In Memoriam, Sandy Robertson. Rock journalist and fervent Wilson supporter who died this month. 

Back in the early Eighties my teenage self was an avid reader of Sounds, one of the UK’s weekly music papers. More than anything I liked it because it aligned with the eclecticism of my own developing music tastes – they were as happy reviewing Motörhead as they were Zoviet France – but another fascination buried in its pages was the occasional nod to something rather more profound. 

A few years before, the NME had infamously lost a portion of it’s circulation by applying semiotics and deconstruction to its analysis of that week’s indie trend [1]. Sounds was rather more honest about it’s literary interests: Lovecraftian horror and cryptic but knowledgeable allusions to those literary precursors of pre-rock excess, William Burroughs and Aleister Crowley. Both had of course appeared in the Sgt. Pepper crowd collage in 1967, but a decade later they were begining to find a new set of devotees in the burgeoning punk and industrial music scenes. 

Glaswegians Alex Fergusson and Sandy Robertson came to London right at this moment. Apparently one of the first things they did was to go to a Colin Wilson lecture; afterwards the man himself showed them how to dowse with a pendulum while Nic Roeg skulked around in the background! Alex became the guitarist of experimental punks Alternative TV – look closely at the pic sleeve of their first 7″, there’s a Colin Wilson book placed under the telly – and Sandy brought identical obsessions (Wilson, Crowley, Burroughs, Kim Fowley!) from his fanzine White Stuff to Sounds. Stylistically somewhere between his role model Nick Kent and ‘hip young gunslingers’ like Jon Savage, Sandy offered rock info with added intellect and literary references, designed to illuminate or possibly corrupt adolescent minds. 

I was far too young to be taking all this detail in yet, but Sandy was still writing for Sounds until the mid-Eighties. Alas, I just missed his three page interview with Wilson in early 1983 (this was later included in my book The Lurker at the Indifference Threshold, with his permission). But he referenced Wilson often: in a review of the reissued masterpiece Forever Changes, in a chart of ‘misunderstood geniuses’, in a piece on Lovecraft and Mythos spin-offs, in an essay about the Manson/rock connection, in an aside using Shaw’s description of music as the ‘brandy of the damned’…it was all there in the ink stained pages of Sounds, amongst the cheap looking ads for the latest noisy platter from Discharge or GBH. 

Soon enough I began to read some of these writers – I found Burroughs and Crowley impenetrable at first, but I got Wilson immediately. Later in the decade I bought Sandy’s amusing Crowley Scrapbook (with an introduction by Wilson) and would see his name alongside Wilson and Burroughs in the likes of Rapid Eye, Simon Dwyer’s ’90’s ‘occulture’ periodical. I’d spot him in the audience of Throbbing Gristle’s grainy Heathen Earth VHS. I’d hear his voice talking to Genesis P-Orridge on a grotty sounding Alternative TV audience recording (“I managed to mention Colin Wilson”!). I’d see him recommending Wilson books in the zeroxed back pages of the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue when it was collected in book form in 2000 (punk was ‘cultural history’ by then).  Occasionally I’d see a letter from him in Mojo magazine and I’d wonder what he was doing these days…

Turns out, he was a dog walker for Michael Gambon! 

The internet made people easier to contact. Sandy was delighted that his writing had led to my interest in such things. In person, he was as friendly as he was knowledgeable – and he was very knowledgeable indeed. The messages and chats we had over the past decade and a half were what friendship is all about. 

Inevitably, he had some fantastic stories to tell. From Jagger to Zappa to Malcolm McLaren, Throbbing Gristle and Wild Man Fischer, from Hubert Selby Jnr. to Ken Russell, he interviewed or hung out with many a legend (true to form, Lou Reed was a miserable sod). He discussed Colin Wilson with Blue Öyster Cult svengali Sandy Pearlman and with Mark E. Smith of The Fall (the latter mentioning Ritual In The Dark on the song Deer Park around this time). On one hand he took the piss out of Venom for their non-existent occult credentials (“Chronos changes the subject by trying to look up the waitress’ skirt; after all, it’s what he does best”) yet spoke of the kabbalstic correspondences with renaissance muso Bill Nelson and discussed Kenneth Grant’s Nightside of Eden with David Tibet of Current 93. It was all great fun. 

As a kind of homage – truth be told I just wanted something with the word ‘phenomenology’ in it – I stole the title of Sandy’s 1981 book on Meat Loaf for this site (again, he was delighted). A Meat Loaf obsessed schoolfriend had shown me Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman and the Phenomenology of Excess back then but the references in it to Wilson’s The New Existentialism – there’s quite a few – went several miles over my head. Truth be told, if they registered at all they must have been totally subliminal. 

Flash forward some years to the end of the Eighties and I borrowed The New Existentialism from the library. I loved it. Now it’s my favourite Wilson book of them all – it changed my perception in a very profound way, just as the originator of the phenomenological method, Edmund Husserl – the driving force of Wilson’s book – would have wanted. 

None of this would have happened if Sandy Robertson hadn’t told me where to look in the first place. Like Wilson himself, I was so pleased to have told him this in person. I’ll miss him. I miss them both. 

Note: 

[1] Notably, Paul Morley and Ian Penman were the main post structuralist culprits at the NME. The latter has become a genuinely readable sage; the former, a nice chap, obviously (he’s great on telly). But his writing continues to stretch my credulity. It was over for me when he described someone – I can’t remember who, exactly – “as miserable as Colin Wilson” (!)