If Britpop ran the publishing industry…

Posted by Jason Diamond

Jarvis Cocker becoming an editor at Faber & Faber is a step in the right direction, but these are my  dream scenarios if Britpoppers from the 1990s ran the publishing industry.

1.  Penguin would hire Morrissey to be in charge of design of the Classics imprint.  They’re already going to be giving him bags of cash to write his memoirs, why not put Moz in charge of getting things back to the level that Germano Facetti had it on in the 1960s?

2. Harper Perennial would get Ben Greenman to pen a fictional memoir on the band Supergrass. (This might not be a bad idea in real life.  If Ben’s reading this, we give him full permission to write this…)

3. New York Tyrant would hire Bez from the Happy Mondays to dance every time he tweeted about drugs.

4. If anybody needs to fill their Jewish quota (don’t we run the publishing industry too?), Justine Frischmann of Elastica is available for freelance to do whatever Jewish things you need.

5. Malcolm Gladwell would be forced to write a New Yorker article on how one in four people born in July of 1980 secretly listen to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis on a daily basis.

6.  The Believer would get somebody to write an article on the 1995 disappearance of Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Edwards.  The article would be really well written, include lots of footnotes, but offer no new ideas as to Richey’s whereabouts.

7.  Damon Albarn of Blur would retire from music and only write YA novels.

8.  Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy would put out a novella on Melville House.  It would be a bestseller.

9. Suede would play all the Paris Review parties.

10. Penguin would also hire Johnny Marr just so they could get him in the same room as Morrissey.  This would inevitably lead to a Smiths reunion, then that would lead to world peace.