Faber & Faber

Faber's Editorial Director Lee Brackstone highlights the influence of Pete Townshend with his three picks from the Faber Archive.

My selection from the archive offers a snapshot of Faber’s deep tradition of publishing irreverent and authoritative pop culture titles; a strand of our publishing that was galvanised by the arrival of Pete Townshend as an acquiring editor in July 1983.

In the subsequent years Townshend, who regularly attended the ‘Book Committee’ meetings as they were then quaintly known, and worked out of an office in Queen Square, would build the foundations for the list which has just celebrated the arrival of Loops, the partnership with Domino Records, and publications like Rip It Up and Start Again, Lowside of the Road, and Nick Kent’s memoir, Apathy for the Devil, scheduled for April 2010. 

Notable Townshend projects included Charles Shaar Murray’s award-winning Crosstown Traffic, Jon Savage’s landmark England’s Dreaming, The Rolling Stones’ Rock n Roll Circus (a photographic record of the Stones’ ‘lost’ psychedelic performance movie when they were upstaged by Townshend’s The Who) and Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened.

This seems a good opportunity to draw attention to the literary legacy Townshend bequeathed to Faber as a gift from the rock 'n' roll gods. Without Townshend’s vision and bravery (and the vision of those who in the early ‘80s gave him the opportunity at Faber - stand-up Lord Evans) there would perhaps be no context for a stunning range of books from QI and Harry Hill to next season’s biography of Syd Barrett and Rob Young’s epic survey of visions of English Arcadia through the folk tradition in Electric Eden. 

The first title is a predictable selection even by my standards. Dave Hill’s biography of Prince (A Pop Life), published in 1989, represents - I think - the first moment I clocked the magic 'ff' on a book cover and started to consider the relationship between publisher, content, design and iconography. (Well, actually I was only 15 so I doubt I really considered any of this.) Released in the same year as Prince’s criminally under-rated Batman ‘soundtrack’ album, the book introduces its subject thus:

‘The word genius is often used in relation to Prince, and very frequently by those who believe they have reason to dislike him most. And for the record, I think that if there is such a thing as ‘genius’ visibly at work in the world of popular music, Prince is probably that person.’

Dave Hill’s sympathetic survey of Prince’s eight-year reign as pop messiah, maverick producer and writer of hits (the Bangles, Sinead O’Connor, Chaka Kahn, The Time), lover (Kim Basigner, Kylie, Cindy Crawford, Susanna Hoffs) and live performer to equal Hendrix, Sly, Clinton and James Brown in one alien being opened up the myth of the man to me and encouraged an obsession that remains vital to this day.

Another title I remember fondly from the mid-80s (published in October 1986) is (The Appallingly Disrespectful) Spitting Image Book. The QI-tie-in of its day, this wonderfully profane and perverted satirical anatomy of the height of the Thatcher-years includes such gems as: a full frontal nude Prince Andrew (see that sausage and believe it), The Queen Mum’s Secret Tattoos (another eerie echo of Faber-future in the shape of Harry Hill’s Queen Mum), Cosmo’s Cut out and Keep Guide to Contraception, 10 facts about Prince (His favourite food is flies; he failed his cycling proficiency test because his feet didn’t reach the pedals), and a guide to ‘How to Achieve Baldness with Dignity’.

The Spitting Image Book now looks like the relic of time when we thought The Young Ones was Extreme TV; a time when a faux-article on ‘The New Celibates’ (Boy George: I prefer a nice cup of tea but it doesn’t half make your willie sore) can still make you giggle - not in the age of Heat magazine it can’t ... Things were so much simpler then: we knew who the enemy was (Thatcher, the Royals, Bernard Manning) and the Spitting Image satire now whimpers and splutters with a juvenile naivety I find endearing.

An interesting footnote: The Spitting Image Book was a monster bestseller in the weeks running up to publication in Christmas 1986. Legend has it that the then print meeting were faced with a tough decision about reprinting in those final December days and decided to go for a gung-ho whopping 200,000 copy reprint. Apparently this final reprint bombed, and left with an overstock of gargantuan proportions at the warehouse in Harlow, any remaining profit on the £3.99 net edition was wiped ...

My final recommendation is (Lord) Paul Morley’s ASK: ‘the chatter of pop’. A bewildering, intoxicating, B. S. Johnson-esque cacophony of interview transcripts, pop manifesto and picture, ASK commands big money in the rare books market today and yet remains out of print (and un-reprintable). It represents Morley at his most loquacious and, for some, Morley at his most irritating and intransigent.

Much is posed and little is resolved. Jerry Garcia rubs shoulders with Killing Joke and the odious Ted Nugent; Midge Ure shares space with Iron Maiden, Gary Glitter and Bauhaus. Drenched in Barthes (which was no bad thing at the time, I’m told), Morley’s book is a document of a moment when writers were given the editorial freedom to take risks, explore ideas and make radical links between pop philosophy and the culture. ASK is deliberately incoherent and tantalisingly unfathomable. Just like life. Check out the picture of Gary Glitter on p34: WRONG.

For these and other great Faber books between 1984-90 we have, mostly, to thank Pete Townshend.