Shaun Hand is an author, musician and DJ based in the Black Country. He's stuck with us all week and today Shaun Hand Week continues with the return of another popular recurring feature from Outsideleft past, a Bunch of Five. Five things that really mean the most to our guest. Over to Shaun...
YOUTUBE
One of the greatest inventions ever: anyone can share their resources, however niche. Music, bootlegs, interviews, documentaries, films, old episodes, lectures, tutorials, audiobooks, local history stuff, random home videos. It’s all there. It’s such a wonderful depository of information and entertainment that it makes all the “reacts to” and “[Political person you like] LITERALLY DESTROYS [Political person you don’t like]!!!!” bullshit worth it.
PUBLIC LIBRARIES
I fucking love libraries. Again, they’re such incredible places of discovery. I always say that Sutton Library was my real school—that’s how I got into all kinds of music and literature and taught myself guitar, piano and basic harmony. I wrote a piece about it earlier this year for my website (here).
It was a beautiful moment when I first took my daughter to our local library and she got her own card and a load of books. She was only two or three and her face lit up. I still take her every few weeks and the staff always make a fuss of her. The whole Brum library-closing saga has made me kind of glad I don’t live there anymore; there are loads of libraries in Wolves, although I suspect the council are going to try closing a load of them in the next year or so.
1977-1982
I devour music from all eras, but the period from 1977 to 1982 is my favourite (with the 1960s a close second). It was the period that The Jam were releasing records, but so many other great bands and styles were happening during that time too. You had punk, post-punk, new wave, all the different reggae subgenres, disco, 2 Tone, early hip-hop, futurist synth-pop, jazz-funk, New Romantic, what-we-now-call-yacht rock, Motown and soul sounding fresh and funky again after a slushy period… It all seemed to be happening, and all on vinyl and cassette and in great-looking fanzines.
1982 was definitely a watershed year. You hit 1983 and everything changes again: synths complete their takeover, The Smiths, Thriller and Let’s Dance arrive, and suddenly loads of music videos include a smug sax player in a sharkskin suit.
BOARDS OF CANADA
If you listen to five seconds of Boards of Canada and five seconds of Birmingham Music Library, you can see what's going on, but what’s a man to do? Their music means so much to me—‘5.9.78’ is possibly my all-time favourite piece of music—and I hope they do another album at some point.
I first heard them (thanks to Sutton Library) in spring 2003. I saw Geogaddi and liked the sleeve and song titles, so I took it home and ended up listening to it that night on headphones in the dark, assuming it would be nice music to drift off to. Instead, I lay there and listened to the whole thing (it’s 66 minutes long), mesmerised. It seriously changed my life; it was like hearing someone play back my own mind. This sounds very pretentious but it’s true: it affected me so deeply that I didn’t listen to it again for about six months; I felt it had done its job and hearing it again would dilute it. But then I got over myself and listened to it almost every night for a year.
RESILIENCE
This is a bit of a cliché, but if you’re trying to get any kind of reputation as a creative, be it in music, literature, poetry, art, theatre, whatever, then you’ve got to get used to three things: rejection, indifference and being ignored, often by people you know because, basically, your friends and family most likely aren’t your audience. That’s not their fault or yours; it’s just how it is, but you can’t let it stop you.
One telling moment for me was when the second FABRIK album came out. We’d spent three years on it, recorded in France, got it crowdfunded onto vinyl, all sorts. The week it was released, I posted about it on my Instagram and, around the same time, posted a picture of some potatoes I’d grown in my garden. Guess which post got more engagement? But at the same time, there are people in America I’ll never meet who say that our tune ‘Black Lake’ is one of their all-time favourite songs—and odd as it may sound, praise from strangers on the internet can be more genuine than your Auntie Sue going, “That’s nice, dear.”
Essential Info
It's Shaun Hand Week in Outsideleft
1. It's a Week of Shaun Hand in Outsideleft - Writer, musician and DJ, Shaun Hand takes us all the way to 2025
2. Notes on the Twilight World of Birmingham Music Library
3. The Happy Shopper
4. A Bunch of Five
5. Three Big Questions For Shaun Hand
6. Teethgraters... Five records Shaun would go to the Ends of the Earth to Never Hear Again