I'm Your Fan Too
If you missed part one of this story, you can go back and read it here:
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I don’t have a date for when I got my first letter from Joey. In fact I don’t even remember how Joey found me. Somewhere through the ether, through an interest in Icelandic music perhaps, she had come across my address. It would’ve been on flyers designed to promote the catalogue for the record label I was running.
Someway, somehow, from all the way out in Nowheresville, USA she had found my address and written to me. I don’t remember if she was ordering any of our records or just wanted to ‘chew the fat’. I don’t remember much.
So let’s add some context. We’ve graduated from the 1980s to the 1990s. The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm followed up their attention grabbing debut with a darker, denser second ep. This one was on 12”. I think I’d fully financed this release. I no longer had to sell copies out of the garage at my parent’s house. Based on the success of their debut, I’d found a distributor for this one. Several hundred copies went directly to a network of independent record shops across the UK. The postman could rest easy this time around.
This second ep could be considered a qualified success. One of the music papers gave it a favourable review. John Peel played a track or two when it first came out. We sold plenty of copies. But we didn’t sell out. We didn’t have to make a second pressing this time around. There was no touchstone moment to match that initial Blondie cover. (And no Debbie Harry cover to match the first release’s innovative gatefold sleeve).
I’d met two of the band when they came to London to drop off the master tapes for this second release. They were visiting for other reasons too. At one point they planned to decamp to the BBC headquarters in the hope of getting to meet with John Peel. I probably should’ve gone with them, but I also had my ‘never meet your heroes, don’t have heroes and don’t meet people’ mantra firmly embedded in my head. I think in the end the mission proved fruitless, but that’s a different story.
I may or may not have known it at that point, but the record label was entering the final phase of its brief existence. The origin story and where some of the funding came from is a tale for another day. But a few years in to operations I had taken on a part time job to help boost funds. By the 1990s it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be the next Richard Branson and it was time to wind up the business. The final release, six years after the first, was to be another compilation. Our first CD release. Featuring both the best of the music we’d already put out and new material from the various acts associated with the label. Among these tracks were two new songs from the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.
Down at this point to a single member, beautifully crafted in their own studio, I’d received these new tracks as part of a demo album created to further promote the band. The truth is this music was too good to be relying on me to advance their career. I wanted to find a major (but still independent) label who could sign them. I don’t have a full list of where those demos went out to, but it included among others Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD and Creation. Rough Trade expressed some interest, but I think they wanted to hear more tracks – this communication I passed on to the band. Mute themselves didn’t reply, but I did get a postcard franked in their offices, from Steve Albini in which he expressed a liking for the music and compared one of the tracks to a song of his own. He also gave out a personal contact address where he could be reached back in the USA. This I also passed on.
What happened next was by this stage largely out of my hands.
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Meanwhile, somewhere in the background to these events, there was Joey. Although the topic is fan mail, I would have to say this – now that I think about it, this wasn’t really fan mail at all. She was not – and this I’m pretty sure I do remember – a fan of any of the music I’d made. She might’ve been a fan of some of the other bands that were on the label. I do know she was writing to other people. She was in contact with the guy who ran the label I’d collaborated with over in Iceland. She had written to the lead singer of an indie band in the US called The Sneetches.
Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that these other people she wrote to might never have replied to her letters. Unlike me. And that probably explains why she kept writing back. For a while at quite a bewildering pace and frequency.
Joey was 18 years old and about to finish high school. She said she didn’t have many friends. She was living with her mum out in some random suburb of a city I’d probably never heard of. Music was the thing that interested her above all else. I remember that she was a big fan of Bjork. She obviously liked The Sneetches because she’d written to their lead singer. There were other bands too. She sent me a mix tape at one point. I may still have it.
She was lonely. Looking to make connections. Her letters were sweet, filled with reflections on her life and details of the music she was in to. These letters often came in envelopes that had been doodled over in elaborate and colourful patterns. Joey was a force of nature, seemingly at some point unstoppable.
In one letter she told me she was planning to come to the UK to study and that she wanted to get my advice on where to head for. Given my brief and ultimately troubled time in higher education, I’m not sure I was the best person to ask. I suppose I was vaguely curious as to what would happen if one day she just randomly appeared at the front door of my parents’ house.
But that never happened. The letters stopped eventually. I assume the point of all the people she’d been writing to was to make a connection. Pen pals are great when you’re lonely, but they’re a poor substitute for the real thing. I suspect (and hope) that she had found someone closer to home to devote her time to.
Lots of stories in life ultimately have no resolution. They are not neat tales with a defined beginning, middle and ending. As with many events I’ve written about, this all took place before the arrival of the internet. Connections were hard earned but easily lost back then. I did still have that mix tape she’d sent me. At the end she’d recorded a short message. There was a stranger’s voice (someone I was destined never to meet) coming out from the speakers of my tape player, from what seemed like an impossible distance and an (at that time) exotically foreign land. At one moment in the recording you could also hear the sound of a garbage truck reversing outside her home. These little ambient quirks sometimes live in your head long after the important details have been forgotten.
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Coda: Just to round off the theme of fan mail, we’ve heard from Joey. We’ve heard from the student with the glasses who lived close to my parent’s house. Later on we had the truck driver who heard one of my records playing on the radio and felt moved to write, not only to order a copy but also to express the effect the track had had on him.
There’s one other piece of fan mail to note. This one takes us into the 21st century. In 2005 I had my second professional sale as a writer to a magazine called Cadenza. The story was titled The Happy Tree and if it was short on plot, it was high on atmosphere and it was a road trip tale, a genre I had a soft spot for. I was published next door to an interview with Joanne Harris, a writer who at that time was riding high on the success of her novel Chocolat and its subsequent adaptation into a successful film.
The Happy Tree was my first print publication and it remains one of my favourite stories. In the following edition of the magazine there was a letter from a reader. It was only a one or two sentence comment, but the gist of it in relation to my story was this: ‘Who is this guy and why have we not heard more of him?’
As fan mail goes, that’s pretty good. It will do for me.
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