Electric Eden

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious, accomplished and entertaining survey of 100 years of music-making and its associated literature and counter-cultures. Its focus is on the pastoral dream of evergreen Albion, with its core the story of folk music since Cecil Sharp began collecting rural song at the turn of the 20th century. Folk’s various revivals and re-inventions are encompassed, from the use of folk themes in English classical music (e.g. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock), through the proletarian focus of Ewan McColl and A.L. Lloyd and on to folk rock and beyond.

Young is less interested though in ‘folk’ as a specific musical genre, than in the vision he sees underlying it - the use of music as a form of ‘imaginative time travel’ to the ‘succession of golden ages’ (both semi-historical and entirely fictional), found in British culture – Merrie England, Albion, Middle Earth, Avalon, Narnia. As he states in the introduction ‘The ‘Visionary Music’ involved in this book’s title refers to any music that contributes to this sensation of travel between time zones, of retreat to a secret garden, in order to draw strength and inspiration for facing the future’.

This is not a characteristic solely of what is normally defined as ‘folk music’ and he includes within it dreamy English psychedelia, and the work of later visionary musical outsiders such as Kate Bush and Julian Cope.

The stories of Cecil Sharp and Ewen McColl have already been well documented, for me the most interesting parts of the book deal with the subsequent trajectories of late 1960s/1970s folk rock and ‘acid folk’, with their infusions of both Early Music and futuristic psychedelia. As well as covering the obvious reference points (Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake), Young gives space to many less well known artists such as Bill Fay, Comus and Mr Fox.

After languishing in relative obscurity for many years, some of these have only recently secured the listeners denied them at the time. In another form of time travel, it’s almost as if some of the albums recorded in the late 1960s/70s were set down as ‘time capsules’, to be unheard in their present but acting as a gift to the future that would appreciate them. The paradigmatic examples are of course Nick Drake, who only achieved posthumous fame when his fruit was in the ground, and Vashti Bunyan, whose Just Another Diamond Day sold only a few hundred copies in 1970s and who has only really gained widespread recognition in the last five years or so. I saw her give one of her first major performances at the Folk Britannia 'Daughters of Albion' event at the Barbican in London in 2006, alongside Eliza Carthy, Norma Waterson, Kathryn Williams, Sheila Chandra and Lou Rhodes.

Places and Spaces

Young is very good on place – both the specific landscapes that influenced particular musicans, and the spaces where music was performed. In relation to the former he mentions for instance Maiden Castle in Dorset, inspiration for John Ireland’s Mai-Dun (as well as incidentally the novel Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys, an author with a similar take on the visionary landscape).
In relation to the latter, he mentions clubs such as Ewen McColl’s Ballads and Blues club/Hootennanay upstairs in the Princess Louise pub in Holborn (founded in 1957) and its later evolution into The Singers Club at the Pindar of Wakefield on Grays Inn Road. In Soho, Russell Quaye’s Skiffle Cellar at 49 Greek Street (1958-60), was replaced at the same address in 1965 by ‘the poky palace of Les Cousins, where the folk monarchy held court, audiences of no more than 150 were routinely treated to mystically revelatory performances. The club never got around to applying for a liquor licence, so patrons consumed tea and sandwiches in a haze of hash smoke, straining to hear the soloists over percussive effects from the cash register’. Denizens included Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, Simon & Garfunkel, John Martyn, Martin Carthy and Roy Harper.

Outside of London in the 1960s, ‘Hertfordshire was already one of the most influential hotbeds of the new folk movement outside of Soho… Herts heads keen for a lungful of marijuana and subterranean entertainment would gather at the Cock in St Albans… Down the road from The Cock brooded the Peahen, where a more traditional, MacColl-style folk-revival club was held’. In nearby Hemel Hempstead, singer Mick Softley ran the Spinning Wheel, while at the Dolphin Coffee Bar, Pete Frame opened Luton Folk Club in 1965.

There's also a good chapter on free festivals, 'Paradise Enclosed', as 'a serious attempt to stake out and remake Utopia in an English field. The temporary tented villages of Britain's outdoor festivals represented a practical attempt to live out the dream of Albion' two hundred years after the Inclosures Act of 1761 and the enclosure of common land.

Some criticisms

In a work of this scale and scope there are bound to be some factual errors of geography (Luton is in Bedfordshire not Hertfordshire) and history (Aleister Crowley was not the founder, or even a founder, of the Golden Dawn). But these are minor quibbles.

There are though a few problems with the framework Young uses for all this rich material. The chief one is its use of the term ‘Britain’s visionary music’ when it is clear that what he is describing is primarily an English phenomenon. Of course there has been plenty of folk music from other parts of the British Isles, but Young barely mentions it. In any event, it has often had a different aesthetic, concerned precisely to differentiate itself from Englishness and commemorating historical conflicts with the 'English' state from Bannockburn to the clearances (in the case of Scottish music).

Although Ireland is clearly not part of Britain, its influence on English folk is also largely unacknowledged here. Did the raucous Dubliners influence those who wanted to take folk in a more rocky direction? Did Irish rebel song envy inspire English political song (Dominic Behan was a key figure in the Singers Club)? Wasn't Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar one of the biggest folk rock hits? This is left unexplored, and arguably the greatest London folk band of all time - The Pogues - don't even get mentioned.

Young is a better musicologist than a folklorist, and while he is clearly aware that claims of an unbroken folk music tradition stretching back into the mists of time are highly questionable, he seems to want to hold on to some notion of 'pagan survivals' in folk. Despite citing Ronald Hutton in the footnotes, he disregards Hutton's findings that we know very little about the pre-Christian beliefs of the British Isles. Instead he repeats the whole Golden Bough/Wasteland mythology of ritual sacrifice as it if were fact: ‘The gods controlling these cycles needed to be appeased with sacrifices. At first, the leader of the pack, the king himself, was slaughtered before his vital energies began to die off, and a new healthy replacement was appointed in his place’.

Finally, Young does not really explore the potential dark side of all this dabbling with blood and soil. He may be right that many of those working within the folk idiom ‘have been radical spirits, aligned with the political left or just fundamentally unconventional and progressive in outlook’ – something that applies not just to the post-1950s Communist Party revivalists but to earlier pioneers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams who, as Young mentions, hung out with William Morris’s socialist circle in Hammersmith. But it is also true that this look backwards to a pre-capitalist idyll can be profoundly reactionary, and potentially very right wing. In a brief survey of current trends, Young mentions the post-industrial 'neo-folk' scene, but does not refer to the controversies over some of the neo-fascist elements involved (see the new Who Makes the Nazis? blog for more on that).

Now I've read the book (all 664 pages), I will no doubt be spending the rest of the year tracking down some of the music in it that I haven't heard yet.

(see also review at Transpontine of some of the South East London connections)

Club security - let a thousand warehouse parties bloom

As discussed here earlier this year, Shoreditch-based club Plastic People was threatened with losing its license, prompting a wave of consternation and protest. The club did re-open, and its famed dubstep/grime night FWD>> has restarted.

Now however some punters are complaining that it has lost its relaxed vibe as the club has been forced to impose tighter security in order to keep the police and Hackney Council happy - and therefore allow the club to remain open. Complaints have included heavy searches on the way into the club, scanning of IDs, and a security guard with a torch patrolling the dancefloor for drugs. Dan Hancox has written at his blog:

'Since it re-opened - and London's forward-thinking dance fans breathed a huge sigh of relief - there have been some good nights there, and FWD>> has returned to its spiritual home on Curtain Road. They seemed to forget to re-install the ventilation at first, making it a de facto bikram rave, but that's tolerable, for the unmatchable joys of that system, that room, that ambience. What isn't, is the conditions imposed on the license-holders in terms of security and crowd-control. Queuing for 15 minutes just to get outside for a breath of fresh(-ish) air or a cigarette is not the one. Nor are police hovering outside in a massive van every night, interrogating the crowd. Nor is airport-style security for the only fucking club in Shoreditch that NEVER HAS ANY TROUBLE'.

There's also discussion on this at Dissensus.

Frankly some of the complaints seem a bit naive. To paraphrase: 'I turned up at a venue with drugs in my pocket, knowing that it's under intense police scrutiny for alleged drug taking, and would you believe it I got banned?'.

But there is a serious point - as well as clubs losing their licenses altogether, clubs can be ruined by the authorities imposing such punitive conditions on them that the pleasure in going there is not worth the hassle of getting in.

I guess like many people I sometimes entertain the fantasy of winning the lottery and opening up a free space with parties and interesting social gatherings (naturally in this fantasy me and my mates do most of the DJing). But seriously, supposing it came true and you had no commercial/financial pressures, even then would you actually be allowed to keep such a place open without being forced to have a heavily policed regime and having to jump through a thousand hoops? It seems to me that whatever the intentions of club owners/promoters it is becoming increasingly difficult to put on nights without these restrictions, just as it seems virtually impossible to get permission to put on any kind of festival without a big fence around it. This obviously applies particularly in gentrifying areas like Shoreditch where clubs and bars have done their job in making the area safe/attractive to the middle classes, and are now being squeezed out as the same middle classes move into the area permanently and want it to quieten down a bit.

Still with recession and cuts, there is an increasing number of empty buildings in London. If licensed clubs are finding harder to survive, there's always the unlicensed option - let a thousand warehouse and railway arch parties bloom!

See also Drinking, Dancing and Fingerprinting

The Cider Tax

A British government in debt following an expensive war seeks to make people pay through unpopular policies - sounds familiar? This instance was in the 18th century in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, and was also a moment in the long history of the state attempting to regulate the production, distribution and consumption of alcohol.

In 1763 the Earl of Bute's government decided to impose a tax of four shillings a hogshead on cider. Since large numbers of farmers and others in the South West produced their own cider, excise officers were empowered to gain access to farms and cottages in order to collect the tax.

'The tax prompted demonstrations, mournful processions, "gatherings intent on violence" and the harrassment of excisemen. The new Bishop of Exeter found that "the people in Devonshire acted childishly and unhandsomely" towards him because "he had the misfortune to vote for the [cider tax] bill". In Exeter 1765, "the mob hissed and insulted him and one fellow had assurance to throw an apple at his head". Sir John Phillips, baronet and MP for Pembrokeshire, did not get off so lightly. A newspaper reported in 1763 that "a riotous mob did grossly affront him" while he was travelling through Monmouth. The citizens pulled him from his carriage, and after discussing whether to hang him for voting for the cider tax, decided to "extremely ill-treat him instead. They made him go down on his knees and beg their pardon'.

The government backed down in 1766. 'The West Country celebrated in 1766 with public tea parties, ox roasts, balls, bell ringing, and the decoration of orchards with gilded apples and laurels. The Gloucester Journal reported "There is nothing heard in our streets, but 'the day of the oppressor is over, the calamity of the cyder drinker is put away; the deadly excise man shall appear no more in our quarters'"

(Source of quotes: The Great Scrumpy Crisis of 1763, Independent 16 February 1992)

The night Steve Biko died I cried and I cried

Stephen Biko, anti-Apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, died at the hands of the South African police on this day (12th September) 1977. His life and death has been commemorated in many songs - here's a short playlist (for a fuller list, see the Biko wikipedia entry).

Robert Wyatt - Biko,

his take on the best known song, written by Peter Gabriel and recorded by many:





Port Elizabeth weather fine
It was business as usual
In police room 619
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja
-The man is dead

When I try to sleep at night
I can only dream in red
The outside world is black and white
With only one colour dead
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja
-The man is dead

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja
-The man is dead

And the eyes of the world are
watching now
watching now.


Tapper Zukie - Tribute to Steve Biko:





Beenie Man - Steve Biko:




Steel Pulse - Biko's Kindred Lament ('The night Steve Biko died I cried and I cried'):





Sweet Honey in the Rock - Biko:





Tribe Called Quest - Biko (Stir it Up) - 1993. Not all about Biko, but obviously name checked in title, chorus and the line 'I'm radical with this like the man this song is after':






Dead Prez - I'm an African (mentions Biko):






As mentioned at previous post, today is also the anniversary of the arrest in 1973 of singer Victor Jara in Chile (followed by his murder in custody a few days later). The two deaths are commemorated together in the song 'Chile Your Waters run red through Soweto' recorded by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Billy Bragg and others: 'The hand that cut short the song of Victor Jara, Put young Stephen Biko in a dusty hill grave'

Victor Jara: my guitar is not for the rich

On this day (12 September) in 1973, the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara was arrested by the military and taken to the Chile Stadium. The day before, a right wing military coup had deposed Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government.

Jara was one of thousands of leftists rounded up, tortured and killed in the aftermath of the US-backed coup. He was apparently shot dead in the stadium - where over the years he had sung many times - on the 15 September.

One of the last songs he wrote was Manifiesto. As his widow Joan Jara recalled in her book 'Victor: an unfinished song':

'during those weeks Victor was composing one which he felt that he had to write before it was too late, to express his reason for singing. He was quiet as he worked on it, introverted and withdrawn. I could hear him singing gently in the workshop as I worked in the house. Then he came to call me to ask me to listen to it. Although it was a very beautiful song, my heart contracted as he sang it to me. I knew that
Victor was writing his testament.

I don't sing for love of singing,
or because I have a good voice.
I sing because my guitar
has both feeling and reason.
It has a heart of earth
and the wings of a dove,
it is like holy water,
blessing joy and grief.
My song has found a purpose
as Violeta would say.
Hardworking guitar,
with a smell of spring.

My guitar is not for the rich no,
nothing like that.
My song is of the ladder
we are building to reach the stars.
For a song has meaning
when it beats in the veins
of a man who will die singing,
truthfully singing his song.

My song is not for fleeting praise
nor to gain foreign fame,
it is for this narrow country
to the very depths of the earth.
There, where everything comes to rest
and where everything begins,
song which has been brave song
will be forever new.
('Manifesto')

Sid Rawle: death of a free festival veteran

Sid Rawle, a key figure in the free festival movement in the UK, died last month aged 64. His activism encompassed the Hyde Park Diggers in the late 1960s, the People’s Free Festival in Windsor Great Park (1972-4), the Stonehenge Free Festival (1976-84), the Peace Convoy and the Rainbow Village camp outside the planned cruise missiles base at RAF Molesworth (1984-5).

There's a very informative post by Andy Worthington at his site about Sid's life and times. As Andy says:

'Sid played a major part in the British counter-culture from the 1960s until his death, although he is, of course, best known for his involvement in the free festival movement, first at Windsor, from 1972 to 1974, and then at Stonehenge, until the violent suppression of the festival in 1985. The author and activist Jeremy Sandford (who died in 2003) described him as “the squatter to end them all, having squatted flats, houses, commons, forests, a village, boats, an island, an army camp, Windsor Great Park".'

Read Andy's full post, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart. See also Ian Bone, Turn Left at the Bridge. Not an uncontroversial figure, he was identified by the media as a leader of the hippies and his role in attempting to mediate with the authorities earned him criticism from some quarters - stilll, nobody can say he didn't try and make the world a more interesting place.

Summer Free Parties

Summer's almost gone, so guess the free party people will be moving back indoors soon. Here's news of a few outdoor gatherings last month:

Police close down illegal raves in Suffolk (BBC, 22 August 2010)

'Two illegal raves in Suffolk have been closed down and sound equipment seized by police.
Police said about 100 people waiting near Corton beach complied when they were asked to leave on Saturday night. Two generators were seized.

Officers were then alerted to loud music in a field in Culford, near Bury St Edmunds, in the early hours. People at the rave were compliant with police and the site was cleared and cleaned by 1100 BST, police said'.

Up to 1,000 attend illegal rave in Wiltshire forest (BBC, 29 August 2010)

'Between 500 and 1,000 people are estimated to have attended an illegal rave overnight in Wiltshire. Police are working to disperse the last of the party-goers from Savernake Forest, in Stitchcombe, near Marlborough. Officers said they received a tip-off about the rave on Saturday night, but did not know the location at that time.

Dozens of cars were abandoned on roads leading to the village and the noise could be heard from several miles away. Wiltshire Police said they had received two complaints, but there were no reports of any damage. Karen Gardner, who lives in the area, said she was first woken up by the noise at 0400 BST.

"You almost feel this thudding," she said. "I was a bit concerned what might be going on in the little wood behind us, but couldn't establish where it was coming from. If it was coming from Savernake Forest there are quite a lot of woods to go through so goodness knows how loud it was over there."

A rave attended by 800 people was also held in the forest in 2003 and a similar event was thwarted by police in 2005'.

Police vow to come down hard on ravers using Trent Park (North London Today, 25 August 2010)

'Police are to start patrolling Trent Park after hundreds of youths gathered for a series of illegal all-night raves. For the past month, ravers have managed to avoid arrest on the picturesque park off Cockfosters Road, Cockfosters, by feeding false leads to police. Police officers have warned the organisers not to hold any more raves, but so far no arrests have been made and parks police have now been called in to patrol the park and prevent ravers from getting in on Friday and Saturday nights.

In order to avoid being hunted down, savvy rave-goers steer clear of posting information about the raves on the internet – even castigating fellow ravers for posting party pictures after the event. News of the events is being spread through text messages instead. The Trent Park decision follows news that officers across the country are being called in to shut down raves held in fields and parks.

Cabinet member for the environment Chris Bond said: “Zero tolerance will be shown to anyone setting up illegal parties in Trent Park. Any ravers who fail to leave will be arrested on the spot and the organisers may well lose their equipment. We are not prepared to allow our residents’ quality of life to be spoilt by a small band of mindless, selfish idiots. Trent Park is one of the most beautiful parks in London. We won’t stand by and watch it being abused.”

A police spokeswoman said: “We rely on intelligence to find out when these raves are taking place but they do not always happen at the times and locations we have been given. We’ve initiated two operations in recent weeks and will continue to monitor and react to intelligence. While no arrests have yet been made, we do have powers under the Criminal Justice And Public Order Act to seize equipment being used and also prevent people from attending. We can arrest those who refuse to leave when requested by police to do so, but we have not had to resort to these powers so far....'

The Night Shadows

Chapter 3 of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is entitled 'The Night Shadows' and opens with reflections on night, sleep and its secrets:

'A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Picture credits: Sleeping Beauty by Edward Burne-Jones (top); photo titled 'Sleeping Dancer' sourced from here. Unfortunately I don't know anything more about the photographer, who seems to be called Matilde, but check out the site for some good pictures.

Paris by Night - Brassaï (1933)

In 1933, the photographer Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) published Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), a remarkable photographic record of his wanderings through the night time city in the company of, among others, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prevert. The book was reprinted with the photographer's commentary in 1976, in which he sets out his perspective on the nocturnal underground of the city:

'Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness. Some once-familiar figures in the army of night workers have disappeared…

The real night people, however, live at night not out of necessity, but because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs. A secret, suspicious world, closed to the uninitiated. Go at random into one of those seemingly ordinary bars in Montmartre, or into a dive in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood. Nothing to show they are owned by clans of pimps, that they are often the scenes of bloody reckonings. Conversation ceases. The owner looks you over with a friendly glance. The clientele sizes you up: this intruder, this newcomer – is he an informer, a stool pigeon? Has he come in to blow the gig, to squeal? You may not be served, you may even be asked to leave, especially if you try to take pictures…

And yet, drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my ‘voyage to the end of the night’ from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades , in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate the other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past’

The book includes photos and descriptions of people socialising and dancing in bars, shows and lesbian and gay clubs - I will feature some more of this later.

These photos were taken at La Bastoche, a bar in Rue de Lappe, in 1932. Gotta love those kiss curls.

I believe the book is still in print, at least it's available from all the usual book sites. If you are interested in nightlife, dancing, photography, social history and alternative cultures you should take a look - and let's face it if you are looking at this site you must be interested in at least a couple of these...

Grassroots: another festival bites the dust

As this story from Schnews makes clear, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get permission to put on any kind of festival in the UK other than a fenced-off, high security corporate leisure event. The latest casualty is the Grassroots festival planned in Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile those who try and put on unofficial festivals are subject to the full weight of the law. The “Rave 6”, charged under section 136 following the police attack on this year’s UK Teknival (see previous report), has now become the “Rave 10” after four more people were charged.

'Yet another independent festival has been cancelled after a concerted campaign by bureaucrats, nimbys and police. The Grassroots Feastival was a small volunteer-run event due to take place in Cambridgeshire in early September. Organisers had lined up three days of revelry, from poetry to Drum ‘n’ Bass and culminating in a communal banquet replete with juggling waiters.

The Festival faced determined opposition from the very start. According to one of the organisers, Mooney, when the application process began in January the council made it clear they would do all they could to stop the festival taking place. Martin Ford from the Police licensing board went one step further and told organisers, “I’d rather put pins in my eyes than have this festival in my county.” Mooney said, “They didn’t want it to happen so they played their games. They couldn’t use legislation so instead they used dirty tactics.” The now familiar modus operandi involved heaping ludicrous demand after ludicrous demand on organisers and stalling for time to the point that the festival risked financial ruin if they pressed ahead.

After the initial consultation, organisers met monthly with the local authorities and there were six revisions of the festival’s management plan in total. Each time they were presented with ever more unreasonable conditions, ranging from heras-fencing the A11 in case of invasion by wandering partygoers who had strayed three miles over fence and field, to installing security watchtowers (with or without machine gun nests) to ensure the unruly throng of 2000 didn’t erupt in spontaneous revolution.

Each time, organisers either met the conditions or managed to argue their case that what they were being asked was beyond the realms of sanity or reason. However the killer blow came with the final application for a licence. When handing in the application, local authorities clearly told organisers that they only needed to submit one paper copy and that the pack of other relevant licensing bodies, such as traffic management and the fire brigade, would be happy with an emailed copy. At the eleventh hour of the last day they had to submit the application, organisers were then told that the licence would be refused unless all the bodies had paper copies. With no time left to do this, organisers would have had to resubmit and wouldn’t have received a decision until just days before the festival. If the licence had been refused at that point it would have spelled financial disaster for all involved and so organisers were left with no choice but to cancel.
A despondent Mooney told SchNEWS, “In some countries people welcome celebrations.” After the attacks on Strawberry Fair (see SchNEWS 715), the Big Green Gathering (SchNEWS 685), UK Teknival (SchNEWS 727) and Thimbleberry (SchNEWS 707) amongst others, it is becoming increasingly clear the UK isn’t one of them'.

'The Rhythmic or Throbbing Crowd' (Canetti)

From the chapter on Rhythm in Elias Canetti's Masse und Macht (1960), translated as 'Crowds and Power':

'Rhythm is originally the rhythm of the feet. Every human being walks, and, since he walks on two legs with which he strikes the ground in turn and since he only moves if he continues to do this, whether intentionally or not, a rhythmic sound ensues. The two feet never strike the ground with exactly the same force. The difference between them can be larger or smaller according to individual constitution or mood. It is also possible to walk faster or slower, to run, to stand still suddenly, or to jump.

Man has always listened to the footsteps of other men; he has certainly paid more attention to them than to his own. Animals too have their familiar gait; their rhythms are often richer and more audible than those of men; hoofed animals flee in herds, like regiments of drummers. The knowledge of the animals by which he was surrounded, which threatened him and which he hunted, was man’s oldest knowledge. He learnt to know animals by the rhythm of their movement. The earliest writing he learnt to read was that of their tracks; it was a kind of rhythmic notation imprinted on the soft ground and, as he read it, he connected it with the sound of its formation.

Many of these footprints were in large numbers close together and, just by looking quietly at them, men, who themselves originally lived in small hordes, were made aware of the contrast between their own numbers and the enormous numbers of some animal herds. They were always hungry and on the watch for game; and the more there was of it, the better for them. But they also wanted to be more themselves. Man’s feeling for his own increase was always strong and is certainly not to be understood only as his urge for self-propagation. Men wanted to be more, then and there; the large numbers of the herd which they hunted blended in their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which I shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

The means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied, steps added to steps in quick succession conjure up a larger number of men than there are. The men do not move away but, dancing, remain on the same spot. The sound of their steps does not die away, for these are continually repeated; there is a long stretch of time during which they continue to sound loud and alive. What they lack in numbers the dancers make up in intensity; if they stamp harder, it sounds as if there were more of them. As long as they go on dancing, they exert an attraction on all in their neighbourhood. Everyone within hearing joins them and remains with them. The natural thing would be for new people to go on joining them for ever, but soon there are none left and the dancers have to conjure up increase out of their own limited numbers. They move as though there were more and more of them. Their excitement grows and reaches frenzy.

How do they compensate for the increase in numbers which they cannot have? First, it is important that they should all do the same thing. They all stamp the ground and they all do it in the same way; they all swing their arms to and fro and shake their heads. The equivalence of the dancers becomes, and ramifies as, the equivalence of their limbs. Every part of a man which can move gains a life of its own and acts as if independent, but the movements are all parallel, the limbs appearing superimposed on each other, They are close together, one often resting on another, and thus density is added to their state of equivalence. Density and equality become one and the same. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing, a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all performing in exactly the same way and with the same purpose.

When their excitement is at its height, these people really feel as one, and nothing but physical exhaustion can stop them... Thanks to the dominance of rhythm, all throbbing crowds have something similar in their appearance'.

We can only assume that when Canetti talks of 'man' he means 'woman' too! Photos: top, a dance at the University of Sydney; bottom, dancers at Poe Park in the Bronx, New York, September 4 1938.

More creeping prohibition?

Worrying story from Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph (3 August 2010) about drugs and alcohol testing in pubs and clubs:

'Revellers including teenagers were tested for drugs and alcohol as part of a police crackdown on pubs and clubs. Police have been "stamping down hard" on the abuse of alcohol and alcohol legislation with a force-wide operation since March, including breathalysing more than 90 youngsters attending an under-18s disco in Kettering. The breathalyser test carried out in May was not compulsory and several youngsters chose not to undergo the test – but they were not allowed admission to the venue. Of the 96 youngsters who agreed to take the test, 14 tested positive for alcohol and were spoken to and offered advice by officers. Sgt Ian Fletcher, of Northamptonshire Police, said: "Some of the kids ran off rather than be breathalysed but our attendance sent out a strong message."

... Officers also drug-tested more than 120 people in town centre pubs and clubs in one night. Of the 126 people officers checked, people in nine premises tested positive for class A drugs'.

I'm not sure what powers, if any, the police have to do this. I believe it is voluntary to undertake them, but then again I can't believe that anybody would freely consent to being tested if they knew they'd taken something they shouldn't have. No doubt the police involved fudge the legal niceties.

Meanwhile, Lewisham Council in South London is proposing to trial 'a borough-wide Designated Public Place Order (or Drinking Control Zone)' which 'will give police discretionary powers to stop people and confiscate, demand and dispose of any alcohol within the boundaries of Lewisham borough'. Failure to comply with a request from the Police to hand over alcohol would result in arrest and/or a fine of up to £500. As I argued over at Transpontine:

'There are some broader issues at stake here. The first is the use of arbitrary police powers. The historical relationship between police, courts and the individual in the UK requires the police to present evidence of wrong doing to a court, with the person accused having the right to defend themselves before a judgement is made on their guilt and a sentence passed. With the DPPO, the police officer is judge, jury and 'executioner' - they can impose a punishment on the spot, such as pouring away somebody's drink, with the person affected having no right to question their authority or decision before 'sentence' is implemented. Worse, under the Police and Criminal Justice Act 2001 (which gave Council's powers to introduce DPPOs), these arbitrary powers can be extended to other 'authorised officers' such as park wardens.

The second wider issue is the creeping hyper-regulation of public space. The nature of public spaces is that people engage in lots of different behaviours and activities, some of which other people may find irritating, annoying or even mildly offensive. As long as people aren't actually harming others, they should be left to get on it. Just because some people disapprove of others' actions is no reason to ban them. Just because a few people engaging in an activity do cause harm to others is no reason to band everybody from that activity. In this case the 'drunk and disorderly' behaviour of a few people, already covered by existing laws, is being used as the basis to affect everybody's right to drink in public. It may not be a total booze ban, but it does mean that drinking in public is only permitted if the police choose to allow it'.

The Manifesto Club have lots of information about Designated Public Order Orders and their implementation elsewhere, as well as some good arguments against them.

'Sodcasting' and sociability

Good article by Dan Hancox in the Guardian last week on 'sodcasting' (as its critics have termed it)- playing music aloud on mobile phones in parks, buses and other public spaces:

"The way teenagers use their mobile phones may annoy the hell out of anyone older than 15, but their seemingly obnoxious desire to play music in public needs explaining. To some, sodcasting might seem like a bloody-minded imposition, a two-fingers from those who don't care what others think of them. To the teenagers, though they probably wouldn't put it quite like this, it's a resocialisation of public life through the collective enjoyment of music; it's friends doing the most natural thing imaginable – sharing what makes them happy".

The article, Mobile disco: how phones make music inescapable, also includes comments from Wayne Marshall (wayneandwax):

'Nor, contrary to popular belief, is it an especially recent phenomenon, says the American anthropologist and musicologist Wayne Marshall, who is currently researching what he calls "treble culture". "Sodcasting could fit into a time-honoured tradition of playing music in public as surely as reggae sound systems or the drums of Congo Square, never mind their antecedents," he says. "Transistor radios and ghetto blasters are both good examples of a longstanding history of people making music mobile. The case of the transistor radio shows that people have long been willing to sacrifice fidelity to portability; while the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one's music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as 'noise'."

Interesting to compare this with the pessimism that greeted the arrival of the first generation of minituarised listening devices in the 1980s (the Sony Walkman etc.). For critics like Judith Williamson they seemed to herald a new era of atomised individualism, whereas arguably here we have the opposite - the use of mobile phones to share music in social interaction.

Dance on 'benefits scrounger'

Predictably, the new UK ConDem government has announced the launch of a new crackdown on benefits claimants, including using private credit checking companies to snoop on the financial affairs of the sick and unemployed. Yes that's right, after pouring billions of pounds into propping up failing banks the state is going after the poorest people in the country to make them pay for it.

BBC News, the Daily Mail and others have been obediently highlighting the following clip as an example of 'benefits scrounging' - film of a man dancing whilst claiming Disability Living Allowance. Personally I think the guy's a bit of a hero, as well as a sharp dancer. Like most people bending the benefit rules to their advantage, he was just trying to get by - getting a few quid extra, but hardly getting rich at anybody else's expense.

As the court report makes clear (see below), he spent years virtually crippled with arthritis before an operation finally enabled him to have an active life, an opportunity he grasped by taking up dancing. He has spread his enthusiasm to care homes. In short he seems to have led a far more socially useful life than many other people who have got rich at other people's expense - and who don't get prosecuted or publicly denounced as a 'scrounger'. Dance on dude!



'Dancer spared jail over benefits fraud (Independent 4 August 2010)

A 61-year-old jazz dancer who fraudulently claimed nearly £20,000 in disability benefits walked free from court today. Terence Read said he was crippled by arthritis and barely able to walk but his condition improved following a hip replacement operation.

He failed to notify the change in his circumstances to the Department for Work and Pensions and officials later covertly filmed him dancing enthusiastically at a swing music night after receiving an anonymous tip-off that he was wrongly claiming Disability Living Allowance. Read, of Blackley, Manchester, was caught on camera gliding across the dancefloor and spinning his dance partner around while being cheered on by crowds of onlookers at an event in his home city.

Sentencing Read at Manchester Crown Court, Judge Rudland told him that in his case public interest was not served by imposing a custodial sentence. He was given a 12-month community order and ordered to complete 120 hours of unpaid work.

The court heard that Read had legitimately claimed for benefits for 10 years from March 1995. He suffered arthritis from the age of 25 and in the early 1990s he was virtually housebound. However, the operation on his left leg provided "instant relief" and proved such a success he was able to take an interest in his new hobby. He illegally continued to claim Disability Living Allowance between June 2005 and December 2008 to the tune of £19,915.

Judge Rudland told him: "You learned to live frugally and contentedly, going out rarely, until the dancing came into your life, which seemed to transform your joie de vivre. There is absolutely no suggestion you are a shirker who has avoided work. It is agreed that the sad fact is you were afflicted by arthritis from as young an age as 25 when most people are enjoying life with an abundance of vigour. In your mid to late 40s you were assessed as being eligible for the appropriate benefits. A time came when you undertook a hip replacement operation which had a significant impact on your mobility. Your life opened up because of the dancing and interest in the swing music of the '40s, which has a considerable following, and you became an accomplished performer on public display. I suspect over time the claim being made went to the back of your mind and it was something you took for granted. Your case was genuine at the start and then drifted into dishonesty. It is not in the public interest that you should be deprived of your liberty. You are doing good work by taking the activity (swing music) into care homes, that brings some pleasure and therapy into lives as a result of the commitment you make in that way."

...David James, defending, said his client is still affected by arthritis and before the operation had essentially been unable to move his left leg. He said the dance evenings were not a weekly event and Read went through the pain barrier as he suffered discomfort in the following days. "He is a proud man who has been humbled by his fallibility," he said. "His past was not a life, it was more of an existence"'.

Some sheep, some homeboys and a funki dred

The annual Lambeth Country Show in Brixton's Brockwell Park - held this year on the 17th & 18th July - is a slightly surreal weekend combining music, food stalls and a fairground with agricultural elements rarely encountered in inner city South London, such as sheep shearing and horse riding displays (not forgetting owls and llamas).

On the Saturday, musical highlights included an acoustic set from the Alabama 3 and a DJ set from Jazzie B/Soul II Soul.


The former (pictured above) might have made it on the global stage via providing the theme tune to The Sopranos but they are very much the house band to Brixton druggies, drinkers, post-ravers, mental health system survivors and (as)sorted radicals. They started out with a singalong 'You are my Brixton' before moving on via Woke up this Morning to a modified Johhny Cash cover - Brixton Prison Blues.

Alabama 3 always like to support good political causes, including prisoners in miscarriage of justice cases. This time the focus was on a struggle closer to home, with singer Larry Love being joined by his kids to voice opposition to the threatened closure of the Triangle Adventure Playground by the Oval.

Jazzie B was joined by MC Chickaboo for a wide ranging set that got the crowd dancing to mash ups of Kellis's Milkshake with Billy Jean; and Seven Nation Army with Public Enemy's Bring the Noise, among others. Further ingredients in the mix included James Brown, Dizzee Rascal, Beyonce, Deelite, Nirvana and Ray Charles. All of this plus tantalising snatches of his hits with Soul II Soul - most notably the opening bars of Keep on Movin' followed by some heavy drum'n'bass. And yes he did sign off with the Soul II Soul motto of 'a happy face, a thumpin' bass, for a lovin' race.'

Like the Alabama 3, Soul II Soul's history is bound up with Brixton (even if Jazzie B is a north Londoner) - in their case their famous sound system Friday nights at the Fridge in the 1980s were a key stepping stone on to making their own records and international success.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Excerpts from René Viénet's 1973 film "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" - a Situationist detournement of a Chinese kung fu movie overdubbed with revolutionary content, as if it was really a film about rebels fighting against Marxist Leninist bureaucrats.

At one point he puts the following words into the mouths of one of the rulers, making clear the Situationist disdain for the radical theorists they saw as the last bastion of the status quo:

'Work! Family! Fatherland! Work! Family! Fatherland! Just stick to that! I don't want to hear any more about class struggle. If I do I'll send in my sociologists! And if necessary my psychiatrists! My urban planners! My architects! My Foucaults! My Lacans! And if that's not enough, I'll even send in my structuralists!'

Vietnam Craig David 'Flashmob'

Some Vietnamese 'flashmob' action, June 18 2010. OK this one clearly isn't a genuine unlicensed, spontaneous gathering. It's a choreographed stunt, seemingly sponsored by a crisp manufacturer. But hey, a couple of hundred people dancing to Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Craig David (Insomnia) on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City is something to ponder on:

One Day - David Nicholls

One Day by David Nicholls is a novel based on the familiar theme of a group of friends growing up (see also Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club/The Closed Circle or even Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), with shifting relationships and values. In this case the premise is to check in on the main characters on a single day a year over a twenty year period from Edinburgh University life in 1988 to.... well, I don't want to spoil the ending.

The day in question, July 15th, is St Swithin's Day, with the author acknowledging that Billy Bragg's song of that title was one influence on the plot ('The polaroids that hold us together / Will surely fade away / Like the love that we spoke of forever/ On St Swithin's day').


Inevitably there's a 1990s ecstasy/clubbing section, with a nice description of the last moments of a night out at a railway arch in Brixton. Let's just say we've all been there:

'Tara is saying let's go and dance before it wears off, so they all go and stand in the railway arches in a loose group facing the DJ and the lights, and they dance for a while in the dry ice, grinning and nodding and exchanging that strange puckered frown, eyebrows knitted, but the nodding and grinning are less frrom elation now, more from a need for reassurance that they're still having fun, that it isn't all about to end. Dexter wondered if he should take his shirt off, that sometimes helps, but the moment has passed. Someone nearby shouts 'tune' half-heartedly, but no-one's convinced, there are no tunes. The enemy, self-consciousness, is creeping up on them and Gibbsy or Biggsy is first to crack, declaring tht the music is shit and everyone stops dancing immediately as if a spell has been broken' (1993).

Homo Sentimentalis & Music

In Milan Kundera's novel Immortality (1991), one of the narrators critiques the notion of what he terms 'Homo Sentimentalis... the man who has raised feelings to a category of value'. For him, this notion leads to a romantic conception of the self, the wish of people to distinguish themselves, to make their mark on the world, to imagine that what they feel, and are seen to feel, is supremely important. In turn this leads them 'on to the great stage of history' with often terrible consequences: 'What makes people raise their fists in the air, puts rifles in their hands, drives them to join struggles for just and unjust causes, is not reason but a hypertrophied soul. It is the fuel without which the motor of history would stop turning and Europe would lie down in the grass and placidly watch clouds sail across the sky'.

The origins of all this go back to music: 'The transformation of feelings into value had already occurred in Europe some time around the twelfth century: the troubadors who sang with such great passion to their beloved, the unattainable princess, seemed so admirable and beautiful to all who heard them that everyone wished to follow their example by falling prey to some wild upheaval of the heart'.

This became further embedded as music developed: 'Music taught the European not only a richness of feeling, but also the worship of his feelings and his feeling self... Music: a pump for inflating the soul. Hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion'.

Maybe there's something in this, but is the 'feeling self' always such a bad thing? The self-romanticising hero may have their share of crimes, but the unfeeling cold subject is at least as responsible for the disasters of history.

Her first ball

'Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. Up until now it had been dark, silent, beautiful very often - oh yes - but mournful somehow. Solemn. And now it would never be like that again - it had opened dazzling bright... in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel' (Katherine Mansfield, Her First Ball, 1922).

(Photo of early 20th century ballroom dancers Irene & Vernon Castle sourced from Sharon Davis - Swing Dancer)