Autism

FLA 23: Joanne Limburg (30/07/2023)

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I first became aware of Joanne Limburg’s work in 2010 when she published the extraordinary memoir, The Woman Who Thought Too Much, about her life experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder. Hilary Mantel, no less, recommended it in The Observer newspaper. Immediately after finishing it, I found Joanne on Twitter to thank her for writing it, and we’ve been following each other there ever since.

 

Joanne has since been diagnosed as autistic, and has completed two further works of non-fiction : Small Pieces (2017), about the loss of her brother and mother; and most recently, Letters to My Weird Sisters (2021), a sequence of letters to four women in history who didn’t ‘fit in’ with their respective societies.

 

Her career as a poet flourished after she won the Eric Gregory Award in 1998, since when she has published three volumes of poetry for adults – Femenismo (2000), Paraphernalia (2007) and The Autistic Alice (2017) – and one volume for younger readers, Bookside Down (2013). 

 

Joanne’s work is thoughtful, imaginative, moving and often humorous, and when I was first considering potential guests for this series, Joanne was in my mind from day one. So I am delighted to say that one morning in July 2023, we had a most diverting conversation about music and writing. Quite often, I only realise a conversational theme during the edit, and in this one, we both keep coming back to it: the concept of permission in creativity.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re the first person who’s been on this who’s my school year age. I think there’s only a few weeks between us.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I think you’re just a few weeks younger, yes.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So this could be interesting in terms of how we experienced the same things in our different parts of the country. What music was being played in your house when you were small, then? What records did your parents have in their collection?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I remember being interested in my parents’ albums according to how colourful they were. I loved the Fiddler on the Roof album, which had a really colourful sleeve.

JOANNE LIMBURG

That had a really colourful sleeve, and Wally Whyton’s Party Playtime, which was for kids. My mum liked opera and my dad liked Sibelius, but I don’t remember them being played much when I was young, they were just sitting there in the rack. I remember Junior Choice being on Radio 1. I remember watching Top of the Pops. And I realised the other day that one of my earliest memories is probably seeing 10cc perform ‘Donna’ (1972). Because I have a particular memory of how Lol Crème looked at that point, because he looked in some ways like my dad. My earliest pop memory – I found it the other day on YouTube – was an advert for Jelly Tots.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Rowntrees Tots, please yourself.’

The soundtrack to the 45-second Rowntrees Tots advert (1974), written and performed by The First Class under the name ‘The Tots’.

JOANNE LIMBURG

There was a sort of tie-in single. ‘Don’t just sit there upon the shelf.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember the ad, but I had no idea there was a single. ‘Please Yourself’ by The Tots (1974) – from the same team who made ‘Beach Baby’ by The First Class. The days of pop writers writing adverts and then adapting them for actual singles with the brand names taken out. Like David Dundas with ‘Jeans On’.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Something else I remember: When I was three, my parents recorded me singing ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ and also when I was three, I have a memory of being in my uncle’s estate car. I was the youngest family member on an extended family trip to Knebworth. I can remember the other kids laughing because I started singing Suzi Quatro’s ‘Can the Can’ very earnestly. I’m sure I didn’t sing it in any kind of tuneful way, and I’m sure I got the words wrong as well. But this is how 70s it was: while the younger kids, me and two of my cousins, were on the back seat, the older kids were in the boot. [Laughter]

——

FIRST: ELVIS PRESLEY: ‘Way Down’ (RCA, single, 1977)

JOANNE LIMBURG

Memories can detach and reattach themselves, but I remember buying this specifically from WHSmiths in Temple Fortune [in northwest London] – although maybe it was in Golders Green. It was quite small, and you had to go up to a desk and ask for it.

 

I had been given a little record player for my seventh birthday, and a friend and a neighbour gave me a load of records to go with it – not necessarily things I would have chosen… Things like… Guys and Dolls?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yeah, the group. Who spawned Dollar.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Exactly. And one called ‘Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally?’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which I think was by Tony Orlando and Dawn.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I also remember ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ by ABBA turning up. Which I think was after ‘Way Down’?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Before, in fact!

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

But ‘Way Down’ is the one I remember buying.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The strangest thing is, I do not remember the announcement of the death of Elvis at all. Do you?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I do. I remember we were on holiday in Scotland, it happened over the summer in August [1977]. In fact, on a different holiday in Scotland, a year later, Pope Paul VI died, and we were not Catholics, obviously, we were Jews, but I remember it because we were in a different place. With Elvis, either it was on the car radio, or my parents were talking about it while they were driving us through the Highlands. I don’t know that I was aware of him until he died and it was explained to me who he was. Though I probably heard ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ or ‘Hound Dog’ playing somewhere, so was aware of his voice in the background.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Way Down’ had just been released in the UK, and there was no sign that it was going to be a particularly big hit. It went in the charts at 46, the next week – the week Elvis died – it went up to 42, so not showing any real signs of going anywhere. And then… it goes to number 4, and then number one for five weeks.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

He did the ultimate publicity stunt… by dying.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The last thing he ever recorded.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Obviously, I liked it then, but I don’t think of it as a particularly momentous piece of music.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But something else I found out. Those really low notes, at the end of each chorus.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

That’s probably why I bought it. Because there’s a kind of novelty thing that amuses a seven-year-old, those low notes.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I still can’t get anywhere near them even now. But I assumed it was Elvis singing them. And it isn’t. It’s the backing singer. He had this backing singer called J.D. Sumner (1924–98), who had this background in gospel and country music. Basically, his big thing was he could do these incredibly low notes. At the end of ‘Way Down’, that last note is C1, which is three octaves below middle C. I think it’s the lowest note sung on a major hit record.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It’s almost infrasound, isn’t it?

 

—–

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You first came to my attention with The Woman Who Thought Too Much. I think I either read the Hilary Mantel review of it, or I saw it in a shop. And at the time, for various reasons, I wanted to find out more about obsessive compulsive disorder, and this was such a well-written, sensitive, accessible and relatable account. In fact, so many of your books have been so enlightening and helpful to me.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Well, there are these sorts of parallels in our life paths. Because I write autobiographically.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes. And in some ways, we have different backgrounds, but… we’re the same age, we’ve lost a sibling at roughly the same age, we lost our fathers at roughly the same age. And I’m currently in the process of getting assessed for autism.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It’s interesting because I sort of think of you as my first actual Twitter friend.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s a really lovely thing to say.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I think we’ve known each other on Twitter for 13 years. Sometimes, I’ll be watching Top of the Pops on BBC4 and I’ll say to my husband, ‘Justin just said this’, and early on, I tried to explain you, and I said, ‘He’s a male me, really.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How wonderful. I’d always felt I was in that grey area where I didn’t know, and when I started to read your stuff, it made so much sense to me.

 

One reason I’m doing this series at all is because I feel a slight sense of unfinished business with music. I found it quite awkward being a musical performer, I started a music degree, didn’t finish it, didn’t know what to do, really.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Oh, I didn’t know you were actually a musician yourself, because you don’t mention that, funnily enough.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I don’t talk about it very much. I got Grade 8 flute when I was fifteen. I was okay, and I got into university partly, I think, because I had perfect pitch.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It often goes with autism.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Right, right. But obviously, neither of us knew at the time what this was, none of it was explained. Because we were in this funny situation and…

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

We both were and were not autistic children.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So were you learning instruments at school, having lessons?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Because I knew that my grandfather had played the violin, I imagined he was a professional. Actually, he was an amateur player, he died when my mum was very small so I never met him. I persuaded my parents to let me start the violin, so I played the violin from eight to fourteen. In fact, for my ninth birthday, I got the record of David Oistrakh playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – I still play that now. But I wasn’t that great – I got to Grade 4 and the piano up to about Grade 3, but I didn’t have the discipline to do it properly.

 

Also, I think I found schoolwork very easy, and didn’t understand that just because you couldn’t do something straight away, it didn’t mean you were rubbish at it. I was immature – I mean, why wouldn’t I have been, I was a child! – but I didn’t get practising at that age. I think I was fairly musical – not perfect pitch, although I’ve got reasonable pitch. But it never went anywhere, and then when I was eleven, I went to this very academic girls’ school where people were there on music bursaries, and I felt just crap by comparison. There were lots of teachers attached to the school, so I was given one of them, and she was just horrible to me. She said to me, ‘You have to join the orchestra.’ So I joined the second violins and it was one of the most demoralising moments of my entire life. I just couldn’t do it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was it about the music, or the dynamic or the space you were playing in?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I couldn’t quite read [the score] at that speed. The other frustrating thing is: I find it difficult to sing with other people, so I don’t know how people sing in harmony. Because if I’m near someone else who’s singing a different tune, I can’t stop hearing it, and I get lost and tangled up. We were singing some Schumann in the choir once and I remember getting completely lost at one point, and there were all these girls obviously singing around me very confidently. So – you know, I’m not particularly musically talented, but I’m not tone deaf, I would say.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I really used to think that we all heard music the same way, that we could all hear the same things.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

And we don’t at all.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m really aware of it now, my reaction to certain stations on digital radio, and I know it isn’t the actual music some of the time.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

There’s a really high-pitched noise.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I have heard you talk about an aversion to loud noise, and that’s happening more and more with me now. Although it depends what the noise is, where I am, how I’m feeling. Has that been the case for you as well?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Always been the case. I’ve always been very upset if something goes bang. I’ve always been scared of balloons.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And does that extend to music as well as sound?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I don’t like it if it’s turned up beyond a certain point, I find it painful. So I don’t really like going to concerts cause it’s turned up so loud at them. It hurts my ears. I’ve often had to leave events earlier because the music was so loud.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I do remember as a kid about noise levels because my dad used to be a drummer in various groups and things, and we’d accompany him to things. I went with him to a drum clinic when I was about 13, which he wasn’t playing in, but there were a lot of absolute virtuosos in that. I’d probably get more out of it now, but it was about four hours of drums. A very late night, that one.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I always think, it’d be great to learn drums, great to learn bass. It’s always the rhythm section I want to be in, but realistically, when you’re young and you think about being in a band, and you just look at them on the stage, or in an orchestra – I don’t know how they manage to stay together. They can all start together and stop together. That must take a long time to get there, and you’re doing the same movement again and again and again. And with something like bass and drums, you’re often playing the same four notes again and again, and I suppose you must have to go into some kind of trance-like state. There must be some element of muscle memory because if you stop, you’d suddenly go: ‘What am I doing?’ It’s like if you walk down the stairs and you start noticing your feet.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Or thinking about the process of breathing. Whereupon it suddenly gets more difficult.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Kevin Godley, 10cc’s drummer, was asked, ‘How can you do all those different things at the same time? He said, ‘It’s not different things at the same time. It’s different parts of one thing.’

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We nearly met, didn’t we? We nearly met at the British Library about 10 years ago.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

When I might have been looking at Queen Anne’s letters, when I was researching my novel about her, A Want of Kindness.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which is the one book of yours I haven’t actually read yet.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It’s quite different from the others – partly because it’s the only fiction. And because I decided, insanely, that I was only going to use words that were around at the time. I don’t know if it feels like an accomplishment to have done that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. It was a great big thought experiment to put myself in someone else’s mind so I needed the furniture of their mind, not mine. I read the King James Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer, and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the sorts of things she would have had in her head, and her letters, and I got a sense of her voice from that.

 

I don’t think it did too badly – it came out in America – but it was marketed as a historical fiction book and it’s more like fiction that happens to be historical. Also, difficult things were going on in my family at the time, and it was an escape, in retrospect: ‘Yes, yes, I’m just going to go to the 17th century and work this all out there.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I heard you on a podcast a while back saying you were working on another novel, is that still happening?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I thought about it. But that’s gone on the extreme back backburner because I don’t really feel like I’m a novelist, as if people might expect another novel from me. Like I didn’t do all of Queen Anne’s life, so there’s a possible sequence in the air, but I found having a novel out very difficult, and I found working on it very difficult.

 

I found another interesting story. A woman called Sarah Scott (1720–95) wrote a best-selling book called Millenium Hall (1762), about this ideal place with all these women who have various racy back stories – which is probably what made people read the book. These independently wealthy women pool their resources and live in Millenium Hall where they spend their time studying and sketching and making music and living the 18th century idea of a good life, and also doing good works on the side.

 

So there’s a school and there’s some cottages. And there’s also – interesting in disability theory – a walled-off bit where they have various disabled people who are thought of as looking different or disfigured, living together in a community, and they support them.

 

Sarah Scott had smallpox very badly as a young woman and was left very marked by it. So this would have been a concern of hers, and she tried to do this [experiment] in real life. It obviously fell through because of all those real-world things: personalities, money, health. And I thought there’s a plot there, in the gap between ideal and reality.

 

Scott’s book is narrated by a man who visits, and it records his wonder and amazement as he’s shown around this extraordinary place by these marvellous virtuous women. So there are these ‘gorblimey guvnor’ monologues by people they helped, saying how much they’ve been helped, how the ladies have shown them how to be better, more virtuous Christians and all this. It would have been thought of as progressive then, but it still speaks to how we try and help people now, and how you see people getting outraged if the objects of their charity don’t show gratitude. And I also wondered what these people said when their backs were turned. There’s a lot of material in it but I don’t know if I can spend another five years writing a novel on spec.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I tried to write a novel which I suspect was thinly veiled memoir, and it didn’t really feel believable as fiction. Maybe I should try again. But I remember you mentioning that you originally considered writing The Woman Who Thought Too Much as a novel, and then you concluded that you had to make it about you, you had to say, ‘Look, this is me, this is what happened.’

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yeah, it becomes about testimony and witness, and the truth-claim you make about it: ‘No, I’m sharing experience. This is me, the value of that.’ And also it’s not that I ‘don’t follow fiction’, it’s not that I ‘don’t enjoy it’, it’s not that I ‘can’t understand it’ – all those various stereotypical things about autistic people. But it seems like a lot of work to me to make people up. I don’t think it’s a lack of imagination so much as ‘I can’t be bothered.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously a lot has happened in your life, to you, and to those around you.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yes, my brother took his own life while I was writing The Woman Who Thought Too Much.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I hope this is okay to ask you about this – as that tragedy is the last thing that happens in that book – but had you already completed a draft?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

No, no, it’s okay. It happened while I was drafting. There’s one bit in the book where I talk about feeling really, really unbearable and I don’t say why. And I think that was when I returned to the book after taking weeks out. Because I had to go back to it. The publishers said, ‘You can take a break’, but I thought it better to just push on.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because you’ve committed by then to a certain level of ‘This is what happened’?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yeah, and I had enormous guilt, which I do talk about in the book. Because about 18 months before my brother died, he’d been diagnosed in America – where he was living – with what was then called adult ADD. And I just went, ‘Oh this changes things, can I mention it in the book?’ – and he totally panicked, because he didn’t want anyone at work to know. And I was just really ashamed. And I still am actually guilty about that. Although I think probably most people who are writing a book about mental health would have responded like that at that point. In retrospect, it looks especially callous, but I think I’m being a bit hard on myself really.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a dilemma I know I have as well: How do you write about other people? You can write about your own response, but you also have to think, How would I feel if somebody was writing about me? I always have that thought when I’m trying to write about anybody. But you can only take that so far, sometimes.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

In The Woman Who Thought Too Much I made a conscious decision that I was the protagonist and OCD was the antagonist. And so I kept writing about other people to a minimum, which had the unfortunate effect of making me look very self-obsessed. But I just wanted to protect everyone. I know someone who’s a crime writer, and she read that book and said, ‘Oh, there’s a suppressed narrative about your mother. Is that deliberate or unconscious?’ And I said, ‘Oh it’s pretty deliberate. And then that suppressed narrative came to the fore in the book I wrote after Mum died [Small Pieces, which is also about my brother]…

—–

LAST: GABRIELS: Angels & Queens (Part I: 2022; Part II, 2023, Atlas Artists/Parlophone)

Extract: ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’ 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Slightly confusingly, this album has appeared in two volumes and there’s now a deluxe version available of both.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I saw them on Later with Jools Holland. I thought, ‘They’re amazing’, but also, ‘I’ve heard that voice before, it’s something that’s been played a lot in the background of things.’ And then I found out it was ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m so glad you chose this, it’s one of my favourite singles of the last few years – and I’ve just discovered it’s one of Elton John’s favourites as well. Because did you see his Glastonbury set?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Oh yes! He had the guy on with him, Jacob Lusk.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

For ‘Are You Ready for Love?’.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I just love voices like that, and when someone’s doing something different with sound.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I hadn’t consciously checked who produced this album until I was doing some preparation for this, and it’s Sounwave who’s worked on all the Kendrick Lamar albums. So the production is this really unusual mix – this very special honeyed voice on top, and these horns and strings that feel like they’ve wandered in from Al Green and Detroit Emeralds records in the 70s, but then you’ve got these murkier, distorted textures in the middle which bring to mind Thundercat’s records too. A very powerful combination.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It seems to speak somehow to the times we’re in. And he’s got one of those gospel-trained voices, my favourite sort of voice. It’s a cliché, but I imagine it’s called  soul music, because you can hear someone’s soul. It’s not just that gospel singers use the biblical language, it’s the tone… I don’t know much about singing voices, I couldn’t tell you what the technical terms are, but there’s something that makes you pay attention and say, ‘Ohh yes, this is human.’

 

—-

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your most recently published book, and just one reason I’ve wanted to get you on this ever since I first had the idea, is Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism and Motherhood (2021), a fabulous book.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Thank you very much.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which as the title suggests is a sequence of four letters you’ve addressed to women in history: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Adelheid Bloch (1908–40), Frau V (19th/20th century; exact dates and real name unknown) and Katharina Kepler (1546–1622). And I was interested to hear you mention two inspirations for it. One was Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes book (2015), which I’ve since read and loved… but also, Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016).

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yes! There were a few other inspirations, but she was one of them. I saw the film of Lemonade, and I thought, She is not exhibiting herself. It’s like: ‘I’m talking to my fellow Black women, and there’ll be stuff the rest of you don’t understand and I’m not going to explain it to you. But you’re allowed to listen. But I’m not talking to you. This is how we talk when it’s us, and it’s our reality.’

 

I was really impressed by that. Well, I don’t understand ‘Formation’, I don’t know what ‘I got hot sauce in my bag, swag’ means. But a point is being made: ‘You, the white listener, are not at the centre of things. We’re talking now. You sit. You listen.’ And so I wanted to make an analogous move , decentering non-autistic people.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What kinds of responses have you had from neurotypical people since its publication?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Pretty good and actually, I had a review from quite a well-known clinician who just took it on the chin, really.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This reminds me of when you’re a kid, and you’re listening to something or reading or watching it, and there are references you don’t necessarily understand, but you think, ‘You know what? It’s fine. One day I will understand this.’ Not everything has to be explained.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

No. Because of the way I write, I probably made things clear anyway. But what I deliberately didn’t do in that book is something people quite often do when writing about their condition (and which I did do in The Woman Who Thought Too Much). They will say something like, ‘According to the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the National Autistic Society says…’ and I just thought, Fuck that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you reclaimed the word ‘weird’?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yeah, exactly. I thought, This is about my experience, this is about flipping the mirror around and saying no, this is how the world looks to us. I was talking about this to someone the other day, and I said, ‘The thing about autism is, it’s always been a spectacle.’ There’s a woman, I think, called Grunya Sukhareva (1891–1981), who first identified that group of children in Russia, and whose work was possibly ripped off by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger… but that’s another thing. It starts with Kanner looking at a group of children, Asperger looking at a group of children and describing them. So right from its inception, its [first] appearance in the wider culture, it’s an outside-in phenomenon, which has led to so much suffering and so much oppression. So I thought: No. This is absolutely inside-out.

 

I’m going to go off on a long tangent now – sorry!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Don’t worry. Please go ahead!

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

When I was studying psychoanalysis years ago, I was reading a paper by Anna Freud, who talked about how she’d been dealing with child survivors of the Holocaust. And she noticed that they identified not with the adults they were with, but with adults like the guards, the non-Jewish staff, and that this was a protective measure. You can see how it’s a protective measure, because ‘I’m not in this powerless suffering group. I’m one of the winners. I’m one of the people in charge.’

 

In Weird Sisters, I talk about ‘the socially gracious Joanne’, and I think about her in relation to someone else’s concept of the ‘nice lady therapist’…and we do this all the time; we want to identify with the ones who are in power – not the people who are having stuff done to them, but the people with the power, the people in control. And one way you can do that is by taking on medical language. ‘I’m on your side.’ And it winds up propping up something that’s often called epistemic injustice, where to find out knowledge about yourself, you have to go to someone who’s extracted it and borrow it back in their terms. And I thought, Absolutely not. I’m done with that. I can understand the protectiveness of that identification, but I think my rejection of it is a reflection of how confident and safe I feel now.

 

Relative to how I felt before that, I can say no. I don’t need to borrow your authority. And I don’t need your approval either.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you chose the word ‘weird’ for this book because you didn’t want to posthumously diagnose the people that you’re writing about, the people you’re writing to.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

And Steve Silberman’s very clear as well that you can’t do that. It’s not ethically right, and it’s bad scholarship.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you have a longer list of people that you were going to include in the book?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Oh yes, yes.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And were there any people from the world of music you were considering for inclusion?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I think I thought about Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179). I can think of lots of men in music… Glenn Gould (1932–82), for instance. Autism and music go together quite well, and I think sound engineering or record production is quite a good job for a lot of autistic people because of the detail.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Though it’s quite surprising there are still relatively few record producers who are women, unless they’re producing themselves.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yeah. I’m sure that’s entirely for social reasons. I love a particular kind of BBC Four-type music documentary when they tell you how the tracks are put together. I love tracks like ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ by King Curtis which narrates its own construction. Sometimes I will listen to a particular track, but to just one bit of it, like just the bass – on, say, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, or just the drums, like on ‘Reverend Black Grape’. It has nothing to do what time in your life you’ve associated it with, or the image of the band. It’s entirely to do with: What is this thing made of? And when I see people talking about production or sound engineering, with that kind of enthusiasm, I 100% understand.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I find that not enough is talked about arrangement in music. It’s such an important aspect. And when people say ‘Music sounds the same’, what they often mean – I think – is that too many arrangements sound the same. [Joanne agrees] I mean part of the problem now is that so many people are using the same software to make records, whereas pre-digital, people were having to find their own way.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I love hearing stories about tape loops – ‘we cut up these tape loops’ and all that ingenuity.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m not here to plug my upcoming book, but quite a few studio stories in that one.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

They’re the stories I like. I don’t care whether they got pissed and threw a TV out the window or not. I want to know how they made the record.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The stories of people getting drunk or having sex are a bit dull. I don’t really believe in excess for its own sake. And it’s been written about so much, and it’s led to some terrible things happening in the entertainment world.

 

But also, it’s considered perfectly normal, apparently, for musicians to stand on stage for two hours a night, on a 300-date tour of the world, in different cities, jet-lagged and missing their loved ones. And we somehow expect them to not take drugs or be screwed up in some way. A strange thing to demand of people.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I know. I remember talking to a musician years ago. I think Amy Winehouse had just died, sadly, and we talked about her, and about Michael Jackson. I said, ‘It’s such a dangerous situation to be worth that much money to so many people. It’s not going to do you any good.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But something that recently happened which came too late for inclusion in my book, unfortunately, was Lewis Capaldi at Glastonbury. A very interesting moment. The crowd understood it, they ‘got it’, which was encouraging.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

People our age and older complain about millennials and Gen Z being all oversensitive, but I think it’s a great quality they have. They recognise that it’s not easy to be human, and we could just be compassionate with each other rather than saying ‘buck up’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s not easy to be a performer sometimes.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

God, no.

 —-

ANYTHING: GEORGE MICHAEL: ‘A Different Corner’ (Epic Records, single, 1986)

JUSTIN LEWIS

I haven’t seen the Wham! documentary yet, because I don’t have Netflix anymore.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Oh that’s a shame. I watched the documentary with my husband.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I just wasn’t using it. But it sounds like the concept of Wham! came out of friendship. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were friends, they never ever fell out as far as I know, and there was a lot of generosity from both sides about how they existed. There was never any kind of acrimony, during or after. And I’ve read about how Andrew almost gave George permission to be a pop star, which he might not have done otherwise. He’d have probably become a songwriter, but as a way of getting his songs noticed…

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yes, this extraordinary generosity, like Andrew was George’s booster rocket. And he was OK with that. I mean, yes, a well-paid booster rocket, but still, it’s an extraordinary lack of ego.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There were a lot of jokes at Andrew’s expense in those days especially, but so much of pop music is about image.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

And a persona on to which people, especially very young people, can project stuff.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With many of the Wham! records, I have little doubt that even if Andrew didn’t write the songs, he was certainly listening to a lot of music. They once reviewed the new singles in Smash Hits, and he had as many astute things to say about the records as George did.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

At the time, I had not entirely positive feelings about Wham!, I think. Probably to do with the age we were, let’s be honest. I associated them with the ‘popular girl’/’mean girl’ people. Especially as Wham! came from my part of London as well. So it was all very close.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You were in… Stanmore, is that right?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Yeah, so George’s father’s restaurant was in Edgware, and my family went there at least once. I think I probably knew people who knew them because some people at my school were from Bushey. But also, I didn’t like the plasticky-ness of Wham!, I found it actively off-putting at the time. I knew it was catchy, and that was undeniable.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I genuinely liked the first album, Fantastic!. And after that ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ was a complete break with the past, and it got such a slagging in the press.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I liked that one. I really liked it, my mum liked it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yeah, yeah. But it was a very dramatic left-turn from what they’d been doing previously. I wasn’t buying the records by then, although I had the first Hits Album compilation (1984) and played ‘Freedom’ quite a lot on that.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Which I never liked at the time, for some bizarre reason, or ‘Last Christmas’ – but not for any particular reason.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So what changed your mind with ‘A Different Corner’, the solo George single from spring 1986, while Wham! were still a thing?

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I can see how it tracks a change in my attitude to George Michael, and to pop. Because, you know, put me back at that age: I’m the sort of nerdy, bookish outsider, so naturally I liked guitar bands, and I gravitated, of course, towards Morrissey. Oops.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have you seen that clip from Eight Days a Week? George Michael is on a discussion panel with Morrissey and Tony Blackburn… talking about Joy Division.

Eight Days a Week, BBC2, 25 May 1984. (Since our conversation, the full episode has been uploaded, during which the panel also discusses Everything But the Girl and the film Breakdance.)

‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ by Wham! had that week entered the UK charts at number 4. The following week it reached number 1. ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable’ by The Smiths had been released that week, soon peaking at number ten. At the time Tony Blackburn was broadcasting at BBC Radio 1 and at BBC Radio London. The presenter of Eight Days a Week was The Guardian’s pop music critic Robin Denselow.

JOANNE LIMBURG

And George gets it much better than Morrissey. I don’t think I saw that at the time, but I do remember an interview Wham! did on Radio 1 then, and they were just so funny, and I realised how smart they were. Even if they didn’t wear it on their lyrical sleeve, so to speak.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There are all these hidden things you only spot later. It took me years to clock that the church organ intro on ‘Faith’, which oldies radio always skips now – it’s the melody of Wham!’s ‘Freedom’.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I’ll have to go back and listen. But yeah, at the time, I thought Wham! represented something consumerist and anti-intellectual and airheaded, even though I never thought they were stupid.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

No, no. But I think the way the 80s get remembered now – and I like lots of 80s pop – is a bit reductive. It’s all a bit neat for me, most of the politics has been taken out of it.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

It wasn’t neat, no. What decade is, when you look at it closely! So I wasn’t sure about them, for reasons that I think had to do with their image, rather than their music, and also because I was a pretentious teenager, and I didn’t appreciate how hard simplicity is. You know, why would I have understood what was clever about what they did?

 

So, with ‘A Different Corner’, I thought, ‘Oh it’s this guy who presents this soppy image, singing this soppy ballad, it’s all kind of fake. I think I saw Wham! as fake at the time, and this song as another piece of mushy sentiment – and also probably gender comes into it. Not wanting to be a girl liking girls’ music’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Funnily enough, I remember there was a pressure on me to like ‘boys’ music’, or ‘real music’, whatever that is. The Jam, you know – who I like a lot, but the fanbase could be terribly judgemental. There was a lot of that going on. And with Wham!, I assumed that by this patch, they were aiming at a younger audience than me anyway – though I’m not convinced now that was true.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

And I didn’t like the feeling that I was being instructed to have a crush on someone. So I think I probably felt that a response was being mandated for me that I had no intention of giving.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So when do you think your perception of ‘A Different Corner’ changed? It is, to be fair, not an obvious single for anybody to release.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I think it might even have been not long before he died – or since he died. Which I’m ashamed to say. But it was also finding out that he did the whole thing himself. That appealed to me. ‘Oh, how can I make this in a studio?’ I thought: That is my sort of person.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I believe he was the first person to sing, write, record and produce a record entirely by themselves and get to number one in Britain. (Aged twenty-two, by the way.)

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

I knew none of this at the time. I think I would have immediately been interested if this had been talked about.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Does the Wham! documentary discuss the placing of these two very different records in the context of Wham!’s apparently upbeat catalogue? Because they are completely different in tone.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

Well, I think they started writing ‘Careless Whisper’ together very early, as teenagers. But with ‘A Different Corner’ – the thought he’d put into it. You can hear the space in it. The video was just him in almost-empty spaces, and it sounds like space. It sounds like someone in an empty room, and he’s constructed that through sound.

 

I always appreciate syntactical complexity – you know, ‘Had I been there’. Even in ‘Careless Whisper’ there’s ‘Calls to mind a silver screen’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And not putting the song title in the chorus. In both those songs, burying it in the second verse.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

‘Turned a different corner, and we never would have met, if I could, I would’ – it just breaks your heart. I think it’s a song about very adult emotions, actually. He was very young when he wrote it, but it sounds like quite an old soul song, really, doesn’t it? It’s a desperately, desperately sad song, and it seems extraordinary that at that point in his life, he was writing it, but also putting it out. And number one for three weeks.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And I guess it’s laying the groundwork for the rather different solo career – ‘Cause I’m not planning on going solo’ on ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ – where he gradually, slowly disappears from view. He becomes much more enigmatic, with these occasional flashes of doing something. The last album of new original material was as long ago as 2004.

 

JOANNE LIMBURG

When the whole ‘Outside’ thing happened (1998), that extraordinary way he responded to being outed. ‘Yes, I was out looking for sex. I’m a gay man. A lot of gay men do that. What of it?’ I laugh every time I see the ‘Outside’ video, when he just took the piss out of it. I just thought, ‘You are such a strong-minded, magnificent person.’

 

 

——

 

Joanne Limburg’s The Woman Who Thought Too Much, A Want of Kindness, Small Pieces and Letters to My Weird Sisters are all published by Atlantic Books. She also has another poetry collection due out in 2027, Alas, published by Bloodaxe Books.

For much more on Joanne’s career and books, please see her website: http://joannelimburg.net

You can follow her on Bluesky at @jlimburg.bsky.social.

 

—-

FLA PLAYLIST 23

Joanne Limburg

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: BOCK & HARNICK: Fiddler on the Roof: ‘Tradition’

Topol, Original London Cast Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcn5dUJ6y1I&list=PLbPRxrjG037NU1htyTgYJ4FjXxZHKdd8F&index=1

Track 2: 10CC: ‘Donna’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SThPj7MPX2o

Track 3: THE TOTS: ‘Please Yourself’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZPu6COSsw

Track 4: ELVIS PRESLEY: ‘Way Down’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weLSA2vekLA

Track 5: LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: ‘Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61: III. Rondo. Allegro’

David Oistrakh, André Cluytens, Orchestre National Radiodiffusion Française: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5OJYNmr0gY

Track 6: GABRIELS: ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-694O6oGWSY

Track 7: BEYONCÉ: ‘Formation’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI2jn3lJTAE

Track 8: HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: ‘Ordo Virtutum, Pt. V’

Vox Animae: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6YCIQ8-q0

Track 9: KING CURTIS: ‘Memphis Soul Stew’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sm9n-6hy6M

Track 10: BUGGLES: ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs

Track 11: BLACK GRAPE: ‘Reverend Black Grape’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik9HDX8hJV0

Track 12: GEORGE MICHAEL: ‘A Different Corner’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPWHkK-_a_A

Track 13: THE SMITHS: ‘How Soon is Now?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCAdHBrVD2E

Track 14: GEORGE MICHAEL: ‘Outside’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62902eXZ8a0

 

FLA 18: Penny Kiley (18/06/2023)

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The writer and journalist Penny Kiley was born in Kent, and studied English at Liverpool University, where she found herself at the epicentre of the city’s musical and cultural scene during punk, post-punk and beyond. In 1979 she became a regular contributor to Melody Maker and a little later on, Smash Hits. In the late 1980s, she became the music columnist for the Liverpool Echo, while also covering the Merseyside arts scene for other local publications.

Latterly, Penny continues to write about music, books and culture on her blog Older Than Elvis, and has now written a terrific memoir, Atypical Girl, about her life, career and belated diagnosis of autism. I was delighted that she agreed to come and discuss all of this with me on First Last Anything, and choose some favourite and significant records too. Our conversation took place on Zoom one evening in May 2023. We hope you enjoy it.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So what records did you grow up with in your house before you started buying music yourself?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It’s interesting, that one. When I was reading series 1 of First Last Anything, I felt there was some sort of dialogue going on between the different interviewees and between the interviews and the audience. And David Quantick [see FLA 6] was the one that said ‘old musicals’, and I guess I’m a similar age to him.

 

My dad was a Londoner, and he used to go to the theatre all the time in London because in those days normal people could afford to go. So we had Oklahoma! and Gigi and Carousel in the house. And I guess that gave me a grounding in really good songs. Over the years, that’s what I’ve always come back to, particularly now, when you get old and cranky and you don’t want to listen to the latest new sound: ‘I don’t care – I just want good songs, songs with stories.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Musicals often seem to be about history or culture or identity, those elements.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

They have to be, because there’s a narrative anyway. But yes, I just like people putting thought into songs and not doing the obvious rhymes or references or allusions.

 

My parents weren’t hugely into music otherwise, but then schools were good. Everybody played the recorder when they got to a certain age, you know? And we had Singing Together (BBC Radio, 1939–2001), this schools radio programme.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, I remember. We’d had Time and Tune (BBC Radio, 1951–) at infants school…

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I don’t remember that!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

…but then at junior school, Singing Together. We’d all sit on the floor, cross-legged, in the school hall. There was a whole Archive on 4 documentary with Jarvis Cocker about Singing Together [broadcast November 2014, on BBC Sounds].

 

Did you play any instruments then at school, or were you in bands at all, anything like that?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I played the recorder and then when I left junior school, I learned piano for about a year, but didn’t really get on with it. I did enjoy singing, though. I was in the school choir, in the back row, at grammar school, and we did Handel’s Messiah with the boys’ school down the road. That was a big kick. That was the first time I realised you can do a performance and get this huge adrenalin rush at the end of it.

—- 

FIRST: T REX: ‘Jeepster’ (Fly Records, single, 1971)

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s also Johnny Marr’s first single, or so he told Smash Hits back in the day. Was this the first you knew of Bolan?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I must have heard ‘Get It On’ before then. I didn’t buy records very often, because I was thirteen, I didn’t get much pocket money.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

To buy a record was a big deal, wasn’t it?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Round about 1970, my parents bought a new stereo, so we had the opportunity to play records, and you’d see Cliff Richard or the New Seekers on the telly and that was a kind of entry-level stuff. But T Rex was the first thing that was mine.

Nobody else in the family got it apart from me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you stay with their stuff for long?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

For a few years. After ‘Children of the Revolution’ [autumn 1972], I got a bit bored. The peak was quite short. I mean, my husband owns everything Marc Bolan ever made and 50% of it is actually unlistenable. Although he will dispute that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is this the earlier stuff, the long album titles, or the later stuff?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The earlier stuff and the later stuff! The earlier stuff is just like just the hippy-dippy stuff. And then the later stuff is just frankly substandard because the quality control had gone out of the window. But the peak’s so good – enough to hang a legacy on.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what is that peak? ‘Ride a White Swan’ [late 1970] to… ‘20th Century Boy’ [early 1973], I guess. Two and a bit years? And he becomes part of the light entertainment fabric, guesting on the Cilla Black Show [Cilla, BBC1, 27 January 1973], doing ‘Life’s a Gas’ on Saturday night television.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

‘Life’s a Gas’, the other side of ‘Jeepster’. That was like buying two singles. Of course, we always played B-sides in those days, but this was like having a double-A side because they were both so good. Both songs are on the Electric Warrior LP which I bought later – now seen as a classic. My first record has stood the test of time! I still play it, and I still hear new things in it all the time. Bolan had talent, obviously, but credit also to Tony Visconti, as producer, for bringing out the best in the songs.

 

I should also mention that, around this time, a lot of 50s and 60s stuff was getting reissued – the Shangri-Las, Phil Spector, doowop – and that fed into my musical education. There was also the rock’n’roll revival, another genre that’s stayed with me. The soundtrack LP to That’ll Be the Day (1973) was a big influence.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading your memoir [Atypical Girl], my first surprise – given that I associate a lot of your work so much with Liverpool – is that you’re not from there at all. You’re actually from Kent.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, a place called Sittingbourne. Everybody knows the name because it’s on the railway. But there’s no reason to get off.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So what was it about the city of Liverpool that appealed to you? It’s worth saying that punk hadn’t happened at this point.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I went there because of the university. I wanted to do English Language and Literature and not many universities did both. The English department had a good reputation and one of my teachers had a daughter who’d done English there a few years before me. I knew nothing about the North whatsoever. But it became like this whole new world. It was amazing because there was stuff happening all the time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You say in the memoir how you’d prefer not to mention the music you were listening to before you got to Liverpool. Why do you think there’s this awkwardness about pre-punk? Was punk such a seismic event because of what happened next, did it follow a period where it was all rather dull – or were there things that you secretly still like?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was a real ‘Ground Zero’ attitude about punk. Everybody threw away lots of their records, or gave them away, or hid them in the back of cupboards, because they were embarrassed. We all had to pretend that we’d only ever liked certain things. I was listening to a mixture of stuff and some of it I would still listen to now, like The Who or Dylan. There was a lot of soft rock stuff that you just listened to because your friends had it. Quite pleasant, but it becomes dull after you’ve heard the Ramones.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When those Top of the Pops repeats started running on BBC4 [7 April 2011] with the episodes of April 1976, I remember thinking, ‘Okay, so it’s before punk rock, what’s going on?’ Even knowing the state of the charts at the time – lots of oldies and novelty records – doesn’t prepare you for quite how bad an episode is going to be. They had to fill 40 minutes at short notice. And it seemed to be the days before they’d invented onscreen captions, because anonymous bands would start playing with no lead-in from the presenter and you wouldn’t have a clue who they were. It’s a cliché, but ABBA turn up and it’s, ‘Oh, thank god – one we know.’ Even though you’d heard it a billion times.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I still remember the early 70s Top of the Pops era as a ‘golden age’, mainly because of glam rock. But by the mid-70s it had got a bit dire. There was one shown again last week, from ’77, and I was thinking, This is so middle of the road. The entire programme, wall to wall.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Punk rock still hasn’t quite happened, unless you were reading the music press.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The Sex Pistols were having hits, but it didn’t change that culture straight away. All that awful middle of the road stuff carried on for so long because punk didn’t really get mainstream. And at the time, I was probably watching Old Grey Whistle Test, with Bob Harris, more than Top of the Pops.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And Whistle Test didn’t really do punk, did it? You had to make an album to be on that.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It was so serious about everything. And then you’d get something like Alex Harvey on [BBC2, 7 February 1975], and you’d go, ‘What the fuck is this?’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh, was that the ‘Next’ clip? I saw that quite a bit later. Terrifying!

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, the Jacques Brel song. I was like 17, 18, and I didn’t really understand it at all. It felt way too grown up for me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Once you know a bit more Alex Harvey, it kind of explains itself, but at the time… It’s so intense. When BBC4 started repeating Top of the Pops, I remember thinking, ‘Why not repeat some Whistle Test in full?’ But when you see one in full, it could often be terribly earnest.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That anniversary programme they did a few years ago was all from the Bob Harris perspective! I got really cross because of Annie Nightingale being sidelined. Obviously, that’s a feminist issue, but also they made it sound like a really dull programme, even duller than it actually was.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I love Annie. People always talk about the Peel show being important for their musical education, but I didn’t really listen to Peel till I was at university. Throughout my teens, I listened to Annie every Sunday night, because even though it was, ostensibly, a request show after the Top 40 show, she would play increasingly left-field music as the evening went on.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The first time I heard ‘Wuthering Heights’ was on her show, when it was a Sunday afternoon programme. A real ‘what is this?’ moment.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Tell me about getting to Liverpool, then, because your experience of music changes dramatically, within weeks.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I arrived autumn ’76, and I went to all the gigs that were on – a huge mix of stuff. The most forward-looking one was Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Students Union [16 October 1976]. I loved that. They’re written out of the picture now, a bit, but I think they were an important link. I mean, that Live at the Marquee EP [recorded July 1976] is brilliant, even though they’re standing there on the cover with terrible flares. The actual music has so much energy.

 

But like you, I didn’t really know about John Peel, he was on past my bedtime when I’d been living at home. You’d read about stuff in the music papers, but you didn’t really hear it. I think there was one boy who lived upstairs in the halls of residence who had ‘Anarchy in the UK’ when that came out [November 1976] but he would play that alongside Jimi Hendrix and it didn’t really seem that different. I guess if you’d seen them live, it would have been an entirely different experience. They did play in Liverpool but hardly anybody went.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was around this time that you met Pete Wylie.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

We were doing different courses – he was doing French, and I was doing English – but we both did classical literature in translation. That’s how I got to know him, we pretty much hit it off straight away. And Pete told me I should go to Eric’s, this was the beginning of ’77. It was a lot more than a punk club, although that’s what it got known for. The booking policy was pretty broad. It also had a lot of old rockabilly on the jukebox. It gave us all our musical education.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Could you see the potential even then, that Pete was going to be a musical giant? Was the charisma evident?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was definitely charisma. Somebody wrote an article about Liverpool in the Baltimore Sun [‘After the “Merseybeat”, 20 April 1979]. I don’t know why, or how we even saw it. But it mentioned Pete Wylie, and the picture was Pete Wylie walking down the street – and you know, ‘everybody knows him’. Liverpool was a village [in terms of the music scene at the time]. And he was one of the faces at Eric’s. The strapline on his website, even now, is ‘Part-time rock-star, full-time legend!’.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How did you get into journalism, then? Had you always been interested in writing?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was five, but I was so obsessed with music, I just wanted to write about that. I knew how to write, and I was reading the music papers. I thought: I could do this. I sat on the idea for a bit, then in my final year, I started writing for the university mag. And then Melody Maker advertised for people, because the NME had some young writers and they thought they’d better get some too. So I became one of their young writers and I think Paolo Hewitt started around the same time as well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Had there been particular journalists you always looked forward to reading, people you made a note of?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There were people at the NME when I was a teenager in the 70s like Charles Shaar Murray, kind of stars in their own right. Obviously, Julie Burchill when she started. There were very few women doing it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Jumping ahead a little bit, I think I had seen your name in Smash Hits, reviewing concerts – I always made a mental note of who was writing the pieces, not just who they were writing about – but I properly became aware of you when I switched to reading Melody Maker, around late 1985. And you did a piece on Half Man Half Biscuit, who maybe I had heard of but not quite heard. But it was a very funny piece, and so I thought: Oh, must hear some Half Man Half Biscuit, but also: must read more Penny Kiley. 

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Oh, that’s good!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So when you joined the Maker, ’79, Richard Williams was still the editor? An amazing writer and editor, obviously. It goes through a lot of phases between then and when I properly started reading it.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It was always ‘the poor relation’ compared to the NME, and obviously both were produced by the same company (IPC) – so it struggled, really, to find its own identity. When I started writing for it, one of its strengths was that it was very eclectic – it had a folk section and a jazz specialist, and there was (famously) the classified section at the back where musicians found people to be in their bands. It should have stayed with that and just moved everybody over a bit to make space for the new stuff.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I get the feeling you could be quite broad in what you could pitch. Presumably they wanted people outside London to give a flavour of what was going on?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, that’s why Richard hired me. I was in the right place at the right time, there was a lot going on in Liverpool that was worth covering. And when I started out, there were people who gave me the space to learn what I was doing: Richard Williams, and also Ian Birch who was the reviews editor before he moved to Smash Hits. I remember Allan Jones, who became the Maker’s editor, would give me pointers like, ‘You don’t write a 1,000-word review, that’s too long.’ But he would still give me the work. So I was learning my trade as I went along.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I switched to the Maker partly because by ’85, I felt a bit jaded with Smash Hits. I was fifteen, I’d been reading it for five years, and I was also interested by then in what was outside the Top 40. At the time, I figured I’d just slightly lost interest in the music, but when I revisited that patch of issues more recently, I realised, ‘Actually, for me, the writing isn’t as good as it had been either.’ It all got a bit wacky, everybody wanted to be Tom Hibbert. Fine if you’re Tom Hibbert, and there were still a few other great writers (Chris Heath, Sylvia Patterson and Miranda Sawyer a little while later), but if the whole magazine is trying to do that kind of joke, it gets a bit wearing.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

When it first started out, it was a lot straighter, but then it got a bit in-jokey and annoying.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yeah. I got bored with all the brackets and exclamation marks. But you’re right, at the turn of the 80s, they’d have like an indie section, where there’d be a piece on Crass or the Young Marble Giants. And there was a disco page with a club chart.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, they’d cover anybody.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And the rule seemed to be if it was a new band, they would get priority. Whereas an established act that predated the existence of Smash Hits would get a slightly sniffy reception. Like a perfectly alright Paul McCartney album. It was about ‘the new’. In fact, that period must be one of the few in pop history where just about everything of interest, certainly in the mainstream, was coming out of Britain. The US charts in that patch – turn of the 80s – were deathly. But the British charts were really varied.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was so much at the time that felt different. And I don’t listen to much new music now, but what comes my way doesn’t feel different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve been trying to work out, for a while now, about why the charts were so important to me when I was 10, 11, 12 – and some of that is undoubtedly that I’m a bit of a stat nerd. But it was also that sense of variety. You’d have a Saxon record next to a Soft Cell record in the top 40 and Tony Blackburn would play both of them, right next to each other. And of course loads of great records weren’t charting at all, but that chart show was like an education, every week: ‘There’s some stuff you’re not going to like, but it’s a wide range.’ There was this incredible sense of democracy about it all.

 

But what was it like for you to revisit your journalism from that period? Was writing Atypical Girl the first time in a while you’d read it again?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I still had all the cuttings books in the cupboard, but I hadn’t really done anything with them. I started looking at stuff when I was writing the book and then I looked at them again when I started my Substack of archive cuttings.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading some of the pieces again, they’re quite prescient. There’s that review of OMD when they’re well known in Liverpool but haven’t yet broken through nationally.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I think I said, ‘They’re going to be big.’ You just knew.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you reviewing the room, though, as well as the performance? You’re spotting what’s happening.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, there’s all that: OMD, The Teardrop Explodes, the Bunnymen, out of the Eric’s lot. They were all on the verge of breaking through – it was just obvious. They did so many gigs, and the gigs got bigger and bigger and there was more of a buzz about them. And inside, you become aware of that.

 

And I was doing some interviews… I was really lucky, actually, getting The Cramps as my first interview [June 1979]. I mean it sounds nuts, because of that image they had, but actually they were so easy.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s often the way, isn’t it? It belies the image, the idea that the outlandish people might be the most difficult.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

First of all, they are actually quite nice people. But secondly, they had things they wanted to say. So, basically, you press the buttons and off they go, it’s fine, but you are so dependent on people wanting to do it, and play the game. If they don’t do that, you’re a bit screwed.

 

I see some old interviews on the TV and I look at the bands lined up on one side of the table and the interviewer on the other side and the band’s giving them a really hard time and I think, I know what you’re doing there ‘cause I’ve been there. You know: ‘We’re the gang and we’re not comfortable with this situation, so we’re going to just become this tight unit and take the piss out of anybody that wants anything from us.’ Once that dynamic is set up, it’s hard to break.

 

But I was so shy that I hated interviews. So I’m looking back at my cuttings now for Substack and realise, Oh, there’s not really that many interviews. That’s a shame. But they did scare me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you did… ten years at the Maker?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It petered out in the mid 90s, but there wasn’t any kind of big finish.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

By which time you were working on the Liverpool Echo and the Daily Post, writing about music and arts as well.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The Echo was one of the biggest regional papers in the country then. It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, career-wise, but it felt like the job had my name on, so I went for it. I was freelance, but the contract was to write two columns a week. It changed a lot over time – I won’t say it ‘evolved’ because it wasn’t really me making the changes, but whoever was in charge of the paper at the time. So, I was reviewing records and whichever big name was coming to the Empire Theatre – but quite a lot of grassroots music stuff, which I was most interested in pushing, and was how I developed a name for myself. I had a lot of run-ins with various people at the Echo who didn’t think I should be doing that sort of thing because I was writing about people their children hadn’t heard of.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which is surely the whole point, though! To introduce readers to new people!

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, it’s not about whether you’re famous or not, it’s about supporting what’s going on in your city. So there was a bit of a mismatch of vision for quite a long time. Liverpool was just an amazing place for the arts. It’s kind of embarrassing because I’m living in the shires now, and when I tell people who aren’t from Liverpool how good it is, you can see them thinking, ‘That doesn’t compute.’ They’ve got their image of Liverpool.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s fascinating in your book to see these names of people on the rise, not just the people in music, but names like Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale having plays on at the Everyman.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

We had LOTS of theatres! The Everyman, the Playhouse, the Empire, the Neptune, and the Unity. And little odd venues on top of those.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And having this new serial, Brookside (1982–2001) on the new Channel 4.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

And going back to music, Radio Merseyside, the BBC local station, in the 80s, was a really big part of the music scene’s infrastructure. Janice Long, obviously, and there was a guy called Roger Hill who did the longest running alternative music programme on UK radio – 45 years – and it’s just been axed in the latest BBC cuts.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously, we’re having this conversation just as the BBC is chipping away at its local radio output, seemingly to almost nothing, and one thing that’s undervalued about local radio is discovering new talent. All those stations, commercial and BBC, were uncovering new bands, because there’s more to local radio than phone-ins. Shows like On the Wire on Radio Lancashire. Every station had one of those, but increasingly no longer.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

When I see Top of the Pops, or From the Vaults on Sky Arts, I spot so many Liverpool acts. They just keep coming, and when I was writing for the Echo, it was taken for granted that there’d be a handful of Liverpool acts in the charts at any given time.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Atypical Girl is also partly the story of your autism diagnosis. How long ago were you diagnosed?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Five years ago now.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m in the early stages of investigating all this myself at the moment, and it really makes you re-examine your life. Has your diagnosis made you review your life in journalism in a different light? Had you already started writing the memoir before it, and did that change your method in writing it?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I can’t remember when I started thinking about writing it. It’s been years. At first, it was going to be ‘woman in a man’s world’, the usual thing. It was a midlife crisis book for a while, because I’ve been doing this blog, Older Than Elvis, about coming to terms with being middle-aged.

 

So I was writing it in stops and starts because of circumstances, and then I went on an Arvon writing course with Laura Barton, one of my favourite music writers, as one of the tutors. (She did the brilliant ‘Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll’ column in The Guardian.) I saved up all my pocket money for it, specifically because it was Laura doing it. (The other tutor was Alexander Masters and he was great, too.) It was hugely expensive, but great fun, and during that week I realised that my book was actually about reinvention. This was still a couple of years before I got the autism diagnosis. One of the things about autism, as you probably know, is about masking and not knowing, not having a solid sense of identity, and of who you are, and trying on different identities.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because you’re trying to emulate other people, or the behaviour of other people, at least.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Partly, you’re trying to fit in; partly, it’s just trying on things for size and seeing what works. And that’s why there are chapters in the book called things like ‘how to be this’, and ‘how to be that’. Because that’s the story of my life. And then alongside the personal stuff, there’s the whole thing about regeneration, the way Liverpool’s changed. So it might not be obvious, but the overall theme is reinvention.

 

When I started pitching it, I wondered if there was enough music in it, or too much music. And it suddenly dawned on me that it’s an autism memoir disguised as a music business book.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The title – it’s a Slits reference, isn’t it? ‘Typical Girls’.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It is. But ‘Atypical Girl’ is still a working title. We’ll see what happens.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading it, I was thinking about how books on music written by women have always ‘had’ to be about more than the music. I was thinking about Sylvia Patterson’s book a few years back, I’m With the Band, and she mentioned in an interview that she just wanted it to be a book about being a journalist, and she was persuaded to write about her background and her mother.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I saw a talk that she gave where she said exactly that thing. And her book ended up as a mixture of the personal and the professional and it won an award, so it does work.

 

When I first started reading music journalism memoirs, they were all by men. It all seemed to be ‘rifling through cuttings books’, and it was always people with a really middle-class background, so there was a lot of ‘Oh I’m so self-deprecating…’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, they can afford to be. ‘How did I get here?’

 

 

PENNY KILEY

‘Oh, I just fell into it.’ Yeah yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I liked how unapologetic you are about applying to Melody Maker. That it was a calculated approach.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I didn’t fall into it, no. I wanted to do it. There haven’t been many times in my life where I’ve known what I’ve wanted, but that was one of them.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s also a section about what is punk and what isn’t punk. Blogging is punk, Facebook isn’t. Television isn’t punk, radio is. 

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That list was on my blog. I stole the idea from Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s still so relevant now, even more so perhaps. People used to say that punk was about being yourself, but in those days, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. We live in an age now where actually, it’s much more possible to be yourself than it used to be. Because – sorry to rub this in – but I was too young for punk. In that I don’t really remember the records. I remember new wave, the Boomtown Rats and Blondie, that wave, but my perception of punk itself was ‘blokes with Mohican haircuts and safety pins’, so not about originality.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

No, I hate all that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And hopefully, at a time when there are millions of podcasts, First Last Anything has a punk edge to it.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It’s DIY.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s DIY! Thank you. How long have you been doing the Older Than Elvis blog, then?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I started to blog on the night before my 50th birthday because I promised myself I would do it before I was 50, and I always meet deadlines. So that’s 15 years now.

—-

LAST: MARGO CILKER: Pohorylle (2021, Margo Cilker/Loose Music)

Extract: ‘That River’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I just checked pronunciation and her surname is apparently pronounced ‘Silker’.  

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I particularly don’t know how you pronounce the name of the LP.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It may be a reference to the birth surname of the war photographer Gerda Taro (1910–37). I’ll pretend I didn’t just Google that. I really liked this record. This seems to be somewhere between country and western, or roots and Americana anyway. Have you liked this kind of music for a long time?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, a long time. I don’t really listen to much new music, but I picked up on this because Allan Jones, who used to be my editor at Melody Maker, is now a Facebook friend, and he goes to gigs all the time. And he posted that he’d been to see her in London. He said, ‘She’s a bit like Lucinda Williams’, and I thought, ‘Well, I really like Lucinda Williams’, so I gave it a listen, and thought, ‘I might buy this. I like it.’

ANYTHING: HANK WILLIAMS: ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’ (1952, single, MGM Records)

PENNY KILEY

I chose this because, like discovering T Rex, it was another pivotal moment: in this case, when I stopped listening to music for work, and started listening to what I chose. Also, I think you have to have lived a bit to ‘get’ country music. I’m reading Lucinda Williams’ memoir at the moment (Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You); she made her breakthrough LP in her mid-thirties (Lucinda Williams, 1988) – and I discovered it a bit later (she’s older than me) in my mid-thirties. Also, when I discovered it, alt-country was big at the time, and someone described that as what punks listen to when they get old.

 

I got into country in a big way when I was going through a divorce in the 1990s. Which is a bit of a cliché. Somebody asked me how I was coping after we separated and I said, ‘A bottle of Jack Daniels and the Hank Williams box set.’ And that was actually the truth. We were talking at the start of this about writing songs, and Hank Williams… he’s such a great songwriter. And the sound is really interesting because it’s on the cusp, it’s hillbilly, but music is about to morph into rockabilly and rock’n’roll and all the rest of it. So he is a bit of a missing link as well, but what a brilliant writer. I just love his writing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And this one in particular, ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’, it’s a funny song in its own way.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, it’s really funny and clever. I chose it because he’s known for sad songs but there’s another side to him.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But it’s overshadowed by the fact that it’s almost the last thing he recorded.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

And it was a posthumous hit. I mean, with a title like that, it just all falls into place, doesn’t it?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think country music, country and western was almost the last music I got to of the main genres because my dad had a reasonably sizeable but very eclectic record collection, but it lacked country and western – we might have had a Dolly Parton compilation, I think, but that was about it. And obviously with some country music, there is this connection with the Republican Party. Not always the case, of course.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, going back to Lucinda Williams’ memoir, she’s starts off with: we’re not all racist in the South, you know.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

See also the Chicks, as they’re now called. And a number of others.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

You say ‘country and western’ and I always cringe a bit at that term. I would always say ‘country’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Funnily enough, I was reading an interview with Margo Cilker, who’s from Oregon, I think, and she describes her music as ‘West’.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That’s fair enough. Every track’s different on this album – the word ‘different’ keeps coming up. But they’re all her, and they’re all ‘West’ – in a way.

 

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know that we share a frustration with music documentaries with all the same talking heads on them.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The same men. Because women aren’t supposed to know about music, according to the BBC. I can’t watch that stuff anymore, although Women Who Rock on Sky Arts was an amazing series, because all the talking heads were women. The musicians themselves, a few commentators, music writers, journalists – all women. It was just so refreshing. It was made by women with a woman director, and – okay – it was a bit of a statement, it would be nice if we were just integrated. We’re still not. And every time I write to the BBC about it, they give me stupid replies. They don’t understand the concepts of representation or marginalisation.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of your notable interviewees in the first few years of your career was the Marine Girls in 1982, featuring Tracey Thorn.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Everything But the Girl had done one single, ‘Night and Day’ (1982). Tracey had met Ben at Hull University, they’d done the single together, and the Marine Girls were about to split up (which I didn’t pick up on at the time). I enjoyed doing that piece. I got  this massive spread in the Melody Maker and Janette Beckman took these amazing photographs so it worked out really well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Didn’t it get the front cover?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I’ve only had two front covers and that was the second one. First one was The Cramps!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In your book, you mention a quote of Tracey’s about the 1980s, and how all the things that are now supposed to sum up the 80s – Royal Wedding, Live Aid, yuppies, Duran Duran – weren’t really relevant to our lives. And I found this interesting – obviously I became a teenager in the 80s, and remember all those things. But the 80s are important to me because they were slightly weird. I wasn’t going out that much – almost no bands came to Swansea and if they did, they’d play an over-18s venue. So I relied on television and the music press and radio, so got close to a lot of this stuff. But the nostalgia of the 80s removes the offbeat and the underground. It just becomes this triumphalist thing about MTV videos. Being that little bit older, and you were going out a lot more, did the 80s feel like a bit of an anti-climax after the late 70s?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Everything in my entire life has been an anti-climax since then! That makes me sound like a real saddo, and actually I did still get excited about my new favourite bands, like Orange Juice or James. But the thing about the 80s and the way people talk about it, the way it’s portrayed… It’s very dependent on where you were living at the time. So, people who were in London, part of the big financial boom and everything, were having a lovely time, and they cared about Princess Diana’s frock. And those of us who were trapped on the scrapheap by Thatcherism were living in an entirely different country. I have never forgiven the Conservatives for that, and I never will.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, we’re still seeing the effects of it, aren’t we?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The legacy is still there indeed. I don’t want to talk about politics but growing up in Liverpool in the 80s did politicise me, because how could it not? Nobody had any money, but we made our own fun. It was an incredibly bohemian culture. There were people doing music, theatre, or film, or visual art, and a lot of the time, the same people were doing all that stuff. You could sign on and not get hassled too much. And with the Enterprise Allowance Scheme you could actually get money for being in a band. So Liverpool was a very exciting place to be, and I’d much rather have been there than somewhere where everyone was just running around with loads of money.

 

 

—-

Penny Kiley’s memoir, Atypical Girl, will be published by Birlinn on 5 February 2026. Further details here: https://birlinn.co.uk/product/atypical-girl/

She continues to blog at olderthanelvis.blogspot.com

Her Substack, a growing archive of her press work and interviews, can be found at pennykiley.substack.com

 You can also find Penny at various other places via this link: https://linktr.ee/pennykiley

 

FLA PLAYLIST 18

Penny Kiley

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: RICHARD RODGERS AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II: Oklahoma!:

‘The Farmer and the Cowman’

Gordon Macrae, Gloria Grahame etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJLVUTJSF0

Track 2: T REX: ‘Jeepster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kGuZMHycU

Track 3: T REX: ‘Life’s a Gas’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4z8Wi-5uwY

Track 4: THE SHANGRI-LA’S: ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KLJaoAGXTY

Track 5: FRANKIE LYMON & THE TEENAGERS: ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’

[from That’ll Be the Day soundtrack]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXJ6mo7aeUw

Track 6: MOTT THE HOOPLE: ‘The Golden Age of Rock’n’Roll’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM3T7kT4JI

Track 7: EDDIE AND THE HOT RODS: ‘Gloria (Live at the Marquee)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNI39woKbxY

Track 8: OMD: ‘Electricity’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXNF4KoVyoU

Track 9: THE TEARDROP EXPLODES: ‘Read It in Books’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd3OM4mWSCw

Track 10: ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN: ‘Pictures on My Wall’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2DSO7gYD3Y

Track 11: PETE WYLIE: ‘Hey! Mona Lisa’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-Bs3cHBbw

Track 12: THE CRAMPS: ‘Human Fly’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK5Xe1SK0r8

Track 13: ROBERT GORDON AND LINK WRAY: ‘Red Hot’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNm0IzwKcqs

Track 14: THE MARINE GIRLS: ‘Honey’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPk4sUH6Uf0

Track 15: ORANGE JUICE: ‘Falling and Laughing’ (Postcard Version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Gdj_jOQEc

Track 16: JAMES: ‘Johnny Yen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAg6sI36Rs

Track 17: WACO BROTHERS: ‘Bad Times Are Coming Round Again’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iMOelbLm2M

Track 18: LUCINDA WILLIAMS: ‘Passionate Kisses’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEqXV9hGk-I 

Track 19: MARGO CILKER: ‘That River’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wp1CEExUxo

Track 20: HANK WILLIAMS: ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19vApPwWqh8

Track 21: ELVIS PRESLEY: ‘Blue Moon’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiY5auB3OWg