Forthcoming in Finds: Brigid Brophy, in some style

17/12/2012 Richard Kelly

Brigid Brophy by Jerry Bauer

Sometimes at Finds Towers we do surprising things – reissuing titles by authors who, for whatever peculiar reason, have never found the champions they patently deserved – and other times we do perfectly obvious things. Returning Brigid Brophy to print (and adding her finest works to Kindle) has to count in the second column, and it’s news about which we are deeply delighted. We give thanks to Brophy’s daughter Kate Levey for enabling this project for 2013, in the course of which we will reissue Flesh, The Finishing Touch, The Snow Ball, The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl, Mozart the Dramatist, and both of Brophy’s books about Aubrey Beardsley, Black and White and Beardsley and his World.

As Stephen Page said rightly at the time of Finds’ launch in 2008, the business of reissuing ‘lost’ books is good work that we know to be not entirely our own. And I’m furthermore thrilled to say that Finds has comrades in the Brophy Appreciation Society, for The Coaelacanth Press have just brought back her 1956 novel The King of a Rainy Country in a truly elegant edition endorsed by Ali Smith, Paul Bailey, Terry Castle and D.J. Taylor. In her fascinating and very felt introduction to the novel Coelacanth editor Phoebe Blatton nods to the ‘scandalous’ neglect of Brophy, but it does look as if that air of scandal is now being dispelled. (At the back of the Coelacanth volume is an essay by Jennifer Hodgson of the Dalkey Archive who have for some years been offering Brophy’s In Transit from 1969.)

Brophy is one of a select band of writers who have suffered probably for being too good. As D.J. Enright noted in a piece for the LRB, her novels ‘have often been described as ‘brilliantly written’: a judgment which can have done her sales little good. (‘Don’t bother with that book – it’s brilliantly written!’)’ But high prose style – which sometimes, however stupefyingly, gets mistaken for artifice or mere surface polish – is most of the matter in this game of ours. ‘True stylishness’, says Enright, ‘always has a point, and makes it firmly yet discreetly.’ Brophy’s firmness was well known to those who shepherded her writing into print. As her former agent Giles Gordon wrote in a fond obituary in 1995, ‘woe betide the “editor” who tried to rewrite her fastidious, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semi- colon (or vice versa), or try to spell “show” other than “shew”, slavish Shavian that Brophy was.’

In fact I was smiling to myself just this morning over ‘shew’ as it appears throughout my paperback copy of Flesh. Your correspondent first discovered Brophy in the late 1980s, not long after watching a mid-1960s TV interview with Yukio Mishima from the archives of some BBC literary half-hour. The host of said show, a nervy and shock-headed chap who sounded rather as though he’d only recently come down from Oxford, noted Mishima’s customary interest in fleshly matters and remarked that there was a fine novelist in English – Brophy! – who ‘wrote very much on the theme of sex.’ Mishima only blinked in reply: a mix, perhaps, of Japanese politeness and his probable private view that no-one else wrote on ‘the theme of sex’ quite as he did. In any event I took away from this exchange that I ought really to be reading Brigid Brophy. And though it was not a simple matter in 1989, copies of Flesh, The Finishing Touch and The Snow Ball came my way and were all I hoped for and more.

As I recall, in new books 1989 was also the year – certainly the summer – of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, and that novel’s debt to the oeuvre of Ronald Firbank would have been a puzzling business to me if I hadn’t already known Brophy’s The Finishing Touch…

Anyhow, much, much more on this subject to come. For now we wish only to convey our excitement in this project, and to spread it around.

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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…

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‘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…

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Celia Dale 1912-2011: ‘Quiet, clever, subtle – and terrifying’

09/01/2012 Richard Kelly

You sometimes hear said, with appropriate regret, that these days we talk so much about ‘communities’ in the hope of disguising the fact that so few of us live in them. True or not, communities can at least thrive even by longer-distance connections that are made by fellow-feeling rather than proximity; and this is particularly true, I think, of writers – writers in genres maybe above all?
I hear now that the crime novelist Celia Dale passed away on December 31 2011, not far short of her 100th birthday – and I hear this because Martin Edwards, himself a well-regarded practioner of the crime novel, has noted her passing at his blog and suggests that he might even have been the first person to post an obituary tribute, in which he hails her ‘spare and highly effective style, coupled with a good deal of insight into human nature.’ (Edwards also collated some useful extant praise: ‘The late Harry Keating said that she had “the accuracy, understanding and quiet wit of Jane Austen”, and Susan Hill lauded her as “a past mistress of the bizarre truth behind normal facades”.’ Elsewhere Ruth Rendell is impressively on record that ‘Celia Dale’s writing is quiet, clever, subtle – and terrifying. I can’t think of anyone whose stories of suspense I appreciate more.’
It was our pleasure at Finds to reissue a quartet of Dale’s best novels back in 2008, and you will find more information about them by following these links to our pages for A Helping Hand, A Dark Corner, A Spring of Love, and Sheep’s Clothing.

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The shade of Robert Aickman pervades Radio 4… Thursday December 15 2011

12/12/2011 Richard Kelly

Here at Finds Towers we of course need no persuading that Robert Aickman is a) as fine a writer of ‘strange stories’ as ever lived, b) still not fully recognised for all his powers, and c) tremendously well suited to the wireless. Thankful news, then, that this Thursday December 15 from 11.30-12.00pm BBC Radio 4 offers ‘The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman’, written and presented by the actor and screenwriter Jeremy Dyson, alumnus of the League of Gentlemen who has adapted Aickman’s work in various forms.
According to the BBC’s press release:

‘By speaking with fans of Aickman and introducing students to his work for the first time, Dyson argues that Aickman’s literary gifts have been undervalued and during his lifetime he should have received greater critical acclaim.’

Quite. The PR also offers an intriguing fact of which I was hitherto unaware: Aickman was the grandson of a Victorian novelist named Richard Marsh whose The Beetle (1897) was, apparently, “in its time as popular as Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Suitably murky genetic materials, then…

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Desperate Reader on Robert Aickman’s ‘The Wine Dark Sea’: A subtle invader of dreams…

05/10/2011 Richard Kelly

A fine, eloquent and very accessible appreciation of Robert Aickman’s The Wine Dark Sea has just been posted by first-rate book blogger Desperate Reader. Here are the money passages for our purpose:

…‘The Wine Dark Sea’ has been a bit of a revelation… My first impression was that this was a collection of ghost stories – I started with one called ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ where a man develops an unhealthy relationship with the telephone and a voice on the other end of it. It’s deeply unsettling both as a tale of the supernatural and because I can no longer imagine how I functioned without my mobile phone. I love the way that Aickman plays with the idea of something simultaneously connecting the user to the outside world and cutting them off from it. The next story that attracted me was ‘Never Visit Venice’ which is also deeply unsettling but for different reasons, not so ghostly but rather straight up horror. By the time I’d finished the title story it became clear that Aickman just deals in the odd. This is the kind of odd that sticks in the mind worrying away at your imagination until you’re not at all sure what’s what.
The end result is this; I’ve had some very strange dreams, spend less time with my telephone always within arms reach and will probably be reaching for this around Halloween next year when I want something a little bit spooky but also reasonably subtle with it. I’m also confident about spending my hard earned cash on Faber Finds that appeal to me in the future which is daunting because their list is long and full of temptation…

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‘One of the finest British novelists of the twentieth century’: Patrick Hamilton by Martyn Waites

26/08/2011 Richard Kelly

Martyn Waites photographed by Charlie Hopkinson © 2009

Now then: a proper treat for you’s dear readers, moreover a pleasurable privilege for the Finds blog to hereby unveil another guest-author contribution – this from the Newcastle upon Tyne-born novelist Martyn Waites, much-acclaimed author of the Tyneside-set Joe Donovan crime novels and also one-half of the bestselling alias that is Tania Carver. Below, on the occasion of our Twopence Coloured reissue, Martyn reflects on the intriguing cult of Patrick Hamilton: the adaptations of his work by which Hamilton is (for better or worse) most widely known, and (rather in contrast) the authentic, unforgettable black stuff for which he is best loved by true aficionados. Over to you, Mr Waites:

I was walking through London recently with the American writer Megan Abbott, author of the wonderful THE END OF EVERYTHING. We were looking for somewhere to eat and, more importantly, drink. I suggested Fitzrovia, not least for its literary heritage, and reeled off a few names that I thought might interest her. Of course, Patrick Hamilton was mentioned.
‘Patrick Hamilton!’ said Megan, visibly excited by his name. ‘I’ve just read HANGOVER SQUARE. Isn’t it fantastic? He’s hardly known back home but I bet he’s huge here.’
Well . . . yes and no. He’s certainly a household name in my house. And probably a selected few other houses as well. But not much beyond that, I reckon. Is that a problem? Well, I rate him as one of the finest British novelists of the twentieth century. And I believe anyone who claims to care about English literature should have read at least one of his novels. Perhaps the peerless psychological Brit noir thriller HANGOVER SQUARE, still in print. Or TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY, his heartbreaking trilogy of obsessive, wrong-hearted love and the harsh erosion of dreams by a brutal reality. Or my favourite, SLAVES OF SOLITUDE, a brilliant, symbolic restaging of the Second World War with a disparate, motley collection of bottom-rung characters set in a seedy lodging house in Henley Upon Thames.
But I doubt many have. Perhaps people may be vaguely aware of Hamilton through film versions of his plays and novels: the awful, narratively disembowelled HANGOVER SQUARE, George Cukor’s enjoyably lurid and melodramatic production of GASLIGHT, starring an Oscar-winning Ingrid Bergman and a vowel-strangling Charles Boyer, or Hitchcock’s gimmicky, tricksy attempt at ROPE. Maybe even the TV series of the Gorse novels, THE CHARMER, starring Nigel Havers.
On the one hand it’s a terrible thing that such a brilliant writer has been so badly neglected. Admittedly there are occasional attempts to remind the general public who he is. A biography every decade or so, a documentary, the BBC’s excellent version of TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY. And now the reissue of TWOPENCE COLOURED, which is a genuine cause for celebration. The Hamilton fan brigade (of which I’m a fully paid up member) are thrilled to bits by all this, but I fear that by and large these events don’t cause much of a ripple with public consciousness.
But is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean, I’m sure it is in terms of sales for Faber or viewing figures for the BBC. But I recall a conversation a few years ago with a friend about another writer – a ‘writer’s writer’, if you will, which usually means they’re read by other writers and nobody else. ‘He’s so good,’ my friend said, ‘that on the one hand I want to tell everyone about him. But on the other I just want to keep him for myself.’
And that’s how I feel about Patrick Hamilton. On the one hand I wish everyone could read him and appreciate his very individual brilliance. But I also freely acknowledge that with his focus on marginalised and often doomed, self-destructing characters, his dark, downbeat style and the pall of human despair that so often permeates his writing… not everyone will get him. Or necessarily want to get him. And, for those of us who genuinely love his work, if we’re honest, that’s fine by us. Because that puts him in the category of ‘special’ or ‘treasured.’ A writer who you have to deliberately seek out, but once you’ve made the effort the rewards are immense.
So who should read him? Well, any reader who appreciates a writer who can understand and illuminate the human condition to the degree Hamilton can, even its darkest aspects – he’s for them. Any reader who appreciates well-drawn characters, strong narratives and emotionally literate storytelling – he’s for them. In fact, any reader who loves good writing.
And to be honest, whom does that leave out?

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FaberFinds @FutureBook: A mission statement…

16/08/2011 Richard Kelly

Last week your correspondent contributed a post to the Bookseller’s excellent FutureBook blog, a rolling commentary on digital developments in publishing and one that I consider utterly essential to publishers and authors (and so, by extension, to readers…?) – for all that it occasionally induces alarm/panic over the pace of change we’re witnessing in the business of books. But then the challenge, as always, is not merely to get up on the surfboard but thereafter to stay on the wave… I concede that I am quite possibly the least contentious/controversial poster FutureBook has yet had, attributable perhaps to the Janus face of Faber Finds which looks, yes, forward to the future of production technology but necessarily back into the past of literary endeavour. Still, and as I say in the piece, we’re running to catch up on that score.
The following bits of my post are the ones that would count as News around this parish:

“In the months ahead I hope readers will see an increased thematic coherence to Finds publishing, a sense of different topics and literary flavours being curated. Our August offerings, for instance, include special focuses on the history and aesthetics of the English suburbs, and on the legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851…
Anniversary publishing has been a function of Finds from the start… Looking ahead to September, we will be pleased to join the wider celebration of Sybille Bedford’s centenary by returning to print her marvellous Faces of Justice…
I’m also committed to Finds offering a kind of complement to Faber’s front-list publishing, a means for readers to explore more deeply the subject areas of Faber’s lead titles. On that score I’m especially delighted that in September, alongside Nick Rankin’s Ian Fleming’s Commandos, Finds will offer The Hazard Mesh by J. A. C. Hugill, a veteran of Fleming’s WWII intelligence unit whose 1945 account of same was one of Nick’s key sources, and for which he has now written a splendid new introduction.”

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Willy Goldman’s ‘East End My Cradle’ at QMU

27/07/2011 Richard Kelly

A note is in order here concerning a quite splendid seminar that was held a fortnight ago at the Queen Mary, University of London, in honour of Willy Goldman’s East End My Cradle on the occasion of its return to print through Finds.
The afternoon’s discussion, convened and introduced by Dr Nadia Valman, provided a wealth of fascinating insights into the working class Jewish East End milieu from which Goldman and his writing emerged; and thanks to erudite contributions from (inter alia) Valentine Cunningham, Ian Haywood, and the author’s son Bill Goldman, one felt a stimulating sense of the larger social and aesthetic issues that attend the idea of ‘working class writing.’
Of course Finds is pleased to have other distinguished examples of same on its list, including James Hanley’s Furys sequence. But Ian Haywood made an intriguing point early in the session about the problems of ‘authenticity’ that are commonly (rightly or wrongly) thought to apply to writers of working class origin. Haywood cited the example of how Alan Sillitoe wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning while in the company of Robert Graves in Mallorca, and further amused the audience in noting that he had spoken to the Guardian for a piece on this very subject to be published the next day. Sure enough, said piece included a version of what Haywood told the QMU seminar: “the term ‘working-class’ writer has always been something of an oxymoron because at the point at which this writer gets published, they must have moved away from their original circumstances.”
There was a vaguely analogous experience to Sillitoe’s in Willy Goldman’s life, in that thanks to the fine patronage of John Lehmann (characterised with fondness by Willy’s son Bill as a certain type of ‘Etonian socialist’) Willy was able to draft a substantial part of East End My Cradle while resident in Vienna. But otherwise his material circumstances were generally straitened, and they certainly hampered his hopes for more ambitious writing projects; instead he was, like so many writers of proletarian background at that time, primarily an author of ‘vignettes, small things, bits’ (cf. Valentine Cunningham). But – and by common consent – what magnificent ‘bits’ they were! (If you’re in need of testimonials just look at some of the glowing tributes paid to East End My Cradle as are gathered here.)
In such good and learned company your correspondent learned many things over two hours, among them the story of Stephen Duck, the agricultural labourer who became a poet at the court of Queen Caroline; also the history of that declension whereby the ground-breaking demotic ‘wot?’ of Charles Dickens became the ‘vot?’ of Jewish dialect writers.
Probably my favourite contributions were those of Bill Goldman, obviously an unbeatable witness in respect of his father’s character, who spoke of being taken as a child to anti-fascist demos of the 1930s where he got the chance to shout at Oswald Mosley from three feet away; and who also related Willy’s hardly improvable verdict upon The Devils, Dostoyevsky’s great novel of a violent and fissiparous Russian nihilist ‘cell’ – namely that the book seemed to Willy a thoroughly accurate portrait of the Stepney Communist Party…
Thanks are due to Nadia Valman and QMU, to Bill Goldman and to all the speakers for making such a fine day happen. East End My Cradle is available to order here.

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Dave Rimmer’s ‘Like Punk Never Happened’: such stuff as pop dreams are made on…

25/07/2011 Richard Kelly

Rock & Pop are such relatively youthful art-forms that Your Correspondent still finds himself surprised by how swiftly the music of his adolescence (1983-1989) has begun to look a little sepia-toned round the edges. (Presumably one’s parents came to feel the same way about A Hard Day’s Night…) In referring to the ‘look’ over the sound, of course, one admits how important was the image-repertoire of 1980s pop to the appreciation of whatever actual music the bands came up with… Which is not for one minute to propose that the Sounds of the Eighties don’t stand up to airplay today, because a swathe of present-day heroes/heroines from Lady GaGa to Alison Goldfrapp might otherwise be struggling.
The BBC’s Top of the Pops, once an ineluctable presence in TV schedules, now feels like half a world away, but without doubt the musically-inclined youth of my generation were sure to study it on a Thursday evening. Thus in the autumn of 1982 I was only one of millions of kids who watched the debut appearance of Boy George and Culture Club performing ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ And, as would soon become clear, my dad was only one of millions of parents also watching to put the baffled question: ‘Is that a boy or a girl…?’
Pop in its profusion gives us a feel for generational shifts and even at the time it was clear that 1980s pop felt coloured by glamour, conspicuous consumption and a liberal dose of gender-bending. The spiked hair, bondage trousers and safety pins of punk (if you like) had been swapped for eyeliner, teased highlights, and parachute-like blouses and suits by Yohji Yamomoto.
The indispensable periodical that charted all of this pop-cultural foment was Smash Hits, which I bought loyally most every fortnight until I was 13 or 14; and its star reporter was Dave Rimmer, whose interviews I found increasingly fascinating – even more so those he contributed to The Face, the rather more grown-up and hollow-cheeked Defining Magazine of the 1980s, to which I duly graduated. Rimmer’s form in this field can be usefully studied here through the listings of the subscription site Rock’s Back Pages. (Many of these articles I remember in vivid detail, above all ‘Duran Duran: The Pop Dream Come True’ from the December 1985 issue of The Face.)
But Rimmer also committed his expert and access-fuelled insight to between-covers, with the book-length study Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop, first published by Faber in 1985 at the instigation of the publisher’s then pop culture editor Pete Townshend. In truth Rimmer’s de facto agent and editor on the book would be his Smash Hits colleague Neil Tennant, who first came up with the ironic expression that gave the book its title (and would in due course come up with a considerable contribution to the pop music that defined the era.)
Finds is thrilled to be returning Like Punk Never Happened to readers this month, including a brand new preface in which Dave Rimmer elaborates on the story adumbrated above of the book’s making. At its page on our ordering site you will see some of the tributes paid it at the time in the rock press. I would also cite this recent eloquent tribute from Rob Sheffield, contributing editor at Rolling Stone (and author of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran):

“The early 1980s were a golden age for British new wave scam artists with fire-hazard hair, as Adam Ant, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Kajagoogoo, etc. made some of the most brilliant pop records ever devised. Rimmer tells the story, and it’s the funniest, smartest book I know about the connections between pop glitter and real-life human passion, the erotics of fandom, or the dirty details of the Boy George vs. Frankie Goes to Hollywood feud.”

Below you can, like me, beckon in the past by the madeleine of that first Culture Club performance on TOTP. And under that is the great Dave Rimmer himself, in conversation with your correspondent (recorded in the Faber and Faber archive) about the origins of Like Punk, the crises that consumed Boy George’s career in the course of its writing, and the vida loca of covering the pop game in an era when record companies still thought it wise to pay for journalists to accompany their acts on the road and stand at close quarters by them…

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