Jason Lamb and the as-yet-untitled book about Nomeansno

A couple of years ago, I saw a message on F******K asking for help in transcribing interviews for a book project for the Canadian band, Nomeansno. I'd just finished the first year of my degree and decided I was just standing under a streetlight wishing I had a cigarette, so I could lend a hand. At the end of my hand-lending, I'd transcribed something like seventeen interviews - with the infamous, the famous, and the not-so-famous - and at least one interview with each member of the band themselves. It was a privilege to do some shit-work on Jason’s book, as that particular band has meant a lot to me since first I first heard them on the Oops, Wrong Stereotype compilation album about a hundred years ago. The underlying vision that Nomeansno conjure is one that I find hard to separate from the person that I believe I am. The critical tone that Rob Wright and Andy Kerr spit in the lyrics of their songs (whose titles I often never remember) often stand in stark contrast to the dynamics of the music (that I can air-mimic with total confidence). This seems to embody my own sense of humour, my own perception of optimistic futility. Many have seen them play more times than I did...*

 

There is a lot of talk about the forthcoming book, but what about you, Jason, what got you involved with punk rock, in the first instance? Was there was a specific moment when you realised that punk was something you felt at home with? JL): I was never really a full-on punk rocker. I never got the mohawk or the spiked jacket. I was a jack-of-all-trades person I guess, but my introduction to it? I’m 50 now, so it was the early eighties. I had just started junior high school – thirteen, fourteen years old. Punk was already a ‘thing’ by then, and I’d heard the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and none of it really resonated particularly. It was just this weird music that I knew about. The first thing I heard that really stood out for me? Somebody had a cassette tape of the Dead Kennedys ‘In God We Trust, Inc.’ EP. I remember listening to it on a Walkman, and that was the first time I thought ‘what is this?! I really like this anger and the things they’re talking about. They are saying “fuck off” in the lyrics, I can’t believe it!’ That really appealed to me. I didn’t immediately jump out and start buying all kinds of punk records but that was the first memory that I have of really being impressed by it and appealing to me on some level. Probably the second thing I ever heard would be a local band called the Dayglo Abortions. They had an album called ‘Feed Us A Foetus.' That was really the turning point as far as what was happening in my backyard. This is a Victoria BC band and then I started exploring it more. I'd already been a bit of a record collector – even at that young age, if I had some money, I would go and buy records – so I started to buy that type of stuff. I think Dead Kennedys 'In God We Trust …' was the first thing I bought, punk-wise. I loved the cover of it. From there I started getting into it more and more. I bought 'Never Mind The Bollocks' and I started to read up on the history of it all. As far as going to see shows, I don't think I saw a live punk show until I was fifteen –'86 and that was the Dayglo Abortions – it was an all-ages show at a movie theatre called the Roxy Theatre, which still exists here, and for a while they did punk shows. They didn't last long because the place got trashed all the time but that would have been the first show I saw. A multi-band bill, it was the Dayglo Abortions, Red Tide, Mission of Christ – who were more of a metal, crossover band, as were the Dayglo's a bit. Nomeansno came pretty much around that same time because they were local of course, I had heard of them. Somebody played me the song 'Dad,' and I thought 'what is this, this is amazing!' I remember seeing the 'Sex Mad' album in a record store and being really impressed with the cover. I remember almost buying it but not buying it for some reason. I finally went to see Nomeansno. I honestly don’t remember what the venue was, the very first time I saw Nomeansno, but I would have been sixteen or seventeen. Right around the ‘Sex Mad’ time. I bought ‘Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed’ right when it came out. I was a fan by then. Since then, I like all kinds of different genres of music. I didn’t pigeon-hole myself into being a quote-unquote ‘punk.’ At school, I was a bit nerdy, but I got along with all the different factions. The high school I went to had all of those things – we had the punks, we had the metal-heads, we had the jocks and the preppies and stuff, but the divisions weren’t really that bad, everybody got along most of the time, and went to the same shows. Probably because it was a smaller town. I just dived in and started seeing shows whenever I could, whenever I was allowed to go out. Nomeansno became my favourite band, and pretty quickly favourite local band at first and I started to realise they were one of the best bands anywhere, never mind just [in Victoria.] The song 'Dad' is a pretty dark song to hear as the first exposure to Nomeansno. We've come to the conclusion that people have a really personal connection to them. I know that I certainly do. Have you managed to put your finger on why that might be? Why do they speak to people so much? There is a lot about Nomeansno that mirrors how I see the world, and I don’t know if I thought that before them or if I think that because of them … JL): Yeah. I know exactly what you're saying. It's hard to put it into words. In the book, I need to touch on that, unpack that and explain it, but I haven't quite tackled that yet. I think it comes down to Rob Wright's lyric writing, and how he views the world in a very deep way. He's the guy that reads philosophy. He doesn't just pretend he knows the stuff. He really knows it and he has a way of taking all these intense philosophical books that for the laymen are often a hard read, and he puts them into a much more digestible form. Unlike bands that rail against Reagan and Thatcher, or the oil companies or whatever the 'thing' of the day is to get angry about. He sings about a much more universal thing, human politics, right? I think everybody can relate to that. I think what people really appreciate – at least I do – is that they talk about these intense subjects. 'Dad' to me is a shining example of this. It's a really heavy-duty song about sexual abuse and incest, but at the end has a little wink of humour, you know? When Andy says "I'm seriously considering leaving home" it's like – oh my god, did they just do that?! There's always this cynical wink of 'hey when all is said and done, it's just life. You don't need to take it that seriously …' They manage to wade through really difficult topics and then give it a lift at the end which means you can survive the experience. Not surviving the song, but possibly of … JL): Going through the experience, absolutely. Maybe there is a strange optimism with their music, even though the surface seems very dark and apocalyptic in some ways – they sing a lot about death, and sin, and lies, and these heavy subjects that are pervasive for everybody – but there is this undercurrent of optimism, that everything is going to be okay but there is a power in diving into the dark because that is how you get to the light on the other side. I just heard Rob’s laughter when you said that. JL): I don’t know, - if he was on the line with us - that he would agree with anything I just said, but I think he probably would. They speak in a general way that is accessible for many people. I think what you said about taking difficult subjects and making them understandable for the layperson is quite interesting. There is a literary quality to the lyrics – the delivery really – and knowing that Rob is really influenced by James Joyce and other literary figures who had the ability to make you feel stuff rather than just read it off the page. You just feel something… JL): I get a little worried sometimes if I’m smart enough to be writing this book, do you know what I mean? I don’t consume all of that stuff. I haven’t read James Joyce’s books; I haven’t read Heidegger’s theses on mankind and the world and all that stuff. My philosophy is Nomeansno! I get that stuff from that. The way that Rob provides that stuff for people means he’s the one who has really dived into that stuff. It must be a little intimidating but being on the outside gives us a perspective that is as valid as any other, but I take your point that an understanding of the roots of what they might have been talking about might be important. JL): One of the things that is really great and speak to the power of Rob's lyrics and their music is a story from Laurie Mercer, who was their manager for most of their career. He told me a story about doing a show in Belfast, around '88 or '89. It was the Andy days. They were playing and there was a kid who couldn't have been more than a nineteen or twenty-year-old kid, who was horribly disfigured in his face. It was apparent to Laurie that this guy had been the victim of a bomb blast. This is not that long after the troubles. It wasn't something he'd been born with, he had this horrible injury on his face. He was right up front, and the band was playing 'Victory.' This kid was weeping and having this religious experience. He had his arms up and he was weeping with joy, having this deep experience, singing at the top of his lungs, you know, 'defeat, not victory …' and all that. Laurie [knew] this music was really important to some people. I thought that spoke with a lot of volume. It’s a sort of transcendental experience when you’re in the crowd and you know the words – you feel the draw of the music. I can relate to that...

How did you get involved with the radio station? JL): I was born and raised in Victoria, but I moved to Vancouver in my early twenties where I was waiting tables for a living. Then I started doing stand-up comedy which has always been a passion of mine. I’ve always loved comedy, always wanted to try it out. I finally did, and I got pretty good at it. I was part of the Vancouver comedy scene in the late ‘90s. I did tours in the comedy clubs, but it got to a point where I thought, ‘maybe I’m not going to be a famous comedian full-time, because it is so hard to do and I don’t want to be waiting tables for the rest of my life, so I need to do something else’ – as a back-up plan. So, I went back to school, and I got my diploma in broadcast journalism at a technical school called BCIT in Vancouver. It was a two-year program. From there, I got a job as a reporter at a radio station in a town called Kelowna, BC. My wife and I moved there. I worked there for a couple of years just as a reporter. We had a kid there, but we didn't want to live in Kelowna because it was a shithole (laughs). We needed to get back to Vancouver ideally, or maybe even Victoria. I began firing off resume's and the first interview that I got was in Victoria. I came back here and got a job at a radio station called The Q! – again as a reporter. There are two radio stations in this building. There's The Q! and The Zone. The Zone needed someone to fill in on their morning show with Dylan, the main host. I did that a few times and me and Dylan had this rapport. They fired his other partner because she was … not very … useful … and I took over her job. That was thirteen years ago. Me and Dylan have been the morning show at The Zone ever since. It's really great because I now can be a comedian again, on the radio. I'm the goofy co-host. I still read the news a few times every morning, and it's opened up all kinds of stuff. It's been the greatest job ever because we have all this access to live shows, people and interviews. It's how I got interested in interviewing people. About three years in – 2011 – I pitched the idea of having a punk rock show. It started off just online, but they promoted it on the radio. I could play a bunch of punk music. I did that for a few years, and then they ended up putting it on the radio on Friday nights. They give me an hour of commercial-free, un-censored airtime for my punk show, which is unheard of for a mainstream commercial radio station. The morning show is a straight-up show for the listening public who are driving to work in their cars? JL): Exactly. That’s my bread and butter, my main job, the one that pays the bills. We’re not your typical wacky-goofy-stupid toilet humour morning show. We have our moments, but we pride ourselves on being real people talking about real things. We make it entertaining and funny for people. We are a popular station, the #1 station in Victoria generally – us and our sister station, The Q, go back and forth being the two top stations in Victoria. It’s been really fun. It’s nice when you can mix business with pleasure. So many people work in jobs that they hate. JL): I am really lucky. Of course, I still find ways to complain about things. I have to get up at 04:30 in the morning every day – that's not so much fun – but I wouldn't trade it for anything, it's been a great job You said do interviews for the punk show as well? JL): we started doing that right away. The purpose of the show was an outlet for me to play the music that I like, but also to support local bands. I always try to play local Victoria bands whenever I can. I always liked interviewing people. I started doing it as much as I could. I got pretty good at it and started to do cool things with The Punk Show – it got a little bit of traction and people were paying attention to it. I would get media passes to festivals, so I would go to Punk Rock Bowling down in Las Vegas, Rebellion Fest over there in Blackpool. It has snowballed over the years. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of interviews for the Punk Show. Are there any particular standouts for you from the radio program, rather than the Nomeansno interviews? JL):  Yeah, for sure. One of my favourites was Rodney Anonymous, the singer for the Dead Milkmen from Philadelphia. They are goofy, humour-based punk rock, but skilled musicians. He's a really interesting guy, I've interviewed him more than once. The same with Keith Morris, he was awesome. Other standout interviews from festivals: there's a band called Jaya The Cat, kind of a reggae-punk band, The Cyanide Pills were really cool. There's so many I'd have to think about it a bit more. I've interviewed some big names, but they weren't always my favourite interviews, Henry Rollins on the phone was actually pretty good. I know a little of the story but why are you doing a Nomeansno book? Why does the world need it? JL): I have no fucking idea! I don't know what the hell I was thinking! Okay, they were my favourite local band and favourite punk band in general. I went to see them a million times, here, in Vancouver, in Kelowna, whenever I could get a chance to see them. Through The Punk Show, I managed to get an interview with John Wright on the phone, which was great. I got another interview with him a little bit later, and then I interviewed Tom Holliston on the phone. Then, when they were coming to Victoria to be inducted into the Western Canadian Music Hall of Fame – in 2015, right near the end of their career – their publicist, Melanie Kaye (who I had become friends with through the Punk Show, and who has always been amazing at getting me interviews with people – I promote her bands and she gets me cool interviews) was representing Nomeansno as their PR lady, and she said do I want to interview them when they come to Victoria for this award. I'm like … fucking … of course, I do! Rob wasn't doing interviews at all by that point. He would just let John and Tom take the reins on that, so I interviewed them backstage a couple hours before the big award show. So, I had this connection to them. They didn't know me, but I had met them a few times. Going back a couple of years now, I just started thinking about how I had always wanted to write a book and what should I write about? Well, Nomeansno deserves a proper book, a visual anthology, that tells the real story. That has never existed. There was a book called Going Nowhere, that Mark Black did back in 2012 which was good for what it was, but it's very small without a single photograph. It's a fan story. I thought, there are enough fans out there that would want to see this – I know I would – so maybe I should take this on as a project. I got a hold of Melanie again and said 'I am going to write up a proposal. Could you forward it to John and Rob? I put together a little proposal and she said she could email it to John, 'but don't hold your breath.' I said yeah, I know. I knew what they were like, right? Private guys, not really into this nostalgia thing, and she said, 'they may not even respond at all. They might say 'no. Don't get your hopes up.' It was a risk. JL): A total risk. This is last February [2020], a year and a half ago. To my complete surprise, two or three weeks later, I got an email from John Wright saying, 'Melanie sent your proposal and we think it's cool. If you want to talk to me anytime. I talked to my brother Rob. He said he would do an interview with you. You can get a hold of Tom and yeah – why not?' I couldn't believe it. I wasn't going to do it if they said no. I wasn't going to write a book about Nomeansno without their authorisation. First of all, as a fan I wouldn't want to upset them – I wouldn't want to do something they wouldn't want to be done – and also, I knew that if they said no, it would completely cut out 90% of the people I wanted to talk to because a lot of their friends and tour managers wouldn't take part in this unless the Wright brothers were okay with it. It was really crazy because at the beginning I was like, once I got the go-ahead from them I started to have thoughts about them about how participation is going to happen here, am I going to get one twenty-minute interview with Rob Wright and that's going to be it? How much access are they going to give me? It could be very little, but then I had these fantasies like, 'what if they not only do an interview with me but also open up their archives of things and I could see their stuff...?' All of that stuff has come true, x10. It's been crazy. That's the long answer but the reason I wanted to do it is that I thought it should exist, I wanted to see a book about Nomeansno, proper, and so I thought I would take it on. My timing was really good, accidentally. I've caught them all at a moment of sentimentality and, of course, Covid hit weeks after them saying yes. That was odd too because it meant that everybody was home, and bored, and lonely. So, I spent 2020 interviewing people. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, and it got to the point I had to talk to everybody. If I am going to do this, I had better do it right. I visited them in the summer of last year. I was terrified of Rob Wright, having not known him. I still remember picking up the phone the first time, just to introduce myself, and I was so nervous, I really was. I thought, 'he's going to be such an intense guy,' but he's actually – and you've heard his interviews he's just such a nice, funny, laid back, dude. He is generous with his words, and that makes all the difference … JL): Andy Kerr was the other mystery to me. I had never met Andy. I saw Nomeansno with Andy a few times before he left the band, but I didn’t know much about him. I knew he lived overseas, so he was also a wild card for me. I didn’t know if he’d even want to take part in this at all. I didn’t know if he was going to be nice to me. I reached out to him on F******k and now we are like buddies. It’s crazy, I talk to him all the time. I still haven’t even met him, [except] through Z**m – seen him, talked to him many times – but, with Covid, I haven’t been able to get over to Amsterdam. So, all four of them are fully participating in it. It’s pretty wild. With it being on PM Press, have you talked about what it is going to look like, can you say anything about your schedule, when you hope to deliver the manuscript? JL): I'm still putting it all together – the text, the manuscript – and I have been collecting literally thousands of photographs and posters. I'm going to give the manuscript to PM Press in the fall, which could push into winter depending on how much I can get done in the next few months, but I am getting there. That is doable, but then it's going to be close to a year before it comes out. When I give the manuscript to PM, they partner me with a copyeditor and we go through the whole thing, make changes, cut things down, fill in the gaps and all that. They also put me in touch with their graphics team to work on the layout and fonts, and all the photographs. That takes six or seven months to do. Then they will officially announce that there's a Nomeansno book coming, probably around Christmas time. Then, in the spring – if everything goes according to plan – there will be an opportunity to do a pre-order (maybe closer to the summertime at this point). The way PM Press works, they use Kickstarter to get an idea of how many copies they need to produce. It also enables them to do special editions, limited packages, and things like that. So, there are all these possibilities, but we don't know what it's going to look like yet, it’s a little bit too early for that. There will likely be a limited run of hardcover editions, maybe signed by the Wright brothers – we’ll see how much we can do with that – and there could be some packages where it comes with a poster, that type of thing. The book itself will be in people’s hands later next year. I don’t want to give a date, of course, but I am thinking the fall of 2022, maybe later fall. I know you were at one point quite inspired by the look of the recent Poly Styrene book ‘Dayglo!’- do you still imagine it looking that way? JL): Kind of. I can tell you the size will be 9x11, the size of a standard piece of paper; full colour throughout, so it's not going to have ten pages of photographs and the rest is all text – it won't be like that. There will be photographs on every page, some full-page stuff. As far as page numbers, I don't know, maybe 350-400, something like that. I love the Poly Styrene book, I'd like it to be somewhat along those lines. I like how it is clean and sharp. My book will be a lot more text-heavy, there's a lot more content. There is another book about the band Dead Moon that I really like, it's called Off The Grid – I love the style of it. That’s another inspirational one for me. Before we started the interview we were talking about the size of the project – and we can make this the last question - did you imagine what a large undertaking the book project might be? JL): I definitely did not understand how big of a project this was going to be. It has been at times a little overwhelming. I think that's because Nomeansno has always been a little bit mysterious about who they are and what they are about, but when you dive into it, it's a thirty-five-year career with a band that did probably 25-2800 shows – all over the world – with hundreds of bands, dozens of different tour managers, road crew's and merch people, and then partners and wives. It's a big story. The amount of stuff that's out there, that they produced as far all the interviews they did, the promotional material, the gig posters – I still see stuff now, a year and a half later that I have never seen before. That happens weekly. 'They shared a bill with that band? I had no idea!’ It’s an almost endless well of information. The story is really interesting. They never hid it from anybody but I guess nobody ever really wanted to find out before. The question was ‘did I know how big a project it would be’ and the answer is no, not at all. When the book comes out, I’m going to be using maybe 2% of the stuff that I have, so I have to figure out what to do about that. For me personally, part of the mystique of Nomeansno was held by the fact that they didn’t reveal who they were, or who was in the band. It seemed they became a little bit more public after Dance of the Headless Bourgeoisie … JL): Well, I have a question for you, as a fan. This is something I have thought about quite a bit. Do you think there will be a sense of disappointment to learn all of the actual stories, or do you think people will appreciate it? I think – and I might be basing this on doing those transcripts for you – that you are right, the story is really interesting, and I think it demands a knowledge of who they are, as people. The mystique is a historical fact that isn’t necessarily needed right now. When I was growing up, that mystery that surrounded what they were saying, all the messages that were coming to me from the packaging, from the production, from the songs themselves, was really important. Will it be disappointing? No, it’s a grand reveal. JL): I will say too that one thing I am not going to be doing in this book – and some people might be upset by it – but John and Rob are pretty adamant that their music and their lyrics are open to interpretations. They are for the listener to decide what they mean. I’m not having deep conversations with Rob about what he meant, because he doesn’t really want to talk about that. To him, it’s not important what he thinks it means. Have you listened to that podcast that Michelle and Matthew, and Jordan? The Nomeansno Thing podcast? They take two Nomeansno songs and they face them against each other, and they unpack the song as best they can. It’s pretty good. I don’t agree with everything they say, but they are doing that. I'm going to be talking about a lot of the music, some interesting, quirky stories about recordings, and what some of it means I guess, but it's not going to be diving in song-by-song, unpacking the meaning, because Nomeansno doesn't want that. That would disappoint those guys if I did that.

*This interview is a little old now . The timeline has changed, the book is with the publisher, I believe, and Covid is killing fewer people at the moment, depending on where you live. I was supposed to put it out in analog form in the winter of 2021 but there were delays and I had to return to my studies. There are more interviews to follow...

Fell running, punk rock and Boff Whalley - "putting the Oi back in Choir".

Richard Askwith's popularising first book 'Feet in The Clouds' was my introduction to the venerable history of fell running. I read that book - and then I read it again - and so cemented my compulsion with what Mike Cudahy called "the magic and the joy" of running off road, in the hills and out in what passes for a wilderness in the UK.

Despite this, my attempts at running in the hills were not as Askwith described. If anything, my running life reflected my personal life at the time, which was frequently a life of failure and collapse.

His book filled my mind with the names of runners that I tried and failed to emulate - Bland, Naylor, Helene Diamantides, Stuart, Holmes to name a few. Names from the sports past too, like Bill's Teasdale and Smith, and George Brass. Somewhere in the online fell running communities web presence, I read a name that didn't need an introduction - Boff Whalley. 

Chumbawamba, back when they were better  different

Oh, I exclaimed at the time.

I'd managed to avoid hearing any Chumbawamba music since getting into punk in late 1986. Y'now, 'Picture's Of Starving Children...' and 'Never Mind the Ballots', but had managed to have my mind cast fully into doubt by my copy of "English Rebel Songs", on 10" vinyl, which I can just about appreciate today, listening to it now as I type.

But back then, in the days of newcastle brown, the Brewery Tap and thrash at the Talbot Hotel? Get away! If it didn't sound like Doom it wasn't getting played.

I did go and see them a few years later. I went to Wolverhampton in the back of a hunt sabs van in 1993. Did they play with Gunshot? To be honest, I was paying more attention to The Girl in the van I’d fancied since a bizarre incident at school with some hair gel behind the library, some ten years earlier. 

I recall getting a ‘ticking off’ for reading Threat By Example at the nightclub after the gig - by this time it was obvious that The Girl was more interested in my friend -  by someone I'd swear was Alice Nutter for years afterwards. 

Probably wasn't though.

And then of course, they had their hit record in the hopeful year of 1997, and we all shouted sell out! once again, as some in the wider punk scene had been doing for a few years already.

It’s not exactly revelatory, twenty years later, to say that there was more to it than 'band makes famous/retires to island in the sun', and no amount of cash to anti capitalist organisations – Indymedia, for instance, or groups monitoring the worst practices of corporations - could atone for the heresy of the act in the eyes of the holier-than-thou or those with no skin in the game. Where would punk rock be without a little seppuku or pedantic moralising, I ask from my vantage point on Mount Hindsight. Who knows. It's a post-modern, post-structuralist world, twenty years later - does anyone care anymore?

 Bare Faced Hypocrisy Sells Records

So it was strangely satisfying to read Richard Askwith endorse Boff's book, which suggests that ‘Run Wild’, written in 2012, is “inspiring, wise, entertaining, moving, readable and incredibly timely.” 

Preamble upon introduction upon preamble later, here's an interview I've done with Boff  - fell runner, actor, writer. Ex- of anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba, currently of Commoners Choir, and many other things you can read about at his website

Enjoy the interview.

Me: Supposedly, there is a difference between a ‘runner’and ‘a jogger’. I suppose there is some truth to that. When did you first consider yourself a runner (and maybe you don’t?), and did you notice a transition from jogging to a more structured form of exercise? 

Boff: It’s not about speed, is it? It’s how you define yourself, or something. Is it “I’m taking this seriously now...”. Or maybe it’s when you stop wearing the trainers you wear to the pub and buy some proper running shoes. I think I jogged for some months when I decided to run a marathon in the early 1980s. Then I think as soon as I started to run off-road in the late 1980s I was running, not jogging – mainly because the person who introduced me to fell running wouldn’t have tolerated jogging.

Me: Do you actively train, or do you just cover miles, letting the ground dictate your pace? Have you set goals for this year, and do you have an off-season?

Where is the most interesting place you have run? Or is that unimportant to you and why?

Boff: Yes I actively train but within that I’m really just enjoying myself, sometimes I run hard and sometimes I just take it easy. What I’ve stopped doing as I’ve got older is the proper speed-training, track training, etc. I still do hill reps, but just when I fancy it. And fast-and-slows, occasionally I’ll break into a few of those!

I don’t have any goals for the year other than to keep enjoying my running.

The most interesting place I’ve run is a really hard question to answer – there are so many beautiful places, even within Yorkshire – I love the landscape with bits of ruined industrialisation, I love the history of the Calder Valley (Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge), its poets and weather and rebels and radicals in the past. I love the big Scottish mountains, the really rough rocky climbs. I love the Lake District... running alone in the moonlight up near Fairfield in the snow. I love the rough descent off Burnsall fell, jumping the wall into the bottom fields. I love runs with other people that are just long conversations with paths and miles rolling by. Sometimes I go for long runs with my partner Casey and we just basically natter for a couple of hours whilst roaming around the Yorkshire Dales, getting muddy and stopping occasionally to look at a map or cross a river.

Me: Have you ever decided to skip a gig or other event because of running?

Boff:My old running friend Geoff Reid once told me you should never watch a sport when you could be playing a sport. I feel guilty about this sometimes if I skip a good run or race to go to the football match! I’ve missed lots of gigs because of fell racing though. When I was running competitively for Pudsey & Bramley I would sacrifice almost anything to travel and race with the team in the Lakes, Scotland, Wales etc.

Me and Danbert, who was also in the band and also ran the fells, once missed a couple of rehearsal days in the USA at the beginning of a tour of the West coast of America so we could run the Ben Nevis race. It was a crucial championship decider and we desperately wanted to do it. The rest of the band were very accommodating. We ran the Ben, jumped in a car and drove like mad to Manchester airport for the flight. By the time we got to San Francisco my legs had practically locked, I remember hobbling down the plane steps, backwards.

Me: I hated sport after the age of eleven, and when I discovered punk I realized others did too and I wasn’t the only punching bag in school. I was a punk weirdo, nobodies easy target and proud of it. That anti sport empathy sat really well with me for about 15 years before I turned old and needed to sort my health out. Running is seen as a solo undertaking, unless you compete, or run with a club, and in fact some of us enjoy the solitude of cross-country running more than anything else. Punk on the other hand claims to be a community. So, if punx hate sports and love the scene, why do we run? What draws us away from excessive substance use and late nights?

Gary Devine

Boff: Well I totally understand what you mean but I’m not like that – I’ve always loved sport. Within the band we were always doing bits of sport here and there and always watched it. I had this conversation with Ian McKaye, who was in Leeds doing some recording with Henry Rollins. We were making an album at the time called ‘101 Songs About Sport’. Maybe around 1987 or 1988. We’d heard that Napalm Death were doing a 100-song album so we decided to do an album with 101 songs. All about sport. We had lots of guest vocalists and players and writers. Mekons, Dick Lucas, The Ex etc. Anyway we met up with Ian and asked him if he would write a lyric for the album. He point-blank refused, saying that where he came from it was jocks v punks, the sporty men at college hated the artists, you had to choose sides early on; so he hated sport, saw it only as something macho and competitive. Fair enough. But I reckon there’s an incredible match between punk and fell running, in the sense of wildness and escaping boundaries and finding your own way. In the sense of being adventurous and wanting to find out about the world. When I first started fell running it was through seeing a Leeds punk (Gary Devine) at gigs, once notoriously scrapping with riot police at a Conflict gig, then the next day running up hills wearing tights and studded shoes. The two things made sense together, and still do to me. Do you remember the Alf Tupper character in Victor comic? He’s very punk. I have him tattooed on my arm. His aim in life is to beat the toffs at running. Punk can be a very personal, solitary thing too, it’s not all about community – there’s the solitary outsider part of every punk’s make-up, isn’t there? Wanting to be different.

Me: Are you active in your local punk scene anymore? Do you see any contradictions between the wider portrayal of punk rockers (from the real to the imagined) and your participation in the often very corporate world of Running©? I’m thinking about global shoe brands with less than ethical histories and current practices that still don’t cut it, Global Positioning Systems with their origins in the US military, and possibly even racist and sexist coverage of professional running events.

Boff: I don’t know what my local punk scene would be, but I feel that punk informs everything I do. I run a choir and our slogan is ‘Putting the Oi in Choir’. Most of what I do, for theatre and music and bringing up kids and shopping etc is informed by punk; the sense of questioning everything and not getting boring. Or being bored. I still try to think about all that corporate stuff in terms of my running, but I’m not very loud about it. I won’t buy or wear Nike etc, I have shoes made by Walsh in Bolton, I really don’t like the branding of fell and trail running and I love how running can be a very low-cost sport, not very equipment-based. It makes me laugh seeing all the gadgets that you can get for running when really all you need are a pair of shoes and a rain jacket. I remember asking another fell runner when I first started, “what do I need to buy for a race?” and he said, “a bumbag and a Mars bar.” I got involved with the Pudsey & Bramley club when they had an unspoken ethos of scruffy belligerence and this was reflected in the tatty vests!

Me: Do you keep a running diary to complement your training? Have you ever logged the miles on your running shoes?

Boff: I’ve never kept a running diary or logged running miles. When I first started I wrote down race results but after about a couple of years I realised that the times were pretty irrelevant, it all depended on weather and underfoot conditions etc so I stopped doing it.  I admire people who are keen enough to do all that, I’m just basically disorganised.

Me: Do you listen to music when you run or do you prefer the flow of sensation that seems to remove the need for constant sensory input from less natural sources? I find I can’t hold too many ideas in my mind, but maybe that’s because the terrain I run on is generally rough. Maybe it’s different if you run on smooth surfaces?

Boff: I never listen to music when I run. I love the idea (especially in today’s non-stop digital age) of being out of the house, in a forest or on a moor, no screens or bleeps or electronics. Stopping and looking around and realising that it’s just me and the earth. Feeling like someone could have had this same feeling any time in the past 1000 years, on these same moortops.

Me: We sometimes see footage of Boris Johnson running with his security detail. Have you seen it? Do you think he is a jogger? Not as in does he run or even jog, but do you think he is posing for the cameras?

Boff: I think he probably is a jogger, deluding himself that running along a London street for twenty minutes gives him some sort of old-school testosterone-fuelled sense of power. He’s a despicable man. I imagine him running along giving wide berth to all the homeless people on the streets.

Me: I would like to see him running for his life sometime, preferably from hungry wild dogs. Fun Question: are there any jogging politicians, past or present, you’d like to see in similar straits?

Boff: There’s a great photograph somewhere of John Prescott opening a bike lane or something in Hull, balanced on a bicycle that he clearly has no idea how to ride, wearing a cycling helmet that’s about five sizes too small for his huge head. Like half a peanut shell on a coconut. Maybe all politicians should go running more so we can see how stupid they look when reduced to such normal activities. There’s a great film too of Theresa May walking along a London street and getting her high heel stuck in a pavement crack. I imagine she’d look pretty spectacularly awkward trying to run up and down Burnsall Fell. Bring it on!

There you go. Thanks to Boff for the answers and the insight, and the anarchy. 

Footnote: I have run this week - I've done about a dozen easy miles and used KT tape. It works.

This Gunshot record is immense!

Cut The Shit

Harmed and Dangerous

After the pain of over extending last week - running too far too soon - I have changed my goals for winter. Instead of jumping straight to marathon distance, and thinking I could handle it as an ex runner on a comeback, I've seen sense and decided to run sensibly and build a good solid base over the next three months.

I was running three times a week and covering up to 18 miles a week. For someone beginning again I think that is pretty modest but the length of the weekly long run took up the bulk of the mileage. That is what led to my problem.

Now I am running four times in seven days but only covering half of my previous load. It's all about quality, not quantity. Today I did a three mile LSD run, with a mile / pace average of 09:23. That is a little fast for an long slow distance, so will need to slow that down. I think that's reaching tempo run pace, although it generally felt comfortable, and as the LSD pace will eventually become my steady distance pace I need to reign it in.

In non-running news, here is something else I've cut this week- its a weeping beech, and one of three in the garden of the house I lodge at. Up until two days ago, its branches were touching the lawn. I crown lifted it. I'm happy with the end result. It's quite a thing to be able to hang out under this tree in the Spring. I hope I haven't killed it.

I just did my 13.5 mile run.

The furthest I ever went in all the running I ever did was 17 miles. That was the entire Malvern Hills range followed by the run home afterwards from West Malvern to South Wu. When I got back to work in Leeds the following monday I asked if I could wear comfy trainers, due to the fifty pence blister on my heel. The 'sup said no and I limped around my patients all week in ambulance issue unbroken DM shoes.

Do I think the urge to keep going at all costs is really damaging and not what running is about? It's such a masculine mode of thought - dig in, no pain no gain, even ubiquitous American epithets like 'suck it up!', 'it'll buff out'  - that I think I should be avoiding those inner voices at all cost.

Where do these inner voices come from? Who taught me that it's better not to quit, to beat myself up because any other outcome is failure? Why is a sport like running, so subjective and personal, prone to so many damaging injuries and harmful ambitions? Is it the leakage from professional sports coverage in the modern era, into the ambitions of our class? An insidious concept that equates accomplishment with affluence, and male expressions of power, wealth and 'success' over everything at any cost?

At 11 miles I developed a pain that increased in intensity as I ran , and stopped as soon as I decided to walk, which I did for the last two miles of my long run. Self diagnosis leads me to believe its an overuse injury, and a form of tendonitis - peroneal tendonitis.

Fortunately I can slow down and change my plans. I still intend to run, as long as the pain stays away, but have decided to alter my end goal.

Down with the Patriarchy!

Takin' it easy...

Not a lot to report today. Ran an easy 10km in a slow time round the forest. It was warmer than I thought and I was overdressed.

Stay tuned for my first 13.5 mile run ever next week.

Dumfries and Galloway - the secret coast, forgotten corner of Scotland. We just spent a week there in the van with the dog.

It's a relatively small area and we only really explored from Dumfries in the east to the Galloway forest and the Rhinns - Scotlands most southerly point at East Tarbet.

The hills are gentle and the coast is peppered with beaches, cliffs, rock needles and peninsula's. The Corbett 'Merrick' is the highest hill in all of Southern Scotland and at 850 metres is more of a pleasant stroll than a chore. It gives good views of Ailsa Craig, a volcanic cap 7 miles out into the Irish sea, which we saw, rising from the horizon like a death star, the day we climbed Merrick. A chance meetings with a lunatic cyclist at the top and a cold war era Nuclear missile technician and his dog Hamish on the way down revealed all about this ominous rock.

Galloway is home also to several of the famous 7Stanes mountain bike centres. I ran on two of these this week. Firstly at Dalbeattie forest, where the running was sweet - I was there before 8am and the undulating flow of well etched, pine-softened single track beneath my Walshies was a pleasure, as was the occasional rock drop and technical boulder section. Awesome for running over and no doubt killer on a bike.

At the end of the week I did my LSD at another of the 7Stanes centres at Glen Trool. A somewhat different beast, it took me through the remnants of an ancient sessile oak wood where Robert Bruce's ragged band smashed an English army with rocks and guile, and down to a section of the Southern Upland Way.

This was hard going as I am not used to running fire roads but I managed a good 12 miler in 2 hours 20 minutes.

All this was a welcome antidote to the shameful debacle at London's Anarchist Bookfair the day before we left, which left me saddened and demoralised at the actions of an actual baying mob of fanatics. I support people who identify as Trans everywhere, and feel there needs to be a dialogue before the descent into hardened factionalism solidifies further.

Feel The Darkness

No, not Poison Idea's riot inducing 1990 late classic but the half moon-lit LSD I did last night. I have had to squeeze my training together a little, as I am about to head north of the border for a week and wanted to maximise my running up there. More on that next time.

As mentioned I returned to the forest tracks this week and headed out along the flow of the bike tracks into the forest.  I left at 18:15, as dusk was falling, and under the canopy the clocks had already fallen back.

I decided to try a new headlamp, as my old tech Petzl just doesn't cut it any more so I have gone entry level and picked up a Unilight H1, mainly because it's as cheap as the chips you used to buy in the eighties, when you'd been sent down the road to the local chippy. It's also hi-viz yellow, bright as a single AA powered 175 lumens Cree LED can illuminate and it's highly waterproof. I found myself using the 20 lumens setting along tracks out of the canopy and only amped up for detail work finding junctions.

It seems my ears interface with the tri-glide band adjusters a little bit but I didn't really notice that until much later in the run and it didn't bother me much. The strap grip is buffered with a line of silicone and didn't move once, and the 45degree rotational head was ample for seeing the state of the tracks ahead.

Thanks to @UniliteUK for that.

The forest soon gave way to the common above Jevington and I found my route onto the Weald Way, which was a muddy mess, preferable to the ice rink chalk. After a good twenty minutes of that I started to rise up above Folkington and the A27 and was reminded of that hill above Keighley in the dark.

I was due to pass under the Long Man and was amazed when the headlamp picked out it's chalky feet fro the path below. A slog up the side took me back to the South Downs Way, which I skirted around for the final four mile descent back home.

There is a point just by the nature reserve at which my GPS shows a path that doesn't exist. If you follow this advice you will come to a three foot fence with double strands of barbed wire, to pass which you will need to bend double thru an old hawthorn glade to find any kind of crossing. The hawthorn trees will hate you and try to scratch you to a bloody pulp, but eventually one will provide a way out. I'd suggest avoiding it.

After passing that trial I fled down to Charlotte's Bottom and home in time for bed.

11.1 miles, LSD constant in a horrendous time. It's not the distance but the speed that kills you. Start slow, relax and forget about it.

Feel The Darkness

PS it's the Seven Sisters Marathon today but I'm off to the Anarchist Book fair which I haven't been to for nearly 20 years.