THE GATE IS OPEN (by STUART HUGGETT)

Thanks to Stuart Huggett, regular GANTOB contributor, for this thoughtful and literary journey along the Sussex coast. A personalised copy of this piece, in a trifold pamphlet, will be winging its way to Stuart along with his copy of the new book GANTOB’s 2023: A trilogy, the latter as payment for his GANTOB blogs last year. Find out more about progress on that front on X and Instagram.

You can submit your own pamphlet for consideration following the instructions below, or by visiting the 52 Pamphlets page. Contributors will receive a copy of the book 52 Pamphlets , publication date January 2025.

But before that, please read or listen to Stuart’s new piece.

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Listen to this pamphlet:

Enlightenment can occur at any time and in any place. For me, the time was less than a week into 2024 and the place was Butlin’s holiday camp.

GANTOB’s call for 52 Pamphlet submissions had been made on Thursday 4^th January, while I was getting packed ahead of a weekend at Butlin’s in Bognor Regis for Rockaway Beach festival. We’ve been to every edition of Rockaway Beach since it began in 2015 and there’s little on the surface to connect it to the worlds of either GANTOB or The KLF/Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu.

With thoughts of submitting a pamphlet in my head, the only KLF connections I could come up with at first were that Echo & The Bunnymen had played the festival twice and The Fall had appeared once. This year’s line-up included Skids, whose leader Richard Jobson does appear in Chris Atkins’ 2021 film ‘Who Killed The KLF?’ None of these connections felt particularly strong though.

A couple of things I did know about that immediate stretch of the Sussex coast, however, was the presence of two key figures in British and Irish literature. A 15 minute walk to the east of Butlin’s brings you to Felpham, where the thatched cottage that William Blake and his wife Catherine resided in from 1800 to 1803 can still be found. Blake began writing his epic poem ‘Milton’ in Felpham, the preface to which is best known in its musical form as Sir Hubert Parry’s hymn ‘Jerusalem’.

A few streets west of Butlin’s, in Bognor Regis itself, lies Clarence Road, where James Joyce stayed in 1923. A blue plaque informs us that Joyce wrote some of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ while visiting here. Draw a line between Blake in the east and Joyce in the west and your path passes right through the holiday camp.

While I was hoping to describe Joyce or Blake as pioneering pamphleteers to bring them into the GANTOB project, the facts of their publishing histories don’t really fit the conceit. Still, we were spending three days eating, drinking, dancing and sleeping on a Blake/Joyce literary ley line, so something might find us, and in his 2021 book ‘William Blake Vs The World’, KLF admirer John Higgs does point out that Blake “was a one-person publishing industry, writing, designing, printing and colouring illustrated works of his own devising. Although he was still in the Georgian era, Blake was practising the ‘do it yourself’ ethos of punk rock.”

One of our party arrived on Friday having brought along the 2006 Tate Publishing facsimile of Blake’s ‘Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience’, remembering our first exploration of Felpham the previous year. Reproduced from the 1992 Folio Society edition, Richard Holmes’ introductory essay quotes from Blake writing about his initial arrival in the village:

“Work will go on here with God speed. A roller & two harrows lie before my window. I met a plow on my first going out at my gate the first morning of my arrival, & the Plowboy said to the Plowman, ‘Father, the gate is open.’”

In his 1995 biography ‘Blake’, Peter Ackroyd writes that, “For Blake this was an emblem of his new life, and of the work that he was about to begin.” If this encounter was symbolically important to Blake, it could also be important to us.

Some downtime on the Saturday led me to explore nearby Hotham Park, with its miniature railway, nature garden, café and private residence, Hotham Park House. A William Blake Trail information board at the park’s southern entrance repeats the story of Blake interpreting the farm boy’s call as a symbolic sign. I’d not been looking for Blake in the park but here he was with the same tale told. I still wasn’t feeling very visionary myself but I banked the memory.

Fittingly for a weekend spent midway between the former lodgings of William Blake and James Joyce, half our chalet party were English and half were Irish. Blake’s presence was starting to loom larger than Joyce’s as the weekend progressed but I bore in mind an argument put forward in Jeremy J. Beadle’s 1993 book on sampling technology and musical post-modernism ‘Will Pop Eat Itself?’ where he suggested that “the literary echoes consciously summed up in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, its use of sound collage, were all discrete sounds fed through the digital sampler of Joyce’s imagination to produce art of a (supposedly) coherent narrative.” It’s worth noting that Beadle’s book analyses The KLF at great length.

Sunday brought us to a lunch booking at Felpham’s Fox Inn, an 18^th century pub across the street from Blake’s cottage. While the property has inevitably changed over time, not least being damaged in 1946 and rebuilt three years’ later, a blue plaque in its doorway marks the spot where Blake was arrested for sedition in 1803, having thrown a soldier billeted at the inn, one Private John Schofield, out of his cottage’s garden in a fit of anger.

Over the course of a couple of hours in the pub, my companions having a Sunday roast while I opted for game stew, the magic of the Blake connections worked their way back through my memories, dredging up forgotten facts while my conscious mind was still rattling through conversations about the FA Cup Third Round.

It was only as we left the Fox, stepping back out through a doorway still vibrating with the energy of Blake’s arrest, that the recurring phrase finally clicked into focus. “THE GATE IS OPEN” is a message on the label of the 12” release of ‘What Time Is Love? (Live At Trancentral)’, the version that began The KLF’s run of Top 10 singles over the next couple of years.

I had to Google it to make sure but there it is, down at the bottom of the label, in the Other Data slot used, on other KLF releases, to quote from their lyrics (“OVER AND OUT”, “THE K. THE L. THE F. & THE OLOGY”), add missing credits (“MC BELLO APPEARS COURTESY OF GEE ST. RECORDS”) or just to play with the record buyer’s expectations (“PROBABLY THE MOST NAUSEATING RECORD IN THE WORLD”).

One Discogs user reckons that ‘THE GATE IS OPEN’ is “a reference to The KLF’s announced but naturally unreleased acid-house album ‘The Gate’ which they intended to record in 1990 but scrapped in favour of filming their one-hour feature ‘Waiting’ on the Isle Of Jura.” The KLF’s own press release ‘WAITING: KLF BIOG 010’  states that “The KLF’s original plan on visiting Jura was to take their mobile studio ‘Trancentral’ and record an album entitled ‘Gate’.  It was to be a minimalist techno record, but the power of the land, sea and sky scapes of Jura and the almost dream-like quality of the light put an end to any thoughts of making music more suited to inner city night life.” Blake would recognise such a description of Jura in his own early perceptions of Felpham.

What if ‘THE GATE IS OPEN’ IS a deliberate reference to Blake though? After all, The KLF have drawn on Blake’s work at other times. The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu’s ‘It’s Grim Up North’ climaxes with an instrumental rendition of ‘Jerusalem’, the Sir Hubert Parry hymn based on the preface to ‘Milton’ that Blake began in Felpham. ‘Jerusalem’ fits perfectly as the whole track is a celebration of the north of England. Remember too, the visual quote from The Fall (who themselves had previously covered ‘Jerusalem’) at the end of the video, ‘THE NORTH WILL RISE AGAIN’.

Elsewhere, Blake informs The KLF’s work more subtly. Some of the sampled crowd noise on their Top 10 album ‘The White Room’ comes from The Doors’ album ‘Absolutely Live’. The Doors took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book of psychedelic experiments ‘The Doors Of Perception’, itself a quote from Blake’s ‘The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell’. William Blake breaks on through.

Referencing H. G. Wells’ unnerving 1906 short story ‘The Door In The Wall’, GANTOB has occasionally written about Green Doors (as in her pamphlet ‘Paint Them Black’). In her telling, these are doors, literal or metaphorical, which appear occasionally in our lives, the passing through, or not, of which are branch points at significant moments in life. It may be notable that The KLF’s quoting of Blake on the 12” label of ‘What Time Is Love? (Live At Trancentral)’ occurs at the start of a significant shift in their artistic practice.

Prior to this single, The KLF’s work, and their previous activities as The JAMs and The Timelords, can be seen as playful, entertaining and innovative, certainly in their post-modern, post-Joyce, cut and paste music. They are not yet transcendent though.

‘What Time Is Love? (Live At Trancentral)’, however, marks the point at which The KLF not only became hugely commercially successful but also visionary in a much wider sense. From here on in, their big budget videos, outlandish ‘Top Of The Pops’ appearances, wild collaborations and mock pagan rituals all fired the imaginations of the global public, for years to come.

Consciously or not, Blake had been invoked by The KLF. His eternal, imaginative spirit entered their work and the course of their lives and popular culture was changed as a result.

The gate was opened. The world followed them through.

STUART HUGGETT, 20 January 2024

PAMPHLET 03 (2024)

Notes

The original source of Blake’s “The gate is open” quote is ‘The Letters Of William Blake’, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1980).

Thanks to Carolyn Bristow, Laura McQuaid, Noeleen Murray and Laura Tyrell for exploring the Blake/Joyce literary ley line with me.

Want to contribute a blog? Pamphlets should be between 800 and 1600 words, ideally an exact multiple of 400. Submissions to 100percentvinyl2@gmail.com should be made as soon as possible (first come, first served, unless something more suitable comes along), and no later than 27 December 2024. Suggestions for developing ideas or other modifications to the submitted pamphlet may be made by the GANTOB Pamphlet Committee.

Follow progress via @gantob2023 on X and Instagram. Good luck!