Post-Punk Then and Now - Gavin Butt

Post-Punk Then and Now

Post-Punk Then and Now Edited by Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher

Contents Preface 1 Introduction: Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in Conversation 2 “Personality Crisis? Honey, I Was Born with One”: Lydia Lunch Interviewed by Dominic Johnson 3 Being in A Band: Art-school Experiment and the Post-Punk Commons — a Lecture by Gavin Butt 4 “On The One Hand The State Is Funding You and Enabling Your Existence, On The Other Hand, Your Whole Shtick Is To Rebel Against It”: Post-Punk and Poland, a Talk by Agata Pyzik 5 “Going Overground: The Jam between Populism and Popular Modernism”: A Lecture by Mark Fisher 6 Lockdown and Breakout: Laura Oldfield Ford and Gee Vaucher in Conversation with Mark Fisher 7 “The Weakest Link in Every Chain, I Always Want To Find It”: Green Gartside in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun 8 “40 Degrees in Black”: Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner in Conversation with Gavin Butt 9 “We Wanted This Sense of Fluxing In and Out of History”: Sue Clayton in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun 10 “Vague Post-Punk Memories”: A Lecture by Tom Vague, and Conversation with Mark Fisher Contributors

Preface Post-Punk Then and Now is based on a series of talks, lectures, and discussions organised by Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in the autumn of 2014. The series was part of the Public Programme of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The motivations for organising the series were anything but “academic”. For all three organisers, who were teenagers during the post-punk period, post-punk served as a heady initiation into culture. In its restlessness, its allusiveness, its overreaching, post-punk vigorously affirmed the possibility that culture could be at once popular, experimental and intellectuallydriven. Post-punk happened at a particularly fraught historical juncture: it came at the end of a long wave of extraordinary invention in popular music culture, but it also coincided with the rise of what Stuart Hall called “Thatcherism”. The Post-Punk Then and Now series took place some 35 years after the election of Margaret Thatcher, when another Conservative Prime Minister was presiding over an austerity programme which seemed set to implement the final phase of neoliberalism. This therefore seemed a particularly opportune moment to gather together musicians, critics and artists — some of whom directly participated in the original post-punk moment, some of whom came to it later — for a sustained ten-week examination of post-punk and its legacy. In this volume, we have sought to preserve the energy and the spirit of the conversations which took place in that ten-week period. Perhaps more than most, this book is the product of collective work, and we would like to thank all the speakers for their hard work in assisting us to convert the series into a book.

1 Introduction Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in Conversation (2|10|14) Gavin Butt: We’ve organised this programme of talks together because we share an interest in post-punk art and music, and the era that gave rise to them. Given that there is relatively little scholarship on the period, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a series of events at Goldsmiths involving in-conversations and talks by leading post-punk artists and musicians, alongside some new critical voices on the subject. One of the questions that cropped up as we began to think about doing this was: Why postpunk now? Why are the three of us interested in post-punk at this particular historical juncture? And why, given that so many of you have turned out today, is this relatively narrow period in cultural history of interest to you too? So we thought we’d try and answer that question today, or at least begin to answer that question in a rudimentary way, by having a three-way conversation before opening up to hear your contributions and ideas. I think I became conscious of the fact that post-punk was beginning to occupy my thoughts over the past few years as I began to reflect on the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, which is where I did my PhD at the university. There had been a very dynamic and interesting scene that preceded my time there, which I caught the tail-end of, and which was still in the air, if you like, in the late 80s when I was there. But, before that, I was also a fan and fellow traveller of many post-punk acts from differing city scenes across the UK and elsewhere. I guess, as I look back, I have begun to assess the formative impact of this time upon my political and aesthetic values, as well as upon my mature intellectual and cultural preoccupations. I discovered, quite by chance, that other

professor friends of mine — Jennifer Doyle, from the University of California Riverside, and the late José Muñoz, former Professor in Performance Studies at NYU — had also, quite independently, begun research on punk and post-punk at more or less the same time. Since we are — or rather were — all of the same age in our mid-40s, it perhaps wouldn’t be unreasonable to answer the question “Why post-punk now?” by saying it’s a middle-aged thing, and that our interest in it is explained away as the expression of a generational nostalgia, of us enjoying the pleasure of returning to the primal scene of our youths. I’m sure there is some mileage in this. But I know Mark, Kodwo, and I are not happy to let the explanation rest there — in large part because understanding a “return” to postpunk as simply and only nostalgic obscures any possible exploration into its specific conditions of creation, and naturalises interest in it to normatively understood stages of an individual life-cycle. Another way of looking at things would be to say that only now does post-punk seem, as a period, remote enough from our contemporary moment to allow us a good enough vantage point to turn towards it and begin to understand it historically. Given that the conditions of cultural possibility then seem so remote, so markedly different to those of our neoliberal present, perhaps it is only now we have travelled so far that we can more fully appreciate exactly how different everything was. For those of you who don’t know, the post-punk period is normally characterised as existing from the late 1970s to the mid1980s, usually from 1978, which is the year that the Sex Pistols split up, to 1984 or 1985, which of course in this country saw the miners’ strike and their ultimate defeat, with miners trudging back to work, facing an uncertain future. This was a future which, in many ways, is now our present-day, neoliberal reality. Mark, in his book Ghosts of My Life, has much to say about the futures of post-punk, the futures that post-punk artists and musicians envisaged, and about what has befallen those imagined futures today. His book is a sustained exploration of what was once — in post-punk — a ready cultural capacity to orient oneself by radical visions of what might yet come. Maybe I’ll turn to Mark first, to ask for some observations from him. Is this something — the imagining of an alternative future —

that you think has become more difficult in contemporary times? Can you say a little bit about what you value about looking back to then from the vantage point of now? Mark Fisher: I think the first thing to say is that, in a certain way it is a bad sign that we are interested in post-punk in the way that we are. As we came in, we listened to a Fad Gadget track — it didn’t sound like something from 30 years ago. 30 years back from post-punk would take you to 1948, 1949, to something like Glenn Miller: who knew what the music of 1948 was, who was particularly interested in it in the late 70s? Certainly, anyone who did listen back to music of the late 40s then could not have experienced that music as sounding as if it belonged in any way to the contemporary moment of the 1970s. But I think, faced with many examples of post-punk, we are confronted with something that does feel uncannily contemporary. GB: In what ways Mark? MF: Well, it just doesn’t sound outmoded. Ironically, much post-punk might have sounded more out-of-date in 1983 than it does now, because there’s been a flattening of cultural time since then. Postpunk was an example of what I’ve called popular modernism. The principle behind post-punk was the popular-modernist idea that you couldn’t repeat things, you couldn’t use forms that had become kitsch — and yesterday’s innovation was today’s kitsch. So postpunk was driven by a principle of difference and self-cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded, the already-existent, the familiar. That’s why Simon Reynolds called his book on post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again. I guess what I’m saying is that that hostility towards the alreadyfamiliar has weakened to the point that it has disappeared. We can’t be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was because we don’t now have a sense of the present or the future anymore. GB: Can I just press you on that point, because I think much of what you say is pretty undeniable in terms of the widespread experimentalism of post-punk music. But if we think about maybe Talking Heads or Throbbing Gristle, Karl Marx’s old dictum about the

“tradition of all dead generations” weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” seems pertinent doesn’t it? Which is to say that as radically new as some of these bands may have sounded back in the day, today I sometimes hear the reworking of an earlier musical moment: Talking Heads reworking funk, for example, or Throbbing Gristle reworking 60s psychedelia in various kinds of ways. I wonder if you think that makes what you call “popular modernism” actually a form of postmodernism — with its habitual replaying of the past? MF: Well, even high modernism was based on reworking; all forms of creativity originate in reworking. With the decline of popular modernism, though, we’ve increasingly seen already-existing reworkings presented as if they were new. No culture emerges ex nihilo, nothing comes out of nothing, there’s always a relationship to the past; it’s a question of whether that relationship is a passive one where it’s simply a matter of imitating and repeating, or an active one where a different kind of repetition is at stake. Take the example of Throbbing Gristle, for instance. Yes, Throbbing Gristle clearly were reaching back for 60s psychedelia as a reference, but their music doesn’t actually sound like 60s psychedelia. Post-punk depended on a set of strictures, often unstated but quite clear rules about what was acceptable. I think part of the reason it makes sense to describe it as post-punk, is that those rules were initially written by punk, and musically they were pretty boring rules. Punk is ultimately just a stripped-down form of rock music, but the shift into post-punk didn’t involve a simple setting-aside of those rules, it entailed a constant renegotiation. It was never a case that “anything goes”, there was a constant struggle over what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. It’s easy to forget how fierce those strictures were. Kodwo Eshun: The idea of constraints is really important. When you see post-punk musicians or filmmakers now, that is the aspect that they are most apologetic about. They have learned to be ashamed of those self-strictures that are all too often dismissed as political correctness. Post-punk was an amateurist and autodidactic project that created a context for belief in your own incapacity rather than training or skill. What emerges is a drive towards self-

authorisation in which people make up rules as they go. One of the norms that gets remade is the very idea of the rock group itself, its group dynamics of male bonding, its gang mentality; you can hear and see these notions coming under pressure and becoming disassembled in various ways. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti said that he wanted to make a music that was as uncertain and as unsure as he felt. Post-punk invented ways to dramatize that uncertainty. GB: What that anxiety also pertains to, if you like, is the form of one’s cultural activity because it’s precisely at the moment when punk dies by becoming rock industry business-as-usual — maybe by 1977 but certainly by 1978 in this country — that simply making music becomes no longer the necessary limit of one’s cultural horizon. That it opens up to the anxiety of potentially working beyond music — sometimes without any sense of authority — and reaching out to other forms of art-making (performance, film, etc.) or different types of activity. Green Gartside, for example, was as driven by his reading of critical theory, of Gramsci or Derrida — by his intellectual practice — as he was by the writing of a lyric, or the improvising of a particular riff. Beyond a specific style of music then — discordant, angular guitars, or electronic, industrial soundscapes — post-punk might be more broadly characterised as creation within a permissive set of novel conjunctures between different disciplines or even institutions. Lydia Lunch recalls the No Wave movement in New York as “the connective tissue where the cultural division of art, film, music and literature was cauterized, causing a vast insane asylum, part Theatre of Cruelty, part Grand Guignol, all Dada, all of the time”. Love the gothic drama of this! Post-punk then as a kind of expanded cultural playground where you risked your sanity, or at least the likelihood of being seen as deranged by cultural gatekeepers, as you went about making your idiosyncratic thing. Drawing from art, from film, from critical theory, or what have you — all this allowed for a re-imagining or a re-inhabiting of the public sphere, mixing things up in ways that allowed alternative visions to be forged.

MF: I think the point about the alternative public sphere is very important. When I interviewed Mark Stewart from the Pop Group, he said that they wanted to be an “explosion in the heart of the commodity”. They didn’t actually become a pop group, they certainly weren’t the Beatles. But nonetheless the overreaching Promethean ambition, the dissatisfaction with being confined to the margins, was crucial to post-punk. Another dimension of that public sphere is the music press as it was shaped by post-punk culture. Probably the most important factor leading to me sitting here today would be the music press of the early 80s. The reason that I became interested in theory and philosophy etc. was seeing it in the pages of the New Musical Express, and that is another telling contrast between that period and the current moment. In the early 80s, its leading writers were autodidacts who had not gone to university but who were nevertheless steeped in post-structuralist thought and used to flaunt this in the pages of a music newspaper that was then selling hundreds of thousands of copies. There was a kind of contagion of autodidacticism, and the music press formed part of what was in effect an alternative education system. I think it was Jon Savage who has talked about music culture as a portal: an album, a single would be threshold that you could cross that would open up worlds to you. There would be all kinds of references, all kinds of distillations in the cover art — whether they’d be allusions to European art cinema or to theory, or to literature, to J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs (and in many ways Burroughs and Ballard were the most important influences on post-punk, more significant than any musical reference point). Part of what made this culture popular-modernist rather than populist was its embrace of difficulty. It didn’t immediately make sense, references weren’t explained to you, and you had to rise to that challenge if you wanted to engage with it. GB: The irony of all that is that despite post-punk being a permissive, DIY kind of world-making, a lot of post-punk artists went to art school to be taught how to become professional artists. I think that’s a really interesting paradox for us to toy with. But maybe that’s

not right. Maybe people didn’t actually go there to become professional anythings. As I’ve been doing research on post-punk, I’m realising that a number of people actually went to art school to be in a band. That was even the principle reason they went. Not to become a famous painter. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne suggest, this was because art school was the place where you could get a local authority grant, have the costs of your tuition paid for by the government, and have three years to do whatever you wanted. Given the laissezfaire model in some art schools, you wouldn’t necessarily have to even talk to your tutor or show up in the studio. So it was a very, very different time. It feels remote from the seemingly more instrumentalised educational world of today. Especially given recent changes to the funding of higher education in this country, students are arguably under greater pressure today to focus on a career trajectory, and to appreciate their time at university as training for a graduate job. This is especially because education is now a costly consumer good, and students are encouraged to be mindful of getting a personal financial return for the investment in their studies. I wonder if going to art school in the 1970s and 1980s to be in a band opened up the possibilities of collective activity — both creative and political — that today’s individualising ethos serves to foreclose upon? KE: A band is a very specific type of collective that accelerates and hybridises the tradition of artistic movements familiar from the history of 20th century modernisms. What you see in a group is a capacity to sustain a certain kind of insider mentality so that different theories, novels, art, all of these, are attitudinised through a stance that metabolises them quite dramatically. To quote a theorist or novelist is one thing; it is quite another to strike a pose with and through that quote. How you construct an attitude that is connoted through a gestural vocabulary, communicated in the way in which you hold your cigarette; all that is as important, more important than interviews or lyrics. What is fascinating when look you at the era of 1978 to 1983 is that the generational resentments of the time targeted the welfare state that sustained that experimentation. People in this era were not

grateful to the Labour Party for the welfare system. On the contrary, they were at odds with, if not antagonistic towards it. Post-punk, at least initially, was not targeting the Tories. It was attacking the Labour Party and the welfare system. The Song of the Shirt, which is set in 1979, begins with a discussion on welfare. A camera travels towards a television monitor on a table in a café that depicts a woman talking about welfare. She says that it is not worth her while to work because her husband can actually get more money through signing on for unemployment benefit. But he won’t go on the dole because he can’t bear to go through the interview process. She is trapped in low-paid work and decides to leave her husband which then obliges her husband to pay child-care support for her and her children. What man, she asks, will put up with this? These discontents animate The Song of the Shirt which then travels back into 1840 in order to understand the conditions for the formation of the welfare state. Just three days ago, at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, George Osborne promised to cap benefits for childcare and housing, stating that it was not fair that working families could earn less than families that claimed benefits. Between the arguments made by Osborne in 2014 and the arguments made by The Song of the Shirt in 1979 is a continuity that is articulated for quite different reasons by quite different political formations. MF: That points to a problematic relationship between much of the organised left and the counterculture that goes back to the 60s. Nobody has described this bind better than the late critic Ellen Willis. She talks of a frustration she felt, an incompatibility between the kind of desires that were articulated and propagated by the counterculture, and mainstream left-wing politics, which she experienced as authoritarian and bureaucratic. We’re haunted by the failure of the left to come to some arrangement with the libertarian energies that came out of music culture. Instead, the right absorbed and converted the energies of the counterculture into its own project of re-individualisation. In retrospect, we can see the 80s as the moment when this happened, when things were lost: it was the period when neoliberalism really took control. You could say that the definitive end of post-punk was the defeat of the miners’ strike.

Equally, I think the historical vantage point that we now have allows us to say that the things that post-punk was antagonistic towards, such as the welfare state, were actually part of the enabling conditions of post-punk cultural production. I think no one in postpunk culture who was targeting the left wanted the neoliberal solution that was offered. But at the same time this isn’t about fetishizing; celebrating social democracy as the ideal political form. Part of what haunts us in post-punk is the prospect of a kind of antiauthoritarian leftism, a kind of libidinal leftism, a leftism that could engage with those libertarian currents, that could engage with the desiring-fabric of style culture. That kind of leftism only ever appeared in fragments. GB: It’s going to be interesting to pick up on these points with Agata Pyzik, who will share her thoughts on punk and post-punk in Poland. Of course, the political conditions of existence of that scene were very different to an ailing Labour government followed by a rampant Thatcherite one in the UK. You had instead military rule in the early 80s and then authoritarian communism. This will allow us to think the conditions of post-punk outside of the more customary AngloAmerican context, and away from Western democracy. We will continue this in the conversation between Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado who will talk about post-punk in Brazil in the mid-80s at the time of a faltering military dictatorship and simultaneous resistances to it. I want to talk to them about how post-punk music might be understood as an integral part of a much broader cultural front organised, without any singular leader, as some kind of transversal libertarian movement. But I guess the thing that haunts all these conversations, and if you like, the political character of post-punk itself, is that it all took place before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War informed the imagined alternatives to this or that political regime, or economic system, and seeped into the mind-set for postpunk’s futurist imaginaries, in a way that is sometimes difficult to remember today — as you allude to in your book, Mark. Maybe we could turn to something slightly different before we close: namely, the historicising of post-punk. One of the key books on the subject is Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again,

published in 2005. But I know, Kodwo, you’ve been thinking about how the historicising of post-punk is not really happening so much in music journalism, even less in scholarly literature, but more recently in the blogosphere. KE: Rip It Up and Start Again was published in around 2004. At around the same time, the blogosphere begins to assemble through a number of writers, such as Mark Fisher under the name k-punk, Matt Ingram under the name Woebot, and several others, each of whom analysed post-punk with an attention and ambition not seen since the 1970s. In the context of the discourse network of the blogosphere, this discussion was not nostalgic. On the contrary, it was urgent and necessary. Now why was this the case? And why was the writing actually more exciting than the majority of neo-postpunk recorded at the time by groups such as LCD Soundsystem or The Rapture. Because the new mode of online writing was theoretical rather than philosophical; because it circulated outside of the academy, creating a collective conversation that simultaneously functioned as libidinally charged speculation. The online discussions over post-punk went beyond questions of canonisation. A small number of writers exerted a massive influence by inventing new vocabularies for a music that had been quarantined in the precincts of old magazines. A new frame of reference was created that reset the terms for analysing the moment of post-punk. * Audience member 1: I have a question about the notion of a future, or our future being cut off. I’m from the United States — so maybe post-punk was theorised there in a very different way. It was a very visceral, this idea that we had no future. Lydia Lunch said that, like in an interview, she said: “I could get killed on the way home, we’re living in the worst area of New York, that’s been destroyed by Reaganomics”. So I guess my question is how does that translate? I’ve always assumed that post-punk got popular again today because again we don’t have a future.

MF: Different senses of the future are at stake really. Maybe postpunk began with the line from the Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’: “when there’s no future how can there be sin?” Post-punk was a Cold War culture, and it fits the analysis that Jeff Nuttall put forward in Bomb Culture, his claim that the major post-war youth scenes are really only possible because of the shadow of the mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that Cold War dread. But when I was a teenager in the early 80s, I used to dream of nuclear war practically every night, and every night when I got home from school, I would turn on the TV anxiously; have we taken the first step to nuclear war yet? Certainly ’79 was a key period for post-punk, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, you could really feel like we were on the way to the third world war. But of course the paradox of this is that the sense of urgency produced an existential imperative: we can’t waste time because we might not have any time. That is what generated aesthetic futures, that’s what made things sound like they hadn’t sounded before. So the sense that there might not be one type of future, generated another type of future. KE: One way to make the future is to intervene in the present which then becomes history; the present could be described as an experience of breadth or narrowness that Thomas Pynchon characterised as ‘temporal bandwidth’ in Gravity’s Rainbow. Part of Simon Reynolds’ recent argument is that contemporary culture has moved, broadly speaking, from analogue scarcity to digital abundance. Which implies that the temporal bandwidth of the present has decreased. Because there is more history, all the time, everywhere; it becomes more difficult to intervene in the present. As a result, the technological conditions for intervention into the present have to be artificially constructed. They are not spontaneously available. They are a form of work in themselves. To embark upon a project that is set in the present, you have to renounce digital abundance by undergoing a temporal diet or a media famine. You have to turn yourself into a castaway marooned on an island of the present separated from the abundance of digital archives of previous musical eras that continually saturate the contemporary. The

conditions that Lydia Lunch spoke about now have to be selfconsciously invented. Audience member 2: I’m trying to think about how to formulate this. Recently I re-read The Buddha of Suburbia, and as you might know it’s set in London; there’s a key character named Charlie Hero who’s loosely based on Billy Idol, and he also went to the same school as David Bowie. Now, of course it’s figured as “Charlie Hero moves from the suburbs into downtown London and his trajectory parallels, or is developed kind of in conjunction with, the protagonist’s”. It’s figured as the rise of punk, but a lot of the characteristics that you have talked about in relation to post-punk sort of tie. Charlie Hero moves to the centre and it’s a completely cynical move to reinvent himself, he sees this as a way to become famous, and so he’s deskilled; he forms a band and they start playing their instruments really badly. So Hanif Kureishi was writing at the height of Thatcherism but it’s also this moment that’s more relevant to what you’re talking about in terms of post-punk. So my question is, a lot of this reinvention, a lot of this nihilism is contextualised in this reinvention of self, of moving from the suburbs to the centre. And I know that one of your interests in this context is about the proliferation of post-punk in Leeds and northern towns and its spreading to other parts outside the UK, but I wonder about how much this idea of the de-suburbanisation and the reinvention of self figures into what I think is actually a description of post-punk in this novel? MF: Well I think that rhymes with what Jon Savage argues in England’s Dreaming, where he argues that you can’t just see punk as an urban phenomenon; it’s as much about the encounters of the suburbs with central London itself. That’s why Bromley and Beckenham, in Kent, were really significant… Bowie had come from that area, but so did Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol, and Japan. KE: The psychic geography of the suburbs creates an intense selfconsciousness that is not necessarily alleviated or assuaged by success; in fact, success might intensify these feelings of alienation.

Post-punk makes a point of its misfit by insisting upon its distance and its unease from metropolitan centres. In The Buddha of Suburbia Naveen Andrews could play the role of the young Hanif Kureishi as a picaresque figure, an updated version of Herman Melville’s confidence man who is able to charm and seduce and play with and against stereotypes. In the novels and essays of Ballard, the suburb operates as an unlimited dream company from which second-generation youth can plot their escape; the suburb incubates a certain kind of boredom that functions as a precondition for dreaming your way into the future. In a contemporary era characterised by nested interruptions, that kind of boredom has to be artificially created. MF: This boredom question touches upon one of the key differences between then and now. There was apocalyptic terror and there was boredom, and both of them posed an existential challenge: faced with imminent death, it’s a scandal that I’m bored. But it’s a scandal that I had to solve myself, or, better, that we had to solve as part of a group. That temporality is difficult for us to return to in conditions that Kodwo has just described, it is so easy to fritter away time, it is so hard to construct that sense of urgency, so hard to construct the feeling that there’s no future, and therefore the present matters very intensely. We can endlessly float in the archive… Just one more click before I do something. Audience member 2: Is the problem that the sense of no future is not acute enough, it’s not concrete enough, it hasn’t got that threatening image of the bomb? MF: Part of the background to this is radically lowered expectations now. We call it post-punk now but that sense of living in a period after the fact was simply not in place at the time. People still had the expectation that music could be produced that was as good as any music that had come before. Those expectations have disappeared; the paradoxical routinisation of the exceptional in the post-punk period seems impossible to imagine now. The urgency that motivated that kind of cultural production is hard to muster when we

are embedded in capitalist cyberspace. It makes us feel immortal, as if we’ve got infinite time to do something. GB: As I was listening to that, I don’t know, it just brought out the vulgar Marxist in me. I was thinking that maybe we are all so interested in post-punk today simply because the political conditions of the contemporary moment in this country are akin to those of post1979. We have another Conservative government that is basically setting about finishing the job that Thatcher started, trampling roughshod over the last vestiges of welfarism and social democracy. Post-punk was our antidote to all that the first time around. It represented a counter-public to Thatcherite cultural hegemony in the late 70s and 1980s. Rock Against Racism, miners’ benefits gigs, gay politics, alternative lifestyles, electronic music, multiculturalism, feminism: these were just some parts of the cultural firmament in which post-punk was lodged and which was set against the Thatcherite project of making Britain “great” again through an exclusionary, sometimes modern (neoliberal), sometimes antiquated (Victorian) image of Britishness. In the resurgence of at least some of this since the election of the Tories in 2010, it feels like a return to that moment again. I’ve been on the various demos recently, for instance, the demos against the introduction of fees to university degrees, and I’ve chatted to a lot of activists of my generation and they all said the same thing: that it felt like the 80s all over again. So, at some affective level at least, we are back where we were. Sure things have changed massively since then — the Cold War is over, neoliberalism now runs rampant over the globe, and some of the progressive gains of the 80s around race, gender, and sexuality are still in place and largely accepted in the mainstream. But I think we are turning back to the 80s — and to post-punk — to see how we imagined it could be possible to beat these fuckers the first time around. Audience member 3: Some of this discussion reminds me of one of the Riot grrrl things during the mid-90s and I was wondering if you could talk about that.

KE: The Riot grrrl era of the 1990s was a self-authorising movement driven by the intensity of creating a movement for its own sake. But from around 2005, when the first smartphones begin t appear, what you see in the advertising of that moment is a self-satisfaction that is inimical to the way in which Riot grrrl could redirect its self-loathing against the patriarchy of the music industry. What you see from the mid-00s onwards is that every time someone looks at their smartphone, they smirk to themselves. A smile that stems from possessing the computational capacity of the Apollo mission, regardless of what you actually do with it. A smartphone fuels an auto-affection that depletes the discontent which fuels a movement like Riot grrrl. When you look at Riot grrrl what you see is the brief and burning renewal of what Ulrike Meinhof called consumer panic; consumption is not denounced for its immorality as much as it is regarded with horror. The marketing of femininity on an industrial scale elicits terror. A contemporary movement would have to renew that sense of panic. That would be one of its challenges.

2 “Personality Crisis? Honey, I Was Born with One” Lydia Lunch Interviewed by Dominic Johnson (9|10|14) Dominic Johnson: After arriving in New York in 1976 at the age of 16, Lydia Lunch would make her mark as a musician, writer, underground film actress, spoken-word performer, visual artist, and subterranean icon. Her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was short-lived but influential, not least through the release of Brian Eno’s compilation album No New York (1978). Alongside the bands DNA, Mars, and the Contortions, Lunch was a pioneer of what came to be known as No Wave, perhaps not so much a style as a musical attitude. Lunch is particularly notable for her singing voice, by turns childlike and coy, a rasping eternal snarl, or a primal scream. Lunch went on to form bands including Beirut Slump and 8 Eyed Spy, and in 1980 she released her first solo album, Queen of Siam, a record one reviewer described as: “A putrid classic of style and substance, so lazily erotic that it nearly sucks the life out of you”. Lydia Lunch: Oh, if only! DJ: Since Queen of Siam, Lunch has released an extensive discography of solo albums, spoken-word records, and albums in collaboration with Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave, J.G. Thirlwell, Rowland S. Howard, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and Exene Cervenka, among many others. Currently she performs and records with her new band, Big Sexy Noise and RETROVIRUS, an all-star line-up which includes Bob Bert of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, bassist Tim Dahl, and multi-instrumental composer Weasel Walter.

Lydia Lunch is also a prolific and compelling writer, both in and beyond her work as a songwriter. In her astonishing memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary (2007), Lunch narrates her life from her time as a teenage tearaway in the 1970s to the years in New York, L.A., and London among other cities. She describes in incorrigible detail her experiences of hustling, criminality, drugs, violence, and plundering boys for sex. Her writing is sophisticated and gritty, her words hot with voodoo, soused with alcohol and blood, and varnished in semen. Her decadent style smacks of Jean Genet and Hubert Selby Jr., forged under the sign of Henry Miller’s romance with Anaïs Nin. Nevertheless, it’s a style entirely her own, typified by grit and literary gravel, and an erogenous brew of slickness, bombast, and swagger. As Thurston Moore writes of Paradoxia: “Lydia Lunch can lure fascist beasts to honey with a whiff of her thigh, she can eviscerate them in their own hideous pools of self-shame”. Her acuity and verve extend to her critical writings, as evidenced in her book Will Work for Drugs (2009), which includes memoirs and essays and interviews with Jerry Stahl, Ron Athey, Hubert Selby Jr., and others. Tonight we will begin with a performance by Lydia in two parts, followed by a conversation between us. We’ll explore No Wave, post-punk, and the broader context of cultural innovation in New York in the 1970s, as well as Lydia’s key themes, politics, and practices. She is the wet nurse in the trauma room, handmaiden, part criminal, queen of harsh, pretty scarred-up, bandaged and bruised, a predator at large. She is Lydia Lunch. LL: I love you. [Laughter]. That’s a pretty good description, Doctor Dominic Johnson. I’m Lydia Lunch. And you’re not. Lucky for you. I hit Manhattan as a teenage runaway in 1976 inspired by the manic ravings of Lester Bangs and Creem Magazine, the Velvet Underground’s sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Dolls’ first album and the poetic scat of Piss Factory — Patti Smith’s best, and probably only good record. I snuck out my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound bus and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped

from, but with 200 bucks in my pocket and a notebook full of misanthropic rantings, sporting a baby face — which I still do — which belied a hustler’s instinct and a killer urge to destroy everything that had inspired me; I thought I had hit pay dirt. I didn’t give a flying fuck if the Bowery smelt like dog shit. I mean I wasn’t expecting the toilets at CBGBs to be the bookend to Duchamp’s Urinal, but then maybe 1977 had more in common with 1917 than anyone would have imagined, as I do consider myself a Surrealist. New York City during the late 1970s and early 80s was a beautifully ravaged slag, impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery, she stunk of sex and drugs and aerosol paint, her breath hung heavy a sweet tubercular, sticky and viscous — [The microphone stops working]. I’ve already killed the microphone, you see that — I don’t need one. I killed it. I’ll just go on without one. Give me the… get your shit together! Her breath hung heavy a sweet tubercular, sticky and viscous, she leaked from every pore like a sexy corpse unable to give up the ghost. A succubus that fed on new meat and fresh blood who in turn suckled on her like greedy parasites alchemising her putrefaction into a breeding ground of intoxicating fauna. A contaminated nursery overflowing with toxic belladonna, deadly nightshade whose blossoms mark death, by embracing the life that defied death which in turn mocked every-fucking-thing else. Long before the family-friendly gentrification and capital-gain criminality whitewashed New York City of its kaleidoscopic perversion in order to make it safe for anyone who could afford the ridiculous rents charged for shoebox-sized apartments, the Lower East Side played crash-pad shooting gallery and bordello, to dozens of art-school dropouts, out-noise musicians, radical poets, no-budget filmmakers, and fly-on-the-wall photographers who all lived in glorious squalor in cheap tenement flats all within spitting distance of each other’s front window. It was a drug-fuelled, no-holds-barred, blood-soaked pornucopia of art terrorists documenting their personal dissent into the bowels of an inferno of a city where it felt like the lunatics had taken over the asylum, and I can assure you they had. Creativity acts like a virus, spontaneously combusting, splattering the brain matter of its host carriers across a finite terrain for a fleeting

amount of time, forever staining the landscape. Hippie radicals flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love seeking revolution before the acid wore off. Heavyweight southern African Americans migrated north looking for paid work and ended up singing the blues in Chicago in the 1940s. The devil hollered when he caught his great balls of fire in Memphis during the 1950s. The scandals, the theatrics and the outrageous decadence of the Weimer Republic in the 1920s fostered both an uprise in prostitution and performance art — check out Anita Berber if you don’t know who she is — it made the golden age of Hollywood in the dirty 30s seem quaint by comparison. The boisterous orgy that began in Andy Warhol’s Factory in the swinging 60s had become a bloated Technicolor corpse, kicked to the curb by gutter punks and No Wave nihilists of the late 1970s whose idea of a good time was defined by how much noise we could make, how much art we could create, and how much trouble we could fucking cause before the cops arrived to close down the after party. Like the anti-art invasion of Dada and the Surrealist pranksters who shattered them, we had a blast pissing all over everybody’s expectations of what art was. No Wave — and I am not punk, nor have I ever been punk, nor have I ever written a fucking punk-rock song — No Wave was a collective bowel-cleansing caterwaul which spat forth a collection of extreme artists who defied category, despised convention, defied the audience, refused to compromise, and has consequently influenced an important part of pop culture as well as mainstream fucking media ever since. Send your royalty cheques please. It’s only “a movement” in retrospect. Post Alan Vega’s aptly named two-piece — Suicide — and before pop-punk-grunge Sonic Youth, New York City was the devil’s dirty litter box and No Wave was the bastard offspring of Taxi Driver, Times Square, the Son of Sam, the blackout of 1977, the dud of the summer of love, the hate-fuck of Charles Manson, the hell of the Vietnam War, Kent State, the Kennedy assassinations; it was a mad collective of death-defying miscreants desperate to rebel against the apathetic complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms, disco, fast food, and professional fucking wrestling. Yeah. We were angry, ugly, snotty, and goddamn vile. We used music and art as a battering ram and a form of psychic self-defence against our own

naturally violent tendencies, an extreme reaction towards everything the 1960s had promised but failed to deliver, a collective mania that shot through the night skies of the decade riddled with the aftermath of all the failures and the frustrations that had come before it. But beneath the scowls of derision and the antagonism and the acrimony and the beautifully hideous harangue and the nearly unbearable shrill, that grotesque soundtrack which our lives defined, we were howling with fucking delight, laughing like lunatics at the brink of the apocalypse in a mad house the size of all of New York City. We were thrilled to be rubbing up against the freaks and the outcasts who somehow for some reason had all decided to run to land’s end and scream their bloody heads off. Yeah, that was New York in ’77 as I lived it. I didn’t start in 1977. I started creating at the age of 12. I probably came out of the womb screaming a fucking horrible poem. I was born surrounded by death. My mother miscarried before me, after me, and I was born choking the life out of my dead twin — no fucking shit… in hell. At the age of six, my grandmother, a cruel Sicilian witch, died in bed while sleeping next to me, and for years afterwards I was chased through the basement by her evil apparitions, her heinous cackle. My mother was surrounded by death too. Eleven brothers and sisters, only three of which lived to adulthood. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, stroke. A sick brood indeed. Rotten fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. I spent my formative years in a town where future Hillside Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi, carried out his first experiments in lust killings. Month after month lurid details of his latest victim — always a preadolescent girl my age — would be splashed across the evening news or the front page of the daily paper. Grid-marking the map of bodies I was convinced, I actually prayed… I would be the next to join. Years later I survived Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker — see you in Disneyland — by three blocks. Now although at the time in the advanced stages of sick addiction to adrenaline and the endless possibility of death’s black magnetism I felt as if I had already spent many a new moon subjugated to the crazed killers’ unique charisma. Now, Ricky Ramirez never knew me but I felt as if we were fucking dating.

By nature I am death-defiant. I have survived illnesses — I’m not exaggerating — that have killed lesser mortals. Burst appendix, engorged lymph nodes, undetected and unwanted ectopic pregnancy that exploded filling my body with poisoned blood, septicaemia. I woke up while being butchered on the operating table, the surgeon’s vicious scalpel like a rotary saw slicing me open when the anaesthetic wore off. I came to surrounded by blinding white light which was in fact not the light, but the fluorescent overheads which I seemed to float eye-level to in a semicoma of indescribable pain. Silently screeching and beseeching every god, goddess, and demon that I thought worthy of summoning as I begged for death, begged for relief, begged to be set free from what I assumed was hell’s ultimate punishment. Eternal, unceasing, unrelenting physical pain, which I am still fucking in, goddamn. I’ve been stabbed in the gut an eighth of an inch short of pancreatic poisoning, I’ve been forced into the desert by a Manson wannabe whose idea of true romance was blood stains on the sun-bleached sand. I’ve been smashed in the head with a Heineken bottle with such brute force that it broke. I spent a charming weekend with a drifter who was arrested three days later at the Chelsea Hotel charged with cannibalism. I know, laugh if you will ‘coz I thought it was pretty damn funny he didn’t bite my baby pinkie toe off. He had my feet in his mouth and honey I’ve still got ten toes. You can count them later if you want to. I have been held hostage in snowy woods by a Robert Blake lookalike holding a sawn-off shotgun to my left temple, demanding to be told horrible fairy-tales detailing a dozen ways I would murder my own sisters. I’ve had two transatlantic flights which have stalled on European runways for hours while bomb-sniffing dogs have been let off in the luggage hold to look for explosives — and that was the early 1980s. I’ve taunted death. And death taunted back. But like a lover who sweet-talks you with endless promises of fantastic potential but always comes up short in the motherfucking pants, you eventually grow bored with the possibility of death. And the attraction you once swooned with now sours and leaves you cold — besides, death is fucking forever man. I mean shit, life, no matter how much you torture yourself or others to pick up the pillory and nail you up to the post, it’s so goddamn short. I mean sea turtles live longer. I’m

grateful for every minute that I’m still alive. I’ve had numerous days of execution, I’ve courted death, who always wins in the fucking end but truly I wanted life, I wanted to live in the extreme, I wanted experiences which would force me to truly appreciate everything. I wanted to take absolutely nothing for granted. I once had a friend say “Shut the fuck up man! You have got it made, you have everything you ever wanted — all the sex you could stomach, all the drugs you could consume, cool friends who worship you, what more do you fucking want?” And that’s just it. I want more. More of everything baby. I want more sex, more drugs, more guns, more money, more sex, more drugs, more guns, more money. I want to glut on every fucking thing that this bastard planet has to offer before the prince of thieves sneaks in to hostage me back to death’s other kingdom. And you better believe I will not go quietly. I will die as I have lived, kicking and screaming wildly against the void. Because to create is in a sense to cheat death. To leave a skid mark. To shit in the face of history, and confront mortality with a middle finger raised in the air knowing full well that death will eventually dispose of this body but it will not be able to completely bury the incriminating evidence that this art terrorist has left behind. [Applause]. LL: Thank you very much. DJ: So you’ve mapped out rather graphically in the performance the context into which you arrived in 1976. Why and how did you start a band? LL: I didn’t want to start a band. I went to New York thinking — although it didn’t exist yet — I would do spoken word. Sure there was Patti Smith doing rock-and-roll poetry, but there wasn’t slam poetry yet, even though it was well past Beat poetry. I remember I would corner Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group — he was the only one who wouldn’t run away from me. Richard Hell would run away. David Byrne would run away. Richard Lloyd would run away. Lenny Kaye would stand placidly in the corner and listen to my terrible poetry about murdering my parents. He was very supportive.

But spoken word didn’t exist so I decided to start Teenage Jesus — half of which was instrumental, which, because I’m contrary, made perfect sense to me. I began doing music out of the dilemma of not having the vehicle or the space yet to do spoken word, which came a few years later. DJ: The style of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks is distinctive: 30second songs often, your lyrics, your voice, and James Chance’s saxophone. Can you talk about the emergence of that as a style? LL: When I went to New York at 14 I stayed a short time, went back and got money in upstate New York, and then I dropped out of school — unlike some of you. I don’t know why you’re here, I guess to see me. Whatever. Actually my English teacher told me to drop out because I wouldn’t read John Steinbeck. I’d already read the Marquis de Sade, so I wasn’t going to read fucking Steinbeck. I went to New York and I didn’t know anybody. It was the second time I ran away — I was 16, maybe almost 17 — and I went to this club that I’d read about in Creem Magazine, a rock zine. It was called Mothers and Wayne [now Jayne] County was there, who was my pen pal by the way, and there was a band playing — they were horrible — but the lead singer looked really passive, so as a predator, already at 16, I approached and said hey, I’m an orphan I need a place to stay. They lived around the corner from Max’s Kansas City. So I moved in as Kitty Bruce (Lenny Bruce’s daughter) was moving out — I know, it’s unbelievable. The first show I saw was Suicide, and Suicide became my first friends. I met James Chance at a Suicide concert. I moved in with James Chance — he was never my lover, I didn’t go there. James had already been doing loft jazz and somebody gave me a busted bass, or a busted guitar and I just decided I had to write some music, and it came out sounding like the terrible temper tantrum that is Teenage Jesus. The thing is, at that age for some reason I was already very insistent that everything had to be documented, that we had to be really tight, which we were. We rehearsed relentlessly, and I had to convince the drummer that he should play like a monkey, one drum

and one cymbal — I literally had to take his hands to teach him. We were very tight. James Chance was originally in it and he was very hot, but Teenage Jesus was very cold, so he had to be forced to have his own band — thankfully he formed the Contortions. So he was just too hot, he wanted to attack the audience. I wanted a barrier. And Teenage Jesus sets were between seven to thirteen minutes, the longest — who wants more? I think the first two songs I wrote were ‘Popularity is So Boring’, not that I’ve ever known that, and ‘Less is More’, which I still believe. DJ: I mentioned that No New York was released in 1978. It consisted of four bands associated with No Wave: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, Mars, and DNA — LL: Mars were to me the ultimate No Wave band. Let me just define what No Wave is. No Wave is user-unfriendly; dissident. None of the groups sound anything alike. Now when you say punk rock, I know there is a wide range of what punk is, it can encompass anything from Magazine to the Sex Pistols. When you say No Wave you really don’t know what it sounds like because each band sounds so completely different. It was also not about political insanity like punk was, it was about personal insanity and having no choice — you’re either going to be murdered, murder someone or make music. New York was very violent in that period. So Mars was the ultimate to me, because they’re the most dissident, most insane. The lead singer [Sumner Crane] was insane: he would make faces on stage he didn’t know he was making. The guitar-player for Mars, China Burg, was my biggest guitar influence. I don’t know what your question was but that’s the answer. DJ: I was going to ask: what was the effect of the album? Did it have an influence? LL: Ha! Nobody cared! But Brian Eno, the best thing about him, besides what he did with Roxy Music and his first two albums, is he had fucked himself into the hospital during that period. Yeah, even as a balding dwarf he still managed to get somebody to fuck him. Wasn’t me, I would have killed him. Brian Eno did nothing for that

record except help get it out — his production sucked. Robert Quine of Richard Hell & the Voidoids produced a lot of Teenage Jesus stuff. Richard Hell & the Voidoids had I think one of the most important albums out of New York of that period [Blank Generation, 1977] and Robert Quine I think I was the first person to approach him after the first Richard Hell show. Richard Hell who would run away from me in terror, but Bob Quine — being a balding freak who wore sunglasses and kept a screwdriver in his pocket — was not afraid of little old me; why should he be? So I think I was the first person to go up to Bob Quine and tell him what a genius he was, and consequently he produced Teenage Jesus and then went on to play some guitar on Queen of Siam. He was a big supporter of what I did. He got me. Lester Bangs, who was a gonzo journalist who died in the late 70s — he got me. Some people really got me, but most people didn’t get it at all, still don’t fucking get it — whatever! DJ: What’s your response to conceiving of No Wave as part of postpunk? LL: I always felt No Wave means audience-unfriendly, dissident, contradictory. I’m contrary. I was contrary to my own music from the very first project. I had Teenage Jesus at the same time as I had a group called Beirut Slump, which Jim Thirlwell described accurately as “a slug crawling across a razorblade”. So I had a group that was very fast, percussive, and torturous, and at the same time I had a group that was really slow. I wrote the music and played the guitar. It was really horrorcore. It doesn’t exist, but Beirut Slump was horrorcore. Then I had a surf-rock band 8 Eyed Spy, and at the same time Queen of Siam, so I was a musical schizophrenic out the gate. I always feel very No Wave because I feel very Surrealist, and I think that No Wave is the closest to the Surrealist movement as far as absurdism, ridiculousness, outlandishness, sure I’ll put fur in a teacup — whatever. A band called Teenage Jesus — whatever. Same thing. DJ: In your performance you mentioned Patti Smith, Suicide, the New York Dolls, and Velvet Underground. Were you specifically

interested in those bands? LL: The New York Dolls were the reason I ran away at 14 to New York. I escaped out my bedroom window. The girl across the street was 13 and her dad drove us to the Greyhound station. I wanted to see the New York Dolls because, well, they were the fucking New York Dolls. Personality crisis? Honey, I was born with one. I’m always in drag every day of my life so I figured they were the best band for me. So the New York Dolls were very inspirational — not so much the music, but because they were so outlandish, the same way that Bowie was very influential to me as a 12 and 13 year-old. DJ: Thinking about that period of ’78–80, I was wondering about the relations between No Wave and New Wave — LL: Ha! New Wave was just the commercialised ridiculous bastard child of funny clothes and crappy music. We had nothing to do with New Wave — the same way we really had nothing to do with punk rock. We thought that the Sex Pistols were a fucking joke man. We thought that Malcolm McLaren invented them to wear t-shirts — I still kind of do. We were snobbish. We hated everything. We especially hated Warhol. I loved a lot of the British groups though. I loved Magazine, Buzzcocks, and Wire for example. I liked a lot of groups from that period — but punk rock was a fucking joke. Same for New Wave — like Blondie. We thought the music was ridiculous. It’s so corny — the clothes are so corny, everyone looks the same. We thought it was kind of juvenile, you know. We hated everything. Punks wanted to be inclusive, it was only a movement in retrospect, as I said earlier. It was a collective because we all lived in rat traps really close to each other. We were all insane. We all worked together on various projects but we weren’t all in it together, man. We thought everything was just ridiculous. We were against everything. DJ: And what about the relation to the downtown arts scene at that moment? Did you share venues or audiences for example?

LL: Yeah, well, Max’s Kansas City would often do like four nights, four Mondays in a row with various bands, and Teenage Jesus got to do one and I invited the filmmakers Beth and Scott B to show films. Instead of showing films they made a film every week called The Offenders, which to me was just fantastic. A lot of people were in it — Walter Lure of the Heartbreakers, John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, Anna Sui the fashion designer — just anybody they could get. They were making a punk serial that they would show every week, and then that just branched out. One of my favourite artists who was also a conceptualist that crossed from music to spoken word to art was David Wojnarowicz — a little bit beyond that period. But the art-gallery scene, I wasn’t so much into it — although I came into it later. I wasn’t into early hip-hop, but I respected the fact that early hip-hop came out of the blackout of 1977 in New York because the looting that was done of all the electronic stores was done by future DJs, and that was fucking radical man! That was awesome. DJ: You described New York at that moment in your performance. How much is No Wave necessarily a New York phenomenon? Could it have happened somewhere else? LL: I think it’s very New York. New York was completely bankrupt. In the same way that in forests sometimes they do controlled burns, New York City’s bankrupted and corrupted government had done a controlled burn of the Bronx and Lower East Side because they wanted to get rid of drug addicts, artists, and rent-control people and any minority who lived in really cheap apartments. My first apartment in New York cost 75 fucking dollars, on the Lower East Side, and they purposely closed down the Fire Department and the Police Department in those areas to blight the area so that they could bulldoze it and build the condos that now cost 3,500 dollars a month to rent. This was a controlled and a manipulated ploy by New York. It was like the worst of what Brixton was. It looked like Fallujah, ok. And this was purposeful. And then in 1977 there was four days of 100-degree weather — I mean London was suffering the same thing around that period — and there was a blackout that struck for three days and the entire

city was basically looted. And that was glorious. I lived in a building with no power anyway. What did I care? I was squatting a whole building that didn’t have any power and was running it from nextdoor. 30,000 cars were stolen in the summer of 1977 and shipped to Kuwait. It was the first time a missing boy had appeared on a milk carton. It was the Son of Sam. It was the blackout. 3,500 people arrested. All of Broadway looted. Crime was so astronomical. It was Dante’s inferno and it was fucking great. I loved it. Right at home. I could sleaze right through it and come out — as you can tell — unscathed. DJ: When did No Wave end, and how? LL: Well I think it still carries on. There are people like Weasel Walter who’s very influenced by it, he’s been on 160 albums and his group the Flying Luttenbachers released 16 LPs alone. He’s now playing in my group RETROVIRUS. There are still groups that are No Wave-influenced. But I think the period in New York ended by 1980. I would say it was even over by ’79. DJ: Are your bands artists’ bands? LL: What do you mean by “artists’ bands”? I don’t know what that means. DJ: I mean where the band is a kind of conceptual-art project. LL: Well I kicked out the bass player of Teenage Jesus because he called it an art project. That was Gordon Stevens and he died not long after, and I’m like that’s a fucking art project you motherfucker, you just died! I don’t know, I’m anti-art although I’m a conceptualist and although I feel like a Surrealist… I don’t what you mean, I can’t comprehend that. Artists… Rephrase. DJ: Well I think you answered it actually. We mentioned just before post-punk and I was wondering how you respond to being described or conceived as post-punk?

LL: It might get you punched in the face. DJ: What about post-Beat, or another kind of post-? LL: You know, when I heard Beat poetry I thought it was a physical thing. I almost like that idea! But you don’t have to pigeonhole everything. I’m just No Wave. I’m a confrontationalist — call it what you will. I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a hysterian, an experiential journalist… Words are my priority. Even when I do photography the title is the most important part. Even in an instrumental song the title is the most important. I consider myself a journalist of this time through whatever medium I use. I don’t consider it art. I consider that I live life artistically and I’ve managed to do that because I ain’t never had a day job, ha ha. And I’m poor as fuck but that’s alright. I ain’t working at the bank. Robbing the bank — done that before. Truly. In the UK. Don’t report me. Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. I’m too confrontational. I’m a hysterian — I document my own hysteria, or political hysteria, or the sexual hysteria of the times. “Artist” seems so fragile. The concept feels so frail. DJ: In terms of Beat, though, do you think you were directly influenced by someone like William S. Burroughs or Herbert Huncke? LL: Nah! I basically thought most of Burroughs’ writing sucked, except for Junky and Naked Lunch. I think the rest of it is pretty shitty. Burroughs was very important for other reasons; he was the first out queer and he was the first to come out and say he was staring at his fucking shoes for eight hours a day while high on daddy’s money in Tangiers. He was the first to know about language as a virus, and the first to know about the conspiracies that are all around us now. He was very important as a thinker but he was a trust-fund baby who I didn’t fucking trust, and the writing mainly sucked and he stole everything from Herbert fucking Huncke who died penniless in the Chelsea Hotel, supported by the Grateful Dead, what the fuck. Guilty of Everything is Herbert Huncke’s book.

I was not influenced by the Beats. Kerouac was another crappy writer. Ginsberg wrote one good poem, in my opinion. His poems are great for 14 year-old boys. Howl is a very important poem though. The Beats were important to me only because they lived life as nomadic writers and they wrote what they lived as a very thinly fictionalised version of reality. When I write, I don’t know how to write fiction. I don’t read fiction. I want the true tale, I want the real story, and that’s what I try to tell: the real story, unglamourised, brutalist, with some poetry involved. That’s why to me it was Henry Miller, Hubert Selby, Charles Bukowski, Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, Emil Cioran, De Sade who mattered. And you notice there’s no women in that, because the women writers — although there’s great ones, Violette Leduc, Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton etc. — they were never as brutal as I felt my life was, and it was never as brutal a voice as I felt women deserved to hear — one that speaks to the brutality some of us experience. And that some of us feel. Those of us that haven’t been sexually segregated into being nice fucking girls that smile a lot and act pretty. Fuck off. [Applause]. But I’m in drag every day of my goddamned life so don’t take it from me. These look like tits but they’re my balls. Notice I always wear dresses, shit. DJ: Because we’re moving into thinking about general political – LL: Are you really a doctor? DJ: Yeah. LL: Get me a doctor, I’m very sick… DJ: We were going to play a track from Queen of Siam. LL: Let’s do it. DJ: We’ll play ‘Knives in my Drain’. LL: This was from 1980, I was 21 when this insanity — musical schizophrenia — somehow took root. Thank you very much. Play it.

DJ: Thank you very much. LL: Thank you very much doctor. I think you should give me a lap dance while this is playing. [‘Knives in My Drain’ from the album Queen of Siam plays, while Lydia Lunch gives Dominic Johnson a lap dance…]. LL: Woo. Burlesque baby, burlesque. [Applause]. LL: And that was the amazing Richard Quine on guitar from Richard Hell & the Voidoids who went on to be ripped off by that grumpy grandpa, the now-dead Lou Reed — fuck him. I shit on his ghost. DJ: Played alongside the earlier tracks, there are really obvious differences — the introduction of a noir atmosphere, jazz elements, atonal piano, guitar solos, spoken word. Can you say a little bit more about what was in your mind at that moment? LL: I was in love with a maniac, we did a lot of Seconal, drank a lot of whiskey, laid in bed and watched a lot of cartoons — and Michael Zilkha of ZE Records, who was responsible for releasing great stuff by Suicide and the Contortions and Teenage Jesus, I’d mentioned to him I’d like to do a record that was nursery rhymes and cartoon music, and he said, which composer? And I suggested Billy Ver Planck, who had composed a lot of cartoon music. Ver Planck hated what we did to his music, hated my voice, hated my guitar, hated Bob Quine’s guitar. But Michael Zilka understood that I was a musical schizophrenic and he encouraged it. He allowed me to do this record. A lot of it is nursery rhymes. One of my favourite facts about Queen of Siam is that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits — ugh — told Bob Quine how much he liked his guitar-playing but it was actually my guitar-playing on one of the tracks, ha ha ha. I have no idea how I was able to come up with this level not only of sophistication but the nursery rhymes as well because some of the

other music is just absolutely fucking infantile, and it works with the big-band stuff. It was just instinct as everything I do is. DJ: It’s striking that in your work since the 1970s there is this state of constant reinvention — almost to the extent of not having a musical signature style. Why? LL: Well because I have many musical signature styles. When anybody ever says oh, I like your music, I’m like oh really, what period? I mean it helps me to know what period they like, because if they were to like the most commercial, which to me was 8 Eyed Spy — argh — or if they say The Agony is the Ecstacy, which is the most atrocious record I’ve ever made, it was the B-side of the Birthday Party’s ‘Drunk on the Pope’s Blood’. If somebody picks that record I’m like uh huh, a true Lydiot, you’re really fucking weird. So it’s interesting to me what period people pick up on or what they relate to because again, I’m a conceptualist. Some people, like Sonic Youth and Nick Cave, they make the same record basically ad nauseam for 20 years, it’s like oh again, here we go, another ballad, here we go another guitar… whatever. That suits them, that’s why they can buy their house in cash. Because they make the same fucking record for 20 years and it’s easier for people to latch onto. DJ: What do you think are the effects for you of being schizophrenic in your style? LL: I am the most successful living artist I know — and I don’t mean financially. I truly mean that because I do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it, mostly with whoever I want to do it, and somehow… I was stubborn enough to document it all, so I own everything I’ve ever released — I own it, that’s right — and it’s all on download for free. So you know, I never thought I was going to live by selling fucking records. I knew that I would try to live by doing live performances. I’m happy if somebody — who knows where — can find the download of my shit and wants to hear it for free. I don’t want your fucking money for my records. However, I just did a desertblues album with Cypress Grove (A Fistful of Desert Blues). Before that, this year, I released Medusa’s Bed, an LP with Austrian avant-

violinist Mia Zabelka, which is a radio drama with psycho-ambient music. RETROVIRUS is a retrospective of my work from Teenage Jesus forward, the live group that I perform with featuring Weasel Walter, Tim Dahl, and Bob Bert. Big Sexy Noise had an album last year, Trust the Witch. I had a record with Philippe Petit called Taste Our Voodoo. You can’t define what all of this is. I’m just very happy I find a way — with small labels, they’re still out there — with whom I can create at the rate that I create. If I was with a major record label I could never do all this shit. They’d say tour this terrible fucking album for five years. A lot of the records I’ve made I’ve never toured with, I’ve never even performed the music. That’s why doing RETROVIRUS now is very interesting to me. It just brings new life to the music. Because face it, it was always 30 years ahead of its fucking time. Come on, catch up. DJ: In your performance text you said that to create was to cheat death. I wanted to ask you about the relation between creativity and risk. Is that an essential link for you? LL: When I create with someone I want to create a sacred space where there’s no bullshit. That’s how I always work and it’s very important to me. Hence why I can work with someone like James Johnston of Gallon Drunk for ten years running, and go back and do stuff with Thurston Moore and various other people. It’s very important for me to create this really sacred space. Every time you get up, get your clothes on and cross the street you’re fucking risking something. I just do what I do by instinct, I don’t ever think anything I’ve ever done is shocking, that’s other people’s interpretations of what I did. If you think getting gunfucked is shocking well you haven’t lived my fucking life. DJ: Reading Paradoxia, for example, it’s really clear that one of your key themes is hate… LL: I’m paid to hate. And my hate is enormous but it’s never against any individual, I don’t have any fucking enemies — they’re all dead. I don’t hate on an individual level, my hatred is very vast, it’s for the

patriarchy, for God the father, the fucker, my father and the father fuckers of our country. It’s always against a system. I don’t have time to hate you personally, I mean trust me I would rather hug you and kiss you. If you want a hug you should get a fucking hug man. I mean no one’s going to love you like I do — the outcasts, the freaks, the degenerates, the queers, the dykes, the… my friends, my lovers, my real family. I love you. Love to love you baby… I get paid to hate, I don’t have time to do that in my personal time. Jesus Christ, I don’t hate for free, that’s silly. DJ: I suppose the reason I’m asking is because in the work there is this sense of you being invested in all-encompassing conventionally negative emotions and affects. LL: Well it’s very important that somebody speaks for the negativity in all of us but lives as an example of how you can vent that through many multiple vehicles in order to not live in fucking hatred. Because if you live in hatred or depression or agony — I’m always in physical pain, we’ll leave that one aside — if you live in depression and anger and frustration, the enemy has fucking won. They want you to feel like shit. [Applause]. Yeah. My rebellion has always been, and this has always been the closing mantra of my solo spoken-word pieces for over ten years; pleasure is the ultimate rebellion. Pleasure is the ultimate rebellion because it’s the first thing they try and steal from you in their campaign of fear and hatred. So I insist on being completely hedonistic, a libertine, and have as much love and spread the love and spread your fucking legs people, as much as possible. Because when you are miserable they have fucking won. And face it, this is a miserable fucking country man. Oh yeah, you know it, you live here! [Applause]. You are surrounded by miserable cunts who are full of shit. Hey, I lived here for a few years, I know what it’s like. I just didn’t stay here people, I’m nomadic, get with it. But if you’re laughing, and you’re creating, and you’re having a good time, and face it we’re all fucking broke and nobody has enough money, or enough drugs or enough fun, that’s just the facts, so at least you can fuck as much as goddamn possible — it’s still free right? Still free to fuck? I got to

make up for lost time, I was celibate for two fucking years man; take a number, stand in line. Any questions? DJ: Do you want to go to questions? LL: Well unless you still have any — we’re running out of time here daddy. Must be my answers. It ain’t the questions, they’re short and concise. DJ: Well we were going to play one more track, we’re going to play ‘No Excuse’, I’ve got one more question and then – LL: And I want to talk about the song. So Dr Dominic Johnson — my future ex-husband, part-time lover — don’t let the tits fool you baby, I am a faggot truck driver and you know it. This song is bizarre because I had done this spoken-word piece called ‘No Excuse’ and actually it sent Richard Kern into rehab but it was about the drummer of Teenage Jesus standing in front of me, and it was about just fucking whining. To me it’s a definitive Lydian track, ‘No Excuses’. Blast it! [‘No Excuse’ plays]. DJ: I see that as a motivational song. LL: Absolutely. DJ: Recently there was an article in the New York Times called ‘Finding Inner Peace with the Angriest Punk of 1970s New York’ and it describes you running motivational workshops. Can you tell us about this aspect of your work? LL: New Rage. Since women don’t have the equivalent of war or sports, for the most part, I designed a workshop for women only called Post-Catastrophe Collaborative Workshop, and I’ve hosted it in a few places and I found it really fantastic. Basically it was just to encourage women to have a place to experiment, for instance especially with spoken word, or illustrated word, or just how to

occupy the stage — to occupy the stage to have your voice heard. It was very satisfying. Anybody could apply to the class. We had a choreographer, visual artist, videographer, musician, various creatrixes giving workshops. My class was in how to find your voice, the art of reading, presenting with confidence. I encourage women to come together and collaborate. Because women, we don’t spend eight, ten hours a day with each other, together in covens like we used to, so to me that was really important. Women need to feel sisterhood and encouragement and to be free to express without any condemnation, so I will continue these workshops, I really enjoy them and the women go on to a lot of stuff straight after, just because it somehow opens possibility up within them. DJ: Do you think there is a motivational or utopian quality in your music where people might not expect to see it? LL: Oh yes, I am so positive it’s frightening. As Kafka said, “there is hope — but not for us”. I’m an apocalyptician. I know the end is near and I’ve been waiting for it my whole fucking life. I love the apocalypse, I love these times — end times, call it what you will — to me it’s just proving the theories that I’ve always had, that man is an idiot, a parasite, a fucking leech, that the patriarchy is wrong, that the planet has got to fucking change, and we have to reclaim the power we once had — yes ladies: the female planet, they stole it from us. And I do think that men suffer as much, and that’s why I never pick on you individually. Under this rule of the idiotic cockocracy it has to be turned around, and we all need to be fucking liberated from the cabal of kleptomaniacs that run the planet. Because the reason we’re in this shithole is out of greed, you know it here in the UK where the economic divide is so incredibly vast and growing, it’s out of fucking control. We’ve rioted before, it might have helped something then. You notice how riots and protests no longer help? Maybe it’s because they’re not violent enough. I’m sorry. I’ll end with that. [Applause]. *

DJ: So I’m sure there are lots and lots of burning questions. Audience member 1: This is a slightly antagonistic question. LL: Can you speak louder please if you want to antagonise? Put some balls behind it baby. Audience member 1: It’s a slightly antagonistic question… LL: I heard that. Audience member 1: …which I hope your contrariness will embrace. You say that in our depressive, violent world you embrace a form of rebellion, but haven’t most of our forms of taking pleasure already been thoroughly commercialised and taken away? The idea of just going out and drinking is just being a good consumer? LL: That’s a great question because it’s not pleasure that they’re selling us, it’s distraction, it’s convenience packaged as the latest con to steal your time away from real pleasure, ok. So drinking at the bar or watching all the reality TV shows or buying the latest devices or the availability of the internet, they feed us these false conveniences to take our time from real fucking pleasure which means intimacy, which means one-on-one conversation, which means a collective coven not necessarily going down to the bar to see the next band when you should be home creating music. So I agree with your sentiment that they’re feeding us every kind of distraction to prevent us from fucking thinking or creating. Because why should we create, when we can just watch it on TV? That’s not real pleasure, it’s false fuels. Audience member 2: Hello, I just wondered if you could say something about the films that you made with Vivienne Dick? LL: The No Wave movement coincided with a lot of women making films at the time. Vivienne Dick is an Irish filmmaker who herself was a completely unique individual. She Had Her Gun All Ready was about Pat Place (of the Contortions) representing Vivienne Dick who

was very paranoid about me at the time. It was the first film about a female stalking another female, and eventually Pat Place just gets so paranoid that she strangles me on the Cyclone Roller Coaster at Coney Island. Vivienne Dick did films that were very experimental, Super-8, a lot about incest and also, about collectives of women, just hanging out and doing what women do. There was also Lizzie Borden, Beth B of Beth and Scott B doing films, so a lot of the films of that period… Specifically Beth and Scott B were very political filmmakers during that period in New York. One of my favourite scenes in The Offenders was when a car was pushed into the East River. Another film, Black Box, was based on a South American torture device that actually existed. In the film, a guy is kidnapped, brought to me, suspended, interrogated, there was no answer I wanted, the same in real interrogation and then eventually he’s put into a replica of the Black Box, a black box with a silver interior, which in South America they would torture you with, using light and sound. Brutal. Horrible. Based on reality. Audience member 3: You said that words are the most important thing, so is a writer one of the things that you are? Or are you a writer with lots of outputs? LL: Well, again I prefer the term journalist or hysterian. I mean “writer”, it sounds so scholarly. All of my lyrics I write in ten minutes or less. When I first began writing it was for spoken word so since then I’ve always had a very conversational style. It’s very fat-free. But I do what I call in-camera editing. I cogitate, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, pace a hole in the ground, but first must have had the experiences needed to document what I’m talking about, and then when I write, it pretty much blasts its way out, there’s very little editing. I wrote Paradoxia in three months. I was able to accomplish that by having the discipline of writing every day from 6am to 9am, whether I wrote one word or ten. Audience member 4: What is your relationship towards New York City now in terms of music?

LL: Oh, it’s sad. I was in New York ’76 to ’79/80, I went to L.A. for two years, I came to London for two years to work with Rowland S. Howard of the Birthday Party, I went back to New York in ’84 to ’90, and then I left for good. I went to New Orleans for two years, San Francisco for two years, Pittsburgh for four years, L.A. for four years, I was in London for two years before that, and then I went to Barcelona for eight years. I find New York repulsive because who can afford to live there with rents being 3,500 bucks a month? I don’t know how anyone affords to live in London either though. The rents are ridiculous; I think the whole atmosphere is just over. I’m nomadic, I think there’s shit happening everywhere, I think that New York has a really overblown reputation like most of America, it’s really good at blowing its own fucking horn, but there are many great places. And it’s not just the place, creativity is a rogue virus, it’s where you find it, you know? I don’t miss New York, I hate going there. I go there — the last two years because I’ve been working on projects there — but I can’t stand it. I just came from Le Locle, Switzerland, a tiny town… I’d rather fucking be there than in New York. That’s me though. DJ: More questions? LL: Don’t be shy. Because I could start asking you questions and that’s going to be painful. That’s going to hurt. Audience member 5: What was the importance of drugs and how much of the intensity of your work came from drugs? LL: Drugs were very important. I think they still are, when used correctly. I had a lot of prejudice against me because I was never a heroin addict. I know that sounds bizarre. Both in New York and London. I still love to do drugs, in moderation, with the right people, when I have the luxury of the time to enjoy them. I never got into heroin, I’ve never been addicted to anything. I like to drink, but I’m never drunk, nobody’s ever seen me fucked up. Trust me, they never have. Drugs played an important part in both the rise and fall of many cultures, movements, for many decades across the centuries.

But it’s all in how you use them, and I guess it’s whether or not you have the propensity to become addicted not. I guess people were always prejudiced against me because I’m like a bull, I don’t go down easily. I’ll go for long periods of time without doing any drugs or drinking, I never needed to do drugs. I liked to do drugs because I liked to alter my consciousness, and I have many different personalities I’d like to bring out. Not everybody has the time… They don’t really make very interesting drugs anymore. Drugs can be very inspirational when used wisely, but it’s like anything, food, gambling, sex, if you have a weakness — and weakness is basically self-hatred. Audience member 6: My question is about the pleasures of the ultimate rebellion… You revel in public divisions and death as well, and your band was horror… LL: Horrorcore. Audience member 6: Yeah, I was wondering if you thought there were any links between the idea of pleasure being the ultimate kind of rebellion, and also the rebellion of horror, embracing and engaging in abjection and filth. LL: I love horror films, I think that horror is what allows you to go as deep into your fantasy without having to actually murder somebody — we don’t all have to be our heroes. But I think that horror is a magnificent release. Like pornography, in the sense that the goal of pornography, the real goal of pornography is to get you off, and to make money. The real goal of horror is to scare the shit out of you, and relieve the frustration of you wanting to do evil shit. I mean these are very important diversions, like rap music, like punk rock, like No Wave. Like pissing your parents off. I’m all for the horror, I wish somebody would ask me to be in a horror film. Gavin Butt: Lydia. LL: Gavin.

GB: One thing that, amongst many, is completely remarkable about you is that you seem to be completely self-created, you’re selforiginated, if you like… both from the assumed name, but also through to the neologisms that you coin to describe yourself, you refuse “writer”, you refuse — LL: Well I’m a refusenik. GB: You refuse “writer”, you refuse “artist”, “band” — LL: I refuse “musician” as well… GB: You choose “hysterian” or “apocalyptician”, and it puts me in mind of Michel Foucault who you mentioned — LL: Thank you. Absolutely. GB: — A sort of self-fashioning. One of the things that you demonstrated tonight in a very eloquent way is how you have lived your life according to an ethics of self-fashioning. So I wondered if you could say a little bit about that, and also about how that then made you a subject for others who make representations of you. LL: I always trusted my instinct and knew I had a duty. Since the age of 12 I felt ‘this is a calling’, I never had any self-doubt, and of course for a lot of people that crawls up their ass. But it’s only fucking music man, it’s only a speech, a poem, a photograph; if nobody likes it, too fucking bad. I just never cared. The only time I felt stage fright was the first time I auditioned with Teenage Jesus at CBGBs. And I thought… wait a second, panic? I don’t panic… I cause panic! And I never felt stage fright again. I consider myself the No Wave Nostradamus, in the tradition of oral poets, the oral tradition of passing the story on, like a Chinese Whisperer, the town crier, I have always seen myself as a loner at the top of a hill with a bull horn and a shotgun, shouting. I have to express myself and I know it’s what needs to be fucking said, whether you agree with it or nobody agrees with it, because if I don’t get it out of my system I’m going to hurt somebody, and it’s not going

to be me. Better to use my silver tongue than to use my fist and feet, I guess, unless you pay for it. Audience member 7: What was it like when Rowland S. Howard died? LL: Rowland S. Howard was so sweet, funny, sensitive, so talented, and such a wonderful human being. When I met him, I knew who the Birthday Party was, I was living in Los Angeles. It may have been ’82? Whenever their first album came out. I was ready to escape from L.A., I was in New York when the Birthday Party did their first show there. I immediately went up to Rowland, he knew my music from Queen of Siam and Teenage Jesus, and said: I’m following you to London. He said please do. And we recorded ‘Some Velvet Morning’, followed by an album that was lost for years called Honeymoon in Red, Mick Harvey and Tracey Pew of the Birthday Party play on it. I have a couple of duets with Nick Cave. Rowland wrote most of the music. The money ran out to finish it, the master tapes were lost in a German studio somewhere and it took me eight years to locate them and find a way to release the album. In 1990 I moved to New Orleans and I knew I had to find a way to get Rowland there so we could work on our album Shotgun Wedding. It was painful because Rowland was basically born dying, I mean he was dying ever since I met him. He wasn’t long for the world, he was so ethereal, so sensitive, so fragile, funny, loving — he loved women. He was such a romantic. In a sense I’m amazed he lived as long as he did. He had a very small output but everything he did was magnificent. Every guitar lick is magnificent, and I’m so happy I had a chance to work with him. Bless his sacred soul. Audience member 8: You said you had a very broad hate, but you also said that hate and fear and oppression and hate were a product of what capitalists have created, so I was wondering whether there’s some sort of control — whether you’re being controlled? LL: I don’t have any hate in my private life so I don’t think I’m being controlled. The thing is I use hate as a catalyst because as a teenager we hate every fucking thing, as we bloody well should, but I

have a lot of vehicles and ventricles to release my frustration so I’m not contaminated. Because I use art as the artillery that I aim at the enemy — who never hears me anyway. I always feel that I am the voice for those who can’t find their own mouth, I will be the bullets fired at point-blank range. I’m not polluted in my private life because I’ve had so many years of being able to spew it across the stage and the page. That’s why I can afford to be so loving. It’s true. Love me, love me baby. DJ: More questions? Hands? I can’t see their hands. LL: Because they’re going to raise their legs next. DJ: I suppose one question I was wondering about is, thinking back to No Wave as a subculture, there’s a sense that subcultures may no longer be tenable because of the way the internet speeds up access to information, or the swiftness by which novelty can be co-opted. Are we post-subcultures? LL: So much has been homogenised. There are two problems. The pop-pornification of everything, so when you have Lady Gaga in her meat outfit stealing every fucking idea she ever had and sounding not at all original about anything, and literally having stylists pulling from every single modern-art movement in the past hundred years, it becomes the pornification of everything and reduces sex to pornography, because it’s not about sex. It’s not about intimacy or depth or danger, it’s about a fraudulent form of burlesque. I call it the Madonna theory; she shows you everything, and tells you nothing of meaning. And this is — this is really a problem for me when middleaged women wear leotards on stage to sell fucking records so that the pimp record companies profit from their absence of meaning or real danger. The other issue is just the homogenisation, what Bret Easton Ellis has just said in an article in the Huffington Post about the “wuss generation” — the early 20-somethings that are apathetic, uninvolved, and uninterested because they’ve had everything given to them. They’re spoiled and lazy and they won’t create anything of value or with meaning because technology has reduced their attention span to that of a gnat. A lot of kids, people come to me in

their rebellion and say where are my visionaries? I’ve always said if you don’t have a vision don’t give it a fucking sound.

3 Being in A Band: Art-school Experiment and the PostPunk Commons – a Lecture by Gavin Butt (16|10|14) This chapter focuses upon the role of art school as a breeding ground for post-punk values and aesthetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Artschool education, along with access to higher education more broadly, was fully state-funded in the UK from 1962 until the introduction of fees in 1989. The post-punk years (’78–’84) were therefore in the midst of what now looks like a halcyon, and somewhat short-lived, period for free education in the UK. Gavin Butt considers the cross-fertilising of ideas between art and music at the time of this “level playing field” for artschool access. He focuses on the remarkable number of bands and collectives that came out of the art-school scene in the Northern English city of Leeds and — taking up ideas of “the commons”, and of sharing economies of production — he shows how artists turned to each other in order to work through the impasses of modernist art and punk rock. What was the value of the group formation to those who ended up in one? How might the work of the post-punk band be understood as a “commons”? And how was ensemble work decisive in the production of new aesthetic and musical forms? I want to open up the subject of post-punk by, paradoxically, narrowing our focus: to the Northern English city of Leeds, a city frequently overlooked in the available accounts of the period in favour of New York, London, Manchester and Sheffield. I focus on Leeds not out of some wilful regionalism, but rather to high light how the post-punk scene there might productively inflect what we understand post-punk to be about. Because something remarkable happened in Leeds in the late 1970s, namely that making music in a band became such a crucial activity or thing to do at the city’s artschools, that it transcended — more often than not — any desire to

simply make music. Instead it took on a more social or ontological form: being in a band at this time became a way of living, a mode of existing even, through which an alternative future could be glimpsed, and a path was created out of the cultural and political impasses of the 1970s. Being in a band became so desirous for some because it allowed for ways of working, of producing new forms, of being-withothers, and of having fun, that didn’t seem possible as individuals apart. In short, to borrow a phrase from contemporary performance studies, the band became a particularly potent “world-making” machine at this time. At least this is my working hypothesis as I conduct my research into what I hope will be a book on the subject. I have interviewed nearly fifty members of various Leeds bands, mainly music outfits but also experimental performance collectives and curatorial groups. During the course of these interviews I have been intrigued not only by the readiness of many to speak about this formative time in their lives with much enthusiasm and excitement, but also by the clustering of testimony around why people felt moved to start a band in the first place. I have interviewed people who have secured international recognition and chart success for their work as band members, as equally as I have talked with those from bands that never made it out of Leeds, or which broke up even before the early 80s. Some of my interviewees have spent their whole lives as band members, whilst others were only so for the shortest period of time. For this and other reasons, testimony on the significance of band membership varies. But even so, for a large number of those interviewed so far, being in a band was some kind of answer — not always the right one — to a perceived problem in the culture: namely, that it appeared to have stalled. There seems to be a strong view amongst the generation who came of age in the post-punk years that late 70s culture in the UK, whether as high art or popular music, was doing the artistic equivalent of treading water. It was not progressing. And it was boring. Mekons member Kevin Lycett recalls the pre-punk period in Leeds as a “sterile, barren and horrible time: emotionally, intellectually and culturally”. For art students such as Lycett, who studied at Leeds University’s Department of Fine Art in the mid-70s

— well before Marxist art historian T.J. Clark became the department chair in 1976 — the experience was of an “eviscerated and dreary” teaching of modernist art and its histories. Abstract painting was the order of the day, as it had been since at least the 1950s. And pop music wasn’t much better, Lycett recalls. There were the increasingly self-regarding and bombastic productions of so-called art or prog rock, completely removed from the realities of the time, and little else. Many Leeds students in the mid-70s similarly felt this sense of alienation from, and frustration with, established culture. With no culture to call their own, they largely partied hard until punk came along. But once punk did arrive it appears to have unleashed a DIY ethos in a whole generation of creatives who felt they had to remake culture for themselves, largely because almost everything available at the time seemed staid, exhausted, and irrelevant to the experience of living in a Northern English industrial city in a period of decline. The city’s art schools provided the context, therefore, for a relatively small group of creative practitioners — often in collaboration, or with intimate knowledge of each other’s work — to remake the values and forms of expression typical of British culture in the run-up to, and in the wake of, Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory at the polls. Many bands that came out of Leeds at this time were forged out of the tight-knit social milieu which existed around the University and the Polytechnic, nestled in close proximity as they are just north-west of the city centre. Indeed we might think of this area of the city, of the surrounding bars and pubs (particularly the Poly bar, the Fenton, the Coburg and the Faversham), and the streets around Woodhouse Moor, as Leeds’ (decidedly) less glamorous equivalent to New York’s Soho at the time — a small urban enclave with a high concentration of artistic activity. Both played host to a remarkably small and dedicated community producing scores of innovative work across the divides of art, music and performance.

Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art studios, c. 1980. Photograph: Tom O’Leary. The roll-call of bands that came out of Leeds at this time is impressive and varied, including the Mekons, Gang of Four, Delta 5, Scritti Politti, the Shee Hees, the Three Johns, Another Colour, Sheeny and the Goys, Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon and electronic acts Fad Gadget and Soft Cell. Many of the key members in such bands were Fine Art students at this time, and as such were exposed to the pedagogies of conceptual and performance art at Leeds Polytechnic (where Jeff Nuttall, Shirley Cameron, and John Foxx, amongst others, taught), and Marxist, feminist and poststructural theory at the University (where Terry Atkinson, Griselda Pollock and T.J. Clark taught). Also, and just as important, the Anarchy tour pitched up at Leeds Polytechnic in December 1976. For many would-be band members this now legendary punk gig was the first opportunity to see the Damned and the Clash play live and also, perhaps most importantly, the Sex Pistols. Many bands — including Gang of Four, Scritti Politti, and the Mekons — formed immediately after the transformative experience of being at this gig.

As Simon Reynolds details in his book Rip It Up and Start Again one of the few studies to pay serious attention to Leeds post-punk — there soon emerged a “militant” and highly inventive music scene in the city, especially around the University bands, steeped as they were in Marxist and feminist theorising. Punk had provided the rage, the impetus and DIY example, but it was up to the bands that came after to trace new musical directions that might escape the prison house of “rock”. But before getting to such questions of style or expressive form, I would like to focus attention on how band members understood the importance of the group formation itself. This is because, at this particular historical juncture, not only were informal groups and collectives a big part of Leeds’ cultural and political life, but many within them saw such groupings as peculiarly charged with transformative potential. Being in a band, making music, seemed to promise expansive possibilities for its members, but ones that weren’t about narrowly securing a career as a rock musician. People created bands because they wanted to change the world. Lycett again: “It is a profound misunderstanding to think that music is all that it [being in a band] was about. It was a strategy, a practice, a response to an incredibly barren and unpromising landscape.” Playing in a band, being part of a broader collective was then — at least as Lycett understands it — a strategic move to escape the entropic pull of 70s culture and society. And it was a practice — a way of living out, a form of doing — that gave performative force to the production of new worlds of artistic and social possibility. John Hyatt, painter and lead singer of the Three Johns puts it slightly differently, “being in a band seemed to be part of the practical answer to the theoretical dilemma of what to do in art”. Making music, then, could be understood as a move in the art game: it was a way of engaging the problem of art making at the tailend of modernism. So, at least on the basis of these two testimonies, some people would get into bands because they wanted to escape, or because they wanted to try and find ways of making art by other means, when the established ways of doing things were discredited or dead. This desire to challenge the limits of the enclosure that had become 1970s art practice, was evident in how various band

members, who were also Fine Art students, challenged their educational institutions to accept their music-making as art. Some submitted album cover artwork for their studio assessment, whilst others presented wall-texts incorporating neo-Duchampian declarations, or, more precisely, long-winded justifications, for why their band’s output should be construed as a work of art. Andy Wood, member of band Another Colour, and a Fine Art student at the Polytechnic around 1980, did the latter and got a lower secondclass degree for his provocation. He also appeared on a BBC TV documentary in 1981, alongside Jacqui Callis, a fellow student and band member, and his art tutor from the Polytechnic, where he further excoriated the “intellectual prejudice” within Leeds art schools that prevented them, in his opinion, from recognizing the value of his band’s work. “It’s serious, its not fun” he sneers, in a recalcitrant manner typical of art school masculinity at the time, “it’s a practice we’re involved in […] We have a lot of problems as a band, because we don’t see ourselves as an aspiring, struggling, rock n roll band. I think we see ourselves much more as a working unit, trying to locate ourselves within different sorts of mode of production”. Wood’s marxisant idiom here alerts us to how he and his fellow band members understood what they were doing as pioneering modes of work, eschewing both old bourgeois-individualist models of fine art production, and labour under the conditions of social democratic capitalism — buffeted as it was throughout the 1970s by the big corporatist powers of the UK state and the unions. Instead, with its focus on freely-associating individuals coming together as “a working unit”, to forge a collective “practice” — perhaps even an ensemble practice (more of which in a moment) — Wood’s words usefully telegraph how post-punk collectivity might be understood as a kind of commons. Communalism was certainly an important feature of the Leeds scene. It is now almost a legend within music journalism that Gang of Four and the Mekons began by sharing resources, including a rehearsal space, a PA system, and musical instruments. In fact, the rehearsal space (on Wharf Street) was later used by other bands, including Another Colour, and by non-musical acts, such as Impact

Theatre Cooperative. Various members of the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5, had shared living arrangements in a couple of large old Victorian houses near the university, and the communalist ethos sometimes extended to sex, with reports of near “incestuous” bed-hopping going on. Added to this was the pooling of resources to make the most of a limited supply of money. Tyrone Huggins of Impact Theatre, and Jon Langford of the Mekons both recalled, independently of one another, how the experience of being in their respective groups was like “living out of each other’s pockets”. Individual pockets would have been filled (if not to bursting) by either state monies assigned as student maintenance grants, or through working part-time jobs — and perhaps, in some instances, by the Bank of Mum and Dad. Groups simply magnified the possibilities of pooled resources in order to fund artistic endeavours. Huggins tells of the particular ingenuity of the Impact Cooperative who, after graduation from university and in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, were able to finance their activities for one or two years by each member applying successively for an award only eligible to individuals once — each successful individual award, of course, invested in the totality of the group’s activities, benefitted all within the band multiple times. The post-punk creative scene was perhaps most like the old English commons however, in the ways in which it sought to “beat the bounds” of disciplinary specialisms. Historically, the English commons were — and to the extent that they still exist, are — a legally recognized communal resource, often a piece of land, with non-exclusive access rights, used by commoners to graze livestock, or to go for pleasurable walks. Crucially for my purposes here, the history of the commons is also a history of attempts to encroach upon it; to enclose it as private property by literally fencing off areas of previously held common land for private, exclusive use. To prevent this from happening commoners would have the legal right to tear down such encroachments — beating back the bounds — in order to keep the field open and accessible to all. Transposing this idea of an open field metaphorically to my discussion of post-punk here, I’m thinking of the full breadth and width of the cultural

continuum as a kind of “field”, which disciplinary specialisms and institutional procedures attempt to enclose in various ways. For example, we have already considered how art school assessments sometimes downgraded students working as popular musicians in order to exclude this from consideration as a legitimate ‘art’ activity, rendering it outside its cultural enclosure — despite art schools serving as a nursery for rock bands since the 1960s! In their attempts to beat back the enclosures erected on the cultural field, post-punk artists might instead be understood as engaging in a practice of commoning. It is highly illuminating, for example, to think about how Impact Theatre — though not an art school outfit — had a number of members who were also, sometimes simultaneously, members of music bands: founding member Hugo Burnham was also drummer for Gang of Four, and Steve Shill was guitarist for Sheeny and the Goys. Frank Tovey, a fine art student at the Polytechnic, would perform mime in theatre productions at the University’s Riley Smith Hall, and stage his own theatrical productions at the Polytechnic, whilst also making sound and music, firstly with his short-lived band Fans (with Jacqui Callis, Barbara Frost, and Marc Almond) and later as Fad Gadget. Marc Almond himself, also a Polytechnic student, made performance art, and with another fellow student Dave Ball, made sound works that would eventually lead to the music of Soft Cell.

Soft Cell at Leeds Polytechnic (Marc Almond, Dave Ball), 1979. Photograph: Tom O’Leary. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti was as much a theorist as he was artist or musician: his reading of Derrida and Gramsci as formative to the direction of his work as listening to Henry Cow or the Beatles. Such widespread disciplinary bed-hopping I take to be the experimental testing-ground for post-punk expression. Artists weren’t afraid of working across different practices, or borrowing ideas or effects from one field and transposing them to another. Indeed, the whole cultural-political drift of post-punk was shaped by a similar transposition: taking avant-garde experiment from its customary enclosure within high culture into the popular arena of mainstream culture. This, as others have noted, makes post-punk into a quasiGramscian project to transform the demotic realm. In taking their deconstructed rock arrangements to a major record label like EMI, Gang of Four were only trail-blazing for others who wished to see

their experimental versioning of popular music out there in the “open” field. Another Colour (Andy Wood, Jacqui Callis, John Hyatt) rehearsing in Wharf Street, Leeds, 1981. Photographer unknown. There was, therefore, an undeniably utopian strain to post-punk, and it could be — as with Another Colour — sometimes embarrassingly earnest in its stated ambitions. This was more than balanced out however, at least on the Leeds scene, by a healthy dose of prankster-ish-ness. Many other students got into bands, at least initially, just for a laugh as it seemed like a great way to eschew the stuffiness of more established and legitimized forms of creative activity. Bands like the Shee Hees and the Mekons could barely play — and that was the point. It was to experiment with a way of working that no-one was expressly expert in or good at. Playing and having fun were important as practices in their own right, as was

improvising; making do with what might seem like imperfect resources and abilities. The Shee Hees, an all female comedy outfit made up of Jacky Fleming, Sally Timms, and Victoria Jaquiss, owed perhaps more to musical hall than anything else. Dressed in Elizabethan Gowns, fags hanging out of mouths, wearing comedy glasses with eyeballs on wires, they performed hilariously bad cover versions of Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello’ and Bobby Vinton’s ‘To Know You is to Love You’ plus self-penned numbers like ‘Worms Have Infested my Knickers’. Fleming recalls that forming the Shee Hees might have been some kind of feminist response to all the male bands that were springing up, and acted to puncture the seriousness and selfimportance tied into the machismo of studio culture (Fleming studied Fine Art at the university). Thus the Shee Hees might be taken as example of a feminist commoning: alert to the masculine enclosures of even fellow post-punk acts, and the need to break down these internalised boundaries.

Shee Hees (Victoria Jaquiss, Jacky Fleming, Sally Timms). Photographs: Kevin Lycett. Improvising within a group setting was a key driver in the production of new aesthetic forms for other bands. For the Mekons, “rehearsals were always a nightmare because no one could agree what to do”, recalls Mark White in Tony Baker’s 2008 film Mekons Leeds. Jon Langford and Ros Allen also remember discussion being an interminable part of the rehearsal process, including debates about politics and theory, as well as who was to play what and how. This fractious to-ing and fro-ing between group members, and between the talking and the doing, makes the performativity of the improvisatory collective unpredictable and difficult to steer. But it was also generative of a sound that each of the individuals alone couldn’t hope to imagine, let alone produce. Rob Worby attests particularly astutely to the shambolic-seeming arrangement of individual contributions that has become the characteristic Mekons sound: “I remember doing the sound in CBGBs the first time we played there. I used to listen to each individual instrument and wonder how on earth they all fitted together because you’d have Steve and Lu playing really tight drums and bass, absolutely rock solid, and then over the top you’d have Johnny making the most terrible din, then Tom playing almost random notes on his guitar. I always said that Susie Honeyman played like the second violin part from a Beethoven string quartet and John and Tom and Sally kind of yelling over the top of it all. Each individual part was completely unique and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the whole but when you put it all together you had this amazing sound of the Mekons, which is just unfathomable really.” This improvisatory ethic is similarly present in the contemporaneous production of Impact’s experimental theatre. Famed for a number of important shows from the late 70s through to the mid-80s, Impact brought together an unlikely mix of non-mainstream literary sources — including the science-fiction novels of Anna Kavan — with film references, improvised physical theatre work, live and recorded music, and unusually striking, though not expressly expensive, lighting and set design to create affectively charged theatrical worlds.

Impact’s Claire McDonald has recalled: “We were sort of oddly maverick […] we were a kind of family, a collective. We drew people towards us, or people gravitated towards us, and we would do things. Our way of doing things was to be together, a bit like a band”. The process of arriving at this “maverick” work sounds remarkably similar to the methods that produced the Mekons’ sound. Listen to Tyrone Huggins: “With us we’d talk about an idea in the morning, I’d order materials, Graeme and Steve would work on the music, Peter and Claire would write, and then in the evening they would work practically on the show. I’d say, for example, here’s a bit of set I’ve been working on. And they’d get some sticks or something and start beating it. And I’d say no, no you’re going to destroy it!! And then I’d relent and go, hitting it, oh, OK! Nothing you presented to anyone would ever be taken in the way you intended it to. Everyone would grab it, turn it around, look at it, and do what they wanted with. So you realized in creative terms you couldn’t be precious about it”. This remarkable reflection speaks to the ways in which Impact worked informally together and thereby transcended the more clear-cut division of labour — between writers, directors, actors, and stagedesigners — characteristic of more traditionally organized theatre companies. “And so”, Claire McDonald goes on, “we could do things that we never would otherwise have had a chance to do. And although we had extremely little money, we were enabled to do all the kinds of things that we did because we were in a group. What I really mean by being in a band is where you have a really shared sense, not really about collaborating together or making decisions by committee, or any of those kinds of things. But much more a sense of what happens to the culture of a group of people when they have a creative and generative ensemble conversation and make something. Together.” This heady description of the ensemble work will likely strike many contemporary readers as inspiring, but not without pausing to register it as an expression of youthful creative ambition from a time gone by (it is salutary to remember that almost all the work I have referred to in this talk was made by young people in their 20s). Contemporary 21st century artists and activists could also be forgiven, perhaps, for feeling a degree of envy for the relative wealth

of state provision enjoyed by artists in the post-punk years, looking back upon them from our much meaner neoliberal economic times. But though remote in some ways, such similar collectivist practices are being undertaken by artists today — and journalists are heralding small-scale sharing economies post-2008, redolent of the ones I have analysed here, as promising signs of a future postcapitalist society. The links to the post-punk past are therefore very much alive and kicking from today’s standpoint. But the post-punk scene as I have set it out here is long gone. It would require another talk for me to tell the story of how that came to pass: of how neoliberal models of partnership and collaboration came to wipe out these short-lived experiments with the commons. We would also have to tell the story of how many bands broke up — as bands so often do — and how many of those that continued, and became successful, ceased to operate as the kind of world-making machines I have envisaged here. Then there are the activist groups that became companies; capitalized in the process. It was through these and other ways that the post-punk light began to fade from the mid80s onwards. Very few bands survived and kept the post-punk flame burning beyond this moment. Those that have done so are truly exceptions to the rule. * Audience member 1: That phrase you used, “beating back the bounds”: was that a quotation or were you just kind of signalling a figure of speech around beating back the bounds? GB: It’s a quotation. Audience member 1: Where’s it from? GB: Lewis Hyde, in his account of the old English custom of beating the bounds in his 2010 book Common as Air — though other scholars on the commons talk about this practice too. Audience member 2: Are you familiar with John Mowitt’s work on the percussive field? I think you’d find it incredibly resonant and

useful for your work. He talks about rock and roll in the 50s and 60s, and he’s specifically theorising the back beat. So the musical figure of the back beat might also be relevant here, as a means of beating back? GB: I’m not aware of that, no, but it sounds interesting. I suppose I’ve been thinking, and researching, more about the sociality of the band formation than I have about actual musical practices of drumming or beating. I’ve been preoccupied instead with artists’ writings that try to articulate what it is about being in a band that is so compelling or even quixotic to them; trying to figure out how people at the time might have understood being-with-others as a way of breaking down social and artistic barriers. Dan Graham’s work has been very important in this context. Rock My Religion is a pivotal text for me as some of the things that he says there reverberate with what I’ve been saying. It’s here, for example, that he talks about the rock band as the closest thing to a self-sufficient commune that there is. Others, like Kim Gordon, offer up short, astute descriptions of the interactions between band members on New York’s downtown scene in the 80s. These are useful for me as they are roughly contemporary with bands coming out of the Leeds scene. Audience member 2: Gavin I was wondering if at some point you’re going to be looking at the cover art? Considering that they all came from studio art degrees, the shambolic nature of the sound that they produced is not really reflected in the images. The images, on the contrary, seem very carefully prepared. It makes me wonder who made them, and how collaborative the process of their production was, etcetera. GB: Which images are you talking about in particular? Audience member 2: Well, Gang of Four’s Entertainment! album cover. But a couple of the other ones, like the one with the hand that’s kind of popping out of the graph paper (cover image of the Mekons’ Never Been in a Riot), I mean that looks like something that’s been thought through.

GB: What I’ve done is I’ve given you a kind of overview of the scene, picking out some of its generic features. That shouldn’t prevent us from recognising the very real differences, the heterogeneity, within the scene as well. I’ve probably made it sound a lot more cohesive than it actually was. Gang of Four weren’t at all shambolic, neither in terms of the sound of their music, nor in their cover art - which incidentally was produced by them. Their kind of intellectual, situationist-type use of found imagery — and actually quite minimalist and clean typography — looks very different to what, in comparison, looks like a much more amateurish, rough and ready, cut and paste job with the Mekons cover. You’re right to suggest, though, that, even so, this looks pretty considered too. The Mekons certainly did sound shambolic, as did some early Scritti Politti. But I think what I’m saying here is that post-punk music was frequently knowing, reflective, and intellectual even when it sounded disordered and ramshackle. So I don’t think we can say that sounding ramshackle is a sign of the absence of thought or consideration. You only have to think of the lyrics to Scritti’s ‘Messthetics’ to understand this point. As Green Gartside sings: “we know how it sounds, yes we know how it sounds”. We know it might sound chaotic to you dear listener, but this is exactly how we intend it. But, yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe there aren’t direct homologies between post-punk styles of music and their accompanying visuals. Audience member 2: Well I just wondered whether there was a disjunction between sound and image because of the fact that they were all being trained in image production, you know… GB: They were. But probably, I don’t know, maybe 50% of the bands that I’ve spoken about this evening never got a record deal so there was no cover art, you know. Those bands without a deal might have made posters for the live gigs, but… Audience member 3: So were these bands playing in art spaces, or were they playing more or less in music spaces? GB: There weren’t really many art spaces as such in Leeds at this time. The artiest space was most probably Leeds Polytechnic

student union and bar, where a lot of these bands played — many having their debut performances there. But it was a music venue really. Most bands also played in different venues across the city at the peripatetic F Club, as well as beyond Leeds at places like Bradford’s 1 in 12 club. Obviously appearing at the Poly meant you were playing to a crowd dominated by university/art students. Whereas playing at a venue like Brannigans or the Roots Club, in the city centre or in the West Indian area of Chapeltown, opened up these art-school acts to non-university audiences. I think there’s probably an interesting story to tell there about how this work makes a transition from this narrow little art world scene to a broader set of audiences in the city, let alone to the mainstream public once record deals are struck and TV appearances are garnered. One can view this then as an incredibly stinted commons actually — at least in the early years — enclosed by the borders of this art-school enclave. Some of the bands never really left that enclave. Some did, some didn’t. But I would say that what was remarkable was that almost all artists who turned to making music at this time did so because they wanted to create a more popular avant-garde; they wanted their work to have a broader appeal and an impact beyond the bourgeois art world. Audience member 4: Thanks for the talk, Gavin. I was a bit worried about the idealisation of the commons in this project in the sense that this clearly is an elite group of bands, or at least some of them have very elite university references, songs about Derrida and so on. It’s not necessarily that these bands wouldn’t appeal to bigger audiences but other audiences aren’t going to have those references. So I wonder if it’s possible to talk in this category of postpunk about other kinds of musical movements that were happening at the same time, maybe that were, for example, heavily influenced by racial politics. Leeds was a place that was very racially divided for a very long time — or maybe still is. But I also want to get at the class politics of enclosure that is the university, that seems to mitigate against a commons. So what about race and class in a project like this? And then finally, if all bands in some way are collaborative and collective, write together, think together, build

together, what’s so specific about this group of bands as opposed to say Fleetwood Mac or Slade? Is there something so different about Scritti Politti or Another Colour? GB: They’re great questions. I’m a little less easy with labelling this an elite milieu than I think you are, because of the access afforded by the British state to the art school system at this time. With no fees and a mandatory student maintenance grant, you might argue the art schools in the late 70s and early 80s were a damn sight more accessible to working class kids then than they are in the UK today. Which is precisely why I’m interested in researching the period. Those without independent financial means were certainly not debarred from going to study art, at least on economic grounds. All they had to do was have some qualifications, a good portfolio of work, and sometimes a good story to get in. I think the greater mixing of social classes in art school at this time probably explains why so many other barriers — between disciplines and publics, etcetera — were beginning to come down. So I’m a little bit wary of seeing it as all too straightforwardly elite. But in some sense, of course, you are right. Even if a greater proportion of working class kids were to be found in the intake to art colleges in the late 70s, the overall proportion of people going into higher education was far less then (around 10% from each generation) to around 40% today. So, in terms of the absolute numbers of people going to art school, it was a relatively more elite thing to do then than it is now. As for issues of race, the post-punk period is actually a key time in British history in which popular music played a vital role in the development of multiculturalism. Rock Against Racism, and the white/black affiliations coming off the syntheses of funk, reggae, dub, soul, electronic, industrial and punk in the music of this time are just a couple of markers of this. As we focus more narrowly upon the art school though, it is possible to see how, even despite the statebacked free education, there were very few students of African, Asian and Caribbean heritage back then. But those who did study at this time were instrumental in “beating back the bounds” of the white enclosure that was the university and the polytechnic. People like Sutapa Biswas, Tyrone Huggins, Chila Kumari Burman, and Fahim

Qureshi — all of whom studied at Leeds - did this through taking on the blind spots in art-school discourse and its unthinking Eurocentrism, and by devising strategies in their work to make themselves visible on their own terms. Sometimes this required banding together with other non-white artists in the manner of the English midlands-based BLK Art Group, or — as with Huggins — joining white counterparts in order to form mixed race creative groupings. The final question you pose, about how post-punk bands worked together in ways that aren’t generalizable to any and all pop bands, is difficult to answer. But, briefly, I would say that being in a band at this time offered the possibility of making transversal connections. These could be across lines of discipline, style, or practice and sometimes across lines of class or race. Such connections, at their best, were productive of highly inventive ensembles in which new directions could be forged, old ways of working abandoned, and new forms produced — such as the production of space in a Gang of Four song, or the creation of a theatre of affect in an Impact production. I don’t think you could say the same about Slade! Audience member 5: I wanted to ask something different. Why this interest in Leeds specifically? Where did this interest come from? Is it personal? And does what was happening in Leeds echo elsewhere in different parts of the country? GB: Yes there is a personal history which links me to Leeds, and to the work that I focus on here, because I am a graduate of the University of Leeds and studied there with Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the bands that I’ve been talking about tonight I was a fan of, and went to see play live. Some members of those bands also studied at the university before me with Fred and Griselda. But I’m intent on studying the period prior to my time there because, to be honest, looking at things from a more dispassionate point of view, I think the excitement had died down by the time I got there. There seemed to be a particular efflorescence of political and cultural activity roughly between 1976 and 1984 in which many bands and collective projects emerged. I

wanted to try and study why that was so, and to do this as a microlevel study — plus, I wanted to write an unapologetically regional account of post-punk. This is because Leeds has been somewhat overlooked in most accounts of the period in favour of the Manchester, Sheffield, and London scenes. But it is also because I think we would do well in our era of globalisation to remember that post-punk was also about the values of active localism to some degree. It was about the alternative possibilities of independent collective initiatives, loosening, or indeed resistant to, the grip of metropolitan institutions like big record companies. I’m therefore thinking of the research I’m doing on Leeds as part of a bigger transnational research project focusing upon other understudied regional city scenes including those of Los Angeles, Wrocław, and São Paulo. Audience member 6: My question is different again. I’m curious basically as to what extent your take on the band, or being in a band, speaks to other scholarship on collective performativity. I’m thinking, in particular, for example, of Fred Moten’s take on the ensemble, or recent scholarship on Afrofuturism and Sun Ra’s Arkestra: either Tim Stüttgen’s take on the queer sociality of the Arkestra, or Greg Tate’s which sees collective performativity in almost negative terms — or at least as not always necessarily pregnant with potentiality. GB: I have read some of that stuff with my PhD students at Goldsmiths. The discourse on jazz is to some degree the master discourse on improvisation, and jazz had a presence in the teaching at Leeds, at least at the Polytechnic in the shape of Jeff Nuttall, who was a jazz aficionado. I like the way that Moten tries to articulate the singularity produced within jazz improvisation. Stüttgen aims for similar, calling up Deleuzian inspired scholarship on music. I’m trying to find ways to think this stuff in relation to my take on improvisation here… Audience member 7: I was just curious really, after the 60s, there seem to be more ideas of having a common space in Europe than in, say, artistic scenes in the United States. They never really had a

collective, small level did they? I was just wondering what you thought about the commons in America? How trans-Atlantic was it? GB: Can you be a bit more specific? Audience member 7: I guess I was wondering about New York. GB: Well, in terms of the No Wave scene, for example, in the late 70s, certainly film-making was key alongside making music. Vivienne Dick, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, and Beth and Scott B were hanging out with musicians, and were making films with people like Lydia Lunch. In fact you could say that cinema was really a practice that overlapped with the making of the music — was part of a shared, common culture with it — in a way that maybe in Leeds it wasn’t. In Leeds it was performance art that overlapped with music-making more. Lydia Lunch became a vivid kind of persona partly as a result of featuring in so many underground films made by her filmmaker friends. Probably this shared way of working for musicians and filmmakers would have been as equally present, for example, in the L.A. punk scene in in the late 70s, early 80s. So I don’t see the US as a less hospitable context for the commons necessarily. Although it would be true to say that the relative absence of a strong welfare state, compared with the British 70s, would likely have forced more US artists into day jobs in order to survive. Audience member 7: It’s interesting that the whole New York punk scene was built on drop-outs. Well, a lot of them… GB: This is one of the things that I have been thinking about too. Performance artist Penny Arcade constantly rails against the academicisation, as she sees it, of dissident culture — particularly of the New York avant-garde from the 1980s onwards. This is because, she argues, it seems to come from the academy rather than the street. You could say the same about the scene that I’ve set out for you here… Audience member 8: I think what is interesting actually is that, in the United States, college radio is an important platform through

which post-punk comes to be broadly established as ‘alternative’ music. In the transition from, say, Sonic Youth to Nirvana, you can track through the heavy influence of college radio and music programmes, which was also really important for rap music as well. That’s another place where I think you can maybe connect some of your interests in the space of higher education and the politics of class mobility, to methods of distribution and audience. Because college radio was not only hugely important to establishing the scenes and garnering broader audiences for the bands, but it was also the vehicle to transition out of them, and their capitalisation actually. GB: That’s really interesting. Audience member 9: Just one more thing about whether it was an elite scene or not. I mean you focus on university, yes, you still had to go and get your A Levels and that sort of thing. But if you look at Leeds Polytechnic then, it was in a transition at that time where you could actually claw your way into art school and end up with a degree with relatively poor academic results. You could get in there with a handful of O Levels at the time. So again, it terms of working class access it wasn’t just the financial side of it. There was also a relatively low bar for prior academic attainment. So it wasn’t an elite scene in that respect. Audience member 10: That is weird because that is exactly what I was going to say. It was precisely this period, sort of ’76 to ’79, when I was actually a student here at Goldsmiths. I mean I got two C’s and a D I think and managed to get on to the Fine Art BA here. I just wanted to say something in relation to issues of class, but also to this idea of a band, and people banding together. I don’t know how many people know this, but I think it might be worth telling, I think you’ve got to see all this against the backdrop of rampant individualism that was going on in art schools at the high point of modernism. Because when I got here in ’76, Jon Thompson stood with Peter Cresswell and doled out keys. We were all given keys to a room, our own room, because there were a series of houses where

the library is now. We all had our own room and locked the door. And everybody was behind those doors sort of having breakdowns, because you weren’t really allowed to see what anyone else was doing in case you would copy their work. We didn’t have crits at that point. It was absolutely the backdrop of this sort of autonomous individual genius, you know, kind of liberal humanist model. So you’ve got to, I think, understand that. But I’m not absolutely convinced that the bands were that collective or collegiate. I think they were a kind of riposte to all this, a way of clinging to somebody else, as much as anything because of the stricture to maintain your own autonomy. And then that takes me to class. All this didn’t fit very happily with someone from a working-class background — like myself for example. In those days class was exoticised, and that was half the problem, but also it wasn’t really avowed, even though you might have been allowed into the academy. Your class position, particularly as a working-class woman, was disavowed. So it was a strange kind of meeting of disavowal and exoticism all at the same time. I don’t know about speaking back to, or from, a class position as I don’t think that you were aware of that necessarily. I mean even when Damien Hirst was a student here in the late 80s, as a working class kid, that hadn’t been built up yet into a proletarianised image of the artist. It was still a very much disavowed position because of the bourgeois aesthetic hegemony in art schools. GB: It was yes. But I think at Leeds things might have been different. At the university, for example, after social historian of art T. J. Clark is appointed in 1976, and Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, and Terry Atkinson are quickly appointed in his wake, almost overnight the Department of Art went through a cultural shift. It moved from being a very bourgeois institution, chaired by Lawrence Gowing, to being one steeped in Marxist and feminist thought. It thereby came to be a place where students could avow their working-class background, or their identities as women, and follow the consequences of this in the art or music they made there, and the politics which underpinned it. Of course this articulation of social differences within the student body was to lead to fractious relations between different ‘bands’ of

individuals, often turning around identity politics in one way or another, rather than any spurious collective harmony across the board. This is how a pedagogic situation came to politicise its student body. And at the Polytechnic there was a kind of gruff, Northern English playfulness in the studio culture which made it perhaps somewhat remote from what you experienced at Goldsmiths too, I don’t know. This became politicising for some feminists around 1980 who took it to task for its unreconstructed masculinity and sexism. Audience member 11: I was wondering could you expand the actual timeline of your project to maybe like ’89 or ’94? I know your focus is on post-punk but, what you’re describing, does become more a working class thing in Leeds a little later on. GB: What are you thinking of in particular? Audience member 11: When rave culture comes in, there were these clubs that were springing up that were being run by working class people, but following that exact model of the post-punk commons you describe. I think they were influenced by what had come before. I was wondering if you were going to add that. GB: Not really because there were definitely different drugs that were flying around at that point! But, no — I mean, correct me if I’m wrong — the rave scene had less of an attachment to art school, and was a little less about these kind of cottage-industry collectives that characterised post-punk art production in its early years. It was much more about the birth of a kind of DJ culture, you know? Not that Djing is uncreative, or that the rave scene wasn’t, of course, without its own extremely important forms of subcultural affiliation. But it was just quite a different kind of scene. Audience member 14: Can I just tie into that? It just eerily reminds me of the emergence of hardcore culture in Umeå, which also has an art school, also an industrial town, and has a river! In ’94 a new government came to power, in ’95 the hard-core scene starts to bubble up; it’s a very similar trajectory.

GB: I don’t know the scene in Umeå at all, but, yeah, I mean there are other city scenes, as I say, that I’m going to be looking at in future work that take place slightly later, and which are shaped within markedly different national contexts. My intention would be to pursue the local specificity of these different movements, in order to grasp the heterogeneity that may lurk under what would otherwise be considered surprisingly similar scenes.

4 “On The One Hand The State Is Funding You and Enabling Your Existence, On The Other Hand Your Whole Shtick Is To Rebel Against It.” Post-Punk and Poland, a talk by Agata Pyzik (23|10|2014) Agata Pyzik’s talk uses post-punk as a probe for understanding the history of Poland since the late 1970s. The story is first of all about postpunk as a Cold War culture. Afascination with Eastern Bloc imagery ran through British post-punk culture. Pyzik shows us how post-punk culture developed on the other side of the Iron Curtain, drawing out the complicated relationship between punk, post-punk and the state during the period of so-called Real Socialism (also known as Actually-Existing Socialism) in Poland. The forms in which post-punk persisted in Poland after 1989 also tell us something about the cultural impact of the country’s subsequent embrace of capitalism. When I was writing my book, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, post-punk struck me as particularly useful for understanding Cold War cultural relations between the East and West. Post-punk happened late in the Cold War, but we must remember that the exchange between the two blocs intensified and accelerated towards the end of the Cold War period. This was the time of many political crises which marked the end of anything optimistic in the post-war era: in the UK, post-war social democracy was collapsing, as economic crisis paved the way for Thatcherism; in the US, Reaganomics brought an intensified mil itarisation of American society which led to the serious threat of World War III. In Poland, international loans had made the 1970s a relatively

prosperous period. But the decade ended in mass strikes and martial law, stifling any positive energy within workers, disabling any possibility of reforming Real Socialism, and marking the beginning of possibly the gloomiest, saddest and most depressing — as well as the last — of the system’s decades. At the same time, post-punk in Poland has never really finished; parts of its legacy bring us to later, post-communist times, and connect with the relentlessly bleak social commentary that comes from hip-hop, which I will discuss shortly. Post-punk under socialism has become a vehicle to help me understand why the socialist project failed. How did the socialist system differ to what came next? Did it actively “help” to establish capitalism? Why were there more similarities than differences between the two sides of the Iron Curtain? I’m quite certain that I would not have starting perceiving Polish or socialist-era art and music in general in quite the same way if I had not been immersed in the punk and post-punk cultures of the UK. It was only after starting to living in the UK that I appreciated the similar ways in which bands and pop culture here and in Poland responded to the same aspects of post-war politics. My book couldn’t have been written had I not encountered British culture firsthand. It’s like we lived in two different worlds: we didn’t understand the West, the West didn’t understand us, but certain historical moments of the Cold War involved and affected both countries and produced a mutual fascination. There were clear similarities. Workers were beaten on both sides. In the UK, there were strikes, workers were violently repressed, and at the same time, in People’s Poland, workers were shot. It was a tragic moment of bashing the working class on both sides, even if informed by different politics. The UK had Thatcherism; we had martial law. These apparently separate and opposed parts of Cold War Europe had a lot to do with each other, sometimes in a very direct, political way. For example, Thatcher had an alliance with Jaruzelski and was buying Polish coal — that is why she could beat the miners’ strike. By the 1980s communism was already in a deep state of decay. Something was ending worldwide. There was never a strict division between punk and post-punk in Poland, because punk happened in Poland so late that it was

already post-punk. But in a way, given that a hell of a lot of those bands that emerged in Poland in the early 80s are still together — they never even went on hiatus, and sometimes still play concerts in London and America — I think that Poland still in a way lives in an era of post-punk. At the moment, just like everywhere else, punk musicians are revered public personas and national treasures, and just like John Lydon in the UK, they often say problematic things: revealing that punk as such wasn’t as “revolutionary” as we tend to think, that it included reactionary elements which were never really unpacked properly. Today many ex-punk musicians in Poland present right wing and even fascist and racist ideas, while their work is often recuperated, instrumentalised, commercialised and aestheticised. New documentaries are constantly being made about that period, and those musicians, now fifty-something, put on the same clothes as before, they shout the same slogans, and obviously it has no relation to any reality whatsoever. I was an avid fan of post-punk while still living in Poland, but it was only after my arrival in the UK in 2010 that I realised how much British post-punk acts in particular were emotionally and aesthetically invested in the imagery of the Soviet Bloc. It wasn’t only about the imagery — this fascination was much deeper and also encompassed politics, no matter how distorted the image of the actual living conditions under socialism were. The romantic allure that the Eastern Bloc had for some Anglo-American musicians was already evident in David Bowie’s Low and Heroes, which helped set the tone for post-punk culture. These albums were recorded after Bowie went to Berlin in 1977 to rescue himself from America’s artificiality and his own drug psychosis. In Poland, martial law and financial crisis famously led to food rationing and a lack of basic utilities like gas; empty shelves in the shops, and massive queues. The system was crumbling, though back then nobody really saw any future beyond it. Young people and punk musicians had seen their own government set tanks on them during martial law; the possibility of the Soviet Union invading had become serious. For many people creating art at the time times must’ve seemed truly apocalyptic. It was bleak, but I would insist it wasn’t that dramatically different for their Western counterparts. The

UK in the 1970s/80s was also incredibly bleak, and the realities lived by post-punk musicians, especially those from non-metropolitan, deindustrialising areas, were reflected in their work; alternately fascinated and repelled by the Cold War, modernity, industry, and (urban) decay. Still, like others, young people in Real Socialist Poland wanted to have fun, and they did. They felt they had nothing to lose, so punk music flourished, as did art — and for some, shortages and curfew only meant they stayed longer at the all-night parties. This fun was a bit bleak too: partly escapist, partly decadent. Art that was made in Poland in the 80s was marked by modesty and a DIY spirit. There was nothing, so people created out of nothing; trash and found stuff. In order to understand the underground culture of Poland at the time, you have to appreciate that the People’s Republic was a multilayered reality. On one hand, you had a certain amount of empowerment for workers, on the other hand, conditions for workers remained hard: they weren’t getting what they were supposed to. In addition, you had censorship and limitations on free speech. The 70s, when punk occurred, was a period of relative prosperity, even if already by the mid-70s it had become apparent that this wasn’t sustainable — a huge strike happened, which later developed into a serious economic and political crisis. But punk could only have happened because of the amount of freedom that became available in the 1970s; a level of freedom that was unprecedented in the history of People’s Poland. Young people could now openly express critical, defeatist attitudes and could belong to subcultures. Probably such freedoms were granted because of a fear that if people were completely deprived of consumer goods and any possibility of rebellion, they would start rebelling in more serious ways, so these new freedoms were still strictly controlled. But at the same time, people were joining the Solidarity union en masse: at some point 10 million people belonged to it, which I think made it the biggest grass roots movement of that sort in the Communist Bloc, Europe — perhaps in the world. Somewhere in the middle of that, there is “culture” which in real socialist countries had a different status than in capitalist countries.

One consequence of this complex situation was a huge punk festival which first happened in a small town called Jarocin. The fact this happened so close to when martial law was implemented (in 1981) suggests we could think of it as a safety valve, although that view is disputed. The festival was under heavy surveillance by secret police, naturally. There was a proliferation of punk communities across Poland, but Jarocin centralised the culture in a way; a lot of found footage, bootlegs, photographs, and film material from the festival has been salvaged in recent years. Jarocin highlighted the difficulties for post-punk musicians in Poland. The festival was 100% founded by the state. On the one hand the state is funding you and enabling your existence, on the other hand your whole shtick is to rebel against it. Jarocin attracted Western journalists and artists, that’s why films such as I Could Live in Africa (1983), by the Dutch director Jacques de Koning, emerged. Polish musicians themselves couldn’t really make and broadcast stuff about themselves. The film was about the reggae band Izrael (the group adopted the name to counter Polish anti-Semitism), and its title embodies something essential about this generation and era. As a direct response to martial law, shortages and censorship, spontaneous youth culture boomed in the 80s beyond the official mass media. More to the point, young people were fascinated with styles in music and artistic expression that were non-European, such as reggae and world music. So they took from Pan-Africanism, Rastafarianism and Buddhism; neo-primitivism and the so-called “new wilds” emerged in visual arts. This boom was directly in opposition to the hated formality of the communist authorities. It was also due to fashion: punk spread across Poland, so the older punks wanted to differentiate themselves from their younger peers, and embracing these different styles was one way to do that. Looking beyond local traditions offered forms of escape. In unofficial footage of the time musicians stress the importance of authenticity and their hatred of commercialisation and of the socialist state hypocrisy, whereby nobody really works but they still get paid. In fact, there was something problematic about appropriating, for instance, struggles against anti-apartheid — since Soviet communism offered some possibility of liberation from those forms of

oppression. Such subtleties — and the critique of “orientalism” developed by Edward Said — were often lost on young rebels from socialist states. Yet there was something endearing about their declaration “I could live in Africa”: it meant they created their own parallel reality.. Actually, many people on the scene travelled regularly. For instance Robert Brylewski, a founding member of the groups Kryzys, Brygada Kryzys and Izrael, whose parents were members of a monumental folk dance ensemble called Slask, aka Silesia, had contacts abroad from early on. There were other musicians who were bringing stuff in, such as Maciej “Magura” Goralski, another member of Kryzys, who travelled to London. People involved in Polish radio knew about Joy Division almost as soon as Joy Division existed. Young people worked illegally in capitalist states, such as Germany and Sweden for a short period of time and lived off that money for the whole year. There were also student exchanges throughout the whole People’s Public period: exchanges with Africa, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam. These wer en’t the most desirable countries, because what most people really dreamed of was the West. Still, these exchanges introduced a certain element of diversity nonetheless, on the streets and especially among students. There’s no denying that for Poles the 45 years of actually-existing socialism were punctuated by uproars and shocks, but most importantly, massive strikes. One of the biggest tragedies was that when workers were striking the intelligentsia and the students were not with them, and vice versa — when students were beaten up in March 1968, the year of anti-Semitic purges instigated by the Party, there was little workers’ solidarity. In the Soviet Bloc, punk was a reaction to socialist governments: it contested the official politics of collectivism, the emancipation of the working class and citizens building the socialist state, and included huge amounts of individualism. Yet it was a reaction to a greatly imperfect realisation of socialist ideas, which didn’t offer real equality: the persistence of class divisions was one of the People’s Republic’s biggest failures. Therefore, those two layers of Polish society, intelligentsia and labourers, could never really meet. They supposedly met in 1980 during the Solidarity union mass strikes, and in the late 1970s, when

thousands were joining the Solidarity union, and the young intelligentsia and communist opposition leaders were engaging in defending workers — the time of the so-called Workers’ Defence Committee. But as the later capitalist reality showed — when anticommunist intelligentsia elites took power, disenfranchising and betraying workers — these two social classes always remained distinct. There were movements in Polish music and art which predated punk and helped to establish the cult of “authenticity” and nonconformism. These things existed in the margins of socialist society, but nonetheless they were there. Let’s remember counter-cultural activities: the world famous theatre of Jerzy Grotowski; the ritualistic theatre of Gardzienice; the presence of folk music within currents of rock and jazz; the beginnings of freak jazz and popularity of Buddhism among more outré jazz and prog musicians. There was a huge exchange between artists and musicians who performed often in galleries. This exchange was especially fruitful outside of Warsaw in cities like Wrocław, where control was much less strict. There you had the “new wild”/pop-art oriented painters/performers group called LUXUS, some of whom played in punk bands, such as Miki Mousoleum, an anarchist skapunk-reggae band. All of them published zines, used graffiti and crafted stencils as part of their art expression. You had a performance-anarchist collective called Orange Alternative, an absurdist movement, which staged pseudopolitical gatherings and events on the streets of Wrocław. In Lodz you had the so-called “Culture of Gathering” (Kultura Zrzuty) from which artists such as Zbigniew Libera emerged, and “second circulation” — the printing and distribution of forbidden literature and political manifestos — was quite established in Poland, thanks to the democratic opposition. Punk zines tapped into that heritage. However, these cultures had little influence on the society as a whole and in this sense, they are rather different from the entryist, populist or “popular modernist” strategies of much of politicised post-punk in the UK. At the same time, I want to urge anyone against making too straightforward a division between official and unofficial culture in the context of Polish state socialism. This division existed, but was much

less strict than we might think — and of course it operated in a different way than in the West because the culture wasn’t driven by commercial concerns. Those bands performed on national stages, after all. Real underground culture was publishing brochures with critiques of the system that could get you sent to prison. I don’t think we should think about musicians in the same way as we think about political oppositionists who were taking real risks. It’s true that you had almost state punk music and then more underground punk music; you had bands like Republika, Maanam, Perfect, Lombard or Lady Pank, which all played in the biggest venues. Lots of people, some older, or middle-aged music journalists in the UK know of Republika. Many of these groups weren’t so bad: some of the music was good mainstream pop, rock or new wave, especially given the 80s were a bad period for music in general. Much of it was synthkitsch that probably doesn’t stand up own so well now. But funnily enough lots of people are incredibly nostalgic about that 80s music right now, probably because of a larger dissatisfaction with the present moment, which is fuelling the nostalgia for Real Socialism that you see all over the Soviet bloc now. There was a clear decline in the quality of artistic production on both sides of the Wall after ’89, which shows how something in the framework of the Cold War preserved the modernist approach to making art. Whether Teddy Boys, Mods, Pop-ists, New Romantics, New Wavers, synth-poppers, punks or freaks, young people remained modernist in their precise and sober approach to art, and in their ambition to change the world. If art was not powerful enough to change the world around them, then at least it could change the one inside them. There is a strong sense that this is not only impossible today, but moreover, post-punk has become a part of the heritage industry. This coincided with the internet, the neoliberal economy, and the decline of music industry as such (which often resulted in attractive, rebellious music culture being subsumed into the ever-powerful art world as “radical chic”). The new David Bowie album can barely be purchased in a record shop as most of them have shut down, but he can be seen on dozens of silver screens at the larger than life V&A David Bowie Is exhibition in 2013, which sold 50,000 tickets before it was even open.

We live in an era when almost every single legendary band either reformed or never really stopped going in the first place. The politicisation of music in the post-punk era has given way to people from the post-punk era merely repeating that same shtick again and again, becoming parodies of themselves. The 45 years of Real Socialism were a time of constant change within the system; a series of tensions and relaxations. It was always a kind of negotiation, a question of how far you can get, which is why, for instance, from 1956, some very bold films were made, then again in 1968 you had a crisis. Or in the mid-70s you could make films like Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble: incredibly critical of the status quo, Wajda first attempted to make it in the 60s, but its production was blocked until the mid-70s, when politics relaxed. When it was released however, the authorities tried to minimise its impact: negative reviews were published, the number of copies in circulation were limited, and the press tried to play down its importance. This would suggest that the system was less powerful than we were thinking. Because if they thought a single film can bring it a bit down, well, that means either the art is so powerful, or the system is so weak. Now it’s been interpreted in this way by a growing number of scholars, like Stephen Kotkin in his book The Uncivil Society. It wasn’t the opposition, alongside Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher, who beat the communists — it’s simply that the crippled Communist Party had given away their power. They were just in such crisis that they gave away power. There was no revolution: not because they were scared, but because the system simply deteriorated; they just gave up. It’s important to remember all this, and we should be wary of the perfunctory use of terms that are commonly applied to art during the period of Real Socialism: the idea that art was state-controlled and the like. I could accept this language, if the terms “freedom” and “democracy” had not been so abused in the 25 years since the fall of the Iron Curtain. These are words that are overused in the current discourse in Poland, you can’t really go anywhere without seeing them. People talk about “freedom” and about “regaining democracy” from communism. Poland before World War II wasn’t a democracy, it was a dictatorship. But it’s very difficult not to see things in this black

and white way; to see for instance that yes, there was certainly censorship, limitations on freedom, worker-bashing, but on the other hand many things were enabled — particularly in art and culture — which are no longer possible. After ’89, not only in Poland but probably in most of the former Soviet Bloc, art is weaker, and of much poorer quality now. The obvious reason for that is that art in the era of Real Socialism didn’t have to earn any money; it wasn’t a business. Everybody thought that in these conditions of the so-called free market, creativity and imagination would be unbound. It turned out that actually it doesn’t work that way, and I think that also should be a lesson for us when we are talking about post-punk. Post-punk being en vogue again is also a side-effect of a phenomenon of nostalgia for communism, frequently called ostalgie. In Poland such ostalgie is much weaker than in, say, Germany, and it’s mostly cultural. Although I don’t know if you’re aware for instance that throughout the nineties, I think until the mid-00s, Polish society was regularly voting for the post-communist leftist party — precisely because this post-Solidarity political movement was failing all the time. It liquidated jobs, services and industries and didn’t provide anything to replace them; it sold out all previously state-owned property and industry to Western Capital. Post-communists were winning, if not in Poland, then all over the former Soviet bloc — particularly in Eastern Germany, for instance, where the attachment of the working class to the communist regime was stronger and more positive than in Poland. They voted for post-communist candidates because they were losing their jobs due to privatisation. As I have already said, in People’s Poland there was no possibility of making music a business, and in the UK, even if there were such opportunities, avant-garde independent labels such as Factory were soon bought up by majors or went bankrupt. But thinking about the frustrations of artists under Real Socialism, and what happened to those artists under capitalism, I realise that we mythologise artists, who are after all a part of the same class system as anyone else. They can also be petit-bourgeois and their aspirations can be an object of criticism. For instance, Peter Hook’s recent book on Joy Division showed very well how crap the group’s lives were; how poor they were. Until the very last

moment actually, they were having so many difficulties it’s a miracle there was something like Joy Division at all. But in their optimism they saw their class as victors, finally becoming the bourgeoisie, and put so much money into the Hacienda and real estate that in the end they just went bankrupt. Neither art nor music exist in a social void; it depends heavily on your class whether you are entitled to create it. As an interesting footnote, one major difference between postpunk in the UK and Poland can be seen in the class backgrounds of those involved. In capitalist Britain, the majority of post-punk musicians, came from the working classes. Art schools and the welfare state provided free education and financing for those less privileged to gain an interest in art and mix it with music. In socialist, supposedly classless Poland, those who managed to create artsy post-punk were often kids from the intelligentsia and privileged bourgeois backgrounds, who used their sense of entitlement to make art from the milieu of their educated, book-filled homes. In the 90s quite a lot of previous scenesters became reactionaries in the New Poland. Many of them are libertarians who want to liquidate taxes and these days, they present repugnant, racist ideas — in the last election the ex-punk, now nationalist Pawel Kukiz received 9% of the vote and got his party into the parliament, while anarchist organiser of street performances Waldemar “Major” Frydrych took to social networks recently to speak against Poland taking in refugees (— the country’s authorities refuse to even take the EU quotas). I think it’s necessary to know this and it enables us to realise what post-punk could also have been about. We are in a strange situation, where we have more and more nice gadgets, films and gigs commemorating the “rebellious punk spirit” which “defied the system” and more and more actual fascism on the streets. After communism, Polish society has been absolutely colonised by a Catholic nationalism now officially in power; an actual hegemon which controls the media, making it increasingly difficult to be criticised. So if there is nostalgia it’s probably on the level of popular culture — people still like those songs therefore the bands go on. It’s a very, very complex thing going on here, because you have nostalgia for your youth: it was hard, it was shit, there was nothing in the shops or whatever but this was the time when those people were

young, so obviously they feel massively nostalgic for it. You know, it’s a natural reaction, you can’t blame people for that. And on the other hand lots of those musicians became kind of dinosaurs, they just go on because they are still popular. I was born in the 80s. I don’t remember the 80s as well as I remember the 90s. The 90s saw a complete collapse of musical culture, and that continues today. We had one-to-one copies of Britpop. But in terms of music accompanying political campaigns, I can remember one especially very distinctive example, in ’95, featuring the post-communist candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski, the very same guy who established the Jarocin festival. The campaign was accompanied by a disco hit, called ‘Olek Please Win’, and he indeed won. What also affected us was the invasion of the English language bands. I spent five years working as a journalist for a literary magazine that emerged out of an 80s literary zine called Lampa, and the editor was obsessed with lyrics. But when I worked there, I saw a dramatic increase in Polish bands singing in English, which our editor saw as a sign of titanic collapse. You can’t communicate with people in your own country if you sing in another language: you are wilfully saying that you just don’t care whether you communicate with them, or tell them something. But what’s really interesting about the scene in Poland since the 90s is hip-hop. Hip-hop has become the “next punk” or post-punk — like punk, it carried a story of political angst and economic decline, which fitted with post-communist Poland. Like everywhere else though, in Poland there was more commercial and more “out there” hip hop. Some of the greatest indie hip-hop bands came from Silesia, the mining region: bands such as Kaliber 44 or Paktofonika had amazing lyrics, about poverty, anxiety, HIV crisis, drugs as an alternative world. The main lyricist of these bands killed himself after their popularity didn’t translate into money, and he felt helpless. If someone wants to know the scale of decline and grimness in Poland then, they should turn to hip-hop, which was a catalyst for the social dissatisfaction felt when capitalism took over. Hip-hop also has factions: some of it is social critique, but some of it is attached to hooliganism and violence, and this one tends to be more misogynistic, nationalist and reactionary. This reactionary

thread might even worsen over the years, as seen currently the post1989 domination of Polish culture by the Catholic Church, worsening with the arrival of the new right-wing government. These right-wing, rather than left-wing, forms of social disobedience, protest, and expressing dissatisfaction are now much more common than they used to be in the 90s. The music industry everywhere is in big trouble. In Poland, now everything is dominated by various mutations of horrendous “Polish rock”, or uninspired versions of American commercial pop. It’s all globalised formats, like Pop Idol.

5 “Going Overground: The Jam between Populism and Popular Modernism”: A Lecture by Mark Fisher (30|10|14) On the face of it, the Jam were one of the most successful British postpunk groups. In the period between their first release and their disbanding in 1982 they gathered a large following and had a series of number-one hits. At the same time, it is as if the Jam have never really been considered properly to belong to post-punk; they are barely mentioned, for instance, in Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again. The reasons for the Jam’s uncertain relationship to post-punk are partly to do with the relatively conventional nature of their sound. They were still a rock group, at a time when post-punk culture was developing a critique of the “rockist” privileging of guitars and lyrics over texture and affect. Later, rock revivalists like Oasis — at the centre of the UK’s “lad culture” in the 1990s — would count them as an influence. The Jam’s neutralisation and incorporation seemed to be confirmed when David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister and an Old Etonian, said that he loved their single ‘The Eton Rifles’. Yet perhaps such a neutralisation was necessary because of the potency of the left-wing populism in the Jam’s music. Paul Weller, the group’s lead singer and main songwriter, has since been haunted by his claim, in an early interview, that he would be voting Tory; but after this early outburst Weller became committed to seeking a renewed version of socialism. Many of the group’s records were vivid accounts of the devastating early impact of Thatcherism on working-class life and youth culture in the UK. They dramatized the psychic and existential effects of what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”: the feeling that, in Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative to capitalism”. After the Jam split, Weller was part of the ill-fated Red Wedge project, a collective of musicians who sought to involve young people in music in a bid to defeat Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party at the 1987 General Election. Red Wedge failed, in part because the parliamentary Labour Party in the late 1980s had none of the energy or

style of the Jam’s left-wing populism. Mark Fisher’s talk and the discussion it provoked dwelled on the contrasts between the early 1980s and now: is a reinvigorated left-wing populism possible, and what role can culture play in producing it? Conversely, what can left-wing political organisations do to reverse the neoliberal destruction of the conditions which allowed a group like the Jam to exist? Mark Fisher: Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Jam. I like Gang of Four as much as the next person, but I maintain that the Jam are more sophisticated and more interesting — politically, culturally, aesthetically — than their more lauded post-punk counterparts. I can’t say I was ever a Jam fan as such — but then some of the music that most matters to me has come from artists to whom I’ve never pledged a fan’s fidelity, and there are times when I’ve listened to nothing else but the Jam for weeks on end. The Jam disintegrated at practically the moment I was coming to musical consciousness and, besides, it wasn’t necessary to be a fan — the Jam were public property, and that was the point. I still remember the time I first heard ‘The Eton Rifles’ and ‘Town Called Malice’ — the former in a barber’s shop, the latter at home on the BBC Top Forty countdown when it came in straight at number one. The Jam thrived in public space, on public-service broadcasting. It mattered that they were popular; the records gained in intensity when you knew that they were number one, when you saw them on Top of the Pops — because it wasn’t only you and fellow initiates who heard the music; the (big) Other heard it too. This effect was maximised in the Jam’s case because their best work happened in the three-minute single. At that point, singles staked a place in the mainstream, directly affecting the conditions of possibilities for popular culture. What we witnessed with punk and post-punk — or more broadly, with the whole efflorescence of popular modernism since the 50s — was an “affective contagion”, to use a term discussed in Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism. One of the problems with many of the horizontalist models of political action is that they assume that we already know what we think and feel, and we are simply prevented from expressing ourselves by oppressive power structures. Yet mass-mediated art could name and focus feelings that were not only suppressed — by “internal” as well as external

censoring agencies — but which were inchoate, unformed, virtual. Mass mediation transformed, not merely “represented” these affects; after they were named and brought into focus, the feelings “themselves” were experienced differently. And you could say that all of this was self-consciously worked through by the Jam’s leader Paul Weller, with his Mod(ernist) affiliation, and its hunger for new sensations. As Marcello Carlin put it in a blog post that is as moving an account of a fan going back to a former obsession as you’ll ever see, it’s now unbelievable that something like ‘Start’ — a single “which goes so far as to debate with its listener what a pop single might be for, and that it might actually be a stepping stone in helping people get along and bond better” — could ever have been a number-one record. I’m pretty sure that this song about a fugitive encounter in enemy territory — which contained the line, “knowing someone in this life / who feels as desperate as me” — was another one of the Jam records I first heard when it was played on Top of the Pops. I took the Jam for granted, but the 30 odd years since they ruled the charts have been a painful process of watching what we once took for granted being taken away from us. Seeing — and working with — John Akomfrah’s installation The Unfinished Conversation and his film The Stuart Hall Project has prompted many thoughts, one of which concerns confronting just this process of watching the taken-for-granted become the (retrospectively) impossible. The way to avoid nostalgia is to look for the lost possibilities in any era, and Hall’s work — from his earliest writings on cool jazz and Colin MacInnes in the late 50s, through to his New Times essays at the tail-end of the 80s — alerts us to a persistent failure to make connections between left-wing politics and the popular culture, even when both were much stronger than they are today. Parliamentary socialism could never come to terms with, still less homogenise, the new energies that had come out of jazz, the 60s counterculture, or punk. By the time that explicit attempts were made to link the parliamentary left and rock/pop — in the earnest ham-fistedness of Red Wedge — it was already too late. Blair’s Britpop flirtations, meanwhile, were like a double death, (the end of) history laughing at

us: the corpse of white lad rock summoned to serenade socialism succumbing to capitalist realism. I thought of Hall a great deal when reading Ian Penman’s essay on Mod in the London Review of Books, one of my favourite pieces of writing from 2013. “The early Mods”, Ian wrote, were navigators, Magellans of the post-war field of leisure time, which had to be imagined, cast in this or that shape. Everything was up for grabs: music and clothes, sex and sexuality; the speech and language of put-down and put-on and pop fandom; transport and travel; nights out and nights in. Everything, in fact, we now take for granted as “youth culture”. It was a heady time of redefinition; but we also get the first migraine flash of a paradox that would split Mod, and define other subcultures: what began as a principled refusal of the nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. Ian could be describing here the terrain that both Hall and Weller were working in/on/through. The title All Mod Cons caught the contradictions of this new space almost too exquisitely: the modern(ist) landscape that offered unprecedented freedoms, novelties and conveniences came booby-trapped with the same old tricks and betrayals. ‘When You’re Young’ could almost be the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ theses on subculture — the idea that subcultural revolt represented the thwarted attempts of a subjugated class to escape its subordination — (hard)boiled down into three-and-a-bit minutes of sheer frustration. “It’s got you in its grip before you’re born… it makes you think you’re a king but you’re really a pawn.” In those days before the endless false promises of retraining or second-rate higher-education courses leading nowhere, working-class youth was in a desperate hurry to cram in as much experience as possible before the speed-fuelled all-nighters and weekenders would give way to the Sisyphean repetitions of the nineto-five: struggle after struggle, year after year, scrimping and saving and crossing off lists, the boredom and the drudgery relieved only by watching the TV and thinking about your holidays. On the face of it, ‘When You’re Young’ was a requiem for doomed youth as bleak as

anything Ian Curtis wrote — but while Joy Division reclined into glacial fatalism, Weller spat and snarled at the traps which snared him. Here were two working-class takes on popular modernism — Joy Division drawing on Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, and art films; the Jam looking to Orwell, Mac-Innes, and Shelley, with existentialism as the thing that the two groups shared in common. Curtis had a depressive’s eerie composure, an infinite resignation, but Weller sought to escape his fate in the very act of describing it. For class consciousness is never a mere matter of identifying a state of affairs that already exists; the making visible of the structures that produce subordination immediately de-naturalises those structures, and changes the way in which subjugation is experienced. When that learned sense of inferiority is rejected, who knows what can happen? The Jam, like the Who before them, drew their power from an autodestructive paradox: they were fuelled by a frustration, a tension, a blocked energy, a jam. Discharging this tension in catharsis would destroy the very libidinal blockages on which the music depended — and this self-cancelling logic of desire reached its necessary conclusion in the Who’s smashing of their instruments. Weller sang through a lockjaw of frustration, a rictus of rage and gum-chewing Mod cool, which meant that some of his best lines got lost, caught in his throat or spat out in unintelligible gobbets of disaffection. But this only opened up another paradox (which, again, can be traced back to the Who — ‘I Can’t Explain’): inarticulacy and blockage were more expressive than the best-written words (and no-one in British music wrote better lyrics than Weller). The problem that Weller encountered after the Jam — the reason that nothing he ever did after they finished would reach this pitch again — no doubt came from his desire to dissolve those blockages and antagonisms too quickly. The Jam tracks that really connect are the very opposite of fluid, and those, like ‘Precious’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’, which aspired to Britfunk fluency never quite convinced. ‘The Eton Rifles’ and ‘Going Underground’, meanwhile, sound like they have been rough-hewn out of motorway flyover concrete.

We can apprehend yet another paradox here. What made this music culture so energising was its capacity to express negativity — a negativity that was thereby de-privatised as well as de-naturalised. In the lack of such outlets, negative affect now is internalised, or else it bleeds into the ostensibly hedonic, generating a suppressed sadness that lurks behind a mandatory enjoyment. Paradox is also opportunity — as someone once remarked, paradoxes are emissaries from another world where things work differently. If popular modernism’s attempts to resolve the paradox of political commitment and consumer pleasure now seem hopelessly naive, that’s more a testament to the disavowed depressive conditions of our current moment than a dispassionate assess ment of the possibilities. In our world, so it would seem, popular culture’s embrace of consumerism leads ineluctably to the decomposition of class consciousness and the arrival of capitalist realism. In another world — the world that Stuart Hall tried to theorise, and to instigate — consumer desire and class consciousness could not only be reconciled, but would actually require one another. The political significance of working-class creativity in popular music was that it gave us vivid glimpses and tastes of this other world, a world that, via these anticipations and rehearsals, at least intersected with ours, or became ours, intermittently yet insistently. Weller’s identification with/as Mod only amped up the contradictions; for by then this was Mod revival — post-Mod if you like — and was that even possible except as a betrayal of (original) Mod’s scorched-earth search for the eternally new? So Weller made a bid to both continue Mod and curate it; a conflicted desire that, once the contradictions were smoothed out, prepared the way for him to become Britpop’s Modfather and the prime patriarch of DadRock. Marcello Carlin is right to argue that the common ancestor of Blur and Oasis is none other than the Jam, and it’s no accident that Ian Penman’s LRB essay on Mod also has cause to mention the same miserable pairing, but everything important is lost in the descent from 70s/80s Weller to 90s Britpop. “Oasis”, Marcello Carlin wrote,

would represent the stubborn Weller, always a Mod, always respectful of the past, of the Rock Footprint, and mindful of the need not to violate it (and, by extension, not to make it interest ing in any useful new way), whereas Blur would stand for the anxious, impatient 1982 Paul Weller, hearing all these old records, all this (to him) new music, wanting to move on and loudly desperate to break away and cut himself free. This is true provided that we remember that Blur simulated a postpunk attitude of impatience with the past much more than they ever attempted to practise it. But the Blur/Oasis dyad — which set a condescending mockney reheating of art pop against artless Neanderthal rock retreads — also represented a return of the very class stratification which had been so exhilaratingly dissolved by the whole lineage from the Kinks and the Who through to the Jam. Besides, the Jam’s best moments were at least the equal of what had inspired them; a working-through of influences rather than their pastiche reiteration. The Jam’s repurposings of the Beatles, Motown, and 60s iconography were meant to be heard as such; signs and sounds worn like so many badges on a lapel, or elements in a popart collage. The impossible-to-miss revisiting of the Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ in ‘Start’ begs us to make the comparison between the Wilsonian white heat of the mid-60s and the fear and misery of the (then) new Thatcherite moment. The Motown echoes in ‘Town Called Malice’ — like a transistor tinnily playing the Supremes on some halfabandoned council estate — contrast the promises of Northern Soul and social democracy with the bitter winds blowing in from a neoliberal (no) future. Compared with all this, what were Blur and Oasis’s photocopies of photocopies if not confidence tricks which borrowed yesterday’s inventions and half-heartedly passed them off as today’s swagger, beginning the erasure of historicity which eventually led to music’s current arrested temporality? If Oasis — and to a lesser extent Blur — belonged to 90s lad culture, Paul Weller’s relationship to masculinity was much more complicated. Paradoxically, the Jam found their own voice in their cover of the Kinks’ ‘David Watts’: a song that combined class anxiety (“he is of pure and noble breed”) with ambivalent longing. Initially, the

Jam might have seemed like just another group of angry young men, but so many of their singles — ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’, ‘“A” Bomb in Wardour Street’, ‘Strange Town’ — are about male vulnerability and helplessness. Then there’s ‘The Eton Rifles’, which David Cameron — infamously, and to Weller’s disgust — claimed was one of his favourite songs. “I was one”, he said, speaking of the elite school’s cadet corps after which the song was named. “It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. I don’t see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs.” What can we put this down to: a stupidity so colossal it is barely fathomable; a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds, that seeks to deny us even our class rage? If it is stupidity, however, it is a functional stupidity, functional for an ideology which has subdued class antagonism to the extent that the Bullingdon boys can pose as everymen, and say — with straight faces — that we are all in this together. What did the young David Cameron hear when ‘The Eton Rifles’ played? He says “protest”, but what did he imagine the song was protesting against, if not himself? Yet the whole concept of “protest” is inadequate for grasping what is at stake in ‘The Eton Rifles’. For isn’t the song — inspired by Weller’s hearing of Eton schoolboys jeering at Right To Work marchers — about the failure, the impasses, of protest? The song stages an antagonism in which there is no neutral big Other to which one could direct protest, there are only partisans in a class struggle. The undernourished, ragtag marchers, facing inevitable defeat at the hands of a well-trained elite protected by the magical insignia of class power: “All that rugby puts hairs on your chest / What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?” Weller uses the Right To Work march as only the main thread in a tangle of implied narratives. It’s as if a whole Alan Bleasdale TV series or a David Peace novel has been compressed into three minutes. Weller feeds us the story in fragments of class betrayal, shame, and recrimination. Listen to the way that one of the characters — a working-class revolutionary abandoned by former comrades too easily bought off by the temptations of parliamentary

power — is “left standing like a guilty schoolboy”. ‘The Eton Rifles’ was a grim kind of prophecy: the onlooking public schoolboys presaging a defeat of the working class — “we were no match for their untamed wit” — and the eventual disappearance of class struggle itself, with Cameron’s dumb enthusiasm for the song a confirmation that his class would have the last laugh. Now, when class power goes open-necked, you don’t see the tie and the crest, but of course they don’t need to be visible to retain their ritual power. Now, you can hear class much more than you can see it. But there is a dissonance between Cameron and Boris Johnson’s plummy vowels and what they say; how they hail us. They talk of “aspiration”, and claim that “hard graft” is the route to all riches — a route available to all those willing to put the effort in. As Jo Littler argues it in her crucial essay ‘Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketising of “Equality” Under Neoliberalism’ from the New Formations issue on Neoliberal Culture: It is notable that plenty of millionaires who inherited their wealth, including Boris Johnson and David Cameron, conveniently promote hard work as the most influential factor in social mobility. Such discourse simultaneously helps to erase any image of overprivileged indolence from the speaker’s persona whilst interpellating the listener as able to achieve a similar social status: a degree of social mobility which is in practice only attainable to a tiny minority. This raising of false hopes is also a lowering of expectations, with the dismal blandishments of bourgeois achievement held up as the only possible model of success. While failure is guaranteed for most, success offers only a dreary treadmill of over-work, empty status symbols, and anxiety about getting your kids into the right schools. What’s been lost is the Promethean working-class ambition to produce a world that exceeds — existentially, aesthetically, as well as politically — the miserable confines of bourgeois culture. This would be a world beyond work, but also beyond a merely convalescent use of leisure, where pacifying entertainment functions as the obverse of alienated labour. This other world was the terra

nova charted and projected by the “Magellans of postwar leisure time”; a world in which the old dandy-flâneur ambition for life to become a work of art would be democratised, where the massproduced and the bespoke would combine in unexpected ways, where no detail was too small to be attended to, and fashion would be as significant as fine art. This was the future that popular modernism prefigured and made available in flashes. The future that actually arrived was more like the existential cul-de-sac Weller sketched in ‘Town Called Malice’: “the ghost of a steam train… bound for nowhere — just going round and round / Playground kids and creaking swings/ Lost laughter in the breeze”. The quiet desperation of a world that is totally dominated by work, especially for those who don’t have it; where the domestic labour of “lonely housewives” never ends, where shiftless men bred for work in factories that have closed down forever sit morosely on hirepurchase sofas they can no longer afford, in endless grey afternoons that promise only more of the same, forever. It is made just about liveable by the anti-depressants and the alcohol: scores of clone towns descending into a downer haze, softened up for wave after wave of neoliberal shock-doctrine “reforms”, as mass culture degenerates into comfort-food lowest-common-denominator entertainment. How did it come to this? It’s ‘Going Underground’, that anthem of de-activation, which provided the answer, and still has everything to tell us about our current predicament. You could hear it as a very early response to Thatcherism, or, perhaps more pertinently, as an analysis of why the working class was too exhausted and disillusioned to muster a concerted response to Thatcher’s neoliberalism. The song sees the working class retreating into embattled private space, becoming a silent majority of individuals fatalistically watching as everything gets worse. “The public gets what the public wants / but I want nothing this society’s got…” In conditions like this, all you can do — so the song’s narrator tries to convince us (and himself) — is dodge the flak, protect yourself, bunker down. Weller’s guitar keeps erupting like a series of controlled detonations, while his narrator, lurching through what sounds like a minefield, pretends to a poise and equanimity he

doesn’t possess. He keeps telling us he’s “happy”, but he spits out the word like it’s a curse. He repeats casual commonplaces to exorcise the guilt that dogs his every step, but also because they are true. Yet they are only true because — and he knows this — people like him have withdrawn, waiting for the VHS recorders, the Sky TV and all the other consumer durables that are supposed to compensate for the total devastation of public space, the disappearance of solidarity. “The public gets what the public wants” becomes “the public wants what the public gets”, with Weller’s narrator dodging between self-justification and self-deception, between shrugs of resignation and disgusted taunts. When he shifts into second person — “you’ve made your bed / you better lie in it” — it’s like Weller has broken out of character, and broken down the fourth wall so that he can address us directly. Listen to the malicious, leering masochism in his delivery of that line — as if imagining the worst is the only way to make the despair and the disappointment bearable. And in the background, all through the song, you can hear the marching bands of authoritarian populism massing… ‘Going Underground’ threw down a challenge to left-wing politics that it didn’t solve. Blairite capitalist realism was effectively a declaration that the Labour Party would no longer even attempt a solution. Anti-capitalism, meanwhile, has been based on the assumption that most of the working class will remain in a state of de-activation. It now seems scarcely credible that a group like the Jam could have found a mass audience. Certainly, the conditions for this kind of working-class creative autonomy have been systematically eroded as capitalist realism has taken hold. But that is far from saying that those conditions, or something like them, could not be produced again. And it is worth remembering that there never was a left-wing politics that had any sort of fit with 60s–80s popular modernism. As Hall warned, socialism by the end of the 70s was caught in a backward-looking traditionalism which had no purchase on the libidinal field opened up by post-Fordist capitalism. Blairism merely capitulated to that form of capitalism, so the challenge of constructing a left-wing politics for these “new times” is still ahead of us. But, in some respects, the conditions for such a renewal have never been better. The organised working-class institutions have

been reduced to rumps, but that also means that the old obstructions that they put up to renewal no longer obtain. Blairite “modernisation” is now as outdated as it is discredited. Perhaps now is the moment when New Times can finally happen — if we can emerge, blinking, from our barricaded (but now extensively connected) cellars, and step out into the desert of a destituted public world, into a mass culture reduced to bland hedonic homogeneity by corporate depredation. Yes, this is hostile country; occupied territory. But how well defended is it? What possibilities are there for us here, now? What could happen, that is to say, if we go overground? * Audience member 1: I’ve got a tiny anecdote and a question about affect in the Jam’s songs. The anecdote is that as a young teenager, I don’t know, 12, 13, I think it was Paul Weller that taught me about poetry and politics being possibly linked. I remember reading an interview with him in Smash Hits magazine when he said that he wanted to be a pop-song writer who would write about kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns, and I remember thinking, oh yeah, and that being like a little revelatory moment in my young childhood. MF: I think that’s probably why those of us of a certain age do hark back to moments like that, because we all experienced something similar, probably repeatedly. Unlearning those oppositions between something like poetry and something like popular culture. I think that is why there is legitimate political melancholy about the current moment because we have lived through a gradual, remorseless, but ineluctable process which has destroyed those possibilities. And if that’s in Smash Hits that’s great isn’t it, I mean, not in the NME, but in Smash Hits… Audience member 1: I was a child. I wouldn’t have read the NME. I was 12! But the question is probably linked in some way, it’s something to do with the singing of the songs, the music of the songs that you mention in your closing remarks about ‘Going Underground’. To me there’s something really poetically smart the

way the short, sharp syllables are spat out, you know, “I want nothing this society’s got”, it’s spat out. But then when he sings “I’m going underground”, it’s buoyant, and it takes you with him. So I don’t think it’s a singular retreat, I think it’s a call… where everyone gets it, at the disco, even on the radio you get nostalgia, everyone gets with that swell of ‘Going Underground’. I’ll just hold back from singing it. MF: I think it’s crucial to bring out those dimensions. There’s an idea of the Jam as shouty, but I think Paul Weller could never open his mouth enough to shout, because he was chewing gum at the same time, his face caught in a kind of amphetamine rictus. So all of the songs were delivered like that, through these gritted teeth, a kind of physicalized frustration. But there was also the buoyancy you refer to. That was part of the appeal of the Tories, that there’s an actual appeal to resignation given the misery, the compromise, the failures of left-wing politics: fuck it, let’s give up and enjoy it. Audience member 2: I think it’s tragic that we have to look as far back as the Jam to see evidence of a group that kind of tried to situate these radical ideas in the public sphere. I just wondered whether you think that pop culture can ever challenge neoliberal powers, and if not what do you think is holding that back? Do you think it’s a poverty of ambition or do you think that it stems from technology, or is it a mixture of things? MF: Well, I don’t think it’s a poverty of ambition, I think it is about a whole series of things. Firstly, I think that it is tragic that you have to look that far back but I think we have to face that tragedy and think through its implications rather than run away from it. And then the question is, why that’s happened. That is 30 years of neoliberal hegemony. The structure or the infrastructure which allowed not only the Jam to happen, but the whole of popular modernism in the UK, was social democracy, which isn’t the only imaginable condition for popular modernism but it was clearly crucial for post-punk. Social democracy with its multiple ways of funding cultural production, either explicitly, by direct funding, but more significantly in the case of music culture, by indirect funding — whether that’s via university

grants or unemployment benefits. Dexy’s Midnight Runners recently did an interview in the Guardian, and they were saying they were just on the dole, that’s how they could survive as a group. Many groups were like that. It’s also about art-school grants. That infrastructure allowed for a use of time where things could be produced without it being known in advance where they would go. Post-punk didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of very specific conditions. And if we’re talking about neoliberalism then we’re talking about the destruction of those conditions. Gavin Butt: I just wanted to explore the interface between post-punk and pop, and pop-ism, a little bit more, because as you were talking I was thinking about the New Romantics, and the subcultural style that surrounds their electro-pop musical form. You could argue that the New Romantics movement was a counter-hegemonic scene, albeit disarticulated to some degree from the orthodox left. It was counterhegemonic because it didn’t exactly embody Thatcherite social values in terms of the play with gender and sexual identity etc., even if setting up Blitz might have seemed more or less in line with her government’s valorisation of entrepreneurialism. I wondered what you thought about Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Because you said that post-punk was about moving away from the love song, and of course Frankie Goes to Hollywood wrote the first ever “cum” song, ‘Relax’, in 1983! Which of course got banned on BBC Radio 1. I went to see Holly Johnson live at KOKO a couple of nights ago, and most of it was uninteresting throwaway pop, including love songs, except, that is, for the Frankie stuff. And I think this was because with the Frankie material there was a concept there. In many ways, they were a concept band, and alongside their fetishy, S&M club-wear, songs about gay sex and the Cold War, their electro-funk music, went all the modernist-type publicity typical of Zang Tumb Tuum, their Dada-influenced record label. Their records had all this repurposed early 20th century avant-garde typography and stuff like that. To me, all those things together add up to a different kind of strand of post-punk that embodies counterhegemonic values but which was also very short-lived of course — it

was done by ’84, ’85. It was only a couple of years. I just wondered if you had anything to say about that. MF: Rather than being simply “Thatcherite”, a group like Visage engaged a different kind of politics to do with gender as you described. They were also one of the most forward-looking in terms of sound, because some Visage tracks sound like house, and Visage were quickly taken up in New York by the hip-hop and electro scenes. There’s still a dominant kind of phobic rockism which downplays their role because they weren’t a “proper group”, but I think that New Romantic scene was interesting on multiple levels. I also agree about Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Now they seem like the end of something, but at the time they seemed like the latest version of post-punk: they were heavily conceptualised by Paul Morley and also heavily studio-based, because ‘Relax’ was effectively a Trevor Horn production which used the musicians as components. GB: I was just thinking as you were talking, very interestingly, about Weller’s lyrics about masculinity and stuff. I mean you look back to the kind of pop I was just talking about, and there were basically flamboyant queers just all over Top of the Pops. MF: Yes, and in the space of the 30 years, there has been a retreat from that into boring gender normativity. That’s why it’s important to talk about laddism as part of that retreat from the questioning of gender which was central to post-punk. GB: People like Divine could appear on Top of the Pops, in tightfitting silver lamé outfits! Looking back it’s remarkable to think about that, about the non-normativity of Divine’s corpulence and queerness. Such forms of appearance are just largely absent from contemporary pop-mediated visions. MF: The hegemonic victories of that period were victories in those areas. When the concept of homophobia was mooted in the 80s, it was ridiculed as “loony leftism”, but now even the Tories have to accept that it’s wrong to be homophobic, it’s wrong to be racist. They

might be homophobic and racist but they know you can’t publicly avow homophobia and racism, and this is an achievement. It’s a sign of how things have moved on, but strangely, in popular culture, we have the return of all depressing old gender binaries. I think that’s why people get excited about Lady Gaga, at least there’s someone trying to do something along those lines again. GB: I think it’s also about the globalisation of American R&B in particular, the kind of pop version of R&B and all the gender normativity associated with it, it’s not the only thing but it’s part of it. MF: It is a big factor, but I was thinking about working-class fashion more broadly, which seems like it’s been dominated by sportswear for 30 years, in contrast with the aesthetics of the self that practised on the Mod and the New Romantic scenes. There’s been a kind of mandatory casualization since then. I think when sportswear ceases to be fashionable, that’s when capitalism will start to fall! Audience member 3: I just wondered… there’s a lot of things from the 90s that are being ignored… I mean the Manic Street Preachers, who were literary, poetic, politicised; you had Pulp and you had Suede and the Britpop thing further away from that lad thing, and Radiohead, another sort of politicised band up until the mid-2000s. Kid A was a massive mainstream album, completely criticising Blair, and Thom Yorke was involved in the anti-war protests as well, around the Iraq War… There was also Rage Against the Machine, who for me, when I was a teenager, were an incredibly politicised band who switched me on to kind of left-wing politics in a big way I think. So I feel there always have been these political strains that do run through. I’m not sure who there is today but then… I don’t really listen to music anymore. So I feel like there have been these currents that do keep up throughout the 90s. I think Frank Ocean is an example of someone who’s in the mainstream, who is a hip-hop artist who has come out as gay, which in hip-hop is still controversial I think. MF: I don’t think it’s the case that nothing of interest has happened since 1981, but it is about density, a density of things happening at

the same time. But also about a sense of newness which I think is lacking from all of those groups that you mentioned. I mean, let’s take Manic Street Preachers, I think that they were already falling into a postmodern pastiche in their sound. The sound wasn’t at the cutting edge of anything anymore, and whilst they were popular they didn’t really achieve the scale of something like the Jam. They were much more like a very popular indie cult band. Radiohead: to take a bit of a devil’s-advocate position on them — weren’t they like publicschool postmodernism? Kid A was really just like lots of stuff you’d already heard before, being passed off as new, wasn’t it? A bit of Krautrock, a bit of Eno: there’s more to them than that, but their experimentalism was ultimately pretty limited compared to what inspired them. Suede, I think, were significant as a kind of counter to laddism. Audience member 3: And Pulp as well. MF: But Pulp had been going years. They were just a very late group. GB: They’ve been together since 1978. MF: Yeah, so they were just a group that lasted out long enough for a revival to come around. I’m not saying that none of those groups had any merit, I just think they were not enough to reconstitute this teeming sense of possibility that persisted until the early to mid-80s. It’s not to do with a particular group but a scene, and a sense that this would go on. At the time we had no idea that this would peter out, we thought that things would keep renewing themselves. That’s gone, and we’re in an era of “that’s quite interesting”, we’re not in an era of “fuck, what was that?” We’re not in an era when we’re confronted with things that make us recalibrate our whole aesthetic sense of what music is and what culture is. I think, in the moment, we were immersed in that all the time. Audience member 4: I have to say I don’t agree with you; I don’t really recognise the stuff you’re saying. I think there’s plenty of really exciting and very new music being made and a lot of politicised

action, but I think it’s a question of scope. But isn’t there also the question of movement and of scene that has become problematic for a lot of people? To a certain extent it’s a self-done thing and there are very few artists who would want to say — it’s almost become a joke to say in an interview, “yeah, we’re not part of any scene or we don’t see any, even if you want to classify us as a scene”. It’s also about fragmentation in culture in general. One of the reasons it doesn’t feel like there’s a new movement or a new scene is because there’s no TV show that everyone watches where you get that feeling, because anyone who’s into Radiohead’s music is not listening to X Factor. People seek out their music in lots of different channels and there’s no unified thing so there’s no space for that feeling of woah, this is so new and this is so… MF: Yes but that’s the problem for us though, not for the right. Audience member 5: Yeah I agree that it’s a problem, but it’s not a problem of there not being ambitious acts, there not being politicised acts or whatever — it’s just that those acts are happening in small places, you know. People are into electronic music, there’s amazing things are happening with politicised acts, plenty of people in rap are really pushing the boundaries, but they’re not on one of the shows on TV that everyone is watching. MF: Well I think there is some element of truth to this, but how true is it that there is new stuff out there? That’s what I would really question. Could you really play me something now that if I heard it that I would say, there’s no way that that couldn’t have come out in 1994? Audience member 5: I would say yes. MF: Well you can play it to me afterwards but I doubt you’ll be able to persuade me! Audience member 6: But why is 1994 the threshold then?

MF: It’s just because it’s 20 years ago. Because it’s a long time ago and it ought to be ancient history now. Audience member 6: Because it’s an interesting moment — if you think about the American version of your argument, you’d think about Public Enemy, and you’d think about ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’, which is their song about an assassination attempt on a senator who’s actually in office at the time — but it’s that moment in the early 90s where the idea of Public Enemy as a social movement begins to crystallise and also it begins to fade. MF: Well, I think if anything qualifies as popular-modernist it would be Public Enemy, and they’d certainly meet all the criteria that I’d look for in a politicised artist… because it was formally innovative, it was politicised, and it was making inroads into the hegemonic mainstream. In hip-hop, Public Enemy were sadly the last example of something of that scale that could combine all of those things. And the dominant tendencies in hip-hop after that were just towards capitalist realism, gender normativity etc. Audience member 7: Personally, I don’t really like the Jam’s music but I’m interested in what you would say about their political influence as a massive band. I wonder how much impact that actually had on their followers: how many people took in that political element of the lyrics and how many were actually just more into the “lads-together” music? MF: It’s a very good question, which raises all the difficult issues about the relationship between politics and music generally. Put it this way: surely it’s better — if there was an “all-lads-together” culture around music — it’s better that the music has this political content to it, which at least in theory could filter down. It might not have had a direct impact. But if it’s part of the general structure of feeling of society, it must have some impact that there are these currents floating around. Audience member 7: I was just going to say I guess my problem with Paul Weller and the Jam, is they don’t seem that genuine. I

wasn’t there at the time, but, looking back on it, it doesn’t seem like it was very real. And the way that he said that he would vote Tory but then he’ll back Labour, it’s kind of this back and forth and it doesn’t – MF: I think initially as a teenager he said he would vote Tory but as far as I’m aware he never said anything like that again. I always thought that Weller was extremely genuine to a fault actually. I didn’t feel it was just a fashion. Actually, though, if left-wing ideas were fashionable, that would be good… Audience member 8: I was just wondering about what you said about having time where you wouldn’t have to work at a real job, compared to now where, if you’re a student, instead of having a grant you are given a loan, and if you are unemployed you have to go on Jobseeker’s courses. The entire structure now is about occupying people’s time. Looking back at that might help us find this programme or method for making that time beyond work available again. MF: The great myth of neoliberalism is the idea that people can be creative in any conditions. The more you deprive people of security, the more creative they’ll be, and if people are comfortable then they don’t produce anything, they will be lazy. That is part of the political importance of post-punk: it is an example of a time when there was relative security, but there was much higher level of popular creativity than today. So I think it’s about making an argument for the need for that different kind of time, and thinking about how we could create the conditions for that experience of time today. The conditions wouldn’t necessarily be the same conditions that led to post-punk, we can’t just go back to social democracy as it was. But then the question is how do we combine security with the unknown? We don’t know in advance what will happen. But I guess that’s why I’m trying to say we should all think about ways in which we can return to a situation in which people can repeatedly encounter something in the mainstream culture which is transformative. That is partly about recovering the desire to occupy that space, and giving up on the comforts of marginality and the ready libidinal satisfactions

of the underground. Although in many ways I think with the internet we don’t really have an underground versus an overground. It’s a kind of clotted centre with things like The X Factor. Outside this, as Simon Reynolds has said, there’s not so much an underground, as a series of orbiting satellites. Those satellites can circulate endlessly without ever coming into contact with the centre which remains dominated by capitalist realism. The right have never given up any ambition to occupy and dominate the centre of political and cultural life; they’ve always found ways to do it, and we have to respond to that with our own positive political and cultural project.

6 Lockdown and Breakout: Laura Oldfield Ford and Gee Vaucher in Conversation with Mark Fisher (13|11|14) The conversation between artists Gee Vaucher and Laura Oldfield Ford brings to the fore the visual dimension of post-punk. Even though much post-punk imagery emerged from experiments that began in art school, it wasn’t intended to be consumed in gallery spaces; it was produced for posters, record covers, and in fanzines. The images that Gee Vaucher produced for Crass were some of the most striking examples of this postpunk “para-art”. There are many parallels between Gee Vaucher’s work and that of Laura Oldfield Ford, both in the militant ambitions they have for their work, and in the quality of the imagery itself. But there are also many differences, some of which have to do with contrasts between the post-punk moment and now. Although Laura Oldfield Ford’s work is clearly informed by post-punk culture and imagery, it comes out of a very different moment: one in which the conditions which allowed post-punk to exist have faded, and this fading becomes a preoccupation of the work itself. The conversation therefore reflects on the way in which the possibilities for cultural production are shaped by particular times and spaces. Crass have a base in Dial House in Epping Forest, Essex, and much of the discussion here turns on the politics of space: can London be saved, or is it now so colonized by capital that an escape into the countryside and the provinces is the only option? Mark Fisher: If we go in reverse chronological order and start with Laura first. Laura will talk about the project Savage Messiah — perhaps you could tell us about how it came about, Laura, what made you produce it, what were the guiding passions behind it…

Laura Oldfield Ford: I started this zine Savage Messiah in 2005 — and you’ve got to think about what the UK was like at that point. It’s the Blair era, it was before the crash, there was still this sense of a kind of pseudo-buoyancy. You could still get cheap credit, and there was still a sense that people weren’t fully prepared to grasp the reality of the “impending-doom” economic situation. Also what was happening at that time, what was most kind of immediate and obvious to me, was this ongoing gentrification and “regeneration” project that was happening in London as well. I should say as well that all my work is generated through the dérive, or the drift; walking around and psycho-geography. This is really my way of trying to critique this urban regeneration, and the fact that spaces were being locked down. I felt increasingly that central London and places that I’d always experienced as spaces that opened up possibilities for other ways of living, and different ways of demarcating and negotiating territory, were being closed off. It was almost becoming like a gated community. Also what was happening around this time was that I felt this anarcho-punk aesthetic was becoming subsumed into a really trite, commercialised aesthetic. You’d see it in Topshop and you’d see it on flyers for Shoreditch club nights and things like that… I wanted to reinvigorate it in a way, and restore that radical critique that I felt was there in the anarcho-punk scene, as it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was someone that was really influenced by that. I was too young to participate in it, I was a really young kid, but I had older cousins and uncles and people around the scene in Yorkshire who were really into punk and post-punk and Crass and Poison Girls, and these bands. So I was aware of it all going on and found it really fascinating. It was also something that I found almost quite scary and intimidating, in a way. It kind of created that shock, and made me really think about things differently. I felt almost offended by the way that that aesthetic had been appropriated… So, making this zine was a way of me trying to redress that in some way.

MF: Why did you choose to do it as a zine? LOF: Because I write as well, and it was an obvious way of conflating the text and the images. Also I liked the dynamism and fluidity of it. I could take it outside — I didn’t have to deal with the white-cube gallery system. It could exist outside of that and have its own currents and dynamism. So, I make these drawings quite quickly, with biro or ink usually. Part of my project, I felt, was to chronicle a disappearing London, in a way. So, it was really important for me to spend a lot of time in places that I already had an emotional engagement with, that for me were almost repositories of memory, and to draw them in a way that I felt had certain architectural accuracies. It was about documenting something. Also, imbuing it with a sense of intoxication, and looking at it from an almost hallucinogenic lens. Some of these drawings become flyposters, and again, exist back on the street. I’ve done projects all over the place in this kind of way.

MF: …Did you actually fly-post the areas that you were working on? LOF: Yes, exactly. Say, for example, this drawing of the Heygate Estate in the Elephant & Castle. I used to live on the Aylesbury Estate, so when these places become sites of urban-regeneration schemes, and all those horrible glossy hoardings appear on the outside of these sites, I would go and fly-post images of the abandoned estate. It’s almost like they become revenant structures, haunting the scheme, in a way. MF: Yes, it’s almost like the really dominant art form of late capitalism is those simulations of future architectural developments! LOF: Yes, exactly. So — this idea of walking and chronicling a disappearing landscape really dominated my work for the last ten years, really.

This drawing is from a project about the lower Lea Valley around the run-up to the Olympics really. It became quite elegiac and melancholy as a project, I think. This brings us a bit more up to the recent work, where I’ve been thinking a lot about zones. I’ve always been interested in liminal territories, zones that become almost porous where these other possibilities can emerge — different ways of experimenting with different possibilities and uses of architecture. Nomadic architecture and space. As I say, I felt increasingly that places I’d been living in, around East London particularly, had become so gentrified they became unliveable, completely locked down. So I started looking more at the suburbs, and I’ve just finished a Stanley Picker fellowship at Kingston University which was really about examining the suburbs. Also, thinking about the way there’s been an inversion from the inner city to the suburbs. If you think of inner-city areas as places where there might be splintering and collisions of ideologies, ideas, encounters, and desires, and all these different things happening simultaneously — this seems to have moved to the periphery, I would argue. This kind of situation we’re seeing now, where there’s so much overseas investment in terms of properties being built and left empty, stalled development, and yet there’s this kind of tide, this shift to the periphery.

MF: That’s because people other than the rich can afford to live there… LOF: ...Yes, because I think Zones One and Two have become so locked down — these spaces are just the city’s unassimilable blockages and obstacles, now. This is work that I’ve been doing around the Winstanley Estate. I’m looking at sequences of connected interior spaces. It’s in Clapham Junction. I think, again, it’s this idea of living in a precarious situation, and being nomadic — constantly having to move around, having short-life tenancies, squatting — even squatting now has become impossible in central London. This whole series of paintings became, like I say, really melancholic — because everything, all the work I’ve made in the last year, none of the people and none of these places actually exist anymore, at all. It’s all gone. So, I started bringing the text back into these paintings, in this almost spectral way, with the chalk floating on the surface of the board. This was a painting of some houses, temporary shelters I guess you would say, around Hounslow. I was walking around Hounslow a lot.

It’s a really strange zone between the edge of the airport, and these rows of suburban housing in Hounslow. You think about the airport being probably one of the most controlled spaces in the whole of the UK. Then you’ve got these rows of suburban housing, but between that you’ve got this strange liminal zone, where people are living in Portacabins, garden sheds, and these precarious kinds of structures. These are communities of migrant workers. This is a Travelodge — I’ve been staying a lot in Travelodges, and I realise that the Travelodge isn’t a hotel; it’s actually hostels for migrant workers. This is increasingly what’s happening. When I was making work about the suburbs, staying in the Travelodge was a moment of epiphany, really. I really got an insight into that experience — this idea of England hallucinating, the suburbs hallucinating. Not as a delirious, collective sense of euphoria, like the free-party scene or rave scene, but actually trapped in isolated spaces. But I’ve always felt that there is an undercurrent of the possibility of this collective “breaking out” of these spaces, and that kind of moment of rupture — that’s always there. MF: We’re dealing with a different sort of drug — what’s that?

LOF: The title of my show at the moment in Kingston is Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC. It is sort of talking about the delirium of Wetherspoon’s Monday Club, really, rather than Castlemorton or something. It’s that sense of getting wrecked on your own, which seems to be what’s happening more and more, rather than a collective euphoria. MF: That’s a form of self-medication. LOF: Yes, I think it is. This is what I was talking about in relation to the suburbs — about the idea of everyone being on antidepressants, going to Wetherspoon’s, drinking massive glasses of Chardonnay, smoking weed in car parks. Having a pipe in a car park on your break at work seems to be how the suburbs are functioning at the moment. MF: Tell us about dates, they’re really important in your work. Scrawling dates across the images… LOF: Well I suppose that relates to what I was saying about subterranean currents — that there’s this repressed energy, these channels that are bubbling just beneath the surface, that at certain points become a moment of rupture. For example, 2011, the riots then, I would say was one of those moments. I often think of these particular moments as being incredibly intense and cataclysmic; almost as if they can become imprinted on a landscape. This idea of the “staining” of a place — that’s really what these chains of dates are referring to, I think. MF: Right, and you see your own work as an active intervention, to reawaken the potential in these spaces? LOF: Yes maybe an intervention, but also a sense of “tuning into” something, and channelling something. Yes, my work is psychogeography, but I also would say that it has shifted slightly into more of a “socio-geography” where it’s also about tuning into these other currents, or these other embedded histories — all the memories

locked into the landscape, in some way. It’s almost like, tuning into it rather than intervening. MF: Yes, a shift from psycho-, or psychology, with its connotations of the individual, to the social is a reversal of the trend — one your work actually tracks — from the collective into the individual. LOF: I suppose that’s kind of it. Even though there’s this sense that people at the moment are isolated, and trapped in these individual spaces — sitting at home, with big-screen TVs, drinking supermarket booze instead of being on the street — at any moment that can tip over. Things can move so quickly, we’ve seen that. So, it’s really about plotting and scheming; occupying these spaces to reconfigure the architecture, and imbue the architecture with completely different meanings. MF: It’s one way of seeing what happened in 2011 with the riots; a sort of failed attempt to break out of these conditions, of mandatory individualisation, self-medication… LOF: Yes, I just see that as the first phase of something. What happened in 2011 will happen again. I don’t see it as a sort of “failure” in that sense. MF: Well, “failure” in the sense that, as you document with some of your images, people faced incredibly draconian penalties for participating in those events… This wasn’t accidental or just overthe-top, it’s because the powers-that-be sensed the danger of exactly that kind of collective breakout, and have done everything they can do to shut it down, really. LOF: But the response to it was really illuminating, it was like a clarifying process, because then you had the emergence of the “broom brigade” and all that. This is a point I’ve always been making, there’s something really dubious and suspect about the way middleclass people colonise places and declare it a “community”. I think the logical conclusion of that is some kind of really nasty, virulent, right-

wing evocation of a community. The 2011 riots did expose that, as well, which was a really interesting consequence. * MF: Let’s turn now to Gee. Gee Vaucher: I was asked to bring some images, which I’ve done; a collection from early days until now. Exit, Oxford piece (1973) This is Exit, the band before Crass, and this is Penny Rimbaud and myself performing a work called ‘Oxford Piece’, in Oxford in 1973. I didn’t understand what we were doing at the time [laughs], it was very much an installation piece. The second picture will show you what happens next. I’m racing here and introducing images of his

naked body as I go along, just so you can see the progression of the performance… This is probably all the evidence I’ve got of this piece. It’s one of the first collaborations between Penny Rimbaud and myself, which still continues. MF: So, were you at art college? GV: We both came out of art school in 1965, though this piece is a long time after that. But I started doing some of my own work, plus out of necessity, working for magazines and books, which was pretty boring. Illustration for Homage to Catatonia by Penny Rimbaud. Gouache. (1975) This is one of my own pieces of work, I’ve only got a series of three (it was going to be a lot more) for a book that Penny had been writing about a friend of ours who was ostensibly murdered by the

state. It got a bit hot round the collar [laughs], as we revealed more and more evidence. Being a lot younger at the time, we kind of stepped back a bit, so the project was never finished. Illustration for Homage to Catatonia by Penny Rimbaud. Gouache. (1975) MF: So, how long were you in New York for? GV: Just a couple of years working. While I was in New York I started the International Anthem, really just to be a vehicle for my own work, and for other people that I respected — writers and illustrators. It went on from there. I happened to be earning money and so I thought I’d put it into something I’d always wanted to do. The next few images are for the International Anthem. These were for issues about domestic violence and Ireland.

MF: Presumably that’s going into the 1980s? International Anthem 4: Ireland. Gouache (1981) GV: Late 1970s, early 1980s. Each edition I did I chose a subject. Then along came the band. The next two images are the covers for The Feeding of the Five Thousand, the first album, and Penis Envy.

Crass, Feeding of the 5000, gouache (1978) MF: Can you say a bit about how you got involved in doing that? Was it via the long-term relationship with Penny? GV: No, not really — I mean, yes and no. We had, and still do have, a very open house and lots of people come with brilliant talents in music, writing, photography, everything really. Steve Ignorant turned up at the house, he was — what — 15? 14? He wanted to do some music so he started working with Pen. I was in New York at the time — actually Steve was a bit older by then.

Crass, Penis Envy, collage (1981) So, they got a little band together, certain people turned up at the house and they stepped into the roles — they just happened to turn up on the right day I suppose! I was in New York and Pen wrote and said what was happening. I said to him to come over and play in New York, and they did. I set up the gigs, they sold up a lot of stuff that was hanging around at the house, got the fare and came over. They did about six gigs in New York. When they left my work was getting more and more troublesome, as far as magazines were concerned. I’d been asked to illustrate a story about President Carter’s brother, who was making a lot of money from his brother being president. I did a rather tongue-in-

cheek picture, and I was told, “we can’t publish it, you’ll have to take that bit out”. So, I did and I felt a bit unclean about it. I thought the next time that happens I’m going home. So the next time it happened, it was for an article about a group of gay guys who had gathered in Central Park and who had been attacked by some middle-class, young lads with baseball bats. It was to illustrate that story. Sadly the editor of a New York magazine was outraged by the illustration and wouldn’t use it at all. I thought, it’s time to leave, it’s no good, it’s not working. So that’s when I came back and obviously joined in with what the band was doing at home. MF: You were living in Dial House? GV: We’ve been living in Dial House since 1968. So, yeah, it was an ongoing thing. We lived there when Exit was going. We live there now that other things are going. Dial House is a place out in the countryside. It’s kind of an open house, people are welcome to visit and have a cup of tea, have a chat, share ideas. Lots of events go on — we do workshops of this, that, and the other. It’s ongoing, no day is the same, and you never know who is going to turn up or inspire you next. Hopefully it works both ways. Dial House has been active since 1968, or it could be 1967. We initially rented it, nobody wanted to live in the countryside in the 1960s, they all wanted to migrate to the cities. Consequently there were many properties; “take your pick”. But then, after a few years of living there, people began coming out of the cities again. We rented DH up until maybe 12 to 15 years ago? Maybe not as long as that. The farmer had always kept it at the same rent which was 70 quid a week. [Laughter]. He thought we looked after it rather well, so that was great for us. For the last 10 years we didn’t pay any rent because of a dispute with British Telecom who had taken it over — it gets more complex after that. Anyway, we had to make a big fight to get the house. We were sitting tenants, under a law that allowed the tenant to stay no matter who bought it. That law no longer exists. Obviously the house and land were worth a lot more money without it being occupied, so British Telecom were trying to get us out. We had to battle away for 10 or 11 years until we finally won. I have to

say though, we did set a precedent in the highest court in the land — so hopefully that will help the next people that get attacked by “the city” [laughs]. Crass, ‘Bloody Revolutions’, gouache (1980) This is for ‘Bloody Revolutions’, a single poster. We did these record covers which opened right up, and you would get a poster on the inside. This is going back on to work that isn’t Crass-related. Now, moving on to more recent stuff, which I’ve been doing since Crass.

A Week of Knots: Sunday –The Family, collage (2013) This is Sunday — The Family. I don’t know if you know the Max Ernst Surrealist novel, Une Semaine de Bonté. I’ve taken all Ernst’s figures out of his original illustrations, then I’ve used the background and combined it with the sentiments of R.D. Laing’s Knots. I’m just working on the second book which is Monday — Mother. MF: Why did Laing’s book Knots connect with your work? Why was that so important? GV: I think it’s one of the most brilliant books, really, It’s about the dilemma and complexity of families. I have a strong belief that it’s the family that fucks us up even if they love us very deeply. In some way we all have to work through painful or confused episodes in our

childhood. Some of us get off lightly, some people suffer dreadfully. So Laing’s Knots really goes through that issue. MF: Is that part of the significance of the communal living situation in Dial House? In that it allows a breakout from the family? GV: Yes, I mean, I think so. I like to think so. I like to think that when people visit they feel very comfortable, very welcome and very at rest, to be there. I think people do, which is lovely. It’s open. They can bring and they can contribute in any way that they can. There’s only been a couple of times where that hasn’t happened — when someone comes and wants to take too much, and it becomes really destructive. MF: One of the things that runs through your work, I think, is opposition between different forms of belonging, and the opposition to the dominant forms of belonging which are forced upon us by nationalism and the family… These other forms of belonging and collectivity which are articulated against that… GV: Well, I think it comes down to love, doesn’t it? Without that, we don’t have a hope in hell — I mean real unconditional love. That’s very difficult even with a one-to-one relationship, let alone the rest of the world. I can’t see any other way of deep connection, or deep understanding really. But it’s a tall order. I don’t know what to think of it really, but that’s how I feel. I just try to do that — well not do it… You just get up and try to be a better person each day by confronting some of your own demons. I can’t see any other way of getting through otherwise. Anyway, this is a bull. It’s a life-sized painting. We have many bulls on the farm and this one was just about to keel over. I get very tired of photographs and paintings you get of perfect animals, like Stubbs’ horses; that’s not the animal kingdom, really. A working animal gets into a terrible state… This bull tries to convey that and its majesty in some way. Our farmer is very sentimental. He doesn’t like to put his bulls and cows down, he just lets them into the fields and they eat themselves into oblivion and keel over. He keeled over before I finished him. He was a lovely bull.

BULL. Mixed pigments on canvas (2004) MF: What we’ve seen there is almost a history of the counterculture in Britain, from the 1960s, through to the receding of that counterculture, in a way. As you were saying, Laura, you see your work as quite elegiac and haunted. Do you see yourself as being at the end of something? LOF: I suppose so, yes. Maybe it relates to that idea of the liminal zone, again. Maybe that’s where I feel that we’re poised at the moment. MF: In time, you mean — or in space? LOF: Well, yes, in a way. The way I feel personally about… as I said before, about just being too young to participate in post-punk, and that anarcho-punk scene, but also being aware of the miners’ strike, and a wave of dissent and political people. But then, there’s the way that became faded out into New Labour, and how frustrating that felt then. Then to be reinvigorated, I guess, in 2010, 2011; it felt like things were starting to shift again, after 2008. I guess there’s that feeling of an impending moment of rupture again, that I kind of refer to, I suppose.

MF: I guess I’m a similar age to Laura, and so have a similar sense of having just slightly missed out on things. LOF: …Yes, I was thinking about 1987 as the most hideous year — when Thatcher came in again. Stock Aitken and Waterman dominating the charts, to me that was the end. I was only 14 or something then. So, it really did feel like yearning for that time which just eluded you. MF: Do you feel the same sort of break Gee? GV: No, I don’t really. I live in the countryside, so things are of a much slower pace there. Things are quieter, people are kind to each other, people speak to each other. People have – LOF: — the Countryside Alliance and UKIP… GV: [Laughs] …Obviously the house has a lot of positive projects being brought in so, I hear about a lot of stuff going on all over the world, up and down the country — brilliant projects that won’t get on the front pages, that’s for sure. So I have a very different feeling about that. That’s not to say I’m ignorant of what’s going on in the city, but my feeling is that when it gets bad, I want it to get worse, because it’s the only time it gives. It’s the only time that real creativity seems to break out, and people understand that they can. Whatever the can is, they can and must — if we want to survive with any dignity. I suppose people that do visit us from the cities and who are struggling up and down the country, my advice always is to get out. Cities are for people with money. It’s like “get out, find a place, share it in the countryside, learn how to live together, grow your own food, bollocks to the rest of them”. In that sense, there is nothing you can do with cities, unless you really, really blockade the streets, and make it… It’s a bit like that film Passport to Pimlico [laughs]. I think “yeah that sounds good”, but you see what happened in that film. It’s quite an interesting film, if you haven’t seen it you should watch it — it’s very funny. I just don’t see how people in cities can live on their own. I don’t know how you can afford it, I don’t know how that works — I couldn’t

find the rent. On my amount, I just couldn’t find it. So it makes no sense to have your own rented apartment. What’s the point? You’ve got so much money to pay out so why don’t you get a whole house, or a factory, or some empty embassy or something and just, you know get people in there that are constructive, that are imaginative, who are creative, who care. I know there are a lot of really pained and damaged people in the city, that it’s a lifetime’s dedication to help just one. I’m not saying that one turns away, but what are you offering them? It’s the shit that’s still there, how can you help? It’s the very thing that’s creative — that pain, that loss, that sort of “unhinged from the earth” thing. Of course, as you say, people will turn to drink on their own, drugs on their own; it’s not even a party anymore. It’s not even a “coming together”. It’s just “give me something warm” even if it’s a card- board box under a bridge, and a bottle to kill the pain. That’s hard, that’s really hard. I can’t take it on personally, I really can’t. LOF: I suppose when I was talking about the research I was doing about the suburbs, I found that walking around places like Hounslow and Croydon, Lewisham, places like that, I found that there were spaces opening up — more porous kinds of spaces. I used to find that in places like the Lea Valley, Walthamstow Marshes, places like that; areas around Stratford and so on. I feel like in the suburbs there is a sight of almost, I would argue, sublime potential. Because the forces of reaction have absolutely locked down the countryside as much as the inner cities now… GV: …In some parts of the country for sure… LOF: …I’m thinking back to the Criminal Justice Bills. To my mind that was absolutely about keeping us out of the countryside. If you think about the amount of wealthy people that have got second homes in the countryside, and the social problems that that has caused. I don’t actually think it is that easy for people to just take off and live in the countryside – GV: I don’t think it’s easy…

LOF: — I think it’s probably more likely to be something that resembles what we might call “suburban space”, possibly, at the moment… GV: I agree with you. I agree that anywhere that’s got even a small piece of land, where you can touch the earth, grow some food, already gives you a sense of belonging, achievement, food… LOF: My ideal situation would be that you could have some knackered cars in the yard, and a fire going in a barrel, but still be able to tune in to pirate radio stations… That’s kind of the right balance, I think… [Audience laughter]. GV: Well, whatever it is, it’s not going to be the same for everybody. It’s having that opportunity to feel some sense of balance. LOF: I guess I just feel cities are worth fighting for though. That’s the thing. That’s what my work has always been about. The sense of that class anger, about the social and class cleansing that’s been going on. GV: It’s been going on since the beginning. LOF: Yes, but you must admit there’s been an acceleration in the last decade. GV: I’m not sure really, because it’s only that we have access to so much news now, in so many ways… LOF: …No, because people have been getting evicted and councils are actually — to use this horrible term — “decanting” people, aren’t they. They’re saying that people can’t even live in Tower Hamlets or Newham, they have to be shifted right out. GV: No, I agree, I’d forgotten what’s been happening for a moment. But then, what do people do to stop it? You can’t do it on your own. You have to come together. It’s the strength in numbers that maybe shifts that balance.

MF: I’m just wondering if this retreat into the country is itself a sign of the break I was talking about earlier? Did you always feel this way about cities…? GV: Yes, I did, really. MF: Where were you based before you were in Dial House? Did you live in London in the 1960s? GV: Dagenham. MF: So, still in the Essex suburbs? GV: London suburbs, yes [laughs]. I’m a keen gardener and that’s where I do my thinking, creating. I mean, I don’t fully agree with you in that “dip”. I think it’s a circular thing, which gets — I like to think — stronger and stronger over time. People might learn from their mistakes and unless you work together you’re not going to manage it. I can’t see any other way. MF: You both went to art school, but you both ended up working beyond the art world. I wonder what role you thought art schools played? Or what role going to art schools played in your subsequent lives? What would it have been like if you hadn’t gone to art school? GV: I don’t know, because I went to art school [laughs]. I mean obviously art schools in the 1960s were very different. For a start you were paid to go to art school. All the materials were free; you were given a grant to go. I mean I came from a poor family, so I got a maximum grant to go. I did etching and print-making and you’d be given a big copper plate for nothing, to work on. I don’t know how people afford it now — I don’t understand how this works anymore, in art schools or universities, or anywhere you have to pay to be educated. So, I’m out of that. I really don’t know how it works anymore. It’s so different, and of course the end of 1968 brought great confrontations everywhere, especially from art schools. Subsequently half the art schools in Great Britain were closed down and the whole system changed. When I went to art school you did

five years in one place, and then you went on to do another three at the Royal College of Art, or the Slade etc. Now, they’ve broken that system — what is it now? One year? Two years? The government tried to break up what was coming out of art schools in the 1960s. I mean, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, loads of people. They wanted to break up the fact that you were living and working together for five years. When I started art school I was 15 and I was able to share ideas with others who were over 20. You had your peers, you learnt a lot of what was going on. It was fantastic. Then they broke that with a very good idea: you could no longer hang around together for five years or more and plot.[Laughter]. NO, I don’t know HOW it works anymore. MF: Yes, that strikes me as one of the things that really has changed, back at the end of the 1960s, then it seems it has got progressively worse since that… Of course, Laura you went to art school in quite a different period. LOF: Yes I started my BA in the late 1990s. I still at that point thought of it as contributing to a certain milieu of an experience, rather than going to gain a qualification. We’ve seen that slide since then, into this corporatisation of the education system. GV: Also you had that period where Goldsmiths became this place of “celebrity-artist” time. That really killed and probably destroyed a lot of potentially good artists, because they were picked up so young. LOF: Yes. I think the fundamental difference, for me, is when I talk about spaces being locked down. I was able to come to London in the early 1990s from up north, with no money, but was able to squat at that point. I was part of, I guess, a sort of creative milieu of people that were involved in political scenes and free-party scenes, and so on. You could squat, you could sign on, and that allowed that space and freedom to drift around London, to develop skills and ideas. I think that’s what has been lost now. Students aren’t able to have that time — they’re working all different jobs to try and pay extortionate rents, you can’t sign on, you’ve got to go to the dole office every day…

GV: No, there’s no revolution coming out of art schools now, that’s for sure [laughs]… LOF: …I think when I talk about space being locked down, that’s what I feel is being encroached upon. It’s our time to really drift, and think, and formulate ideas. I suppose that’s why I was really excited during that point, around 2011 when the Occupy movement was happening. The student protests as well, then the riots. That was an interesting moment. That’s what I was saying as well — I think things just go dormant for a while, and now and then they erupt again. GV: Well, they appear to go dormant. The thing about the squatting is that it’s gone back to what it was originally in the 1960s. People squatted factories, embassies, they didn’t squat houses. It was for a whole group of people to move in. It was for families. It wasn’t for just you. It was very different. That law now has pushed it back to what it was. You can’t squat houses but you can certainly squat the factories — there’s plenty of them around. LOF: In central London though, what you see increasingly are these developments that are sold off at auction in Hong Kong and Singapore. They are investment opportunities. You simply can’t squat these places, even though they’re standing empty. That’s my dream to see all the yuppiedromes occupied. That’s what I think about all the time and agitate for… [Laughter]. MF: Why can’t they be squatted? The levels of security? LOF: Yes, the levels of security. It’s not just some bloke with an Alsatian that you can bung 20 quid to and he’ll give you a key… [Laughter]. It used to be that you could buy flats in Peckham for five quid. I’m not joking, the North Peckham Estate was amazing — you could just get keys off people in the pub. MF: The thing that’s coming out is the enclosure of space and the enclosure of time. That’s what you are mourning the disappearance of, Laura, those pockets of that “un-pressured” space-time within the city itself.

LOF: Yes, I think the lower Lea Valley particularly functioned in that way, as a place where you could retreat to drift, think, dream, and these other possibilities would emerge in that landscape. It’s unpoliced space as well. Free of advertising and CCTV, a very quiet kind of space. GV: Something great has happened there, 14 acres of London ground has been given to the Organic Lea people on a 30-year lease. LOF: Oh, right, I thought you were talking about Westfield. [Laughter]. GV: Oh, no! This is like prime land, it backs onto Epping Forest, and they HAVE taken it over. Three years ago they were given the lease, and they started growing and running an organic vegetables box scheme. It’s “open day” every Wednesday; they give you a meal, they cook all the food up. That’s a fantastic project. They’re now introducing workshops for this that and the other. Who would have thought that could have happened? It’s the old council greenhouses where they grew all the plants and flowers for parks this side of London. That’s amazing. I think that’s a great achievement. So there’s a bit of tranquillity there if you like, and some good food coming out of there. Squat a greenhouse! LOF: Manor Allotments were probably not too happy about that. GV: Can’t please everyone! [Laughter]. MF: Perhaps we could talk a bit about the actual post-punk period, and the significance of that. It’s clear from the images you showed, Gee, you said that in lots of ways the roots of your work have been in the late 1960s, and in that counterculture. That’s one of the things that Crass were often accused of, of being hippies. Do you think there is any special significance about that period — the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s? It seems to me that one way of looking at that, and why that was so important, was the counterculture in the contexts of the kind of resurgent reaction — as

we see endlessly in your images. That super-photogenic nihilism of power, and glamour; of Reagan, and Thatcher, clamping down on the counterculture. That clampdown also goes back to the 1960s, but it really locks in during the 1980s and onwards. GV: Well, 1968, if you were around then, it felt like the whole world was going to change. It was incredibly exciting. It seemed possible. But, when you’re young you have these dreams… [laughs]. I think it got pretty close. I don’t understand this idea about hippies, quite honestly. If you really look at the history of hippies, they brought to notice many things, looking at your own health, trying to treat your own health, looking at your food and trying to eat better. It was about taking control, being your own authority. That was the very strong message of the hippies in the beginning. What happened in the end was totally different, it got flooded with drugs and it went up its own arse and all the rest of it. But that awareness didn’t get lost on a lot of people — that self-awareness and working together. The free-love thing was a different thing altogether, that’s another discussion, really. But, yes, we were hippies, Pen and I, because we come from that age, and we learnt a lot from that experience. We took from it what we felt were the most powerful things coming out of that voice, and left behind a lot of the shit — we never had drugs at Dial House because we don’t take drugs. So, that got left behind, and we took the whole thing about being your own authority — took it to its conclusion, really. Then, obviously, the Sex Pistols came along, which was a breath of fresh air quite honestly, because up until then the Top 20 was like, I don’t know, Eddie Fisher or… I don’t know, I can’t think who it was but it was crap. Suddenly you got this really raw message coming out. I just thought it was amazing. How that went on and how that finished is another matter again, but we took up the challenge because we didn’t think there was no future. That was the pure basis of it — “no future”, we thought, “what are you talking about?” The future is yours, if you want to take it, and it’s always there. How you run with it, and who you run with, and how you do that, is another matter. We’ve always advocated that you do it with the utmost consideration. So, yes, that’s where we came from. Obviously we

were much older than the average punk. Steve was the youngest in the band. We all came from different backgrounds — middle-class, upper mid-dle-class, working-class — so it had this conglomerate stuff going around in it. I think the Sex Pistols really sort of brought it home. It’s one of those things again where “something has to give”. You might not like how it “gave”, or how it ended up, but at the time it was incredibly amazing, inspiring, even if you didn’t like the music or what they were saying. There was something there that you could think about because it was so in your face. MF: Why was music able to seize the cultural moment, in that time? From the 1960s on to the 1970s? GV: …I think that’s what the communication was of the time. It wouldn’t have been any good to stand up at that time and recite poetry; it wouldn’t have got through. The Beats could do it, and the Beats did do it, with words, standing up there with maybe a sax or something and just reciting. People were connecting with that. But, to have done that during the 70s, it just would not have worked. I’ll talk about Crass because none of us were musicians. We just thought we’d take up the challenge and get up there and play. I think a lot of bands did that. The thing was to just give it a try and whatever you do, do it from the heart. I think that really had an amazing effect on a generation of young people — they found their voice, their footing, and their journey; their own road to get to where they are now. MF: There’s a kind of paradox there then, with the claim on the one hand of “no future”, on the other hand the injunction for people to go and do things. Both of those things sit in uneasy tension within punk, really. So, you’re saying really that you took up the second bit, the injunction to just do things. GV: Yes, and I think we took it seriously. We did think that we could share our experiences, and share it in the way that we did, very carefully. Everything we did, the words, the images, the presentations, the performances, we did with great consideration, and hoped that people would understand. We gave ourselves a

period of time to try and say what we felt, and then we stopped. That was always on the agenda. Having said that, I think, when we stopped, we did actually think we’d ruined a generation of young people. As time has gone on, I don’t believe that now. MF: Ruined? GV: Well, I did think we’d really fucked a generation up quite honestly… Left people stranded with nowhere to go, really. People were into rejecting everything. It’s no good to keep saying everything is ugly, everything is bad — that has to be measured up against what you must think is something very beautiful. That’s why we finished Crass with Acts of Love: Fifty Songs to My Other Self. We had to finish with something saying, “where’s the balance?” You can’t just keep pointing fingers, saying everything’s crap and life’s a ruin, all the rest of it… Because, against what? It’s got to have some balance, somewhere, hasn’t it? Otherwise you’re just going to drive yourself into the ground, and everything becomes so black and negative. MF: I guess that’s why it makes sense to see Crass as part of the post-punk moment, rather than punk as such — because of being a response to that initial nihilistic gesture, or negative gesture. Laura, I think then, your work is very much about living in the ruins. It’s not so much celebrating ruination as finding how to make it habitable. Ruination at the literal level, which you deal with in your images, but also at a cultural level — having to scavenge for materials, to scavenge for resources at a time when they aren’t really available… LOF: Do you mean in terms of occupying buildings, and the drawings of the estates, and the way we occupy those kinds of spaces? MF: I think it’s partly that, but it’s then also about the phantoms of the counterculture itself, the ruins of the counterculture and post-punk — and what it means, with all the ambiguities about occupying something like that, and the complex emotions involved with trying to

keep fidelity with that, at the same time as recognising that its moment has gone. LOF: Yes, I suppose I do think about those places as being spectral in some way, when I make drawings of those abandoned estates. I think about places like Hulme in Manchester — the crescents that were occupied en masse by travellers, punks, and people from all over, that forged these temporary occupations of space, that opened up these other possibilities. But then, I guess when we’re talking about post-punk as a specific moment and certain type of music, it relates to that idea that I was talking about before, the subterranean currents. The essence of that remains constant; there’s a kernel of something and an essence of something, but the way that it manifests itself shifts and is in a constant state of transformation. It’s moving through different scenes, and emerging at different points, different moments in dance culture, electronic music, rave scenes… GV: But it’s that resourcefulness that comes out from what you do. It’s the resourcefulness of human beings. It’s very hard to hold a human being down. That’s what’s so glorious about… Glorious in the sense that I was chatting with some people that were sleeping outside Paddington Station… Chatting with them, I saw their resourcefulness. Ok, they’re sleeping rough, but there are three of them, they sleep together, they share the food, they’re warm, they’ve found a really good place. Yes, so I wouldn’t advocate it but the resourcefulness of their life was pretty inspiring, against the backdrop of what they’re dealing with personally, which I don’t know and I didn’t ask. I didn’t find out why they were there, or on what circumstances — it can go from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it was resourceful. They were safe. That is inspiring, in that sense. LOF: I suppose something that I find slightly problematic that came out of such scenes that I was involved with, and the punk scene, was the kind of extension of the DIY ethos. It became almost like this entrepreneurial thing where only the people that are able to participate in that, were able to survive in that kind of situation. I

would actually elevate the idea of revelling in the idea of refusing work, and deliberately avoiding those kinds of structures. GV: No, I don’t support going to work, no… [Laughter]. Not unless it’s your choice [laughs]! But obviously that’s not the reality… People don’t have the resourcefulness very often to know how to survive in a contented way. In that sense they didn’t feel unsafe and were familiar with their choice of where they’re going to doss every night. There’s something there that gives some relief from what they’re having to go through. It’s a difficult subject, because I do find the resourcefulness of humans very inspiring, I think they are inspiring. And it’s not a situation anyone should be put into, at all, on any level. But, somehow they’re surviving it, and without screwing themselves even further into the ground by drinking themselves to oblivion, or whatever it takes to kill the pain. MF: Hasn’t people’s resourcefulness been used against them? Isn’t that what Thatcherism and Reaganism were, in a way? The actual social-security conditions, which would allow people not to be forced out onto the street, were attacked. There was an appeal, very different to yours, for “resourcefulness”, which was in their hands “responsibilization”. People are out and homeless because they aren’t “showing enough initiative” — they should get on their bike, and so on. That then leads into this culture of mandatory entrepreneurialism that Laura has spoken about. There’s John Bird, the Big Issue guy, who says something like, “don’t give anything to beggars because it encourages them, and only give money to people selling The Big Issue, because they are budding entrepreneurs”… GV: I’ve got several friends that don’t have a home, and they don’t want a home. They just go up and down the country; they pick up bits of work here and there. They are homeless, if you like, as a statistic, but they’re not homeless in their own heads, because that’s where they want to be. It’s difficult in a sense, but you can understand that freedom. *

Audience member 1: Laura — I found some of your line drawings extremely moving, and very beautiful, but the way that you’ve described them to me feels a little bit like almost a celebration of alienation, and an elevation of people’s responses to that alienation within an urban setting. I was putting that against Gee’s description of finding soil and space and fresh air in Essex and Epping, and I was interested in those two things because anarchism has come up a lot in the discussion, I guess mostly because of Crass and things like that. It seems to me that anarchism has become almost a celebration of fighting against the system, rather than doing something different. If you go back to lots of the thinkers, Kropotkin or Tolstoy, it was very much around about getting something different outside of the confines that are put around you by the existing power structures, and things like that. I just wondered if you felt that was a fair comment, or felt whether actually your two visions are closer than I’m experiencing…? GV: Take the word “anarchism” first, because I don’t consider myself an anarchist. It was something foisted on us as a band really, so we thought we’d play around with it and give it a try, but I can’t say I’ve ever read any of the major anarchist books. But, having been foisted on us, from my own translation of anarchism, it was about inner turmoil, and the inner chaos of reconsidering, re-questioning who I was or what I was doing. It didn’t go any further than that — it’s not political in that sense, it’s totally internal. So, I don’t know. LOF: I do understand what you mean, how you might have interpreted those drawings in that way — in some way elevating an idea of alienation. But I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to articulate really. I would see it more as an idea of the potential for some sort of collective moment, of cataclysm or rupture, like I said. The way that architecture can be reconfigured, through different forms of occupation, lends itself to that as a possibility, I suppose. I talk about those places in relation to the certain moments of epiphany. Those are the moments that I sometimes try and isolate and articulate in the work — when everything seems to gel and coalesce and there’s that moment of insight, of different possibilities opening.

Audience member 2: I was thinking of an essay called ‘The Politics of Ambiguity’, and the idea that you can make political artwork — sometimes it’s very obvious, and that’s where the politics lies, it lies in the ambiguity of the politics that it represents. There was the other argument of making very ambiguous artworks, which kind of go all over the place. I was interested in your thoughts about the idea of lots of political images becoming clichéd? GV: I mean, there are certain pieces which I’ve done that are ambiguous. You can translate ambiguity any way you like, but it’s going to be political because it’s a piece of artwork. There are some pieces I have done which I defy anyone to translate differently from each other. Like, ‘Your Country Needs You’, you can ONLY translate it one way… Audience member 2: Being on the MFA we’re being taught that we need to be more ambiguous with our work. Maybe that’s not the intention… GV: Well, I don’t know if you can teach that — you must do what you feel is right… Audience member 2: …There are a lot of images out there where you think “yeah I’ve seen that before, I know what they’re talking about”, and you move on to the next one. Are those images losing their political charge and potency? LOF: I think it’s all about context, and where the work is seen, how it emerges, and the specific circumstances. I’m interested in shifts of register in the work, and how it can go from being a document of a finely detailed, almost architectural document of a disappearing landscape, to being a fly-poster. Once it’s out there in the street, how that starts to become transformed and reconfigured by the experience of the people, actually, that are engaging with it. For example, a lot of my fly-posters get attacked, defaced, and ripped down. To me that’s a way of gauging what’s going on. You put something out there and see how people respond, you see which things get targeted first, and so on. That’s why I started making the

zines and fly-posters. You’ll have zine launches or moments that become “events” that draw people in. You start to be part of a critical milieu. I met Mark and a lot of other people through doing my zine. It made it open, having this public face to the work. So, I think I would give that just as much consideration, almost, as the content of the work. MF: Weren’t you subject to similar pressures in respect to your work being described as too polemical — as not ambiguous enough? LOF: That’s always there, yes, this accusation of being didactic, or too obvious in the work. I think that’s actually starting to change a little bit, in my experience now. Some of the discussions that came out of the occupation movement, and stuff from here actually, running 2010–2011 — saying maybe we do need to shift away from that idea that the work has always got to be ambiguous, and the idea and the content has to unfold gradually, and maybe there is space for a much more obvious and immediate discussion around the work. That’s something that I picked up from some of those meetings that were going on. Audience member 3: When you were talking about underground currents, I was thinking of ley lines. I have experimented a bit myself with psycho-geography… You kind of go out there, you explore terrain, you turn around corners and find yourself in places — because you’re not kind of going anywhere, but you actually discover things. You do pick up these kinds of energies if you’re receptive to them — what I wanted to find out was about that thing you were saying about divine potential. That sounds exciting. Quite often when things rupture, they don’t always simmer over into that creative pot, it can be quite destructive. The pictures that you had of the people that ended up inside — I remember when it all kicked off with the Poll Tax things — I had friends that ended up getting three-, five-year sentences and things. But if the potential was there to do the things that Gee was talking about to do with relationships, and coming together…

My experience of punk back in the day, people were often gluesniffing and off their heads. You couldn’t really engage in anything that felt like “belonging”, other than wearing the same fashions. Even then, people were checking you out to see if you’ve got better fucking bondage trousers than them. [Laughter]. It didn’t feel like anything about “coming together”. But, they didn’t find the communalism that Gee describes, and that’s where the fulfilment is for me, really — how you could realise that potential through creativity. I went to see that Morris exhibition and I was quite impressed by that. He had visions that moved people to explore more about the “we” than the “me”. With punk, some of these things get too narcissistic. You can’t really meet the people, because it’s about being cool rather than being together. LOF: Yeah, I mean, that idea of “the collective” and the commons is, I think, absolutely central to the research and the ideas that I have. I guess that’s what I meant that in a way I was interested in a shift away from psycho-geography as being just about my own subjective personal engagement with the landscape, and move away from that to talking about collective memories. When Mark mentioned the dates that appear in my work, they’re about those cataclysmic moments where you get people converging in one particular place. It becomes that moment where “the collective” reasserts itself. Audience member 3: So there’s a potential for change? LOF: Yes… Of course, the immediate consequences are hideous, of people getting locked up, the draconian sentences that were being passed down to people. The reason that I made those paintings of those blokes that have been convicted was to, in a way, undo some of that malicious damage that was inflicted through the idea that the Met could pillory people or humiliate them further by publishing their photographs on Flickr, with their names and addresses. It was about restoring something. They became almost like religious icons in the end, those paintings, inadvertently. The treatment of it was quite intuitive, that’s how I felt, so I acknowledged that point, but at the

same time, I do think that in those moments, that’s where that sublime potential exists. Audience member 4: I get the sense, especially from what Gee was saying about the 1960s and getting out of the cities… A lot what you were saying Laura seemed to be focused on London, specifically. You spoke about the suburbs as a kind of potential, but I also worry that this will spread, and the suburbs are going to be just as screwed as Zones One and Two in ten years’ time… I guess I wonder if you see there’s more potential in cities other than London? My feeling is that in smaller places there’s a greater feeling of collectivity, especially in music or art scenes that exist in those smaller cities? LOF: The reasons that I’ve discussed London a lot are just because it’s a place where I’ve spent the most time in the last 20 years. I’ve also travelled around and done projects in other places. I’m somebody that wants to live in a massive city, so I don’t really feel like I want to move out of London into a smaller British city. I really do feel like cities are worth fighting for, and big cities, and everything that that gives us — in terms of the splintering, those collisions of ideas that I was talking about before. I still feel that sense of awe and absolute sense of being invigorated and inspired by London, because I grew up in Yorkshire and came here because I wanted to be immersed in a really big city. A lot of people now can’t afford to live in London and are considering moving to other parts of the UK, but I don’t really want to do that. I still want to stay here and stand my ground for as long as possible. In relation to the question of the suburbs, from the research that I’ve been doing, the conclusion that I’ve arrived at from walking a lot over the last year, is that it emerges as two distinct categories: zones of sacrifice and zones of refuge. Those zones of sacrifice are places like Croydon and Hounslow, Lewisham; places that have almost been laid to waste, but are encircled by zones of gentrification. Then there are zones of refuge where people working in the city can then base the wife and kids and have this constructed rural idyll, in somewhere like Teddington or Thames Ditton — you know the kind of place I mean? [Laughter]. These places that I call zones of

sacrifice, massive cities like Bradford for example, I do think there are possibilities emerging from those places as well. But I’m really reluctant to give up on London — I just think that it’s got to be fought for. GV: I was born in the last year of the war. Obviously I’ve seen London changed from a bombed-out hole, where I used to play, to what it’s become now — this onward onslaught of just going towards money, money, money. It’s not as if it was an ideal city before the bombing, you had these whole areas where “the workers” lived — smelly, stinking holes. Some now have been done up and made nice for the middle class, of course, but there’s no romance in what it was. They were just hovels for “the workers”. It’s a city, that’s what cities are, you have the core, which is the rich, the famous, the godknows-what-else, the palaces, whatever it takes. As you go out you get the peripheral, the suburbs. Suburbs used to be the other side of Liverpool Street. That was the suburb when I was a kid. Now it’s gone further out, further out, now Walthamstow is getting eaten up by this clamour for property and wealth, and God knows what else goes with it that people buy. It’s like, what are you trying to save here? Just because I live in the country doesn’t mean that I’ve given London away. That’s like giving one’s history, one’s generation away… You do what you can to stop the thinking that “the city is for the rich”, full stop. New York’s the same, everybody’s out of Manhattan. They’re going to put gates up on Manhattan soon — only the rich will be able to live on the island. [Laughter]. Because gradually everybody’s getting out of there, because it’s so expensive. You’ve got that in central London — as you say, the lockdown area — and Manhattan will become a lockdown area. It is so different now, because it’s international money. You don’t stand a chance. But they will eat themselves up — it won’t be like this forever. Rome fell and this will fall too, this whole system will fall. It will crumble, definitely. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime, but I’m doing my best to undermine it, and that’s all I can do. I can’t deal with it in my face anymore. I don’t go on demos; I don’t do any of it. I can’t, because if I do I’m just going to do something that will get me

locked up. I don’t really feel I want to do that, not because I’m a coward, but I feel I’m more use out of there, and I keep chipping away, chipping away, we can all do a lot of chipping. We have a good relationship with hundreds of people that come through Dial House, who then go out and chip away and I’m very happy with that. Undermining, because that’s all we can do. This whole city is built on sand at the moment and it will crumble. I do believe that. I’ll certainly do my penny’s worth to make it happen. I’m not fighting for London. If I’m going to fight I’m going to fight for the people. In the end it’s only a structure. As you say, you inhabit something, you can change it, make the whole thing change over. If people want to squat, and I can do anything to help, I will. I’m not going to squat with them, because my days are gone… Not that I’ve ever squatted, I only helped others… But if we can help in any way with people in cities, then we do. It’s very small sometimes but what can grow, given that little kernel, is something enormous. People know their cities — I mean, I know London as well, I was born here, but people in Manchester, Leeds, you name them, major cities… It’s like, you give them a kernel, they run away with it, and build it into this enormous underground thing, or something that’s just shaking every five minutes underneath, until, as you say, there’s an epiphany and it sort of suddenly “gives”. It suddenly “gives”. But what did the last riot do? What came out of that? What was it? A lot of people lost a lot of money, the Metropolitan police became very rich that week, that’s for sure — lots of people did. The street people just got the same old shit. What came out of it that was constructive? LOF: I guess people’s sense of power in being in a massive collective like that? GV: It wasn’t a collective. It was just a group of people, who had had absolutely enough, but it was not a collective. Audience member 5: In these discussions about cities, and resistance, one common observation is that areas of London that have been taken up as creative areas have become the sites where

gentrification happens. I was thinking about, as a complete resistance towards that subsuming of creative energy as something that then allows areas to become areas of investment for people… GV: Yes, but who does this? What makes it a viable investment? Artists moving in and a coffee shop: that is it, you’ve gentrified it. You know within the year there’s going to be two or three coffee shops down the road. The artists start doing the graffiti… I’m not putting that down, I’m just saying it not only becomes gentrified and bought out, but it also makes it safe for people. There’s a funny conundrum there, because they are “go” areas, not “no go” areas. There’s people being creative, and that creativity attracts money. They’re very clever, they can see that now, they see it immediately, you get a group of artists or creative people moving in, they get the coffee shops in, they get this that and the other and once Costa has moved in you know it’s a safe area. That’s the way it works. It’s very clever, it’s very conniving. It’s like: we do it! We’re the creators. What do we do about that? Audience member 6: Maybe artists should start making a negative ambience, as a programme? Make it unsafe. Refuse the yuppies… [Laughter]. Audience member 7: I get the feeling that this is all going to collapse, but more under its own weight, rather than any kind of left intent. But, what do we do in the meantime? GV: Make sure it shifts in the right way, I mean, I don’t believe in revolutions anyway, but you could have this shift, or revolt on the street. There’s always going to be those that lead, and there will be the lemmings. Unless there’s a depth of real passion, of love for one’s fellow human beings and this earth that we live on, it goes nowhere, because it gets corrupted so easily. We try and teach young people so that they’re incorruptible, cannot be bought out, cannot go from that path that you feel is like… you’re trying to make the world a better place for everybody and everything in it. If you’re not committed to that 100% — it has to do with love again — then it’s never going to work is it? You’re going be sold down the line by the

very person running alongside you, throwing bricks… That’s the truth of it. That’s very sad, but you know, you keep chipping away. I don’t see there’s ever going to be any depth of change until we change ourselves in the deepest way. MF: What do we do in the meantime, Laura? LOF: I would say cognitive behavioural therapy! [Laughter]. GV: You can do better than that [laughs]! LOF: I mean, what can I say? I think I’ve already been through what I think about that. We’ve got to get down to Rochester and Strood and see what’s going on down there.

7 “The Weakest Link in Every Chain, I Always Want To Find It”: Green Gartside in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun (20|11|14) This conversation with singer, songwriter, and producer Green Gartside focuses upon the ways in which Scritti Politti — the group founded byGartside in 1978, which he still leads today — functioned in its earliest years as an experiment in which a range of theoretical inputs from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to Derrida’s Of Grammatology to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse entered into an intensive feedback cycle with the mobilising dynamics of beat musics, that ranged from the disassembled R&B ofCaptain Beefheart to the lovers rock of earlyGregory Isaacs and the early hip-hop of Run DMC. Scritti Politti’s ongoing project to reconfigure the institution of rock music by deconstructing the form of the pop song proved to be deeply influential in the post-punk community gathered around London’s Rough Trade Records store and record label. Scritti Politti were never more controversial than in 1981, when their fourth single, ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, first heard on NME’s compilation cassette C81, announced a revolution within the revolution that was post-punk. What is audible is that the impact of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ on the direction and the vocabulary of post-punk permitted a series of mutations throughout popular modernism whose effects are experienced and argued over to this day. Kodwo Eshun: When we conceived the programme for this season of public lectures, one of the figures we all wanted to have a conversation with was the man sitting next to me: Green Gartside, a figure whose work we had followed for many years now. Green Gartside is a singer and a songwriter, whose albums include Songs to Remember (1982, Rough Trade), Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985, Virgin), Provision (1988, Virgin), Anomie & Bonhomie (1999, Virgin), and then back to Rough Trade with White Bread Black Beer (2006).

He has worked with collaborators such as producer Adam Kidron, keyboardist David Gamson, and drummer Fred Maher. Scritti Politti is the umbrella name for this series of productions. The one constant figure throughout these shifting line-ups is Green Gartside. I asked Green to play some of his favourite music as everybody arrived. I’m going to tell you the names of the songs that you might have missed. We started off with Captain Beefheart’s ‘Lick My Decals Off, Baby’, followed by Matching Mole’s ‘Starting in the Middle of the Day We Can Drink Our Politics Away’, J Dilla’s ‘Workinonit’, Incredible String Band’s ‘Koeeoaddi There’, Parlet’s ‘Huff ‘N’ Puff’, Johnny P’s ‘Hold it Down’ then we had Captain Beefheart again with ‘Japan in a Dishpan’, the Supremes’ ‘Reflections’, and Willi Williams’ ‘Armagideon Time’. Those compositions give you a DNA for Green’s thinking, sonically, compositionally, artistically, politically, and aesthetically. We are going to play some compositions by Scritti Politti and talk about them. In doing so, we will map the shifting coordinates of different kinds of theories in relation to different musics and how those were lived in Leeds and London during the late 1970s and New York in the 1980s. We will not be able to touch on all of Green Gartside’s songs so we will focus on the years of 1978 to 1985. Green Gartside: This is terrifying for me, I have to say. Much more frightening than playing. I didn’t play live for over 20 years due to panic attacks. Actually there’s a gentleman in the room who helped persuade me to play live again, James Endeacott, who worked at Rough Trade. I was just thinking I’m particularly terrified because the other day I was asked to do a thing for Newsnight about Nick Drake. They were going to pre-record this thing, they asked “where do you want to film it?” I said a recording studio near me, and I had this whole thing down about melancholia — really — about the romantic, poetic tradition of melancholia. It was about melancholia and the language of the blues, of longing, loss, and escape, and how that became part of the lingua franca of pop music in the 1960s. Also, the experience in adolescence, of melancholia; I had my little bit of Lacan there, I had this whole fucking thing down. [Laughter]. The camera started rolling and I froze. I couldn’t put two words together,

it was an absolutely horrifying experience. I ended up bailing and I don’t know why that happened — but that was a few days ago so… [Laughter]. Hence, the Guinness… Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. It also helps to start these things on an anecdotal level, which is much more easy for me to cope with, when feeling like this… KE: We are in a department of Visual Cultures but one reason we wanted to host this programme of conversations on post-punk is because we think of post-punk as an alternative curriculum in which music functions as a portal that leads you into different kinds of culture. One thing that informs this moment is a discontent — with the state of Britain as it was in the late 1970s, with the state of music, of youth, and of education. One way to start is to sketch a portrait of you as a young art student at Leeds Polytechnic at the School of Creative Arts, in 1977, the same year that you saw the Sex Pistols. I have a text that you co-wrote in the summer of 1977 that I am going to read from. You have no memory of this text. GG: No, you said you brought this today and I don’t have any recollection of writing it. That’s not unusual for me — that’s the other thing to warn you about. My memory is pretty fucking atrocious. KE: The periodical is called The Politics of Art Education. It is edited by Dave Rushton and Paul Wood. Section Three is called Show Us Your Uniqueness. It’s co-written by Alan Robinson, Green Strohmeyer-Gartside, and Tom Soviet. It is an analysis of the dismal creative culture experienced by students at the School of Creative Arts at what was then Leeds Polytechnic: The repressive character of art colleges is responsible for the remarkable ignorance, indolence, and pathetic helplessness of art students, a condition of repressive omission, which may be one stage further in bourgeois degeneration than repressive tolerance. The work that goes on at Leeds is not even an institutionalised ritual of rebellion. In this form of repression hegemony is heavily exercised through lacunae in definitions of course policy, as well as the false consciousness attendant with fixed stereotypes in student and staff conversation. When

everything is excluded from notionally useful conversation, this is power canalisation, legitimating principles approved by a larger framework outside the course, which is not critically examined in the course itself. The status of any statement is controlled by structural principles interior to this legitimation. If there is no criticism, how is the legitimacy of this hegemony to be evaluated through the student work? There is no student framework to sort out the significance of staff commentary, such as it is in this respect. Repressive omission reduces the prospect of students appraising social institutions, the utterances issuing from those institutions, and the parameters by which student practice is ordered. The idle and flatulent exchange of words that does go on creates the appearance of a sympathetic circularity of discourse. The staff are fond of such remarks as, “If the students want it, they’ve only got to ask it.” In practice this sort of remark leads students to ask commonsensical, technical questions. This order of liaison only addresses means to ends, and must therefore at best only supplement any selection of possible ends or objectives. Without a critique of culture and society operating in the course, the means of going on are reified with an attachment of truth value, legitimated through the stagnant, liberal malaise in which the institution flounders and the staff mouth off. [Applause]. GG: Yes, fuck me. I did write that, it’s all so horribly familiar now. God almighty. You know, we have to forgive. I was talking to Robert Wyatt about this, and listening to what we had to say when we were younger. He was as much troubled by what he got up to as a young man, as I am about things like that, and much worse. He said that he’d learned to forgive; were he to bump into his younger self, would he forgive him, give him a pass? He reckoned just about, on balance, he would forgive his younger self most things. So, as awful as that is, since Robert Wyatt told me to forgive myself, that’s licence for me. I was young, that’s all I’m trying to say, I was young.

KE: You brought high expectations to Leeds Polytechnic of what an art education could offer you. GG: …Fuck yes… KE: …And the disappointment is what comes across vividly — a sense of being let down. GG: Yes, I was very angry, I really was. I grew up in South Wales in a new town. Everyone was working-class like my dad, he sold packet soup to hospitals and army barracks. My mum was sometimes a hairdresser, sometimes a secretary. The only thing that made my life bearable — and I always come back to the Beatles — was pop music. It was through initially listening to the Beatles that I was introduced to world of ideas and questioning. There’s a high point of democracy, there’s the postwar consensus, settlement, counterculture. A lad came to my school when I was 14 or 15, he was a Marxist, he was in the Communist Party — that was another key thing. He was the first bass player in Scritti Politti. I went to art school and I was already predisposed to asking questions about everything. I wanted to know “how” and “why” about everything. I suppose it was some sort of will to mastery or power, or understanding. I went to art school in Newport. There was a guy there called Keith Arnatt, he was a conceptual artist, you may have heard of him. He stood there with a placard saying “I am an artist” on it, I think, then photographed himself being buried. This is all fascinating to a young teenager, and through him the first thing I read I think was — oh I’ll get through this as fast as I can — Joseph Kosuth, who some of you may remember. KE: We know him all too well. GG: I don’t know anything about Kosuth. After reading Art After Philosophy, which I read as a teenager, it led me to Wittgenstein, to Art & Language — and so I get to Leeds. I chose Leeds as the place to study art; I went to lots of different places and when I got to Leeds on the day you could look around there was some sort of show going on. I went up a flight of stairs and in one room there was a man

shooting budgerigars, and in the next room was someone making themselves vomit, and so it went. I don’t think there was anybody painting, which was great, I liked that. I thought this would be a place of ideas and critical thinking, and it wasn’t. It was really disappointing. It was the same old, same old art school; lecturers staggering in late, having nothing interesting to say or ask, the arthistory part of it was just unbelievably… — I’m sorry if anybody here is related to whoever taught art history there at the time — but it was just excruciatingly bad. So I was thrown back onto my own resources to think about these things, and to try and theorise, to do all that stuff, wondering about the significance of art at the time, the politics of it, everything from questions of meaning… You could kind of decimate these people — the tools at the time were analytical philosophy. I struggled through Wittgenstein, I did as best I could with Quine, anybody else I could lay my hands on, I.A. Richards, all that slew of people. I’d steal the books frequently because I couldn’t afford them, they were very expensive. I would sit alone in my room and really struggle to get through this stuff. I’d go in and challenge people with it. You could knock them apart with that dead easy, in terms of the meaning of what they were doing. The politics was Gramsci and Althusser. That all came back from an interesting politics that started at school, where we, or I, started a debating society and a branch of the Young Communist League — I mean forgive me, it was a long time ago. But, I mean, we had hope then. I can remember starting this debating society at school and the very first meeting was had after school, we thought it was very important that we discussed things. I remember my girlfriend coming in and she decided that she believed in a “conscientious oligarchy”, which was pretty rich stuff for 15 year-olds, or whatever. So, I get to Leeds and it was just art lecturers staggering in hungover, and suggesting various female art students go for a Chinese meal with them. The whole place was dreadful. So, something had to be done. That’s the background to that horrible, turgid bit of whatever it is. KE: It’s not turgid at all…

GG: …Ok then, it’s animated. It totally reveals whatever I’d been reading at the time, in an attempt to sort of “get it all in there”. KE: When you say Art & Language, which Art & Language texts were you reading? GG: I started right at the very beginning. I started with Kosuth, the American… I lost interest in Kosuth — if he’s a wonderful man, fantastic, and if he isn’t, who knows… I think he was the American editor of the journal called The Fox, which I used to read. Then there was the Art Language journal, which I read — that got pretty dense. I don’t know if you’ve all had a crack at it, or seen it. It would be easy to rip the piss out of it because it was awfully cloggy stuff. You were in it to wade through it. But wade through it I did, and it led me to other thinkers and other arguments. So, it was Art Language from the get-go. KE: What comes across here is that the writing has a target. There is a polemic, there is a project, a mission; it is not just a complaint, or a lament. There is a fury that school cannot live up to the rhetorics of liberation, spontaneity, expression, and utopianism that it promotes. In an old interview, you said that you had to invite T.J. Clark from Leeds University to examine your degree exhibition, because Leeds Polytechnic wanted to expel you. At the same time as that was happening, the Sex Pistols came to Leeds on their Anarchy in the UK tour where you saw them. So you have these two moments that are formative for what will become Scritti Politti. GG: Yes, Leeds Polytechnic were always trying to throw me out because they would claim, “you don’t need your space because you’re not painting”. I was writing a lot — I used to do the whole thing just to get them off my back — I would write and stick the writings on the wall, which had precedence in artworks. They always looked quite nice, I thought. I invited people from Art & Language to come and talk, because the level of education and discussion at Leeds Polytechnic was so bad, I thought. I would set up in various pubs in Leeds, in the evenings, different people to come and talk. By that point it was really a bit of a political battle going on, as well. They

wanted to collapse the Fine Art and the Graphic departments in together. They were firing technical assistants. There was a whole political thing, which ran hand in hand with trying to get people to talk sensibly about painting. So, I wasn’t popular, and to their credit they said when I had finished this huge kind of… I don’t know what it was… Some kind of Wittgensteinian assault on whatever was going on — I don’t have a copy of it anymore — they said T.J. Clark should come and see if it made sense, or if it was just gibberish, since none of them could understand it. Apparently he did come and read it, and said “Yes, the boy is talking sense”. So I was reprieved. The same week that happened, I think, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, and the Heartbreakers came to Leeds, and the whole plan… I’d been to the Communist University at UCL that summer and met someone there from Birmingham. I think I was thinking I was going to go to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and do something there. But then, the Anarchy tour came, and everything changed — everything I wanted, thought, everything. It sounds so unlikely and so hard to understand that an evening in a room with a bunch of bands could have that cataclysmic an effect, but it genuinely did. It’s hard to account for, but that was it. That’s all I wanted to do, then, to make music. I had always wanted to make music but it wasn’t my place growing up in Wales, there were no bands. One of the things that got me, made me political in the first place, that started me thinking, was just the general impoverishment — culturally and materially — in South Wales at the time. It was a desperately oppressive thing. That’s why music and politics seemed to be that important to me. Of course there was no precedent in Wales at the time — I don’t know, Shakin’ Stevens was somewhere I expect, singing in a club… [Laughter]. Tom Jones — I don’t know, there was nothing, absolutely nothing. One didn’t feel one was able or allowed to make music, and you would never be good enough. Then, that night, everything changed. KE: Let’s pause where we are at the end of 1977 and then move forward to the first Scritti Politti single in November 1978.

GG: …I never ever listen to my own music. I’ve always found it agony. You may as well! [Laughter] We couldn’t play, we blew the last of whatever student grant was left on buying — there were three of us — a drum kit, a bass guitar. The drummer and the bassist learned to play in a matter of weeks. I knew some rudimentary guitar stuff. KE: This is your friend Niall Jinks… GG: Yes, Niall Jinks, the Marxist from Gravesend, who came to the Welsh new town, and Tom Soviet who was an art student that I met at Leeds. Tom Morley was — Keith Morley was his real name, he went through various changes of names… KE: Those blond dreadlocks that nobody had seen before… GG: …Yes, collectively — all things were done collectively — we grew his dreadlocks. [Laughter]. KE: An extreme style statement for the time. GG: I know it’s such a commonplace thing now, but as far as I know he was the first white guy I ever saw with dreadlocks. KE: ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ is the A-side of the first Scritti Politti single from November 1978. [‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ plays]. GG: Christ, that’s agony! KE: Well, agony is close to ecstasy. [Laughter]. The name itself: Scritti Politti is a long way from calling yourself the Damned or the Clash. Taking a name that abbreviates the Italian term for political writing tells you a lot. Condensed in the title of Skank Bloc Bologna is an encrypted statement that invites the listener to decode an aesthetic attitude which is also a political position.

GG: Well, punk was played by then, it was a whole year after. For those of us that were hugely immersed in it and massively affected by its psychoactive power, it was done. The whole thing was to make your own noise anyway. There was license there. Briefly, in Leeds, we were called the Against, for about three weeks — which really is an appalling punk name. We thought, “fuck that”. Obviously Scritti Politti comes from Gramsci, I was reading a lot of Gramsci at the time; that was terribly important to me. That seemed as good a name as anything. It had echoes of ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard, it had this kind of glossolalia of pop, which is very important. There were hints of Robert Wyatt on his Rock Bottom record, when he’s kind of talking-singing gibberish which of course is massively powerful. At that early point, what I was reading, which would have included principally struggles with this man — somebody gave me this the other day, Derrida… KE: It’s a Derrida fridge magnet. [Laughter]. GG: Since he was so important, I thought I would bring him here. KE: I’ve got a Nietzsche fridge magnet. GG: It doesn’t look a lot like him. KE: No, the Nietzsche fridge magnet is really good. That’s not such a good Derrida fridge magnet. GG: …So Derrida, and whatever I could understand of him. It was the early times of trying to get to grip with Lacan, Foucault…But it was hugely important, what I was reading, certainly insofar as the music has a guitar de-tuned, so that when you play chords in it they’re not proper chords, there’s a dissonant effect from that. There was the influence of reggae which was already huge — that’s all punks listened to anyway, reggae, from the early days, in the punk clubs. There was the doctored drum kit so it didn’t sound too macho. Instead of cymbals, we found on the streets of Soho some old film canisters that they used to put celluloid film in. Those sounded suitably awful. So, they replaced cymbals. There were two types of

punks; there were those who listened to the Ramones and stuff — they were loud, confident, their guitars were distorted properly, they were fairly self-assured, they had fairly tight rhythm sections — then there were people like us. By design or default we made a much less “secure” music. In my case it was very much by design. It was influenced by theory. In the title ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ the ‘Skank’ comes from the dancing we were doing in the clubs, ‘Bloc’ is the historic blocs in Gramsci, ‘Bologna’ — this is an interesting thing — there had been a book called Red Bologna which maybe some of you have read. I can’t really remember what it was like. As far as I know it was an account of what was happening in Bologna in 1977. It was very much a Euro-Communist angled thing about the Italian Communist Party. Coming from an involvement with the Young Communist League — and that’s a whole complicated thing to talk about — we still had, in the mid-to-late 1970s, some hope for what was happening in the Communist parties in Spain, in Italy, Finland, Venezuela. These were Communist parties that ostensibly had moved to Gramsci terrain. I think it would be fascinating to read Red Bologna again. It was very inspiring, and to do with the workers’ cooperatives there; the collectives, the neighbourhood involvement in political decision-making. It was a fantastic thing to read about in Britain in 1977, when it was so fucking awful here, and frightening. That’s where the “Bologna” came from, it didn’t have anything to do with the troubles that happened in Bologna in March of that year, I think it was, when there was the whole Autonomia thing. Lotta Continua got murdered, and everything happened there. That became of interest later … KE: Perhaps the impact of ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ was that it came with a photocopied sleeve that effectively demystified the means of production by outlining the steps towards making a record. It itemised the cost of recording, the cost of mastering, the cost of pressing, the cost of printing labels, and the distribution of vinyl. And yet the music is not a transparent illustration of those practices of demystification. It is much more mysterious than the invitation made

by the sleeve. There is a clash between the two, a way in which the one leads to the other, that is compelling. GG: Yes, the DIY thing was very important. There was a great emphasis on a socialisation of production, on collaboration, on sharing information, on helping other people to make records. Going back to Leeds for a minute — we talk about punk, and obviously punk both inherited a great deal from the 1960s, and also rejected a great deal… there were a lot of hippies in Leeds at the time when we were there. They were interesting and annoying in equal measure. There were lots of squats, food co-ops, women’s groups, local activism, there were tons of mimeographed booklets, pamphlets, people doing their own poetry, lots of that stuff is really good, and we took from that. The whole mysticism, New Ageism, all that lot that turned into the Bhagwan Orange People was where all that had to go, obviously. That was important. Obviously, we were people of the left, so it was very important to us to try and involve as many people — it sounds too trite to talk about hegemony and the battle for cultural space and the discussion — but it really was that. I was very concerned about the kind of conversation that was going on critically about music, and the music press. So we would get involved with the journalists. The squat we lived in became a kind of open place. We put our address on the first record, so like the day after, the doors went, and we would have fucking all manner of people pitching up; school boys, public-school boys that had run away and wanted to make their own bands, anarchists from Italy — Christ, it was extraordinary. In terms of the music, arguably there’s no way to demystify the process of making music in music. There were a number of progenitors to punk. The celebration of anti-professionalism was very important, and those that had gone before us were decentred subjects who also celebrated a kind of anti-professionalism: the Syd Barretts, the Captain Beefhearts, the various other people. We weren’t afraid to draw on them as influences. It wasn’t that degree of a “year zero”.

KE: When you say it wasn’t that degree of a “year zero”, does that suggest there was a selective uptake of certain tendencies that had not been followed up or that had been prematurely blocked? In the possibility space opened up by punk, it was possible to access some ideas put forward by Beefheart but do them differently, do them otherwise… GG: It was time to hear them again, rethink them again, put them into service… KE: …At this point you were living in a squat in 1 Carol Street in Camden Town, in North London. Camden Town feels a long way from New Cross, where we are now, but it’s necessary to reconstruct how important Camden was at that moment, because of spaces like Compendium bookstore which functioned as a hub for London’s alternative culture. GG: The two most important places in London at the time were Rough Trade and Compendium Books, that was unquestioned; that was it. Camden had more venues than anywhere else, and more squats. It was lively squatting there. One thing with the politics of the time, it was very violent. There was a band called Skrewdriver who squatted I think five or six doors away from us, who were a violent Oi band, they were fascist thugs. There was fighting and violence — there had been in Leeds as well, every day. As a punk, I was armed with a knife the whole time. There would be violence at gigs, to and from gigs, every day. I still would go out and sell Challenge, the newspaper of the Young Communist League. I don’t know if you know about Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, the writers… KE: …The British Althusserians that edited the journal Theoretical Practice? GG: Yes, they had moved things along, but everybody around me in this larger collective group that Scritti operated — we considered the band to be everybody around us. We were photographed as a big group. The other people had all come from the St. Pancras branch of the Young Communist League to begin with. They were a very

clever, thoughtful bunch of people that I had met at the Communist University in London. We were all squatting around there together. If Scritti were known for anything at that point it was this collective existence: this communal living, this thinking everything through, and arguing and talking at great length and depth about politics, culture, popular culture, pop music, and how it all fitted together, using the language of what became the postmodern “big hitters”. It was an extraordinary time, but again very violent. Carol Street and that area of Camden was very creative and very frightening. KE: To characterise this moment, we could say that Scritti were engaged in an institutional critique of rock itself. Rock music, the pop charts, the song form, the lead vocalist, the masculinity of rock music, the record industry — all of those institutions were being argued over. It is in this context that a term like “rockism” emerges as the problematisation of the supposedly “spontaneous” nature of music… GG: That was massive. In a lot of that Derrida was incredibly useful. It’s very difficult to unpick how much I used this theory in order to further my own aesthetic ends, and to what extent the theory drove the aesthetics. It’s untangleable. But it was really useful — only a few years later — to use Derrida, and Chic and Michael Jackson to win an argument against post-punk, for instance, or the direction that we were moving in. At the time, the target was phallocentric rock music. We were also in a men’s group, which was kind of terrifying to us and an interesting story for another time. There were ideas about music that were 19th century. It was dreadful, the discussion that went on about music — in the press, and generally, ideas believed about music and creativity. All of them being concerned with questions of authenticity, expressivity, honesty, truth, the natural. There was a privileging — obviously jazz was the greatest thing, then you had the blues, then you had rock music, I don’t know where reggae fitted in, then at the bottom of the pile was pop music. That became a big argument, but in 1977 to 1978 there was big theoretical stuff about rock music, romanticism, and all that was repressive and conservative about that.

KE: To talk more about this moment, it is a good idea to go to another track. This is from September 1979, from the second release by Scritti Politti, which was called 4 A-Sides. This track is called ‘Doubt Beat’. [‘Doubt Beat’ plays]. KE: What I like about ‘Doubt Beat’ is that there are lyrics — such as “Sometimes I think that we do, and then I think we don’t / Sometimes I think it’s all the system that will never signify”, and “We have no big interest, we listen sideways / This much we always know is discipline and punish / We work for interest is how we discriminate” — that take a lot of listening to identify. You are not sloganising with theory. It’s not as if Discipline and Punish is being brandished. On the contrary, it is embedded within the song form. The idea of discipline and punishment has been metabolised by the musical process itself. What comes across is not so much the lyrics as the beat. At this moment in time, you didn’t talk about post-punk. You always talked about “beat music”. Beat music left open what form that music could take even as it emphasised the importance of the beat. What matters is not only the lyrics but the way in which the guitar starts a choked and broken sound; the way the drums pound and roll and then resolve into reggae as the bass comes in. It is the beat that is important and what the voice does as it orbits around the beat. Because it is reggae, the bass takes over from the lead guitar; the drums take on a role that is melodic and textural as much as it is rhythmic. Just as theory has been metabolised by the music, the music is theorising itself. As the song continues, there is a second voice that shadows the lead voice, both of which are you, and which repeat and question and undermine what the first voice sings. In the idea of ‘Doubt Beat’ is an ongoing questioning of what “beat music” is and what it means to work that out in the song itself. GG: Well then, for at least you, I succeeded [laughs]! KE: Not just me

GG: I’m not sure how many guys as smart or as attuned as you there were out there at the time. But that pretty precisely sums up what was going on. Like I said, it was not only a music that felt like it had to be expressive of, and symptomatic of… — I don’t know exactly how it stood in relation to theory — expressive of, symptomatic of… and the people deeply involved in theory, the theories’ involvement with politics and our daily lives. Also, what we perhaps foolishly expected of theory — what I’d grown up expecting theory to be able to do, or how big a part of my life it played. It was in me, that language was in me so deeply. But then, we were never very far away from a kind of — this is a difficult thing to talk about — a kind of collapse, in a way. This did drive you quite near an edge, partly in terms of what you were trying to avoid, and partly in terms of trying to live a life apart from the material privations that there were at the time, and the dangers that there were, and the violence that there was. And, the lack of assuredness, that was not affected. It was a really strung-out, difficult time. You spoke very eloquently about the song, and I would agree with pretty much everything you say — which makes my life much easier! If I disagreed with you, I would say so. KE: In November 1979, Scritti releases their third single, 2nd Peel Session EP. Around this time, you become very ill. Simon Reynolds wrote that you suffered an anxiety attack after a gig with Gang of Four in Brighton. You and your friends are drinking, talking, speeding, just living intensely and you experience this panic attack. You’re taken away in an ambulance to hospital, and then after that you leave London, your parents read about this… GG: Yes, I hadn’t spoken to my parents in years. KE: So you are estranged from them. They read about this in New Musical Express and they ask you to come home to South Wales. This is 1980. This is a moment in which the experience of living the intensity of a Marxist life collapses… GG: Well, the struggles with that. The interpersonal struggles as well with the people around me, the various relationships to Marxism and

Marx, to various histories, reactions to theory; there are lots of other things that were going on, yes. KE: It all leads to a… GG: A breakdown, yes. KE: You leave the Carol Street milieu in order to recuperate. GG: My friends bought me Lacan’s Écrits as a parting gift. Which was very thoughtful of them. I can remember them saying, “Take this, may it make you stronger”, or I don’t know, not exactly that — very strange. KE: In Wales you worked on what would become a stunning change in the direction of Scritti Politti. You began working on the songs that would become ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, and ‘Lions After Slumber’. We’ll play ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ to give people a sense of the change. [‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ plays]. GG: I don’t actually know that version of it — I’m not familiar, I don’t have it. It doesn’t sound like the version or versions I knew. I don’t know where that’s from. Audience member: That version came out of Germany — Rough Trade Germany put out that. KE: But that’s the one on the Early compilation. GG: Is it? Oh, wow. I hadn’t heard that before. I go on to sing about politics being prior to the vagaries of science, don’t I? KE: You sing that “Politics is prior to the vagaries of science / She left because she understood the value of defiance”… GG: Clever [laughs], I don’t know. I don’t know what to say about that, really. I wrote the song and can remember going to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and saying, “I’ve written a song, I don’t think I can

sing it, it would be great if Kraftwerk could do it, and Gregory Isaacs”. [Laughter]. That was my plan. Geoff Travis being Geoff Travis said, “Yeah, that sounds eminently reasonable”. So, we sent a version of it off. We got a positive response from Gregory Isaacs’ management — but we never heard anything from Kraftwerk. I met Kraftwerk a couple of years later in New York. We went to see Tito Puente together, me and Ralf and Florian. So, I’m with Ralf and Florian and I asked, “Did you remember ever getting that?” They said, “Yes, but we hate reggae”. [Laughter]. So, I did it with Robert Wyatt instead, which is probably for me a happier outcome. The thing about going to Wales, my voice had changed then. I’d stopped doing the English accent. I was drifting away from the English accent. It’s no coincidence that Derrida’s stuff about the voice — not only Derrida, also others — was something that affected me deeply. Prior to that Scritti had started playing a largely improvised live set. We would go out there and make songs up on the spot — which was good fun for a while, and the audience would shout, “make one up” — possibly in preference to the ones that we’d pre-recorded [laughs]. That’s what we did, but that seemed to me like a dead-end. Indie was becoming “Indie” with a big “I”. Rough Trade had gotten huge, the Cartel were set up, there was a whole way that indie music now sounded, the way that people who were into indie dressed; it shrank. It became rock music again. There was no way I wanted anything to do with that, it was horrible. The other option was to make this increasingly a-tonal improvised music. I didn’t think that there was anything more honest, truthful, or revealing. I mean, you might talk about it now in terms of affect or de-territorialisation — there was nothing there that was any more powerful, with regard to those things, than there was in “Pop” music with a big “P”. That’s to put it simply. There’s a lot of stuff that I drew on theoretically. The thing at the time was that I’d gone to Wales and was listening to a lot of black R&B pop. I didn’t like black pop music when I was little, I’ll confess. We used to listen to Radio 1. Occasionally, a Motown song would come on, and I just didn’t get it. There wasn’t that much black music. John Peel didn’t really play black music at all in those days; that might be a bit contentious, but he didn’t, and I grew up listening to Peel. So when I took time out,

the things I played were partly as a result of music that Geoff Travis gave me to listen to, partly when I went home my sister was into Northern Soul and stuff. She’d left home and her record collection was still there. So, there was that to listen to, and a bunch of old pop records, and records that mates had, which would have been the Kinks and so on. So, suddenly there was this music to listen to, there were things to re-evaluate. There’s still the enormous pressure of theory, the enormous consideration given to it, the enormous power of it, involved in everything. What I did was to write a kind of apologia, or a mini thesis, or polemic, or something so that when my bandmates came down to Wales to see how I was doing, I presented them with copies of this thing. It was an argument as to why we should stop fucking around at the Electric Ballroom, scratching our guitars and making farting noises on the bass, and we should make pop music. We should try and write songs. This is to put it very crudely. I don’t have a copy of whatever that was that I wrote in June at that time in Wales. Anyway, so this was duly handed out, and we tried then to make something — the very first attempts to write something that bore some structural, sonic relationship to what at the time passed for a pop music, or a pop song. It was something I had studiously avoided, in a way, up until then. I decided not to be afraid of it. I decide that there was nothing more honest about the voice that I had — it didn’t feel any more honest. Everything was in crisis, and so out of that a new voice emerged, and a new way of working. KE: It does sound like you’re unshackled from the guitar. The guitar has been replaced by keyboards — and the beat… GG: …Yes, the drum machine is in. The idea of the drum machine was fascinating, of course, 1979 was really the year of Kraftwerk and Gregory Isaacs, and a further immersion in theory. KE: There’s a drum machine, the bass is electronic and it’s lovers rock. It’s a synthetic version of lovers rock.

GG: Yes, I was conscious that it was the kind of language that would have gotten me thrown out of the men’s group in Camden 18 months before. We had a weekly men’s group. KE: Why would it have gotten you thrown out of the men’s group? GG: I don’t know: ‘Sweetest Girl’? Fuck me. You wouldn’t have dared. KE: You mean it would have been thought sexist to admit to… GG: Yes, it really would have been a difficult thing. Of course the most important thing from the moment one had that kind of experience of listening to the Beatles, in that dreadful growing up in Wales, was freedom. That’s what music gave me, freedom. It was an incredible experience of freedom. Every day when I go into my studio and there’s the choice to play one note or another, to make something from scratch, or to do anything I want in that room. It’s incredible, and the most powerful and valuable thing. We had boxed ourselves into a kind of “it should really sound like this”. It cut off, as you rightly say, a whole area of thought, pleasure, enjoyment, exploration… There was no point keeping on doing what I’d already done. The Desperate Bicycles said that “it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it”, and in a year or two’s time I had gone to New York; it was difficult, it was expensive, but the going and doing it was still the key thing, obviously. KE: But ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ is in quotation marks. It is not as if you have abandoned the certainties of Marxism for the uncertainties of deconstruction. It’s much more complex than that. GG: Parentheses are everywhere — parentheses are around parentheses in everything we did. KE: It’s like you’re taking on the love song in its gravitas and its quotidian nature, and then gently overturn some aspects of it while admitting to your newfound admiration for its mechanics. So ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ is a complex moment signalled by the change in

design. The cover of ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ is a Dunhill cigarette packet. It is a beautiful 12” and the next two 12”s also have – GG: There’s an alternate cover, which is a Bangladeshi woman with a rifle. KE: Yes…If we compare The “Sweetest Girl” with the first three singles which are photocopied sleeves, the third of which had excerpts from a text called ‘Scritto’s Republic’ that you had written on the order of language and the discourse of beat music — now you have these images of commodities. The ‘Faithless’ single that comes afterwards depicts the label of Eau de Sauvage perfume. GG: Dreadful [laughs]. KE: And the ‘Asylums in Jerusalem’ single features an image of the Courvoisier brandy label. This is a moment of commodity fetishism and the glamour of the product. These three singles and your first album Songs to Remember held critique and desire in a state of suspended complexity. They are in and against. The song was much more malleable than people imagined it to be. GG: Yes, this is good, carry on. [Laughter]. This uncannily accords with the thinking of the time, I think. It was to be pushed further, soon afterwards. There were references to theory and political texts in almost everything — or an awful lot of what I wrote — that continued through. We didn’t “sneak it in there”, it was in you. If you sang about what you knew in that dreadful romanticist idea of what musicians “do”, then that’s what I knew, that’s what I lived. KE: This is the most blatant version of that. [‘Jacques Derrida’ plays]. GG: Jesus. KE: There is this sequence afterwards which is one of my favourite sequences where you –

GG: I rap don’t I? Holy shit… [Laughter]. KE: It is not only because you rap, it is because you personify desire as a voracious creature that wants to “eat your nation state”. In an earlier song called ‘Hegemony’ you personified Hegemony as “the fairest creature”. The song ‘Jacques Derrida’ has a country squaredance beat which then introduces the new pop language of rap for the first time. Related to that is the paratactic eloquence of ‘Lions After Slumber’ in which you speak-sing a long list of desires before announcing “my drummer, my drummer, my drummer”. Your singing takes on a playfulness that lets you play with internal rhymes and repetition. GG: As much as it was derived from Derrida, there was a license for playfulness. There was much argument about that in Derrida. I was certainly happy to take that license that I got from his writing. There was still the rigour in his work, but you could, if you like, take liberties from what he wrote. I mispronounce his name, of course, which is evidence of my auto-didacticism. KE: No, it’s the reverse. It’s Derrida put under pressure by the song which has to be made to rhyme. GG: I honestly thought that was how his name was pronounced. I had never heard anybody say his name out loud. It’s kind of fortuitous that it becomes Jacques Derrida [pronounced Der-ee-da], I thought, “Jack the reader”. [Laughter]. There was license and liberty taken, and he was active in allowing me that, or I let him allow me that, or I made him allow me that. There are probably other smartarse bits of lyricism in it, but there was certainly the celebration of the banal. Derrida, I remember, would have liked the etymologically banal; it comes from something shared, doesn’t it? It means a shared thing; banality is a shared thing. I mean Adorno’s big rant against banality and popular music and the rest of it, this was a real “fuck that”. It went deeper than that, though. It’s kind of all there; again if you were to listen as closely as you have done, then you kind of find that stuff.

KE: There’s a line in ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ that I’m very fond of. You say, “the weakest link in every chain, I always want to find it / The strongest words in each belief to find out what’s behind it”. To me that summarises these years. GG: Yes, that was a neat little encapsulation of that. KE: It’s a beautiful statement that you could easily miss. Words are not the primary element in your music. It’s enunciation, it’s the way the words slide out of the side of your mouth, it’s the fact that your voice is becoming more falsetto but then sometimes drops in pitch. When theoretical statements are totally integrated into a delivery that announces its study of lovers rock and its modulation by gender. You are singing in a more feminine way… GG: I am. It’s a kind of psychic ventriloquism. I don’t know — well, I kind of do know about that voice. It was a magical thing — I hate the word magical — but, finding that voice was an extraordinary… It was a much-disliked voice, everyone hated it. There was a review in the Times by Andy Gill — not the Gang of Four Andy Gill, another Andy Gill who was a critic — it was talking about soul singers, and what people singing R&B should really sound like, and he cited, I don’t know, Sam Cooke, I don’t know who else, I can’t remember the list. He said compared with all of these, I sounded like Violet-Elizabeth Bott, from the Just William books. She’s the spoilt little girl who’s “thick, thick, thick and she’s gonna thcweam”. I love that, that’s my favourite — he so entirely missed the point. There is no vibrato in my voice, no sort of melisma, there isn’t any of this stuff that seemed to signify “soulfulness”. This was fairly studiously avoided. Sadly, I can’t do it now even if I tried, but I went out of my way to make sure it didn’t have those ornamentations… Once capital secularised Gospel, it was a fascinating moment, because it wasn’t the text any more, it wasn’t “the Lord” that was animating the singer and producing this stuff, it was a series of devices, mannerisms, the rest of it. That again was fascinating in the 1980s, when advertising, particularly in America, started using R&B singers to sell — whatever it was. In all of those things that you

associate with an unmediated interiority, a kind of expressivity, the voice was a very important place to go and to work from. KE: It changed with your appearance. You dressed very stylishly. You had a hairstyle somewhat reminiscent of Princess Diana. GG: She copied me on that one, unequivocally. [Laughter]. I’ve got photos, I’ve got the timeline down… KE: This is the final song that shows the further processing of the voice. [‘The Word Girl’ plays]. KE: Here, the word “girl” is in implied quotation marks. It was also in quotation marks on the sleeve. At the time critics ana-lysed this in relation to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and the language of love as a continual oscillating between the banal and the ineffable… GG: That’s definitely well put — surface and depth… KE: It is 1985, the year of the second album, Cupid & Psyche 85, recorded in New York. In seven years, you have travelled into the heart of the American pop machine with your collaborators, and you are making a music that has the finish, the shine, the polish, the production, the high-end detail and intricacy of the engine of a Maserati or a Rolex. I can still hear the lovers skank of reggae travelling throughout it all. Many writers interpret this moment as a real break with your past but I can hear the continuities now as much as the discontinuities. GG: Theory isn’t gone. Politics hasn’t gone remotely. Theory and politics brought me here, as much as did running away from indie and being unhappy with the privileging of rock, jazz, and all the rest of it. That moved the writing to pop and discovering the power there, and the influence of American R&B and its sophistication. Syncopation was something that I really began to understand. In post-punk there was a lot of this trying to be kind of funky and having

no idea what the funk was. To learn and to feel the funk, and to explore what’s happening in syncopation — it’s a powerful business. It’s an interesting thing to talk about. This was still music informed by theory — it’s interesting, I think in the last bit of the song ‘Wood Beez’ I sing about the “gift of schizo”, which was Deleuze and Guattari thank you very much, madam. That’s the sleeve, the “gift of schizo”. It wasn’t long after that, just to tie things up, that I became sick, sick of what I’d gotten into, sick of the industry that I’d tried to play with, and it had made me very ill. I was very unhappy to be celebrating the “gift of schizo” mistakenly. At that moment there was a kind of withdrawal, another breakdown, and withdrawal from a certain kind of theory, and a move to try and account for that theory’s ability to account for things. There was a move in some ways back… It wasn’t the best thing for someone who’s losing the plot to try and teach themselves Kant, or go back and discover what was going on between the analytic and continental divide. I ended up in hospital reading that stuff, and that’s the end of today… Before it happens again. [Laughter]. Fuck. KE: You said that post-punk tried to do funk and couldn’t do it. Part of what was great about post-punk was “getting it wrong”, and in doing so creating something new. There is this thread of “wrongness”, or what you called “ill-preparedness”, throughout your music. The recurring fragility of making music, the ambition and aspiration to make a new music and the kinds of illness and vulnerability that go with that. When we talk about theory, perhaps theory is a general term for uncertainty. Certain kinds of Marxism helped you to unsettle the way you were, to unsettle art and the question of art education, to unsettle the punk that you were discontented with, to live inside of the old and new soul music that you loved, and to express your distance from it. These kinds of uncertainties are part of what we find valuable about post-punk — the search for new ways to invent forms for that. GG: That’s right, but that shit will make you sick if you take it as seriously as I did. It’s maybe in the freedom and pleasure in actually making the music that you get, there’s a Nietzschean thing here to

do with air, health, and breathing. That comes whilst you’re gleefully pulling everything apart around you. To what end? The reason for carrying on is the immeasurably important freedom there is in music. I won’t be told by anybody else which is the most deterritorialising or effective piece of music. I read somewhere the other day someone talking about “capitalist harmony”. I thought, if I had a gun, I would have reached for it. I love making music, me [laughs]. KE: We’ve got time to answer two or three questions… GG: …You’ve no idea what agony this is. Now you know what agony it is for me, do you really want to ask me questions? Let’s see how nasty you are. [Laughter]. Gavin Butt: This touches on something that Kodwo mentioned: it’s about how theory has operated for you; what role it has played when you have reached an impasse with creative or musical form. It seems like theory enabled you to move beyond an impasse with punk as musical form. Then, later, with the move from post-punk to pop, for example. But I’m wondering to what degree theory would ever be the impasse itself? I know from my own experience at art school, a little bit later than you, that actually the more I got into theory, the less work I made in the studio, because at least for a moment, I theorised myself out of a way forward, and actually created an impasse with it. But, for you it seems, it created an edge that you needed to move beyond where you were. GG: .I’m not sure if I ever felt impeded by it. Would I have been more productive without it? I don’t know. Did it ever get me past an impasse? Did I ever need it to make music? No. I think my love of music and the freedom in music is the bigger, stronger thing, in a way. GB: It seems to have allowed you to engage in a practice of musicmaking which is remarkably inventive, albeit moving through its various stages of development in a rather tortured way.

GG: Oh dear, poor me. I don’t know, I go back to the Beatles and the Young Communist League. It’s dreadful to think of that growing up in the early 1960s as a high point for democracy — what a dreadful thought. I mean, I benefited from a good education. I didn’t die of a childhood illness. My parents were able to buy a record player, which was a machine that unleashed enormous power for me, because I was fascinated by how that power worked. I was completely in love with the Beatles. You have these three years — just to digress — from ‘Love Me Do’, which came out when I was six or something, then three years later there was Timothy Leary, the Maharishi, the Egyptian Book of the Dead; the Beatles were talking about why the Beatles weren’t important. Can I read you a little favourite quotation you might or might not know? It’s from that same three years after ‘Love Me Do’, this is from Timothy Leary in 1967 or something: I declare that The Beatles are mutant; prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, with a mysterious power to create a new species, a young race of laughing free men. They are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced. As hilarious as that is, it’s actually fascinating. The same year, by the way, John Lennon in a magazine called Cream — that I’d got at school from somebody — was quoted (this is three years after ‘Love Me Do’): I think we must make the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, break the dream they are surrounded by. They are dreaming someone else’s dream, it’s not even their own. This was the stuff that I was finding out about — at eight, nine, ten years old. Apart from the power of the music itself, their musicalsophistication development really drew me towards being attracted to difficult musics and ideas. In a way, theory and politics and music were bound up for me from the very beginning. It’s unimaginable to think of them as separate in any way.

8 “40 Degrees in Black”: Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner in Conversation with Gavin Butt (27|11|14) Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner are best known for their work as tropical punk-art duo Tetine, which they formed together in São Paulo in 1995. Their music and installation art — alongside their curatorial work, compiling, and DJ-ing — have persistently mined the promise of the postpunk scene in mid-80s Brazil. This conversation outlines some of the key features of this cultural moment, including its DIY ethos, its experimental activities across creative media, and its attempts to strike out from under the stultifying dominance of the 1960s Tropicália movement. Mejorado and Verner speak as former participants in the São Paulo and Belo Horizonte art and music scenes of the 80s: Mejorado as young underground club performer, and Verner as one-time member of numerous bands including R. Mutt, Divergência Socialista, and Ida & Os Voltas. The conversation addresses the political character of such creative activities at a time when democratic energies in Brazil were in the ascendant, and the power of the military dictatorship was beginning to falter. Before closing, the exchanges shift focus to the work of Tetine, and to the making of art and music after post-punk, at a time of dance music and globalisation. Gavin Butt: Music journalists and musicologists are now well-versed in telling origin stories of post-punk in the UK and the US, detailing the emergence of bands from New York, London, Manchester, Sheffield, and other cities. But the scene in Brazil is less widely appreciated, and still little understood in the Anglophone world. How did post-punk emerge as a phenomenon in Brazil? Bruno Verner: The post-punk scene in Brazil started a bit late. In the UK it all began around 1978 but in Brazil the first track that defined post-punk wasn’t recorded until around 1981. It was a track called ‘Perdidos Na Selva’ [Lost in the Jungle] by Gang 90 & As

Absurdettes. It was because of a guy called Julio Barroso — a musical researcher — who brought back to Brazil lots of records from New York after spending some time there. In 1979–1980 Julio was writing a music column from New York for a Brazilian magazine called Revista Som Três. He would write delirious reviews of shows he had seen, records he had discovered and everything else he was experiencing in New York. He was hanging out with everybody and was everywhere. He wrote about James Chance promoting an event called Saint Valetine’s Day Massacre in a loft and performing with the Contortions, James White and the Blacks, and the Flaming Demonics with trombonist Joe Bowie from Defunkt as a special guest. Julio was after the punk-funk-jazz, Caribbean, and mutant disco connections. He was also a big fan of female acts such as Cristina, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, the Bush Tetras, the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and so on. Once back from New York he decided to form Gang 90 e as Absurdettes, which was a collective of sorts with four girls, himself doing the vocals, and other guest musicians. It all influenced the beginning of Brazilian post-punk. Julio was a journalist, poet, and also a DJ — he was doing all the roles at once. Eliete Mejorado: He was a full-time dreamer. BV: Full-time dreamer as well. [Laughter]. Because of Julio Barroso and his Gang 90, lots of other groups started to form. EM: There was a need, because we were living under a dictatorship, to do something otherwise we would die from cancer! It was the zeitgeist, there was a necessity to do something new. I came from São Paulo. It was very strange, because during the dictatorship we never saw anyone from abroad. Then, when things started to open up during the 1980s, actually lots of people from elsewhere moved there. The country was literally upside-down. We had massive inflation and unemployment but there was a feeling that something new was about to happen. Brazil was changing. It was like the windows were finally being opened. BV: One of the girls from Gang 90, the first post-punk band, was a Dutch girl who came to Brazil, she was called Alice Pink Pank. None

of this was planned. I think, as Eliete was saying, it was all driven by a need. There was a necessity to change things. People were fed up with the rules, with TV Globo — the then (and still) dominant media corporation in Brazil. We were tired with the old modes of MPB [Música Popular Brasileira]. At the same time, we had a funk and disco music scene going on with great stuff happening in clubs in Rio and Sao Paulo while the military regime was very hard. GB: …And one of the places you and others turned to for alternatives was beyond Brazil’s national borders, right? It was looking to post-punk music in the UK and the US. That was brought in by trolley-dollies on planes… BV: All sorts of things. In the 70s, for example, there were people like DJ Carlos Machado, who became a specialist in bringing new sounds to Brazil. EM: He was already building a network with air hostesses! He knew people from Pan Am and had a friend who was also a music lover in an import-export company. He was into electrofunk, disco, soul, and had everything from Afrika Bambaataa who was already big in Brazil to the cool underground stuff no one had. The stuff that was not licensed to the Brazilian market. BV: And Julio was organizing Brazilian nights at the Mudd Club in New York, hanging out with black punk musician Snuky Tate and having people such as Michael Bernhorn and Charles K Noyes from Toy Killers perform there. So when Julio came back to Brazil he brought all these experiences and influences and a bunch of records with him. He was also in love with bands like Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and the B-52s. This was yet another side of things.

Snuky Tate and Julio Barroso in New York in 1980. Photograph by Renato dos Anjos. EM: Talking about how it started, it’s funny because I don’t think anybody beyond the people directly involved in the scene were really prepared for what happened. GB: Can you say something about your particular experience of this? What was your involvement in it? What do you remember? You were young then, very young. Were you in your early teens? EM: I met this bunch of people when I was 15. This would have been 1982. They were into fashion and performance. We were doing living mannequins in window displays and we were into lip-syncing and performance art. I remember having to travel the whole city dressed up. At that time São Paulo was raining all the time. We weren’t normal — we were “darks”. It was 40 degrees but we had to wear black no matter what. Your make-up was towards Mexico City. This was the code, everything up, from the south perspective. I had to take the underground and a bus to get to downtown São Paulo from where I lived… but to come back home late it was a nightmare, because you could be raped, everything could happen. The buses could take two hours to come. Then you’d see a bunch of men

playing some samba in the bus stop, they would sing stuff like “já que você veio assim você vai ter que dar pra mim” which means “now I have to fuck you because you’re dressed like that”. I was thinking: “how am I going to get out of here without them noticing?” You had to be prepared. GB: Where did “dark” styles of dress come from? They seem redolent to me of the largely all-black clothing associated, at least in a UK context, with goth and alternative street styles of the 1980s. Do you have recollection of any specific “look” or any particular people you were modelling yourselves on? EM: Nina Hagen — someone that was big in Brazil. My nickname was “Nina”. Don’t tell anyone. [Laughter]. I loved her. I think she played a key role in my life. I lip-synced to her track ‘Zarah’ at SESC Pompéia in São Paulo in a performance put together by my friend Jonathas Gama. I was a Lesbian Nazi governess and also performed to Meredith Monk’s ‘The Tale’. “I still have my allergies.” This happened in the main theatre at SESC Pompéia in 1983. We also presented stuff like this in the early days of [night club] Madame Sata in the same year. BV: SESC Pompéia was Lina Bo Bardi’s theatre which is part of a cultural centre, something like the Southbank in London, but smaller. EM: As Mercenárias also played at SESC Pompéia. Mercenárias were one of the first — I think the first — all-female music act from São Paulo that really mattered. Before that the scene was very much about men. Indeed, everything was about men [laughs]!

As Mercenaries, Sao Paolo 1984 (from the band’s archives) GB: Let’s talk about As Mercenárias, because I think at least one of them had an art school connection. Is that right? BV: Sandra Coutinho [bassist] and Ana Machado [guitarist] met in art school, actually, at ECA [Escola de Comunicações e Artes] in São Paulo. Rosália Munhoz, the vocalist, was living in one of the student houses at CRUSP [University of São Paulo]. But they used to go to punk shows and buy their drugs from one of the punk guys who used to hang out in the city centre; that’s actually how they met. Rosália in particular was in love with punk. Mercenárias shared a lot of stuff with the punk scene — which in Brazil started more or less at the same time as post-punk. EM: ‘The Beginning of the End of the World’ — the first punk festival from Sao Paulo — also took place at Sesc Pompéia in 1982. It is also the title of Mercenárias’ first international release on Soul Jazz, which we had the pleasure to compile and write the sleeve notes for. BV: Sonically they were very much influenced by the Brazilian punk scene as well. However, if you hear their music it is slightly more complex. You get a more complicated side of things. There are

strange harmonies floating around and the song structures are less conventional, more conceptual and stuff. GB: One of the things we’ve been talking about in this series of conversations is how punk really became part of the “problem”, if you like — that punk became rock-music business-as-usual very quickly. The idea of punk as a “style of revolt”, to quote Dick Hebdige, petered out as its musical and subcultural style became quickly commodified and sold back to the youth. That really inaugurated the necessity of a break away from punk, and towards something else — to post-punk. Was this the case in Brazil? BV: Punk in Brazil wasn’t that mainstream — although what happened here with the Sex Pistols became known across the world of course. The UK scene was all new for a time in Brazil. There was a dream about what was going on elsewhere, a fantasy. This was very much present. EM: What we call naiveté, to dream. BV: Yes it was very naïve. Most people involved in the scene weren’t musicians. No one could really play. This was the first time in Brazil that we were breaking from the idea that Brazilian music could only be about the bossa nova or samba, you know, and a connection with jazz, and that you have to play difficult chords in order to make a song, a melody or whatever. EM: And Tropicália! BV: Yes. The punks were also breaking with Tropicalismo — one of the most well-known movements of Brazil from the late 1960s, and mainly because of the work of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Tropicália’s main protagonists since 1968. The punk acts even had some kind of manifesto. Clemente from the band Os Inocentes wrote his ‘Manifesto Punk’ which railed against MPB, Caetano, and Gil. People just wanted to do something else. There was a desire, and a necessity to forget a little bit of our past. This desire to negate the

past was very important to every single musician that has ever written a piece of punk or post-punk music in Brazil. EM: Our journalist friend, Pedro Alexandre Sanches, writes in the preface to his book, Tropicalismo: Decadência Bonita do Samba: “Have I ever been born?” This is because, if everything is about 1968 and Tropicália, and we are always coming back to Tropicalismo and MPB, how do you get the right to express yourself? Or are we always going to agree with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil? GB: Does everybody know what Tropicália was? Maybe we should explain. BV: In short, Tropicália was a movement that actually lasted for one year in 1968, that was led by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Torquato Neto, Rogerio Duarte and others — and by Rogerio Duprat, who was a key figure as well. There’s an album called Tropicália ou Panis et Circenses, which is also the title of one of the Os Mutantes songs. Duprat was the guy who made all the orchestrations and it became a very well-known album because there was a lot of innovation in what was being produced there. But, in Brazil, all that came after was kind of “erased” because Tropicalismo became the “Brazilian voice” to the world, mainly in the US where they hailed Tropicália as of one of the best Brazilian albums of the century. I think for most of our generation, in the beginning we were all against it. We were mainly against Caetano and Gil. With most of the bands in the post-punk scene you can feel they share a lot of this. But, at the same time, we loved Os Mutantes, which were the strangest organism on Tropicália together with Tom Zé and Rogerio Duarte. They were the teenagers, “the rock band”, the ones who wanted to be the Beatles — but knew they were not. Os Mutantes were doing something else, something completely different and way ahead of their time sonically and visually — they sound completely different from everything and in part because there was a woman singing.

GB: As I understand it Tropicália was a kind of cultural expression which fused different genres of music, and also tried to fuse avantgarde music with popular forms as well. In a way, that carries over into Brazilian post-punk, because a 1980s band like Chance mixed post-punk experimentalism with samba. So I think what you’re suggesting is right: that the break with Tropicália is not as absolute as it might appear, that there is, in fact, some continuation. BV: For the punk scene it was kind of absolute, I would say. They didn’t want it. Punks wanted to do their stuff straight away. Of course, the post-punk scene was different. People were looking back to Tropicalismo, but trying to transform it. This was different from what always happened in MPB from the 1970s, which was a more straightforward continuation of the concepts of Tropicália. When you hear a track like Chance’s ‘Samba de Morro’ we can say that there is some kind of influence, but at the same time, there are other things in question which are very different. It is already an electronic track. There are other kinds of influence which are not necessarily “Brazilian”, “Tropicalista” or MPB. This made a lot of difference because bands like Chance were breaking with the normal ways of recording stuff. The whole atmosphere of the song — its dissonances, the thin pre-set beat, the darker and spacious production — I think these contributed to a quite different sound at the time. Post-punk was in search of new ways of production, we were trying to imagine new concepts for the future or how the future should sound. And also breaking with the idea that you had to be a “musician” to be in a band. The refusal of the past, then, was both rejection and admiration. I think this double-movement is crucial to understanding the scene and the post-punk moment. GB: Shall we hear it? [‘Samba de Morro’ by Chance plays on the video; a live version performed on the TV programme Metropolis in 1988].

Chance in their studio in Sao Paolo, 1987. Photograph by Rui Mendes. BV: In Brazil we have this thing we call “gambiarra” — when you don’t have the thing you want you substitute it for something else in order to find a new solution for a problem. This changes your actions, your things and the objects into something else. This was very common back in post-punk and is somehow related to what Chance is doing with the matchbox in the clip. First of all, it was difficult to buy synths in Brazil. We had Casio keyboards, we had drum-machines like the Dr Rhythm DR 110 — the latter was a popular choice of drum machine which lots of groups were after. When I started playing electronic music, the first thing I got was one of those Casio pocket calculators that had a pre-set with the Da Da Da beat used by Trio. Do you remember? GB: Yes, I do remember — horrific. [Laughter]. BV: We always loved that pre-set. It was fantastic, we could make lovely music with that thing; at the same time, it made a direct reference to Trio that we thought was brilliant. GB: Presumably electronic instruments allowed for experimentation because they were new, right? They hadn’t really been used much

before. BV: Yes, and because things weren’t all acoustic anymore. Even when we had drummers, we wanted to have at least two or three songs where someone would go there and just fire up a pre-set beat. It was charming. It added to the performance. This kind of thing began to happen in São Paulo with Chance, in Belo Horizonte with bands like R. Mutt, Divergência Socialista, and Hosana Nas Alturas, in Rio de Janeiro with Saara Saara and Black Future, in Brasilia with Tom Tom Macoute, and in Santos with Harry and City Limits and so on. We used a Roland SH101 in R. Mutt and in Ida & Os Voltas, and then later we got more modern machines like the Yamaha RX 21 or the DX100 synth for Divergência Socialista. All this stuff was very difficult to buy. We had no money. So we — the three bands — bought them collectively and shared the gear for gigs. What else? There was this guy who was actually the first electronic musician in Brazil, Kodiak Bachine. He was from São Paulo and was in a band called Agentss. There’s one video of the song ‘Eletricidade’ which is a piece of video art as well: an 11minute-long clip with everything, all the clichés, the robots, São Paulo as a Blade Runner kind of city. This is also the beginning of the electronic thing. GB: I wondered if you could talk a little more about that, because there is the “making do”, the gambiarra of Brazilian music at this time — which is to some degree an extension of the punk ethic, that anybody can play, anybody can put a band together, and learn three chords etc. But then, post-punk seems to be characterised by both a continuation of that ethic and also an avantgarde experimentalism which involves expanded forms of creative practice, which doesn’t necessarily only take in music. It might encompass also, for example, the creation of experimental video work, it might take in poetry, spoken-word stuff. These things were very much a part of the São Paulo and Belo Horizonte scenes weren’t they? I wondered if you could say a little bit about that?

EM: I think in São Paulo it was more like — music was music — art was art. It wasn’t all together as it was in Belo Horizonte. In Belo Horizonte it was much more artistic. Artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, dancers, video artists, and performers, they would all collaborate. Everybody knew each other and the scene was small. I remember taking part at the ‘Festival de Inverno’ [The Winter Art Festival] in the late 80s at UFMG [University Federal of Minas Gerais]. You would go to a bar at night and it would take only one day for you to know everyone. I remember hanging out with Adriana Banana and Marcelo Gabriel from the punk experimental dance company Cia de Dança Burra [The Stupid Dance Company]. We would sing ‘Muscolo Rosso’ by Cicciolina together. It was all about performance art, spoken word, physical theatre, and experimental music. They’d come from the poetry scene, from the dance scene, from video art. I think it had to do with the size of the city. In São Paulo there were places that we would have it all together as well; bands playing, people performing such as Claudia Wonder taking a bath in this pool of blood. But things were held slightly more apart too. BV: In Belo Horizonte there was a strong poetry scene. So, bands I played with like Divergência Socialista, R. Mutt, and Ida & Os Voltas, all came from a background of poetry. There were lots of artists working together. For instance, the video of Divergência Socialista’s ‘Cú De Comunista’ was shot by Patrícia Moran, who is now a wellknown filmmaker. In the early 1980s she was part of the scene as one of the vocalists of Sexo Explícito, which was another band. It was very communal. You wouldn’t play in only one band; you would play in three bands, all the time. The line-ups were almost the same people. Divergência Socialista were a bit like the Fall — with 100 line-ups! It was pretty much led by the poet Marcelo Dolabela. It was one of Belo Horizonte’s most experimental post-punk bands and one of the first electronic acts, together with R. Mutt. The music sounded like a strange cross between early Cabaret Voltaire with tape manipulation (we called it dada tapes) and stuff like Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, Walter Franco, Dee Dee Jackson, the B-52s, Gal Costa,

and Dolores Duran. Everything was allowed in Divergência. It was a very liberating project. GB: Talk of “liberation” and your mention of communalism makes me think: we’ve not really talked about politics. Could you characterise the post-punk scene in political terms? If I think about Felix Guattari’s exploration of emergent political forces in the mid-80s in his Molecular Revolution in Brazil, I could easily see post-punk as part of the wider democratic culture analysed there — one beginning to flourish in the shadow of a faltering military dictatorship. Guattari characterises this as a series of autonomous movements taking shape in — amongst other things — feminist groups, gay groups, and the workers’ party under Lula. It was really about creating a new kind of political body-politic unlike anything pre-existing military rule. Did this wide continuum of political mobilisation impact upon the post-punk creative scene, do you think? Or was it more simply just a part of it? EM: I think the post-punk scene was very much part of it, because there was dissatisfaction in the air. There was nothing we could do but we had to do something. We would hang out in a cemetery and then we would write lyrics. We would dream. The thing we could do was that we could dress as if we were somewhere else. We had the necessity to pretend we were somewhere else. This necessity created lots of things. BV: For instance, Divergência Socialista’s video ‘Cú De Comunista’ was played by Aron Feldman who was an important underground filmmaker from the 1960s, contemporary of Glauber Rocha from Cinema Novo. He was doing extreme DIY political documentaries with zero cash and one camera. He was already in his seventies. He participated actively in Belo Horizonte’s post-punk scene: he would drive the bands in his van, he was their official photographer, he participated in music videos and made his own feature films with people from the scene as actors. EM: This was micro-politics that everyone had the power to do. There was this micro way of doing it. But at the same time, it was

very disorganised, the whole thing. Brazil is too big. So, it took a while to organise itself. It wasn’t like nowadays where we have the internet — communication was so difficult. For a band to journey to play in São Paulo was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It was very hard. To travel inside Brazil was super expensive. BV: Everything was through the post as well. In Brazil — not many people know this — we had an intense mail-art scene, which was also how people got information from other countries. Belo Horizonte was part of this because there were so many poets. It was concentrated in specific parts of the country. Thinking about travel, Mercenárias played only once in the north part of Brazil. For a band that existed during their post-punk heyday for seven or eight years, and couldn’t play in other cities or travel around their own country, this was very limiting. GB: So it really was quite localised. BV: Yes. In the beginning it was always São Paulo and Rio. It was way more complicated for the underground scenes in Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, or Brasilia. The bands had to go to São Paulo. Everything was there. The music magazines were there – EM: Mainly written by men. BV: — The galleries were there, the clubs, the cultural centres, the big institutions like SESC Pompéia, the big theatres and everything. It was all in São Paulo. GB: Did TV Globo give much time to punk or post-punk? EM: No, they didn’t give a damn. GB: In the UK we had the Bill Grundy moment in 1976, when the Sex Pistols went on to the Today TV show hosted by Grundy, and a scandalised mainstream visibility was instantly afforded them in the tabloid newspapers.

BV: We did not have things like that happening in mainstream TV. Everything that was scandalous was underground and therefore off the circuit. In Rio we had all the big new-wave acts. Every adolescent knew by heart any of their songs because they played on the radio and everywhere else. And of course, they were all playing TV Globo music shows. GB: …And they were coupled up to big record companies, right? BV: Yes. And TV network Rede Globo had Som Livre, a record label… EM: But the man who was responsible for distributing underground post-punk records in Brazil was Luiz Calanca. This was through his record store Baratos Afins, which you can still find in the Grandes Galerias in the city centre of São Paulo today. He is a living bible. BV: Baratos Afins is also a record label. Almost the whole post-punk output from São Paulo was released by the label, which was 100% independent, and 100% different from what was going on with mainstream rock acts on the Rio scene, supported by the major corporate record companies. GB: So, returning to Divergência Socialista, and sticking with the political angle, can you give me your take on the politics of ‘Cú de Comunista’? EM: ‘Cú de Comunista’ means “communist ass”, and it also alludes to the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) — the trade-union centre in São Bernardo, where Lula came from. So there were also these two meanings — and all these abbreviations in the song. Phonetically speaking, the sound of CUT in Portuguese is similar to the word “Cu” with the preposition “de”. There’s a play with the meaning here. Censorship was an issue during the military period. We had to speak in codes.

Divergencia Socialista performing ‘Cu de Comunista’ live at DCE-Ufmg in Belo Horizonte, 1988. Photograph by Frederico Piancastelli. BV: It is about espionage, intelligence and security agencies; communications and miscommunications and the Brazilian communist party. It also alludes to the Cold War. Who’s going to press the button first? And Americans going after “communists” in South America countries. The 1964 coup d’état that overthrew President João Goulart, resulting in a 21-year-long military dictatorship supported by the US, is also alluded to somehow in the song. Cú de Comunista was one of Divergência Socialista’s Casio song-poems. It goes like this: “FBI”, “KGB”, “CIA”, “PCB” [Partido Comunista do Brazil], then “UPI”, “DDD” which means “discagem direta a distância” in Portuguese [long distance call], “CTI”, “PC do B”. EM: That was the “micro” thing. Everyone was doing their politics in the way they could. If you weren’t taken by the dictatorship, you were taken by HIV, so you would be taken anyway… [laughs]. GB: So, this is not a kind of slight on the Workers’ Party is it? Or is it?

EM: No, Divergência Socialista would play for them. BV: We toured for the Workers’ Party. We were totally pro-Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]. We played in many areas outside central Belo Horizonte because of PT and we participated in their campaigns. We would play on top of trucks through the sound systems installed by them on the outskirts of the city. At some point we even composed an electro hip-hop number called ‘Só Democracia com Socialismo’ [Only Democracy With Socialism] which functioned as a jingle for their campaigns. GB: Let’s fast forward to 1995, shall we? You two meet and you decide to form Tetine. Tell us a bit about why and how you came together. Your output since has been remarkably varied: you work as recording artists, perform as musicians, write and perform poetry, and make video and installation work. You seem to engage in a transversal kind of creative activity which moves across cultural spheres, and which isn’t contained by any one of them. In all of this, it strikes me as a very neo-post-punk kind of practice — if that’s not too awkward an expression. Can you say a bit about working across so many different kinds of activity? BV: When we met each other it was totally by chance. It was the 1990s and I wasn’t in Belo Horizonte anymore. I went to São Paulo and was kind of lost. I was starting a linguistics course in the university. So, I wasn’t really doing music. One day I was invited to perform with a theatre group to produce a soundtrack, and that’s how I met Eliete. She was one of the performers in this piece. We just clicked. I had a drum machine, they had a piano and we had to improvise some stuff. I thought “she does stuff that’s not the normal musical way”. EM: I came from a performance background. Everything in music in my life was so wrong, like I had a piano teacher who spanked me [laughter] and I hated it. So, it wasn’t like, in that sense, I would go to music. I loved stuff like Meredith Monk. I loved the idea of physical exhaustion and the work of Grotowski. I was trying to extract the voice from my knees. I was very much into these body experiments.

Almost like dance. When I saw Bruno, he was so cool, he knew how to translate my body into music. I could sing something that he could translate into music. We did some very radical stuff in the beginning in very small venues. BV: In the beginning we didn’t know what we were doing, actually. We were experimenting with everything. I was trying electronics and didn’t know how to programme stuff very well — it was all kind of wrong. That was the thing — there wasn’t a lot of judgement. When I met Eliete I recognised these as ultra post-punk characteristics of an artist. You don’t need to be the virtuoso. You try to forge other ways, and find other ways to make music. I was interested in that. It was different in the 1990s and everything had changed. It was all about DJ culture and super-clubs. EM: The 1990s for me was a time where people would hide, even the DJs. Everybody was behind something. You would listen and hear loud music, but you wouldn’t see the DJ. BV: We wanted to take the microphone. We weren’t interested in showing that we are “good” instrumentalists. Actually, one thing that influenced me and Eliete a lot, that I think was one of the most important things for Tetine, was funk carioca — which is another completely different side of it. Funk carioca is the electronic music produced in the favelas of Rio. Tetine got deeply involved with the whole baile-funk scene in Rio. We instantly identified ourselves with its sonic radicalism and the DIY side of it. EM: It was love at first sight with the baile-funk scene since its beginning. We connected straight away with the attitude and the raw and sexual energy that was reflected in the bailes [parties] and montages [tracks]. The balls are like nowhere else in the world. On top of that we fell in love with the female MCs right away and began collaborating with them. Our song ‘I Go To The Doctor’ with MC Deize Tigrona is one of our collaborations we are most proud of. It was first put out as a white label and then Soul Jazz released it.

BV: When we talk about baile funk, we’re talking about an entire culture that developed itself totally outside of the Brazilian dominant bossa nova-Tropicália-MPB kind of “taste”. Until not long ago the genre was extremely criticized. People thought it was not sophisticated enough and that it couldn’t represent Brazilian culture. In 2002/2003 we started our radio show Slum Dunk on Resonance FM 104.4 and began playing funk-carioca sets every single week. It was the first time it was aired to an audience in Europe. Then we did Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca which was the first DJ mix compilation to appear internationally. EM: At the same time, we put out two independent albums, Bonde do Tetão and L.I.C.K MY FAVELA, with Tetine’s own queer punk funk-carioca tracks. Suddenly everything changed and people began paying more attention to these sounds. We played the Wire festival in Chicago and we also did in an installation with Jarbas Lopes, an artist from Rio de Janeiro. The first time we did it was at Gasworks in London back in 2003. He built a tent which is made up of announcements… BV: …Of parties in the favelas in Rio. The balls were announced in raffia banners. It’s very characteristic. So he built a penetrable tent made of sewn raffia banners he collected from the hills. EM: We would then play and collaborate inside. BV: It’s all improvised. We’d stay for hours inside, activating the space. Everybody is welcome. There’s food and cachaça [a Brazilian spirit made from sugar cane, also known as “pinga”] and anyone can play, drink, bring an instrument, and/or use the microphone. Anything goes.

Tetine and Jarbas Lopes “Deegraça” (installation) at Multiplicidade, Rio de Janeiro, 2014. Photograph by Eduardo Magalhães GB: So is this like an open-mic kind of set-up? EM: It is a celebration. The tent becomes a living organism that functions as a sound system. It is like visual poetry with addresses, numbers, sentences, and sayings. We don’t have much control of what happens inside the tent even if we plan what we want to do. It is a very beautiful performance piece, and a sculpture in itself. You can take part or watch it from outside. The tent becomes a huge sound speaker that pulsates in the space. GB: I’ll just ask one more thing about Tetine and then we’ll open it up for questions. You describe yourself as a “tropical mutant punk funk” outfit. Can you say a little bit about the importance of selfdescription? Because if you’re creating new form, it’s arguably important to be able to refer to it and mark its novelty, and it seems you’re interested in doing this naming yourselves. Is this important? Or are you happy to leave it to others?

BV: For us “tropical punk” or “tropical mutant punk funk” relates to a state of mind. It is a spirit. It is a way we found to describe our actions as a DIY Brazilian punk funk organism. We made this up to talk about our music and performances. There’s an element in the word “tropical” that has to do with what we want to communicate. In a way we’re talking about temperature. It’s the black sun. Luminosity and darkness at the same time. We see ourselves as two tropical beings that don’t quite fit in the traditional tropical world. We’re playing with these two stereotyped concepts or clichés that are apparently opposites. We are making a third thing which we believe we fit in. It is not polite. It is not appropriate. It is wrong. That’s also how “tropical punk” came about. We thought to ourselves, when we arrived in the UK, for instance, everyone would ask, “Are you Brazilian?” I would say, “Yes I am”, and then they would say “What do you do?” to which I would reply, “I’m an artist”, or “I’m a musician”. Then instantly I would get, “Do you play samba?” Or “Do you play bossa nova?” Which was the recycling of the Brazilian stereotype. Then we are back to “Have I ever been born?” because there is a story after Tropicália, although it isn’t one that’s been recognised or is written in books. All the music books in Brazil are about Tropicália or bossa nova. It’s hard to find a book on post-punk.

Tetine live, London 2006. Photograph by Astrid Schulz GB: Which is why you are also doing important work as archivists and historians of the scene right now, from your compilation of the 2005 album The Sexual Life of the Savages, through to the 2013 Resonance FM programme Slum Dunk where you played the “lost” music of Brazil. That’s really important isn’t it, and another part of what you do as Tetine? BV: Yes, of course. When we started with the radio programme, the idea was exactly that. It was all about funk carioca in the beginning, because we thought that people needed to know that electronic music was being produced in the favelas, and it was completely overlooked by the dominant narratives of Brazil’s pop history. That’s how we got to Resonance FM. Then we decided: let’s play all the songs they do not play in Brazil; the stuff that people go like “that funk carioca, that’s poor music, that’s music from the favelas”; or “this doesn’t represent our culture, our culture is bossa nova”; or our culture is “um cantinho, um violão” with the guitar played in a jazz way. That’s how both The Sexual Life of the Savages and Slum Dunk came about. [“Um cantinho, um violão” is a verse of the famous bossa-nova song ‘Corcovado’ by Tom Jobim, recorded in English as ‘Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars’.] * GB: I think we should have some additional voices now to join the conversation. Can I see your desktop image again? I do actually want to get round to that at some point, because the title of our conversation is “40 degrees in black”, but now you’ve come to the UK it’s like “8 degrees in gold lamé” or something like that. [Laughter]. There’s a shift which we can talk about there. Shall we turn to our audience?

Tetine’s Tesco. Photograph by Marinella Setti. Audience member 1: I wanted to pick up on that exact point. Eliete, you said, “It was 40 degrees but we had to wear black no matter what”, you said you were “darks” — that was your expression. I got this sense that not only were you against earlier forms of music, but you were also against the weather.[Laughter]. The weather itself is encouraging some kind of optimism, whereas your optimism was founded in a certain kind of refusal. Could you say a bit more about the things you were against? They could be big or small. You know, in post-punk it was, “no guitar solos”, so anti-solos. Instead of long guitar lines, you have guitars but you have pauses in them, the guitars are broken up. That’s a musical thing, but there’s stylistic things too, like “don’t smile too much”, “show no teeth”, these kind of things. If you could say a bit more about the things you were against, so we can get a better sense of the “code” you and your friends lived by… EM: Yes, show no teeth. And, if you happened to be a woman, “carry your own luggage”! [Laughter]. There was this thing about, “oh, I play bossa nova”, being nice, and this image of honesty and all those

good ladies. None of this fitted within our rules. You had to be able to have attitude. Being a woman in São Paulo was not — is not — easy. It was, and still is, very macho, macho, macho. Being a musician, as a woman in São Paulo — it’s hard. So, there was this thing that if you’re a woman, you have to be able to carry your luggage to show that being a woman doesn’t mean you’re weak. BV: We certainly had no guitar solos. Actually people had no idea how to solo, even if they wanted to [laughs]. No bossa-nova vocals… Audience member 1: No harmonies! Audience member 2: Were you also against the city? As an urban environment? You were in the cemetery doing things because you didn’t want to be in the city? EM: You didn’t want to be disturbed. You could be there by yourself. Audience member 2: I’m thinking this because São Paulo is already a metropolis at the time. A huge urban environment, and very diverse. EM: Super diverse. BV: Yes, but you could dream you were in other places as well. Audience member 2: Another question: your movement was not in the favelas was it? Like Cartola or somebody was, and seen as an inferior form of music… EM: Punk and post-punk are from the streets and the suburbs. Samba and funk carioca are from the hills. BV: Tell the story about the time we were on a radio show in Brazil, and you compared Mercenárias with Bonde Das Bad Girls. EM: They didn’t like that. “How dare you say something like that about our girls?!”

BV: This was a prestigious radio show. They said, “What do you listen to?” and Eliete said, “I love Bonde Das Bad Girls”, who are an all-girl funk-carioca ensemble. “I think they remind me a lot of Mercenárias in the beginning of their career”, she went on. Everyone stopped on the show. [Laughter]. The guy, a famous presenter, then went “How dare you say that about Mercenárias!?” EM: You cannot mix people that way, you see? There is a saying: “Brazil is not for beginners”. BV: Just like samba, in the beginning funk carioca was hated as well. It was something that people didn’t like at all in the 1990s. Funk carioca was influenced by Miami bass but on top of its structure there is a second rhythm called tamborzão which is a Brazilian beat that connects the whole thing with Candomblé drumming, Ogan and Macumba. EM: …Which is a Brazilian religion, like witchcraft. Ogan plays the drums in the Candomblé and invites the Gods, the Orixás by possessing the believer’s bodies in order to communicate with them. Funk carioca’s tamborzão is so strong that it would make it rain… If you know what I mean… [Laughter]. BV: It became famous in this country — in 2005, when M.I.A and Diplo sampled the horns of Deize Tigrona’s track ‘Injeção’, which is already a sampled bit of the film Rocky, the 1980s movie. Then Diplo sampled it again, and made a track with M.I.A called ‘Bucky Done Gun’. EM: May I just say something, Diplo was secretly listening to our radio show on Resonance FM back in 2003 and he got crazy about funk carioca, you know. Then he released his record. [Laughter]. But since he is American, handsome, white, sexy, everything is easier. [Laughter]. BV: When we released Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca, one of the things we had with the record label was that, “we need to place this music on another shelf”. It cannot go to the “world-music” shelf

anymore, because if it stays there, it is going to be the same thing as ever, you know what I mean? It would be exoticized and that was all. We thought, it’s time to recognise that this is a form of electronic music as interesting as Aphex Twin or whatever, any European or American music. Audience member 3: I have spent some time in Brazil, sort of hunting through record stores. I’m quite a fan of Harry — they’re an interesting band because they seem different to the other post-punk Brazilian bands I’ve heard. They’re not funky at all, they sound like Joy Division, they all sing in English. I wondered if you could say something about them. I also wondered if you could say something about relations between post-punk and other kinds of styles and genres. There are massive metal scenes depending on where you are, and there’s also a really big psycho-billy scene down in Porto Alegre. So you’ve got everything from CSS [a rock band from São Paulo] to bands in Porto Alegre that sound like Sonic Youth. What are the relations between post-punk and these other, more contemporary scenes? BV: Harry was part of the post-punk scene. They were from Santos, a port city less than 100 kilometres from São Paulo. They were an electronic act, actually. Harry are included on The Sexual Life of the Savages. They made three albums, and were the first band to start singing in English. I think they badly wanted to break into the international market. You didn’t have many bands singing in English in the 1980s. Mostly it was all in Portuguese. As for CSS, once you get to 2000 there’s some kind of revival of the early 1980s going on, with the whole Electroclash thing. CSS is part of this mentality. Their music has a post-punk feel, and is very influenced by what happened in the 1980s. Audience member 4: I don’t know whether this is kind of related to that, but I’m interested in your ambivalent relationship to Tropicália — not wanting to be reduced to it, but at the same time “tropical” being how you describe yourself, at least in part. So you have an ambivalent relationship to a style which is bound up with a “national”

idea about Brazil and Brazilian music. I wondered how working in the UK is important for your work, and how you relate to other practices here? EM: I don’t know. If we were still in Brazil we probably wouldn’t exist anymore. I think we would have stopped. GB: Why? EM: Brazil hates memory sometimes. It’s funny, the way Brazilians deal with memory. We are in an eternal Memento. We remember things one moment, and then forget them the next. That’s the problem with politicians you see. I always felt like a foreigner there, in a way. That’s why I was always wearing black, maybe. GB: If you feel like a foreigner there, do you feel like a native here in the UK? EM: No. [Laughter]. I think I have this problem now: I feel like a foreigner everywhere… [Laughter]. But here I am. It’s a very strange position. I’m living in another planet. [Laughter]. Audience member 5: Could you say more about the sexual politics of that time? About the 1980s punk scene, and possible connections, if any, to the gay and lesbian liberation movements? That’s one thing; then you mentioned HIV/AIDS a few times. There’s something striking about the strict contemporaneity of the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the emergence of punk in a number of dictatorial scenarios, such as in Spain and Chile. I’m trying to make sense of what analysis we could elaborate, overarching both scenes. Brazil I’m not familiar with, so if you could share something on the correlation between sexual-liberation movements and the punk scene, then the role of HIV/AIDS, that’d be great! EM: We were with everyone. Everyone I was involved with died at the time. All the people who were doing the shop stuff, the fashion things — they all died. I’m lucky, to be honest. You had to erase so

many names from your telephone diary. I was very much into the gay scene, where almost everyone died. Sexually it was all so open. GB: Was it mainly gay men? Or gay men and lesbians? EM: Everybody together. You could be everything at that time; that was the beauty of it. There was this moment from the 1970s that was like, “wow!” I think that’s pretty much the image we have of that time nowadays. But it’s not like that anymore, I don’t think. It’s much more conservative. It’s much more sectored. BV: We have this thing we call “desbunde” in the 1970s and in the 1980s, when everything was allowed. First of all, people were not aware of HIV when it started. I think the first cases that went big in Brazil were in 1985/86. Then when, for instance, a soap-opera star would die all of a sudden, it was a shock to everyone. People were just dying. Also, there was a lot of prejudice. It just became a horror show.

9 “We Wanted This Sense of Fluxing In and Out of History”: Sue Clayton in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun (4|12|14) Glenn O’Brien’s Downtown ’81, (1981), Ericka Beckman’s 135 Grand Street (1979-2009), or Christoph Dreher and Heiner Muhlenbrock’s Ok Ok Der moderne Tanz (1980) exemplify post-punk cinema as a documentary fiction that dramatized the performances of specific post-punk groups in urban milieu. In contrast, The Song of the Shirt — directed between 1976 and 1979 by filmmakers Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling and credited to The Film and History Project — radically expands our received ideas of what post-punk cinema might be, even as it shares post-punk music’s will to problematize the institution of music.. Indeed, The Song of the Shirt was never intended to function as a feature film, but was conceived in three chapters that were individually screened for trade unions and women garment workers in discussion with the film-makers. Clayton, Curling, and their collaborators initial investgatin into the condition of women and mothers working in late 1970s Britain developed into a collective research project into the formation of the welfare state in the 1840s., Clayton and Curling drew upon new research carried out by feminist historians and working class historians, collaborated with experimental musicians and Screen film theorists, and located their practice within the resurgent British independent film movement. In its experiment with film form, film practice, film production and film distribution, The Song of the Shirt was a declaration of collective independence that paralleled and extended post-punk music’s critiques of the rock group, enacted in and against the form of rock music itself. Kodwo Eshun: Our conversation focuses on Sue Clayton’s pioneering work from The Song of the Shirt, directed and produced with Jonathan Curling between 1976 and 1979, and broadcast in 1982 in the first year of Channel 4. The Song of the Shirt was

subtitled A Film in Three Parts and was credited to the Film and History Project. I want to begin by reading a passage from the booklet that was published on the occasion of The Song of the Shirt which states that: The Song of the Shirt grew out of a video project on women and the welfare state. We wanted to examine why the status of working women had deteriorated from the time of the industrial revolution, and how it was that women living and working outside of the family came to be seen as a challenge to the social order. The film looks at the origins of philanthropy, and resistances to it, by examining as a group women working in the sweated clothes trade in London in the 1840s: a new trade overflown with poor, often unmarried women from the country, for whom employment was seasonal, and prostitution often the only alternative. The film refuses to credit any historical source as the truth about these women; it turns the tables and looks at the motives behind what was written, from Mayhew’s sensational account of their domestic lives, to hysterical comparisons in parliament, with the festering and mouldering discontent of the 1948 Paris Revolution, and the absurdly impractical schemes to get these 500,000 surplus women to emigrate. These conventional sources are repeatedly played off against arguments and criticisms from the radical publications of the Chartist and co-operative movements. The film is episodic, using short sequences of still photographs, graphics, and acted reconstructions.’ [The opening of the film plays]. Sue Clayton: What begins to happen next, after the whole of the first sequence on capital and labour, is the introduction of the parliamentarians on the trains. First we go from contemporary women, are they in the labour market? Are they not? Should they be? Should they not? Through these portals, these bridges and canals, and tunnels back into history, what you get is a mapping of all the women coming to London on the canal paths, with the trains and the bridges going over the top. On the trains, all the men are

rehearsing these speeches that they’re going to make in parliament about the women. So, you have the bridges of the trains, the structure of capital and then you have the women and the water interconnecting. KE: One of the most powerful aspects of The Song of the Shirt is the way the film time travels from the London of 1978 to the London of 1840. The opening of the film dramatizes the left critique of the welfare state that was current at the end of the 1970s. An unnamed woman on a portable television monitor states that, “In law, all women are dependents. I just had enough, I mean, the money I was getting was less than he’d have got for us all on the social security. Only the interviews, you know, the sort of scrutiny they put you under, he just wouldn’t face it, he just wouldn’t do that, so I left.” Then she says, “And then you’ve got this threat, you know? What if the SS find out, and it’s going to make him support you? Well, no man’s going to like being told that; a bloke being told that he’s got to suddenly start supporting a woman and a couple of kids.” So the financial support that the welfare state obliges her exhusband to provide towards the cost of bringing up children by herself is not experienced by the single mother as a social good but as a threat aimed at her ex-husband that he will then direct at her. State support is experienced as state interference that causes more harm than good; this sense of insecurity prefigures the contemporary Conservative policy that continually pits the so-called deserving waged against the undeserving unwaged. Could you talk about how you and your colleagues experienced the welfare state during the late 1970s? SC: You’re absolutely right; there’s a very strong parallel with what’s going on at the moment. I’m working on a longer-term project about 1970s cinema called Other Cinemas, co-edited with Laura Mulvey. People now are so interested in 1970s cinema. I reference this article by Christian Joppke called ‘The Crisis of the Welfare State: Collective Consumption and the Rise of New Social Actors’ from 1978 that starts by saying that ever since the 1970s, it’s become a truism to say there is a crisis in the welfare state. Joppke says that

from 1945 to the 1970s, there was perceived to be a balance; there was full employment, men went to work, women kind of went to work; some stayed at home. There was still an underclass of people who were squatting and homeless and so on, but you could see a sort of balance that was going on between social-democratic values: new health acts, education acts, the NHS, free schooling, free health. Then from the 1970s, it all started to fall apart because there was high unemployment. Suddenly the welfare state became really loaded, exactly as it is now with programmes like Benefits Street. With welfare now, people are obsessed with fetishizing people on benefits, saying “Are they mad? Are they bad? Are they criminals? Are they good? Are they victims?” It’s exactly what seemed to be circulating around women. As often happens, the first casualties of unemployment in the 1970s were mainly women. Like Martha, the girl in The Song of the Shirt, who is saying, “I could work, but the amount I’d earn is so small I may as well be on the SS”, which was the name for being on benefits. So, somehow it seems like the capitalist culture can tolerate quite a few million on benefits so that the other part of the system works. That’s where we started. Who are those women on benefits? What do they really want to be doing? Do they want to be defined as “people on benefits”? You could just as easily now unpick all these endless programmes about the welfare state: are they victims, or are they somehow criminal, bad, or morally this or that? So, the reason we decided to track back to the 1840s is that we looked at where the whole notion of a welfare state might have come from, and it seemed to us to have come from all those parliamentary investigations in the 1840s. There was an inquiry into the welfare of women and children in 1842 and 1848. That’s when all these parliamentarians were saying “We have a problem, we have these surplus women”. And doesn’t that resonate with “surplus inflow of migrants”? There is always a group of people who don’t fit, who are seen as a sort of surplus. They’re always “flooding”, “they’re flooding in!” [Laughter]. So, these women were “flooding” into London, and if you look at the language it’s exactly the same language that is used now in relation to immigration. Somehow, they were surplus because

they didn’t quite fit the economic model that was developing. They weren’t surviving anymore in agricultural communities, so there were these half a million surplus women, who hit London in the 1840s. Could they find a proper place in the workforce, and have the same rights as other workers? So there’s this schizophrenia. We’ll either romanticise them, and make them objects of charity — that’s one thing the welfare state can do to people, “poor them, isn’t it sad”, which isn’t how people necessarily want to be thought of — or “they’re a threat, they’ll bring disease, they might be prostitutes, they’ll destabilise our city”. That’s why we went back to what we call the origins of the welfare state. There’s that sense of groups of people that present a problem to capitalism. KE: In that sense, you were carrying out what Stuart Hall called “the work of ideological excavation” in his essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, published in Marxism Today in January 1979. Stuart Hall wrote that in the “absence of any fuller mobilisation of democratic initiatives, the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful bureaucratic imposition”. Which is exactly how Martha experiences the welfare state. Hall argued that “the radical right assault on the whole structure of welfare and social benefits” was “a work of ideological excavation” that “if well done” could deliver “considerable political and economic benefits”. Faced with this experience of the welfare state as “a powerful bureaucratic imposition”, however, you and your colleagues responded by embarking upon an ambitious research project that worked out new methods for visualising archives and staging history. Your formation was not in film but in literature. You and Curling studied English Literature at Cambridge University; then you went on to study photography at Central London Polytechnic. SC: Yes, I went to Central London Poly to do Photography. I didn’t aspire to become a filmmaker, because women just didn’t do it, there were virtually no British women making films. There were a couple of women making documentaries, but there were virtually no women even in television — this is before Channel 4. So I didn’t actually

even aspire to think I could be a film director, but then when I met Jonathan we started working on the research for The Song of the Shirt collectively. After a year at Central London Polytechnic, I wasn’t on any kind of student grant, because it was a second degree. I was working as a hospital cleaner for half the day, and I thought, “No, I want to make films so the photography course is wrong”. So I applied actually to Birmingham, to the Centre for Cultural Studies, and met Stuart Hall [laughs], and applied to the Royal College of Art film programme. I said to Stuart Hall, “What’s all this stuff you’re doing about the working-class and subcultures? It all sounds to me a bit patronising”. I was terribly working-class and kind of stroppy in those days [laughs]. I said, “You should do academics and subcultures and turn the torchlight on yourself, and stop just analysing working-class subcultures”. He just roared with laughter and thought it was absolutely hysterical. So I got offered a place at Birmingham, which would have been to actually turn the searchlight onto the people who are making the judgements — which now might seem obvious, but it didn’t in the 1970s. It was almost a scary thing to do. So, I was going to do the whole research project academically through Birmingham, but then I had an offer to go to the film school at Royal College of Art, and I decided that I would do it purely through film. We had a group of feminist historians, Sally Alexander who remains attached to Goldsmiths, and Anna Davin; there was a journal called History Workshop Journal, and they had a feminist history project. It was that period of oral history. The idea of talking to “ordinary” people who had lived through experiences wasn’t as common as you would expect it to be now. So, they were doing that very “first-hand” work in oral accounts and historical research going back to the Victorian period. Then because I was at Royal College of Art I came across the next wave, which was the Independent Filmmakers Association [IFA]. So, the IFA that I came across when I came to Royal College of Art was all the radical filmmakers working in London at the time, from the structural people like Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, and Stephen Dwoskin — who all taught at Royal College of Art, they all taught me — and London Filmmakers Co-op — where you could actually go and print or process your own film,

start playing around with the materiality of the actual film — through to all sorts of people like us: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Sally Potter, Derek Jarman, quite a lot of other individuals, then all the collectives. So there’s Berwick Street Film Collective that made Nightcleaners, there was Cinema Action, which was more like a newsreel group, there was Newsreel Collective, there was Amber Films in Newcastle. There was this fantastic spectrum that I walked into, that would have been 1976, when there was the Patriarchy Conference, which really changed the face of feminist thinking. In that same year, 1976, the IFA was formed there. All these filmmakers with these unbelievably diverse practices, everyone from gallery people with a post-1960s New York vibe, to post1968 Paris, to people who had come from working with cinematographers in Cuba, Chile, Argentina, you know it was all quite global. There was this whole spectrum of filmmaking, from very what you call art, through to what you call social realism. What was so incredible was the fact that we were all in the same organisation. We had the weirdest discussions; we would be saying, “How do we start this revolution then?” [laughs]. “Not by running film through your film processer upside-down like you do at the co-op! We need to be out on the street!” [laughs]. It seems so touching when you look back. If you watch Nightcleaners, it’s the same on the soundtrack; you’ve got Sheila Rowbotham as a feminist saying “Maybe women don’t belong in trade unions because trade unions are male-dominated… Maybe middle-class women can’t understand the issues that working-class women face.” Their statements are so big and seem naïve, but they were related to big movements, like feminism, class politics, and trade unionism, interarticulating quite naively, but in a very creative way, to make new connections. I became influenced by everything from Cuban cinema, that’s when I started watching a lot of Soviet avant-garde — which you can really see in the way we shot, all silent and black-and-white, epic narrative, edgy soundtrack composed by Lindsay Cooper who was in a band called Henry Cow which was a very avant-garde… KE: Avant-garde chamber music, that’s how I would describe the great Henry Cow. [Laughter].

SC: [Laughs]. So, we acquired the oddest team, really. KE: Maybe this is a way of helping us to understand who the Film and History Project were. You told me once that the Film and History Project numbered around 200 people in total. SC: It was about 200 people that worked on it, yes. KE: How did that work? SC: What I should have said was that we never intended The Song of the Shirt, for a single second, to be a feature film. We just did it the way anybody who is a graduate or a student might say, “I’m going to do a project for a week or two, and I’m going to look at the 1840s, and canals and bridges”. It just began as a research project trying to say that history isn’t fixed, which we’d all been brought up in a much more conventional education to think. So, we had a lot of people working on graphics, filming graphics, filming print from parliamentary documents so close that the ink breaks down into random patterns, or filming sentimental pictures of women so close up that it becomes abstract, or breaking down music into those little skittering grumbling little notes of Lindsay Cooper’s. Everything was deconstruction. It was the great age of deconstructing. We had a lot of people work on music, graphics, photography within the film. There’s a whole series of photographs that accompanies a subtext in the film done by a photographer called Sarah McCarthy who had her team. KE: Sarah McCarthy’s photographs were featured in Screen Education, autumn 1980, number 36. She has an essay called ‘Photo Practice 2’ and on the first page there are some of her images from The Song of the Shirt. SC: Lindsay Cooper would do the soundtrack. Her original song, called The Song of the Shirt, was adapted from a poem written by Thomas Hood, which Lindsay arranged; you keep hearing the little refrain of the song until, finally, at the end of the film you hear the full song. There’s the fact that this was made before video. This is the

same time as early community video. You had these Portapaks — this huge kind of thing [laughs] on your shoulder. It was like a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box with a lens at the front, a really early video camera. That technique of having those images on video screens, and filming off the screens, moving the camera around all the monitors, behind them, onto text and then back onto the video which would have titling within them, and getting all those layers — we were pretty much the first people to do that. They were all quite artisanal processes, and maybe that’s worth remembering about filming in the 1970s; it was very slow, because nothing was digital, nothing was instant. You had real-time film and real-time tape and real-time editing. Then printing in some darkroom in the middle of nowhere, physically bringing that back and putting it on the screen. The whole process of filming was really slow and research-based, with all these layers and levels. So, we started thinking we’d just do this for a couple of weeks because we thought it was interesting, and it just grew and grew and grew. The first part is more about labour and trade unions. The second part is more about national politics; Chartism, Owen-ism, and the broader political sphere. And the third part is more about women and sexuality. We intended it as three related films to show in different contexts, to feminist groups. We were taking a 16mm projector, literally carrying it to every venue [laughs]. That was what the independent sector was. It was all very much slower, and more focused, I suppose. Then what happened was we discovered there’s a thing called the Kinematograph Rental Society [KRS], which may still exist under another name. It was an exhibitors’ organisation whereby any film that was ever going to be released in Britain was entitled to a press screening. I don’t know if it exists in that form anymore, it probably doesn’t, but because we’d made something that happened to be roughly feature-length and because it was being shown at somewhere like the ICA that counted as a “cinema”, we suddenly found that we had a feature film, because we qualified for this kind of screening. So we showed the film and there were film critics from the Times, the Observer, the Guardian, and they all reviewed it as a feature. Then it became known as a feature film — but we’d meant it

to be shown in three parts. The Times said that it’s as if somebody researched history for several years, then threw all the papers up into the air in despair, and collected them up as they landed. [Laughter]. I was very flattered by that as I was getting into the idea of punk and modernism, and I thought “Yeah that’s cool then!” KE: I think that’s totally wrong. SC: The film is actually very orchestrated, yes. KE: To make a work that starts out in 1979 then travels to 1840 has the effect of making 1979 a costume drama. Opening a continuity between the present and 1840 estranges the present. The opening shot shows a woman crossing the road, preoccupied. We see her walk under the bridge and then re-emerge in a Victorian dress. This is not a costume drama or a historical romance; more, a method for dramatizing the persistence of the past upon the present. The costumes are neither escapist nor romanticist. Instead, they are a burden on the women. Last month, the journalist Jeremy Seabrook published a book entitled The Song of the Shirt, which examines the recent collapse of the Rana Plaza buildings in Dakha, Bangladesh, that killed 1300 garment workers, most of whom were subcontracted to British companies. In the early hours of Dakha, a city of four million people becomes a city of female workers that bear the brunt of this division of labour. Could you talk more about anachronism that distinguishes The Song of the Shirt from other documentaries and dramas before and since? SC: [Laughs]. The first thing I’d say just very briefly is that London in the 1970s looked very different. There’s a brilliant catalogue for an exhibition called Goodbye to London, an Astrid Proll exhibition. It has all these pictures of London in the 1970s, and all the places that are now yuppie paradises were very industrial, poor, sooty, dirty and dark. It still felt much more like a Victorian city. All those canals — I mean, that’s all Camden Lock before it was done up. That’s now where Good Morning breakfast TV is, in that Camden building. I would just say that: that London actually looked like a derelict Victorian bomb site, a lot of it, in the 1970s. Whole districts of

London were still quite slummy and poor. So, you did feel in the 1970s like you were living in the remnants of the great Victorian age, and you kept thinking, what’s gone wrong? What’s going to come next? I think one of the things I’ve struggled with since as a feature filmmaker is that I’ve got this historical project that I so want to do as a feature film, but in the current conventional cinema market I just cannot properly find a way to do it, in a way that doesn’t romanticise women and turn itself into period fiction. It’s harder in the mass market to make something that moves between historical eras and non-matching signifiers. For instance, in the train sequence, with the parliamentarians going on their trains on the old North London line, they’re in Victorian costume but you can see quite clearly out of the window. Sometimes you get ten seconds of pure Victorian building, then you suddenly get a Tesco or something. We liked that. We wanted to keep this sense of fluxing in and out of history. It’s very hard to let any big commercial company let you do that today. I guess I was proud of the fact that in that time you could experiment. People would often say to you as a film student that you can make the difference between the past and present in making the present colour and the past black-and-white! That’s precisely what we didn’t want to do, because we wanted to put it all into the same register. It immediately does reference, I think, Soviet cinema, in a way. KE: Which Soviet cinema were you thinking of? SC: Weirdly I would always have thought I was a Vertov kind of girl [laughs], but looking at it, it is quite Eisenstein, because it is about the epic movement of people. Eisenstein often does have women, with the famous scene on the steps, the woman and the pram, that sense of just ordinary people signifying historical movements. So, I think the black-and-white helped us reduce everything to a texture. You’ve got the texture of all the lithographs which you can see, you’ve got the texture of all the parliamentary documents, the texture of the fabric, and the actual stitching. You’ve got that sense of stitching and writing as being similar things. There’s sewing and clothes-making as text.

[Refers to image displayed]. There is also my modern response to the film, an exhibition called Fournier Street, which I made last year in a series of stills. We’ve got the seamstress creeping out of the Spitalfields house that she lived in in Song of the Shirt. I wanted to try and create some story about international capital in a place where you’ve now got the City of London. You can see the City. In the 1840s, it was women in the clothes trade in Spitalfields, then it was the Jewish refugees in the 1920s and 1930s, then it was the Bangladeshi community, and now the clothes trade is mainly Nigerian. Spitalfields has always been the centre for that very poor work, as you described, but it is bang up against the City of London. KE: At the RCA you met your cinematographer Jonathan Collinson, who was the most important cinematographer of the British independent movement. You can see his work in the films of Marc Karlin, whose influence you can see in the early work of Black Audio Film Collective. You, Jonathan Collinson, and Jonathan Curling invented this formal way of working in which the camera tracks from lithographs to videos moving through in a darkened space. You invented that astonishing opening scene in which the camera tracks towards the portable television monitor that sits on a table in a café from which a woman speaks, superimposed by quotations and gradually crowded out by Cooper’s squabbling oboe. It is as if the emphasis on movement alludes towards the direction of history. Do these movements owe a lot to Marcel Ophüls’ films such as Letter from an Unknown Woman, or The Earrings of Madame de…? What can you tell us about these cinematographic inventions? SC: There are three or four specific inventions. I might just start with the Ophüls one. The whole starting point for us would be these huge parliamentary inquiries that were done into the lives of women and children. I think they were famous because they were the first time when children became almost fetishized. So, when we shot the actual tribunal, we used a huge hall which was part of the old Regent Polytechnic and it had this amazing chequered carpet, a chess-

board carpet about as wide as this room. What we did was we put the two parliamentarians conducting the questions to the seamstresses right at that end — the guys we’d already seen on the train — and the women that we’d seen on the canals right at that end. So, we put them way further apart than they probably would have been. Then, the whole camera sequence was a figure of eight, so that the camera was moving. It’s really hard to do a figure of eight in all directions when you’ve got tracks. The camera would track around where the guys were asking questions, then it would loop back and track around and behind the women who were answering, and back. The reason we did that was to undermine the idea that there was some absolute truth. If you look at what is said, the men are not listening to what the women are saying [laughs] — and the other way around. The parliamentarians would say, “Do you attend the sermon and church?” By which they really mean, “Are you Christian? Are you moral? Are you good?” The women say, “Well mostly we work all night on a Saturday and sometimes we fall asleep, then she got up late, and so I couldn’t go because…” They’re speaking in a completely different discourse. We didn’t want to use continuity editing because that is what confirms naturalism. If you have a shot of anyone looking, whatever you cut to next you’ll assume it’s what they’re looking at. You consolidate the world you’re in. But if you’ve got these constant loops, going into monitors, out of that and round the corner, through the canal, round the courtroom then you’ve got this constant sense that you can’t trust anything. The meaning of everything is always shifting. That flow, isn’t really how Ophüls uses it. I love Ophüls but he uses it in a way that’s just purely sensual and gorgeous. But we used it to keep making people not have a point when they could go “Ah! So, he says that, so she looks frightened”. I don’t like that kind of grammar. KE: To displace shot-countershot you came up with this travelling, tracking motion. SC: Yes. It’s edited in-camera with these very big set pieces. I think strangely we did more innovation in that aspect than in something

specific with the camera itself. It was more in the mise-en-scène. KE: Were the historians on set with you? SC: Yes, a lot of them were in The Song of the Shirt! We didn’t have proper actors so anybody that stood still long enough we put them in a bonnet and made them be in the film [laughs]. In fact, Mandy Merck, who is quite a famous feminist theoretician, was advising on it, and I said “Look I haven’t got time to listen, you’re going to have to come to the set”, and she said, “I’m not wearing a fucking bonnet! I’m a lesbian, I’m not going to… Sexual politics…!” [Laughter]. If you look closely at this one shot you can see all these disgruntled film theorists going “Grr, I hate this!” [Laughter]. Some of the actors were professional, but we couldn’t enter that professional economy of working with professional actors. So, quite a few of the people in it, like in that whole section about Chartism, that guy was a radical, an organiser on one of the big council estates in South London, and he said, “Great, I’m going to be a Chartist”. So, he would argue back with his lines and say “Chartism didn’t mean that!” So it’s not just like having an actor who says what you want them to say. The actors would be constantly saying, “I disagree! I think we need to say this!” KE: So there were actors but they were by no means the norm. All kinds of people were invited to perform actions rather than act. So, you weren’t interested in acting as such. Is that why there is a declamatory style sometimes and then a mumbling style, where people speak to themselves? Some actors are repressed and others speak as if they were on stage. SC: The thing that was least satisfactory for me about The Song of the Shirt, and about all of us working in the 1970s, was acting. I think we did quite well to unpick the whole notion of history in the present. The problem with acting in that period was that the “left” zeitgeist feeling was very much Brecht. Everything was Brecht, Brecht, Brecht. Everything was about distanciation and anti-naturalism. You had these performers making it clear they were performers, “I’m an actor, I’m speaking a voice, don’t believe me, and don’t get sucked into the ideology”. But that gives you a huge problem when you’re

working with performers. I can see why there needs to be a critique of performance but what I don’t think we ever cracked is something about performance. KE: If you’re working with between 100 and 200 radical historians [SC laughs], there must have been many conflicting positions within your group. And different Marxist positions occupied by you and your friends. What were the major tensions between positions and how did they play themselves out? SC: There were two broad schools of feminism in that period which were socialist feminism and radical feminism. Socialist feminism was very much about aligning itself with trade unions, with the Labour Party, or left of the Labour Party, to say “Let’s sort out this issue: women should have these kinds of rights and should be equal in these kinds of ways”. Radical feminism was critiquing the notion of separating labour into paid work, unpaid work, industrial capitalised work, and domestic work. They tended to be quite strongly in opposition to each other. In the broader “left” world of the 1970s, I guess what’s reflected in the film is the Chartists, a movement that wanted universal suffrage for men, because you had to have above a certain income, even as a man, to vote. Women didn’t get suffrage until, I think, 1928. So, again there was one faction in politics of saying, all we need is the vote, first men and then women. Then there was the Owenite movement which was founded by Robert Owen. He had a whole theory that people shouldn’t live in a cash economy at all, saying that if a worker spends a day making a pair of shoes, they should be able to exchange that for a cloth cap or something that another worker also took a day to make. You exchange products based on how many hours’ labour it took to make things. In the film you’ve got both those systems. KE: You yourself were affiliated to Big Flame. SC: Yes, I was.

KE: Maybe if you could explain who Big Flame were and their position within the Marxist culture of the time. Many critics talk about socialist friendship; I want to understand the Marxist friendships that were happening. SC: Big Flame was an odd group because it had this Trotskyist politics, but it was not very rhetorical. In those days, a lot of people were still in the Communist Party because they hadn’t given up when they saw what was going to happen in Eastern Europe. There were a lot of breakaway Trotskyist groups, there was IS (International Socialists), IMG (International Marxist Group), WRP (Workers Revolutionary Party); a lot of actors were in WRP, the Redgraves and people like that. Big Flame was a much more “from-the-groundup” sort of community. It was much closer, in fact, to Stuart Hall’s kind of values; it was popular culture. There was a really famous TV series done in the late 1970s, set in Liverpool, called Boys from the Blackstuff. I don’t know if the writer was Big Flame, but that was very close to Big Flame kind of politics — it was grassroots, quite popular culture-based, and very much along that sort of Stuart Hall line that you have to have a big, attractive popular culture to take on the big Thatcher. So I was attached to Big Flame but they were looking for, probably, a slightly more populist rhetoric. Part of me was pulled that way, and part of me, because I was Royal College of Art-trained, was being pulled into this kind of textual work that was deliberately difficult to read. So I had the art-school values against the Big Flame values. A lot of the History Workshop Journal people were Communist Party, and they had quite a traditional notion of what working-class history would be. They almost wanted it to be people on cobbled streets talking about being seamstresses, or bicyclemakers or something. I should just say that the point of the whole film was precisely to put all these people in dialogue with each other. From Screen theorists who were just translating a lot of early works on Soviet cinema, through straight Marxist history, through all the kinds of feminism, through to avantgarde art, through to the actual women garment workers, through to the trade unions — we were working with the garment workers’ union — the point of the project

was to make those people speak to each other. The point was that we were deliberately trying to cross the boundaries between all those groups. In my asylum project that I’ve been working on for the last seven years, I’m doing exactly the same. When I show the Hamedullah film, I’ve got lawyers, social activists, NGOs, therapists, refugee kids who don’t really speak to each other. The film is there to deliberately cause all these discourses to be thrown up in the air and land how they will. KE: You travelled the country with The Song of the Shirt, screening sections of the film to different audiences and holding discussions. To provide some context for this social practice, I’m going to read a passage from a substantial essay that you and Jonathan wrote for Screen in 1979 which was called ‘On Authorship’. You wrote that: When filmmakers accompany their films, acting as their own distributors, exhibitors, it was principally because they can then engage discursively with audiences, resisting the authorial reading, displacing it into political and aesthetic discourses. Thus, although such a practice might appear to emphasise the authorial reading, and in certain contexts, it certainly does, as in arts galleries, its validity lies precisely in the way authors being present can argue to disclaim the role of author: obliging a discussion of the production of the text and so on, at the expense of the unproblematic pleasure of author-to-author recognition as it operates in arts-to-artist gallery discussions. Filmmaker plus film tours as sponsored by the Arts Council are therefore a welcome though problematic form of funding for filmmakers. On the one hand it is useful for them to have the exhibition of their film supported, but on the other it is necessary to resist the artistic ideology which underwrites such a policy. Indeed, this is but a particular example of one of the major contradictions in which independent filmmakers are placed. That is, being required on the one hand to emphasise their authority if they wish to obtain production funding from cultural institutions, but on the other wishing to displace their authorial position in their political

engagements with institutional audiences, for example trade unions and women’s groups. What you diagnose in this essay were the dilemmas faced by filmmakers from the IFA. Was that passage a self-portrait of what it was like to take Song of the Shirt on the road? SC: I think so. I should say, if anyone wants to look it up I wrote another article for a film magazine called Vertigo called ‘Dancing at the Crossroads’ a few years ago. That title is taken from what people did in rural Ireland when they weren’t allowed to have parties in any villages, they would all meet at the crossroads and dance there to escape the police telling them they couldn’t party. So, that was my kind of metaphor. I think that “dancing at the crossroads” is kind of apparent in that essay. The crossroads is that you either become an auteur — that’s what Sally Potter and Derek Jarman did. Sally and Derek decided to become artists and market themselves in that way to fund their future work. The rest of us who stayed in collectives in that period didn’t, because we did find that interfered in the way people related to us and to the ideas. We saw this as being an open text in three parts and we expected to keep remaking it and changing it in the light of what the audiences had to say about it. In fact we started showing it before 1979, we were showing it all the time when it was being made. KE: Nightcleaners famously incited a series of confrontations between those that wanted a campaigning film and those that embraced its experimentation with form and medium. Did these kinds of tensions emerge in audiences faced with The Song of the Shirt? SC: They did, a bit less so. I remember very distinctly being at the ICA, which was really the focus of where we all went in London. I remember Marc Karlin, of Berwick Street Collective, standing up and presenting Nightcleaners, and there were actually these very poorly paid women cleaners in the audience. He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket. He had a very eloquent voice, saying “Well we filmed with these nightcleaners…” And there was just heckling from

these nightcleaners saying things like “Who the hell are you to tell us what we think and who we are?” Even though, in fact, it was feminists like Sheila Rowbotham and others who actually did all the interviewing in that film. I thought, I’m never going to be that person in that velvet jacket. I became very anti-auteur. All the time that I worked in documentary, I just didn’t connect with the notion of the author. I’m from a very working-class background. That’s why I was very nervous and shy about saying “I’m the author of this work”, and also because so many people did work on it. It wasn’t a collective, that’s why we called it a “project”, because even a collective is an author; you might have a collective of three people or five people, but we said that everyone that worked on it was an author, because they were. People would stand up and say “I don’t agree with what you say about Chartism, I’m going to rewrite it”. Martha at the beginning of the film, she just had her say, we didn’t tell her what to say. So it was quite documentary. KE: Your essay on authorship begins with a critique of film theory by arguing that the independent film sector does not exist to provide film theory with a set of texts on which to perform various critical operations. SC: …God we were so snarky… KE: …That sounds as if you were a theoretically informed filmmaker at odds with certain theorists. SC: We were right in the middle between grassroots — not even trade-union politics, but non-unionised, real underclass kind of politics on the one hand, and Screen magazine on the other. We really were fighting and engaged in all quarters. * Audience member 1: I’m interested in how when you were talking about The Song of the Shirt you made this analogy about how the language being used then was similar to the language of immigration

now. In this current film about asylum seekers, are some of the strategies that you used around that being applied here? SC: That’s a very interesting question because those Victorian women were migrants from other parts of England, into London. So, it’s a very similar language. I’m making another film about asylum, but the one I made called Hamedullah: The Road Home, what turned out to be interesting was when he went back. He was deported, because these young kids that come on their own are protected under the Children Act, and as soon as they’re 18 they’re picked up by G4S and bundled off into detention, and they’re deported from the cargo terminal of Stanstead every other Tuesday night — which is what I’m working to fight against. Audience member 2: Given the fact that the film is conceived initially as three different parts, have you thought about reordering the film now? Moving those around, or screening the parts separately again to different audiences and seeing what happens? SC: That’s another very good question. Rather than show the three parts, what I would do is upload that film in the same way that I’m doing with all my refugee material, into a system where the viewer can actually create a flow of material, not just jump in and out with a lot of tags. That’s something that I’d like to do.

10 “Vague Post-Punk Memories” A Lecture byTom Vague, and Conversation with Mark Fisher (11|12|14) The fanzine or zine was one of the most important forms in which postpunk culture circulated. Many of the most renowned post-punk writers and artists — including Paul Morley, Jon Savage, and Linder Sterling — began as the producers of zines. But zines were important in their own right, as spaces in which a post-punk network was con- solidated, and new kinds of discourse could proliferate. Tom Vague started to produce Vague at the height of post-punk, in the South West of England. Vague’s preoccupations follow the rhythms of the wider post-punk culture — initial enthusiasm for groups such as Adam and the Ants is followed quickly by disillusionment. This reflects the volatile mood of the time, but also the speed with which the underground crossed over into mainstream pop, as antagonism turned into an embrace of the mainstream. As Vague developed, it kept faith with the spirit of post-punk experimentation even as it widened the focus beyond music. Later issues of the zine included long-form articles on psycho-geography, situationist theory and cyberpunk. Tom Vague’s lecture on the history of Vague is also a very particular history of post-punk culture and its aftermath in the UK.

Vague 1, November 1979 Tom Vague: Vague fanzine was founded in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher came to power, at Salisbury College of Technology and Art in Wiltshire — by me, the illustrator/cartoonist Perry Harris, and a Dutch guy called Iggy Zevenbergen. It was done as a “postpunk popular-modernist search for the new” — or for something to do other than attempt to play guitar or sing — rather than with any literary or artistic aspirations. We started Vague in the wake of the first Futurama post-punk science-fiction music festival in Leeds featuring Public Image and Joy Division. Thus it was inspired by post-punk and reggae; Adam and the Ants, the Banshees, the Clash, Joy Division, PIL, the Pop Group and the Slits, and Tim Aylet’s Channel 4 fanzine. The Vague launch gig was at Mere Youth Club in Wiltshire, 20 miles from Stonehenge, featuring the Sterile Androids from Winchester,

Vague was named as a DIY post-punk spoof of Vogue magazine, and was closely linked to the principles of vagrancy and vagary. It featured ‘The Vagrants’ cartoon strip by Perry. The same year as the fanzine started, the porn mag Club International featured a Voguespoof Vague magazine cover, and the VAG typeface was designed for Volkswagen. Vague is a real surname found in Cornwall, and the Vagrants were a real mid-60s rock and soul group from Long Island, New York — described as “the bad boys of garage-punk”, and an influence of the Ramones — who reformed in the 90s as the New Vagrants to record a 21st Century Vagrants album. Vague wasn’t a punk-rock fanzine historically speaking, it was post-punk — but it had authentic irreverent punk-rock attitude, semiliterate stream-of-consciousness prose, and experimental DIY antiVogue-style design. We didn’t use the term “post-punk” then, or “progressive”, but from ’78 we were into punk groups that were more experimental or avant-garde, not traditional punk rock. The first issue consisted of two offset litho-printed sheets of A3, one green, one black, folded and stapled, featuring record and gig reviews of Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Adam and the Ants, the Specials, Madness, the Selecter, Swell Maps, and Red Crayola. On the back cover of Vague 1, Iggy, Spanish Alf and the black post-punk artist Dave Somerville are pictured outside the Salisbury College common room between the tech and art college buildings. The first issue was designed and printed by Mark Cross from the art college, who went on to design album sleeves, and typed by Sharon Clarkson. The second one was photocopied in a shop. I was at the tech college doing a building-studies course but the other punks in Salisbury were art students. Perry’s ‘Lovable Spiky Tops’ cartoons documented the evolution of Vague and the Salisbury punk scene, as we attempted to put on gigs and avoid bikers, Teds, rockabillies, squaddies, smoothies etc. The first cartoon was about the adventures of a PIL Public Image Limited badge. A lot of Vague fanzine production work was done on the train between Salisbury and Gillingham in Dorset, where I lived. We also

covered the West Country punk scene, focused on Bournemouth, where we saw the Clash, the Damned, the Jam, the Banshees, Buzzcocks etc. at the Winter Gardens or Village Bowl, and also gigs in Southampton, Bristol, and London. I had done proto-Vague “how’s-the-tour-going?” interviews with the Jam and Eater at the Bournemouth Village and we had ligged with XTC and the Pop Group in Bristol. In 1978 we started planning to do an Ants/Banshees/Public Image post-punk fanzine. We were particularly into Adam and the Ants after first seeing them at Salisbury tech college during an antipunk bikers’ riot, when they epitomised post-punk and described themselves as “heavy punk funk”. We went on expeditions in Minis to see the Ants on the Young Parisians and Zerox tours, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I had a grey and yellow post-punk Mini. In Vague 1 there were reviews of the Banshees and the Cure at Southampton Gaumont on the Join Hands tour, the Ants at the Electric Ballroom, the Specials, Madness, and the Selecter 2-Tone tour, and the Swell Maps and Red Crayola Rough Trade tour in Bournemouth. The first albums reviewed were The Specials, the Banshees’ Join Hands, the Ruts’ The Crack, and the Human League’s Reproduction, which began “The Human League are another one of those synthesiser bands…” The first singles were the Slits’ ‘Typical Girls’, Kraftwerk’s ‘Showroom Dummies’, and Salisbury band the QTs’ ‘Savage in the City’. Mark P’s Sniffin’ Glue fanzine was the primary influence on Vague and all other British fanzines, though I copied Ripped & Torn more and only kept scrapbooks in ’77, which were more footballthan music-related. The first copy of Sniffin’ Glue I came into possession of was via my biker mate Derek Skinner (who was known as Skin), from when he went to see John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the Count Bishops, and the Boys at Bournemouth Winter Gardens. Vague fanzine was first encouraged by Mayo Thompson of Red Crayola and Sue Donne at the Rough Trade shop, although it wasn’t exclusively a Rough Trade post-punk fanzine. Rough Trade was founded in 1976 by Geoff Travis in a hippy headshop at 202

Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill. Here they established the independent, indie, or alternative rock music tradition in most of its idiosyncratic post-punk forms — the deconstructed DIY rad-fem pop of the Raincoats, Essential Logic, and Kleenex, Swell Maps and the Monochrome Set’s male equivalent, the radical avant-garde Scritti Politti and Red Crayola, the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, the avant-garde radical rock of the Mekons and Gang of Four, and radical trad rock represented by Stiff Little Fingers. Most of the original Rough Trade customers were either starting a punk band, a fanzine, or a reggae sound-system; including Mark P, the editor of Sniffin’ Glue, Jon Savage (London’s Outrage), and Jane Suck. Rough Trade sold the New York photo-strip comic-fanzine Punk and became the mailing address/office of London’s photocopied answer, Sniffin’ Glue, which inspired a deluge of Xeroxed efforts produced by punk fans — as opposed to uncritical fan newsletters — which were distributed by Rough Trade. By 1979 the competition was Ripped & Torn/Kill Your Pet Puppy, Search & Destroy/Re/search, Alternative Sounds, Biff, Chainsaw, City Fun, the beer-zine Ded Yampy, 48 Thrills, Fumes, Granite City, Grinding Halt, Guttersnipe, the glossy In The City, Intensive Care, It’s Different for Girls, It Ticked and Exploded, Tony Fletcher’s Jamming (the most successful fanzine), Mike Scott of the Waterboys’ Jungleland, Richard North’s Kick, Killin Time, Making Time, Mersey Sound, Next Big Thing, NMX, No Cure, On, Mick Mercer’s Panache, Peroxide, The Poser photo-fanzine, Simon Dwyer’s Rapid Eye Movement (from Brighton, the hippest post-punk fanzine), Rising Free, Safe as Milk, Shake, South Circular, Stabmental, The Story So Far, Sunset Gun from Glasgow, Ten Commandments, the anarchopunk Toxic Graffiti, Trouser Press, Viz, Vox, and Wool City Rocker.

Vague 2, December 1979 Vague 2, from December 1979, the hippest, most post-punk issue featuring Joy Division and Gang of Four, was also the worst produced. Our pioneering post-punk fanzine didn’t get off to a very good technological start. After all the available typewriters ceased working properly, I ended up writing some bits of it not very well, and then the photocopiers printed it too small. Perry’s ‘Vague Beginnings’ cartoon in this issue features Iggy, Perry, and me saying, “Salisbury’s boring. There’s nothing to do. Let’s start a fanzine. What shall we call it? Let’s base it on a real magazine…” The first issues were co-edited by Perry, Iggy, and me. I assumed more or less total editorial control by the third issue, with

my girlfriend who was called Jane Austin (with an I not an E) and my next-door neighbour Chris Johnson as assistant editors. There was a “how’s-the-tour-going?” Vague interview with Joy Division by Chris Johnson, who was working at their hotel, after Ian Curtis had an epileptic fit at the end of their set at Bournemouth Winter Gardens, supporting Buzzcocks. I did a rave review of Joy Division, at the expense of Buzzcocks, who I considered too pop at this stage though I had been and am a fan of them as well. Our first proper interviews were with Gang of Four and Red Crayola at Bournemouth Town Hall, at the time of the former’s Entertainment album. The local post-punk heroes Program, from New Milton near Southampton, who we championed to not much avail, were obviously influenced by Ultravox/John Foxx and Tubeway Army/Gary Numan. They cited their influences as Wire, Gloria Mundi, This Heat, who they supported in Bournemouth, and Magazine — bands “going in many different directions and exploring many possibilities”, rather than “boring narrow-minded bands like the Angelic Upstarts and UK Subs”, with “no direction, no future” — but they insisted they were “more of a rock band than an electronic band”. The post-punk Salisbury bands, rounded up by Mike Dyer, were the Kitchens, who had a couple of singles out, Identity Crisis, the QTs, and the Crimmos. There was also Stalag 44 from Warminster, and Frank Stocker the Vague hippy correspondent on magic mushrooms. The single of the month was ‘Transmission’ by Joy Division. Perry’s review of ‘London Calling’ was: “Isn’t that good but the Clash might get a hit out of it. The reggae B-side is far better.” The albums were Public Image Limited’s Metal Box and Adam and the Ants’ Dirk Wears White Sox.

Vague 3, March 1980 Issue 3 from March 1980 was the first one printed at Skittles in Gillingham, Dorset, by the railway station. Our hippy printers Rob and Sue, formerly of Butler’s Wharf in London where the Pistols played, produced the rest of the Vague fanzines and the first annuals. Vagues were mostly typed cut-and-pasted with proper scissors and glue, and Letraset, and stapled in Mere, in my bedroom, and the Ship pub. This issue was more post-punk populist than popular-modernist I think, with the Ramones, the Clash at the time of London Calling, the Boys, the Softies, and the Tours; an article on decentralisation, the Kitchens, Mental, and Toyah single reviews.

In the Ramones’ End of the Century/‘Rock ’n’ Roll High School’ report, the Vague pop sub-cult conflict between post-punk and trad punk rock continued. Putting the case for the latter, Kid Reid of the Boys introduced the Ramones backstage at the Bournemouth Stateside (formerly the Village) saying: “I don’t like weird stuff. I think it’s easy for a band to be experimental. The hardest thing to do is write a short pop song. I can really relate to the Ramones.” But I gave the Clash an unfavourable review for being too trad rock. Ironically, after my post-punk loss of faith in them, I went on to do the London Calling 25th anniversary CD booklet notes in 2004, when they gave me my biggest break in the music biz. The Vague 3 album of the month was The Raincoats — Mike Dyer’s ‘Homage to the Raincoats’ article summed up their post-punk anti-rock appeal with: Punk’s not dead, the Raincoats live, their spontaneous exciting grass roots music is subversive activity, revolt against the bigness and sophistication of the music industry. The Raincoats are not glossy or sophisticated, there’s a roughness and crudity in their sound that’s alive in contrast to the technical perfection of more successful music. The Raincoats often sound out of tune, play wrong notes, and scrape and grate their guitar strings. Like Rough Trade they are an antidote to the over big and too influential companies which manipulate consumer taste into conformist trends. We promoted post-punk village-hall gigs featuring Program and went on the road with them around the West Country. The Shaftesbury gig was in the town hall at the top of Gold Hill — of Hovis advert and Thomas Hardy fame.

Vague 4, April 1980 Vague 4: the most local West Country issue and the best produced, featuring Mikey Dread of Dread at the Controls and Clash tour fame, and Talisman (formerly Revelation Rockers) by our reggae correspondent Andy Kelford from Ringwood. By then Iggy and Sharon were only listening to reggae, Big Youth, Mighty Diamonds, Dillinger, at their bed-sit — the nearest thing we had to a blues club in Salisbury. Animals and Men from Frome, featuring Nigel House who went on to Rough Trade shop fame, took their name from the Adam and the Ants Futurist manifesto song. They were influenced by the Ants but were closer to the Monochrome Set or Psychedelic Furs, and

came up with the post-punk hit singles ‘Don’t Misbehave in the New Age’ and ‘Terraplane Fixation’. Moskow were the most successful West Country post-punk band with their ‘The Man from UNCLE’ single. Claire of the Wait from Wales, who we interviewed at Wincanton racecourse, is pictured with one of the Psychedelic Furs on the cover. There were also the Kitchens, the QTs, Lemmy of Motörhead, the local hippy George Hart of Heap’s Grandma Moses, the Bath bands Commercial Viability, 530 Boots, and Skitzoid, Stiff Little Fingers, and Plain Characters. The first review of Vague by Kris Needs in Zigzag magazine was: “covers a boring SalisburyBournemouth sort of area with enthusiasm”. Simon Dwyer, the editor of the leading post-punk fanzine REM/Rapid Eye Movement, wrote in his Sounds fanzine round-up: Every day the seditious seeds planted by Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn bear some unlikely fruit. Every day another young editor staggers proudly under the Westway with a new bag of radical reading matter, making the three-minute trip from one bright spark of the current explosion, Better Badges, to the other, Rough Trade… Rough Trade’s mail-order generation dumped passive consumerism and rattled off reams of rubbish in a search for identity, purpose and fun… In every corner of the country there seems to be something going on… Wiltshire’s Vauge [sic]. Joly MacFie’s Better Badges at the Bell Press, 286 Portobello Road also printed fanzines, which were distributed by the Rough Trade Fanzine Co-op distribution network. This operated on an anarchocapitalist “pay-as-you-sell” basis, or the remainder were sold back to the editors at cost price — thus encouraging and orchestrating the post-punk fanzine boom inspired by Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn. At its height in 1980, Sue Donne at the Rough Trade shop was receiving 12 new titles a week; most of which were taken on to be distributed around the nationwide network of record and book shops.

Vague 5, July 1980 Vague 5: an Adam and the Ants special featuring the Vague Adam and the Ants interview and Ants Invasion 1980 tour report, as they went pop. By then, as far as Adam Ant and the post-punk guitarist Marco Pirroni were concerned, punks had turned into hippies. After Adam said: “They’ve all got too fucking esoteric, just crawled up their own arseholes, punks have become hippies in the last nine months”. I asked: “What about Lydon and PIL?” His response was: “John Rotten’s a poet. It depends whether you like poetry or not. He made a very good first single and I haven’t liked anything since.” This issue also featured an interview with the Cure, ‘A Curious Day Out in Bournemouth’, when they were at their post-punk peak at

the time of ‘A Forest’, and I met Paul Morley backstage but didn’t get on with him. There were also interviews with the Passions, the Human League, and the Scottish Scars, who we liked but didn’t get on with very well either, an Ian Curtis obituary and Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle film review. There was a piece on the Undertones, whom I didn’t interview, but they dedicated ‘Teenage Kicks’ to Vague fanzine at Bournemouth Winter Gardens. The issue also featured the Specials, the Bodysnatchers, and the Go-Go’s, Mike Scott of the Waterboys’ Another Pretty Face, and a report on an anti-vivisection demo against the Porton Down government/military science centre near Salisbury. Vague 6, September 1980 Vague 6 featured the Pop Group and the Slits at Alexandra Palace — where they played along with the Raincoats, Essential Logic, the Au-Pairs, and John Cooper Clarke at the communist Morning Star

50th anniversary agit-post-punk festival. We did these centrespread photos, after we didn’t manage to get an interview with the Pop Group, the premier post-punk group of the West Country — but I went on to do the press release for the We Are All Prostitutes 25th anniversary re-release. There was a largely unfavourable anti-anarcho-punk report on Crass at Southampton, Bournemouth, and the 1980 Stonehenge festival bikers riot. Also Devo, Gary Glitter, Martian Dance, the Modettes, the Jam, the Vapors, UK Subs, Cosmetics, Silent Guests, and Blaue Reiter, Michael Moorcock’s Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle book, Breaking Glass, fanzines A to Z, and the Vague gig at Shaftesbury Town Hall featuring Program and the Squad from Southampton, reviewed by Jane Austin. Vague 7, November 1980

Vague 7 was the programme for Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier tour in November–December 1980; issue 5 reprinted with a different colour cover and some extras, the Ants interview and reviews, Animals and Men, the Human League, the Cure, the Passions, Scars, and Another Pretty Face. This was the most successful, best-selling issue. Vague 8, December 1980 Tony Fletcher of Jamming fanzine wrote: Vague is growing a deserved reputation as one of the best about; in fact could prove the eventual successor to Ripped & Torn. It’s frequently scruffy, badly printed and incomplete, but must be the most regular fast-growing fanzine

about. It’s got that hard punk attitude, lots of colour and plenty of spirit. Suffered even more than Panache from being an Antperson to the extent that it sold 4,000 copies of an Ants special on their last tour, and then spent the whole of the next issue slagging them off. Adam Ant said of Vague: “The kids like it”, and he was quoted in the Fanzine of Noise as saying “the journalist he most respected was Pete Scott and the fanzine he most admired was the excellent Vague”. Then they said: “Well, I hope he listened to what Pete Scott said in Vague 8.” Vague 8 contained the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier tour report and Pete Scott’s critical album review. Somewhere up north in a bus station on the Ants tour, I recall meeting two post-punk kids going to see Ludus (the group of the Buzzcocks artist and Morrissey associate Linder Sterling) and being put to shame that I wasn’t following such a hip/avant-garde/obscure/cult group anymore. There were interviews with Ian McCullough of Echo and the Bunnymen and Pete Murphy of Bauhaus — I think the latter’s classic ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ has stood the test of time as post-punk dub although their cool rating slumped somewhat in the proceeding goth years — a review of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, the Specials, the Skids, Program, the Mo-dettes, the Revillos, and a report on the second Futurama post-punk Apocalypse Now festival at Leeds, in which I slagged off U2. I thought the Velvet Underground-influenced Wasted Youth stole the show, writing: “I much prefer this new psychedelia (especially under another name) to the grossly overrated U2 — Why, oh why, did it have to be them and not any other of the aforementioned that kept going?”

Vague 9, March 1981 Vague 9 was meant to be the programme for Bow-wow-wow’s early 1981 tour, which was cancelled. The tongue-in-cheek ‘Revolt into Style: New Golden Vision’ fashion issue also featured interviews with the Monochrome Set, the other Ants’ off-shoot Smiths precursors, Classix Nouveaux, Wasted Youth, God’s Toys, the Damned, Program, an Amnesty International report, Perry’s classic ‘Last of the Mohicans’ cartoon, an Adam and the Ants obituary, and 1980 Vague fashion by Jane Austin, when Vague was more fashionable than Vogue. Bow-wow-wow, the former post-punk Ants managed by Malcolm McLaren, were anti-post-punk or as they called it “coldarse new-

wave bank-clerk look, atom bombs, synth…” After the Ants’ tour ended in Manchester at the end of 1980, I jumped ship to Bow-wowwow, as they were launched as Malcolm McLar en’s post-Pistols proto-hip-hop cassette pirates. Having blown the last of the Vague money on McLaren/Westwood pirate gear at World’s End (formerly the shop Seditionaries/Sex), though Jordan bought a copy of Vague 7 and a train ticket to Torquay, I stowed away in Dave Barbe and Mathew Ashman’s hotel room to get their thoughts on sun, sea, cassette piracy, the recession, EMI, Malcolm McLaren, the Burundi beat, Adam and the Ants, their controversial Chicken mag, and World’s End. Classix Nouveaux were the least cool band I promoted, the newromantic group who formed out of X-Ray Spex. Vague new-romantic confessions: I was a Classix Nouveaux t-shirt sales-men/roadie and interviewed A Flock of Seagulls. On the Classix, Wasted Youth, and Our Daughter’s Wedding tour in 1981, I passed out in Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s studio in Liverpool after smoking a joint, causing a box of matches in my pocket to ignite and a cloud of smoke behind the mixing desk — that was the end of new-romantic post-punk for me. After the 1980 Antmania tour programme and Bow-wow-wow exclusive heyday, Vague fortunes went into decline, following a typical dystopian youth cult narrative — publication went from virtually monthly to just about bi-annually, my Ants book failed to find a publisher, the Vague Promotions gig by Martian Dance in Bournemouth was a financial disaster, and the cancelled Bow-wowwow tour dented sales of Vague 9. In early 1981 we were evicted from the Bournemouth Vague office and I was dumped by Jane Austin, for being a too-real vagrant and economically unviable. This was the end of the rural punk literary romance for me, as well as the actual punk-rock and post-punk music scenes, more or less, we had lost and it was the 80s. Punk was dead and my rural punk lit romance with Jane Austin was over — intensifying the depressing grey post-punk experience (in a rural rather than industrial setting). But this was also when Vague was properly launched nationwide and I realised my destiny — to be more of a post-punk vagrant roadie than a proper music journalist. In the wake

of a Joy Division-soundtracked rural post-punk comedown, I spent the rest of the year pretty much as a proper vagrant on the road: hitching around the country following tours of the Banshees, Bowwow-wow, Classix Nouveaux, Theatre of Hate, and Wasted Youth, selling fanzines, t-shirts, and badges. In retrospect this seems like archetypal Thatcher-youth activity but at the time we thought we were rebelling against it. Vague 10, June 1981 Vague 10 from June 1981: featuring Siouxsie and the Banshees, Public Image Limited, TV Smith, Viz Comics, the Brixton riots, Jordan, Richard Strange, and the Thompson Twins.

The Siouxsie photo at Poole Arts Centre was by Iggy Zevenbergen and the design was by me. After the interview at Poole, we followed the rest of the ‘Israel’ single tour, selling fanzines on the stall. On the next tour we returned to Poole Arts Centre with the issue, which was duly confiscated by the Banshees’ new merchandiser. Admittedly, it was meant to be an alternative tour programme but, you know, this was the Banshees — a punk band — not the Stones. However, I had met up with a former Bournemouth punkturnedskinhead outside and got him in as my plus-one on the guest list. In due course, the Banshees merchandising stall was besieged by skinheads inquiring after the latest issue of their local fanzine. The tour manager had to beg me to call them off and the Vagues were swiftly returned. There was something on the Banshees in virtually every issue, as they vied with the Ants, the Pop Group, and PIL as the premier Vague band, and their interview was the first thing I got paid for by Zigzag magazine. I think this was the point where punk rock/post-punk finally ends as the Banshees went from post-punk to goth. Virtually every Vague interview featured a fairly extensive debate about Public Image Limited, sometimes even more than the Ants. We were obsessed with PIL, even more so than the Ants in the early days, as illustrated by the PIL badge saga in Perry’s cartoon strip. We dressed more in a post-punk anti-fashion jumble-sale style influenced by them, than leather/jeans punk uniform. Vague really began as a post-punk Public Image fanzine after we saw them at the Rainbow at Christmas ’78 (Manchester and Leeds) with dayglogreen John Lydon-face screenprint shirts and posters. But the best we managed to come up with on them was Perry’s review of their second album Metal Box, and my enthusiasm for their post-punk avant-garde progressive rock was on the wane by The Flowers of Romance album.

Vague 11, January 1982 Vague 11 from 1982 was the Crass special, also featuring CND, Charles and Diana wedding, Viz Comics, the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, the Cramps, Futurama 3, Wasted Youth, the Silent Guests, and the A-Heads. By issue 11 the Vague office had a new address, 34 The Paragon, Bath. After we were kicked out of our Bournemouth flat, Chris Johnson had ended up in Bath, pictured in the local press squatting a house on the Royal Crescent, of Oliver fame. He subsequently got a room in a short-life co-op house on the Paragon, and got me in. According to Simon Reynolds:

Anarcho-punk based itself on the most literal interpretation of the Sex Pistols’ anthem, the irresponsibility and narcissism of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ transmogrified into a neutered marriage of prosaic laissez-faire individuality and ascetic abnegation. But for all this, fanzine ideology is strangely close to the dreaded mainstream, to common sense. Fanzines advocate ‘being yourself’, the expunging of conditioning, even of all influences. Tom, editor of Vague: ‘You can’t tell anyone anything, except maybe, don’t let anyone tell you anything.’ I had sympathy for Crass politically but hated their basic punk thrash music and became anti-anarcho-punk, because I felt it was regressive and not post-punk. I was won over to the cause to a certain extent after putting on a Crass gig in Salisbury, at the Grange Hotel, and interviewing then for Zigzag in 1981, but still didn’t think much of the music. I don’t mind being called anarcho-punk now, but back in the day I would’ve sooner been considered a new romantic. I came to feel more at home on the anarcho-punk scene than I did in the mainstream music business in the 80s though. They were the only group who tried to put the punk ethic into practice, but they inspired hordes of copycat Crass anarcho-punk bands and fanzines, when we thought the point was to avoid being classified in a subcult. The only anarcho-punk fanzine I could relate to was Kill Your Pet Puppy, and I had some respect for Toxic Graffiti. I think Vague and Kill Your Pet Puppy were the best fanzines because they didn’t follow the party line, we were anarchist punk rather than anarchopunk and tried not to be boring. When it was a matter of “Who are you for: art-punk or anarcho-punk?” I was in the Ants camp but in retrospect I’m with Crass more.

Vague 12, July 1982 The cover artwork of Vague 12 was a pop-Situationist detournement of/homage to Club International’s Vogue-spoof Vague cover, “magazines we’d like to see on the bookstands in ’79”, featuring a picture of the porn star Fiona Richmond by Fanny — not Che Guevara’s girlfriend Tania as some thought. It’s also in the Vague collage on the cover and poster centrefold of number 13, design by Chris Johnson.

This issue examined the positive-punk vs negative-punk struggle embodied in the early 80s post-punk groups, UK Decay, Killing Joke, Theatre of Hate, Bauhaus, and Danse Society, before the dark forces of goth and U2 won out. There was also Perry’s Lovable Spiky Tops and Viz Comic cartoons, articles on the decline of the music press, nuclear war, Falklands War jokes, and an Adam and the Ants retrospective. This Vague got the best review from the West Country fanzine Sheep Worrying, summing up our lack of real talent but having something: This is more a symptom than a fanzine. As a review of the wouldbe street credible music scene Vague is irritating, affected and superficial, but as an unwitting expose of the kind of parasite Tom Vague is, it is sometimes fascinating. Tom Vague spends a very small proportion of his lengthy articles writing about the gigs or records he purports to be reviewing. The rest is a sort of disjointed autobiography, with special attention to how drunk he got, whether he could con a free ticket/record/handout, the violence he always seems to stay out of, toadying to the in stars whilst badmouthing the out ones. The clever title/cover design lead you to expect some wit, but Vague is mostly humourless, the only laughs come from some cartoons that turn out to be cribbed from a Newcastle fanzine called Viz.

Vague 13, October 1982 Ray Lowry wrote in The Face magazine of the next one in late 1982: Vague is an above average, funny collection of opinions and bitcheries about post-sporran music trends. In issue 13 there was a really amusing cartoon section, a William Burroughs primer, a hippy-bashing Glastonbury piece, WOMAD report and pieces on Vague faves Death Cult and Sex Gang. Of course it’s mildly encouraging that alternatives to big girls’ blouses are pushing their way through all over the place but I’ve yet to be totally convinced by a slice of the new psycho-punkabilly music. By Vague 13 I had got into the positive-punk proto-goth anarchoglam groups, Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Danse

Society, and Look Back in Anger. Southern Death Cult, from Bradford, out of whom came the Cult, were post-punk originally — influenced by Adam and the Ants, Crass, Echo and the Bunny-men, and American Indians. There were also reports on the 1982 Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals, the first WOMAD featuring the post-Pop Group Rip Rig & Panic and Pigbag from Bristol, the Banshees at the Elephant Fayre, and William Burroughs’ post-punk influence. Vague 14, May 1983 Vague 14 from 1983: the first London issue, featuring a Vague mission statement article against the “right to work”, by Pete Scott:

As the technological revolution continues to accelerate, more and more men and women will be set free from their condition of “wage slavery”, it may be necessary to alter the whole structure of society… The creation of a permanent unemployed class would certainly be a step in the right direction… So, if you’re on the dole, make the most of it. And above all, don’t be taken in by the “Right to Work” propaganda of bands like Chelsea and the Redskins. There was the last interview with Southern Death Cult and the Death Cult Beggars Banquet EP supplement, UK Decay, Danse Society, Dancing Did, Iggy Pop, another article on American Indians by our Manchester correspondent Dave Hicks (who was involved with Southern Death Cult and Joy Division/New Order), anarcho-punk, and more Perry cartoons. Richard North/Cabut described this one in NME as: A huge and interesting pub anecdote in print, Vague has come as near to professionalism, without joining the establishment, as a fanzine possibly can. It’s glossy, full of colour and absolutely vital with it. Given a decent distribution this mag could do very well. Vague is deep from the heart of the squatting, hitching punk rock beast. From which the most positive elements are taken and examined. Full of charismatic optimism and resolution, it’s a classical fanzine. This was at the height of the anarcho/positive-punk/goth scene and the revival of Zigzag magazine as the goth glossy under the editorship of Mick Mercer — the nearest I got to being a proper music journalist, when I was technically down and out, homeless squatting in Brixton and Elephant & Castle. In the summer of ’83 the Vagrants formed an alliance with the Mob, our anarcho-punk neighbours from Somerset, and crossed the river to live in their old squat on New North Road, Islington. As the Mob went off to form the Black Sheep housing co-op, this became the scene of the first stage of the formation of the Cult. When Southern Death Cult split, Ian Astbury moved into our squat as he teamed up with Billy Duffy from Theatre of Hate. I did their first biog and debut EP insert notes, and tried in vain to keep them on a postpositive-punk path, against Billy and Ian’s proper-rock leanings. After

our eviction from New North Road, the Vague office was briefly in the Anarchy Centre on Roseberry Avenue. Vague 15, June 1984 Vague 15, the 1984 issue, featured the ‘End of Music’ and ‘Stop the City’ Vague rants, the Cult, Getting The Fear, the rest of Southern Death Cult, and their singer Bee on Charles Manson, the Church of the Sub-Genius spoof cult religion, more Viz and Perry comic strips, the Stoke Newington group Look Mummy Clowns, Nick Cave (reviewed by John Apostle aka Travis of God Told Me To Do It, now an LA producer), Xmal Deutschland, Greenham Common, and American Indian women. The ‘End of Music’ King Mob Situationist pamphlet featured in this issue started the Vague obsession with the Situationists and

psycho-geography, after I became disillusioned/bored with the goth/psychobilly music scene. In 1984 the Vague office moved several times; from Essex Road into Stoke Newington, after a brief spell in Acton, back to Stoke Newington, Beatty Road and Amhurst Road, to Berlin and Hamburg, after the Xmal Deutschland European tour, back to 50 Beatty Road and then 57 Palatine Road for Xmas. Stoke Newington in the mid 80s was a hotbed of cider-drinking anarcho-punk squatters with dogs on bits of string, who my anarchopost-punk faction avoided like the plague. I spent most of the mid– late 80s at 7 Evering Road — opposite where the Angry Brigade were busted and a few doors up from where Jack “the Hat” McVitie was bumped off by the Krays — reading Situationist texts, conspiracy theories, and Vietnam War books, and watching cult films on video. Vague 16/17, May 1985, republished 1989 Vague 16/17 Psychic Terrorism Annual in 1985 was the first perfectbound journal issue with a spine, competing with San Francisco’s Re/Search manuals and reviving IT and Oz hippy underground-press ideas/ideals, featuring the Lindsay Anderson film If…, the Situationists, Paris May 1968 and all that, the Angry Brigade, King Mob, and the Sex Pistols connection. This featured Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, as Genesis POrridge was going from post-punk to acid-house a little early for most people, the German film Decoder about Muzak featuring Genesis P-Orridge of PTV and TG, William Burroughs and Christiane F — who I ligged with in a Berlin nightclub (the real one, not the actress in the film) — Aleister Crowley, the JFK assassination, the miners’ strike, and The Avengers TV series. There were also my Berlin and Xmal Deutschland European tour diaries — post-punk Hunter S Thompson effort. In 1984 I was a roadie mechandiser for Xmal, selling t-shirts around England and Europe as a post-punk Lord Haw Haw. This issue also featuring the post-industrial totalitarian rock outfit Laibach in former Yugoslavia. I used to hang out with the Cocteau Twins as well — which I think is

my best namedrop now — when I was working for the 4AD and Beggars Banquet labels. Robin Gibson wrote in Sounds that: Vague 16/17 Psychic Terrorism Annual is a hugely significant volume. Vague has been evolving for a long time, but this issue takes a decisive next step. No longer just a thoroughly selfdefining fanzine at some kind of odds with the establishment, it has become a complete, confident, but still eminently accessible, outsider. It’s also still funny, egotistical and constructively nasty. It brags and nags while the ideas flow, but it has a continuity which intensifies its genuinely anarchic spirit rather than stifles it. Vague has a lot in common with the late 60s/early 70s underground press, while its starting point is the most dangerous inquisitive and inspiring area of punk. It doesn’t fit into (doesn’t need) any clear context, and it’s essential because of that. Vague 18/19, March 1987 Vague 18/19 Control Data Manual from 1987: the most extremistfundamentalist post-punk anti-music issue, featuring the ‘Videodrome’ Situationist text by Mark Downham, Captain Swing Riot Control report by Joe Banks, Jack the Ripper, the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson, Hassan i Sabbah, Nazis, JFK assassination, UFOs etc. Mark Stewart of the Pop Group, then of Mark Stewart and the Maffia, contributed some of his Control Data material featuring the Bilderbergers and William Burroughs. Vague 20, February 1988 Vague 20 was the first glossy-cover Televisionaries issue from 1988, containing the Red Army Faction Baader-Meinhof gang story of the West German terrorist group, who corresponded with and influenced British punk rock and post-punk — the Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’, the Clash, Snatch and Brian Eno, and Cabaret Voltaire.

By then the Vague office had moved to Freston Road in the squatted Republic of Frestonia in Notting Dale. Also included was the ‘Generation Zero’ Situationist text by Mark Downham, ‘The Abolition of Work’ by Bob Black, ‘Smile’ supplement by Stewart Home, more Viz, and a football fanzine supplement. Vague 21, January 1989 The Cyber-Punk issue from 1989: cover by the Sex Pistols’ designer Jamie Reid, featuring a lengthy interview with Jon Savage that previewed his history of the Sex Pistols and punk rock, England’s Dreaming, ‘Cyber-Punk’ by Mark Downham (which has recently appeared in a French translation), ‘Class War’ pulp fiction by Stewart Home, and ‘Blast 88’, a Wyndham Lewis Vorticist homage. Vague 22, June 1990 Vague 22 Media Sickness issue from 1990: cover designed by Jamie Reid again, featuring the Situationist International exhibition at the Pompidou Centre and the ICA, interviews with Jamie Reid, Margi Clarke, and the original Situationist Ralph Rumney, more Stewart Home, and ‘Cheap Holidays’ in other people’s misery — Paris — Berlin — Prague — Budapest 1989. Vague 23, September 1991 Vague 23 God Told Me To Do It from 1991: featuring the ‘God Told Me To Do It’ radical hip-hop posters, 23 Skidoo lists of 23, an interview with the Performance director Donald Cammell by Jon Savage, Twin Peaks, ‘Steam-Punk’, a William Gibson and Bruce Sterling interview by Paul Stewart (Mark Stewart’s brother), Hype cyberpunk graphic strip, and Stewart Home on Richard Allen novels. Vague 24, May 1993

Vague 24 The West Eleven Days of My Life: Notes from the Portobello Style Underclass was the last Vague magazine from 1993, featuring Notting Hill in Bygone Days, Happy Mondays — who I liked as much as Joy Division — more football, and Stewart Home stuff. Vague 25, June 1994 The Great British Mistake: Vague 1977–1992 Greatest Hits was published by AK Press in 1994, featuring the Ramones, the Clash, the Ants, the Banshees, Crass, Viz, Psychic TV, Situationists, the Angry Brigade, and the Sex Pistols. Vague 26, 1994 Vague 26 was Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction; an anarchopunk book published by AK Press in ’94 (available in e-book format, published by Bread and Circuses). Vague 27, 1997 Vague 27 was the book Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade; published by AK Press in ’97, available as part of the Televisionaries e-book and to be published in French by Editions Allia. Vague 28, 1997 Wild West 11: Grove Massive Psychogeography Report featured Michael X, ‘Performance’, the Clash, and a foldout Trellick Tower poster-mag issue; Vague revival attempt in 1997. Vague 29, 1997

The booklet Entrance to Hipp: An Historical and Psychogeographical Report on Notting Hill was published in 1997. Vague 30, 1998 The booklet London Psychogeography: Rachman Riots and Rillington Place was published in 1998. Vague 31, 2000 The compilation King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International was published by Dark Star in 2000. Vague 32, 2000 King Mob Echo: Gordon Riots to Situationists and Sex Pistols supplement were published by Dark Star in 2000. Since leaving the 20th century I think I’ve continued the postpunk search for the new with various pop psycho-geography reports, mostly about Notting Hill/North Kensington — websites, films, exhibitions, booklets and newsletters — much the same as I was doing back in 1979. * Mark Fisher: You’ve presented a fascinating history of post-punk, and you’ve also given a sense of the breadth of the scene as well: the way it was bordered by the anarcho-punks on the one hand, and the goths and new romantics on the other. There are a couple of things I noticed listening to you. It’s interesting that Vague, as such, started in 1979 with Thatcher, and the actual magazine barely outlasted Thatcher… It’s almost as if it was the counter-discourse to Thatcher. Once she’d gone it never existed in the same way. The other thing that comes across to me is a serial disappointment with music; first with the Ants, then with Siouxsie and the Banshees. There was a sense that music had a promise which exploded for a while, but then we’re back to the same old business — like punk

never happened (as Dave Rimmer put it in the title of his book about New Pop). So, you started to move toward the idea of anti-music at a certain point, which was to do with that intense sense of disappointment and betrayal, I would imagine. TV: Yes. That was there in punk rock; the Sex Pistols can be seen as anti-music or really reviving grassroots rock ‘n’ roll. I’m a fanzine editor, but a fanzine does just imply that you’re a fan of a group. Sniffin’ Glue was a real fanzine, compared with me they were real experts on a cult music that they were fans of. For me, from the onset, being fans, sure, but being critical all the time really [laughs]. I’m always looking for new bands up until the mid-1980s and then the enthusiasm for looking for new bands ran out [laughs]. MF: Was that to do with something that happened in the music scene or was it your own patience that had worn out at that point? TV: I think it’s something that’s quite natural to happen in your mid20s, you’re not such a “fan”. I thought punk was meant to be searching for something new, not just reviewing records, going to gigs, and the music business. MF: So by that point other stuff had taken over, the conspiracy theories… TV: The conspiracy theories and far-left politics all came out of punk, or things that Malcolm McLaren said, and what different types of artwork people were using. MF: How did you fund that? Obviously the Ants one sold really well and that funded the next few… TV: Selling them outside gigs… With the Thatcher thing that really took place in the 1980s, we thought the whole point was about rebelling against that. We were “getting on our bikes” as Norman Tebbit says it, looking for work, and setting up a small business. That really wasn’t the intention on the way, and it didn’t work out

financially, but there was the Ants one, and the Psychic TV issue was cheap to make… MF: Then there’s the “anti-work” thing, which started to work through the 1980s in particular. You mentioned it with the “Right To Work” stuff, and it’s interesting in thinking about that as an opposition to Thatcherism. Rather than demanding work it’s about demanding alternatives to work. I’m sure in one of those 1980s Vague issues you say how long you were on the dole for… TV: Yes, so that’s the answer to how I financed it! [Laughter]. Yes, so just to find an alternative to nine-to-five work. I’m just about doing it now, only in my later years, not being on the dole. I’m not on the dole now — just. MF: You said in one issue you’ve been on the dole however many years, someone else has been on the dole for 20 years, I don’t think that would be possible now would it? You’d be hounded off the dole… TV: Yeah I don’t think it’s possible. It was always difficult. In the 1990s somebody brought up doing various Enterprise Allowance schemes. That’s Thatcher youth. MF: Were you on the Enterprise Allowance scheme? TV: Yeah, a couple of times. MF: I was on it as well — I wasn’t very enterprising. [Laughter]. But it was a way of staying afloat. It was a way of staying on the dole without being on the dole. TV: Yes, but I have got a work ethic to keep on doing this for not much money. As you say, that’s the main point I’m trying to make, which is about alternatives to “work”. MF: Yes, and pursuing obsessions which get more and more extended as the issues get bigger and less frequent. You mentioned

the texts ‘Videodrome: The Thing in Room 101’, and ‘Cyber-punk’. Can we talk a bit about Mark Downham, who wrote those strange, experimental texts? Where did he come from? Did you know him? How did those texts come about? TV: I met him in the mid-1980s where there was this post-punk Situationist activity in small-press publications. Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, Tony Wilson were all Situationist influences into pop culture, but Mark Downham and Stewart Home were more the same age as me, into the same things. Stewart was actually doing avantgarde or anti-art things. I met up with Mark Downham again after ten years or more. In this century, early 2000s… He works in the City, in some investment bank or something, I really didn’t know about that side of his life. [Laughter]. He was up in Manchester or Liverpool; he did have some kind of Hacienda connection… something called the Royal Family and the Poor up there that he was involved in… MF: So did he approach you with the texts or did you commission them? TV: Doing a fanzine, he would just send me loads of stuff. There’s still unpublished stuff that I just couldn’t fit it in. Hand-written. Of course this was pre cyber-punk. Audience member 1: I’m curious about the end of the 1980s and mid-1980s, when you went to Warminster and things like that, and there was an anarcho-punk scene, and travellers’ convoys; rave music and techno. Did that have any impact on you? You mentioned Psychic TV. There’s that whole scene with rave and techno, anarcho-punk and Crass… Did that other form of music — DIY, free parties, techno, and all that have an effect on you? TV: I think Genesis P-Orridge was tuned in to what was going to happen, but he didn’t quite do it. He was making an attempt then — which was why he became associated with me, to become a bit more commercial [laughs]. Brian Jones session, “hyperdelic”, I think. I remember going to see something with him, still in the mid-1980s at King’s Cross, with him and the Mutoid Waste Company. I remember

Richard talking about warehouse parties; yours were hipper than that… Those King’s Cross things, and early raves, to me it was mainly anarcho-punk people and Psychic TV-types. I personally was kind of generation-gapped when acid house came along. I was disillusioned with anti-music. I only really listen to house music, and I think it’s a natural progression from post-punk, synthesiser music, to house music. Audience member 1: Yeah, I’ve got this copy of a fanzine I’d never seen before called Unnatural by this guy who’s now at Goldsmiths. I was looking at it and there’s all kinds of connections to techno, underground, and all that. Some of the graphics are very much like Vague, it seems to have carried on in all these techno outfits… MF: Yes, Vague was an influence on British cyber-theory — particularly the Downham texts. This is why I’m trying to press you on it — they seemed to come from nowhere… TV: I’ve got a quote from a blog — it’s more complimenting me on publishing Mark Downham rather than complimenting me, per se! He [Mark Downham] was the first person, really, writing like that. MF: Yes, the Situationist stuff was one thing, but it was the mix with Ballard, Baudrillard, and very early on to Gibson, the significance of the term “cyber-punk” itself, etc. It was form following content. It wasn’t enough to write about cyber-punk in a distanced, academic way — it had to somehow embody that in the textual strategies itself. There was really nothing else like it in the mid-1980s, really. TV: I can’t think of the term this blog was saying, about a new “postcyber-punk genre”, that Mark Downham cited as a British thing, rather than American thing. MF: I think it opened up that British approach to cyber theory, which people like Nick Land and Sadie Plant developed in the 1990s — it was an alternative to that kind of Californian “sunny side-up” model of cyber culture, really. Just on the writing style, if one looks at the

crucial Nick Land cyber texts they hark to Mark Downham. This para-academic space of “pulp theory” really is fascinating, and could only really have come out in something like Vague at that time. It’s pre-internet, and the only way those kinds of “para” discourses could circulate, really. TV: Vague was just kind of like my blog, really. MF: You obviously moved to London at a certain point. TV: That was early 1980s. MF: You were squatting? TV: Yeah. I briefly had a flat in Bournemouth. I wasn’t a squatter in the Royal Crescent in Bath, but in London we were joining that kind of network of punk rockers, post-punks, and anarcho-punks. Honestly, when I moved to London it was goth in 1983. On this side of the river in Elephant & Castle, at the time of The Bat Cave. MF: What’s interesting is that you have an anarcho-punk methodology, but not an anarcho-punk style. You rejected the term “anarcho-punk” at a certain stage, because of its association with a certain kind of “lo-fi”… TV: It wasn’t just a musical dislike of Crass, or that kind of post-punk theory — that anyone who wasn’t playing punk thrash wasn’t postpunk. We thought that groups had to have something… I feel bad about slagging off the Buzzcocks now, they’re one of my favourite groups — they can be described as a post-punk group as well as a punk-rock group. MF: But it wasn’t just about the music, it was also about style wasn’t? Wasn’t it part of the betrayed promise of new romanticism and goth, a return of this flamboyance or glamour, that the anarchopunk scene then became associated with exactly the opposite? I think that’s also part of the stylishness of Vague as a kind of counterdiscourse. It wasn’t enough to look amateurish and scribbled… That

worked at the first stage of zines, but by the mid-1980s you had to have a kind of counter-style to the dominant style culture, really. TV: Yes, but it wasn’t just me, or the glam coming in. Richard North/Cabut and groups like Blood and Roses, and Brigandage, there was that kind of political squatting scene, but they weren’t in the boring uniform, there was still some glam. Gavin Butt: What really struck me listening to your fascinating history of the zine is how unapologetically local it is. There’s a kind of localism — bands in Salisbury, Bournemouth, Bath, or wherever else. You also covered bands that had more of a national public and fan-base, but there was a really unapologetic attention to local bands. I guess that was part of the spoofing on something as international and mass-produced as Vogue magazine coming out of London and New York. Was that localism important to you, and did you think about that? TV: Yes, I think that was a tenet of post-punk, coming out of punk rock. Do It Yourself in your own local area, even if it’s really unfashionable or in the middle of nowhere. I think it became more interesting if somebody came from Wiltshire or Middlesbrough or Wales, rather than Camden or Soho. There’s a contradiction though that at the same time I wanted to get away from the West Country and get up to London. Yeah, to be a local fanzine — I wanted to get away from that as well… GB: So, quite contradictory in a really interesting way. Another question: Futurama, sounds to me like it must have been an amazing science-fiction and music festival. I never was able to go along — being too young to have been there. But thinking about it, it seems to me so un-punky, if punk was “no future”. Post-punk, on the other hand, was typified by Futurama — by an embrace of science fiction and music as a way to reorient oneself towards a future. Could you say a bit about what that was all about and how you fitted in there in relation to Futurama? You went at least twice, right?

TV: There were half a dozen, I carried on, I think I went to five. Most were in Leeds. Then, later on, it was more post-punk going goth. People like New Order and Nico — there was one at Stafford. There was this guy John Keenan, and it was out of that Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, northern post-punk. I think John Keenan is still going, he’s mainly known for Futurama… I’m not sure if he’s still a promoter in Leeds. With the science-fiction thing, it was pretty much PIL and Joy Division headlining one day, then the second day it was Hawkwind or various Robert Calvert-related connected people in 1979. It wasn’t called post-punk; I don’t even know if even Paul Morley would have been describing it as post-punk… Then, electronic — that carried on through the 1980s… There’s a Leeds festival, a “normal” outdoor kind of festival… Leeds has always had big gigs, like the Who. I just emailed Rouska fanzine from Leeds saying that that was where Vague started — after that PIL, Joy Division one I went back to college in Salisbury, did a bit of typing, and got the first Vague together. I was 19, at the technical college, re-taking O Levels and then doing a building-studies course to be a surveyor or architect. I did finish the course, I think I’ve got some sort of building diploma — I never actually got it, I sort of went in a different direction. [Laughter]. The “tech” side of it is part of where I’m coming from — I’m not an art student and never was an art student. MF: But the main distribution is going to gigs, the Rough Trade shop, by mail-order? TV: Yes, there was this distribution network with Rough Trade, Better Badges and so on. I just about made a living out of that up until the mid-1980s. Then it was the advent of the Smiths, or just after that, when Rough Trade really became a normal record business and stopped distributing fanzines. I went from the Rough Trade warehouse in King’s Cross to Housmans bookshop. I think that’s when I went more to the radical-politics side of things. MF: That’s interesting about the Smiths actually, if we’re thinking about the end points of post-punk. There’s still a continuation with post-punk but nevertheless the kind of imagery around the Smiths,

the basic kind of rock sound and so on, were nods to the past in a way that wasn’t really possible at the height of post-punk. It’s interesting that you say it all ended with the Smiths… TV: Yes, I wasn’t particularly a fan, but I think fair play to Morrissey and Linder. I think she’s done things with Morrissey as well as with the Buzzcocks. Audience member 2: Do you think that for British counterculture, with magazines from this kind of era, as soon as the internet came in the 1990s all the old ways of putting out flyers, doing your own tshirts, putting out magazines all disappeared. Searching for these kinds of things it seemed like things were better in the old days in that less people produced this stuff, not everybody had access to a Facebook page, and only committed people like Tom never gave up. I want to ask him if he thinks that what’s out there on the web is anything like what he’s done? If the web was around in his day, how would he have handled that? TV: Yes, it was a much smaller scene. We thought post-punk was quite a large scene but it still was very much a subcult. I think about 4,000 copies of one issue was about it — pretty good for a fanzine, but it’s not much for a serious magazine. People doing blogs get to an insane kind of subculture. They get to far more people than we did with our fanzines. Audience member 2: It may have only been 4,000 but, the way I see it, that’s 4,000 personal connections. On the web you wouldn’t get the personal connection. With the zines you’ve got people actually getting off their arse, going to the gig, doing the money — for me that’s all missing from the web. It’s not got the same excitement as ending up in a field somewhere, buying a piece of paper that you then take home and hide from your mum… MF: Is that partly to do with difficulty as a condition of possibility, in a way? It took a lot of work to do it, to put a fanzine out, as opposed to putting something up on Facebook. Perhaps we could think of postpunk in general as emerging at a time when access was widening,

people could do things themselves, but it wasn’t completely “open”; people couldn’t post up anything. There’s a kind of faux-democracy now in that people now can do anything, but no-one’s reading it. It doesn’t build up these hubs or points of consistency in the same way. Clearly it’s partly about accessibility, the fact that you could cutand-paste — and it’s interesting that Vague tracks the development of technology from typewriters and glue, through to word processers. TV: Not always in front! MF: Yes, a little bit behind, but that is the kind of cyber-punk thing, it’s not the latest thing, it’s the last discarded thing that becomes the basis for street experimentation. You needed there to be things like photocopiers, that culture of DIY, but there were limits to it. That created this kind of traction which is under threat in the online world. There’s this circulation without the “grit” in a way… Gavin Butt: The other thing about the zine is that it’s embedded in a social world. It’s something that you buy at a gig, you can happen across it. You might not know anything about it, who’s producing it, who’s reading it — but you see it there. That way you can become initiated into the readership. This next is an arguable point, but it seems to me to be more difficult to happen across a blog — if you don’t know about it in advance, nobody has told you about it. So, there’s a kind of narrowcasting with a blog. MF: Something we haven’t really talked about is record shops. I first saw Vague at the Rough Trade shop. I hadn’t seen anything like it, I just came across it. I hadn’t seen a review of it, I just liked the look of it. TV: I think that’s become the internet social media… The network of record shops around the country, Probe in Liverpool, Revolver in Bristol… I guess in any youth cults in the UK or around the world, where punk scenes were, there were similar interactions, and now they’re on Facebook.

Audience member 3: I was wondering what drew you to psychogeography and stuff like that? What does it mean to you? TV: I got into the Situationist concept of psycho-geography through punk rock, and Malcolm McLaren mentioning it. Then I read up on the Situationists. The only things I was interested in at school were history and geography, more than literature or art. It wasn’t as if the Situationists invented psycho-geography, or just interpreting the environment in a personal way, rather than what you’re told. Disillusionment or loss of interest in music led to being more interested in the places that music comes from. Audience member 3: Is that why you’re drawn to Ladbroke Grove, Westbourne Park? TV: Definitely, apart from the Rough Trade connection. I didn’t use them for my postal address like Ripped & Torn did, but Notting Hill in 1979, well it represented the Rough Trade shop then. The original one isn’t there anymore, but it’s now opposite the Hugh Grant travel bookshop which tourists come from all over the world to see… And for post-punk there was Acklam Hall, under the Westway [flyover], which I haven’t mentioned but it’s an important post-punk venue in London. Notting Hill and other areas of London had equally interesting things going on and music connections. Notting Hill has the Clash and reggae, and also a sort of hippy history; Jimi Hendrix and Beatles connections. I think I’ve come back around to music through pop psycho-geography. Anybody can do a psychogeographical study just walking through the street. I think most Situationist people would agree that I’m not doing, strictly speaking, proper psycho-geographical research. I have gone back to pop culture and I’m interested in any music that has got something to do with a place, which most music has I suppose!

Contributors Gavin Butt is Attenborough Chair of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex. He is author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, and codirector of This Is Not a Dream: a documentary film exploring artist’s DIY use of moving image technology. Between 2009 and 2014 he was co-director of Performance Matters: a creative research project on the cultural value of performance. He is currently researching a book on post-punk art and music in the city of Leeds. Sue Clayton is a feature and documentary film writer and director. Clayton began her career in the independent sector, co-producing and co-directing The Song of the Shirt in 1979 with Jonathan Curling and subsequently directed the documentaries Dracula: The Undiscovered Country (1993), Japan Dreaming (1991), Theme Park Britons (1989), How To Survive Lifestyle (1988), Turning Japanese (1987), Women on Film (1983) and the six part series Commodities (1986) co-directed with Jonathan Curling. Her fiction films include the co-directed Too Sensitive to Touch: Sex and Talk in the USA (1982),The Last Crop (1990), Heart Songs (1993) and The Disappearance of Finbar (1997). Recent films include the awardwinning documentary Hamedullah: The Road Home (2011) and the consultant produced Deported to Afghanistan (2015). Sue Clayton is Professor of Film and Television in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London and is the Director of the new Screen School at Goldsmiths. Kodwo Eshun is co-founder of The Turner Prize nominated artists The Otolith Group, whose works have been presented internationally

at solo and group exhibitions. He is the author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (2012) and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998) and co-editor of WORLD 3 (2014), The Militant Image: A Cine Geography: Third Text 108 (2011), Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? (2009), A Long Time Between Suns (2009) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (2007). He is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and Visiting Professor, Critical Cultural Cybermedia, Research-based Master Program at Geneva University of Art and Design. Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (2009) and Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). His writing has appeared in many publications including New Humanist, Frieze and Sight&Sound. He has produced two acclaimed audio-essays with Justin Barton: londonunderlondon (2005) and On Vanishing Land (2013). He is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldmsiths, University of London. Green Gartside is an internationally acclaimed singer, songwriter and producer whose albums include Songs to Remember (1982), Cupid & Psyche 85 (1985), Provision (1988), Anomie & Bonhomie (1999,) Early (2005) and White Bread Black Beer (2006). Dominic Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (2012), Theatre & the Visual (2012), and The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (2015). He is the editor of five books, including most recently Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (2013) and (with Deirdre Heddon) It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells (2016). He is an Editor of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review. Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and its pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to

her warrior nature. She has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s Akashic Books have published her recent anthology Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator’s Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. Eliete Mejorado is a Brazilian artist and musician - a member of Tetine. Mejorado has produced a number of performance pieces, installations and videos such as The 4th World, I Hope You Enjoy Your Stay, Tetine vs O Bandido Da Luz Vermelha involving music, visuals, text and voice. She has also released albums such as In Loveland With You (Slum Dunk), From A Forest Near You (Slum Dunk), Let Your X’s be Y’s (Soul Jazz Records) and Tetine vs Sophie Calle (Sulphur Records). Laura Oldfield Ford is a London based artist and writer. She completed a BA at the Slade in 2001 and an MA in Painting at the RCA in 2007. From 2013-2014 she was Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University. She is author Savage Messiah (Verso 2011) and is currently a researcher at the Royal College of Art. Her work is concerned with issues surrounding contested space, landscape, architecture and memory. She is interested in a reworking of the “dérive”, or drift: a subjective process of mapping territory along the lines of social antagonism. She has developed a multidisciplinary practice and draws on her experiences as political activist and involvement in subcultural scenes — particularly protest movements. Agata Pyzik is the author of Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero, 2014). She lived in the UK between 2010 and 2016. Her work focuses on art, politics, music and culture, and she writes for various magazines including The Wire, Guardian, New Statesman, Calvert Journal, Icon, New Humanist and Frieze. In Poor but Sexy, she looks at the abandoned scenes of history in Eastern Europe, their relationship with West through historical and political movements, and the development of popular cultural forms.

Tom Vague was the editor/designer of one of the first post-punk fanzines, Vague, which he co-founded with cartoonist Perry Harris at Salisbury College of Art and Technology in 1979. Through the 80s, Vague went from featuring the Ants, Banshees, Joy Division, Pop Group, PIL and the Slits, to becoming a cyber-punk manual, covering Situationist and conspiracy theories; Psychic TV and the Baader-Meinhof gang. He has since worked on his London Psychogeography project in Notting Hill, including the Clash London Calling box set booklet and www.colvillecom.com In the truest sense, Gee Vaucher is a rebel artist with a cause. By seeing her art as essentially a tool for social change, Gee Vaucher has ducked and weaved her way through whatever medium might best express whatever it is that she seeks to say. Within paintings, drawings, collages, prints, films, happenings, sculptures, and soundscapes, her singular demand for human rights, dignity and fairness is always manifest. Bruno Verner is a Brazilian musician and artist — a member of Tetine. He has produced a number of albums including Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca (Mr Bongo) and The Sexual Life of The Savages - Underground Post Punk from São Paulo (Soul Jazz Records); Let Your X’s be Y’s (Soul Jazz Records) and In Loveland With You (Slum Dunk), amongst others. Verner has performed extensively in Europe and Brazil. He is currently pursuing a PhD on Brazilian Post-Punk in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree.

Published by Repeater Books An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd 19–21 Cecil Court London WC2N 4EZ UK www.repeaterbooks.com A Repeater Books paperback original 2016 1 Copyright © Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher 2016 Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work. Cover design: Johnny Bull Typography and typesetting: Jan Middendorp Typefaces: Chaparral Pro, Campton ISBN: 978-1-910924-26-6 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910924-27-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.