About Very Very Much
I’m Joe Muggs. I am a music writer and reviewer.
The purpose of this site is self indulgence. That is to say, it is dedicated to things and people that have played a big part in my life – and it is also an excuse to sit down with some of the people I admire most and get down to some serious talk about why they do what they do.
It’s also a chance to indulge my belief in the idea of the musical underground. It’s quite a gauche thing to admit to these days, but there it is. I don’t mean “underground” in terms of obscurity, or of extremity, or of being a secret society, or of elitism, or of drugginess – although it can entail any of those things for sure – indeed, as many of the interviews will demonstrate, much of what I’m most interested in took place in mass movements and at the top of the pop charts. No, I mean occult social history*: the underground in the sense of something that people live and move and exist within, in which, slightly hidden from view, our culture is transmitted: not national culture or racial culture or class culture (although, again, all these certainly come into it), but yours and mine, the sort where you can look around the people you’re with and go “yep, these are my people”. And it’s the sort of culture that refuses theoretical boundaries, it won’t be bound by a musical genre name, or by theory X expounded by critic Y, because there is just too much of it to fit anyone’s definitions, and because it has generally been, and even with social networks and emails remains, oral culture without documentation and proof. It can’t be contained because it is the life stories and unreliable memories of thousands, millions even, of people, and those stories and memories will always surge out of whatever you try to contain them with. None of which, I hasten to add, means I am in any way anti-Theory: quite the opposite, I love a bit of it, and for those who like to get into musicology and sociology and Constructive Nihilsm and Social Entropy and all the rest of it, I hope I can provide some useful material. But for me, I’m more interested in practice, in what these people have done and why they are the exception to trends.
So of course, I can’t sum it up either. But what I can do is find the most interesting people I know in my little corner of our culture and put their stories and their creations together, in the hope of building up a picture of how the information flows through the places and times I’m most interested in. These people are mostly involved in music, have mostly been around the block, have done things that have reverberated through the wider culture, and lived to tell the tale. So I’m not interested in interrogating them, or “being a journalist” - I get enough of that in my day job. This is about breaking bread and hearing stories, just trying to get a verbal snapshot of a character in a place and time. And because they’re all related by… well, by being of interest to me first and foremost, many of the things they say overlap with one another so hopefully, gradually, as they accumulate and look at the same things from different viewpoints – even if those contradict – they will throw more light on the cultures and subcultures of the past twenty-plus years. We shall see.
There is music to accompany it all, too. Again, we shall see how that develops, but the aim is, as I used to do in a club that I ran many many years ago, to get DJs to play the music they really want to play but can’t get away with anywhere else.
There may be other things on the site, something approaching a blog, some feedback area – a “letters page” even – but the central point of it is the voices and music of those that I talk to.
None of this would be possible without the help of three people: Brian Stevens who is taking the stunning pictures, Ben Bashford who is building this bastard, and my wife Natasha Morabito who listens to me gibber. All of them are people who like good stories and have a few splendid ones of their own.
*and thanks to Alexis Petridis for this excellent three-word summation of what I’m on about.
