I didn’t want to use my own name, so i signed the letter Snoopy. When I was sixteen, I wrote a letter to a weekly rock paper called New Musical Express congratulating them on their recent coverage of reggae, which i was fanatical about at the time. I was quite jealous, so I adopted Snoopy as my pseudonym. She was in her sister’s band, had a stage name, and used to sign off her letters to me using it. A few years later, I became penpals with a girl from my old school called Marianne. I immediately fell in love with the Peanuts gang, in particular Charlie Brown’s dog. In 1969, when I was ten, a friend of mine’s sister recommended and lent me a book of American cartoon strips called For the Love of Peanuts. I was born in Islington, London, in April 1959, and moved with my family to the new town of Basildon, in Essex, in 1964. Inspired by Snoopy’s list, I made a compilation of about 81 hours of dub, which you can listen to right here. His memories of late-70s reggae record shops, radio stations, zines and newspapers, and the adventures, fights, and relationships that came along with them, make for one of the best accounts I’ve ever heard of the dub reggae scene, especially the version that migrated from Jamaica to England at the height of King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Dub Specialist, the Revolutionaries, the Aggrovators, Augustus Pablo, Yabby You, Joe Gibbs, Keith Hudson, Sonia Pottinger, 4th Street Orchestra, Lloyd Coxsone, Rupie Edwards, Derrick Harriott, Skin, Flesh & Bones, Tommy McCook, and Duke Reid.
THE 1975 ALBUM COVER TUMBLR SERIES
“My friend told me you were interested in getting in contact with me.” The third reason is that he answered my series of questions about his life, the list, and its beautiful music with the same kind of warmth and expertise that makes his writing so valuable. Second, when I reached out, he was willing to respond to a stranger: “Hi,” he said. First, he made this vivid chronicle of music that’s so under-documented and mysterious, producing the closest thing I know to a kind of Leonard Maltin Guide to the history of dub. Snoopy, born Paul Nagle, is a hero three times over. Forty-four years later, thanks to a lucky break, I found him. In the London music newspaper Black Echoes, he published his 125 favorite albums from the golden age of dub reggae. “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke?/Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke/Calling his ego imagination?” he sings on the track’s outro.One of history’s best music lists – better than Pitchfork ’s, Rolling Stone’s, or Elvis Costello’s – was made by a teenager named Snoopy in the summer of 1977.
The song seems to be a stream of consciousness for Healy as he sings about “Vaccinista tote bag chic baristas” and “communista keisters” before reflecting on his own identity. “Way before the paying penance and verbal propellants and my, my, my cancellation.” (Healy briefly deactivated his Twitter after he was accused of using the 2020 killing of George Floyd to promote his new song on social media.
“I always used to bust into her hand in my, my, my imagination/I was living my best life, living with my parents,” he sings in the first verse. Can someone check in on Matty Healy? On Thursday, the 1975 released the single “Part of the Band,” a strange song backed by violins and a soft melody and follows the group’s frontman as he reflects on imaginary handjobs, a bad relationship with a dude, and whether or not he’s just a basic white guy.