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A dose of passion
Published 17 January 2008
Jarvis Cocker is on hand to expand Radio 4's sometimes limited horizons
Zine Scene Radio 4
It took a good, long break from Radio 4 for me to feel the spontaneous urge to switch it back on. The house had become flooded with verbiage, with "issues", with declamatory announcements, as though it had been towed under cover of darkness to Speakers' Corner. Radio 4, for all its apparent variety and world-curiosity, has a limited lexicon, tending to overuse the phrases "Gloucester Old Spot", "clematis" and "light-hearted", this last implying, not inaccurately, that the rest of the station's output is as heavy as a wet coat.
But switch on I did, and there was the voice of Jarvis Cocker, sounding to me like home. Not that I've ever lived in Sheffield, where he's from; it was more in the sense that he has a regional accent at all. You hear half-gulped generic "northern" voices all the time on Radio 4 trailers and (alleged) comedies, but few as unaffected and specific as Cocker's.
He's been an invaluable source of entertainment and enlightenment since my mid-teens, when I wrote to the fan-club address of his band, Pulp, and was rewarded with a handwritten message from its organiser, Mark Webber, and a limited-edition swatch of tweed from a discarded pair of Cocker's trousers. Webber, once a teenage fanzine writer, went on to become a Pulp guitarist, as did Russell Senior, whom Cocker credited at the start of his two-part documentary Zine Scene (15 and 22 January, 11.30am) as having helped Pulp's cause with a laudatory gig review in the Bath Banker, Senior's own 'zine.
"He sold it to me at the fish market where I was working," Cocker noted, neglecting to mention that he once wrote a song called "I Scrubbed the Crabs That Killed Sheffield".
Self-produced fan magazines began in the 1940s, written by science-fiction obsessives, but much later became an established part of Britain's underground music culture due to two things: punk rock and the photocopier. The first espoused doing it yourself; the second facilitated it. Cocker interviewed two senior academics whose research has brought them into contact with hen's-teeth artefacts such as Kitten Carousel, a feminist punk fanzine whose cover was lettered in pink nail varnish.
For the cultural historian Roger Sabin, fanzine creators are motivated by "avoiding censorship - they enjoy the total control they have over the content". Their readers (of whom I was one) are willing to smuggle wrapped-up 50-pence pieces in the post in the hope of gleaning new facts - or, failing that, opinions - about their favourite bands. Fanzine readers form a small but rabid community whose passions run far higher than the average NME reader's.
You could have said the same of Pulp fans in the 15 years between the band's formation and their breakthrough in the mid-Nineties. Cocker was in his thirties before he got to perform on Top of the Pops and cock a snook (so to speak) at the likes of the sometime BBC presenter Chris Kelly, whose 1977 assessment of the fanzine movement was replayed here. Kelly was heard enunciating the names of the Buzzcocks, the Clash and Subway Sect as though they were something he'd just trodden in, before pointlessly comparing the writers' breathless gig reports with the work of the Bloomsbury group.
There are bound to be Radio 4 listeners who wish pop groups were still referred to on the station through gritted teeth only, but it is such desires that threaten to make Radio 4 so orderly as to be suffocating. Elsewhere, the usually excellent 6 Music has also got itself in a pickle trying not to lose existing listeners while out gathering new ones. In recent months, Radio 2's "sister station" - increasingly its test bed for new presenters - has recruited a right pair of chumps, in the music-indifferent vein of Radio 1's Chris Moyles, to its daytime schedule.
Shaun Keaveny was drafted in as breakfast host to compete with commercial radio and Moyles, rather than offer an alternative to them, as his predecessor Phill Jupitus did. If I wanted to hear someone read out rude surveys from the Sun, I'd get a job at a bookie's, but Keaveny now plugs away in the knowledge that, compared to George Lamb, the crass new mid-morning host, his show sounds like In Our Time. BBC 6 Music has, it seems, taken to hiring presenters who don't like music. Fanzine writers are mobilising as we speak.
Pick of the week
Private Passions
20 January, 12 noon, Radio 3
Katie Melua's pick of the non-pops.
Are Horoscopes Rubbish?
20 January, 1.30pm, Radio 4
Not if they're read out by Ian McMillan.
Fixing Families
24 January, 8pm, Radio 4
Nick Baker visits the Dundee Families Project.
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