Dave McCullough speaks! (RIP) (A Dave McCullough Archive)

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/bobcast/episodes/2015-02-12T21_46_53-08_00

From 1983, Sounds legend Dave McCullough appears on something called Greenwich Sound Radio, as the guest on a regular item called 'Creatures What You Never Knew About" (someone talking and playing records from their collection - worth digging through the archive as there's people like Robert Wyatt and Green Gartside guesting on other episodes.

McCullough sounds exactly how I'd imagined - sparky, lippy, opinionated, very decided in his opinions.

 A lot of what he says is total bullshit...  even contradicting himself within minutes  - but he says it in such a beguiling spiky yet silver-tongued way that I'm utterly charmed.

Biggest contradiction is the narrow view of rock history he outlines (Elvis>>>.Stones>>>Pistols/Jam/Clash/Buzzcocks>>>Fall>>>Smiths..._ versus the much wider and more interesting sense of music that is evident from what McCullough actually plays on this show. Half of the selections are people like Peter Hammill, Hall & Oates (who get two tracks!), Dory Previn, and Tim Buckley (and Sefronia-Buckley too - sickly ornate horror!) and most of the rest is well-wimpy early offerings from Hurrah!, Microdisney, the Pastels plus a Devotosolo ("Cold Imagination" off Jerky Versions of The Dream).  Jackson Browne gets a namecheck as well. 

Only tracks by The Fall and the Jam fits the historical narrative McCullough supposedly adheres to and upholds with every fiber of his writing being.

our Dave walking with The Clash (looks like Leicester Square)

I could only afford one music paper, so always used to buy NME, but I did spend a lot of time standing up in W.H. Smiths speed-reading the other papers. 

And with Sounds mostly I was looking for Dave McC’s stuff.

He had a great idiosyncratic style - very much Sounds's own equivalent to Morley - funny, playful, quick-minded... and he had unusual quirky taste. Sometimes he would take against things that logically you'd think he ought to be into, judging by his past preferences profile. Or he would take violently against things that he'd once fervently been into.

It’s funny how things stick in your head.

I can remember him reviewing The Fall post-Hex and saying how they'd gotten stuck in a dour rut and should do something unexpected like work with an orchestra.

"How I Created Modern Music - by D. McCulloch (a weekly serial)" - M.E.S. takes a playful swipe at our Dave, former Fall champion turned scourge, via NME"s Portrait of The Artist As A Consumer column. And isn't McCulloch referenced in an actual Fall lyric? Or am I imagining that?

And what do you know? Another appearance of Sounds journalist Dave McCullough in the NME's Portrait of An Artist As A Consumer column!!! This time The Birthday Party, whose Nicholas Cave places our Dave on his Deathlist! Wonder what he did to piss Cave and crew off?

Dave McC seemed to loathe The Cure and their audience, for reasons I can’t remember.  Thought they were sheep, I think. But then again I found a review somewhere that was gushing about  the first Cure album. And a review that's fairly positive about Pornography. He seemed to flip around a lot in his views! 

I remember he was a big fan of an obscure Scottish postpunk group called The Visitors.

Very early - the first, in fact? - to write about The Smiths and all the Scottish Postcard stuff, obviously.

And Joy Division. 

It’s a shame he disappeared. There was a brief stint working at Blanco Y Negro, alongside Geoff Travis and Mike Alway. I'm told he also did some reviews for City Limits. And then....  silence.

I wonder what propelled his withdrawal. I read somewhere he went back to Northern Ireland and became a teacher. If so, probably an English teacher judging by the many literary references in his writings (he compared Kajagoogoo's "Ooh To Be Ah" to Joyce!) and his emphasis on lyrics in the radio show above.

In the audio interview, Dave McCullough talks about being more interested in motor cars and pedigree dogs than music! So perhaps that was the onset of a great disillusionment. Although he doesn't sound disillusioned - he sounds full of fire and spirit. 

If anyone knows... let me know.

Dave McCullough namechecked in this Saint Etienne song about a lifetime of music obsessiveness, "Over The Border" (from Words and Music)

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For the full story about that McCullough interview at Greenwich Sound Radio, check this blogpost I did around interviewer / radio host / tapezine man Bob Pearce. 

And here also is a tribute to/reminiscence of McCullough that John Carney aka Kevin Pearce did for Tangents back in the day.

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Below you will find an enormous - and steadily growing - disorderly archive of McCullough pieces from Sounds... starting with this hilarious slag-off of bitter rivals NME's C81 cassette with Rough Trade - despite the fact that it is crammed full of the exact music that he himself has been championing at Sounds. (Clearly Geoff Travis held no grudges when it came to McC working at Blanco Y Negro)

postscript July 2021: news has reached me this year, from two separate sources, that Dave McCullough died in 2013, aged 55.  No word yet on the circumstances (or what he had been doing in the years since dropping out of the music journalism game). 55 - that's way too early. How sad. RIP. 

I am continually adding to this repository of DMcC clips, many of them sourced from Soundsclips the twitter archive,,,,, from Matthew Worley.... from Zounds Abound (another Twitter archive) ... and other random sources. 

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June 4, 1983 issue of Sounds.

DAVE McCULLOUGH is smitten by The Smiths

DESPERATELY scrambling for something "new," the music business and the music press don't (as is normal) realise that something new IS happening. It might appear quiet, low lying, polite and very obscure, but it isn't.

First there was punk (!), then post punk, the funny name groups like Echo and Teardrop, groups who used traits of psychedelia nicely. And who only now, three years too late, are being (successively) ripped off by Tears For Fears et cetera. The funny names keep coming and they are useless and way out of time.

This year already you've had a new crop of groups, The Wake, The Smiths, The Box and a recharged Go Betweens, who present a new urbanity, a new sensibleness amid the attempts to shock and the attempts to block (the future).

Music BEYOND punk rock.

Smiths say: "Don't mention punk in this piece. We feel that is far behind everything we're about. It's ancient history..."

This polite, sensible and unflash approach shouldn't hide these groups' true allegiance to '76 and all that, nor, especially in Smiths' case, the very IMPOLITE state of their art.

Smiths are no ordinary name in a paper.

SMITHS look tremendous, they have the cool. Guitarist Johnny Marr plays a red Rickenbacker type machine gun in best early Jam fashion. He looks a HANDSOME Costello but denies the resemblance strongly.

Singer Morrisey (sic) has a history stretching back to '77 punk and writing for fanzines. He is reputed to be the "last great Devoto figure out of Manchester". He has the cool down to a tee, flinging flowers about on stage and writing lyrics which deal with sex as you've never heard apparent "confessors" like the mixed-up Marc Almond write about it.

The subject of child molesting crops up more than a few times in Smiths songs. They are hilarious lyrics, more so because they will suddenly touch on the personal.

Smiths have a grand "Freebird"-like (!!) finale to their live set. This and the Costello and child molestation claims they will reject out of hand, this is all part of the Smiths plan. Gonna be huge.

Smiths are signed to Rough Trade, a nice angle this, not only because those Smiths' lyrics must therefore be brought into question vis a vis Will Geoff Travis APPROVE? but because it raises the question, will Rough Trade be able to make this exceptional new group the stars they can very likely be?

Morrisey is a wonderfully arrogant pig ("I crack the whip and you'll strip (sic), but you deserve it, you deserve it"). Quite simply, funnily, they KNOW the talent that the Smiths possess.

How good are you?

Morrisey: "I tremble at the power we have, that's how I feel about the Smiths. It's there and it's going to happen."

Are Rough Trade the best label for immediate stardom?

Morrisey, enigmatic smile on handsome face: "What we want to achieve CAN be achieved on Rough Trade. Obviously we wouldn't say no to Warners, but RT can do it too."

I know Factory wanted you. Wouldn't they have been cooler?

Johnny: "We'd be stuck in the 'Manchester scene' then. What we're thinking of isn't even in terms of national success. It's more like world wide..."

Morrisey: "Factory aren't really interested in new groups. Factory have been good, but they now belong to a time that is past. Look, we had a great social life, Factory has been great, but let's leave all that behind us now."

"Look, the quote that best sums up the Smiths is from Jack Nichells' book Men's Liberation: 'We are here and it is now'. I feel really strongly about NOW. I don't want to wait around, I don't care about two years time, things have got to happen RIGHT NOW for the Smiths. And I think they will."

LET'S sort this sexual thing out.

I get a traditionalism from Smiths that is almost HM (that Skynyrd finale). It's certainly an aggressive sexual stance they've got. Morrisey goes Oscar Wilde:

"I'm in fact very anti-aggression. Obviously I'm interested in sex and every song is about sex. I'm very interested in GENDER. I feel I'm a kind of prophet for the fourth sex."

"The third sex, even that has been done and it's failed. All that Marc Almond bit is pathetic. It sounds trite in print but it's something close to 'men's liberation' that I desire."

The fourth sex! Excuse me, but I'm still in a metaphysical state about it. It will come. With every Smiths appearance it comes closer. Off stage, in bed, in bed alone. It's coming...

"I just want something different. I want to make it easier for people. I'm bored with men and I'm bored with women. All this sexual segregation that goes on, even in rock 'n' roll, I really despise it..."

Smiths share with this year's best new groups an anti-boredom stance, an aura of breaking through to completely new territory. A sexual neutralism that rejects the Bowie/macho/wimp norms. It is hard to identify because it is so radically different.

Everything I call the Smiths is wrong because I still place them in an old context: hard when they are soft, immoral when they are moral:"... We do not condone child molesting. We have never molested a child."

Traditionalist macho, when they...

Morrisey: "... I just so happen to be completely influenced by feminist writers like Molly Haskell, Marjory Rose and Susan Brown-Miller. An endless list of them!"

"I don't want to GO ON about feminism but it is an ideal state. It will never be realised beyond that because this society detests strong women. You just have to look at the Greenham women. This is a society that only likes women who faint and fawn and want only to get married. I'm not neurotic about it, but it is an integral part of the way I write."

Why the importance in carrying flowers?

Morrisey: "They're symbolic for at least three reasons. We introduced them as an antidote to the Hacienda when we played there; it was so sterile and inhuman. We wanted some harmony with Nature. Also, to show some kind of optimism in Manchester which the flowers represent. Manchester is so semi-paralysed still, the paralysis just zips through the whole of Factory..."

Your finale tells that "(Love Is Just A) Miserable Lie". Do you believe it, that people are totally separate, even from an ultimate state of love?

"Yes. Unfortunately. But there's an optimism in admitting it... Explain? Oh I could tell you of years of celibacy when I just couldn't cope with physical commitment because it always failed. I suppose I'm unnatural in the general scheme of things, because I have these feelings."

Morrisey is a self-publicising weirdo, in other words a lover.

"I want a new movement of celibacy. I want people to abstain... explain? Howard Devoto I know quite well and I know he formed a group in order to make friends (he'd never had any). I can only say I'm the same, and gather from that what ye will."

JOHNNY mentions the Ramones in passing. There is a Ramonish tint in Smiths that is only the beginning of what they are about. A nihilism, the molesting scam that soon leads into a fierceness and a morality-despite-it-all that is more Fall-like.

Morrisey: "These are desperate times. But I don't think we should join in with the desperation. We should conquer it. I'm fed up with this depressive attitude people have."

What about your humour?

"There are many really desperate characters from literature who had amazing senses of humour. Stevie Smith wanted to kill herself at nine. That's wonderful. I can relate to that. Sylvia Plath, just before she killed herself, had this incredible sense of humour in Letters Home..."

Is having or not-having a job important in Morriseyland?

"Not in the least. Jobs reduce people. One of our lines goes 'I've never had a job because I don't want one' : jobs reduce people to absolute stupidity, they forget to think about themselves. There's something so positive about unemployment. It's like, Now We Can Think About Ourselves. You won't get trapped into materialism, you won't buy things you don't really want..."

Smiths are an anti-stance group in the grand Fall tradition. An Alka Seltzer to a binge of Heaven 17s.

Morrisey: "We're fed up with people who won't talk about the press, all this New Order crap. They probably REALLY haven't GOT anything to say. I believe that's the truth..."

Johnny: "We're unique because we really rate the press. Putting out papers every week when there is so obviously very little good music around except the Smiths must be really hard..."

Morrisey: "The British music press is an art form."

Garry Bushell?

"There is always an exception to a rule, Dave."

Is it crucial being H.A.N.D.S.O.M.E. in Smithland?

Morrisey: "Absolutely."

Johnny: "We find it just finishes off the package nicely. It just so happens we're handsome. We didn't rope in good-looking chaps on bass and drums, it just happened that way..."

Doesn't this rule out 95% of the world from Smithland?

Morrisey: "Probably. But we genuinely want a handsome audience above everything else. I can predict that in six months time they'll be bringing flowers to our gigs..."
But what happens if you're ugly as sin?

Morrissey, waving a vague finger about: "Oh I'm sure they can arrange it somehow. They can, ah, learn to LOOK handsome. With great training of course!"

Of course. Expect a plastic surgery boom in '83.

 

Dave mccullough The Clash and the Slits live, Sounds, 6 January, 1979

A love that burns

The Clash/

The Slits

Music Machine

White, red, yellow, black. The Clash straddled the Music Machine stage like they meant it.

A white shirted Jones, a red shirted Strummer, a yellow clad Headon and a black shirted Simenon. The place was packed fairly solid and the atmosphere was good and friendly, which is pretty unusual for the Mornington Crescent Cool Club.

The Slits had just trudged off stage. I only saw two numbers, both impressive in a loose and spontaneous way, the new(ish) drummer Budgie providing the guts and gruel playing that was perhaps missing in the past. Their version of ‘Femme Fatale’ was particularly memorable. Ari Up doing the dizzy dervish but ruining her performance slightly, I thought, by playing the sex cat at times. They’ll be up among the leaders in ’79.

The Clashers were obviously out to improve on their rather lacklustre and clinical performance at Harlesden the last time they played London. White, red, yellow, black, the three frontmen still shaking with the threat they felt in, uh, the past. Really, there’s very little to say about The Clash when they’re on this sort of level of live excellence.

‘Safe European Home’ exploded the set to action; the sound crisp and fresh, if slightly unco-ordinated, with Jones’ lead receiving particularly unsympathetic treatment in the mix. ‘I Fought The Law’ again featured a magnificent band performance in terms of their sheer determination to overcome or, at the very least, to compensate for the shortcomings of the sound. But it was the presence of these technical errors early on in the set that enhanced and emphasised the band’s gradual acclimatisation to the conditions they faced.

The turning point came about mid-way through the set with the rousing ‘Tommy Gun’, Strummer spitting out the words like an angry sergeant-major, the left leg pumping up and down like an angry piston. It’s The Clash’s standard approach to the rock and roll live chore these days that is the predominant aspect of their stage performances; they feel and generate rock and roll energy in the same way that the Stones did (I assume: they were before my time) and in that sense the band has moved out of the New Wave theory of the shock, anti-establishment steam. What we have now is steam replaced by an attitude of total attack. The jet-fighters are still sitting ominously on the runway. Only now they take with more assurety and less uneasy resolution.

It’s a wonderful progression and it’s conveyed most vividly in the moving ‘Stay Free’, where the band veritably shine and sparkle with the experience and maturity they’ve accumulated. And then they can burst in into the stinging stock-Clash stamped ‘Guns On The Roof'(it burns live, whereas it doesn’t quite come off on record) and the hilarious “hi man!” relief of “Judy”. And so, a stunning gig. A gig with real atmosphere (a rarity these days). A gig where I pogoed for the first time since joining Sounds.

(via Soundsclips)

 Bobby Gillepsie riposte in the Letter Page re Dave McC's Generation X slag-off

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