Club UK in Wandsworth: Love, Ecstasy and Crime

Heading out to Kew Gardens over Christmas, we drove through Wandsworth. As always on that journey through South West London, my partner and I reminisced incredulously about how we used to drag ourselves for miles across the capital by public transport to visit that part of the city. And we weren't alone - because from 1993 to 1996, Wandsworth was the home of Club UK, attracting people from all over London and beyond to queue in Buckhold Road next to the Arndale Shopping Centre.

Like many new clubs at this time, it was launched in a blaze of publicity about its luxurious decor and facilities. Like most, the reality was that the money was mainly spent on the sound system, and it was in fact a 'utilitarian, cavernous warehouse' (to quote DJ magazine), with 3 different music rooms - the 'techno room', the 'pop art room' and the main room. Promoter was Sean McClusky, who was also involved with the Leisure Lounge in Holborn and previously The Brain in Soho (he had also been drummer in 1980s band JoBoxers).

There were two main nights. On Fridays, it was Final Frontier, a techno/trance night put on by Universe (who promoted the Tribal Gathering festivals with the Mean Fiddler). The flyer below exemplifies the rhetoric of that scene, with its talk of a 'our weekly marriage of spirituality and technology in perfect harmony' and its call for 'No rules, no limits and no sell out'.

Final Frontier flyer, January 1995 (click to enlarge)

Saturdays was a house night, with a dominant soundtrack of the kind of anthems despised as 'handbag house' by tedious musos, but which I loved (and indeed still do). Yes lots of disco diva vocals and four to floor rhythms. When I think of Saturday nights at Club UK, the tracks that come to mind are things like Your Loving Arms by Billy Ray Martin (the Junior Vasquez Soundfactory mix), To the Beat of the Drum by La Luna, Wildchild's Renegade Master, Push the Feeling On by the Nightcrawlers. Oh and that piano break track with the sample of Blur's Girls and Boys (Pianoman - Blurred).

Club UK flyer, February 1995 (click to enlarge)

What made Club UK special was a crowd of 1400 people for which the term 'up for it' seems completely inadequate. I can still vividly picture walking in there for the first time on a Saturday night - as soon as we stepped through the doors it felt like we were in the middle of an explosion of energy. The track playing was Reach Up (Papa's got a brand new pigbag) by Perfecto Allstarz - the whole place was erupting, there didn't seem to be any sense of a separate dancefloor, everybody in the place was dancing including the bar staff. You would meet all kinds of people there from public school kids (there were press reports of Etonians being suspended for taking drugs there) to squaddies - I remember on that first visit chatting to a couple who had done a bunk from a local children's home to be there.

Club UK was the opposite of cool, in every sense of the word. It was a sweatbox with little or no air conditioning, condensation dripping off the ceilings and sometimes unbearably hot and crowded. One night when we there they had to open the fire exit into the Arndale to let people breathe - so there was an impromptu chill out area on a balcony overlooking the deserted shopping centre (pretty sure this was on their second birthday party, July 1st 1995, with Danny Rampling playing). I remember sucking ice pops to try and cool down. The place was ecstasy fuelled, so many people would go the whole night without buying a drink. Many dubious clubs at that time used to turn off the water in the bathrooms so that people had to buy water from the bar. I don't recall Club UK going to that extreme, but sometimes the cold water taps were reduced to a dribble and they certainly made a small fortune selling their own brand of bottled water. Like in many clubs, there were many random acts of kindness as strangers offered each other sips of water on the dancefloor.

South London Press, 17 October 1995 (click to enlarge)

One hazard was the sporadic police raids. The first one was in December 1994 on a Friday night. Then in October 1995, 150 police raided it on a Saturday. Operation Blade involved dogs, horses, and the Territorial Support Group. 800 clubbers were turned out on to the streets, and many searched. 10 people were arrested. The police raid on Club UK was carried out with TV cameras in attendance, correctly described by the clubowners as a 'media circus'. It seems the raid was deliberately timed to provide a story on which to hang the launch two days later of a new anti-drugs campaign called SNAP (Say no and phone). Ironically the police launched this campaign at Club UK's South London rival, The Ministry of Sound, a place where drug use was just as widespread.

 

Mixmag, November 1995 (click to enlarge)

With hindsight, there were though some dodgy people around Club UK. As in the United States when prohibition of alcohol led to the Mafia control of drinking clubs, the prohibition of drugs like ecstasy created a huge market for UK gangsters to fill.

In December 1995, three men were found shot dead in a Range Rover in a country lane near Rettendon in Essex: Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe. There are different versions of why they were killed, as they had many enemies from their involvement in violence and drug smuggling. But it is well established that Tucker ran security at Club UK. According to Tony Thompson in 'Bloggs 19: the story of the Essex Range Rover Triple Murders' (London: Warner, 2000), 'Controlling the doors of a club instantly means that you control who sells drugs inside. Tucker began to charge dealers 'rent' of around £1000 per week in return for granting them exclusive access to the club... in March 1994, twenty-year old Kevin Jones died at Club UK in south London after taking ecstasy. In a bid to track the source, police put two of the club's suspected dealers under surveillance and discovered they had been paying Tony Tucker, the man responsible for security at the club, £1000 per weekend for the exclusive rights to sell ecstasy and cocaine'. Thompson also suggests that Tucker supplied the ecstasy to a dealer at Raquels nightclub in Basildon, the source of the infamous E that caused the death in November 1995 of Leah Betts at her 18th birthday party.

The Rettendon events are fictionalised in Jake Arnott's novel True Crime, where one of the characters declares: 'It's who runs the doors, Gaz. That's what this thing is going to be all about. It doesn't matter who runs the club, who promotes the event or whatever. It's who's in control of security, that's going to be the thing. That way you decide who can bring in drugs and deal inside the place'.

 
The fulll story of criminal gangs in the 1990s club explosion remains untold. That gangsters like Tucker controlled the drugs trade in clubs is not surprizing, but as they made more and more money it seems likely that some must have crossed over to investing profits in buying and running clubs. It would be interesting to know where some of the money came from for some of the high profile new clubs that opened in that period. And its a sobering thought that in any counter-culture/alternative scene where criminalised drugs are prominent, you are probably only ever a few degrees of separation away from a a very nasty guy with a gun.

But still... who can forget those nights in Wandsworth.

The pop art room at Club UK

Great to remember all the good nights, but let's not forget those who didn't make it: Andreas Bouzis (18) and Kevin Jones (20) who died after collapsing at the club.

See also Clubbed to Death

F.Scott Fitzgerald - May Day

F. Scott Fitzgerald's story May Day, first published in 1920, is an account of a drunken night in New York in May 1919. Drunk socialites dance and argue before hitting an all night cafe, drunk soldiers attack socialists in the streets. He describes the different stages of alcohol intoxication, from feeling good to fighting: 'At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague back­ground before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves... as he sipped his third highball his imagination yielded to the wann glow and he lapsed into a state similar to floating on his back in pleasant water'. Before the end of the story, the same character has been in a brawl with bouncers.

A key setting is a dance to a jazz band at Delmonico's, with the author conjuring up its smell: 'From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties - rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odour drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odour she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet - the odour of a fashionable dance'.

Fitzgerald also notes the trance-like sensation of dancing and its stimulation of memory : 'this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else - of another dance and another man... another roving beam... threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic colours over the massed dancers. Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colourful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times... her mind was passive now, her senses were lulled to trance-like sleep; only her feet danced and her voice talked on in hazy sentimental banter'.

Free Radio

Must admit I know very little about pirate radio outside of England, but here's a few interesting stories that caught my attention:

Florida: One Love Radio (ABC Action News, 12 February 2009)

.... the Winter Haven Police Department arrested Anthony Davis after searching his Lee Avenue in Winter Haven. Detectives found audio mixers and DJ equipment and a 100 watt transmitter that they say Davis was using to broadcast his reggae music style radio station on 87.9 FM.
Complaints about his station came from a local Orlando TV station, Channel 6 which uses the freqency for their TV audio. Davis called his station format "One Love Radio". A third degree felony charge of unlawful transmission of radio frequency was filed against Davis who told detectives he worked as a security guard in Haines City.

Israel: RAM FM (Ynet news, 4.7.08)

RAM-FM, an English-language radio station broadcasting from a Jerusalem studio, was shut down by police on Monday for transmitting without a proper permit. The West Bank station broadcasts Western music in an attempt to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer together. The station's headquarters are located in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where it broadcasts on 93.6 FM.... The station's headquarters are located in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where it broadcasts on 93.6 FM...The station attracts a diverse audience of tens of thousands, from Israeli soldiers and Palestinian students to West Bank villagers, English speaking immigrants, migrant workers and foreign diplomats. It is one of the numerous pirate radio stations broadcasting throughout Israel, which are often blamed for dangerous disruptions in airport air traffic communications and interference in regular radio broadcasts. (see also this)

Free Radio Berkeley - Liberating the Commons

'Within the first year after the initial broadcast of Free Radio Berkeley [in 1993], it became clear that the Free Radio Movement was part of a much larger global endeavor. Community radio is rooted in the struggles of people for a just and humane existence. Whether it was: Bolivian tin miners establishing radio stations in the late 1940’s as part of a campaign to improve working conditions; Radio Rebelde’s role in the Cuban Revolution; Czech citizens creating clandestine radio stations after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 by the USSR; or the supportive role of community radio in the recent uprising by indigenous people in Bolivia to reclaim their natural resources – community radio has always been a tool of expression and organization... After the first coup against Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Free Radio Berkeley supplied transmitters to peasant organizations fighting against the coup. Transmitters also went to both the Chiapas jungle and the urban streets of Mexico City... Embracing Free Radio as a form of media expression that is genuine and real is the first step on the road to liberation from the society of the spectacle. Only by coming together as communities can people begin to: form the relationships that really matter, tell the stories which impart a collective identity, history and purpose; dance, sing and celebrate life together; and forge new bonds of commitment and support. Free Radio is the Peoples Drum'.

Datacide Archive Online

12 years of articles from the great 'noise and politics' zine Datacide are now online. Spend some time there, it will be worth your while!

Online for the first time you can now read my article from the latest Datacide 10:

Neil Transpontine: A Loop Da Loop Era: towards an (anti-)history of rave
"We are all familiar with those superficial overviews of ‘popular culture’ in which the same clichéd images are used to denote entire social movements – a few naked hippies at Woodstock standing in for the 1960s counter-cultures, a couple of Mohicans for punk and some gurning ravers in smiley t-shirts for twenty years of electronic dance scenes from acid house to breakcore. In this way history affirms the status quo by suggesting that nothing fundamental ever changes, and the multiple possibilities of negation and creation opened up by these movements are denied... There is no single history but numberless trajectories that converge and pass through the various sonic, social and chemical phenomena grouped under that unstable term ‘rave'...."

You're on hold

I've just read a short pamphlet 'Muzak to my ears: Canned Music and Class Struggle: Public Space and Muzak as Policing'. I will write a review of this at some point, but one thing that struck me was the reflection on the music used when you phone a bank or other institution while you are kept on hold: 'music is now used as environmental material to enhance sales techniques and marketing, usually to soothe the nerves and irritation of impatient phone callers but, as Ballard points out, also to jangle the nerves and exacerbate the irritation of dissatisfied service customers, probably to make them stop holding on'. It includes a great quote on this from JG Ballard (I think sourced from the book Elevator Music):


"...the subject is fascinating - all part of mood-control. For me the intentions of background music are openly political, and an example of how political power is constantly shifting from the ballot box into areas where the voter has nowhere to mark his ballot paper. The most important political choices in the future will probably never be consciously exercised. I'm intrigued by the way some background music is surprisingly aggressive, especially that played on consumer complaint phone lines and banks, airlines and phone companies themselves, with strident, non-rhythmic and arms-length sequences that are definitely not user-friendly."

In the course of my own personal credit crunch I have spent a fair amount of time waiting for calls to be answered, and yes the music remains more than irritating - but at least suggests that you are waiting in a queue with some prospect of speaking to a human being, even more frustrating is going round and round in circles through endless menus of options (press 1 if you would like to get further in debt, press 2 if your house is going to be repossessed etc.) - none of which include the possibility of any kind of conversation.

Still if you think listening to Music on Hold is bad, spare a thought for the Call Centre workers on the other line - wearing headphones all day and therefore susceptible to serious damage to their hearing from Acoustic Shock caused by 'a sudden, unexpected noise, often delivered at a very intense frequency'.

'Muzak to My Ears' is available as a pamphtelt from Past Tense publications, c/o 56a Infoshop, 56 Crampton Street, LondonSE17 3A (£1.50 including post and packing, cheques made payable to A. Hodson. Most of the text is available online here.

Liverpool Street Closed by Silent Dance

Even though I stand by my critique of last month's T-Mobile pseudo-flashmob, the advert may have had the effect of amplifying the real silent rave phenomenon, judging by last night's events in London:

'Liverpool Street Station was overrun by dancers who had congregated on the concourse for a silent disco, organised via the social networking website. The crowd, who were all listening to music through headphones, broke into dance at 7pm on Friday night in a scene which aped the advert which was filmed at the station last month. The flash mob caused police to close the station for around 90 minutes due to fears of overcrowding. Participants, some of whom had travelled hundreds of miles to take part, said the station was so packed that there was no room to dance. Some revellers climbed on top of a ticket office to perform their routines, while others climbed notice boards and other station furniture... Word of the the event, called Liverpool Street Station Silent Dance, was circulated on the internet through Facebook.

Jennie Tuck, 16, a student from London, said: "It was an amazing atmosphere. Everyone assembled underneath the departures board and watched the clocks for a 10 second countdown to seven o'clock. When the clock struck seven, everyone went mad. People were dancing and screaming and jumping up and down. One guy completely stripped off and loads of others were crowd surfing."

A City of London Police spokeswoman, who was on the scene said: "We had to close the station because it was completely overcrowded. There were around 12,000 people here" (source: Telegraph, 7 February 2009).

On Facebook, people already seem to be planning a similar event in Trafalgar Square next Friday 13th February at 7 pm. What we really need is somebody to turn up with a sound system on a truck to really take this to another level.

Dancing and Class Formation

How do social classes come about? From a Marxist point of view, class is defined by people's relationship to the means of production - there are those who own (or who own substantial share holdings in) banks, factories, land and various large companies, the 'independently' wealthy who don't rely on a wage to survive. Then there are the mass of the population without reserves, who can only make a living by selling their labour. In this perspective, the middle class doesn't really exist - as most middle class people are also only a couple of pay cheques away from the same destitution as the rest of the proletariat.

But I digress. The point I want to make is that the objective economic conditions for classes are only part of the story - as the radical historian E.P. Thompson argued in his The Making of the English Working Class, for classes to become social actors with a particular world view, acting in their perceived interests, a cultural process has to happen in which people develop common ways of socialising, thinking and acting. For Thompson, class is not just about "so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production" and class formation "is a fact of political and cultural, as much as of economic, history".

So where does dancing fit in with this? With a nod to Jurgen Habermas, Geoff Eley extended Thompson's idea to talk of "a working class public sphere", a self-conscious independent culture with its own publications and diverse organisational forms. He argued that in addition to formal political meetings, there emerged in the nineteenth century "new forms of collective sociability" that created "a distinct public space of independent working-class activity". Dancing was part of this, with Eley identifying the tea parties and balls of the Chartist movement as examples of this collective sociability.

But dance aspects of the public sphere are not specific to the working class. Anyone who has read Jane Austen knows how important balls were in the early industrial period as a means for the wealthier members of society to meet, interact and ultimately marry and reproduce. Over time they were one mechanism by which landed aristocrats and new money bourgeoisie came to form a new dominant class (or rather for an existing dominant class to accommodate newcomers).

Something similar happened in the 1960s, as the doors of the ruling class opened to admit new moneyed stars from the media and entertainment industries. Once again dancing - this time in 'Swinging London' nightclubs - facilitated this. Terence Stamp (left) a working class boy turned actor who benefited from this recalled: 'In the sixties, amongst ourselves, our age group, there was an absolute coming together. And what made the coming to­gether was basically music and dancing. In a way it was a new aristoc­racy. But the main thing was that there was suddenly access between the classes. Had the sixties not happened, I would never have been able to spend the night with a young countess because I would never have met her. And as the great Mike Caine once said to me, 'You can't shag any­one you don't meet.'"

Of course social mobility between classes is not to be confused with classlessness - the former implies the continued existence of classes, just with the potential for a few to move up and down the ladder. As Shawn Levy has written of that era: ''As the sixties emerged, proponents of the the­ory of classlessness could point to the likes of Quant and Stamp and the Beatles and a dozen other exceptions- people who'd broken into a new class where talent and the wealth that followed success mattered more than who your parents were. But it was inarguably the case that this mer­itocracy- with its members-only restaurants and nightclubs -was just as exclusive as the old upper class of money and birthright; you may no longer have needed to be born to position but earning it was, arguably, a harder and rarer feat. And, too, entrance to the new world only lasted as long as the traditional elite chose to allow it. "The rich people let us play in their back garden for a few years," said tailor Doug Hayward, "and then they said, 'Right, lads, very nice, you've all had a good time, now let's get back to it".'

Sources: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963; Geoff Eley, ;Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: the. Making of a Working-Class Public, 1780-1850', in H. J. Kaye and K. McClelland (eds.), E.P. Thompson: critical perspectives, Cambridge, Polity, 1990; Shawn Levy, Ready Steady Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, 2002.

Zines, Blogs and the Historical Record

Simon Reynolds writes in the Guardian about the continued existence of printed zines in the age of the blog (he's also put up an interesting series of interviews with zine editors here, including John Eden of Uncarved/Woofah). Simon concludes:

'What's going on here is what academics describe as "slippage of the auratic". Walter Benjamin theorised about the "aura" possessed by the singular artwork, the painting or sculpture, in the age of mechanical reproduction. Yet as digital culture takes over, "aura" is being conferred on things that not long ago would once have been considered mass produced and characterless. In the age of the webzine and MP3, it is solid-form cultural artifacts – vinyl records, vintage DJ mixtapes, yellowing magazines – that become attractive in the face of the infinite dissemination and seeming ephemerality of web culture.'

I agree that part of the attraction of zines might be a nostalgia for material culture in the age of digital reproduction. But as a sometime wannabe social historian there is also something special about the printed zine as a contemporary artifact of a specific time and place. When I pick up, say, a riot grrrl zine from the mid-1990s, it tells me many things - not just what the writer was thinking at that time, but where they were based (from the address), what wider scene they were linked in with (from the listings) etc.

A future historian relying on blogs won't have to search through obscure archives in search of old hardcopy documents but they will face other obstacles. For a start blogs are much harder to locate in time and space - posts may be dated, but they can be revised, edited and re-written, making it difficult to be sure what is a contemporary record of something and what is something amended with hindsight. Many blogs don't even state what country they are published from, let alone city, so linking utterances to people's actual experiences of particular scenes is also problematic.

But the biggest problem is that while printed sources can last for many years, blogs can be deleted at will by the authors or other parties. In some cases the only documentation for something occurring can we wiped from the historical record because somebody forgets to pay their bill, because a host company goes out of business or because somebody is embarrassed by their juvenilia.

So please don't delete your websites and blogs even if you are sick of them - and if it's really good, maybe think about printing out a hard copy and sticking it in a library somewhere. Or maybe do a zine and send me a copy!

Bad Attitude - music reviews from radical women's newspaper (1995)

Bad Attitude was a 'radical women's newspaper' published in the early 1990s from 121 Railton Road, Brixton (among other things, home to the famous Dead by Dawn speedcore nights). Some of the women involved it had previously been involved in the young women's zine Shocking Pink, including my late friend Katy Watson. Here from issue 7 (1995) is one of Katy's music columns.

Welcome to my second review column of punk/indie women's bands. I'm pleased to say that this time a much higher propor­tion of them are independent/DIY bands, rather than on major labels, which I think is something worth supporting. Once again, I've only mentioned things that I found reasonably enjoyable. Is this a good idea? I don't know. Maybe you'd like to tell me.

So first off it's time to get your leopard-print bikinis on and... Spend the Night with the Trashwomen! For this is the title of my most highly recommended LP of this issue. It's by the Trashwomen, as you might guess, and is entirely wonderful. The style is garage, as in Sixties-style surf songs, a little like the Cramps, only belting along at about twice the speed and very cheaply produced which makes it seem even more rough'n'ready'n'fab. There are quite a few instrumentals and their lyrics are mainly along the lines of love, sex and dates, except for the self-explanatory 'I'm Trash'. So not a night out with Sheila ]effreys (not that I've anything against her). Several songs are complete classics, to my ears. It came out last year and I don't even know what made me buy it. I can only think it was the hand of the Goddess. (On Estrus records) And now it seems they have a favourably­reviewed live LP out....

Also in garage area though slightly more punky is a 4-track EP Punk or Die by Pink Kross, who are three girls from Glasgow. 'Doll core', apparently. The first track 'Drag Star Racing Queen' is a real cracker. I loved it. Catchy, thrashing, tuneful, fast, with lyrics either winning or daft, depending how you're prepared to take them. The other three tracks aren't as wondrous, but who cares when the first one's so brilliant? (Bouvier)

36C (LP) by Fifth Column, a Canadian dyke band. The first song, 'All Women are Bitches', is a classic, one of the best things I've heard this year - a powerful and catchy piece of pop-punk. But after that I found the others a let-down. The tunes are good, the singer has a fine voice and the lyrics are feminist, but it's all much slower. On the other hand if you appreciate melodic guitar songs this is good stuff. Personally I wish I'd just bought the 7" of 'All Women .. '/Donna'. (K records)

Alien's Mom (3-track 7") by Tribe 8. A San Francisco dyke band, much thrashier than the above. The title track is an OK thrash-punk tune with likeable lyrics about a woman leaving her husband for another woman. As for the drippy B-side - some things are best kept to ones therapist. I like Tribe 8 a lot, but this isn't the best I've heard from them. (Outpunk)

Out punk Dance Party (compilation LP). A variety of mainly north American dyke and queer bands from hardcore punk to one rap number. It gets off to a great start as a house beat familiar to any gay club-goer is wiped off the turntables with a satisfying needle­screech, but the tracks themselves are vari­able. Includes a good 'un (though not new) from London's own Sister George and I found the CWA rap story pleasantly amusing, plus a couple of the boys' bands a pretty good. However, though this could have been the definitive queercore comp, only half of it is up to scratch. (Outpunk)

You're Dead (4-track 7") by lovable young­sters the Frantic Spiders. I think this is their first record (?) and in their letter they say "this is very old and not indicative of the rousing live experience that Frantic Spiders are famed for". This may be, but all the same it's not bad. It's punky pop at a good pace, quite clear-sounding and there's a funny metaillic sound to the guitar, like slide guitar wthout the slide, which is also good. 'Retard' is the most memorable song, but don't they know it's not nice to call people that? (Weirdness).

American Thighs by Veruca Salt (LP) The most mainstream-indie of this issue's reviews. It sounds very much like The Breeders, ie US alternative pop-rock, tuneful, female vocals, expensive production, loud bits... quiet bits ... To be honest this is a bit too slow and mild to be my cup of tea, but I can see it's not bad, the guitars have a reasonable grind and if you like that sort of indie e stuff, you could well like this. The single, Seether, taken from the LP, is fairly lively and rockin'. (Both on Hi-Rise/Minty Fresh).

Suck (4-track 7") by Witchknot : I sup­pose this is roughly in the vein of hardcore but it has the unusual addition of a fiddle. They're six women from Bradford and I'd describe it as being something like a cross between the Dog Faced Hermans (one of their favourite bands, it seems) and the Au Pairs. Political lyrics, a strong vocalist and a fairly dissonant sound. And can you beat 'Pianist Envy' for a song title? (£2 (payable to D Taylor) from Witchknot, PO Box 169, Bradford, W Yorks BD7 1YS.)

I also got hold of records by a couple more all-women bands (both from the US) though I don't know how recent they are. 7 Year Bitch are feminist punksters whose EP Anti­disestablisbmentarianism (the longest word in the English language - don't say you don't learn anything here) is pretty good fast polit­ical hardcore, though the lyrics are stronger than the tunes. 'Dead Men Don't Rape' is an obvious crowd-pleaser. (Rugger Bugger) I also found a split single called Can We Laugh Now? with Thatcher On Acid on the other side. Musically this is good, though paradoxi­cally the lyrics are a bit irritating. (Clawfist)

Also worth checking out are US dyke band Team Dresch. Basically this is a little too gentle for my taste, but more mellow types might like it. I got a 3-track 7"; 'Hand Grenade' and 'Endtime Relay' are good, melodic guitar pop with a nice catch to them, a little dreamy­sounding. The other song 'Molasses in January' seemed painfully slow to me, but on the whole I'd recommend it. (Kill Rock Stars)

At the other end of the scale are Delicate Vomit, an all-women punk band from Newcastle. In case you hadn't guessed from their having 'vomit' in the name they are towards the hardcore end of punk. I haven't got a record to review, but the one song I heard sounded interesting.

Pope promotes another fascist

No it's not just disco bombing Islamists who think that people who enjoy nightclubs deserve to die. Pope Benedict 'has promoted to bishop an ultra-conservative Austrian clergyman who called Hurricane Katrina "God's punishment" and condemned the Harry Potter books for "spreading satanism"... Gerhard Maria Wagner, 54, is to become auxiliary bishop in the Austrian city of Linz, where he is viewed as a controversial figure by churchgoers and clergy alike. In 2005, he wrote in a parish newsletter that Hurricane Katrina was an act of "divine retribution" for the sins of a sexually permissive society.

He said it was worth considering whether environmental catastrophes should not be seen as a result of "spiritual environmental pollution" - a type of "divine retribution" for New Orleans' relaxed attitude towards sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. "It is surely not an accident that all five of New Orleans' abortion clinics, as well as nightclubs were destroyed," he wrote, adding: "It's not just any old city that has gone under, but the people's dream city with the 'best brothels and the most beautiful whores'.' (more in today's Guardian)

The news comes just a couple of weeks after another extreme right wing bishop, the holocaust denying Richard Williamson, was readmitted to the Church.

Pakistan: Eunuch Dancers Protest

The Hijras of Pakistan, sometimes described as 'eunuchs', are generally gay transvesites/transsexuals, some of whom have had some kind of sex change operation. Life for them is tough, with harrassment and poverty. For many of them, dancing at weddings and other functions is a key source of income. They have been organising in defence of their rights, as shown in this week's protests following the arrest of several Hijras on their way home from dancing:

'Over 100 eunuchs on Tuesday protested against Taxila police’s alleged excesses outside the senior superintendent of police’s (SSP) office. Shemale Rights President Bobby led the protestors, who carried placards and banners with messages against police. A large number of policemen and traffic wardens stayed up there until the eunuchs dispersed following the suspension of three policemen accused of torturing, looting and detaining five eunuchs in Taxila...

Bobby told reporters that the three policemen in question had held five eunuchs from a village on January 23 night when they were on the way home after performing at a dance function. She alleged policemen tortured eunuchs and snatched Rs 150,000 cash, jewelry and five cellphones from them during confinement. She demanded that eunuchs be released and culpable policemen be punished.

(Pakistan Daily Times, 28 January 2009)

As many as three eunuchs sustained wounds in police baton-charge when they tried to go to the SSP’s office for withdrawal of an FIR [First Information Report] against their colleagues who were booked at a function in Taxila and sent to the Adiala Jail. Police baton-charged eunuchs, including Bobby, Sana and Gul, in front of the SSP’s office near Peshawar Road. They were protesting against the arrest of eunuchs at a function in Nawababad, Taxila. Police had arrested Sitara, Aalia, Robina, Saim and Akmal when they were dancing at a function on January 23 and sent them to the Adiala Jail. All Pakistan Eunuchs Association President Bobby told ‘The News’ that the Taxila Police had arrested five eunuchs when they were dancing at a function and sent them to the jail after registering cases against them. Police also snatched Rs150,000 from them, Bobby added. According to Bobby, the arrested eunuchs had not committed any crime rather they were dancing which is the only source income for them. Bobby said that eunuchs wanted to stage a peaceful protest but police baton-charged them in which three eunuchs were wounded...

Earlier, some 200 eunuchs gathered in front of the SSP’s office and blocked the Peshawar Road. They carried banners and placards inscribed with different slogans against police. When they tried to enter the office of the SSP (operation), police officials started beating them with batons. In retaliation, eunuchs pelted stones and eggs on police. They tore uniforms of some police officials during the scuffle that continued for half an hour. They also broke windowpanes of SSP’s office. However the situation was controlled after SSP (operation) Sardar Maqsood reached the spot. The traffic on Peshawar Road remained blocked during the clash between police and eunuchs.

(The News - Pakistan - 28 January 2009)

Crowds and Equality

"Within the crowd there is equality. This is absolute and indisputable and never questioned by the crowd itself. It is of fundamental importance and one might even define a crowd as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant. It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might de­tract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equal­ity ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd" (Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, 1960).

Photo of crowd at Winter Enchanted 2006 (Adelaide) in front of DJ Alex Kidd by Sweet Unncertainty at Flickr.

Slim Gaillard, Jack Kerouac and Me

In Hanif Kureishi's latest novel, Something to Tell You, the narrator mentions being in a club in London in the late 1970s and meeting Slim Gaillard (1911-1991), prompting him to remark 'There can't have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road... this was a man who'd known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth'. It reminded me that I too once saw Slim Gaillard (1916-1991), in the late 1980s (1987?) playing in a room above the Alexandra pub opposite Clapham Common in South London, I believe at a Hi Note jazz club night. By this time he was an old man, singing songs and still doing his trademark stream of consciousness private 'o-reenee' dialect (apparently he was accompanied by Jason Rebello on piano).

Other than his age it wasn't vastly different from the scene described by Jack Kerouac in "On The Road" (written in 1951): '... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C's, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages'.

Well in Clapham I don't recall bongos or people sitting on the floor, but I guess I was a 'young semi intellectual'! That was my only direct encounter with someone from the beat generation, other than once hearing Brion Gysin give a talk in Bedford library of all places (standing in for William Burroughs who didn't show- this was mid-80s).

More on the Alexandra and dancing in Brixton and beyond in late 1980s here

Dancing Questionnaire (11): Kate Aan De Wiel

Kate Aan De Wiel looks back on dancing all the way from West Ham to Cuba:

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Tap dancing lessons and an appearance as a Little Dutch Girl at West Ham Town Hall at the age of 3.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
The 'High' of dancing Cuban Rueda da Casino with a bunch of friends in front of a crowd of people.

3. Dancing. The best of times…
In Cuba, in the street with a crowd of Cubans dancing Cuban Salsa

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Realising that at my age, and with my knees, I should really pack up dancing.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
Country dances as a child at school.The Twist in the 60s, Mod dances in the 60s, etc etc in the 70s and 80s. Then discovering salsa and Cuba in the late 90s.

6. When and where did you last dance?
2 years ago at a club in Highbury, the Cuban Lounge at the Buffalo Bar on a Monday night - my favourite !

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
El Tragico by NG La Banda .. and bugger the knees !

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

'Men of the Nancy Type': London 1927

"In 1927 the charge of keeping a disorderly house at 25, Fitzroy Square, near Euston Station, was brought after a long period of surveillance by the police . The actual charge was that in the house there were: 'divers, immoral, lewd and evil disposed persons tippling, whoring, using obscene language, indecently exposing their private parts and behaving in a lewd, obscene and disorderly and riotous manner to the manifest corruption of the morals of His Majesty's Liege subjects, the evil example of others in the like case offending and against the Peace of Our Lord the King, His Crown and Dignity'.

Let's take a look at some of these heinous offences as related by police observers. Police Sergeant number 42 reported on January 3rd: "At 11.35. p.m. three men entered the basement door. The door was opened by a man wearing pyjamas... I saw them dance around him in the hall. At 12.20 four men were admitted by the man wearing pyjamas, who kissed one of the men as they entered. At this time the gramophone was playing in the front room, people were jumping and dancing making a very rowdy noise. I could hear the men in the front room singing and talking in effeminate voices. At 3.30. a.m. two men came out of the door. They were very drunk, vomited in the area, struggled up the steps and left."

On another occasion: "I saw a man standing at the door in a dressing gown. He kissed one of the men as they entered, laughed and shut the door. At 12.30. a.m. I saw four men walking in couples approach the house, they were cuddling.. one another as they walked and speaking in low effeminate voices ... They were men of the nancy type. "

….Several of the guests were followed after they left the house, with officers noting that the men cuddled each other whilst waiting for a bus. They were described as being 'powdered and painted'. The policeman who followed them said that they smelt strongly of perfume and guessed that, by their appearance, they were 'West-End poofs or male opportuners.'

Police photograph in the aftermath of the 1927 raid,

showing Robert Britt (second from left)

Because of what they had heard and seen the police considered it their duty to raid the house on the 17th January, 1927. They surprised six people in one of the rooms. Robert Britt, a twenty-six-year­old dancer, was wearing a thin black transparent skirt with gold trimming and a red sash tied around his loins. The ladies shoes he was wearing caused him to appear taller than the other guests. He was naked from the waist up. Other people in the room were either in pyjamas or partly dressed. It seems difficult today to understand what offence they might have committed and even in the twenties a legal dispute ensued as to what exactly a disorderly house was. Several of the defendants were found not guilty but Britt was sentenced to eighteen months hard labour and others up to six months without hard labour".

Source: In Darkest London: antisocial behaviour 1900-1939 - Steve Jones (Wicked Publications, 1994).

India: moral vigilantes attack women

In an incident of moral policing in Karnataka, a group of men in Mangalore attacked a group of women in a pub on Saturday afternoon.The attack was carried out by members of the Sri Ram Sena, who said they had received complaints from the public about the presence of young women. The five or six women in the pub were chased out and hit by the self-appointed moral police....

"About 15 to 20 activists, reportedly belonging to Sri Ram Sena [Hindu nationalist group], barged into the pub late last night and assaulted boys and girls dancing there," said Inspector General of Police (Western Range) A M Prasad. Even the girls were not spared by the agitated activists who chased and thrashed the victims when they tried to flee from the pub on the busy Balmatta Road in the heart of the city, eyewitnesses claimed...

Prasad said the attackers accused the pub owner of allowing the boys and girls to dance and act in an "obscene manner"... "Those people (attackers) simply came in and started beating the girls. It was a bad scene. Our waiters tried to stop them but they did not listen and kept assaulting the girls," pub owner A Krishna said.

(source: NDTV, 25 January 2009)

Headphone Space

Despite expressing scepticism about the sonic limitations of headphone-based Silent Disco, I agree with the sentiments of Future Next Level's Ode to Headphones. He is undoubtedly right that 'Headphone space is quintessential to the appreciation of music' but also correct that it only really works with decent cans. The fact is that despite the ever expanding quantity and accessibility of music, the quality of the listening experience is in some ways in decline. Many of us listen to a lot of music with tiny earbuds, on mono ipod docks, or on the crappy speakers on laptops and phones. When we listen through a decent pair of headphones instead it can be a revelation - there's just so much sound which is just not reproduced properly on any of the above.

I had one such memorable experience of headphone space when I first got the Burial album. I walked from New Cross to Kennington, via Peckham and Camberwell, listening to it on the big conspicuous headphones that I wouldn't normally advise people to wear on the streets of South London. Anyway that just added an appropriate edginess to the mood, mixed in with pleasantly melancholic memories sparked by the locations and the music's invocation of the ghosts of parties past (in my case wandering past places I used to go like the boarded up Imperial Gardens club and Camberwell Squatted Centre, this sense was very tangible). Anyway the point is that it was the headphones that allowed me not to only to hear the music in all its depth, but to immerse myself in the moods it conjured up, changing my relationship to the places I was passing through - music as a soundtrack not a background distraction.

Dancing the Twist, 1963

Old home movies are a fascinating source for how people actually danced in the past. This is a great clip of a New Year's Eve party in 1963 - not even sure where, it looks North American (the clip was posted by Candadian-based Fun with Stuttering)



One of the things that interests me is at what point did it become acceptable for a single woman or man to go out on the dancefloor and dance on their own - without being asked to do so by and with a member of the opposite sex first (chiefly by a man asking a woman)? Before the Second World War, social dancing in Europe and America seems to have been very much 'couple dancing'. Perhaps jitterbugging/jiving was a transitional point - while the dancing was still couple based it did not require the constant physical contact between dancers. I have found references to women dancing on their own, or with each other, in London during the war.

In this 1963 film, there are couples dancing but also people dancing on their own, or rather dancing as part of a group without being attached to a member of the oppiste sex. There is a woman on the edge of the group doing the Twist in her own space, and two women doing the Twist opposite each other. So perhaps the Twist was a step towards the modern dancefloor, where by the disco period couple dancing was confined largely to the slow dance at the end.

Pop Feminist tells me she's doing some research on the Twist, look forward to seeing what she comes up with.

The Sound of Silence

'Imagine walking into a party where everybody is wearing wireless headphones and is singing and dancing to an inaudible beat. This was the vision of the founders and creators of the Silent Disco' (more here)

Hmmm... it's one thing people dancing with headphones at a flashmob style event, but I am deeply sceptical about silent club nights , with people paying good money to wear headphones (the above quote is from an article about a Silent Disco night in Bath next month) - even if they are listening to a mix broadcast to them by the DJ rather than to their own individual soundtrack.

The problem is that even if people are dancing in synchrony to the same music (see Global Raver's criticism of iPod raves), the common soundtrack is only part of the collective experience of dancing - even in the loudest club there is generally the possibility of some kind of conversation, something that is presumably not possible while listening to music on headphones.

In addition what goes in through the ears is only part of how we sense music. Dance music in particular entails feeling the bass in different parts of our bodies. I really noticed the absence of this last year when I saw Kode 9 DJing in what is usually an indie pub in New Cross (Amersham Arms) - playing through a bass-lite sound system set up for bands, it felt like a key part of the music was missing. With headphones even more of the music must be missing - you just cannot generate the same bass sensation through the ears alone.

Of course I've nothing against the Silent Disco people, I'm sure it's fun as a novelty. My real concern is that it might pave the way for the future with 'noise pollution' being used as an excuse to require clubs to replace speakers with headphones. That really would be the end.

Boy George

I won't be joining the tabloids in gloating over the fate of Boy George, jailed last week for 15 months for 'handcuffing a male escort to a wall and beating him with a chain'. I don't want to defend his actions - he seems to have got stuck in druggy paranoia, with bad consequences both for himself and others - but I hope he gets out soon and doesn't get too hard a time inside.

I am sure he can handle himself though - not just through his legendary bitchy wit (as highlighted in his entertaining autobiographies Take it Like a Man and Straight) but through his physical presence. As I recalled in a previous post, I remember seeing him at Turnmills in the mid-1990s standing head and shoulders above most of the crowd and built like a working class Irish South London geezer - which is actually part of what he is.

I was never a great fan of Culture Club's music, but I did appreciate the global gender confusion they caused. I actually liked Boy George's DJing though - people were snotty about him not being able to mix, but he wasn't just a celebrity putting on obvious tunes. He put out some great dance tracks on his More Protein label, including Lippy Lou's wonderful lesbian white ragga pop house anthems Freaks and Liberation.

Anyway I am sure we haven't heard the last of Mr George O'Dowd.

We dead lie unburied

War in Gaza, and (less publicised) war in Sri Lanka, war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq. It's too soon to say whether and how these tragedies will be commemorated in song, but some of the earliest known ballads deal with the misery and suffering of war, offering a kind of counter-narrative to the patriotic sagas of kings and generals.

These examples are from the Han Dynasty period (202 BCE - 220 CE). Remarkably, the government of the time established a Bureau of Music (the Yueh-fu) which collected popular ballads and song. As a result lyrics from this time have survived for over 2000 years.

We fought South of the City Wall

We fought south of the city wall.
We died north of the ramparts.
In the wilderness we dead lie unburied, fodder for crows.
Tell the crows for us:
'We've always been brave men!
In the wilderness we dead clearly lie unburied,
So how can our rotting flesh flee from you?'
Waters deep, rushing, rushing,
Reeds and rushes, darkening, darkening.
Heroic horsemen fought and died fighting,
Flagging horses whinnied in panic.
Raftered houses we built,
And south, alas! and north;
If grain and millet aren't reaped, what will you eat, Lord?
We longed to be loyal vassals, but how can that be?
I remember you, good vassals,
Good vassals I truly remember:
In the dawn you went out to glory, At nightfall you did not return.

At Fifteen I Joined the Army

At fifteen I joined the army,
At eighty I first came home.
On the road I met a villager,
'At my home what kin are there?'
'Look over there- that's your home!'
Pine, cypress, burial mounds piled, piled high,
Hares going in through dog-holes,
Pheasants flying in through rafter tops;
The inner garden grown wild with corn,
Over the well wild mallow growing.
I pound grain to serve for a meal,
I pick mallow to serve for broth.
Once broth and meal are cooked
I'm at a loss to know whom to feed,
I leave by the gates, look east.
Tears fall and soak my clothes.

Source: Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China, Anne Birrell (University of Hawaii Press, 1988)

Sudan: arrests for 'indecent dressing'

'Police yesterday arrested a number of youths in a raid at Bor Freedom Square where thousands of youth gather to perform their normal Sunday traditional dances and wrestling. The youths were detained over indecent dressing styles. The incident happened shortly after the youths have already started their activities (wrestling and dancing) at different points of the overcrowded Freedom Square. The police arrived in large numbers and started amassing young men and ladies accused of dressing indecently in public places. The captives were assembled at the police headquarters and later released after having been warned not to ever attempt to dress like that other time' (more at Jonglei State News, 19 January 2009)

Wonder what the offending clothes were?

Bubblepunk

Simon Reynolds kicked off a week of posts about The Sweet with the provocative question 'was there in fact a better British hard rock vocalist of the 1970s than Brian Connolly of The Sweet?'. Of course die-hard 1970s rockists would have been horrified at the very suggestion of admitting The Sweet to the hard rock canon - a glam pop band who didn't even write their biggest hits.

But anybody listening to tracks like Ballroom Blitz or Teenage Rampage now would surely have to agree with joint songwriter Nicky Chinn that 'the records sound quite raw and punky... this was pop that had an edge: there were hard guitars, there were crashing drums'. Not only that but the songs were short, punchy and relatively fast compared with some of the ponderous 'real' heavy metal of the time - what Barney Hoskyns has called 'The beefed-up, turbo-charged 'Chinnichap' sound - bubblepunk'.

The band even had a proto-punk attitude several years before The Sex Pistols, as Chinn recalled: 'We were doing "Ballroom Blitz" on Top of the Pops, and all day Steve [bassist Steve Priest] had been acting a bit strangely. After the opening bars of the song, he turns round with his back to the camera, and on the back of his leather jacket were the words FUCK YOU'. Unsurprizingly, this was never broadcast by the BBC.

Even their gender bending is often derided, because unlike Bowie they didn't learn it from Lindsay Kemp. They are sometimes bracketed with Slade as 'brickies in eyeliner' (to use Siouxsie Sioux's memorable phase). But for a generation of pre-pubescent children like me watching in awe on Top of the Pops it probably had a bigger impact than Bowie, if only because they were so ubiquitous. As glam blogger the Stardust Kid puts it: 'In most respects glam rock is totally fake, but to young kids like me it was real and alive. It may have been 'Brickies in eyeliner' but to the kids it was 'stardust for the dudes''.

I'm not sure I would go as far as Barney Hoskyns in suggesting that The Sweet influenced black American style from George Clinton to Prince, but who know maybe he's right that 'Space-age glam also played a large part in the look of P-Funk. George Clinton was funk's own Roy Wood, while Bootsy Collins - the rhinestone-encrusted overlord of space bass - was the Sweet's Steve Priest on Pimpmobile overdrive'.

But I do agree with Todd Haynes (director of glam celebration Velvet Goldmine) that glam was 'the result of a unique blending of underground American rock with a distinctly English brand of camp theatricality and gender-bending. And for a brief time pop culture would proclaim that identities and sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed, and rock and roll would paint its face and turn the mirror around, inverting in the process everything in sight'.

From Youtube - The Sweet on Top of the Pops in 1973 performing Blockbuster - all silver platform shoes and gold catsuits. The band were sometimes accused on stealing this riff from David Bowie's Jean Genie - in fact both of them probably took it from The Yardbirds 'I'm a Man', itself a cover of Bo Diddley - orginality is often over-rated!

Most quotes from Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and The Glitter Rock Revolution - Barney Hoskyns (London: Faber: 1998). Brian Connolly (top) and Steve Priest (bottom) on the cover of German teen magazine Bravo, 1973 (sourced from Cover Browser)

Radio Days

I've been spending a lot of time this weekend hanging round in a car. What has made it all bearable is the radio. Despite having weeks worth of music on my pc, and more music at my disposal than I will ever have time to listen to, radio still offers something else - the unknown and unexpected. Of course this is not true of most stations, but in London at least the airwaves are still crowded with pirates and sometimes community stations with short term broadcasting licences.


So on Force FM (106.5) I listened to DJs Ade and Frisk discussing the relative merits of nu garage, Bumpy 4/4, old skool garage, Bassline and UK funky. They were definitely most in favour of the first two, but the whole thing reminded me of the role of pirates as hothouses for the proliferation of micro-genres and mutations of the 'nuum. More importantly the music was good, Todd Edwards 'When angels sing' a standout track. On Rinse FM there was the inevitable God Made me Phunky, a UK funky take on an old house track that was itself inspired by a 1975 Headhunters track - from the first wave of funk... making me think about the shifting fortunes of the term funk in music - something that for a long time has conjured up a sense of retro-fixated scenes like acid jazz but now reclaimed for the latest twist in urban music... And so on.

Radio has always been important to me. When I was at primary school we used to gather round a small transistor in the lunch break and listen to the chart rundown, in the days of T.Rex and The Sweet. As a teenager I genuinely listened under the covers to the John Peel show, my mind being blown by punk - I can vividly remember hearing Stiff Little Fingers 'Suspect Device' for the first time in my bed. Years later I first heard jungle on a summers day in Brockwell Park (Brixton), lying on the grass and twiddling the dial.

Today all kinds of music are more easily accessible than ever, but there are also mechanisms to keep the unexpected at bay, like lastfm and Itunes Genius- 'if you like this here some more of the same'. Most radio stations, from Kiss to Xfm, are programmed on the same basis of giving their 'core demographic' what they expect to hear. But on the edges of the dial there are still surprizes to be found.

Pseudo flashmob at Liverpool Street Station

Earlier this week there was an apparent flashmob at Liverpool Street - several hundred people dancing in the railway station. But it wasn't a unlicensed gathering for the pleasure of dancing in public - it was in fact arranged by mobile phone company T-mobile to film an advert.

I must admit I tend to see flashmobs as a kind of free party-lite version of Reclaim the Streets. There's something rather apologetic about turning up somewhere, having a quick bop in near silence and then disappearing after half an hour. On the day in 1996 when Reclaim the Streets met up at Liverpool Street, thousands of us closed down the M41 Motorway for the afternoon, with big sound systems. We certainly didn't get a positive write up in the Daily Mail.

Still I guess the flashmob still offers the transgressive thrill of temporarily transforming a transport hub or a shopping centre into a party zone in the company of strangers. Liverpool Street station has seen some genuine flashmobs. There was last year's Tube Party as well as the event when hundreds of people wore Rick Astley masks and sung Never Gonna Give You Up (1980s pop hit - probably unknown to anybody reading this outside of the UK). In October 2006, there was a Mobile Clubbing flashmob, with a crowd dancing to their ipods.

But a choreographed telephone advert is a fake copy of something that has already been diluted.

There was a genuine flashmob today though at Heathrow airport, protesting against plans for a third runway. It doesn't seem to have involved much dancing, other than a large conga dance procession.

Astoria closes

I've mentioned before that the Astoria in London was threatened with closure, but now it has actually happened. This week's Demolition Ball was the final gig. Earlier in the week 'Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records, said the Astoria, which opened as a cinema in 1927 and became a concert venue in 1976, had "a lot of soul and character". He added: "In Paris or Mexico places like this don't get knocked down, they get revamped. It's criminal they're knocking down these iconic buildings." For years it hosted the G.A.Y. club - with its guest appearances from Kylie Minogue and other gay pop faves, as well as gigs by the likes of Nirvana, Belle & Sebastian, Augustus Pablo (first London gig), Madonna, Blur and Richey Edwards in his final appearance with the Manic Street Preachers in 1994. It was also a ballroom during and after the Second World War.

The 2000-capacity Astoria is being bulldozed as part of a railway scheme, along with two neighbouring spaces which will also disappear - the 1000-capacity Astoria2 club (formerly LA2) and the Metro , a cellar club where mod/soul/indie night Blow Up has been running since 1993.

Lots more Astoria memories here

Benjamin Péret: songs of the eternal rebels

Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) was active in the Surrealist movement from its formation until his death. Among other things he edited at one stage the journal 'La Révolution surréaliste'.

His most substantial prose work is the surrealist novel 'Mort aux Vaches et au champ d'honneur' - literally 'Death to the Cows and to the Field of Honour' but sometimes translated as Death to the Pigs (since Vaches was used as slang for cops).

To give one example of its striking imagery, it features a section where the sobs of cinema goers form a sea of tears that floods the world:

'Suddenly the sun yawned like a dog waking up, and breath reeking of garlic polluted the atmosphere. A kazoo came and fell in to the heap of barbed wire the broom-seller was tangled in. He grabbed it and blew into it. A long whine and several tears emerged, which burst and expelled lumps of foam all around, which floated on the sea of tears. Delighted, the broom­seller continued to blow into the kazoo, continuing to to produce teary fireworks which burst into foam and settled all about him... When the sea of tears was covered over with a thick rug of foam, circumstances changed rapidly for the broom-seller, who had the unfortunate notion of lying down on it. Barely had he stretched out when the kazoo's whimpering became extraordinarily loud. They were no longer whimpers but veritable roars which destroyed his eardrums and slowly dug a tunnel through his head'

Like other Surrealists, Péret used automatic writing as a technique to discover the marvelous in everyday life: 'The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars, occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty'.

His experiences in the French army in the First World War made him a pronounced anti-militarist, as well as being vehemently anti-clerical - Mortes Aux Vaches includes images of 'A general trampled by reindeer' and dogs sniffing dead priests. The photograph here was originally published in La Révolution surréaliste (1926) with the caption 'Our colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest'.

Péret was one of the first of the Surrealists to break with Stalinism. In the early 1930s, living in Brazil (with his wife, the singer Elsie Houston) he joined the trotskyist Communist League. In the Spanish Civil War, he worked first with the independent socialist POUM and then an anarchist militia fighting on the Aragon front. Later he was part of a group called the Union Ouvriere Internationale which broke with the trotskyist movement over the latter's defence of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers state (see this biography of Ngo Van Xuhat for more about this)

In a 1949 poem, A Lifetime, Péret looked back on his long association with Andre Breton and wrote of:

'the songs in raised fists of the eternal rebels thirsting for ever new wind
for whom freedom lives as an avalanche ravaging the vipers' nests of heaven and earth
the ones who shout their lungs out as they bury Pompeiis
Drop everything'.

Main source: Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs and Other Writings, translated by Rachel Stella and others (London: Atlas Press, 1988). The best source online is L'Association des amis de Benjamin Péret (in French)

What is it?

It was my birthday recently. Some friends who know my penchant for small stringed instruments - I play mandolin and ukulele and also have a baglama - brought me back this instrument from Morocco:

It's shaped like a camel-skin covered frying pan, with a tubular neck. It has three strings and makes a bass sound with a satisfying rattle. Can anyone tell me any more about it - what it is, how it's played, what kind of music it's associated with? I've come across a mention of a North African instument called a guenbri which kind of fits this description. I know there's a few musicologists reading this blog - can you help?

Woofah Issue Three

Woofah issue three has been out for a month now, but it's taken me a while to get round to reviewing it. If you haven’t seen previous issues, it’s a lovingly produced glossy A5 zine, aiming to cover reggae, grime and dubstep. As well as taking seriously musics that are under-represented in print (in my view), the contributors also have a strong sense of the way music emerges from connections between people in specific places and scenes, from their life journeys through these times and spaces, and from the sonic dialogue that is opened up when sounds created in a particular zone are transplanted somewhere else.

In the latter respect, I was fascinated to read the interview with The Bomb Squad (legendary producers of Public Enemy, among others). In the latest twist in the Black Atlantic dialogue, these African Americans have been seriously checking out dubstep made by people in England many of whom in turn would have grown under the influence of their groundbreaking hip hip productions. It’s all about the bass – ‘It’s dark, it’s heavy. At the same time its rebellious’ (Hank Shocklee).

Elsewhere an article on the history of UK Dub follows a route from Jah Shaka’s Dub Club at the Rocket on London’s Holloway Road through to Aba Shanti’s University of Dub at Brixton Recreation Centre, while Soulja of FWD recalls London and Essex hardcore and garage nights at places like Telepathy in Stratford, the Berwick Manor Club and Grays (Grays Inn Road) on her journey through to becoming dubstep promoter and working with Rinse FM – nearly 14 years on air as a London pirate despite crackdowns including an ASBO that banned one of the people involved from going above the 3rd floor of any building!

You can get it here. and you really should.

The Light Behind the Curtains

The break of dawn is not always the end of the party, but it is usually the beginning of the end. If nothing else, the first rays of daylight are a warning that the spell is breaking and that the special quality of night as a period outside of the normal rules of daytime (work, school etc.) is fleeting. In the 1920s, Herman Hesse described a moment at a party when 'a feeling that it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us symptoms of the weariness to come'. For him this was a signal for a last joyful burst of energy 'we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more'.

A more doleful image of a party's end occurs in great Sicilian novel The Leapoard by Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958):

'The ball went on for a long time still, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears. The ladies' faces were livid, their dresses crushed, their breaths heavy. "Maria! How tired I am! Maria! How sleepy!" Above their disordered cravats the faces of the men were yellow and lined, their mouths stained with bitter saliva. Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it were disposed a row of twenty vast vats; by that time nearly all were brimful, some spilling over. Sensing that the dance was nearing its end, the sleepy servants were no longer changing the candles in chandeliers, and the short stubs diffused a different, smoky, ill-omened light. In the empty supper room were only dirty plates, glasses with dregs of wine which the servants, glancing around, would hurriedly drain; through the cracks in the shutters filtered a plebeian light of dawn. The party was crumbling away…'

This pessimistic perspective is in keeping with the theme of the novel. Its main character, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is dying and reflecting melancholically on the fading away not only of his own life but of a way of life as the Sicilian aristocracy decays in the face of Italian unification - the party is over in every respect. For him 'The crowd of dancers... seem unreal, made of the raw material of lapsed memories, more labile even than that of disturbing dreams'. A young couple dancing may be 'sweet and touching' but they too are mortal and doomed: 'his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail-coat, the pink of her interweaving dress, looked like some unusual jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script'.

Still the end of the night doesn't have to signal despair. In Camera Obscura's great party song Let Me Go Home (a favourite floorfiller at How Does it Feel?), 'Daylight appears through the curtains and nobody cares, Supremes in our dreams, Do we quit bein' obscene on the stairs?'. Anyway, sometimes the end of the party holds out the promise of something more: 'Well the room goes boom to the sound of temptations and more, Twisting and turning that girl's looking good on the floor, Well the four walls they collide, Until the blue-eyed girl decides to let me go home'.

Image: from Visconti's 1963 film of The Leopard

Songs about Dancing (5): Sophisticated Boom Boom

I was walkin' down the street,

And it was gettin' mighty late.

Well, the truth of the matter is,

This poor girl had been abandoned by her date.

When, from out of nowhere,

Came this music loud and clear.

Let me see, from over there?

(No, from over there.)

Over there? (Yeah.)

Well, I open up the door,

And much to my surprise,

The girls were wearin' formals,

And the boys were wearin' ties.

And I feel that I should mention,

That the band was at attention.

They just stood there, oh, so neat,

While they played their swingin' beat.

So I grabbed this little boy,

Who came struttin' 'cross the room,

And I say, "What's that?" And he say,

Sophisticated boom, boom.

It's been long overdue, Sophisticated boom, boom.

We been need'in' somethin' new, Sophisticated boom, boom.

Now stand up straight and tall, Like your back's against the wall.

Take two steps forward (Boom, boom.) (Boom-boom, boom-boom)

And shake your hips. (Boom, boom)...

Sophisticated Boom Boom by The Shangri-Las was originally a b-side to Long Live Our Love in 1966. It was written by George "Shadow" Morton. The song title was also used as the name for a cool Scottish girl band in the early 1980s and for Dead or Alive's first album in 1984. The Shangri-Las were from Queens (NYC) - perhaps the song describes going through a time tunnel in 1966 and coming across a Vampire Weekend gig in Brooklyn in 2007.

Queer Albert Hall

'Queer urban culture was the site of diverse intersecting modes of queerness and "normality," coalescing around their desires for homosex, sociability, and intimacy. These antagonisms crystallized in two prominent annual events: the Chelsea Arts Ball and Lady Malcolm's Servants' Ball -both held at the Royal Albert Hall.

1926 Chelsea Arts Ball (from Getty Images)

The former, in particular, was a centerpiece in the metropolitan social calendar, a New Year's Eve costume ball that attracted massive media attention and crowds of up to 7,000 socialites, artists, and ordinary Londoners in elaborate fancy dress. These "true pageants" were, observed Kenneth Hare in 1926, notable for their "variety, inventiveness, vivacity and colour." For many men, becoming part of this carnival gener­ated a palpable sense of release. Hundreds of working-class queans flocked to both balls, discarding the masks they wore in everyday life, wearing drag, dressing outrageously, and socializing unashamedly while never appearing to be anything out of the ordinary. In so doing, they were further protected by the Albert Hall's unique legal status: it was outside the Met's operational sphere. For once, temporarily and locally, men could fully escape police sur­veillance.

A 50-feet high mermaid designed by Ronald Searle for the 1954 Chelsea Arts Ball
(from Perpetua - Ronald Searle tribute blog)

The results were spectacular. In 1934, one observer described "groups of men dressed in coloured silk blouses and tight-hipped trousers ... lips ... rouged and faces painted. By their attitude and general behaviour they were obviously male prostitutes."...

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

From the early 1930s the organizers of both events were increasingly exercised by these "disgraceful scenes," and a nagging sense that men's behavior was somehow out of control. In 1936, Lady Malcolm herself wrote cryptically - apparently in some desperation-to the Times: 'Each year I notice at the ball a growing number of people, who, to be frank, are not of the class for whom the ball is designed. It is what it is called- a servants' ball, and I am jealous that it shall go on deserving that name."Both balls employed private stewards to maintain "order" and exclude "undesirables." From 1933, having failed to secure a police presence, Malcolm employed two ex-CID officers to remove any identifiable "sexual perverts." From 1935 tickets were sold with the proviso that "NO MAN IMPERSONATING A WOMAN AND NO PERSON UNSUITABLY ATTIRED WILL BE ADMITTED". On entry, men's costumes had to be approved by a "Board of Scrutineers." Whatever they tried, however, the organizers could neither keep the "Degenerate Boys" out nor adequately contain their visibility; indeed, they often struggled even to identify them amidst the fancy dressed crowds. In 1938, an observer thus described the "extraordinary number of undesirable men at this Ball who were unmis­takably of the Homo-Sexual and male prostitute types." Well into the 1950s, the balls remained, in Stephen's words, "a great Mecca for the gay world."

Working-class men reappropriated two high-profile public events, creat­ing a space at the center of metropolitan culture in which they could be together and socialize free of the constraints that braced everyday queer lives.'

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

Quote: Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 - Matt Houlbrook (University of Chicago Press, 2005) - I couldn't find any specifically drag photos, but these images certainly show that this was some party.

George Brecht

George Brecht (1926-2008), Fluxus artist, died last month.

His many sound pieces included 'Drip Music' (1959): 'For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel' and 'Comb Music' (1959): 'For a single or multiple performance. A comb is held by its spine in one hand, either free or resting on an object. The thumb or a finger on the other hand is held with its tip against the end prong of a comb, with the edge of the nail overlapping the end of a prong. The finger is slowly and uniformly moved so that the prong is inevitably released, and the nail engages the next prong. This action is repeated until each prong has been used'.



Photo is of him performing 'Solo for Violin' (1964) at 359 Canal Street, New York City during Flux Fest at Fluxhall - a piece for which the score reads simply 'polishing'.

More Soho Nights: Hand Jive

More on Soho Nights from today's Guardian:

'... in 1956, I heard about this new dance craze called hand-jiving. So I made a number of visits to a coffee bar called The Cat's Whiskers in Soho. Cliff Richard used to appear there. I remember the place was crowded with young kids when I arrived. It was pretty late, but not after midnight. In those days, midnight was the witching hour; things closed up after that. I did not speak to anyone, but I do remember the atmosphere was very jolly. Wholesome would be a good word. And the reason they were jiving with their hands was just because there was precious little room to do it with their feet. Everyone was doing it, which was quite a bizarre sight.
The craze just fascinated me. It seemed like a strange novelty, but it really caught on. There were quite a few variations they could do, like one called the mashed potato... What's more, hand-jiving was an activity that everyone shared and had a go at in their own particular style. Not being a great jive artist myself, it was one of the things I could do, and I used to join in. .

Ken Russell's work features in Soho Nights, at the Photographers' Gallery, London W1 (0845 262 1618), until 8 February.