How often in a lifetime does a person stumble into the middle of a cultural event? Very few people have a knack of, again and again, finding themselves at the centre of SOMETHING. Eno is the textbook example of someone who had either the ingenuity, or luck, to pull this off. But most of us mortals count ourselves very fortunate to get even a single brush with a cultural moment larger than oneself. For me the opportunity to have two books published by Repeater was just such an opportunity.
Tariq Goddard first approached me in 2008 to write a book. That was before the publication of Mark Fisher's classic "Capitalist Realism" (2009). Tariq's generous interest in me came on the back of my blog WOEBOT. However, at that point I was slightly less focused on writing. I was animating, closely involved in bringing up my children, and making music, so I turned him down - and palmed him off with Marcello Carlin.
I subsequently got to know Tariq a bit. He is a profoundly charismatic, at once sweet, but also somehow brutal, individual. I always found him enchanting; possibly in spite of himself. Tariq tried again in 2015 to sign me up. But it wasn't until 2017 that I finally got around to pitching Repeater the idea for "Retreat" which was eventually published in 2020. I followed that with "The Garden" in 2025. I can't imagine ever having had the opportunity to publish those two large books were it not for the break he gave me.
Tariq himself has been an author of fiction; a very high class one. I've relished the two of his books I've read, "High John the Conqueror" (2022), and his magnum opus "Nature and Necessity" (2017). So it's something of a mystery how he became such a dramatically effective, even revolutionary, book publisher. If he'd been a radical community organiser, the eccentric and profligate heir of a fortune, or an entrepreneurial fugitive from conventional publishing, ending up at the helm of the imprints of zero and Repeater might have made more sense.
As becomes clear in the compulsively addictive nonfiction study "Publishing" he has penned for the North American Duke University Press, part of their "Practices" series, it's precisely this understanding of fiction, that most impractical form of writing, that placed him so well to understand the essential nature of writing itself. Understanding writing as he did enabled him to understand that near-autistic breed, authors.
"Publishing" has a tripartite structure. Ranged around lucid meditations upon Reading, Writing, and Wondering - which Tariq argues as being essential, interdependent processes - he gives us the vicarious thrill of a look behind the scenes into that world in which he was apex and linchpin. As exciting as it sounds, it was evidently in equal measures frustrating, infuriating, and unnerving.
Whenever I think of Tariq I immediately flash on the great entrepreneurs of Independent music: Alan McGee, Geoff Travis, Ed Bahlman, and Richard Russell. That's to do with his wholly innovative mapping of the business and aesthetic principles of those record company pioneers across onto book publishing. Did anyone ever do this before? Not as far as I'm aware... But it's also a reflection on his large and tremendously healthy ego. Naturally, the person who immediately springs to mind is Factory records supremo Tony Wilson. There's an accompanying sadness that that makes my dear old friend Mark Fisher his symbolic counterpart as Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Even when Mark was still with us, apparently that was a comparison he loved.