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Further Investigations of Pixelvision, Nadja, Howlround and Ashley Blewer’s Delve Through the History of Video Formats

I’ve had a longstanding fascination with Pixelvision cameras since I first saw Michael Almereyda’s 1994 film Nadja, which is a noirish black and white arthouse take on the vampire genre (think left of centre 1990s American indie film along the lines of Hal Hartley’s work, with which it shares a number of central actors, with dashes of David Lynch, who both produced and appears in Nadja) which at times utilised Pixelvision cameras.

Pixelvision video cameras were curious things; as noted in Ashley Blewer’s The Illustrated Guide to Video Formats, they were released in the US in 1987 by toy company Fisher-Price, were only available for around a year and approximately 400,000 were made.

It was relatively expensive for a child’s toy, which it was marketed to, as it cost $179 USD (which was the equivalent of roughly $430 or £300 in 2021) and had a number of distinctive features which make them something of a curio: it produced a distinctive minimal very low resolution 120 x 90 pixel monochrome only video and recorded onto conventional audio cassettes. However, it’s price and the style of video it produced attracted artists, music videomakers, filmmakers etc, including the above mentioned Michael Almereyda and the cameras are now collector’s items with working models often fetching fairly high prices.

Ashley Blewer’s The Illustrated Guide to Video Formats is also something of a curio; it contains hand drawn illustrations of dozens of different video tape formats, related equipment etc and the book acts as an informative, playful, easily accessible curator of a wide range of them. And boy were there a lot over the years.

Apparently Blewer is working on a similar guide that focuses on audio formats, which I’m looking forward to seeing.

Older and sometimes obsolete media formats, particularly analogue ones, seem to have gained something of a romantic evocative appreciation and use over the years, with their characteristics often being  utilised in hauntology orientated work, where, as I wrote in A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands:

“The use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble and so on that calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and which can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.”

All of which brings me to the photograph below, which is one of musician Robin The Fog’s live setups (aka Howlround), who extensively utilises analogue tape in his work; the photo makes me smile every time I see it and shows a notable dedication to his cause (!)

Links at A Year In The Country:

 

Links elsewhere:

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Tales of Unease: Ride, Ride and Taking a Trip With a Supernatural Guardian of Time

Tales of Unease (1970) was a British anthology drama series adapted from stories originally published in three anthology horror-story books edited by John Burke and published between 1960 and 1969.

The series currently has a limited distribution and availability: it was released as double-bill episodes on video cassette back when, hasn’t had an official digital release and only a couple of episodes seem to have been unofficially distributed online. In 2022 it was released on a now fairly rare on the used market DVD by Network Distributing Ltd, which specialised in the DVD and Blu-ray of older (generally) British film and television, much of which has never had an official home release in any other form and so the company’s closing in 2023 has left a big gap in the cultural landscape.

Ride, Ride is the first episode in the series which is set at the turning point of 1960s hippy aesthetics and it’s a great period piece that features a number of distinctive period signifiers including hippie-esque 1960s fashion, wonderfully self-indulgent art school projects and a psychedelic oil light show at a student dance.

Its main character is a young male art school student who is drawn to a strangely distant seeming young woman at the student dance, who harangues him into giving him a lift home on his motorbike. However, the next week his fellow students tell him that the dance hasn’t happened yet and it’s actually on next weekend, after which he subsequently finds out that the young woman had died in a motor crash three weeks before.

He has an impending sense of doom and the next week at the dance when the young woman appears again, he tries to avoid her but also seems somehow aware that there is no avoiding fate and when he gives her a lift home again, they crash and die.

It had already been indicated that there was something preternatural about the young woman when she had previously mysteriously suddenly appeared on his motorbike as she waited expectantly for a lift home and, though not explained, she appears to possibly be an almost Sapphire and Steele-esque supernatural guardian tasked with ensuring the correct flowing of time and events.

 

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1984, Big Blue, Apple and Battles for the Future’s Past

 

I’ve written about the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel of the same name at A Year In The Country before, including some of the controversy that surrounded it relating to the imposition/use of non-director approved music by the production company… which brings me to some other Orwellian 1984 related controversy which involved Apple Computers.

In 1983 and 1984 Apple created and had broadcast a television advert  that depicted a dystopic society that appears to be inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 and which was directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed another iconic vision of the future in Bladerunner. The advert features monitoring telescreens and a meeting where subservient and uniformly drably dressed workers are shown in a meeting listening to a Big Brother like figure who is orating along lines not dissimilar to those shown in similar scenes in 1984:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

A nameless runner in athletic wear is shown outrunning visored police officers, carrying a large brass-headed hammer. She races towards the screen and hurls the hammer towards it just as the Big Brother-esque figure announces “We shall prevail!”. The screen is destroyed and the advert continues with a text and voice over saying:

“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”

There have been different interpretations of the advert by both observers and those who created it; these have variously posited Apple as the plucky underdog that brings down the conformity and leading market success of computer manufacturer IBM (which coincidentally had been nicknamed Big Blue) and also that it was not such a specific reference to IBM but rather showed the fight for the control of computer technology as a struggle of the few against the many, with the Macintosh symbolizing the idea of empowerment and originality.

Previous to the advert being broadcast attorney and film producer Marvin Rosenblum had bought the television and film rights to 1984 from George Orwell’s widow Sonia Orwell and considered the advert to be a copyright infringement and sent cease and desist letters to those involved. He did not file a lawsuit in regards to this matter but also the advert had a very limited broadcast that included its transmsission via 10 local US television stations on 31st December 1984 and it then had a second, and only national, transmission on 22nd January 1984 during a broadcast of the National Football League’s prestitigious annual championshop the Superbowl.

Apple did not further televise the advert, which has gone on to gain iconic status, although they did post a new version on their website in 2004 as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Macintosh computer, digitally adding their then popular iPod digital music player and headphone earbuds to the heroine.

Viewed today there is a certain irony to the advert; in part because of Apple’s popularisation of mobile digital technology many of the world’s citizens carrying around their own two-way “telescreens” in the form of touchscreen mobile phones, while the empowered struggle of the “few” against the many in the case of Apple is dependent in terms of access to Apple’s “empowering” equipment on the financial ability to purchase digital products which often cost several hundred percent more than other similar products, albeit sometimes with less advanced specifications, equipment… technology giveth and technology take away etc etc…

Above and below are some of the advert’s storyboards drawn by Hank Hinton that were created while it was being developed and pitched and in which “Big Brother” has more friendly cartoonish face than in the finished advert and curiously I keep thinking that in one of the drawings he has a Ziggy Stardust-esque lightning bolt across his forhead, although actually it’s the runners hammer.

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Jonathan Jiminez’s Naturalia – Documenting a Creeping Through the Cracks

There have been a fair few books of photography of abandoned places published (or urbex photography, to use another name) and you could quite easily spend all your spare cash on them for the foreseeable future and still have only scratched the surface of them.

Naturalia: Reclaimed by Nature by Jonathan Jiminez is part of this ever-growing library or genre of photography books and caught my eye due to its specific subject matter.

As the title suggests, it focuses on abandoned places which have been reclaimed by nature, although it doesn’t strictly focus just on abandoned places/buildings but also takes in abandoned cars, military hardware etc.

As with much of this area of photography, there is a curious push-pull to the photographs and their subject matter, as they often contain both beauty and a lingering sense of loss or even melancholia:

“I travel the world in search of abandoned places. Over time, I have increasingly focused on what appears to be the most powerful element in this vast theme of abandonment: places taken over by Nature. It is poetic, almost magical, to see it creeping through broken windows and cracks, gradually taking back the spaces built and then abandoned by Man until they are almost completely swallowed up.” (Jonathan Jiminez quoted from his site.)

I’m particularly taken by the above photograph, in which nature’s “reclaiming” of a house seems to have turned it into a real world fairy tale evil witches house… while the photograph below could almost have tumbled from some distant future’s past where nature and city have long since stopped being divided.

Links at A Year In The Country:

 

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A Pocket Guide To Dream Land and Journeys Through the Spectral Seaside

The British seaside in some ways can be considered to have inherently spectral hauntological, the past inside the present aspects, in that it seems to be in an ongoing state of quiet sadness for its own past glories, coupled with its attractions, such as traditional piers, ballrooms and penny-flipping games, often seeming at least partly rooted firmly in the past of their Victorian era boomtime.

The spectral aspects of British coastal towns have been explored in various pieces of work that interconnect with hauntology that I have written about previously at AYITC, including Luciana Haill’s augmented reality project which uses digital technology to conjure “spectres” of the seaside’s past and also Keith Seatman’s Time To Dream But Never Seen album. The latter of these is a “a loosely themed concept album based around a hauntological refraction of the British seaside and mayday fairs in times gone by” that, as with much of hauntologically inclined work “draws from and utilises contradictory atmospheres and memories to create an atemporal parallel world”.

Dave Clarkson’s 2022 largely instrumental electronica album A Pocket Guide To Dream Land: Faded Fairgrounds And Coastal Ghost Towns Of The British Isles explores similar territory and atmospheres and could be considered an unofficial companion piece for Keith Seatman’s album.

It extensively utilises field recordings from trips to seven “faded” British seaside towns, including a number of sounds that, while contemporary, also seem deeply rooted in the past, such as traditional fairground organs and penny fall arcade games.

The album opens with the almost straightforwardly cheery roll-out-the-barrel-esque fairground organ-based track “Organ Donor” which through being subtly dislocated seeming and its positively threatening title hints at both the fun and terrors to come.

And then without a moment’s pause the doors to the funfair’s ghost train swing open and the listener finds themselves on the woozy, dream-nightmare ride of “Rollercoaster Ghost”, which through using the screams of people, presumably, enjoying themselves on fairground rides, serves to both bring back memories of similar experiences back when while also, on this particular glitchy bitcrushed ride, turning the track into a hauntological take on a 1980s US slasher film relocated to the grimy underbelly of faded older British cinema. While “Illuminations (Dirty Electricity)” brings to mind and recalls childlike wonder at seeing the lights strung along the seafront, while its title and recurring electrical crackles recall both the worries of vintage Public Information Films and the fear of the “bad wires” in the hauntological touchstone TV series The Changes (1975).

If you’re looking for fairground treats to calm your nerves then you might head to the hot dog stand but here the “Sizzling Hot Dogs and Burnt Onions” are soundtracked by a distorted drum’n’bass/gabber-esque soundtrack that could almost have graced a release on Digital Hardcore Recordings in the 1990s and not so much recalls memories of innocent times of eating too much and going on too many rides in childhood but rather of having stumbled into the funfair on a bad trip and finding yourself staggering amongst the hall of mirrors of the rides as your senses are overloaded by the sights, sounds and smells.

The album also acts as a document of Clarkson’s own personal and family history, as “Spectral Pier Ballroom” which “is a spliced and stripped composite of three separate old musical recordings from his family archive, featuring his late father, grandmother and grandfather”. On the album they are reconfigured as echoing cut-up voices that fade in and out of the weather and eventually into the waves and which seem both a fond remembrance and also possibly a Sapphire and Steel-esque breaking through the walls of time by the ghosts of the past who may have unknown and unfinished business.

And now the weather’s gone off, of course with this being the British seaside, so why not head into the “Penny Arcade in The Rain” and try your luck? And just like the penny falls arcade games that it samples, this track has a repetitive hypnotic quality that keeps drawing you in until your pockets are empty.

The album isn’t all hauntological spectres peering perhaps curiously and perhaps menacingly over your shoulder. The seventh track “Tiny Lights (Magic in a Child’s Eyes)” begins a duo of relaxing more ambient and at times near new age-like tracks that you can float away amongst the “Coastal Ghost Towns” with as the waves lap gently on the shore and the seagulls overhead decide that just for today they won’t swoop down and off with your fish and chips but rather will leave you in peace.

Then despite its melancholic title of “Memories and Loss” the penultimate track has a notably upbeat quality that brings to mind the more “intelligent dance music”/home listening orientated side of 1990s chart pop house, dance music etc… and ah, with that in mind it’s not a surprise to learn that Graham Massey of 808 State, who were some of the prime proponents of such things, contributed to the album.

The album, sort of, ends as it began with a return to the funfair organ on “Organ Transplant”, which begins as something of a doppelganger of the intro track, with the sounds of the vintage pipes not seeming as threatening or disorientated after the previous few more chilled/upbeat tracks. However, as the track continues the sounds of demolition become apparent, with it being unclear if these are harbingers of renewal and reinvestment or the end of these “faded fairgrounds” and finally all that is left to do is listen to the beeps as you put your meal deal through the metro supermarket’s self-service point and catch the train home…

Links at A Year In The Country:

 

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Browsing the Otherworldly Bookshelves of Wyrd Britain

Wyrd Britain, if you don’t know about it, is a website where Ian Holloway wanders amongst and explores the, appropriately enough considering its name, wyrder side of culture and it has something of a bent towards the “spookier” side of wyrd culture and has posts on related TV programmes, radio dramas, books etc:

“Wyrd Britain is a blog (and Facebook page) concerned with stories in, of, from and about the stranger places of Britain. Stories that explore a Britain other than the one we think we know. A Britain where the ghosts are unquiet, where the woods are alive and where distinctions between the present, the future and the past are permeable… Through our [bookshop] we hope to be able to pass on to like minded souls some of the treasures we find on our wanderings.” (Quoted from Wyrd Britain’s Etsy bookshop.)

It’s also an online bookshop, which, while it has a quite broad remit generally specialises in vintage science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal, fringe culture etc books and I often find myself popping over to visit to have a browse of what new treasures have turned up on it.

Above is a selection of some of the books and covers that caught my eye at the Wyrd Britain bookshop when I popped over just now, which includes a few favourites from the “back pages” of A Year In The Country, including  Geoff Taylor’s surreal cosmic artwork for Richard Cowper’s The Twilight of Briareus and the “Knockouts” edition of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos… and is it just me or does the cover art to Frank Lauria’s The Priestess somehow bring to mind Barbara Steele’s character in The Curse of the Crimson Altar?

When I was growing up I had an uncle who still had a lot of the odd/slipstream-esque 1970s and early(ish) 1980s science fiction, fantasy etc books that he’d read when he was at university back then and every now and again when I was visiting I’d browse amongst them. Because of the distinctive and often cryptic, surreal etc cover designs and artwork they had it was like being given a glimpse into an adult, esoteric, exciting  other world.

Browsing the online shelves of Wyrd Britain’s bookshop is not all that dissimilar; a lot of the books that are for sale there are from a similar era as the books my uncle had and there’s a similar sense of looking into and exploring a strange, far off world.

To a degree, I guess a lot of 1970s science fiction book artwork had that sense, which is something I’ve written about before:

“In the 1960s and 70s, science fiction novel covers seemed to often allow space, or free rein for quite out-there slipstream-like illustration and design, including Peter Haars’ psychedelic illustrations for editions of books published by Lanterne in Norway [see the above image] which included those by local authors and the likes of Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian W. Aldiss, C.S. Lewis and Kurt Vonnegut. Viewed today such covers seem to encompass a sense of a kind of paral- lel-to-the parallel-world of a hauntological record label, and a point in time when the likes of ‘speculative fiction’ magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius captured and expressed a moment where science fiction and related writing was hiply and exploratively psych like.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways.)

If you’re thinking “Hmmm, Ian Holloway, that name sounds familiar…” then you may well have come across some of his other work.

He has released music under his own name and as the (presumably Quatermass inspired) The British Space Group, amongst other names, including a track on the A Year In The Country themed album Fractures back in 2016. He also used to post about not dissimilar culture as that which he now writes about at Wyrd Britain at his site wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk, which if memory serves correctly was one of the frontier-like outposts of wyrd related culture before the interest in such things exploded.

Links elsewhere:

Wyrd Britain’s site

Wyrd Britain’s Etsy bookshop

Wyrd Britain’s Bandcamp

Ian Holloways’ Quiet World Bandcamp

 

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Here’s to the New Year and Thanks to Old Friends

 

Shindig!, Electronic Sound, John Coulthart, Starburst, Fortean Times and Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation have been longstanding supporters of A Year In The Country and have included reviews etc of AYITC releases for a fair few years now. Along which lines, in this post are a few examples of their recent and recent(ish) coverage of two of the AYITC books.

First off is a double header from Shindig!, which includes reviews by Sarah Gregory of the A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions and A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales books:

“For any self-respecting hauntologist, A Year In The Country is a treasure trove of wyrd delights… Blissfull, we’re immediately in familiar territory, delving deep into the world of the occult and near-dystopia interweaved with the aural and visual cues that underlie this leftfield esoterica…” (Sarah Gregory writing about A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions in issue 143 of Shindig!)

“Prince continues his hauntological ‘deep dive’ into the ‘otherly pastoral’, investigating the uncanny links between nature, the land and the urban world… [and in this new book he describes] his personal journey across the ‘psychic borderlands’ of film – cinematic episodes in which boundaries between past and future are blurred.” (Sarah Gregory writing about A Year In The Country: Threshold Tales in issue 147 of Shindig!)

Shindig! magazine’s site is here.

Next up is a piece in the ongoingly wallet endangering front section of Electronic Sound, which covers and rounds up  culturally mouth watering book, synth, tech, music etc releases:

“It won’t be too long before writer Stephen Prince opens his own University of Hauntology, probably located down some muddy English bridleway… this new book takes in the ‘haunted soundscapes of electronica’ and promises ‘dystopic visions, alternate realities, paranormal quests and exploratory electronic’… As ever, it’s a must-read…”

Electronic Sound’s site is here.

And talking of wallet (and time) endangering things… Lost Transmissions and Threshold Tales were also included in two of the “Weekend links” posts at artist and designer John Coulthart’s feuilleton website where he “catalogues” his “interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms”.

Visit those here and here.

Next up is Bob Fischer’s “The Haunted Generation” column for Fortean Times where he regularly “rounds up the latest news from the parallel world of popular hauntology”:

“For almost a decade Stephen has been exploring all manner of rural strangeness through his constantly evolving project, A Year In The Country. He has a virtually unparalleled enthusiasm for TV, film and music from the more overgrown corners of the pastoral realm, and this passion is evident in both Lost Transmissions and Threshold Tales.” (Bob Fischer in his The Haunted Generation column from Fortean Times issue 439.)

Bob Fischer is a notable standard bearer for all things hauntological and “wyrd” via his Fortean Times column, his The Haunted Generation site, live events and more. For even more wallet and time endangering things(!), his site can be visited here and Fortean Times’ site can be visited here.

And then nestled amongst the digital pages of the “world’s longest running magazine of fantastic film and television” is Alan Boon’s review for Starburst of A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions:

“[A Year In The Country’s books have delivered] a series of exploration into the haunted worlds of film, television, music and literature that have become set texts for the folk horror and hauntology connoisseur.”

Read the full review at Starburst’s site here.

Well, after writing this post and revisting those magazines and sites it seems like much of my day may well be taken care of exploring a Japanese VHS video cafe, Belbury Poly’s parallel world time machine-esque soundtrack creations and the like (!)

Thanks and as always a tip of the hat to all concerned: Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills, Andy Morten and Sarah Gregory at Shindig!; Isaak Lewis-Smith, Push and all at Electronic Sound; John Coulthart; Bob Fischer and all at Fortean Times; and Ed Fortune, Alan Boon and Jordan Royce at Starburst.

Cheers!

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2022: Valerie – The Corn Mother 52/52

The Corn Mother novella weekly serialisation artwork

So, I looked up online for any details of a film called The Corn Mother, to see if there’d been any sales of related memorabilia and the like. There was nothing on any of the auction house’s sites in previous sales or on that main public auction site that I use from time to time.

In fact I could only find a handful of mentions of a film with that name; they were all about this album soundtrack for it, which talked about it being an “imaginary film”, which I’d say isn’t quite true, as, if it were, well, what’s cluttering up my stockroom?

Actually, that’s not quite right. There was one other mention. On some film fans forum. Somebody called Andrew589 asking for any information about The Corn Mother film.

I might send him a message tomorrow when the shop quietens down a bit.

 

Scene fades to black. Credits roll.

 

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2022: Valerie – The Corn Mother 51/52

The Corn Mother novella weekly serialisation artwork

Jack came back from a house clearance today. Mostly old junk and things destined for the skip. A few nice old cameras. I told him how they get used as ornaments nowadays and some people have even started using them again, so they’re worth putting out in the shop. He just looked at me gone out, said something about couldn’t they just use their phone and did Boots even develop films anymore.

One thing that caught my eye was these boxes with film reels in them. You know those old fashioned looking silver canisters that take you back to another era. The kind of things cinemas used. A fair few of those. I asked Jack about them but he said the woman whose house they were from didn’t seem to know all that much about them.

Most of the canisters were unmarked but one had, I think, The Corn Mother written on it. It was faded and scuffed, so it was hard to be sure. I don’t know if this kind of thing goes for much or if you’re even allowed to sell them if they were used in cinemas. I’ll have to look it up online.

 

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2022: Jack – The Corn Mother 50/52

 Act 4/4

The Corn Mother novella weekly serialisation artwork

This lady asked me to come and clear out her husband’s stuff. I wasn’t sure if he’d passed away or they’d split up and he’d left it all behind, and I didn’t want to ask and upset her. You just have to get on with the job in that situation.

There were plenty of old cameras and lenses, some darkroom equipment. I’m not sure if anybody really wants that stuff anymore. Maybe a few collectors online buy that kind of thing. Valerie would know more about that.

Down in the cellar there was more of the same and a few boxes with film reels in them. I asked her about those. She didn’t seem to know a lot about them, said he used to bring home all kinds of stuff from work, hated seeing things thrown away.

It’s not really my line. Old furniture and nick-nacks, that’s what I tend to look out for. What I know about.

 

(This is part of ayear long serialisation of The Corn Mother novella written by Stephen Prince. More details on The Corn Mother book and albums here.)

 

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2021: Andrew – The Corn Mother 49/52

The Corn Mother novella weekly serialisation artwork

I know it was made. I’ve read about it. It’s been written about a fair old bit. I’ve had conversations about it. Asked at conventions if anybody had a copy and they didn’t say “Never heard of it”, they’d just say something like they were looking for it as well.

But last week when I looked it up online I couldn’t find any mention apart from that album I bought and some references to corn mother folklore. There’s not another single word anywhere about it.

I thought maybe it was just a blip online. Some search engine algorithm had gone out of sync, servers gone down or something. A whole pile of coincidences that had happened at once.

I’ve searched again every day since. It’s still not there. There’s nothing at archive.org that stores a lot of old web pages either. I asked and emailed people I know about it and I just got a similar blank response as that actor gave me at the film convention last year.

But I’ve got the notes I made all those years ago for the fanzine up in the loft somewhere, my printouts of internet pages, the magazines where it’s mentioned. They’re all here. All of them.