Them or Us: Segues, Totality and The Andy Wilson Affair

A morsel from the archives - and brought to you now to stave off the moment when you realise that the Unkant staff have been on a grossly extended seasonal holiday - this text was first broadcast on ResonanceFM Radio, as part of Late Lunch with Out To Lunch, 17-i-2007.

Out To Lunch sat in his favourite leather arm-chair in his Somers Town flat, swigging from a can of Carlsberg Special Brew and leafing through a book recently self-published by The Andy Wilson Affair called Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970-1975, a paperback encased in a monochrome band photograph printed on shiny aquamarine, five long-haired wastrel minstrels standing in a field with stoned expressions and ongoing beards, like everyone in the early 70s. A cool breeze rustled the leaves in the trees and pressed cotton t-shirts against male breasts, evincing the chilly, on-the-march existentialism of counter-cultural activists, where the stiff nipple betokens tokes of grass and revolutionary politics. The Andy Wilson Affair's book began with an epigraph from Adorno and concluded with a chapter attacking Zappa as a petty-bourgeois control-freak who was incapable of sharing a drink or a spliff with the lads.

This was broaching rows unheard since the late 70s in the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, when Out To Lunch had held forth to a motley crew comprising Peter the Thief, Erika Good-For-Nothing and Martin Banal, the Bolshevik hack! Out To Lunch necked the rest of his Special Brew, crumpled the can and threw it onto the pile mounting up on the Afghan rug. The Andy Wilson Affair deserved something his obsessive reading of Radical Philosophy could not grant him; full Zappological clobberation, botheration and spifflication! Here was at last the single reader necessary for the construction of something new in literature, a Coleridge to his Wordsworth, he could feel a prelude to the epoch of a true musical proletariat burning in his sunken veins.

It was then that he recalled a verbal exchange with The Andy Wilson Affair during a noisy picket of Camden Council for their latest miserable package of cuts to local services. Once the issue of the royalties on Music, Violence, Truth had been dealt with - a pamphlet penned by Lunch in a post-9/11 fury, rejected by Wire magazine and finally published by The Andy Wilson Affair to be dished out at avantgarde concerts in London - Lunch and The Affair descended to broadcastable gossip.

"What've you been up to lately?" asked The Affair.

"Nothing much. Went to the Historical Materialism Conference to hear Marco Maurizi talk about zombies, remarkable for its lack of references to Poulantzas and Milliband and for Marco's ability to move between social and psychic insights as if there's no difference. It reminds me of Paul Hession's attitude towards his drums and his cymbals. The touch is so singular and sensitive, it transcends the old antagonism between stretched skin and metal, organic and inorganic, nature and nurture, matter and spirit. All those bad antagonisms which keep us separated from our species being …"

"A psycho-social analysis, in other words. What you'd need if you're talking about zombie films!" shot back The Affair.

"Exactly. Maurizi foments a distinctly liminal atmosphere, a twilight zone of undead dialectical thinking. Indeed," Lunch chewed the edge of his placard with a look of rodent thoughtfulness, "the whole conference was quite weird. Everyone there was actually interested in the subjects under discussion. Kind of like an SWP Marxism without the hacks …".

"Hmm. Founding an academic journal and getting it bought out by Brill after years of strenuous mail-shots does seem a long-winded way of achieving that." said The Affair out of the side of his mouth whilst pressing a leaflet into the hand of a passer-by. "Personally, I've always used discussion of music as my way of fending off apparatchiks and preserving some modicum of proletarian subjectivity versus the Stakhanovite activism of politics-department graduates …"

Recollecting this conversation at home in the tranquillity of his leather armchair - while listening to Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun at top volume - Out To Lunch opened the mini-fridge at his elbow and tore the ring-pull off another can of Special Brew. Despite The Affair's lamentable antipathy to Frank Zappa, Andy was working along lines of musical materialism similar to Lunch's. Like Adorno, The Affair understood that "the objective structures of capitalist society induce … doubts regarding the ultimate reality of certain subjective phenomena." [Adorno, Current of Music, p.407), so that playing records, attending gigs and arguing about music weren't some "deviation" from a struggle conceived in Stalinist, neo-Kantian terms as some sort of moral duty, but the very lifeblood of vital resistance to capitalist inertia. But The Affair also knew that if music became a specialist pursuit deprived of contact with left theory and politics, it became a weak-kneed defence of the laissez-faire status quo. He was no Coil fan, after all.

But how could The Affair's theoretical correctitude - a juggernaut of dialectical thought poised on the very brim of commodity logic and social rebellion - express itself in such egregious music judgments as lionizing Faust - a likeable but confused bunch of German hippies - and dissing Frank Zappa? Out To Lunch decided that he needed to play a series of music tracks, only pausing between them to evacuate himself of the internal social utterance such material invariably provoked. But first he decided to recite some of Tim Allen's poetry - last heard on "Late Lunch with Out To Lunch" in July 2004 - from In The Presence of Sharks, a collection of Plymouth poets afterworded by Wyndham Lewis-scholar Alan Munton, and just out from the Phlebas Press, though not before he'd read out the passage by T.S. Eliot from The Waste Land which named the Plymouth imprint. His mind was like a filing cabinet perused while a secretary is stuffing new materials in at the front, a confrontation between bureaucracy and the kaleidoscope. So imagine yourself in Out To Lunch's leather armchair, thinking these thoughts, rolling these lines of verse on your tongue, sipping the vile vitter foam of Special Brew and listening to these select chunks of canned music …

Download the original broadcast here >>