He read extensively from an early age, particularly Look and Learn with its Trigan Empire science fiction comicstrip, and later the works of Geoffrey Willans, J.P. Martin, Norman Hunter and W.E.
He was raised by his parents in Methodism but refused automatic confirmation into the church at age 13, preferring to discuss ontology with his minister, who lent him works by Paul Tillich.
Around age nine, he was deeply affected by a reading of Rudyard Kipling's horror story "The Strange Ride of Morowbie Jukes", by Lucy Boston's fantasy novel The Castle of Yew and terrified by the TV broadcast of Richard Matheson's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episode of The Twilight Zone.
In high school, after reading the science fiction anthology series "Out of This World" (edited by Mably Owen and Amabel Williams-Ellis), he graduated to devouring the works of Ray Bradbury, Peter Saxon, H. Rider Haggard, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Leslie Charteris, and became a keen enthusiast of sword and sorcery fiction as represented by Lin Carter's Flashing Swords anthologies and Thongor series novels,[7] Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian tales, Michael Moorcock's Elric sequence and others, and horror fiction (especially the Weird Tales school, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei and H.P.
[12] With high school friends Lindsay Walker and Michael Blaxland, Blackmore formed a small independent movie house called Azathoth Productions.
[13] Fictional juvenilia included "The Last Town" (a Lord Dunsany pastiche), "The Sacrifice" (based on an image of death from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal), and an uncompleted sword-and-sorcery novel, Starbreaker (with Ashley Morris).
Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs became lasting literary influences at this time,[10] the latter after his high-school English teacher lent him a copy of The Wild Boys (novel).
He there met such figures as Forrest J. Ackerman (who showed him the ring which had been worn by Bela Lugosi when playing Dracula) and Jack L. Chalker (publisher of Mirage Press); he was enthralled by Ursula K. le Guin's guest of honour speech in which she spoke of science fiction breaking out of the 'literary ghetto' and declaring that 'Philip K. Dick deserves to be placed on the shelf alongside Dickens'.
He was a member of the early Esoteric Order of Dagon under Mollie Werba and the Necronomicon (under R. Alain (Randy) Everts) Lovecraftian amateur press associations, with his zines Red Viscous Madness, and Forbidden Dimensions, Nameless Dreams.
[3] Authors hosted by Blackmore for events and signings at Dymocks George St include Storm Constantine, Harlan Ellison, Richard Harland, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Bill Congreve, Simon Brown, Kyla Ward, Robert Hood, Cat Sparks, and Bryce J. Stevens.
Blackmore had classical piano training, but his formative musical influences were The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Stooges, Genesis, Queen, Rick Wakeman, King Crimson, Television, XTC and such experimental bands as Henry Cow, Can and The Residents, along with Australian bands such as The Church, The Reels, The Models, Midnight Oil, MEO 245, Allniters, Outline and Voight 465.
From a mixture of influences including prog and experimental rock, pop and punk, Worm Technology evolved their unique sound while living together in an old schoolhouse in Rozelle in Sydney.
A cassette-only album of punk-style acoustic and vocal originals, "If You Don't Care for Your Scalp You Get Rabies" (1977) (its title a line uttered by Terry Jones in the Monty Python episode "Mr Neutron"), performed by Blackmore, Walker and Smith, was released under the band name Tiploid Grundy and the Rabid Slime Moulds.
Worm Technology initially played covers by 1960s-1970s acts including Kevin Ayers, Lou Reed, The Troggs, Them, The Human Beinz, Modern Lovers, Ramones, Elvis Costello, The Jam and The Buzzcocks, and punkified medleys of old TV cartoon theme tunes such as Astroboy, Marine Boy and Gigantor (WT were playing their "Gigantor" cover before Californian punk band The Dickies recorded theirs in 1980.).
The band put unique twists on some of their covers, such as playing Glen Campbell's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" in a Joy Division style, and doing a rock version of the Brian Eno/Cluster piece "Broken Head".
Continuing their disdain of most rock posturing, the band played one tour with all members dressed as crooner Val Doonican, wearing cardigans and thick black spectacles.
This contained two tracks imported from Ian Walker's side-project duo The Togs (with WT band manager Rik Ford), and other songs including "Crimefighter" (sung as if by a world-weary Batman) and the popular rock number "Wombats" (lyrics Blackmore) in which Blackmore put together his synth solo by segueing keyboard lines from songs by Iggy Pop, Fischer Z, and The Angels, and Smith took his guitar line from "Magazine Madonna" by Sherbet.
[20] In Providence, Blackmore met such figures as author Les Daniels,cartoonist and author Gahan Wilson, Marc A. Michaud (publisher of Necronomicon Press), critic Will Murray, editor David E. Schultz, Philip J. Rahman (copublisher of Fedogan and Bremer, with whom he made an agreement to act as F&B's Australian distributor), Italian scholar Giuseppe Lippi, critic Steven J. Mariconda, French scholar Jean-Luc Buard, Necronomicon Press illustrators Jason C. Eckhardt and Robert H. Knox, editor Robert M. Price, critic Paul Buhle, and German scholar Kalju Kirde.
The Gargoyle Club operated in Leichhardt, New South Wales and Petersham until 1992, after which it moved to venues in inner city Sydney and was subsequently joined by writers such as David Carroll and Kyla Ward.
The club published two issues of their horror fiction magazine Cold Cuts co-edited by Antoinette Rydyr, Ron Clarke and Don Boyd, Art Director was Steve Carter.
In the early 1990s, owing to instinctive rejection of methods of social control, Blackmore became involved with the anarchist scene around Jura Books and the squatters collective Jellyhedz in Sydney, though his primary political interests lay in the Situationist International (especially the works of Guy Debord); and the ontological anarchism of Hakim Bey.
After discovering AK Press and Vague magazine, Blackmore co-founded Thoughtcrimes, an independent distributor of radical books and tapes which also operated culture-jamming and subvertising campaigns.
Blackmore married fellow bookseller and Neopagan Glayne Louise Vowles, with whom he had been in a relationship since 1994, in 1999 in a Hermetic ceremony which included readings from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, Liber AL and The Black Book of Carmarthen.
Certain items at the wedding were inscribed with the motto "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" ("We dance in the darkness and are consumed by fire"), from the title of the 1978 film by Guy Debord.
A devotee of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Blackmore wrote the creative component of his Honours thesis was a 35,000-word ficto-critical novella on the relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall.
[1] Blackmore is Official Editor (with Scott A. Shaeffer) of the Sword and Sorcery and Weird Fiction Terminus (SSFWT) amateur press association (founded by Benjamin Szumskyj) which has members in Australia, the US, the UK, Sweden and Finland.
Blackmore's weird verse (primarily formalist in style) has appeared variously in And Then I Woke Up!,Arkham Sampler,[55] Avallaunius: The Journal of the Arthur Machen Society, Beastly, Cyaegha, EOD,[56] The Eldritch Dark,[57][58][59] EOD,[60] Etchings & Odysseys,[61] Melaleuca, Midnight Echo,[62] New Lovecraft Collector, Penumbra, Shoggoth,[63] The Small Tapestry, Spectral Realms,[64] Strange Sorcery,[60] Telmar, and Weird Fiction Review.
[citation needed] Blackmore's story "The Infestation" was read live to air by Steven Paulsen on Rick Kennett's 3CR and 3MDR Community radio guest shows "Pilots of the Unknown".
[76] His story "Cemetery Rose" was read by the author and dramatized with sound effects for the Writing Show's Six Days of Hallowe'en podcast (cohosted by Australian Horror Writers Association) in 2006.
[78][79] His collage artwork, which is influenced by the Situationist technique of detournement, has been exhibited at the First Australasian Thelemic Conference (Sydney, 1994) and published in various issues of Tertangala magazine.