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Please note - this page under continuous revision - last revised 29th July 2005 |
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Chapter 3: Conventions |
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Billy
the Squid |
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SEAMONSTERS was the rather clever title of a fanzine put out by my then partner Simone Walsh. She had first encountered fandom via her husband Tony Walsh who had formed the Bristol and District sf group in the early1960s. By the time I got to know her in 1972 she was discontent in the marriage and eventually we became a couple, as I had been keen to leave the relationship I was in with a non-fan in favour of someone I had more common interests with. (Unfortunately simply having fandom in common isn't always sufficient and we parted in 1979.) Anyway, SEAMONSTERS was a good fanzine, very distinctly Simone's voice even though it looked pretty much like my own STOP BREAKING DOWN (it's all that coloured quarto duplication you know, they all look the same, not like the Good New Days of photocopying and cut&paste clipart...) and actually won the Nova Award in 1979. I can't remember now whether I had much at all to do with editing, apart from cranking the duper and some stencilling, probably not a lot is my guess, except for the usual domestic discussions of whether that Chris Atkinson piece really is a pile of crap or not, you know the sort of thing. Anyway anyway, BILLY THE SQUID. The title still makes me grin and was in fact inspired by both SEAMONSTERS and the section on William Bonney in Borges' UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY which I was reading at the time. In the first section we must note that Rob Hansen (a Huge Name Fan currently less visible than he ought to be) was still living in Cardiff but was a frequent visitor to our flat in Ealing. Joseph Nicholas (or Joseph Nicholas X as he was also known, once we discovered that Joseph Nicholas was not actually his real name...) was still a real sf fan at the time, and equally frequently seen about our place. (What was his 'real' name, anyone recall?) The Silicons were a series of small (less than 100 persons, a lot less sometimes) conventions organised by the then highly-active and very powerful Newcastle fangroup the Gannets. Silicons were invariably excellent, usually because of the organisational skills brought to bear by Kevin Williams, who had a particular knack of inspiring active creativity in some other Gannets that was previously unsuspected. So Silicon, held at the August Bank Holiday, was for a few glorious years a Must Not Miss event. Yes, sometimes I think there truly was a Golden Age. The events at the Silicon reported here contain the names of many a vanished fan; I'll fill in some more details on them as-and-when. Suffice to say for now that there is actually no-one mentioned who one might expect to see at a convention in this century. Pity, some of those people were great guys in their day. --------- That's a really interesting collection of records there in that last section - I can't say that they're regular turntable hits around here now, 27 years later, but they're all in my head-jukebox and I can hear them on demand. And I have real copies of them too so I could indeed make up a tape of my November 1978's Greatest Hits. Wow. Actually, I was listening to The Falcons YOU'RE SO FINE and Gene Chandlers DUKE OF EARL just the other day. YOU'RE SO FINE is sometimes cited as the point where r&b started to mutate into soul (can't wholly see this myself) but its true significance to me is that my parents bought a copy way back in 1959 and it certainly turned on a few neurones in my eight-year-old head, even more than THE INK SPOTS IN HI-FI had. Chandler's DUKE OF EARL has a fannish resonance, as well as being a A-Number 1 record; the Easter 1973 convention at Bristol was attended mob-handed by what was then Ratfandom; myself, John Hall, John Brosnan, Rob Holdstock, Leroy Kettle, Malcolm Edwards. Maybe some others, I dunno. Anyway, inspired by John Hall (of whom it may well have been said) we started waddling around the convention doing a sort of combination Robert Crumb trucking strut and Madness nutty-boys train walk. Singing DUKE OF EARL. I still recall the looks of genuine horror on the faces of many rather older and more staid fans. Duke Duke Duke-Duke of Earl-Duke Duke-Duke of Earl-Duke Duke-Duke of Earllllll...you can see how it might have annoyed. See, silly fun at cons wasn't invented in 1998. And we haven't even mentioned the piggy-back fighting and British Bulldog at Yorcon 2 yet. |
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Nice
Time Come Back Again |
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And
there I was and... |
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Some
Notes Towards An Incomplete Version Of Events |
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