By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2024-10-29 21:41:40 | Updated at 2024-10-30 15:16:26
2 weeks ago
Richard Norris’s new memoir, Strange Things Are Happening, takes its title from an obscure 1960s psychedelic pop song by the short-lived Canadian band Rings & Things, which was reissued by Bam-Caruso, a label Norris worked for early in his musical career. This kind of excavation of fragments of the psychedelic past, bringing them into conversation with later eras and other influences, marks much of Norris’s work. “Throughout all of my time as a musician and producer,” he writes, “I’ve been focused on developing a single idea: blending psychedelic sounds and effects with rhythm.”
Starting his first band at the age of fourteen in 1980, Norris found himself a bit too late for punk, much too late for the original psychedelia – and just in time for acid house. His career took off with the release of the pioneering London acid-house album Jack the Tab (1988), followed by chart success in the 1990s with the Grid, an electronic dance act. Norris’s memoir takes the reader on an exuberant trip through the happenings of his prodigious career, from a customs mishap involving mystical items sent to him by Sun Ra, via an awkward encounter with Bo Diddley in a New York lift, to a music recommendation received from the ghost of Joe Strummer. Norris has a talent for sharp physical descriptions and pithy turns of phrase, and he conjures up long-ago experiences in impressive detail. His portrayal of the “strange charm”, “trickster mood[s]” and “shamanic fan club” of his musical collaborator Genesis P-Orridge is particularly memorable.
Despite the psychedelic subject matter, Norris wisely refrains from navel-gazing accounts of his own hallucinogenic experiences, instead weaving a subtler sense of the lysergic – a word that appears frequently – into tales of music, relationships and spirituality. The book opens on a scene of Norris as a four-year-old child, transfixed by a rainbow; when he claims near the end that he has now reached its pot of gold, this doesn’t ring true. It feels more as if he is still inside the rainbow, pursuing “uncharted euphoric shapes” with the joyous DIY spirit that runs through all his projects, from his fanzines of the 1980s to his recent ambient compositions. More convincing is the book’s concluding praise to the transformative power of creativity: above all, Strange Things Are Happening is a paean to the magic yielded by continual curiosity.
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