of Jupiter” in ‘Visions of Tomorrow’ (no.11 August 1970) starts off in a near-Western style. The Prospector coming into the saloon. Just that the setting happens to be on the moons of Jupiter. Ah, that’s the old saloon thing though, isn’t it? That’s the classic ‘tavern’. Obviously it couldn’t have been a Western, not with a title like “Spawn of Jupiter”. But it could have been Western-orientated. They all are. That’s what I was talking about earlier. When I had to write an additional sequence into the beginning of the short novel ‘City Of No Return’ to bring it up to the required word-length, I inserted a ‘tavern’ scene, it really had nothing to do with the novel at all. It merely introduced the characters, brought two people together. It’s one of the standards to me, of any novel – or any Western. You get a group of people together – in an environment where anything can happen. It’s a sort of repetitious thing you can use. I’ll have to read “Spawn of Jupiter” again, I think I’ve got a copy somewhere. After that… er, what happened after that?

Then the ‘Pocket-Book’ market imploded, and you became editor of the ‘Authentic SF’ magazine (from issue no.66, 15th February 1956). Yes, I churned them out, until the dreadful year 1954. Where the whole thing blew up, because of – Stephen Francis wasn’t it? They had this obscenity case, and the purveyors – the booksellers, were so scared about being swept up in the net they just wouldn’t touch any of it. ‘Pocket Books? – don’t want that, don’t want that!’ ‘Yes, but this is Science Fiction, this is Boxing, this is a Western’. ‘No, don’t want any of it, don’t want to know, they could have something nasty in there…’ And the whole thing went down. This wasn’t nice for me. I’d just got the house. So I had to get my old job back. And start working, and writing. And I’d write anything for anyone at that time. It was about that time that I did that Foreign Legion book. Then, it must have been about that time – ‘Authentic SF’ came along. Of course – with Bert Campbell initially running the thing, it was a little bit different to the rest. I mean, at least he had an idea what he wanted to do. But he was, at the same time, a realist. And honest enough to admit ‘I realise I’m paying you pennies’. And that was it. So I did a couple of things for him.

One of the things that characterised your period as editor of ‘Authentic SF’ was that many of the stories included were your own, under a variety of assumed guise. You didn’t always have a great deal of choice of material when I was doing ‘Authentic SF’. If people were good they were sending to the States. If they weren’t any good, you didn’t want to publish them. And that’s why quite often in ‘Authentic’ – it wasn’t big-headedness or anything, deadlines come and you’ve got to fill out, there’s nothing good come in, so I’ll write something myself, or I’ll put in one of mine. That’s why there were so many nom de plumes spread around in those issues. But it wasn’t because of greed or anything like that. We were offering very low money, and one of the things the publishers kept going on at me was ‘we need American authors, can’t you get some American authors?’ So I said ‘do you realise what you are paying these people?’ I forget. I could tell you, but I’d have to dig out the information. It’s gone clear out of my mind.

You managed to get Van Vogt into the mgazine. Yes – I got Horace Gold and I got Van Vogt and a few people like that. I think Van Vogt came to me through (Forrest J) Ackerman (SF archivist, super-fan, and ‘Authentic’s American correspondent). But I contacted Gold direct. Because he published some of my stuff. So he said – in a sense, ‘you rub my back, I’ll rub yours’. I said ‘I can’t give you much’. He said ‘doesn’t matter, it gets the name in print, I’m getting what I want to get’. So I ran several of Gold’s. And I went to the publisher and I said ‘there you are, I’ve got you some top-line American authors in the magazine’. And nobody knew who the hell they were! The ‘Authentic SF’ readership obviously wasn’t the ‘Astounding’ readership. So that was that.

‘Authentic SF’ was unusual for the time in that it also published a number of female writers. No, there was not a great deal of women. A great deal of ‘Alice Beecham’ was me. That was one ‘woman’. I don’t know if there were any others. There may have been a couple, I’m not sure if Hilary Bailey was one? but I wouldn’t know them, you see? All I went by was the names on the manuscripts. There was Joy Goodwin, I’m not sure if she was in there – or was that ‘Nebula’? There weren’t very many authoresses about. There weren’t many authors about. We were all doppelgangers of each other.

Yet one of the fine writers you helped discover was Barrington J Bayley. I don’t know if I ‘discovered’ Barrington J Bayley.

He was certainly frequently published in ‘Authentic SF’ – although he may have started in ‘Vargo Statten’. Yes, I’m trying to think who… he was one of Mike Moorcock’s friends. That’s right. He was one of that group. I published him, of course. You did, didn’t you? – he was a mate, so you put him in if you could. Not that they were any worse than anyone else. It was an interesting time, because you were young, you had the energy – and you had no critical faculty at all!

You frequently appeared in the very fine ‘Nebula’ magazine. Did you ever meet its editor, Peter Hamilton? Peter Hamilton… and ‘Nebula’. We have crossed each other’s paths. But I can’t visualise him. I not sure if we ever met. Yes we did. No – I’m thinking of Philip Harbottle now, when he was doing ‘Visions of Tomorrow’. So no – I don’t know if I ever met Peter Hamilton. I don’t know if he ever came down (from Scotland). He may have done. But he was a great source of… a lovely market for me. I used to like the stories in ‘Nebula’. I thought ‘Nebula’ was a very good mag actually. There was some very good stuff in it. And he seemed to like what I was doing. So we got on quite well. But it’s odd. Now people say we were doing it wrong. Ken Bulmer says we did it wrong. And I tend to agree with Ken, because he was saying we fell into a trap. We got into a trap where we had to write for the money, and because we had to have that money we had to write for the available markets. If you could do it again – you’d start writing slightly better, take a little bit longer over it, send it to America, get your name known over in the States, then we could do an Asimov, or a Pohl, or a Van Vogt. Then you think – well, yes, but could we have done that? Could we have afforded the time? And the answer is – of course, no. We couldn’t. The mortgage needed to be paid. And it needed to be paid now… not maybe, not in a year’s time. So it was really difficult.

The Martian story-cycle which became your well-received novel ‘Alien Dust’ (Boardman, 1955) came originally from stories featured in ‘New Worlds’. They were all put together under the title ‘Alien Dust’, yes. Not all of them – yes, I think, all of them. That’s right. And then again, one of those stories is the perfect case of me missing the boat entirely. It’s one of those – I won’t say ‘peevish’ things, because it’s nobody’s fault, it just happened. I wrote a story called “Precedent” about a stowaway on a ship bound for Mars. And they find him, and they have to throw him out. It was just a story. But I think it was Tom Godwin who wrote a story – “The Cold Equation” (‘Astounding/Analog’ August 1954), where they find the stowaway on the ship, but it’s a she. And they have to throw her out. And I look at that, and I think ‘oh dear’ – and I know I was first, not that it matters because you get overlap anyway, but why didn’t I think of a GIRL? Why did it have to be his bloody son-in-law or his brother-in-law or something, and the moral dilemma is ‘what would the wife say?’ Because logically again, at that time it would never have occurred to me that a woman would do that. It was just one of those things. It was a good story. But he got anthologised and lauded, rightly so. It even got on TV. While poor old “Precedent” just sat there, twitching…

INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW...

EC Tubb: Two Novels

Book Review of:

‘DEATH GOD’S DOOM’

(Cosmos Books – ISBN 0-9668968-0-7 – £6/$10)

& ‘THE RETURN:

DUMAREST SAGA no.32’

(Gryphon Books – ISBN 0-936071-83-4 – $20)

by E.C. TUBB

Tavern. Serving Wench. Enigmatic Mercenary with a mythic past. A Merchant ‘more bone than flesh’. Then a magical quest to find ‘Gualek The Golden, the City of Eternal Life lost in far ensorcelled Dashkit’. All predictable heroic fantasy ingredients at least since Robert E Howard first marketed the Conan franchise. Through Fritz Leiber’s mischievous ‘Ffahrd & Grey Mouser’. Until it explodes graphically into ‘2000AD’s Slaine, via Michael Moorcock’s doomed albino anti-hero Elric Of Melnibone. But those who know EC Tubb only through his long-distance ‘Earl Dumarest’ hyper-romps – or those who caught TV’s ‘Space 1999’ re-runs (he wrote some spin-offery for that too), might be unaware that in the 1950’s when Tubb’s domination of domestic pulp SF was virtually complete, it was he who first created a character called ‘Elric’. But this, he concedes generously, was probably just ‘a coincidence’. EC Tubb is now eighty, yet shows few signs of reducing his phenomenal creation of fictional worlds. Malkar’s fantasy medievalism was first glimpsed in Sam Moskowitz’s legendary ‘Weird Tales’ in a story editorially compared to the very finest of CL Moore. Now Malkar gets re-animated at (slim) novel-length, to battle the Elkite Pirates until ‘the deck ran red with blood that dripped into the sea where the creatures of the deep waited to feast on human flesh...’, and then penetrate a besieged city only to find himself trapped between dimensions by the satanic Lovecraftian demon-deity Phang. While the incidental death-toll multiplies at an absurdly horrific rate. Malkar’s entire company get monstrously-massacred – against the reader’s expectations, on two distinct occasions, and Malkar’s sole concession to human compassion reduces down to slaughtering the wounded to ‘end their suffering’. Death? ‘what matter when men are so plentiful?’ asks Seer logically. And although these escapades are eminently readable, Malkar never actually gets to reach his Lost City, it says so on the book-jacket so no plot-secrets are betrayed by so revealing. Tubb – it seems, is already saving Gualek for the soon-come sequel – ‘The Sleeping City’.

But as new hugely oaken gothic doors creak open for Malkar, they seem to be finally closing on Earl Dumarest. Since he first rose ‘through interminable strata of ebony chill to warmth, light and a growing awareness’ in ‘The Winds Of Gath’ (1967) the star-lost Dumarest’s quest to re-locate mythic Earth through galaxies of strangeness and Space Opera heroics was spun out on a two-books-a-year schedule throughout much of the 1970’s. Until the unpredictable vagaries of publishing, rather than the hideous machinations of his Cyclan cyber-adversaries brought the cycle to a premature end... if, indeed, thirty-one volumes later can be described as ‘premature’. Yet Tubb himself, and Dumarest-ophiles – who remain legion, continued to need the full closure that only Dumarest setting foot on Terra could provide. Hence ‘The Return’, rescued from a rare 1992 French-only edition, and wrapped in a new Ron Turner art-embellished English (and American-language!) format for the first time. So here is an older, meaner, more ruthless Dumarest, so close to journey’s-end that he’ll allow nothing to stop him. First escaping from what the computer-for-brains Cyclan calculate as a 99% probability of nuclear incineration, and using Raniang co-ordinates salvaged from the Cerevex Temple in ‘Dumarest 31: The Temple Of Truth’ – Dumarest planet-hops from fragrant Arpagus to the Space Scavenger’s world of Kaldar in the Lonagar Drift in the devious company of the beautiful but deadly Zaheva Postel. He kills Toibin in a knife-fight, to avenge the death of Dren Ford, thereby acquiring the Geniat, a Kaldar ship – and then it’s via stop-over journey-bites to encounter the lethal secret of ancient Fionnula – ‘redolent of decay’, to... well, Earth. But there’s time for a partial re-union with long-lost love Kalin of Solis (‘Dumarest 4’) and a final Cyclan face-off. So there’s some tying-off of loose strands. But not all. Tubb leaves questions dangling, and... without giving too much away – he never actually gets to land on Earth. So there’s still a potential ‘Dumarest 33’ lurking in there. Meanwhile, Tubb’s universe remains cruel, mean-spirited and unrelenting, as physically punishing as it is unforgiving. And there’s little in the way of cutting-edge high-tech hardware either – star-charts are listed Yellow Pages-style in printed almanacs, they still use radios, and its politics make Brute-Monetarism seem like a rest-cure, with just a slave-economy there for losers. His Raiders are strangely stylised pre-Mad Max curios who manifest villainy by singing raucous songs in taverns, and even gender roles are monochrome traditional. You suspect this is not deliberate retro, although it could be read as a kind of ironic post-modern 1950’s Steampunk-variant. Transistor-Punk perhaps, or SF-at-78rpm? You don’t come to Tubb expecting sophistication, but sometimes you get it anyway. You do come to Tubb for superlative story-telling skills. And that always comes as a given. At eighty years old, the man his biographer named ‘The Tall Adventurer’, can still be awesome.

In case of problems enquiries concerning Cosmos & Gryphon Books can be directed to Philip Harbottle, Cosmos Literary Agency, 32 Tynedale Avenue, Wallsend, Tyne & Wear NE28 9LS

Published in:-
‘ESSENTIAL SF no.4’ (UK -Feb 2000)
‘G.C. ROCKS no.9’ (UK - July 2000)