Pete Astor has been a staple of the British indie scene since the early ’80s, fronting a diverse number of outfits including the Loft, the Weather Prophets, the Wisdom Of Harry and Ellis Island Sound. He launched a solo career in 1990, as well, and is also a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster. Astor’s latest release is One For The Ghost (Tapete). He’ll be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week, writing about the origins of these songs and how they relate to the LP’s theme of past and future, complete with illustrations he created with Susanne Ballhausen.
Astor: As a teacher/ lecturer in music, I’m always looking at ways to make work. I should also be clear that when I say I teach music, it doesn’t mean anything technical—I know a G from an Am, but that’s as far as that stuff goes. What I’m interested in is creativity, making good things: creative practice to give it its official name. Basically, the kind of thing they taught/teach in art schools which allowed Pete Townsend to see Gustav Metzger lecture at Ealing College and map his auto-destructive ideas onto what the Who did.
Not nearly as grand or messy, I love finding good writing spurs for coming up with words; New York poet Bernadette Meyer has some really good ones, Kenneth Koch has a brilliant book, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?.
Closer to home, I’m a big fan of poet Paul Farley, and he had this thing where he said when writing about something you should make two columns, then in one column, you should say things about the event that are factual; in the opposite, you should put fantastical, absurd or plain untrue things in contrast to each fact. This is how this song started; sometimes it’s impossible to write about something head on—the light’s too bright—but coming at it sideways like this unlocked something for me. About four years after that initial splurge and many hours of play, this came out.
Some endings:
