Asger Jorn

So there I was talking to a neighbour and the Situationists came up in the conversation, and he says to me I think I've got some of their stuff up in the attic that I got when I was doing house clearance (he being somebody who over the years has dipped in an out of the world of art/labour.) Not going to tell you where he lives because he'll be getting a load of radical theory pimps breaking into his house and flogging his worldly goods for ludicrous prices online.

Next day he comes round and lends me this, Pour la Forme by Asger Jorn, published by  the Situationist International in 1958.

A signed copy no less:

Complete with Guy Debord and Jorn's famous detourned map of Paris, The Naked City:

Asger Jorn (1914-1973) was a Danish radical artist and founder member of the Situationist International. Some of the texts  from Pour La Forme have recently been translated into English by Ken Knabb:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/asger-jorn/index.htm

Automation and the Leisure Society

Jorn's essay on The Situationists and Automation is interesting. On the one  hand it shows how much the SI were a product of their time - like mainstream sociologists in that period they took for granted that humanity was on the threshold of a leisure society in which automation had rendered most work unecessary. But Jorn has quite a nuanced view of the opportunities and dangers of this future.  He recognises the risk that 'the devaluation of all human goods to a level of “total neutrality” will be the inevitable consequence of a purely scientific development of socialism... contributing toward the adaptation of humanity to this bland and symmetrified future'.  He poses the question of whether automation 'opens up more interesting realms of experience than it closes. Depending on the outcome, we may arrive at a total degradation of human life or at the possibility of perpetually discovering new desires. But these new desires will not appear by themselves within the oppressive context of our world. There must be a collective action to detect, express and fulfill them'. That was what he saw as the Situationist project.

Well the leisure society promised in the 1950s and 1960s certainly hasn't materialised, with no jet packs and people seemingly working longer hours or unemployed with time on their hands but no material abundance to go with it. Was it a fantasy or is it something that is still on the horizon, a cyber-communist future enabled by some development beyond 3D printing that makes material goods as freely available as the internet has rendered digital goods? So far only science fiction writers like Iain M Banks (the 'Culture' novels) and Ken MacLeod seem to have seriously thought through what living in such a world might be like.

Music to forget the Brain Beat (Kerouac)

'Because all these serious faces’ll drive you mad, the only meaning is without meaning– Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat' (Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 1965)

 

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

- photo from when he joined the Naval Reserve in 1943

Saturday night dancing in 1950s London - Steven Berkoff

Playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (b.1937) wrote an autobiography 'Free Association' in 1997. Born in a Jewish family in Stepney (his father was a tailor), he spent his teengage years on the Woodberry Down Estate and hanging out around Stamford Hill (he went to Hackney Downs School, as did Harold Pinter). The book includes some great descriptions of going out dancing in London in the early 1950s, in particular at the Tottenham Royal, the 51 Club in Soho and the Lyceum Ballroom.

Tottenham Royal: The Mecca

'I recall in my youth the extreme beauty of some of the men and women, the sharply fierce eyes and beautiful peach-like skins and the men with their handsome Celtic faces. They would gather together like warring clans at the weekly stomp at the Tottenham Royal,which was run by Mecca. I was to write a short story about that  dance hall called Mecca - it was published in my collection Gross Intrusion. What an ironic title, Mecca Dance Halls, for it was indeed our Mecca and the weekly call to nature was as primitive as the herds of rutting deer that would gather on the Scottish moors for their mating, selecting and challenging.

It was the golden time, the weekend when the coarse and unsatisfying work had been shed and the day-to-day dose of humiliation was over, at least for me, and one could wash the week away, in the ‘neutral’ environment of the Mecca. All men and women were equal there, since the humbling work you did during the week mattered not at the Mecca. Your schooling might be shabby and abrupt, your teachers callous and indifferent, your hopes no higher than to be cannon fodder for industry and factories if you were a native, and if you were a second-generation immigrant you might be absorbed into the skills the migrants brought with them and be a worker in the garment industry, a cutter, tailor, presser, or as in my particular case, a a ghastly menswear shop.

In the Royal, Tottenham, you were you wished to be - warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell...

Tottenham Royal

....on Saturday we could forget all these other struggles, the dead and stultifying world outside in which you had to assert yourself with the blunt instruments of a poor education and little guidance and the hope of becoming a taxi driver or the manager of Cecil Gee’s Menswear. Now all that was behind you and in your drapes and rollaway Johnny Ray collar you spraunced into the Mecca with the expectation of a dream. Anything could and would and did happen, since the Mecca played into your hands: it was the greatest money-spinner of all time because it restated and restored the tribe and tore away the constraints of the civilized world of work and buses and factories. Here you could be who you thought you were. You created yourself. You were the master of your destiny. You entered quiffed and perfumed in the most expensive aftershave Boots had to offer. You entered and already the smell of the hall had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin, lacquer, cigs, floor polish...

First you go and deposit your coat and then jostle for a square inch of mirror so as to adjust your phallic quiff, which has to protrude enough for it to be stable, until your very arm aches and you have to lower it to restore the blood supply. Many arms were crooked and like birds we were preening and pecking. In the ladies' I imagine even more complex rituals were going on, since this was the sea of flesh, a virtual harvest of all the young, bright, beautiful, sweet, delicious and not-so-beautiful and not-so-delectable, but at least the energy of all that youth swarming together in the Mecca was formidable...

  ...every night at the Royal was a dream time. You walked as if in slow motion and got there early so that you stood a good chance of pulling some sweet, delectable creature, had a good dance and swanned around. The dance was all-important since this was a way of demonstrating your skill as a mover, your grace, wit, balance and tricks. The jive was one of the greatest dance forms ever invented. And so all your arts were in some way fulfilled. You were the dandy, the mover and performer in your own drama, the roving hunter and lover, the actor adopting for the girl the mask of your choice. You wore your costume and walked the hall beneath the glittering ball and when you saw someone that you felt was about your stamp you asked her for a dance; if it was slow, when you took her on to the floor your heart started to increase its beat...  

When you entered the Royal, the band, usually Ray Ellington, would be up the far end. The Stamford Hill crowd would stand on the left-hand side and the crowd from Tottenham would stand on the right; there would be no mixing unless you felt cocky and wanted to fraternize; in that case you elected yourself to the position of leading luminary and went to pay your respects. Dancing was the thing and as the clock ticked away until the terrible hour of 11  p.m. when the band would stop, you became more and more desperate to find someone you could take home and crush for half an hour of fierce kissing and squeezing and creating sparks as your gaberdine rubbed against her taffeta'.

Jive  

I learned to jive at a formal session which a young teacher called Leslie taught at a small jazz club in Finsbury Park. I don’t remember who took me there or how I heard about it. In one corner of the room (and I now remember the room was walled with mirrors - it must have been a small ballet school in more genteel times) was a record player and Leslie would show us the basic one-two-three-four.

Once we had mastered this very simple rhythm, the next step was to guide the woman while in a kind of side-to-side locomotion our arms would spin her like a top. With the determination that was to be a hallmark of my youthful endeavours, I threw myself into the jive and practised night and day to work it out in mirrors, on door handles and on a current girlfriend, a flaring redhead who I met on the Hill. She was from the other side of the manor, which was bad news for both of us, but at that time we were mainly concerned with getting the jive together.

After a while I got into the swing of it and Greys Dance Hall became my weekly Tuesday night session. A kind of Finsbury Park clan would gather there. When you came in there was a little bar where you could buy sandies, tea, coffee and soft drinks. The place had a weird and pregnant atmosphere, not least because Curly King would turn up from time to time and it was also the time I first glimpsed the Kray twins. They were always immaculately turned out in dark suits and ties...

...Sunday was Lyceum night, but you could always do some hopping at the 51 Club in Little Newport Street. That was good for jazz and they played the best records and you danced your feet off. I did less and less exercise at school I made up for it by jiving, at which I was becoming a veritable Gene Kelly. 1 had perfected my jiving via Leslie at Grays, Finsbury Park, fine-tuned it at the Royal [Tottenham] and let it go at the‘51’.

It was my sanctuary. A small dark room with some of the best dancing to be seen in the West End. I would come home some nights soaked to the skin and it was even better than sex. I evolved a style that was ultra cool. By this time the Johnnie Ray era had been replaced by Teddy Boys and you wore four-button suits, shirts with stiff collars and double cuffs. My collars were sent each week to ‘Collars Ltd’ for starching and laundering, and woe betide if the collars came back soft or not stiff enough. I would go bananas. The style of dance was affected by the suit you wore and so you had to lift your arm, keeping your elbow fairly well in to your side or your jacket would be pulled up and you would appear ungainly. No, you had to dance cool so as to keep the form intact.

It was a brief but unique period in English social and fashion history, since it twisted the jive away from its American cousins and adapted it to fit into an idiosyncratic London style. The chaps at the Lyceum became fops and Beau Brummels and the suit was more than ever your calling card or your place of esteem. You had to be immaculate'.

Ryan takes ecstasy and other US presidents

Struggling to remember the names of Cold War US presidents? Here's a handy South London mnemonic taught to my daughter by her history teacher!

'Ryan takes ecstasy. Kenny just nicks Ford cars really badly'
= Roosevelt/Truman/Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush

How about Russian leaders in the same period:
'Silly Kids Buy Guns. Yes'
= Stalin/Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev/Yeltsin

Solidarity with Gezi Park

Protests are spreading across Turkey following the violent police assault on the Gezi park occupation on Taksim Square in Istanbul city centre. At least 100 people have been injured as gas and water cannon have been deployed against people protesting against the demolition of the park to build a shopping centre.

Pictures from: http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/

Earlier, occupiers had put up tents and had the usual occupy mix of meetings, discussions, music and hanging out.

This video shows people singing Çav Bella - the Turkish translation of the Italian partisan song, Bella Ciao.

Nightclub Fires: 2013 and 1970 (with reflections by Guy Debord)

Santa Maria, Brazil, 2013

'Sixteen people will face criminal charges in connection with a deadly fire at a Brazil nightclub in January. More than 240 people were killed when insulation foam caught fire and spread toxic fumes through the packed venue in the southern town of Santa Maria. Police said the blaze started when the singer of a band held a firework close to the ceiling, which then caught fire. The singer, the band's producer, the club's owners, and fire officials will be charged with negligent homicide. A police report published on Friday said dozens of eyewitnesses reported seeing the singer on stage holding the firework which triggered the blaze. Attempts by the singer and a security guard to extinguish the fire failed when the extinguisher they used did not work, the witnesses described.

Many said that the security guards at the Kiss nightclub at first tried to stop people from leaving the club. The fact that the club only had one door was described by the investigators compiling the report as a "grotesque safety failure". Escape routes and lighting in the club were also found to be inadequate. The club was found to be overcrowded. Eyewitnesses reporting more than 1,000 revellers packed into the venue, which had a licence for fewer than 800. All of the 241 victims were found to have died of asphyxiation as toxic fumes from the insulation foam quickly spread through the club. Police believe that five of those killed were people who had gone into the club to try to rescue others. More than 600 people were injured' (BBC News, 22 March 2013).

Thousands pause outside the Kiss nightlub in Santa Maria on a march after the fire

St Laurent du Pont, France, 1970

'A fire at a nightclub in France has killed 142 people, most of them teenagers. The club, a mile from the town of St Laurent du Pont, near Grenoble, was packed with revellers when the fire started at around 0145 local time (0045 GMT). A fire department spokesman said the partly-wooden building "went up like a box of matches" and the victims perished within 10 minutes. Many of the interior fittings, including the ceiling, were flammable, the spokesman said, but many people might have escaped from the Club Cinq-Sept had emergency exits not been blocked. Firefighters found bodies piled five deep around the exits which had been padlocked and barred with planks to keep out gatecrashers.

It is believed some dancers were trampled to death in a stampede as people rushed to get out of the dance hall through the main entrance. Only 60 of the 180 people in the building are believed to have escaped - many of them are in hospital with up to 90% burns. Herve Bozonnet, who got out virtually unscathed, said: "It was ghastly. People on the dance floor were engulfed by burning plastic from the ceiling." Another survivor, 17-year-old Dominique Guette, said: "We tried to break down emergency exits but it was impossible." (BBC News, 1 November 1970)


Guy Debord on the Saint Saint-Laurent-du-Pont Fire

'The instantaneous incineration of the dance club in Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, in which 146 people were burned alive on 1 November 1970, certainly aroused strong emotions in France, but the very nature of these emotions has been poorly analyzed, then and now, by many commentators. Of course, the incompetence of the authorities concerning security instruction has been revealed: these instructions are well conceived and minutely spelled out, but making them respected is quite another matter because, effectively applied, they more or less seriously interfere with the realization of profits, that is to say, the exclusive goal of capitalist enterprises in both their places of production and the diverse factories in which diversions are distributed or consumed. The dangerous character of modern [building] materials and the propensity for horrible decor to become the decor of horror have already been noted: "One knows that the polyester ceilings, the use of plastic covering on the walls and the inflatable seats burned like straw and cut off the retreat of the dancers, who were surprised in their race against death" (Le Figaro, 2 November 1970). 

 .... many people have been sensitive to the particular horror of exit denied to all those who flee, already on fire or close to it, by a barrier specially created to only open towards the interior and to close again after the passage of each individual: it is a question of avoiding the situation in which someone might enter without paying. The slogan on the signs carried by the parents of the victims a month later - "They paid to enter, they should have been able to leave" - seems to be obvious in human terms, but it is fitting to not forget that this is not obvious from the point of view of political economy, and the difference between these two projects is only and simply knowing which one will be the strongest. Indeed, to enter and to paid is the absolute necessity of the market system; this is the only necessity that it wants and the only one that preoccupies it. To enter without paying is to put the market system to death. To enjoy oneself (or not) on the inside of the air-conditioned trap, to possibly leave it - all this has no importance for it, nor even any reality. At Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, the insecurity of the people was only the slightly undesirable by-product - the nearly negligible cost - of the security of the commodity...'

Originally written in 1971, for publication in the 13th (never published) issue of Internationale Situationniste. Translated by NOT BORED!

See also: 2009 fire in Perm, Russia; 2008 Shenzhen fire, China/2004 Buenos Aires fire

Shimmy on Down

A new low in corporate clubbing at the Shimmy club in Glasgow, where women have complained about a two way mirror looking in to the women's toilets which groups of men can pay to view from an adjoining function room:

'Allegations that a nightclub in Glasgow has secretly fitted a two-way mirror to allow male guests to spy on the women's toilets "as a bit of fun" are being investigated by police and council licensing officers.Glasgow city council said it had received complaints that the Shimmy nightclub had installed a spy mirror – without warning female guests – between the toilets and a function room that was allegedly rented to private parties for £800.

A customer at the club called Amy told the Guardian she was warned about the two-way mirror by another customer when she visited Shimmy's recently to celebrate her birthday. Distressed, she left the toilet, and noticed that people in the club's main room could glimpse inside the toilets. The main view into the women's toilets was from private booths that were immediately adjacent to the mirror, she said. "It was booked out by all boys and they were up against the mirror and making gestures up against the mirror."

Amy complained directly to G1 Group, owner of the recently relaunched club in central Glasgow, saying it was "absolutely outrageous" that women customers were having their privacy invaded, allowing men to "leer disgustingly" at them. "Nowhere is it made clear that this is the case, so when visiting the bathroom for the first time, there are women bending over the sink, pouting into the mirror to redo their lipstick, adjusting themselves personally whilst unknowingly being watched by people on the other side," she said."What is even more vulgar is that the toilets face on to a private booth that can be booked out to specifically leer into the girls' bathrooms whilst the girls are unaware that they are being watched." (Guardian, 21 May 2013)

The G1 Group PLC 'founded by Managing Director, Stefan King' claims to be 'the most dynamic and forward thinking bar, restaurant, hotel, cinema and nightclub group in Scotland... currently operating 40+ venues across Scotland'. Not just The Shimmy  but G1 as a whole is facing a fierce backlash from women in Scotland. Existence is Futile on tumblr says: 'I urge you all to avoid/boycott ‘The Shimmy Club’ in Royal Exchange, Glasgow as they have a non-advertised two way mirror in the female toilets. This type of sexist exploitation of women has no place in Glasgow, let alone no place in 2013. The sexual objectification of the female club goers is utterly disgusting... Not only clubs/pubs and restaurants they also own The Grosvenor Cinema. I had a look to see exactly how many venues they own in Scotland and I was very surprised. Definitely making a note of them and boycotting every single one'.

Nightclubs: from the Aristocracy of the Fabulous to the Decorative Dance Floor

'Once upon a time New York nightclubs catered to the aristocracy of the fabulous, to those with the looks, the style, or the connections to gain admittance to the world of the night. That all changed with the invention of bottle service. Buy a table for some astronomical sum, and mere money will admit you to this world which once excluded the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, with their real jobs and neat suits. Sucking the credit cards out of their wallets became the main game, and the nightclubs became big business. Nightclubs ceased producing their own kind of celebrity, and became dependent on attracting the sports and entertainment stars of their day. The nightclub became, in other words, just an enterprise dependent upon the spectacular, rather than one of its prime engines of efflorescence.

The game became one of attracting celebrities, who might in turn attract the bankers and hedge fund men for the VIP rooms. The general admission crowd down on the dance floor would be largely for decoration, The kinds of mixing of the classes that both troubled and thrilled Manet’s contemporaries* will now be carefully vetted. Managing such intercourse calls into being new kinds of labor. Rachel Uchitel was a VIP concierge director. She was an ambassador of client desire, making sure the big names and big spenders came to her club and kept on coming.... one of the roles of a VIP concierge director is to introduce people who matter to women they may find attractive. “It’s not our job to get anybody laid,” Uchitel insists. But it was her job to populate the VIP rooms with women as attractive as they are discreet. Models, perhaps. Or almost-models. And it is the job of club promoters to bring these almost-models in. The contemporary nightclub, in other words, is a sophisticated machine for the highly selective mingling of money and sex. Or perhaps just the promise of sex, and sometimes just the promise of money. Whether the girls put out or the boys shell out is none of the club’s concern’

*Wark is discussing here Manet’s depictions of 19th century café-concerts, ‘the beginnings of a spectacular industry that has since been perfected. Now that the threat of the dangerous classes seems half a world away, at least from a New York nightclub, the danger to guard against is not that the rabble might reject the desires on offer, but that it might rather embrace them with too much gusto. Leisure, sex and suburbia are no longer marginal sites within which new kinds of spectacular economy grow. They are the very center and essence of that spectacular economy'.

The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century by McKenzie Wark (Verso, 2013)

Studio 54, New York - a 1970s example of glamorous clubbers as celebrity bait?

[I think everyone will recognise this as one tendency - but not sure that it is something that has replaced all other forms of nightlife, or that it is new. I distinctly recall the horror I felt when VIP rooms became a thing in 1990s London clubs like the Ministry of Sound, something that seemed to totally contradict the egalitarian feeling on the floor. But there was always too a sense that those hidden in their VIP suites were actually missing the real experience. And celebrities 'slumming it' in 'lower class' clubs - and the management of these clubs catering for their wealth - goes back at least as far as the jazz clubs of the 1930s in New York, London and elsewhere]

NME Charts December 1983: the best of times and the worst of times?

What were the UK pop kids, dancers and punks listening to 30 years ago? Here's some clues in the charts  from the New Musical Express 24 December 1983.

The Dance Floor charts weren't really a reflection of record sales or even necessarily of what people were dancing to in many UK high street clubs. This one was compiled by the DJ at Birmingham club 'The Garage' so it's probably more a snapshot of what people were listening to there and in similar places where the DJs played an eclectic mix of of  funk, soul and more post-punk funk from the likes of A Certain Ratio and Jah Wobble. Certainly I remember going to lots of student parties in this period where James Brown was obligatory - he was still releasing great records in this period, with 'Bring it On' coming out in 1983 and his last hit 'Living in America' in 1985.

The term 'World Music' hadn't yet caught on, the category 'Third World' was used in the NME charts to cover music from Africa, the Middle East, Mongolia and seemingly anywhere outside of Europe and North America. The chart was compiled by Triple Earth Records, which went on to become a significant 'world music' label in the 1980s.

The Reggae Disco singles charts and Reggae LPs chart were compiled by 'Observer Station' with a whole lot of Johnny Osbourne - three singles and an album riding high. Michael Palmer's Ghetto Dance was number one single ('Ghetto dance, ghetto dance, Babylon give me a chance...').

The Independent charts were based on record sales and had become a big deal in a period of many iconic indie acts (Smiths, Cocteau Twins, New Order, Birthday Party), the anarcho-punk scene (Conflict, Subhumans), psychobilly (The Meteors and Cramps) and emerging goths (Death Cult, Sisters of Mercy, Alien Sex Fiend). Label wise the big ones were 4AD, Mute, Rough Trade and Factory, but Stoke-based punk label Clay Records was also important (Discharge, GBH, Abrasive Wheels etc).

The main UK charts featured some classic pop as well as lots of crap which no amount of nostalgia/retro irony can rescue from the charity shop unwanted piles where it now lingers. The dominant album was Michael Jackson's Thriller - number one in the charts a year after it was first released. Culture Club has become a global sensation that year, and Luton's Paul Young was riding high. I worked in a Luton factory that summer packing electrical instruments while listening to Radio One with his then girlfriend's mum!

'Summer Nights' by Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

The sounds

Of the Harlem night

Drop one by one into stillness.

The last player-piano is closed.

The last victrola ceases with the

“Jazz Boy Blues.”

The last crying baby sleeps

And the night becomes

Still as a whispering heartbeat.

I toss

Without rest in the darkness,

Weary as the tired night,

My soul

Empty as the silence,

Empty with a vague,

Aching emptiness,

Desiring,

Needing someone,

Something.

I toss without rest

In the darkness

Until the new dawn,

Wan and pale,

Descends like a white mist

Into the court-yard.

First published 1925.

See also: Dream Variations

'the people who danced on the hill on summer nights'

My favourite Arthur Machen story is the The White People, published in 1899, featuring the diary of a young woman who has stumbled into the world of faery or something similar...

'she told me one very strange story about the hill, and I trembled when I remembered it. She said that people always went there in summer, when it was very hot, and they had to dance a good deal. It would be all dark at first, and there were trees there, which made it much darker, and people would come, one by one, from all directions, by a secret path which nobody else knew, and two persons would keep the gate, and every one as they came up had to give a very curious sign, which nurse showed me as well as she could, but she said she couldn't show me properly. And all kinds of people would come; there would be gentle folks and village folks, and some old people and boys and girls, and quite small children, who sat and watched. And it would all be dark as they came in, except in one corner where some one was burning something that smelt strong and sweet, and made them laugh, and there one would see a glaring of coals, and the smoke mounting up red...

And when they were all inside, round in a ring, touching each other, some one began to sing in the darkness, and some one else would make a noise like thunder with a thing they had on purpose, and on still nights people would hear the thundering noise far, far away beyond the wild land, and some of them, who thought they knew what it was, used to make a sign on their breasts when they woke up in their beds at dead of night and heard that terrible deep noise, like thunder on the mountains. And the noise and the singing would go on and on for a long time, and the people who were in a ring swayed a little to and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now, and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known some one who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and nurse tried to sing some of it to me, and it was so strange a tune that I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put my hand on something dead.

'Philos under a full moon' by Ric Nagualero

Sometimes it was a man that sang and sometimes it was a woman, and sometimes the one who sang it did it so well that two or three of the people who were there fell to the ground shrieking and tearing with their hands. The singing went on, and the people in the ring kept swaying to and fro for a long time, and at last the moon would rise over a place they called the Tole Deol, and came up and showed them swinging and swaying from side to side, with the sweet thick smoke curling up from the burning coals, and floating in circles all around them. Then they had their supper. A boy and a girl brought it to them; the boy carried a great cup of wine, and the girl carried a cake of bread, and they passed the bread and the wine round and round, but they tasted quite different from common bread and common wine, and changed everybody that tasted them. Then they all rose up and danced, and secret things were brought out of some hiding place, and they played extraordinary games, and danced round and round and round in the moonlight, and sometimes people would suddenly disappear and never be heard of afterwards, and nobody knew what had happened to them'.

Obligatory Thatcher Death Post

Effigy of Thatcher at the party in Trafalgar Square last night - the hair made out of Sainsbury's carrier bags
(insert joke about grocers' daughter here)

When Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990, me and my workmates at a north London hospital invited some like minded people over to our HIV unit to share a bottle of champagne. Later some of us went down to a party in Trafalgar Square to continue the celebrations. Although Thatcher was forced out of power by a Conservative Party leadership challenge, there was no doubt even then that the poll tax movement, including the riots in central London on March 31 1990, was a major factor in her fall from grace.

After ten years or more of defeats at the hands of Thatcher and her cronies it felt great to have been part of something that had shown that they were not invincible, even if it didn't turn out to be quite the political turning point we'd expected - within a few months we were engulfed in the horrors of the Gulf War.

The end of Thatcher's career was a politically significant event - the death from natural causes of a very old woman many year later in her bed is not. But the Margaret Hilda Thatcher who died in the Ritz Hotel was only a minor component of the mythical 'Margaret Thatcher' that dominated Britain in the 1980s. The mythical Maggie was an almost superhuman figure, single-minded, all-powerful, ruthlessly vanquishing her foes and transforming the country and indeed the world on a couple of hours sleep a night. This myth of the Iron Lady was carefully cultivated by Conservative party strategists and a fawning press. But it was also built up by opponents on the left who credited her with a new doctrine of 'Thatcherism' and more broadly by all those who turned her into a symbol of secular evil (a witch, no less) and who chanted endlessly on demos 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out' as if what later became known as the neo-liberal offensive against the working class was a one person operation. 

I remember causing controversy selling this at a Luton Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament event in 1985. People also used to chant 'one more cut, Maggie's throat' on demos. With hindsight I wonder whether such sentiments were a symptom of weakness - the violent fantasies of the powerless and defeated.

If you go back now and read contemporary radical analysis of the 1970s it is striking how much of what was later branded as Thatcherism had already been identified before she even came to power .  For instance, 1978's Policing the Crisis by Stuart Hall et al saw the 'The Law and Order Society' taking shape throughout the 1970s, under both Labour and Conservative governments, with the post-war consensus breaking down as a result of economic crisis. Of course Thatcher's government may have accelerated some of these tendencies, but they were neither new nor Thatcher's idea (Brendan O'Neill's 2008 piece on The Myth of Thatcherism is lucid on this, though I'm still open to argument that there were some novel features of the Thatcher regime, such as deliberately pitching its appeal to upwardly mobile working class people).  Her global role is also exaggerated and distorted - the supposed champion of freedom wasn't quite the ally of Polish workers that she sometimes pretended to be, and she backed the murderous leftist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as well as the murderous rightist Pinochet in Chile.

Several hundred people partied outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton on the day that Thatcher died

Still if the myth was... well a myth... the pain was real.  Thatcher was the figurehead for a regime which oversaw state violence, economic misery and mass tragedy with seeming indifference to the lives of those affected. For people in or around the mining industry, the 'Battle of the Beanfield', the nationalist community in the north of Ireland, Hillsborough and more, it was personal. In fact much of what was dismissed as left wing paranoia at the time has been proven to be true - yes, the police really did lie and cover up what happenened at Hillsborough; yes, British agents really were involved in the murder of Irish lawyer Pat Finucane etc. etc.  So no great surprizes that Thatcher's death has prompted celebrations in Belfast, Brixton, Bristol and Glasgow, and by Liverpool fans, among others.

Trafalgar Square last night

Last night's anti-Thatcher party in London's Trafalgar Square felt like a gathering of some of the scattered remains of Thatcher's Enemy Within. Among the 2-3,000 in the rain, there was an Irish tricolor and starry plough flag, a National Union of Mineworkers banner (shown below), and plenty of ageing punks, anarchists and socialists.

I went along despite some misgivings... In terms of a political response to the situation we face today, rehashing the 1980s is a dead end. What confronts us not a hangover from a 1980s political project ('Thatcherism') but a global economic system that seems incapable of matching the enormous potential of human creativity with even the basic human needs for shelter, security and a half decent standard of living, no matter which politicians appear to be in charge... Getting older and having to deal with the death of friends and family has also robbed me of taking any pleasure in other people's bereavement, even if in 1984 I would have been quite happy to see the Cabinet blown up in Brighton... And yes it's just as problematic today as it was in the 1980s to go on about a woman, even a Prime Minister, as a witch and a bitch...

Still I went to Traflagar Square, partly because having lived through the rest of the story I felt I had to be there for the final chapter, partly because I wanted to show my solidarity with those victimised by the press including individuals named and shamed in national newspapers for just liking a facebook page. Some people were there to gleefully dance on Thatcher's grave, others just wanted to remember those who died and suffered under her rule. As a party it wasn't great, it was pouring with rain and the music was limited by the police stopping sound systems, quoting Trafalgar Square bye-laws (of course there were some samba drummers).

Still the point was made - whatever else people might think about this week's anti-Thatcher parties and related campaign to put Judy Garland's Ding Dong the Witch is Dead to the top of the charts* they have blown a hole in the fake national consensus that would have celebrated Thatcher as a political saint. The ghosts of the struggles of the 1980s have re-emerged to challenge their erasure from history - even if they do not point a way forward they cannot be forgotten and still have much to teach us.

Police surround sound system in Traflalgar Square

* Ding Dong the Witch is Dead' ended up as number 2 in the 'official' BBC Charts, although it topped the iTunes chart for much of the week.

Respect for the Dead: Some funerals from the Thatcher Years

Up until 1983, the authorities generally left Irish republican funerals alone. An abrupt change of policy by Margaret Thatcher's government resulted in police and soldiers violently intervening in numerous funerals for the remainder of the decade.

It was not simply a matter of preventing shots being fired over coffins - the RUC would provocatively try and seize flags, gloves or berets off coffins. There were baton charges and plastic bullets in clashes with mourners.

A coffin falls to the ground as Royal Ulster Constabulary officers fire plastic bullets at funerals of IRA Volunteers Paddy Deery and Eddie McSheffrey, Derry City, 2 November 1987

Police try and push through mourners at same funeral:

Mourner injured in police baton charge in Derry '87.

Police try to seize flag from coffin at 1983 funeral of Joe Cravan of the Irish National Liberation Army

Police at the Belfast funderal of Larry Marley in 1987, delayed for three days as a result of police intimidation.

And they wonder why?:

Anderson Town News, 12 April 2013

 



Acid House 'Trip to Hell' 1988

KRS-Dan on Flickr has been uploading some yellowing newspaper clippings from the acid house era. This one from the Sun, 2 November 1988, sums up the late Thatcher period. A ludicrous acid house 'trip to hell' cartoon next to an image of Margaret Thatcher as Superman!

Well with Duke Dumont's slice of retro-house Need U topping the UK charts in the week of Thatcher's death, we can safely say that house music has outlasted her. Even if bizarrely Need U has been knocked off the top slot by people buying Judy Garland's Ding Dong The Witch is Dead to mark the demise of the one-time Iron Lady.

From Music Week, 10 April 2013 - Thatcher should never have messed with the Friends of Dorothy

Related: Thatcher's War on Acid House by Michael Holden (vice.com, April 2013):

'First she came for the milk. Then she came for the mines. Then she ran out of things to come for, so she went after the soccer fans and acid house. It might sound unlikely in an age where there are a pair of TV screens showing Sky Sports in every pub in the UK, but if you wanted to go toe-to-toe with the establishment at the tail end of the Thatcher years, the fast track to getting a beat down from the police was to watch soccer or listen to a series of repetitive records with the intention of dancing.

If you were looking for a measure of how the country has adjusted since Thatcher's reign, you could do worse than consider how two constants of the modern mainstream—soccer and electronic music—were once painted as folk devils by a regime fast running out of new things to point its police horses at... for young people, the harshness of the establishment’s war on the twin evils of soccer and dance music came as something of a surprise. It wasn’t till I fled a party in Dalston in 1989 that I felt it firsthand. The motivation for my hasty departure was the sudden entrance of a group of cops based at Stoke Newington Police Station who were notorious in the area for their thuggery. They'd come in, take the numbers off their uniforms, and break things up about as violently as they could without firearms, swinging at male and female ravers alike...'

Partying in Paris 1944: with Sartre, de Beauvoir & Camus

In 1944 the Nazi occupation of Paris was in its last deadly phase. The RAF was bombing the city's railway stations and the Resistance was stepping up its activities - to be met with fierce repression and mass executions. Following a show trial, 23 members of a Jewish and other migrant workers' resistance group led by Armenian communist Missak Manouchian were executed, most of them in Paris in February 1944.

A group of artists and writers linked with various degrees of commitment with the Resistance met and socialised in these conditions, holding parties in each others houses with quite a guest list.

Pablo Picasso was living in Paris at the time and wrote a play, Desire Caught by the Tail, which was performed in the home of surrealist writer Michel Leiris, with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beavoir and  Albert Camus taking part, and the audience including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Picasso himself. The party continued after the play: 'Those who stayed after midnight had, because of the curfew, to stay til dawn; Mouloudji sang 'Les Petits paves', Sartre sang 'Les Papillons de nuit' and 'J'ai vendu mon ame au diable'.

George Bataille

'Eager to continue the mood of celebration, some of their friends went on to organise a series of ‘fiestas’, as Leiris called them. The first was held in March at George Bataille’s flat, where the musician Rene Leibowitz was in hiding; for the second Bost’s mother lent them her villa in Taverny. They drank and they clowned. Queneau and Bataille duelled with bottles; Camus and Lemarchand played tunes on saucepan lids; Sartre conducted an imaginary orchestra from the bottom of a cupboards…'

Sartre and de Beauvoir

'The third fiesta was held in June 1944 at Toulouse’s flat, where the huge circular drawing room opened on to a garden. The hall and the rooms had been decorated with flowers, ribbons, garlands, knick-knacks… At three in the morning, Toulouse [Simone Camille Jollivet] made her appearance, wearing rouge on her eyelids and blue eye-shadow on her cheeks. Unsteadily she danced a paso doble with Camus. The party lasted til daylight, and when Sartre and De Beauvoir, together with Olga [Kosakiewicz] and Bost, were walking through the deserted Place de Rennes, they saw placards on the station wall: no trains would run until further notice. Later on in the day it was announced over the radio that English and American troops had landed in Normandy.’

Simone Jollivet ('Toulouse') 

Of course this group of friends were also famous for their socialising in Saint Germain cafes such as Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. It was while hanging out at the latter in May 1944 that Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir first met Jean Genet who came over and introduced himself.

Jean Genet

After the war they continued to party - in 1946 for instance Sartre, de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Francine Faure took Arthur and Mamaine Koestler out on the town 'to a little dance hall in the rue des Gravilliers and then to a nightclub, the Scheherezade' followed at four in the morning 'to a bistro in Les Halles, where they drank a great deal'. As existentialism became fashionable Sartre popped in a couple of times to Le Tabou, a nightclub on the rue Dauphine that had became popular with its  black-clad aficionados. In May 1947, the news magazine Samedi Soir published a  report entitled 'This is how the troglodytes of Saint-Germain live!', which described the 'gigantic orgies organised by filthy young existentialists' who spent their time 'drinking, dancing and loving their lives away in cellars, until the atom bomb - which they all perversely long for - drops on Paris' (quoted in Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey).

Mamaine and Arthur Koestler

It's tempting to apply Sartre's notions of 'seriality' and 'group-in-fusion' to these convivial spaces, the former the everyday condition of individuals in isolation from each other and the latter characterising those situations when individuals overcome their separation in collective activity (Sartre famously quoted the storming of the Bastille as the supreme example). If post-rave we can conceive of the dancefloor or even the cafe as an example of 'group in fusion', Sartre tended to see the group's fusion being dependent on the individuals within it define themselves against some 'third' other. He wrote of the cafe as  'a milieu of indifference, where other people exist without troubling about me while I don't worry about them', and indeed did much of his writing in cafes on this basis.

Francine Faure and Albert Camus

Source of all quotes unless otherwise stated: Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre

Public Dance Halls Act 1935 in Ireland

Excellent Dublin newspaper/blog Rabble has an interesting piece on the Public Dance Halls Act 1935 in Ireland, which remains in force to this day. The Act requires a licence from the state for any dancing 'which is open to the public and in which persons present are entitled to participate actively' and applies broadly not just to pubs and clubs but to any 'place' defined as 'a building (including part of a building), yard, garden, or other enclosed place, whether roofed or not roofed and whether the enclosure and the roofing (if any) are permanent or temporary'. In practice, the police have historically used this even to apply to private houses in some cases.

As Rabble points out, the Act was originally passed on the back of a moral panic about jazz undermining traditional Irish culture - but ironically its implementation undermined that very culture as it was used to stop country dances too.

The future regulation of drinking and dancing in Ireland is a live political subject, with a Sale of Alcohol Bill currently under discussion (see Rabble article).

Chris Porsz: 1980s New Town Punks, Teds & Psychobillies

The working class style tribes of  the 1980s have been nicely recreated in Shane Meadows'  This is England films/TV series. But some of the best contemporary images of that world that I have come across are by Chris Porsz, many of them collected in his excellent book 'New England: the culture and people of an English New Town during the 1970s and 80s'

Many of the more cliched images of 80s sub-cultures are based on a tiny minority of people in bands or scene setters in big city clubs - a long way from how people on the dole or with low pay tried to make a mark with their hair, clothes and music in towns where sometimes the few exisiting clubs wouldn't even let them in.

Portz's pictures were taken in Peterborough, but they could have been taken almost anywhere in England in the early '80s, with punks, pychobillies, rockabillies and skinheads hanging out in town centres with bottles of cider for refreshment. Certainly they remind me of Luton at that time.



Looking at these pictures now it's interesting to note how even amongst the hardcore, piercings were quite muted - in the early 80s those with nose rings were really transgressing the boundaries of the socially acceptable. Likewise tattoos weren't common beyond the upper arm.

(you can buy Chris Porsz's book at his website and in bookshops including Tate Modern in London. His site also includes some sweet reunions where the subjects of  his 1980s photos have been reunited with the images of their younger selves)

All photos © Chris Porsz