In Gear (1967)

Look at Life: In Gear is a 1967 news clip from the Rank Organisation offering a quick tour of the fashion boutiques of Kings Rd, Soho and Carnaby Street in 'Swinging London' - although the narrator actually states: 'They say London swings. It doesn't. Not even the Kings Road, Chelsea. But here and there among the conformist fat crowds is a lean cat or two, looking like it might swing given some encouragement'.

Places featured including Granny Takes a Trip (pictured), I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet (‘one way of saying no to authority is to parody it ... buy uniforms of the past to affront the uniformity of the present’) and Biba, all seemingly offering ‘an escape from the H-Bomb, television and other horrors of the workaday world'. Not only that but the ‘soft, music-loud caverns of the avant-garde can be misleading for they are the work cells of revolution’ – though the revolution in question is not a reference to the social/political turmoils of the period but to a shift in the fashion industry, with boutiques generating style rather than simply offering diluted versions of haute couture originals.

There's also some footage of people dancing - ‘the in-scene of London is one big fancy dress ball… a super charade of happy happenings... what gear the cats are wearing is one story where they wear it is another'. Frustratingly it is not clear exactly which clubs are featured in the film out of those mentioned as ‘the in gaffes where they go’ - including Tiles, Bag o’Nails, Samantha's, Georgie's and the Saddle Room.

(full transcript at V&A website)

The commercial festival boom

Some reflections after my trip last weekend to Latitude festival...

25 years ago the British state mounted a huge and brutal police operation to clamp down on the Stonehenge Free Festival. 15 years ago it passed legislation designed to outlaw autonomous dance music festivals in the aftermath of Castlemorton.

The point was never to crush festivals entirely, but rather to make sure that they could only take place when approved, regulated and controlled by the state. Nevertheless it did feel as if the fact of thousands of people gathering together for days on end for music and dancing was something that was fundamentally alien to the ruling culture, at least to the cultural life of the ruling Conservative government.

Even officially sanctioned festivals retained some kind of oppositional edge under the Tories. Glastonbury in the 1980s mainly raised funds for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Lesbian and Gay Pride, which attracted huge numbers to free festivals in London parks, was already being criticised by some queer activists for apolitical hedonism, but this was an era when there was still an unequal age of consent and the government was passing its absurd anti-gay Clause 28. You certainly couldn't imagine government ministers approving, let alone attending either of them.

In the past few years, summer music festivals have become a huge phenomenon in the UK with seemingly countless weekend gatherings for all kinds of music taste. Hundreds of thousands of people must spend at least a couple of nights camping out at a festival. If you add in people who attend non camping festivals such as Notting Hill Carnival you are talking about millions of people every year.

So in a cultural sense the 80s/90s festival crowd has conquered. And indeed its the post-punk/raving generations who are now taking their kids to the more family friendly festivals like Latitude.

Equally of course, the festival scene has been conquered by commerce and administration. Many of the festivals are big business concerns with corporate sponsorship. The biggest player is Festival Republic Ltd which now runs Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals, as well as being contracted to manage Glastonbury. This started out as Vince Power's Mean Fiddler Group, which grew from running London's The Mean Fiddler music venue in the early 1980s to putting on the Irish-themed Fleadh festivals in London before expanding ceaselessly to run 27 venues and many festivals. Vince Power sold up to in 2005, with Live Nation - a California-based multinational music events company - now the major sharefolder in the renamed Festival Republic.

Festivals have inevitably become more middle class as high entrance fees at most festivals prohibit the attendance of the kind of people who were the backbone of the earlier festival scene. In the 1980s at Glastonbury for instance there was a tacit understanding that thousands of people who couldn't afford tickets would be able to sneak into the site for free, now most festivals are surrounded by high fences and heavy security.

If Thatcher's government denounced festival goers as Medieval Brigands and passed homophobic laws, today's politicians feel festivals are safe enough territory. At Latitude there was several Labour politicians present (notably Ed Miliband, Minister for Climate Change) while the Prime Minister's wife was at LGBT Pride this year.

Despite all the commercialization and regulation of state approved festivals there are obviously worse ways of spending a summer weekend than staying out surrounded by music. But whether the desire for some kind of carnivalesque-lite collective experience has any kind of wider political significance at all I'm not so sure. Does the road to realizing human species being pass through a marquee in a field in Suffolk? Maybe not, but I am sure that in some policy think tank even now, somebody is sweating over how to assemble some kind of Gramscian popular historic bloc that can appeal to the festival public alongside more familiar political demographics like White Van Man and Ford Mondeo Man.

See also: If it's called a festival, is it one?

Calvin Harris at Somerset House

It was all hands in the air at Somerset House last week (20 July) for Calvin Harris, inciting a Monday night outdoor crowd to jump around: 'London.... are you ready to go off?'.

I know Calvin Harris is everywhere with his electro-dance-pop, but what's not to like? He played Acceptable in the 80s, I Created Disco (complete with its fake sample suggesting that disco was created in some post-WW2 laboratory experiment) and new melancholic/euphoric anthem I'm not Alone. No Dance Wiv Me unfortunately in the absence of Dizzee Rascal.

The Evening Standard review of the gig wasn't far off in comparing it to KLF's Stadium House, he chucks all of dance music history into the blender - I'm Not Alone for instance has a bit of a Strings of Life flavour at one point.

Support was Mr Hudson, currently going Supernova with a bit of help from Kanye West (inevitably Calvin Harris has remixed it).

Latitude 2009

I spent last weekend at the Latitude festival, near Southwold in Suffolk. Musical highlights included Emmy the Great's sweet songs about (near?) unplanned pregnancy and fatal car crashes, dancing to Camera Obscura's Hey Lloyd I'm ready to be heartbroken, an answer song twenty years after Lloyd Cole first posed the question; and most especially The Pet Shop Boys.

Their's was an all singing, dancing , costume changing performance - complete with Gilbert and George style background movies, acrobatics and construction workers moving the set around. At one point Neil Tennant left the stage in a dinner jacket after a few subdued ballads like Jealousy then marched back out in a crown and robe for a mash up of Domino Dancing and a Hi-NRG cover of Coldplay's Viva La Vida, all followed up with encores of West End Girls and Being Boring (which always make me cry). Certainly made a change from watching blokes with guitars.

I also took in Ladyhawke, Regina Spektor, Lykke Li, Pretenders, White Lies, Airborne Toxic Event, Doves, Patrick Wolf, Squeeze, Little Boots and Mika - to say I actually saw all of these would be an exaggeration, the last three were in crowded marquees where listening from the edge was as close as we could get. There would have been some more but we got fed up of the rain on the third day and left early.

Latitude has a wider arts festival shtick, with film and literature as well as music but I didn't have time for too much of that. There were also fairy tale movies in the woods, ballet dancers by the lake...


...the Disco Shed (basically decks in a shed, people dancing outside)...


... and everywhere the english summer sunshine and showers outfit of shorts and wellies, with occasional fancy dress flourishes (a group of blue painted smurfs wandering through the crowd for instance). Oh and the inevitable Michael Jackson memorial in the woods.

Norbert Rondel and La Discotheque

Interesting obituary in The Guardian this week for Norbert Rondel (1927-2009), another of those dodgy figures straddling crime and nightlife in 1960s/70s London. A Jewish refugee from Berlin, he was, among other things a professional wrestler, South London used car salesman, landlord's heavy for Peter Rachman, prisoner, chess player, (alleged) conspirator in the famous 1975 Spaghetti House robbery and doorman at La Discotheque in Wardour Street.

Of the latter place - a 1960s mod hang out - Jon Waters has given an account at Modculture:

"I made my way up the stairs to 'La Discotheque' and gave the nod to the bouncer whilst dropping some cash into his hand. We had sussed out some time ago that we could gain entrance for half price and made full use of the facility. The obligatory stamp went on the back of my hand and I was in.

The door opened releasing a hot fug of fetid air mixed with cigarette smoke. The place was heaving as sweating bodies jostled for space to dance. Junior Walker's 'Shake & Fingerpop' was pumping out and I could feel my heart jump into overdrive. Locating the rest of the firm was easy. 'Haggis' and 'Big Roy' were giving it some on the floor. It looked like Haggis had pulled for the night. Roy was in a world of his own on the dancefloor, dancing by himself, if that were possible in view of the close proximity of the bodies all around him. Roy was unbelievable. He would dance all night with hardly a break but never take any gear. The energy he possessed was beyond belief.

Terry was busy doing some business somewhere and Mac was sitting in a corner. He was completely stoned, staring at his clenched fists on his lap and chewing like crazy.I couldn't get any sense out of him. By now the combination of the music and the dexys were really kicking in so I fought my way out to the others on the floor and let the music wash over me. James Brown 'Night Train', Betty Everett 'Getting Mighty Crowded', The Impressions 'You Been Cheating', Otis 'Mr.Pitiful' and Pickett's 'Midnight Hour'...pure heaven!

Terry reappeared after a while. He had taken a few too many and his mouth had gone into overdrive. He talked a lot of bollocks when he wasn't high but Christ! He was really giving my earhole some grief! I spotted a girl I knew from Borehamwood and using her as an excuse I escaped. We danced and for a while and she let slip details of a party tomorrow night. A result! Sundays were dead and we were not first choice on most people's party lists (probably due to the amount of suede and leather coats that tended to go missing when we were in attendence).

More 'dexys' were consumed. Every now and again a few more envelopes were distributed which meant occasional trips to the building site. Still the music pumped out. The Supremes 'Back in my Arms Again', Jnr.Walker 'Shotgun', Eddie Floyd 'Things Get Better', Toys 'Lovers Concerto', James Brown 'Papas Got a Brand New Bag', Marvin Gaye 'I'll be Doggone'. Gradually the night wore on'.

La Discotheque is often credited as being the first London disco, in the sense of 'being the first club to only play recorded music in London'Mod: Clean Living Under Very Difficult Circumstances - A Very British Phenomenon by Terry Rawlings and Richard Barnes).

Police Helicopter sent to Devon Birthday Party

Police closed down a birthday party at Sowton, Devon on 11 July, on the basis that it has been described as an all-night party on facebook. Accotding to BBC News, 17 July 2009:

Andrew Poole, who was celebrating his 30th birthday, claimed police riot vans turned up before any music was played. But police said it had been advertised on the internet as an all-night party. Mr Poole, a coach driver from Sowton, said 15 family and friends had come to the event, where they were watched by a police helicopter for about 15 minutes.

He said before they had turned on the music, four police cars and a riot van arrived and demanded the barbecue was shut down and everyone leave. The event was closed down under section 63 of the Criminal justice and Public Order Act 1994. "We were nowhere near anyone, we weren't even playing any music," he said. "What effectively the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating burgers."

According to This is Exeter his mother also criticised the police action:

Mrs Poole said: “Four cars drove down a private lane to a private field. The police helicopter was over them and all it watched them do was put up a gazebo and light a barbecue... It was a small event with no more than 10 people there when it was raided. My son had put information up on Facebook and had 17 people confirmed they were coming. If that means it is a rave, I would like to know where they get their numbers from?”

Drinking Bans

Robbed by the Police: Alcohol confiscation and the hyperregulation of public space is a good new report by The Manifesto Club highlighting the proliferation of 'Alcohol Control Zones' in England and their use to stop people drinking in public:

'across the country, police officers and community support officers (CSOs) have been confiscating alcohol from members of the public who are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Between 2004–6, 3802 people received on-the-spot fines for drinking in public. Overall, we estimate that there will be 20,000 confiscations in July and August this year'.

In Brighton for instance, people have had alcohol confiscated: sitting talking on the beach or in a park; walking quietly through town with friends; when they have not yet opened their alcohol; and when they are about to return home to drink their alcohol. The following accounts are by two people from Brighton:

‘A group of us were hanging out in a pedestrianised street in Brighton celebrating a birthday with a few drinks … . The community police officers came round, and emptied everyone’s drinks into the drains. None of us were causing a disturbance or hassling anyone - indeed there were a couple of excellent buskers on the street and a few people dancing Latin-style.’

‘I was at a street festival event with my girlfriend; I had a few cans of lager with me, and was drinking one as we were walking. There were lots of other people, mostly in large groups, also enjoying the early summer evening with a few drinks. Perhaps because there was only two of us, a couple of police officers felt empowered to approach and order me to empty the can's contents into the grass. They both stood over me while I did this. As the police set off to harass other smaller groups or individuals, all around larger groups continued to drink freely and peacefully.’

See also Booze Bans: the new frontier of joyless regulation by Henry Porter; Facebook Group against booze bans

Marx Cartoons

Yesterday's Telegraph reports that a Manga introduction to Marx's Capital has recently been published in Japan - cover below (for more about this publication see this).Something that has been around for while is Jesse Drew's Manifestoon, an animation of the Communist Manifesto, a subversive detournement of Disney and other cartoons. According to Drew: 'Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though American cartoons are usually thought of as conveying consumerist and individualistic ideologies, as an avid fan of cartoons as a child, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson--that of the "trickster" nature of many cartoon characters as they mocked, outwitted, and ultimately defeated their stronger, more powerful adversaries. In the classic cartoon, brute strength and heavy artillery are no match for wit and humor, and justice always prevails. For me, it was a natural process to link my own childhood concept of subversion with an established, more articulate version of subversiveness'.

Jesse Drew has also been involved in Free Radio and lots of other interesting stuff.

Moonwalking

It's taken my brain a while to make the connection between two of the recent themes at this site - the 1969 Moon landing and the death of Michael Jackson, Moonwalker.

In relation to Jackson, it's his popularisation of the Moonwalk dance that has been the centre of the various flashmobs since his death. For instance at the recent Fusion festival in Germany, there was this mass Moonwalk (well yes I know most people seem to be just shuffling backwards, rather than creating the illusion of stepping forward at the same time, but they are trying):



Contrary to popular mythology, this dance was not invented by Jackson. The backslide (as it was known) has long been in the repertoire of dancers as the following film makes clear with examples from dancers including Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway (in white suit at 1:49), Sammy Davis Jr. and many others. The earliest example features Daniel L. Haynes in King Vidor's film Hallelujah in 1929 (at about 2:36 in this video), but doubtless it goes back further than that. It has also featured in the mime routines of the likes of Marcel Marceau and Lindsay Kemp.



It was after Jackson started using these moves in 1983 to accompany his song Billie Jean that the move became known as the Moonwalk. According to Jeffrey Daniel, the dancer/choreographer who taught Jackson the moves, it was Jacko himself who called it the Moonwalk, mistaking the backslide for another dance move with that name (the actual Moonwalk step according to Daniel 'makes it look like you're on the moon and it's less gravity than you would have on earth'). By this act of creative misrecongition, Jackson linked the dance directly with the dreams of his generation - it was after all in the 1969 summer of Apollo 11 that the Jackson 5 recorded their first album and made their first TV appearance.

It is interesting that what caught people's imagination in relation to the actual moon landing was less the scientific achievement of a vehicle taking people from earth to its satellite and back again than the simple human act of walking on the moon. After all the first words spoken by Neil Armstrong in 1969 where precisely 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'. And the Apollo 11 astronauts left behind a plaque with the inscription reading: 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.'

What would it feel like to take that most fundamental of biped actions in space? Jackson's Moonwalking answer is that it is something thrilling, a step beyond normal human motion. Other musicians have also pondered the significance of lunar steps, or used them as a metaphor. In Walking on the Moon by The Police it's the lover's feeling of weightlessness that prompts the comparison: 'Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the moon... Walking back from your house, Walking on the moon, Feet they hardly touch the ground, Walking on the moon' (there's a nice jazz version of this song by Philippe Kahn).

Walk on the Moon by New York indie band Asobi Seksu picks up on that other space meme - not elation but the isolation of the lonely traveller in a monochrome world 'swimming in gray'. Then from the hippy musical Hair (1967), there's the psychedelic dimension of 'Walking in Space' - a trip in every sense - 'My body Is walking in space, My soul is in orbit, With God face to face, Floating, flipping, Flying, tripping...Tripping from Mainline to Moonville... On a rocket to The Fourth Dimension, Total self awareness The intention' etc. etc.

Arthur Russell's This is How We Walk on the Moon, featured in an earlier post, seems to envisage the moon walk as an optimistic struggle, moving forward one step at a time: 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'. A metaphor for a personal struggle against adversity or perhaps for something wider - moving on up. There are also instrumental pieces like Moon Boots by ORS (1977).

The imagining of walking in space (and dancing in space, sex in space...), beyond the limits of gravicapital, was part of the project of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, of which more to come.

We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams

I first became aware of the line 'We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams' when it was quoted on the cover of Sasha and John Digweed's Renaissance mix in 1994; it seemed to chime with the epic grandiosity of the album, embodied in its cover design and 3 CDs worth of finely mixed Italian and UK progressive house.

The words are also uttered by Gene Wilder in the film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (not sure if they are in Roald Dahl's original novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). This line has been sampled by Aphex Twin and 808 State among others.


The source of the line though is a poem by a short lived Victorian London-Irish poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844 – 1881). I didn't get round to reading it in full until this week when I picked up an anthology including it on Deptford market (Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in English Language, 1928 editon).

The Ode, from O'Shaughnessy's collection Music and Moonlight, is remarkable in a number of ways. As well as the music makers quote, the first stanza also bequeathed the phrase 'movers and shakers' to the English language:

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems

The poem presents a romantic image of music makers and poets as marginal figures ('world-losers'), but whose visionary creations prefigure and maybe even cause great social change. 'We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying, To the old of the new world's worth'. In this sense, music is powerful: 'One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure, Can trample a kingdom down'.

The final stanza suggests the possibility of renewal through contact with the dreams and music of other cultures:

Great hail! we cry to the comers

From the dazzling unknown shore;

Bring us hither your sun and your summers;

And renew our world as of yore;

You shall teach us your song's new numbers,

And things that we dreamed not before:

Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,

And a singer who sings no more

I know it's fanciful, but this can almost be read as a prophecy of what has actually come to pass with the impact of music made by people of African descent in the US, Caribbean, UK and elsewhere.

Tango for Peace

Yesterday was the 4th anniversary of the jihadist bombs in London, which killed 52 people. One response was TangoCommute:

'To mark the 4th anniversary of the 7th July terrorist attack on London, TangoCommute aims to transform the sense of separation between people into one of connectivity with a public display of passion for peace. Participants have an opportunity to make a modest contribution to understanding conflict and building peace through the embrace of the dance; silently, free from judgements or statements and including all members of society.

This year on 7th of July, from 6 to 7 pm, dance couples will spread across seven of London’s bridges and seven railway stations. Equipped with only headphones and their partners, they will silently dance the tango amidst the commuters'.

They did something similar at Waterloo station last year (pictured), and on Blackfriars Bridge last month. Indeed they want to spread tango love elsewhere: 'TangoCommute - passion for peace is a new dance movement expressing compassion and connectivity during the evening commute in city centres worldwide'.

Lots more pictures on Flickr

Rise (No) Festival Picnic

One of the first acts of Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson after his election was to scrap the explicit anti-racist message of the Rise Festival, held on and off in London parks between 1996 and 2008, and subsequently to scrap it altogether. This was one of London's largest free music events, attracting around 100,000 people in the last few years in Finsbury Park. Bands/artists who have performed have included Chumbawumba, Run DMC, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Gregory Isaacs, Roy Ayers, Kelis, Jamelia, Saint Etienne, CSS and Jimmy Cliff.

UpRise is a campaign to get the festival reinstated - since it won't be happening this weekend, they are organising a Rise Festival Picnic in the Park instead: “Sunday, July 12th marks one year on since Europe's largest anti-racism event, Rise Festival, last took place...So, on Sunday, July 12th, we want to show Boris how much we loved Rise Festival and all that it stands for. We can't organise any music due to the council's licensing restrictions and the short notice, but what we do ask is for you to join us in Finsbury Park to chill out, chat to like-minded people and generally have a great day basking in the spirit of Rise Festival! Look out for the UpRise: Save Rise Festival banner ...”

It runs from 2 pm to 7 pm -there's no licence so don't expect a stage with bands, it's more of a 'bring what you expect to find' affair, I am sure some DIY music won't go amiss...

(more details of the picnic on facebook)

Arthur Russell

Thinking about this month's moon landing anniversary, I realized my post on this should have mentioned the sublime Arthur Russell track 'This is how we walk on the moon': 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'.



There's a conference on Arthur Russell coming up in New York later this year:

'Kiss Me Again: Mapping the Life and Legacy of Arthur Russell
10 October 2009, NYU, New York

The composer and musician Arthur Russell lived and worked in New York between 1973 and 1992. During his time in the city he performed and recorded compositional music, pop music, disco, new wave, songs for the cello, and hip-hop-inflected electronic pop. As any listener of his music will know, he also liked to blur the boundaries of genre as he went about his work. Russell's open-mindedness and antipathy to being marketed contributed to his lack of recognition, and his music went relatively unheard outside of aficionado dance circles after his passing. But beginning with the simultaneous release of Calling Out of Context and The World of Arthur Russell in 2004, and culminating with the release of the documentary film Wild Combination in 2008, Russell's work has gained a new lease of life.

Acknowledging the newfound interest in Arthur Russell, New York University, the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London and Bloomfield College are organising an Arthur Russell conference that will take place at NYU on 10 October. The all-day event will be organised around four panels, two featuring invited speakers, two featuring speakers who respond to this call for papers. The conference will also feature a screening of Wild Combination, with director Matt Wolf answering questions, and (it is hoped) rare Arthur Russell footage shot by Phill Niblock and Alan Abrams. The evening event will feature musicians who worked with Arthur Russell. Tim Lawrence's biography of Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams, will be launched during the event. Attendance is free'.

The deadline for ideas for papers is 15 July; if you want to take part contact the organisers Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU), Tim Lawrence (UEL) & Peter Gordon (Bloomfield)- details here.

Malaysia: police arrested in disco raid

KUALA LUMPUR: Five policemen, including a chief inspector, were among 70 disco revellers arrested by police yesterday after they tested positive for drug abuse. Deputy Superintendent Aida Abdul Hamid led a 50-strong police team from Bukit Aman in the 3am raid on the Raptor discotheque in Jalan Kepong, Jinjang..."When we entered the premises, police found more than 300 party revellers, aged between 20 and 40, lounging around and dancing." The management was ordered to turn off the music and switch on the lights," a police spokesman said.

The party revellers, 215 men and 91 women, were divided into two groups and given a small plastic container each. They were ordered to submit a urine sample for drug testing."During the checks it was revealed that 15 policemen were among the party-goers." Following tests of their urine samples, five policemen including a chief inspector tested positive for drug abuse," the spokesman said. It is understood that the chief inspector, in his 40s, tested positive for ketamine and amphetamine. It was later revealed that the senior police officer was attached to the Kajang police headquarters.The other four policemen who tested positive were rank-and-file personnel from several districts in the Klang Valley. The remaining 10 policemen, including an assistant superintendent, were released when their tests came up negative...

Police found numerous pills scattered all over the floor, later found to be Eramin 5, along with several packets of a powdery substance, believed to be ketamine. Besides the five policemen, the other 65 party-goers detained were 38 men and 27 women. The spokesman said the discotheque opened five weeks ago and was one of the biggest outlets in the Kepong area.

Full story New Straits Times, 26 June 2009

We were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets

40 years ago this month since the first human moon landing. The song that most resonates for me relating to this is Monochrome by The Sundays from their 1997 album Static and Silence, if only because it perfectly mirrors my own experience - a small child and his sister woken up to watch the pictures beamed back from the moon:

"it’s 4 in the morning July in ‘69, me and my sister we crept down like shadows, they’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence and a monochrome vision.. it’s history and we stayed awake all night and something is said and the whole room laughs aloud, me and my sister looking on like shadows, the end of an age as we watched them walk in a glow, lost in space, but I don’t know where it is, they’re dancing around, slow puppets silver ground".

There are other pieces of music associated with this episode. The BBC apparently played David Bowie's doomed astronaut anthem Space Oddity during their moon landing coverage (must admit I always assumed that Bowie recorded this after the moon landing, but it seems it prefigured it). Pink Floyd meanwhile jammed live on BBC during the moon landing, according to Dave Gilmour 'They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead - it's a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues'.

Post-acid house, samples from the Apollo 11 voyage have been widely used as a signifier of spaced out (inter)planetary humanism, for instance on The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991). Then, rather incredibly, there's Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's recent rap track Rocket Experience ('I've been there, now it's your turn'):



Of course, Gil Scott Heron offered a contemporary critique of the prioritisation of Cold War space spectaculars at the expense of wider human needs with his Whitey on the Moon: 'A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon, Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon, I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon, Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon'. While he was right on one level, I still hold on to the optimism of believing that the human adventure hasn't come to an end with MP3s and High-Definition TV.

I don't have much to add to a talk I gave on 23 April 2005 as part of the 'ART IS NOT TERRORISM' event at Confluences, Paris, a 'Benefit event for the defense of Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble at the occasion of 10 years of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts'. The event also included films, music and contributions from Jason Skeet, Kodwo Eshun , Riccardo Balli, James Becht, Ewen Chardronnet, Claire Pentecost, Brian Holmes, Nicola Triscott, Anjali Sagar, Michel Valensi and others.

Nostalgia for the Future: The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

Once upon a time, people believed in the future. When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, one of the most popular programmes on TV was called 'Tomorrow's World'. Every week scientists would talk about how new and wonderful inventions would make our life better. Sociologists talked of an impending leisure society, where our biggest problem would be what to do with all the spare time created by increasing automation.

Space was central to this sense of future possibility. In eight short years the human species went from Yuri Gagarin's first tentative journey beyond earth's atmosphere to landing on the moon in 1969. However much this achievement might have been framed in the politics of the Cold War it truly was a giant step forward for humankind.

This faith in the future was not confined to apologists for the existing order of things. In 1969 the Situationist International looked forward to the day when 'Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature' (1). Sun Ra proclaimed that 'Space is the Place' for all those who found earth boring and George Clinton invited 'Citizens of the Universe' to join the 'Partying on the Mothership' (2).

I was of the generation of small children woken up in the early hours to watch the first pictures beamed back from the moon. The TV shows and films of the period led us to believe that soon we would all be doing it. By 2001, according to Kubrick's film, humans would be reaching out to the absolute on the far side of the galaxy.

We were lied to. What really happened in 2001? Grey September, planes crashing into buildings followed by weapons targeted from Space on some of the world's poorest people. We are now living in 'a general global state of war that erodes the distinction between war and peace' (3). A new kind of war without temporal or spatial limits - a war waged everywhere and nowhere, anytime, any place.

What better weapon in this new kind of war than space-based systems with the whole world in their sights? In 'The coming of age of the flesh machine', the Critical Arts Ensemble describe the development of the sight machine as an element of the war machine. They write: 'Through the development of satellite-based imaging technologies, in combination with computer networks capable of sorting, storing, and retrieving vast amounts of visual information, a wholistic representation has been constructed of the social, political, economic, and geographical landscape(s) that allows for near-perfect surveillance of all areas, from the micro to the macro. Through such visualization techniques, any situation or population deemed unsuitable for perpetuating the war machine can be targeted for sacrifice or for containment' (4).

The United States Air Force has an Air Force Space Command with its own Strategic Master Plan setting out a 25 year plan to maintain US space superiority. It boasts that 'Recent conflicts in Afghanisatan and Iraq have clearly demonstrated the asymmetric advantage space brings to any fight, whether that fight is in the middle of the desert, isolated mountainous terrain, or a large metropolitan area' A frightening new military newspeak has developed - 'Space Force Application' (weapons in space deployed against terrestrial targets), 'Counterspace' (preventing enemies using space), 'Space Force Enhancement' (using space to support air, ground, and sea forces) and 'Full Spectrum Space Combat Command'.

The Plan proposes developing the 'capability to deliver attacks from space… Space force application systems would have the advantages of rapid global access and the ability to effectively bypass adversary systems' (5). The vision then is of an orbital killing platform, out of this world but able to strike at targets on its surface. Weapons that can be deployed at the push of a button without the pesky inteference of mutineers, strikers, war resisters and saboteurs.

The Plan also describes something called the 'Commanding the Future' initiative, established to implement all this. This is the official vision of the future in 2005. No more fairy stories of better days to come. Instead the future as an idea has been colonised by fear and pessimism. We are told that the future will be a more dangerous place, in which only the State can save us. Every repressive law is now justified in the name of protecting us from some terrible future eventuality. So we have the Patriot Act which has ensnared Steve Kurtz and many other innocents.

Opposition movements have also turned their face to the past. Previous radical movements populated the future with utopian visions of different possible worlds. Marx wrote of the 1848 events in France that 'The social revolution… cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future' (6). Since the heyday of the space race and the defeat of the radical movements of the 60s and 70s there has been a lowering of horizons away from changing the world towards just stopping things getting worse - the buzz words always seem to be 'stop' and 'resist'. Elsewhere, social conservatism is on the march from religious fundamentalisms to endless retro fashions in music and clothes.

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts was partly an attempt to make good some of the unkept promises of our childhoods. Like the band Pulp we asked 'we were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets. When you have seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?' (7). We wanted to rediscover space as the site of new ways of living and being, relishing the eruption of the marvellous rather than smothering it in the commercial, state and military baggage dragged into space by the mainstream space programmes. To do so we created a speculative playground in which all manner of new possibilities could be explored - dancing, music, sex - in the context of the entirely feasible proposition of community based spaced exploration.

The questions posed by the AAA remain unanswered: 'What would it be like to step into space? Beyond earth's gravity, its economy, its laws, what wonders would we discover? What unknown pleasures would we stumble across on our trip to the stars?' (8).

For most of us, the AAA is now in the past, but it is also in the future. One of the ideas we toyed with was that the AAA was a revolutionary movement of the future operating in the present, maybe, like in the film Terminator, sent back into the past by future autonomous communities in space, to guarantee their eventual success.

The task remains of reclaiming the future as a place of expanded human subjectivity and social wealth, rather than as a repository for present day anxieties. If sometimes it feels that we are in dark times, we must remember that the darker the night, the brighter the stars.

Neil Starman


The Once and Future Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Paris, April 2005

References:

1. Eduardo Rothe, The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power, Internationale Situationniste, no,12, (1969).
2. The reference here is to the Sun Ra tracks 'Space is the Place' and 'Outer Spaceways Incorporated' and to Parliament's 'Mothership Connection'.
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
4. Critical Arts Ensemble, Flesh Machine: cyborgs, designer babies and the new eugenic consciousness (New York: Autonomedia, 1998)
5. Air Force Space Command, Strategic Master Plan FY06 and beyond (2003)
6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napolean Bonaparte (1852)
7. Pulp, Glory Days, from the LP 'This is Hardcore', 1998.
8. Neil Disconaut, Mission Accomplished but the Beat Goes On: the Fantastic Voyage of the AAA, in See you in Space: the Fifth Annual Report of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (London, 2000)




See also: This is how we walk on the moon

Eel Pie Island

The excellent Another Nickel in the Machine - a site focusing on 20th century London -has recently featured some great photos of A Rave on Eel Pie Island in August 1960. I have reproduced a few here, check out the original post for more.


This was obviously a beatnik affair, complete with barefoot dancing - the music probably trad jazz, the preferred soundtrack for Britain's first generation of self-proclaimed ravers. A contemporary article reports 'The tolerant atmosphere in places like the Eel Pie Island club, off Twickenham, is at first surprising: up to 500 people will gather in the hall of a the derelict island hotel and, despite their often outlandish appearance, will listen and jive together all evening without incident' (Traditional Jazz is Booming, The Time, 12 August 1961). The scene doesn't look unlike a squat party rave of the last 20 years - graffiti on the wall, androgynous baggy clothes etc.

Eel Pie Island is located in the River Thames at Twickenham in South West London, and is a key location in London counter-cultural history, particularly the Eel Pie Hotel and its dancehall. Before the Second World War it was popular for ballroom dancing, then in the 1950s hosted jazz raves (like the one pictured here), before becoming a launchpad for English R&B, with bands like The Rolling Stones and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers playing there.

A 1967 article describes Eel Pie Island as 'for the past 10 years a Mecca of the long-haired ban-the-bombers.. On three evenings a week, the humped footbridge linking the island with the mainland supports a bedraggled procession of young people who trek from all over the country to spend a few hours a the island's famous jazz club. The throbbing, smoky atmosphere of the big hall where they dance, and the jungle of rough grass and bushes leading to the edge of the Thames forms a wild haven for non-conformists'.

The article goes on to disclose 'The Secret of Eel Pie Island' - that the club is partially a 'beatnik experiment', an 'open therapeutic community' run by Arthur Chisnall, a sociologist 'as an experiment in reaching and helping disturbed youngsters in their search for a purpose in life...Beatniks and delinquents who have drifted to the island over the years have since found their way to colleges, universities and into the social service' (Times, 6 January 1967)

The hotel closed in 1967, but the club reopened for a while in 1969 as Colonel Barefoot's Rock Garden, featuring underground acts like Hawkwind and The Edgar Broughton Band. The place was then occupied for a nominal rent by the Eel Pie Commune (1969-71) - there is an interesting article by the anarchist illustrator and Commune founder Clifford Harper here describing those two years of drugs, hippiedom and political arguments: 'It had 25 bedrooms and at one point 100 people from all over the world were at Eel Pie Island. It was anarchy... It had a big lawn and some grounds and the hotel was full of people... Part of the hotel we opened as a dance hall on Friday and Saturday night. Out in the suburbs, six to seven hundred kids would turn up'.

In his memoir, Eel Pie Dharma, Chris Faiers remembers: 'The old hotel rapidly filled with dossers, hippies, runaway schoolkids, drug dealers, petty thieves, heroin addicts, artists, poets, bikers, American hippie tourists, au pair girls, and Zen philosophers from all over the world... The derelict Eel Pie ballroom was opened for business once again. It looked like a high school gym done over by hippies. There were garish psychedelic paintings all over the flaking walls. The most striking was the looming head of a red-eyed hippie king, with his Aubrey Beardsley tresses winding about the walls'.

Some great parties I am sure, but not a libertarian utopia - as usual where drugs and money are involved, some very dodgy characters were drawn to the honeypot. Another participant recalls that 'the only guns seen were those produced 18 months later by some East End gangsters, brought in to ensure the dance-hall's peaceful transition of authority from the patronage of a nearby Hells Angels chapter to that of a slightly more professional management'.

The Hotel was burned down in 1971 in the midst of a controversy about Richmond Council issuing a demolition order for the building to pave the way for a contentious redevelopment of the site.

A new book on Eel Pie Island by Dan Van der Vat & Michele Whitby is due to be published in October 2009.

Dubstep, Funky and the Goddess of Love

Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances is a new blog looking at music/culture/politics through the unusual lens of a South London based voodoo practitioner/writer.

In this post, the author offers a new twist on the feminine/masculine pressure debate, looking at dubstep and grime in relation to My Lady Erzulie Freda Dahomey, the Voodoo Goddess of love, her influence considered to be largely absent (with some exceptions such as Grievous Angel's Devotional Dubz): 'Where was Erzulie Freda in this? What happened to the sweet vocals and champagne, the dancing and allure, making an effort before you leave the house, creating a space where the brutality of city living is overcome for a few hours and replaced with fleeting and ephemeral worlds of delight and fascination... All soundsystem needs The Lady. She's the beating heart of any night out. Queen of the dancehall, captivating and enchanting, turning the night into something you'll remember for the rest of your life... In her world, every moment is like the first kiss of an ideal lover, and her presence reminds us of how beautiful nature is, how amazing and filled with possibility London can be, and how much magic there is to be found in a night out'.

Naturally from this perspective, UK Funky gets the thumbs up for bringing back 'girly vocals, smart dress codes, and a female audience to a scene that has been dry of these mysteries for too long. Erzulie has re-entered the building, and wants you to buy her a bottle of champagne'.

Michael Jackson Flashmobs

The inevitable Michael Jackson tribute flashmob drew a big crowd to London's Liverpool Street station this evening, the idea being to do a mass Moonwalk. The police prevented it happening in the train station itself (scene of several other silent raves in the past), so it relocated to the street outside. It doesn't look like there was much space for full on Moonwalking, but clearly there was lots of milling about, singing and dancing while the traffic ground to a halt. There was also Jackson-inspired flashmob dancing in the streets in downtown Toronto and by the Ferry building in San Francisco. Any way a good example of instant mobilisation, less than 24 hours after Jackson's death was announced.

The sense of slightly aimless but enjoyable chaos reminded me of my closest encounter with Michael Jackson, on his British tour in 1988. It was shortly after the 1987 release of the Bad album, the third of his great Quincy Jones-produced trilogy (after Off the Wall and Thriller). MJ and his sister Janet ruled the dancefloor (or at least the electronic dance pop end of it) at that time, the latter with the excellent 1986 Control album (produced by Jam and Lewis). I remember the week Bad was released and hearing it for the first time in a club in South London (Dance Chase at the Alexandra on Clapham Common), everyone was talking about it.

In August 1988 Michael Jackson was playing in Roundhay Park, Leeds, and as I was staying not too far away in Sheffield we decided to go and check it out. We didn't have tickets but figured we might be able to sneak in. At the Park it was apparent that thousands of others had had the same idea. As well as the ticket holders inside the gig, surrounded by a high fence, there was a big crowd in the park. Some were content with listening to the music and seeing the part of the screen next to the stage that was visible from outside but many others were determined to find a way in, using crowd barriers as ladders to climb over fences (only to be chased out again), and generally giving the runaround to the police, out in force in the park with dogs and horses.

It was all semi-riotous and put me in mind of 'Starlust - the Secret Fantasies of Fans' by Fred and Judy Vermorel (1985). Basically their thesis was that rather than simply being integrated into the capitalist spectacle, extreme fan behaviour created a kind of surplus energy of utopian romanticism that was potentially disruptive of everyday life.

Michael Jackson may have been a fucked up kid who grew up to fuck up other kids, let alone his crimes against good music (I refer to some of his awful schmaltzy ballads), but in the intersection of his best tracks, dancefloors, and the desires of dancers many interesting moments have arisen - and no doubt will continue to do so.

New Links

A couple of (related?) new blogs with similar interests to this site:

Apples from the Underground - ' blog inspired by the underground subcultures of resistance , rave music creativity , temporary autonomous zones and radical theory'. Some interesting stuff about French free parties, including last weekend's Free Parade in Paris - trying to find out more about this (will translate some material from the French Free Parade site, does anyone have any information in English that I can use?)

Shituationist Institute - 'progressive party palaver' from Berlin, Athens and beyond. Some good party reports, I liked this account of a weekend in Berlin, including going to an anti-nationalist 'Love Techno Hate Germany' party.

On the side of the dancers, the dirt and the dust

'Order reigns in Tehran!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:I was, I am, I shall be!" (OK so in the original Rosa Luxemburg quote it's Berlin rather than Tehran, but the sentiments still apply)

The repression continues in Iran, but so too does resistance. What started out as a protest about the election results has turned into a more fundamental challenge to the Islamic Republic.

The (officially) defeated election candidate Mousavi has blood on his hands just like the (officially) victorious Ahmadinejad. He was Prime Minister in the 1980s at a time of executions of political prisoners and the butchery of the Iran-Iraq war. But the protests on the streets have drawn on a wider resentment against religious repression and economic hardship - both of which have got worse over the past couple of years, as Azadeh Moaveni observes

Late that summer [2007], authorities launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation against young people they accused of un-Islamic appearance. Within a few short weeks, police detained 150,000 people, and all the women in my life went out to buy the shapeless, long coats that we had worn back in the late 1990s. Though the campaign targeted young men as well, authorities singled out women with particular brutality... To add to Iranians' frustration, interminable queues accompanied the government's petrol-rationing scheme, unveiled that summer. In the evenings it could take several hours to fill our car, and when our local petrol station was torched by rioters furious with the new plan, we stopped using the car. Iran's streets began to remind me of postwar Baghdad. Censorship had been stepped up such that seventh editions of sociology textbooks were not receiving permits to reprint. The ominous white morality police vans that patrolled the streets kept young people in a permanent state of anxiety. One morning, while taking my baby for a stroll near the mountains, a teenage policewoman grabbed by arm and tried to lead me to a police van. "Your sleeves are too short," she barked'.

In the turmoil leading up to the election, there was some space created, at least for some: '“We were singing, dancing in the streets, boys and girls together. We had never done this before. No one wanted to go home'. Things are clearly now much more sombre, but determined:

'I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favourite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again... I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them' .

Ahmadinejad meanwhile has denounced his opponents as 'dirt and dust' and of 'officially recognising thieves, homosexuals and scumbags'.

The movement cannot be dismissed as just a few middle class students caught up in a faction fight within the Iranian state (a view I have head expressed at a meeting in London last week). Interestingly, Khodro Auto Workers staged a slow down in support of the demonstrators last week. Similarly the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Company have endorsed the protests, despite their opposition to all of the state-picked candidates in the election. There have also been protests by hospital workers at the Rasul Akram hsospital in Tehran.

On the music front, a number of songs have already appeared dedicated to Neda Aghan Soltan, shot dead by state forces last week, here's just one of them:

Mohammad Reza Shajarian, one of Iran's most famous singers, has written to the state broadcaster IRIB demanding that they stop playing his songs.

Further reports/analysis: Revolutionary Road , Hands of People of Iran, Socialist Blogs, Worker Communist Party of Iran (their poster reproduced below)