Classic party scenes (1): Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) is a kind of even-more druggy The Monkees with breasts, in which a young female band (The Kelly Affair, later renamed The Carrie Nations) taste the decadent delights of Los Angeles only to be caught up in Manson-murder style slaughter.

It features a couple of classic party scenes, set at the mansion of Ronnie Barzall, a Phil Spector-like music manager. People dance energetically to a show by psychedelic band the Strawberry Alarm Clock . It's all gyrating hips, hands in the air, a smattering of semi-naked dancers amongst the swingers and groovy people, sex and drugs in beds and swimming pools in adjoining rooms. It's not a hippy crowd as such, more a mixture of freaks and suit-clad jet set. Best of all is the dialogue: "This is my happening and it freaks me out!", "In a scene like this you get a contact-high!" and the ultimate chat up line "you're a groovy boy, I'd like to strap you on some time".

There's also a bit where a woman on a chain says "What I see is beyond your dreaming", a line I immediately recognised as a sample and thanks to Dissensus now know to have been used on Roni Size's Mad Cat from the New Forms album (1997). Lots of trailers and clips from the film here.

Stonewall

In the later 1960s, the Stonewall Inn was one of the few gay bars in New York where the management allowed dancing: there was a jukebox pumping out Motown, but only when the police weren’t looking. If Lily Law or Betty Badge were spotted, a light came on to warn people to stop dancing or touching. Cops often called by checking ID and that everybody had the legally required three pieces of clothing 'appropriate to one’s gender'. In June 1969, the police raided again - Jayne County describes what happened:

Something happened in the summer of 1969 that changed my life, although it wasn't until years later that I recognised it anything terribly important. I was on my way to the Stonewall [Inn] one Friday night in June, and when I got to Sheridan Square there was a bit of a commotion in the street. One of the regulars came rushing over and told me that the police had raided the Stonewall, roughed up a lot of the queens, stuck them behind the bar and done sex searches on them to establish that they were men.

Miss Peaches and Miss Marcia, two of the mouthiest street queens in the Village, were really furious, and they'd run round to the front of the bar, shut the door, piled up trash against it and set fire to it while the cops were still in there. When I arrived there were scorch marks all over the door, and cop cars coming from all directions. Everyone was running around the Village going, 'They're raiding the Stonewall!' People began to gather and it grew and grew.

The queens got very vocal, and some of them started to pick things up and throw them at the police. At one point a police car came down Christopher Street, and five or six queens leapt on it and started jumping up and down on the roof, and the roof just caved in. More and more people arrived and started joining in.

Word was getting around. There were hundreds of people standing around wondering what to do. I was with a group of queens and we started walking up Christopher Street going, 'Gay power! Gay power! Gay power!' We walked all the way to 8th Avenue, and then we looked at each other and said, 'What do we do now?' So we turned around and walked all the way back down Christopher Street, still yelling, 'Gay power!' By the time we got back to the Stonewall there were hundreds more people there. They stopped the traffic. The buses couldn’t get through. People were screaming ‘Gay power!’ at the passengers on the buses. More fires were started.

At one point, we were on the corner of Sheridan Square, and we could see the police lining up along Greenwich Avenue with riot gear and shields and everything, so we all put our arms around each other and started dancing along singing, 'We are the Pixie Girls, we wear our hair in curls, we never play with toys, we'd rather play with boys,' to the tune of 'Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay'. The policemen were laughing. In the end they cordoned the whole area off, and people were rioting there all night.

The riots went on for hours and hours and dispersed really late. The next night everybody just went down there and did it again. The bars were getting raided regularly, and people just got fed up. There was something in the air anyway; riots were happening a lot in America at that time - anti-Vietnam, anti-police, anti-whatever. If you were out and you heard something was happening, you'd say, 'Oh, let's go and be in the demonstration!'

The queens took the lead in the Stonewall Riots. They walked around in semi-drag with teased hair and false eyelashes on and they didn't give a shit what anybody thought about them. What did they have to lose? Absolutely fucking nothing. A lot of people were standing around as the Riots began wondering, '1 wonder if 1 should do this? It's going to be a big step for me, a big statement.' But for the queens it really wasn't. It was just an extension of the lives they were already living on the streets. Nowadays, the Stonewall Riots are regarded as the birth of gay liberation, but for me and the other street queens, it wasn’t such an amazingly important thing; we were already out there.

Source: Jayne County, Man Enough to be a Woman, Serpent’s Tail.

Woofah

Nobody writes letters anymore, so outside of birthdays and Christmas I never receive anything worth opening in the post. But last week was the exception as the first issue of Woofah magazine landed on the doormat. Woofah is a new 'reggae - grime - dubstep' magazine edited by John Eden and Paul Meme, aiming to provide some intelligent coverage of scenes which just don't get enough written about them. Woofah combines high production values (glossy paper!) with some really good content. I particularly liked the interviews with Mark Iration (of Iration Steppas) and MC/thoughtist Lez Henry (author of the excellent What the deejay said).

These interviews made me reflect on how a feature of UK dance musics is the cross-pollination between genres in defiance of the efforts of various style border police to keep them separate, cf. Mark Iration's background in house music and bass'n'bleeps as well as dub. Also, how much of the history of these musics is largely undocumented - so much follows a familiar trajectory of central London and Manchester clubs. How about a history that was able to give credit where its due to places like Lewisham Boys Club (scene of some legendary reggae soundclashes) or the Checkpoint club in Bradford (where Mark Iration played house and bashment for the youth of
Huddersfield, Bradford and Leeds)?

In a time when so much stuff is chucked on the web and skimmed rather than read, Woofah have taken a deliberate step back, arguing that some things have enough value to be worth stopping for a while and paying attenion to. So if you want to read it, you're going to have to get your hands on a copy.

Brick Lane Music Festival

A sunnyish Sunday afternoon in East London last weekend for the Brick Lane Music Festival, with lots of free music across local bars and clubs. On the way we saw Gilbert and George standing on their doorstep, and checked out the magnificent new Rough Trade store. Hundreds of people were sitting outside curry houses in Brick Lane eating their lunch. But the main event for us was Norman Jay at the Big Chill Bar.

He played a Good Times set of wall to wall anthems, from disco (Lamont Dozier - Back to my Roots, Tavares - Heaven Must be Missing an Angel), acid jazz (Young Disciples - Apparently Nothing), Salsoul (Loleatta Holloway - Runaway), Ska (Specials - Too Much Too Young) and the odd rave classic (Shut Up and Dance - I'm raving, I'm raving). The place was packed with people dancing from one end to the other.

Somewhere in an English prison there's an ex-member of the British National Party who planted a bomb in Brick Lane in 1999. He also attacked two of my other hangouts in London: Brixton town centre and Soho, where three people died in the Admiral Duncan - a gay pub in Old Compton Street. His choice of targets -an Asian area, an African-Caribbean area, and a gay area - testified to his vision of a white city purged of racial and sexual difference. No doubt a Jewish area would have been next, if he hadn't been caught. Dancing to Norman Jay was an all ages, straight/gay, multi-racial crowd, in itself a celebration of the real London that some neo-Nazis would love to blast out of existence, but will never succeed in doing.

Madonna, Britney and Hamas

Funny Marina Hyde article in The Guardian today about islamists and pop music.

In Schmoozing with Terrorists, published this week, journalist Aaron Klein conducts interviews with several jihadists, during which he asks their opinions on various celebrities. To summarise: holy warriors seem to have got pretty exercised about that kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears at the 2003 MTV video music awards...

Anyway, Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hamas's military wing, has a strategy for handling the ladies. "At the beginning," he tells Klein, "we will try to convince Madonna and Britney Spears to follow Allah's way." Um ... dude, did you see this year's MTV awards? Britney can't even follow the backing track's way. The complex strands of the Qu'ran might be a stretch at this difficult stage in her journey. But Abdel-Al, a like-minded leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, concurs: "If these two prostitutes keep doing what they are doing, we of course will punish them. I will have the honour - I repeat, I will have the honour - to be the first one to cut off the heads of Madonna and Britney Spears." Can you technically be anything other than the first person to cut off someone's head? Whatever. He goes on to say that women such as Madonna "must be 80 times hit with a belt". I think I already saw that in the Express Yourself video.

Dance before the police come

USA, Harrisburg: party-goers jailed

The city of Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] violated the rights of the out-of-state residents cited for violating a parks ordinance in connection with last week’s McCormick’s Island Camp-out With the DJs, a civil rights attorney said Tuesday... At least 127 out-of-state people were cited by police for illegal assembly under an ordinance that requires a permit for any gathering of more than 20 people in a city park to listen to music or make speeches. Police said they discovered the party during while searching for Christian Yanez, 27, a city man who drowned trying to swim to the party in the middle of the night. The planned 48-hour party was cut short after Yanez’ body was found in the Susquehanna River around 9 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 2. Later that day, police began stopping partygoers as they came ashore on shuttle boats provided event organizers. After being searched and having their identification checked, state residents were told they would receive a citation in the mail and released. Those from out of state were handcuffed and shackled, then transported to police headquarters, where they were held for up to 12 hours awaiting arraignment by night court Judge Robert Jennings III. Jennings set their fines at $1,051, the maximum allowed under the ordinance, and sent those unable to pay the fine, or that amount as bail, to Dauphin County Prison (Patriot News, 11 September 2007).

Though almost all the revellers were eventually released by Monday, they were ‘strip searched, deloused and put into uniforms’ on arrival at Dauphin County Prison, a notoriously harsh and overcrowded US prison (In the Mix, 9 September 2007)

USA, New York: DJ arrested in gay club bust

The staff at Mr. Black, a gay dance club located on Broadway and Bleecker, spent Labor Day weekend in lockdown... Seventeen Mr. Black employees and patrons were arrested during a 4 a.m. Saturday-morning raid conducted by a small army of police—25 to 40 strong, according to one eyewitness (including a few undercovers in drag)—from the Manhattan South narcotics squad. On the morning of the raid, after police pushed past Connie Girl, who works at the door, they reportedly asked, "Who's the DJ?" When Scissor Sisters DJ Sammy Jo identified himself, he was cuffed. His friend Jean Von Baden, a DJ visiting from Denmark and in town on holiday, was also arrested...

Sonny Shirley, an employee, says in an e-mail: "I asked the officers outside why we are being arrested and was finally told, 'You don't have any rights, shut the fuck up.'" Several employees say they saw the cops high-fiving each other as they were cuffing club patrons and employees. "The officers were giving high fives to each other in the bar while we were standing with our hands up as some of our people were being taken away," says Ladyfag. "It was just insensitive and unnecessary." Roze Ibraheem, the head of Mr. Black's security, says that police at the station referred to transgendered doorgirl Connie Girl as "it" and "that" and that "other derogatory anti-gay statements were made." Ibraheem says that at the club, police told the crowd of about 115 people: "Sorry, homos, you're gonna have to find somewhere else to go hang out," and that one employee was referred to as a "fairy" in passing.

During booking, many of the employees were strip-searched and made to do the "cough and squat"... Mr. Black employees don't deny that drugs can get inside the club; but they do deny that they aid or abet it, and they say they certainly don't sell it. "Bad things can happen anywhere. We're a nightclub; we're not having high tea. There are people who do drugs and get drunk," says Ladyfag. "But this was like we were criminals. You just got the feeling like this is what it must have been like: We're gay and we're being attacked." (Village Voice, 11 September 2007).

England, Great Yarmouth: police station clash

The conflict between police and party goers escalates in the East of England as the crackdown on free parties continues (see previous posts):

Eight people have been charged after a police station in Norfolk came under siege at the weekend. Five of the eight revellers, who are believed to be predominantly male, have been released on bail pending further enquiries while the other two are still at Great Yarmouth police station, where the event took place.They are all due to appear at the town's magistrates' court on September 6. More than 100 people hurled beer cans, bottles, bricks and blocks of wood at officers and tried to storm Great Yarmouth police station in the early hours of Sunday morning. The angry confrontations were sparked after sound equipment destined for a rave on the town's Harfrey's industrial estate was seized. So far 44 of the ravers' cars have been seized for evidence and nearly 20 people have been arrested (Norwich Evening News, 20 August 2007)

Police last night warned that illegal raves will not be tolerated during the final bank holiday of the summer. Norfolk and Suffolk police chiefs issued a joint statement in a bid to prevent a repeat of Sunday's bloody confrontation, when ravers clashed with riot officers on an industrial estate in the town... At the height of last week's violence, more than 100 officers responded in riot gear and used CS spray to force out some 300 revellers who had barricaded themselves in a factory yard at Harfrey's industrial estate after the rave had been disrupted (EDP, 24 August 2007).

Goth girl murdered

Thanks to the as usual spot-on Ian Bone for this reminder that in modern Britain people still get beaten up, and sometimes killed, for wearing different clothes or liking different music.

Sophie Lancaster, aged 20, was murdered in Lancaster for the crime of being a 'goth'. Her boyfriend is seriously injured.

Club Louise and Sombrero's - London 1976/77

One facet of early punk life in London (1976-77) was that there were no punk clubs, with the gap filled for some by lesbian and gay clubs - probably the only place where the first punks could go without being hassled. Most famous was Club Louise in Soho, where the teenage style terrorists of the so-called Bromley Contingent hung out - including Siouxise Sioux - as well as members of The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Slits. The place is described in Bertie Marshall's entertaining and acerbic memoir of the period Berlin Bromley (2006):

S.S. [Siouxsie Sioux] mentioned this exclusive little club in Soho that you had to be a member to get in and was populated by les­bians and the odd male lesbian watcher and a couple of well-known actors. We all went, led by S.S. through the streets of Soho to 61 Poland Street to a red painted door with gold plates. S.S. rang the bell and through a little peephole a voice said in lisping tones, "Are you members!" What, I wonder, did we look like through that little window; some night­mare WaIt Disney might have had! We got in. Sitting at a low desk in the entrance way was a very old lady with a pile of grey hair atop her head and long grey dress and grey fur coar- grey lady? Bits of diamonds here and there, she looked a thousand-years-old. "Ah, you must all become members, my dears," her accent was French. Three pounds bought us a little red and white member­ship card.

Michael the doorman was an American fag and Madame Louise's toy-boy. This was her club. We were all under twenty-one and looked it, but somehow they didn't care, we must have passed some test. Perhaps Louise wanted to attract a younger clientele? The small foyer led into a bar room, a large mirror ran along the back wall, very dim lighting so you could hardly see your reflection, long black leatherette sofa seating, small tables with red cloths on them, black chairs, red carpets.

It was empty except for a waiter we named 'Ballerina John', an Irish queen with really awful acne and long red hair that he kept flicking over one eye. John had been thrown out of dance school because of some sexual indis­cretion in the toilets. Ballerina John came over and took our orders-five vodka and oranges. And because of the licensing laws, it was required that we were served food-food was a few slices of anaemic-looking Spam and shrivelled gherkins on a paper plate.

S.S. had found this place on one of her jaunts with pre­tend-girlfriend Myra. Most of us kept looking at ourselves in the gloriously long and flattering mirrors. From our table we could see a spiral staircase going down. "I love these mirrors," S.S. purred. "What's down there?" I asked. "A dance floor," S.S. said, retouching her nose with her powder puff…

What did I wear to Louise's the first time? Old men's pyjama jacket with a silver grey tie over black ski pants and black plastic sandals and white fingerless gloves. S.S. in one of her fifties Swanky Modes dresses, (Swanky Modes was a shop in Camden run by two sis­ters, designers of vaguely fetish women's wear). S.S. was wearing a b/w polka dot 'Betty Boo' dress; she would do impersonations of the cartoon character now and then. We'd catch ourselves in the mirror, suck in our cheeks and pout like mad. Sipping our vodkas, we could hear strains of music, Diana Ross and the Supremes ... S.S. decided that we should all trot downstairs... a small dance floor sur­rounded by low tables with red cloths and mirrors around the walls. We sat at a table under the stairs.

There was a smoked-glass DJ booth, where a young dyke played Bowie then Marlene Dietrich ... around the room sat a couple of butch dykes with feathered haircuts and three-piece men's suits. S.S. pulled me onto the dance floor to Bryan Ferry's 'Let's Stick Together'. I followed her in a demented jive, swinging each other around and around, yelping and cooing. We'd suddenly stop mid-jive and turn and look at ourselves in the mirrors, as though fixing and freezing our features forever at sixteen. With the help of make-up and the dark lights of the club we looked perfect and glamor­ous… Louise's closed at 3 a.m., which meant getting the night bus home, a cab was too expensive.

Marshall also mentions that the Roxy in Neal Street, Covent Garden - the first punk club as such - has previously been 'Chagarama's, the trannie bar', and recalls that as punk exploded and Louise's became too popular, some of the scene decamped elsewhere:

We discovered another club. Sombrero's was on Ken­sington High Street and a very GAY Disco, owned by a pair of Spanish queens, it had a raised dance floor of multicoloured Perspex that resembled a boxing ring and had waiter service. A lot of Oriental and Middle Eastern queens went there, it was very faggy indeed, gold chains and sprayed hair, little leather clutch bags, rich older queens and their younger pickings. It was home in the early 1970s to the glam rock scene, Mr and Mrs Bowie.

One time Johnny Rotten was hero of the week down at Sombtero's, he intervened in a knife attack against one of the door staff, stopped the queen getting it in the gut, by kicking the assailant in the nuts! Rudy, a rotund and chirpy Spaniard was the DJ, he played 70s disco. My favourite story that he told, was one night Marianne Faithfull came down and went to his DJ booth on the look-out for free drinks; of course Rudy obliged. She repaid him by singing a drunken version of 'Little Bird'.

Update November 2022 : 

This post has received lots of attention over the years with some great anecdotes from former denizens of the Sombrero in particular recalling some of its fabulous characters (see comments below post). The main club night was called 'Yours or Mine'. It seems that David Bowie and Angie hung out there in early 1970s and it was here that they met  Freddie Burretti and his friend Daniella Parmar. Burretti went on to design some of David Bowie's signature looks while Parmar's short blonde crop haircut was adopted and popularised by Angie Bowie. Jagger, Boy George and Marilyn are mentioned too. To get round restrictive licensing laws the place served food to all customers under the more generous terms of a supper licence - though seemingly nobody in their right mind ate the ham and potato salad on offer.

In 1980s Adam and the Ants recorded the video for their hit single Antmusic there, as Adam recalled: 'we hired my old haunt, the tiny Sombrero club in Kensington, and filmed us 'performing' the song to a crowd who are reluctant at first to dance to it, but eventually get completely into the song and surround us on the under-lit dance floor' (Adam Ant, Stand and Deliver: my autobiography' (2008).

Adam and the Ants on the underlit dancefloor

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.

Iranian parties raided

Police in the Iranian city of Karaj have been busy, busting two parties in a week:

Iranian police arrest partygoers (BBC News, 9 August 2007)

Police in Iran say they have arrested 20 young people at a party in the city of Karaj, north-west of the capital Tehran, on Wednesday night. More than 200 people were arrested a week ago in the same city for attending an illegal rock concert... Police Col Majid Bazmun told the state Irna news agency that police surrounded the building in Karaj where the "decadent gathering" was taking place after acting on a tip-off from a member of the public.

Iran's chief of police, Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghaddam, said that the crackdown of recent months, described officially as the drive to "elevate security in society", would continue as it had proved popular with the public.

Iranian morals police arrest 230 in raid on 'satanist' rave (Guardian 5 August 2007)

'Iran's drive to enforce Islamic morals netted revellers from Britain and Sweden after police swooped on a "satanic" concert organised over the internet. Police arrested 230 people and seized drugs, alcohol and 800 illicit CDs after raiding the event in Karaj, 12 miles west of Tehran. Those arrested included young women in skimpy and "inappropriate" clothing, officers said...

The event included rock and rap performers as well as female singers, who are banned under Iran's Islamic laws. The authorities described the artistes as "satanist" without elaborating. Iran's rulers routinely label much of western-style popular music and culture as decadent. Preparations were kept so secret that revellers were made aware of the venue only hours before the rave.

Last Wednesday's raid occurred during a government-backed "social security" campaign in which police have arrested or cautioned thousands of women whose dress or headscarves have been deemed insufficiently Islamic... Authorities last month doubled the number of officers deployed on morals patrols. Police have been instructed to arrest young men with "western" hairstyles. Those arrested are released only after giving the names of their barbers and making signed commitments to get hair-cuts. They then have to return to the police station to show their new hairstyles'.

Picture of parents of those arrested waiting outside Karaj police station from For a democratic secular Iran

East Anglian Crackdown

Police in East Anglia seem to be continuing with their crackdown on free parties. A couple of weeks ago, 70 baton-wielding riot cops from Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex were sent to stop a party in King's Forest, Ingham (near Bury St Edmunds). 5 people were arrested as lines of police with riot shields closed in from both sides of the crowd.

An 18-year-old told the East Anglian Daily Times, (17 July 2007): “The rave was totally peaceful. We deliberately chose a location which was out of the way and far away from anyone. If the riot police had left us to it, everything would have been fine. Many people were terrified and left with bruises while I know one person who suffered a suspected broken hand as he protected his girlfriend. We just want to go to a party with no fear of violence in a peaceful setting where you can sit in the woods with friends and listen to your favourite music. This won't deter people, in fact it will bring people closer together and make our beliefs even stronger.”

The Suffolk Evening Star (17 July 2007) also quoted a party goer: “A friend of mine was assaulted as he was trying to run away from police. He has a suspected broken hand but when he asked for the officer's number he just laughed at him and said '118 118'. Other officers covered their number badges up so you couldn't see them. They carried out several charges and started beating people up with batons until we were forced to leave".

Steppenwolf

Herman Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, first published in 1928, is an outsider novel whose protagonist, disgusted by German militarism and bourgeois complacency, retreats into self-loathing and isolation like a lone wolf of the Steppes. That is until a series of encounters lead him into a world of bisexual flirtation, sex, drugs, jazz, dancing, 'Anarchist Evening Entertainment' and ultimately a fantasy Magic Theatre where he must come to terms with the illusion of the self.

The book has had an influence on music- its title gave a name to the rock band who recorded 'Born to be Wild', while one of its phrases, 'For Madmen Only', was used by proto-goth band UK Decay for the name of their first album.

For me though the most interesting aspect is its description of dancing. I used to wonder if that euphoric sense of dance as festival was a product of late 20th century electronic music and MDMA, but Hesse describes similar sensations in the 192os in his imagined Fancy Dress Ball where they danced the foxtrot to unamplified sound. Check this out:

'Every part of the great building was given over to the festivities. There was dancing in every room and in the basement as well. Corridors and stairs were filled to overflowing with masks and dancing and music and laughter and tumult… the whole building, reverberating everywhere with the sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by degrees a wild dream of paradise… the intoxica­tion of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy... I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy­ tale. I myself breathed the sweet intoxication of a com­mon dream and of music and rhythm and wine and carnal lust…I was myself no longer. My personality was dissolved in the intoxica­tion of the festivity like salt in water. I danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and their's mine.

I had lost the sense of time, and I don't know how many hours or moments the intoxication of happiness lasted…There were no thoughts left. I was lost in the maze and whirl of the dance. Scents and tones and sighs and words stirred me. I was greeted and kindled by strange eyes, encircled by strange faces, borne hither and thither in time to the music as though by a wave... And now 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. Blindly, with bursts of laughter, we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more, into the music, and the light began to flood the room. Our feet moved in time to the music as though we were possessed, every couple touching, and once more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us'.

Fairground Music

No festival seems to be complete without a fairground and in the past week I've been to a couple in London. On Sunday I went to the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park, enjoying the Brixton sun, cider, and Sean Rowley broadcasting his Guilty Pleasures kitschfest show with the help of the Bikini Beach Band (who play surf versions of chart hits - this time including Amy Winehouse's Rehab and 'I bet that you look good on the dancefloor'). The weekend before was The Rise festival in Finsbury Park ('London United Against Racism'), where we saw Saint Etienne before it poured with rain - I blame the band for playing their song 'Lightning Strikes Twice'.

In both parks there were big fun fairs, and as I was spinning upside down at high speed listening to Bob Sinclair's Feel the Love Generation at high volume I pondered the nature of fairground music to distract myself from feeling sick. In both fairs there was a preponderance of chart house, pumping four to the floor beats and melodies simple enough to pick out above the sound of screams and machines. Mid-1990s floor fillers seemed popular - I heard Heller and Farley's Ultra Flava and I Love You Baby in Brockwell Park. Even more anachronistically, The Drifters were being played on one ride. The sound of the old Fair Organ were nowhere to be heard, though you do still come across them occasionally at retro Steam Fairs. I wonder how fair music gets selected - is it just a matter of one of the operators having a Best of Ibiza '95 cd to hand or is there more sophisticated programming at work? Does the music get changed according to the audience (e.g. at an indie or rock festival would the soundtrack change)?. Does music sound different upside down? Further centrifugal investigations are required.

Back to the Classics (1): Gilgamesh

Just how fundamental is musicking and dancing to human experience? To be sure, 'music', 'dance' and indeed 'human' have meant different things to people in different times and places, but it is also clear there are continuities across time and space. As one of my favourite DJs might say, let's get back to the classics and have a look.

First up, there's Gilgamesh, arguably the oldest surviving substantial work of literature. Various tellings of this Babylonian epic tale have been found written on stone tablets some four thousand years ago. The story tells of a king who goes on various monster-slaying, goddess-defying adventures in search of the secret of eternal life only to discover the futility of his quest in the face of human mortality.

In this tale, music and dancing are presented as being very much part of the good life. Making offerings to deities and heroes, Gilgamesh presents ‘A flute of carnelian… for Dumuzi, the shepherd beloved of Ishtar'. Another character is tempted into Gilgamesh's city with the promise that 'Every Day in Uruk there is a festival, The drums there rap out the beat, And there are harlots, most comely of figure, Graced with charm and full of delights'.

The most remarkable section for me is where Gilgamesh encounters Shiduri, a goddess who keeps a tavern at the edge of the world. She urges him to abandon his quest and focus instead on human pleasures:

'But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full, enjoy yourself always by day and by night! Make merry each day, Dance and play day and night! Let your clothes be clean, Let your head be washed, may you bathe in water! Gaze on the child who holds your hand, Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!'.

This is timeless advice and arguably still holds true for those fighting today in the land where this story was first written (present day Iraq), as well as for the rest of us.

Quotes from the 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' translated by Andrew George (Allen Lane, 1999)

July global round up

This month, rave shut down in England, religious police raid club in Malaysia, and Iceland's first Reclaim the Streets party.

Suffolk, England: Five arrested as police shut down rave ( Evening Star, 16 July 2007)
'Suffolk police today put ravegoers on notice that illegal parties would be shut down this summer.The warning came after scores of officers from across East Anglia were drafted in to break up a rave in a Suffolk forest. More than 70 officers were involved in the operation to stop the party at Ingham, near Bury St Edmunds, and five people were arrested on suspicion of organising the event. Police chiefs leading three units of officers - one each from Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk - said there had been few problems and the rave of up to 1,000 revellers had been stopped relatively peacefully thanks to the number of officers brought in.

The major operation, in which officers also seized sound equipment, follows two similar raves in recent months - one at Parham Airfield and the other at Euston, near Thetford - which both erupted in violence towards the police. Supt Alan Caton stressed illegal raves on privately owned land would not be tolerated in Suffolk. He said: “This is the start of summer and our message is clear. We have a duty to ensure where possible that rural places are not subjected to the noise and disruption that these parties cause. Where evidence is found to identify the people responsible we will do everything we can to bring them to justice.”

A police spokeswoman said officers were called to the rave on Forestry Commission land in the early hours of yesterday: “Our aim was to take swift action to disperse revellers, arrest organisers, seize equipment, minimise damage to land and prevent disturbance to local people.” The illegal party was still going on at lunchtime and ravers leaving the forest clearing insisted they were doing no harm. One, from near Newmarket, said: “It's not upsetting anyone - there are no houses around here. It's just young people having good time"... Tim Root, who lives in the village, said he only heard the rave as he walked his dog and could see nothing wrong as long as the parties were kept out of the way and the revellers left no damage or litter behind.

Malaysia: Nightclub Singer Facing Prosecution (The Star, 16 July 2007)

'The Perak Religious Department (JAIP) will decide on Aug 6 whether to charge nightclub singer Siti Noor Idayu Abd Moin for dressing sexily and “encouraging vice” by performing at a club. JAIP director Datuk Jamry Sury said he would wait for a recommendation from his enforcement personnel after they meet the 22-year-old at the department here on that day. On July 3, the department detained Siti Noor Idayu and several others during a raid at a nightclub in Tambun here.

In a move that drew criticism from non-government organisations, Siti Noor Idayu was ordered to explain why she had “exposed her body” and “encouraged immoral activities” by working at the outlet. However, Siti Noor Idayu had said she was not even drinking and wore a white sleeveless top and long pants when JAIP officers raided the nightclub' (picture of singer in offending outfit).

Iceland: Reclaim the Streets (Indymedia, 14 July 2007)

'REYKJAVIK, July 14th - Today, Bastille-day, around a hundred people raved all over Reykjavik's ring road in a carnaval against heavy industry. Iceland's first Reclaim the Streets began cheerfully as Saving Iceland ran down Perlan and onto Reykjavik's western ring. A clown army danced to the beats down into the city centre. This Rave Against the Machine was organized by Saving Iceland to "reclaim our public space, space to be free to dance, to be free from dreary industrial car culture and to voice a sound of festival in opposition to the grim industrialisation plans for Iceland," says a Saving Iceland activist.

When the crowd descended Snorrabraut on it's way to Laugavegur, the main shopping street, police blockaded the road and there was a standoff for an hour and a half. When the driver of the sound system tried to exit the vehicle, police attempted to arrest him, violently attacking bystanders. A number of people got injured and four arrested. Police went for people's throats, knocked people face down on the ground, leg-cuffed people and smashed a car window. Activists stayed non-violent. The crowd moved on to the police station down the road, and sympathizers welcomed us with a surprise second sound system'.

Video of party here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NenbTc0cQs4

Brooklyn Bridge Street Party

One night of Fire in New York (Village Voice, July 16 2007) :

'Global terror, the NYPD's increasingly restrictive rules governing public gatherings, and a city economy based on honing New Yorkers into efficiency drones has sucked much of the spontaneity from New York City's street life. So it was a rare act of liberation to watch a crowd of thousands—sans permit—swamp the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday for a renegade street party known as "One Night of Fire."More amazing still, the cops let it happen.

Perhaps the NYPD brass figured there was just no stopping the exuberantly costumed hordes who began converging from both sides of the Brooklyn Bridge at the assigned time of 7:57 pm. Organized via email and listservs, the party came with instructions to "wear white, the more costumed the better. You are the angels that keep this city alive and untamed." People did that and then some, showing up in wings, festooned in sequins and gossamer threads, smothered in white plastic bags, or covered in face paint.

Prodded along by "coaxers" dressed in red and black with flaming cherry motifs, all sorts of drummers, pipers, stilt-walkers, angels, devils, and curious creatures filled both the pedestrian and bike pathways—to the great annoyance of commuting cyclists forced to dismount and wade through what felt like a cross between Mardi Gras, Burning Man, and a Grateful Dead show parking lot.

No one knew where the party was headed, which was half the fun, the point being just to be there and test the bounds of what's possible in this increasingly bounded city. A 9:01, a great whooping went up as a txt msg came through to "follow the cavalry!" That turned out to be a guy in a rubber horse-head pedaling a bike and blaring what sounded like a foghorn. We flooded back into Manhattan and into City Hall Park, where people frolicked in the fountain for several minutes, then on to the Q and R trains to Brooklyn.

It was so packed, it took half an hour just to get on the subway, despite the gyrating exhortations of several half-naked stilt walkers and Carny gals urging people on. For a second, it looked like things might turn ugly when a half dozen cops armed with with assault rifles jumped out of a black SUV on Broadway, accompanied by several police vans. The cops eyed the crowd warily, then just as quickly got back in their SUV. But that was the closest things got to conflict.

Subway cars became moving discos, jammed with marching bands, ravers blaring boomboxes, pole dancers and a guy toting a cooler full of liquor-drenched cherries and other libations. And at Coney Island, police watched as a dozen or so fire twirlers whirled flames on the beach, accompanied by scattered bursts of fireworks. The commanding officer clapped as he ordered the cops to shut down the pyrotechnics. Later these same officers watched as skinny dippers dashed into the waves. They eventually ordered everybody out of the water'.

Pictures by Sarah Ferguson. More reports and pictures at NYC Fashion Geek

Born in the UK

Previous posts have considered the recent 30th anniversary of The Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and the 25th anniversary of The Falklands War. 1977 is marked in a series at 3am magazine, where (ex)punks like Richard North/Cabut and Michelle Brigandage recall The Summer of Hate as it played out from the Kings Road to Dunstable (some interesting personal photos in this series).

In 1977 I was still at school, old enough to be fascinated by punk but not quite old enough to acitvely participate. So I was intrigued to hear Badly Drawn Boy's recent Born in the UK where he remembers the period from the perspective of being born in 1969, with landmarks including punk, the silver jubilee and the Falklands War:

Where were you in Seventy Six, The long hot summer,

You wanna be a rebel, Then turn your hosepipes on,

With two years to wait, For the sound of Jilted John

Virginia Wade was winning our hearts, She made us want to live

Vicious and his brothers, Were trying to set us free,

But much more than this to you and me, This was the Silver Jubilee,

We made something out of nothing, A sense of loathing and belonging

Some of us were gonna be rich, With the Iron Lady,

Lennon's gone already, Let's post the boys to war,

Oh mother, what're you worrying for,

It's somewhere he's not been before

Then you see the Union Jack, And it means nothing,

But somehow you know, That you will find your own way,

It's a small reminder every day, That I was born in the U.K.

The video is very evocative too, maybe less so if you were born in 1979 or 1989

Dancing in the Service of Thought

Soren Kierkegaard has a great line about ‘dancing in the service of thought’. I don’t think he was really talking about dancing, but it got me thinking about dancing and thinking. Reading lots of books about dance, it has struck me how little consideration is given to what is going on in people’s heads when they are dancing. I guess there’s this Cartesian notion that dancing is something done with the body, whereas thought, the work of the mind, is best suited to quiet contemplation. Hostile critics see dancing as mindless, while others enthuse only over the body in motion.

Sometimes it's possible to be lost in music, but in my experience there’s often a lot of thinking going on, particularly if the physical body gets into a semi-automatic groove and there are no distractons like conversation (well usually the music's too loud). Sometimes there are flashes of insight, sometimes a stream of consciousness - ‘I love this tune – I recognise this sample – I remember dancing to this in Ibiza – I loved that crème brulee we used to have in the café in the old town when we couldn’t be bothered to go clubbing – they’re cute – have I get enough money for another round – I must remember this so I can write about it in my blog - I wish life could be like this all the time – I hate my job – what time’s the last bus - I love this tune’. Awareness of the present slipping betweent the past (memory) and the future (desire). Indeed the tension between actuality (concrete, immediate sensation) and potentiality (abstraction, 'what is not' actually present) that constitutes consciousness for Kierkegaard.

What do you think about when you're dancing? Have you ever written a song, solved a problem or made some kind of breakthrough of thought? If you can't remember perhaps you should try to notice next time, though obviously the act of being conscious of consciousness might partially invalidate the thought experiment!

I wanna be a cosmonaut

Next up in our collection of space-themed songs comes this East London punk obscurity from 1978. 'I wanna be a cosmonaut' by Riff Raff (Chiswick Records) includes the lyrics: 'I should be starring, Just like Gagarin, There’s the place for me... I wanna be a star in USSR'.

Other than being the first punk record from Romford, this is probably most notable for being the first outing on vinyl by one Mr Billy Bragg.

Download - Riff Raff - I wanna be a cosmonaut (MP3)