ISSUE 10 SUNDAY 7 JUNE 2020

IN THIS ISSUE • Camilla Blackett exposes the lie that is “Over There” The wonder is how everything, • The Art of Junior absolutely everything, anyone Tomlin can name that makes our so- • Lunch with Andy called civilisation unique has a Warhol scared source – a sacred purpose. • Gnostic golf epiphanies + more Peter Kingsley, Catafalque

It was the week summer officially started, although it felt like it had been summer forever. And finally, in a cruel irony only nature could orchestrate, the rain came down, ‘Like the angel come down from above’, as Steve Earle sang. Collectively, looking in horror at what’s happening ‘over there’ as Camilla Blackett powerfully reminded us in these pages, so the reckoning with a failing state and a changing country that has refused to change sharpened in focus.

We have reached astonishing new depths of achievement when it comes to introspection; while even still this week at The Social Gathering marks our 10th iteration as a collaborative blog. Tom Noble, our designer, marketing guru and long-suffering fan, wanted to do something big to celebrate that moment (the 10 issues, not the introspection, that is). Perhaps, although this would belie his commitment to the hopeless West Yorkshire cause, there’s something hopeful about reaching double-figures. But how do you define BIG in a world that seems to be getting smaller? Carl, who runs the bar and whose vision led us to this place, said fuck it, let’s celebrate #23. The milestone meant little to me until I started to think about it as the week unfolded with its usual manic energy; up at 5am writing, editing, reading, communicating with authors, catching up with correspondence, procrastinating, drinking tea, sorting through records, listening to reggae, eating eggs, eventually walking the dog at 7am with my 8-year-old girl whose innocence has been a balm in the darkness then eventually ‘starting’ the day. I was taken to a place far from celebration and haunted by the word decimation, which Wikipedia helpfully reminds us was ‘a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort’. As a ritual acknowledgement in honour of our 10th issue, I think we’ll wait till the bar reopens before putting Robin through this indignity.

But how do we celebrate these occasions when we have temporarily lost the means, the methods and the madness that facilitates the ‘normal’ way we come together to celebrate or mourn as a community? It is almost three months since I ventured into . I am 48 miles away in a hamlet nestled in the triangulated gusset where Essex meets Cambridgeshire and rubs up flirtatiously against Hertfordshire. It is beautiful. I have no complaints and nothing to complain about, even though I frequently do. I defiantly celebrate it (even though I am a Yorkshireman) as Essex but it could be any of the Shires: peaceful, comfortable, genteel. I am woken by the crack and croak of pheasants just after 4am. Most days I don’t resent it and I start the day with a mix of excitement and the trepidation of Bill Murray in one of his most celebrated roles.

My last two visits to London were during that week you might, if you’re a wanker, describe as liminal: the second week of March 2020 when every reasonable person had decided lockdown was inevitable with the acceptance of the Dear Leader – I refuse to embrace him with the determiner, Our. The first was a celebration which I had feared might be muted in the context of a cancelled (and mishandled in the process) London Book Fair: the launch of my new imprint, White Rabbit. It felt like we were getting the hugs in before last orders. By the Thursday of that week and my last visit to the metropolis, those hugs felt risky, transgressive even; the elbows were out (not code). It was ’s funeral. If ever an occasion demanded hugs surrounded by dance music royalty like and David Holmes it’s the burial rites of an Shaman. A celebration of the birth of something and a Wake. We don’t need to force the symbols; life delivers these determined moments to us like lessons from the Ancient Texts. Like Tony Soprano’s ducks.

This enterprise and collaboration between a bar and a new publishing imprint began as a response to Lockdown. But Lockdown, we’re told, is over. What the hell do we do now, we thought? Remember those frantic first few weeks? The adrenalin, the hope, the fear, the weird sense of entropy. So ten issues and ten weeks in, with lockdown ‘fraying’ to coin a verb from the tabloids, What the hell do we do now?

I have found it difficult to read these past few months, which is troubling for someone whose principal (only?) professional requirement is to excel in this department. But one book, recommended by my therapist, has helped me enormously, ‘spoken to me’ as they say. It is called Catafalque by Peter Kingsley. I doubt you will read it (though I recommend you do!) so there’s no harm in me sharing the final line: ‘It is only by shedding everything, including ourselves, that we sow the seeds of the future.’

This national crisis and the reckoning to come has seen contrary impulses pulling at us from all directions. The fear and suffering has meant we gravitate towards universals, ideas about change and the betterment of society, an end to injustice and abuses of power. All of which at the risk of going woo-woo, starts by looking within. Carl Jung said, ‘The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.’ We are insistently told by our ghoulish government that they are Led by the Science. Right now I dare to dream, and imagine a world where we are Led by the Sacred. To where, I have no idea. But only faith and trust in the things you don’t understand can lead you to enlightenment. “OVER THERE” CAMILLA BLACKETT

At the end of last week we asked friends in the States if they could paint us the view from there as part of our regular series and also what we could do as The Social Gathering to help. Screenwriter Camilla Blackett responded by holding up a mirror. Please read and consider what she’s saying. And to state the obvious, this is us at the Social stating categorically that Black Lives Matter.

As a Black British woman living in the US I was asked to help provide guidance on “ways in which people in the UK can help with the situation over there the US”.

And yet it is that particular phrase that sticks in my teeth.

“Over There.”

Those two little words “Over There” have been present in all of the genuine and well meaning texts from white British friends as they express abject horror as they watch coverage of American cities burning in protest of a week of killings of Black Americans.

“Over There.”

So let us talk about “Over There”.

“Over There” is a deft deflection.

“Over There” is a minimisation. “Over There” is a lie.

“Over There” is a denial that London didn’t burn for nights in rebellion against the killing of Mark Duggan and decades of violent racial profiling.

“Over There” is a pivot from the fact that in a pandemic, Black Britons are dying at four times the rate than their white counterparts due to structural inequality.

“Over There” is to silence Kayla Williams, a black mother of 3, dying from Covid after being ignored by paramedics.

“Over There” is ignorance to Cann Hall Police bragging on Twitter about increased powers to harass black and brown bodies in the full view of the public.

“Over There” is to ignore Desmond Mombeyarara being tasered, unprompted, by Greater Manchester Police in front of his small child.

“Over There” is to dim that black paramedics are detained and harassed simply for standing outside.

“Over There” is to suppress that Belly Mujinga was killed by the man who spat upon her and British Transport Police have still, done nothing.

But what’s most jarring about the phrasing “Over There” is that the supreme wealth of the British Empire was built upon going “Over There” and that the violence of that habitual impulse is at the very rotten root of what you see on fire in cities across the US today.

So my guidance to my white British friends is not to look “Over There”. It is to look at your feet. At the place where you stand. And to ask yourself, not how to assist in a rebellion overseas but to grapple with the one brewing in the proverbial teacup of home.

Camilla Blackett is a screenwriter based in LA WHERE DO WE LIVE NOW? #5 WILL BURNS

Will Burns contemplates nature, Chequers, raving and detritus in the Chiltern Hills

Lonely, fraught, strange days. I am up at four with the sun and the birdsong. My days have taken on the rhythm of these non-human things, beginning in dim light and settling into the long lull of the afternoon before a brief flare of energy as the evening turns into the night. My walks are at dawn now, avoiding the increased traffic along the towpath, in the woods, on the hills. Up at the monument that stands at the highest point of Coombe Hill people are luxuriating in the new freedoms. The car park at the top overspilling, people having picnics. By late afternoon the grassy hilltop surrounding the austere spike memorising the dead of the Boer War is littered with beer cans and crisp packets, plastic bottles, clingfilm. More dog shit. Even at our lowest point we will find it in ourselves to desecrate the earth.

Click here to read Will’s column in full WORLD: THE ART OF JUNIOR TOMLIN

This week on The Social Gathering, we were very pleased to run an extract from an interview with artist Junior Tomlin. It was taken from a new book – Junior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art – an amazing retrospective of his work in the ’80s and ’90s. Junior’s artwork was a vital and unmistakable part of the burgeoning rave scene, back when physical flyers were still king. If you ever found yourself driving round the M25 in search of some mythical all-night party or other, chances are you were reading directions off the back of a flier designed by Junior.

Huge thanks to Velocity Press and Marcus Barnes for allowing us to share.

Junior Tomlin: “It’s funny, yeah, you feel like you’ve been there since the beginning. The first record cover I did was in 1989 and the first rave I did was 1992 – Raveworld with the three heads floating in . I enjoyed the rave era, it was so new. Especially when you’re listening to the music and also listening to it evolve, from the bleeps to the hardcore to the jungle and drum & bass, it kept on evolving. I was tuning in to pirate radio stations, when I could actually pick them up, buying the records, listening to the records. I’d hear something on the radio and try to track it down. I used to go down to Mash Records on Oxford Street just to find my flyers because sometimes the promoters would forget to get me copies. I was down there one day, and I met Ray from Rugged Vinyl, which is how I ended up working for them. Everything is interconnected.”

Read the full interview and see more artwork here WALLY: THE FULL STORY BEHIND PRINCE’S MOST MYSTERIOUS SONG MATT THORNE

As every fan knows, Prince recorded far more songs than he ever released. Matt Thorne talks us through one song which, for many years, was coveted above all others: ‘Wally’.

Most years he put out less than ten percent of the work he completed. The mythology around his music depends as much on what he squirreled away in his famous Vault as the songs he officially released. Over the years fans and critics have devoted almost as much attention to the songs from famous unreleased projects like Dream Factory or Crystal Ball as they have to his major albums. And there are many additional less well-known unreleased albums such as Madrid 2 Chicago or Welcome 2 America that are equally mysterious parts of an unfinished puzzle.

The reason why ‘Wally’ became so famous was nothing to do with Prince, but because in one of the earlier Prince biographies, Per Nilsen, with an almost Prince-ly sleight of hand, dropped a few breadcrumbs that’d keep Prince fans guessing for years.

During his interview with Prince’s sound engineer and , musicologist Professor Susan Rogers, she told Nilsen that she’d been present on December 28th 1986, engineering a session where Prince recorded a song so personal, revealing and intimate that he was horrified by what he’d done and kept adding more and more layers of percussion to the track until it was unlistenable, before encouraging her to delete the whole thing.

It was perfect: the best Prince song is one you can never hear. The next morning he returned to the studio and recorded an alternative version, later getting Eric Leeds to add saxophone and Atlanta Bliss to add trumpet. It wasn’t quite as personal as that first take, but still so revealing that if any Prince fan heard it, it’d convince them that his artistry was greater still than any regular listener could possibly imagine. The mythology was irresistible. Even the title was mysterious. ‘Wally.’ Who was Wally and what did it mean?

Read the full story from Matt here, and his book Prince is out now GNOSTIC GOLF EPIPHANIES WITH DAVID KEENAN

LEE BRACKSTONE... Four years ago I was contacted by a writer whose work I knew from The Wire and other publications on Twitter called David Keenan. He had, a few months previously, written a scabrous review of a book I was proud of publishing and here he was (the cheeky bastard), petitioning me to read a novel which I think in its original incarnation was called Adieu to All Judges and Juries. I read the pages on a demented road trip from Mexico City to Guadalajara on the way to the Book Fair on ‘the LSD bus’ with the renegade Sexto Piso publishing crowd. An author, Carlos Velazquez, aka ‘The Hippo’, was sitting next to the driver, relentlessly skinning up. When we stopped for breakfast outside DF at a roadside taberna, he pulled up the sleeve of his t shirt to reveal a tattoo. A Design for Life. Quite.

Just a few pages into these pages by David Keenan on a motorway seemingly only used by Narcos, the army and naïve publishers, I was forced to reluctantly acknowledge that not only could this guy write, he was writing in another language using a spectral vocabulary. (And I hadn’t, I assure you, been indulging in the candy-flavoured hallucinogens.) I called David Keenan in . We agreed a deal. I shared some pages with Eduardo Rabasa and The Hippo on the bus later that afternoon. When we arrived in Guadalajara, we celebrated trading Spanish language rights in the book that would become This is Memorial Device over several mescals. How defiantly and appropriately Malcolm Lowry. Or Roberto Bolano, if you prefer. David and The Hippo are now firm friends: the most terrifying encounter between their two respective countries since the Scottish Vikings visited Mexico in the 1986 World Cup.

Today, a few days into official British Summertime we announced the third novel by David Keenan as a new season in his publishing life commences at White Rabbit Books. It will be the first novel published at the imprint, which is dedicated to literature related to music, because Xstabeth is full to the brim with music. It is, among other things, a novel about singersongwriters, St Petersberg, St Andrews, golf, and music as a visionary and transformative experience.

Xstabeth arrived with me accidentally. Last year I had arranged for David to be the inaugural Writer in Residence at Andrew Weatherall’s Convenanza Festival in Carcassonne. Andrew and I had talked about the idea of starting a private press publishing one short book a year (fiction or non-fiction) to coincide with the festival in September. The imprint would be called Convenanza Press. Safe in the knowledge there are many files of books in various finished and incomplete forms on David’s hard drive (at least six that I know of) we discussed what might be a suitable title for such a venture. A week or so after the festival he sent me Xstabeth which was then called This is Where the Heart Ends claiming he couldn’t remember having written it. I believed him. We talked some more and reached the conclusion it had been written over a period of weeks towards the end of 2017 after a particularly eventful visit to Holland together. A moment, we both reflected, when we had both been quite unhinged.

Earlier this year, I think around the time of Weatherall’s funeral, David informed me of the existence of a 22,000-word prequel to Xstabeth called The Towers The Fields The Transmitters. Excited and intimidated by the sheer volume of WORDS ready to pour forth into the world from this writer we decided to gift this book to readers in ebook form when you pre-order the new novel. The Towers The Fields The Transmitterswill then disappear. Did it technically ever exist? Or did we collectively dream it into life?

Here is a short contextualising preface David wrote for Xstabeth and a 23 track White Rabbit playlist. A few weeks ago, I shared Xstabeth with Edna O’Brien who, although her eyesight is failing, was keen to read it. She said of it, ‘I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless, enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream. In Xstabeth, as with For the Good Times, the narrative shuttles between episodes of nearness and chasm … Reading it feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music.’

DAVID KEENAN... I have little memory of the writing of Xstabeth, but I believe it took place just after, or just before, the publication of my first novel, This Is Memorial Device. In other words, it was written in a state of possession. And then it disappeared. I moved onto something else and forgot I had even written it. Then I stumbled across it one day while tidying files on my computer and finally read it for the first time. And it spoke to me in an unrecognisable voice, a voice that seemed fathomless, bottomless. I came to the point of figuring out what my own book was about, or rather, more, what it wanted to be. Though in a way I’m still figuring it out. And besides, there is no point.

I have been a lifelong fan of William Blake. I always thought my studying of him would one day pay off in some kind of gnosis or illuminated understanding. But truly, I have lived with Blake long enough to know that there is no stopping, no place of rest, in Blake, no final judgement. Blake’s works are alive, energy in eternal delight, and so are not resolvable, and have no ‘point’ to deliver or to be gained. Blake cuts through literary materialism, which is why he is as alive, now, today, as he ever was.

There is no resolution in life, people simply disappear. Authors, then, are like ministering angels, with the balm of continuity, the blessing of resolution, the benediction of sense, and structure. But as Blake notes, throughout his work, there are infernal angels too, and these, also, have their holy duties.

Pre-order XSTABETH to read the exclusive digital prequel

The latest issue of Divers to Dive: A Pandemic Dream Journal, David Keenan’s ongoing collaboration with the artist Eleni Avraam, is also available for download here

Features... Instructions for Evensong on the Re-Opening of the Churches, Clarice Lispector’s Holy Book, Angus MacLise’s YEAR, An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke, binding angels, hard flat butterflies, Lew Welch, Huey Lewis, and the Tao Te Ching, Bach 333, Heraclitus FTW, Melissus and Folke Rabe, happy birthday Walt Whitman, Cosmos Magnificat!

And a new issue of Divers to Dive lands every Sunday night, 8pm THE ARTIST’S LUNCH WITH ANDY WARHOL CHRIS FRANTZ

At the end of July, White Rabbit Books publishes a memoir by Chris Frantz, who has the distinction of founding, playing and recording with not only one but two of the most influential North American bands. Remain in Love, published 40 years on from the release of their classic album Remain in Light, tells the story of Talking Heads, the late 70s in downtown Manhattan and the rise of New Wave at CBGBs alongside peers like Richard Hell, Television and Blondie. It’s the story of Psycho Killer and Wordy Rappinghood, touring with The Ramones in Europe (and their complaints about the lack of McDonalds Restaurants); and it’s a portrait of a relationship that endures and thrives to this day, between Chris and Tina, one of the greatest rhythm sections in the history of rock n roll, and the Genius of Love.

Andy would even do a radio commercial for us, saying “Buy the new Talking Heads Record and tell them Warhol sent you,” and he continued to be a fan of our band, although he sometimes mistakenly referred to us as the Talking Horses. He was the most famous and quite possibly the greatest artist of our time, yet he always treated us like we were way more important than he was. He was there for many of our shows in New York, too, and I felt very fortunate to have spent some time in his Factory.

Read the full extract here

Remain in Love by Christ Frantz is published by White Rabbit on 21 July 2020. Click here to pre-order a signed copy from our friends over at Rough Trade GOIN’ BACK A few of our favourite Social Gathering pieces from the last ten weeks, just in case you missed them first time round...

• All of Sophie Green’s Isolation Observations, possibly because they closely echoed many of our own feelings about lockdown, but when Sophie sent in her eighth instalment, it felt like conclusion... or possibly an ellipsis dotted in optimism? • Heading back to a noisy classroom in Belfast,1984, with the great Wendy Erskine (plus art by Babak Ganjei) • The unveiling of Cold War Steve’s Benny’s Babbies, with a little help from Kit de Waal, Joe Lycett and many more of Brum’s finest • The first in our View From Here series, as music manager Andy Kelly gave us his take from Sydney • Making PPE in your kitchen with John Crump, because you simply can’t trust this government to sort their shit out

THIS WEEK HAS BEEN POWERED ON BY… John Boyega in Hyde Park / Prince’s birthday / Half thongs / white tea / 4.30am wake-ups / America Over the Water by Shirley Collins / Echo Dek on vinyl / People Funny Boy by David Katz / rain / Rainbow Children / One Night Alone reissues / lockdown nostalgia / Parasite (finally) / Midget Gems (not the green ones) / #ringpiece not #earpiece / the Nick Adams stories / Justin Robertson’s Rotating Institute / Walking in the Snow off Run The Jewels 4 / black nail polish / Northern Monk Hazy Pale / Olive and Mabel / Bandcamp / Cold War Steve ‘The Racehorse’ / Romare - Gone / Q Mag’s 354 album suggestions / Tesco Spanish tortilla / Working Men’s Club Megamix / drinking more water / feather duster / spider catcher / big ladders / Dillinja / Ava DuVernay’s The 13th / Fischerspooner’s The 15th / Prins Thomas mixes of Dungen’s Häxan / A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America & the Caribbean by Shika Shika / takeout pints from the mad local micro pub / Joe fucking Wicks, every fucking day / Brink of Extinction / Waba Duba / The Vast of Night / realising that Matt Hancock trained to be a jockey while he was supposed to be an MP / Black Lives Matter

The Social Gathering is brought to you weekly by Lee Brackstone, Carl Gosling, Tom Noble and Robin Turner. Thanks for putting up with us for a whole 10 weeks. Find us at The Social and White Rabbit.