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Manchester / London
Manchester / London
'Without music, life would be a mistake.'
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889)
INDEX
2024
2023
Article
1977:
No More Heroes
1977:
No More Heroes
Written
by
Steven Hughes
July 6th 2024
by
Steven Hughes
July 6th 2024
To begin with I’d like to discuss someone who is a hero to millions around the globe and a beacon of hope. Someone whose staying power – he’s getting on a bit now – and seemingly bottomless talent remains unsurpassed, at least in certain select circles.
This individual has many fans and draws crowds of thousands every year. They’ll travel to far-flung places such as Nebraska, and wait in the rain to bathe in his motivational magic. One of his devotees describes him as a ‘legend’, another calls him an ‘icon.’ No, it’s not Bob Dylan: it’s Warren Buffet, the 93-year-old billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway who, annually, fills Omaha’s vast Health Centre Arena at an event known commonly as ‘Woodstock for Capitalists.’ Along with business partner Charlie Munger, he has steered Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textiles manufacturer into a multi-billion dollar global conglomerate. He is now a leader of a business which a recent article in The Guardian described as a firm ‘built around a fan base … a dedicated community of followers, who travel far and wide to catch the big show, buy the merch, and jostle to get close to the stage.’
Corporate America has long known Buffet and the recently deceased Munger as the Lennon and McCartney of big corp. Despite accusations of exploitation in the housing market, and despite Berkshire Hathaway’s ‘gigantic’ investments in fossil fuels, to their investors both men remain heroes, and enjoy the type of adoration normally bestowed upon rock gods such Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie. Conservatives would have us believe the line between artist and entrepreneur is thin and uncertain, and that the one equates easily to the other. Certainly, someone in the rock business knows how to make a few bob. I can’t think of many managers or financiers who have made their mark as artists. Malcolm McLaren comes to mind.
The Beatles started a firm, Apple Corp, which, to their credit, didn’t last very long and only ended up costing them money. George later went on to become a movie mogul when he launched Handmade Films, ostensibly to produce Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). This venture too would end in disaster when the rock ‘n’ roller himself was swindled by unscrupulous financiers. The ever-retiring Bowie inked a $17 million deal with EMI America in 1983 only to find himself marshalled onto a miserable greatest hits tour (Sound And Vision ’90) less than a decade later. An evidently frustrated Bowie chose the occasion to superannuate his back catalogue, only to revive it on demand.
In 1977, the year in which Jimmy Carter was sworn into the White House; the year in which the swashbuckling space opera Star Wars hit the cinema screens; and the year in which the Soviets demolished the Ipatiev House in whose basement the Romanov family were murdered by Bolsheviks – the Sex Pistols released their iconoclastic single ‘God Save the Queen’. On both sides of the Atlantic a ‘New Wave’ thus emerged which set about undermining the 1970s ‘rock god’ paradigm. Choking on punk’s exhaust fumes, the New Wave embraced the music video as marketing tool and art form, and even the keyboard, that most Prog of instruments, was allowed back to the fore. 1977 was also the year when The Stranglers released their fourth single, ‘No More Heroes’, which referenced historically ‘heroic’ figures such as Leon Trotsky, Lenny Bruce, Sancho Panza, and Emperor Nero etc. Heralded sonically by a tumbling bass intro followed by keyboards, a contemptuous lyrical salvo demands to know: ‘Whatever happened to ALL the heroes?’ All of them: where have they gone? Why have they deserted us?
Also in ‘77 Bowie released one of his most highly regarded tracks, ‘Heroes’. Co-written with non-musician, art house hero Brian Eno, Bowie’s limited appeal to our more noble instincts allows that we might be heroes ‘just for one day.’ In the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, the line ‘I, I will be king / And you, you will be queen’ sat well with a society still very much in thrall to its stuffed and starched monarchy. The song proved internationally popular, becoming a mainstay of Bowie’s live set. The lyrics are every bit as specific as those of The Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’ in which the names checked in the song are those of exiles, side-men, fakers, and fools. Content to watch while Rome burned, Bowie sang of the neo-liberalisation of the hero, the off-the-peg pop cult heroism worn just for one day. The Stranglers, by contrast, sing of heroic extinction. Their single and subsequent album cover bore the image of a wreath, with the suggestion that heroes are buried but not forgotten.
Once, when a young fan approached the group in the hope of securing autographs, their lead guitarist and main vocalist, Hugh Cornwell, sent the youngster away. ‘Don’t have heroes,’ he advised, brusquely. ‘Be your own hero’ – Why? Because there are ‘no more heroes anymore.’ Cornwell later explained that the list of famous people mentioned in the song were anti-heroes, possibly even ‘punk heroes.’
Kahlil Gibran wrote: ‘A truth can walk naked, but a lie always needs to be dressed.’ Perhaps this is what Bowie, a keen shedder of skins – Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Hallowe’en Jack, the Thin White Duke – meant all along: that we can be Pearly Kings and Queens, mummers, mockers, pantomime pranksters, gunpowder plotters, but just for one day. A day is all you need and it’s all you’ll ever be given, so make good use of it. Bowie’s vocal delivery on this track, strained and sincere, would seem to suggest something more than urgency lay behind suggestion carnivalesque frivolity. In December 1976 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood launched their new Seditionaries shop at 430 King’s Road. This Chelsea boutique, like Bowie, had by ’77 undergone ecdysis several times: from Paradise Garage (West Coast vibes); to Let it Rock (Teddy Boy revivalism); then Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die (Leather); next up came Sex (whips, chains, bondage, the whole bloody lot); and then finally, post-Seditionaries, it turned into World’s End (pirates, mud pies and buffalo gals).
Those who could afford the coin were assured that Seditionaries’ garments were, as the label attested, ‘Clothes for heroes.’ One had to be brave and audacious to even consider wearing such threads out and about. The interior of Seditionaries was cold, brightly lit, decorated with black and white murals depicting the aftermath of Dresden, and bore holes in the ceiling meant to imitate bomb damage. McLaren, who took a lump hammer to the plaster himself, eventually succumbed to mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to the deadly asbestos in the shop’s walls. As for Westwood, Seditionaries and its next iteration World’s End certified her shift from niche, outré boutique designer to catwalk doyenne, toast of Paris and New York, for a lot of cash and for much longer than just one day.
Elvis died on 16th August 1977, Marc Bolan on 16th September. Heroes were no more, supposedly. At least the old type of hero: the icon, the legend, the king, was dead. Monarchs were to be traduced and spat at; unenthusiastic TV chat show hosts turned spunk-trumpets for foul mouthed yobs; according to the tabloid press and at least one discussion programme that year, Brass Tacks, punk rock posed a greater threat to our way of life than Communism.
This individual has many fans and draws crowds of thousands every year. They’ll travel to far-flung places such as Nebraska, and wait in the rain to bathe in his motivational magic. One of his devotees describes him as a ‘legend’, another calls him an ‘icon.’ No, it’s not Bob Dylan: it’s Warren Buffet, the 93-year-old billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway who, annually, fills Omaha’s vast Health Centre Arena at an event known commonly as ‘Woodstock for Capitalists.’ Along with business partner Charlie Munger, he has steered Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textiles manufacturer into a multi-billion dollar global conglomerate. He is now a leader of a business which a recent article in The Guardian described as a firm ‘built around a fan base … a dedicated community of followers, who travel far and wide to catch the big show, buy the merch, and jostle to get close to the stage.’
Corporate America has long known Buffet and the recently deceased Munger as the Lennon and McCartney of big corp. Despite accusations of exploitation in the housing market, and despite Berkshire Hathaway’s ‘gigantic’ investments in fossil fuels, to their investors both men remain heroes, and enjoy the type of adoration normally bestowed upon rock gods such Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie. Conservatives would have us believe the line between artist and entrepreneur is thin and uncertain, and that the one equates easily to the other. Certainly, someone in the rock business knows how to make a few bob. I can’t think of many managers or financiers who have made their mark as artists. Malcolm McLaren comes to mind.
The Beatles started a firm, Apple Corp, which, to their credit, didn’t last very long and only ended up costing them money. George later went on to become a movie mogul when he launched Handmade Films, ostensibly to produce Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). This venture too would end in disaster when the rock ‘n’ roller himself was swindled by unscrupulous financiers. The ever-retiring Bowie inked a $17 million deal with EMI America in 1983 only to find himself marshalled onto a miserable greatest hits tour (Sound And Vision ’90) less than a decade later. An evidently frustrated Bowie chose the occasion to superannuate his back catalogue, only to revive it on demand.
In 1977, the year in which Jimmy Carter was sworn into the White House; the year in which the swashbuckling space opera Star Wars hit the cinema screens; and the year in which the Soviets demolished the Ipatiev House in whose basement the Romanov family were murdered by Bolsheviks – the Sex Pistols released their iconoclastic single ‘God Save the Queen’. On both sides of the Atlantic a ‘New Wave’ thus emerged which set about undermining the 1970s ‘rock god’ paradigm. Choking on punk’s exhaust fumes, the New Wave embraced the music video as marketing tool and art form, and even the keyboard, that most Prog of instruments, was allowed back to the fore. 1977 was also the year when The Stranglers released their fourth single, ‘No More Heroes’, which referenced historically ‘heroic’ figures such as Leon Trotsky, Lenny Bruce, Sancho Panza, and Emperor Nero etc. Heralded sonically by a tumbling bass intro followed by keyboards, a contemptuous lyrical salvo demands to know: ‘Whatever happened to ALL the heroes?’ All of them: where have they gone? Why have they deserted us?
Also in ‘77 Bowie released one of his most highly regarded tracks, ‘Heroes’. Co-written with non-musician, art house hero Brian Eno, Bowie’s limited appeal to our more noble instincts allows that we might be heroes ‘just for one day.’ In the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, the line ‘I, I will be king / And you, you will be queen’ sat well with a society still very much in thrall to its stuffed and starched monarchy. The song proved internationally popular, becoming a mainstay of Bowie’s live set. The lyrics are every bit as specific as those of The Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’ in which the names checked in the song are those of exiles, side-men, fakers, and fools. Content to watch while Rome burned, Bowie sang of the neo-liberalisation of the hero, the off-the-peg pop cult heroism worn just for one day. The Stranglers, by contrast, sing of heroic extinction. Their single and subsequent album cover bore the image of a wreath, with the suggestion that heroes are buried but not forgotten.
Once, when a young fan approached the group in the hope of securing autographs, their lead guitarist and main vocalist, Hugh Cornwell, sent the youngster away. ‘Don’t have heroes,’ he advised, brusquely. ‘Be your own hero’ – Why? Because there are ‘no more heroes anymore.’ Cornwell later explained that the list of famous people mentioned in the song were anti-heroes, possibly even ‘punk heroes.’
Kahlil Gibran wrote: ‘A truth can walk naked, but a lie always needs to be dressed.’ Perhaps this is what Bowie, a keen shedder of skins – Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Hallowe’en Jack, the Thin White Duke – meant all along: that we can be Pearly Kings and Queens, mummers, mockers, pantomime pranksters, gunpowder plotters, but just for one day. A day is all you need and it’s all you’ll ever be given, so make good use of it. Bowie’s vocal delivery on this track, strained and sincere, would seem to suggest something more than urgency lay behind suggestion carnivalesque frivolity. In December 1976 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood launched their new Seditionaries shop at 430 King’s Road. This Chelsea boutique, like Bowie, had by ’77 undergone ecdysis several times: from Paradise Garage (West Coast vibes); to Let it Rock (Teddy Boy revivalism); then Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die (Leather); next up came Sex (whips, chains, bondage, the whole bloody lot); and then finally, post-Seditionaries, it turned into World’s End (pirates, mud pies and buffalo gals).
Those who could afford the coin were assured that Seditionaries’ garments were, as the label attested, ‘Clothes for heroes.’ One had to be brave and audacious to even consider wearing such threads out and about. The interior of Seditionaries was cold, brightly lit, decorated with black and white murals depicting the aftermath of Dresden, and bore holes in the ceiling meant to imitate bomb damage. McLaren, who took a lump hammer to the plaster himself, eventually succumbed to mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to the deadly asbestos in the shop’s walls. As for Westwood, Seditionaries and its next iteration World’s End certified her shift from niche, outré boutique designer to catwalk doyenne, toast of Paris and New York, for a lot of cash and for much longer than just one day.
Elvis died on 16th August 1977, Marc Bolan on 16th September. Heroes were no more, supposedly. At least the old type of hero: the icon, the legend, the king, was dead. Monarchs were to be traduced and spat at; unenthusiastic TV chat show hosts turned spunk-trumpets for foul mouthed yobs; according to the tabloid press and at least one discussion programme that year, Brass Tacks, punk rock posed a greater threat to our way of life than Communism.
Tory Tumult:
The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ and David Cameron
Written
by
Steven Hughes
June 26th 2024
by
Steven Hughes
June 26th 2024
The ‘Eton Rifles’ or The Eton Volunteer Corps was founded in 1860 as a response to a national call to arms to form volunteer companies to defend the United Kingdom against a perceived threat from the French. You may even know a local pub called ‘The Rifle Volunteer’ commemorating such events.
As it happened, Napoleon III never planned any hostility, and the whole affair was largely cooked up by alarmists in England, misinterpreting scattered hints from France as signs of an impending invasion. Amid the paranoia, the two nations happily cooperated during the Second Opium War with China and in 1904 would go on to sign up to the ‘Entente Cordiale’. But for now, the alarmists in Britain held sway, insisting there a clear and present danger to the British way of life from Europe.
Our present Home Secretary and former Prime Minister, David Cameron, served in the corps at Eton College. David Cameron was, of course, the architect of the Brexit referendum, appeasing brand new alarmists who foresaw an imaginary European enemy for the 21st century. Not that he believed in this himself: he was far more concerned by the imaginary threat from UKIP who sat as an MP in the UK Parliament, a Conservative Party defector who quit UKIP the moment the referendum results rolled in. UKIP, it seems, had done its job. With the fuse lit, it was time run off home for tea.
As Conservative Leader back in 2008 David Cameron named the song ‘Eton Rifles’ by The Jam as a personal favourite, prompting the song’s composer Paul Weller to retort with incredulity: ‘Which bit didn’t you get? … It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corp.’ In one Top of the Pops appearance broadcast in late 1979, Weller, Foxton, and Butler, looking foppish in cravats and straw boater, performed from behind a line of fresh-faced fusiliers, protecting their lower regions as if in anticipation of some rather unsporting below-the-belt manoeuvres.
Sup up your beer and collect your fags
There’s a row going on down near Slough …
- The Jam ‘Eton Rifles’ (1979)
So sang The Jam in their 1979 call to class war, or at least their suggestion of a Saturday night post-pub punch-up, its language mimicking the football hooliganism vilified in the press at the time. This clarion call to a royal rumble served as a timely reminder to never underestimate the might of the upper-classes. It was no mistake this song appeared in the charts in October 1979, the year Margret Thatcher and her monetarist Tory Party romped home to a landslide victory in May, scooping up 306 seats to Labour’s 203.
Just like the hapless working-class lads in Weller’s rhymes of resistance, equipped with little more than their smokes, the ‘oiks’ on this occasion took a jolly good bashing.
We came out of it naturally the worst
Beaten and bloody and I was sick down my shirt.
- The Jam ‘Eton Rifles’ (1979)
Similar to Labour Party election losses, the lyrical origin of ‘Eton Rifles’ has been much ploughed over. Anecdotally, one version of events recalls a skirmish which occurred in Slough between a bachelor party of working-class lads who overheard a similar group talking in plummy accents. Surmising the well-turned-out lads must have taken a wrong turn en route to their home turf of Eton, the ‘oiks’ decided to help them on their way. Except it didn’t quite work out like that and, as the song reminds us, the ‘poshos’ won the day:
All that rugby puts hairs on your chest
What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?
- The Jam, ‘Eton Rifles’ (1979)
Yet another version of the song’s origin has it that this was Weller’s response to a news item featuring a street brawl in Slough between ‘Right to Work’ marchers and Eton students. The march, sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party, saw unemployed protestors jeered at by the students. Taking exception and intending to teach the brash young students a lesson in the art of pugilism inter-class fisticuffs ensued. But the students, some of them rugby players, some military cadets, were simply in better shape and they routed the wannabe-workers, leaving them beaten and bloody.
But pause to pick apart these lyrics and you’ll discover another narrative concealed in this song: it’s a tale of treachery and fakery delivered with a denunciation aimed at all those who load their guns only to run off home for their tea. While on the surface Weller seems somewhat sanguine regarding that not unexpected beating dealt out by the toffs, beneath there’s a note of bitterness at what feels like betrayal:
Thought you were clever when you lit the fuse
Tore down the House of Commons in your brand-new shoes
Compose a revolutionary symphony
Then went to bed with a charming young thing
- The Jam, ‘Eton Rifles’ (1979)
The unspoken and yet binding camaraderie of the gang lies broken. The kids are divided when one breaks rank, foreshadowing both the scabs who would undermine the class war proper during The Miners’ Strike in 1984, and the criticisms aimed at Weller when he split The Jam to form The Style Council.
What a catalyst you turned out to be
Loaded the guns then you run off home for your tea
Left me standing, like a guilty schoolboy
- The Jam, ‘Eton Rifles’ (1979)
Though some of the lads said they'd be back next week, the crucial word is ‘some.’ Some of the lads. Not all. There will be no repeat, and therefore no revenge. A humiliating defeat in this battle on the margins of class politics. Despite the indignation Weller feels, Cameron might have got it right: we must concur then that young Cameron just really liked this song. The music is exciting, with stabbing riffs and powder keg percussion it expresses urgency and vitality. Like an accidental overdose of gamma radiation, Bruce Foxton’s bass playing unleashes the hidden muso within us all. This is a song of defeat and treachery rather than a hard-fought heroic close battle. It fades like battlefield smoke, to reveal the battered and bloodied, and their discarded weapons.
We all know by now how readily popular culture can be co-opted. Punk, the movement The Jam’s career steered in and out of, quickly found itself incorporated into the mainstream, pogoing its way into sitcoms and onto tourist postcards to little resistance. It would re-emerge in the form of borstal bovver boys, Sham 69, and then in the late-stage Punk/Skinhead crossover that was ‘Oi!’. By this point however too many punks were marching a little too far to the right. Though this is a disputed narrative, and pains should be taken to point out that neither ‘Skin’ nor ‘Punk’ originated exclusively from the foul froth of the far-right cauldron. Eventually, pop guns left abandoned, Crass and the Anarcho-punk movement combined communal expression with punk music, and took up the fight without rifles.
Weller’s ire switched tack with ‘Going Underground’ (1980) and then ‘Beat Surrender’ (1982). In 1982 The Jam, much to Foxton and Buckler’s chagrin, put up the closed sign. Enough said perhaps? Not quite. Weller endured, fronting The Style Council and joining the Red Wedge Tour, alongside Billy Bragg and The Communards, their declared intention being to instil Labour Party politics in the lived experience of the nation’s youth. Kinnock was the party leader at that time (1985) and another 12 years of Tory misrule awaited. And that wasn’t the end of it either. The Clash, with whom The Jam maintained a lyrical back and forth, summarised it best: ‘They got Burton suits, huh, you think it’s funny turning rebellion into money’ (The Clash, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’, 1978). And besides, there were other battles to fight alongside class.
And what of those wearing the Savile Row suits, such as Lord David Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton? He’s still around, Air Pods firmly in his ears as he taps along to ‘Eton Rifles’ while granting export licences to the arms trade.
Honestly, Dave: which bit aren’t you getting?
Article
Hue and Cry,
and Labour's Lost Love
Written
by
Steven Hughes
March 29th 2024
by
Steven Hughes
March 29th 2024
‘Gonna withdraw my labour of love
Gonna strike for the right to get into your heart, yeah
Withdraw my labour of love
Gonna strike for the right to get into your cold heart
Ain't gonna work for you no more
Ain't gonna work, for you no more’
– Hue and Cry ‘Labour of Love’ (1987)
Whether we’re sowing its seeds or offering it to the alien, love is the pop industry’s primary all-consuming ur-commodity. You can’t buy me it even though there’s a whole lot of it. It’s all you need, but what does it have to do with anything? And what is it anyway? Perhaps our mistake was to love it all a little too much?
And withdrawing it as an act of strike? Hue and Cry’s ‘Labour of Love’ (1987) proclaimed such a strategy. A strange episode in pop (are there anything other than strange episodes in pop music from 1961 to 1998?) it entered the charts at 37, around 37 years ago. The political climate of the mid-late 80s, with recent industrial action of the miners at hand, ensured the political demands of the era seeped into popular music and song lyrics. Some, like The Style Council and The Communards went all out with ‘Red Wedge’. Tracy Ullman made Labour leader Neil Kinnock a video star. Even Mancunian refuseniks The Smiths got involved, with 80s punk troubadour Billy Bragg declaring their ‘Heaven Knows, I’m Miserable Now’ the most political song of the decade. In the 80s, a love struggle became a labour struggle, and it made sense. It was in the air. An air we no longer breathed, but instead consumed.
In the classic Marxist notion of alienation, labour as the ‘life of the species,’ and potential for human fulfilment has become, under capital, stifled, fragmented, and man has become a mere appendage to the machine, technology, and such analogies. Human play and charm turn to toil and trouble. The desire to reciprocate within the material world finds itself reduced to the necessity to extract and make a living. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), the worker exists outside their work, while at work feeling outside themselves. Estranged, uncanny, out-of-joint, displaced, alienated: this is the human worker under the capitalist mode of production.
More recently, we see the standardisation of a new form of alienation characterised not by the omission of human qualities from the processes of labour, but by the very opposite: that is the use and exploitation of these qualities. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1979) Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the obligation placed on us all to function as integrated members of a consumer society, whereby we are routinely required to manage and market our emotions to sell, persuade, convince, produce. Workers in the service industry most notably, but also everywhere elsewhere, are required to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.’ That is, new workers must learn to smile and chirp, ‘Hi! How are you?’ as they smooth the flows of capital and consumption and bureaucracy. In such a way capital burrows into the nervous system, cognitive capacities and into our emotions. In a feedback loop, workers internalise capital.
The stressful and psychologically numbing effects of emotional labour is no less than the daily demand to separate internal feelings from external social performances and thus maintain an atmosphere conducive to the advantages of business. From Head Office down to Area Manager, from Professor to Associate Lecturer, from bar-keep to bar-maid, and onwards from branch worker to customer, the micro-managing of emotional behaviour ensures even the most routine of tasks must be enacted as a labour of positivity, as a labour of love. As today’s high-street retail workers will testify, they have received training in the simulation of friendliness, something Hochschild would call ‘deep acting’. Sex workers have been doing it down the ages. We are all selling ourselves in some way or another. Capital pays you to look happy. Capital teaches you sell with a gypsum smile stuccoed to your face.
In the 1987 promotional video for ‘Labour of Love’ a quintet of sales assistants, apparently from Next, successfully resist plastination through their rigorous jittery dancing, persistent piano rhythms, hi-NRG soul, and the repeated protest: ‘Gonna withdraw my labour of love…’ Not for them the petrification of pop idolatry. Sidestepping all references to bigger cages and longer chains, this mob shakes their hips and shimmies so emphatically that the mortar never quite gets a chance to dry on them. They’re going to strike for the right to get into your heart.
In the video we watch our quintet break free from the social cement that threatens to consume them, and by proxy us. For isn't it up to us, on hearing this hue and cry, to take up arms against the 'pseudo-satisfaction' of this pre-digested commercial product? The boys in the band are showing us what's to be done. Move quick before their plaster of Paris sets and standardises you. Adorno warned us: the culture industry would fix in social cement all that threatened the dominant codes of production. In this cemented sense, popular music is rendered a non-authentic commercial product. It becomes undifferentiated and promotes passivity. The more of it you create, the more widespread the passivity becomes. The entertainment industry, like the expanding information industry with which it is mutually associated, presents consumption as a hit parade of 'false needs' – or needs falsified. And chief among them is Love. Love. Where would we be without love?
The entertainment industry promotes love as the one thing none of us can live without even if, or especially if, we're not quite sure what it is. Didn't those poets of four-to-the-floor ‘danceteria’ madness Haddaway, their name itself a reference to being sold out, pose the all-consuming question, 'What is love?', before pleading with some nameless baby to hurt them no more? Ah, the price of love.
Pop reminds us that love greets us hand in hand with pain. Love presented as pop novelty would be the love child of techniques of manipulation whose creative potential conditions the actions not only of the masses of pop devotees, but also the operators themselves, the presumed creatives who are nonetheless consumed by the seductiveness of their own goods, and the message of love they convey.
Well, not so Hue and Cry. The trick, it seems, is to break the spell and resist all treats on offer. As they put it: 'The romance goes when the promises break. My mistake was to love you a little too much.' So don't. Withdraw. And then, when perspective is gained, strike, right back into that 'cold heart'. Love’s labour suspended:
I don't want you, I don't need you
I don't need your tricks and treats
I don't need your ministration, your bad determination
I've had enough of you, and your super-bad crew
I don't need your, I don't need your
Pseudo-satisfaction baby
– Hue and Cry ‘Labour of Love’ (1987)
So why no revolution? Hue and Cry were far from alone in their exhortation to audiences that they should lose their bonds, throw off their shackles and break free. Be free from capital, but crucially be free from revolution also, be free from emotional entanglement with the age? After 'love', the appeal to 'revolution' stands amongst pop music's most oft-repeated commands to its children. In T-Rex's ‘Children of the Revolution’ (1972) the pop revolutionaries remained one step ahead of the music industry’s ‘bump and grind’ and were more than willing to toy with its symbols of success, just so long as you didn’t truly believe that a Rolls Royce was good for your voice. And onwards through a decade or more of various anarchies, the right to work, new Englands, and forwards to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution’ (1988), by which time the Thatcher and Reaganite right-wing had deftly incorporated the language of radicalism - much as the right has adopted the language of anti-elitism today.
And to Sir Keir Starmer: where’s his pop video cameo? Nowhere, it seems. When the decision is made to strike – to strike back or withdraw – it helps to know what you’re striking for and why you’re labouring in the first place. Could it be the latest generation of pop artists can find no affiliation with any Westminster party or politician of late, least of all Starmer’s Tory-lite vision for the Labour Party? We can’t call it the ‘New Labour Party’ because that’s been done. So how about the ‘No Labour Party’ after the early-80s ‘No Wave’, a New York-based avant-rock movement associated with Lydia Lunch and James Chance, largely undefinable with no consistent features, and now widely forgotten. Who knows, we might be saying the same of Starmer soon.
Gonna strike for the right to get into your heart, yeah
Withdraw my labour of love
Gonna strike for the right to get into your cold heart
Ain't gonna work for you no more
Ain't gonna work, for you no more’
– Hue and Cry ‘Labour of Love’ (1987)
Whether we’re sowing its seeds or offering it to the alien, love is the pop industry’s primary all-consuming ur-commodity. You can’t buy me it even though there’s a whole lot of it. It’s all you need, but what does it have to do with anything? And what is it anyway? Perhaps our mistake was to love it all a little too much?
And withdrawing it as an act of strike? Hue and Cry’s ‘Labour of Love’ (1987) proclaimed such a strategy. A strange episode in pop (are there anything other than strange episodes in pop music from 1961 to 1998?) it entered the charts at 37, around 37 years ago. The political climate of the mid-late 80s, with recent industrial action of the miners at hand, ensured the political demands of the era seeped into popular music and song lyrics. Some, like The Style Council and The Communards went all out with ‘Red Wedge’. Tracy Ullman made Labour leader Neil Kinnock a video star. Even Mancunian refuseniks The Smiths got involved, with 80s punk troubadour Billy Bragg declaring their ‘Heaven Knows, I’m Miserable Now’ the most political song of the decade. In the 80s, a love struggle became a labour struggle, and it made sense. It was in the air. An air we no longer breathed, but instead consumed.
In the classic Marxist notion of alienation, labour as the ‘life of the species,’ and potential for human fulfilment has become, under capital, stifled, fragmented, and man has become a mere appendage to the machine, technology, and such analogies. Human play and charm turn to toil and trouble. The desire to reciprocate within the material world finds itself reduced to the necessity to extract and make a living. In Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), the worker exists outside their work, while at work feeling outside themselves. Estranged, uncanny, out-of-joint, displaced, alienated: this is the human worker under the capitalist mode of production.
More recently, we see the standardisation of a new form of alienation characterised not by the omission of human qualities from the processes of labour, but by the very opposite: that is the use and exploitation of these qualities. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1979) Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the obligation placed on us all to function as integrated members of a consumer society, whereby we are routinely required to manage and market our emotions to sell, persuade, convince, produce. Workers in the service industry most notably, but also everywhere elsewhere, are required to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.’ That is, new workers must learn to smile and chirp, ‘Hi! How are you?’ as they smooth the flows of capital and consumption and bureaucracy. In such a way capital burrows into the nervous system, cognitive capacities and into our emotions. In a feedback loop, workers internalise capital.
The stressful and psychologically numbing effects of emotional labour is no less than the daily demand to separate internal feelings from external social performances and thus maintain an atmosphere conducive to the advantages of business. From Head Office down to Area Manager, from Professor to Associate Lecturer, from bar-keep to bar-maid, and onwards from branch worker to customer, the micro-managing of emotional behaviour ensures even the most routine of tasks must be enacted as a labour of positivity, as a labour of love. As today’s high-street retail workers will testify, they have received training in the simulation of friendliness, something Hochschild would call ‘deep acting’. Sex workers have been doing it down the ages. We are all selling ourselves in some way or another. Capital pays you to look happy. Capital teaches you sell with a gypsum smile stuccoed to your face.
In the 1987 promotional video for ‘Labour of Love’ a quintet of sales assistants, apparently from Next, successfully resist plastination through their rigorous jittery dancing, persistent piano rhythms, hi-NRG soul, and the repeated protest: ‘Gonna withdraw my labour of love…’ Not for them the petrification of pop idolatry. Sidestepping all references to bigger cages and longer chains, this mob shakes their hips and shimmies so emphatically that the mortar never quite gets a chance to dry on them. They’re going to strike for the right to get into your heart.
In the video we watch our quintet break free from the social cement that threatens to consume them, and by proxy us. For isn't it up to us, on hearing this hue and cry, to take up arms against the 'pseudo-satisfaction' of this pre-digested commercial product? The boys in the band are showing us what's to be done. Move quick before their plaster of Paris sets and standardises you. Adorno warned us: the culture industry would fix in social cement all that threatened the dominant codes of production. In this cemented sense, popular music is rendered a non-authentic commercial product. It becomes undifferentiated and promotes passivity. The more of it you create, the more widespread the passivity becomes. The entertainment industry, like the expanding information industry with which it is mutually associated, presents consumption as a hit parade of 'false needs' – or needs falsified. And chief among them is Love. Love. Where would we be without love?
The entertainment industry promotes love as the one thing none of us can live without even if, or especially if, we're not quite sure what it is. Didn't those poets of four-to-the-floor ‘danceteria’ madness Haddaway, their name itself a reference to being sold out, pose the all-consuming question, 'What is love?', before pleading with some nameless baby to hurt them no more? Ah, the price of love.
Pop reminds us that love greets us hand in hand with pain. Love presented as pop novelty would be the love child of techniques of manipulation whose creative potential conditions the actions not only of the masses of pop devotees, but also the operators themselves, the presumed creatives who are nonetheless consumed by the seductiveness of their own goods, and the message of love they convey.
Well, not so Hue and Cry. The trick, it seems, is to break the spell and resist all treats on offer. As they put it: 'The romance goes when the promises break. My mistake was to love you a little too much.' So don't. Withdraw. And then, when perspective is gained, strike, right back into that 'cold heart'. Love’s labour suspended:
I don't want you, I don't need you
I don't need your tricks and treats
I don't need your ministration, your bad determination
I've had enough of you, and your super-bad crew
I don't need your, I don't need your
Pseudo-satisfaction baby
– Hue and Cry ‘Labour of Love’ (1987)
So why no revolution? Hue and Cry were far from alone in their exhortation to audiences that they should lose their bonds, throw off their shackles and break free. Be free from capital, but crucially be free from revolution also, be free from emotional entanglement with the age? After 'love', the appeal to 'revolution' stands amongst pop music's most oft-repeated commands to its children. In T-Rex's ‘Children of the Revolution’ (1972) the pop revolutionaries remained one step ahead of the music industry’s ‘bump and grind’ and were more than willing to toy with its symbols of success, just so long as you didn’t truly believe that a Rolls Royce was good for your voice. And onwards through a decade or more of various anarchies, the right to work, new Englands, and forwards to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution’ (1988), by which time the Thatcher and Reaganite right-wing had deftly incorporated the language of radicalism - much as the right has adopted the language of anti-elitism today.
And to Sir Keir Starmer: where’s his pop video cameo? Nowhere, it seems. When the decision is made to strike – to strike back or withdraw – it helps to know what you’re striking for and why you’re labouring in the first place. Could it be the latest generation of pop artists can find no affiliation with any Westminster party or politician of late, least of all Starmer’s Tory-lite vision for the Labour Party? We can’t call it the ‘New Labour Party’ because that’s been done. So how about the ‘No Labour Party’ after the early-80s ‘No Wave’, a New York-based avant-rock movement associated with Lydia Lunch and James Chance, largely undefinable with no consistent features, and now widely forgotten. Who knows, we might be saying the same of Starmer soon.
Interview
Prof. David Archibald
(University of Glasgow)
discusses Socialism, Scotland, Cinema and Song
Prof. David Archibald
(University of Glasgow)
discusses Socialism, Scotland, Cinema and Song
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by
Brett Gregory
October 25th 2023
by
Brett Gregory
October 25th 2023
Transcript
BG: Tonight's guest is an academic, an author, an activist, a filmmaker, and a singer from Glasgow in Scotland.
DA: Hey, my name’s David Archibald, and I teach film studies at the University of Glasgow.
BG: Great voice, David. Anyway, as well as teaching film, what are your wider research interests in the subject?
DA: I'm the editor of the Political Cinema series at Edinburgh University Press, so perhaps that may indicate something of my general research interests.
BG: And what other projects has this led onto, specifically?
DA: I recently completed a book on Ken Loach, which is published in the series. And just now I'm working on a project that attempts to link feminist activists in Cuba, Catalonia and Glasgow through collaborative no-budget filmmaking. And I'm also doing another research project that explores how a music band might be able to make history with a capital H.
BG: So what's your personal perspective on cinema as an art form?
DA: In common with the pioneers of Third Cinema, a radical film movement from what is generally now called the Global South, I take the view that cinema can be utilised as a generator of theory: that we can think and that we can learn through making.
BG: I like that, that's interesting. I reviewed your latest book, 'Tracking Loach,' for Arts Express earlier this year, as well as for the arts and politics website Culture Matters, which is based in the North East of the UK. Out of curiosity, what was your rationale behind the book's title?
DA: I called the book 'Tracking Loach' because I've been tracking the British filmmaker, Ken Loach, in different capacities for some decades, as an audience member for many, many years, but also as a journalist including writing articles for the great New York-based journal ‘Cineaste’, and as an academic with various chapters and articles.
When I heard that Loach was coming to Glasgow to film 'The Angels' Share' about 10 years ago, I got contacted and was asked if I could look over his shoulder while he was making the film. And I proposed that I would write a book about his celebrated working practices. Thankfully, he said yes, so the book is an account of tracking Loach in many ways over many decades from a political perspective.
BG: What would you say is particularly significant about the films Ken Loach has directed in the first quarter of this century?
DA: What's noticeable about Loach's work is how the films are utilized to force the political discourse beyond the screen. And Loach's work – whether it be 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' which deals with Britain's role in Ireland in the Irish Civil War, or 'I, Daniel Blake' about the conditions facing unemployed workers in Britain – what's noticeable is the significant way that they shift the discourse away from the one set by the British right-wing media.
BG: And how would you personally assess Ken Loach's impact on, for example, the field of cinema as a whole?
DA: Loach has been a socialist for his entire adult life. His contribution to radical cinema is unmatched in breadth alone on a global scale.
BG: Now, in this cold-hearted corporatized society of ours, what would you identify as a key practical value of independent artistic expression?
DA: I think that artworks help to set agendas for conversations to come into being. I've spent a long time attempting to foster and nurture alternative ways of talking and doing, being and making. There's a parallel perhaps in the invaluable work that alternative media, like your own radio station, do. They’re vital in creating a new set of possibilities for us. That's why I'm delighted to be here, speaking today.
BG: Yeah, it's all about digging deep, excavating the new, the unknown, the hidden, and sharing the wealth. So, Glasgow: a place that’s always brimmed with energy and ideas in the arts, culture and, particularly, grassroots politics. What does this tell us about the city's psyche, its outlook, and its history?
DA: Glasgow is a city haunted by a proletarian ghost. The city is well known for its industrial past and for a radical heritage which goes alongside it. The spirit of collectivism which developed when it was a major industrial centre continues to operate in much of the city's cultural scene. Its manifest, for instance, through various ways that artists are open to working together. There is a collaborative ethos and that's connected to the spirit of collectivism which was forged in the shipyards and factories. And I’m interested in exploring and have always been interested in this for a long time, exploring how to converse with that ghost and see what might transpire.
BG: But your passion for and your pursuit of these creative conversations, as you say, has taken you further afield beyond Glasgow, beyond Scotland even.
DA: I'm currently working with Núria Araüna Baró, an academic from the Public University of Tarragona, and with four groups of feminist activists in Havana and Glasgow, cities which are twinned and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Catalonia, the city in which Núria resides and Matanzas in Cuba; these two cities are also twin. It's a project that tries to connect these activists through dialogical filmmaking, building trans-local connections. And we have an event at the Havana Film Festival in December next month, at which women from all the four cities will meet for the first time. It's a beautiful project, and I feel very lucky to be part of it. So although I create work that is deeply rooted in the city, always interesting to build international connections and alliances beyond them.
BG: Admirable stuff, man. Your students at Glasgow University are lucky to have you. Right, your band, The Tenementals. Tell us more.
DA: The Tenementals is a wild research project and a lot of fun. It attempts to recount the history of Glasgow in song and asks what might history look, sound and feel like if it was created by a group of musicians. It also asks not whether artworks or songs can be history but whether history with a capital H can be artworks or songs. It's wild because it refuses the strictures often imposed on conventional academic research and finds its own path within the artistic community. It runs to its own beat, untethered by authority or control. That's really the only way it can be alive. It has to do whatever it has to do, and the history that it constructs is a history of fragments. It's a radical history of a radical city told in a radical way.
BG: And your latest song – which we’ll be actually playing out with – has got a compelling radical history all of its own.
DA: Although we set out to record a history of Glasgow in song, we're certainly not parochial, far from it: our outlook is international. In January we played a support gig for striking workers and we wanted to do a cover. We were thinking through options, and I was speaking with a filmmaker and academic friend of mine, Holger Mohaupt. And we were talking about German songs popular during the Spanish Civil War. And he mentioned 'Die Moorsoldaten' or ‘Peat Bog Soldiers' in English. It was first performed 90 years ago this year, 1933, in a concentration camp for leftist political prisoners. And although it's been covered in English by a number of quite famous singers like Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, it's not particularly well known in Britain. We asked Holger's daughter, Lily, to sing it because I'd heard her very, very beautiful but delicate voice on some films that Holger had made previously. The first time I heard her singing in the recording studio or in the rehearsal studio, I knew instantly that we had to record it.
BG: And the release is a bit different?
DA: We've just brought out two versions, one in German and English with a new translation, and one the rarely performed six-verse German version. We hope to introduce an old song to new audiences in a new way. It's a song about opposition in the most difficult and darkest of times, and I think that that has resonance.
BG: Yeah, the darkest of times pretty much sums a lot of things up at the moment. What are your thoughts on the future? Do you see hope?
DA: You know, when I was a teenager, people often used to tell me that I'd grow out of the radical socialist ideas which I held. Socialists are often presented as dreamers and fantasists, but if we look at the catastrophe which capitalism has created in terms of global climate change, the true fantasists are surely those who would have you believe that it can be resolved under capitalism. It cannot. Socialism, for me at least, remains the hope of the future. And while some academics often talk very vaguely about living differently or about being differently or working in a post-capitalist world, I suppose we're not afraid to name our object of desire: a democratic socialism in which workers have control over their own lives, and where human beings live in harmony with the world, rather than ruthlessly exploiting it in the interests of the ruling class.
BG: That's very honest and rousing, David. The struggle often feels lonely for many, myself included, but thanks to you, not today. It's been brilliant having you on the show. I'm really happy to have finally met you.
DA: Thank you, Brett. It's been great to talk with you, and good luck with all your great work.
BG: Cheers, man. And, as promised, here are The Tenementals with their latest single, the haunting and historical ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’ which is available now via Strength In Numbers Records on Bandcamp.
BG: Tonight's guest is an academic, an author, an activist, a filmmaker, and a singer from Glasgow in Scotland.
DA: Hey, my name’s David Archibald, and I teach film studies at the University of Glasgow.
BG: Great voice, David. Anyway, as well as teaching film, what are your wider research interests in the subject?
DA: I'm the editor of the Political Cinema series at Edinburgh University Press, so perhaps that may indicate something of my general research interests.
BG: And what other projects has this led onto, specifically?
DA: I recently completed a book on Ken Loach, which is published in the series. And just now I'm working on a project that attempts to link feminist activists in Cuba, Catalonia and Glasgow through collaborative no-budget filmmaking. And I'm also doing another research project that explores how a music band might be able to make history with a capital H.
BG: So what's your personal perspective on cinema as an art form?
DA: In common with the pioneers of Third Cinema, a radical film movement from what is generally now called the Global South, I take the view that cinema can be utilised as a generator of theory: that we can think and that we can learn through making.
BG: I like that, that's interesting. I reviewed your latest book, 'Tracking Loach,' for Arts Express earlier this year, as well as for the arts and politics website Culture Matters, which is based in the North East of the UK. Out of curiosity, what was your rationale behind the book's title?
DA: I called the book 'Tracking Loach' because I've been tracking the British filmmaker, Ken Loach, in different capacities for some decades, as an audience member for many, many years, but also as a journalist including writing articles for the great New York-based journal ‘Cineaste’, and as an academic with various chapters and articles.
When I heard that Loach was coming to Glasgow to film 'The Angels' Share' about 10 years ago, I got contacted and was asked if I could look over his shoulder while he was making the film. And I proposed that I would write a book about his celebrated working practices. Thankfully, he said yes, so the book is an account of tracking Loach in many ways over many decades from a political perspective.
BG: What would you say is particularly significant about the films Ken Loach has directed in the first quarter of this century?
DA: What's noticeable about Loach's work is how the films are utilized to force the political discourse beyond the screen. And Loach's work – whether it be 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' which deals with Britain's role in Ireland in the Irish Civil War, or 'I, Daniel Blake' about the conditions facing unemployed workers in Britain – what's noticeable is the significant way that they shift the discourse away from the one set by the British right-wing media.
BG: And how would you personally assess Ken Loach's impact on, for example, the field of cinema as a whole?
DA: Loach has been a socialist for his entire adult life. His contribution to radical cinema is unmatched in breadth alone on a global scale.
BG: Now, in this cold-hearted corporatized society of ours, what would you identify as a key practical value of independent artistic expression?
DA: I think that artworks help to set agendas for conversations to come into being. I've spent a long time attempting to foster and nurture alternative ways of talking and doing, being and making. There's a parallel perhaps in the invaluable work that alternative media, like your own radio station, do. They’re vital in creating a new set of possibilities for us. That's why I'm delighted to be here, speaking today.
BG: Yeah, it's all about digging deep, excavating the new, the unknown, the hidden, and sharing the wealth. So, Glasgow: a place that’s always brimmed with energy and ideas in the arts, culture and, particularly, grassroots politics. What does this tell us about the city's psyche, its outlook, and its history?
DA: Glasgow is a city haunted by a proletarian ghost. The city is well known for its industrial past and for a radical heritage which goes alongside it. The spirit of collectivism which developed when it was a major industrial centre continues to operate in much of the city's cultural scene. Its manifest, for instance, through various ways that artists are open to working together. There is a collaborative ethos and that's connected to the spirit of collectivism which was forged in the shipyards and factories. And I’m interested in exploring and have always been interested in this for a long time, exploring how to converse with that ghost and see what might transpire.
BG: But your passion for and your pursuit of these creative conversations, as you say, has taken you further afield beyond Glasgow, beyond Scotland even.
DA: I'm currently working with Núria Araüna Baró, an academic from the Public University of Tarragona, and with four groups of feminist activists in Havana and Glasgow, cities which are twinned and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Catalonia, the city in which Núria resides and Matanzas in Cuba; these two cities are also twin. It's a project that tries to connect these activists through dialogical filmmaking, building trans-local connections. And we have an event at the Havana Film Festival in December next month, at which women from all the four cities will meet for the first time. It's a beautiful project, and I feel very lucky to be part of it. So although I create work that is deeply rooted in the city, always interesting to build international connections and alliances beyond them.
BG: Admirable stuff, man. Your students at Glasgow University are lucky to have you. Right, your band, The Tenementals. Tell us more.
DA: The Tenementals is a wild research project and a lot of fun. It attempts to recount the history of Glasgow in song and asks what might history look, sound and feel like if it was created by a group of musicians. It also asks not whether artworks or songs can be history but whether history with a capital H can be artworks or songs. It's wild because it refuses the strictures often imposed on conventional academic research and finds its own path within the artistic community. It runs to its own beat, untethered by authority or control. That's really the only way it can be alive. It has to do whatever it has to do, and the history that it constructs is a history of fragments. It's a radical history of a radical city told in a radical way.
BG: And your latest song – which we’ll be actually playing out with – has got a compelling radical history all of its own.
DA: Although we set out to record a history of Glasgow in song, we're certainly not parochial, far from it: our outlook is international. In January we played a support gig for striking workers and we wanted to do a cover. We were thinking through options, and I was speaking with a filmmaker and academic friend of mine, Holger Mohaupt. And we were talking about German songs popular during the Spanish Civil War. And he mentioned 'Die Moorsoldaten' or ‘Peat Bog Soldiers' in English. It was first performed 90 years ago this year, 1933, in a concentration camp for leftist political prisoners. And although it's been covered in English by a number of quite famous singers like Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, it's not particularly well known in Britain. We asked Holger's daughter, Lily, to sing it because I'd heard her very, very beautiful but delicate voice on some films that Holger had made previously. The first time I heard her singing in the recording studio or in the rehearsal studio, I knew instantly that we had to record it.
BG: And the release is a bit different?
DA: We've just brought out two versions, one in German and English with a new translation, and one the rarely performed six-verse German version. We hope to introduce an old song to new audiences in a new way. It's a song about opposition in the most difficult and darkest of times, and I think that that has resonance.
BG: Yeah, the darkest of times pretty much sums a lot of things up at the moment. What are your thoughts on the future? Do you see hope?
DA: You know, when I was a teenager, people often used to tell me that I'd grow out of the radical socialist ideas which I held. Socialists are often presented as dreamers and fantasists, but if we look at the catastrophe which capitalism has created in terms of global climate change, the true fantasists are surely those who would have you believe that it can be resolved under capitalism. It cannot. Socialism, for me at least, remains the hope of the future. And while some academics often talk very vaguely about living differently or about being differently or working in a post-capitalist world, I suppose we're not afraid to name our object of desire: a democratic socialism in which workers have control over their own lives, and where human beings live in harmony with the world, rather than ruthlessly exploiting it in the interests of the ruling class.
BG: That's very honest and rousing, David. The struggle often feels lonely for many, myself included, but thanks to you, not today. It's been brilliant having you on the show. I'm really happy to have finally met you.
DA: Thank you, Brett. It's been great to talk with you, and good luck with all your great work.
BG: Cheers, man. And, as promised, here are The Tenementals with their latest single, the haunting and historical ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’ which is available now via Strength In Numbers Records on Bandcamp.
Film Review
'The Stones and Brian Jones'
(Nick Broomfield, 2023)
'The Stones and Brian Jones'
(Nick Broomfield, 2023)
Written and Narrated
by
Brett Gregory
September 27th 2023
by
Brett Gregory
September 27th 2023
Transcript
What follows is my review of ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’, the latest film from Nick Broomfield, acclaimed director of turn-of-the-century classic documentaries such as 'Kurt and Courtney', 'Biggie and Tupac' and 'Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer'.
Brian Jones founded The Rolling Stones, one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time, by placing a small advertisement in ‘Jazz News’ in Soho, London, in 1962. Moreover, he himself derived the name of this group, his group, from the great Muddy Water’s track, ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’.
By 1963 Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had finally converged to become The Rolling Stones and, regardless of anything else which may be written or said about him, true or otherwise, this was, and always will be, an enormous cultural contribution for a 20 year old young man to have made.
However, there is a sequence in this documentary that begins just after the fifteen minute mark which, for me, personifies Jones as a prisoner of his own making, pacing around and around the exercise yard inside his mind, mumbling over and over to himself, until finally he collapses and dies from exhaustion.
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
A former girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and mother of his third child, Julian, describes in voice-over that Jones’ own mother, a piano teacher, was a ‘very rigid’ woman, devoid of ‘fun’ or ‘laughter’, who ‘didn’t know how’ to love her son. Over the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ we then hear the voice of his engineer father, Lewis Jones, lamenting his son’s increasing ‘fanaticism’ with jazz and his attendant undisciplined behaviour. He eventually kicks his son out of the family’s middle-class home in 1960.
Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ then introduces us to some hazy home video footage of drunken patrons dancing deliriously at Filby’s Jazz Club in leafy Cheltenham in England. Jones, aged 16, worked the door of this club and it is here where he met his first girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, who, within a year, became the mother of his first child. This nameless baby was given up for adoption by the time Jones reached 18 years of age; he then promptly deserted Valerie, and his memory of her, by busking around Europe.
When his drug-related death arrived in 1969 at the age of 27, drowning in the swimming pool at his farmhouse mansion in Sussex, England, Brian Jones had fathered at least five children with five different women. As detailed by wider verifiable sources, he had also been physically abusive towards all of them. In order to maintain the time-honoured tale of the ‘tortured artist’ however this documentary chooses not to delve too deeply into such baleful behaviour.
This said, Nick Broomfield does narrate solemnly: ‘Brian’s self-loathing came out in the way he treated other people.’
In turn, we also learn that in 1965 Jones began a relationship with the Italian-German model and actress, Anita Pallenberg, and, to outsiders, their famously raucous two year relationship was riddled with passion, provocation, performativity and purple haze. However, Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in the movie ‘Degree of Murder’ in 1967 to a soundtrack composed by Jones, comments here: ‘So I guess they got a lot of sexual or erotic excitement out of these fights. I mean, it certainly wasn’t a tender relationship.’
Indeed, after Pallenberg died in 2017, aged 73, Rob Sheffield’s obituary in the aptly titled Rolling Stone magazine reminds us that: 'As Brian grew more abusive and jealous, eventually breaking his hand on her face, she left him for Keith [Richards] during a … trip to Morocco.’
As an adjunct to this somewhat pitiable pop star portrait, the BBC archive interview with the aforementioned Pat Andrews from 1965 continues to illuminate: ‘I feel quite sorry for Brian in a way because, the kind of person he is, he can never be happy, could never have true friends … He’s got no feelings for anybody.’
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
Inevitably, Brian Jones also brimmed and burned with musical talent which, in numerous ways, helped to lay down the foundations and future direction of The Rolling Stones. This fact is intimately revealed to us by their former bass player, Bill Wyman, who is now in his 80s, when he fondly recollects in a fatherly tone how Jones’ unique creative contributions to classic tracks like ‘Little Red Rooster’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ still resonate 56 years later.
Yet, sadly and also inevitably, his band mates were not exempt from Jones’ churlishness or cruelty either. As Wyman comments: ‘If he didn’t get his way he kind of used to get very aggressive … [Stubbing] a cigarette out on the back of your hand in the car.’ And it is at this moment when we uncomfortably recall, earlier on in the narrative, Jones flicking cigarette ash into Wyman’s hair during a live press conference without him knowing.
Amidst all this doom and gloom however Broomfield’s documentary still meticulously vivifies The Rolling Stones’ cyclone of success during the mid-1960s through a blend of black-and-white newsreels, amateur concert footage, still photographs, music recordings and voice-overs. As the band take charge of Planet Earth by introducing black R&B to an entire generation of white teenagers, post-pubescent pandemonium is naturally in hot pursuit. Thus, we are thrilled as stages are stormed, airports are attacked and Mick Jagger’s hair is ripped out from its roots by the grasping hands of gasping female fans.
Clearly though, this wasn’t Brian Jones’ band anymore. Jagger and Richards had been anointed in his stead and, due to their growing desire for greater album sales and greater stardom, they didn’t play his beloved R&B as often as they used to.
Out of shape and out of time, a slave to sedatives, scotch and coke, Jones was told by Jagger, Richards and Watts on 8th June 1969 that he was no longer a Rolling Stone.
One month later he was dead.
Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ explores the dark origins of one of the world’s most successful rock bands and, as a consequence, it is compulsory viewing not only for die-hard fans of The Rolling Stones, but also for connoisseurs of music culture in general.
What follows is my review of ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’, the latest film from Nick Broomfield, acclaimed director of turn-of-the-century classic documentaries such as 'Kurt and Courtney', 'Biggie and Tupac' and 'Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer'.
Brian Jones founded The Rolling Stones, one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time, by placing a small advertisement in ‘Jazz News’ in Soho, London, in 1962. Moreover, he himself derived the name of this group, his group, from the great Muddy Water’s track, ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’.
By 1963 Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had finally converged to become The Rolling Stones and, regardless of anything else which may be written or said about him, true or otherwise, this was, and always will be, an enormous cultural contribution for a 20 year old young man to have made.
However, there is a sequence in this documentary that begins just after the fifteen minute mark which, for me, personifies Jones as a prisoner of his own making, pacing around and around the exercise yard inside his mind, mumbling over and over to himself, until finally he collapses and dies from exhaustion.
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
A former girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and mother of his third child, Julian, describes in voice-over that Jones’ own mother, a piano teacher, was a ‘very rigid’ woman, devoid of ‘fun’ or ‘laughter’, who ‘didn’t know how’ to love her son. Over the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ we then hear the voice of his engineer father, Lewis Jones, lamenting his son’s increasing ‘fanaticism’ with jazz and his attendant undisciplined behaviour. He eventually kicks his son out of the family’s middle-class home in 1960.
Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ then introduces us to some hazy home video footage of drunken patrons dancing deliriously at Filby’s Jazz Club in leafy Cheltenham in England. Jones, aged 16, worked the door of this club and it is here where he met his first girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, who, within a year, became the mother of his first child. This nameless baby was given up for adoption by the time Jones reached 18 years of age; he then promptly deserted Valerie, and his memory of her, by busking around Europe.
When his drug-related death arrived in 1969 at the age of 27, drowning in the swimming pool at his farmhouse mansion in Sussex, England, Brian Jones had fathered at least five children with five different women. As detailed by wider verifiable sources, he had also been physically abusive towards all of them. In order to maintain the time-honoured tale of the ‘tortured artist’ however this documentary chooses not to delve too deeply into such baleful behaviour.
This said, Nick Broomfield does narrate solemnly: ‘Brian’s self-loathing came out in the way he treated other people.’
In turn, we also learn that in 1965 Jones began a relationship with the Italian-German model and actress, Anita Pallenberg, and, to outsiders, their famously raucous two year relationship was riddled with passion, provocation, performativity and purple haze. However, Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in the movie ‘Degree of Murder’ in 1967 to a soundtrack composed by Jones, comments here: ‘So I guess they got a lot of sexual or erotic excitement out of these fights. I mean, it certainly wasn’t a tender relationship.’
Indeed, after Pallenberg died in 2017, aged 73, Rob Sheffield’s obituary in the aptly titled Rolling Stone magazine reminds us that: 'As Brian grew more abusive and jealous, eventually breaking his hand on her face, she left him for Keith [Richards] during a … trip to Morocco.’
As an adjunct to this somewhat pitiable pop star portrait, the BBC archive interview with the aforementioned Pat Andrews from 1965 continues to illuminate: ‘I feel quite sorry for Brian in a way because, the kind of person he is, he can never be happy, could never have true friends … He’s got no feelings for anybody.’
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
Inevitably, Brian Jones also brimmed and burned with musical talent which, in numerous ways, helped to lay down the foundations and future direction of The Rolling Stones. This fact is intimately revealed to us by their former bass player, Bill Wyman, who is now in his 80s, when he fondly recollects in a fatherly tone how Jones’ unique creative contributions to classic tracks like ‘Little Red Rooster’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ still resonate 56 years later.
Yet, sadly and also inevitably, his band mates were not exempt from Jones’ churlishness or cruelty either. As Wyman comments: ‘If he didn’t get his way he kind of used to get very aggressive … [Stubbing] a cigarette out on the back of your hand in the car.’ And it is at this moment when we uncomfortably recall, earlier on in the narrative, Jones flicking cigarette ash into Wyman’s hair during a live press conference without him knowing.
Amidst all this doom and gloom however Broomfield’s documentary still meticulously vivifies The Rolling Stones’ cyclone of success during the mid-1960s through a blend of black-and-white newsreels, amateur concert footage, still photographs, music recordings and voice-overs. As the band take charge of Planet Earth by introducing black R&B to an entire generation of white teenagers, post-pubescent pandemonium is naturally in hot pursuit. Thus, we are thrilled as stages are stormed, airports are attacked and Mick Jagger’s hair is ripped out from its roots by the grasping hands of gasping female fans.
Clearly though, this wasn’t Brian Jones’ band anymore. Jagger and Richards had been anointed in his stead and, due to their growing desire for greater album sales and greater stardom, they didn’t play his beloved R&B as often as they used to.
Out of shape and out of time, a slave to sedatives, scotch and coke, Jones was told by Jagger, Richards and Watts on 8th June 1969 that he was no longer a Rolling Stone.
One month later he was dead.
Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ explores the dark origins of one of the world’s most successful rock bands and, as a consequence, it is compulsory viewing not only for die-hard fans of The Rolling Stones, but also for connoisseurs of music culture in general.