Green Gartside and Mark Fisher on politics and music

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:04

  Hello again, good afternoon. Welcome back to the penultimate event off the page. And the idea for this event was driven from a notion of pop music as being something that was capable of carrying more than most of us expect from a pop song. I don't mean necessarily political resonance, but even more than that…

• 00:07:06

  And I think that's a really great thing. So, yeah, you know, I don't know what it was before. I think that's a good thing. I think the great thing about the age of culture, and like I said, the mid 80s. Right, and I think the tendency at events like this might be to sort of back away from the intensities of that kind…

• 00:20:16

  Does that make sense? Yes. I mean, but it's significant you say you stopped doing these notebooks around about the mid-'80s. I mean, was that related to the, well, there must be some relation between that and Squitty being right at the heart of the pop mega-machine at that point? Well, you know, there's a lot of this…

• 00:27:56

  And, you know, which would lead you down to the only bookshop in Newport in South Wales, where I grew up, and search for a book on Buddhism, because I figured... And next to... You know, and in the philosophy section, there was A.J. Ayers' Language, Truth and Logic, which is the only philosophy book they had, which I…

• 00:34:37

  And it was particularly with the help of Jeff and people like Bob, I think, that would have facilitated any of that happening. And so there was a... There was a lot of, an enormous lot of help in realising those records, both, you know, politically, tactically, professionally, sonically, everything. But that…

• 00:40:20

  Whereas now, if you look at it, it just seems like the end of that. The end of that. And that the kind of process which led up to you being... to make Cupid and Psyche wouldn't continue. Well, I don't know. You know, the chaos at the end of it, you know, which, for me, was where the... I mean, the easy thing…

• 00:46:21

  I mean, I never, ever listened to my own music, but I was forced to the other day, going to a mastering room where a compilation was being assembled. So I had to listen to bits of Cupid and Psyche. And, um... You know, like this. Yeah. And, um... What struck me most forcibly, through clenched ears…

• 00:58:22

  of the listener i think and what's so as a consequence what's really more pressingly at stake than uh with a music or with a pop music at the moment is what's happening to education in uh in the uk and i know you have thoughts about that and and um we've run out of time yes i think we have but um it seems like…