EXCLUSIVE PODCASTS
1/ The Penkiln Burn written and read by Bill Drummond
Produced by Chris Watson for caughtbytheriver.net
Download it here
2/ River at the End of Autumn, written and read by Chris Yates
Produced by Chris Watson for caughtbytheriver.net
Download it here
3/ The River Cray read by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Produced by Chris Watson for caughtbytheriver.net
Download it here
4/ Jack Frost by Roger Deakin, read by Robert MacFarlane
Produced by Chris Watson for caughtbytheriver.net
Download it here
Even if you don’t know who Jeff Barrett is, the chances are — if you’re
between 20 and 45 and remotely interested in music — you have a record on
your shelves, or a track in your iPod, that he was involved with: Saint
Etienne, Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, Beth Orton, New Order, Happy
Mondays, Doves, The Magic Numbers.
As a press officer, an A&R man, and the founder of one of the music
industry’s most successful record labels, Heavenly Records, Barrett has
touched the careers of all these artists in some way.
I first met him in 1986 in the Rock Garden pub, a once hip boozer on Queen
Street, Glasgow. I was a mad indie kid in my first year at university.
Barrett was in his early twenties and working at Creation Records, the
coolest indie label in the world at that moment.
I remember looking across the bar as he sat talking with Primal Scream, in my
universe, the equivalent of the Rolling Stones. He was holding a 7in single
in his hand and, doubtless, telling the Scream why they should like it. His
face was dancing, animated, under a long, unruly mane of reddish blond hair.
(“Foxhead” the Happy Mondays would later christen him.) Within the year Jeff
would convince me to leave my family, my city, my university course and my
girlfriend to move to London and play guitar in an indie rock group that he
was managing.
For a long time I wondered how he did that.
He did it, of course, by using what he brings to every project he approaches:
enthusiasm. Jeff is, in the greatest, purest, sense of the word, a fan:
whether it’s a record, a movie, a club, a restaurant, a pair of trousers, or
a person, if he likes it, you’re gonna get it — both barrels.
There cannot be many London musicians, journalists or record company
executives who do not know what it is to have bumped into Jeff in a Soho pub
only to find themselves leaving the Heavenly Records office on Frith Street,
Soho, at 3am with a medley of new tunes in their head and a list of things
to check out stuffed in their pockets.
I have often thought it was a pity that everyone couldn’t experience what it
was like to be thrown into this enthusiasm-grinder for a few hours. Now,
with the click of a mouse, everyone can.
Many weird and wonderful offshoots have grown out of Heavenly Records — from
nightclubs (the legendary Sunday Social in 1994: where Noel Gallagher
frugged next to Paul Weller while an unknown pair of DJs yet to be called
The Chemical Brothers began their ascent) to bars (The Social, tucked behind
Oxford Street, now in its second decade) to magazines (the brilliant Socialism).
But the latest may appear to many to be the strangest: caughtbytheriver.net,
the internet’s coolest angling and culture website. Not that it’s a crowded
genre, of course, but then as a record company Heavenly has always
specialised in carving its own genres by ignoring them entirely.
The website grew from being a straightforward fishing blog, gradually becoming
a vessel for the founders’ passions and enthusiasms, growing broader in
scope, coming to incorporate everything from fishing tips to, er, cake
recipes. It acquired an aesthetic, a sense of itself. That “caught” in
Caught by the River came to mean caught as in bewitched, entranced,
captivated by just stepping outside the grind for a moment. When you work in
the music industry (or any industry) its problems become very real to you:
midweek chart positions, radio playlists, Tesco isn’t stocking the record.
(In the musical long run all this stuff is, of course, irrelevant: what was
the midweek chart position of London Calling? What radio playlists
was Marquee Moon on? Did Tesco’s heavily stock The Queen is
Dead?) You don’t have to be an angling aficionado to appreciate the
site’s “hold on, let’s stop the world for a minute and savour the good
stuff” stance. Like a perfect blend of The Idler and some of
the great 1980s fanzines such as Slow Dazzle and Hungry Beat,
Caught combines a relaxed worldview with a frothing passion for the good
things in life.
Caught by the River is a joy, a treasure trove of stories, obsessions,
anecdotes and enthusiasm. You realise that, far from being a radical
departure, it is just a structured extension of something that Barrett has
been doing with Heavenly for nearly 20 years: spreading enthusiasm for the
best of pop culture, for music, film, literature, sport, nature . . . for
what it is to be alive and engaged with the world. Today, the three men
responsible for the website — Jeff and the label’s Robin Turner and Andrew
Walsh — sit around the table of a West London pub trying to explain their
latest off-map excursion.
Robin Turner: We were basically on a year of gardening leave from EMI [the
label that, until recently, funded Heavenly] waiting for them to make a
decision as to what was happening with the label. We found that for the
first time in a while we had the chance to do something creative.”
Jeff Barrett: “Fishing was something I’d done as a kid. I was very lucky — I
lived really close to the River Trent, really close to these gravel pits.
You know, you’d tie your rod on to your bike, nick a pint of milk from a
doorstep for your breakfast. As I’d got older I’d fished on and off, I’d
picked up a rod maybe once every two years. You stop doing it because there
seem to be better ways of spending your time as you get older. Music,
football, girls. I started going again a few years ago and pretty soon I was
going fishing as regularly as I could. The water, it smelt like childhood.
“I came in the office saying how great it was going fishing again and that I
needed a buddy and Andrew piped up and said he’d come . . .”
Andrew Walsh: “I loved that we’d go fishing and share maybe a few words in a
12-hour period. And 12 hours goes like that [he snaps his fingers]. One of
the first places we went was in the Cotswolds. You couldn’t get a mobile
phone signal. It was the first time in ages that nobody could get hold of
you. That was the start of Caught by the River, in many ways. I just woke up
one morning thinking ‘caught by the river.net’ — I didn’t know what it
meant. But everything needs a cool name, doesn’t it?”
JB: “It came from us spending time together and enjoying each other’s company
and having adventures. I initially thought that Andrew was suggesting a
website that dealt solely with fishing, somewhere to blog our fishing trips
and I couldn’t work out how to do that because a) it involved writing —
which I hadn’t done for a long time, as I was a press officer really — and
b) hang on, I can’t even fish! But the name was good, we knew it meant
something.”
RT: “It was interesting learning the basics of website construction,
programming and stuff, because we are not people who are naturally that way
inclined.”
JB: “Doing the records [brilliantly Barrett doesn’t say ‘records’, he says
‘rekkids’] is how I make a living and I do still like doing it . . . a bit
[He sighs]. But there’s so much crap now getting in the way of the creative
part. To work with and hang with talented people and to assist them in some
way to get to the point of their art — that’s what we are about. Like Robin
said, when EMI got bought by Terra Firma everything got frozen. We couldn’t
sign anything new. Basically, as an A&R man, which is what I am, I
couldn’t do my job. You know the hit you get when you find that buzz band,
when you sign them? That hit wasn’t available to me any more. I was
thinking, ‘Mmm, the romance is going out of this. I’ve been doing it for a
hell of a long time. Maybe I am a bit bored.’ Then, when you’re sitting
there unable to sign anything, that’s when you get really bored. Double
bored. And, yes, there was an element of reacting against the music industry
lifestyle of late nights, loud music, drugs, whatever.”
AW: “But it’s not to do with ‘OK, one minute we’re in the music industry and
we’re taking drugs and the next minute we’re fishing and we’re not [taking
drugs]’. We just wanted somewhere we could enthuse about our passions
without trying to flog something. Where we could talk about art we loved
without trying to make a living out of it. When you fish, you tend to fish
for an eight to 12-hour stretch. In the time we’re living in — with mobiles,
BlackBerrys and the like — if you’ve got time to fish you’ve got time to
think. And that’s when the important things come to mind.”
JB: “So that’s what we decided to do with the site: share things, not just
fishing — movies, art, books. It became a forum for: ‘If anybody cares, this
is what I’ve just read, this is where someone suggested I go fishing,
someone suggested I check out the paintings of Kurt Jackson, who paints
rivers . . .’ I mean it’s one big pub conversation really!”
The website’s obituary section — the perfectly titled Caught by the Reaper —
where certain kind of celebrities get the attention they’re often denied
elsewhere, is alone worth an hour of anyone’s browsing time. It includes
Barrett’s own thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the death of Rob Gretton,
the Joy Division/New Order manager, and Bobby Gillespie on the passing of
Lux Interior from the Cramps. “You know, we loved Lux Interior,” Barrett
says. “So we got hold of Bobby and said ‘Do you want to write an obituary
for us?’ And we got this beautiful, tender piece of remembrance.”
RT: “And there’s a brilliant reminiscence by John Williams, the crime writer,
about Nick Sanderson of Earl Brutus. It’s all about them breaking into Peter
Gabriel’s house. They were obsessive fans when they were kids and they found
out where Gabriel lived and went round. There was a note on the door saying,
‘I’m out playing tennis’. So they went into the house and had a look around.
They got his number off the phone and rang him later!”
They all crack up laughing at the youthful audacity of this: youthful audacity
being something that resonates strongly in the world of Heavenly and CBTR.
It’s the kind of attitude that’s carried Barrett, Turner and Walsh from the
internet into the world of proper book publishing, striking a deal with
Cassell Illustrated to put together a hardcover collection of “words on
water”.
The book — from its tranquil cover and its illustrations by John Richardson
and the legendary long-deadangling artist Robin Gibbings — is a beautiful
object. The content more than lives up to the packaging, too: from renowned
fishing writers such as Dexter Petley and Chris Yates, to authors such as
Jon Savage and Irvine Welsh, to musicians such as Jarvis Cocker and Bob
Stanley, there’s 400 pages of diverse and engaging reflections on what it is
to lose oneself by the riverbank.
“When we initially thought about approaching people for the book,” Turner
says, “we thought, ‘Gotta go through the agents’. And we got loads of ‘Er,
who are you?’ answers. Lots of polite refusals. So then we thought ‘OK,
let’s think about the people we know’.” Being Heavenly Records they knew
everyone.
RT: “Like with Karl Hyde from Underworld, he’s known for making quite fierce
techno records, but he’s written this beautiful piece about growing up near
the River Severn and about his dad making a raft and sailing down the Severn
with his family. And there were a few of those. It was the same principle
I’d learnt doing Socialism magazine on zero budget, which was
‘You don’t ask you don’t get’. It’s also asking people to do things that
wouldn’t normally be expected of them, taking them out of their comfort
zone.”
JB: “It was a similar thing [to the website] of going to people we admired and
asking: ‘You got a favourite river? Tell us about it’. The book’s a natural
extension of the site; they’re not fishing stories, they’re river stories.
Running water lends itself to poetry, contemplation and the like.”
AW: “I remember ringing up Irvine Welsh and thinking he’d laugh.”
JB: “He said, ‘I really hate to say this but I haven’t got the time’. His last
book was coming out, he was on the road, on the junket. He even came into
the office to say ‘sorry’. He then proceeded to tell us this great story
about his mum and dad and the Firth of Forth. I was thinking, ‘I wish I had
the tape recorder running’! Anyway, he said no, then, just as we’re going to
press with the book, we thought, ‘Gotta give it one more pop’. Didn’t hear a
word from him for six days then there it was ‘You win bud. Here . . .’ 3,000
words.” I put it to Barrett that perhaps making things such as that happen —
getting the writers you wanted, close to deadline and so on — was providing
the kind of thrill he wasn’t getting through not being able to sign bands at
the time?
JB: “Definitely. We are all of no half-measures persuasions. We like jumping
in and doing the book really took us somewhere. It was an adventure.”
There’s that word again.
“Yeah.” He grins. “I think that’s a real key word for what we do, adventure.”
We’re in a different pub, in another city, and we’re talking — ostensibly —
about rivers and fishing as opposed to 7in pop singles, but Jeff Barrett’s
face is as dancing and animated as it was in the Rock Garden in Glasgow,
nearly a quarter of a century ago . . .
www.caughtbytheriver.net
Caught by the River A Collection of Words on Water, Compiled and edited
by Jeff Barrett, Robin Turner and Andrew Walsh. Published by Cassell
Illustrated, £17.99, on Tuesday. Go to: octopusbooks.co.uk
Plus an exhibition of artwork taken from the book is exhibiting in the Café
at Foyles Bookshop (Charing Cross Road) from June 16 to July 26
