Morality Police in Yemen

'The Egyptian crooner Ehab Tawfiq has bedroom eyes, smouldering good looks and a voice that enchants Arab audiences. Sadly he won't be perfoming any time soon in Yemen, where he has been blocked by a controversial new Saudi-style "religious police" charged with enforcing austere standards of public morality. Tawfiq sings catchily about love and relationships. But a concert he was due to give in Sana'a was postponed and then cancelled last month after a campaign by the country's newly-formed "virtue committee", which distributed posters and leaflets — and, say some, encouraged death threats and intimidation — condemning the handsome Egyptian for promoting "sedition, immorality and nudity".

For many Yemenis, and for women in particular, this was another alarming sign of the growth of Salafi extremism — an unwelcome import from neighbouring Saudi Arabia where the "mutaween" religious police are part of the scenery. "These people scare the hell out of me," complained Nadia al-Sakkaf, the editor of the Yemen Times. "Yemeni youth are frustrated and depressed. There's nothing for them to do. And since when did we need to act against pop singers?"

The first signs appeared a few months ago in the Red Sea port of Hodeida, where young men and women began to be accosted by bearded vigilantes demanding proof that couples were related. A hotel disco and bar were closed down and several Arab women dancers deported. Daoud al-Jeni, a self-styled "virtue activist', described his mission as being to curb "obscenity and prostitution". Anti-vice teams, some armed with sticks, have also been operating in Aden, the former British colony in the south.

In mid-July the Authority for Promoting Virtue and Combating Vice — exactly the same name as used in Saudi Arabia for 80 years — was launched in Sana'a and quickly moved to pressure the authorities to raid and close down two Chinese restaurants that were allegedly being used for "immoral" purposes, including selling alcohol....

Ironically, the virtue committee idea appears to be taking off in Yemen just as the Saudis, angered by some high-profile excesses, try to loosen the stranglehold of their own mutaween, who police the ban on women drivers, on women travelling without a chaperone and whose latest activity is to enforce a prohibition on selling dogs and cats for domestic pets.
Yemen is a highly traditional Muslim country where most men wear tribal robes and carry curved jambiya daggers in their belts. But it has never been comfortable with the brand of dour Salafi/Wahabi fundamentalism promoted by the Saudi religious establishment. "If these vigilantes start approaching couples and asking them for their marriage certificates in Sana'a you will soon see jambiyas flying," warned a middle-class resident of the capital.

Arwa Othman, an author and folklorist who is defiantly bareheaded in a land where most women wear the hijab, is horrified by the virtue campaign and the zealots behind it. "This idea will kill this country," she says. "They've been talking about it for a long time in schools and mosques and in the army. Now they're in alliance with the government. These people appear when there is poverty and hunger and dictatorship. These are the right circumstances for extremists."

From article by Ian Black in The Guardian, 3 September 2008. Read full article here.


Here's a bit of what they object to - Ehab Tawfik's song Allah Allaik Ya Seedi:

Jersey nightclub backs down on body fascism

'A nightclub that barred fat women has backed down after international protests and claims that it was guilty of discrimination. The Havana nightclub in St Helier, Jersey, was accused of barring larger women while letting in men of similar size. Almost 1,000 people have joined an internet-based campaign calling for a boycott of the club and a protest on Friday night. More than 20 women are reported to be preparing to give statements to police claiming that they suffered discrimination.

Police were called to the club on Saturday night to prevent public disorder after Martin Sayers, the club’s manager, and his door staff started turning away larger women. Georgina Mason, 23, one of the women refused entry, told the Jersey Evening Post: “About five or six or us got to Havana at about 11.30pm and the bouncers said we were not allowed in because we were too big.” Miss Mason, a bank worker, said: “I told them not to be ridiculous and asked to speak to the manager. When the manager came out he would not look at me directly but said that they had received many complaints about fat people and he told me, ‘Go and lose some weight before you can come in — fat people are bad for business’.”

Jemma Warner, who saw larger women being turned away, said: “The man himself was far, far away from what we might call male perfection, making the situation somewhat ironic. Boycott the Havana club because this kind of discrimination is way more ugly then any kind of body shape.” Kierra Myles, who was also at the club, said: “Does this mean larger people can’t go out and have a good time? Should they hide away because they might be overweight? As if there is not enough pressure on young girls to be thin and have the — in my opinion, disgusting — size-zero look. Then you have narrow-minded people like that stopping people that are perfectly happy within themselves from going out and having a good time...

...Mr Sayers, who has run the club, which has a capacity of 380, since 1992, defended his actions initially, saying: “We got a lot of people that I’d classify as morbidly obese and we were getting complaints. I am deeply apologetic but business is not good at the minute and I was trying to protect my business.” Last night, however, he said that the ban had been dropped and he appealed for those who had been offended to come back. Mr Sayers, who admitted being overweight himself and on a diet, said: “There was an error of judgment and I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to these people and say they are welcome back to the club. The vast majority of our customers are overweight. There should not be discrimination against people for any reason and if this incident highlights that then I guess something useful has come out of it.” He denied that fat women were less attractive, adding: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”'

Source: Times, 30 July 2008. A successful campaign on the back of a bit of facebook networking. They seem to have taken down their protest facebook group now, to be replaced by a couple of misogynist sites supporting the original ban with statements like 'No One Likes Fat Chicks! So Don't Let Them In'. The kind of thing that makes it easy to believe that Jersey really is full of the spawn of child abusers and nazi collaborators (gross generalisation obviously!).

Milton Keynes Sanctuary Flash Mob

Here's a flashmob with a sense of history - on Saturday 30th August 2008 a couple of hundred people turned up at Ikea in Milton Keynes and danced with whistles and horns for five minutes before dispersing. The reason? The Ikea was built on the site of The Sanctuary: 'The Sanctuary Music Arena was a 3,000 capacity music venue in Denbigh North, Milton Keynes in the UK. It opened its doors in 1992, billed as the first and only designer dance venue in the country.The Sanctuary saw some of the UK's first legal Raves and was pivotal in the development of the Drum and Bass and Hardcore music scenes. The Sanctuary played host to the UK's biggest dance music promoters, including Fantazia, Obsession, Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, Slammin Vinyl and Hardcore Heaven. Now its gone, gone to make way for a new Asda, an Ikea store and the MK Dons football stadium but even though it's been demolished the memories will always stay with the people that raved there' (Source: Facebook Sanctuary Memorial Group).



"It started as a normal day of retail therapy at one of Ikea's flagship British stores - that was until hundreds of clubbers went wild in the aisles as part of a Facebook flash rave. Shoppers in the furniture store in Milton Keynes watched with amazement as the ravers partied in tribute to a now defunct nightclub. The Sanctuary Reunion was held to remember a club bulldozed in 2004 to make way for the store and was organised through a group on social networking website Facebook. Ageing clubbers, including a pregnant woman and families with their children, danced for around five minutes in the textiles department on Saturday afternoon at 3.30pm... jumping up and down, some wearing fluorescent vests and others blowing whistles" (Source: Metro, 2 September 2008)

"2008 Saturday 30th of August...We arrived at the store a little after 2pm. The area was over run with Mk Don supporters so it was hard to tell if people were turning up. There was definatly a police presence that you wouldn't expect so the mood got a bit paranoid. Ikea had put some barriers up at the front so they could separate the in coming and out going customers. We had got in surprisingly quickly so we had an hour to kill in store. The staff presence was massive and to be honest me and my friends were feeling really edgy. Once we had hung around in textiles for 10 mins or so, loads more people started arriving. You could see couples giggling as they pretended to look at rugs and groups of lads coming through shouting "Yeah heres textiles!". By 3.20pm it was blatantly obvious what was going to happen and the police and Ikea staff were all in good spirits. The area was great and as soon as we started grouping together more knew where to go. Just before time, Ikea staff stopped more from coming through... when the horn blew the place went crazy, whistles and ravers galore. It was a shame that more people were taking pictures than dancing but everyone (and their kids) were having a wicked time. 2 minutes seemed to take forever after a few minutes, some hip hip horays and applause the group broke and went to buy their bits and go for a drink. It was a wicked day had by all!" (Source: Facebook Sanctuary Reunion Group)

Women and subcultures

Johan at Birdseed's Tunedown has posted on 'Feminine Men's Peculiar Misogyny', wondering about contemporary 'feminine' men subcultures in Scandinavia and where the women are in these pretty boy scenes. Hmm, not sure - I know very little about these particular 'subcultures' (if such they are), but a point of reference for this discussion might be Pop Feminist's questioning 'Can Women be part of counterculture?' Her basic point is that while men can play around with being outsiders (for a while), women have this status imposed on them whether or not they join any counter/subculture:

"Youth rebellion is the domain of young men, who tend to become progressively less radical as they age and assume the comforts of patriarchy (the power-structure isn’t so bad after all!). Women, on the other hand, lose sexual viability as they age and for those brave enough to confront the fact that the joke was on them, become rebels. This is where we get the stereotype of the “crazy old lady”—a revolutionary if ever there was one.

Let me suggest a basic foundation for counterculture:
Counterculture: Elective marginalization

Women and other disenfranchised groups, on the other hand, constitute a counterpublic:
Counterpublic: Forced marginalization'.

Grooverider Free

Only last night I thought to myself, 'why's every one gone quiet about Grooverider? Shouldn't we be making more fuss about him being in jail?' I started working on a 'free Grooverider' post and lo and behold by my psychic powers of persuasion he has been released today!

For those who don't know, the drum & bass DJ (real name Raymond Bingham) was arrested in Dubai in November 2007 after being caught with 2.16 grams of cannabis at the airport. He was jailed for four years.

Decoder: The Sound of Muzak

Another classic article from the zine vaults, again incredibly not already online. 'Decoder: the sound of muzak' by Tom Vague was first printed in Zig-Zag in Feburary 1985 and then reprinted in his own Vague zine (May 1985). This article had a big impact on me, not so much in terms of the film it describes, but in introducing to me the notion of music as a form of control.

As far as the Concise Oxford Dictionary is concerned it doesn't exist. As far as the majority of people are concerned it doesn't exist. As far as the Muzak Corporation is concerned that's just fine. Muzak Corp is the only company in the world that doesn't advertise it's product to the public. In fact they don't even want it widely known that Muzak is a product. They're quite happy for it to be known as harmless background music.

That's not to say that the people who create and use Muzak don't think highly of it; 'Muzak is more than music. It's an environment,' is the catchphrase used in the Muzak manual. And that's not boastful hard-sell either, that's factual information. 'Muzak is scientifically-engineered sound,' continues the manual, 'The sound of Muzak is subtle and musical. But it is not music which is meant to entertain. Because music is art. But Muzak is science. So it does not require a conscious listening effort. Yet it has an enormous effect on those who hear it ... Muzak is programmed to motivate office and industrial workers, relax restaurant patrons and medical patients, make shopping more pleasant and less hurried ... The entire process is known as Muzak Stimulus Progression ... It provides an overall feeling of forward movement, can mitigate stress and produce beneficial psychological changes.'

However, not everyone is in a state of stimulated, blissful ignorance of Muzak's supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Beneficial to whom and who decides what is beneficial, you may well ask. Hamburg journalist/director, Klaus Maeck did so, at great length. Eventually turning his obsession with Muzak and the harm it does into the new German underground movie, 'Decoder’.

Klaus used to run Hamburg's 'Rip-Off' Records and as a journalist covered the likes of Einsturzende Neubauten, Abwarts, Xmal Deutschland, Malaria and Psychic TV. He had previously documented the likes of the aforementioned on Super-8 and gained some recognition as a Punk film maker, because in his words, "Nobody else was doing it in Hamburg." After the collapse of 'Rip-Off' and disillusionment with journalism, Klaus began to concentrate on his idea of making a film about Muzak. Over a couple of years he researched the phenomena and compiled the 'Decoder Handbook'; to support the film with information about Muzak and related subjects; like Cut-ups, Infra-sound, Dream machines, cassette-piracy and frogs. (Still don't see how that last one fits in.)

His research entailed visiting Muzak control offices - In every main city in Germany - Hamburg, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Munich - there is one office for this purpose - And he got to interview one of the directors, but found himself responding in a peculiar way; "I sat there talking with him and I really felt something. When I arrived there I wanted to ask him some quite provocative questions. After one hour I was really calm and talking with him very gently. He explained to me, really he told me and I really believed him, that Muzak is good in hospitals. Instead of having valium, you hear some Muzak and you're really calm before an operation.

"I think that's the good thing about Muzak." Klaus concedes, "To be used in that way instead of chemicals, pills and so on. But that's the only good thing about it. You can manipulate the brain with it. Mainly it’s negative, but it could have some good effects. I still can't believe, this director told me they use the same Muzak in hospitals, supermarkets, fast­food chains, offices, factories. I cannot believe that, because in supermarkets its purpose is to make you comfortable to buy more. In offices it's to make the working atmosphere more relaxed to increase efficiency. But he told me it's the same. And there is only one tape reel running in this office, going by telephone cable to all the different places. You don't get anything on tape or record. It's just through cable.

"It's built up on the human bio-rhythm, on the normal daily rhythm people have; like you start work at 8, so around 11 they make the Muzak more exciting because you're thinking about lunchbreak. Then in the afternoon it’s calm because you've just had a break. Then at 3 they make the Muzak more exciting again. The tape runs and runs all day, endless. You can't decide for yourself which Muzak you want to hear. They decide in the office. Even if you turn it off you're still in that rhythm. I think it's pretty dangerous. You never know when Muzak is on the radio - many major groups arrange their music using Muzak techniques. You never can be sure."

And so using the basic theme of Muzak; the damage it can cause, how to deal with it and ultimately decode it, scriptwriting began for 'Decoder’. At this stage Klaus brought in Muscha, a young film maker from Düsseldorf, who had the experience necessary to direct the proposed one and a half hour film. And together with Volker Schaefer and Trini Trimpop, they set about building a plot around three central characters: The main protagonist, a young noise-freak, played by Mufti of Neubauten/Abwarts fame, sets out to decode the hidden information of Muzak. But Mufti's quest doesn't interest his girlfriend, who works in a sleazy sex show on Hamburg's Reeperbahn. She's played by another familiar figure from the German underground, Christiane F, who in the film is obsessed with frogs. In real life of course it’s something else.

As Mufti and Christiane's relationship breaks down, a sub­ plot develops around Jager, the Muzak Corporation hitman, who's being blackmailed back to work to bring an end to Mufti’s decoding. During Jager's frequent social jaunts down the Reeperbahn, he begins to show more interest in Christiane than Mufti does. But he doesn't discover the connection until the end, when he decides, too late, to finish the job in his own interest.

The Jager role is played by the only pro-actor in 'Decoder', Bill Rice, the star of another nocturnal delight 'Subway Riders', and a well known face on the New York theatre scene. In fact his desperately appealing, sad face was why he got the part. "He's not famous but he had such a good face we just had to have him," enthuses Klaus.

Finally the Austrian-American director of photography, Johanna Heer was recruited to the team, and shooting began in sterile computer centres, even more sterile hamburger joints and, as a contrast, glaringly Iit peep-shows and underground sound-labs. At times I found it a bit hard to follow the sub-titles and I was watching it in the morning, the wrong time of day to watch it according to Klaus, but I thought the story did well to unravel itself from the various ongoing sub-plots and themes. And the use of colour and tone carries the film through; each central character is Iit in different fluorescent shades between neon and argon, which often explode into 'architectures of fire’.

However the soundtrack (available on 'Some Bizarre') is probably its most endearing feature. Regular Zig-Zag readers may already be familiar with 'Decoder' because of Dave Ball's work on it, which he said something about in the March issue. Various Psychic Tellys, Collapsing New Buildings and Some Bizarros did their bit to add to the general ambience. And I even found myself liking Marc Almond's 'Sleazy City' in the peep-show sequences. Their soundtrack is cut with FM news broadcasts and the scientifically programmed art-product of industrial psychologists, musicologists and marketing engineers. There's a war on, as Klaus outlines;

"I think Muzak or music in general can be used to manipulate the brain, in any way· for relaxing, or getting you excited. And they work with it. They do it. And I think you, we, whoever can do it also in a different way, like Mufti does in the film; he does the opposite. He develops Anti-Muzak for his own purposes, to provoke in the end street riots; first to make people puke instead of feeling relaxed in the burger place. I'm still convinced, even if it sounds funny, that you really can do it. If you have 3 or 4 people with tape recorders on the streets you can provoke something like that. You get manipulated all the time by the media. So why shouldn't we use the same techniques for our purpose, to try to break that down. I think that's okay, necessary even."

There's a war on. An information war: 'Decoder' credits its two major influences in this field with cameo roles of their own design: Genesis P.Orridge appears as an anti-pope sort of figure, leading an underground resistance movement - I think all the people in 'Decoder' parody themselves to a certain extent, but Gen's parody is the funniest. In one scene Mufti stumbles into his bunker, where he becomes a not entirely willing participant in a nihilistic noise ritual. Gen's main line to Mufti before he's sent packing is; "Information is like a bank, and we have to rob this bank."

Rob a Bank. Storm the Reality Studio and Retake the Universe: Ironically the development of functional music and subliminal techniques owes a great deal to Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. Advertisers and god knows who else have been using their Cut-up technique to manipulate people ever since Burroughs first applied it to his literary works. He used it to seemingly rearrange a text at random to create new words and watch the future flood out. But it can of course be used for more down to earth motives, such as profit and greed.

Burroughs also wrote a book called 'The Revised Boy Scout Manual', which gave instructions on how to use his techniques on the streets. It was planned for this to be incorporated into 'Decoder', with tape-terrorists/pirates using cut-up tapes to provoke a riot in the final scene. But when the 'Decoder' crew arrived in Berlin to shoot footage of the anti­-Reagan riots, they were astounded to find the cassette-pirates already there. Ghetto blasters had been set up in open windows and helicopter and gunfire noises were being played in the streets. Hundreds of tape recorders were confiscated as a result.

As an acknowledgement of the debt the film owes him, Burroughs himself crops up in Mufti's dream sequences; first leading Christiane across a field in Jarmanesque ambience. The second time handing Mufti a broken tape recorder on Mufti's TV - this was shot when Burroughs was staying in Tottenham Court Road for 'The Final Academy' in 1982 – Ain’t nothing here now but the recordings. So hit it! Pause it! Record it and play! C-30! C-60! C-90! GO!

Here's a section from the film Decoder (1984), featuring Genesis P.Orridge. His speech seems quite prophetic now of the internet age, just on the horizon at the time of the film: "Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich, some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job, your job is to rob the bank"



See also: Sonic Attack

End of The End

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

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

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

See also Turnmills closes; Clubbing in Kings Cross: End of the Line

Ken Campbell: 'I'm not mad I've just read different books'

Ken Campbell (1941-2008) died on Sunday, not only an actor and comedian but an incomparable counter-cultural transmitter. With the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool he famously staged an eight-hour theatrical version of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy, having picked up a copy of the book in the late lamented Compendium Bookshop in Camden. Wilson himself took great pleasure in 'having this totally subversive ritual staged under the patronage of H.M. The Queen' (since it was at the National Theatre) - at one point Wilson came on as a naked extra chanting 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' (source: Wilson's 'Cosmic Trigger').

In 1979 Campbell and Neil Oram co-wrote The Warp, a 22 hour epic that starts off with a 15th century Bavarian war resister and ends up in the 1970s with UFO conferences and New Age Travellers. It was revived in a production directed by his daughter Daisy Campbell in 1999, performed continuously in the 'Millennium Drome' beneath the arches of London Bridge station alongside a Megatripolis rave.

I saw Campbell at Battersea Arts Centre a few years ago doing one of his legendary monologues History of Comedy: Part One - Ventriloquism, a performance of rambling genius. As he once said, 'I'm not mad I've just read different books'.

Glasgow Arches Under Threat

Famous Glasgow nightclub The Arches is at risk of losing its license (though its website declares that it is currently still open for business as usual):

'One of Scotland's leading arts venues has been ordered to close for six weeks after police discovered dozens of men engaged in indecent acts within a concealed area. Strathclyde Police uncovered the incident after receiving several complaints over a number of months that "acts of public indecency" were taking place at a monthly club run at the Arches in Glasgow. During an arranged visit to the Burly night in March this year two uniformed officers found up to 30 men "in various states of undress" and engaging in sexual activity in a corner area covered by black mesh. Despite the presence of two uniformed officers several of those taking part continued with the activity before disappearing into the crowd. One man was arrested and reported to the procurator-fiscal.

After a formal police complaint was made to the City of Glasgow Licensing Board, the Arches was told yesterday to shut its doors for six weeks after it was accepted the management was "not fit and proper" to hold the entertainment licence. The venue is to lodge an immediate appeal and will continue to trade prior to the case being taken to the sheriff court, where management hope the board's decision will be overturned. Failing that, the venue will have to comply with the sanction, shutting the entire Arches operation and then paying the local authority's legal costs. It has already axed the Burly event, which attracted older gay men from all over Scotland.

(Glasgow Herald, 30 August 2008)

The Arches is surely the best known club in Scotland: 'With a capacity of up to 3000, the cavernous Grade A listed Victorian archways provide the perfect setting for a phenomenal production set-up, with a Funktion 1 PA system and award-winning visuals supporting some of the biggest nights in Europe over the last 15 years. Which is probably why a selection of top DJ’s recently voted it amongst the top ten clubs in the world in DJ magazine. Alongside the five giants; Death Disco, Pressure, Colours, Freefall and Inside Out, where the world’s biggest DJs regularly play; Pete Tong, Sasha, Laurent Garnier, David Holmes, Judge Jules, Erol Alkan, Green Velvet and Carl Cox to name but a few, the Arches is also known for its smaller, more independent and specialist club nights, such as newcomers Art of Parties and massive weekly student night Octopussy, which houses a jacuzzi, swimming pool, bouncy castle and wedding chapel' (source: Arches website).

Global Raver

Global Raver is a new blog promising 'social commentary on global dance music' by Anthony D'Andrea.

D'Andrea is the author of 'Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa', a work examining 'the social life of mobile expatriates who live and circulate within a global circuit of countercultural practice, which paradoxically overlaps with political economies of tourism and entertainment in semi-peripheral "paradises", such as Ibiza and Goa'.

The blog has some interesting content, including the pre-history of Goan sub-cultures, reflections on the Berlin Love Parade, and an article reminding us that Joe Biden, Barack Obama's running mate, was the author of the 2003 RAVE act (Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy). The law 'cracks down on rave promoters if drugs are found in their events, even if they have provided effective security, and even if they have no relation with individuals who consumed or traded drugs in their events. Moreover, based on former "crack house statutes", the law also criminalizes the venue owner (club, bar, warehouse etc.) just for renting their space. Again, landlords don't have to be related to - or not even aware of - those dealing or consuming drugs in their venue, in order to be heavily prosecuted... The original bill proposed that the sales of water, glowsticks and even telletubbie bags were to serve as criminal evidence. This disposition was soundly removed'.

Westering Home

Away this week from my usual London habitat, I have instead been (re)visiting the ‘ancestral homeland’ of the Isle of Islay in the Hebrides. To my resting urban ears, listening to the waves and the seabirds has been music enough, but still as always I am curious about what’s happening musically.

Well, yes there are bagpipes in the form of the the Islay Pipe Band, an earlier incarnation of which my father played in before he left the island. He bequeathed to me his chanter, but I have never yet learnt to play the highland bagpipes – still time, still time. By the way, does anyone remember Acid Folk by Perplexer, mid-1990s slice of bagpipe sampling techno? I remember dancing to it at a party at Taco Joe’s in Brixton. But I digress.

We went to a music session at the Lochside Hotel in Bowmore, the main village on Islay. In a bar overlooking Loch Indaal, people turned up with a banjo, accordion, guitar, fiddle and mandolin. There was a really good singer, Norma Munro, with a set including The Gypsy Rover, Yellow’s on the Broom, and inevitably on Islay, Westering Home. This oft-recorded song about returning to the island is probably the best known Islay song, not excepting Donovan’s Isle of Islay, the latter a nice enough song but committing the crime of mispronouncing the island’s name to make it rhyme with ‘play’ – it’s actually pronounced ‘Isla’.

I am always interested in a pub session, it’s a different kind of musicking from the gig format – open in the sense that the line up is fluid depending on who turns up, and the set list is usually not determined in advance. It is performative, but not necessarily dependent on an audience. Every session has its own unwritten rules, and no two sessions are therefore ever the same.

Anyway if you’re ever visit Islay – and I recommend you do – you can check out a session yourself every Wednesday night at the Lochside Hotel.

(Just to be clear though, it's not all folkiness up here - at the fairground it was strictly Euro-bounce-core, while in the swimming pool the lifeguards in control of the sounds put on the rockist breakbeats of Granite by Pendulum).

I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers

Native moments - when you come upon me - ah you are here now,

Give me now libidinous joys only,

Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank,

To-day I go consort with Nature's darlings, to-night too,

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men,

I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers,

The echoes ring with our indecent calls, I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,

He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be one condemn'd by others for deeds done,

I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?

O you shunn'd persons, I at least do not shun you,

I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet,

I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

Walt Whitman, Native Moments from Leaves of Grass, 1855. Photo from The Paradise Garage (legendary 1980s New York gay club) sourced from The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Arthur Weinstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banning Babyshambles

I was incredulous when I heard that Wiltshire Police had banned indie-wastrels Babyshambles from headlining the Moonfest festival scheduled to take place next week. Given shamble-in-chief Pete Doherty's propensity to not turn up when expected, I assumed this was some story cooked up by the festival organisers to blame a non-appearance on 'The Man' and boost Doherty's outlaw credentials into the bargain.

But no, it's absolutely true! As reported in NME 'Chief Superintendent Julian Kirby, divisional commander of Wiltshire Police, said: "We carried out an analysis of what Pete Doherty and his band does. What he does as part of his routine is to gee up the crowd. They speed up and then slow down the music and create a whirlpool effect in the crowd. They [the crowd] all get geed up and then they start fighting." Police presented their findings to North Wiltshire Magistrates on Monday (August 17), who ordered festival organisers to cancel any appearance from Doherty or Babyshambles. It is believed that the case represents the first time police anywhere in the country have used Section 160 of the Licensing Act (2003) to get a performance stopped'. The festival has now been cancelled.

The police apparently based their findings on an analysis of Youtube footage of Pete Doherty's gig last month at London's Albert Hall - a gig that ended in a stage invasion and some scuffling with bouncers, but was hardly a riot. Although the sight of Wiltshire's finest panicking about a load of skinny indie kids is farcical, there is a serious point here. In London we've already had the police dictating what genres of music clubs can play, with grime nights in particular coming under the spotlight. Now a specific band has been banned on very dubious grounds. Thank god Kurt Cobain is dead, Nirvana were prime offenders in playing quiet then loud songs and would never have got another gig on the M4 corridor. As for the ultimate quiet/loud band, The Pixies, we can only hope that they never try and play anywhere west of Reading.

Township Funk

This track is Township Funk by DJ Mugava (pointed to by Lower End Spasm). Sheffield's Warp Records are releasing this in the UK.

I don't know much about DJ Mujava - apparently he's from Pretoria in South Africa and his real name is Elvis Maswanganyi. Fact is I know very little about African takes on house music like Kwaito and Mzansi House from South Africa or Kuduro from Angola, but I am happy to know they exist and would like to find out more. There's a fair amount of the music and dance around on Youtube and elsewhere, but I would also like to know more about the scenes, what are the parties like, where do they have them, who goes to them, what do people wear etc.

Any good blogs/sites out there covering this sort of stuff? So far I've come across Kuduro Files and Kwaito.co.uk.

Ronnie Drew & The Dubliners

Ronnie Drew, founder of The Dubliners, died yesterday at the age of 74.

When I was growing up my parents only had a handful of records, mostly albums of folk songs and ballads recorded by The Spinners, The Corries and The Dubliners.

These were three bands who had apparently fallen foul of some folk purists for crossing over to a mass audience: 'The Spinners, The Corries and The Dubliners... have entered the cabaret and concert arenas with great success and have, as a result, largely lost their original folk following' (Fred Woods, The Observer's Book of Folk Song in Britain, 1980). In doing so though they achieved what some folkies had only theorised, the creation and dissemination of a body of English/Caribbean (Spinners), Scottish (Corries) and Irish (Dubliners) songs that large numbers of people sang in pubs, homes and in their heads. I doubt it if my parents ever went to a folk club in the 1960s and 70s, but thanks to bands like these on TV, radio and record, I did grow up knowing some great old songs - apparently my dad used to sing The Wild Colonial Boy to me when I was a baby to stop me crying.

But The Dubliners were in a class of their own, with raucous voices and broad accents quite at odds with some of the effete renditions of Irish songs that preceded their fine example. They popularised a huge repertorie, including not just older traditional songs like Whiskey in the Jar and The Black Velvet Band, but rebel songs, workers' songs (the wobbly anthem Joe Hill and Springhill Mine Disaster) and bawdy drinking songs - their version of The Seven Drunken Nights was banned in Ireland. Their Dublin song Take Her Up to Monto features the Queen being told to "Póg mo thóin" ('Kiss my ass'), the original name for The Pogues (Pogue Mahone), a band whose existence is barely thinkable without The Dubliners.

Here they are singing McAlpine's Fusiliers, Dominic Behan's London Irish ballad reflecting the experience of Irish workers on English building sites (MacAlpine's being a British construction company). In the early 1990s I used to play in a session with Irish and Scottish musicians in a pub in Lambeth (opposite the Imperial War Museum), and this was one that used to get sung nearly every Sunday lunchtime.



I haven't got time to post on some of the other musical legends who' ve died recently, so check out Bob from Brockley for an appreciation of Isaac Hayes (Pop Feminist has the best photo) and Jerry Wexler (a man who once said he would like the words 'more bass' written on his tombstone - so say all of us).

Berlin, Bangalore, Shoreditch: Immaterial labour on the dancefloor?

Despite my earlier scepticism about the so-called malaise in dance music, some interesting points are being made in the related discussions about the demography of dance floors and the impact on party dynamics.

One notion seems to be minimal techno as the soundtrack to the nightlife of people working in media/creative industries, with Berlin as the paradigmatic example. Owen Hatherley talks of parts of the city becoming ‘a playground for an international of 'creatives'’ for whom nothing much is at stake: ‘pure pleasure becomes boring after a while, as does the constant low-level tick-tock of a techno designed seemingly for little else than just rolling along’.

Simon Reynolds explores this further, noting that ‘'Creatives' have a different relationship to work and leisure than people who work in manufacturing or the service economy. There is a sense that they are rarely fully at work or fully at leisure. Because their jobs are more fulfilling, there is not the same sense of your-time-is-not-your-own, enforced boredom, nothing like the same alienation’. As a result the explosive energy of the working class weekender packing a week’s worth of living into night’s raving is diffused, ‘because the division between the ecstatically heightened timezone of "party" and normal existence is not as drastically demarcated’.

I think the phenomenon they are describing does have some basis in reality, and is certainly not confined to Berlin or particularly minimal techno. In London the Shoreditch/Hoxton nightlife expansion from later in the 1990s has similarly been viewed as providing a playground for people involved in arts, fashion and media (or who want to be), with no single dominant soundtrack other than a mash up of dance musics with indie and retro-kitsch. I was struck in reading reports of recent protests against dance restrictions in Bangalore by the similar social composition.

I am not sure ‘creatives’ as a description fully covers this global fraction of the dancefloor population. A more useful concept, as developed within the milieu of post-autonomist Marxism, is ‘immaterial labour, that is, labour that produces immaterial products, such as information, knowledges, ideas, images, relationships and affects’ (Negri & Hardt). Those involved in immaterial labour include not just workers in the arts and media industries, but for instance people working in information and communications technology sectors.

I am sceptical of some of the claims made for immaterial labour, particularly the notion that it amounts to a new social subject with some kind of vanguard role in social transformation. Less people may be working in manufacturing and agriculture in the West, but elsewhere in the world this is not the case. And the category of immaterial labour can hide huge social differences between for instance, self-employed professionals with their own companies and call centre workers.

Nevertheless it does seem to at least partially describe a real phenomenon; it does seem true that ‘common conditions of labour in all sectors place new importance on knowledge, information, affective relations, cooperation and communication’ (N&H). Some of the characteristics of immaterial labour are precisely those mentioned by Simon Reynolds; Negri & Hardt identify the tendency ‘to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinitely to fill all of life’. Immaterial labour tends not to be confined to particular place, the work can move around the world (e.g. to Bangalore) and so can some of the more mobile workers. Although physical working conditions may be less unpleasant than in factories, and wages relatively high for some, immaterial labour is often precarious with short term contracts and commissions – hence perhaps the importance of social networking.

So perhaps immaterial labour on the dancefloor lacks the desparate edginess of the hardcore raver, giving rise to a smoother and increasingly homogenous global clubbing experience, what Mark Fisher has termed ‘nomadalgia: a lack of sense of place, a drift through club or salon spaces that, like franchise coffee bars, could be anywhere’

On the other hand, Negri and Hardt would argue that through a process of globalisation from below, transnational ‘cooperative and communicative networks of social labour’ are emerging, the basis for a more co-operative form of society that is developing within the shell of the old: ‘the future institutional structure of this new society is embedded in the affective, cooperative, and communicative relationships of social production’. If so, then it is in nightclubs as well as in offices that the ‘multitude’ is taking shape.

In the 1990s UK a clear divergence emerged between raving and clubbing, the former characterised by ‘an assertion of the local’ (Reynolds), with the endlessly debated 'Nuum (post-hardcore continuum) strongly associated with a fierce attachment to place (‘it’s a London thing’) and a self-image as an illicit urban underground.

Clubbing on the other hand has often involved a cosmppolitan self-image of being part of a global derritorialized house music/techno culture, linking dancefloors in London, Manchester, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Berlin, Manchester and beyond – even if most people didn’t get any further than Ibiza. If we accept Atali’s notion of music prefiguring new social relations, then perhaps house music has prefigured the emergence of immaterial labour, not only in the social composition of the dancers, but in the affective, co-operative, communicative relations of the dancefloor.

At the same time it is arguable that one of the weakness of the immaterial labour as key social subject thesis is that it neglects the needs and experiences of the global poor whose living is precarious in a much more fundamental sense than the journalist or software engineer. Likewise, to the extent that clubbing often excludes the same people it can be characterised not only by a lack of genuine social inclusion (the dancefloor community only extends so far), but by a diluted sense of musical energy - beats with the rough edges smoothed off.

Just following a line of thought here, not completely convinced by the immaterial labour thing - comments welcome as always.

Reference: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004)

Voilà notre nuit!

Au Petit Rocher (also known as Chez Dinocheau after its owner) was a popular tavern/restaurant frequented by Parisian 'bohemians' such as Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and 1860s. It was situated in a cellar at the corner of rues de Navarin and de Breda.

Among the drinkers was the writer Fernand Desnoyers who would regularly sing there, his songs being published in his 1865 collection Chansons parisiennes('Parisian Songs'). One of his songs, 'Les rôdeurs de nuit' ('The prowlers of the night') is a celebration of staying up all night:

Quand le bourgeois dort,
Il fait soif encore,
Passon la nuit a boire!
La rue est toute noire;
Mais les vitraux des boulevards
Sont en feu, comme des regards.
Atmosphere enflammée,
Filles dans la fumée,
Eau-de-vie et bruit,
Voilà notre nuit!

(When the bourgeois sleeps,
We are thirsty, still;
Let's drink the night through!
It's quite dark outside;
But the windows on the streets are
Ablaze like people's glances.
Burning atmosphere,
Girls in the smoke,
Brandy and noise,
This is our night!)

Source: Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey (London: Viking, 2006)

War in Georgia

Matthew Collin, who has been reporting for the BBC during the recent terrible events in Georgia, is also the author of 'Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House'(1997).

His blog, This is Tblisi Calling, hasn't been updated since the war started, but there are some interesting reflections on the use of music in the simmering conflicts leading up to this week's violence. For instance, in May the Georgian government held a patriotic song contest: "The deputy culture minister, Mirza Davitaia, who’s running the show, says the state initially started the song contest for very practical reasons: 'When our friends were in the army, in the reserves, they found out there were no army songs,' he explains. 'Soldiers, when they run, they don’t have good Georgian songs [to sing]. In Soviet times they had Russian songs, and now they have nothing for this'."

More surreal has been the Georgian government's use of 70s pop acts in its campaign to rally support, including a concert by barely-remembered English band Smokie and sending Boney M in to play in South Ossetia with the Georgian president dancing along.

Sadly, Georgia's 2008 entry for the Eurovision song contest - Peace will Come by Diana Gurtskaya, does not seem to have been heeded by either side - even if the singer, a 'blind refugee from the separatist war in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia who now lives in Moscow... has been awarded medals for her cultural endeavours by both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili'. The lyrics might be fairly banal but still true: 'Look, the sky is crying cold bitter tears, weeping for the people lost in fear, While we fight for nothing... Kids with guns are always too young to die'.

Some background information on the conflict at Flesh is Grass; Bob from Brockley has links to various discussion. Must admit I am not particularly interested in various leftists/ex-leftists trying to decide whether to support 'plucky little Georgia' or 'anti-imperialist Russia', both states are implicated in this war and both seem to have targeted civilians.

Bangalore: 'Today they are saying we can't dance and tomorrow they'll say we need a licence to go out with our families'

'Bangalore's socialites and pub-hoppers were out dancing on MG Road in broad day-light in protest against the city police's strict clampdown on late-night parties. It seems that partying at night in the city may not be the same anymore as the new police commissioner has initiated curbs on pub life in the city. One of the protestors said, “What we need is a healthy society to come out and express themselves and tell the world that we are all lovely people and we should just be left on our own to have a good time.”

... However, it seems doubtful that the new Government would amend the law as the ban came after a police raid on a rave party in the city's outskirts early Sunday morning. Thirty people were arrested and drugs seized and this gives police additional ground on their stand. Nevertheless, it hasn't stopped people from campaigning for a better nightlife... “It's about our freedom. Today they are saying we can't dance and tomorrow they'll say we need a licence to go out with our families,” added another'.

Source: IBNLive, 11 August 2008

'Amid protests over the ban on playing live music and dancing at pubs in the city, police said they have ensured that 32 discotheques, which were "operating without a valid licence," remained closed. "The discotheques did not have the required licence," Bangalore Police Commissioner Shankar Bidari said while explaining the intensified crackdown on illegal discotheques since the beginning of this month. "Once they get the licences they are free to operate", he said adding that the licences were similar to those required by live bands to ensure operation... The commissioner said that these outlets were permitted to play recorded music but they needed to ensure that the volume was not very loud. On Sunday, people from various walks of life including films, art, music, and disco jockeys employed in the city, staged a protest against the police "imposing a ban" on playing of live music and dancing at pubs'.

Source: Times of India, 11 August 2008

See also: A Plain Truth, Churumuri, Life & Thoughts of Thomas. Bangalore is in the state of Karnataka, whihc is ruled by the right wing Hindu nationalist BJP. I liked this comment posted by Vinod, one of the protestors, to an article at Daijiworld: "Now, all you proponents of 'Indian Culture', tell me - can the definition of Indian culture be left to the cops? Can decisions which are so closely entwined with our personal life be left to the whims and fancies of politicians who can't do their basic jobs without having their palms greased, but deign to decide how we live our lives. So, are you ready to put your trust in a police state to preserve this mythical elephant called 'Indian culture?'". The law used by the authorities is here (see particularly section 31).