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11. The end result of these ideas would be the feeling that, we, the consumer democracy, were in fact post-political – and afflicted with a Fear of Subjectivity.
The lost young men of Campbell and Wisniewski just didn’t seem hip to the Attitude of the Nineties – they were too awkward, too obscure, too strait-laced, too fey. As culture-vulturing city slickers, all they could do was carry on sitting there. Sighing, perhaps. Fairly soon, all the elitist smarty-pants twiddly bits of Eighties post-modernism – Style Culture, atria, nouvelle cuisine, Jeff Koons – would be declared (in public, at any rate) An Enemy of the People.
The culture of self-conscious artifice had been replaced by a culture of self-conscious authenticity. And as the margins of culture were fed into the conservative, market-dictated flow of the mainstream, it would take some fancy footwork to remain oppositional. But oppositional to what? What did the term mean nowadays? In many cases, the only way to become culturally confrontational was to make a choice to cease your cultural production – to culture strike, as the writer, punk historian and activist Stewart Home would declare and demonstrate.
Howard Devoto
Of all the icons assembled in the pantheon of punk, Howard Devoto could most probably lay claim to being the most enigmatic and the most revered. He was described by Pete Frame (the creator of the Rock Family Trees) as ‘the Orson Welles of punk’, and pronounced in a tribute song by Momus to be ‘The Most Important Man Alive’. Morrissey stated that it was Devoto whom he had in mind when he wrote ‘The Last Of the Famous International Playboys’, while Paul Morley claimed that Devoto introduced a ‘new literacy not just into punk, but into rock as a whole’. He has also been cited as an influence by novelists as different in style as D. J. Taylor and Jeff Noon.
And yet Devoto himself remains mysterious. His guru-like status has been all the more respected for the dignified manner in which he has allowed his body of recorded work and published lyrics to represent him. Having co-founded and founded, respectively, two of the most influential groups of the punk period, the Buzzcocks and Magazine, he then went on to record a solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream, before forming his third and final group, Luxuria, in 1986.
He ceased recording professionally in 1990, preferring the anonymity of a day job to some kind of honorary position in the music business as an elder statesman of cultural revolution. He could therefore also claim to be ‘the T. E. Lawrence of punk’. With regard to his current employment, Devoto has little to say. ‘I am the manager of the archive at a leading photographic agency in central London. I also receive royalties from my recordings.’ He is neither open nor defensive about his working life beyond music, except to say that his work with Luxuria did not deliver the support he required to proceed.
‘There was something very limiting about punk,’ he states, in a tone that is both assertive and measured – Alan Bennett without the soft edges – ‘and in the early days that was punk’s strength. You knew your themes, you knew how to look and you knew your musical style. And there you were, for a while. But I’d loved all kinds of other music up to that point. There was some big elemental thing that happened with the Sex Pistols, but in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff which I had liked, and which, in the realm of ideas, were not totally different tins of biscuits – Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in, really.’
In the spring of 1976, in Manchester, Devoto co-founded Buzzcocks with guitarist Pete Shelley. They recorded the massively influential Spiral Scratch EP, and a highly collectable official bootleg, Time’s Up. Heard now, these recordings have lost none of their fizzed-up, self-aware energy, driven by Shelley’s sublime reinvention of jagged, high-speed pop guitar playing. On machine-gun-tempo songs such as ‘Friends of Mine’, ‘Boredom’ and ‘Orgasm Addict’, Devoto delivers his smarter-than-smart lyrics with an edgy petulance that disguises their wit and biting acuity as a kind of pantomime of dumbness. ‘You’re making out with schoolkids, winos and heads of state,’ he lashes out on ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘You’re making out with the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cake.’
Artistically, the young Devoto was responding to influences from Alice Cooper to Camus. Having studied philosophy as a student, and having been interested in meditation, his lyrics on Spiral Scratch and Time’s Up were fully intended to be carefully posed, self-questioning philosophical statements about the problems of existence. Interviewing himself, when Spiral Scratch was originally released in 1977, Devoto wrote of the song ‘Breakdown’, ‘“Breakdown”’s hero is in the position of Camus’ Sisyphus – “To will is to stir up paradoxes.”’ Punk rock had thus been a personal and creative catalyst for Devoto, offering him a means to conduct nothing less than a biopsy on his own soul.
‘I think that punk rock was a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness,’ he says, ‘and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with that process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands – in a world, most probably, after religion. My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols, and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something which really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical Sixties.
But going back to what I was going through, personally, and all of the stuff that you do go through as a student, I remember – before punk even – pursuing Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; I had pictures of the Baader Meinhof on my wall, and all of that hunger strike stuff was going on. It was that struggle for commitment which you have as a young person. And where did you put all that when you’re a young person like me, who wanted to play a “Yes, but –” game with everything?’
Since 1990, Devoto has given the whole punk reunions circuit an extremely wide berth, as well as being highly reluctant to offer up his recollections to what has become the major academic industry of ‘Punk Studies’. An example of this reticence could be seen in his contribution to the commemorative documentary, which was made in 1996, about the two Sex Pistols concerts held at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. Despite being the man who actually arranged these concerts – with his own first group, the Buzzcocks, supporting at the second – Devoto chose to be represented on the programme by a reel-to-reel tape-recorder, playing a recording of his few comments about the occasion.
Person to person, he can give a meticulous account of his involvement in punk, often using factual information and chronology as a means of avoiding generalized statements about punk’s ‘attitude’.
‘Can I just say,’ he states, ‘that what I don’t buy are things like a piece which I read by Caroline Coon about punk a few years ago, which said how desolate the mid-Seventies were, culturally and politically. And I don’t buy John Lydon’s line, either, in this new film The Filth and the Fury, where he’s going on about “the system being really oppressive in Britain, and that’s why punk rock happened”. I just don’t accept this stuff, really. In myself, I can’t say that I was feeling particularly great at that time – but what’s new?’
Having left the Buzzcocks almost as soon as they released their first record, Devoto formed Magazine as a way of expanding the possibilities that had been opened by punk. In a leaving statement issued on 21 February 1977, he wrote: ‘I don’t like most of this new wave music. I don’t like music. I don’t like movements. Despite all that, things still have to be said. But I am not confident of Buzzcocks’ intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat.’
As ever, Devoto’s stance was one of disaffection and dissatisfaction – rejecting the early complacency into which punk rock so readily dropped, prior to becoming little more than a picture postcard parody of itself. With Magazine, he explored the causes of this stance through lyrics and performance at once disturbing and playful, self-aware and endlessly self-questioning.
Musically, Magazine comprised the formidable teaming up of Dave Formula, John McGeoch and the legendary Barry Adamson, whose own solo work would pursue the idea of attempting to solve the case of oneself. In hindsight, Magazine would have found their place in the history of music on the strength of just one of their early recordings, ‘Shot by Both Sides’.
‘Magazine was its own particular blend of trying to contain a certain sort of intelligence in that sort of music. One of my partners of those years, asking about a Magazine lyric, said, “Is that about you and me?” And I said, “You’ll never know because I swap them around.” But also in Magazine there was the idea of me addressing the audience and making ambiguous pronouncements about our respective roles – your idea of me, and my idea of you. And I was really playing with that during the period of the first two Magazine LPs – when I was in the prime of my ambition. I’m still proud of Magazine. Half a lifetime of feeling went into it.
‘And I’m sure that I tried to rant on about the importance, to me, of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things. I’m trying to explain the Magazine song, “Shot by Both Sides”, I suppose, and this is the area which I’ve explored in everything I’ve done since the Buzzcocks.’
In many ways, Devoto’s life since adolescence, when he first started to write, has been an epic of self-portraiture. Even now, he is writing his autobiography and recording it as a spoken word document, to be left to the National Sound Archive after his death. He has barely reached the middle Seventies and the work is already twenty chapters – ten hours – long, including one hundred and fifty samples of music. Not surprisingly, one of his favourite authors is Marcel Proust. His own writing, as a lyricist, has articulated his personal position with an eloquence and originality that rivals much of the best contemporary fiction and drama.
But at the heart of his constant enquiry – as revealed with brooding poignancy on his final LP with Luxuria, Beast Box – seems to lie a fear of what he might discover if he could actually answer his own questions about himself. ‘They’ve opened the Beast Box haven’t they?’ he concludes the title track of that LP, and even on the haunting crescendo of ‘Railings’, which he recorded in 1998, for the rock group Mansun, his distinctive voice appeared to croon from its own grave, ‘Don’t burn your hand on the window, if you just want to take in the view …’
‘Life is hell,’ says Devoto during this interview, neither joking nor seeking to shock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about twenty. Now, in the last ten years, since I’ve essentially quit music, I’ve come to some kind of accommodation with that. But at a blood and brain level, that’s really how I feel, and it’s one big reason why so far I don’t have kids.
‘From where I was, in 1990, I suppose that most people in my position would try to find another niche for themselves in the music business. But I have too much damaging, damaging pride. And if you take my lack of confidence, and you take my pride – well, there you really are shot by both sides.’
Contemporary Interventionism
In the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey of British experimental art from 1965 to 1975, ‘Live in Your Head’, there was a work by Keith Arnatt from 1972 in which the artist had been photographed standing on a busy street, wearing a placard which proclaimed, ‘I’m a Real Artist’.
Dour and faintly absurd, yet with a confrontational edge that flits between threat and polemic, Arnatt’s street sloganeering seems particularly relevant to a new sensibility that has emerged in contemporary British art, and that seeks to rearrange or dismantle the purpose and cultural status of current artistic activity.
In ‘Live in Your Head’ the foregrounding of documentation over aesthetics, for example, and of politics over individualism, could be seen as a direct rehearsal of the ICA’s ‘Crash!’ exhibition, or the ‘democracy!’ show curated by students on the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art. Taken as a gear-change in the zeitgeist, these shows and a host of lesser-known pamphleteers, activists, interventionists and ideologues, comprise a distinct reaction – or response – to the agenda set within the visual arts throughout the 1990s.
On the one hand, there is a sense in which dissident, confrontational or otherwise socially engaged artistic practice would seem to become disqualified the moment that it has any relation with the ‘elite’ white cube of the gallery, or the social systems of the art world. On the other, within the gradations of artistic dissent – from artists engaged in direct street action, through to those who are actively reinventing the notion of art in the community – there still seems to be room for such work to be curated without losing its integrity.
‘Many of the major new galleries have engaged artists to work with communities in imaginative education and outreach programmes,’ says Teresa Gleadowe, the Course Director of the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art; ‘Such activities have little relation with traditional studio-based practice – they involve public participation, research, conversation, exploration, shared interests and causes. Social engagement is a common concern. Most of these projects do not result in the production of art objects, and some may not easily be recognized as art at all.
‘The “democracy!” exhibition took on the job of representing some aspects of this activity and of finding ways of presenting it in a gallery situation. This is a difficult and even paradoxical endeavour, which demands from the visitor a level of deep engagement – reading, listening, forensic investigation. As an exhibition subject it is a risky enterprise, and one which might not easily be undertaken by an established institution. It seems appropriate that young curators, working within the research environment of a curatorial course, should give themselves the task of making manifest practices of this kind.’
Evidence that such socially engaged art practice is swiftly gaining in significance, raising a host of issues related to venue, craft, distribution and commodity, can be seen at a glance from some of the artists involved in ‘democracy!’. Sarah Tripp’s documentary project, for example, interviewed a network of people about their faith and belief; Group Material – best known for their ‘AIDS Timeline’ – were an artists’ collective based in New York’s Lower East Side, ‘committed to art’s potential to effect social political change’. Also for ‘democracy!’ Jeremy Deller worked with elderly people, ‘opening the doors of the Royal College’s Senior Common Room to the members of a local drop-in centre’.
Taken point for point, a freshly politicized approach to making art can be seen to exchange the sexual, nihilistic, aesthetically exquisite and pop culturally individualist agenda of last decade’s ‘Sensation’ generation, and replace it with a virtually existentialist reassessment of art’s capacity and function. Where the lucrative visceral shock tactics of Emin, Hirst or the Chapman brothers could be seen as the convulsions of outraged romanticism, so the various practitioners and collectives of the latest sensibility appear to be based in a kind of philosophical ethnography, questioning social and cultural power structures from the outside, and developing an art that is largely impossible to own, display or accord a financial value.
For the novelist, pamphleteer and founder of the Neoist Alliance, Stewart Home – who famously went on ‘Culture Strike’ between 1990 and 1993, refusing to make any new work at all – this relationship between culture, commodity and distribution is central to both his writing and its publication. He regards both Tracey Emin, with whom he once exhibited, and Damien Hirst as artists who have ‘recouped’ on his ideas (his ‘Culture Strike’ bed, and his ‘Necrocard’, respectively) by turning them into commodified objects.
‘I guess that in some ways I’ve worked with self-publishing and small presses in order to enable different discussions to go on outside of the commodified business exchange. The Tate have been collecting my pamphlets and leaflets since the 1980s, so you can criticize these institutions, but their archivists and librarians are really on the ball. Basically, if you get an A3 sheet of paper, and fill it with whatever polemic you want, then those ideas are going to get around and get a response.’
A further collective devoted to such practice is Inventory, formed in 1995 as a group committed to exploring the possibilities of anthropological research as text-based art. Through their Inventory journal – with the slogan, ‘Losing, Finding and Collecting’ – and a succession of activities based on street interventions, Inventory could be seen to represent a determinedly outsider stance, while seeking new, cheap ways to disseminate their thinking.
‘We all abandoned individual practice at the start of the 1990s,’ says an Inventory spokesperson, ‘primarily because we found the whole new British art scene, which had originated around Hirst’s “Freeze” exhibition, to be utterly alienating. We saw ourselves as more connected to surrealism, Dada, Walter Benjamin or Bataille, and we wanted to talk about ideas through a journal which could be slightly academic, mad, and shocking.
‘But that wasn’t enough; we wanted to explore the various economies of social life through social situations, and so our work is political inasmuch as it’s occurring at a time when even the word “socialism” appears to be taboo. We regard nihilism in a pro-active, Nietzschean sense, as something to be worked through, and empowered by. By investigating the nature of field work, we turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves. This could be translated into politics – through the surrealist notion of a permanent state of revolution.
‘I don’t think that anyone in the London contemporary art scene trusts us enough to represent us; they like us to be a bit of a cult. But we’ve survived for five years without them, and so we can easily do another five. We’re quite happy representing ourselves.’
One of Inventory’s better-known ‘interventions’ was a fly-posting project in Hanway Street, in London’s West End, called ‘Smash This Puny Existence’. Braving foul weather, local hostility and the approaches of bored prostitutes, the group fly-posted this dark cut-through between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road with a series of newsprint posters proclaiming such announcements as ‘The Puerilification of Culture’ and surrealist texts on the experience of walking through a city. The group also discovered that a loophole in public by-laws made it possible for a person to stand on Oxford Street holding a large placard (of the sort usually seen advertising closing-down sales) which blared ‘Smash This Puny Existence’.
This project was also disseminated by Matthew Higgs (the curator of this year’s British Art Show) through the long-established art books publishers, Book Works, as part of their Open House series of guest-curated projects. Book Works was founded in the mid-1980s as ‘an attempt to reposition the book in the context of visual arts’, and in recent years their role as enablers of documentative, interventionist and pamphleteering artworks has become increasingly significant. Above all, many of their publications create affordable artworks, which can have whatever collectable status the buyer decides.
‘Over the years, this has produced an eclectic range of works,’ says one of Book Works’ founders and directors, Jane Rolo, ‘from early collaborations with activist groups like the Guerilla Girls, or Adrian Piper’s book Colored People – a visual commentary on preconceived ideas about race. More recently, Czech artist Pavel Buchler’s project involved projecting a red light from Chetham’s Library in Manchester – where Marx and Engels studied – on to the Saint George’s flag of Manchester cathedral. With the Open House project, we’ve been able to work with talented young curators like Matthew Higgs and Stefan Kalmar, and to commission books by artists like Janice Kerbel and Nils Norman: to invest in ideas, rather than the cult of artist as celebrity’
Stefan Kalmar has introduced his commissions for the Book Works Open House project – under the umbrella title ‘access/excess’ – with a quotation from the Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’
As though to illustrate this supposed disruption of systems and orders, Kalmar has commissioned four artists to create what are in essence handbooks for social or anti-social activity. Janice Kerbel’s ‘15 Lombard Street’ gives precise instructions on how to rob the branch of Coutts & Co. bank at that address, for example, while Nils Norman’s ‘The Contemporary Picturesque’ considers protest culture tactics in relation to ‘the development of a repressive form of urban architecture and design – such as surface studs, trash cages and anti-poster surfaces’.
Ultimately, events such as the recent ‘Reclaim the Streets’ demonstrations in London can be seen as a potentially volatile summation of the burgeoning relationship between marginalized artistic activity and direct political action. For Stewart Home, however, as a veteran of many interventionist, hoaxing and direct action campaigns, the political significance of anarchic demonstrations should not become too intimate with art. ‘The danger is that you begin to brand such street actions as “art”, and thereby dampen their political directives. It’s always easy for them to try and control us by treating us as a cult.’
Freezing cold in Cavendish Square, shadows in the doorways of John Lewis – the clear night sky, promising frost, above the ornate red brick of Marylebone’s rooftops … In a nasty little pub, a knot of cumbersome figures accumulate: unironic anorak wearers, plump young men with pudding-basin fringes and bottle-end glasses, dandyfied smoothies reeking of scent, Dadaist-looking spiv types with loudly checked tweed lop-sided motoring caps such as Mr Toad might have worn, a few greying punks wearing old men’s suits … These people may look like potatoes, but they’re the forces of Opposition; like Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy, clan-gathering round the back of Oxford Street, W1.
Shortly before half-past eleven the whole rag-bag assortment creeps and shuffles, grey and hunched against the frost-whitened streets, where sounds are growing softer, along the shadow of the buildings, to a back mews, and a big black garage door, behind the uppermost panes of which a feeble yellow light is dimly gleaming. The little crowd – fifteen or so, maybe twenty – huddle forward in the silence, as the big black door opens just a few inches and a hand so white and frail as to seem luminescent slides out to greet them with a single beckoning finger. Heads lowered, they all shuffle in …
The vast auditorium, smelling of brass polish and dust, is barely lit. But you can just make out a couple of … grand pianos … on the stage. To a murmur of exceedingly well-mannered applause, two casually dressed young men seem pretty much to sprint from the darkness of the wings, hurl themselves down on the pair of adjusted piano stools, fling their hands to the keyboard and … play a Morton Feldman minimalist piano duet for the best part of the forty minutes. Welcome to the ‘Wigmore Alternative’, the Anti-Rave! – where the music doesn’t pound in beats per minute, it echoes in beats per hour …
The enigmatic composer Lawrence Crane (England’s unacknowledged Satie, a joker in the pack) and founder of the Wigmore Alternative – part pastoralist, part humorist, part über-archivist, part punk rocker – would demonstrate, in the twilight of the 1980s, the importance of Organization … The artistic application of the aesthetics of librarianship or proofreading. Cranesque order and neatness was a rout to the sublime.
Pet Shop Boys
For a pop duo who had their first Number One hit – ‘West End Girls’ – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern. Like the artists Gilbert & George, they have developed a creative partnership that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit when they performed on ‘Saturday Night at the London Palladium’ – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts and Jimmy Tarbuck – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the zeitgeist while retaining their cultural independence.
To some extent, the enduring relevance of the Pet Shop Boys could be due to the fact that they seemed to find their perfect musical identity right at the very beginning of their career. By mixing the sensory rush of luxuriously orchestrated dance music with an image and lyrical style that was almost its direct opposite, foregrounding isolation and social commentary, they achieved an originality and acquired a stance that has simply intensified over the years. With the Pet Shop Boys, there is nearly always a hidden, sharp edge of critique – critique of society, of pop, and of themselves – just beneath the lustrous sheen on the surface of their image. After all, they even managed to cover Village People’s ‘Go West’ with a Russian constructivist spin.
The Pet Shop Boys are holding a series of interviews in a semi-derelict suite of rooms just beneath the highly ornate, neo-Gothic eaves of the old Saint Pancras Station Hotel. The hotel has been empty for nearly a decade – although the Spice Girls filmed their video for ‘Wannabe’ here – and this interview has been presented as a kind of eerie performance piece with touches of science-fiction. Summoned up the five dusty flights of the abandoned ceremonial staircase, a tape-recording of barking dogs breaks out high above you. So far, so New Romantic.
Greeted at the top by Dainton, the Pet Shop Boys’ friend and bodyguard, you are then led through a further suite of darkened rooms, at the end of which, booming away, there is a projection of the Pet Shop Boys’ latest video. When you finally get to Tennant and Lowe, they are sitting on an illuminated glass floor inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 – a Space Odyssey, and wearing matching Versace bomber jackets made out of a gold metallic fabric designed to retain every crease and wrinkle. They look like off-duty astronauts.
‘If you had this floor in your house,’ announces Tennant, suddenly domestic in the midst of Goth-Futurist ambience, ‘and it was taken away, you’d really miss it. Everything would look really drab, because it gives off a lovely light. It’s actually quite warm and contemplative.’ He looks around the floor again, for all the world like a customer in Habitat on the Conran Shop, choosing interior lighting.
Tennant and Lowe are there to promote their new single, with its classically Pet Shop Boys title, ‘I Don’t Know What You Want but I Can’t Give It Anymore’. This single is a mesmerically spooky disco stomper, which has a lyric about paranoia, surveillance and infidelity, but a snare-drum and hi-hat back-beat that sounds as though it was lifted off a track by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. In fact, it is one of those potent configurations of opposites that the Pet Shop Boys have made their speciality. In addition to this, they have developed a new image for the video you could call ‘Boot Boy Samurai Chic’.
As a look, this new image just manages to ride that perilously tight back-curve of style that Eddie Izzard identified as connecting ‘fantastically hip’ with ‘totally naff’. What makes it succeed, ultimately, is the fact that the Pet Shop Boys have pushed it to the very limit: scary gold-haired wigs that show the dark roots of dyed hair, heavy black eyebrows of the kind last seen on Siousxie Sioux in about 1981, spider-thin dark glasses that lend an air of complete blankness to the features, and striped culottes that hang like ankle-length skirts. Gothic interiors, men in skirts and synthesizers – it has to be New Romantic.
‘I do think that the video’s quite New Romantic,’ says Neil, ‘but New Romanticism worked for such a short period of time, didn’t it? And needless to say David Bowie had the best moment in it by leaping in about two hours after it all started with the video for “Ashes to Ashes”. That really is the ultimate New Romantic video, although there’s probably some good ones by Steve Strange and Visage – “Fade to Grey” perhaps?
‘I remember when I used to live in a flat in the Kings Road, just above a Chinese restaurant, and I happened to open the door one day just as Steve Strange walked past. He was wearing “Look Number Three”, which was when he had a beard and sat on cushions. It was his “Cushions Period”, but I always remember it as quite exciting.’
‘There’s not enough of all that, these days, is there?’ adds Chris Lowe, as though remarking on the demise of corner shops. ‘The Kings Road used to be fantastic.’
‘If I had the nerve,’ Neil confides, ‘I’d walk up and down the Kings Road dressed like we are in our video. Secretly, I’d quite like to do that. But it takes too long to put the wig on …’
‘But that was the whole point!’ exclaims Chris. ‘The whole point of New Romanticism was that it took such a long time to get ready. That was what you did – get ready.’
‘I have to say that I like the bit in the video with the whole ritual of putting on the costumes. The costumes are a distancing technique – a way of saying that we’re nothing to do with anything else that’s happening in pop,’ says Neil. ‘Pop music, these days, is either cheesily sincere – as in your boy bands – or it’s effectively natural-looking, and we wanted to do something with a level of artifice in it. I always liked pop that has a sense of wonder about it. I mean, would you rather see David Bowie on roller skates – like he was in his “Day In, Day Out” video – or would you rather see David Bowie dressed as a clown, walking along the beach at Hastings with a bunch of New Romantics? I imagine you’d rather see him dressed as a clown in Hastings – I know I would.
Also, the Pet Shop Boys have always been obsessed with not being real, because we think that’s more interesting. I have always thought that the idea, for a pop star, is to not be able to believe that they’re real. Which is why I think it was brilliant that Elvis never performed in Britain. Actually, to their credit, the pop gossip columnist of The Sun suggested that all the interviewers should be dressed like we are in the video.’
‘But it can also look grotesque,’ Chris points out.
‘No. It really wasn’t designed for daily wear,’ agrees Neil. ‘It was designed like our “Pointy Hats” look a few years ago, to be seen through an electronic medium. That way you can smooth things out. We did the “Pointy Hats” in real life, just once, when we launched MTV in Russia. When we came out to do the press conference we discovered that the ceiling of the room was too low for the hats, and then when I sat down the collar of my jacket rode up, so I had to kind of bend forward. An English audience would have found this hilarious, and we’d all have had a good laugh. But the Russians just sat there and stared at us, and then asked all the usual questions as though nothing was odd. You’ve got to have a nerve to do this kind of thing, you know. But when you look at our “Pointy Hats” video, it’s a classic video. It’s an attempt to move away from all the supposed naturalism in pop …’
With their new image, record and forthcoming tour, the Pet Shop Boys are presenting, as usual, an entire theatrical package. This time, they have pulled off the considerable coup of collaborating with the visionary architect, Zaha Hadid, some of whose buildings have been considered too radical to be constructed. In the light of this latest collaboration, one can see how the Pet Shop Boys – Lowe is a trained architect himself – are continuing their fascination with presenting artificial environments in which to perform their songs.
‘Actually, the idea came about because Janet Street Porter had been walking with Zaha Hadid for her television programme,’ says Neil. ‘And she said, “Why don’t you get Zaha Hadid to design your new musical?” and we said, “Because she’s an architect and it’s a completely different discipline to designing for the theatre.” But then we were in New York and I was flicking through a book of Zaha’s designs in the Rizzoli bookshop, and I suddenly saw all of her architectural models as stage sets – wonderful shapes to walk across while holding a microphone, wearing a ludicrous costume and having a wind-machine on you maybe.
‘So we approached her, and I have to say that she and her operation have been inspiring to work with. They take all the practicalities of a rock show on board, and they are the only people we have ever worked with who take the budget seriously. They are working on a modular set which can evolve during the show and be adapted to different sizes of venue. Which means that the backing singers are going to be doing some heavy lifting, only they don’t know that yet …’
So what does all this new look mean? Or does it mean anything? To judge from the exterior shots of the video, and the extreme styling of their new image, they are positioning themselves in a vision of the future in which the architectural brutalism of the Seventies has become as weathered as the Victorian neo-Gothicism of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Saint Pancras Hotel. It is, perhaps, the idea of the future itself appearing antique and old-fashioned, with every adult and child dressed, as revealed at the end of the video, in the extraordinary Samurai chic which we had assumed was a sub-cult gang costume – like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange – rather than the mark of complete social conformity.
‘There is a comment about conformity,’ says Neil. ‘But I think that if our previous shows were paintings, then they would have been figurative. Whereas this one is definitely abstract. Unlike our other shows, this doesn’t have a narrative, however loose. I think that it is possible for pop music to get over-intellectualized, but on the other hand it probably isn’t intellectualized enough. In the late Seventies and early Eighties pop was definitely intellectualized, and interestingly enough there was a lot of good music around at the same time. These days, you’d get embarrassed to start talking about art or writing in pop because people might think you’re being pretentious, which is a really sad pay-off of the whole laddish thing in the Nineties.’
‘Like Bowie gets ridiculed for wanting to be interested in new things,’ says Chris. ‘But we’re always looking for a new underground …’
But the problem of how to be confrontational would still obsess a new generation of cultural practitioners during the 1990s. How the hell did you catch anyone’s attention, what with the whole more-in-your-face-than-you thing going on? To some pundits, the age would seem obsessed by sex and death, centring on what Professor Eric Northey would define as ‘the nectothon’ of the mass mediation of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death and funeral. Culturally, in many ways, this was a post-modern re-run of the aestheticism and morbidity of the nineteenth-century ‘fin-de-siècle’ – the cartoon decadence of a neo-grunge demi-monde, with yobs and snobs united in the flashlight of high fashion.
And how did you deal with the phenomenon-seeking inverted commas of free-floating irony? That would become another problem.
Irony (as understatement, overstatement, the conflation of opposites and a general fiddling about, in the name of critique, with context and intentionality), within the cultural practice of the early 1990s, would turn out to be the growing pains of the New Authenticity – the phase before the social realism kicked in. But back in the winter of 1988, there was a feeling abroad about irony that was touchingly innocent; it could remind you, in hindsight, of Truman Capote’s wistful recollections, as an alcoholic, of how he used to get drunk: ‘In Harry’s Bar it just seemed such fun,’ he said.
Likewise Irony. Looking back on it now, and seeing the two culture-vulturing city slickers, thinking out ways to sidestep the obvious, outwit the trend-waves, and play a tune on the bleeps and squeaks of the zeitgeist, there is the realization that the fluffy end of the arts and cultural media during the late 1980s and early 1990s (the swift dissolve between Cult Studies and Lifestyle journalism) had become set to being hyper-cynically arch, or ‘arch’.
On the one hand, Irony could be regarded as a means of responding to, and co-existing with, the conversion of all things socio-cultural into a post-modern bombardment of culturally destabilized, aesthetically blurred, ultimately unauthored and free-floating signifiers – the Phenomena of things. Irony, in this respect, was a kind of ‘two can play at that game’, or ‘I’ll be your mirror’ means of critique.
But the Ironists of the early 1990s had also honed the pursuit of Style Watching (the refraction of the post-punk style press through aspirational high bourgeois print media) to such a degree, that their commentaries became increasingly reliant on the instant translation of trends and phenomena into a code of social satire. This was a mixture of wit and anthropology that could end up dissolving in the acid bath of its own chemistry. For there was a faintly psychopathic edge to all of this, in the sense of cold-blooded style watching, however astute, needing to lack almost any kind of empathy – or even emotional awareness – with its subjects, but simply looking for the most precise emblem of their Type. In many ways, this was the point where Naturalism met Marketing – on an island off the coast of Camp.
At the time this seemed like the weaponry of applied dandyism, and wide open to the perils of terminal ennui: where dandies articulate their philosophy of life through Mock Heroic fashion (the world expressed in a tie-pin, for instance), so the culmination of Irony would be a search for the tiniest detail in other people’s dress and behaviour, which would say the most about them. A noble enough enterprise, in keeping with the naturalism of nineteenth-century fiction (cf. Tom Wolfe’s literary and journalistic homage to Balzac and Dickens), but also open to abuse as the reduction of all things to nothing more than a periodic table of status.
Needless to say, by the middle 1990s, the sheer surfeit of Irony in the zeitgeist was like some kind of cultural vitamin imbalance. We were gorged on Irony, sickened and bloated and cramped with snooty cleverness. Irony was our trapped wind. The critic Robert Hughes – somewhat brutally – even described the art of Jeff Koons as ‘the last of the methane in the cow of post-modernism’.
But then a miracle occurred, and Irony turned into the Pursuit of Authenticity. This was partly a cyclical reaction to the trend, but also because a new generation of Ironists had realized that the only way of becoming Irony-proof themselves was to proclaim yourself one hundred per cent Authentic: a no-nonsense, bit-of-a-laugh, see-you-down-the-pub kind of person. Enter the massed armies of Mockney, the Lads, Ladettes and Babes – the football’s coming home, none-of-that-low-fat-malarkey, ‘trainspotting’, fever-pitching, text-messaging, wap-phoning, Girlie Show and two smoking barrels. Enter, Attitude! A breath of fresh air, perhaps, or the fashionable face of anti-intellectualism.
Robert Hughes, needless to say, would now become Newly Marginalized and wheeled out as a Reactionary for his trouble – partly because of his book, The Culture of Complaint – which was held up as a proto-typical, disgusted-of-Manhattan, ‘everything’s dumbing down’, anti-political-correctness kind of book (the same thing would happen to Harold Bloom, with his ‘School of Resentment’ comments about the dangers of politicized – isms to literary criticism, in his massive book, The Western Canon), but also because the top froth of the culture – television, advertising, various chunks of the visual arts, pop and literary worlds – had been hanging on to irony for dear life, even as they were beginning to feel the pull of New Authenticity.
Robert and Harold, therefore, were shut up faster than a pair of dotty old men who had wandered into a rave – they just didn’t get it, did they, and in the neo-Swinging Nineties, if you weren’t hip to the Attitude!, you were … almost definitely … hopelessly … middle-class and toxic.
And this was strange: in a broad-band of culture which was being maintained, administrated, mediated and consumed almost entirely by the middle classes, for an actual cultural practitioner to be regarded in any way as ‘middle-class’ was pretty much the end of the line. It usually implied that you were anti-modern, and, worse, anti-multicultural. Cultural-type people, therefore, were falling over one another to become bourgeois-proof. Regional culture (for example), and dialect in particular, was seized upon to provide the new morality comedies of Authenticity – from Trainspotting to The Full Monty; but at the same time there had seldom been such a pan-media boom in essentially bourgeois lifestyle subjects, from funky cooking to interior design and urban gardening.
‘So why,’ – as Quentin Crisp once remarked – ‘was there such a racket?’
‘The ‘dumbing down’ ticket was a waste of time: a debased and pointless phrase which, along with the equally pointless ‘politically correct’ and ‘Middle England’, simply denoted some vague idea of an armed confrontation between, on the one hand, tweedy intellectuals from the Home Counties with maths-teacher haircuts and a passion for opera, and on the other wantonly extravagant, taxpayer-paid-for, brand-new Faculties of Hip-Hop Studies. It was simply the old High and Low culture debate, but now with added Bitterness.
Rather, the 1990s, perhaps, were acting out their version of the cultural identity crisis that occurred towards the end of most eras, and which the critics of the time can never quite agree upon. And as a fin-de-millennium, as well as fin-de-siècle, the Nineties got a triple whammy of crisis.
With regard to the trend for such crises, writing in 1939 about the 1930s, for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge had stated: ‘The present is always chaos, its prophets always charlatans, its values always false. When it has become the past, and may be looked back on, only then is it possible to detect order underlying the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying the false values.’
And here was Blake Morrison, in 1999, beginning a polemical essay for the Independent on Sunday newspaper – headlined: ‘All Plugs and No Shocks: PR Driven, ‘accessible’, bland, ‘self-congratulatory’. That’s today’s art scene’ – with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘“We can assert with some confidence,” Eliot wrote in 1948, “that our own period is one of decline [and] that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago … I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even have to anticipate a period [of] no culture.”’ Morrison adds: ‘It’s not that we’ve got no culture, but something almost as bad is infecting the patient: Blandness, capital B. Not just the quiet, inoffensive kind. No, something more shrill and happy-clappy. A relentlessly cheerful, end-of-millennium, let’s-make-everyone-feel-comfortable blanket of good taste.’
Such doubt and pessimism about the state of culture, therefore, why It’s All Over or has never been worse, would appear to be a traditional sub-strand of culture itself – a homoeopathic dose of fatalism, to keep the arteries of progress clean. It had occurred in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, back in 1728, and Theophile de Gautier’s Preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, at the start of the nineteenth century, through nearly every cultural configuration by way of Wilde, Pound, Auden, Shaw and Orwell, to the disillusionment with the idealism of the 1960s shown by Sixties people like Christopher Booker (The Neophiliacs) and even Jonathan Green (All Dressed Up). And so when the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is announced, one can only really think, ‘Well, no change there, then.’
But as the shutters came down (the moss-green submarine light in the grey penthouse apartment, the pedal-dampened difficult chords, the snapped violin string) and the culture-vulturing city slickers experienced the gathering loss of sympathy between a particular generation and the times they are living in (pondering Muggeridge and Morrison perhaps), there was suddenly the nagging doubt, ‘What if they’re right?’ … That what was now required, maybe, was the exchange (to judge from the shorter history of disillusionment) of a secular for a spiritual path.
For the 1990s seemed to be a decade of dichotomous thinking, which pointed out more sharply than usual the limits of generational sympathy. Within the culture, there were few gradations of points of view – little anxiety of oscillation between Either and Or. Beyond the increasingly important world of visual art – because visual art, in the 1990s, would become a multi-purpose emblem of modernity and regeneration, rather like London’s Docklands had been in the Eighties – the rest of us would simply become aware of subtle, or not so subtle, massaging shifts in the presentation of things … You just got the feeling that you were usually being sold something, and that, as cultural commodification appeared to be approaching critical mass, most of it simply wasn’t worth the price. ‘So much of everything!’, as Peter York has refined the moment into a four-word statement.
Britain, TV and Art
It was Mike Myers, the American star and creator of the spoof nerd cable TV show, Wayne’s World, who really addressed the recent British obsession with searching for expressions of its national identity in the ironic remodelling of its popular culture. For it was Myers, in an unexpected piece of comic shape-shifting, who discarded the definitively American character of Wayne – all gleaming white teeth and cap-sleeve t-shirt – for the amplified Britishness of Austin Powers: psychedelic secret agent and International Man of Mystery.
The cinema release of Austin Powers coincided with the attempt to revive ‘Swinging London’, as an emblem of Britishness for the late 1990s, heralding the official rise of Cool Britannia. So when the fashionable alliance of New British restaurants, BritCulture and a myriad PR companies was suggesting that a return to the colourful optimism of the mid-1960s was just around the corner, Austin Powers marched round the other corner on our cinema screens, leading a parade of sequence-dancing Beefeaters and hand-springing policemen to a waiting E-type Jaguar painted in the colours of the Union Jack. ‘Hello Mrs Kensington …’ he drooled to the leather-clad agent sitting at the wheel, and the mirror held up to Britain’s latest image of itself as neo-Swinging retro-kitsch was showing a perfect reflection – New Irony and all.
As Britain is described by cult American television, so the affectionate satire of Austin Powers can be seen to have sharpened into downright derision on some of the latest imports to British small screens. In a recent re-run of an episode of Mike Judge’s cult cartoon of teenage nihilism, Beavis and Butthead, the sniggering duo were sitting on their ripped sofa as usual, watching a video by the British band the Verve. ‘Aren’t these dudes from that country where everything sucks?’ remarked Beavis, eventually. Similarly, in the adult cartoon South Park, with its accounts of the goings-on in a small boring town in Colorado, the foul-mouthed children of South Park Elementary would sooner sit next to the red-eyed son of Satan in class, than the British kid Pip – ‘because you’re British, ass-wipe’. Pip, dressed in the cap and jacket of the boy hero of Great Expectations, accepts all abuse with a generous good humour that somehow makes him even more pathetic.
What seems to give these American comments on Britishness their comic edge is the manner in which they identify that strand of cultural self-consciousness that has provided Britain with some of the best, as well as the worst, of its national self-expression. Since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer wed Pop to absurdism in their ground-breaking television show, ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’, in the early 1990s, the cultural fetishizing of Britishness by way of ironic nostalgia and post-modern caricature has been approaching critical mass. The inevitable response to the burn-out of irony would be the rise of the post-Prozac public confessional – the New Sincerity, aided by its sidekick of New Sincerity with street-credibility – the New Authenticity.
An attempt at self-defence at a time of cultural insecurity, the cry of ‘Any old irony’ had been echoing around the studios of British television for some years, and would seem to have authorized a situation in which – as W. H. Auden once suggested in his poem about the perils of trying to reach Atlantis – it had become impossible to tell the true from the false in terms of articulate statements about Britishness. What had come into relief was a raised tracery of distinguishing national characteristics, from the archaic comedies of British manners acted out by Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse, to the baggy British groups with their trademark nasal whine of post-Oasis BritRock. And these are the enduring traits of Britishness that the cutting edge of American comedy has found so easy to lampoon. In addition to the targeted sarcasm of South Park and Beavis and Butthead, who could forget Frasier’s temporary obsession with a horrible English pub? Or the time that a thinly disguised Mary Poppins came to help out The Simpsons, and wound up on the sofa with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and a fag in her mouth?
As the advertising industry has the most calculated interest in reflecting versions of Britain back to itself on television, so it has taken the trend for ironic retro-kitsch – itself an infantilist reflex of nostalgia for our pop-cultural youth – and applied it to articulations of national identity. The TV advert for Mercury ‘One 2 One’ cellular phones, is a computer-generated montage of Vic Reeves interacting with the great British comedian Terry-Thomas, in scenes from the 1960 classic, School for Scoundrels. Beyond the product message, what emerges from this advertisement is a working definition of the way in which ‘Englishness’, as a contemporary concept, is terminally stylized in order to be culturally rehabilitated from any reputation for nationalism or anti-multiculturalism.
This notion is compounded by the latest television advertisement for Rover cars, in which suppositions of Britishness are visually punned into a new, fashionably acceptable vision of Britishness. To an immaculate early-Seventies soundtrack, sourced from vintage Roxy Music and Sparks, the Rover commercial ‘remakes and re-models’ (to borrow from the title of another early Roxy Music number) a British landscape in which the Edinburgh Tattoo becomes the tattooed arm of a young woman at a rave, and a kid munching fast food on a skateboard becomes an arch reference to Meals on Wheels. With a knowing catchphrase, ‘It’s nice to know that things haven’t changed a bit’, Rover’s heavily pushed advertisement is selling New Britain as a state of mind by effectively suggesting that Old Britain is dead and buried.
