Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell

Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell:


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“As is often the case with those who make disturbing art, he seems a person of integrity. Those in the public eye who go out of their way to seem benevolent, the supposedly squeaky-clean ones, are the ones to beware of. Nasty pretends to be nice, and vice versa.”


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“Mainstream entertainment, like mainstream religion, is used to control people. But there are threads that run through all religions and I see music in similar terms. Both religion and music provide ways of seeing the unseeable and a necessary escape from the sometimes unbearable harshness of reality. Ideas can be communicated about death and the worlds beyond the one we inhabit.”


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“Once I had been allowed to enter the movement, I decided it was rubbish, continuing a lifelong pattern of disowning my goals once they were achieved.”


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“Not only did this represent champagne aspirations on a beer budget, but Nick and I were attempting it without our partners. There were lessons to be learned: break up a winning team at your peril. Never overlook the contributions of your collaborators.”


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“Every artist who achieves longevity does so not just through the making of music, but the making of decisions, eventually thousands of decisions, starting with what to call themselves and who to play their demos to, through whether to sack their friend and go with a professional manager, which live agent to work with, and then on to the lifelong navigation of an endless series of suggested compromises.

The artists who thrive are not just the most musically talented but the most dedicated to their core values. There is a toughness required of this kind of work, but given that artistry is delicate, a dichotomous nature is necessary. That is the thread that has linked the artists I have worked most closely with. Extraordinary strength coupled with sensitivity that is so acute it is almost psychic.”


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“I was starting to realise that a large part of the creation of success was about ignoring the reasons it might not happen. Blocking out reality and getting on with it. Focusing on what I wanted to happen and how to get there, not the reasons it was unlikely to work.”


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“The process of songwriting and recording often involves wild oscillation between feeling immensely empowered – godlike is how some describe it – by one’s own abilities to make something out of nothing, and feeling like an idiot who is wandering around naked while everyone laughs. These extreme swings can occur in very short spaces of time and when they do you are fairly close to madness. The uncertainty of the creative process feels to me at times like chewing tin foil.

The manager of one huge artist proudly told me that he insists to the musicians he works with that they behave functionally. He said that he doesn’t buy into the idea that instability is intrinsically linked to creativity. Perhaps, I thought, he is just working with talent so mediocre that their behavior is as mundane as their music. Whatever abilities I possess feel like they are simply the flipside of the least functional parts of me. Dysfunctionality comes with gifts as a consolation prize. Whether a person is able to tap into these gifts is another question.

But no one whose art is really good tends to feel all that good for much of the time. Blissful happiness is an unlikely condition in any event and would certainly be an unusual place for a gifted person to inhabit, at least for long. The best a great talent can hope for is to reach some sort of an accommodation with themselves. An appreciation that they at least have something to show for their alienation.”


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“John Peel was an influential tastemaker, but I wanted to diverge from his approach as much as emulate it. He was probably the greatest champion of independent music ever because the way he chose which records to play was so ideologically powerful. His position was not that he would play good music, regardless. It was more political than that. If he perceived something was too pop, he would not play it.

So while John Peel was a supporter of Scritti Politti’s early singles and debut album for Rough Trade, Songs to Remember, he never played anything from their masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite albums, Cupid & Psyche 85. This music was even better than their previous output but he did not support it. Green and co. had decamped to New York and made the music they dreamed of, which was R&B, with storied soul producer and arranger Arif Mardin. But Peel stopped playing them because he considered what they were doing too pop.

I didn’t wish to take this approach.

‘Indie’ to describe music was a term that was destined to become obsolete, and I didn’t want this type of ghettoization to happen to XL. I wanted to be able to back artists to be as ambitious as they saw fit. Equally, I wanted to discourage artists from being overly commercial if that meant their records would suffer. I wanted to work with the best artists and help them make the best music. I didn’t want to be tied down to an ideology that would get in the way of that. I didn’t want records to have to be commercial – like a major; equally, I didn’t want them to have to not to be – the way John Peel seemed to sometimes see it.”


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“Her approach owed something to punk, perhaps best summed up as: If it ain’t broke, break it.”


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“This book is not about sales figures or awards. Too many artists whose work is close to my heart have not achieved huge sales for me to think of units sold as what is important. Commercial success is a measure of something outer; not necessarily anything deeper. The record industry’s obsession with figures is limiting and stifles creativity. Music that reaches a lot of people but has no substance is of no interest. Music that has depth but only reaches a small audience is often the most important and long-lasting.”


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“I just knew that whatever we did needed to be a celebration, and that I had to have faith that something special would manifest. The principle I tried to stick to was that the absence of doubt would lead to success. Commit to the process, don’t waste time thinking about whether it will or won’t work, and execute to the best of your ability. The rest will take care of itself.”


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“Coincidences are ‘God’s way of staying anonymous.’ They are a reassurance that there is a flow and it’s useful to note and appreciate them when they occur.”


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perhaps a relief

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For the past few years I've been trying to figure out if there are ways for me to increase the readership of my books and I think I've finally come to the conclusion that, at least for the time being, there aren't any. This perhaps comes as a relief.


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Twenty years of A Radical Cut

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Today is the twentieth anniversary – to the day – of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality. The very first post here was on August 8, 2005. The title came from a Slavoj Žižek quote (this was a long time ago, I would never quote Žižek now.) You can find the quote in this Twenty-eight quotations on failure post, if you scroll down to the middle, which was the first in a series of posts collecting quotes around a theme including: pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and of course failure. Other ongoing series include Some passages from and Some favourite things from my year. I've told this story before, but the main reason I started A Radical Cut was because I had written a book called Families Are Formed Through Copulation and was having great difficulty getting it published. Every publisher I sent it to said no, and more than a few genuinely seemed to hate it. So I was wondering if there was some way I could just write and have at least a few people read what I was writing, not have to wait so long (and receive so many rejection letters) before someone got to see it. Families Are Formed Through Copulation did eventually get published in 2007 by Pedlar Press (though it's now out of print.) And starting in 2014 my work began to have a little bit more of a positive readership and therefore it became a bit easier for me to get my books out there. Now I feel like I'm having almost the opposite problem, in that it seems to me I'm writing too many books too quickly (which is probably a problem many writers would like to have, assuming the books are any good.) (It now occurs to me that perhaps I would have written more books if, back when I was starting out, I'd had an easier time getting them published.) Earlier this year I started a Patreon and I suppose, at the time, I was planning to slowly phase out A Radical Cut and eventually just do the Patreon. But so far I haven't had the heart to make even small steps in that direction. Doing something for twenty years really makes it feel like it's a part of you. So we'll have to see what happens. Not quite sure how to end this, so perhaps I'll simply repeat myself (at least if you've read previous posts) by saying, if you don't already know, my last book got some really nice reviews. I wonder if I'll manage to do this thing for another twenty years.



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