INTERCHANGE MAGAZINE
Interchange was a magazine dedicated to electronic and experimental music that ran for four issues between 1982-1986. These postings reproduce all the issues, made from scans of the original masters, together with a few anecdotes regarding how each one came into existence. The online images are low resolution but you can also print out your own copy of the magazine via a link to a hi-res PDF. A link to Interchange 2 can be found HERE, Interchange 3 HERE and Interchange 4 HERE.
There were also three cassette releases. A c90 compilation tape Inter 01, a c60 by The Adventures Of Twizzle, The Great Waster and a c46 by Ward Phillips, Cyclades. I discuss (and post the artwork for) Inter 01 HERE and The Great Waster HERE). The Ward Phillips link HERE will take you to the artwork and within that piece, another link to the music itself.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
I was born and raised in what was (and still is) regarded as a very middle-class area of southwest London, Kingston Upon Thames.
I was shy and bookish as a child which, together with my 'nice' accent, marked me out at school and resulted in me being bullied for a number of years. As a result of this I came to the conclusion that anything my fellow pupils liked or did was something that I did not want to be a part of, sport being the primary example.
Our house was not a very musical house. Despite my having cello lessons for a number of years, I heard very little music. We had a family record player but only about a dozen records, all rarely played. Of them, I only specifically remember Ken Dodd's Tears though we also owned a number of classical, mainly opera, recordings. The family radio was tuned to Radio 4.
Of course as a mid teen I began to buy my own music and eventually owned my own record player, probably to my parents' minor annoyance. I wish I could say my early purchases were 'cool' in some way but they were mainly ‘Top of the Pops’ chart singles by, for example, Abba, Earth Wind and Fire, and Chic. I do not even remember all the furore surrounding Punk when it exploded in 1976, but in any case, our affluent neighbourhood was relatively untouched by the phenomenon. Of the two ‘punks’ at our school, one was the son of a local Tory councillor. Enough said! In any case I didn’t care for punk at all, a noisy racket poorly played but did very much approve of the d.i.y. ethos.
After I had somehow discovered the John Peel show on Radio 1 my record buying began to change, though it was still informed by mainstream culture, The Undertones, the Buzzcocks, The Police and Human League. But I had also begun to read the music press, Sounds especially, and I think it was an article in that paper on the ‘new wave’ of electronic music that pointed me towards bands like Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle, and I began to seek out every band mentioned in the piece.
There was an enlightened record stall at our local market that would buy discs for me from Rough Trade (such as Soft Cell's Mutant Moments ep), but Kingston also had a Beggars Banquet record shop where I bought that great rarity of the time, Gary Numan's Are Friends Electric as a picture disc, B.B. being Numan's label. They also had a small selection of second-hand records and it is there I bought Joy Division's Closer and T.G.'s Second Annual Report, the latter the re-issue on Fetish.
I think I can safely say that Second Annual Report changed my life as it opened me up to a counterculture beyond music, something I only had inklings of before then and with which I immediately identified. I got myself on the Industrial Records mailing list and began to immerse myself in all the tropes of Burroughs, Manson, Crowley etc. The great bonus of all this was that it was unlike anything my school 'mates' knew anything about and my terrible shyness and insecurity was augmented by a (much worse) elitist snobbery.
Other than the (relatively infrequent) pieces in the mainstream music press, though Stevo's 'futurist music chart' in Sounds was a semi-regular, the only other way to learn what was going on was to read fanzines and then write to the labels concerned. I bought them by the armful whenever I went to concerts in London; gigs at the Lyceum Ballroom were an especially good source because the fanzine stall was usually run by Better Badges, who were major printers and distributors of them.
I became something of a collector of 'weird stuff', but there were only a few 'industrial' related fanzines, of which Flowmotion in Leeds and Grok in Bristol were my favourites. It was in order to 'fill the gap' that inspired Interchange.
INTRODUCTION TO ISSUE 1
The debut issue of Interchange took over two years from its inception to completion. It was started before I left London (in late 1980) to go to university in Newcastle. I had written (I had no ‘phone) to various people asking for information and interviews, the latter of which were mainly done via post. The exceptions to this were the Nurse With Wound and Nocturnal Emissions pieces which were done in person.
I remember the Steve Stapleton (N.W.W.) interview very well as it had something of a surreal prelude. I must have written to him suggesting a particular day (a Sunday) but had not received a reply. I decided that this did not really matter and that I would make the journey from Southwest to North London and just turn up. It was a roasting hot day and a long walk to Brackenbury Road in the sweltering heat. As I approached the stretch of road where I guessed the house to be I could see that there were crowds of people milling about a garden and spilling onto the street. As I got closer it became apparent that all this was happening at the house I wanted. I obviously had no idea what was going on but worked my way through the crowd asking various people 'where Steve was'. Eventually I found him and was informed that I was crashing a family birthday party (his mother's?) and there would obviously be no time to chat. He suggested I visited his studio in central London a few days later.
The studio was a tiny room (perhaps 15’x 10’ in size?) in a small street (I forget exactly which) just south of Oxford Street. It was near the infamous Virgin Basement on the north side Oxford Street (the mall it was situated in was a junkie hangout and quite sleazy) which I knew of because it always seemed to carry odd stuff such as United Dairies and even Come Organisation records, the latter banned from Rough Trade for their (supposed) facist links. It was not until many years later that I discovered the reason that particular branch of Virgin carried them was because Jim Thirwell (Foetus and occasional N.W.W. collaborator) worked there.
The studio itself was quite dark and spartan (not at all 'slick' or 'modern', I don't even remember a 'proper' draughtman's table) but there was a cassette player and a few shelves of tapes. One was playing as I arrived. It had a solid rhythm - 'Chugga chugga chugga'. The next track seemed to be the same 'Chugga chugga chugga' but played backwards. It sounded great! I had no idea who the band was, it didn’t sound like Nurse, so I asked. “It’s 'Neu!' Haven’t you heard of them?” I had to confess I hadn’t. Kindly, he made no comment on my being unaware of one of the greatest ‘Krautrock’ bands of all time, and immediately gave me the tape. Such gestures were typical of the generosity of almost everybody that I had dealings with at that time. We then drank tea and recorded what I now believe to be the first N.W.W. interview.
Sadly, I have only the haziest memories, possibly false, of the Nocturnal Emissions interview. Some years later, they reminded me that I had actually stayed overnight at their house, which I adamantly refused to believe I had done. I can only apologise at my shocking memory. Even more years later (I still ponder this!), I think I had perhaps confused their place with that of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s Paul Burwell. Who'soever house it was, I do remember it being in a dangerous state. I am pretty sure I was told it leaked and seem to remember the bathroom didn't have a wall to wall floor, or possibly it was a ceiling. As an utter innocent this was probably my first experience of anything resembling a squat.
The magazine was originally to have been produced using a Gestetner duplicator which I had somehow (I have no idea how!) come to possess. I also have no idea why I ever thought it would be a good idea to use one in the first place, as even in the late 70’s it was an obsolete piece of messy technology that produced poor results. One had to cut the stencils for it by typing directly onto them and there was, in theory, a carbon copy made on the backing paper. I used an old manual typewriter (probably my mother's, so it was probably pre-war), and the quality of the stencils and carbons was appalling. Of course the duplicator itself was never used and when I moved north it was abandoned.
Fast forward to 1982 (ie: two years!) and I was in the throes of dropping out of Uni, where I was 'studying' (if I ever turned up) agricultural economics (don't ask!). I had also fallen in with a group of local ‘freaks and weirdos’ who I had met via a tape swapping advert in a local record shop. These included Paul and Jude of ‘The Adventures of Twizzle’ and John of ‘Metgumbnerbone’. Zoviet France lived just along the road. I was still technically a student and so had a grant, but virtually everybody else was on the dole. Despite that everyone seemed to have some sort of creative project on the go except myself, and so the magazine idea was revived. I needed new pieces to bring it up to date, the main one being the 'The Final Academy' review. I wasn't keen on reviewing gigs in the magazine because they were things you could only experience in person, but this one seemed special, not least as it ran for four days and was 'multi-media'. Oooh!
During this time I had got to know a lot of people by mail, and had even met a few of them. 'The Final Acadamy' bought everyone out of the woodwork. I spent time with Gordon Hope of Flowmotion/A Mission records, the R&D 28 gang (Rock Wilson, John Sanders and Mick Gaffney) and Vittorre Baroni (of Art Postale/Trax) who had come over from Italy for the event.
I made the almost obligatory trip to the B2 Galley in Wapping to see Gysin's 'Dream Machine' in action. You left the tube station to find yourself surrounded by Victorian warehouses and what looked like (and possibly was) a WWII bomb site. I was too shy to try and blag my way to meet Burroughs and co, but did bump into Brion Gysin in the Brixton Academy foyer. He saw my cassette recorder, I was, as always, recording any gig I could smuggle it in to. “Are you recording these?” he asked. When I admitted I was, he kindly took a cassette cover, scribbled ‘without permission’ on it and added a signature.
I retyped all the old carbons on a (slightly) less crappy manual typewriter. In principle if I spotted a mistake as I typed I would 'tippex' it out and type over it when it dried. Looking at the masters today there seems to be precious little evidence of any 'tippex'. I don’t even think I knew what the term ‘proofreading’ meant. Probably I was sick to death of typing it all again and just wanted it done; although it would have been nice to have spotted and corrected the multiple use of the term 'United Daries'.
Once done it was photocopied in the limited edition of 230 (of course!) A5 in London at a resource that Larry Peterson of 'Cause for Concern' tapes turned me on to. I boxed up the printed sheets and hauled them across London to Victoria coach station to be taken back to Newcastle (a seven hour journey) where they were finally folded and stapled up. I then sent issues to all of the contributors. I was so embarrassed and ashamed at having taken so long to repay their generosity that after having sent out their copies I could not bear to bring myself to write to many of them ever again, a piece of stupidity I still regret.
I cannot remember what proportions I gave away, swapped or, possibly, even sold, but was amazed that they seemed to disappear quite quickly and that it received some good reviews. Thoroughly fired by this turn of events, I began plans for issue 2…
A NOTE ON THE SCANS.
The scans are made from the original masters. In making them I was in a quandary over what to do about a few images; namely the Nocturnal Emissions postcard used as the header for their piece and the photos accompanying the item on 'The Final Academy'. In the original magazine these reproduced very poorly, so for this version I have scanned the originals and re-inserted them. It then begged the question as to whether I should ‘neaten up’ my Biro drawn lines, remove paste up marks or realign bits of skewed text. I have decided against this as I did not want to sanitise the look of the original, but have adjusted a few bits of very light text in the master copies to make it more legible. The online images are low resolution, but you can print out your own copy of the magazine via the compressed hi-res (6.2mb) PDF HERE.
INTERCHANGE 1
