Write n Wrong
Here’s a recent radio interview I did with Thunder’s afficianado, Ryan Kidd. It’s always good to be interviewed by someone who really love’s Johnny’s music and has done their research in advance. Ryan had clearly read & reread ‘In Cold Blood’ which was gratifying. I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed talking to Ryan about (mostly) Mr Johnny Thunders.
In time, the majority of fads and fancies that once appealed to past generations tend to fall from favour. Such is the fate of the Grotesque. Carnivals from the US to Europe and the UK had a surreal, scary edge as if the participants had dispensed with common reason, rather like the wine maddened followers of Bacchus. One could surmise that sinister peculiarity as opposed to beauty was the sought after effect especially at fetes with pagan origins such as Halloween, although the green faced hag of yore has been replaced by foxy pinup witches. Despite the continuing popularity of Edgar Allan Poe, the modern reader contextualises the author’s luridly grotesque tales to a bygone era. Even if we no longer recognise the grotesque, it is still very much in evidence, for example the footage of NY Mayor, Rudy Giuliano, sweating black hair dye like Dirk Bogarde melting in ‘Death in Venice’ or Donald Trumps’ carrot toned three tier fat -ruffles that swathe his neck. Whilst these two political gargoyles are regularly lambasted, their grotesqueness is overlooked. In a society where God has been devalued, worship of the ever young denies the unseemly aspects of humanity. There should be no reason on earth why a young Japanese girl wearing bunny ears whilst giggling and skipping should appeal to an internet audience of thousands but by focussing upon the infantile, we deny death, the ever looming shadow. One young Japanese actress/model committed suicide at the age of 16, fearing that she was no longer desirable. We are now in the age of mass deceit courtesy of a youth obsessed media aside that is from cinematic horror. Relegated to the big screen, the ‘Lady in Black’ and ‘It’ enable us to manage fear in a safe environment When it comes to dressing up, ‘Cos-Play’ favours high gloss glamour although it is quite startling to read warnings not to scratch mere flesh whilst wearing acrylic nails. It seems that we have forgotten Heinrich Hoffman’s cautionary poem ‘StruwwelPeter’ otherwise known as ‘Shock Headed Peter’ (1845.) A concerned parent and physician, Hoffman created one of the creepiest most enduring characters in the annals of childhood literature to scare his 3 year old son into keeping his hands clean in an age when basic cleanliness was still something of a rarity. With his mussed up hair and freakishly long nails, ‘StruwwellPeter’ was to prove an inspiration upon director Tim Burton’s vision of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ who bypasses the grotesque for the plaintive thus befitting an audience who have learned to keep the shadows at bay rather than face them directly.
Originally published in 2018 by Strange Attractor Press, ‘Incurable’ sold out virtually overnight. Curated by myself & featuring an introductory biography of the ill-fated Lionel Johnson ‘Pale as wasted golden hair’ brings back to life the most reclusive of Poets of the decadent 1890’s. ‘Incurable – The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson’ is now available as a superior P.O.D via Amazon in the UK & US so why not mistreat yourself to a copy of the doomy decadent dandy’s literary melancholia. Best read by candlelight with an absinthe chaser. (PS, Lionel also introduced his special friend, Lord Alfred Douglas to Oscar Wilde, and lived to rue the day.)
Purchase here: https://amzn.eu/d/gNGyAZf
Certain animals exude mystique. Experts in enigma, no cat could ever be ordinary. Our feline friends exist on a different plain, between reality and the other-worldly. Foxes have a similar allure possessing a feral mysticism. Whilst cats are mostly deified, Foxes are generally maligned, feared by city dwellers and hunted to near extinction by country folk. To survive they have to be virtually uncanny. Creatures of folklore, the fox is one of the principle animals that witches shapeshift into, whilst the Irish once believed that they were kindred to Faerie. One particular story that has stayed with me is that of keen huntsman who called off the chase when he realised that the Fox they were pursuing was pregnant. Thereafter, foxes would congregate outside the manor of the huntsman and his next of kin, to keen their strange song whenever there was a death in the family. My own Fox story is not quite as dramatic but worth telling. I had taken to feeding the foxes where I lived but it always seemed to be the same large lean male, the father of a small pack who dined outside my balcony door. The visits were always nocturnal but one bright summer’s afternoon I noticed him scampering irregularly across the lawn to my little patch of garden. Making no sound, he pressed his nose right up against the glass of the garden door and it was then that I noticed he had been badly wounded on his lower back. He then frantically tried to get underneath the tarpaulin which covers my mobility scooter. The fox and his family had taken refuge there in the past so he knew it was a safe place. A google search then ensued as I hurriedly left phone messages with a nearby animal sanctuary and the RSPCA. Thankfully, it was the animal sanctuary
that called back first. They informed me that the RSPCA tended to put rescue animals down if they were injured. Fortunately the practice of the sanctuary differed – they took every single animal to a local vet for treatment if they could be saved. After 3 weeks recuperation, the animal was dropped off where it had been picked up.
Sure enough, Mr Fox returned, looking much healed. I’ve never been certain whether he had accidentally hurt himself or if someone had lashed out at him with a gardening tool. Either way he was back. One curious thing that I’ve noticed is that whatever time I wake up Mr Fox and his mate depart the grounds as if they were waiting for me to arise. It is oddly comforting. They are still with me and I am still with them.
This evening I pulled myself from out of a pit of despair and watched a couple of things including a video of a creation called Chapell Roan. There she was on stage, well maintained voice, gorgeous tumbles of red hair, wearing some Cherie Currie style lingerie – I suppose that translates to Anne Summer’s style ‘Street Sweetheart’ undies. This was the first pointer that Chappell was in fact a corporate plant masquerading as a backwater 25 yearwas in fact a corporate plant masquerading as a backwater 25 year old of humble roots. Of course, at some point Ms Roan had been a genuine talent or she wouldn’t have been groomed to become a robot version of her past self. What big business fails to understand is that in the good old days, those gifted enough to succeed in the music industry such as Emmy Lou Harris or Debbie Harry who both excelled in being themselves and not record company makeovers. Amy Winehouse might have had a stage school background but her soul and song craft where her own. Younger audiences have been duped into believing that authenticity doesn’t matter, only it does because without it, there can be no real brilliance, no breath-taking moments of Leonard Cohen style calibre. As I watched Chappell Roan going through a series of well-tutored moves a little of my own soul died on behalf of the kids neutered into believing that careful corporate business constructs are real and not pre-programmed. Chapell Roan is neither particularly good or bad, she is merely a product of the times in which we live but without humanity, there can be no great art, only the tolling of an empty bell.
I am so weary of the fight. Not just to write but to be understood. Recently a reviewer described me as a ‘Thunders Obsessive’ which lead me to wonder that if I had been a man, would they have said ‘driven’ or ‘ambitious’. To know a subject well doesn’t make a person an ‘obsessive’ it makes them studious or knowledgeable. The fight for dignity is harder for women, particularly ‘outsider’ women. I’m pretty sure that the reviewer doesn’t have a clue about the other books and articles I’ve written and neither does Wayne Hussey who condemned me as someone who ‘only writes about skinny junkies that she fancies’ or words to that effect in his lengthy autobiography, ‘Salad Daze’. No one ever disrespected William Burroughs but the same could have been said about him. When I started writing, I was interested in subculture, the Beats, what we might now call off-grid characters. People throw words around without understanding the implications of their glib, macho, perception. Mainstream life never interested me and neither do books about relationships. My childhood was so fractured, I didn’t understand healthy relationships, what it might be to grow up in a loving environment so my choices of early subjects where Noir, hard-bitten and decidedly nocturnal, life’s fire-flies are far more interesting than those who dwell in comfort and wealth.
In the last two years, I’ve had several articles published by Fortean Times, the last magazine I actually enjoy. Although I have some dear friends who are musicians, it has been liberating to step away from the realm of ‘rock n’ roll.’ The people whose music I loved are no longer with us whilst the music press is no longer as relevant as it used to be. It is also about growing up, moving on and returning to the oeuvre of fantasy and faerie that I loved as a child, before Marc Bolan arrived like a comet of Bo Diddley riffs and sequinned bliss. Roger Corman’s lurid cinematic adaptations of Poe, especially the ones featuring Vincent Price, also enthralled me as a lonely child. Later there was the ancient enchantment in the books of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood as well as a fondness for Walter De La Mare’s often uncanny poetry. I’ve just discovered the verses of Thomas Hardy and appreciate his spectral evocation of the past. I have always tread the thorny – path between melancholia and depression which is well suited to tales of strangeness and the esoteric. Only the lonely can haunt their own lives.
‘Third – and definitive, by explicit declaration of the author – edition of the biography dedicated to the king of the guitar, Johnny Thunders, originally released in 1987. … In Cold Blood remains a monumental work on a historical/biographical level, above all for the wealth of first-hand sources to which Nina Antonia had access.’ Andrea Valentini
Bric-a-Brac & Byegones
Most people like to rummage, hoping to find some treasure or trinket for next to nothing. Unfortunately, charity shops are no longer cheery grottos of disorder having morphed into overpriced boutiques. Woe to the down at heel dreamers, the stylish yet skint and those of slender means. Second hand on the high street has sadly become as regimented as any other outlet. Worse still is the scarcity of Bric-a-Brac shops, scrappy, overladen emporiums of everything people almost wanted and discarded keepsakes. Tinselled caves of melancholia stocked with the remnants and revenants of past lives, old photograph albums foxed with age, Victorian scrap books with pages missing, Rosaries and garish jewellery, costumes of the hapless, wedding rings from unfortunate unions and sheet music for songs no one listens to any more, abandoned toys from yesteryear and tattered lace recalling Miss Haversham. Ever since Dicken’s wrote ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ Bric-a-Brac flourished, but no more. In recent years they had become the orphans and strays of shopping streets and largely overlooked aside from the perennial magpies of which I count myself. These days, car boot sales suffice but they are often in hard to reach locations for those dependent on public transport and lack the charm and faded gentility of Bric-a-Brac emporiums, where one could strike up some kind of rapport with the owner by merit of irregular visits.
In the past year, the remaining two local Bric-a-Brac shops have shut down due to the deaths of the respective owners whose combined age must have been in the region of 170. How lucky we were to have had them! The first, was run by a charming Italian gentleman whose name I sadly don’t know. Whenever a customer entered the shop, he would hide an ashtray full to the brim below the counter. Now and again he really would have a genuine antique but he could also romanticise even the most humble bit of junk, with lyrical ease. So stricken was I to discover that he’d died during ‘lockdown’ that I even wrote a poem about it that I’ve just had the pleasure of recording. It was seeing the shop empty, all the ornate clutter swept away, along with his life. Within a month or two it had become a nail bar on a street that already had one. That shop had been the soul of the thoroughfare, something real and familiar and it had virtually vanished overnight. In walking distance was ‘Memories of Mortlake’ run by elegant Elka from Austria. I had been a regular for nearly 30 years. The front of the shop was bright baubles, old carvings, scrapbooks, embroideries, brooches, a dazzling array especially in Summer when the bright light would make prisms in the window. In Winter, Elka would place holy relics in the window, pushed up against Welsh Dolls and little figurines of Dutch boys & girls. As Elka aged, still with regal posture and Katherine Hepburn style, so the shop became more unruly and yet no less appealing. Unfortunately she became increasingly possessive of the items. One afternoon I picked something up and asked the price, she practically pulled the object from my hand, exclaiming ‘Oh isn’t it pretty! I’m not sure that I want to sell it.’ Elka lived above the shop that was her life. As I was to discover, she kept the best for herself but she was kind enough to let me see the upstairs of her domain which was the most glorious antiquarian mess that I’ve witnessed. Sat along the three flights of stairs were Victorian Dolls in different stages of dishevelment propped up on picture books of equal age. The walls were crazily paved with masonic certificates, Edwardian religious tracts and odd paintings, mainly dramatic biblical scenes. In the lounge, there was nothing but sculptures, all these stone heads staring into the cosy dusk of a room rarely used whilst the roof garden festooned with Ivy and other tangles of plants had become a graveyard of broken statues, still beautiful but past reclamation. The kitchen was overrun with vintage ceramics and yet more paintings and prints including one by Margaret Tarrant, an illustrator of whom I am particularly fond. The picture was of a little Pan playing his pipes for two enraptured children. I still have that picture on the wall by my desk.
‘Like a glimmering of a votive candle in one of Johnson’s dream churches, Incurable sheds new light on one of the most gifted, if reclusive, poets of thefin-de-siecle. Incurable pays tribute to this enchanting and eccentric poet while providing fresh insight into an era that continues to fascinate.’ Cathleen Mair for The Idler
Autumn’s almost on the wing, bringing with it ‘Unquiet Grove’ the latest equisitly chilling anthology from Egaeus Press. One of my favorite independent publishers, it was a pleasure to write the introduction for this feast of phantom forests, green unease, forbidden paths and whispering witch-fungus. ‘Unquiet Grove’ is now available to order from www.egaeuspress.com
Nina Antonia 