Sinister: Love of language, interest in character and sense of theatre.

[Kieran Devaney]

Dear Sinister,

Today I was reading ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ the music magazine that held 
the interest of more than a few people here when it first came out, because 
Stuart Murdoch was allegedly in it.  Normally I shy away from the music 
press entirely, or, more specifically, I shy away from buying the music 
press entirely, since I’m often to be seen shiftily reading the review 
sections of Q, Uncut, NME, The Wire and others in shops, without ever having 
the intention of buying. In fact, in a move that screams ‘too much time on 
your hands’ I sometimes read half the reviews that interest me from a copy 
of Q in, say, HMV, before putting it back and nipping down to WH Smiths to 
read the other half. In doing that, I get to read all the reviews I want 
without loitering without intent in either shop. But to say that such 
activities were motivated by having too much time on my hands would be 
false, since usually when I do that, there are a thousand other, more 
important things I should be doing. I’d like to say my aversion to the music 
press is motivated by a political or artistic gripe – that the NME’s 
traditional fare of hyping bands to the point where they inflate like shiny, 
heart shaped helium filled balloons into premature rock ascendancy, and then 
proleptically (Microsoft Word seems to think ‘proleptically’ isn’t a word, 
but it has been proven wrong in the past), claim that they, the NME, never 
really thought all that much of them in the first place. I’d like to say 
that, and I do think that, to a degree. I’d also like to say that my 
aversion stems from their penchant for guitar music make by pretty white 
boys over all else has been detrimental to the growth of other musical 
genres, at least in terms of sales, that their reviews and features are 
based in fashion and sensationalism, rather than telling us something useful 
about the band or record in question, that they are continually changing 
their minds about who it’s ok to like and who it isn’t, that their tastes 
are infinitely conservative until the ‘avant garde’ they so frequently 
deride and sneer at, comes up with something they actually like, at which 
point they take it on board like an old friend they’d known for years (e.g. 
the new Jim O’Rourke record). I’d like to be able to say all of that, and I 
do think that, to a degree, but my main reason for not buying any magazines 
(though I read a few reviews online for free), is firmly cash based. That’s 
right kids, it’s art vs. commerce, and commerce always wins (a bonus point 
if you can name the reference). But I’ve digressed, as I inevitably do, I 
didn’t actually buy this copy of ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ it was borrowed 
to me by a friend some days ago, though lord knows why he bought it, he 
doesn’t listen to any of the bands in it, which is probably why he hasn’t 
asked for it back – it’s the one with the blurry, grainy photograph of the 
Dirtbombs singer on the front anyway. And reading it made me remember why I 
don’t dip into music magazines all that much for the most part – their 
feature on said Dirtbombs was, for example, appalling in it’s sycophancy, I 
thought, a sprawl of catch-all terms like ‘raw’ ‘visceral’ ‘fun’ and 
‘essential’ even. Now don’t get me wrong, I happen to quite like The 
Dirtbombs, I’ve even got their new album, I liked their live thing for John 
Peel, but this feature was the kind of lazy dross that reminded me of when I 
used to read the NME – the very fact that The Dirtbombs are getting radio 
play now, them being a years old garage rock combo is a prime example, 
perhaps, of just how much UK audiences are enamoured with The Strokes, The 
White Stripes et al, how The Dirtbombs, who as I understand it have been 
ploughing the same furrow for years, not worrying at all about success or 
any of that, feel about suddenly being en vogue, suddenly being part of the 
musical zeitgeist, was not addressed. Instead it was four or five tiresome 
pages of the bands rock and roll excesses and how great they are. Pity. It 
got worse though, as I read on, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ thinks enough of 
itself to frequently slag off rival publications, most frequently The NME 
and The Wire, which annoyed me really – it called The NME ‘a mouthpiece for 
authority’ and The Wire ‘pretentious’, both of which, I suppose, are fair 
enough criticisms, perhaps not ones I myself would use because I think you 
have to appreciate that both magazines are made for a certain demographic, 
and with that in mind, they don’t do all that badly. It does sound a bit 
silly though, coming from another music mag, especially one that, 
content-wise, seems to sit between the two, featuring bands that are a bit 
more leftfield than the ones that make the NME, but ignoring anything that 
might be ‘jazz’ or ‘modern classical’ or ‘improvised’. And it also sounded a 
bit silly when ‘Careless Talk…’ employed a style not that dissimilar to its 
hated rivals, so we got some snotty NME fawning sensationalism in the 
Dirtbombs article, coupled with some Q style this is what (dad)rock is all 
about type stuff, as well as the classic ‘witty’ NME perfunctory put-down, I 
believe chief careless talker Everett True reviews the new Lee ‘Scratch’ 
Perry record simply with the word ‘whatever’. How fantastically punk rock of 
him. But there was also the kind of snotty, Wire style pretension in lots of 
the reviews, as well as the laborious, Wire style laborious, strained, 
blokey type reviews in abundance. I wasn’t much impressed really. Another 
qualm was their continual derision of Radiohead, but there wasn’t any 
substance to it (they do it to a couple of other bands too, but Radiohead 
came up the most times I think). I like Radiohead, but I certainly don’t 
think they’re infallible, and I’m yet to see a serious piece on their 
failings, glib put-downs just don’t cut it, surely a magazine that wants to 
rise above the NME’s pettiness should be avoiding such witless quips, they 
just aren’t going to convince anyone. Their dislike for Radiohead seemed to 
be solely based on the fact that the band were successful, and again, surely 
a magazine that wants to rise above the NME’s pettiness should be avoiding 
the frankly stupid assertion that being in the charts = being crap. I think 
the idea of the magazine is a return to the DIY aesthetics and ‘realness’ of 
fanzines, but in reality it seemed to occupy a territory that has the worst 
bits of fanzines (unexplained dislike for certain bands, fabulous praise for 
others, sneering, hints that the writers think they’re the coolest people on 
earth), combined with the worst bits of the bigger magazines. Not a fun read 
at all really. I certainly wont be buying it in the future, not that I 
bought it this time, but still…


I wrote that a while ago, but neglected to send it, I think because it 
contains too much negativity, and I thought I needed to balance it out with 
something a bit more upbeat. The new edition of ‘Careless Talk…’ has since 
come out and I believe it has the sprightly Conor Oberst, of Bright Eyes 
fame on the cover. I hastily glanced through it yesterday in HMV, and had a 
quick read of an email interview they did with Hefner, one or two things 
struck me about the article, firstly, that the writer accused Hefner’s 
competition of being “either too old (Pulp), or too shit (Belle and 
Sebastian).” Now not only is this the kind of childish dig I was bemoaning 
earlier, but this article is followed directly (on the same page even) with 
a piece written by none other than Stuart Murdoch! Perhaps they aren’t all 
that keen on Stuart’s writing and are trying to get him to quit, or perhaps 
this is ‘Careless Talk’ at its fiery best, with diverse and even 
contradictory opinions vying for space, a truly multi-faceted publication. 
Whichever, putting the two articles together like that did strike me as 
churlish, and if I were Stuart I might be a bit offended. The other, and 
probably more important thing that struck me about the Hefner article was an 
acute sense of déjà vu – I’m sure I’ve read it somewhere before on the net, 
and I remembered that when (if?) I read it before; the interesting bit of 
the article is Darren Hayman talking about his song writing technique. 
Darren regards himself as a professional writer, you see, writing is his 
job, and that his songs come from lots of hard work rather than flashes of 
inspiration. This did disappoint me a bit, because it takes the magic away 
from Hefner’s songs, we expect people we admire to be spontaneous and 
brilliant all the time - as they are in whatever it is we admire them for 
(perhaps this is what celebrities mean by the pressures of fame), and rarely 
do we acknowledge the toil that has gone into their art. I always pictured 
Darren, post coital, scribbling his grubby thoughts on the back of a taxi 
card with a chewed biro, another paean to being unable to distinguish 
between love and sex. Seeing the real truth in front of me - that he 
probably spends more time sat in front of a piano, notebook in hand than he 
does chatting up girls, was odd, we want our rock stars to live the dream 
don’t we? And although if, prior to reading the article, I would’ve really 
thought about it, I would have admitted to myself that a lot more work went 
into Hefner songs than you’d think, having Darren himself admit it is like 
him breaking the magicians code. Two more, similar images have entered my 
head whilst I was thinking about all that, both from comedians incidentally, 
the first is from me reading an article about Harry Hill, it might have been 
an interview with his wife actually, and she was saying that he spends hours 
and hours every day on his comedy, that he has books of the stuff, a whole 
room full of books on comedy and comedians. And though I’d always thought 
that there was a sort of deliberateness to Harry Hill’s stuff, seeing it put 
like that somehow makes his comedy less ‘funny’ because half the reason we 
enjoy stuff like that is that it seems spontaneous. The other thing I was 
thinking about was a TV thing I saw, which had Paul Whitehouse (of Fast Show 
fame), and he was saying that he hardly ever laughs at comedy anymore, since 
he became a comedy writer, that sometimes he’ll see things and he’ll be able 
to say “Yeah, that’s funny.” In a detracted sort of way, but comedy no 
longer affects him as it used to. I found this terribly sad, that the thing 
he loves has been changed because of his knowledge of the process involved 
in creating it – because he is so involved with this process, he is no 
longer able to fully enjoy the end product as much, or in the same way. I 
found this terribly sad, and I believe it was Oscar Wilde who wrote: “Yet 
each man kills the thing he loves.” And how true that is. But Darren Hayman, 
Harry Hill and Paul Whitehouse must have all thought, naively as I do that 
genius is not, to drag out the old cliché, 99% perspiration and 1% 
inspiration, but something more ethereal, that the universal truths that art 
strives for must be plucked from the air, rather than diligently laboured 
over.

God, that’s depressing isn’t it? I promised something more upbeat didn’t I? 
Well that comes in the form of all singing, all dancing, guitar jousting 
folk hipsters Belle and Sebastian, who I saw in London whenever it was, 
about this time last week. Lots of people have written well about the gig, 
so I wont go on about it too much, except to say that it was great and 
everything despite a few songs not coming off too well, blah blah blah. I 
was quite surprised though, when I got inside the venue, that it had been 
described, on more than one occasion as ‘soulless’ since it actually wasn’t 
too bad, certainly a vast improvement on the bland, squat Birmingham version 
of the academy. On the way there I met a medical student called Dave who was 
a bit lost like me, and once we got inside we shouted over the records that 
were playing enough for me to learn that he didn’t recognise records by 
Hefner, The Velvet Underground, The Magnetic Fields or some others who I’ve 
forgotten – he didn’t know all that much about music, which left me with 
very little to talk to him about, he didn’t recognise ‘String Bean Jean’ or 
the Only Ones’ song at the end either, nice guy though. I completely forgot 
to ask him if he was on the list though, I doubt it, since he completely 
forgot to ask me either.  I had a lovely time anyway, and cheers to Hannah 
again for letting me stay at her gaff (I quite like the word ‘gaff’).

I’ll be off then
-	Kieran

p.s. Kudos to whoever is taking Sinister’s collective meanderings and 
relaying them back to us in the form of haikus, clever that, very Warholian.




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