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Post by Craig Herbertson on Mar 4, 2015 6:26:50 GMT
I've never met these people but they are trying to kickstart a film about censorship via a take on Savoy books. This censorship thing is irritating me endlessly and it all looks a bit arty but certainly worthwhile so I will have a punt.
[a href="Savoy books "[/a]
'This new film will trace a recent history of experimental, alternative publishing in Manchester and the UK via the history of Savoy Books. An experimental and innovative approach to storytelling will utilise previously unseen footage dating from the 1980's and 1990's, featuring visual records from Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, John Coulthart and Michael Butterworth along with found and archival footage sourced from the BBC and Northern film archive. The film will also necessarily approach censorship debates, considering the cultural and political context of the sensationalism around obscenity trials.'
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Post by pulphack on May 19, 2015 7:02:58 GMT
Only two and a half months late getting around to this, but...
I would recommend Savoy to anyone. They push the envelope - hell, they shove a whole stationery shop at times - but they are full of surprises and have some wonderful books in their history. My own awakening to them came with The Savoy Book, an anthology I got out of the library in the early eighties, which is a kind of continuation of the New Worlds ethos under Moorcock, with a harder edge - they are Mancs, after all, and reflect that city's approach to life. Factory owe them a lot, put it that way. A few years later I bought Jack Trevor Story's The Urban District Lover, the last of the Albert Argyle trilogy and as I couldn't find the others, wrote to see if they were still available. Mike Butterworth sent me the other two gratis, and their other JTS books similarly, just because he was happy someone had discovered Jack. He also corresponded with me and gave me some great advice and constructive criticism about a book I was writing then (it was crap, but I learned a lot, though my critics would disagree).
At this time they were making records with PJ Proby, and his versions of Heroes, Anarchy In The UK, Tainted Love and TS Eliot's The Wasteland have to be heard to be believed. Let alone his take on The Passenger ('he rides and he rides and... boy, does he ride...'). Or Hardcore, his alleged duet with Madonna ('Telly Savalas uses his bald head like a phallus'). The latter has David Britton's prison number as a parenthesis on the title. James Anderton, then Chief Constable of Manchester, hated them and busted them for obscenity many times, mostly for the kind of top shelf smut that was sold in the newsagents next to their bookshops. The magistrates found Savoy selling Club & Mayfair appalling, but the shop next door could sell Whitehouse and Playbirds without being done. There was an obvious agenda here. In return Savoy baited Anderton, particularly in the comics featuring Meng & Ecker, Lord Horror's bootboys.
Ah, Lord Horror... a divisive figure. Based on Lord Haw Haw and allegedly the brother of James Joyce*, this Nazi amoral scumbag runs through their history. My take on him is that he is a satirical figure that allows David Britton to savage the hypocrisy of England and the English, particularly the Establishment that is so heavy handed on any kind of dissent or deviation from the 'normal' (Anderton being an obvious example). The first novel was the last book to be banned for obscenity in the UK (unless I've missed something since), and ended up with more gaol time, which is shocking. Go on youtube and you can see intellectual heavyweights like Muriel Gray and Iain Lees on C4 calling Lord Horror sick and depraved and fit only for schoolboys who like to be shocking. No doubt that may comprise part of the audience, but if a so-called satirist like Lees can't see the real thing when it hits him... As it happens, I don't 'like' Lord Horror much and have only read one. But it is genuinely effective and makes its point. Just not for me. Anyway, there were a series of Reverbstorm LH comics to follow, as comics cannot be prosecuted under the same act, apparently. And audio versions. By Proby. And then the latest audio features Fenella Fielding reading and singing some peverse tales.
When they started publishing, they had a catalogue that included rock books, JTS, Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, as well as poems by Mike Harding, classics by Henry Treece, and reprints of Ken Reid's newspaper strip character Fudge. Eclectic and interesting. They were distributed by NEL, but it went tits up and they lost money. JTS did his usual trick of being a bad omen, and even though he had a prime time ITV show at that time (Jack On The Box), he managed to sell less than 2,000 of every title they published.... they printed 10,000. There were six titles. Bankruptcy beckoned.
The shops made them money, but Anderton hated them, and so the beat and avant-garde side came to the fore in adversity, and the later Savoy seemed a world away from the early incarnation. Except that Mike Butterworth still like Ken Reid and will tell you he was a genius.
They have stuff on youtube. The books tend to go out of print quickly as they only do small runs now. But they're well worth checking out. For many reasons. They were a pilloried and persecuted bastion of free speech. They had great taste in that kind of unpopular pop culture (ie the not hip and soon forgotten). And virtually every band on Factory used to buy books, magazines and bootleg albums from their shops. Actually, that last might not be a recommendation to some...
(*edit - that is, they represent Lord Horror as James Joyce's brother, Lord Haw Haw being named William Joyce; a little conceit of theirs)
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Post by Craig Herbertson on May 19, 2015 8:48:18 GMT
Fascinating read pulphack. I've also found Mike Butterworth a gem of a guy and extremely helpful (he read all my manuscripts and gave me a lot of tips.) It's a measure of how much freedom of speech had been eroded when you think back to Anderton and his bullying campaign. probably few people would bat an eyelid now and put it down to crowd control.
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