Issue 60 / October 2015

14
Bido Lito! October 2015
There
are few places
more potent than a pub on a
weekday afternoon. I don’t mean
your local Wetherspoon’s, with its filter coffee
and discount curries and aroma of unbranded
disinfectant. I mean those pubs that you
glimpse from the corner of your eye – that exist
just beyond daylight, round corners, down
alleys. Despite three decades of stuttering
regeneration, a few of them still exist in this
city and, when you find one, you might just
overhear whispers of projects and plans that
are certain, no messin’, to change the world.
Take STUPLEX for instance. Conceived in The
Roscoe Head a couple of years ago, Stuplex
is the product of an afternoon booze-fuelled
pub chat that didn’t just fade on the stale
breeze, but remained rattling round in its
progenitors’ minds until they couldn’t help but
do something about it. Those progenitors were
the writer and artist A.E. Pearsall and Liverpool
music legend Paul Simpson, and though
Stuplex began as little more than an intriguing
title and a collection of shared ideas, it wasn’t
long before it became one more fascinating
artistic product to emerge from Liverpool’s
postmeridian pub world.
All of which might help you understand its
context, but it won’t tell you what it actually
is. So let’s attempt a description. Stuplex is
a publication, but one that can take many
forms. It features writers, artists, musicians
and more who all help put it together by hand
– stitching booklets, burning CDs, making
prints – before everything is combined in a
sealed box and published in a limited edition.
You can buy copies of Stuplex online – or from
the occasional art market or print fair – but once
they’re gone, they’re gone. Stuplex 001 sold
out long ago, but you may find a copy of 002
on their website if you’re quick.
Each edition of Stuplex has a theme, with
contributors free to take the idea where they
want. Stuplex 001, built round the concept of
‘decay’, featured stories, poetry, prints, a CD
and a magic spell. The second edition, themed
around ‘decadence’, was bigger, a little more
lavish, and included photographs, envelopes,
and a gleaming golden cassette. I was so taken
by the idea myself that I’ve now become a
Words: Damon Fairclough / noiseheatpower.com
Enter the
Enigmatic World of
regular
Stuplex
contributor,
submitting short
stories to both of the first
two editions.
For the writer Jeff Young, whose work often
explores the mildewed corners of memory,
Stuplex is a natural repository for his words.
“As someone who collects limited edition value. For
small press books and pamphlets – and as a
great admirer of Joseph Cornell’s box art – I had
the feeling that Stuplex would be something
I’d buy if I saw it in a bookshop,” says Young.
“That was enough for me to want to be part
of it.”
Young inadvertently helped conjure Stuplex
into existence when he introduced the cofounders
to each other back in 2013. “Paul
Simpson, of Wild Swans repute, and I meet
once a week for a catch-up and a glass of
wine,” Young continues. “I introduced him to
writer and artist A.E. Pearsall, who had been
a student of mine on the Writing MA at JMU,
and, when they hatched a plan for a series of
limited edition boxes, I was invited to write a
piece for the first one.”
That piece was 23 Proposals For Decay Magic,
a curious incantation designed to “encourage a
state of decay” according to Young. His second
Stuplex contribution was 23 First Lines of
Decadent Novels I Will Never Write, at which
point it becomes clear that Young has an
apparent fixation with the number 23 – and
knowing a little of the way his mind works, I
somehow doubt that it’s simply his favourite
National Lottery ball.
In fact, Young’s reference point is the 23
enigma, a phenomenon that a number of
writers and artists have cited over the years,
from William Burroughs to Psychic TV to Bill
Drummond. Put simply, it refers to the belief,
or at least the observation, that many curious
events, both significant and obscure, are
connected to this innocent-looking arithmetical
Jeff Young, it is
a conceptual nugget
to nibble at rather than
swallow whole, but, nevertheless,
it has still proved an enduring idea.
“I first came across it in the mid-1970s
from various places – Ken Campbell’s Science
Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, which would have
led me to Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus!
Trilogy, which I would have picked up in the
original Atticus bookshop on Clarence Street,
and about the same time I’d have been buying
William Burroughs paperbacks. I liked the idea
that these worlds were overlapping and it
all coloured my sense that Liverpool had an
occult, counter-cultural aspect to it. I didn’t
actually believe in the power of the number
23 but I liked the idea of it.”
It may be no surprise then that the third
iteration of Stuplex won’t be a multi-author
extravaganza like the first two, but will be the
publication of Jeff Young’s 23 Enigma Vortex
Sutra in a limited edition of 230. The work is a
journey through 23 verses describing incidents
and events, both real and half-imagined, in
which that fate-bothering number seems to cast
a mysterious, unsettling spell. Half the copies
will consist of the text in pamphlet form, while
the other half will also come with a CD of the
piece recorded at the Everyman Theatre last
October. Read by Young and the actor Penny
Layden, the recording also features live music
by Liverpool-based composer Martin Heslop.
“23 Enigma Vortex Sutra was first
commissioned by the Everyman for an event
called Radical City,” says Young. “When my play
Bright Phoenix was on at the Everyman last
year, it seemed right to regroup and perform 23
Enigma again. We performed it at 23 minutes
past 23 hundred hours on 23 rd October. It has
always been accompanied by music, and it was
always Martin who created it. We have similar
tastes, interests and influences and we’re close
friends too. That closeness provides us with a
mix of instinct, intuition and spontaneity. The
man is wondrous.”
According to Heslop, it was the original 23
Enigma commission that brought him and
Young together. “We realised quite quickly that
artistically we had similar reference points,” he
says. “Since then we’ve worked on all kinds
of things – live art installations, spoken word
and music, and various theatre shows. Jeff’s
themes and imagery, like mine, are submerged
in the city as a dangerous, magical fairground
full of cracks where forgotten spirits roam. He
always finds a way of coaxing them out of
the cracks and giving them back their
lives on the page.”
Just like
Young, Heslop
has also contributed
23
to every manifestation of Stuplex thus far,
though as a poet rather than a musician.
“I love writing music but words are my main
obsession,” Heslop continues. “I see each
piece of work as crossing over into the next
one anyway, whether that’s music, poetry or
prose. You can describe war or the city or the
sea with words or sounds or music, and it’s all
one and the same.”
Young and Heslop are both currently
conjuring phantoms around Liverpool – Heslop
as a composer for Lizzie Nunnery’s play Narvik
at The Playhouse, and Young in a number of
small-scale pieces including a response to
Niamh O’Malley’s Bluecoat exhibition in
October. But keep your third eye open for
Stuplex 003, and dose up on 23 Enigma Vortex
Sutra. Then go out for an afternoon pint and a
chinwag.
Perhaps the 23 Club would be a good place
to start.
Stuplex 003 is out now, and is available to buy –
along with a small number of previous editions
– from stuplex.co.uk.