Skip to main content

Kevin Williamson - Neu! Reekie!, #UntitledOne and Why His First Publishing Venture in Fifteen Years Won't Be Dealing With Amazon

Mayday looks set to be an extra special occasion for Kevin Williamson this weekend. This has little to do with the political past of a man who, as a one time Scottish Socialist Party firebrand, was the first person to be ejected from the Scottish parliament building in Holyrood while making a protest against the Iraq war while sporting a George Bush mask.

It is to do with the launch of #UntitledOne, the new poetry anthology and accompanying music compilation produced in association with Birlinn's Polygon imprint by Neu! Reekie!, the monthly poetry, music and animation night presented at assorted Edinburgh venues over the last four and a half years by Williamson in partnership with poetic whirlwind Michael Pedersen. While the former features the likes of Tom Leonard, Scotland's Makar Liz Lochhead and Douglas Dunn nestling up to Jenni Fagan, Aidan Moffat and Jock Scot, the latter sees Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers line up with the likes of The Sexual Objects, Momus and Teen Canteen.

This pan-generational, cross-artform approach will come to life tonight at a special launch event at La Belle Angele, the same Edinburgh club where Williamson first mixed and matched poetry and music at an event called Invisible Insurrection in 1993. That was under the auspices of Rebel Inc, the brash, punk-inspired lit-zine he'd set up the year before, bringing together early work by Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner alongside more established kindred spirits like Gordon Legge.

With Laura Hird, Duncan McLean and others providing equally fresh voices, Rebel Inc shook up Scotland's literary establishment in a way that hadn't been seen since Hugh MacDiarmid called Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi 'cosmopolitan scum' at the 1962 Edinburgh World Writers Conference. It was Trocchi whose notion of an 'invisible insurrection of a million minds' inspired the name of Rebel Inc's event.

With #UntitledOne marking his return to publishing for the first time in fifteen years following a fall-out with Canongate Books, who had published some sixty titles under the Rebel Inc banner, the sort of insurrection Williamson has in mind this time out focuses on the state of the publishing industry itself.

“I missed publishing,” the Caithness born writer says over a cup of mint tea in the National Gallery of Scotland cafe in Edinburgh, “but the publishing industry I was in has gone now. I came into it pre Amazon, at a time when the net book agreement was still in place, and now you've got a different landscape, which I don't think is conducive to authors and publishers, and I would like to do it differently.”

That difference will come in the provocative form of a flat refusal to deal in any way with all-encompassing online distribution site, Amazon.

“Amazon are now in the process of creating an absolute monopoly on distribution,” Williamson observes. “They've already got sixty-six per cent of books in America, and it will go that way in Britain, then it will reach a point where they can destroy publishing and the ability of writers to make a living.

“As a publisher I'd like to take a stand against that, in a really small way that's almost comical, a tiny poetry publisher declaring war on the biggest distribution corporation in the world. I quite like that, because it's comical but it's also serious. I don't think publishers and authors have the balls to actually have a go at Amazon properly, but Amazon's getting more and more powerful, and if we don't fight them now then it'll be too late because all the independent and experimental publishers will be gone.”

Williamson has clearly not lost any of his political fire since his Rebel Inc days and nights, even as his own work as a writer has come increasingly to the fore. In 2005 he won the Robert Louis Stevenson Prize for literature, while his first poetry collection, In A Room Darkened, was published in 2007. As well as establishing Neu! Reekie!, with whom he has performed Robert Burns' Tam O'Shanter to a live indie-folk backing, Williamson also found time to co-found with Mike Small pro-independence website Bella Caledonia. With such dual concerns ongoing, #UntitledOne is making a political statement as much as an artistic one.

“I want to look at different models in Scotland,” he says, “and basically ask writers and publishers to take a stand on Amazon, because they'll be crushed if they don't. Amazon are going for global domination. They're a corporation that must be destroyed. They're monopoly capitalism of the worst kind, and we have to work out a viable alternative to them.

“In Scotland,” he continues, on a roll, “the worst thing the SNP government have ever done was give £12 million to Amazon to open a distribution centre here, to a company who are basically scroungers and who don't pay tax. Amazon have claimed more money than they've paid in tax, and it's a shameful thing what the Scottish Government did.”

For this weekend's event, Williamson is inviting audiences to bring along their Kindles to be smashed. Whether such a pro-print gesture affects Amazon or not, Neu! Reekie! and #UntitledOne will carry on regardless with three months of intense activity. In June, #Untitled Live will feature performances from Young Fathers, DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall and Edinburgh techno pioneers Fini Tribe alongside poet Holly McNish and others. This will be followed by a fifteen date tour around Scotland's small towns and villages, with Williamson, Pedersen and assorted guests travelling in a pair of Range Rovers. There will also be several dates in Japan alongside the band Tenniscoats.

With two further books planned, #UntitledOne in all its forms is both mission statement and retrospective.

“It's a snapshot of all the people we've had on at Neu! Reekie!,” Williamson says of #UntitledOne “and it's all poetry. When I did Rebel Inc books we didn't do poetry, but that's really what I want to publish now. I want to do it on a small scale, as niche, boutique publishing almost, putting out carefully curated objects that look good and feel good, and which bring together all the different aesthetics of Neu! Reekie! We also want people to buy the book directly from the publishers. Apart from getting a book of brilliant poetry, they're also helping to destroy Amazon .”

#UntitledOne is published by Polygon, and is launched at La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, tonight from 6pm. #UntitledLive, featuring Young Fathers, Andrew Weatherall and Fini Tribe plus surprise guests takes place at the Central Hall, Edinburgh, June 9.
 
www.birlinn.co.uk
www.brownpapertickets.com

The Herald, May 1st 2015

ends



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL