Daniel B. Yates

Going Underground: Music vs. Theatre Part I

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 07:18:00 +0100

Last night @HannahNicklin tweeted: “Fuck, amazing gig. Amazing. Realised that everything I love about DIY punk scene is very similar to the best parts of the theatre community.”

To which I replied: “Cross-artform, cross-genre, cross-continent - small scale, culturally distinctive, alternative producers of experience.”

By which I think I meant: I agree that perhaps we can see some correspondence in the DIY spirit across both the ‘theatrical underground’ and the ‘musical underground’.

No one really talks about a ‘theatrical underground’, partly perhaps because the artform is too small and closely-knit to justify such a tectonic definition. Come to think of it, no one really talks about a ‘musical underground’ any more either, under the weight of the mainstream’s lost certainties and taboos, postmodernism and a diffuse digital ecosystem.

But despite all this lack of talk, it might be possible, even instructive, to erect/resurrect a notion of theatrical and musical undergrounds, and maybe even have them mean something.

You can’t see either. They are not single entities, not unified or even connected, but rather a shared structural-marginal place. They often work in productive tension with their dominant institutions, at once resisting and coming into their orbit. They work at the level of refusal. They modify and adapt small performance spaces. They are engaged with experimental processes, or screwing with existing processes. They often produce ‘difficult’ or extreme work. They typically lack infrastructure, then fetishise that lack. There is a notion of newness and avant-gardism, however attenuated. They alter, reverse, progress, and mess. They deconstruct the spectacle, by default as much as design. They consider themselves authentic. They produce dislocations, futures, new cultural spaces, oddities, chance meetings, hauntopossiblities, archaeologies, alternatives.

Which I think just about holds water, and if so, then Exeunt is absolutely about championing these ideas and artists. However. Underground, smallscale, DIY, call it what you will - I won’t immediately be rushing to put all my critical eggs into this basket.

Around the mid-2000s music criticism underwent a set of internal debates entitled rockism vs. poptimism (the latter a Simon Reynolds coinage) in which key critics sought to move crit away from rock and towards an acceptance of pop. The argument, as it might very roughly pertain here, ran something like this: rockist values stress a certain (white, booshwah) authenticity, art, small scale, avant-gardism. Mainstream work is blanketly devalued by the rockist because it is fake or inauthentic, it is popular with the masses, it does not have progressive intentions. Ultimately, or so the poptimist argument went, rockism could not find terms other than it’s own (white, booshwah, Frankfurtian) through which to understand the value of work. It was cut-off from ordinary enjoyment.

In contrast Poptimism argued for a qualified relativism. In true pomo style it allowed itself to love the big, the vulgar, the trashy, even to, in some ways, love the machine. It asked that pop be taken on its own terms and merits, that it might be partially seen through the eyes of its audiences. Underpinning all this, the claim that genuinely good work existed in mainstream pop, if only critics would care to look.

Obviously this maps onto theatre only very very roughly; however I’m intrigued as to how poptimism might be conceived of in regard to our own glossy mainstream. How we might as critics come to the overground and it’s audiences, not with blanket pre-conceptions of McMusicals but with a mind to honestly examining their meanings, perhaps their subversions, their mometary extremities, their artistic strengths. Conversely, if we think small, we might always be thinking ‘white middle-class and educated’. Small can often mean reaction, it can mean lack of ambition. I fear for a theatre that smells like a hipster vegan cafe, as much as for one that smells like a boutique organic perfumery. We should check our privilege. Hoping a black person turns up to your mixed-media animated collage about fairies is not a viable way to consider your audience. Popularity matters. Audience reach and numbers matter. Theatre should not be an elite sport.

If every small theatre company behaved like Crass there would be a real problem of bad art and ghettoisation - as if, in the grand scheme of things, theatre didn’t have those problems enough already.

—

EDIT
Andrew Haydon has anticipated some of the thrust here, tweeting in response:
“Or: totally ignored by most people, making no impression on anything and culturally stagnant?”

Which is a tad harsh on smallscale DIY theatre, not that I’d disagree with the first two clauses. Although it would be absolutely true of punk, which by now is so far decomposed it doesn’t smell at all (although a read of Griel Marcus’ Lipstick Traces will forever kid you its the most resonant thing ever to have happened in history) but which absolutely cannot be said of ‘underground music’ which (however you define might it) enjoys a rooted and constantly fertile place in the cultural soil, and ought to be the envy of theatre pretty much worldwide (which sounds like a curious notion, that theatre might be able to possibly envy music, but one I think i’ll try and expand upon in a further blog).

After the event

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 11:13:00 +0100

It’s useful to be circumspect when discussing an event at which one wasn’t present. I wasn’t present at an event last night, as riots and civil unrest broke out across Tottenham in North London. I got home about 4am to find twitter fervid, retweeted pix of flames in the grainy night, kinetic tweets from the scene. At 4:15am, after the BBC had replayed the same footage for the hundredth time, and were busying themselves with a lacklustre interview with an American colonel, while four miles up the road London burned, I flipped to LBC radio for breaking news. No such luck. So I headed out on foot.

I found myself after the event in its ghostly wake, a line of tired cops in riot gear strung out across monument way, behind them a highstreet reconfigured. Perhaps as befits an event, its reality was not quite available. It might’ve looked like a scene from Hot Fuzz, in between takes, the smashed Victorian brickwork, the upturned wheelie bins trimmed with melted plastic, the trudging extras in their helmets. Call of Duty: Tottenham was being bandied about on twitter, hardcore gaming gone hardercore, but here was the game’s shell, its nets, the empty multiplayer room, the interactive environment had now been interacted with, but more than that, it had been hacked and modded, in a rupturous serious way. The game world had its edges glimmer and disappear, the walls had zero depth, uncoded vistas were appearing as the players’ avatars twitched.

Moving round the side streets a French guy asked me what had happened here. I told him what I knew: that last thursday a guy called Mark Duggan was shot by armed police from Operation Trident, a division specifically set-up to police the black population, in very unclear circumstances. A protest outside the Police station yesterday evening had grown, pitched battles with the police ensued, people were hit and charged with horses, two cop cars were burned and a double decker bus. “Just like France” he smiled ruefully. Crossing the police tape into the High Road I came across the two cars, they looked ancient, like stone, and in the ashen grey patina you almost expected to see fossils. Whatever gas, as the paint combusted, was long since expelled. Event archaeology. St Marks Gospel church, just behind the police line, a large art deco building panelled up its tower and across its nave with glass, remained unharmed. Not fifty metres down the road Nationwide and Barclay’s bore the marks of apparent and structural disdain. An African guy gleefully pointed out a wrenched cashpoint in a nearby alley, a note of incredulity, bordering on admiration in his voice. Through the spider-cracked windows of the bank chairs had been tossed, limp bin bags had been hurled through a gaping doorframe scattering their contents, a tipping ground, it appeared now a strange softened act of disgust. However hot it got last night, there was pattern and critique here.

An ear back on the radio and the presenter was talking of a two-fold event, a “peaceful demonstration” which had then “descended” into violence, as “mischief makers” joined the fray to begin looting. This tired mantra is the dry dissecting hand of order. If we know anything about action of this kind, there is no divorce between the principled and the nefarious, there are no democratic goodies and anti-democratic baddies, however appealingly neat that would be (and which should be intuitively suspect for that very reason). As I walked back through the peeling playground on Hackney grounds I heard a man on the radio discuss how he would consider accepting fenced goods, “I wouldn’t have 6 months ago” he explained, “only, I’ve had a paycut of 12 grand since then.” A community that experiences murder by, and the routine attentions of, the Police might protest and they might take stuff from stores. In an area where unemployment is the highest in the capital, encompassing some of its poorest wards (about to become poorer should Pickles have his way) a distinction thus made only glosses the continuity of real antagonisms, reaching instead for a paranoid authoritarian gesture, which sides with law and order presuming it for the common good. If those liberals that will no doubt today seek to identify the bad, the “violent minority”, “thugs”, “idiots”, “youths” and as many radio callers last night charmingly put it (usually prefaced by a hurried put-upon mention of political correctness) “the blacks”, they might give pause to consider the evental-site, its politics, history, and social relations; they might consider the lives of the people that they judge to have “gone too far”.

Apropos of recently seeing Alecky Blythe’s excellent London Road at the National Theatre, I was reading about the events of the Hackney Seige in 2003 with which Blythe had engaged in a previous verbatim piece. What occurred in the 15 day standoff between police and a single gunman, just around the corner from where I now live, was something approaching martial law. Large draughts of the heavy handed Met had effectively occupied the area and were stopping and searching at will. Here at Tottenham I was expecting similar, but found something different. A sense of fatigue and permeability. Down the centre of the high road 14 or so Police vans were choked, a number of squad cars, their occupants ejected down the sides of the road, sitting on doorsteps, leaning on postboxes, red-rimmed eyes, clutching bottled water. Further down four heavily-armoured personnel vehicles (brutal snub little things that brought to my mind the Nazi Hetzer) had their backs open, their contents loosely exposed, sagging crates of riot gear and indeterminate flouresence and plastics. No one had closed the doors on the kennels within the dog vans. The whole air of the massed force was like an exhausted army at rest, a mobile camp set up in the middle of a London street. Two Policemen who had blocked off the High Rd in a small alley had hung their shields on a double gate, one breathed heavily “that was a long night and all” in reference to some previous campaign. One cop leaned on another, quite an uncharacteristic pose. “You fucking stink mate”. There was a stale fear which mingled with tiredness. A sense that there was little doubt the army would be called on to march again. An army that had never really been out of occupation.

When one doesn’t witness an event, like I didn’t last night, one is faced with a piecing together. With no primary sensate data to draw on, as I passed shop owners huddles outside their half-opened shops, with their hands on their hips, and brooms brushing away the debris which has accrued round their fruit and veg stands - into my inner monologue came the spooling tapes of news journalists in solemn and sententious tones. “In the aftermath a community rebuilds”. “Normality slowly returns”. “Put the events of last night behind them”. But the event, according to Alain Badiou, is precisely one that cannot be put behind us. It changes us, we are shaped in reference to it, through it we become subjects. We have the opportunity to consider ourselves in its light. And yes a scene of aftermath is a scene of reconstruction, but what guise does that reconstruction take, and must it be renormalised? This effort of reconstruction is about much more than sweeping up, than condemning violent minorities, and thugs, and youth. It is a process of making sense of this event. If this is truly an event, then the battle is not over, for social meaning which lies unravelled like the masonry strewn across the road, is there to be rebuilt. We rebuild for the communities that have been cored and hollowed out by successive governments, who are suffering waves of gentrification, for their young who have no stake. We rebuild for a summer and beyond, like Badiou says, “we seize the event of truths, their newness, and their precarious trajectory”.

"I refuse to believe that the rhythmically unsophisticated white booshwah British ear can really hear..."

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:55:00 +0000

““I refuse to believe that the rhythmically unsophisticated white booshwah British ear can really hear the groove in most Salsa, Afrobeat etc let alone dance to it. In fact they can’t, I’ve seen them. The vital disconnect between the brain and hips, the current effectively bypassing them and going straight to the weirdly pivoting leaden feet, violently compromises any attempt to appear crotch-led and sexful. We are a nation, at best, of hoppers, and stampers, terminally foot-focused, though in moments of high excitement we may flail and windmill, channelling the rhythm section’s kinetic force through our arms, like a mighty two branched Oak in a violent storm, trunks rooted firmly to the ground, limbs thrashing violently and a-rhythmically.””

- Carl Neville

In a Forest Dark and Deep

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:15:24 +0000

In a Forest Dark and Deep

"The Political Play"

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:27:00 +0000

This is a tangential response to Andrew Haydon’s post “Political”.

I have a big problem with the attribution of the word “political” when it comes to a piece of theatre.

We have a popular canon of plays we deem to be “political” ones, we have writers we call “political playwrights”. These have a commonly accepted engagement with the “big issues”.

And to an extent this is all well and good. There is a sense that someone like Caryl Churchill acted as a vital part of a national expression of antagonism towards Thatcher, for example. Or that someone like David Hare is a little like the Archbishop of Canterbury but with better swearing – a benign estate, pulling sway over the polity in the great balance of powers.

Until you come to consider, what does that mean for those plays which are not “political plays”?

Suddenly we have these things that are.. what.. Plot driven? Character driven? About ordinary people? Entertainment? Well what then is plot, character, people and desire? Is Top Girls a political play because it features public women from history, but A Number not because it features men talking privately?

Are these non-political plays supposed to suddenly escape what it means to represent something? To ignore the process of framing, of making value judgements, accepting, assigning, rejecting social meaning? They are supposed to not depict people in social relationships, in historical moments?

Because people are these things. This is the truth of people. A play about an ambitious prince could be called a play about ambition, but ambition outside of the context of his being a prince would be partial, and to call it only thus would be to utterly misdescribe the situation. You are a sparkling and unique individual, no doubt, but who you are is also a composite of those “extrinsic” things which define you.

To me, criticism that refuses to recognise the political dimension of all plays, which start from a moment of contingency, a blank page, and have to construct a recognisable world with all the value judgements that entails - is guilty to some degree. Far too often it naturalises and essentialises, lazily resting on assumptions, positing hazy universalism and false historical continuity - “‘tis the ‘umin condition”, “‘twas ever thus”.

And to miss the contingency of art and the world is to limit the possibilities of your understanding both.

But also that it diminishes the beauty and power of theatre, to grasp us, as we are, and speak to and move us.

Perhaps it matters less that this is a form of depoliticsation akin to deforestation - obliterative and frankly alarming. But more that it won’t let theatre say important, beautifully crafted, and revelatory things about cultural politics – cultural politics that are not somehow separate from ourselves, that happen when we put on our political voices, but are just the matter of fact way we live our lives.

So how about we rename them “public plays”, and give theatre its full due?

self-help and speed-reading: on non-narrative art

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 01:17:00 +0000

Apropos of Deborah Pearson’s article we put up on Exeunt yesterday - I’ve been wondering whether this is any space for meaning beyond the reach of narrative, and what is the function of non-narrative art.

I’ve always bought Pierce and Saussure’s contention that meaning is difference - that meaning arises in the gaps. And now it seems to me, that in these gaps lies the seed from which narrative flowers - if to signify is to relate one thing to another, if the sign is always what it is and what it isn’t, if it is laid out in a systemic chain - narrative, there, inescapably woven into the core of meaning.

To leave this then, is to the leave the symbolic, to become Kristeva’s “abject”, as good a definition of depression, or nothingness, as I’ve ever come across.

I started thinking, and narrative seemed applicable in so many places. Those who subscribe to the dialectic, those Great Men of force, have a narrative move encoded at the Cthonic heart of the universe. There is an Existential reliance on narrative, being always as becoming, the story of how we are. I recalled Frank Kermode linking narrative to death, and the “narrative turn” in the humanities. Lyotard and his death of the grand story. I remembered a lecture I once heard a lecture by a couple of NY English professors arguing for emotion as a narrative event. Coming across an advert for narrative therapy on gumtree.

I thought about the stories that define my life, as a man, as a boy, a son, a brother, a lover, an outsider, an insider - between Propp and social interactionism all these roles had their narratives into which I would schematise experience. Sometimes retroactively, searching to accommodate or deflect an unwanted feeling. Sometimes as if it was the form my will took, my action poured into these containers.

So if narrative is implicated in being, history, time and emotion, what then of non-narrative art? How do you interpret the gesture that resists interpretation? What is it that non-narrative art provides, or can possibly hope to achieve? Is its meaning in fact non-meaning? Are we all so many Prufrocks, still mourning the loss of sense? The bourgeois, still shocked by a dadaist urinating on a lamp-post?

Andrew Haydon turned on to An Introduction to Speed Reading by Chris Goode, an Imagist, non-narrative poem and performance piece.

“Make your rucking Hispanic pool-cleaner move the book while you keep your eyes absolutely still as if you were in some kind of academic catatonia or waking lifestyle narcosis”.

There’s an interesting comparison here, between this and a moment in sociology, sometime in the 90s after 20 years of identity politics and three times that of Curtis’s Century of the Self, when the Self came to prominence as a theme.

Stevi Jackson, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens amongst others, saw the building blocks of the self as narrative positions, buying the ‘narrated life’ (bios-graphie) and importing it into their definition of modernity.

Giddens set upon lifestyle journalism and self-help books, positioning them as the texts of the age, building a sort of mediatised compound person, wherein the actor of modernity was reflexively organising their lives around available narratives, where our traditional ancestors just stuck to Gods, crops, winds and Nobles.

Which all sounds like commonsense, until, what begins to form in the afterthoughts of the page, is some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. A monster which bears an uncanny resemblance to the type of person addressed in self-help books. If Shelley invoked some pure truth of spirit, Giddens was too busy reading the manual. It was a bit like commissioning a documentary on Hollyoaks and recreating Hollyoaks shot for shot. Like reviewing a play by writing it out.

In attempting to describe, taking this literature as determining of ourselves, Giddens had produced a representation that was closed off. Here was a reflexivity devoid of critical reasoning. Where a self-help narrative was the same as a territorial one in Pinter, or one of inaction in Hamlet. Wherein the text could show us nothing but a clean, unified self.

“Hollyoaks is Hollyoaks” was a critical failure.

I think this is where non-narrative art steps in. Not to defy meaning, to throw us back onto the absurd, but on the contrary to open up the text to its mutual constitution with the audience, to allow us agency in following our own narratives.

Much better than the question, “how can we understand people through these texts?”, is the question Goode asks, “what relationship do we have these texts”? Here Goode does the work of the artist, critic and critical sociologist; looking at speed reading as a means of acquiring knowledge, to what ends, as a symptom, as an epistemic tactic, as an interpretive act.

He discursively takes on narrative linearity, leaving us with impressions, small narratives, which jostle and eclipse one another, building a picture, interested, condemning, contradictory - always polysemic, never foreclosing the subject position.

You don’t need to escape narrative. In the end perhaps it’s enough just to know that speed-reading and self-help books can be made to yield different stories.

Du Goudron et des Plumes at the Barbican

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:22:14 +0000

Du Goudron et des Plumes at the Barbican:

Sans Objet at QEH Southbank

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:19:00 +0000

Sans Objet at QEH Southbank:

The theatre of protest

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:05:44 +0000

The theatre of protest:

Interview with Wire

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:55:00 +0000

The interview is up at Drowned in Sound. The transcript is below. Enjoy yourself.

A band like Wire I see as more like territory or geography than a band…

Graham Lewis: [chuckling] typography…

…perhaps, less brittle maybe…

GL: The thing that first surprised me was when we made the first piece of work we were doing, we stopped working in 1980, was when we became an adjective. That’s quite an extraordinary metamorphosis. You know something you never think of when you first start something. You could actually become an adjective, or a metaphor even. So being geography I like a lot.

Have you ever been a verb, to Wire?

GL: I think we always have been. That’s what we are.

Colin Newman: No I don’t think we ever have been, although one could.. I think the thing is because the word is so common, we chose the name originally because apart from the obvious, it’s so shorn of any kind of meaning, it doesn’t have very much association. But it is of course an incredibly common word so before Google got very smart, which it did in the last five years, if you Googled wire you would never get anything about wire. But it is very common.

It has that sort of infrastructural sense to it, technical bones

GL: I guess if you’re around long enough, that’s what you hope for isn’t it. You don’t get blown away.

CN: It’s pretty terrible. I mean i’m pretty nervous of that process personally, because I like the idea of being free as much as possible, from any baggage, about anything, ever.

GL: But the important thing, a very important thing for artists is that you’ve got to persist, isn’t it.

CN: And provenance. You can say the work has provenance, so that’s one way in which you can use that particular kind of backdrop. But y’know that’s my Modus Operandi, is to be as slippery as possible.

Wire sort of has continuity and discontinuity about them, the Wire archipelago. Ideal Copy your 1980 return, was that in some way a challenge to provenance?

GL: It came out of Like all of these things it sort of fell out of the ether really, at the time I was really fascinated with photocopying. I was making an awful lot of work using that machinery and technology. And Bruce and I we’d been talking an awful lot about.. it was the period where fake and piracy started to become very, one was aware of that in the world, because it was around that yuppy period when there was a lot of money to be made in making fake goods fake anything, so that was around, but I think it was Bruce who nailed this. The ideal copy is DNA and that’s where it really came from.

DNA breaks down, bad replications…

GL: ..But DNA is it. Everything else, including us, is rather transient and not terribly important, and the whole ambition the whole drive against inertia etc. is DNA.

Aspect of being the purest design…

GL: Yeah of this design that mutates and continues and crucially wants to live. So that’s where it comes from “when it’s cold I feel cold / when it’s hot I feel ambitious”. This sort of.. microbial insistence but as large as it is microscopic.

So talking of ambition, and art, I have a plan for this interview to be collaborative article. Now as Wire are more like territory I want us to create something in the model of a travel article. But a specific type of travel article, a cliche of the genre. It’s usually called a “Tale of Two Cities”, usually begins “city x or country x is a city/land of contrasts” and it elaborates these entirely false two cities and refuses to connect processes. So rather than a chronological mapping of 1970s Wire1, Wire 2, 3…

GL: …We’re up to Wire 4 now. or 3.2 is it?…

CN: Let him.. I’m interested in his travelogue idea..

Well it’s less a travelogue, rather a concept map, working on these falsifiable dichotomies, so we’d have provisional Wire A and Wire B, which wouldn’t remain identical to themselves…

GL: this is like Quantas physics

In that it’s liable to crash

GL: Depends whether it has a rolls royce engine.

Errr.. well crashing is sort of the point

GL: Go for it.

Innovators vs. establishment

GL: Innovators make no money. This has always been a starving land.

You’ve travelled serious amounts of aesthetic and processual ground within “the band”, even within individual periods, this exploratory spirit that has made Wire “not fit”.

GL: That makes it very difficult, what shall we say, for the establishment to invest heavily because they like things which do not move and can be easily exploited. That’s a different kind of production, we’re in the production of art. And art is a question that is continually moving, and formulating and responding to that is really, all you can do.

And where does that come from? There’s always been an enormous sense of confidence, and coherence, about Wire’s experimentation

GL: I think it does help if you’re your own cartologist.

…so mapping yourselves, retaining the relation from A to B…

GL: Well that’s what you’re doing. If you’re setting off on your own adventure you are continually redrawing the map and erasing it as well, amending it. And you’ve got to be optimistic, in that [philosophical] sense.

CN: If i can get a word in edgeways. My personal geography. I sat in my bedroom in Watford in 1976 and decided I wanted to invent rock and roll, with the arrogance that only a 22 year old can have, and latterly I’ve described that process as taking the “and roll” out. because there was an awful lot of frippery, I don’t actually like rock and roll I don’t like it all, I hate 50s music, I hate black and white. I like colour. And I’ve always just thought, yeah, this is it. I felt that I was on the point of something, totally within my own head, nothing to do with the rest of the world. But I think what I’ve brought when I bring material to the band is a kind of confidence, you know, they’ll all laugh at me, they’ll all just think I’m an idiot, because i’m prepared to stand there with an acoustic guitar and electric guitar and play these ridiculously shorn things, and then they join in, and something happens. You’ve got to be very brave to do it. When we started to do this album. Iphone, acoustic guitar, some words from Graham, some words I had myself. Sent a bunch of stuff out to these guys. Robert said “It sounds like the seventies”. Graham said “I hate acoustic guitars”. Within a day of being together, playing that material, we were already well on our way to making a great record.

GL: As Colin said, quite often it’s the case, if nobody laughs you know it’s not going to fly. If they’re going hmmm, mmm in agreement. Because that’s when there’s usually something in it that’s worth exploring. Whether it’s absurd, worrying…

CN: Then you get into a mindframe of being convinced that you’re right, basically. If you’re not the mainstream, it’s because everybody else has got no idea.

GL While Colin was having his epiphany in his bedroom in Watford, I was at art college in London, at Hornsey. And the thinking was that it would always be a good idea to have a group because it would give you possiblity of working in something which at that point didn’t exist, which was basically like a multimedia world. Because it would give you access to doing all of the things you liked, which included you know, obviously music and noise and words, and image clothes, design. All sorts of logistics, performance all of those things. And a band became a good vehicle. What we did have was that everybody had loads of dislikes, things they didn’t want to do,. and lots of people had very specific ideas of what they did like. And even though we didn’t really have very great conventional music skills, what we did have was great curiosity and the energy to criticise, and criticise very heavily ourselves, and I think that’s where the “confidence” comes from, because nothing can get through.

There is a sense in which Wire are establishment as well, a touchstone, historical marker, longevity with a measure of security..

CN I dont know if that’s necessarily our fault.

GL: That’s not exactly establishment is it, that’s like saying DNA is establishment.

in that you’ve formed the structures of music

GL: Godlike more than establishment

CN: To use the grand Churchillian phrase we are the most unlikely victors of history. In 1980 EMI had written us off, the world had pretty much written us off. We’d made a brilliant album and then done some very arty performances that everyone thought was shit. And then we broke up. There was very little in the way of legacy about what we had, nobody was really interested. History happened to work in our favour, American Hardcore, and y’know British Indie, and then it just became almost de rigeur to somehow drop Wire, but half of that is just like ticking a box. You’re not credible until you’ve ticked that box. I’m playing devils advocate here, there’s a wide range of people claming Wire influence who I personally hate musically.

GL: But there you go, otherwise you have to be a dictator and go round their house and kill them.

I find it interesting when a band like yours has that encounter, that DNA mirror moment, birth perhaps…

GL The disappointing thing is when people copy, when they copy the DNA and they haven’t looked very closely, and they make something tacky and vulgar out of it. Like Menswear or something. Who’ve taken all the bits but it’s a fucking ugly creature. I really like it when people say it was a big influence, and you go “how” like that song you did about so-and-so it made me think about this and that’s why I did that, and you go “yeah, that’s the way I work”. Because that’s how you steal, inspired by somebody else’s work, you take it and digest it and then you reproduce it, you don’t copy it, unless you want to make a point of taking it.

I’m also interested in bands that have reached the kind of critical stature of Wire, in how that band negotiates its own history. Does it become a burden, how do you manage it without it becoming heritage.

CN: basically what we do, since we’ve set up our label which I run, there are two basic strands to what we do. There’s a strand which deals with the biggest possible audience we can get to which is your new album your tour, and there’s a second strand which deals with the core fans. And we’re bang into releasing illegal bootlegs, where you get them to subsribe and you can release those over a period of time. So the people that want everything we have to figure out a way.. and they don’t distinguish between Jeanetta Cochrane 1979 live recording, and that’s really exciting, and a new album.. it’s all just “stuff”.

GL: You were talking about it being a burden, and there were times when you certainly felt that. And i think it is very much pre-this it was, now is everything available on the same level, that freed us from a considerable amount of history. Because we’ve just put out some old new bootlegs, and at the same time a new album, and people are talking about that for them, it’s the same thing, and for us it’s the same thing. You don’t have that hierarchy of time and technology, that was against you before, because you were continually fighting to go forward and to allow to make the space, so that you could actually go forward.

so the digital estate has freed you up

CN: I think something interesting happened in the 90s with regard to how artists operated within their own market place, which probably came out of fine arts, is that an artist should know their audience and know how to interact with their own market. And it didn’t have that awful 1950s thing which was [affects posh voice] “oh no, we don’t have anything to do with commerce, we’re artists”. I started to run a label in the 1990s and it was natural to take on doing a Wire label, then it became a thing where we could release any kind of damn thing we wanted to release. As long as it’s Wire. On that label. And we worked out strategies for that, and we’re not saying oh we have to make a single now to please the record company, the record company doesn’t give a fuck either way. So actually we know very well, what our market wants. And there are two markets, one very interested in a new Wire thing, a new Wire thing plays very well. Escpeically if it’s a good thing.

GL: And I think that relates to.. going back to when we started, we were like the first generation who had been brought up on pop. And to us there was no question as to whether pop was art or whether it wasn’t art. Particularly in relation to its mercantile qualities as well. I mean we are all related in that way to Duchamp and to Warhol and to what they suggested. And so all of these [pop] things become natural, it’s becoming a naturalised citizen in a country of your own wishes, or dreams, the one that you wanted to get to.

CN: So in a way we’re senior citizens in our own land, but we’re not sure how that land interfaces with anybody elses.

GL: We’re just waiting for immortality.

CN: I’m very good at your pat one liners, and Wire is the most famous band you’ve never heard of. If you know about it, you know quite a lot about it. But there are a lot of people who have never heard of us, who are serious music fans, who probably like a lot of the bands who we’ve influenced but don’t know us.

GL: Well that’s probably because.. [canny] we were never terribly successful at one thing. At one time.

Spectacle versus art

There’s one story about Wire which Simon Reynolds relates in his Rip It Up and start again, where you Colin, while at art college in watford, shared a car with Brian Eno, and it was on those journeys where rather than just being a student, or we might say in the broader context of music -just a guy in a band, began to feel that you were an artist, that you could suddenly talk about that without sounding pretentious, that you were legitimate…

CN: There is a step that everyone has to go through, like someone that you know, you’re at school and you’re just like one of the people, or you’re someone down the pub, and you’re sort of 18 and you declare you’re an artist, I think “wanker” would be the first thing someone would say to you. So how do you get from there to being the kind of person who calling yourself an artist without any embarrassment or shame. It wasn’t just Brian, it was also Hansjorg Mayer and Peter Schmidt. And they were all artists, and we’d just, when Brian was in, going down to central London because I lived in Hendon and they used to drop me off. And we just talked, and I began to realise that they were talking to me, not as if I was just a student and they were tutors, we were just some people talking. And the penny dropped for me at that point.

GL: That’s probably the scariest moment really, that’s when you commit and understand you’re taking on quite a tough job really.

CN: It seemed natural to me at the time, I felt, I remember getting very excited that we were going to make, me and my mate slim were going to make a remake of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, I think the idea was it involved taking quite a lot of speed and staying up all night. And painting everything black and white, except one scene in which there was extra blood. It wasn’t very thought through…

GL: Was Eno in it?

CN: Yeah, yeah, and everyone in the car nodding sagely. And it surely wasn’t going to be very good but it didn’t matter.

GL: It’s so funny. I remember having a similar experience at Hornsey with a tutor called Brian Harris who did the inside of the 154 album, with the typography, somebody wanted to buy some work off me when I was at college. And the tutor was excited, and thought it was fantastic, and I asked “how much should I charge?” and he said, “how much do you think you’re worth?”, and I thought “fuck, this is more difficult than I thought.“ It’s not just doing it, you’ve got to know why you’re doing it, and what you want for it. And that’s it “welcome”, then it’s art. It’s not a hobby any more, and it’s not arty anymore, because that’s not good enough.

Graham, you once mentioned in interview a thing called the “X-Factor” that Wire were seeking in their music, a place of uncertainty, a sort of alter-space.

GL: I think you’re always navigating towards things you haven’t done. And that can be worrying, for you and your audience, but you just do have to do it.

thinking of your audience and tugging them into new places

GL: I mean thinking about your audience is a peculiar kind of conceit, I think one is aware of people who like what you do. I mean hopefully the people who stay around, our constituency or whatever you want to call it, which is changing all the time, those people expect that. It’s really interesting when, we just did the Lexington a while back and it’s interesting to see what people write about it, and people were going “oh yes and they played all these new things.. which were fucking great” and someone else is going “I would have preferred it if it had all been new and they hadn’t played that stuff they played last time.” And that’s it, that’s a good audience I think to have, because it’s one you don’t have to cultivate in the same way.”

You could become a cult of novelty

CN: Well there are plusses and minuses to everything

There’s a coy reference on your wikipedia page to Situationism, is that haywire

CN: Well I found our wikipedia page about 5 years ago, someone had put something about Wire was a political punk band from the 1970s very influenced by Throbbing Gristle, so like okay, this was written by a TG fan..

GL: or Genesis even

CN: So I started kind of changing it but they only let you do so much, and gave up after a while because ti was so full of untruths, because i think they’ve got better but there used to be a point where someone could decide to put the boot into someone and write a load of crap.

GL: But it’s funny the situationist thing and how it crops up, because it’s like if you say “no” then people say “but surely you were ware of it” and you can go “of course”, and “yes”. But it’s like saying are you influenced by Dada, “yreah”, or “noo”. Because we certainly weren’t situationists, but of course we were aware of tactics and abilities, but if you want to go into that stuff you should go and talk to Bernie Rhodes or Jamie Reid or someone, people that carry it, have armbands for it.

Did you guy see the University of Strategic Optimism? Explains.

GL: I caught this recently.. there’s an art group in St Petersburg now who are working with the idea that police are no longer there to defend the public, they are there to exploit the public, they are just another arm of the mafia in Russia. And this art group, and philosophers as they started off as, the things they are doing are just so fucking good. What do you call those bridges.. cantilever, and there’s one across the river there and its fucking huge, and what they did they painted on the underneath a 75m penis, so that when the bridge comes up it does this.. and do you know what it’s opposite to? The Russian secret police station. Now is that situationism? I think it’s fucking genius. And they’re doing things like this all the time.

Your gigs at the Electric Ballroom in the 1980s, you dismissed them earlier as perhaps just arty, but it seems they were in some way dealing with the relationships of spectacle…

CN: Yes, there’s definitely a moment there… We’re just about to next year we’re going to re-release document and eyewitness show, and part of that comes from those shows, and those at the Jeanetta Cochrane which were slightly more worked out versions. And they were all done by theatre students, so it was all very nice, nicely staged, and we did four vignettes followed by the band playing, and the Electric Ballroom thing was a slightly more provocative thing. And wasn’t exactly my favourite gig to be honest. It was more of a concept than a…

GL: But it was an incredible contrast from thing which was enjoying a great deal of financial support and something else which was done for sixpence. But both being one offs.

CN: Well the Cochrane was a four-off

GL: Well it was never the same

I couldn’t find descriptions of these

GL: The ones in the music press were really anti. They fucking hated it.

Bourgeois art-wank?

GL: All sorts of objections. I mean they couldn’t understand what we were doing so it had to be shit. Because in those days art wasn’t a very good thing England…

That’s tricky for a band like Wire

GL: That’s very tricky because that’s what we did. We never made a secret of it. But you’ve got to remember this was pre YBA know what I mean. In those days there was no art market, there was no art industry as such. People had to go to America to see art. There was nothing.

CN: I mean the problem was the band was disintegrating at the same time. It wasn’t part of an ongoing process, there was no sort planned avenue, more a culmination of “let’s go down.. being weird” if you will. There’s a version of it which was cut with various bits of speech, there’s a version of just the gig on its own, which will come out as document and eyewitness naked, as a kind of.. joke. But musically, I mean we were not over-rehearsed, but between those two shows, Electric Ballroom and Jeanetta Cochrane there is some amazing material that wouldn’t have got recorded.. It’s really a story about the fourth Wire album that didn’t happen. because EMI didn’t want to take up the option. Well they may have taken up the option but they didn’t want to give us an advance, so at that point we had no money.

It was around that time you first wanted to started your own label, an EMI imprint

CN: But they didn’t want to do it.

GL: They didn’t know what they were doing. They were disintegrating.

…They didn’t understand you did they…

CN: …Obviously they didn’t understand us…

GL: Well [exhales with slight exasperation]. They didn’t understand what they were doing. We’d got knocked back from them. When they said 154 it’s obviously a work of genius, y’know. There are five singles on here, y’know, which one should we choose, talk about cup runneth over. And they said well, what do you wanna do? And we said, well we want to advertise it, on tv. That’s how you should spend the money.

A new media, this was right before MTV.

GL: Exactly, and they were like oh no no. You can’t sell music on tv, at that point artistically you knew that the creative relationship had finished, and then they got.. well [chuckles] unfortunately what happened then is that MTV did come along and EMI got bought because they were in disarray. Because they just didn’t move, they didn’t see it coming.

and post-punk, which you were a part of, did shake the majors

GL: Well no, it was more MTV that did that

CN: We were just too ahead of the curve to be honest. I mean, if we’d stuck around for just another two years kind of almost reading water, then we would’ve been absolutely in the right place.

GL: As it was with Duran Duran

CN: But there was no will in the band to do that. We could not at that point move collectively, because there was no agreement about where we were and what we were trying to do

GL: But it was so difficult, the thing was we had a real problem with like where could we go, y’know?

Did at any point you want to become Duran Duran, take your synths to the states…

GL: [chuckles] No, no. What we wanted to do was advertise on TV. Because what we wanted to do advertising. And we had this great music which we thought would make a fantastic soundtrack for the things we wanted to do. I mean we were fans of the guys at JWT, like Putnam and all those kind of people, in advertising.

Creatives, the burgeoning creative class

GL: Yeah, because that’s where i used to hang out. That was where the interesting things were happening. As Colin said we just two years ahead, and EMI didn’t see it. However Duran Duran, who just happened to be DJs at the rum runner and big fans of Wire they were there at the right time. And that’s soimething you can;t fuck with. That’s just tough luck.

Musically, your first return saw you sign to Mute and you were beginning to embrace synths a bit more…

CN: If there was any sense of ourselves as being sort of cutting edge in some way, we’d want to be engaging with whatever the tools of the moment were. At the point when we were recording Ideal Copy was just about the time that pro 24 for the Atari came out, you were just getting the S900 Akai sampler, and you could put two of them together, and go stereo and that was the big news at the time. That you could do that thing. And we wanted to do things that way. In hindsight it didn’t produce all the best work. But there was a problem, I mean post 154 up until fairly recently actually about the band having anya greed direction. There have been moments of freefall. I think one of the reasons that we did miss out at the end of the seventies and the early eighties is that band wasn’t really there, we were really screwed by doing a support tour for Roxy Music which was horrible. We earned no money from it, we were shafted more and more ervery night by their crew, who gave us less and less of everything, it was winter we were playing in these horrible sheds, y’know enormous sheds, and a pairing of of 1979 Wire and 1973 [Eno} Roxy Music would’ve been a pairing made in heaven, but 1979 Roxy Music were a different thing altogether. Brian Ferry and his backing band.

GL: Is this what we’ve got to look forward to?

CN: Is this what we’re doing it for?

GL: No.

CN: This looks shit. Is this what we’ve got to do to make money? No one signed up for that, nobody wanted that. We just had nobody around us, there was no culture, there was no “Indie” music culture, which could’ve just said, guys what you do is fantastic you don’t need to be doing things like that, because there’s another gnereation coming along and they see things differently or whatever. There was noone there toi say that to us. We just looked at that and thought that was really terrible, we don’t want to do that.

GL: It was really bizarre because, as Colin said, there was no indication that is was completely practical, for the rest of your life you could go on playing in front of 1500 people, in really nice places which are acoustically built for the job and it’s not against the law. It’s no crime. There wasn’t because there was this sort of pyramid trajectory of how you were supposed to “progress” as a band, ever onward toward the summit.

CN: It’s just the way it was.

Back to 1977 the first album, a year away from the winter of discontent. I see parallels between then and now; a government in crisis, ideologically worn out, growing unrest, a protest movement..

GL: I think there were definitely references to it in the material, yeah. There’s an absolutely extraordinary set of photographs, taken by an American photographer, which were in Leeicester Square with the bin bags and the rats and the Starlings and the birds were shitting every where. Really dark photographs, of course EMI didn’t use them very much, because they weren’t quite what they were trying to say I don’t think.

It feels in the early stuff there is this trauma in Wire that shaped the band, maybe it’s a trauma that is shared by punk, but that in Wire process and method was a method of overcoming.. rather than say pure negation or nihilism..

CN: Yes, but Wire were never a punk band. We were a year too late to be a punk band. British punk was 76, and we’re a 77 band.

GL: This is a thing that is a misnomer…

…I mean that you shared a… social trauma with punk… and parodied punk in 12XU and Mr Suit, you began with punk pseudonyms, Klive Nice as opposed to Johnny Rotten..

GL: …We were talking about Jeanetta Cochrane and the Electric Ballroom the reason we were able to do that in 1980, was that in 1976 and 77, when we were playing in front of people they were throwing bottles and glasses at us. And I know there was a lot of copycat stuff going on, but I don’t think it was out of affection. We were there, and we still try to bear witness about what happened, but we were not a punk band. And we said so, and no one seemed to believe us..

…your first NME cover bore the headline “no punks please, we’re Wire”..

GL: I mean would you call Pere Ubu a punk band?..

A couple of years ago I saw their opera based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and it seemed to fit a certain portable set of ideas…

GL: …Would you call Jonathan Richman a punk band? Patti Smith a punk band? The Ramones are arguably not a punk band. Are the Saints a punk band?

There are expansive definitions…

CN: …But it’s such an overused word. I mean what’s punk is it No Doubt? Is it Gwen Stefani?

GL: I think the reason you’re using this word and saying that, is that there’s alway’s been a proportion of what in the work has a reportage quality to it. Because that’s obviously what one’s stimulus is, if you come to write text or whatever, you have to ask the question what is going on? Sometimes it’s from the imagination of course, but that’s rather refined at times isn’t it. One’s dreams to tend to have some root in a twisted version of reality anyway.

I say it because I think punk and post-punk might be useful again. Okay last question, on the most recent album, the closer “Are you Ready” has lyrics which capture that oblique confrontational quality of Wire. References to being “part of the band”, the “future”, the “brand”. Is that a band manifesto of sorts?

GL: Sometimes one has to write about those things. Lowdown became a band manifesto although I didn’t know it at the time. Much of Wire, in its gestures and acts is about that.. Back to Punk for a moment, I tell you who were punk, have you ever heard of The Monks?

Yes, two guys was it on forces radio..?

GL: Yeah, American GI’s who were made into a group by German conceptual artists

Julian Cope writes about them

GL: He must do, there’s a great film called Transatlantic Feedback, that’s about Punk and that’s an art concept as well. Which nobody knew about until recently actually, but is kind of crucial now.

last dichotomy, now versus forever

CN: And now. And now. The eternal now.

Dirty Protest

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:43:31 +0000

A strand of analysis that has emerged recently, from the intellectual vanguard of bloggers engaged with the budding UK protest movement, concerns the language employed by the police and attendant RSA when it comes to their dealing with democratic participants on the streets.

Dibyesh Anand paints a picture of an operational idiolect that is currently being formulated by the State’s repressive arm who are in a certain galvanised condition, finding their own meanings in response to the most concerted period of resistance for a generation:

“The medicalisation of discourse here is conspicuous. Expressions such as ‘We contain’ or ‘We end the containment through drip feed’ or ‘This is a sterile zone’ gives a sense that it is not people but virus/disease that is being talked about. Protestors are human beings and not diseases that need containment. When ‘containment’ creates ‘sterile zones’ around it, it is terror (there is no other word to describe it when one witnesses young men and women’s face when they are hit with baton or charged with horses and pushed into a confined area by police in riot gear) that is used by the police to create dissent-free spaces.”

Tom Stoppard, in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, reveals the Soviet mental institutions which, long after the thaw, were coldly operating as political prisons into the 1980s. In his examination of the Mary Kay Letourneau case of a woman in the US who slept with an underage boy, Zizek sees this practice as inherent in state medical discourses, which prevents bold and trangressive action from being admitted as an ethical possiblity. Certainly, from my time in the system, it became quite clear to me that the social contours of any given patient would conform to a pattern of deviance. They had often ended up there by means of a transgressive and violent act, and the organic basis of the illness, and the epistemological break in their thinking, could be accorded to the marginal places from which they came. It was often a case of learning the rationality of the institution and being swiftly moved out. Indeed there is a reading of Irving Goffman’s Asylums in which the radical body and mind are neatly fitted to a “career” as a mental patient. The starkest case was my friend Rebecca, who had no apparent organic symptomatology other than being a black woman in love, and was being kept in by a combination of testimony from her abusive former partner and her explosive refusal of the norms of romantic attachment.

With medicalisation comes dehumanisation. In the comments section of this frankly vile police blog, our blue shirted boys freely reduce democratic participants to epithets of effluvia such as wankstains, bell-ends, and scum. As Dominic Fox points out, there are also references to “washing students” with water cannons, the great grimy metaphor for the unclean which went out of mainstream comedy sometime in the 1980s, to now rear itself again with the ominous overtones of cleansing.

Kpunk aptly brings out Foucault:

The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, ‘but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

I would also add Sartre, who wrote of dirt, and more specifically “goo”, as being threatening to human ontology because of its indeterminate nature. For Sartre it was a reminder of the fact we will one day no longer transcend matter and again become it, but we might easily map this across the protest interface, that the marked dissent which has exposed the democratic deficit in the UK and galvanised a generation to become post-post-ideological renders the truth of a plasmatic polity, where to remain legitimate those in charge must must literally police the borders of the state, furiously scrubbing out the wankstains and soil, amongst whose number lies Alfie Meadows.

Sound familiar?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:01:10 +0000

“I am the government of your country…: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need.”

Andrew Undershaft from G B Shaw’s Major Barbara

Hamlet, the Gestus, and the meaning of pop music in theatre

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:17:00 +0000

So finally saw Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the NT, well half of it to be exact as other commitments called. And what to say? It was a good half - solid, energetic, competent. Kinnear’s performance far outshone the mania of Tennent and the langours of Law, more controlled than the former and more precise than the latter. There were traces of Brannagh in the emoting RSC clipped quality, and a couple of self-conscious adoptions of Larry Olivier’s legs; betighted, angular and much admired by Tynan despite, or probably because of, their looking like an eroticised faux-naïf pigeon.

Polonius was particularly good, he left big spaces with which to darken the bluffers guide to life, a sense of deep and cleaving regret. Ophelia, God bless her, was the facile punchbag Shakespeare wrote her to be. We know Shakespeare encountered young women, away from his wife in Southwark and Shoreditch. TS Eliot once wrote of Henry James that he “had a mind so fine no idea could violate it”, Peter Ackroyd riffed, writing of Shakespeare “he had a sympathy so fine no belief could violate it”. And this nicely encapsulates Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to render another’s interiority in vivid flesh, and his mobile, often contradictory sense of withholding judgement. However his gifts do not extend to the subjectivities of young women, something those Shakespeare scholars who bend him to every conceivable progressive angle should probably admit.

A not unrelated failure of theatre was also in evidence today – the use and abuse of pop music. Theatre is roundly dreadful at presenting the meaning of pop music to be anything other than that of “young people”, an unexplained, generally inexplicable phemomenon of some half-remembered land. Today we had Ophelia sitting curled on the Olivier floor doing her homework next to a beatbox playing The xx. Laertes even spoke his lines over the music which was a brave move.

It’s hard to know what the show’s various minds were believing The xx meant in this context. If they wanted currency then there is a measure of it, but in this regard the NT are at least a year further behind the zeitgeist than a BBC nature programme. The xx probably mean “doomed youth” here, because they’re, y’know, sparse and introspective. The song was ‘Islands’, a numbed love song with an edge of eery clarity, about the compromise of a relationship; it’s a nerveless settlement, and so utterly wrong for the abusive blankness and torment of Hamlet and Ophelia it’s almost tragi-comic.

Anyone under 25 in todays audience is going to relate to The xx more widely as laconic irony, the quiet toughness, the introspective determination. I wish theatre would learn that pop music is as packed with meaning as any text, and treat it with due intertextual reverence. The less said about the clattering junglism which marks Hamlet’s patricidal incursions the better.

A much nicer touch was the delivery of the King’s initial state-of-the-nation address to camera, a camera which took centrestage, and drew focus when the producer’s circular wave of the arm towards it dictated the rhythm of the actor’s speechifying.

It was a neat way of dislocating those relentless aristocratic interiors that Shakespeare inherited from the Tudors, but I only mention it because of stumbling across Mark Lawson interviewing Jimmy ‘Cracker’ McGovern on the beeb, who weighed into theatre acting for being deeply inferior to its televisual cousin.

“Always shouting at the Gods” means for McGovern, there is no “truth” in the acting of the theatre. This strikes me as a literal naturalism that even someone working in the aesthetic confines of “television drama” might think to move beyond. The very heightened delivery of a theatrical performance (which let us remind ourselves can also include naturalism, projecting a voice is not as McGovern contends a constant reaching but the exact hiding of that reach) allows a particular kind of truth which is often more revealing than the simple truth of a well-narrated emotion, what Brecht called the Gestus or the moment where all the implications of an utterance are conveyed, where emotion and social relations are crystallised together in perfect transparency. This analytical elegance is something that for all the medium’s positive virtues (and I love telly) is rarely found there.

Red Bud at Royal Court

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:32:00 +0000

Red Bud at Royal Court:

Men Should Weep at NT

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:31:00 +0000

Men Should Weep at NT:

Fela the Musical at the NT

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:30:00 +0000

Fela the Musical at the NT:

Critical exhaustion in the "old world". A postcard from Raymond Williams.

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:05:00 +0000

“France, you know, is a bad bourgeois novel.” I could see how far he was right: the modes of dramatisation, of fictionalisation, which are active as social and cultural conventions, as ways not only of seeing but of organising reality, are as he said: a bourgeois novel: its human types still fixed but losing some of their conviction; its human actions it struggles for property and possession, for careers and careering relationships, still as limited as ever, but still bitterly holding the field, in an interactive public reality and public consciousness. ‘Well, yes.’ I said politely, ‘England’s a bad bourgeois novel too. And New York is a bad metropolitan novel. But there’s one difficulty, at least I find it a difficulty. You can’t send them back to the library. You’re stuck with them. You have to read them over and over.

‘But critically’, he said, with an engaging alertness. ‘Still reading them’. I said.

From his essay Drama in a Dramatised society.

Blood & Gifts at the NT

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:49:00 +0000

Birdsong at the Comedy Theatre

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:37:00 +0000

Shirley Valentine at Trafalgar Studios

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:50:00 +0100

Shirley Valentine at Trafalgar Studios: