Sock Free Hideaway

 

BEATS OF LOVE 

77. A-Side: Are Your Dreams at Night 1985 Sizes Too Big? by Graham Holliday

PUBLISHER, THE Grass is Green in the Fields for You according to the blurb, shuns exaggerated, self-opinion, and instead favours collaboration, community and conversation.

And any book that has Pat Fish cast as a catalyst for change has simply got to be read. Despite the publishers' best intentions, Graham Holliday utilizes eyewitness accounts of an important backroom gig by the Spacemen 3 to cement what he felt he had already witnessed. His blog itself morphed into something bigger than mere memories of a gig, despite the book's claim.

Watching small gigs is in the main voyeuristic and only rarely a communal experience, but when it is it transcends the stadium experience coz, the acts themselves become as encompassed in it. There are no barriers, as this book testifies.

Jason has become the minor rock star he was on his way to being when I first fell under their spell. These lucky attendees saw something different. He had stood up for a start and was too young to look anything other than normal. Prompting Fish to write 'Here come your girlfriend's little brother's mates.'

The gushing praise for the band is great to read but unsurprising. That a tape is actually out there of them being booed is revelatory. Will Carruthers bitterly funny, exaggerated, and self-opinionated anecdotes sort of bring everything into better focus when counter balanced with the book's enthusiastic fanboy accounts.

Holliday nails it when describing the stark divisions inside the Spacemen 3 affiliated Reverberation club.

'Territorial regulations applied : how old you were, how you dressed, what school you went to, (or had gone to), what music you liked, who your friends were, where you lived, how you lived, maybe even how you talked, if you smoked, if you drank, or if you took drugs.'

They could apply to most clubs in the mid to late eighties. And most likely today.

Again, despite the publishers' best intentions, the project is initiated, edited, and written by Holliday and thank God it has been. He has even felt compelled to write what he was listening to during the writing and editing process. Checking some of them out now. 

That, to me, has been the real highlight, discovering seldom heard peripheral acts  

and finding some fresh raw garage treasure in the process. 

And then playing Spacemen 3 records ridiculously loudly, of course.