Last time (nearly two years ago, sorry about that) Weezer’s sixth album, and third self-titled, The Red Album, was an inconsistent but often fascinating bag of ideas. It struggled for sales, but arguably found the 21^st Century iteration of the band at their most defined. It also saw them enter their most prolific period of releases, with three main albums and three rarities compilations released between 2008 and 2010. But did quantity equal quality? Well…

23. Raditude

1. If You’re Wondering If I Want You To (I Want You To). 2. I’m Your Daddy. 3. The Girl Got Hot. 4. Can’t Stop Partying. 5. Put Me Back Together. 6. Tripping Down The Freeway. 7. Love Is The Answer. 8. Let It All Hang Out. 9. In The Mall. 10. I Don’t Want To Let You Go.
Recorded November 2008-January 2009 by Cuomo, Bell, Wilson, Shriner. Produced by Butch Walker, Dr. Luke, Polow da Don and Jacknife Lee. Released November 2009.

Make Believe was released in May 2005. The Red Album in June 2008. Raditude in November 2009. It would be wrong to say that Weezer rushed into their next album immediately after Red, but it was certainly a quicker schedule than we’d been used to since the days when the Maladroit demos were floating around concurrently with The Green Album’s belated release.

In advance of Raditude’s release, there was little indication of the direction the band were moving in – but it was a new direction. The first major change was that, for the first time, Rivers would work with external songwriters – including producers Jacknife Lee and Butch Walker, and All American Rejects members Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler. This in turn tied into the second change, which was a conscious effort to widen the band’s style, and in the process appeal to a more mainstream pop market.

This might have seemed like an odd strategy to take given that The Red Album was hardly noted for its commercial appeal – but the band had been picking up new, and younger fans ever since Make Believe, and while they would never again successfully capitalise on that album’s sales figures, it did seem to inspire Rivers to reach out to a younger and more diverse audience.

Unfortunately, he did so with a batch of songs that were, and let’s not beat around the bush here, largely absolutely rotten. There are so few redeeming features to Raditude – it’s a grossly cynical, heartless, charmless grab at commerciality, that sacrifices almost everything that Weezer had going for them up to that point, and ignores everything that had ever made them commercially successful in previous years. It’s almost entirely vapid, and I can barely even bring myself to discuss tracks like “Tripping Down the Freeway” or “In the Mall” (the latter another Pat Wilson effort) in anything resembling detail. They are instantly forgettable, not even holding any worth as disposable pop songs.

Leadoff single “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To” is perhaps the most successful stab at producing an accessible, catchy radio-pop effort – it’s hard to deny that it’s got the most Cuomo-ish hook of anything on the record, even if it pales into comparison with the likes of “Buddy Holly” or even “Keep Fishin’”. But where Cuomo had in past years shown a knack for capturing identifiable teenage aches and frustrations, here his approaching-40-year-old-man-pretending-to-be-a-kid schtick is grating in the extreme. In later years, as we’ll see, he would successfully mix “pretending to be stupid” with “accidentally revealing that he’s clever” to great effect – but here, he just comes off as stupid.¹

The two tracks that are arguably the most of interest are the ones that we’d already heard in advance of the album, courtesy of their release in raw demo form on the Alone II compilation. “I Don’t Want To Let You Go” is the one true, unequivocal success on the album – even though it possibly sounded a bit better in its stripped back demo form – a yearning love song of the kind Cuomo excels at, reminiscent of (if not quite as good as) Alone I’s “I Was Made For You”.

“Can’t Stop Partying” is certainly one of the most fascinating things Cuomo has ever done, although you’d be hard pushed to call the Raditude version entirely successful. The original demo version saw him take a lyric by rapper and producer Jermaine Dupri and give it an unexpected slant by allying it to a sombre, acoustic performance that infused the lyrics with a (seemingly absent in the writing) sense of regret and remorse. It was exactly the sort of thing that a true collaboration is supposed to produce – something that would simply not have existed out of the mind of either party individually – and if included on any Weezer album in that original form (even without any additional production) would have been one of its undoubted highlights.

Unfortunately, the Raditude version pushes back to something you suspect is far closer to what Dupri had originally intended when writing it. Although Cuomo strips out some of the specific drugs references (replacing “I gotta have the E” with “I gotta have the beat”) there’s far less of a sense of weariness thanks to a more pulsing and heavily produced backing track.

In fact, the section that comes the closest to the mood that Rivers had established on the acoustic version comes with the track’s most contentious addition: a rapped insert by guest star Lil Wayne, who manages to sound just as tired as Cuomo does on the original, albeit this time possibly not to the enhancement of the song. While there’s fun to be had in the juxtaposition of his nickname (“Weezy”) with the band’s, for the most part he feels out of place, especially with straight-up explicit swearing of a kind not usually heard on Weezer records.

That said, the original version is undoubtedly one-note, with a single stance on what’s being sung about; on the album version, it veers between perspectives in a dizzying and confusing fashion that aptly reflects the state of mind of the vocalist(s). So it’s not that the Raditude version has nothing going for it at all – simply that it doesn’t fully commit to what it was originally setting out to.

Nevertheless, an interesting failure such as “Can’t Stop Partying” is still a far more worthwhile proposition than almost anything else the album has to offer. “Put Me Back Together” has earned a reasonably well-liked reputation among certain groups of Weezer fans in the years since, but it’s a mawkish sludge that chugs along for three utterly forgettable minutes.

“Love Is The Answer”, meanwhile, was apparently deemed good enough to be recorded for Raditude even after Rivers had already given it to Sugar Ray to include on their July 2009 album Music For Cougars. Weezer’s version adds sitars (one would suspect, given some of his work outside Weezer, that Brian Bell was responsible for the tone given to this recording) so it’s at least less generically bland than the Sugar Ray version, but neither requires more than one listen in your life.

The two tracks that most straightforwardly point towards Weezer’s new “pop single” direction line up second and third on the album after the leadoff single: “I’m Your Daddy” and “The Girl Got Hot”. Both have, it’s hard to deny, catchy hooks to them – especially in their respective choruses. But they’re coupled up with such excruciatingly cringeworthy lyrics that it’s hard to take either one in any way seriously.

And this isn’t the sort of endearing cringe that Rivers can sometimes get away with, either. “I’m Your Daddy” is just plain weird – Rivers was apparently inspired to write it while his infant daughter was in hospital, which is lovely and cute; but the song as written isn’t about his daughter, it’s about fancying a girl at a nightclub (and if anyone can tell me what “I will ape a goomba” is meant to mean that would be great, as nearly ten years later I’m still to figure it out). And “The Girl Got Hot”, meanwhile, is every bit the piece of borderline-misogynist trash you’d expect from the title.

Indeed, it’s the particularly egregious moments on Raditude – not to mention the sense of unearned confidence that runs through it from the title outwards – that means that even its positive moments are easy to overlook. It’s not a completely worthless record – no Weezer album ever is – but it reaches confusedly for something it has no chance of ever actually successfully achieving, and instead lands us headfirst in a pile of shit.

But it does still at least have “I Don’t Want To Let You Go” on it.

24. Raditude Bonus & Aftermath

1. Get Me Some. 2. Run Over By A Truck. 3. The Prettiest Girl In The Whole Wide World. 4. The Underdogs. 5. I Want To Be Something. 6. Represent.
Recorded November 2008-January 2009 by Cuomo, Bell, Wilson, Shriner.

As was becoming customary, Raditude expanded its standard 10-track length with bonus tracks for a “Deluxe” physical and digital release. The digital editions were largely supplemented with covers, live versions and remixes (and the thoroughly pleasant Green era offcut “I Hear Bells”), but there were four wholly original tracks on the physical deluxe edition.

“Get Me Some” is a Raditude-era co-write with Dr. Luke, and is largely forgettable. “Run Over By A Truck” dates from pre-Red Album, but wouldn’t have really strengthened either album by being included. Where things get mildly interesting is with “The Prettiest Girl In The Whole Wide World” – one of the oldest songs Weezer would officially record in the 2000s, it goes all the way back to 1997, and was played by Rivers solo in the late ‘90s as well as being demoed (a version that remains unreleased) when the band first reconvened after the Matt Sharp split in 1998. It’s pleasant enough, but also not particularly attention-grabbing – and it’s only really its provenance that makes its inclusion on Raditude of note.

The best of the Raditude bonus tracks, oddly, is the one that pushes its sound far more into a clean, overly-produced pop sound than anything else on the album itself. “The Underdogs”, co-written with Kazuhiro Hara, would sound utterly jarring to a fan of 1990s Weezer, and has some pretty facile lyrics; but it’s also blessed with an absolute belter of a chorus that makes it one of the best things on the record.

A fifth additional recording from the Raditude era, “I Want To Be Something”, was actually released as a bonus track on Hurley; it’s a mournful Rivers solo acoustic demo, and it’s certainly stronger than almost anything else on the album it was eventually a part of; but it’s easy to see why it wasn’t considered for full recording for Raditude, since it doesn’t remotely fit with that album’s tone.

Finally, in 2010 – prior to Hurley­ – the band released a standalone digital-only single. Titled “Represent”, it was an “unofficial anthem” for the US Men’s National Soccer Team ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Rivers’ second attempt to write a song based around the US football team – the first being “My Day Is Coming” – it amusingly opens with commentary on the equalising goal that took the side to the tournament in the first place, in slightly Three Lions-ish fashion. The rest of it is… well, a fairly generic cruncher about sporting aspiration, with a very American slant to the lyrics (by which I mean there’s basically no humility or apology).²

25. Hurley

1. Memories. 2. Ruling Me. 3. Trainwrecks. 4. Unspoken. 5. Where’s My Sex? 6. Run Away. 7. Hang On. 8. Smart Girls. 9. Brave New World. 10. Time Flies.
Recorded 2009-2010 by Cuomo, Bell, Wilson, Shriner. Produced by Rivers Cuomo and Shawn Everett. Released September 2010.

If Raditude had been a gamble on attempting to grasp for greater commercial success and a wider, more mainstream appeal, then it failed spectacularly. Aside from the negative critical reception the album got, sales performance was poor, charting lower than The Red Album across the board.

It made sense, then, that the band would go for a “back to basics” approach with the next record, but the speed with which they did this was surprising – the next album, Hurley (named after the photograph of Lost actor Jorge Garcia on the cover but with persistent rumours of a commercial tie-up with the clothing label of the same name) was released in September 2010, the first time a Weezer album had come out less than a year after its predecessor.

The speed of this release was also surprising given that Raditude saw the end of the band’s long-term association with DGC/Geffen/Interscope – instead signing a short term deal with punk label Epitaph. But while noises out of the band suggested a break with the style of Raditude, many of the problems that dogged that album still remained.

One of only two Cuomo solo compositions on the album, lead-off single “Memories” (which lent its name to a nostalgia-heavy touring of the band’s first two albums) is the first, but not the last, Weezer single to declare in its lyrics a desire to go back to what made the band beloved and successful. Unfortunately, the track comes nowhere near achieving that – it’s a plodding cruncher with an unmemorable chorus and largely forgettable lyrics.

Significantly better is the second track, “Ruling Me”, which is a far more successful attempt to belt out a straightforward slice of upbeat guitar-pop, co-written with Dan Wilson of Semisonic. It also effectively strikes the balance between the “dumb high school” type lyrics that characterised Raditude and some of Red, and Rivers’ own oft-buried internal smartness, with “When we first met in the lunch room / My ocular nerve went pop-zoom” something of an archetypal line.

The problem that “Ruling Me” has is that among an album of meatier substance it would be a nice, enjoyable palette cleanser – but on Hurley, so much of which is otherwise forgettable dross, it’s not strong enough to elevate proceedings. The same goes for comfortably the album’s strongest effort – and the only other non-co-written track – “Unspoken”.

But where “Ruling Me” is the most successful attempt at the disposable but fun pop that the album is attempting, “Unspoken” simply feels out of place. One of the strongest tracks of the post-Make Believe era, it’s got more character and depth than anything else on the record, and would be better suited to a place on The Red Album than here. It also sits oddly early on the album, before things have really had a chance to get going – and between two of its weakest tracks. It may seem churlish to criticise something for being too good for the album on which it sits, but that’s certainly what it feels like.

Of the two that bookend “Unspoken”, “Trainwrecks” is merely another plodding dirge; but the real problems kick in with “Where’s My Sex?”, which somehow manages to out-awful anything on Raditude, competing with “We Are All On Drugs” to be one of the most unlistenably dumb things the band have ever produced. If you don’t know the context that “sex” was Rivers’ accidental childhood pronunciation of the word “socks” then it’s just baffling, and if you do… well, then it’s still baffling, frankly.

The rest of the album passes by on a wave of wispy nothingness – listening back to “Run Away” (a co-write with Ryan Adams) for this writeup I could have sworn I’d never heard the thing before in my life, while “Hang On” is only notable for featuring actor Michael Cera on mandolin but does absolutely nothing of note with it or him. And then there’s “Smart Girls”, in which Harvard-educated Cuomo whines “Where did all these smart girls come from?”³

After the equally forgettable “Brave New World” comes “Time Flies”, perhaps the only vaguely interesting thing the album does sonically – with scratchy and echoey production, it sounds like it was just recorded in a single live take, but has a likeable authenticity for that reason. The song doesn’t really go anywhere (and ends abruptly), but it’s a pleasant enough listen.

And then… that’s it. Ten tracks, thirty-three minutes, but nothing like the return to taut pop simplicity that that length (and past form such as The Green Album) implies. It’s just… there. Apart from “Where’s My Sex?”, nothing on it is as bad as the low points of Raditude, but it’s a record you could happily forget exists. Indeed, its most interesting moment arguably comes in the bonus tracks, which feature an absolutely belting live cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”.

There’s a context in which Hurley might have been a perfectly acceptable middling Weezer album – but coming so soon off the back of Raditude certainly wasn’t it. And nor was the fact that after it, the band seemed to head immediately into semi-retirement – with what would ultimately be a four year wait until the next album. It’s an unsatisfying conclusion to what had been a messy, difficult and largely unedifying half-decade of activity.

Indeed, at the time that I started these blogs (which shows you how slow I’ve been at doing them) it was their last album to date, and stood a real chance of being their last album full stop. Thankfully, although we didn’t know it at the time, that four-year break would see the band have another stab at recapturing old glories – and making a rather better fist of it.

Weezerology continues with Part Eight, Futurescope.

Hence, Red Dwarf.

The first episode I see opens with one of the lead characters sporting a grossly oversized prosthetic head – I will remember this scene vividly for years to come as my first experience of the show. The following week, I find an episode revolving around a “pleasure GELF” hilarious, especially when one character sees their perfect mate as a mirror image of themselves.

I can finally join the group of kids at school who yammer on about how great this Red Dwarf thing is. This weird, edgy comedy that’s a bit Doctor Who and a bit Young Ones (I’ve no idea if I’ve seen an episode of the Young Ones by this point, but I know I find their shouty “Living Doll” single hilarious). It feels a bit subversive, even, that we’re allowed to watch it – even though, of course, plenty of it goes over our heads.

I watch at least some of the rest of the Series IV repeat run beyond Justice and Camille – D.N.A., certainly, and possibly Meltdown. But after that, my experience of the show is piecemeal – I don’t catch the fifth or sixth series exactly as they go out, but subsequent repeats allow me to start filling in the gaps, slowly.

And then in 1994, BBC do an odd thing: they put out a Red Dwarf video. Not a video of episodes – they’ve done a few of those already. This is a video of out takes – of bloopers. Of “Smeg Ups”. It’s one of the must-have Christmas presents that year – and while it might have been more sensible to ask for one of those videos of the many episodes I still haven’t seen yet, I have to have it too. This probably marks the point where, for the first time, I’m properly hooked on Red Dwarf.

Over the next couple of years, I get the Smeg Outs sequel video the following Christmas (despite many of the outtakes coming from early-series episodes that I still haven’t seen yet), and eventually I venture into the tie-in novels – borrowing an Omnibus from a (now secondary) school friend and reading the entirety of Last Human in one sitting at a library. When Series VII comes along, there’s a cadre of us who are all awaiting it eagerly: devouring every tie-in article from Radio Times to SFX, and excitedly discussing Tikka to Ride the morning after broadcast (which was a Saturday, but we had orienteering. Yeah, I went to a public school). When the ill-fated Remastered videos are released, a friend called Matt Owens is there at Woolworths each week to get the next one, and I borrow them from him a short while afterwards. The BBC2 Red Dwarf night is a must-be-taped, endlessly-rewatched package of pure joy, too.

By the following year, though, while I wouldn’t say I’ve fallen out of love with Dwarf, I’ve certainly drifted away a little. I’m 17 by now, so I guess I’ve got other things on my mind, other things (and people) to obsess over. I still watch the show as it airs, but no longer pay active attention to the buildup or aftermath. I discover an official website dedicated to the show during early school-computer-room-based forays onto the internet, but it’s a passing curiosity rather than a burning interest.

The next time I reconnect with the show, I’m at university. It’s 2002, approaching the summer, and I’m struggling slightly with my course – failing miserably to learn some Old English translations that will define the results of my first-year exams (exams that it’s entirely possible to be booted out of the university entirely for failing). On a foray into one of Oxford’s many charity shops, I find a copy of the first Dwarf novel. It’s been a while – well, it’s only actually been a couple of years, but when you’re 19, that feels like a while – and I welcome the chance to reconnect with the series.

What I don’t expect is just how much, this time, I fall completely in love with that first novel. What does it is a sequence quite early in the book, covering Rimmer’s own attempts to revise for an exam that he’s destined to fail. It’s not that he doesn’t understand the subject matter (although he probably doesn’t), so much as the fact that his own internal procrastination prevents him from ever even starting work. The gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach as I read – knowing that, even by reading this book instead of revising Beowulf I’m exacerbating the problem – is unpleasant; but equally, I feel understood.

I fail the exam the first time, but pass it – barely – on a resit. So I get to go to second year, and move out of halls into a house with some newfound friends. In a pleasant piece of synchronicity, one of them – Martin – has a near-complete set of Red Dwarf VHSes – and we spend many, many post-pub-or-club nights sitting up until 3 or 4am, drinking cheap vodka, and watching them as part of a constant rotation of comedy videos.

In an even more pleasant piece of synchronicity, late in 2002, the first series of Red Dwarf makes its debut on DVD. I’m immediately hooked into the series’ release cycle after getting the first one for Christmas – and for the first time I can actually watch the entirety of the show, in sequence, complete with a bunch of additional context about how it was made.

And it’s this – finally, this – that pulls me ever-deeper into Red Dwarf fandom. As the DVDs come out, I start to read more about them online. But it’s in 2004 that I first start to get properly into the idea of reading fansites. The detail of exactly what I’m Googling in order to find it will become lost to the mists of time, but the first thing I read on a site called Ganymede & Titan is an April Fool’s joke they’ve recently published, featuring a purported video of an aborted “Series IV Remastered” project.

I click around the site, and find all manner of in-depth nonsense – the sort of thing that’s exactly in my wheelarch the more invested I get in something – and, better yet, a tremendously childish sense of humour and copious amounts of swearing. Ultimately, I stay up until 4am reading basically everything on the site.

I think I’ve found my people.

In the second half of 2004, I realise that I have stuff I want to say about Red Dwarf myself. I also don’t have a full-time job. These two characteristics combine and result in the creation of Fuchal, my first Red Dwarf fansite. I bash out a couple of needlessly lengthy articles, which – aside from some suitably teenage and self-indulgent blogging – are the first “proper” material I write for the web.

By now, through commenting and contributing to discussion, I’ve become friendlier with the G&T gang, and in 2005 we make two important steps. Firstly, a group of us – headed up by G&T’s Ian and John – who all run fansites decide to collaborate on a single, central Red Dwarf blog. While not designed to replace our existing blogs and archives, Observation Dome is intended as more of a free-flowing repository of found nonsense and – well – observations. Now that I think of it, it’s basically a group Tumblr, several years before Tumblr.

Having collaborated reasonably well on OD for its first few months, it’s what happens next that really changes the direction of my Dwarf fandom. The official site announces a competition to make a fan film, the winner of which will feature on the upcoming Series VII DVD release. Between us, the Observation Dome gang hatch out a plan to make a spoof documentary, charting the infamous failed attempts to make a Red Dwarf movie in the early 2000s – littering the script with in-jokes relating not only to the show itself, but its wider fan culture. We’re fairly sure nobody will find it funny except us, but we press on and make the thing anyway. While G&T founder Ian Symes makes use of his college resources to produce and direct, somewhere along the way it’s decided that I should play Doug Naylor.

We shoot the film over a raucous weekend in Ian’s student digs in Enfield, before a long and tortuous editing process – and then, a long and tortuous wait after submission to find out whether the Grant Naylor Productions team will find it amusing, insulting or – worst case – baffling and dull.

I’m plodding through an extremely muddy Glastonbury festival when I get a text message from Ian. It reads, simply, “WE’VE FUCKING WON!”

When I get home from the festival, I check the official website, and sure enough, there’s my face, in a screengrab from the film. We’re one of two submissions picked to be featured on the disc later that year. The day I’m able to pick up the VII DVD from the local Sainsbury’s, knowing that my face and voice (and, in a Terrorform-homaging scene I wish we’d cut, bare chest) are contained within, is quite a proud one.

G&T eventually becomes responsible for quite a lot of my life – it gives me my closest friendship group when I move to London in 2006, initially house sharing with Cappsy, another of the “Observation Dome” gang. It’s around this time that we also take the decision to close down the Dome, instead merging our existing fansites into one all-conquering gestalt: the brand new Ganymede & Titan. Although I’ve still only written a handful of articles on Fuchal, I throw myself into the new site with vigour, also starting a new series of podcasts (which, in an anti-Apple stance that has admittedly softened since, we doggedly persist in referring to as “Dwarfcasts”).

Cappsy will eventually be the best man at my wedding, with Ian also a groomsman; and my housemate of a couple of years later Julian, while not a fan of the show himself, I also meet directly through this group. But somewhere along the way, despite being part of the anarchic (and sometimes antagonistic) unofficial group of chancers, I also become friendly with Andrew Ellard, who since the turn of the century has worked for Grant Naylor as Red Dwarf’s website editor, DVD producer and general all-round public face of official fandom. Aside from the obvious shared interest, we mainly bond over karaoke.

I continue to be active in online Dwarf fandom through the show’s revival on Dave in 2009 (G&T gets a mention from Doug on his Back to Earth DVD commentary, and Ian and I conduct a phone interview with him the following year); and a couple of years later – as whispers begin that a tenth full series might be on the horizon – the 2011 Dimension Jump convention is marked by our releasing a book. The Garbage Pod is a self-published collection of old G&T articles and a bit of new material, that I’ve put together, curated, edited and released. We get copies printed in time to sell them at DJ – but, more notably, with Doug in attendance at the convention (his first in over a decade) it’s an opportunity to finally meet him in person, complete with the jacket I wore when playing him in the film.

We also give him a complimentary copy of the book, and in it I stick – more as a cheeky nod than anything, as it’s not like Doug doesn’t know who I am by this point – one of my freelancer business cards. Prior to this I’ve had idle conversations with Andrew about the fact that, if he ever decided to jack in doing the site, I’d be interested in pitching to take it over; although I don’t know if and when this will ever happen, and if I’d be remotely considered as a possibility if it did.

A surprisingly short while after the convention, I get a message from Andrew: it’s happening. He’s committing himself full-time to his writing and script-editing career, leaving a vacancy at reddwarf.co.uk. If I can knock some writing samples together with a CV, he can’t promise anything, but he’ll certainly put a word in on my behalf.

A few short weeks after that, I’m sitting around a table at Shepperton Studios with Doug and assorted other Grant Naylor personnel, discussing the terms of my taking the job. Oh, and the fact that in a couple of weeks, my first news piece for the site will be about how people can get audience tickets to see the new series of the show.

It’s actually happening.

And so, wistfully but resolutely, I hang up my “unofficial” spurs, and record my final Dwarfcast for G&T – which goes out the same day my first articles on RedDwarf.co.uk are published.

So that, I guess, is how you get a job as a professional Red Dwarf fan.

I’ve been doing the job for just short of five years, now – with at least one update to the site every week (and sometimes more). Some weeks I’ve broken massive news and announcements; others, I’ve scrabbled around for anything tenuously connected to someone who has worked on the show at any point. Red Dwarf’s massive online fandom has come to expect a certain sort of thing from the site ever since Andrew’s days, and I hope I’ve done a decent enough job of providing it. I’m proud of some of the longer-form stuff I’ve done – including an epic twenty-fifth anniversary interview with Doug, a comprehensive database and history of all the books, and a ridiculously difficult quiz that got a surprisingly insane amount of Facebook traction.

Getting paid to write about my favourite show every week has always been an honour and a privilege, as has the access it’s afforded me to get closer to the show – it’s not like I get to be deeply involved in the production, but back when I was an obsessive teenage fan I never imagined I’d one day get to actually walk around Shepperton pretending I was on the ship; or, on my thirty-third birthday, sit in Kryten’s seat on Starbug. My connection with the show helped me get Robert Llewellyn to appear in a sitcom I co-wrote, and the added exposure from working on the site has helped in getting to know a great and varied number of terrific people both online and off.

It hasn’t always been plain sailing, of course – the very nature of TV show production and promotion means that sometimes things are frantically produced or rewritten to account for ever-shifting deadlines or changes of circumstance. Everyone involved with Red Dwarf knows just how important the show is to the people that love it – because it’s just as important to us, too. We want the show to be the best it can be, and to give the best account of itself wherever possible. When it comes to sheer stress, though, I doubt anything will beat co-ordinating the upload of the Series XI/XII announcement video – filmed live at a convention happening up in Nottingham – from a London hospital room just days after the birth of my first daughter.

But on the whole, and while I’ve been lucky to have many different writing jobs and freelance engagements over the past decade, I wouldn’t trade in the Red Dwarf gig for anything. Because when it comes down to it, the simple fact of the matter is that this is my favourite TV show – the one in which I’ve invested by far the most time, attention and love.

But why is that? A lot of it, sure, is the nostalgia wrapped up in it being the show I happened to fall into back in 1992. But I don’t feel the same way about The Brittas Empire, so it can’t just be that. I’ve never been able to shake Red Dwarf because so much of it speaks so directly to what I tend to enjoy. The things I like about sci-fi are its idea-driven nature, and the fact that it can say so much about the world we live in. But one of the things I often dislike about sci-fi is how overly seriously it can take itself. So Red Dwarf, like Hitchhiker’s Guide, takes the big ideas and the critical lens of good sci-fi, but allies them with just the right sense of absurdity.

It always – well, pretty much always – makes me laugh. I enjoy the gags and performances – I think Chris Barrie, in particular, is underrated as one of the great comic performers of his era. I think some of the plot conceits are genuinely more original and inventive than almost anything else in the genre. I love the world that it creates – expanded upon by those novels – and the extrapolation of where modern culture will eventually take us. I love the characters, and I care about what happens to them, and I’m fascinated by their ongoing development – how a show that was once about the fear of growing old and alone in a godless universe has now become about actually having grown old and alone in a godless universe.

And I still love many of its trappings – the look and feel of it, the iconography, the music. There’s plenty about it that you’d think you’d get bored of after nearly twenty-five years, but I still even get excited by a new set of opening titles, and an episode name written in red Microgramma D Bold Extended. I love Starbug, and the Jupiter Mining Corporation logo, and despite the annoyance of the fact that any group of more than about ten Red Dwarf fans gathered in a room will eventually end up singing it, I even still love Tongue Tied.

It’s a pretty great time to be a Red Dwarf fan. The first episode of the eleventh series has just started previewing online (it airs “properly” on Dave next week), and there’s a twelfth series to come next year. And then in 2018, while we don’t know whether there’ll be more episodes being made (yet), there’s the show’s thirtieth anniversary to celebrate, too.

As for Series XI, any promotional biases aside, from purely the perspective of a fan of the show it’s a delight to report that it’s legitimately superb. It builds on the foundation provided by the Series X revival, but takes the show into fascinating new directions, with production values that arguably improve on everything (yes, everything) that’s come before – and plenty of fan-pleasing nods thrown in, to boot. In short, it’s everything I would have hoped, but may never have dreamed a few years back, that modern-day Red Dwarf could come out like: funny, inventive, superbly-realised sci-fi comedy. Like it’s always been.

And that’s why I’ve always been – whether professionally or otherwise – a Red Dwarf fan. And why I probably always will be.

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.

Well, that’s alright, then.

Originally published 28.06.12:

Oh good, it’s that time of year again, when Back to the Future date hoaxes do the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. And the rest of us bang our heads on the table in despair.

Look, I don’t blame the people who start these things, who photoshop a date in 2010 or 2011 or 2012 onto a screengrab of the DeLorean’s date readout. They’re trying to wind up the internet, and they’re succeeding. It’s an old joke, now, but if people keep falling for it they’re going to keep doing it. But the people who keep spreading it around, and making it so easy to wind everyone up… ARGH.

Why do I let it bother me? I wonder to myself. I mean, I’m a massive pedant, everyone knows that. But this one gets my back up more than most – and I think it’s because I love BTTF so much – it’s one of the most truly delightful, joyous, wonderful things that modern pop culture has ever created – that it irritates me that other people don’t care enough to get it right.

I mean, look: if you like BTTF enough that you think it will be pretty cool when we finally land on the future date featured in the film (and it will), then surely you should at least know these two basic facts:

1. Every year featured in the Back to the Future trilogy ends in a 5.

2. The first Back to the Future film is about travelling BACKWARDS in time, not FORWARDS. It’s Part II that features the trip to 2015.

Beyond those two fundamentals, however, as a Public Service Announcement I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of all the dates referenced in the BTTF films – so that next time one of these spreads around, there’s a handy and quick reference by which to confirm that it’s utter bollocks. So here it is.

Back to the Future

The dates the Doc punches in when showing Marty how the controls work are:

• July 4th 1776 (“the signing of the Declaration of Independence”)
• December 25th 0000 (“the birth of Christ”)
• November 5th 1955 (“a red letter day for science”)

This last date is the date that Marty gets transported back in time to, as it’s the one left on screen when the Libyans arrive. Despite what some Twitterers say, the Doc never puts in “a random date”.

The date on which lightning strikes the clock tower and Marty returns to 1985 is:

• November 12th 1955

The date in 1985 that Marty returns to is:

• October 26th 1985

The date the Doc travels to at the end is:

• An unspecified day and month in 2015

Back to the Future Part II

The date the Doc brings Jennifer and Marty to (and thus, the ACTUAL “Future Day”) is:

• October 21st 2015

The date Old Biff travels to and gives the Almanac to his past self is:

• November 12th 1955

The date in “alternate” 1985 that Marty and the Doc return to is:

• October 26th 1985

The date Marty and the Doc go back to retrieve the Almanac is also:

• November 12th 1955

The date the Doc accidentally travels back to, because of the lightning strike jolting the time circuits (the ONLY time a “random” date is travelled to) is:

• January 1st 1885

Back to the Future Part III

The date Marty leaves 1955 to go back to the Old West:

• November 16th 1955

The date Marty arrives in the Old West:

• September 2nd 1885

The date Marty leaves the Old West:

• September 7th 1885

The date Marty arrives back in 1985 and the DeLorean is destroyed:

• October 27th 1985

So there we go. Now, STOP IT.

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.