Established 2005
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
Interview
Prof. David Archibald,The Tenementals,and Monica Queen
'Te Recuerdo Amanda'
Prof. David Archibald,The Tenementals,and Monica Queen
'Te Recuerdo Amanda'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
September 11th 2024
by Brett Gregory
September 11th 2024
Interview Transcript
Brett Gregory speaks with David Archibald, founding member and frontman of The Tenementals, a group of academics, artists and musicians who are developing a series of songs which recount a history of Glasgow, and breathing new life into some old protest songs in innovative covers. Here, Archibald talks about some of their recent releases, which cover songs related to Spain, Scotland and Santiago, and the band’s debut album, ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’ which is released on Strength in Numbers Records in November.
BG: Hi, I'm Brett Gregory, and the editor for the UK arts, culture, and academic website, Serious Feather, and this is Prof. David Archibald from the University of Glasgow, founder of the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals.
DA: So, yes, Brett, it's good to be back in touch. A lot's been happening with The Tenementals as well. We played a few gigs, we did a special May Day event in Glasgow, and also we played at the Belle and Sebastian Glasgow Weekender, so that was nice to be asked to do that.
It's been quite a year for The Tenementals; in fact last year we released our first single, two versions of the classic antifascist song, Die Moorsoldaten or Peat Bog Soldiers in English which we spoke about in our last interview; and, out of the blue, we were contacted by the people who oversee the archives of the concentration camp in which the song was first performed. That was at Börgermoor concentration camp, and it was first performed on the 27th of August 1933, as you'll remember. and the reason the archivists were in touch was because they wanted the song to be placed in the archive that they have about the camp, and they've got a an archive about that particular song because it's been covered by a number of various artists previously and, you know, when they were in touch they also said some, you know, quite very moving words about the two versions that we had made – we made one in English and one in German – and I think every, every, every music band, every, every band probably want their music to have some form of resonance with the world, the external world but, I mean, to receive this news was quite overwhelming, and we were quite taken a back with it.
And then we went on to produce another cover, this time a song by Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and singer, who was murdered during Pinochet’s coup against the elected government in Chile in 1973. We were doing an event at St. Luke's which is a beautiful, beautiful venue in the East End of Glasgow, and we were performing there on the 15th of September last year, almost 50 years to the day when Victor Jara's body was found dumped in a street. He'd been arrested by the military during the coup, he was held in a makeshift prison, and in the prison the guards broke his fingers to stop him playing the guitar. They shot him dead, and they dumped his body. And because we were doing an event which was 50 years and one day after the death or the finding of Victor Jara's body, we wanted to do something which kept his memory alive so we recorded one of the beautiful songs that he wrote called ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. It's a song which is about remembering really, it's a love song in some ways I think, but it's also about remembering, and it's also about people involved in the struggle to build a better world, and sometimes the sacrifices that are involved in that.
And we asked Monica Queen. Monica Queen is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful singer who's maybe known quite well in Glasgow and circles in Scotland. I'm not so sure how well she's known out of Scotland, but her voice is extraordinary, and we asked her if she would sing it, and she was up for it, and our drummer Bob Anderson off in drums with Monica and her partner, Johnny Smiley, and Johnny's the mixing maestro on our recording, so it just seemed like a good idea. So at that night when we played our own set at St Luke's, and then we went off, and I came back on, and I said a few words about Victor Jara, and why we were going to sing that song, and then introduced Monica and our guitarist, Simon. And Monica just sang it, Simon on a little guitar, a little Spanish guitar they'd found in the street actually, and it was just an incredible moment. Her voice is amazing, and Monica is not a native Spanish speaker, she doesn't speak Spanish – she speaks some Italian – but she sang it in Spanish, and there were 500 people in the room and, you know, time seemed to stop it.
It was a really, really beautiful moment, so we wanted to record that single, and record that track, and try to recreate something of that moment and, you know, we hope that we've done that to some degree, and that was in the spring, we did that in the spring, but we're very slow and our rhythm is pretty irregular, so we're just bringing out a video now, and it was the video was shot by my pal, Jim Rusk, edited by Simon, the guitarist, and I had a hand in it too, and we went down to the River Clyde, and we shot it. And the original song is about someone remembering, someone goes to a factory, so we went to kind of industrial landscape, Glasgow's industrial landscaping, and we filmed a little video there and, you know, we don't want to be overly romantic, but when we listen to the songs of Victor Jara, we think that in some ways he walks with us, you know? It's like we keep his memory alive. One of the DJs that played the track on one of the local radio stations up here, in his words, he said that ‘they killed Victor Hara because they were afraid of his music’, and that's true. So every time Victor Jara's songs are sung you know it's a blow against the people that would kill the writers, the Poets, the dreamers, the people who try and imagine a different world. So that was a quite a special moment, and we hope that the little video we've made kind of adds something to that in a modest way.
We then released what will be the first single from our debut album. We were talking about The Tenementals is a project which attempts to create a radical history of a radical city in a radical way by making a series of songs we create what we call a ‘trans media history’ of a city, and that the history we construct is through the songs, through the videos, through the things that we say in newspapers through blogs like this, we believe that this is a history that we're contributing to an understanding, or a way of understanding about how the city of Glasgow is, what its history is, and also how it understands itself historically. What is the city's historical consciousness?
The album's coming out it's modestly called ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’, or maybe not modestly, ambitiously called. Whether they be six volumes remains to be seen, and it's coming out with Strength in Numbers records in November.
And the first track we brought out roundabout May Day was a track called ‘A Passion Flower’s Lament’, and it's a song about the men from Glasgow who fought in Spain, who travelled to Spain, and who died in the in the Spanish Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. And it's written from the perspective of a statue that sits on the banks of the River Clyde which commemorates the members of what was called ‘The International Brigades’ who fought during the Spanish Civil War, and didn't return, and the statue is named after a very famous Spanish communist politician commonly known as ‘La Pasionaria’, and it was erected in the 70s by, you know, by activists on the left, and it's become an important part of Glasgow’s cityscape, and a common gathering point for radical groups and, you know this Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, is a contested historical period. Maybe some people might know [people] that study kind of failed revolutions. There was a period in that was called ‘The Civil War within the Civil War where different leftist groups were, you know, fighting each other, but they weren't just arguing with each other about the contents of their paper, but they were shooting each other, and one of the people that was caught up in that was a University of Glasgow student, Bob Smiley, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the Aragon front, and he died in a prison cell in Valencia. He was arrested by the forces on the Republican left. He was in the process of leaving Spain and he was, you know, beaten up and he and he died, and it's, you know, it's history's murky, you can't be exact but it's possible, perhaps probable, that he died at the hand of the people who were on the same bloody side as him.
So the song asks whether we should be worrying about the difficult aspects of the conflict when as we absolutely know, and as the song says, ‘Once more the jack boot seeks to recruit’. So at a moment when we can see fascism coming for us and, more primarily, we've seen results in Germany and Spain and elsewhere – to a lesser degree in Britain but nevertheless – there the song sort of says, ‘Well, what do we do about the troubling aspects of a kind of anti-fascist history at the moment when the fascists are coming back, and the song leaves that open. Perhaps art creates, you know, often poses questions rather than answers them, but also what the song seeks to do is to resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Spain, to focus on a moment of revolutionary possibility. We absolutely firmly believe that if it happened once it can happen again, you know, the Spanish ruling class are fearful of the memory of the Spanish Revolution, precisely because they know that better than anybody else if it happened once it can happen again.
The song is sung beautifully by Jen Cunnion who sings most of the songs in the album, but Jen, she's not always available for live gigs, so we've got worked with some other fantastic singers as guest vocalists and Belle and Sebastian, and Sarah Martin has sang live with us a few times, but she also recorded one of the tracks on the album. It's a song called ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, it's a song about the events in Scotland known variously as the 1820 ‘Radical War’, the ‘Radical Rising’ or the ‘Scottish Insurrection’. Therese Martin also sings on the sing song so there's two Martins on that song. No relation other than they're both great singers. 1820 perhaps 1819, and Peter Lewis perhaps well known in England, and perhaps some of the history around that is pretty settled. 1820 witnessed a period in Scotland of sustained civil unrest, a general strike, and aborted armed uprising; and it culminated with its leaders sentenced to death while others were deported. And during the lockdown I took a track up to Sighthill Cemetery where there's a monument dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the rising. So the memorial lists those who were executed but also those who were deported to Australia, and one man's name is listed as Thomas Pike or Pink, and I thought, you know, now we don't even know his name, and I thought that that was interesting in the sense that 1820 sits somewhat uncomfortably in the Scottish national consciousness. For some it's too radical, for some it's too nationalist, for some it's a bit murky because the British state was involved and there were agent provocateurs and so on. So it's a little bit murky and I thought as soon as I saw that I thought that's the song ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. There's a kind of poetic connection with the fact of the uncertainty around one of the participants’ name as much as there is around the uncertainty of what that event is, and what it means so we added our own artistic license to the mix when we tweaked the title a little.
We recently performed the song live on the anniversary of the execution of one of the participants, James ‘Purlie’ Wilson. At the site he was executed Wilson is credited with inventing the pearl stitch, hence the nickname, and yet he's not very well known in Scotland. Many of Glasgow’s streets are named after imperial merchants and men who profited from transatlantic slavery, and at the same time as radical reformers are side-lined we want to see if we can amend that in some way, so it's the second track in the album, and the album will be released in November.
It contains nine tracks there's two other singles, you know, we haven't really told anybody about this, but the two singles that are likely to come out, there's a song called ‘The Owl of Minerva’ which is a kind of a slight kind of gear change. It's a song that I do a little bit of singing and it's six minutes long, and it imagines what the owl associated with Hegel's aphorism, ‘The Owl of Minerva’, takes flight at dusk, what would it be like if ‘The Owl of Minerva’ was living in the Finnieston Crane, one of the magnificent titan cranes that sits on the Clyde. So in that song she flies over the city, commenting on what she encounters and reflecting on the historical process, and we'll be bringing that out next.
And we're also probably going to bring out a single called ‘Universal Alienation: We’re Rats’ which riffs off a celebrated speech by Jimmy Reid, who was a major trade union figure in Glasgow in the 70s. He led the occupation of the Work-in that took place in the yards in the 70s, and was also elected as the rector of the University of Glasgow by the student body there, and he made a magnificent speech there. So we've made a song about that which riffs off Reed and he's, you know, his politics, it's not uncritical, and sort of updates that to talk about you know the alienation within the university sector so, you know, that's another track that's coming out soon. And thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust who have been very generous. They gave us some money which subsidised some of the production costs of the album, and we're able to put on a free to enter album launch, so we're going to be having that on the 27th of November in a venue called Oran Mor. We're looking forward to sharing the songs with the public.
And we've actually started working on Volume II. We've written a few songs, there's a song about hope, there's a song about the city's connections with the anti-apartheid struggle which are based on some of my own experiences of that when I was a younger man. And other material which is quite close to our hearts which will come out in good time. So we're going to share some of the songs actually from the second album at the launch of the first album as well. So we look, as I say, we look forward to doing that.
Obviously things have changed politically since in the months we spoke. I think at the back end of last year or the start at the very beginning of this year there's been a lot of change. We don't have time to focus much on political party leaders; we focus on what we can do, where we are. We need to pressurise them of course in Britain and Scotland and then elsewhere, and perhaps there's no more pressing subject on which to pressurise the leaders of the British State at the minute than on the question of their participation in the genocide in Palestine. We've participated in many of the marches in Glasgow as we could have. We're absolutely alive to the fact that while that event takes place in Palestine in the Middle East, Britain is actively supporting that event, and I think the scale of that event hasn't not really been made clear yet. There was an article recently by Professor Sridhar who's the chair of global Public Health at the University Edinburgh which built on the recent report in the Lancet which had estimated that the death count in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people, and she extrapolated that methodology, and argued that if the if the conflict continued until the end of 2024, which is not that far away, then the total deaths could be in the region of 335,000, a third of a million people, the killing of one third of 1 million from a population of 2 million. I mean what is the word for that?
So what can we do, little, we march we put pressure on our leaders, we bear witness to their participation in genocidal war crimes, and we call them out at every opportunity. Yeah, and we concentrate on that.
I'm just going to say that The Tenementals is what I've called a wild research project and some of the band members are academics, but for the band it's got one foot in the university but for a project like The Tenementals to have a life to breathe it has to move to its own beat, so The Tenementals has to run on the logics of a rock band rather than the metricise Logics of the neoliberal university. Art has to be accountable to itself rather than the control mechanisms that come with working in higher education, so that's really the only way that The Tenementals can be alive. And I've actually been working on developing this thinking around the concept of Wild Research. We, a few colleagues in Glasgow, and we're having a symposium on Wild Research, and Stephen Skrynka’s amazing Revelator Wall of Death. He's actually built a functioning Wall of Death which operates as an art school, and we're having a symposium in there in September where different artists and academics, filmmakers, writers will come together and discuss the whole the idea of Wild Research, and also how we might use that title to kick back against some of the, you know, the strictures that are placed on our work.
So my work with The Tenementals since astride my work as an academic, and so I've been thinking about that, as I say, the work on wild research, and I'll be heading back to Cuba later in the year with my Catalan comrade and colleague Núria Araüna Baro to do some work on the famous filmmaking project which we've started so it's been a busy, busy time.
And thank you Brett for taking some of your time out. I know that you, as I said earlier, you've been working on your filmmaking projects, the Kafka short, and working on your own writing, and your blog and so on, and in all power to you. We need as many radical voices out there as we can. We all make a modest contribution, but combined those modest contributions hopefully add up to something more, so let countless radical voices bloom. Thanks, Brett.
You can find 'The Tenementals' on Spotify here:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/10S0JCoRJ7tFjX4j33IcSD?si=Dx3VEdLfQUu2iI1Xa43h9w&nd=1&dlsi=1a546069d4524166
And on social media here: @tenementals
Brett Gregory speaks with David Archibald, founding member and frontman of The Tenementals, a group of academics, artists and musicians who are developing a series of songs which recount a history of Glasgow, and breathing new life into some old protest songs in innovative covers. Here, Archibald talks about some of their recent releases, which cover songs related to Spain, Scotland and Santiago, and the band’s debut album, ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’ which is released on Strength in Numbers Records in November.
BG: Hi, I'm Brett Gregory, and the editor for the UK arts, culture, and academic website, Serious Feather, and this is Prof. David Archibald from the University of Glasgow, founder of the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals.
DA: So, yes, Brett, it's good to be back in touch. A lot's been happening with The Tenementals as well. We played a few gigs, we did a special May Day event in Glasgow, and also we played at the Belle and Sebastian Glasgow Weekender, so that was nice to be asked to do that.
It's been quite a year for The Tenementals; in fact last year we released our first single, two versions of the classic antifascist song, Die Moorsoldaten or Peat Bog Soldiers in English which we spoke about in our last interview; and, out of the blue, we were contacted by the people who oversee the archives of the concentration camp in which the song was first performed. That was at Börgermoor concentration camp, and it was first performed on the 27th of August 1933, as you'll remember. and the reason the archivists were in touch was because they wanted the song to be placed in the archive that they have about the camp, and they've got a an archive about that particular song because it's been covered by a number of various artists previously and, you know, when they were in touch they also said some, you know, quite very moving words about the two versions that we had made – we made one in English and one in German – and I think every, every, every music band, every, every band probably want their music to have some form of resonance with the world, the external world but, I mean, to receive this news was quite overwhelming, and we were quite taken a back with it.
And then we went on to produce another cover, this time a song by Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and singer, who was murdered during Pinochet’s coup against the elected government in Chile in 1973. We were doing an event at St. Luke's which is a beautiful, beautiful venue in the East End of Glasgow, and we were performing there on the 15th of September last year, almost 50 years to the day when Victor Jara's body was found dumped in a street. He'd been arrested by the military during the coup, he was held in a makeshift prison, and in the prison the guards broke his fingers to stop him playing the guitar. They shot him dead, and they dumped his body. And because we were doing an event which was 50 years and one day after the death or the finding of Victor Jara's body, we wanted to do something which kept his memory alive so we recorded one of the beautiful songs that he wrote called ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. It's a song which is about remembering really, it's a love song in some ways I think, but it's also about remembering, and it's also about people involved in the struggle to build a better world, and sometimes the sacrifices that are involved in that.
And we asked Monica Queen. Monica Queen is an extraordinary, beautiful, beautiful singer who's maybe known quite well in Glasgow and circles in Scotland. I'm not so sure how well she's known out of Scotland, but her voice is extraordinary, and we asked her if she would sing it, and she was up for it, and our drummer Bob Anderson off in drums with Monica and her partner, Johnny Smiley, and Johnny's the mixing maestro on our recording, so it just seemed like a good idea. So at that night when we played our own set at St Luke's, and then we went off, and I came back on, and I said a few words about Victor Jara, and why we were going to sing that song, and then introduced Monica and our guitarist, Simon. And Monica just sang it, Simon on a little guitar, a little Spanish guitar they'd found in the street actually, and it was just an incredible moment. Her voice is amazing, and Monica is not a native Spanish speaker, she doesn't speak Spanish – she speaks some Italian – but she sang it in Spanish, and there were 500 people in the room and, you know, time seemed to stop it.
It was a really, really beautiful moment, so we wanted to record that single, and record that track, and try to recreate something of that moment and, you know, we hope that we've done that to some degree, and that was in the spring, we did that in the spring, but we're very slow and our rhythm is pretty irregular, so we're just bringing out a video now, and it was the video was shot by my pal, Jim Rusk, edited by Simon, the guitarist, and I had a hand in it too, and we went down to the River Clyde, and we shot it. And the original song is about someone remembering, someone goes to a factory, so we went to kind of industrial landscape, Glasgow's industrial landscaping, and we filmed a little video there and, you know, we don't want to be overly romantic, but when we listen to the songs of Victor Jara, we think that in some ways he walks with us, you know? It's like we keep his memory alive. One of the DJs that played the track on one of the local radio stations up here, in his words, he said that ‘they killed Victor Hara because they were afraid of his music’, and that's true. So every time Victor Jara's songs are sung you know it's a blow against the people that would kill the writers, the Poets, the dreamers, the people who try and imagine a different world. So that was a quite a special moment, and we hope that the little video we've made kind of adds something to that in a modest way.
We then released what will be the first single from our debut album. We were talking about The Tenementals is a project which attempts to create a radical history of a radical city in a radical way by making a series of songs we create what we call a ‘trans media history’ of a city, and that the history we construct is through the songs, through the videos, through the things that we say in newspapers through blogs like this, we believe that this is a history that we're contributing to an understanding, or a way of understanding about how the city of Glasgow is, what its history is, and also how it understands itself historically. What is the city's historical consciousness?
The album's coming out it's modestly called ‘Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI)’, or maybe not modestly, ambitiously called. Whether they be six volumes remains to be seen, and it's coming out with Strength in Numbers records in November.
And the first track we brought out roundabout May Day was a track called ‘A Passion Flower’s Lament’, and it's a song about the men from Glasgow who fought in Spain, who travelled to Spain, and who died in the in the Spanish Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. And it's written from the perspective of a statue that sits on the banks of the River Clyde which commemorates the members of what was called ‘The International Brigades’ who fought during the Spanish Civil War, and didn't return, and the statue is named after a very famous Spanish communist politician commonly known as ‘La Pasionaria’, and it was erected in the 70s by, you know, by activists on the left, and it's become an important part of Glasgow’s cityscape, and a common gathering point for radical groups and, you know this Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, is a contested historical period. Maybe some people might know [people] that study kind of failed revolutions. There was a period in that was called ‘The Civil War within the Civil War where different leftist groups were, you know, fighting each other, but they weren't just arguing with each other about the contents of their paper, but they were shooting each other, and one of the people that was caught up in that was a University of Glasgow student, Bob Smiley, who had fought alongside George Orwell in the Aragon front, and he died in a prison cell in Valencia. He was arrested by the forces on the Republican left. He was in the process of leaving Spain and he was, you know, beaten up and he and he died, and it's, you know, it's history's murky, you can't be exact but it's possible, perhaps probable, that he died at the hand of the people who were on the same bloody side as him.
So the song asks whether we should be worrying about the difficult aspects of the conflict when as we absolutely know, and as the song says, ‘Once more the jack boot seeks to recruit’. So at a moment when we can see fascism coming for us and, more primarily, we've seen results in Germany and Spain and elsewhere – to a lesser degree in Britain but nevertheless – there the song sort of says, ‘Well, what do we do about the troubling aspects of a kind of anti-fascist history at the moment when the fascists are coming back, and the song leaves that open. Perhaps art creates, you know, often poses questions rather than answers them, but also what the song seeks to do is to resurrect the revolutionary spirit of Spain, to focus on a moment of revolutionary possibility. We absolutely firmly believe that if it happened once it can happen again, you know, the Spanish ruling class are fearful of the memory of the Spanish Revolution, precisely because they know that better than anybody else if it happened once it can happen again.
The song is sung beautifully by Jen Cunnion who sings most of the songs in the album, but Jen, she's not always available for live gigs, so we've got worked with some other fantastic singers as guest vocalists and Belle and Sebastian, and Sarah Martin has sang live with us a few times, but she also recorded one of the tracks on the album. It's a song called ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, it's a song about the events in Scotland known variously as the 1820 ‘Radical War’, the ‘Radical Rising’ or the ‘Scottish Insurrection’. Therese Martin also sings on the sing song so there's two Martins on that song. No relation other than they're both great singers. 1820 perhaps 1819, and Peter Lewis perhaps well known in England, and perhaps some of the history around that is pretty settled. 1820 witnessed a period in Scotland of sustained civil unrest, a general strike, and aborted armed uprising; and it culminated with its leaders sentenced to death while others were deported. And during the lockdown I took a track up to Sighthill Cemetery where there's a monument dedicated to the men who were executed for their part in the rising. So the memorial lists those who were executed but also those who were deported to Australia, and one man's name is listed as Thomas Pike or Pink, and I thought, you know, now we don't even know his name, and I thought that that was interesting in the sense that 1820 sits somewhat uncomfortably in the Scottish national consciousness. For some it's too radical, for some it's too nationalist, for some it's a bit murky because the British state was involved and there were agent provocateurs and so on. So it's a little bit murky and I thought as soon as I saw that I thought that's the song ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. There's a kind of poetic connection with the fact of the uncertainty around one of the participants’ name as much as there is around the uncertainty of what that event is, and what it means so we added our own artistic license to the mix when we tweaked the title a little.
We recently performed the song live on the anniversary of the execution of one of the participants, James ‘Purlie’ Wilson. At the site he was executed Wilson is credited with inventing the pearl stitch, hence the nickname, and yet he's not very well known in Scotland. Many of Glasgow’s streets are named after imperial merchants and men who profited from transatlantic slavery, and at the same time as radical reformers are side-lined we want to see if we can amend that in some way, so it's the second track in the album, and the album will be released in November.
It contains nine tracks there's two other singles, you know, we haven't really told anybody about this, but the two singles that are likely to come out, there's a song called ‘The Owl of Minerva’ which is a kind of a slight kind of gear change. It's a song that I do a little bit of singing and it's six minutes long, and it imagines what the owl associated with Hegel's aphorism, ‘The Owl of Minerva’, takes flight at dusk, what would it be like if ‘The Owl of Minerva’ was living in the Finnieston Crane, one of the magnificent titan cranes that sits on the Clyde. So in that song she flies over the city, commenting on what she encounters and reflecting on the historical process, and we'll be bringing that out next.
And we're also probably going to bring out a single called ‘Universal Alienation: We’re Rats’ which riffs off a celebrated speech by Jimmy Reid, who was a major trade union figure in Glasgow in the 70s. He led the occupation of the Work-in that took place in the yards in the 70s, and was also elected as the rector of the University of Glasgow by the student body there, and he made a magnificent speech there. So we've made a song about that which riffs off Reed and he's, you know, his politics, it's not uncritical, and sort of updates that to talk about you know the alienation within the university sector so, you know, that's another track that's coming out soon. And thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust who have been very generous. They gave us some money which subsidised some of the production costs of the album, and we're able to put on a free to enter album launch, so we're going to be having that on the 27th of November in a venue called Oran Mor. We're looking forward to sharing the songs with the public.
And we've actually started working on Volume II. We've written a few songs, there's a song about hope, there's a song about the city's connections with the anti-apartheid struggle which are based on some of my own experiences of that when I was a younger man. And other material which is quite close to our hearts which will come out in good time. So we're going to share some of the songs actually from the second album at the launch of the first album as well. So we look, as I say, we look forward to doing that.
Obviously things have changed politically since in the months we spoke. I think at the back end of last year or the start at the very beginning of this year there's been a lot of change. We don't have time to focus much on political party leaders; we focus on what we can do, where we are. We need to pressurise them of course in Britain and Scotland and then elsewhere, and perhaps there's no more pressing subject on which to pressurise the leaders of the British State at the minute than on the question of their participation in the genocide in Palestine. We've participated in many of the marches in Glasgow as we could have. We're absolutely alive to the fact that while that event takes place in Palestine in the Middle East, Britain is actively supporting that event, and I think the scale of that event hasn't not really been made clear yet. There was an article recently by Professor Sridhar who's the chair of global Public Health at the University Edinburgh which built on the recent report in the Lancet which had estimated that the death count in Gaza could be as high as 186,000 people, and she extrapolated that methodology, and argued that if the if the conflict continued until the end of 2024, which is not that far away, then the total deaths could be in the region of 335,000, a third of a million people, the killing of one third of 1 million from a population of 2 million. I mean what is the word for that?
So what can we do, little, we march we put pressure on our leaders, we bear witness to their participation in genocidal war crimes, and we call them out at every opportunity. Yeah, and we concentrate on that.
I'm just going to say that The Tenementals is what I've called a wild research project and some of the band members are academics, but for the band it's got one foot in the university but for a project like The Tenementals to have a life to breathe it has to move to its own beat, so The Tenementals has to run on the logics of a rock band rather than the metricise Logics of the neoliberal university. Art has to be accountable to itself rather than the control mechanisms that come with working in higher education, so that's really the only way that The Tenementals can be alive. And I've actually been working on developing this thinking around the concept of Wild Research. We, a few colleagues in Glasgow, and we're having a symposium on Wild Research, and Stephen Skrynka’s amazing Revelator Wall of Death. He's actually built a functioning Wall of Death which operates as an art school, and we're having a symposium in there in September where different artists and academics, filmmakers, writers will come together and discuss the whole the idea of Wild Research, and also how we might use that title to kick back against some of the, you know, the strictures that are placed on our work.
So my work with The Tenementals since astride my work as an academic, and so I've been thinking about that, as I say, the work on wild research, and I'll be heading back to Cuba later in the year with my Catalan comrade and colleague Núria Araüna Baro to do some work on the famous filmmaking project which we've started so it's been a busy, busy time.
And thank you Brett for taking some of your time out. I know that you, as I said earlier, you've been working on your filmmaking projects, the Kafka short, and working on your own writing, and your blog and so on, and in all power to you. We need as many radical voices out there as we can. We all make a modest contribution, but combined those modest contributions hopefully add up to something more, so let countless radical voices bloom. Thanks, Brett.
You can find 'The Tenementals' on Spotify here:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/10S0JCoRJ7tFjX4j33IcSD?si=Dx3VEdLfQUu2iI1Xa43h9w&nd=1&dlsi=1a546069d4524166
And on social media here: @tenementals
Article:
The Tenementals
'Peter Pike or Pink'
Article:
The Tenementals
'Peter Pike or Pink'
Written
by
Steven Hughes
August 1st 2024
by
Steven Hughes
August 1st 2024
Strength in Numbers Records have released ‘Peter Pike or Pink’, the second single from the Scottish protest group, The Tenementals, today (August 2nd). Their album, ‘Glasgow: A History (Volume I of VI)’, which is due out this autumn, aims to recount and explore Glasgow’s radical history, and includes their debut single, ‘Die Moorsoldaten (The Peat Bog Soldiers)’, a song which is virtually unknown outside Germany, despite being covered by notable artists such as Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson.
Indeed, Serious Feather editor, Brett Gregory, conducted a podcast interview with the band’s front man, Prof. David Archibald, about ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’ in December 2023.
The very name ‘Tenementals’ is evocative of those characteristic Glaswegian buildings of red, grey and beige stone built between 1850 and 1900. These tenements successfully addressed the large scale housing problems which were required to home ever increasing numbers of working families during the population boom. Over time however they succumbed to poor sanitation, disease, and overcrowding, with poorer families unable to keep up with increasing maintenance costs. As a result, tenements in the Gorbals and Anderston areas of the city decayed into slums and, by the 1960s and 70s, more and more were demolished. Fashionable high-rise blocks began to take their place, a process of gentrification which transformed what was once a social necessity into much sought-after luxury; all the tales of hardships seemingly hidden beneath a veneer of plaster and picture windows intended to allow in the light.
‘Peter Pike or Pink’ challenges such sanitised narratives which might otherwise separate the people of Glasgow from their radical past. The Tenementals use music – in this instance a rich folk-punk clarion call reminiscent of 1980s Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello – to encourage us to gaze through a more revealing window, despite the apathy and complicity of the UK’s mainstream press.
The song was inspired by a chance encounter with a memorial stone upon whose legend was inscribed an unfamiliar and decidedly uncertain name: ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. Pike or Pink? This man took part in the 1820 ‘Radical War’ or ‘Scottish Insurrection’ when workers in central Scotland attempted to establish a republic during a sustained period of civil unrest. How strange that, among more familiar names, his should be obscured, perhaps deliberately?
Accompanying the lead singer, Prof. David Archibald, on the track is Belle & Sebastian’s Sarah Martin – who has appeared at several gigs with the band, including at ‘The Revelator Wall of Death’ where they played alongside RMT trade union leader, Mick Lynch.
In turn, the group has made it their avowed intention to disinter the bones of Glasgow’s overlooked political history.
As David Archibald recently stated during a podcast with Glasgow City Heritage Trust:
‘We hope that we’re creating some kind of very messy transmedia history of a city … People have always used art and culture as vehicles for maintaining some kind of possibility … and also to conjure a new world … Of course, I’m in a minority of academics who would stand up and say ‘I’m a socialist, and I argue for socialist ideas. I’m not afraid to name The Tenementals' object of desire: a socialist world.’
You should definitely listen to ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. Its passion and its politics is for everyone. And don’t worry if your history of Glasgow is a little shaky: it soon won’t be if The Tenementals have their way.
Indeed, Serious Feather editor, Brett Gregory, conducted a podcast interview with the band’s front man, Prof. David Archibald, about ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’ in December 2023.
The very name ‘Tenementals’ is evocative of those characteristic Glaswegian buildings of red, grey and beige stone built between 1850 and 1900. These tenements successfully addressed the large scale housing problems which were required to home ever increasing numbers of working families during the population boom. Over time however they succumbed to poor sanitation, disease, and overcrowding, with poorer families unable to keep up with increasing maintenance costs. As a result, tenements in the Gorbals and Anderston areas of the city decayed into slums and, by the 1960s and 70s, more and more were demolished. Fashionable high-rise blocks began to take their place, a process of gentrification which transformed what was once a social necessity into much sought-after luxury; all the tales of hardships seemingly hidden beneath a veneer of plaster and picture windows intended to allow in the light.
‘Peter Pike or Pink’ challenges such sanitised narratives which might otherwise separate the people of Glasgow from their radical past. The Tenementals use music – in this instance a rich folk-punk clarion call reminiscent of 1980s Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello – to encourage us to gaze through a more revealing window, despite the apathy and complicity of the UK’s mainstream press.
The song was inspired by a chance encounter with a memorial stone upon whose legend was inscribed an unfamiliar and decidedly uncertain name: ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. Pike or Pink? This man took part in the 1820 ‘Radical War’ or ‘Scottish Insurrection’ when workers in central Scotland attempted to establish a republic during a sustained period of civil unrest. How strange that, among more familiar names, his should be obscured, perhaps deliberately?
Accompanying the lead singer, Prof. David Archibald, on the track is Belle & Sebastian’s Sarah Martin – who has appeared at several gigs with the band, including at ‘The Revelator Wall of Death’ where they played alongside RMT trade union leader, Mick Lynch.
In turn, the group has made it their avowed intention to disinter the bones of Glasgow’s overlooked political history.
As David Archibald recently stated during a podcast with Glasgow City Heritage Trust:
‘We hope that we’re creating some kind of very messy transmedia history of a city … People have always used art and culture as vehicles for maintaining some kind of possibility … and also to conjure a new world … Of course, I’m in a minority of academics who would stand up and say ‘I’m a socialist, and I argue for socialist ideas. I’m not afraid to name The Tenementals' object of desire: a socialist world.’
You should definitely listen to ‘Peter Pike or Pink’. Its passion and its politics is for everyone. And don’t worry if your history of Glasgow is a little shaky: it soon won’t be if The Tenementals have their way.
1977:
No More Heroes
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?
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.
Prof. David Archibald
(University of Glasgow)
discusses Socialism, Scotland, Cinema and Song
(University of Glasgow)
discusses Socialism, Scotland, Cinema and Song
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by
Brett Gregory
December 6th 2023
by
Brett Gregory
December 6th 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.