6 THE LIST 8 )2 J...”
I am walking round the corner past Charles Mansion’s Cafe onto Woodlands Road, and I am running over what to write for The List, and I remember the interview with Mark E. Smith of The Fall and it was an incredible read; he just told the interviewer that all his questions were meaningless and just gathered off the internet, it was on the phone and he was just bored and talked to his sister, told him to piss off, and then answered finally: ’So, we will be smashing.’
It was perfect and revealing of both of them and it did a far better job than almost any other interview I've ever read. You can not hide. In his honest treatment he was respectful and also he seems to realise that an attempt to conform to questions often produces a false voice.
lam thinking about howl should have stuck to my plan of G going down King S Tut's for the gig last night and getting backstage, and befriending him and slipping some of the S questions into conversation to see if they would be more appropriate in this form when I see him sitting in Mansion's having a pint and looking shrunken.
Mark E. Smith is well formed and can do no damage to himself by this interview and can also never fail in this form, plus he has had a lot of newsprint written about him, is familiar to us through it and lets it flap around him like night-gowns in tornadoes. My local newsagent on the other hand gets hardly any coverage in the media. Hundreds of the magazines and papers never mention this small shop.
It is between the two bouts of Insomnia and has all the usual newsagent stuff and so much more. You have to go and be served by 2am, the man. He is funny and has given me some clothing as a gift. He has worked miracles in what can often be a dry, uncomfortable channel through plastic foodsnack provision piles, and a browse free zone. You are in and out of a place you go in to get what you know you can get. Occasionally you ask for staples and fax paper and the man looks around thinking he doesn‘t sell shoes or Heavy Horse Livery either.
Zam has opened up the space with an extension into a space that he conjured out of a dead stock larder, so now your trip around the square donut of crisps and biscuits is much less spatially intense.
The stock here is terrific: eight kinds of pencil, post-cards, bananas, tights, and strawberry jarn. There are Jay Cloths, Pledge and Brillo Pads and the unusually rare choice
2000
of cranberry juice; both kinds of milk, blue and green, in three different sizes.
There are all the magazines you may desire except Carpenter’s Monthly with its I Saw You section. All the mags are racked up on tiers with smiling faces like a close-up audience with kids in the stalls, then rows of models, then music people in the grand circle and finally computers up in the gods instead of porn associates and cars.
There is more than one choice of dog- food, including the ludicrously fish- based Chappie which can be used to comfort dogs that have moved in from the coast recently.
The shop is packed and it is like the bit before the tills at Safeways, it is like one huge bit before the tills with Mayaswell ® items like they just pushed up the till to sit right at the end of an aisle so everyone would shop with that same praying mantis-strike abandon that they have at the last ditch mini- aisle.
Some people’s greatest fear is to have to do all their Christmas shopping from a newsagent, forced to buy your
E family crap silver space guns, Police Ranger Car and
ridiculous mini-golf sets or counterfeit flying discs, stationary
F from Eastern Europe in the fifties or pre-
bald tennis balls. I remember the ultimate gift from a newsagent was two dolls in wicker called: ’Twins In A Basket.’ Simply some twins in a basket.
Once again Zam has triumphed and he has none of these, he has a range of Scottish souvenirs in a display case. You can get a wide-eyed abductee doll in a kilt, a mug with a thistle on or a Siamese triplet Scottie dog in rippled, pottery-fusion.
All this and, because of Scot-Pak whose employees nick stuff out of kitchen drawers at parties and stick it in a wee zip-lock bag, you can even get five foot of curtain wire.
I hope this will increase / business ’ for them.
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ROISIN M(( ()SKE
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Famespotting
Leigh Stephen Kenny
Who he?
He’s the man With a big sound, big ideas and even bigger hair.
Why should I know him?
Well, you may not know him at all as over the last little while he had a d€Cldedly low profile. Kenny gathered a raggedy band of mates together to form a band. The result was Bedlam Ago-Go, a rumbling maelstrom of breakbeats, guitars and raSping raps. They lasted long enough for an album which was tragically ignored and Kenny jacked it in. Now, after exorCising those demons, he’s head honcho in LSK, an altogether more laid-back contemplative affair.
What's the story with them?
Kenny is poet/smger/rapper and shares the duties up front With his Sister Rhianna where they are backed by a mix of live instrumentation, samples and scratching. The sloping hip hop funk of their debut Single ’Hate And Love' turned more than a few heads earlier this year and the subsequent full- length platter Mosaic arrives in August and mill provide the perfect soundtrack to those all-too fleeting moments of summer warmth and light. Where did all this come from then?
Kenny claims his first muSical experience aged seven when his mother spun him around the man to the sound of Michael Jackson's 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough’.
Any chance he'll pay us a visit soon?
Funny you should say that. If yOu look towards the lower reaches of the bill at T in the Park, who should you find but the man himself. Get there early though to be Sure Of not missmg anything (Mark Robertson)
I LSK play T in the Park Stage Fri/0 on Sat 8 Jul A single ’Roots’ is out on Mon 77 JL// With the a/bL/m Mosaic to follow on Mon 7 Aug on 52 Records
W 'R BACK IN THE TE T Dougie from Travis
See T in the Park supplement
T WAIT TILL
M, 1. 'j