Moore The Merrier

ou managed to get through the two hours of droning voice and sinister metal music? I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

Alan Moore is talking about his latest spoken word/music project Unearthing, a collaboration with producers Crook & Flail (Andrew Broder and Adam Drucker), featuring cameos from Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, Justin Broadrick of Napalm Death, and former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton among others. Moore, now 56, is as self-deprecating as only a Northampton-born comics legend, polymath and “jobbing psychogeographer” can afford to be. No matter how esoteric the subject matter, his words are always leavened by dry humour and that middle-of-England growl.
The bio on a thumbnail: a product of the late ‘60s freakzine/arts lab germ culture, Moore first got his break writing strips for 2000AD and DC Comics. Masterpieces such as V For Vendetta, Watchmen, Swamp Thing and From Hell were, alongside Gaiman’s Sandman and Spiegelman’s Maus, largely responsible for the highbrow rebranding of comic books as graphic novels (Watchmen was famously included in Time’s list of the 100 most important books of the century).
On the occasion of his 40th birthday, Moore decided to declare himself a practising magician (interested parties are advised to check out DeZ Vylenz’s excellent documentary The MIndscape of Alan Moore). The 1996 novel Voice of the Fire, 12 stories spanning 6,000 years in Northampton, sealed his reputation as one of the greatest storytellers of his generation. His last major project Lost Girls (2006) co-authored with his wife, San Franciscan illustrator Melinda Gebbie, set out to rehabilitate pornography as graphic art.
More recently, Moore has been working on an epic novel entitled Jerusalem and publishing Dodgem Logic, a throwback to the pirate mags of his youth, as well as exploring shamanistic spoken word/music fusions. Unearthing, a two-hour reading of a piece commisioned for Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances, takes the form of an homage to his old friend, British comics veteran and fellow occultist Steve Moore. For all its technologically enhanced elements (the deluxe limited edition box set includes a CD, vinyl, dot-matrix printed transcript and photo portraits by Mitch Jenkins) Unearthing, is, if anything, a fireside event.
“I suppose the fact that I was writing a piece about my oldest and dearest friend was perhaps responsible for giving it an intimate tone,” Moore admits. “And even though some of the writing is very fancy, and perhaps over-elaborate in places, there is a warmth to it because of the subject matter. This is obviously somebody that I care about a great deal, and I think that gives it some of this fireside attitude, despite the fact that it’s this multimedia event with a DVD in the making. This is simply words on paper arranged into a compelling order, which, like you say, is a technology that’s been with us since Paleolithic times.”
Moore’s tribute to his old friend is very much in keeping with his ongoing quest to mythologise the commonplace. As well as telling the story of one man’s life, Unearthing functions as a map of Steve Moore’s imagination, work, and the locale of Shooter’s Hill in South London. It is, we suggest, psychobiography as much as psychogeography.
“Yes, psychobiography,” Moore concedes. “I couldn’t really talk about Steve without talking about Shooter’s Hill, there’s a kind of entanglement going on there. But if you apply exactly the same principle to a human life that you do to a street or a part of the city, you get results that are every bit as interesting. When people use the word ‘psychogeography’ – and I’ve used it a lot myself, so I’m as guilty of this as anybody – what I think we really mean is simply poetry. The simple act of looking at a place or a person through the lens of poetry becomes an incredible tool for analysing a geography or a human life. You are able to find the rhymes, the repeated accidental motifs: whether you’re talking about a district or a person, there’ll be events in their life that have a kind of resonance.
“With Steve, we both noticed that swords turn up with a surprising regularity, which was something that he hadn’t actually noticed before. I probably shouldn’t be mentioning this in print because they’ll probably have some kind of a tax squad round there tomorrow morning, but in his relatively small back bedroom in Shooter’s Hill he’s got something like seventeen beautiful Samurai swords and Oriental coin swords. They’re so perfectly balanced you just think, ‘Yes, I can actually see that cutting someone’s head off could be quite an aesthetic experience!’ Beautiful things, but if I was Steve’s next door neighbour I’d probably be a bit worried. He’s an old, strange man with a lot of sharp objects. You never know when someone’s just gonna go postal!”
One of the more potent ideas raised by Moore’s psychogeographical explorations is that there’s no such thing as a ‘regional’ place. In the democracy of the earth’s locations, the small town has as much historical significance as New York or Berlin.
“This is a big thing for me at the moment,” Moore admits, “I’m starting to come to this conclusion that in almost all the countries of the world, our capitals and our major cities have more in common with each other than they do with the actual countries in which they’re situated. London is not a marker for the British or English experience. It’s an alien place, like all capital cities are. It’s got more in common with New York. New York could be construed as three Londons piled on top of each other, but with a neater street zone.”
They’re all interzones in other words.
“They’re all Burroughs’ interzones. They don’t really belong to any place or time, they are just the Big City. Despite all the predictions that by this point we’d all be living in megacities like Mexico City or somewhere, I believe that the regions where we all live are increasingly important. I think that globalisation, global thinking, was a fairly disastrous experiment and its limitations have been apparent for quite a while. I think that we are probably moving towards an era of localisation, local thinking, and local economies and local cultures might be a thing of the future.
“Just doing the work on Jerusalem – which is still ongoing, I’ve got about nine chapters to do – that’s been an incredible excavation of my family’s life and the history of the neighbourhood they hailed from for four or five generations, all mixed in with demented fantasy. I still keep finding out things about Northampton that I didn’t know. A couple of years ago I found out we invented radar here. It’s just a different way of seeing the place that I come from, making it into Blake’s Jerusalem, which I think probably all such areas are. There is a sense in the Blake and Parry hymn, everybody’s favourite, that Jerusalem can only be raised amongst the dark satanic mills. It doesn’t sound like an upmarket, gentrified Jerusalem that Blake is talking about.
“With Dodgem Logic and all the other stuff that’s going on in my life at the moment, I genuinely believe that we have to start paying attention to the places where we actually live and the people around us, we have to empower ourselves simply by understanding our environment and our lives according to a different language, perhaps a more poetic language. It would be nice if we could encourage people to bring a bit of personality back to this bland mass culture that we have. That widening of the gulf between real human street level culture and the mass culture that is being imposed upon us... I think something good could come out of that widening chasm.”