All you judges beware

I wasn't sure about going to see Grant Gee and Jon Savage's new Joy Division documentary so soon after weeping my way through Control. Joy Division had a massive impact on me as a teenager and I worry about the mystery being obscured in over-documentation of what was a very short episode. But since my partner won two tickets for the screening at the Brixton Ritzy I could hardly refuse to go, and I am glad I did.

I thought it nicely complemented Anton Corbijn's fictional treatment. The latter evoked the period very well, but as a movie inevitably it raised the story to the dimension of the mythic and universal. The documentary on the other hand is very much rooted in the specifics of time and place, with lots of grainy footage of Manchester and Joy Division gigs and a tour of the sites of lost landmarks in their story - the Electric Palace, Rafters, Pips and other nightclubs. There is mention of Manchester's notoriously right-wing police chief, James Anderton, and super 8 footage of the racks in a left-wing bookshop stocked with magazines like Peace News and World Revolution.

Nice to see the late Anthony Wilson in what must have been one of his last interviews, although part of me thinks that there is danger - typified by his comments - of inscribing Joy Division too tightly within a narrative about the transformation of Manchester. Joy Division's beauty was their defiance of the mundane. As was mentioned in the film their songs opened up windows into other worlds for those looking for them - whether it was referencing J.G. Ballard (Atrocity Exhibition), Kafka (Colony), or Williams Burroughs (Interzone). There's a funny story in the film about Ian Curtis's encounter with Burroughs at a gig in Belgium. Others who wrote about Joy Division, like Paul Morely and Jon Savage, were also inspired and inspiring - even if the latter's quote from Raoul Vaneigem in his 1979 Melody Maker review was later to take on a macabre resonance: 'To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man'.

Several people in the film talk of Ian Curtis in terms of possession, as if he was channelling some kind of energy. Most memorably, Genesis P. Orridge, talks of him switched on by electricity like some 'tranced out symbol for a human being'. Curtis himself seems to have been interested in such notions, and the film features a recording of him undergoing some amateur 'past life regression' hypnotherapy with Bernard Sumner.

All this and an opening quote from Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts into Air: "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are" .

More on Situationists and Factory Records

Further to previous post about Tony Wilson and Situationists, I've come across the following statement from Wilson made at the Hacienda in 1995:

"I was at Cambridge with other would-be Situationists like Paul Sieveking and I was a member of the Kim Philby Dining Club which I think had some people from the Angry Brigade involved. We all wanted to to destroy the system but didn't know how. We knew about Strasbourg and the Situationist tactics of creative plagiarism and basing change on desire. The Situationists offered, I thought then and I still think now, the only future revolution I could imagine or want" (quoted in Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, 2001).

The Kim Philby Dining Club did indeed include among its members John Barker and Jim Greenfield, later jailed for their part in the Angry Brigade bombing campaign of the early 1970s. According to Gordon Carr in his book 'The Angry Brigade' (1975) the Club was named after the ex-Cambridge Russian spy in around 1968 'by a group of Cambridge Situationists in honour of the man they regarded as having done more than any other in recent times to undermine and embarrass the Establishment'.

Also came across On The Passage Of A Few Persons Through A Rather Brief Period Of Time by John McCready, another article specifically on the SI and Factory Records. He uncovers some other connections, reminding us that it was actually Rob Gretton (among other things New Order's manager) who came up with the Hacienda as a name for the Factory nightclub in Manchester, inspired by reading a copy of Christopher Gray's Leaving the Twentieth Century - a collection of Situationist International texts given to him by Tony Wilson. He also notes that there was a Kim Philby bar in the Hacienda, that A Certain Ratio name checked a Situ/Surrealist hero on 'Do The Du(casse)' and gets Peter Saville (designer of iconic Factory sleeves) enthusing about the 'two cowboys' image in the situationist 'Return of the Durutti Column' comic strip.

See also Owen Hatherley and Sonic Truth on Wilson.

Tony Wilson and the Situationist International

The recent death of Tony Wilson has prompted a few mentions of the influence on him of Situationist ideas. Most famously, the name of the Hacienda club in Manchester was apparently inspired by a statement in Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953) that 'the Hacienda must be built'. The following extracts are from Howard Slater's Graveyard and Ballroom: A Factory Records Scrapbook, originally published in his excellent Break/flow magazine in 1999. It presents a more nuanced discussion of the relationship between music, commerce and radical ideas that the kneejerk dismissal of the likes of Wilson as simply 'situationist recuperators' (see for instance this recent discussion at libcom). Image is from a 1978 Factory flyer.

There are many Situationist references around Factory Records that range from the obvious (Haçienda) to the tenuous (Stockholm Monsters named after Swedish youth riots of 1956?). Most would be agreed that this influence stems from Factory impresario Tony Wilson who had met short-lived SI member Christopher Grey at Oxbridge and once flashed a copy of the Situationist International Anthology during a Factory documentary, Play At Home, on Channel 4 (1984).

The closeness between Tony Wilson and the long-term Factory act the Durutti Column may suggest that this group's mainstay, Vini Reilly, shared Wilson's enthusiasm: on A Factory Sample Reilly lists ex-band members in terms of 'Exclusions' and includes, as his image contribution, the Situationist Group's 'Two Cowboys' graphic. There was the sandpaper album sleeve after Debord's book Memoirs and Wilson's management alter-ego, in a reference to the French student uprisings of 1968, was called Movement of the 24th January.

These connections between Tony Wilson and a popularisation of the Situationists was made explicit by Factory's sponsoring of the ICA's SI exhibition catalogue in 1989 and by hosting the 1996 SI conference at the Haçienda. However, most people within a post-situationist milieu would more than likely view Wilson and Factory with suspicion: he has been a long term TV presenter with Granada and a music industry mogul via Factory Records (albeit a company that went into receivership, appears to have kept minimal financial records and seemed more interested in 'sacrificing' its wealth on buildings and ostentatious interior design).

To all extents and purposes Wilson occupies a position within the 'spectacle' but it should not be forgotten that Guy Debord's one-time publisher Gerald Lebovici was just as similarly involved with the entertainment industry through his activity in French cinema and publishing. Contradictions such as these are fruitful for discussion for they keep alive the issues about how best to promote and popularise revolutionary ideas: from within or from without? Can a particular social context be more conducive to these ideas than another? Is it more fruitful in the media, at the workplace, or in a club? Can music and cinema be revolutionary? What wider, transversal effects can a slight shift in cultural paradigms have? These contradictions also reveal something about the 'establishments' people are fighting against. What contents will it co-opt and why? How much is allowed through? Where does censorship begin? In sleep or at the end of an assassins rifle?

It is easy to discount the likes of Wilson and Lebovici and it is made easier, even comfortable, by their being identified and dismissed as middle-class: such contradictions, capable of containing a political charge, are thus defused. For most people, seeing a copy of the SI Anthology as a subliminal flash-frame image on TV, going to a nightclub called the Haçienda or listening to a Durutti Column track is hardly a call to revolution but it is a means of keeping ideas of social change at least symbolically active and, just by thinking of advertising and the tight control capital wields over its 'self-image', we cannot deny that forms of 'symbolic warfare' are more than necessary.

There is always a danger that those committed to revolutionary action forget how it was that they arrived at their position or, similarly, how that position needs to change and adapt to differing conditions and potentials. There is a cumulative effect where every little counts and in every social context. The claim that Factory, as 'pop-situationists', have watered down situationist ideas is maybe to infer that these ideas have a privileged area of application and whilst 'recuperation' is a process that can't be ignored, it too often seems to revolve around an 'individualised' response and a classification and hierarchic ordering of an action or intention.

The former occurs through the idea that an action, a track or a reference only has one intentioned meaning: if Tony Wilson flashed the SI Anthology this is in order that he accrue some trendy radical chic to his label. But this would be to feel certain of the reason the book is displayed and from there to control and feel certain of the response of viewers when the follow-through can hardly be predicted. What occurs here is that too much weight is granted to the action of an individual who is judged according to an individualised criteria of motives that has a too definite idea of what actions rank as 'premier league' when revolution is concerned. The judgmentalism that is often inherent in claims of 'recuperation' is, moreover, one that whilst seeking sole possession of a text's use, also elevates it into the status of a religious icon...

Vaneigem Mix 1: Though Tony Wilson has not, as far as I am aware, made any detailed references to the SI's influence on Factory he has expressed an interest in music's role in propelling youth unrest. What should be stated is that music is not revolutionary per se but carries with it many presuppositions of an awareness of a need for social change; not least in terms of its activation of desire in the listener, its opening up of unconscious and imaginary terrains and its proclivity towards social interaction. It can be rhetorical, propagandist and a source of optimism and hope, and from jazz scenes through anarcho-punk to rave and techno, music has always been attached to counter-cultural and political movements, exacerbating dissatisfaction with the status quo and working the contradictions between ideas of reality and what it could be transformed to be...

One common pro-Situ objection to the idea of music's being political is its very insertion into the 'industry', that it manufactures and sells for profit a range of consumer objects and that these consumer goods are themselves a source of mystification, sublimation and oppression. Just as this can encourage a 'transcendent' failure to engage with the political-charge of 'actually-existing' capitalism, the idea of a purchase being the alienation of some ineluctable human essence is to infer that a sold object has only one quality (its being a commodity) when, as former SI-member Asger Jorn has demonstrated, there are other qualities or values that are at play. One of these is Jorn's idea of "counter value" or "artistic value" where, instead of limiting value to exchange value and the concomitant imposition of iron-clad commodity-relations, Jorn speaks of value not "emerging from the work of art" as if it is an innate property, but being "liberated from within the spectator", from a "force which exists within the person who perceives" a painting, a movie, an installation, a record.

Jorn, putting it grandly, adds "artistic value, contrary to utilitarian value (ordinarily called material value) is the progressive value because it is the valorisation of mankind itself, through a process of provocation". Jorn is attempting to look for cracks in the "reign of the commodity" and by moving his survey towards spectator or listener reaction he is asserting that response is not necessarily controlled or contaminated by commodity-relations, but that it is the variable that could release latent energies that have the potential for change. This is not to deny that the majority of manufactured music is nothing other than a commodity pure and simple, but the important point is that this is what it sounds like: commodified, system-built and market-researched, these are products that sell themselves in terms of their being aligned to already established concepts and motivations and which diminish the potentially disruptive oscillations of the variable i.e the role of a sense of nation in Brit-pop...

Vaneigem Mix 2: The most explicit and unadulterated references to the Situationist International made anywhere in the back catalogue of Factory Records can be heard on the three tracks that the Liverpudlian band Royal Family & The Poor recorded for the Factory Quartet compilation: Vaneigem Mix, Death Factory and Rackets. With the first of these we are confronted by a track where the vocalist presents a montage of paragraphs from Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life that reveal strategies of consumption as a means of reviving a post-war capitalist economy through the creation of needs and expectations that have been accelerated by advertising...

Vaneigem Mix, incomprehensible on a first listen, stood out as both angry and rational at the same time (a kind of praxis) and what may have sounded like a spontaneous outburst soon revealed itself as needing countless listenings so as to crack its theoretical code. It is here where many people first encountered the writings of the Situationist International and it was enhanced by the added musical accent, the phrasing and unwavering conviction of the voice that drew you towards wanting to understand and learn from what was being said.

The Ravers Next Step: into the 1960s

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a new scene was developing, based around 'traditional jazz'. The musical distinction was that while the former favoured the 1920s jazz band sound found on Chicago recordings by Louis Armstrong and others, advocates of the latter claimed that the real New Orleans sound was to be found in the music of players who had never left the city to head North, unlike Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. This search for the ever-receding holy grail of authenticity was mocked by some at the time. Jeff Nuttall recalls that "Uncle John Renshaw, a band­leader of the time, used to say with some irony 'I'm in the sincerity racket, meself.'"

Despite its antiquarian musical roots, the trad jazz scene (and the related skiffle scene) was very much a youth sub culture of 'ravers'. Nuttall recalls that in the mid-1950s:

"Soho was alive with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz could be played and heard informally and where the rich odour of marihuana became, for the first time, a familiar part of the London atmosphere. Sam Widges was the most popular. Also there was the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm. They were open most of the night and often the management would leave you to sleep where you sat. It was a place to stay in the dry if you didn't want to go home. It became obvious that parental control was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people. Teenage wages were going up and so were student grants. It was becoming possible to push the leaky boat of adult delusions a little further away. The Soho Fair, which ran annually for three years [1955-7], was a festival of the ravers. Bands and guitars and cossack hats and sheepskin waistcoats flooded out of the cellars and into the streets. It was so good that it had to be stopped, so good that it was in the first Soho Fair that the real spirit of Aldermaston was born'. Trad jazz bands provided the soundtrack on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to or from Aldermaston nuclear weapons base from 1958 (picture of dancers is from 1958 march).

In a 1962 New Statesman article, George Melly described 'An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace', a "'trad' ball" where "Band followed band from 9.30 P.M. until 7.30 A.M. the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'... the essence of 'rave gear' is a stylized shabbiness. To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar sack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes. The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woollen tights. Trad' dancing in the con­temporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing. When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two very graceful and clever couples. But today the ac­cepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, pref­erably out of time to the beat... Trad musicians have chris­tened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'." The Acker referred to here was Acker Bilk, the jazz clarinettist and unlikely musical figurehead for late 1950s/early 1960s ravers.

The trad jazz scene as a youth movement was soon to be overwhelmed by The Beatles and everything that followed. In the semi-situationist journal Heatwave (1966), Charles Radcliffe included the ravers in The Seeds of Destruction, a ground-breaking survey of 'youth revolt':

"The Ravers... had some Beat characteristics and rather tenuous connections with the anti-bomb movement but their main preoccupations were Jazz clubs and Jazz festivals; this was the period when ersatz traditional (Trad) Jazz, as purveyed by Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and others was inordinately popular. Partly Trad's popularity arose in reaction to the decline of the small fifties Beat scene; it was easy to dance to and Jazz clubs were among the few places where teenagers could do more or less as they wished without adult interference. Partly it arose because the musicians did not take themselves too seriously and were often simply good-time Ravers".

Ravers' dress was a kind of "'music-hall-cum-riverboat-cum-contemporary-folk-art' with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol decorated bowlers, umbrellas, striped trousers, elegant jackets. The chicks had long hair, wore ban-the-bomb type uniforms (duffle coats, polo-neck jerseys, very loose around the hips, and jeans). The Ravers were, on the whole, distrusted by other groups with whom they came into contact; the Beats used the term 'Raver' derogatorily and the nuclear disarmers treated Ravers' 'superficiality' with superior amusement and occasional annoyance... The Ravers, as such, died with the 'traditional' Jazz boom but the 'Raver philosophy' continues and there are once again groups calling themselves Ravers. The term has likewise regained its approbatory meaning after the frequent critical use by the CND generation".

Here we have a phenomenon that was to re-emerge with 'ravers' from the 1980s onwards - the use of the term as a put down by the would-be serious minded.

The George Melly quote is reproduced from 'Revolt into Style: the pop arts' (1970); Jeff Nuttall from 'Bomb Culture' (1969). Image source: Science and Society Picture Library. For more on Heatwave, see the excellent Dancin' in the streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago. 2005

We would love to hear some first hand accounts of 1950s/60s raves - photos too would be great. If you were there why not leave a comment, or email transpontine@btinternet.com

Pleasure Creates Life

"Pleasure creates life. We do not want forced, guilt-ridden pleasures anymore. We want no more pleasures severed from total sexuality, pleasures cut off from the omnipresent body of the will to live. Amorous embrace is eternal witness to life, in it distance and time are abolished, and because of it, because intense measures push the barriers set up against them steadily back, because we are returning to the common spring, to the fundamental unity of life, we hold as absolute certain that making primal utterly free activity [gratuite] dispenses forever with governing and being governed, punishing and being punished, violating and being violated, judging and being judged. In one single movement it abolishes the dialectics of death which rule over survival".


Source: Raoul Vaneigem, The Book of Pleasures, 1979.

Photo: Night of a Thousand Stars, Rivoli Ballroom, Brockley (South London), 1990s.