Tag: andrew o’hagan

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Different-Sized Cogs In The Same Machine

Craig McAllister

Almost a couple of years ago I met with a publisher with a view to getting the best of Plain Or Pan onto the printed page, which is, as you well know, the only print that really matters. You don’t need to ask a musician if they prefer mp3 to vinyl. It’s no different for folk who spend time agonising over words and rhythm and metre. There’s vindication in seeing your words in physical print. It means someone else has thought them worthy of sharing with others. Anyone can pick them up, flick through them, go back and forth, even highlight parts if they happen to be some sort of book masochist, but until they’re printed, the digital word lacks gravitas and acceptance. Any idiot with a keyboard and access to the internet can do this – the idiot writing this, for example – so, for me, the printed word is king.

Our meeting went well, I thought, and at the end it was agreed that I’d select the best of Plain Or Pan’s hundreds of articles and compile them into a book with a cohesively-running theme. I’d do some fact checking, tweak a few words here and there, have it proofread and have it all ready for publication. I set to work immediately.

I trawled the blog from the early days to the most recent, discounting articles on account of being too short, too similar, not good enough, just plain embarrassing – as a writer it’s really not hard to find fault in your choice of words. But a good many of the articles still held up. I’d tell you I was surprised at this, if only not to sound like a raving egomaniac, but I knew I had a way with words and phrases, so when long-forgotten articles were re-read in the cold light of a decade and more later, it was thrilling to find many of them were genuinely still exciting. “I’d forgotten about that!” “What a turn of phrase!” “An unexpectedly perfect metaphor!” Shucks, reader, I positively glowed with pride!

I knew I had a decent book in the making. It’d be split into three distinct sections; Life, Death and Music and could be read from page 1 to the end or dipped in and out of as the reader saw fit.

I secured permission from Roddy Doyle and Happy Mondays to use their words/lyrics in a couple of articles. Wayne Coyne from yr actual Flaming Lips, when asked if I could use Do You Realize? as the central theme to an article, took one read of it and said, “Go right ahead, brother!” It was game on. All the best articles would be in there.

After much detective work, I secured permission from a German exchange student to use an image they’d shot in my hometown of Irvine some 40 years previously for the book’s cover. I had everything I needed; it really was game on.

Once compiled, I used slightly hooky ‘found’ software to transfer the whole thing to my Kindle and I read chunks of it every night, making notes where changes had to be made. There weren’t many changes, in all honesty; everything that I’d selected flowed with a rhythm and pace that would make the whole book a page-turner and unputdownable object of desire.

The final job was the proofreading, a thankless task, and something my sister gamefully tackled with eagle-eyed enthusiasm. After tidying up a few stray words, lost commas and the occasional typo, it was ‘bound’ together in Word; the German exchange student’s eye-catching and very apt cover, an actual (and beautiful) foreword from a well-known writer pal of mine, a contents page and the three big sections. Watch out world, ‘POP Record‘ is coming.

It was sent to the publisher.

‘Yeah…I’m having second thoughts here…sales potential…publishing is struggling at the moment…I’ve other books ahead of yours in the queue…‘

It was one muttered and mumbled excuse after another.

It was not to be.

The whole thing currently rests in a folder on my computer. It just needs a publisher who’ll take a chance on it. Believe me, I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. It’s good to go, man. Just press print and it’ll be ready. You think it’d be easy, huh? I mean, I could go the whole self-publishing route, but that strikes me as kinda phoney. I’ve not totally dismissed the idea, but, a bit like musicians, anyone can release a home-grown CD…it’s another thing entirely to have someone release it for you. There’s that vindication word again.

I was telling this to author Andrew O’Hagan last night. He was in Glasgow promoting ‘On Friendship’, a collection of his essays on, eh, friendship and he’d asked me afterwards if I was working on any writing at the moment. *Two things, I said, and opened with the Plain Or Pan story above.

“Fuck ’em,” came Andrew’s succinct reply. “It deserves to be out there and you deserve a publisher that’ll treat it accordingly. I wonder if I can help?”

It turns out though that he needs some help of his own.

Andrew O’Hagan, the writer who at the age of 24 received a letter from Norman Mailer praising his writing style, the writer who spent time with William Burroughs, who travelled Ireland and Scotland with Seamus Heaney, who sat on the steps of the building opposite Fred and Rose West’s house and documented the whole grisly tale, who was editor-in-chief at the London Review of Books, who worked closely with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team to expose a corrupt world, the ambassador for UNICEF who wrote the modern classic Mayflies and watched on as it made the leap from page to screen must also, it appears, kick against the pricks.

Currently, he’s locked in discussion with Netflix over the $50 million production of his most-recent novel Caledonian Road. Should it be three seasons or five? Should he be involved in adapting his novel for the screen, or is that the job of Netflix’s screenwriting team?  Not for Andrew the goal of having his wee blog posts published on recycled paper for posterity, but – here’s the thing! – writers at every level still face opposition, friction and rejection.

You can be a blogger firing out pop-culture missives to a few thousand folk a week or a best-selling and highly respected author, but we’re both just well-oiled yet different-sized cogs in the same gritty machine. And I can draw some sort of comfort from that.

Here’s Fairport Convention‘s suitably melancholic and sepia-tinted Book Song. Waltz time and folky, it’s a song about what might have beens and features a terrific electric guitar part (Richard Thompson, I’m assuming) and a lovely duetting male/female vocal (Iain Matthews/Sandy Denny). It’s from What We Did On Our Holidays which is very much an album you should strive to hear if you never have.

Fairport Convention – Book Song

*The other thing I’m working on?

“I’d LOVE to read that!” enthused O’Hagan. Vindication, again. So while ‘POP Record‘ languishes in the ‘what mighta been’ pile, my attentions will turn to something entirely different.

Drop in again in a year or so when I’ll be back to bemoan the difficulties I face in securing that particular sure-fire Sunday Times best seller.

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The Admin. Assistant West Coast Promo Man

Craig McAllister

Back in the mid 80s, the coastal town of Irvine, half an hour or so by train from Glasgow, was an incredibly fertile breeding ground of artistic creativity. No one knew this at the time – indeed if you’d suggested as much, there’s a good chance your observations might have been met with a swift kick to the nether regions. Irvine – Irvine no more, as The Proclaimers proclaimed – was, like many provincial towns not supposed to be churning out pop stars, literal thinkers and all-round media fodder. Nicola Sturgeon might’ve grown up in the town at the same time, but she was still finding her feet and perfecting her spins on the Magnum’s ice rink rather than in the debating chambers of Holyrood.

The Trash Can Sinatras were our unlikely star turn; a local band who came together through shared interests on a youth opportunities scheme and ended up with a record contract and pop success permanently within touching distance. All other local bands fell into two camps; those who were pleased for their fellow local band’s success, or those who bitchily moaned that they’d become too big for their boots. Which is nonsense of course. Any of those bands would’ve bitten your hand off for a similar chance. Just ask them.


Runners-up to the Trash Cans, and head of the pack of ‘nearly weres’ was The Big Gun. Pre-dating the Trash Cans by a couple of crucial years, they maintained identical Strummer via Edwyn Collins quiffs and played the sort of shambling, Buzzcockian indie pop that was very much of its time. There are still folk in anoraks with Sarah Records badges on the lapels that’ll cry themselves silly over Heard About Love, the band’s DIY 7″ release. Thrillingly, the mighty John Peel played it more than once on his show and briefly, but brightly, The Big Gun’s star shone before fizzing out like the outro on the b-side.


Although The Big Gun never made it, whatever ‘it’ is, a couple of the constituent members/hangers-on went on to make their own mark. Andy O’ Hagan became Andrew O’Hagan, respected author of such excellent reads as The Missing, contributor to all the weighty quality dailies and some-time Editor-In-Chief at the London Review Of Books.

John Niven (not actually of the band but very much a part of their circle) went on to play in 2nd division also-rans The Wishing Stones, wrecking (or “breaking in” as he called it) my pal’s borrowed Tele in the process, before moving to London Records as an A&R man (that Mike Flowers Pop’s version of Wonderwall was all his fault) and finally putting his experiences into print in the far-flung but entertaining Kill Your Friends. Niven continues to write, Irvine Welsh by way of Castlepark rather than Leith, and, along with the weighty library of books that constitutes his polar opposite O’Hagan, is well worth investing some time in.

Recently, and out of the blue, 2 ex Big Gunners have recorded and released an album. Dead Hope is the name of the band. Songs From The Second Floor is the name of the album. It features former Big Gun vocalist Keith Martin on drums alongside his longtime partner in musical crime Andy Crone who maintains his position on bass guitar. Vocals and guitar duties fall to Scott McLuskey, someone, given the insular nature of the local band old boys’ network, I suspect I’d recognise if I saw. Although Dead Hope is essentially a Glasgow band, their roots are in Irvine. There’s a thanks on the credits to Basil Pieroni, yet another key constituent of that fertile provincial scene who these days still does his twang thang with the rarely-spotted Butcher Boy.

Dead Hope. A none-more-punk name you’ll be unlikely to encounter this year. It’s No Future for folk who remember the past; a manifesto-driven ideology, an unacceptance of the state of the nation. There are no promo band shots in the traditional sense. The cover art in tandem with the band’s name says it all. To drive the point home, sledgehammer sure, the album title references the obscure Scandinavian film of the same name where the pointlessness and, aye, hopelessness of modern-day life is a constant theme. Coldplay this ain’t.

this is Dead Hope’s debut album, the leaflet inside says. we offer no comparable band names to divert or convince you what may or may not be true.

Dead Hope believe any society that promotes boris johnson to a position beyond that of admin. assistant is truly fucked.

Setting their stall out in such terms, I came to the album with half an idea of how it might sound; angry, for one. And noisy. Gnarly bass. Abrasive guitars. Maybe a bit shouty. Maybe even a bit too shouty for my middle-aged and slightly gluey ears. But no…

It’s shouty yet sloganeering. It’s noisy yet melodic. It’s the breakneck speed of Husker Du by way of a street swaggering Cribs. Metallic sheets of Brillo Pad guitar are followed by choruses that your postman might choose to whistle as he completes his round. Despite that Cribs reference, bits of it sound like Man Made, the trio fronted by young Nile Marr who wilfully eschews anything that might pigeonhole him as his father’s son. There’s also buckets of Sonic Youth squall, bIG fLAME and Pop Group discordance and a mini dubby King Tubby outro towards the end.

All in all, it’s a pretty breathless and thrilling listen. I’d imagine played live it’d be even more vital and visceral. Sat alongside the movers, shakers and young pretenders of our time, it fairly holds its own. In fact, it teaches those young bucks a valuable lesson; bile over style and rage before age. In an era of right wing world politics and whatever horrors that might ultimately bring, we need more bands with the conviction of Dead Hope.