Thinking Allowed

An Interview with Dr. Todd Landman
by Jon Thompson

Dr Todd Landman BA, MA, MA, PhD, MMC has more letters after his name than Paris Hilton has diamonds. He's the director of the Centre for Democratic Governance at the University of Essex, UK. He's also the co-founder of Psycrets: The British Society of Mystery Entertainers. I caught up with him just before Easter to ask him about life, magic, and how he came to be an American in Essex.

So, how did he get started in magic? "A friend of mine gave me a Chinese wallet," he says. "I still have it. I was eight years old and that was 1974. I looked at the wallet and thought 'this is kind of fun'. On my ninth birthday, my parents had a magician at my party."

Landman was hooked, and began buying magic at a local shop. "That was John Fedko's Magic in Camp Hill in Pennsylvania, which turned out to be the headquarters of the Keystone Conjurors, so as kids we were members of that."

When Fedko left for the Magic Castle, he left everything to Joe Homecheck. "[he] became my mentor," says Landman. "He realised I was coming in a lot and said, 'Look, now you need to start learning the real stuff' and sold me my first copy of Bobo's Coin Magic, Expert at the Card Table and stuff like that."

Serious study magic followed. "What I mostly worked with was coins across, coin matrix, card warp, and I'd always go into a [magic shop] and say I want something fairly propless, so I loved Paul Harris' Immaculate Connection because you could just take three cards and link them. So, over the years, all the way through high school and university, that was the kind of stuff that I did, mostly. Never really got into big stage stuff."

Landman began gigging at an age when most people are still squashing bugs: "I did my first public show when I was eleven years old," he says. "I made eleven dollars. All the kids were eight. It was a birthday party and my mom dropped me off at the gig and I did it. And I've been doing gigs ever since."

But how on Earth did a boy from rural Pennsylvania end up in Essex? "By a circuitous route!" he says. "I went to the university of Pennsylvania for four years, went off to grad school in Washington for three years, and actually did a stint with the World Bank which was quite interesting."

Landman finally found himself studying for a PhD in Boulder, Colorado. "That's where I met an English professor from Essex University," he says. "He had a pot of gold for a year and said 'do you want ot come to England for a year and work for me?' and I though, well, I don't see a downside so I went to Essex thinking I would come to some Ivy-covered, wonderful institution. I ended up in a sort of post-Communist concrete jungle. When I got here it rained for 27 days straight!"

Being the director of the Director of the Centre for Democratic Governance at Essex, husband, and father to an 11-month-old daughter can't leave much time for magic, but Landman is still gigging regularly. "I'm doing about four shows a month now and I'm working on sort of small theatre stuff," he says. There are some big shows coming up, too.

"I'm performing at the Headgate Theatre in Colchester this summer. I'm doing some work in Birmingham, in Selly Oak, and I have a link with a very nice Medieval priory where I do weddings and I'm doing an Autumn show there, a kind of dinner and evening show. I also have a kind of residency at a local restaurant in the area. I go in twice a year and do a kind of dinner theatre thing. So, yeah, performing regularly, teaching magic a little bit, and of course running Psycrets!"

Ah, Psycrets. So, what's the difference between Psycrets and the British Society of Mystery Entertainers? "They're the same thing," he says. "It's Psycrets: The British Society of Mystery Entertainers."

The Society came about as a result of a conversation with a fellow perfromenr about holding a mentalism meeting. "I was going to have it in Manningtree - a kind of back woods town in Essex where Matthew Hopkins the witchfinder comes from," says Landman. "And I thought that'd be great, you know, meet up in a pub, have a bit of a curry, and talk about mentalism, and he said why don't you organise something in London?"

News of the event spread fast: "I went onto various forums and just posted the fact that the meeting would take place," says Landman. "I had an off chance of being in Treadwell's bookshop and heard there was a room there. So I spoke to the owner and asked if I could book the room for a day and literally with a spreadsheet and a PayPal account and a couple of one liners on forums I advertised this meeting."

One person who saw the advertisement was Roni Shachnaey. He was moderating the Oracle magazine magic site: "I said to him would you come to this thing and he said once you get 26 people let me know." Why 26, exactly? "I got no idea. When I got 26, I said I got 26 and he said I'm coming. He came all the way down from Scarborough to London for the first meeting and was very enthusiastic about setting up an organization."

I remember that first meeting myself. It was held on a warm Saturday in July 2007. About 30 of us packed out the small meeting room downstairs at Treadwells. I'd just released Naked Mentalism was feeling rather out of my depth in the presence of real mentalists like Andy Nyman and Paul Brook, and pretty much everyone else there. But they were all open and friendly, which is a characteristic of the subsequent meetings. There are no egos - just lots of interested people swapping ideas well into the night.

As Landman reveals, the first meeting was held partly to gauge the strength of community. "The agenda for the first meeting was, let's meet everybody let's see what you're doing, let's see if we can get a publication together and let's see - if people want - if we can form an organization. I then did a round of emails to everyone who attended that meeting asking whether we should have an organization." Surprisingly, however, not everyone wanted one to develop.

"A lot of people didn't want to formalize and other people did, but Roni and I took the view that we should formalize it, get a web site going and start seeing if we could drive a membership."

Membership quickly blossomed: "It's going to be two years this July. We have over a hundred members, and some quite famous ones. Some quite interesting guys from all over the world are joining us, from Turkey, from Spain, Iceland and Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, so I mean we're getting really interesting applications from all over the world. We had Arthur Emerson join us from Emerson and West. 121 published effects. He's 81 years old and, you know, a member of the MIMC, the PEA, IBM, and wants to contribute to what we're doing."

The regular meetings, held every six months under the banner Tabula Mentis, are well attended by the membership. But one big question remains: is a certain popular bearded mind-botherer a member?

"We haven't had contact with Derren Brown yet," says Landman. "We'd like to and we're working on that. We obviously had Andy Nyman at the first meeting and we'd like to get him back."

So, what's next for Psycrets? "The big challenge now is putting together some sort of regular publication," says Landman. "We don't know what we're going to be doing yet but it'll probably be something electronic."

So, watch this space. And, Derren, if you're reading, Psycrets would love you to pop along. The web site has notices of upcoming meetings and membership requirements: http://www.psycrets.org.uk/

Jon Thompson