Earlier on, when I was doing my A Levels, I?d had something of an epiphanic experience when I read Simon Reynolds?s book on ?shoegaze? bands, Blissed Out. That had been one of the first theoretical books that had really got me excited because I thought, wow, you can take all of these (what seemed to me at the time) exotic French philosophers smoking their pipes in Paris, you can take their sophisticated jargon and use it to talk about the kind of music I?m listening to?you can talk about My Bloody Valentine using Derrida, or whatever. The name for the zine that I published around ?95-?96 at Warwick, ***collapse, a distant forerunner to the journal published by Urbanomic, actually came from a chapter in that book, on the band Loop. Just the chapter title for me was emblematic of this pioneering spirit of applying maximally portentous philosophical language to pop culture, something that would totally be a part of the spirit of CCRU later on. Not only was the chapter entitles ?Black Mysticism of Transcendental Collapse?, it was about one of my favourite bands too! People ask me about the name Collapse and think it?s some kind of reference to quantum theory but no, that?s the real reason behind it!