I Am Zelig

Okay, so to be fair I’ve never seen Zelig or its more populist cousin Forrest Gump, but I know one aspect of these films is how a virtual nobody happens to cross paths with a range of history makers. That when you peer into the background of photos of celebrities, there they are somehow constantly in the shadows of these famous people.

Writing up these memoirs (random recollections, because memoirs is way too grand for what this is), I’m constantly getting that ‘I was there’ feeling to certain events. I never knew Deadmau5, but I was part of that same small community where he started out on his successful musical career. I didn’t know who Stephen Merchant was going to become, but I would’ve sat in the same cramped break room as him at some point in that pokey office above a building society on Bristol’s Baldwin Street.

When my first short story was published on the literary site Pulp.net in 2002, it was only a few months behind Ali Smith appearing on there. She was further down the road in her writing career than I was (or ever would be), but had not at that point racked up the multiple literary awards and Booker prize nominations that she would go on to achieve.

The first writing group I ever joined was way back in the mid-1980s, where geographically disparate members sent stories around by post (the system was known as an orbiter) and gave feedback on the submissions of their fellow writers. Among this particular group was future Hugo award winning science fiction writer Charles Stross. (He compared my writing to Lucius Shepard – another award winning SF writer – and predicted a bright future for me. I never read any of Shepard’s works at the time for fear of unconsciously imitating his style and only finally read one of his most famous books more than 30 years later. I hadn’t then and haven’t since (in my eyes) written anything stylistically like that book, but hey…)

When I met Johann Johannsson for the first and only time, it was in a hostel close to Kings Cross station and he and his travelling companion were just two unknown teenagers (or perhaps just turned 20) who’d happened to have caused a very minor ripple via their band’s fuzzed up cover version of Heart of Glass. I would’ve had no idea that 25 years later he’d be nominated for an Oscar for the soundtrack he’d composed to the film The Theory of Everything (and nominated again a year later for Sicario.)

Elsewhere, I’d met David Gates before he formed Salt Tank and had some modest chart success. I could count myself as one degree of separation from soul legend Edwin Starr. I’d been drinking with The Sugarcubes (although not with their elusive and talented vocalist Bjork). I’d slept on the couch of the guy who could’ve been The Sex Pistol’s lead singer. I had a handwritten postcard sent to me by Steve Albini in 1990, three years before he became the producer of the final Nirvana album.

Yes, much of this is tenuous, but when you put it all down together on paper it somehow feels as though it amounts to something.

It also amounts to nothing. I lay no claims to influencing anyone or changing the course of any histories. In that regard I am not Zelig. I am not Forrest Gump.

(I’m also not Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy who famously wrote two autobiographies – the first titled I am not Spock and then a second twenty years later titled I am Spock.)

*

The final Daisy Hill Puppy Farm releases came via a 12” ep called Oz-Ice that featured two tracks by Australian bands on one side and two by Icelandic bands on the other. They also appeared on a cassette compilation put together by the aforementioned David Gates. And they also popped up on a compilation from One Little Indian records, the label that had brought success for The Sugarcubes.

Alongside all these was our own final label release – a CD called Bigger Than Venus. It was an odd beast. It mixed some classic tracks from the previous six year back catalogue alongside a large assortment of new material (in retrospect we did not go out with a bang, there was a lot of random selections crowding out the good stuff on that compilation). Amongst the good stuff were two new Daisy Hill Puppy Farm songs. One of these was a cover version of the David Bowie classic Secret Life of Arabia. In its way, this was as revolutionary as the original Blondie cover that had kickstarted the band’s career.

But by this point, Daisy Hill Puppy Farm were no longer a band. They were Johann working alone in his studio, playing, crafting and controlling every element of the music. All the disparate tracks that came out via these various compilations were taken from that one album of demos that I’d been sending around to larger independent record labels in the hope of gaining the band a proper deal.

After that my involvement and my part (small as it was) in the story ended. Johann Johannsson went on to become a successful producer (he produced one of Marc Almond’s later solo albums), successful composer (he was signed to 4AD at this point and released several albums through them) and latterly a highly regarded film score artist. I followed all this at a far remove, sporadically, losing touch with these developments for many years in that pre-internet period.

What I did glean, if I gleaned anything, was that at some point he’d destroyed those last Daisy Hill Puppy Farm demos and effectively torched his past. His website made no mention of the band at all, as though that part of his history had simply been erased.

The last projects he worked on included scoring the music for the eagerly anticipated Blade Runner sequel. There, sadly, the story ends. At age only 48 he died in Berlin of heart failure, brought on at least in part by substance abuse.

*

But there’s a coda to this particular story. During lockdown, I woke up one day to an email from someone based in Iceland that I didn’t know. Someone who’d apparently been trying to track me down for some time. He’d eventually been given my email address by a Canadian woman who’d been a fan of that C.O.M.A. 7” and had some years later come into contact with me online. (This could be another entry for ‘I’m Your Fan’ – soon I’ll need a second hand to count them all…)

Two academics in Iceland were making a film and book about the career of Johann Johannsson and they were keen to question me about my involvement in those early days of the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. They were also eager to know if I still had high quality masters of those final DHPF recordings. This raised moral issues for me, because if Johann had genuinely destroyed his original copies of those songs, did I have the right to share them? (Was Kafka’s friend right when he didn’t obey Kafka’s request that all his writings be destroyed upon his death?)

They presented counter evidence, suggesting articles and interviews existed where Johann had talked positively about his time with Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. At that point we could not go back to the source and ask which version was the truth. My only other observation would be that most of those demos did get released in some form or other and those that didn’t actually don’t represent some great treasure trove of lost recordings.

The project is still ongoing and eventually there should be a film and book and related media to tell a much fuller story than I could ever hope to do here. I only spoke the once over Skype to these people and I’m sure their intentions are good. I told them what I could, but beyond that I guess I felt it was ancient history and my small part in that history had ended around 1992. It was faded for me, one Zelig moment replaced by a succession of others, all ultimately leading to nowhere in the grander scheme of things.

 

 The postcard sent by Steve Albini in response to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm demo tape I sent to Mute Records in 1990