There was a nice extra moment of connection in preparing this one. As you’ll hopefully know by now, a big part of the ethos of publishing these conversations is to show how “the culture” is made up from life stories intersecting. When the life experiences of people from very different backgrounds and generations meet via certain cultural reference points, bigger patterns emerge. At some point we’ll actually do some “dataviz” stuff with this, because this isn’t just vibes: once you start mapping those points of connection, the patterns are actually tangible.
Anyway: lately Hugh Taylor has been transcribing the Q&As. Hugh is a great commentator on all sorts of aspects of culture – most lately on the Skill Issue Substack he does with Chris Watson from the mighty Rye Wax1, talking about games, club music and politics. When he came back with this transcript, he delightedly announced that he and his friends as 18 year olds used to eagerly attend Jude’s genre-colliding do at The Lion in Stoke Newington, which she mentions here. It was a little thing, but it added yet another layer to the old palimpsest that we’re building here.
There were lots of connections already. Brian and I have known Jude for years as a good friend, close enough that we’ve all been to mutual friends’ weddings and funerals – and Jude and I both shared the unique formative experience of working for Word magazine in the late 00s and early 10s, me as a freelancer, and her in various roles including reviews editor. More of that in the conversation, too: this was a great one to get into, in fact, because I always think that media as subculture is under-discussed, but the real interactions and friendships that form around it do end up being part of the fabric of things just as much of those between musicians, artists, DJs or whatever.
I’ve always known Jude as a phenomenally honest writer. I can’t find the exact Pauline Kael quote right now but she said something about the purpose of a critic being simply to add something extra to the experience of the artwork, and that’s very much what Jude does. She really, really cares about the craft of what she’s doing, but has no desire to show off, no anxiety about what other people might think high or low brow, and doesn’t tailor her tastes or opinions to match flavour of the month hype from any cliques. That latter part might sound contradictory given what we talk about here regarding friendships and mentorship within culture journalism, but there’s a fine but very important distinction between that sense of open mutual regard between colleagues and the opaque games of power and privilege that all too often define who gets to do what in the world we work in.
I hope all that comes over in this conversation, it was done quite late in the evening on Zoom between our respective home offices in the New Forest (me) and the hills of the Welsh Borders (her), and it was a lot of fun. We talked a lot about indie and particularly indie clubs, folk, post-rock, and yes, working for the best magazines in the world. If you want to get to know Jude’s super-direct approach to music writing, she does tons for The Guardian and The Observer, she’s done some great documentaries for BBC Radio, she has her own outstanding Substack, and maybe best of all is her book The Sound of Being Human – a uniquely accessible combination of memoir, science and love letter to music. You can see her in person too, if you want to go to her Bright Field event in Abergavenny at the end of June. But hopefully, you’ll also get a sense of it here: as ever, everything she cares about is right out there in the open.
So for a lot of these interviews, we've told people's life stories related to music chronologically – but you've already done that in your book, and we want people to buy your book! However, there's one thing which I don't think you exactly in the book: can you remember the first music that made you feel a part of something socially, outside of your family?
Hmmm... let me think. It's funny because yeah, with music, when I was younger, as a child, it was very much: this is something that's mine, it's nobody else's, it's my private world, it's my companion. Not like a band is my companion, but the music itself is my companion. Hmm, first music I liked that made me feel part of a group? It's probably by the time I started making friends in secondary school, in comprehensive... [ponders, then lights up] The thing that's come to my head is “Things That Make You Go Hmmm...”2 [laughs] – which I remember winning in a raffle in a school disco. I do write about this a little in the book, school discos and how I had a strained relationship with it – because I knew I loved dancing but I always felt very self-conscious, because there were the pretty girls, and the rugby lads, and I didn't know how I fit into all this, or who I was in the middle of it all, and how do I dance – but I do remember that, the DJ played it that night at the school disco, first or second year or comp... “Step On,” they always used to play, and that – and I won the single in a little raffle, I remember my friends being excited about that: my friend Claire who's still my friend. Dancing to those I felt part of something. And of course when Neneh Cherry was on Top Of The Pops, and in school the next day the other girls had seen her on there – this I did mention in the book, and afterwards so many women have gone “OHMYGODIREMEMBERTHATSOWELL!!” Being a certain age, tween as we'd say nowadays, and seeing this woman who's so opposite what I was in so many ways – no, not opposite, different, completely different – but I loved everything she was doing. And we'd bond over that, but mostly bonding was about dancing and singing and copying routines actually – a very girl pop sort of thing.
It's so funny the way the most dweeby of school discos can plug us into the communal experience. For us it was so notable when “Jack Your Body” and “Pump up the Volume” came out, I vividly remember these girls from my village going “yeah it's this new thing, it's called house, it's got a special dance you do to it” and doing this weird shuffly leg thing.
Oh I loved house music, I loved everything around it... when I was ten! But it was from a Smash Hits position, I drew lots of smiley faces in different configurations on my pencil case – you know, those long leather pencil cases you used to get – and mine was covered with smileys with eyepatches on, and smileys with berets on, all those different versions of them. I always liked the idea of the visual world around music, of the art, whether that be cover art or street art, just creativity in making worlds. Thinking about it, Smash Hits made me feel part of a community, liking songs through it made me feel part of a community, even though I didn't read it with my friends – that was just me, at home, desperately wanting to write to some penpals3 but being a bit too nervous [chuckles]. Magazines always made me feel part of a community of people through music – Smash Hits really powerfully did that for me, later Select really powerfully did that for me, and then Word, actually, genuinely really powerfully did that for me for five months before I magically got to work for it.
I remember getting the bus from this terrible job I had for this corrupt charity in Acton up a dodgy fire escape run by a racist, sexist, Islamophobic absolute arsehole – but through which I did meet some good friends who are still my friends, mind – and Word had come out, I'd seen it in the train station in Swansea with my mum and dad when I went to visit them and I went [gasp] what is this, oh my god it's got Nick Cave on the cover and it's got headlines on the cover that are a bit Smash Hits-y and a bit playful and funny, and every Thursday of the week it came out, I'd get the 207 bus on my lunch break over from Acton to Ealing and if the express bus came it would be brilliant because I could get there and back and actually eat my lunch [laughs]. But when I was in those pages I felt like I was in a community, I did.
There were other times music brought me those things... at sixth form when I met my best mate, who's still my best mate, Dan, Dan C, not the Dan I married, and we started going to indie clubs in Swansea. Then when I was first in London meeting people on forums and we'd go out to gigs. On the weekend just now in Stroud4, Jarvis played “I Wanna be Your Dog” and oh god, every time I hear the beginning of that... oh god honestly – I used to go to Trash before it really kicked off, not because I'm cool but this forum I was on the people used to go to it, and they'd always play “I Wanna be Your Dog” and they'd always play “Blue Monday”, and it reminded me I basically stopped going because I wasn't much of a clubber and just wanted to go to gigs, and the week after the last one I went to The Strokes were there, and it became really cool, just after I stoped going there. [giggles]
Well of course, Erol5 was a jobbing Camden indie DJ every night of the week before Trash really took off right? It's funny that there's this real continuity of indie clubs through the years. I'm, what, four years older than you – and when I was in sixth form, start of the 90s, I'd go to indie nights and yes, hear “I Wanna be Your Dog” and “Blue Monday” along with “Ace of Spades”, Smiths, Cure, lots of rock and alternative stuff that was already older, as well as the grebo and indie-dance and Manchester stuff and all that of the time...
Right, so I went to a tertiary college, my school was one of those ones that you did five years then left – probably because they didn't think anyone would do anything after that anyway, heh. So the tertiary college, just up the road from me, really close to me where I lived, was totally amazing, really the making of me in in so many ways. There's so many people who've gone into creative careers that cite Gorseinon College, just an incredible place, no uniform, call the teachers by their first name, there's this amazing opera director called Adele Thomas from Port Talbot who did this amazing interview with The Observer last year6 about how it changed her life, and I think it did for me as well. So about that time I started meeting other people from other places, started going to Baron's nightclub in Swansea which had an indie club on Thursdays and a funk and “lounge” stuff club on Wednesdays.
This is '94 to '96, peak Britpop days, I remember first day of going to sixth form, September 1994, I'd just had my braces out, I had a Supersonic t-shirt on – Oasis – I was like “Yessss, my new life starts here!” It felt big! But yeah going to those clubs was great, I went to The Indie Thing in The Zone too, what I loved as well in Swansea is quite a goth town... city, sorry, got to call it a city, but it always felt like a town, Swansea. It's quite a goth city. So you'd have the goths coming to Baron's, and it was this club night Tipping Point where you'd have loads of grunge, Nirvana, Soundgarden, all this stuff, you'd have “Cannonball” by The Breeders which became a real lodestar of a song for us and our gang which I wrote about in the book – it's one of those songs for me that absolutely is community. Anyway I was talking to a friend recently and I don't know if this is exactly true or if this memory has kind of invented itself, I really wish I knew if it was true, but they'd play stuff from the 80s like The Smiths and The Housemartins, and also goth stuff like Fields of the Nephilim, and I've got this distinct memory of all the goths dancing to the Neph, then starting dancing to “Happy Hour” by The Housemartins7. I don't know if that happened, I hope it happened, but all the goths did dance to the poppier end, certainly The Smiths, whether The Housemartins was just a bit far out of the goths' framework I don't know.
But we had loads of grunge kids, then the goths, then the skinny t-shirts and short hair – on boys and girls – started to appear obviously. That period, it was as much about Blur and Pulp and Oasis. I mean, my love of Oasis stopped when I saw them at Glastonbury in 1995 and thought, “Ooh they're thuggish and a bit downmarket and their crowd are horrible!” [laughs] But Blur and Pulp were as important to us and our gang of music lovers – and I think a lot of music lovers – as Portishead and Tricky and Underworld and Orbital... and obviously being where we were Gorky's8 started coming through – I had a boyfriend who made me amazing mixtapes of weird Welsh stuff as well, all that psychedlic Welsh stuff – and quite a bit of Scottish stuff, Urusei Yatsura, all that early Chemikal Underground stuff, Delgados... there was so much different stuff going on that it was really exciting. And radio was amazing then. Radio 1 was amazing then. I loved Radio 1's mish-mash of everything at the time, and poetry with Mark & Lard in the evenings... it's funny talking now to friends who've got kids who are teenagers about how different things are now, but what we would do in the evening is listen to the radio! One of us would write a letter in and we'd be listening wondering if our letter would be read out by Mark Radcliffe, it was quite lovely really [laughs, sighs].
There you go – Housemartins, almost ten years after the fact, that's indie club continuity again. This is clubbing history but it's very unwritten, compared obviously to everything that came from acid house, which itself is only really in the past decade or so starting to be properly documented... But there was this continuity in alternative clubs, doubly so in smaller cities and town where everyone bundles together because they have to...
Yeah. I never danced to acid house or anything like it until I went to Tribal Gathering in 1997. The dance clubs in Swansea were just no go areas, in my head, or for our gang, because they were full of scary townies who would beat us up! [laughs] I don't know if they would have beaten us up, I did go to a few things, there was something I went to with some girls from college – first time I drank three pints one after another and was sick all over my dress, one of those nights – but thinking about it I didn't like going into those clubs because there was a lot of predatory older blokes as well. I had a couple of experiences where I was just “I don't like this, this isn't very nice, I'm 16, 17, and they know I'm 16, 17...” I mean, indie clubs, you still want to go there and get off with people obviously but it was just more friendly and more of a laugh.
It's just the DJs you have to watch out for in indie clubs... there seemed to be a tradition of indie DJs with way younger goth girlfriends round where I lived.
Not ours, we were lucky in that respect, they were very nice!
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