Interviewed on the New Books Network Regarding Swans and Nirvana

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/new-books-network/e/58779912

This was a bit of an honour and a pleasure. An author called Steve Naish caught me late last year and inquired whether I was open to being interviewed for the New Books Network (it’s also available on iTunes.)

Always a pleasure to have a conversation with someone: as a basic philosophy, I think humans require input in order to process it into meaningful or worthwhile output. That seems simplistic (it is) but what I mean is all the time in the world sitting in a room dreaming and musing doesn’t add up to anything compared to the momentum created by external stimuli and impetus. One would think that writing was a solitary business, something one did alone, but I think it’s swifter and more productive when it involves other people day by day to keep it moving and give something to play with or push against.

Steve’s most recent work is Riffs And Meaning: Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy. It immediately appealed to me personally because, on the first dubbed cassette of Nirvana I ever heard, way back in 1993, the space at the end of Side B had been filled with two Manics songs: ‘Vision Of Dead Desire’ and ‘You Love Us’. Killer tunes. But then I dived so completely into American music that I lost track of them altogether. Worse, MTV played that fecking awful ‘Design For Life’ song over and over for an entire summer of my teenhood and I couldn’t bring myself to touch the band. A few belated attempts to return to The Holy Bible never really picked up pace…

…Which is where I’ve been verrrrrry pleased to find this book and gain a context that made me want to go back and look over Manic Street Preachers. There’s something about reading passionate words and analysis that makes me look again with fresh eyes – gets me every time.

Riffs & Meaning