PART 1: THOUGHTS TUMBLING OUT OF MY MIND
“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone
ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking
for someone he was not.”
So begins Paul Auster’s City of Glass. It’s a mystery I still
find irresistible, an invitation I can never refuse. I had wanted to use the
phrase “Wrong Number” somewhere for quite a few years. Initially it was going
to sit behind some film work I was doing, but the words later became the name of
an almost imaginary journal. It was with this idea in mind that I
finally started my WRONG NUMBER blog. And now it’s time to begin putting together
the journal that the blog was designed to support. To make it real.
WRONG NUMBER was going to be an anthology of short stories. To
put that in the context of me, I’d moved away from writing about music
around 2007. The next few years saw me make a handful of short films. Although artistic failures, those
films helped me get into the way of generating story ideas. That led to writing fiction, which had
always been my goal; I’d just not been able to do it before. So,
I would put out a fiction anthology, featuring my beloved SF&F and horror. Well,
no. The more I thought about it, the more the idea didn’t seem the right fit. I know a number of awesome writers (some of you may be reading this right now), but they operate primarily within non-fiction fields, music being the big one. I
obviously wanted to get as many of these talented individuals involved as
possible, so it made sense to open the doors to include not only fiction, but non-fiction
and everything else in between. That’s when the idea really started to take hold for
me.
I loved being New Bands editor on Plan B, but eventually
got burned out on new music. I
retreated into films and books, as I do, then found a new lease of musical life
through watching a lot of 1960s and 1970s European cinema. French new wave
scores, Jean-Claude Vannier, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders – it all fed back
into what I was writing at the time. David Lynch has never been far from the (formica) table for me and the likes of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has been a staple soundtrack for reading to since the mid-nineties. Without boring you to death here, the
point I am trying to make is that I may have stopped writing about music and
ceased to make films, but music and films continue to have a massive influence
on my writing. That’s the way I like it.
More recently, a growing obsession with classic Doctor Who
sent me crashing into Nigel Kneale and Paul Cornell. It helped that weird
fiction and H.P. Lovecraft had already been hanging around. I’d been writing to
Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone, ephemera on
Finders Keepers, the ever present Pastelism of Geographic and not forgetting the increasing lure of Shirley
Collins and the Albion Band. Having been holed up in a hidden writing bunker, I’d
somehow missed Ghost Box records. They were of course an obsession waiting to happen. And I’ve got to thank Joe Stannard for pointing me in the
direction of Kemper Norton, Pye Corner Audio and Black Mountain Transmitter: missing
sonic links to my reading, watching and writing.
Black Mountain Transmitter’s Black Goat of the Woods is a
case in point: a 40-odd minute darkening ode to Lovecraft bookended by John
Carpenter-esque excursions. Playing it whilst writing helped channel much of
the mood I was after, even if it may appear far from the surface in the
finished product. That’s the type of pathway I’d like to suggest for the
journal. So, gates open. They need not open onto Hell. But I won’t mind if they
do.
WRONG NUMBER will aim to sit on the borderland, like the house
that William Hope Hodgson spoke of. Its realities need to be dangerous, its
unrealities a little too inviting. It was meant to be another SF&F/horror/weird
fiction anthology, but the wrong person picked up its call. Now it will be something else.
PART 2: TUMBLING THOUGHTS MASQUERADING AS INFORMATION
[This section of the document was distributed privately. It was not removed, as some have speculated, by a disillusioned future contributor.]
PART 3: SKETCHES ON THE INSIDE
Thanks for listening. Before you go, here’s an inconclusive
list of things not quite mentioned in the above. Things that are on my mind and
may relate to what I’m trying to do here.
- The all too real unfictions of Christopher Priest’s The
Affirmation and A Dream of Wessex
- Hitchcock’s Vertigo (following Kim Novak down those streets,
always)
- Stage magic in Celine and Julie Go Boating
- The Doctor Who of Holmes and Hinchcliffe, The Daemons and
The Visitation
- Boards of Canada, Broadcast and Warp
- The Twilight Zone and Richard Matheson
- The Andromeda Strain, Altered States and Last Night (the Canadian
end of the world indie from 1998)
- Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
- Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair
(not only a real mystery reminiscent of early Auster, but one that centres around an
East London street where I used to work)
- Scully’s dead father appearing to her in The X-Files Beyond
the Sea
- Island films by Ingmar Bergman
- A mythic Bristol playing out to the sounds of Movietone
- Project Blue Book’s relationship with the Black Lodge
- Ken Russell’s The Devils and Mordant Music’s MisinforMation
- M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Shirley Jackson
- Electric Eden by Rob Young and discovering the house called
Fairport near where I live
- Lev Grossman’s excavations of C.S. Lewis in The Magicians
and The Magician King
- Watching Bagpuss and reading John Burningham picture books with
my daughter
- The Wicker Man / Don’t Look Now 1973 double-bill
- Tarlair, an abandoned 1930s outdoor swimming pool in my
hometown Macduff
- A dream of living on the coast of Cornwall… winding away
into the future
