I come to praise Phonogram, not to bury it. But first, something important needs to be stated: in the end, it really was too powerful to live.

I moved to London in August 2006. The first issue of Phonogram was released in August 2006.¹

Of course, the last post in this series was rather extensively about Phonogram’s personal impact on me, so I don’t want to get into it too much again, but one more time for the cheap seats. This comic has made me friends, brought me a little closer to an industry I love, helped me to rediscover the power that music can have, gently furthered my career as a writer; and while it was sort of indirect, it was basically responsible for the evening last year on which I hosted a launch night Q&A in a comic shop.²

The final issue of Phonogram was released in January 2016. It’s not quite the same month I’m leaving London – that’s not happening for a couple more months – but at least they managed to (just) get the year right.

2006-2016. Ten years of synchronicity, coincidence, and poetry.

I’ve been in denial about the end of Phonogram for some time. And reading The Immaterial Girl as it’s come out, while it’s had some pretty great moments (especially that Scott Pilgrim Lloyd issue, which struck at my brain and chimed like the most tuneful glockenspiel in the world, as anyone who knows anything about me would expect) there was little about it that felt like it needed to be the last run. Surely there was still plenty of life in the concept, the characters, the world that Gillen and McKelvie had built?

Well, perhaps there still is; perhaps there are countless untold Phono-stories in Gillen’s brain, or perhaps one day the doors will be opened for someone else to play with the concept using different characters. But with the final issue, The Immaterial Girl makes clear exactly why it’s the ending that it is; why a comic that’s about pop music and magic could only ever really have reached its conclusion in 2009, with the death of Michael Jackson. We all just have to sit here ashamed that we didn’t manage to work out that that’s where it was going until it got there.

Except it turns out that it still needed to have a postscript, because it was published ten days after the death of David Bowie, and one of its backup strips features “Modern Love”. I mean, come on. If this is what Phonogram is capable of, it’s no wonder it had to end now. Otherwise we’re none of us safe.

Part of the game we played with this series was in allowing Kieron to pretend that David Kohl wasn’t entirely him; that there was some element of fiction in there. And there probably was, but the backup strips in Immaterial Girl always felt even more like the author speaking directly than any of the rest of the book had previously done. So the final page of the backup strip here shouldn’t feel like too much of a surprise. But it does. Call it going Duck Amuck or going Grant Morrison Animal Man or even going Fraction/Zdarsky if you like; but really, all it is is a final indulgence, an admission, a shared, knowing wink. “Yeah, alright. You got me.”

And in a way, it also betrays why the series needed to end now. Because Phonogram was always about the relationship between artists and fans, told from the perspective of fans. Of course, those lines always got blurred from time to time, but it’s harder to argue that the Phonogram of 2016 is looking in at art and culture from the outside in the same way as the Phonogram of 2006 was. Gillen and McKelvie are, themselves, artists of repute. That’s why they’re doing The Wicked + The Divine, a series about actually being an artist that has ironically (or not so ironically, really) made them more well-known and successful than they’ve ever been. They’re not really plucky outsiders any more (at least not in this field), and that’s absolutely okay; but it means that almost everything they do in it comes from a completely different perspective.³

In short, any new Phonogram created from here on out would sort of have to be about the winners, rather than the losers.

Of course, Phonogram didn’t actually kill David Bowie. It doesn’t really have that kind of power.⁴ It’s got an innate sense of coincidence, but even that is often the sort of coincidence that you blurrily create in your head, slightly conflating events or confusing dates (we come back to “print the legend”). Stuff retrospectively fits together and makes sense, more than it seemed to at the time. It’s just that that final issue managed to be a bit more immediate with it all.

But it is sort of… if not good that it’s ending now, then apt, at least. Necessary, even. It would be far too easy to keep wanting new Phonogram, feeding on the emotions and nostalgia that it provides, allowing it to encourage (indulge, even) that part of the brain that likes to wallow in pretension and melodrama. I’ve been part of what one could charitably describe as its hardcore fanbase (and less charitably as… well, all sorts of things) for basically all of that decade, writing multiple thousands of words about it, contributing to the fanzine, showing up to pretty much every thinly-veiled excuse for a party, and always feeling slightly disgruntled that there wasn’t quite room to get me me a pull quote on the Singles Club trade. But tying all of that off after ten years, that feels nice and round, and clean. Certainly cleaner and simpler than anything else the book ever did.

There’s just time for one more Phono-party before I blow this town. I imagine we’ll say goodbye to it the best and only way we know how.

2006-2016.

It’s July 2006. And yes, those of you who are paying attention will notice this means that the first issue of Phonogram has yet to be published. But that’s the kind of story this is.

So, it’s July 2006. My girlfriend is, if not literally on the other side of the world, then as near to it as makes no odds. I’m in Oxford, living in the house we used to share with three friends from university, but which now it’s just me that shares with them. In about a month’s time, I’m going to move to London and try to find a home and a job. The people I live with are great people, and Oxford’s a great town, but still: I feel lonely, and a bit adrift.

And then I hear a song called “Pull Shapes”, by a new(ish) band called the Pipettes. And for all that that song, and its accompanying album, could be accused of being a cynical and overly twee exercise in nostalgia marketing, they are exactly the kind of thing I need to drop into my life at that point. In a weird kind of way – a way that I’m aware probably sounds a bit sad and pathetic – when I listen to We Are The Pipettes, it’s like these three cute girls with nice voices in polka dot dresses are some kind of surrogate girlfriends. It’s a feeling that’s only strengthened on the August bank holiday weekend, when I see them perform at an outdoor music festival on Clapham Common.¹

Fast forward to December 2008. For the second time, me and the same girlfriend are apart – but this time, it’s rather more permanent. Having spent most of the preceding year-and-a-half living together in Brighton, our relationship has gradually disintegrated, and once I move back to London, it ends for good.

And while that’s going on, there’s finally a new issue of Phonogram out. It’s the first chapter of volume two, The Singles Club. And while it’s a somewhat slight opening instalment, one that I don’t feel really gets across the fullest sense of what that second volume will become, I can’t help but notice that it’s called “Pull Shapes”. Because it’s about a girl who loves the Pipettes.

This isn’t really something I give any great thought to at the time, but in retrospect, it’s painfully apparent how this is just the first example of Phonogram 2 intertwining quite terrifyingly with my life.

But it’s nothing compared to what the second issue has got in store for me.

So, for almost the entire period between Phonogram‘s first volume ending and its second beginning, I had been living in Brighton, commuting back to London every day. I didn’t mind this commute, partly because there were so many upsides to living in Brighton (although they can basically all be boiled down to simply “It’s Brighton”), and partly because although it meant getting up ludicrously early and getting home ludicrously late, I actually quite enjoyed the couple of hours to myself every day on the train with my laptop. I got a lot of writing done, read a lot of comics, watched a lot of TV shows… and listened to a lot of music.

As anyone knows, listening to a lot of music – especially a lot of the same music – in a concentrated burst can be hazardous to your health. Particularly when you heavily associate it with a particular time and place (and if that time and place is a very specific period in your life… say, when you’re living in a different town for a set period of time). It leaves you open and vulnerable to painful associations, should anything happen that means you end up looking back on that time less fondly.

Such as, if that time includes the gradual disintegration of the most significant relationship you’ve been in up to that point. If that happens, you might find that some of the music you were listening to so intensely at that time becomes completely off-limits. If you’re me, for example, you’ll never be able to go back to the twee-indie soundtrack of a popular offbeat indie film released in the year 2007 ever again.

It’s now April 2009. Four months after The Singles Club‘s first issue, and four months after The Breakup – which I’m still struggling to get over – the second finally lands. It reaches me while I’m at a particularly low ebb. I’m also still dealing with the fact that the latest volume of Scott Pilgrim (the fifth) managed to be the one about the painful breakup that didn’t feel a million miles away from my own. To have one comic so acutely reflect your emotional state may be regarded as a misfortune. To have two… well, to have two results in what happens when issue #2 of The Singles Club drops.

Because issue #2 of The Singles Club is about a guy who can’t hear a certain song (specifically, as far as the story goes, in a nightclub) without being struck by intensely painful memories of an ex-girlfriend. As the song plays, she appears as a haunting vision – rendered in washed out, ghostly tones, while a subtle shadow appears around each panel border – conversing with him casually and subjecting him to a barrage of flashbacks. It’s simultaneously both a literal “curse” that he feels has been placed upon him (and thus in keeping with the use of “magic” that previous issues of Phonogram have hinted at), and a great big massive metaphor for how music makes us feel (suggesting that actually, there’s no “literal” magic at all, and the whole thing is a metaphor).

In the issue’s back matter, Kieron Gillen comes up with a phrase for this kind of thing, and it’s so apposite I still don’t actually believe it hadn’t been coined sooner: “curse songs”.

Ouch.

I understand exactly what a curse song is. And now, I understand exactly what Phonogram is. And this is the point where I become a little bit obsessed.

This is where Phonogram‘s true power lies: the ability to express some pretty bloody universal feelings and emotions in a way that the reader had previously been unable. If the first volume felt like a niche proposition in terms of its subject matter (I still don’t really understand how anyone could enjoy it if they weren’t a fan of Britpop), and the second had started out feeling even moreso (trendy teenagers on a night out in Bristol?), then issue #2 is where it began to speak for all of us. Even if we didn’t recognise the precise circumstances going on in the story, we could surely recognise the emotions, and see our own slightly different experiences reflected.

It’s the same kind of thing that makes issue #3 – “the Emily Aster one” – so good; even though it’s not a situation I can personally empathise with, I know for a fact that there are people who hold that issue up the way I do with #2, as the moment where the series felt like it was talking specifically about them and nobody else.

And even if #3 doesn’t do this for me, I’m pretty sure #2 won’t end up being the only one that does, either.

Sure enough, it’s July 2009, and Phonogram: The Singles Club #4 is due to come out. But between the second and fourth issues, something strange has happened. Someone’s decided to make a Phonogram fanzine. For all kinds of reasons, this is just about the most Phonogram thing that could possibly happen² – and obviously, I’m one of several people who immediately decide to have a go at submitting something. I sketch out an idea for a one-page strip about DJing, and enlist my friend Kat to draw it.

My line of thinking is that it’s an area of music consumption that, the odd reference to “Retromancers” here and there, hasn’t really been explored by the series yet. Specifically, the feeling you can get from DJing – and even more specifically, the kind of feeling I’d get playing our old crappy indie night at university, where the room would only have about ten people in it, but if you stuck on the right record (usually “Girl from Mars”) you could fill the place with a tremendous, tangible sense of exuberance – and it was suddenly as if you were spinning records to a thousand people.

I think it’s a pretty neat hook, and the curator of the fanzine agrees (either that or he doesn’t have enough submissions to be choosy). It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m pleased with it – and pleased that something I wrote is being sold at San Diego Comic Con beneath a Jamie McKelvie cover (because the second most Phonogram thing that could possibly happen is for there to be a Phonogram fanzine where one of the Phonogram creators draws the cover). And I’m pleased that I’ve found an angle that the main series hasn’t really done yet.

And then issue #4 comes out. And it’s about DJing. And it’s the best issue of the series yet: tremendously funny, artfully constructed and paced (every page but two is made up of the same six-panel grid) and with a climactic double-page spread that’s absolutely to die for (and really should have been a poster). And it has a moment where, with the room flagging and lethargic, the DJs break out a special, exalted record that’s guaranteed to get everybody moving.

And it’s like… well, why do any of the rest of us need to bother?

Over the second half of 2009, I’ve met someone new. And while my curse songs are still curse songs, I’m generally feeling a lot better than I had been while the first half of the series was coming out. I’ve even discovered some new (to me) music that I now positively associate with this new relationship and my new frame of mind. I’ve been listening to Let’s Get Out of This Country, the third album by Scottish indie-pop combo Camera Obscura (funnily enough, it’s an album that originally came out around a month before that Pipettes record), and in particular its opening track, “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”.

A few months into our dating, my new girlfriend³ and I even see the band play at a summer outdoor music festival on Clapham Common. It’s funny how these things go.

As if detecting this mood of mine, Phonogram decides that it’s time for its redemption issue. And so, in December 2009, comes #6.

Issue #6, aside from featuring some pretty fantastic and unconventional visual storytelling from McKelvie – about half of it is basically a fanzine dropped into the middle of a comic – tells the story of Lloyd, a desperately serious young man first encountered in issue #1, who has (what he thinks is) a great idea for a pop group, and wants everyone to call him Mr. Logos. He’s also hopelessly in love, we learn here for the first time, with one of the other characters. While that story ends up playing out pretty much as you’d expect it to for him (that is… not very well), there’s a glimmer of hope for poor Lloyd thanks to a conversation he has with one David Kohl.

Kohl, of course, was the lead character in Rue Britannia, and despite all protestations to the contrary, Is Basically Kieron Gillen. During The Singles Club, he takes on this strange, almost elder-statesman kind of status – primarily in the eyes of Lloyd, who in issue #1 spots him arrive at the club and immediately declares that he has to try and talk to him. Because Kohl has been there and done it all before, and his exploits with Britannia in the first volume have passed into phonomancer legend.

In other words, he is to the younger phonomancers somewhat like what Kieron is like to an array of younger writers and wannabe-writers. Especially the ones who get invited to Phonogram drinks parties.

In #6, Lloyd gets to have his conversation with Kohl, and it’s a conversation that can’t help but feel is reminiscent of conversations I’ve had with Kieron myself. And that, I’m sure, Kieron has had with lots of other people. To be clear, I don’t think Lloyd is in any way based on me and my interactions with Gillen (there are, however, at least one or two people whom it’s rather clearer that he’s based on), just that it’s an entirely familiar dynamic.

At the end of their chat, Lloyd is told by Kohl to go and listen to a new, up-and-coming band called Los Campesinos!, who Kohl describes as “They’re going to be bi… actually, scratch that. They’re never going to be big big. But they’re going to be big to some people.” This moment is, of course, Kieron speaking directly – he’s a noted fan, and friend, of the band – and it’s easy to take his recommendation at face value even if, unlike Lloyd, you’re not in the situation of having listened to nothing but Dexy’s Midnight Runners for the last year.

Thing is, I already liked LC! quite a lot; but I also had a bit of a problem with them. Because I’d been listening to their album Hold On Now, Youngster… quite solidly on those Brighton-to-London train journeys, while the follow-up We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed coincided nicely with the December 2008 breakup. I wouldn’t have called them quite as curse-songey as the twee indie-film soundtrack – I could still, at least, actually listen to them – but they had felt somewhat tainted by being, for me at least, of that time.

Kohl’s instruction to go and listen to them, and the reaction that Lloyd has when he eventually does (after going through something of an angry emotional breakdown spurred by the events of later that night), actually persuaded me to do the same – specifically, I went and listened to the same early tracks that were around at the time The Singles Club is set, which I’d never really dug into before.

And just like Lloyd, “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives” does something for me. In my case, it lifts the Los Campesinos! curse. I’ve never looked back.

Incidentally, the title of issue #6? “Ready to be Heartbroken”.

It’s June 2015. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie are no longer “the creators of Phonogram“. They’re now “the creators of The Wicked + The Divine“, one of the biggest creator-owned comics success stories since Saga (going by the most recent available sales figures, it’s only a few thousand short of Mark Millar’s two current series, for example). This means that the solicitation of the much-delayed third Phonogram volume – the one that actually, we’d all pretty much resigned ourselves to never seeing – also includes getting a cover slot on Previews. This is uncharted territory for this little book.

I catch myself wondering if, after all this time, new Phonogram will ever really feel the same. It surely won’t have the same effect on me that the previous volume did. I half wonder what the creators have to gain from putting it out, given the success they’ve had with things that aren’t it; and whether they’re only really doing so out of a nostalgic sense of obligation (worse, have they actually become retromancers of Phonogram itself?) Is it going to be the PG3 that we wanted so badly five years ago, or has time dulled both that need, and the ability to fulfill it?

If it has, it shouldn’t matter: Phonogram has already changed my life in more than enough ways. But it’d be nice to imagine that it still carries the same magic.

It’s June 2015, and as I look at the first preview pages released for Phonogram 3, I find myself mentally applauding the use of a Ceefax-esque font for the narrative captions that accompany a flashback to the 1980s.

So yeah, maybe it does. We’ll see.

“I believe that the best way to show how music affects the world is to take evidence directly from life to show how music has changed me and people around me. Not that it’s a particularly truthful form of biography. There’s a key line in the second issue: ‘Sometimes the truth just gets in the way of what really happens.’ That’s absolutely key. The phrase I’m using is Automythology.” – Kieron Gillen

It doesn’t look like much, but the above panel is one of the most important in my comics-reading life.

It’s August 2006. I’ve got this friend called James. I haven’t known him that long, somewhere in the region of a year or so, having been introduced by my then-girlfriend, a friend of his, under the pretext of her giving each of us somebody else to talk about in person about comics. The first seeds of our eventual long-term collaboration have begun, however, with my getting him to write comics reviews for the recently-launched Noise to Signal (RIP). And in his latest weekly column, he’s mentioned a comic that he also in person won’t stop going on about. You can probably guess where this is going, but it’s called Phonogram.

He hasn’t literally thrust the first issue into my hands, so much as repeatedly insisted that I buy it myself when I’m next in Forbidden Planet; but for the sake of the myth, he has, essentially, thrust the first issue into my hands. One point he keeps mentioning is that there’s an anecdote on the first page about buying a t-shirt at a festival for no reason other than to keep warm, and how it’s the first time he can ever remember a comic so acutely reflecting his own personal experiences.

So I buy the comic, and I read it, and I get to that moment (which doesn’t take long, because, y’know, it’s the fourth panel of the entire series). And I recall that a little over year earlier I’d found myself in need of a new t-shirt at the 2005 Glastonbury Festival – not because I was cold, admittedly, but because flooding and mud had done for most of my other belongings. But the bootleg t-shirt that I’d had to queue for over an hour for a cash machine in order to pay a hugely extortionate eighteen quid for?

Well, it was a Superman t-shirt, obviously.

Look of disgruntlement: model’s own.

The first volume of Phonogram – initially published as six issues before being collected as the trade Rue Britannia – tells the story of David Kohl, a “phonomancer” (translation: person who performs magical rituals via the power of music) who reluctantly undertakes a mission to prevent the resurrection of the Britpop movement (and its physical embodiment, the goddess Britannia) and in the process the rewriting of the collective memory of everything it meant and stood for. Along the way, the book offers, among several themes, an extensive rumination on nostalgia and memory. A particularly notable piece of discourse on this occurs partway through the second issue:

If you have any sort of memory of Britpop as something that was important (or, indeed, unimportant) to your life, then are an extensive range of possible reactions to Kohl’s assertion here. It’s possible, of course, that you’ll agree with him. But it’s more likely that you’ll say “No, it wasn’t like that at all!” and then immediately start talking about your own memories.

If you’re me, for example, you’ll talk about the feeling of subversion that came with gathering together the four or five other people who liked Blur into the school’s music room to play the taped-off-the-radio first airing of a new single. About having crushes on girls based entirely on your first conversations with them being about the band, and wishing you were a bit more like Graham Coxon so that they’d look at you the way they look at him. And about only just being talked out of blu-tacking the lyrics of “Mis-Shapes” on the wall of the common room as a defiant manifesto because, as was rightly pointed out, it wasn’t quite worth the hassle.*

That was my Britpop: discovering for the first time that the radio could bring something new and exciting into your small and unimportant teenage world, but remaining utterly untouched by anything that was actually going on in its tangible circles (no gigs, no club nights, no contact with the outside world at all), instead feeling like there were only a handful of other people around you who really understood it (even when “Country House” was getting to number one). Like many others who were just slightly too young to really get involved, we were fervent observers rather than participants.

Kohl may not realise that There Are Other Britpops Too at this point in the book, and it’s tempting to take the apparent authority of his statement as confirmation that the author sides with him, too. Indeed, I’ve seen that levelled directly at Phonogram as a criticism. But in fact, as later issues make clear, Kohl’s inability to see beyond his own version of this particular nostalgia is one of his biggest problems. And his own realisation of that is a defining theme of the second half of the story.

Our nostalgia, the book concludes, is nobody else’s but our own.

Kohl’s journey through the wretched, terrifying “Memory Kingdom” of Britpop – a storybook vision of Camden here, a totemistic mound of bodies symbolising the Oasis myth’s moment of transcendence at Knebworth there – sparks his understanding that his own version of Britpop is no more, nor any less, valid than anybody else’s. And indeed, that even that globulous, hazy shared memory, as nightmarish as it is, is a truth of sorts. As is the perspective of the kid in the Babyshambles t-shirt** who thinks the Libertines were “the most important band since punk”:

Everyone’s memories are truth, in their own way. But they also have to stay as memories. The danger that this volume of Phonogram ultimately cautions against isn’t having the wrong memories at all: it’s allowing those memories to take over the present.

And so a series that arguably only attracted much of its initial audience through nostalgia – whether drawn in by shared experiences like the t-shirt story, by the rumour that there really was a comic being published about loving Kenickie records, or even just by those cool album-pastiche covers – ultimately ends up looking forwards, instead.

Pop quiz – is this page:

a) Deeply resonant to anyone who’s ever drifted away from a band or artist but never truly fallen out of love with them;
b) The moment where Kieron Gillen revealed he had a heart;
c) Some of the earliest evidence of Jamie McKelvie becoming one of the best moment-to-moment character expression artists in comics;
d) All of the above (apart from the one about Kieron having a heart)?

It’s May 2007. James and I are at the Bristol Comic Expo, where we’ve arranged to meet and interview Kieron and Jamie about Phonogram – which has recently finished publishing its single issues, with a collected edition on the way.

Having briefly chatted to the pair at their stand during the day, we eventually catch up with them at the bar later in the evening – just after an Eagle Awards ceremony at which both Phonogram and Casanova have, quite ludicrously, lost out in their category to The Walking Dead – and retire to the (relative) quiet of outdoors to record our interview. We were hoping to maybe get ten minutes with them – instead, fuelled by wine and hubris, it lasts for nearly an hour.

Reading the interview back now, I’m a little embarrassed by some of it, professionally – our questions are mostly surface and a little naive, and our inexperience also shows in the decision to publish an almost entirely unexpurgated transcript rather than editing it properly.*** But even though it’s a good piece in spite of us, rather than because of us, it’s still a pretty important moment. For the first time since we started writing about these things, we feel actually connected to the world of comics. We feel like we’re part of something. As well as being fervent observers, at this moment we’re also participants.

Phonogram will never be Britpop, of course. But eventually, it will have a Memory Kingdom of its own. Here, in the city where the comic itself is set, is where my corner of it starts.

To be continued…