Reflections on Plan B magazine

Former Careless Talk Costs Lives and Plan B contributor Steve Hanson has just started the mammoth task of re-posting all his articles and reviews onto his blog.

Go over there and encourage him.

He's started with this particular entry - some lengthy reflections on Plan B magazine. For example...

[Brief but former editor, David] McNamee [writing in The Guardian] understands the difference well:


‘Plan B was almost called The Music That We Like. It was only going to cover female artists, it wouldn’t listen to PRs, its writers were to be from fanzines and blogs and were going to pseudonymously “steal” the names of famous music journalists.’

I stole and inverted the name of a famous music journalist, as well as writing under my own name, the Luther Blissett Situationist game. It was kind of indulgent, I suppose. McNamee mentions that:


‘…in its early issues, some of the reviews looked more like diary entries or manifestos than descriptions of music, which infuriated people. As writers we weren’t afraid to empty our hearts and list in aggravating minutiae exactly why a piece of music was so special.’


But it seemed to me a certain core of people could do that, others couldn’t, or would be sidelined to web content if they did. There was an A-list at Plan B, Miss Amp, the Special People. They Who Could Be Emotional and Lengthy. Miss Amp used to run the wonderful fanzine ‘Amp’ (which I reviewed at The Terracope) and is actually called Ann-Marie, or was, before she attempted to morph into a kind of Paula Yates to Gonzales’s Michael Hutchence. Most of the A-list went to parties in Brighton and are now immortalised in Kieron Gillen’s graphic novelisation (including writers like David). A friend of mine used to log on to the website (when you could do so, it didn’t last long, perhaps he is partly to blame) and write things like ‘…you bunch of bleeding pebble-bashers’. I never encouraged him to do any of this, he just had (and has) a nice line in surreal-but-cutting harangues. He can make basic description into a character assassination.


The London-Brighton-centrism had its positives though, if Everett is to be believed I got sent to Iceland because he couldn’t be bothered leaving Brighton any more (see my blog on the Airwaves festival elsewhere on this site). I certainly enjoyed the benefits of utter obscurity, time-warp little towns with cheap(er) rent and the ability to order pretty much what sounds and gigs I wanted for free.

P.S. The illustration for this entry comes from Art Spiegelman's peerless Breakdowns, which I picked up yesterday in Border's for the near-unbelievable price of under 10 bucks.