I finally caught up with one time Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones press spokesman Michael Morgan at his Hackney flat yesterday. We spent much of the day going over Ray’s life-story, and Michael also kindly presented me with a bundle of press clippings and other material he’d photocopied for me. Among the many impressive cuttings Michael Morgan gave me is one entitled ‘The Night I Stole Liz’s Jewels In The Gresham’ (from the Irish tabloid The Sunday World, 23 November 1997): “One of the world’s oldest jewel thieves has spilled the beans on how he amassed a £5 million fortune by robbing top showbiz stars as revenge for his brother’s tragic death in a World War II bombing raid.

By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother would come in from his factory job, put Tainted Love (later a huge hit when it was covered by Soft Cell) or some other northern favourite on a record deck, then flop on his bed to listen to the music until his mum had made his tea.

I’ve never been into the Cocteau Twins myself… just ain’t my thing. However, I recently got into an online discussion in which I mentioned that I’d known their second and main bass player Simone Raymonde in the old days when he’d been in a band called Disruptive Patterns, and that this group had morphed into The Drowning Craze. Or rather, I mentioned that the Drowning Craze had emerged from a band whose name I couldn’t remember off the top of my head! It took some serious thinking to retrieve the name… In the late-seventies and early-eighties I belonged to various groups that played and rehearsed in and around London and its south-west suburbs – the furthest out of London I played was in places like Guildford and Stevenage (okay Stevenage is north of London, but mainly we played south-westish), usually in pubs or sometimes clubs like The Starlight in West Hampstead (the less prestigious upstairs venue twinned with the relatively small Moonlight Club).

You have to love Alejandro ‘Chuckles’ Jodorowsky… he’s such a great conman that he’s able to fool most of his fans most of the time (fooling all the people at any one time is rather more difficult). His first feature film Fando y Lis (1968) was fabulous, but his output went gradually downhill from there…. as I’ve already said in different words elsewhere on this site. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed watching Chuckles’ almost overnight transformation from an obscure cult figure whose films were very difficult to see, to his re-emergence as a maverick who merits regular name-checking by the ‘mainstream’. The tipping point for Chuckles was 2007, when Tartan in the UK and Blue Anchor in the US issued a box set of his three key movies (Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain), and since then I haven’t been able to move without stumbling over press coverage for Jodorowsky; a couple of weeks ago he was even featured on the front cover of the print version of The Guardian’s weekly Guide.

Heimrad Backer’s book of concrete poetry transcript (to be published in Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling’s English translation by Dalkey Archive next March) consists entirely of quotations of material relating to the holocaust seen from the perspective of both its victims and the perpetrators. A few rearrangements using techniques such as repetition (all indicated in the notes at the end) are made to draw out the nature of the language used, particularly as regards documents that demonstrate the bureaucratic obsessions of the Nazi butchers. Nonetheless, rather than resorting to representation, through limited and selected citation transcript confronts the reader with a small portion of the Nazi regime’s bloodbath of mass murder and attempted genocide.