"Nipper's Everywhere Now..." - 'His Master's Voice' with Rickerly for Sleeve Notes
- David Hartley
- Jun 17
- 5 min read
They called him Nipper because he nipped at the heels of all who entered. The little nibble at the ankles, houndstooth at the Achilles. The wet nose, the slobber, the tongue. What was he trying to say? What was his message?
It took a while for myself and brother Rickerly to come up with a decent idea for our 'Record Store Day' commission for Sleeve Notes. This very special endeavour was conceived by the always wondrous David Gaffney and Adrian Slatcher who paired up various writers with various musicians and charged us all to create 5-minute masterpieces on the theme of 'Records'. We were to record our pieces, and then perform them at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Record Store Day itself. For a while, Rick and I tossed around a vague idea about how you can sometimes hear ghostly or demonic phrases in records played backwards (as explored in the Mogwai track 'Repelish', or, perhaps more excitingly, in Missy Elliot's 'Work It'). I tried to fuse the idea with some of my thinking around neurodiversity and sputtered out a wonky story about ghostly voices heard backwards on vinyl recordings in a psychiatric hospital. We put together a rough draft, let it rest for a while, and came back to it wholly uninspired. So, we did the bravest thing we could do: ditch it, and shoot for something else.
Rick sent me a track he'd been working on and I put it on a loop for a while. In some of the sounds I could hear a sort of distorted dog bark so I found myself falling back onto safer creative ground; animals and their mythologies. In an instant, Nipper the dog from the 'His Master's Voice' painting appeared in my head, shining and angelic. Ah, there we go, I thought. An enigmatic and slightly weird image that became the first icon of the vinyl record world, quite literally at the centre of it all. Even just a cursory read about the pup on Wikipedia garnered a wealth of material. Here was this little terrier who used to 'nip at the heels of all who entered' and became one of the most globally recognised brand images of all time. He's been reproduced more times than any other dog excluding cartoon hounds, and there is a four ton statue of him in a roof in New York City. 'Nipper's everywhere now' came through to me as a rhythmic and repeatable phrase, and that led to slightly Lovecraftian thoughts of a deeper and more ancient canine force, a sort of mythic wolf lineage playing some sort of mysterious long game with humanity. The curious gaze into the gramophone funnel was no longer so cute; instead, it was a concerning glimpse of dogs as watchers, absorbing everything we say while they bide their time, waiting for the moment to strike. Nipper's everywhere now...
Rick's music had this brilliantly driven repetition to it. It felt circular and whirling, close in tone to the Tomorrow's Harvest era of Boards of Canada, particularly 'Palace Posy' (which, fun fact, is an anagram of 'apocalypse'). It also has a long introduction which I found to be oddly quite freeing. I decided to let it play and build without any intrusion of my voice, thereby truncating my already limited time even further - I only speak for around 3.5 minutes of the allotted 5. It meant that I knew from the off that I had to be ultra short with this piece, which was right in my wheelhouse as someone who has cut their writing teeth on flash fiction. It therefore had to be tight, constricted, and ambiguous, and the resulting piece ended up more like a tone poem than a story (although I always insist that everything I write is a story and never a poem, no matter what it becomes).
Curiously, this long intro also helped to shape the core element of our performance. Being theatrical lads we always knew we wanted to put together a bit of a stage show, and we had already agreed that Rick would appear in his spectral guise with his multi-mask head. We discussed whether I should be masked too but I've always liked the audience being able to see my face, as I can do a lot with it to manipulate and control their moods. Instead, I used the long build-up time to paint a dog onto my face; a simple black patch over the eye, a black nose, whiskers, and dots on the top lip. After a few practices, we had the timings nailed and the show itself went marvellously well. We ended things with me in the famous Nipper pose, and then scurrying off the stage after Rickerly's click of his fingers. It was a total joy to be able to do all this in front of a sold out audience at the Anthony Burgess Foundation.
The rest of the night was also a roaring triumph. We were one of ten pairings, and all of us took to that stage during the event. It was quite the logistical feat as the other instruments included guitars, a cello, a double bass, a moog synth, and Burgess's grand piano which was beautifully played by John Foxx of Ultravox in collaboration with Nicholas Royle. The other stories took us to ethereal record shops, nostalgic brief encounters, the edges of space via the Voyager Golden Record, and the melodious life of a musicology student, with shared themes of music-as-memory, the fleeting nature of life, and the depths of time and experience. All in all, it was a fascinating project. As writers we had to skirt the edges of lyricism by creating stories and poetry that danced with the music but didn't fully wed to it. The music helped us rediscover the rhythm and melody of the written word, as well as the writerly value of musical elements such as repetition, pauses, crescendos, and tonal shifts. Perhaps the musicians would say something similar in reverse; that they had to hear the breakages and strains of written word, the restrictions and liberties of language made into narrative, and react accordingly. Further proof, if it were needed, that cross-discipline collaboration should be a fundamental part of all creative life, that we get too stagnant if we stay in our familiar pools.
The whole of Sleeve Notes: New Writing and Music to Celebrate Record Store Day is available to listen to on Bandcamp, and there are limited edition cassette tapes to purchase too. Huge thanks to David & Adrian for making this happen, and, as ever, great awe and admiration to my first and greatest creative partner Rick. I'll always be with him... until the howl, the final howwwwwllllll....
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