Arts Lab and... Ambagious Tactics

Excerpts from an Alan Moore's article celebrating the importance of Arts Lab, published on Big Issue site and printed in the magazine. You can read the complete piece HERE.

This article is taken from the landmark takeover of Big Issue by graffiti writer 10Foot. It can be bought from street vendors across the UK or online through the Big Issue Shop.

Alan Moore: [...] What made this ramshackle institution such a pleasure was that Arts Lab had no hierarchies, no leaders. They were basically a bunch of friends who met up weekly to discuss art projects that the whole group were invited to contribute to, perhaps a magazine, perhaps poetry readings in a pub backroom, perhaps something ambitious and theatrical.

There were no limits save physical or financial possibility, and, without supervision, we could be as intellectual and political or rude and vulgar as we wanted.

[...] In 2015, during a day-long seminar on counterculture and why we now need it more than ever, attendees who wanted to take the ideas we’d been discussing forward were invited to leave contact details and, some weeks thereafter, got together at a local cafe to eventually emerge as the Northampton Arts Lab’s second incarnation, a bit like with Time Lords.

[...] We’ve staged elaborate theatrical productions, published fancy magazines and hardback books and at the moment are producing a commemorative tribute to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s deck of creative art-prompts, Oblique Strategies. [...]

On the same page you can read more details about the project:

2025 marks the 50-year anniversary of the first publication of Oblique Strategies cards by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno. Each card contains a statement which can be used to inspire a creative response to your situation. Northampton Arts Lab decided to mark this anniversary by creating a limited-edition tribute act deck, made up of over 120 different “Ambagious Tactics”. This new deck is edited by Alistair Fruish with specially commissioned contributions from well over 100 different people. Some of these creatives are connected to Eno and Schmidt, and some are folk who regularly used Oblique Strategies, others are members of Arts Labs around the country, and some people were asked for the hell of it. Any money made by this project will be distributed to support worthwhile endeavours.  

If you’re interested in reserving a copy, email us.

Take a look to the picture below!

Brian Eno, again!

Below, final Q&A from the interview SOME MOORE. Part 2 of THE INTERVIEW FROM HELL! by Steve Darnall, published in Hero Illustrated n.8, 1994.

Excerpts from Part 1 are available here.

Obligatory dumb question: which album would you take to that mythical desert island?
Alan Moore: [long, slow, thoughtful breath] It's very difficult. I could never really whittle it down to one album or even 10 albums. I mean, you'd have to leave something brilliant at home, wouldn't you?
I suppose if I had to look at big influences, it'd probably be Brian Eno. Perhaps one of the early ones, like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy or Here Come The Warm Jets. 

Or maybe Another Green World. That‘d be nice music for a desert island, wouldn't it?

Alan Moore presents... Brian Eno!

In 2005, Alan Moore interviewed Brian Eno as part of BBC Radio 4 Chain Reaction series.

Alan Moore: Welcome everybody. My name's Alan Moore. I'm a comic writer and warlock, and I'm lucky enough to be interviewing somebody that I've admired for far too long... Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk in May 1948. Pronouncing his own name gave him the breath control that he would later employ to such startling effect upon his 1975 recording Miss Shapiro. Sprung from a long line of postmen, he received a 1960's education, experimenting with a tape recorder as his primary instrument, the young artist moved to London during 1969, before bumping into a former acquaintance named Andy Mackay, somewhere along the Northern Line. Joining Roxy Music, the new band with whom Mackay was currently engaged in playing saxophone, Eno burst upon public awareness as the central pillar of the decadent, inventive, glam rock period of British pop. Setting his stall out as a non-musician, he abruptly parted company with Roxy Music to produce a string of stunning and extremely influential solo albums, casually inventing ambient music, and the trend for sampling along the way, he has worked on pivotal productions with artists who range from Devo, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt and the new wave scene, to Pavarotti and U2. One of our modern fin de siecle most extraordinary minds, his interest gleefully embracing perfume, science, futurology and ladies bottoms. I am delighted to introduce... Brian Eno. [Audience applause]

You can listen the complete audio interview HERE.

Transcript is available HERE.

The Sound of Silence

Alan Moore reveals you the secrets of writing: HERE!

Excerpt from page 52-53 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 25th episode of the series, Words, Music & Performance. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] the life of a writer can be a very solitary thing. Unlike some writers, I cannot go and sit in a coffee shop to create. I need complete silence and no interruptions, which leads to a condition of pretty much permanent isolation. In fact, when lockdown started, I thought that if the virus was created in a lab, it would have been by a writer. Lockdown is normal for writers like me.

Never seeing your friends, never going out, hearing from people over the phone intermittently, being in a room on your own in complete silence – this is our existence.

[...] I used to enjoy listening to music when I was a cartoonist but that’s a different thing entirely. Cartooning can be done by some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists. I used to listen to the John Peel show and it wouldn’t affect my cartooning at all. Once you start writing, that all changes.

I realised that I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics because it would interfere with the words that I was trying to write. I moved on to purely instrumental pieces but was halfway through an album by John McLaughlin when the music was interfering with the rhythms that I was trying to write in. Listening to ambient music lasted a couple of months before I realised that was affecting the atmospheres I was creating. Some of my comic strips from that period feature huge captions focused on the way things sound, all because I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.

Eventually I gave in to the silence.

Stream the full course HERE!

Influences

Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Excerpt from an interview by Mark Burbey published in The Comics Journal n. 93, September 1984.

Mark Burbey: What sorts of influences do you draw from when you're writing?
Alan Moore: I really wish I could answer this by saying something decisive and opinionated like, "I only listen to Cuban jazz from the 1940s and I only read obscure Portuguese poetry in the original text." Sadly, I'm as boringly catholic as most people and tend to absorb just about everything I read, see, or listen to.
    I suppose one major point is that in writing comics I don't really absorb too much influence from the comics that I read unless it's something inexpressibly brilliant like Frank Miller's stuff, or American Flagg!, or Love and Rockets. Mostly I'd say that my influence comes from novels that I read or the occasional film that I see. If anything, I'd say that what I'd like to do as a writer is to try and translate some of the intellect and sensibilities that I find in books into something that will work on a comics page. Although I've obviously read and been influenced by most of the classic works of comic art like Eisner and Kurtzman, I can't help but feel that if you're influenced too much by your forebears in the comics field then a sort of process of dilution results, in which each succeeding generation of artists and writers is a little paler and more anemic than the generation before.
    For my part, it seems to smack too much of inbreeding (something we British have a terror of, probably brought on by the state of the Royal Family). I like the idea of bringing fresh ideas and approaches into the field, and although I seldom succeed in these objectives, they're what I'm aiming at.
    As far as actual influences go, any list would be long, boring, and inconclusive. For what it's worth, however, I like Cordwainer Smith, William Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, Angela Carter, Stephen King, John Gardner, Flann O'Brein, Thomas Disch, William Faulkner, Damon Runyon, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Peter Carey, and so on and so on. I suppose a major influence would have to be musician Brian Eno; just in the precise and mechanical way he approaches the idea of creativity I've been able to find a vast amount of inspiration to how I structure my own work.

Moore on artists, books, music, movies and TV shows

Excerpt from an interview published on Inside The Rift the 8th of January 2018. 

Full interview available HERE.

Prox: Are there any artists, books, movies/TV shows or music you’d like to recommend to the readers?

Alan Moore: I hardly ever watch movies or television, but I very much enjoy the work of Andrew Kötting (Swandown, By Ourselves), Ben Wheatley (Free Fire, High-Rise, A Field in England), and the increasingly rare outings of Chris Petit (Radio On, The Falconer). On TV I really liked the two seasons of Utopia, am always delighted when Stewart Lee gets a new series of his Comedy Vehicle, and continue to be very impressed by the writing of Vince Gilligan on Better Call Saul. The contemporary art world I know almost nothing of, but Jimmy Cauty’s dioramas of urban collapse and a coup d’état Police force are sobering and wonderful in equal measure. Books make up the greater part of my relatively few leisure activities: I would heartily recommend Iain Sinclair’s The Last London, and I’m eagerly anticipating both the follow-up to Michael Moorcock’s Whispering Swarm – one of the best things he’s ever done – and the final volume of Brian Catling’s hallucinatory Vorrh trilogy. I’ve also recently enjoyed a beautiful and compelling account of rearing a goshawk, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which turned up in the mail from an unknown benefactor, and am currently engrossed in Jane Jacobs’ masterful contrarian view of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Oh, and anybody out there who has not yet absorbed Jarett Kobek’s i hate the internet should do so immediately if they hope to ever understand our current ridiculous historical predicament.

Musically, I remain an ardent admirer of Brian Eno – his version of the Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free on The Ship is tremendous – although I’ve also rather taken to the Sleaford Mods. And you should watch out for a young rapper/performance poet operating under the handle of Testament. I had the good fortune to be sharing a bill with him some months ago, and his reinterpretation of William Blake’s poem London was nothing short of transporting.

[Full interview available HERE.]

Brian Eno appreciation by Alan Moore

In the following, an excerpt from Indoor Thunder: Landscaping the future with Brian Eno, an appreciation of the British musician and innovator written by Alan Moore, originally published in Arthur magazine No. 17, July 2005. 

It can be read in full here.

"Brian Eno is one of our modern culture’s brightest lights, never more radiant than in that culture’s most obscure and interesting corners, someone we should all be grateful we’re alive at the same time as. He’s the ambient motor hum, the alpha wave harmonic barely audible behind civilization. We should all sit quietly and listen." [Alan Moore]