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)

The Big Dance in London

Big Dance 2010 (3 -11 July) was a week of live dance performance in the open air across London. I caught some Latin dance at the Scoop by Tower Bridge on the south bank of the Thames. First up there was an Afto Cuban dance dedicated to Ogun, Orisha of war.

Then there was some New York/Puerto Rican salsa.

In an around City Hall there was an exhibition of photographs of people dancing in various parts of London.

The State and Clothes: from the Statues of Apparel to the Burqa Ban

The day before the national celebration of the storming of the Bastille in pursuit of liberty, the French government today passed a law banning the wearing of the full veil. It states that "no one can wear a garment in public which is aimed at hiding their face"; women wearing a niqab or burqa will faces fines.

Of course there is a well-founded feminist critique of women being pressured to cover their faces, but it is undeniable that some women do choose to wear such clothes for their own religious reasons. The law does not seem to distinguish between women who freely choose to wear the full veil and those who may be made to do so by others. In the latter case, it is patently absurd to prosecute somebody for something they did not choose, in the former case a fundamental principle is at stake - why should the state be able to dictate what people wear? The notion that the police will be able to arrest women on the basis of their clothing is absurd.

French interior minister Michèle Alliot-Mariez is clear that what is being imposed is not simply a dress code, but a definition of the self and its interaction with others. The simple piece of cloth is a threat to the very notion of citizenship: "We are an old country anchored in a certain idea of how to live together. A full veil which completely hides the face is an attack on those values, which for us are so fundamental. Citizenship has to be lived with an uncovered face. There can therefore be absolutely no solution other than a ban in all public places."

The notion that clothes define the social order, and therefore that the state should regulate clothing to uphold that order, is an old one. A classic example was the Statutes of Apparel issued by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1574, which tightly defined exactly what fabrics could be worn at different levels of the feudal hierarchy. So for instance only members of the royal family could wear purple silk; 'Velvet in gowns, coats, or other uttermost garments' could only be worn by 'barons' sons, knights and gentlemen in ordinary office attendant upon her majesty's person, and such as have been employed in embassages to foreign princes' (or those above them). For women the rules decreed, among other things, that 'None shall wear any velvet, tufted taffeta, satin, or any gold or silver in their petticoats: except wives of barons, knights of the order, or councilors' ladies, and gentlewomen of the privy chamber and bed chamber, and the maids of honor'.

Today these rules look ridiculous; no doubt future historians will take a similar view of those politicians who spent time in the midst of a global economic crisis and impending environmental problems decreeing what part of a woman's face has to be visible for all to see.

Prince - 20Ten

Since Prince fell out with with Warner Brothers in the 1990s he has pursued various unconventional strategies for distributing his prolific output of music, including giving away albums for free with newspapers. 2007's Mother Earth was distributed in the UK with The Mail on Sunday, putting me in in the shameful position of having to buy a copy of this notorious right wing rag. His new album, 20Ten, was given away last weekend with the slightly less objectionable Daily Mirror - at least I didn't have to worry about anybody seeing me.



While I am all for free distribution, I can't help thinking that being given away with dubious tabloids somehow devalues the music. And with the rate he churns songs out, quality control does sometimes seem to go out of the window. But 20Ten is actually his best album for years. Musically it's still pretty much the same template as he developed in the 1980s, a mixture of pop, electro-funk and soulful ballads (with Future Soul Song the standout of the latter). Some of these tracks would be widely acclaimed if they had been on one of his albums from that period, I guess now people do tend to take his songwriting/singing/guitar playing talents for granted - or have stopped listening.

This is an album of real songs, with Prince reining in some of his tendency to self-indulgent funk workouts and fillers. There's some space references on Beginning Endlessly, always a hit with me: 'Why should you be satisfied with just heaven and earth? When you look around there's so much more to the Universe'. Best of all, Act of God is a Sign o' the Times style summation of the state of the world, encompassing war and economic crisis:

Dirty fat banker sold a house today.
Sold at auction, wants the family out the way
Kicked them on the street cause they couldn't pay the tax
Call it an act of God...

But, I got news for you, freedom ain't free
They lock you in a cell if you try to be
But the ones who say no make history
Call it an act of God.

Tax dollars build a plane , drop a bomb
Supposedly to keep us all safe from Saddam
Bringing bad news to another woman
Call it an act of God.

Remembering Live8, July 2005

Five years ago this month world leaders at the G8 summit were promising to 'Make Povery History', something seemingly forgotten today as the demand to 'Make Poverty Compulsory' to pay for the global crisis takes precedence.

On 2 July 2005, there were big Live8 concerts in various parts of the world in support of the anti-poverty campaign. I went to the London one where, among others, Madonna, REM, Elton John, U2 and The Killers played. To say I saw any of these would be an exaggeration, more accurate to say I caught a glimpse in what was one of the most alienating musical spectacles I have ever got caught up in.

It was a free concert, but the site was completely enclosed by a massive fence. This was frustrating on the way in, when people had to queue for at least an hour to get through one entrance in a huge boundary, but was even more annoying on the way out. We left early, but were refused exit from most of the marked exits having been told that these would only open at the end. We had to go all the way back to where we came in (in the north of Hyde Park, quite a walk) to get out. It felt very claustrophobic. As I discussed in relation to a similar experience at another festival, this kind of crowd control for free events is a relatively new development. Up until at least the mid-1990s, big free festivals in parks were invariably open access and attracted huge crowds. If things got too crowded, people regulated themselves by spreading out over a larger area or going home.

Inside Hyde Park, it felt very much like the crowd were there to be extras for the TV show. The volume was low for a gig/festival, which destroyed any musical atmosphere, and the screens were out of sync with the sound. Bizarrely people only seemed to get animated when there was a camera pointing at them, perhaps because they felt so remote from the event. Every time the camera swept over the crowd people went mad and started cheering.

A gathering of 250,000 people demanding the abolition of poverty would be pretty amazing, even if the politics of the organisers were dubious. But it didn't feel like that - rather it was an assembly of atomised individuals self-consciously taking part (participating is too strong a word) in a media event. We'd only been there half an hour when we heard the couple next to us say - 'we've done it now - lets take some photos to show people we were here, and go home. We can get a t-shirt on the way out'. That summed up the event, along with having one of the richest people in the world, Bill Gates, talking about abolishing poverty from the stage. He got a cheer as a celebrity, with my lone boo seemingly unheard. Nothing surprizing, but depressing nevertheless.

Five years later, making poverty history remains as remote as ever.

UK Teknival in Wales: Drop the Charges against the 'Dale Rave Six'

This from Schnews (18 June 2010):

'Around 2,500 partygoers descended on Dale Aerodrome in Wales last May bank holiday for the 2010 UK Teknival, only to be met with a massive police response. Police broke up the party on the first day, arresting 17 people in the process. Four remain on police bail and six have been charged. Automatic number plate recognition, a police photographer, hand-held camcorders, helicopters and even a plane were used by police in a sophisticated surveillance operation which resulted in hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment and vehicles being seized (not to mention a similar amount spent on the police operation no doubt)...

This year as hundreds of vehicles congregated near the small village of Dale on the coast of southwest Wales, four policemen attempted to block the road leading to the disused aerodrome site, causing a massive tailback which brought traffic to a standstill for three hours. One witness reports they were stuck at least five miles behind the front of the jam. Eventually, after someone brought out a 12 volt rig and people started dancing in the road, the policemen moved aside and actually directed everyone onto to the site, negotiating with a landowner to get a gate opened.

As a result of the blockade, soundsystems didn’t begin setting up until the early hours of Sunday morning. By about midday the next day, police, the local council and the BBC were all on the scene. Fairly positively-slanted BBC interviews with partygoers were broadcast nationally and posted online, although the second has since been removed from the BBC website. Mid-afternoon Sunday a helicopter flew overhead, broadcasting something that might have been the words of Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 over a loudspeaker. The message was inaudible due to loud music being played on the ground; even those straining their ears to hear only caught snatches of it, and witness accounts vary. It was apparently a warning to leave within between one, four, or twenty-four hours.

Whichever it was, at this stage the majority of soundsystems started packing their rigs into their vehicles as ordered by the police. It became clear then that the three day mega-rave everyone was expecting had been thwarted. The atmosphere of unease and fear generated by the authorities caused a mass exodus of ravers who would otherwise have stayed to help to clean up the site after the party. Most people left the site in a hurry, although some efforts were made to clear rubbish. As each soundsystem drove off site their driver was stopped and arrested, their equipment was seized and their vehicles were impounded. Only the luckiest got away. Confiscated items include work tools, vinyl collections, several vehicles without sound equipment in them, a hire van, and hired and borrowed music equipment. Police deliberately kept the hire van for two weeks, making the total cost £950.

Along with one other soundsystem that left early on Monday morning, a well-known deep house music soundsystem stayed behind and continued playing music and partying until mid-afternoon on Monday, when more than twenty police, including the Chief of Dyfed-Powys Constabulary, came over and physically handed out a Section 63 notice, telling people to leave within one hour. They explained that they had drunk too much to drive and asked if they could stay until the next morning. The officers agreed that they could stay on site and drive home in the morning on condition that they packed their equipment into the van immediately.

Whilst negotiations were taking place, a disabled traveller started to play punk music on his car stereo, which police then confiscated from his live-in vehicle. “He wasn’t even playing repetitive beats,” recalls one partygoer, “he was a disabled man playing music in his own home and the police seemed to illegally enter his home and steal his stereo.”

Police then left the site, but an hour later, a low-loader recovery vehicle arrived to tow the van containing the soundsystem, followed by four riot vans and about fifteen police cars. There were less than fifty people left on site at this point. A woman whose partner was detained overnight was forced to sleep outside the police station as she awaited his release because their van had been impounded leaving her nowhere to sleep and no way of returning home. Despite this, the police refused to let her stay inside.

Four people were released on police bail pending further investigation and the ‘Rave Six’, as the mainstream media has dubbed them, have been charged under Section 136 of the Licensing Act 2003 for carrying out unlicensed licensable activity. The six have now been released on unconditional bail and are due to return to Haverfordwest Magistrates Court on 24th June. Four of the six arrested were merely friends from the last soundsystem to leave the party and had nothing to do with the overall organisation of the event. (It’s highly probable that the other two didn’t either). Offenders under Section 136 are liable for up to six months in jail and/or a fine of up to £20,000'.

More information: Drop the Charges Over UKTek (Facebook group)

The Wind from Nowhere

'The dust came first. Donald Maitland noticed it as he rode back in the taxi from London Airport, after waiting a fruitless forty-eight hours for his Pan-America flight to Montreal. For three days not a single aircraft had got off the ground... The great passenger terminus building and the clutter of steel huts behind it were clogged with thousands of prospective passengers, slumped on their baggage in long straggling queues, trying to make sense of the continuous crossfire of announcements and counter-announcements' .

The opening passage of JG Ballard' s The Wind from Nowhere put me in my mind of the recent grounding of aircraft as a result of the dust cloud from a volcano in Iceland. In this novel, the problem is a terrible, accelerating wind that sweeps across the whole world, ultimately levelling most of the built environment while the survivors cower underground.

This was Ballard's first novel, published in 1962 (I have been reading the Penguin edition, pictured, first published in 1967). He later disowned it as 'hack work', but there are some familiar Ballardian themes - chiefly his evident pleasure in describing the collapse of civilisation. For instance, in the chapter 'Vortex over London': 'Nelson's Column was down. Two weeks earlier, when the wind had reached ninety-five mph, a crack which had passed unnoticed for seventy-five years suddenly revealed itself a third of the way up the shaft. The next day the upper section had toppled, the shattered cylindrical segments still lying where they had fallen among the four bronze lions... As they turned into Charing Cross Road Marshall noted that the Garrick Theatre had collapsed' etc.etc.

New York gets it too: 'Apparently New York is a total write-off. Manhattan's under hundred-foot waves, most of the big skyscrapers and office blocks are down. Empire State Building toppled like a falling chimney stack. Same story everywhere else. Casualty lists in the millions. Paris, Berlin, Rome - nothing but rubble, people hanging on in cellars'.

Of Cattle and Music

How much do the origins of music owe to cattle? I was prompted to think about this when reading 'The Storr: unfolding landscape' (edited by Angus Farquhar) a book documenting an ambitious 2005 public art project staged on the Storr mountain on the Isle of Skye by nva (a group with their origins in Test Department).

The event seems to have involved a nightwalk around the mountain with various light and sound happenings - seemingly including the sounds of ancient horns. Hence the book includes an essay by ancient musical instrument expert John Purser, Paths of our Ancestors, which discusses their significance:

'there were much older instruments belonging to the peoples who herded cattle in Ireland and Scotland - the beautiful curved bronze horns from the Bronze Age itself, of which many still survive. The orginals - some still playable - are derived in form from the horns of cattle and can reproduce the sounds of cattle among other things. They date from three millennia ago and, with their accompanying rattles shaped like a bull's scrotum, they carry with them a fertile memory of a great herding culture...

Besides being able to imitate the sounds of cattle, bronze horns can also convey a sense of fear or of magic - sounds which relate to the mythology of the cattle, in to which much that is magical is woven. That deeper sound world which is shared by all living things, in which the sounds of warning, or enticement and allure, have some strange commonality beyond analysis, will carry to you the sounds of our ancestors, human and animal, from deep in their throats. Listen in silence and you too may, in imagination, follow those paths where human and animal, reality and myth, meet without embarrassment in natural companionship'.

The notions of the horn section remains at the heart of soul and jazz, even if the instruments no longer resemble their animal ancestors. But the name itself is a reminder that some of the earliest musical instruments were made from cattle (from actual horns, and in the case of drums from the skin of cattle), partly in imitation of the sounds of these creatures. Later bagpipes too were made from animal skin, as well as the belly of some stringed instruments.

I was reminded of some of the primeval power of music last week, and indeed of Test Department, when I came across this lot in Glasgow's Buchanan Street. Clanadonia are self-styled 'Tribal Pipes and Drums band', and they do make a fearsome sound.

Cars: Adorno, Numan, Kundera

'Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations... which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment' (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: reflections on a damaged life, 1951).

Here in my car 

I feel safest of all 

I can lock all my doors 

It's the only way to live In cars

Here in my car 

I can only receive 

I can listen to you 

It keeps me stable for days 

In cars 

(Gary Numan, Cars, 1979) 

 'I was in my car and a couple of men in a van swerved round me, pulled up in front, got out and were clearly going to give me a bit of a hammering, trying to get me out, kicking the car and screaming and shouting. I was pretty scared, locked all my doors and ended up driving on to the pavement 'cos I couldn't go anywhere, people obviously leaping out of the way because I was in a bit of a panic. Cars is just a about feeling safe in amongst people in a car, cos no one can get to you in your own little bubble' (Gary Numan, quoted in BBC documentary Synth Britannia (2009). The narrator described the song as 'part eulogy to JG Ballard and part tesimtony to living in 70 s London'). 

 'The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the pavements, which are crowded with pedestrians. If they want to look at each other, they see cars in the background, if they want to look at the building across the street they see cars in the foreground; there isn't a single angle of view from which cars will not be visible, from the back, in front, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible' 

(Milan Kundera, Immortality, 1991)