Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts

Friday, October 03, 2008

Street and Studio

I enjoyed Street and Studio: an Urban History of Photography at Tate Modern in London over the summer (the exhibition opens in Essen next week if you're in Germany and curious).

There were some iconic images, like Richard Avedon's 1969 photograph of Andy Warhol's Factory gang (this section shows, left to right, Paul Morrissey, 'Little Joe' Dallessandro and Candy Darling -full image here).



I liked Madame Yevonde's gorgeous 1930s Goddess portraits - who cares if they are aristocrats in fancy dress, there is an otherworld fantasy of fab frocks and hair that anyone can relate to.

My favourite pieces were focused on people in their clubbing clothes. There was a collection of Malick Sidibe's 1960s potraits of young people in Mali (don't think this specific image was in the show, but there were lots of others):

Then at the end of the exhibition was a room dedicated to Rineke Dijkstra's video piece with a splitscreen showing people in the Buzz Club, Liverpool and Mysteryworld, Zaandan (in Holland), 1996-97 - with a soundtrack including George Morel's Morel's Groove). It looks like she got people off the dancefloor to stand in front of a white wall, dancing, staring at the camera, chewing gum, smoking, making out, looking bored....

This bootleg doesn't quite do it justice, but gives an idea of the piece:

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Remembering Katy Watson

My good friend Katy Watson died last month. Her obituary was published in yesterday's Guardian:

'In the late 1980s Katy Watson, who has died of Hodgkin's lymphoma aged 42, was a key member of the collective producing Shocking Pink, a feminist magazine by and for young women, which tried to take on teenage magazines on their home ground, with photostrips and cartoons. She was also involved in two other feminist magazines, Outwrite, and, in 1992, Bad Attitude. Katy was inspired by the 1990s Riot Grrrl and Queercore punk bands, some of whom she interviewed for Bad Attitude. She took up DJing and played at lesbian and gay punk clubs, including Up to the Elbow and Sick of It All - the latter which she started with friends...

...Her life was transformed by the birth of her children Orla in 2002 and Joe in 2007. Her happy parenting experiences informed her involvement with the lesbian mothers' group, Out for Our Children. Her first book for young children, Spacegirl Pukes, appeared last year - she was proud that a book could be published in which a child had two mothers without the fact needing any explanation - and her second book, Dangerous Deborah Puts Her Foot Down, will appear soon. Her novel, High on Life, a fictionalised account of heroin addiction, was published in 2002. She is survived by her children, her parents and her sister Anna".

I first met Katy in the early 1990s in Brixton where we were both living and both hanging out at the 121 Centre, an anarchist squat centre in Railton Road (home of Dead by Dawn club, which I've written about before). Katy was involved with Bad Attitude, a feminist paper, I was involved with Contraflow, a radical newsheet. Bad Attitude had an office at the top of the building and used to let us use their computer.

I have so many memories of Katy, but as this a music site I will concentrate on that side of our friendship. Music was a central part of Katy's life - in fact in my last conversation with her, in the hospice just a few days before she died, she asked me if I'd heard any good new bands recently. Although she did not want to think too much about the possibility of dying, it is notable that she did go to the trouble of choosing the songs she wanted played at her funeral. So when a big crowd of us gathered at the Epping Forest Woodland Burial Park, we all came in to 'Denis' by Blondie and followed the coffin out to Magazine's 'Shot by Both Sides'.

Katy's first love was punk, so the 1990s Riot Grrrl and queercore scenes were right up her street. She interviewed Bikini Kill for Bad Attitude, and indeed Kathleen Hanna from the band once slept on her sofa in Brixton. She took up DJing and I remember going to see her play out at places like The Bell in Kings Cross (famous London gay pub known for indie/punk nights - some great footage of the place here) and at Freedom in Soho, when Mouthfull played there downstairs. We were always swapping tapes and CDs, I have a boxful of obsolete (?) cassettes Katy made me - Sister George 'Drag King', 'Spend the Night with the Trashwomen'...

In the mid-1990s Katy was part of my clubbing/party posse. Saturday nights were often spent in the Duke of Edinburgh pub in Brixton, waiting for news from the United Systems party line about where the free party was happening - followed by a trip out to Hackney, or Camden or wherever. As I kept a sporadic diary at the time, I know that on April 29th 1995 me and Katy went to a United Systems squat party in Market Road, off Clarendon Road (north London). There were police outside with bolt cutters, so we had to go round the back and climb over a wall and across a rooftop to get inside. Another time we went to a party in a squatted church in Kentish town, with the sun coming through the stained glass after dancing all night.

We also went to clubs - Megatripolis and Fruit Machine at Heaven, to Speed at the Mars Bar in '95 (LTJ Bukem's drum and bass club). Once in 1996 we got really glammed up and headed to Pique, a night promoted by Matthew Glamorr at Club Extreme in Ganton Street. It was cancelled , but someone gave us a flyer to a private party in Lily Place in Farringdon, a fantastic loft style party packed out with people dancing.

Katy started getting into Americana, she introduced me to The Handsome Family and Alabama 3, whose Twisted night we went to at Brady's in Brixton. We went to lots of gigs at The Windmill on Brixton Hill, from alt.country to Art Brut, and we went to Electrowerks in Islington to see ESG (in June 2000).

A lot of good nights, but no more, which is very sad. Still her five year old daughter has been jumping around since she could stand to The Ramones and, more recently CSS. Her son is just starting to stand and no doubt will be dancing himself soon. So the spirit lives on... I don't believe in the literal afterlife, but it's nice to imagine Katy wandering around in some punk rock Valhalla looking round for Joey Ramone and Johnny Thunders.

Neil

The F-word, HarpyMarx and AfterEllen have all picked up on Katy's death, which would have pleased her. Shocking Pink in particular had a big impact and it's nice to know that some of yesterday's readers are today's feminist bloggers. I will dig out some old S.Pink and Bad Attitude and other Katy stuff over the next few weeks.

The photo of Katy was taken on the infamous May Day 2000 Guerrilla Gardening action in London's Parliament Square. Katy was a keen gardener, as well as Guerrilla Gardening on May Day she was a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and got us tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show!

See also:



Thursday, September 04, 2008

End of The End

Central London club The End is closing in January 2009, 13 years after it opened in West Central Street and became one of the top places in town for electronic dance music in all its various shades. It seems that the owners just want to move on to other things in their lives and have received an unspecified lucrative offer for the premises... hopefully it will not simply be replaced by luxury flats or office space.

Clubs open and close all the time, still many are worrying that more seem to be closing than opening in London at the moment, and there certainly aren't many with the kind of serious sound system and broad electronica policy offered at The End. When the club opened in 1995, dance music was a license to print money and a mixture of gangsters, dealers and music biz entrepreneurs were opening up spaces all over the place. Few of these have survived, and with dance music returning to a niche love affair fewer are opening. The End was driven by music enthusiasts with founders including Mr C (DJ and sometime member of The Shamen), Layo Paskin (of Layo and Bushwacka DJ fame).

I remember going to the famous Sunday gay club DTPM in the early days of The End. Other club nights have included Trash (where Scissor Sisters played an early London gig), Twice as Nice (where footballer David Beckham once DJ'd - apparently he played Wookie's Battle) and Fatboy Slim's Skint- all this plus very long DJ sets from the likes of Laurent Garnier and Richie Hawtin.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Arthur Weinstein

Glamourbrain alerted me to the death last month of New York club face Arthur Weinstein.

Weinstein opened HURRAH, a club at Broadway and 62nd Street, in 1976. When it closed down he ran a number of ‘illegal after-hours clubs downtown that mixed the fashionable and the young and artistic. The kids had radically odd colors of hair, and the coat-checker was a transvestite’ (New York Times). The clubs included the Jefferson in his apartment on East 14th Street (1980) and the Continental on West 25th (1981-83). His partner 'Colleen gave the Continental a characteristic look, at once kitschy-retro and futuristic. She put up several dividers, creating little rooms, and pasted them with wallpaper from the Fifties and Sixties. She had Futura 2000, the graffiti star, cover a wall in the former loading dock and put a giant aquarium tank in the main space' (Observer 2004).

As recalled in the Observer interview, running these clubs involved dealings with corrupt cops, mobsters and the FBI- one night at the Jefferson 'the Public Morals Squad raided us. With axes. That was some night. A guy who was part of the sanitation police was there and he started fighting with them. And they beat him up. He went to jail. He had a gun on him.'

Later Weinstein ran a legal Lower East Side club called the World and in the 1990s designed lighting for clubs including The Tunnel (1990-1998), The Limelight (1990-98) and Club USA (1993-1996).

Brooklyn Vegan has a nice appreciation of his life, with lots of interesting comments from people remembering seeing bands at his clubs (including Jesus and Mary Chain and The Pixies) and Fred Giannelli from Psychic TV recalling a 1988 PTV Halloween gig at Weinstein’s The World.

Weinstein was also an artist, photographer and sometime resident of the famous Chelsea Hotel – there is an interview with him at the Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea blog. The Hotel Chelsea blog is fascinating by the way – everybody knows about William Burroughs and Leonard Cohen staying in the Chelsea, but did you know about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn?

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Old Folks Talkin'?

Is dance music over, yet again? There certainly seems to be a lot of online discussion to this effect.

Like many interesting music blogging memes, Simon Reynolds seems to have prompted this with a Blissblog post stating: "I don't believe in beats anymore" and suggesting that he was losing the "quasi-mystical faith in beats as somehow figurative: a belief that the tremors that each breakthrough by auteur-producer or scenius alike sent through the state of pop somehow correlated with or could be equated to tremors through society... After a good decade at full-tilt, that particular structure of affect and belief has faded away for me now, or for now (something could bring it back, possibly, but what that would be I can't even begin to imagine). Beats are just beats again: cool, funky, useful, invigorating, inventive."

At Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne has followed up with a fairly pessimistic assessment of the state of techno, mourning 'the atrophy of a particular sense of optimism, of possibility, that once seemed encoded in particular rhythmic structures and the ceaseless advancement of electronic music's shifting stylistics. Dance music is once again a lifestyle product, a soundtrack for entertainment'.

I think Simon at least is talking about the changing impact of beats on him, rather than making a general pronouncement on the state of electronic dance music. And personally I feel much same the way. It would be very easy to find objective reasons for this - maybe it was true that in the 1990s, dance music scenes (at least in the UK) did feel part of a wider shift in society. With the Criminal Justice Act we had specific laws against raves and mass demonstrations in central London against them. There was a beats-fuelled circuit of road protests, Reclaim the Streets parties and outlaw festivals like Castlemorton. On the other hand, maybe some of us expected too much of mere music which is why some of the more delerious and apocalyptic writing from that time feels quite dated (see some examples I've posted here from ***Collapse and Here & Now magazines).

But there's another dimension here, which involves taking on one of the great taboos of blogging. I am not talking about sex, politics or religion, all of which people seem happy to go on about regardless of how out there their views may be (nothing is occult anymore, in the sense of hidden). The final taboo is age. The internet allows us to create a disembodied virtual self where we can reveal what we think without ever having to reveal what we look like or how old we are. Partially this is a positive thing - we can make connections with people on the basis of a commonality of interest or enthusiasm without prejudging whether they are cool enough to hang out with us (or we with them).

The problem comes when people universalise from their own limited perpective. Let's face it, in terms of dance music anybody who was there in 1988 is going to be at least 36 now - assuming they were a pretty clued up 16 year old. Anybody whose history goes back a bit further to the post-punk period (like me) is going to be into their 40s. A lot of music blogging is done by people in this age bracket, partly because many of us have kids and don't have the time or perhaps the inclination to be going out every night any more.

I am not saying that makes us too old to dance (I am sure we will still have our arms in the air when they play Promised Land in the old folks home) or to have an opinion. But beats no longer have the same centrality in our lives. Our relation to new music is often via the internet rather than hearing tunes on a sound system, even if we are going out more the novelty of throbbing bass and watching the sunrise has certainly worn off. So we need to be careful about dismissing scenes just because they are not primarily our scenes anymore. For teenagers running round East Anglia in search of a free party the beats are still fresh and the summer of love is now, not twenty years ago.

Growing old gracefully means recognising that you are no longer 18 or even 28. If you are not going to be a sad old git (and if a male, a dirty old man) you have to reach a point where you can appreciate that there are young and beautiful people in the world without trying to sleep with them. Equally you have to be able to recognise that there are people dancing and making music without thinking that you are always the best person to judge what it means - sometimes it's better to pass on the torch than to piss on it.

"and we don't care about the young folks talkin' bout the young style
and we don't care about the old folks talkin' 'bout the old style too"

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Collapse magazine: Black Noise by Mark Fisher

In the mid-1990s there seemed to be a cottage industry at Warwick University churning out techno-theory and Deleuzian drum & bass thoughtism. One product of this was '***Collapse' magazine, edited I believe by Robin Mackay and Robert O'Toole. I must admit that I was always slightly ambivalent about this - was it raiding academia for some tools to understand the exciting times we were dancing through, or was it domesticating that explosion of sonic/somatic/social experimentation by making it into a respectable focus of academic scrutiny?. I've always been up for some critical thinking and reflection, but sometimes it felt like it was slipping so far away from the lived experience of raving as to amount to a kind of theoretical colonisation.

Anyway here's a piece on jungle by Mark Fisher (K-Punk) - or more precisely a cut-up by him with quotes from the writers listed at the end - first published in ***Collapse, number 2, Spring 1995:





Black Noise

BLACKOUT - Jungle is creeping necrosis eating away at melanin-deficient flesh. Genetic piracy hacking into white DNA and recombining it. A 'bacterium mutated into a more lethal form ... some malignant sci-fi creation ... out of control', a 'microbe... infected with a virus which 'switched on' lethal genes ...'
WHITEOUT - At the same time (and many "times" run simultaneously here) Jungle is whiteout, a hyperversion of whiter than white pop. Hear it as the latest product of the black fascination with white futurism that began with Afrika Bambataa's hijacking of Kraftwerk. 'What Afrika Bambataa and hip hoppers like him saw in Kraftwerk's use of the robot was an understanding of themselves as already having been robots,' .. Jungle's SF diss topias recall the posthuman teknoscapes imagined in the barely remembered, 'embarrassing' musics of Gary Numan, John Foxx, the Normal, Japan. But this time it's beyond the 'song', beyond any human speculation; now it's all a matter of interlocking circuits, 'the continual whirr of machines' .... ,The human persists only as ghostly traces, ambient decoration, sound effects: 'the residual subject off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire periphery, a parasite of machines, an accessory of vertebro­machinate desire'.
D-FACED - So, of course, it's faceless, (dis)located at the point 'beyond the face' where 'cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities'
"NEW ZONES of post-essentialist blackness.' Whatever top-down reterritorializations are imposed, blackness is a matter of deleting identities rather than defining them. 'Identity' in black culture is always a matter of becoming. There is no truth but the vehrshon. Anything that's not all-white Immediately becomes-black. Jungle is hip hop with the last vestiges of 'natural' funk removed + house shorn of all humanist glitz/gospel evangelism + digitized reggae +
BABYLON TIMEWARP - Nothing here is in real time. Everything you hear is timestretched, virtualized on the plane of consistency as digital information then actualized again as metallic voodoo simulacra. Slower or faster than the original. 'Accelerated trills up and down the piano, abrupt switches in tempo, moments of dread slowness punctuated by the highest squeals ...' Everything plays at (at least) two speeds. 'You're talking about things I haven't done yet...'
SPLICING - The sampler is just like the telepods in The Fly, taking human and non human, fusing them at the molecular level and moving them somewhere else.
GIBSON was already part way there in Neuromancer, 'It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.' Dub was always virtually present in hip hop, funk and house but it's been re-actualized in Jungle (and in every 90s music that matters) as low-frequency languor, half-speed bass. ('Its the ganja,' Molly said.,.') Anyway dub is not a form of music so much as a mode of parasitism, a viral contagion using host bodies to replicate itself: a version is what is left which the song has been hollowed out, involuted.
AFROFUTURISM . Jungle is unimaginable from where the White Man Is. From there, "Black' = prehistoric origins, the dark hole we came from. The future = history, i.e. more of the same. Jungle is the impossible combination of blackness and the future, the dark continent we're heading towards.

DREADNAUTS - Cybernauts. Afronauts. "Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.'
JAMAICA - Nomadology: "The maroons were the first black rebels on the islands. The word refers to runaway slaves who formed their own outlaw communities in the mountainous interiors of islands like St. Kitts and Barbados. But the Jamaican maroons were the ones most feared by the British authorities'. Don’ t look for roots in JA, although in a certain sense it all begins there. "A rave, be it programming Jungle, Techno or House, is just a big dance with a massive sound system on which Djs present special mixes. In Jamaica they’ve been doing that for more than 40 years’

SHATTERED WINDSCREEN - "Hardcore is to pop culture as ramraiding is to Rumbelows - a slam bang concussion ..... Think of a Hi-Ace van as a sample, the ride as the rhythm, the crash as the beats and the adrenalin of getting away as the Interface between your body and the beats ... ‘Durban Poison' by Babylon Timewarp suddenly bursts into a moment of Oriental horns as if the inner city estate has cracked up to reveal a seething colonial unconscious underneath. Youth aren't revolting, this music says, they are reverting’.
WHITE TRASH – Yet Jungle could only happen here. It’s a peculiarly British assemblage; what happens when ‘the chickens come home to roost. The British Empire has folded in on itself. And as the pressure in the cities has mounted , the old national culture has started cracking at the seams’. Black and white fusing on the estates, in the dancehalls and on the plane of consistency.

BLACK ECONOMY – ‘ You can locate hardcore as the black economy of British culture. It’s effects extend way beyond music’.

CRACK UP – Breakdown. Shock out. ‘They don’t make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you what happened, well it happened to him. It’s not bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?’

ALCHEMY – Reggae has always been produced in conditions closer to a factory than a theatre. Hardheaded economic pragmatism drives the producers as they transmute MOR chart hits into bass heavy libidinal flow. Derritorialization as alchemy. ‘Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity and ganja.

ILLEGAL SUBS – Rave was E-state music. DarkSide was Crack House.

ESCAPE VELOCITY - "An escape for language, for music, for writing. What we call pop - POP music, pop philosophy, pop writing ... To make use of the polylinguism of one's own language (to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic third world zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.'
PRESENT TENSE - "There is only a NOW that is either blissed-out or dread-ful (dread is a kind of jouissance in negative, a slow subsidence into uncontrol and panic.'
MULTIPLICITY - 'Ragga' and 'Jungle' designate multiplicities not unities: get up close to either and they fractalize into micro-multiplicities rather than fragment into component parts. Ragga was already a becoming reggae of hip hop, hip hop was already a becoming electro or soul and funk. The becoming jungle of ragga and the becoming ragga of jungle is only one zone of intensity, only one intersection, to be tracked in this music. Rewind to the becoming jungle of rave, the becoming jungle of hip hop, listen again to the becoming dub of jungle: then fast-forward into becomings and couplings not yet synthesized. The temporality isn’t white culture linearity (one form superseding another) but rhizomatic involution (the past as template not monument). Think recycling not revival.

'There was a kind of ghostly DNA at work in the Sprawl. something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals’
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED - 'We know that 13-17 year olds are nothing more than demon seed, the damned children of England (an estate block in drawn out and terminal decline)'
'Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light. Entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks then vanish utterly’
GREY ZONES - What happens when white and black are (re)mixed. Temporary Autonomous Zones. Unpoliced, unlit, unseen. Suddenly. anything can happen. Hello darkness.
Deleuze/Guattari - Anti-Oedipus/Thousand Plateaus/Kafka; ­Simon Reynolds - Blissed Out; Dick Hebdige Cut'n'Mix; Liz Hunt - What's Bugging Us; Kodwo Eshun -Reviews; Mark Dery - Black to the Future; William Gibson Neuromancer ; Steve Barrow - The Dawn of Dub .

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Primal Scream

Bob from Brockley has alerted to me Primal Scream's cover version of Hawkwind's Urban Guerrilla, to which they have added the lyric 'I'm a suicide bomber'. The story of my adolescent fixation on Hawkwind and the anarcho-trance-rock-underground can wait for another post, but what of the Primals?

I must be one of the few people who think that Primal Scream were at their fey/faux psychedelic peak in their C86 indie pop incarnation ('Gentle Tuesday' etc.). Not long after I saw them at the Leadmill in Sheffield in their 'Ivy Ivy' phase - they had reinvented themselves as leather jacketed rockists and it was terrible. Remarkably, thanks to Andy Weatherall, acid house, and ecstasy, they made one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, Screamadelica. Soon though they were reverting to that authenticity fixation and ever since they have functioned, in the UK musical imagination at least, as a kind of talisman of the 'real thing', a late 20th/early 21st century rerun of The Rolling Stones - complete with vague gestures of rebellion, guitars, more guitars, and (yawn) much-hyped drug habits. A kind of vicarious lifestyle of arrested development for the consumption of Loaded laddists who never grew up.

I retain a residual fondness for Bobby Gillespie, like me his dad was a Scottish socialist/trade unionist, but I'm afraid that sometimes his political gestures are as cliched and clumsy as his rockist image. The suicide bomber chic of their version of Urban Guerrillla is in line with Gillespie's 'Make Israel History' comments a couple of years ago - his solidarity with Palestinians might be commendable but does he really want to line up with the suicide bombing 'sweep the jews into the sea' tendency? I don't suppose he does, but a kind of uncritical rhetorical extremism can be as addictive (and damaging) as heroin and guitar solos.

Bring back the Sonic Flower Groove!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Dancing Questionnaire (9): Tracy K - 'music was everything and the possibilities were endless'

Tracy K recalls nights out dancing from Tamworth to Tokyo, via London and Aberystwyth. The tale of dancing in Tokyo with Belle and Sebastian made me very jealous

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I can remember my mum, who had me at 19, dancing me round the room as a baby to Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave. I know I've inherited my dancing gene from her!

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?

Too many to mention, but I've met a lot (a LOT) of my significant others in clubs, so I would say the dance as mating ritual. I would also have to mention the kind of shamanic ritual of mass dancing to Jah Wobble at Glastonbury in the 1990s and dancing onstage with Belle and Sebastian in Tokyo to Dirty Dream #2 on my 33rd birthday.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…

Being at a generic indie club in 1995 at the Marquee with my very best friend in the world and realising we were the only two women in a sea of cute indie boys. Being young, single, moderately attractive and a feeling that the music was everything and the possibilities were endless.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…

Again, London in 1995, having been dumped by charming bastard, I went to see Gene at the Forum and cried my eyes out in the moshpit to Olympian. Alone at the aftershow club, I danced broken hearted to The Smiths, pursued hopelessly across the floor by a lad in a Morrissey shirt too shy to make eye-contact. Pathetic...in both senses!

5.Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?

Aged 11, I frequented the local youth club, which had an excellent nightclub room: I tended towards the Mod, with my southern soul mum and ska loving dad, so it was The Jam, Madness etc all the way back then.

Aged 16-18, my male friends and I went into Tamworth's premier (ie only) club, fondly called the Imbecile (Embassy). We would storm the floor for the token indie half hour (The Cure/Smiths/Pixies/Wonder Stuff etc) and then sup our cider and black morosely for the rest of the night. this was enlivened by regular trips to Rock city in my mates' clapped out mini. Very heady days!

Aged 18-21, university days. My friends and I went to the local footy Club on a Friday night every Friday night for 3 years. A mixture of poppy chart stuff, cheesy old music and the occasional cool track. We all loved dancing and had little routines to Loveshack etc. We could never work out why we almost never got asked for the end-of-the-night slowie, when we were a group of 13 girls who were inseparable...hmmm...

Aged 21-25 and then again from 28-30. A downstairs club in a seafronty hotel in Aber, painted black, which attracted the local Goths, indie, metal and mistfit kids [The Bay Hotel, Aberystwyth]. I was DEVOTED to this place, I went 3 times a week and danced my arse off every week, always one of the first on the dancefloor, always one of the last to leave. The happiest and most carefree times of my life. I met the best people, heard the best music and felt at home there. Actually, I felt like the queen of the scene there. Everyone knew each other, there were never any major stresses or fights (there was a cheesy nightclub upstairs, a similar atmosphere but more fights) and it had a devoted crowd of habituees. Wonderful place, I miss it still.

Aged 29-32. Moved to London, went to lots of okay clubs but discovered the After Skool Klub (not a horrible school disco type place, despite the name), the right mixture of indie, retro and classic music with kids who just didn't care. I took lots of people there, used to love staggering out in the early hours of a summer morning and watching the sun rise sitting by Embankment. Around this time I also used to go to the Metro midweek: there's always something special about clubbing midweek, when everyone else is going to work in an hour or two and you have just staggered out of a dingy basement, mascara in rivulets down your face and your clothes soaked with sweat. Around this time I met a girl who was a great dancer, we danced for the love of dancing. People thought we were lesbians, because we were so in synch with each other. People are generally idiots though.

Now. I go out dancing less frequently, though the will is still there and I get itchy feet about 11:30 on Saturday nights. Our local club is a bit too student disco for me these days and I can't take anywhere seriously that actually plays Razorlight. I look back fondly at my dancing days and think they were some of the happiest of my life: the freedom, the music so loud it's in your blood, the hypnotic state you get into when the dj keeps them coming, the sense of communion with people you love, the ritual of getting ready. I love all of it. I miss all of it.

6. When and where did you last dance?

I had a little dance at the ASK with my friend a couple of Saturdays ago, but she was working, so it wasn't for long. Before that, it was my hen night in Manchester the weekend before and we danced in a mental little basement club which played Fun Boy Three and Sinatra. A couple of my best mates who had stamina and cocktails running through our veins. Magic!

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?


Probably Pixies Debaser or The Breeders Cannonball. The Cure's Boys Don't Cry would do it too, or Stevie Wonder's Superstition. I love a good bassline...

All questionnaires welcome- just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Revolution Girl Style Now!

Riot Grrrl was probably the ultimate zine-driven scene. While punk, for instance, threw up fanzines written by people who wanted to document the new music of the late 1970s, with riot grrrl the zines came first. Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, who formed key scene band Bratmobile, first put out Girl Germs zine in 1990. They then gave a name to the emerging movement with Riot Grrrl zine, the first issue of which came out in June 1991. Toby Vail, meanwhile, put out Jigsaw zine as a result of which Kathleen Hanna got in touch and they started Bikini Kill – inevitably the best-known of the Riot Grrrl bands also put out a zine of the same name.

Riot Grrrl – revolution girl style now! (Black Dog Publishing, 2007) gives due weight to the zine and DIY dimensions of the movement, with a chapter by Red Chidgey on Riot Grrrrl Writing. She argues that the zine ‘manifestoes were a form of wish fulfilment, conjuring up in words whatever the authors wanted to see happen in real life… “Riot Grrrl was about inventing new titles”, says Jo Huggy, ”you think up some name for a fantasy revolutionary group of girls, spread the ideas of it about and hope, for someone, it’ll come true”'.

In England, key riot grrrl band Huggy Bear declared in their Her Jazz manifesto (printed in their Huggy Nation zine, 1992): ‘Soon truckloads of Girl Groups and Girl/Boy Groups will be arriving to storm onto our platforms to start the riot they’ve been dreaming and plotting in the many hours spent waiting, growing taller with anticipation’.

Thus the bedroom dreams of a post-punk feminist youth movement gave birth to just that, initially in early 1990s Olympia and Washington DC and then in the UK and elsewhere.

The scene struggled to cope with a media onslaught, and the record industry was soon repackaging a diluted form of girl power with The Spice Girls. Nevertheless, Riot Grrrl inspired girls (and boys) across the world to form bands and write, and there continue to be riot grrrl networks to this day.

Riot Grrrl was also one of the final pre-internet movements. As Beth Ditto notes in her foreword to the book, it was ‘Built on the floors of strangers’ living rooms, tops of xeorox machines, snail mail, word of mouth and mixtapes’. In the pre-internet world ‘the main means of communicating and networking… was through exchanging zines and writing letters’ (Julia Downes). Erin Smith, who published the early Teenage Gang Debs zine recalled, there ‘was something special about having this pen-pal and then kind of calling on the phone, and then hearing about this other person, and then reading their zine, and then mailing your zine out to people and just hoping somebody’s going to understand it’.

Internet communication is much quicker and broader – I know that within minutes of writing this somebody on the other side of the world will be reading it. But arguably communication is often shallower than the exchange of gifts implied by sending tapes, zines and letters to kindred spirits.

This book is a good start at documenting Riot Grrrl, though inevitably there are gaps. In the chapter Poems on the Underground, Cass Blaze covers the UK music influenced by riot grrrl in detail. She considers Huggy Bear, Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens and the crossover with the indie-pop scene. I would have liked the US Riot Grrrl music scene to be treated in similar depth. The link with the related queercore scene could also have been explored more, with bands like Sister George in the UK and Tribe8 in the US.

There's lots of good Riot Grrrl stuff out there online - you could start with The Riot Grrrl Manifesto, The Riot Project and Riot Grrrl Online Blog.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Seven (more) songs

The seven songs meme is still doing the rounds - it goes like this:

'List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to'.

I must admit I've already had a bite of the cherry at my South Londonist blog Transpontine (having been tagged by Rough in Here and Someday I will treat you good). Now I've been tagged here by Simon Reynolds, and since I go through all the effort of maintaining two blogs, I don't see why I shouldn't have two shots at this.

Rather than spending time thinking about what my current seven favourite songs are (which is a bit Hi Fidelity for my taste) I'm just going to list some found objects - seven songs I heard over the weekend that meant something to me.

Something old

B-52s - Give me back my man ('I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy')- because this was the first record I danced to at a friend's party on Saturday night at a pub in Kings Cross. It reminded me of all the other parties where I've danced to this band, to this track/Rock Lobster/Planet Claire/Love Shack/Party Gone Out of Bounds.





Something new

Black Kids - I'm not gonna teach your boyfriend how to dance. Because this was one of the last records I danced to on Saturday, a Robert Smith-channeling refusal to assist a love rival with two left feet. There's a good even dancier remix of this one floating around (and Kate Nash has already covered it).

Something borrowed

Roy Davis Jr. - Gabriel (Large Joints Remix) - well not so much borrowed as a steal, 20p from a car boot sale in Rotherhithe on a mix cd (Sound of the Pirates - the garage sound of uk pirate radio mixed by Zed Bias). Garage angelology - you see the the archangel of love popped by to tell you that 'one love was the focus of the true message'. So take your communion on the dancefloor: 'Dancing soon became a way to communicate, Feel the music deep in your soul'.

Something blue

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat - because I sat down on Sunday with the assorted strummers of the Brockley Ukulele Group and played this. I note, via Bob from Brockley, that another seven songs respondent, From Tehran with Love, chose no fewer than 5 Cohen songs. As long as the worlds greatest Canadian-Jewish-Zen Buddhist songwriter remains venerated by some in predominately Muslim Iran, there is hope for the world (the Iranian singer Farhad Mehrad has covered some Cohen songs)

Something in a movie

Belle and Sebastian - Expectations - a long time favourite of mine which I was delighted to hear on the soundtrack to the teen pregnancy movie Juno, which I watched on Saturday. 'Your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange, Making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay'.

Something in a book

Huggy Bear - Her Jazz - because I am reading a book about Riot Grrrl. This still sounds a fresh and urgent call to arms -'Girl Boy Revolution Yeah'.

Something on TV

2 Unlimited - No Limits - because the video was on one of those freeview music channels on Friday night as part of one of those 50 cheesiest pop songs ever programmes. I do have a soft spot for late 80s/early 90s production line techno-pop, it’s a toss up between Technotronic and 2 Unlimited for the techno-pop crown. It amuses me that they are both from Belgium, at the time also home to the super-credible house/techno label R&S. In the high street/holiday resort clubs of the time it was 2 Unlimited rather than Joey Beltram that filled the floor. I remember being in a club in West Belfast (think it was the Trinity Lodge in Turf Lodge) and when they played ‘Get Ready for This’ loads of people started chanting IRA in time to the chorus. That was a lesson for me in how the products of the pop production line get used in ways the producers could never dream of.

I tagged some people last time who responded including Uncarved and Speakers Push Air. Looking round it appears that most people I know in both the music and South London neighbourhoods of the blogosphere have already been tagged, so this time I am just going to leave it open. If you fancy listing seven songs, just go for it.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

O Ecstasies, O world, O music!


'O Douceurs, ô monde, ô musique ! Et là, les formes, les sueurs, les chevelures et les yeux, flottant. Et les larmes blanches, bouillantes, - ô douceurs ! - et la voix féminine arrivée au fond des volcans et des grottes arctiques'.

‘O Ecstasies, O world, O music! And here, shapes, sweats, heads of hair and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling – O ecstasies! – and the female voice reaching to the bottom of the volcanoes and the arctic caverns’

from Arthur Rimbaud, Barbare, published in Illuminations (1874).
Photo taken in Space, Ibiza, 1995 - a year I was there too. I found the photo at Faithfanzine.com but couldn't find photocredit -
if you took this and would like to be credited let me know.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Black Metal

Norwegian Black Metal really isn’t my thing, but luckily there are others out there surveying its murky waters. Valter at Documents has written a series of posts reflecting on the 1993 murder of Mayhem's Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth by Burzum's Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes. The latter – who is still in prison - seems to be on the extreme right wing in a fairly straightforward way, the former claimed to be a communist, but if ever there was a case of red fascist this is it. For it seems to have been precisely the most brutal and repressive elements of Stalinist dictatorships that Aaseth found attractive, professing admiration for Cambodia’s Pol Pot and Romania’s Ceausescu: “I like secret police, cold war and worshiping of dictators. I like bugging and spying on people, torture chambers in police stations and that people suddenly “disappear”."

I must admit in my many and varied encounters with the multifarious varieties of leftism this is something I’ve never heard openly expressed – usually the facts of Stalinist repression are either (a) used to prove that the regimes in question weren’t really communist at all, ( b) denied or dismissed as propaganda or (c) justified on the grounds of historical necessity. Still given that there was never any shortage of apologists for these regimes, Aaseth's desire was probably not so uncommon even if hidden (and they are still out there).

It should be obvious that neither fascist nor Stalinist regimes would tolerate the long haired nihilism of black metal, so the eagerness of bands in this scene to embrace such ideologies might seem surprising. Valter draws on Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille to throw light on this phenomenon, particularly the latter’s suggestion that the artist ‘ harbors a secret desire for a society that denies him the right to exist’ (Valter’s paraphrase) - because in a dictatorship, art and literature really matter and can assume heroic dimensions, the persecution of musicians and intellectuals giving them a greater social importance for instance. I am not sure this is the only explanation, but Black Metal is undoubtedly an extreme example of the (literal) dead end of transgression as an end in itself.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Women and Rave

Carrying on the discussion about gender and dance music, here's an extract from 'Women and the Early British Rave Scene' by Maria Pini, originally published in 'Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies', edited by Angela McRobbie (Manchester University Press, 1997). Maria Pini based this work on interviews with women in the rave scene, and later expanded on the subject in her book Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: from Home to House.

In general, I would argue that rave's appeal to women is tied with its opening up of new modes of 'looking', its set-up of particular interpersonal relations and its encouragement of new understandings of 'self'. Women within this context feel freed from traditional associa­tions of dancing with sexual invite, and in this sense rave seems to repre­sent an 'alternative' space… many of these women articulate their involvement within rave, and the pleasures it is seen to afford, in terms of an implicitly feminist dissatisfaction with traditional sexual relations and particular forms of masculinity. For instance, Jane speaks of other social-dance scenes as 'pick-up cities', and describes the kind of feelings she associates with these:

‘There was always a feeling that you could fail- if you didn't get picked-up, and also, if you didn't get picked-up by the right person - then what was the point? There was always the idea, when you got approached of 'oh God, are they going to demand something from me that I'm not going to give­ - meaning a snog, or a fuck, or a date, or a phone-number or whatever’.

The rave dance-floor, I would argue, is one of the few spaces which afford - and indeed, encourage - open displays of physical pleasure and affection. Explicit displays of 'ecstatic' happiness, and the relentless drive to achieve this, have never been so central to a youth culture's meaning. Arguably rave represents the emergence of a particular form of 'jouissance', one which is more centred on the achievement of phys­ical and mental transformation and one which is possibly best under­stood as a non-phallic form of pleasure. Many of the interviewees did speak of rave pleasures as being 'sexual', but many had difficulty in clearly 'languaging' what this 'sexual' was. I would suggest that this is because these pleasures do not dearly 'fit' standard, patriarchal defini­tions of sexuality, and eroticism. To illustrate this difficulty:

“I kind of see it as a place where I can feel sexually about other people, but it doesn't actually go anywhere ... It doesn't have to go anywhere 'cause that's it really: (Catherine)

“It's not sexual, but orgasmic .. I wouldn't say it was sexual. It's different from being sexual. It's orgasmic in the sense of being very intense and reaching a peak”. (Miriam)

“Well it's sexual kind of ... no, it's not sexual- it's different. (Helen)

“When I go raving ... it's very ... um ... well, one word that really comes to mind is auto-erotic ... because you're getting off on yourself. And you can dance quite sexily and you can enjoy it ... and you can get really into being a sexual being. It can be sexual, but it's a kind of self-contained sexual, so that auto-erotic spreads out- out of the erotic- and into a whole personality thing”. (Jane)

Also Jane points out that although she might normally feel 'guilt' around certain forms of self-pleasure (and here, she mentions masturbation), auto-eroticism within rave is normalised:

“But, somehow it's sanctioned more in a club - 'cause if you look round you think other people are doing it too so, it's OK. It's normalised because like, everyone is doing it and you can always see somebody out there with less clothes on than you and dancing way more sexy than you - and all you think is 'wow, they look like they're having a good time' - and it actually helps “.

Hence, what seems to emerge within rave is a space for new modes of femininity and physical pleasures. In terms of how this space fits within a wider life-context, many interviewees described the rave scene as pro­viding a space for the expression of 'other sides' of themselves. As Jane puts it;

“It's about letting go of being conformist, and being professional and proper and ... 'together'. It's 'other' to presenting that face of you. It's not necessarily the dark side of you - but it's the messy side of you ... It's about something you do which isn't about working. It's about the time you spend doing things which are about freedom”.

To close then, despite women's relative absence at the levels of rave pro­duction and organisation, at other levels rave can be seen as indicating an important shift in sexual relations, and indeed might suggest (with its emphasis on dance, physicality, affection and unity) a general 'femi­nisation' of 'youth'.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

House Music/Gender/Sexuality

Great post on house music and masculinity from a Jamaican in New York perspective at fem.men.ist (and interesting comments from a similar perspective by DJ Ripley). From the original post:

'I would go to mostly to Red Zone to hear DJ Dmitri from Deelite spin. It was a mostly people of color crowd, and people would just be there to DANCE their asses off, go to the bathroom to wash their faces and gulp water from the pipe, then go back and dance some more. Then there was the dancing itself. Gender became a blur. Drag queens would go from voguing to uprocking and breakin. Girls in baggy pants and baseball caps would do the same. There was a large diversity of gender. And men who i knew were hetero would have fun busting into a runway strut and a fierce vogue... After living in Jamaica, to see such a celebration of gender fluidity was stunning- and more importantly, liberating. Judith Butler theorizes gender to be performance, and we all tried it on, supported and ritualized fluidity, away from the gender police. It gave me permission that i had never had before as a hetero man to try on various masculinities, to be more comfortable being andro, and trying on movements where i could explore being more butch or more femme. I had officially escaped the confining box of hegemonic masculinity, and wore my fluidity naturally with pride' (there's also some interesting stuff about invoking Orishas on the dancefloor, but that's another post).

Obviously my perspective as a white man in London is different, but certainly the gender/sexuality fluidity of techno and house music parties/clubs was part of what made it so exciting when I first submerged myself in that scene. A lot of the squat techno parties I went to in the early/mid 90s were androgynous in a fairly masculine way - i.e. men and women all dressed in jeans/black clothes/combat gear. Then there were the glam house clubs I frequented where there was much more of an emphasis on dressing up, but still in a very playful way, boys and girls with glitter, sparkly clothes and make up. There was a mixed gay/straight vibe and many straight clubbbers were going to gay clubs like Heaven.

I recall the feeling of this beginning to freeze over from the mid-90s - in the culture there was a resurgence of 'blokeism' with lads mags extolling a lowest common denominator masculinity of football, cars and breasts. On the dancefloor more and more blokes were turning up in nobody-could-mistake-for-camp Ben Sherman shirts. For women the playful adoption of a 'glamour' look became more like a compulsory 'club babe' dress code. It was no surprize that within a few years, cliched boys with guitars rock had began to push dance music back to the margins.

And just to prove this trend wasn't just in my imagination, here's a letter published in Mixmag in 1995:

"I am becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about promoters insisting that women (babes) should be dressed to thrill. I think that women (babes) are being pushed away from the dancefloor by these essentially male promoters and treated as a commodity, by which I mean that a better looking female crowd induces a greater number of men, more media attention and a hipper status... to get into a venue we are told not to be geeks, to glam it up and to look gorgeous. Does this mean I have to wear high heels, restrictive clothes, a wonderbra and to visit the hairdressers for the latest stylish hairdo? I like to dress up, it gives you a sense of occasion, but I can't dance in high heels, I need to wear comfortable (which does mean drab) clothes, and just tie my hair back. So far I've had no problems entering clubs, but the way clubland is heading how much longer? Is it soon to become a distasteful sight to see a woman (babe) out of it and saying fuck off to all the men, she's here for herself" (Elizabeth, Hastings, Mixmag, June 1995).

Thanks to John at Uncarved for alerting me to this discussion.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Turnmills closes



Another London nighttime landmark has closed, following the final weekend of Turmills - the famous club in Clerkenwell. The final record to be played last Monday afternoon was apparently Blue Monday by New Order. Landlord Derwent London is planning to convert the building into an office block.

Turnmills opened as a wine bar in 1985 and came into its own as a club from 1990 when it became the first in the country to be granted a licence to open 24 hours a day all year round. In the mid-1990s it became home to groundbreaking gay nights Trade and FF and then to the Friday house night The Gallery, which started in July 1994 and featured DJ 'Tall' Paul Newman - whose dad John Newman owned the club.

I spent some happy nights at The Gallery and techno club Eurobeat 2000 which was also held there for a while. The pages reproduced here are a hyperbolic article about The Gallery from Muzik magazine (July 1998 - click on them to read) which described it as 'the full-on Northern club night in the middle of London' on the basis of it being an attitude-free night of full-on hedonism in 'a cool venue full of twists, turns and little hideways to indulge in a "bit of the other"'. It is true that the dancefloor wasn't massive, but it didn't matter as there were speakers all over the place and people danced wherever they happen to be standing, by the bar or the pinball machine as well as on the dancefloor proper.

There was also a gallery overlooking the main part of the club. I remember sitting up there on The Gallery's first birthday night in 1995, watching Boy George (who is a tall bloke) walking though the crowd in a T-shirt saying "Hate is not my drug", shaking hands, and heading into the DJ booth to announce himself with Lippy Lou's Liberation, followed by a stampede to the dance floor. I remember wearing a silver sparkly top, girls with fairy wings and a man walking into the toilets wearing a dress and offering round a bowl of bonbons (at Easter 1996 they also gave out chocolate mini eggs at the door). Musically I remember pumped up mixes of disco classics I Feel Love and Do you wanna Funk, Insomnia by Faithless and more than anything else bouncing around under the lasers to Access by DJ Misjah & Tim.

In his book, London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd mentions Turnmills, seeing it as an inheritor of Clerkenwell's historic reputation for disrespectful nightlife and more broadly as 'the harbour for the outcast and those who wished to go beyond the law'. For Ackroyd, these continuities in London life 'suggest that there are certain kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves', a kind of spirit of place which he has referred to as a 'territorial imperative'. Whether this spirit of Clerkenwell will withstand property developers remains to be seen. Derwent London at least seem intent on exorcising the ghosts of Clerkenwell radical and salubrious past, stating that their business is 'to improve the desirability of people coming to these buildings'.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Classic party scenes (2): Basic Instinct



It's 1992 and cop Michael Douglas pursues suspect psycho Sharon Stone into a San Francisco club with sex, drugs and pumping sounds by Channel X (Rave the Rhythm) and LaTour (Blue). Jacques Peretti once characterised this as 'The Citizen Kane of club scenes... in which Michael Douglas, playing an Andrew Neil-lookalike in V-neck jumper and no shirt (a sweaty fashion detail signifying middle-aged man smelling out sex) watches Sharon Stone, who taunts his manhood by indulging in a faux-lesbian sex dance'.

Apparently this scene was not filmed in a real club but on a Hollywood film set inspired by the Limelight Club in New York.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Machine Music in an Age of Sweat

The following is an extract from 'Machine Music in an Age of Sweat' an article by Fishtoe published in the Glasgow-based libertarian magazine Here & Now, no.16/17, 1996. In a way it is typical of some of the breathless writing from that time, when in the excitement of new intensities of noise and sweat the North West Passage seemed to have been found that would bypass all previous political and cultural efforts via the dancefloor. Also here is the dawning of the realization that maybe the moment was passing, or maybe the moment is always already passing... just as it is always already becoming for the next unjaded person coming along.

Techno is re-routed machinery. It is not metaphoric. It does not show us what could be achieved in the real world. It is a practical example of the seizure of the means of production, in this case weapons technology and found sounds; and the transformation of intended purposes through a technique of melting juxtaposi­tions. The reality produced by techno machines is radically different and the vistas of possibility opened up are far wider than that envisioned by those who advocate the seizure of state power, or workers' control. The shaping of mass behaviour through the generation of aural ambiences is of greater significance for free desiring production than anything dreamed of through imposed political directives.

Techno is hardness. It forbids the seepage of humanity into its impervious structure. It is pure grounding, without mediated spirits disguising its nature. It is without representation, there are no mirrors. Movement must always be away from it. It is an architecture, shaping the possible movements and consciousness of those who skate its grooves. Techno is a surface.

However a certain slackness has appeared at the centre of the techno project, a contentment that reduces it to less than shopping mall muzak (a form that at least fulfils its own function, causing distraction from itself and attracting attention to its visual perception). For music to be negative it was usually enough to rely on loudness and speed, flooding received behaviour with tempo­rary excitations which would override the reality principle. Any other formula must be considered affirmative in its relation to social production, only extremity is true. The Future Sound of London are most prominent in the unreserved positivity felt by techno-groups towards the technology used. This is compounded by a seepage of good vibes generally into ambient; New Age affirmations of spirituality strain upwards towards the light, severing all awareness of anal capital, such anti-materialisms are the essence of cringeful vulgarity.

That dance culture which is entirely celebratory in structure should reconstitute negativity is an unforeseen perversity that certainly has nothing to do with intent, or the political opinions of the people participating. In fact the dawning political conscious­ness of techno may be taken to be its formal capitulation into affirmative culture; in adopting political discourse it finds itself subject to the forces that generate it.


Amongst the harsh landscapes of junglist drums and bass, the wistful post-war drone of synths, the fragments of sound after the humans have left. Machined ambience, always melancholic, feels the absence of swarming human proliferation over its structures and can only connect to the dancing as those who are entirely alien to each other can, in a kind of mutual excited colonisation. Like all art ­forms it intuitively recognises its connection to a post-apocalypse; formalism is a process of exclusion and refinement - it denies the excess of the real world through clear lines, holding it back behind temporary artificial limits. The faculties of perception are tuned to engage more fully with the world as it floods back in and engulfs.

Language, the human presence does not belong in techno, only snatched, disembodied phrases which remind us that we are always in crowds, that our reality is always socially generated. Voices may swirl up from the depths of machine drums but they say nothing, their randomness is their effect. It is a music that does not participate in ideologies or representations but is a generating ground, literally a background. Human action occurs entirely in the foreground, across the surfaces which stretch out, against a backdrop of noise which determines movement in the simplest of base and superstructure models. Dancers connect into the archi­tectural ambience of pure function in an unmediated reality. This is an economy of sweat; what was once a demeaning sign labour, the mark of a limit to the possession of the means of production and thus the time to enjoy the products of that labour, is now a free currency spent in a relation of pleasure. So many signs are dissolved in the reversal, supersession and forgetting of mediated object/subject relations that it's possible to observe a fleeting body which in shorting sign-systems becomes a thing itself.

The weakness of techno lies in the adoption of a formulaic criteria for the reproduction of this intensity, attempting to hold on to it, and not continue to alter its boundaries. Extremity lapses into this year's melody. The wholesale embrace of technology, of spurious New Age spiritualisms, marks the loss of the thing for itself, and the return of producing for the ear. Its the re­penetration of the human in terms of quality, a rigid formulation of easily digested cliches, and the collapse back into the arena of art. What does not occur is the rigorous dispersal of the discoveries of techno, of the relations of aural ambient architecture and unmediated behaviour, into everyday life.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Clubbing in Kings Cross - end of the line

The beginning of this month saw the final closure of three clubs in the old Goods Yard by Kings Cross station in north London - The Cross, Canvas (formerly Bagleys) and The Key. For the past 15 years this zone of old warehouses and railway arches was one of the key areas for London clubbing, attracting up to 4,500 people between them in any one night, but in an area being massively redeveloped it was never going to last.

My first visit was there in March 1995 for Glitterati at The Cross, a glammed-up house night with Danny Rampling DJing (flyer pictured). The Cross had a small terrace with palm trees and seats from fairground rides. On that night it did indeed feel very glamorous, no mean feat for a couple of railway arches, but I guess that was down to the crowd.

The glamour had worn off by the time I went back the following year for a Renaissance night, perhaps because Renaissance had built up such a hype about the incredibly luxury of their events. My diary of Saturday 20th January 1996 records "First the highlights. The bloke passing round a bottle of champagne on the dancefloor at 2 am... the (German?) women who said to me'Luuuuvvly shirrrt oooh from Hyper Hyper!.. The people from Dublin who took our picture''. On the negative, there was the door policy: "two blokes in front were turned away because one had steel toe caps; so did one of our party but the bouncers didn’t even look at this boots. Was it because he had pink trousers on... perhaps, though my pink hair wasn't a problem. In fact I was only asked one question - how many of you are there, and how many are girls?". The night was billed “The Italian Renaissance” on account of Italy’s Alex Neri being on the promised DJ line up along with Boy George and Ian Ossia. It was £15 in and the famous Renaissance decor consisted of "a couple of polystyrene cherubs, a tatty cross and some red material".

Bagley's was much more messy, definitely more like a rave than a club. My main memory of it is going there for me and my partner's joint stag-hen do in June 1997. The night was Freedom (which ran from 1996 to 2001), based on the premise of having different kinds of music playing rather than a single style. I wrote at the time 'Bagley’s is a huge place with at least four big rooms playing a range of music from garage to techno. Unfortunately this meant that at any one time about half the people there were wandering from place to place looking for something better (with little joy in my case). Although the place was busy, there wasn’t much of an atmosphere, and it all felt a bit grim. The venue itself felt like a squat party without the imagination. There were no hangings or interesting decor, just a few sad trees in one room. One of the few things in its favour was that there was plenty of fresh air, with access to an open air terrace outside. I’m sure on a starry summer night it would be great, but it was too wet to appreciate'. Not one of my best nights then, but I know other people had some great times there.

It is the nature of club spaces that they come and go, but there are broader questions about what happens in a city when the marginal, semi-derelict zones where nightlife flourishes are replaced by the bright shining surfaces of redevelopment. There are apparently plans for new clubs in the area, but another chapter in the history of dancing in London has definitely come to an end.

Do you have any good Kings Cross stories? Post in comments.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

1996: chronology of parties and police

Following the recent 1997 chronology we go back another year to 1996, a time of Reclaim the Streets parties, police raids on gay clubs and, in Algeria, the killing of rai performers . All events below from UK unless otherwise stated. As always I'd be interested in any recollections or reflections on these events

January:

100 police raid Hollywoods club in Romford, Essex. As well as arresting some people for drugs, two women are arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Police bust a Vox Pop/Virus squat party in South London, and people move up to a Hackney venue. When they get there the police steam in making arrests and beating people up.

Police confiscate rig at Immersion Sound System party on the site of the Newbury road protest in Berkshire.

Gay rubber night GUMMI at Club 180 in London is stopped after a visit from the Met’s Vice Squad.

Local council take out injunction against four members of the Exodus Collective in Luton, forbidding them to hold free parties

February:

200 police in riot gear raid the Coliseum nightclub near Stockton-on-Tees, arresting 35 people

On Valentine’s Day hundreds of people dance, drum and bounce on Brighton’s North Street. Police pile in at end of the Reclaim the Streets party and arrest 43 people.

Three people from Black Moon Sound System arrested in Corby at the prevous July’s attempted Mother festival found guilty under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice Act and their £6000 rig confiscated.

March:

Police raid a party at the A.R.T.L.A.B. in Preston with an Environmental Health Officer who removes equipment under noise pollution regulations [Dream Creation, 1996]

Police set up road blocks to search people going to Lost in Paradise at Fantasy Island, Skegness. 11 arrests.

Jury throw out disorderly house charges against Club Whiplash in London, raided by sixty police with dogs in 1994.

Sex Maniacs Ball at the Fridge in Brixton cancelled at the last minute after police pressure. The tenth annual Ball, a charity event, was to be held at Brixton Academy, but they cancelled the booking after the police threatened a raid. Bagley’s at Kings Cross did the same. [Pink Paper 29/3/86] In response the Sexual Freedom Coalition was set up to “combat police inteference in clubs and with publications”, and on April 20th 200 people danced through Soho to Downing Street in protest at police action.

“Four people were arrested on drug possession and sale charges after police crashed a ‘rave’' party at a local nightclub in Danbury [USA]. More than 600 people ranging in age from about 14 to 21 attended the party, staged by an out-of-state production company at the Subzero nightclub on Elm Street”. [News Times, Danbury, March 25, 1996]

April:

Police in Essex board a privately-hired coach taking people clubbing in London and search everybody on board. Several arrests for drugs offences.

May:

Sussex police seize a sound system at a warehouse party in Bevendean.

Mounted police move in at the end of a Leeds Reclaim the Streets party; 12 people arrested

Tribal Gathering festival, Britain’s largest dance event, cancelled after authorities in Oxfordshire refuse it a licence following police objections - despite a successful event last year, months of preparation, and advance ticket sales of 25,000.

50 people arrested in dawn raids on two gay clubs in Santiago, Chile [Pink Paper, 24 May 1996]

June

100 riot police raid the Zoom Bar in Halle, Germany on the day before the city’s first ever gay pride event. 70 people inside the gay bar are handcuffed and made to lie on the floor during searches for drugs. Some are clubbed to the floor, others strip searched [Pink Paper, 4 July 1996].

On June 9th, several hundred people block the main A6 road into Leicester city centre for a Reclaim the Streets party, with sound system, comfy chairs, children’s paddling pool and fire jugglers. After three hours the police force people off the road, making six arrests.

A woman in Melbourne, Australia, wins compensation from the police after being stripsearched in a raid on the city’s Tasty nightclub in 1994. During the drugs raid, 465 were stripsearched, many of whom now claim compensation [Pink Paper14 June 1996]

The Tunnel and Limelight clubs in New York are raided and closed down, and the owners charged with conspiracy to sell ecstasy.

July:

On the biggest Reclaim the Streets action so far, 8000 people party on the M41 motorway in West London. There are no arrests on the day, although in the aftermath police raid the RTS office and an activist’s home and charge one person with conspiracy to cause criminal damage to the M41, parts of which were dug up during the party.

Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army crack down on Irish nationalists in Derry (N.Ireland), blocking off the streets in the city centre as people leave pubs and clubs. 900 plastic bullets are fired. 41 people suffer injuries including a fractured skull, broken jaw, and a broken leg. 18-year-old Michael McEleny, on the way home from Henry J’s disco with his sister, is hit in the face with a plastic bullet which tears away his cheek leaving him with a broken palate and cheekbone. According to his sister “Bullets just flew everywhere. Every two seconds there was another one. You couldn’t stand up. Every time I tired to get up and run, another bullet was fired. Anyone who stood up was hit”. 16 year-old Kevin McCafferty is left unconscious and critically injured after being shot in the chest and head with plastic bullets on the way home from Squires disco. Rioting spreads throughout Derry in the following days, and Dermot McShane iss killed after being run over by a British army vehicle. [An Phoblact/Republican News, 18 July 1996].

350 CRS police close down the Bordeaux Arts Festival in France, searching 600 people and making 23 arrests. Although the dance music festival had the permission of the landowner, the French Interior Minister Jean-Louis Debre declared it an illegal event. [Wax, August 1996, Muzik September 1996]

August:

Big police operation against Smokey Bears legalise cannabis picnic in Portsmouth - sound systems stopped from entering the area

Riot police baton charge revellers at Maidstone River Festival in Kent.

10 people arrested at Reclaim the Streets party in Birmingham on.17 August. On the same day there is a five hour RTS party in Bath. The following week, 80 people are arrested as police mobilise to stop a Brighton Reclaim the Streets party.

Sussex police use a helicopter to break up a party near Brighton.

September:

95 police raid the Living Room club, the Marlowes, Hemel Hempstead. 250 clubbers are evacuated, and 18 arrested, mostly on drugs charges.

100 police stage a drugs raid on I Spy, a gay night at Leeds club Nato. 19 people arrested. Police clear the club with people being met on the streets by at least 25 vans of police [Mixmag, Nov 1996]

Reclaim the Streets activists take part in the Reclaim the Future events in Liverpool in support of striking dockers. A march of 10,000 people is livened up with sound system, and a docks building squatted for a free party. On the Monday 600 people picket the docks and there are 44 arrests.

In Barnsley a planned gay night at the local Hedon Rock bar is blocked after a local hompohopic campiagn by the so-called Campaign Against Homosexual Equality [Pink Paper27/9/96]

The popular Rai singer Boudjema Bechiri, 28 (known as Cheb Aziz) is killed by Islamic militants. He is the fourth Rai star to be killed, since Rai songs which are often about sex and drink have been declared blashpemous and banned in areas dominated by Islamic fundamentalists [Observer, 22 Sept 1996]

October:

Police raid on Love Muscle gay club at the Fridge, Brixton, London.

Reclaim the Streets Halloween Party in Oxford- over a thousand people dance on the road and on bus shelters with music from Virus Sound System, Desert Storm, Rinky Dink and some bagpipers. Police escort sound systems out of Oxford as they attempt to set up an after party-party. There is also an RTS party in Cambridge.

Reclaim the Streets party in Manchester with free music and free food. No arrests, but one van is impounded

Taliban seize power in Afghanistan: “Women are barred from work, men ordered to grow beards... They snatch music cassettes from cars and smash them with rocks by the roadside” [Guardian 9.10.96]

Riot cops evict squatted social centres in Madrid and Barcelona. Armed riot cops storm a squatted cinema firing hundreds of rubber bullets. Riots follow as people marched on the police station to demand the freeing of the 48 people nicked. The centre has been used for films, gigs, exhibitions and debates as well as huge parties to raise money for the Zapatistas and other causes.

November:

100 police raid Jubilee pub in Camden, north London and arrest 23 people

Riot police with dogs bust a party in a tunnel in Beddgelert, North Wales

December:

Adrenalin Village, London fined for opening beyond their 2 am limit [South London Press, 13.12.96]

London gay sex pub/club the Anvil loses its licence; police had raided the pub (also known as the Shipwright’s Arms) in Tooley Street following reports of sex in the upstairs bar [Pink Paper, 29.11.96]

Heaven events in Motherwell cancelled after police pressure