Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

(Serpent’s Tail) £10.99

by Guy Sangster Adams

Occasionally, a book arrives in the post for review, that grips so tightly from an initial glance at the jacket blurb and the first line, that one reads it in a single sitting, straight from the Jiffy Bag, unable to tear oneself away, even if one should want to. Anne Peile’s debut novel, Repeat it Today with Tears, is one of those books.

Set in London in the early 1970s, and narrated by Susanna, a teenager who is studying for her ‘O’ levels, the book charts her search for the father she’s never known, the idealised figure who has been absent from her life, the part she needs to make her whole. When she discovers he is living within walking distance of her home in Clapham, across the river in Chelsea, she affects a meeting, but chooses to conceal her identity, and adding a startling rapier tip to the parrying straightforwardness of the book’s opening line, “The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the Easter holiday,” begins an affair with him. To borrow from King Lear, to which there are parallels, in that moment it is as clear to Susanna, as it is to the reader, that ‘that way madness lies’, but so engulfed is she, both by her love and her role, that she becomes both perpetrator and passenger, as ensnared in the tragedy that unfolds, as the reader is compelled to keep reading.

Repeat it Today with Tears is unsettling, not least in its examination of the fragility of boundaries and the close proximity of tipping points, between accepted mores and taboo, between sanity and insanity, between love and the (self-)harm, (self-)loathing, and destruction that can stem from its embrace. It is also an alluring and beautifully written book, with acutely well observed characters, from the protagonists to the vignettes, such as the women doing their laundry at the Nine Elms wash baths.

Peile’s evocation of London, and specifically Chelsea and the areas just south of the river, Battersea, Clapham, Wandsworth, in 1971/1972, is also wonderfully done. She creates a fascinating mix of teenagers and teenage fashion along the King’s Road, in and around the Great Gear Market, and their confluence with the older Chelsea set of artists and bohemians, then still prevalent in haunts such as the Picasso café and The Chelsea Potter pub. Set against the very different world, across the river, a world that had not changed so fast, though change was on its way, not least in the demolition clearing the site for the New Covent Garden market.

All in all, Repeat it Today with Tears is a phenomenally powerful debut novel, and highly recommended.

Anne Peile will be reading from Repeat it Today with Tears at the Plectrum Live Edition at The Horse Hospital on Wednesday 23rd June 2010. FOR MORE DETAILS

Links:
Serpent’s Tail
www.serpentstail.com

(Stephen Overbury) £12.99

by Guy Sangster Adams

The film Performance, a chapter on which is included in London Babylon, also acts as a useful cipher for the themes of this intriguing book. The story at the core of Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s film, shot in 1968 though not released until 1970, is the societal collision between the East London gangster, Chas (James Fox), and the reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger), in whose West London house he seeks sanctuary. Interlaced with sex, drugs, violence, and esotericism, darkness undercuts the brightness of the psychedelic, and the cut-up technique blurs the real and imaginary.

Just as the cast and crew blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction, and encapsulated the conventions that ‘Swinging London’ had dissolved, in mixing, around its Kings Road, Chelsea epicentre, the aristocracy, the underworld and the new the new icons of pop- and counter-culture. Both David Litvinoff, the film’s consultant and dialogue coach, and John Bindon, who played one of Chas’ gang, had links to the Krays and the Richardsons, and violence was very much a part of their lives. Whilst the aristocratic antique dealer and interior designer, Christopher Gibbs, created the sets for Turner’s house, and Cammell, born into a privileged background, had been a society portraitist with a studio in Chelsea. Though that said, after boring of the latter, Cammell did live, by all accounts, a formidably unconventional and decadent life.

Unsurprisingly, given all the above, the stories and rumours, from the salacious to the troubling, that surround Performance are legion. Similarly the abutment of such an extraordinary mix of characters and backgrounds that gathered around the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid to late 1960s, has also given rise to equally extraordinary tales that remain highly intriguing even as, with the passage of time, their veracity becomes harder and harder to ascertain.

With London Babylon, Steve Overbury has in part taken a lead from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, and also the shorthand and license that appending ‘Babylon’ to a title (vis à vis Imogen Edwards-Jones’ sequence of books) now brings, and does not shrink from recounting those tales in all their salacity and scurrility. Though his focus is not only the famous names, but also the lesser known characters who though they were at the fringes of the Beatles and the Stones, their actions were not without effect. Amongst them, Bindon and Litvinoff, the drug dealer and Keith Richard’s driver, ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez, and Count Jean de Breteuil.

Akin to the melting pot of styles and backgrounds present in ‘Swinging London’, Overbury’s book is also an hybrid of styles. As he explains in the introduction, the other motivator behind the book’s title was the discovery in his research that in the 12th century a section of London Wall was called ‘Babeylone’, and throughout London Babylon there are sections which are more formally structured and referenced studies of London’s cultural history. Whilst also threaded intermittently throughout the book are the surprising imagined dialogues between Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and others.

London Babylon has clearly been a labour of love for Overbury; to bring the book out he has, as he explains on his website, had to resort to “Punk publishing”, and the hefty work load that that entails. The book is a little rough around the edges, for a future edition a further copy edit would be great, and for me at least a list of sources or bibliography would be fantastic. But that is not to diminish the breadth of Overbury’s passion and research, and the degree to which he has clearly immersed himself in his rich subject matter.

Links

London Babylon
www.londonbabylon.co.uk

(Faber & Faber) £12.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

“I felt the explosion full in the face. The force of it hot-wired my imagination, invaded my dreams and taught me everything I needed to know about the realities of youthful self-empowerment,” writes Nick Kent about the impact of his first exposure to the Rolling Stones at the first concert he ever went to. It was 1964, Kent was just shy of his 13th birthday, and through a school friend whose dad was the promoter he not only had a front row seat, but was also invited backstage afterwards to meet the band: “Suddenly I had my future adult agenda mapped out before me.”

That portentous night lit the fuse on the agony and the ecstasy, the insight and addiction, the violence and opprobrium, that would engulf Kent in the following decade. Nine years later he met the Stones again, this time to interview them, by which stage he was a key figure both at the renascent NME and in a golden age of music journalism. The band approved of what he wrote to such a degree they commissioned him, all expenses paid, to accompany them on the final leg of their tour and write a book about his experiences: “my wildest teenage dream becoming a reality.”

But for the highest highs, in every sense, acclaim, and limelight life that the 1970s brought Kent, it also brought him the most extreme counteractions. In the closing scenes of the film Withnail & I Ralph Brown’s similarly kohl eyed character, Danny, laments on the passing of the 1960s, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over, and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” The blackness, which Kent terms the “dark vortex” was to follow in the 1970s, and forms an omnipresent undercurrent to Apathy for the Devil, as “the caring sharing 1960s were dead and gone” and fuelled by increasingly harder drugs, primarily heroin, “now it was every man for himself.”

Apathy for the Devil provides a front row seat, more often than not the edge of that seat, on Kent’s tumultuous journey through those equally tumultuous ten years, and his myriad adventures with those who would define the decade. Ziggy-era David Bowie announces, “So you’re Nick Kent. Aren’t you pretty!” on their first meeting, his dealings with Led Zeppelin become increasingly white-knuckle, as at times is his friendship with Iggy Pop that endures throughout the 1970s. His love affair with Chrissie Hynde ends in heartbreak, sacked twice by the NME, he pursues a music career that, not least through his increasing heroin addiction, fails to kick start but includes giving the first public performance of New Rose, ‘the first British punk single’ whilst playing in the first line up of a band that would become The Damned.

He also developed a close friendship with Malcolm McLaren, also acting as his music culture guide and joining an early line up of the Sex Pistols. Though that friendship was infamously decimated at the Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club  in 1976 when, at McLaren’s instigation, Sid Vicious beat Kent up, followed up the following year when to announce Vicious joining the Sex Pistols McLaren sent telegrams to the media saying, “he [Vicious] gave Nick Kent just what he deserved at the 100 Club.”

By the end of the decade the “dark vortex” had consumed Kent, and as he adds in the book’s ‘Afterwards’ if time travel became possible “the seventies would be the last time zone in history I would return to.” But his return to that decade in words and memories makes for an extraordinary book, by turns a fascinating, revelatory, insightful, troubling, comedic and tragic, but always engaging account of the irresistible rise and fall of the author and his decade. As Danny in Withnail & I also said, “If you’re hanging on to a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision - let go before it’s too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope?”

Links

Faber & Faber
www.faber.co.uk

(Atlantic Books) £25.00

By Guy Sangster Adams

In 1959, the sixteen year old Barry Miles, with a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in his pocket, hitchhiked from his home in the Cotswolds along the south coast with London as his “ultimate destination.” For as long as he can remember London had exerted a magnetic pull on Miles; once there he made a beeline for Soho. The previous summer, whilst staying with his cousin in Wembley, they had explored Soho and sat “drinking coffee from glass cups” in the 2i’s coffee bar “staring out at Old Compton Street thinking this was the centre of the world as ‘Dream Lover’ by Bobby Darin played on the juke book.”

Soho and London’s West End are at the heart of London Calling because it has been there, as Miles writes, “that the magnet that draws people to London” is located and from 1945 to the 1990s, the period that the book primarily covers, a key area, with forays to the King’s Road and Notting Hill, for the creative and counter-cultural life of the capital. Miles outlines in his introduction that the  focus of the book is more personal history than encyclopaedic: “I have usually described the people I know, or whose work I am most familiar.” But then since his first visit to the 2i’s, Miles has been very well placed not only as a witness but also as key participant in the counter-culture.

Along the Soho streets that Miles explored on his first visits could still be seen the majority of the bohemian milieu that had been drawn to the area in the 1940s and the newer arrivals that began to gather through the 1950s in the pubs and clubs like the French House, the Colony Room, and Ronnie Scot’s, including Julian Maclaren-Ross, Tambimuttu, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Colin MacInnes, and George Melly. Many of whom Miles would subsequently meet, and all of whom feature in the first part of London Calling along with the founding of the ICA, the Angry Young Men, and Teddy Boys.

In 1963, after four years at Gloucestershire School of Art, and many such trips hitchhiking to the capital, Miles moved to London, and was directly involved with much of what part two of London Calling explores. As the manager of Better Books in the Charing Cross Road he co-organised the Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time event at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, the idea for which stemmed from a reading Alan Ginsberg gave at the shop and which was a key event in the creation of London’s underground/counter-culture. The following year with John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and support from Paul McCartney (who was the shop’s first customer) he co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, where subsequently John Lennon met Yoko Ono.  Also in 1966 he co-founded the International Times, Europe’s first underground newspaper, as a fund raiser for which the following year he co-organised the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream which was headlined by Pink Floyd.

Part two also includes Oz magazine, UFO, The Arts Lab and the film Performance. Whilst part three takes in the 1970s and 1980s via Punk, Alternative Miss World, New Romantics and Neo-Naturists, Gilbert and George and Leigh Bowery.

In the introduction Miles writes that he “also wanted to make the book accessible and amusing as humour is an often overlooked side of the avant-garde, so many of the anecdotes are included purely for the sake of levity.” In this he is entirely successful because London Calling is a wonderfully readable book to which the anecdotal, in addition to Miles’ personal experiences, add another wonderful layer to this fascinating and highly engaging book. To parts of the history which might be better known, they also provide fresh insights, to say nothing of wry smiles! “Recently, walking down Great Chapel Street in Soho,” Miles recounts, “I overheard two young men talking, ‘You know,’ one of them said, ‘looking at this you could easily be in Shoreditch.’”

From the 1990s onwards the “vast acreage” of the East End has developed as the artistic neighbourhood of London, though Miles writes, “it is too spread out to have any real centre” and though there is “plenty of transgression, protest, experimentation, and excess [...] it’s just not underground anymore.” Since the mid-1980s, and increasingly so in our fully networked age, art and music have gone mainstream, and though “there will always be cutting edge activity, bohemia has been globalized.”

Read Carla Borel’s StillSoho by Barry Miles from issue 2 of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick  READ MORE

For more on the life and writings of Julian Maclaren-Ross:

Watch the Black Spring Press profile on the Plectrum Broadcast Player which includes contributions from his son Alex Maclaren-Ross, writer Cathi Unsworth, and Robert Hastings, the owner of Black Spring Press. CLICK HERE

Plus from issue 1 of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick:
Book Review: Julian Maclaren-Ross Selected Letters edited by Paul Willetts READ MORE
Independent Focus: Black Spring Press & The Revival of Literary Reputations READ MORE

Links

Atlantic Books
www.atlantic-books.co.uk

(Mute)
CD, Vinyl, 2CD, On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

That the excellent new Liars album already has an host of influential fans is borne out by the second CD in the 2CD edition of Sisterworld which features remixes and reinterpretations of each track by other artists including Thom Yorke, Alan Vega, Devendra Banhart, and Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and packaging designed by the Grammy award nominated Brian Roettinger/Hand Held Heart which when one opens the CD case allows a ‘through the keyhole’ view into the concertina-fold outer sleeve and a glimpse into the sunshine filtered woods of Sisterworld.

Sisterworld is Liars’ parallel world, a conceptual space to which they have ascribed the criteria that it is their “own space, devoid of influence, somewhere remote from the false dreams amassed in L.A.” in which they “explore the underground support systems created to deal with loss of self to society,” by way of “the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A.”

Sisterworld is, as the view through the concertina suggests, as dramatically and sensorily charged as being in the midst of a dense forest on a summer’s day; light when it breaks through the branches creates temporal spaces of the most magical beauty, whilst the dark corners seem darker than you could ever imagine, the shadows forever shifting and encircling, accelerating one into fright-or flight-or freeze.

Liars, Sisterworld ©Zen Sekizawa

In short, the fifth album from this three-piece is phenomenally engaging. It creates an highly evocative soundtrack to a personal film that plays so vividly through your mind as you listen; a film of falling through the cracks in the film capital of the world, adrift and alone in the city of angels with a paucity of guardian angels. Sisterworld is by turns transcendent and troubling, the smoothest caress can quickly become the harshest of grips, ethereal harmonies, and floating violin, viola, and cello strings are blown away by the rawest garage rock, following the hopeful will-o’-the-wisp bassoon can be fatal as you realize that the rasping vocals are framing a counterpoint picture of despair.

But the best alternative realities are made stronger by recognition and understanding of the mainstream to which they are opposed, and Sisterworld is a brilliant alternative to the mainstream, and a wonderful escape from the glass and steel forest of homogenisation.

Links

Liars
www.liarsliarsliars.com

Mute
www.mute.com

(Laurence King) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

Maia Adams’ supremely elegant new book provides the first overview of the extraordinarily innovative designs and diverse creative practice that has transformed fashion jewellery over recent years and instigated its current renaissance.

Fashion jewellery has antecedents in the costume jewellery of the twentieth century, from Coco Chanel in the 1920s who, as Adams writes, “challenged the status quo that jewels were only for the very wealthy,” to the 1960s and the use of plastic, wood, and paper by designers such as Paco Rabane, to its apogee in the diamante studded 1980s, and the prevalence of the “supersized imitation jewels” of Butler and Wilson, and the rubber bangles and crucifixes designed by Maripol which Madonna made ubiquitous. But as Vicki Beamon, of Erickson Beamon, explains in Fashion Jewellery, “Costume is an antiquated term for jewellery that, on the whole, was designed to look real,” and as Adams elaborates, to define the theme of her book, “this new breed of designer fashion jewellery makes no such claims - its purpose is not to imitate but to innovate.”

Erickson Beamon AW08 jewellery ©Greg Kadel

Erickson Beamon are one of the 33 designers profiled in the book, and provide a key link from the 1980s to the present day, three decades during which their “jewels of fantasy,” as Hamish Bowles has written, have reflected the times “from the rollicking, coruscating, dangerous 80s, the sleek, spare, barely there 90s, and our eclectic new century.” Judy Blame equally provides a link to the 1980s and in both his pioneering use of found objects in his jewellery and multi-faceted career that has also included accessories design, styling, and photography,  he has equally become an iconic mentor and inspiration not only to a new generation of fashion designers such as Gareth Pugh, but also to the new fashion jewellery designers.

Judy Blame coin purse ©Judy Blame

Many of whom, as Adams writes, “work simultaneously as stylists, photographers and fashion, costume, or product designers [which] means that they bring an eclectic arsenal of techniques and influences to bear on a body of work that runs the gamut from craft-based to technology-led; cerebral to silly; witty to whimsical.”

Amongst its line up of luminaries, Fashion Jewellery also features Scott Wilson, long time Hussein Chalayan collaborator, whose  sculptural headwear/jewellery hybrids have become renowned “spectacular catwalk statements” and whose earrings adorn the model on the book’s striking cover. In addition, Laurent Rivaud, to whom Vivienne Westwood went when she choose to launch her jewellery line in 1994, including the iconic orbs, and who now, under his own label R, creates minutely detailed jewellery, antique in appearance, drawing inspiration from a host of influences including Arthur Rackham, Fortunato Pio Castellani, Lord Leighton, and PJ Harvey. Whilst Natalia Brilli wraps an eclectic array of objects such as whistles, sea urchins, scarabs, and watches in leather to create her one-off jewellery pieces.

Natalia Brilli's gemstone bangles ©Julien Classens & Thomas Deschamps

Fashion Jewellery is crammed with great photographs, including still lives, catwalk shots, and fashion editorial spreads, working drawings, and features exclusive interviews with many of the featured designers, and provides a fascinating, inspiring, and exciting exploration of an equally fascinating, inspiring, and exciting time in jewellery design.

Links

Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

Nintendo
b/w Abraham, Martin, & John; On the Turner Grand #2;  Nintendo (demo version)
(Xtra Mile Recordings)
EP available now, download only

(Xtra Mile Recordings)
Album, released 15th March

By Guy Sangster Adams

The resplendent piano saturated Nintendo EP is a wonderful prologue to Chris T-T’s excellent new album Love is not Rescue. Nintendo, which is also the opening track on the album, immediately establishes the sea change in sound and themes from T-T’s last album Capital which, fittingly as it concluded his London Trilogy, featured a far more caustic, rockier and inner city edge and edginess. But although both the new EP and album are less about kicking over the statues that is not to say that they don’t pack just as powerful a punch, and in many ways perhaps more so.

Against a piano as calming as watching a gentle incoming tide, lyrically Nintendo charts a relationship on the ebb, and holistically creates a superb and contradictory mix of poignancy and self deprecation, with a knowingness and great wry humour; for managing to make Nintendo Wii both a moving and funny lyric alone T-T should be lauded! For the EP Nintendo is backed with three tracks not included on the album: a demo version of Nintendo, On the Turner Grand #2 a six minute piano improvisation, and a great cover version of Dick Holler’s Abraham, Martin, and John. The latter is a beautiful, melodic, reflection both on loss and the struggle for human rights.

Key facets, equally, to the other tracks on Love is not Rescue, which are erudite and engaging, set to a stripped back sound of piano, organ, or acoustic guitar, to which the sounds of pedal shifts or fingers sliding on the fret board, all add to the whole. They are highly reflective and explore love, loss, and relationships, from the stand point of looking back over the decade since the release of his first album, and the effect that career choices, nigh on perpetual touring, to say nothing of getting older, have had on T-T’s personal life, and conversely the effect of the personal on the professional. As with Nintendo, Stop Listening and In The Halfway House (I Don’t Sleep Around) adroitly mix the laying bare of emotions with wry humour, not least in their pay-off lines, whilst Tall Woman is an acutely affecting study of saying goodbye to someone who has literally loomed large over one’s life.

Love is not Rescue also includes a great reworking of A.A. Milne’s Market Square, from When We Were Very Young, which as with Milne or T-T alike could be enjoyed as a wonderfully whimsical tale about wanting to buy a rabbit or as a more cautionary story about how even in a market of global availability the things that are most worthwhile to us don’t always have to be bought and sold.

That said, Nintenedo EP and Love is not Rescue do both have to be bought and sold, but they are entirely worth your money!

Links

Chris T-T
christt.com

Xtra Mile Recordings
www.xtramilerecordings.com

(Laurence King) £19.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

The sequel to her book Restaurant Design, Bethan Ryder’s New Restaurant Design which is published in paperback for the first time, continues her exploration of the world’s most “elegant, unusual, and spectacular dining spaces.” Underscoring and continuing her theme established in the earlier book that eating out can be “as much a lifestyle choice and source of entertainment as a form of nourishment,” Ryder showcases 45 restaurants grouping their designs under four sections Global Views, New Baroque, Modern Classic, High Concept.

Philippe Starck features twice in the New Baroque section with both the “fairytale fantasy” of the Bistro of the Faena and Universe hotel in Buenos Aires in which the gilt detailed, snow white furniture is watched over by white unicorn heads emerging from white silk draped walls, and also with Bon in Moscow, the third Bon restaurant but the first outside Paris. Predominantly black and gold the space “conjures up a hauntingly gothic atmosphere” with an interior that includes black crystal chandeliers, gold Kalashnikov lamp bases, distressed, graffiti scrawled walls, and a white skull motif on the black upholstery of the “half burned gilded armchairs.”

Whilst the major feature of the dining experience at Evo, within the High Concept section, are the views of 18 kilometres (11 miles) afforded from the UFO-like glass, geodesic dome perched atop the 105 metre (344 foot) high Hesperia Hotel in Barcelona, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, Alonso I Balaguer Arquitectes, and GCA Arquitectes Associats. Thus the interior has been kept simple with glossy black lacquered tables, cream chairs, and golden yellow rhomboid-shaped fabric shaded lights which arch up following the curve of the dome “like sci-fi sunflowers.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

Modern Classic includes the Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury/DW5’s extraordinary Black Box, the restaurant for the shop Aïzone, a branch of Aïshti the Beirut fashion department store akin to Harvey Nichols or Barney’s. The exterior is lined with black aluminium panels and there is a projecting arm which not only contains a three-dimensional picture frame to display images and advertisements, but can also accommodate Aïshti fashion shows. Khoury’s, as Ryder writes, “daring and creative reclamation of war-torn buildings” has continued to reassert the identity of this troubled city; Black Box itself was damaged during the 2006 Lebanon War.

But Khoury remains phlegmatic, as is underlined in Ryder’s interview with him in the introductory section of the book which features interviews with 11 of the most influential restaurant designers (including Patrick Jouin, Marcel Wanders, Rob Wagemans, David Collins):
“Our part of the world raises far more burning and dramatic questions which you are faced with and which you cannot avoid. The problems are so obvious, especially when it comes to entertainment, and the situations are very interesting, I like tough situations, and I don’t like cute, happy little stories. That’s not my department.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

New Restaurant Design is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and floor plans, and coupled with Ryder’s erudite, informed, and unstintingly researched text creates both a superb overview of current restaurant design and an highly evocative travelogue.

Links

Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Optimum Releasing)
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

The Avengers: The Complete Series 3 is the second phase of Optimum’s fantastic intention to release the first full restoration of every episode of The Avengers over the course of a year, which began in October 2009.  Where episodes have been lost, they are recreated through stills and commentaries, and the DVDs come replete with a host of fascinating extras.

With series 3 The Avengers established the model for which it is best remembered and the ingredients that have ensured it has remained both highly influential and a classic exponent of the spy-fi genre.

Filmed in 1963 and originally screened in 1964 in a peak time Saturday night slot on ITV, for series 3 Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, described in the original promotional material as a top level secret agent “who works under cover of his life as a wealthy man-about-town with an aristocratic background,” became ever more dandified, his bowler hat, furled umbrella, and flared cufflink displaying cuffs now omnipresent. Whilst the idea of Steed being aided by alternating amateur assistants in the earlier series was shelved in favour of Mrs Catherine Gale (Honor Blackman) being his partner in each episode. Which also allowed for a crackling sexual tension to be developed between the two characters.

With her PhD in anthropology and social conscience Mrs Gale was presented as a foil to counter Steed’s more ruthless and louche character traits. Though she equally, and importantly, subverted stereotypical roles for women combining not only brains, beauty, and independence, but also physical prowess; the fight scenes in each episode more often than not displaying Gale’s expertise in Judo. Blackman, as she explains in an interview included amongst the host of great extra features on the DVD, always threw herself wholeheartedly into the action sequences, which in the episode Mandrake, also included here, lead to her inadvertently knocking out the actor playing her assailant for seven minutes. Early in series 3 Gale’s leather outfits were introduced, ostensibly as clothes it would be easier for her to fight in, and became both influential and infamous. They were teamed with knee high leather boots that very quickly gained the widespread sobriquet of ‘kinky boots’; their popularity leading Blackman and Macnee to record the single Kinky Boots in 1964.

Lobster Quadrille, the last episode of series 3, was originally screened in March 1964, and was Blackman’s last episode as she left the programme to take up the role of Pussy Galore in the James Bond film Goldfinger, which was released in September of that year. Redolent of the humour inherent in both The Avengers and the Bond films which the series undoubtedly influenced, the final scene features Steed bidding farewell to Gale as she sets off on holiday with the suggestion that she might spend her time “pussyfooting along those sun-soaked shores.”

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Laurence King) £17.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

Like surfing and skateboarding, there is an highly addictive and compulsive edge to fixed-gear (or ‘fixed-wheel’ in Britain) riding, often veering into the obsessional, as photographers and filmmakers Mike Martin and Gabe Morford interviewed in Fixed state, “track bikes are a gateway drug to all forms of cycling.” Martin and Morford’s documentary, Mash SF, explores the riding techniques, to say nothing of tricks and hill bombing, developed by 13 San Franciscans in the face of the challenge of riding track bikes without brakes, multiple gears, or the ability to freewheel, around the city, and since its release in 2007 has been highly influential in the global subculture which has grown up around the adoption of track bikes for urban streets. Fixed is the first book to examine both this rising subculture and its sporting and historical antecedents, and provides a fascinating overview.

Chris Boardman breaking The Hour record in 1996 © Gary M. Prior/Getty Images

Across three sections Racing, Track to Street, and Beyond Riding, Fixed explores the development of the fixed-gear style. The earliest bicycles were all fixed-wheel, but from the turn of the last century the style was predominantly reserved for sports use and has developed through ever greater quests for speed, characterised not least in recent years by Chris Hoy in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and in the 1990s the duelling between, and radical designs employed by Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree, both of whom are interviewed in the book, to win the record for The Hour time trial. From the early 1970s a parallel street culture has developed, initially through the adoption of the style by bicycle messengers in New York, spreading to messengers in other cities worldwide through the 1980s and 1990s.

Keo Curry performs his signature trick, the Keo spin © Kyle Johnson

Whilst in recent years with fixed-gear becoming, as Edwards and Leonard write,  a “wider phenomenon in urban culture, boutiques, and galleries,” designers, artists, and brands including Paul Smith, Ben and Oscar Wilson, Cinelli, Vans, and Nike, have created their own interpretations of fixed-gear bicycles and attendant clothing and accessory ranges.

Riders on the London Fixed-Gear & Single-Speed Tweed Run, January 2009 © Roxy Erickson

Links
Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Laurence King) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

100 Years of Menswear begins and ends with suits; from the accession of Edward VII in 1901 and his influential lead towards a greater informality in dress codes, to Thom Browne whose collections are a direct riposte against the informality of ‘business casual’ and motivated New York magazine in 2006 to declare him the “cutting-edge men’s designer who’s going to save the suit from extinction.” Though with nearly three and half centuries of adaptation and reinvention behind it, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s oft borrowed line, the suit’s death-knell may well be exaggerated. The very dapper Twain also features in the book in a great photograph from 1900 in which he is wearing one of his trademark white serge lounge suits of which, as Cally Blackman writes, “he had 14 made so he could wear a fresh one every day.”

John Hazel, Harold Wilmot, and John Richards arriving at Tilbury docks aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 © Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Though men’s fashion over the last 100 plus years has not been purely about suits, and has also been subjected to a myriad of influences, which means that any book attempting to cover it enters, as Blackman underlines in her introduction, a “minefield” because “the categorisation and classification of looks and styles is notoriously difficult; they are interwoven, overlapping and slippery.” To plot a clearer path through this, Blackman has divided the book into two parts, 1900-1939 and 1940 to the present day, and subdivided each part into six sections through which she explores, for example the impact of uniforms, manual work wear, sportswear, and Hollywood films.

Marc Bolan at home c1975 © Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This works well, particularly as the book is 95% pictorial, enabling changes and developments to be not only clearly illustrated and plotted, but also highlighted through juxtaposition. Which is supremely aided by the quality of the picture research which has resulted in the book, from Terry O’Neill’s fabulous cover shot of David Bowie onwards, being packed with many wonderfully evocative and rarely seen photographs and illustrations.

Links
Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Optimum Releasing)
Released on DVD 11 January 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

During the Second World War both Britain’s deteriorating canal system and the declining number of working boats plying its waterways enjoyed a brief period of revivification. This fascinating, evocative, and beautifully shot Ealing Studios gem, which is available on DVD for the first time, is part drama and part documentary and was filmed along the Grand Union Canal in the summer of 1944, though not released until September 1945. The film centres on two families, the Smiths and the Stoners, who have lived and worked afloat for generations and the love story that unfolds between Mary Smith (Jenny Laird) and Ted Stoner (Robert Griffiths). Whilst also documenting and trumpeting not only the revival of the inland waterways for the war effort but also the history of canals from the eighteenth century onwards.

Tradition versus progressiveness is also at the heart of Painted Boats, in common with a number of Ealing Studios films and not least with director Charles Crichton’s later film The Titfield Thunderbolt. With Painted Boats this is encapsulated by the juxtaposition between the Smith’s horse-drawn barge Sunny Valley and the Stoner’s diesel-powered Golden Boy, and the extra hardships that refusing to change brings to the Smiths, not least ‘legging’ Sunny Valley loaded with thirty tons of coal through tunnels. Though mechanical horsepower does not inure the Stoners from change either as the increasing dilemma as to how long they can continue on the canals or whether they may have to move ashore hangs over them as it does over all their contemporaries.

In fact, post war the decline of commercial canal traffic was phenomenally rapid, until by the 1960s only a token number of working boats remained. Of course we are now very familiar with the leisure based reinvigoration of canals, but Painted Boats provides a wonderful insight into the closing chapter of a way of life, and is made all the more evocative by the poetic commentary written by Louis Macneice.

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Optimum Releasing)
Released on DVD 11 January 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

From the Hammond organ to the fore title track, to the introductory panning shot across the deck of the tramp steamer  Corita taking in a surreal mix of characters, from medieval Spanish conquistadores and hessian robed monks, to twentieth century uniformed merchant seaman and a 1960s white roll-neck jumper-ed blonde siren, it is clear that this 1968 Hammer film is not only particularly redolent of that stable and of its times, but also has all the makings of a cult classic. Compounded by the original trailer which is included on the DVD and wonderfully proclaims that viewers will see “monster weed attack helpless beauty,” to say nothing of “giant molluscs, see them fight to the death.”

Though in no way as scary as it might possibly have been 40 plus years ago, The Lost Continent, which was adapted by the director Michael Carreras from Denis Wheatley’s 1938 novel Uncharted Seas, is still a very watchable and enjoyable film, not only with a retro loving, tongue in cheek. The film divides neatly into two halves and two genres, the first a thriller on the high seas as the captain of the Corita, played by Eric Porter, embarks on one last trip from Freetown to Caracas, not only smuggling a cargo of highly dangerous explosives, but also with a whole host of passengers with something to hide and a mutinous crew aboard. A hurricane brings all the secrets to a head and also throws the ship and the film into a world of sci-fi horror, a lost continent in the Sargasso Sea, replete with man eating seaweed, enormous killer crustaceans, and the equally murderous descendants of a Spanish Galleon marooned 500 years earlier.

Of course, as with any film originally released four decades ago the special effects are phenomenally dated, but in this case the datedness adds to the charm of the film. Whilst the release on DVD also affords renewed attention for the soundtrack, not only Gerald Schurmann’s great psychedelic score, but also the theme song by The Peddlers, two thirds of whom were part of Joe Meek’s ‘house band’ The Saints, and who have been recently sampled by genre busting producer, musician, and innovator Luke Vibert.

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Thames & Hudson) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

There is an amazing photograph in 70s Style & Design that wonderfully encapsulates a number of the key strengths of the book. A shaven haired girl wearing a beret, cat’s-eye specs, and a t-shirt which has had its collar roughly hacked away, slashed to expose her breasts, and is held together with a safety pin. Described thus, one would assume it to be a punk image and one thinks of Ray Stevenson’s shot of Johnny Rotten in a beret, shades, and Seditionaries jacket. Though the image also appears to allude to the early 1980s both in the geometric shapes in primary colours on the t-shirt, but also the shaved head, shades, cover girl perfect heavy blusher and red lipstick, and the contradictory mix of overt femininity and androgyny which evokes Jean Paul Goude’s styling of Grace Jones at that time. But in fact the photograph was styled by Pru Walters in 1973, and the t-shirt is made from a Duggie Fields ‘Kandinsky-inspired’ fabric.

Inherent within this is not only that 70s Style & Design contains a host of brilliant photographs and illustrations, many of which are published for the first time, but also the difficulty in appraising the fashions of any fixed period. They do not neatly begin and end with the calendar proscription of a decade, nor was punk as hermetically sealed from what had gone before, despite the proclamation of Malcolm McLaren and Bernard Rhodes’ ‘You’re going to wake up one more morning…’ proto-punk manifesto t-shirt which listed Duggie Fields firmly in the opposite camp to the then Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols.

Guy Bourdin’s 1979 advertisement campaign for Charles Jordan ©The Guy Bourdin Estate/Art+Commerce

Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop have resolutely fulfilled their stated intention to overturn the threadbare “platforms and polyester flares”, time that taste forgot  approach to the 1970s. But over and above this, in their celebration and mapping of its rich diversity and multifarious parallel and often overlapping inspirations and influences from across the breadth of culture, including street fashion and high fashion, architecture and interior design, activism and politics, and the arts, and the through flow from the 1960s and flow on into the 1980s, they have pulled off a feat that the majority of other books of this type on this or any decade rarely manage. Which is to unpick what can appear a Gordian Knot and to present the threads (in all their finery), to spot the links, and to chart how they weave back together with a straight forward clarity that is never simplistic, but is always engaging, highly informed and researched, and acutely well observed.

Steven Behrens necklace chosen for 1979 De Beers Diamond Collection ©De Beers

In this way, for example, it becomes clear that the D.I.Y ethic which is a fundamental and celebrated facet of punk, was also present in the craft revival from the early 1970s, which promoted self-expression though the ideals of “made by hand with heart,” the craze for customisation (celebrated by Jean Paul Goude in a photo story in Nova magazine in 1970, in which the denims of each model have all been individualised through being ‘cut-off’, bleached, or with the addition of fringing, fabric patches, and button badges),  and also the ‘flat-pack’ furniture pioneered by Habitat. Whilst Lutyens and Hislop also parallel the rise of army surplus and utility chic from the late 1960s into the 1970s, which in turn inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s high fashion pea coats and safari jackets, with the High-Tech interior design style. Which at first utilized genuine reclaimed industrial materials, and was used to great effect by Roger K. Burton in his highly influential design for the boutique PX in 1978, before being appropriated by Habitat in their Tech range in 1980.

Helen Robinson in PX photographed by Sheila Rock ©Sheila Rock

Over recent years the influence of Biba and Barbara Hulanicki, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren have been increasingly well documented, and as they should  feature here, but placed within the widespread contemporaneous currents their influence and inspirations become yet more fascinating. It is also great to see the less well documented influence of Mr Freedom and the Pop Art, 1950s Americana, and comic strips that it brought to the rich 1970s mix, along the way inspiring Yves Saint Laurent and Elio Firroucci, restored to the prominence it deserves, with the  attendant verve, elegance, and fabulous high colour, with which this book explodes throughout.

Links

70s Style & Design
www.70sstyleanddesign.com

Thames & Hudson
www.thamesandhudson.com

Guy Bourdin
www.guybourdin.org

Art + Commerce
www.artandcommerce.com

De Beers
www.debeers.com

Sheila Rock
sheilarock.com

(Dogwoof)
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

“Andy Warhol was wrong, his view was that people wanted 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, our view is that people want 15 minutes of fame everyday,” proclaims Josh Harris, the subject of Ondi Timoner’s fascinating, absorbing, and unsettling film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (a prize she also won in 2004 for Dig!, making her the only director in the festival’s history to win the award twice). In the midst of the current cultural dominance of social networking and video sharing websites, interactive talent contest and reality television programming Harris’s proclamation seems an apposite statement of fact. But the fact that he first said it in 1999 imbues his words with the prescience about the internet and the media for which he has been renowned, despite being, as the caption at the beginning of We Live in Public states, “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

Harris founded the highly regarded internet consulting firm Jupiter Communications in 1986 and then in 1993 founded pseudo.com, the first internet ‘television station’, and to the incredulity of terrestrial broadcasters predicted a time when people would watch their favourite programmes online.  Increasingly through the 1990s Harris moved away from the conservatism of the business world to explore the ways in which new media could and would shape society and fundamentally alter social interaction. His increasingly avant garde, experimental, and conceptual programming and events lead New York magazine to dub him “the Warhol of the Web” and reached their infamous, and highly influential apogee with Quiet: We Live in Public and weliveinpublic.com.

Josh Harris beside the toilets at Quiet

Quiet, which lasted for the duration of December 1999, involved 100 people living in a ‘pod hotel’ in the basement of a disused textile factory in New York, in which all notions and structures of personal privacy were removed. Each pod was equipped with its own video camera and monitor so that everyone could watch everyone else constantly, the only shower was in a transparent, geodesic dome in the middle of the living space, the toilet walls were taken down, and a neon sign constantly reminded the participants ‘we live in public.’ Fittingly, since it pre-empted the cultural shifts of the following decade, it was closed down by the New York Police department on 1st January 2000. They were concerned that it was in reality the headquarters of a cult; for recreation there was a firing range and an extensive armoury of automatic weapons - something which Big Brother has yet to try! But by the time of its closure the behaviour of the participants had become increasingly aggressive and erratic and despite the constant interaction with others many spoke of feeling acute loneliness.

Quiet 'pods'

Following Quiet, for six months in 2000 Harris moved into a flat with his new girlfriend Tanya Corrin which was equipped with motion and sound sensitive cameras covering every conceivable angle - including one in the toilet bowl - so that every part of their life together and every bodily function was under constant surveillance and broadcast on a 24 hour live web feed, with viewers also able to interact with the pair via internet chat rooms. The experiment began with Harris stating that viewers would ultimately watch the couple conceiving their first child live, but ended with Corrin walking out and Harris suffering a metal breakdown.

What Harris was discovering ten years ago, increasingly holds true today, as more and more people trade privacy for intimacy with virtual friends, and the  desire for recognition and celebrity are seen as the gateways both to happiness and to feeling loved, and CCTV surveillance is seen as the key way to create a better society. Both Harris’s projects provide, as does Timoner’s film, a tragic indictment of the price that can be paid for the ever increasing ways in which we live in public. As Harris warns, underscoring this cautionary tale, “The more you know about each other, the more lonely you become.”

Ondi Timoner

Links

We Live in Public
www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com

Dogwoof
www.dogwoof.com

at the Roundhouse, London, 15th October 2009

by Guy Sangster Adams

Ian McCulloch ©Alex Hurst 2009

As the dry ice that completely obscures the stage at the beginning of Echo & The Bunnymen’s set feathers out through the audience it is as though it makes manifest all the highly charged thoughts and emotions, memories and expectations of all those gathered. There is quite literally something in the air tonight, a very tangible sense of right time, right place. Touching shoulders, touching souls, sending involuntary shudders around the architectural majesty of the Roundhouse, weaving about the iron pillars, before swirling up to the domed roof. Where, up lit from the stage, it highlights the suspension of belief that has gripped the auditorium.

Is it a dream? It is still impossible to make out anyone on the stage, but the sound majestically echoing the building coalesces with the dry ice, reaching everywhere it reaches and further. It is surreal, as though one is hearing long cherished memories for the first time, whilst the heart sores the head is trying to compute whether it can be real. Did Echo & The Bunnymen always sound so phenomenally good? My confusion is furthered having read some very disparaging reviews of the new album, The Fountain, earlier in the day saying that Ian McCulloch’s voice is shot and that the middle-aged band are just going through the motions. It won’t be until later in the set that they play Bring on the Dancing Horses and McCulloch sings the line “shiver and say the words, of every lie you’ve heard,” but by then, indeed from the word go, they have resolutely trounced those criticisms.

Three songs in the dry ice has cleared to reveal that the iconic scene one’s mind’s eye has been imagining is real: McCulloch is centre stage, sunglasses and overcoat on, periodically clutching the stand and rolling his forehead over the microphone, like Jim Stark and his milk bottle; the loner played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He looks out, he looks back to drummer Nick Kilroe and keyboard player Jez Wing, he looks left to Gordy Goudie on guitar and Stephen Brannan on bass, but he never looks to his right,  where in splendid isolation stands Will Sergeant, who in turn plays head down, only looking up to change the succession of different guitars, whilst at the back of the stage a myriad of projections filmed by Sergeant play across the screen, from clouds, to religious statuary, to psychedelic oil patterns, harking back to The Roundhouse’s brief tenure as home to the UFO club in 1967.

Ian McCulloch & Will Sergeant ©Alex Hurst 2009

The venue and all the references it is imbued with thoroughly suit Echo & the Bunnymen. “It’s great to be at The Roundhouse,” announces McCulloch, “The Doors played here!” before introducing their cover version of People Are Strange. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek played keyboards on The Bunnymen’s recording of the song for the film The Lost Boys, and has remained a fan, and the sweeping grandeur of McCulloch’s vocals, akin to Jim Morrison in his ability to mix rough edged rock with mirror finish croon, is in full force tonight.

Reporters of the demise of McCulloch’s voice should be here; if it’s shot, it’s shot through with power, drama, and emotional intensity and the ability to propel one out of oneself. Indeed, as the set draws to a close with a phenomenal rendition of Killing Moon, the first time he sings the line “Fate, up against your will”, “fate” rockets beautifully to the roof and spines tingle, the second time he sings it, the word again goes to the roof taking the whole auditorium with it, the third time we are through the roof running the rings round Saturn.

Twenty-five years after Killing Moon was first recorded, indeed 31 years after Echo & The Bunnymen first played, you might be forgiven for, as Michelle the girl next to me says, “expecting less, but this is more; how have they become more?!” She is spot on; to appropriate the line Morrison sang at the Roundhouse in 1968, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” Cascading around McCulloch’s voice like a Catherine wheel, Sergeant’s innovative, highly influential, and much emulated guitar playing is equally on perfect form, ascending and transcending the space in the most beautiful, kaleidoscopic spirals and dazzling shimmers.

Ian McCulloch ©Alex Hurst 2009

The furthest reaches of their back catalogue, Rescue and Villiers Terrace, are played with the panache, verve, and excitement more normally associated with showcasing new songs. Whilst the same adjectives equally fit the first single from The Fountain, Think I Need It Too, with which they encore, followed by an outstanding Nothing Lasts Forever segueing into Walk On The Wild Side, which McCulloch amusingly concludes with “take a walk on Merseyside!”

With the two concluding dates of this tour in Liverpool sold out - a third has just been added - the band’s home town clearly already knows what everyone at the Roundhouse discovered, from the fifteen year old girl with saucer eyes breathlessly clutching the set list to her chest in the foyer, to the fortysomethings excitedly asking for autographs outside, that in the grandest style Echo & The Bunnymen are both igniting the rites of passage of a new generation, whilst reconfiguring the formative years of previous generations. For whom, it is as though the band reclaimed our memories for an hour and a half before handing them back Collagen enhanced, Stardust encrusted, with an extra gloss of new inspirations, leaving as sweet a taste as the last track of the night, Lips like Sugar.

Kiss whoever you must to do so, but go see Echo & The Bunnymen on this tour!

Echo & The Bunnymen are currently playing dates in Canada and the USA, before returning to England in December to play Oxford, Newcastle, Leeds and Liverpool. For more details:

www.bunnymen.com

www.myspace.com/thebunnymen

Mercury Records
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Shooting straight out of the sleeve and grabbing one simultaneously by the neck and the heart with such a passionate intensity there is no time for fear nor love, but only to release one’s soul to the last gasp climatic thrill, by rights the single Sometime Around Midnight should already have been as big a hit in this country as it was in the US. Originally released in the UK in February, this re-release remixed by Cenzo Townsend (whose extensive discography of collaborations includes Bat For Lashes, Babyshambles, Kaiser Chiefs, Primal Scream, and U2) magisterially reinforces a great song that showcases these Californian indie rockers’ diverse influences and talents.

Named after the second section of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, TATE founder Mikel Jollett (vocals, guitar, keyboard) also writes fiction, recently contributing a short story to McSweeneys, and in the autobiographical Sometime Around Midnight he brings his literary articulacy to lyrics that recount a chance meeting with an ex-girlfriend who although she has moved on he realises just how much he is still in love with her. Jollett creates an everyman tale, capturing how men feel gripped with a welter of passion and aggression, abject hurt but still with the need for reassurance from the lover who has spurned them, and how often they are happiest to express those feelings against the background of a fist in the air Springteen-esque “last chance power drive.”

Jollett’s voice which is capable of being at once brooding and seductive, vulnerable and menacing, in the manner of Brandon Flowers, and TATE’s musical cohesion of the classically trained Anna Bulbrook (viola, keyboards, tambourine, backing vocals) and the jazz schooled bassist Noah Harmon with the more traditional rocking combination of Steven Chen’s lead guitar and Daren Taylor’s drums, propel a lyrical journey that might be headed for melancholy or introspection, into a sound that makes one want to love again, and again, like one’s never been hurt. Sometime Around Midnight is almost a call and response to The Killers’ When You Were Young and should indeed be similarly lauded.

Links:
The Airborne Toxic Event
www.theairbornetoxicevent.com

(Howl Records)
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Beginning with a crescendo that immediately disorientates, is this a finale without an overture? Or as Chris Constantinou sings in a voice cut with the ages of rock, “Jackie, is it my birthday, or am I dying?” Marco Pirroni’s backwards guitar sideswipes like a pendulum across a drum beat so solid it might be an ionic column, but still you wonder am I looking down or looking up? Is this my future, or is this my past? Until Sinéad O’Connor enters the duet with a clarity so sharp, sculpted from the whitest marble, you  suddenly imagine you can see the geometric beauty of individual snowflakes, as she pitches question against question, “Do you ever feel like you’re posing, posing like an angel?” Whilst Pirroni’s now spiralling guitar throws you willingly from your pedestal into an helical orbit that scintillates and inspires. Fuelling an iconic sound that puts the sea back into ionic as the fixed point becomes a lighthouse and Constantinou and O’Connor’s revolving vocals merge as though you are simultaneously  illuminated and cast into darkness, doubts are dispelled, as in a moment you know all, but in the same moment you forget everything.

Surreal, transcendent, glamorous pop; as the track fades the need for another fix is immediate, repeat upon repeat.

The Wolfmen © Tina Korhonen

Links:
The Wolfmen
www.thewolfmen.net

Kevin Cummins
(Faber & Faber) £30.00

By Guy Sangster Adams

Beneath the title, Morrissey in silhouette standing on a ledge against a grey sky looks down on a view unseen, though in one’s mind’s eye one sees a Manchester skyline. Cummins’ photograph evokes Bruno Ganz’s Damiel, one of a group of trench coated angels who listen to the tortured thoughts of mortals and try to comfort them (which does sounds like an allusion to Joy Division and The Smiths…) in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. Shot by the Rochdale Canal in 1989, industrial architecture looms over Morrissey’s head and his shoulders are hunched as though he carries Manchester’s past, present, and future upon them; never to escape his oft repeated refrain from Suffer Little Children, the closing track from The Smiths’ debut album, “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for.”

If there is a charge to answer in being a key component in establishing and iconicising both the first wave of highly influential Mancunian bands from the mid 1970s into the mid 1980s and then from the late 1980s until the present day doing the same for the second wave (who had been inspired not only by the music of the first wave but also by his photographs of them) then Cummins must plead guilty.  He has been at the centre of the story since witnessing the two Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. Gigs whose audiences also included Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, and gave rise not least to The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, Magazine, New Order, Factory Records, and The Smiths, all of whom feature in this book. As the music and the drugs changed, Cummins stayed on it photographing The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Oasis, whilst also capturing the divergent splinter projects Electronic, Black Grape, and solo Morrissey.

The story that Cummins’ photographs document, along with essays by Paul Morley, Stuart Maconie, John Harris, and interviews with Johnny Marr, Peter Hook, and Mark E. Smith conducted by Gavin Wright, is as contradictory and contrary as the city and its citizens; elegiac and uproarious, as full of braggadocio as it is introspective, as given to high flown erudition as it is acerbic to perceived pretension, as serious as it is funny. Ian Curtis angular in performance, broods, and reflects in repose, but stays forever young; Shaun Ryder from clutching a giant E of the rooftop signage of the Hotel Subur Maritim in Sitges, Spain at the height of the Happy Mondays, seems to have aged 20 years photographed in a barber’s shop in Havana in 1995; The Stone Roses awash with paint as though brought in with the melting tide from John Squire’s Jackson Pollock-esque cover for their eponymous album; the Gallaghers never crack a smile; Morrissey stays handsome.

Ian Curtis, Joy Division, Futurama, Queen’s Hall, Leeds. September 1979 © Kevin Cummins

Cummins’ work continues to inspire new generations; two cutting edge examples of whom are Darren Wall, whose Wallzo design studio designed the book, and Richard Milward, who wrote the Foreword. Wall spent his teenage years pouring over Peter Saville record sleeves, and the book has the uncluttered elegance of a Factory artefact, whilst the sky blue of the Manchester City FC home strip of the section separating pages and cover, both looks great and adds an extra layer of association. Whilst Milward captures the chord that Cummins has struck in so many, “For years now, Kevin’s photographs have watched over me and my pals, like debauched religious figures, inspiring us to get intoxicated, wear parkas, pick flowers, and listen to records. Their familiarity is blissful.”

Manchester during the period covered by the book has gone, for better or worse, from post-industrial, post-Blitz dereliction reenergised by Punk, into the international buzzword of Madchester, to regeneration into Manhattanchester. Much has been gained, much has been lost, much has stayed the same; the opening photograph in the book is of a mural painted for a 1977 Silver Jubilee party in a cobbled street of bricked up terraced houses, whilst the closing photograph is of a razor wire topped wall spray painted with a Union Jack slashed with the slogan: ‘There’s no future in England’s dreaming: John Lydon of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here fame.” The latter is preceded by a photograph of Ian Curtis’s crave inscribed with his name, the date of his death, and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and is followed by the equally, achingly poignant, blank white page where Tony Wilson’s Afterword would have been, should have been. Whilst on the facing page the message he left for Cummins three days before he died: “Kevin, sweetheart.  Sorry I haven’t sent the piece to you yet. I’ve just had to go back into hospital. It’s all in my head though, darling. I’ll download it as soon as I come out.”

Gallagher brothers, Oasis Sly Street, East London 21 February 1994 © Kevin Cummins

Much has been gained, much has been lost, but what remains is the spirit of Manchester. One of the last performance photographs is of Noel Gallagher alone, presciently as it would now seem, playing at Teenage Cancer Trust gig in Manchester in 2007, possibly playing The Smiths song that he covered that night, which perhaps acts as a far better response to the title and a refrain for Cummins’ portrait of the city and its people; through the pouring rain, There is a Light that Never Goes Out.

In short, Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain; the pleasure and the privilege is ours.

Links:

Kevin Cummins
www.myspace.com/kevin_cummins

Faber & Faber
www.faber.co.uk

The Autobiography of Jah Wobble
Music, Mayhem, Life

(Serpent’s Tail) £12.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

Jah Wobble, as he has been dubbed since Sid Vicious’ drunken slurred attempt at saying John Wardle, is one of the infamous ‘four Johns’ who met at Kingsway College of Further Education in North London in 1973. The other three were John Lydon¾meeting whom Wobble describes as one of the few “Stanley/Livingstone moments” in his life¾Vicious, whose own transformation from John Beverley had come courtesy of Lydon who in turn became Johnny Rotten, and John Gray.

Of the three that became defined by their nicknames, Wobble has been happiest within the skin of his, “the ‘jah’ was  perfect because I was such a big reggae aficionado,” he writes, “I thought that it was perfect, it stood out, and I knew people would never forget it.” Whilst post-Sex Pistols, Lydon’s right to use the name ‘Rotten’ became part of a protracted legal battle with Malcolm McLaren, which was only resolved in Lydon’s favour in 1986, and it could be argued that it was Vicious’ submersion into the character of his nickname, of which Wobble writes, “in terms of twentieth-century iconography Sid’s cartoon-like image is right up there,” that contributed to his untimely end.

Which is not to suggest that the first 50 years of Wobble’s life covered in this book have been plain sailing, as the subtitle underscores they have been full of music, mayhem, and a life very much lived oscillating between the highest highs and lowest lows. The key formative trigger for Wobble to play bass guitar, for which he is most well known, was seeing Bob Marley & the Wailers at the highly influential gigs at the Lyceum in London in 1975, and in particular the rhythm section of Aston and Carlton Barrett. Wobble bought his first bass in 1977, but it was a telephone call early the following year that instigated his musical career when Lydon asked him to join his new band, Public Image Ltd.

Martin Atkins, John Lydon, Jah Wobble at Lydon's Gunter Grove flat (c)Janette Beckmann/Redferns/Getty Images

He played on the first two PiL albums, First Issue and the highly innovative and continuingly inspirational Metal Box, before leaving the band in 1980 to embark on a prolific solo career which has included his bands The Invaders of the Heart and the Human Condition, the album Rising Above Bedlam which was nominated for the inaugural Mercury Music Prize in 1992, losing out to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. Though Wobble had also played on the latter as part of an equally extensive and eclectic list of collaborations he has undertaken including Sinead O’Connor, Can, Bjork, Baaba Bal, and Brian Eno.

Over the last thirty plus years performing, recording, and writing as a bass player, singer, composer, poet, music journalist, and also through founding his own record company 30 Hertz Records, Wobble has been for better and at times for worse exposed to every facet of the music industry and Memoirs of a Geezer is as much an insider’s story of the seismic changes the industry has been through from Punk to Rave to digital downloads, as a cautionary tale as to how to keep your head above the water of its whirlpool. Which isn’t to say there haven’t been moments when the tide has engulfed him - though he’s been sober now since 1986, his alcoholism contributed to a suicide attempt and the breakdown of his first marriage.

Jah Wobble (c)Graham Jepson

Burnt out by the music industry and in attempt to stabilise his life in 1986 Wobble worked briefly as a cab driver and a courier before getting a job on London Underground - amusingly announcing to a packed rush hour platform at Tower Hill, “I used to be somebody, I repeat, I used to be somebody.” An allusion to the film that is both a favourite and one that he draws parallels with, On the Waterfront,  and Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy a promising boxer who is forced to take a dive, and ends up working as a docker surrounded by corruption on all fronts. As this book illustrates Wobble has always stood his ground when faced with anyone or anything with whom he disagreed, in younger days he did not pull his punches and though in later life the punches have become metaphorical they are no less iconoclastic in Memoirs as he tells it exactly as he sees it from Punk, Sex Pistols, McLaren and his PiL band mates through a host of other music and literary figures including Richard Branson, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Iain Sinclair.

It is not only the reverberations of Wobble’s passion for the bass guitar that flow through Memoirs of a Geezer, but also London, and more specifically the East End, his birth place.  Which for forty years, despite a few forays ‘up West’, was not only his home but also provided him with inspirations, challenges, and wake up calls in equal measures, and despite the dramatic changes that it has undergone since the war, which Memoirs vividly charts, a point of stability until eventually that too was irrevocably hindered and he moved to Stockport with his second wife and children. There are flashes throughout Memoirs of a Geezer of another great documenter of London and, if one likes, another dandy geezer, Julian Maclaren-Ross, and in its sense of place and reflection of both sides of the coin of Maclaren-Ross’s most well known and influential writings, Memoirs of the Forties.

Memoirs of a Geezer is an engaging and salutary tale of taking the knocks but refusing to be cowed, a reflection both on the creative processes of making music and the inherent battles in getting that music to wider audiences, and a fascinating and highly evocative cultural history, of people and places many of whom and of which have now changed beyond recognition. But part of the book’s strength is that it is written by a man whose intention is not to document the past and sit back with his pipe and slippers, but whose life has already been so full, that in order to embrace the next half century he needed to download the last, in order to give him a blank canvas, free reign, or what you will, for whatever comes next, which is certain to be just as full of music,  mayhem and life.

Links

Jah Wobble
www.30hertzrecords.com

Serpents Tail
www.serpentstail.com