The Origins of The Sticky Pages Press

Hanway Street* ... just the name is enough to send me reeling back to 1977 ... 78 ... 79? Afternoons out of school, on to a 24 or 29 red Routemaster double decker and up Charing Cross Road then Tottenham Court Road. Collett's & Foyles for books, Virgin & secondhand stores for records (no CDs then). I was in search of The Holy Grail - Zappa's Joe's Garage. Paul Cavacuiti had given me a ropey C90 cassette with a tantalizing 5 minutes of Watermelon in Easter Hay right at the end. I'd never heard anyone play a guitar like that. And what were those strange insidious whisperings at the start?

As I remember, there was a tiny cramped record store on Hanway Street. Here - I felt sure - I'd find Zappa. And I did - not Joe's Garage but Filmore East with its grubby all-white cover and cruddy writing housed in a transparent sleeve. Oh, and a price sticker with an amount that seemed astronomical. That much for this? I'd been told not to judge a book by its cover but records were different (remember those were the days of Roger Dean, Hipgnosis ... plenty of gloss & shine on). I hadn't listened to enough Zappa, hadn't opened my ears and eyes enough to appreciate what the cover implied and what the music embodied: the sneer, the critique, the black pepper, the other way of going about things.

Ten years later it all made a lot more sense & I'd spent a week up in Leeds with Out to Lunch the Professor of Zappology. I came home buzzing. Suddenly EVERYTHING was possible (poetry ... music ... living ... thinking ... Zappa ... Prynne ... Adorno ... Debord ... Punk ... William Blake ... ) and I sat down and made my first 'book' The Shabbiness of Intent with its grubby cover and cruddy writing**. And looking at the Pritt-sticky pages adhering to my fingers what else could I do but devise The Sticky Pages Press? And so, boys and girls, that's how it all began ...

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* thanks to a new Blog Follower for (indirectly) jogging my memory

** where did it go? OTL sent the volume around The Loop & it eventually found its way to Iain Sinclair (whose title The Shamanism of Intent I'd stolen & warped). Did Sinclair bin it, offended by the irreverence? Or did he then send it on? To whom? Is it still orbiting? Who knows ...