{"id":845,"date":"2006-09-14T13:59:36","date_gmt":"2006-09-14T12:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/?p=845"},"modified":"2006-09-14T13:59:36","modified_gmt":"2006-09-14T12:59:36","slug":"blissblog-on-bob-dickinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/2006\/09\/blissblog-on-bob-dickinson\/","title":{"rendered":"blissblog on Bob Dickinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

A month or so ago I got an email from Bob Dickinson<\/strong>, the original keyboard player (and violinist!) in Magazine, before Dave Formula replaced him. Dickinson was from an avant-garde classical background: when he saw the famous notice in the Manchester Virgin store from Devoto looking to recruit members, he had “just finished doing a 6-hour version of Gavin Bryar’s ‘Sinking of the Titanic’ at the Peterloo Gallery (with Dick Witts)”.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

http:\/\/blissout.blogspot.com\/2006_08_01_blissout_archive.html#115514034502880773<\/a><\/p>\n

I interviewed Bob Dickinson nearly a decade ago and had no idea about any of this. Or rather, I interviewed a<\/em> Bob Dickinson who I now believe<\/em> is the same one.<\/p>\n

In the mid-90s, before the proliferation of the internet – a lot of people seemed to have access to DTP stuff and photocopying. There was an explosion of zines of all sorts of hues. I gravitated towards a kind of post- situ\/neoist\/mail art\/occulture ultra-left milieu which included things like the Association of Autonomous Astronauts<\/a> at its more accessible end, and the Equi Phallic<\/a> and Neoist<\/a> alliances at the other. I can’t begin to tell you how prolific and energised that scene was. Some of the texts are anthologised in Stewart Home’s Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism<\/a><\/em> (Serpents Tail) , <\/em>alas without their graphics.<\/p>\n

The East London Section of the London Psychogeographical Association<\/a> combined left-communism and paganism and inspired a large network of similar groups across the world, as well as novellists such as Iain Sinclair<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Manchester Area Psychogeographic produced a number of one-sheet newsletters. The “group” at that stage seemed to consist only of Bob Dickinson (as was the\u00a0case with many of the groups in the scene)\u00a0and I interviewed<\/a> him for a zine of mine that ended up not being printed. I did put all of it and some other M.A.P. texts online<\/a>, though.<\/p>\n

Bob also produced a show for BBC Radio 4 about zines which featured some of my efforts. He got a mention in Radio 1 DJ Mark Radcliffe’s book in relation to producing his show I think as well.<\/p>\n

A renaissance man, if it is all the same one, and the connections seem to be all in place (MAP wrote about early Factory and I think Nico in Manchester…)<\/p>\n

Since then psychogeography has become a massive industry, as an academic discipline\u00a0on the one hand, and as a more literary version of tourism on the other. Both of these scenarios have attempted to remove the more confrontational aspects which made psychogeography so appealing in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A month or so ago I got an email from Bob Dickinson, the original keyboard player (and violinist!) in Magazine, before Dave Formula replaced him. Dickinson was from an avant-garde classical background: when he saw the famous notice in the Manchester Virgin store from Devoto looking to recruit members, he had “just finished doing a …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘blissblog on Bob Dickinson’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncarved.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}