Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain: Interview with David Wilkinson.

At the end of the 70s the initial energy of punk had begun to dissipate, the Sex Pistols had broken up and, with the election of Thatcher, like a drunk getting lost on the way home, Britain stumbled out of social democracy and into neoliberalism, an ideology that over the next 40 years would reshape the UK in it’s own unpleasant image. With the two strands of art college sensibility and raucous singalong present in the first wave of UK punk, and exemplified by the Sex Pistols, coming apart (1) there emerged one of the most innovative and exciting periods in 20th Century music! Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain explores the developing politics of this group of musicians as they evolved and explored their way into the 1980s. Drawing attention to the latent and expressed utopianism in post-punk’s politics and practice it contextualises post-punk as one of the key political struggles of that period, the battle ‘over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left.’ (2) By contrasting and comparing bands including Gang of Four, The Fall, The Raincoats and the Slits and foregrounding the importance of Rough Trade, David Wilkinson, who lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, explores 'who made post-punk, how it was produced and mediated and how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present'. (2) Having got very excited by such an insightful, relevant and engaging book I contacted David to see if he would be interested in answering a few questions about the book and post-punk more generally. Despite a busy life he kindly agreed...

You were born in the mid 80s? How did your interest in post-punk come about?
I got into post-punk as a teenager when there was a media-driven revival of interest in it at the start of the 2000s. This didn’t just consist of magazine articles and compilation CDS, reissued albums and reformed acts; it also involved a crop of new bands forming as part of this wave. I was part of the last generation whose teenage tastes were shaped significantly by print music journalism. I couldn’t get enough of reading about post-punk’s alternative world, its DIY ethic and its artistic and political radicalism. I have writers like Simon Reynolds to thank for that.
At some level, I must have associated all this with my developing political consciousness (I was involved in movements against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). I think others probably had a similar experience; post-punk influences can often be detected amongst today’s global network of small-scale ‘DIY’ bands and their audiences, many of whom seem to share a broadly progressive political outlook. And I also suspect this connection has continued generationally. Certainly a lot of people I know through left politics who are five, ten, even fifteen years younger (especially in the Labour Party) have a disproportionate interest in post-punk!
The post-punk revival of the early 2000s, however, did not really link up more generally with the anti-war movement. The revival also corresponded with the ‘regeneration’ strategies of post-industrial cities, which (especially in Manchester, my home city) drew on post-punk history and aesthetics to market urban space. They continue to do so in ever more ridiculous ways - Joy Division lyrics advertising luxury flats and so on. Although from my political perspective that’s dispiriting, it did teach me an important lesson – that culture is always politically contested and must be fought for.
What makes post-punk so special?
I struggle to think of many other subcultural/countercultural movements in rock that have so compellingly brought together musical, political and economic radicalism. There is also something hopeful about the way it arose at the same moment as neoliberalism but – at first – offered a very different take on the world. Post-punk suggests that the ‘capitalist realism’ that Mark Fisher has convincingly argued goes along with late capitalism may not be quite so total in its hold.
Have there been any other musical movements that had/have similar oppositional, prefigurative practice? Early Rave?
I think there’s something about the sociability of rave that might have a utopian dimension – the way that it potentially opens people out to others they may never have crossed paths with, makes us acknowledge at some level our dependence on each other and our shared humanity. Rave’s DIY elements were often more self consciously entrepreneurial than post-punk – and let’s face it once someone’s on a comedown the last thing they want to do is be sociable. But there’s still a glimmer of hope. There’s probably some connection between rave’s rediscovery in recent years and the way we’re all a lot more networked now via social media. Maybe the revival of raves is partly an attempt to make good these proliferating connections in a less alienating way. Just a speculation…
Left post punk is in a line of art movements, stretching back to the Russian Constructivists, that explored cultural production and form around the question of ‘What does a process of production that is truly socialist look like?’ (3). What answers did post-punk arrive at?
The first important thing to say here is that post-punk reflects a growing working class involvement in the leftist avant-garde that we can trace back to the expanded opportunities of the postwar years. John Cooper Clarke reckoned it was ‘the furthest the working classes had gone into areas like Dada’ and he was probably right.
On the question of production, post-punk threw up different answers – not all of them explicitly committed to socialism, it has to be said. But of those that were committed, you got a split, basically – between those who thought it looked like building a different infrastructure of independent labels, distribution, media and so on – and those who thought that as things stood, maximum impact could be achieved by ‘subverting from within’ – using the existing music industry to promote an oppositional stance (what came to be known as ‘New Pop’). I’m more sympathetic to the former because I think New Pop was very quickly absorbed into the system it critiqued - but that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems with the DIY approach – one problem being the difficulty of sustaining such an effort against all odds.
The associated question was/is ‘What form and content does the object/cultural product that is a comrade in the struggle for socialism look/sound like and how should it affect the individual and society?’ (3)
This is something that post-punks (and the music journalists who helped build the movement) argued over endlessly! It’s a constant debate that runs right through the subculture, always popping up in zines, letters to the music press, interviews, even music lyrics themselves with a band like Scritti Politti for instance. Post-punk was a very self-conscious movement – but in a self-critical rather self-absorbed way, thankfully. There was no consensus but that’s what makes it fascinating.
What were the main cultural influences on post-punk? Art history, left politics, feminism, preceding counterculture, punk, working class experience?
All those things and more. Post-punk can’t be separated from over a decade of radical upheaval on all fronts that terrified the ruling class and culminated in a reactionary swing behind Thatcher. Even Harold Wilson was spied on by the secret service, such was the paranoia!
On the question of art: It’s often assumed to be the work of a faction of middle class art school students within punk – but that leaves out the fact that a) Not everyone who went to art school was middle class, especially in an era of grants and a social safety net not yet torn up by successive governments since 1979 b) You didn’t have to go to art school to be interested in oppositional ideas and politics. Working class experience is important, not only because it contributed ideas like mutual aid and autodidacticism but in more oblique ways. Despite the demystifying thrust of post-punk it also picked up where the counterculture left off with the esoteric – and there is a tradition within working class culture that gets tapped into here. I think Mark Stewart from the Pop Group says somewhere that his grandmother held séances; Mark E. Smith’s interest in the supernatural and the occult is well known – and figures like Poly Styrene were drawn to mysticism and ended up a Hare Krishna. Folk knowledge was important too – a pre-industrial survival from peasant culture and a transformation of it in changed conditions. The feminism of someone like Una Baines can’t be separated from her interest in Celtic mythology.
In Resilience and Melancholy (4) Robin James seems to be saying, if I understand her correctly, that certain pop music structures parallel values within neoliberalism. Did similar ideas inform post-punks preoccupation with form, that musical structure and sound could mirror a politics?
I’ve not read James but yes, there’s a connection – perhaps it’s not so much that music mirrors a direct politics but post-punks definitely got that certain ways of doing music might ideologically reproduce the status quo – and conversely, others might shake it up. That didn’t just come across in their experiments with musical form - e.g. shunning individualistic solos - but also their experiments with actually making music e.g. swapping instruments to keep things fresh.
With The Raincoats do you think their musical structures were more organic, that having internalised a socialist/feminist narrative the structure of their music gave voice to that alternative worldview as an integral part of their creativity?
Yes – and I write more about this in the book. They faced accusations of ‘worthiness’ for attempting this but especially their later material on Moving can often be quite playful.
There were tensions within post punk; culturalism v anti culturalism/ individualism v collectivism/ essentialism v gender as social construct. Were those tensions an important part of the dynamic or a hindrance to the full realisation of some bands’ potential?
It depends. Sometimes it really did get navel-gazing; other times the self-scrutiny produced a backlash that fed into the New Pop desire to just have ‘fun’ and forget all that intellectual stuff; but more often than not it was the fact of wrestling with these thorny questions that animated the movement and made it so admirable.
Punk gave women the opportunity to explore and deconstruct gender but pretty much perpetuated traditional working class male identity as unchallenged (5)-do you think post-punk gave men that opportunity to explore gender identity and relationships- to start to deconstruct the gender models?
This is something that isn’t discussed much in the book. There’s more on it in the thesis that the book’s based on – and in a piece I wrote for the Zero anthology Punk is Dead. I think punk was conflicted from the start on masculinity, class, sexuality. Think of a figure like Pete Shelley – shy, thoughtful, anti-macho, bisexual and consciously drawing on yet subverting the ‘boy next door’ imagery of pop music. Post-punk carried that on but it wasn’t always easy to undo dominant forms of masculinity, so I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘punk = traditional, post-punk = subversive’.
I have a PhD student who’s just started working on post-punk masculinity and I’m interested to see what he comes up with – it’s a productive topic and worth thinking about in relation to bigger shifts of the era like women’s liberation, or changing types of work and consumption and how this redefined manhood.
There was a false dichotomy propagated by Garry Bushell that authentic working class identity excluded higher education. Was this the start of the reductive idea of working class identity as excluding education and politicisation? Do you think this story supported the neoliberal dismantling of working class political organisation and the move to construction of identity around consumption?
Yes, in short! That said, I can see the impulses that motivated a figure like Bushell. Obviously I have no common ground with him now, but back then he saw himself as on the left and as defending a form of working class culture that was being eroded, patronised and neglected – one based on community, loyalty and shared values apparently untainted by contact with either middle class education or ‘leftie student’ politics. Of course it wasn’t as simple as that – working class culture and employment had been changing dramatically since the 1950s and had become something very different by the late 70s/early 80s. Meanwhile social mobility had produced a large chunk of young people positioned awkwardly between the working class and the middle class both culturally and in terms of the work they did or the education they had. But Bushell wasn’t alone in his nostalgia – it was part of a wider tendency that hasn’t yet gone away and partly animates today’s hopelessly confused debates about Brexit (hopelessly confused on both sides of the divide, I should add).
You observe that the Gang of Four were hot on analysis but lacked any alternatives to ‘what was’, did any of the other bands you looked at strike you as more Utopian, able to give more clues as to ‘what could be’?
Yes. The Raincoats tried to reimagine sexuality; The Fall warped and twisted the everyday world in a way that showed it could be transformed; The Blue Orchids put the questions of ecology and even the meaning/purpose of life on the table.
Even Gang of Four, despite their pessimism, did short-circuit that ideological division between ‘being clever/political’ and ‘having fun’ – you can dance and sing along to them and get into it not in spite of the content but because of its radical fervour!
David Harvey writes about capitalism generating new senses of needs and wants (6). One of the themes running through the book is the reimagining of freedom and pleasure from a non capitalist perspective- could you elaborate on that?
It comes down to this – there has always been a strand on the left that’s said: ‘Capitalism not only needs to be superceded because it produces grotesque inequality, exploitation and cyclical crises that are usually paid for by those least able to bear the strain; it also holds back the human potential of the vast majority by making them work for the benefit of a tiny elite rather than to satisfy their own needs and desires and for the benefit of society as a whole.’ You can trace it back to Marx on alienation – even further back if you like, to the Utopian socialists. After WWII, you see a revival of this strand in the work of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, partly because it’s no longer just work that’s alienating - but also mass consumerism and its deadening, pacifying, wasteful effects. That’s hugely influential – and the most radical strands of youth culture, post-punk included, were often trying to imagine what a truly fulfilled future might look like. That, I argue in the book, is one of the key things neoliberalism had to shut down or co-opt.
What’s exciting is that this strand has popped up again in the present around the idea that automation, artificial intelligence etc, if used right, could free us up to spend more time on the things that really matter. It’s there in Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future, in the feminism of the Laboria Cuboniks collective, in the ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ meme and so on. We could learn a lot from those who’ve been over this ground before – which is why my latest research is looking back at the counterculture, one of the main forerunners of post-punk.
Did post punk’s ideas and form influence the mainstream in time or did the segue into ‘new pop’ blunt post-punk's effect?
It depends what kind of influence we’re talking about. Indie wouldn’t exist without post-punk – both musically and in the sense of independent record labels driven by a commitment to more than just profit. You hear musical echoes of post-punk in the most unlikely places now that we live in a world where the past can be cannibalised by the internet.
You compare and contrast Scritti Politti and Gang of Four, The Fall and Blue Orchids, The Slits and The Raincoats to explore similarities and differences within leftist post punk. Were there any other bands you were tempted to include?
Oh, loads. It was hard to narrow it down to those six and I do worry that the book may come across as unrepresentative – but I did want to concentrate on a particular element of post-punk and really do it justice rather than spread myself thinly and risk writing superficially. In the book I justify my in-depth readings by saying that post-punk tends to attract particularly intense fans who would be likely to think about the music in this level of detail!
You identify early Rough Trade’s oppositional and prefigurative practice as an egalitarian, democratic collective model, was it an important space for the exploration which was such an essential part of leftist post punk?
Yes – it couldn’t have happened without initiatives like Rough Trade. Not just the ideas they spread and the opportunities they gave to those who wouldn’t otherwise have been heard – but the radical experiments with the form of popular music. The cultural thinker Raymond Williams is a big influence on the book and one of his arguments is that you can’t separate the form of culture from the way it gets made.
Do you think digital technology has democratised the means of (cultural) production to the point that it is so decentralised it's hard for a movement to coalesce like it did around Rough Trade?
Probably, yes. In some ways that’s all to the good but in others we have lost something – we have to remember that although the technology’s there for people to make and release music much more easily now, the channels they often have to do it through are rarely motivated by leftist values in the way that early Rough Trade was. That shapes what comes out – more and more we’re forced to be ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ in the music and culture we make and we have to fight against that – we have to make stuff that communicates something about the world, not a polished, false and partial version of ‘identity’.
You comment that the revival of post-punk in the early 2000s was politically contentless, in Inventing the Future (7) Srnicek and Williams make the point that cultural change often precedes political change, have you come across many contemporary bands that have the concerns you identify in the book, that take the process of production and musical form seriously? One band I was thinking about are Gnod who are involved with Islington Mill in Manchester (8) and Tesla Tapes (9).
Yes – there’s loads of stuff going on across a multitude of musical scenes but of the contemporary post-punk acts I can think of, maybe Shopping, Lonelady and Downtown Boys off the top of my head. This idea of cultural change preceding political change (taken from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci) is right – something was in the air before you saw the revival of the left in Britain, Europe and the States.
Your final chapter talks of post-punk as a resource relevant to contemporary political and cultural struggles. What specific aspects of post-punk do you think we should be re-examining and learning from?
I’ve probably covered a lot of this already, but to sum up: The link between cultural form and politics; the attempt to democratise cultural production and de-link it from the profit motive; the related decentralisation of power; the attempt to start improvising what a better future might look like in the here and now; and its sheer utopianism in shitty times.

David Wilkinson Lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has worked on the Leverhulme project ‘Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture’ and is involved with the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change.

Buy this ace book here


Bibliography.

(1)Laing, D. (2015) ‘One Chord Wonders; Power and Meaning in Punk Rock’, PM Press, Oakland, CA, USA.

(2)About this book, (2016) https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349698073

(3)Kiaer, C. (2005) ‘Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism’ The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

(4) James, R. (2014) ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism’, Zero Books, Winchester UK and Washington, USA.

(5) Laing, D. (2015) ‘One Chord Wonders; Power and Meaning in Punk Rock’, PM Press, Oakland, CA, USA.

(6) Harvey, D. (2005) ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK and New York USA.

(7) Srnicek, N. and Williams, A. (2015) ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’, Verso. London UK and Brooklyn, NY, USA.

(8) http://www.islingtonmill.com/who-we-are/

(9) https://teslatapes.bandcamp.com/

Music and Resistance: GIS.

Photo by Bea Dewhurst.

Though written more than thirty years apart both Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain and File Under Popular explore the idea that radical music is about more than lyrics, that the production of radical culture/music should ideally also engage with and reconstruct the process of production, distribution and musical form. Music emerges from a certain set of wider economic, political and social circumstances but also from the far more specific set of circumstances that exists in and around the band; how it operates, the creative process, its relationship to the means of production etc. London based Girls In Synthesis take their inspiration from post punk and consequently have a deliberate DIY (DIT?) ethos, they’ve kept everything in-house; artwork, videos, performances and recordings all being created by the band and a small group of collaborators. In an interview from 2018 John commented ‘There was definitely a strong and clear vision before we played a note or wrote a song. The vision was to bludgeon the ears, without resorting to heavy riffing, distortion, rock n roll clichés etc. It has certainly evolved over the last year and a bit into something a little more nuanced and subtle. We present the group as a full package, so if we can’t sell an idea to each other (visuals, music, presentation etc) then we veto it. That has been in place from the start.’(1) Ideas and music emerging from an egalitarian democratic art collective that’s trying not to merely reproduce existing musical forms.

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, Resilience and Melancholy and File Under Popular all explore the importance of musical form and the concept that certain musical forms can convey particular ideologies (values and worldviews) due to either the structure mirroring (neoliberal) political values or via socialised associations. The idea that musical form can have political content/effect. Often musical form can perpetuate the cultural hegemony of a dominant ideology but it is also true that music can disrupt and challenge that hegemonic representation of society, be an artform that gives dissident expression to the lived experience of a community/class.This is obvious in GIS music which sounds like, and evokes, working class experience in 21st century Britain. It is the sound of music as self conscious resistance, music as protest constructed from cultural experiences/resources of fraught urban intensity, turning the weapons of neoliberalism back on itself. It is a music born of, and conveying, an intense, urban precarity. And, despite the fragmenting of working class solidarity and consumer capitalism’s emphasis on individualism and competition this working class experience is recognised as shared. That’s why GIS music communicates so effectively because it comes from, and enters into, a shared experience, it is a reminder, recorded and live, of the excitement, strength and hope of community and empathy. Live this sense and experience of community is encouraged by the physical structuring of a GIS gig where John and Jim position themselves within the crowd, creating a participatory interactive situation, deconstructing the passive spectacle of entertainment consumption.  

Watch the video to Disappear from the band’s first release. An amusing video of three people getting covered in gunge? Or a visual representation of life for those on zero hours contracts, on benefits, in casual work? Watch the bands faces, in 2.12 it somehow manages to encapsulate the sense of anxiety, of vulnerability, of entrapment that characterises many people's lives. The band as presented to the viewer have no agency, no options, they have to sit there, cope with adverse experiences that have their source elsewhere, show minimal reaction, cope while simultaneously carrying out the next prescribed function. It is an expression of solidarity, of shared knowing, and in that is its importance, a reminder that despite the isolating effects of late capitalism our experiences are ‘in common’ and can be a basis for solidarity and class consciousness.


Bibliography.
(1)https://www.echoesanddust.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-an-interview/

Wilkinson, D. (2016) Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Cutler, C. (1985) File Under Popular:Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music, RER Megacorp, London and Seiotext(e)/Autonomedia, New York.

James, R. (2014) ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism’, Zero Books, Winchester UK and Washington, USA. 

Test Dept Live. Studio 9294, 26/4/19.

Photo by David Altweger.

More socialist art collective than conventional band Test Dept originally took shape in south east London releasing History-The Strength of Metal in Motion in 1982, the next fifteen years saw Test Dept keep up a ferocious work rate releasing, on average, an album a year until 1997 when the band decided to call it a day with the release of Tactics For Evolution. One of the early industrial bands, Test Dept utilised discarded industrial detritus in the creation of their music and alongside their writing and recording curated several large art events. Throughout the 2000s Test Dept members stayed active in the arts and in 2014 core members of the group reconvened producing DS30 to commemorate the Miner’s Strike of 1984-5.

In 2016 Test Dept:Redux played a series of concerts including Raw Power, these concerts continued into 2017 when material for a new album started to be played. Also in 2017 Test Dept’s name appeared as co-curators with Aaron James of the ‘Assembly of Disturbance’ in partnership with Ernesto Leal of The Red Gallery. As part of the festival Test Dept presented an exhibition, talks, DJed, performed a live soundtrack to film, performed as Test Dept and also, in collaboration with other artists, as Prolekult.
Last year saw more news coming through that long term Test Dept members Graham Cunnington and Paul Jamrozy were working on a new album Disturbance set for release in March this year on One Little Indian Records! In November the first new Test Dept track for 20 years, ‘Landlord’, was released followed by the album which lived up to any expectation as a superb piece of work, combining visceral, riveting, finely honed industrial music with coherent, well informed, incisive political polemic.

On Friday 26 April Test Dept played Studio 9294 in Hackney Wick for an ‘album launch’, the area around Hackney Wick station is interesting, seems like a post industrial zone that has been colonised by the arts, with the venue tucked round the back of the station. We get there at 8ish, cool smallish space, nice staff, the stage is intriguing, with metal frames, an old tyre hanging, something that looks like an old ship steering wheel but made out of metal. Sometimes you feel you’re at something significant.

At some point the sound of a bell chiming rings out, it’s the start of Shelley Parker’s set. Now I don’t know anything about the kind of music she creates but apparently she had an EP out on Hessle Audio called Red Cotton which ‘sees Parker combining her abstract sound sources with dance music-adjacent rhythms and club-ready doses of sub-bass’(1). To me it sounded exciting, mesmerising, engaging, nuanced and intelligent dance music. May well see if I can get hold of her EP. Excellent.

At just gone 10 Test Dept start, Paul Jamrozy is blowing on some horn/bugle thing, it seems like a wake up call and simultaneously reminds me of the Elves appearing at Helm’s Deep to stand with the people of Rohan against the forces of Moria. (Except in The Lord of the Rings the elves join up with a community aware of what’s going on and planning their next move whereas in Britain it feels like most people would be down in some cellar getting pissed and talking about football.) From the first track the music is controlled intensity, constructed to achieve an objective, form follows function. The crowd at Studio 9294 must be predisposed towards the message Test Dept are sending to be here, understand its importance, or they couldn’t endure this bombardment of the senses, most people here must share the same politics as Test Dept or they couldn’t withstand this assault. The four figures on stage move from instrument to instrument, Paul who had the bugle thing is now hammering on a huge drum, on a heavy duty tyre, now some scrap metal, Graham Cunnington is at the mic again, his vocals injecting even more tension into the mix, the percussionist moves to her left and starts hammering on somethings metallic, a fourth person is doing something DJish with a box of tricks at the back, and this intense, superbly constructed maelstrom of anger, horror and conviction keeps moving, forensically dissecting late capitalism, exposing it for the (hidden) Horror Show it is. ‘The dirt behind the daydream’ to quote Gang of Four.   

We are looking over another bombed out Middle Eastern city, which one? Iraq, Syria, Libya? Have ‘the west’ and/or its allies attacked it directly or through proxies? Neoliberal capitalism in the form of a hyena pads relentlessly on looking for the weak, the vulnerable to isolate, rip apart, devour. A CAD style representation of a drone reappears emphasising their roles in modern warfare, modern surveillance. Refugees or migrants (does it matter? People) are packed into a dinghy that looks in imminent danger of going down, Can we imagine how appalling their lives must have been to have risked people smugglers, Libya, the Mediterranean in the slim hope of a crap life in Europe, are they from the bombed out city we saw earlier? Grenfell Tower, the word JUSTICE, protesters, and then a smirking Theresa May dancing on stage to Abba, Boris Johnson grinning down at us from his position of invulnerability.

I have to go or I’ll miss my last train, I gabble something to the merch people about how amazing the gig has been, I’m agitated, angry that the media has generally justified late capitalism's morph into something that feels alot like sophisticated fascism, agitated that I am complicit, frustrated that in all probability many of those who vote will again support a party whose policies have contributed to 120,000 excess deaths over 8 years.  

I get on the train, sit on the train, still disturbed by what I’ve heard/seen. Two hours later I go to bed.

Bibliography.
Smith, M. (2018) Shelley Parker debuts on Hessle Audio with new EP, Red Cotton’ https://www.residentadvisor.net/news/42812

Girls In Synthesis Live. The Waiting Room 13/4/19.

Photo by Bea Dewhurst.

To accompany the release of Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018, a documenting of their first four releases (Louder Than War Records), Girls in Synthesis set off on a short tour between 6-13 April taking in Nottingham, Hull, Manchester, Northampton, Leeds and London (with a Brighton gig still to come). In an interview last summer John from the band discussed their approach to playing live with E&D commenting that ‘...We started performing in the audience at the end of last year, and the shows became a million times more memorable. If you were going to be critical, I guess some could level a “attention seeking/spectacle” charge at it. However, the results speak for themselves. People come away from our shows having felt something. That’s the whole point. Hate it or love it, we’d rather have a reaction. And that’s what we get. People have much better ways of spending a Tuesday night in East London, why not give them something to react to and, essentially, remember?...Relational Aesthetics was the idea that a piece of art was completed by the involvement/contribution of others-a ‘participatory other’ rather than a passive consumer. Is that what you are doing live? Transforming the ‘audience’ into part of the creative process? Absolutely. There wouldn’t be a great deal of point performing this music without an audience present… our music isn’t technically interesting, it’s pretty unforgiving and belligerent. I guess it doesn’t care whether you like it or not. But, as I’ve said, audiences do react if you give them an opportunity to. We’ve had shows where people will just grab the mic and start doing there own thing. We’ve given people our guitars and let them get on with it… we’ve only really just started touching this aspect, really. We often wonder what we’ll do when we play bigger venues or support acts in such places… but we’ll get round it. Playing on-stage for a whole show isn’t an option for us’ (1).

Their four releases have been ferocious, superbly organised bursts of sonic light, searing and invigorating commentaries on contemporary Britain, musically and lyrically capturing the intensity of late capitalism and its felt effects. Marrying this to a utilitarian visual aesthetic of army surplus shirts, boiler suits and DMs and with the approach to playing live outlined above made them a must see band for me this year.

The Waiting Room is a small, literally underground, venue in Stoke Newington, imagine a big living room with a stage at one end and a bar at the other, perfect venue really! Really nice guy behind the bar, knows his local music scene, the place has a good vibe. First up were Human Pet, I hadn’t heard of them before but from the off they were on it; tight, intense, intelligent danceable neo-punk, nimble cleverly structured songs. Clash Magazine described them as having a ‘scratchy indie sound...layered in grunge effects...The off kilter riffing burrows its way into your cranium (2). When you’re on at 20.15 and get people moving you’re good, and these are. Hopefully more on Human Pet at a later date.

Glimpses of the various members of Girls In Synthesis before their set confirmed that they are a real band and not a perfection myth perpetuated by some super sophisticated algorithm that had analysed my preferences and constructed an idealised match! On the back wall are a GIS banner plus the repeated phrase ‘We Might Not Make Tomorrow’, after a quick last sound check two mic stands are positioned off stage, the lights drop..and this is where it all turns into an adrenalised blur of white light and shadow, of band members careering off into the crowd, of Jim and John’s vocal interplay, of them using the stage as a physical launch pad, of Nicole’s thunderous drumming seeming to hold the whole searing, explosive thing together as she is both a continuity of, and simultaneously looks on at, bodies working hard to adequately express the immediacy and ferocity of the music. Somehow I find myself dancing about at the front which means about a metre from the band, two old punks appear to my left drawn in by the energy of something hard to pigeon hole but completely invigorating and euphoric. Tight, tense, creating a liminal space between what is and what could be, Girls In Synthesis were superb, a reminder of why music helps you to both cope with, and make sense of, life. How long were they on for? I don’t know...half an hour? Forty minutes? Long enough and not long enough, of course you want more, you always do.

My imagination had set the bar pretty high for Girls In Synthesis live, they cleared it with no trouble.


Bibliography. 
(1)https://www.echoesanddust.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-an-interview/
(2)https://www.facebook.com/pg/humanpet/about/?ref=page_internal

Platinum Rats by The Briefs. Excellent!

OK, I’ve never really experienced album review as journey before! But US punks The Briefs and their new release Platinum Rats managed to move me from initial response of ‘Heard it all before’ to ‘This is excellent’ in about three listens! I hadn’t heard of The Briefs before this album and we didn’t get off to a great start when I checked out their Facebook page and was confronted with a picture of a crucified figure’s feet-presumably Jesus’- with the accompanying text ‘We’ve nailed it’. Hostility towards organised religion in punk is about as old as, err, well, punk really but whatever you think of the person of Jesus (one of thousands of people who’ve experienced state torture and death through crucifiction historically and contemporarily) taking the piss out someone’s suffering in these days when cultural/political struggles over torture are still being fought seems, I don’t know, unwise? Maybe I’m overthinking...(and in all fairness it may have been a gig poster), but anyway it didn't endear The Briefs to me initially.

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is ‘an eclectic mixing of styles. These styles can be from different historical periods and cultures, manifest in architecture, fashion and the arts...’ (1) another related aspect is the self conscious homage, the plundering of the past and the cobbling together of pastiche, on a first listen these were the kind of thoughts that were going through my head as an album that seemed rooted in ‘77 came blasting out the speakers, it seemed in danger of being a reproduction of a mythical musical origins story, punk as time travel, The Adverts meet The Rezillos!

BUT, you know what, after a couple of more listens and a bit more internetting I realised that ‘Yes’ it is retro, ‘Yes’ it sounds initially like a pastiche of early punk/New Wave but The Briefs are completely aware of that and wear their influences and admirations proudly! On their website their bio comments ‘The Briefs take the stage like commandos of the New Wave, retro zombies from the Disco Inferno’! (2). They know who they are, they know what they do-and they do it very well indeed, these aren’t just punk retreads/recycled riffs, this is a lesson in the art/craft of New Wave/pop punk (and that’s not pejorative)!

Platinum Rats is 12 examples of great songwriting, musically fresh and exhilarating and lyrically intriguing, the whole album sounds like one beautifully crafted melodic punk gem after another!

As the tracks keep coming you catch half heard glimpses of a whole raft of New Wave bands, (and even a bit of Robert Calvert vocals in ‘Out of Touch’) but it never sounds tired or derivative. The only gripe I’ve got is the lack of a lyric sheet because The Briefs sound like under that playful, not taking things too seriously, image they have some important stuff to say, track 1 ‘Bad Vibration’ ends with a sampled voice proclaiming bizarrely ‘Revolution, overthrowing the government, free sex, free dope, y’know, free TV’, on track 3 ‘Nazi Disco’ they take a swipe at fascism and white supremacy but all I could make out really clearly was the last few lines ‘I don’t need your Nazi Disco, We don’t want your Nazi Disco’...and track 5 ‘GMO Mosquito’, well I guess the title points to what it’s about but I would like to be able to read more closely what they’re saying.

OK we got off to a bad start but despite my initial reservations The Briefs won me over through the sheer quality of their songwriting and musicianship-in short Platinum Rats is a great album!

Platinum Rats is out on April 12th on Damaged Goods Records and The Briefs are over in Europe this summer playing Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, if you live anywhere near one of their gigs try and get there, judging by this album you’ll have a great night!

Bibliography.
(1)Bowman, M. Herbert, D. Mumm,S.(2001) ‘Religion Today: Tradition, Modernity and Change. Course Introduction’. Open University, Milton Keynes. p.92.
(2)http://www.thebriefsofficial.com/about/

Girls In Synthesis Release 'Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018'!

In a world when every news bulletin convinces you the world is run by the sociopathic and the incompetent here is some good news! On April 5 Louder Than War Records are releasing Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018, an album of the hard to get hold of first releases by Girls In Synthesis!! Inspired by the early DIY punk and post-punk movements and with a sound described as ‘intense, abrasive, confrontational, and original..yet somehow containing half-caught glimpses of incendiary half-remembered songs that helped bring you to musical life, (that) formed the origins of your musical cosmos’(1), GIS have had four releases so far ‘The Mound/Disappear’, and the EPs Suburban Hell,  We Might Not Make Tomorrow and the 4 track Fan The Flames. That’s 14 tracks of jarring, exhilarating, intense, thought provoking neo punk, of utter relevance to Britain nine years into Tory rule. If you want an insight into UK working class experience in the 21st Century then skip the mainstream media, give GIS a listen! This band engages with contemporary socio-political affairs that the mainstream media would rather you didn’t think about too much as it feeds you distraction, trivia and elite serving narratives. GIS bring you back to reality, remind you that the world is about more than cheap SIM cards and royal babies. Although not an overtly political band (‘I wouldn’t say we tackle politics head-on, like some groups do, but we do address it in our own way’(2)). their music engages with anger at suburbia, naivety about hard drug use among musicians (Suburban Hell), nuclear threat, animal rights, US politics, fading youth (WMNMT), elite corruption, greed, arrogance, the experience of powerlessness, precarity, anxiety familiar to so many, the corrosive effects of being subject to, and internalising, the hostilities of society (FTF). Girls In Synthesis are important because they don’t just point the finger, they remind us that we are all infected and that our struggles for truth, reality and justice are as much internal as social/political.
As you listen to the Collection unfold/drive forward you are aware that musically this band started from an extraordinary place with ‘The Mound’ and then kept getting better, with Fan the Flames moving the band on again from We Might Not Make Tomorrow, as they continue to evolve and develop.
To tie in with the Collection release in April, Girls In Synthesis have a short tour, a chance to catch the hallmark elements of ferocity, compassion and intelligence combined live in a way that only they can, more interactive, immersive art installation (2) than conventional gig, a more complete realisation of the DIY (DIT-Do It Together?) ethos than many classic ‘punk’ bands even contemplate. As John has previously commented ‘People come away from our shows having felt something. That’s the whole point. Hate it or love it, we’d rather have a reaction. And that’s what we get’(2).

The people I work with seem to want to listen to retro commercial radio stations whose playlists are musical honey traps of lowest common denominator innocuous familiarity, lulling the listener into a soporific state, so they can be sold to the advertisers, cultural roundabouts always moving but taking the listener nowhere...the musical equivalent of a comfort blanket, ‘Keep Calm and Go Round In Comatose Inducing Circles’. Against the backdrop of late capitalism’s domesticating of so much cultural output Girls In Synthesis stand out like a searing, prophetic burst of uncompromising honesty, like a beam of condensed light, waking you up, reminding you of the importance of art as insurgency. Art as site of resistance, music as cultural resource in the struggle to remember and reproduce reality in a world of disorientating bollocks. If you can get hold of Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018 do so, if you can catch them live, be there!

Girls In Synthesis: 'a dissident soundtrack to the urgent intensity of urban Britain’ (1).

Tour dates
Nottingham-6 April
Hull-9 April
Leeds-10 April
Manchester-11 April
Northampton-12 April
London-13 April
Brighton-20 April

Watch 'We Might Not Make Tomorrow' here
Get hold of Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018 here
Photo courtesy of GIS Facebook page.

(1)Foster, T. (2018) ‘Fan the Flames with the Girls In Synthesis’ https://thepunklounge.com/fan-the-flames-with-the-girls-in-synthesis
(2)Foster, T. (2018) ‘Girls In Synthesis: An Interview’ https://www.echoesanddust.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-an-interview/

'Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story' Interview With Co-Author Celeste Bell.

Marianne Joan Elliot-Said was born in Bromley and grew up in Brixton, after leaving both school and home at 15, pre punk she identified with the hippy movement and led a precarious life orbiting music festivals. At this time she also recorded an album and released a ska/reggae single ‘Silly Billy’. All this changed in the summer of ‘76 when she saw an early Sex Pistols gig and was inspired to form a band, Poly Styrene was born!
X-Ray Spex, initially fronted by Poly Styrene and Lora Logic on sax, in many ways embodied all that was positive about first wave punk and contributed one of the few stand out tracks on the (as I remember it) very patchy ‘Live At The Roxy WC2’ album in 1977. Later the same year a studio version of that track ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours’ came out and is considered a touchstone among early punk releases. Paralleling Max Weber’s metaphor of industrial capitalism becoming an ‘iron cage’ for the working class ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours’ uses sexual metaphor to rail against subjection to capitalist consumerism, a theme that would reappear in Poly’s writing.
The album Germfree Adolescents came out in 1978 and evidenced Poly’s extraordinary insight and talent for exploring complex sociological concepts in accessible shorthand as she tackled consumerism, gender, the construction of self, gendered expectation under capitalism, genetic engineering, and performance.
After playing the 1978 Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park X-Ray Spex undertook a UK tour which left Poly exhausted, she subsequently left the band in 1979.
In 1980 she released the jazz tinged solo album Translucence before joining the Hare Krishna movement.
In the early 90s X-Ray Spex reformed for a one off gig and in ‘95 released Conscious Consumer.
In 2008 Poly dueted with John Robb on a remixing of a Goldblade track, appeared at a Love Music Hate Racism gig in London and then played a sell out gig with X-Ray Spex at the Roundhouse with a band that included her daughter the singer/writer Celeste Bell (who at one point Poly offered her X-Ray Spex role to). In 2010 Poly released ‘Black Christmas’, a song co-written with Celeste. The following year her final album Generation Indigo came out, a month before she died.
Poly Styrene was a musician and lyricist of extraordinary talent, she is a punk and feminist icon and in many ways a reminder to us of how society could be. Roughly eight years on from her death, on March 28th, a book Dayglo; The Poly Styrene Story co written by her daughter Celeste and Zoe Howe comes out as part of the ‘Poly Styrene; I Am A Cliche’ project. Excited by the idea of a definitive book on Poly by one of the people who knew her best I contacted Celeste for an interview about the forthcoming book, she kindly agreed.   
How did the the idea for the Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche project come about? Was it one of those ideas that wouldn't go away?
The book project was first and the film came about as a continuation of what we wanted to do with the book.

The project involves both the book Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story, which is out in March, and a film to be released in 2020. Have you been surprised by the level of interest?
I was quite surprised although I always knew that my mother's story resonated with many people for many different reasons and she always had a loyal and passionate fan base.

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche was crowdfunded wasn't it? How did that go? I imagine it could be quite nerve wracking!
It was really stressful! It was wonderful to see such a positive response from people supporting us but yes it is not something I would necessarily want to submit myself to again. The funds obtained from the campaign only partly financed the film as it has become a lot more expensive to finish than I had originally envisaged.

The book is co-written with Zoe, how did you find each other, have you collaborated before?
I met Zoe circa 2008 and she interviewed me for a book she was writing at the time titled How's Your Dad - Living in the shadow of a Rock Star Parent? We kept in touch and I reached out to her about working with me on a book which primarily would be focused on my mother's artwork. The book we have now developed from that; it is part art-book, zine, biography, memoir - a real mix.

What was it like researching the book? Was it quite difficult finding primary sources as X-Ray Spex and Marianne's early life were pre internet or was there plenty of material and the issues were more to do with editing?!
I feel that as I was so close to the story it wasn't too challenging. I had grown up listening to my mother's stories about her time in the music industry, it is a story which feels almost like my own.

Was the researching and compiling a journey of discovery for you at all? Did you come across information and people you hadn't previously been aware of?
There were definitely some surprises. It always is learning about someone you feel you know inside out from other people's perspectives. I interviewed my father for example, who I have had a very rocky relationship with for many years and it was interesting to be in a space where I could hear his side of a story which had been presented to me in a very specific way as a child.  

Punk has often been hostile to religion but both Lora (Logic) and Poly joined the Hare Krishna Movement in the early 80s, did Poly have a sense of continuity between those two involvements or see them as distinct from each other? Was her seminal involvement in punk and her spirituality different expressions of the same search?
My mother was definitely searching for meaning in her life. She channelled this search into her artistic expression, where, through her writing, she was asking big questions about identity, society, materialism, sexuality. I think she didn't necessarily find answers to those questions though and the experience of being in band with a lot of media attention left her more confused and mixed up than ever. Her retreat into the Hare Krishna movement was in many ways a complete break with everything that had come before, but was still driven by the same yearning for answers.  

In the book are you able to expand on the post X-Ray Spex Poly/Marianne, her involvements with the HKM and her continued recording and releasing of new music? Her last album, Generation Indigo, came out in 2011 didn't it?
Yes, X Ray Spex was only a small part of her life, she retired from music at 21! I was born post  X Ray Spex, so it the Hare Krishna period and the struggles in our relationship as mother and daughter are themes we were very keen to explore in depth.

While writing the book did you reach any conclusions about why Poly Styrene has continued to be a such a potent cultural figure?
I believe the answers she was seeking through her art are as relevant today as they ever were. I also believe that she was almost prophetic in her description of what the world would be like in the future - we are very much living in that world now.

Poly Styrene seemed to personify all the positive aspects of punk, the malleability of gender, the irrelevance of heritage, the opportunity for participation, the ability to critique society and to think independently. Do you think that is why she continues to be important, because she reminds us of what could be?
Yes.

Germfree Adolescents has some of the most perceptive, sophisticated lyrics ever! It's like a social science course in shorthand, dealing with issues of identity, gender construct, power, consumerism. Had she studied Sociology?  
She left school at 15. However she was highly intelligent and highly sensitive to her surroundings. She also had an insatiable curiosity and was always reading and educating herself. She did take a course in Psychology post X - Ray Spex however.

What happens now with the book, when does it come out and how can we get hold of it?
It comes out at on the 28th of March. A day before Brexit! You can pre order from Waterstones already. There will also be a limited amount of special editions with all kinds of goodies available to buy in selected stores soon.

Are there any book launches or book signings planned at all?
We have a book launch at Rough Trade East in London on the 28th of March.

Much thanks to Celeste for time and words and to Celeste and Zoe for researching and writing the book!

Referenced for Intro.

‘Poly Styrene’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly_Styrene

‘X-Ray Spex’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_Spex

‘Oh Bondage Up Yours’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Bondage_Up_Yours!

Bell, C. (2017) ‘My mum, the punk pioneer: Poly Syrene’s daughter remembers the X-Ray Spex leader’ https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/apr/28/my-mum-the-punk-pioneer-poly-styrenes-daughter-remembers-the-x-ray-spex-leader

Sweeting, A (2011) ‘Poly Styrene Obituary’ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/26/poly-styrene-obituary

‘Germfree Adolescents’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germfree_Adolescents

‘Celeste Bell’ https://www.fredperry.com/subculture/playlist-profile-celeste-bell

Clarkson, J. (2009) ‘X-Ray Spex Live @ The Roundhouse, London 2009’ http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Review/6869/X-Ray-Spex-CD-X2-LiveThe-Roundhouse-London-2009