Flower Factory A Fairy Tale
Book available from here
With words as his weapons and ideas as the incendiary punctuation of the corporate juggernaut, Richard Foster is perhaps the greatest contemporary music writer who you should make the effort to read. His enthusiastic and spirited descriptions of the sound and vision of frontline groups you have never heard of have decorated the online pages of The Quietus and Louder Than War like missives from the culture trenches. His tsunami enthusiasm and brilliant wordplay are the twin godheads of his works of verbal art and signposts to brilliant scenes in culture from the pre-war Russia and the new European undergrounds.
Like the music and culture he immerses himself in, Richard is a Spartan warrior of this nu underground. You may not get instant name recognition because he does not play the poisonous mainstream game where media-ocrity is celebrated and safety is clung onto like the lifeboats being lowered down from the sinking Titanic.
A wild-eyed figure who seems to be from a distant past his broad Lancashire accent – a brawling Lanky Twang and tweedy dress make him seem like his home town Accrington fell walker marching across rich landowners’ fields back in the days of the great trespass and culturally this is perhaps the closest description of him.
Just who this high decibel enigma is revealed in his new book which is both a hallucinogenic autobiography that somehow explains everything whilst also taking an adept Daguerreotype and cultural take on the country that he has called home for twenty years: Holland.
The book could also be an autobiography of these fractious times with the writer cutting loose across the ugly seas of populism and creeping encroaching Orwellian new climes that seek to suffocate the cultures we all hold dear into safe and banal comfort zones. It tells the tale of the younger author moving to Holland, like many contemporaries, thrilled with the new and the vibrant culture and the possibilities of the lowlands. This was a time of culture explosion, squat partiers, wild noise and carefree artful abandon, Holland was a free-thinking dayglo compared to the grey skies of Blighty.
The book is about culture shock, it’s about decade shock and a sense of loss of what we once assumed permanent. It’s the shadows and flickers of pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit Europe, it’s acutely observed outsider visions of Holland – a country so familiar and yet so silently different. It’s a fraught relationship that exposes the host and the outsider. It’s a gimlet Lancashire eye peering at the flatlands and its observations tell you as much about the scribe as the described.
A brilliantly written book full of the love of words and the lexicon of language it’s a Helter Skelter ride into the heart of Holland. This is a wild-eyed embrace of the fervent counter-culture of squat bands and parties, the thriving art and noise scenes that were always entwined with the squat politic and tried to defy the creeping corporate grinding bland. This is a tale of art defiance whether by noisy bands, never-ending parties or brain frazzing ideas or even in the machine gun prose of this magnificent book that is a wild ride into the tulip-coated heartland of an unsuspecting nation…
Richard Foster is still the disrupter, the celebrator of distance and ideas and his words are as ever full of the fire and brimstone of the truly touched by the hand of the godhead of art. This is a book about the passion for music, the lust for life and the embrace of art. It’s about ideas and Action : Time : Vision and is both a biography of a long-lost European ideal, a broken-hearted Britain and the nervous breakdown of culture and the culture wars as well as being about the fascinating and wild mind of the Accrington intellectual – an academic with fire in his veins and a soundtrack of high decibel passion ringing in his ears.
