Hail, hail Keith Moon! – and the historical Who-ligan element at Faber and Faber

21/05/2012 Richard Kelly

Like most people associated with Fabers I’m proud to be of assistance around this august, 80-year-old, fiercely independent parish. But in my case an extra-special gratification is that Pete Townshend used to work here. And if you’re a mad Who fan, as am I, then such truth is golden.
It was in July 1983 that Townshend took up an editorial role at Faber, invited by then-publisher Matthew Evans. Townshend had always been interested in poetry and prose, and was increasingly worn down by the treadmill of his rock existence, especially so in the years after the untimely death of Keith Moon in September 1978.
Townshend’s brief at Faber was fairly free, and he oversaw a fair bit of new fiction and non-fiction, but one of his special enthusiasms was for books about rock and pop. He has always been one of the most eloquent advocates of these musical forms as art, even if it be fleeting and possibly ephemeral ‘pop art’. And so he commissioned inter alia Charles Shaar Murray’s award-winning Crosstown Traffic (on Hendrix), Jon Savage’s landmark England’s Dreaming (on punk), Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened (now a Faber Find), et cetera.
The rock/pop music list at Faber now under Lee Brackstone’s editorship remains a glorious thing, and naturally we like for Finds to supplement and embellish that list wherever possible, which is why I’m delighted that we are about to restore to print Full Moon: The Amazing Rock and Roll Life of Keith Moon, written by Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler (with Chris Trengrove and Peter Lawrence.)
‘Dougal’ grew up at the same time and in the same London milieu as the founding members (Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Moon) of The Who. Leaving school aged 15, he was first employed by HM Customs & Excise, but after finding his way into The Who’s inner circle he became personal assistant, chauffeur, bodyguard, minder and all-round majordomo to the mercurial genius Moon. He performed these functions for a tumultuous ten years, leaving in the year prior to Moon’s untimely death by overdose in September 1978.
Full Moon is the memoir of Dougal’s experiences, first published as a Star paperback in 1981 whereupon it was received rapturously by fans of Moon and The Who, also becoming an ‘instant classic’ account of rock ‘n’ roll excess, avidly consumed on tour buses everywhere. Our Faber Finds reissue of Full Moon will restore the book to print for the first time in 30 years, and also mark its debut as an e-book. It will contain an exclusive new interview about Moon and The Who with Peter Butler and Chris Trengove. And the authors have launched an excellent new website devoted to the book, which you can find here.
Full Moon is, you can imagine, a fairly rambunctious read. As Moon’s unauthorized biographer Tony Fletcher wrote in 1998, ‘The story of the Indian restauranteur, the six hookers, the cocaine and the after-dinner desserts alone renders it worth the [then] considerable second-hand price.’
But, aside from his flair for raising hell, if you need persuading about the musical genius of Moon then I would humbly recommend you take a look at the documentary clips below, both of which feature contributions from Dougal. In particular check out the segment on Moon from the authorised Who documentary Amazing Journey. No writing about music by non-musicians can properly instruct a sincere pilgrim on the true nature of the creative decision-making behind musical composition and performance. But good audiovisual documentary-making certainly can. You can’t beat musicians explaining how a piece of music works just by showing you. (Or as George Steiner memorably noted, ‘Asked to explain a difficult étude, Schumann sat down and played it again…’)
What documentary film can add to all this, and so set the seal on the excellence of the lesson, is by cutting from the demonstration to the subject in action, and the makers of Amazing Journey do this very well. So treat yourself to Keith Moon, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll drummer of them all. And keep ‘em peeled for Full Moon, coming round again soon…

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

‘Brilliant novelist’ David Stacton returns in Faber Finds: a tale of literary virtue rewarded

21/05/2012 Richard Kelly

David Stacton

Might David Stacton (1923-1968) be the most unjustly neglected American novelist of the post-WWII era? There is a case to be made, and Finds is pleased and proud to be making it, for we are about to bring back into print a great and glorious swathe of Stacton’s remarkable oeuvre. But don’t just take our word for it. You also have the seal and sanction of Larry McMurtry, the celebrated American novelist-screenwriter responsible for Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, who recently wrote to Finds Towers from Texas with some simple and hugely heartening words:
“David Stacton was a brilliant novelist – Faber is to be praised for getting him back in print.”
Meanwhile over at the Commonweal blog Anthony Domestico has been so kind as to wave an early flag for our Stacton project (and therein he tips the hat to Robert Nedelkoff who has been an incalculable help to our getting this exciting voyage underway.)
In a way, we could not want for a more apposite Finds author than Stacton. Across a published career of 15 years or so he put out 14 novels (under his name, that is – plus a further raft of pseudonymous genre fiction); many short stories; several collections of poetry; and three compendious works of non-fiction. He was first ‘discovered’ in England, and had to wait several years before making it into print in his homeland. Assessing Stacton’s career at the time of what proved to be his last published novel People of the Book (1965), Dennis Powers of the Oakland Tribune ruefully concluded that Stacton’s was very much ‘the old story of literary virtue unrewarded.’ Three years later Stacton was dead.
The rest has been a prolonged silence punctuated by occasional tributes and testaments in learned journals, by fellow writers, and around the literary blogosphere. But in 2011 New York Review Books reissued Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court, his eleventh novel and the second in what he saw as a trilogy on American themes. (History, and sequences of titles, were Stacton’s abiding passions.) Now in 2012 Faber Finds will offer selection of seven of Stacton’s novels.
Readers new to the Stacton oeuvre will encounter a novelist of quite phenomenal ambition. The landscapes and epochs into which he transplanted his creative imagination spanned vast distances, and yet the finely wrought Stacton prose style remained fairly distinctive throughout. His deft and delicate gifts of physical description were those of a rare aesthete, but the cumulative effect is both vivid and foursquare. He was, perhaps, less committed to strong narrative through-lines than to erecting a sense of a spiritual universe around his characters; yet he undoubtedly had the power to carry the reader with him from page to page. His protagonists are quite often haunted – if not fixated – figures, temperamentally estranged from their societies. But whether or not we may find elements of Stacton himself within said protagonists, for sure his own presence is in the books – not least by dint of his incorrigible fondness for apercus, epigrams, pontifications of all kinds.
(BTW on this aphoristic gift of Stacton’s, you might also like to check out the following appreciation by Jim O’Brien, which offers the added treat of reproducing a couple of original paperback covers arising from Stacton’s pseudonymous literary half-life.)
The first titles in the Stacton reissues will be A Fox Inside and The Self-Enchanted. The above-mentioned People of the Book, and the ‘Invincible Questions’ trilogy, are among those that are to come. Much, much more to follow, I hope and trust. Don’t tell me you’re not curious…

Posted in Appreciations, Reissues | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

Pop, still eating itself

21/05/2012 Richard Kelly

Bless my soul, Finds has merited a mention in the Oxonian Review (est. 2001)! And not for our reissuing of Lord Blake’s Disraeli, or the Tolstoy Diaries, or even of Froissart’s Chronicles – but, rather, by means of a glowing review of Dave Rimmer’s superb Like Punk Never Happened.
David Lichfield is the author of said review, and certainly ‘gets’ and embraces everything of import about the book. Worth reading in full, but this is his peroration:
“Nearly thirty years after its original publication, Rimmer’s book is a depressingly relevant read. With the recent revolution in music consumption and the related decline in sales, some may argue that we need our pop stars to go the extra mile – to be controversial, and to maintain star qualities that enable them to stand out from the throng of musicians whose work is available at the click of a button. While we want our pop stars to be made of different ingredients to the man in the street, the appeal of showbiz media demonstrates how invigorated we feel when they are brought down a peg or two. Yet, as a lesson for history and a warning against the destructive tendencies of fame and fortune, Like Punk Never Happened is as relevant to 2012 as to 1985.”

Posted in Miscellaneous |
Leave a comment

“Adventures in e-publishing”

21/05/2012 Richard Kelly

Roger Morris is both an accomplished author of historical crime fiction (who had the quite blistering idea, inter alia, of making Dostoyevsky’s Porfiry into the star of his own dedicated series of St. Petersburg investigations), and an asture observer of current trends in publishing, to which topic he devotes a section of his website. There he has conducted and posted a number of highly interesting interviews with people who have a professional stake in the e-publishing game, and recently he added me to that list with a Q&A about Faber Finds and related matters. I hope you may find most of this discussion diverting, but if I had to pick out a ‘money quote’ for my own purposes it might well be this:
“In respect of personal taste – I have taken on one or two titles that are especially dear to me, but mainly Finds is not about my personal taste: it’s about the myriad tastes of readers out there. I will happily publish anything that seems to be of real distinction, in whatever genre…”

Posted in Miscellaneous |
Leave a comment