During my misspent youth writing for the NME, I would sometimes deal with Mick Houghton of Brassneck Publicity, who was renowned for his charming manner, but also for doing only (and I mean, only) what his acts wanted. Now Houghton, formerly a music journalist and author of I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny, has written about his riotous years as a rock publicist in Fried and Justified.
It includes ruminations on the dark art of PR and nods to Houghton’s personal history (he waves away a triple heart bypass operation as if he had stubbed his toe). But the core of the book is his proximity to a veritable who’s who of artists, including KLF (Bill Drummond writes the book’s foreword; Jimmy Cauty designs the cover), Echo and the Bunnymen, Julian Cope, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, Spiritualized, Ramones, Sun Ra, Suicide, Bert Jansch, the Undertones, Elastica, the Wedding Present and the House of Love.
As signalled by the subtitle’s reference to the “record business”, Fried and Justified focuses on old-school music industry mores, with chapters unfolding in chunks of time. As a publicist, Houghton found himself uniquely placed as both an insider and outsider, watching acts morph from bright young things to industry deities to burn-outs and back to being creative again. Such trajectories involved brilliance, stupidity, ambition, dysfunction, madness, love, hate, sex, alcohol, drugs, bust-ups – and gigantic egos.
It’s all here in gory backstage detail, including Liverpool-based Zoo Records, the label run by Drummond and Dave Balfe, which defined a generation with groups such as the Teardrop Explodes and the Bunnymen (“Great bands are not made, they just happen,” writes Houghton, sagely). Then there’s Jesus and Mary Chain fuming their way to stardom (“Jim and William [Reid] were too insular to enjoy the success they had and too principled and uneasy to kiss music-industry backsides”); Julian Cope’s spiralling drug mania, characterised by 1984’s Fried album cover, on which Cope crawled naked beneath a turtle shell; and KLF burning £1m in 1994, with Houghton wryly observing: “(KLF) weren’t irresponsible kids fucking up – they were irresponsible adults who only occasionally fucked up.”
Along the way, Fried and Justified sheds light on a bygone industry that, although flawed, occasionally nurtured genuine misfit-creatives. Now retired from PR, Houghton mourns old friends (including Bunnyman Pete de Freitas, who died in a motorcycle accident) and celebrates others (he’s thrilled that Cope eventually prospered as an author and artist: “Try dismissing him as an acid-damaged rock nutter now”), while deeply regretting his ongoing rift with Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch, triggered by Houghton jokily calling the band “Echo and the Buglemen”, a reference to cocaine, on the sleevenotes of the retrospective box set Crystal Days.
Ultimately, Fried and Justified takes the reader on a wild rock’n’roll fairground ride of the damned, where you’re simply not allowed to get off. Towards the end, Houghton writes of Drummond, the Bunnymen and Cope: “There’s something deep inside them that binds them by an invisible thread, a consequence of the circumstances that aligned in Liverpool to bring them together.” By the end of Fried and Justified, it’s clear that it binds him too.
• Fried and Justified: Hits, Myths, Break-Ups and Breakdowns in the Record Business 1978-98 by Mick Houghton is published by Faber Social (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
