Spiritualized – Lay Back In The Sun
The Last Of England
The meaning of England is different for everyone who lives in it. Its physical reality – its actual and emotional landscape – resonates at different frequencies for all of us. But whatever tone we hear, it is increasingly drowned out by the louder but flatter sound of landscapes being levelled, colour being drained and character being driven out by money and self-interest and over-development. Whether the real England, for you, is the local newsagent or the local church, the thatched cottage or the city terrace, the hardware store that clings on in your high street, the struggling street corner pub, the patch of overlooked waste ground, the chaotic street market, the hedgerows or the downlands, an old farm or an urban canal: you can be sure that if it is not sufficiently profitable or obedient, then it is not safe from the accelerating forces of homogenisation and control.
Paul Kingsnorth, Real England
Giving someone like me this book was guaranteed to trigger a detonation. It calls for a halt to the homogenist agenda of the Korporate Kontrol Kulture and a return to the essence of what constitutes ‘real’ England, something I’ve been banging on about for ages. Not to suggest that the author is deludedly-smitten with the fantasy of the whack of willow on leather, lukewarm pints in the pavilion, red telephone boxes and swallows nesting in the eaves of the church. Paul Kingsnorth is a veteran campaigner on what might be simplistically- termed ‘Green issues’ and has walked his talk in places such as the besieged Zapatista villages of Mexico to the tribal enclaves of West Papua, and he’s also swept the floors in a McDonalds. From the outset he makes it very clear where the battle-lines need to be drawn – between those who cherish the unique characteristics that define the spirit of a particular place, and those whose only allegiance is to shareholder profit and short-term investment “yield”. It is that very mentality that is destroying all the last vestiges of England, the England that still prevails – albeit barely – outside of the monoculture. Often those fighting to preserve their local pub, their boatyard, their market, have little in common except for a shared enemy, which is often a nebulous collusion of government policy, business rapacity and institutionalised cretinery. Time and again we see that the corporate emphasis on profit and “growth” to the exclusion of any and all other considerations has leached through into every aspect of daily life.
Time and again the enemy shows itself in forms we can all recognise: second-home buyers from Surrey reducing Cornish villages into ghost towns; the overpaid idiots who move into rural Somerset and then write letters of protest about the farmer muck-spreading; the pub-chain companies who deliberately ruin landlords and their hostelries in order to make a fast profit on the sale of the vacated property; the developers who knock up identikit Lego apartments that sit unoccupied whilst private security firms beat up the homeless sleeping in the unused communal doorways. All of them are the enemy, otherwise collectively known as “The Wankers.” The Wankers conform to a totalitarianist agenda that they would struggle to recognise in that light, and yet totalitarianism is exactly what it is. This fact first struck Kingsnorth when he took a trip to the Bluewater shopping complex in Kent. He walked into a world that was totally ordered, totally controlled, designed specifically for one purpose and one purpose alone, and was in almost every aspect of its conception totally at odds with basic human values. The Third Reich could not have conceived of something like the modern shopping mall, and I wonder if Speer and his mob would have approved or said, “Now come on, that’s just going too far.” There is something very, very, very fucked up about these places, and anyone who feels comfortable in such an environment really needs to pause and consider their position in the universe. They are cathedrals of corrupted desire, engine houses specifically designed to sell you shit that you don’t need. The damage they’ve wrought upon the traditional English high street and our general cultural wellbeing is probably incalculable, and they are just one manifestation of this creeping rot of development, “regeneration” and “improvement” that is actually doing more harm than good. Not every empty space is a plot waiting to be built upon. Not every river’s edge is demanding of a piazza and a row of apartments. Not every town and city needs a clone zone of Philpott’s, Starbucks and Tesco Metro barnacled around the kind of “enterprise parks” that sent J.G. Ballard’s imagination racing. And yet to express opinion to the contrary is, in certain company, heresy. I recall overhearing a conversation at work in the wake of the recent G20 protests (that left one man dead and several other people with serious injuries). A young woman, probably in her late twenties, was complaining about the protestors and demanding that they just “shut up and go home,” an attitude that her colleagues echoed. They honestly could not see what they had to complain about, and was eager to see the status quo maintained, even if that meant cracking a few crusties heads open along the way. If you’ve got a significant portion of the population (and I’m confident that there’s thousands out there like them) eager to be willing victims of vampire capitalism – whose attention might only be captured if their most conveniently-located branch of Pret got firebombed – then how in he hell are a few well-meaning hippies and chunky sweaters from CAMRA going to stop the rot?
Well, as far as I’m concerned if you’re not part of the solution, then you are very much part of the problem. Some may not agree with how the corporate monoculture operates, but their apathy puts them inadvertently on the side of The Wankers. In my own case, I’ll admit that I’m not out there manning the barricades and offering immigrant families shelter in my own home. Neither is Sting, for that matter. My contribution to all of this is to wherever possible resist the monoculture. That means wearing clothes with no logo’s, slogans or any other “branding”, thus preventing me from becoming a walking billboard offering free advertising for The Wankers. That means never using the dining facilities offered by high street fast food chains (though in a pinch I’ll use their bogs). That means only replacing equipment in my home when it actually breaks – as proven by my 14-year-old TV set, 12-year-old video recorder (yes, I’ve still got one of those), and 10-year-old PC. I don’t drive a car, and couldn’t afford one anyway. I keep it cheap by necessity, and keep it simple out of choice. No mobile phone, no Twitter, no Facebook updates, none of that bollocks. By completely ignoring much of what is foisted upon us by the mass media, my life is far less complicated than almost anyone else I know. This allows far more time to contemplate the world – time that I consider vital – and leaves me free to spend time with my family and to paint and draw and write pieces like this.
Paul Kingsnorth also maintains a blog, and a damn sight more useful it is than my own indulgence. I would recommend a careful study of its contents, and if it steers you towards a cause that you feel you can contribute to, all well and good. Be it the beleagured village pub, rural post office, urban market, greenbelt meadow, local hospital, struggling greengrocers or developer-targeted playing field – whatever it is that The Wankers have set their sights on destroying, then just out of sheer bloody-mindedness alone it’s worth standing up for these last vestiges of what makes this country such a frustrating but fascinating place to live. ‘Cos once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, and you’ll be living in a Wanker’s paradise.
Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop
She is a slut…He thinks he’s tough… She is a Bitch… He is a Puff… Yeah Yeah!
Not big, not clever, but by the time this song hit the charts ‘punk’ had already become as uniform and predictable as everything it was supposed to blow away. Jilted John took the puerile, cartoonish elements of punk and reduced them down further still. No empty sloganeering from the barricades for this lad, oh no, he was going to cry all the way to the chip shop because his girlfriend had dumped him in favour of some twat called Gordon.
It was just another in a long line of British novelty pop records that includes everything from ‘The Funky Gibbon’ to ‘Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’ to even the dreaded Blur and their loathsome Mockney anthem ‘Country House’. Forgotten just as quickly as they were conceived, the underlying incentive for their creation was, I suspect, a useful device for school disco DJ’s to clear the dance floor with so that someone could get in and mop-up the ciderpuke.
Jilted John – Jilted John
Rainy Day Woman
Well, they’ll stone you when you walk all alone.
They’ll stone you when you are walking home.
They’ll stone you and then say you are brave.
They’ll stone you when you are set down in your grave.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.
Nice words Bob, but I just can’t stand your voice. I’d actually rather just listen to:
Andrey Dergatchev – Rain
All The Better To Eat You With
This song was recorded over fifty years ago, and still makes most of today’s bands sound like the uninspired careerist journeymen that they are. Absolutely rip-snortin’ rock & roll made by human beings barely able to control themselves. If you don’t like this, you might as well give up.
Bunker Hill – Red Ridin’ Hood & The Wolf
The Lost World: the art of James Allen St John
James Allen St. John’s name will forever be associated with that of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was through the paintings and illustrations he did for Burrough’s Tarzan novels that he made his name, and though nigh-on a 100 years old now these images still retain a power and visual appeal that makes you weep for the loss made by the booktrade’s complete subservience to the photograph/Photoshopped image that prevails today. It is work such as this that is lovingly collected and appreciated, whereas I absolutely guarantee that a lot of the images produced today will be but piss in the wind to future generations.
JASJ was born in 1872 and benefitted from have a mother who was herself a painter, spending the early years of his life escorted through the museums of Europe, just soaking up the influence. “One of my greatest pleasures,” he once confessed, “was to ramble at will through the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the countless quaint and charming corners of the unfashionable parts of the city, so dear to all dreamers.” His earliest memories were of his mother’s studio and “the eyes of her portraits following me about the place.”
After a failed attempt by his father to shape his son into a merchant, the “dreamy boy” was shipped off to his uncle’s ranch in California, in the hope of toughening him up. Instead, he met Eugene Torrey, artist and former student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, who convinced the lad to pursue his dream. He studied throughout his teens and into his twenties, finally establishing himself in New York City where by the turn of the century he was painting portraits and landscapes for a living. After further studies in Paris, he returned to his birthplace of Chicago and began working for Midwest, the publishers of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He was a seasoned veteran when the pulp magazine explosion occurred, and he contributed images for Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures and the legendary Weird Tales. When St John died in 1957, the profession of book and magazine illustration was still enjoying its heyday, but a man of his talents today would be surplus to requirements, unless he could cut a mean stencil and wield a spraycan that is.
Why do I think this kind of work is better than the modern gallery tat and ’street art’ ? Because it was created with some degree of skill, some care and attention to detail, and retains some sense of awe for things we have yet to understand. Modern art for me has none of that mystery – it seems to be smugly convinced that it’s got things all figured out, and not only that but it’s going to shove that conviction in our faces. It’s insulting, and the “artists” involved seem to revel in the fact that they’ve insulted us. St John cared about the reaction his work would garner, an old-fashioned attitude perhaps, but one worth cherishing.
Porno Holocaust
Mike Patton – Porno Holocaust
We Gotta Go Now
There is an unwritten law in rock & roll that at some point every band must at least once attempt to play the song ‘Louie Louie’. Like smashing up a hotel room, abusing groupies or getting Eno in to save their floundering careers, it’s justy something that has to be done. There are few songs that are easier to play, as the chord structure makes anything The Stooges did sound like King Crimson, but if it’s not approached with the right attitude, then it’s not going to work. Many have tried over the years – Motorhead, Frank Zappa, Black Flag, Billy Childish, even The Stooges for whom it was the last song they ever played together for almost thirty years – but few have ever really been able to at least match the mad energy of the original hit version, performed by The Kingsmen way back in 1963.
There’s many a great story surrounding this song, least of all the FBI investigation into the “obscene” lyrics, but my favourite is the one where KJFC DJ’s Stretch Riedle and Phil Dirt (bollocks to Chris Moyles and Jo Whiley, those are proper DJ names) conducted a 63-hour-long Louie Louie marathon. I’d like to think that somewhere during that gruelling test of endurance, they found the time to play what I consider to be the greatest version of the song ever made:
The Swamp Rats – Louie Louie
Teenage Death Girl
This song is from Kim Fowley’s 1978 album Sunset Boulevard, as insane an artistic statement as you could ever hope for. Musically, it sounds like the demo tracks for a mid-period Billy Joel or Hall & Oates album, except that one night sometime during the recording sessions a total streetfreak broke into the studio, grabbed a microphone and just started howling at the moon. And that streetfreak was Kim Fowley.
If we are to accept the theory that the value of information is proportional to its unpredictability, then clearly Fowley is offering something akin to the Wisdom of Solomon here, as the lyrics are absolutely batshit schizoid madness. You could even treat it as a confession of sorts, as Fowley finally unspools all the dark secrets of his years cruising up and down sunset, picking up runaways and schooling them in the ways of Hollyweird. The world is undoubtedly been a more interesting place for him having been in it, but I wouldn’t let him within 500 miles of my daughter.
Kim Fowley – Teenage Death Girl
Burn Burn Satellite
Sigue Sigue Sputnik were total crap, right? They were an embarressment, a one-hit wonder shit machine that briefly spewed their technocolour vomit across the charts and then slid away into much-deserved obscurity. That’s the established line, the one ground into consensus by the jackboot of ‘good taste’, but I think it’s worth looking again. Those of us who lived through it will recall 1986 as a dark, dark year for culture. Top Gun was at the cinema, and Stock, Aitken and Waterman had just begun their assault on our senses and week after week we were being bombarded by a double-barrel Top 40 barrage of dance-pop shit and twee indie irrelevance. We’d started going out to clubs at this point, and there really aren’t the words to express just how depressing it was to be stuck in some glitterball firetrap, cradling a bottle of warm Grolsch and wishing the roof would fall in on the ‘DJ’ as he put The Communards on again for the 47th time that evening. Nobody seemed to be doing anything even vaguely interesting, and yet the territory was there for the taking – if only someone had the balls to go for it.
Enter Sigue Sigue Sputnik who looked utterly ridiculous and sounded awful – which is as good a description of a pop band as you will find – but brought with them the first inklings of what was to come in the years ahead. Referencing all the films we liked – A Clockwork Orange, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Mad Max – and nicking their name from a Moscow street gang (translation: “burn, burn, satellite”) they hijacked dystopian fictions and tried to make them their own playground.
It all failed of course, because for all their lyrical outlandishness (”Hips, lips, guns, guitar, hey Jane Mansfield superstar!”) the music was just abysmal. Having said that though, I’ll never forget seeing our deputy headmaster walk into the 6th Form commons room and practically kick to death the radio that was blasting out ‘Love Missile F1-11′. He was utterly appalled, and having not seen that kind of reaction to music for a long time, I regarded it as an important signifier, a prerequisite for something necessary. I hadn’t really seen anyone so outraged since the days of the Sex Pistols, and SSS may have hoped to have had the same impact, but after one top ten hit and and the ambitious media stunt of their album Flaunt It – which came complete with adverts between the songs – they were gone, only occasionally resurfacing on the pub circuit.
I never forgot about them though, and when I saw U2 “reinvent” themselves with the Zoo TV tour – Bono pratting about in black sunglasses and plastic strides, ‘The Edge’ throwing out disjointed squalls of guitar over fuzzed-out Eno bleeps and bloops, mass media scrolling on the screens behind them, absolute bollocks cut-ups for lyrics – I thought, this is fucking Sputnik all over again! I recognised all the archetypal rock posturing and quiffs and leather and sloganeering and the embracing of the media as an integral part of the band’s cultural cache. Recall if you will the Achtung Baby TV adverts, a stunt that SSS would have loved to have pulled had they the money – only instead of a Trabant they’d have more likely dropped a hot pink Cadillac Eldorado, and then set it on fire. And as bad as their music was, compared to the likes of what I hear these days pumping out of the same clothes shop that flog the same logo-splattered technicolour tat that SSS wore, they sound as majestic as Mogwai. With Transformers films at the cinema and a media saturated by vacuous day-glo non-entitites shouting drivel, it’s almost like the world that the Sputniks wanted has finally arrived. Maybe in their own idiotic way they were trying to warn us about what was coming; and we failed to pay attention, so there really is no-one else to blame but ourselves.
Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Flaunt It
