OBSESSIONS

Herbert is constantly in panicked retreat before the onslaught of the Golden Horde, grabbing up a few of his favourite things and running, dropping the rest which they idly pick up and get their sticky fingers all over. He will claim to have been into anything years before it became popular, and will back reluctantly away from any of his gewgaws which have made that awkward transition into the public eye. Examples include Irvine Welsh's appropriation of Iggy Pop, or the seizing to the Art World's bosom of Kurt Schwitters and his Merzbau, that dusty wall formerly admired by the happy few in Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery.

A few icons to survive the smashing hooves so far include:

Jim Woodring

Author of such glories of the cartoonist's art as Jim, and, of course, Frank, is the oneiric master of ink and brush. His autobiographical work depicts a life brushed by angels and bric-a-brac, drowning in drink, terrors and significances, which you have to keep reminding yourself is actually his dreamworld. His major creation, the ever-optimistic dog/cat/bear thing, Frank, lives in an equally scary distortion of cartoonworld that is locked into narrative cycles as compelling and poetic as those of George Herriman's Krazy Kat. High praise for a rubbery soul.

Further delights of cartoonerama will be discovered beyond the click.

Laurel & Hardy

Holy fools of the silent realm, whose loud yelpings and Billy Bunter noises ushered in the era of sound more poignantly than Jolson, L & H are the modern Quixote & Panza. When you add the great alcoholic Stoneface, Buster Keaton, you end up with a cinematic triumvirate that anticipates in all innocence most of the isms of the century: Beckett? Bunuel? Barthes? Queue neatly behind the boys.

Herbert has written copiously about both units: click with caution.

Italian Football

Who needs opera when hairy men will throw tantrums weekly? And play gracious football into the bargain. Pompous billionaire bosses, despairing wily coaches, elegant Renaissance hairstyles (no mullet-topped fishboys on the Peninsula). OK so sopranos are omitted but learn to cope. What you were hoping to see as you clutched that gristly half-eaten pie in the stands at Arbroath and wondered if it could get any chillier.

Here we can offer some Quality Control: a poem about the Italian national team which was actually published by the Times and translated for the Gazzetto del Sport. This was my proudest moment (and probably my best review).

Kraftwerk

Since a teenage skiing holiday in the Italian alps, where Radioactivity was on the hotel jukebox, Herbert has been hooked by the hypnotic minimalist deadpan robotniks. Despite having his beloved 70s recordings ripped off him by stupid anarchists when the world finally caught up in 88, he continues to admire Kraftwerk's lack of productivity and effortless preservation of their enigmatic image. Florian Schneider is Dietrich.

Captain Beefheart

Herbert's earliest memories of John Peel are back in the dust-spangled 70s, hearing a strange clicking noise and a throaty gent intoning "The Dust Blows Forward & The Dust Blows Back". He had always known America was for something but then he got it down. You got that down?

Billy MacKenzie

Dundonian angel, intensely eccentric and depressive. Whippet boy possessed of the most gorgeous voice of the Leighties. Flinger of nude spoons deep into the silvery Tay. Nearly forgotten fallen icon: Billy was everything that grotesque Laughtonesque Herbert wanted to be but could never even dream of becoming. He was certainly everything that Herbert thought iconic: localised yet international, transgenderic (and therefore worthy of a neologism), Catholic, large-familied, stand-up-and-entertain-us-with-a-songaBilly. His early work had a deranged synthetic loveliness; his later material failed commercially; his last, posthumous releases redeemed utterly.

Affirm your resolve that all Billy's albums must be remixed and rereleased together with his uncollected stuff in a glorious 12 CD set. Pester record companies and Boris Blank to this end.

The Fall

Where do we start? On holiday (again) in Grantown-on-Spey, sitting by a bowling green having been to see the ospreys, this being the late 70s, Herbert perused an NME and read a review of an early Fall gig. The name intoxicated, saving him from reading Camus for another whole year. He ran off and bought Bingo Master's Breakout (no, not in Grantown, in Dundee -- he ran far, he ran long, he ran like a McGonagall). This, then, was his drab aesthetic: the regionality of the accent, the refusal to dress up the way or indeed down, the fact that the music patently didn't give a fuck, it just did the work, and the fact you should just do the work -- you didn't sit on your bahookie being ironic -- you did the work. And the language, the recasting of English into something more deranged and sardonic than most contemporary poets could manage, something baroque and direct at the same time. He knew, he knew in his brain.

Where do we go from there? Double-drummed Hex Enduction Gigs where everyone staggered out, slightly puzzled that the world appeared to be continuing? Touching moments of irrational telepathic terror shared with his mate Jamie during No Bulbs? The personal inability to stop yelping "Jew on a motorbike!" (Garden, from Perverted by Language) or a collective need amongst his acquaintance to perform the riff to Bremen Nacht (The Frenz Experiment) in a Whisky Galore-type deedling session that went on and off for weeks? The fact that on meeting anyone called Michael (including a priest), he has had to suppress the call "Michael! Michael!" in a duff Manc accent (I am Curious Orange)? The intense melancholy identification with Shift-Work as poetic recognition continued to pass Herbert by in favour of one-trick ponies and funambulist mutts? Sitting in a Brixton pub gaping at Scanlon, Hanley and Co. as if they were mythic beings instead of a rhythm section? Staggering around Manchester University mumbling "Beefmen to go!" for reasons too tedious to explain involving the Situationists. Rolling about and bashing his ribs as he witnessed Adam & Joe being beaten up by MES in suburbia?

Alas, the idolatry of it depresses yet consoles, then repels yet invigorates.

Back to Gairnet, while you still can!

Or would SONAQs help your whirling wits?

Too late? Then you need Projects

If gripped by the tenacious claw of the curiosity virus, you'd better go to the Biographical Decontamination Unit