Of course, there’s no point writing oneself into a corner or being labelled a one trick poet. So I’ve started writing fiction. Actually, I’ve always written prose. Poetry is for – oops.
The Editor is a pulp-action thriller about an elite editorial freelancer who takes on a big assignment for a super-secret branch of the US intelligence services. The job involves multiple authors, nested revisions, thousands of reviewer comments and a mysterious style guide.
Our hero, who is both linguistically and editorially ripped, operates at a level above and beyond most editors, employing a fiendishly elaborate armada of macros, speed-reading techniques and version-control software before even reading the source text.
Rich and humorous detail is provided by a dedicated squad of copywriters, proofreaders and spellcheckers who assist the editor by performing the referencing grunt work, among other tasks. But complications arise as a result of mismatched file formats, unrealistic client expectations and changes to the original brief that go all the way to the office of the President.
Despite a series of setbacks as well as attempted sabotage on the part of a nameless contributing author, the editor successfully produces a version of the document that is totally free of errors, bodaciously structured and indexed, insanely readable and delivered in .rtf, XHTML and PDF formats.
Highly charged, meticulously detailed and surprisingly realistic, The Editor features an offbeat cast of characters, sparse yet grammatically correct dialogue and daring feats of rewriting.
Suggested tagline: No more tracked changes — this time it’s final (.docx).
My flight had been delayed by an awkward incident during a brief stopover in Z—. One of the passengers — an older man in a crumpled suit — had been pulled from the boarding queue. Two persons, who did not look as if they belonged to airport security, searched the man’s carry-on luggage.
From my place in the queue I observed him as they pulled out first a newspaper and then what could have been a paperback novel. The man in the suit did not flinch.
The book had a green matte cover with gold lettering in a language I did not recognise. As the official flicked through its pages I could see that it was unread, brand new.
A sales receipt fell onto the floor of the terminal building. The man in the crumpled suit noticed this but the official did not (and his colleague was busy calling the incident in on her mobile telephone, in any case). Presently, they led the man away.
As our ageing Bombardier turboprop banked and turned over the marble mountaintops, I marvelled at my own audacity: I had slipped the receipt between the pages of my debut poetry collection, somehow certain that both it and the unreadable message scrawled on its reverse side would be safe from harm once I arrived in the Republic.
Even at the very end, when it seemed almost hopeless to everyone else, I still believed there was a small chance they’d make it. I fact I’d held onto that belief — stubbornly, I admit, and without logic — since the beginning of their journey.
Of course, I’d had no way of knowing who they actually were when I accepted the gig. All I knew then was that there were five of them: two adults and three small children, ages undefined. But there was something about one of the adults that caught my attention — a kind of glitch in the statistics cascading down my device’s screen — that caused me to ignore our otherwise strict and unmoving protocols, for the duration of the mission at least.
It started out bleak and cold, as expected. Early-morning traces in midwinter are rarely bright. Each of the five subjects’ vitals indicated sleepiness and lethargy. Only the youngest had slept for anything like the number of hours recommended for an ordinary day — let alone a long journey.
They emerged from the house before dawn, their blurs of dark clothing highlighted momentarily beneath each working streetlight, each snapshot shape crowned with drizzling rain. The taller of the adults dragged a suitcase in one hand, a child with backpack in the other. The second adult — the one whose vitals had piqued my curiosity the night before — pushed the pram containing the youngest child, while herding the third child down the slippery path.
They arrived at the first of the day’s destinations, a bus stop, ahead of schedule. The adults sat the two backpacked children on the bench, somewhat out of the rain, and angled the pram into the corner of the shelter. I traced them from the dry warmth of my vehicle, noting that the brief pause in their onward journey had no discernible effect on either of the adults’ body battery levels. In fact, they were already decreasing.
Presently, a red bus arrived and I handed over tracing to whoever was already onboard. I watched as the adults entered the bus by the back door, wrangling suitcase, pram and children into the zone reserved for parties such as theirs. The doors of the bus folded inwards with a wet squelch and they were gone.
I thought they’d make it easily but as it turned out I was wrong. Still, in that instant before their vitals disappeared from my console, I couldn’t help wishing it had turned out differently. That they’d managed to catch the connecting bus, then the train, the second train and the ferry.
But my reverie was interrupted by a fresh notification from my device, and my vehicle’s ignition engaging automatically. For a time, we followed the bus’s red cat-eye lights, but then the vehicle peeled off at a t-junction of its own accord, and I lost sight of them for good.
As a long-term fan of Davey Dreamnation and his ouevre, I accepted the task of writing his authorised biography both willingly and eagerly.
However, the fact that the troubled star has not been seen for several years—and is, in fact, presumed dead—has made my ostensible task that much harder.
How do you write the authorised biography of a person who does not seem to exist?
Dreamnation allegedly disappeared in 2011. He did so right after changing his name to Davves and issuing what would have been his swan-song 7″ single, had he not in fact issued (and then deleted) his actual swan-song, the magnificently barmy The Silence of Untold Sound, in 2010.
Ever since this confusing chain of events, doubts have been cast both on Dreamnation’s masculinity (the 3-second vocal track on the aforementioned Davves single, ‘Pre-Soak’, was clearly recorded under the influence of helium) and his musical abilities (the b-side, ‘Detailed Image Package’ contains no sounds whatsoever, let alone musical notes).
Clearly, as the catalogue entry for ‘Pre-Soak’ makes clear, Dreamnation was under a great deal of mental and physical stress at the time of his disappearance.
In fact, given the extremely poor quality of the whole Davves project, it should not surprise us in the least that he should have chosen to retreat from public life in such a mysterious manner.
The
last known photograph of Davey Dreamnation, who went by the pseudonym
Davves in the months leading up to his mysterious disappearance in 2011.
If, indeed, Dreamnation did choose to disappear.
And there’s the rub: as a music writer and biographer, I am often placed in exquisitely awkward positions.
To take but one example, during my research for this project I submitted myself to an interview with one of Dreamnation’s artistic accomplices, the alarmingly hirsute Clint Bo Dean.
On entering Bo Dean’s Tribesco lair, I immediately regretted my decision, particularly as he used the occasion of the interview to spruik his personal brand of toiletries, a kind of ‘Panache, by Lentheric’ for men, with a side line in talc.
The awkwardness of this situation should be obvious: having consented to having my own name associated with an ill-fated line of cologne for funerals, my mere presence during the interview itself amounted to some sort of conflict of interest (at the very least, with myself).
However, the jitch I found myself in was also intensely exquisite because by allowing Bo Dean to spray my face with his abominable scent, I came a little closer to understanding the reason why Dreamnation ever consented to associate himself with Bo Dean in the first place—and therefore, to a clearer image of my subject.
Just one of the literally millions of photographs of Clint Bo Dean circulating freely on the Internet.
As
I left the interview, my body caked in Bo Dean’s unspeakable odour, and
my ears ringing to the unmistakable strains of Bo Dean’s own swan song
single, ‘Clint Bo Dean is Really Cool’, it dawned on me that, in order
to capture the spirit of Davey Dreamnation, all I needed to do was carry
out a process of triangulation, or perhaps dodecahedration.
Over the following weeks and months, therefore, I sat down and
subjected all of Davey’s living pals and record label artists to some of
the most gruelling interviews I have ever conducted. While the results
are certainly not pretty, they do glancingly attest to the complexity of
Davey Dreamnation’s character, and of his chain of friends and
influences.
In the following posts some of these friends and influences—including
Clint Bo Dean, Stung, Eyna, Christy Burr, Mead, Scaramouche and Captain
Sans Tenille—will be given an opportunity to speak, in their own words,
about the impact of Davey Dreamnation, and DNRC Records, on their own
lives.
I think their words will speak for themselves. Hopefully, however,
they’ll also speak Davey Dreamnation back into existence, however
fleetingly.
Such is the bittersweet curse of the posthumous biographer.
When I was first approached to write the definitive biography of Davey Dreamnation—an invitation I was, obviously, more than happy to accept—I was given to understand that I would have unfettered access to Dreamnation’s personal archives, including his astonishing collection of unreleased songs; his musings in writing on the parlous state of the music industry; and his unparalleled collection of Cats memorabilia.
All of these priceless items were indeed supplied to me the day after I signed the publishing contract. The unreleased songs were furnished on a huge number of 30-minute cassette tapes without labels; the various attempts at memoir arrived in the mail printed on a pile of Post-It notes; and the wigs, costumes and beer coasters from the set of Cats had been bundled into a large van which was, conveniently, parked outside my Tribesco home.
In short: all well and good.
However, I was not told that a fourth set of objects—if, indeed, we can call them that—would be provided for my perusal: namely, a grand total of 101 audio recordings (including 7-inch singles, extended-play and long-play albums, and picture discs) released and then deleted by Dreamnation’s fabled record label, which he pompously, if also ridiculously, christened Davey’s New Record Company Records (or DNRC Records for short).
The earliest known photograph of Davey Dreamnation, taken in 1999—two years before he was born.
Indeed, even had I been told that these records, which turned up unannounced on my front doorstep, were products of a long-term yet secret endeavour to revolutionise the music business, I would have responded with disbelief.
To say that the existence of DNRC Records is a rumour that has flitted through the music industry like a curious butterfly in the months and years since Dreamnation’s disappearance would be an overstatement. Not many of Dreamnation’s fans were even aware of its existence during the all-too-brief period between his astonishing rise and inevitable fall—a fact that perhaps says more about Dreamnation’s popularity than these fans’ actual knowledge of his life and works.
Nevertheless, there had been whisperings. As one of the most passionate defenders of Dreamnation’s musical ouevre on the public stage, I had of course heard most of them. There were rumours that there was one complete DNRC Records catalogue still in existence; that the recordings themselves had been launched into space and were freely available on the International Space Station; and that the incidental music in Cats, when played backwards, was in fact a medley of some of the more brilliant DNRC Records tracks.
A rare photograph from an early Davey Dreamnation live warehouse performance in Tribesco, Australia, circa 2001.
Being a seasoned music journalist, I took a non-committal stance on such idle gossip while secretly hoping that, one day, the mystery of the recordings themselves would be solved.
Now, I am happy to state that, after months of laborious investigations, many hours wasted listening to and repairing cassette tapes, and comprehensive interviews with some of the key players in Davey Dreamnation’s life—including Christy Burr, Clint Bo Dean, Mead, Moss, Pixel Mouse, Scaramouche and Stung—I have finally managed to piece together a definitive catalogue of all extant DNRC Records releases. This despite the fact that all said releases were supposedly deleted the instant they were first issued, and despite the supposed non-existence of both the label and its roster of artists.
Cynics might presume that what follows is a barely-factual account of my own fantasy DNRC Records, to which I reply: not so.
Those who know me well will vouch for my extreme professionalism, good taste and mental aptitude. I am no charlatan, no pretender. Let Dreamnation’s enemies seethe in anger at the collective brilliance of DNRC Records that shall soon be unleashed on the listening public in the form of a blistering volume of raw power entitled The Rise and Fall of DNRC Records.
