(worth noting: not an endorsement of conspiracy theory nonsense, more a reading of the psychic entrails, something weird in the air, also relevant is this and this. Somebody should write a conspiracy theories post really).
Was
it somewhere to draw strength to face the day, was it where the last
shreds of politics were making their last stand, was it the only thing
around that said, "Me too", slashing through the barriers of country,
class, race, gender and sexuality, which are presently being made ever
more formidable.
Did pop tell your stories and
struggles when others refused to even acknowledge you existed, was it a
flickering pilot flight in the dark, was it a galaxy of dancers and
dancefloors?
What's it to you?
Politics
has been cored-out of everyday experience, most obviously in pop
culture. What are the decades blogs if not a testament to the
once-prevalent fusion of culture and dissent. Echos remain if you now where
to find them, in smaller places and smaller arguments.
Struggle. Class. Race. Gender. Sexuality. Politics. Weapons & Armor, and the correct use of these for the purposes of hacking and slashing.
We want something uncomplicated, neat and clean and not frustrated.
What
if you weren't lucky. What if you knew you were trapped and had no way
to get out: past generations at least had the option of rattling their
cages. The politics of clinical depression, the lifestyle of
joblessness. The agony of hours of fuck-all to do and knowing that it
doesn't matter.
We've all been hurt and we've all been damaged.
Retreat, hold territory, survive.
That's
what retromania might be all about really, knowing that pop culture
won't save you anymore, has ceased to be enough after the clampdown:
your vintage clothes; your 40-year old guitar licks; your movie
references.
A lot of 2000s pop culture is about secret
damage, barely concealed wounds, knowing something's being taken away
without you quite knowing the how, who, or why.
And everywhere signals everywhere: "Look away, look away, look away."
I was going
to say quite a lot about the excellent Spannered, a novel of sorts that isalso a track list, a set of interleaved
illustrations, a semi real-time game of “name
that tune” and a confessional biography/documentary on the bliss of one weekend
in the TAZ circa Bristol in 95 and which seems to take both the website that
promotes it and the mocked-up cassette mix at the back of the book as an
invitation to investigate the time and the tunes further. However, the book’s author “ Bert Random” answered
thecouple ofquestions I asked him so comprehensively and
eloquently my own takeon it seems a bit
irrelevant, suffice to say I recommend it wholeheartedly, and I might even go so far
as to say it strikes me as something, especially in its unfussy integration of
various types of old and new media, that is as a work basically predicated on the
Internet (as “Bert” suggests in his second answer) as something excitingly,
well…… new.
`Spannered is set in 1995, the protagonist is 21,
which I am assuming is your age more or less at the time, and the book
ends with him crashing out after a weekender. What's your take on what
came next? Specifically I suppose how was the energy and
identification, the tightness of the social group. the cast of characters in the book then maintained and how did it diffuse over the coming
years? I am asking because unlike many works that celebrate these high
points or peaks of a culture or the inevitable compromise with adult life etc,
in Spannered that melancholy, "realist", elegiac end note isn't
really there.
When I was putting
‘Spannered’ together I really wanted to avoid the clichéd clean ending, because
it seemed to me that wasn’t the real experience for millions of people who partied
through the 90s and beyond. For most people there were years and years of the
kind of behaviour described in the book before it got unsustainable or twisted
or boring, rather than ‘going straight’ happening as some kind of redemptive
climax. It’s set in 1995 as a convenient mid-point but draws on memories from a
much wider period, and once I’d decided to jettison the plots, and just do a burn
through a weekend instead, ending on melancholy normality didn’t feel like a
realistic option. Lots of people did get fucked up, to various degrees, but far
more people didn’t. Far more people just partied hard for a long time then gradually
slowed into jobs or families or other types of creativity (or all three). I don’t
really understand why so many narratives set in this chaotic underground world seem
to lose the courage of their convictions and have leaving that world as the climax – for me the high point was the
dancing and the laughing and the people, not the music stopping.
There were a
few early drafts of the book that stretched into gruesome midweek comedowns but
in the end it all felt unnecessary. I’m not pretending it was some kind of utopia,
so there’s the bad chapter where the narrator freaks out, people who are obviously
quite damaged throughout, and lots of it that isn’t particularly flattering, but
for millions of people raving was/is an overwhelmingly positive experience and
this truth gets overwhelmed by the moralising plots that neatly resolve in a
way mainstream culture finds acceptable and reassuring. I think this leads in to
the question you ask below about nostalgia, with the current revisiting of rave
being partly born from a subconscious recognition that history hasn’t fully
captured the sheer joy of being in a field with twenty-thousand people and
loads of sound-systems, dancing under the stars while utterly, utterly,
shitfaced. The friendships from those days have endured and are strong – my
closest friends are still the people I met on those dancefloors – and with the
ease of communication through social networks and email old friendships that
had died because of distance have been rekindled.
Like Hunter S
Thompson said ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’ and that’s what
happened to a lot of the party crew – running festivals, being professional
photographers, artists, writers, sculptors, blacksmiths, carving out niches at
an angle to most of the world. The homogenisation of culture is getting harder
to avoid, but people still try. In fact, I spent a day last weekend with loads of the old friends at a legal one-day
party some of the old free-party crew were putting on in a park in Bristol –
loads of the old faces, laughing and dancing in a field twenty years on; can’t
argue with that really.
There is a sequence in Spannered where everyone
adds their drugs to a communal pile, contrasted with some
professional, more business oriented drug dealers. Can you expand on some
of the business dynamics of the rave scene in Bristol/elsewhere around the
time, not just in drugs but also in terms of DJing, artists, musicians,
promotion etc?
Bristol is a
fairly small city, smaller than Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, etc, which means
it does sometimes have the feel of a village, and being tucked away in the
south west it can be quite self-contained, making it easier for there to be lots
of cross-over within its boundaries. In my head Bristol has always been a series of Venn
diagrams: there you have the Wild Bunch circle, which overlaps the Full Cycle circle,
which overlaps the house and techno circles, which overlaps the free-party
circles, which overlap the dub & reggae circles, which overlaps the indie
circle, etc. I think a lot of people subconsciously want to stand at the intersection
of as many circles as possible so as not to miss anything, I certainly wanted
to. And if you have the time, inclination, and stamina Bristol is small enough to sometimes feel
like that is a real possibility, which is quite intoxicating.
As in many
other cities some key venues became hubs of lots of different scenes, hosting
all kinds of nights with the same partyheads going to loads of them, with the best
nights often being held in little community centres or one-off spaces. In Bristol it was places
like Easton Community Centre, which was always buzzing, or an old converted church
called Trinity, that was a perfect place to have a transcendent experience. There
was a fundraiser one year for a homeless cold-weather shelter, in the actual
shelter building before all the beds and stuff were brought in to set up for
the winter, and that was a great space – essentially a huge warehouse but with
plumbed in toilets! Every city has strange spaces like that; in Preston they had
the ARTLab, in Manchester
the Hulme crescents, the 121 Centre in Brixton – the weird places were always
the best. DJs would bicker among themselves in the many record shops back then (I
think Bristol has more street-art galleries now than it does record shops…),
and the same PAs and sound engineers would do gigs for different promoters and
turn up at the odd warehouse party, the same crew did flyposting for everyone,
the same security firm worked for loads of venues, people would do décor and
lights for whoever was putting on a dance; there was a lot of crossover in all
aspects. For years there was a legal, free festival known as Ashton Court
Festival that pulled people from all different aspects of music and performing
arts across the city into a combined effort, which helped foster a bit of an
all-in-it-together feeling; it ran from the mid-70s up to the early 00s and during
the 90s the open-air Club Stage was guaranteed to be a raucous party with a
policy of booking music from *all* the different party and club crews. There
was undoubtedly a lot of money-making along the way – legal and illegal – but from
a punters point of view that didn’t really to matter, there was fun to be had
and that’s what counted, as long as you weren’t being burnt by some fucker
selling asprins or something.
The book is partly structured around different
tunes (each chapter is named after a different track) and within
the text itself there are countless references to, snatches of and
descriptions of tracks, in other words a kind of shadow-set of memory-rushes
and recognitions for the initiates (of which I am admittedly not one).
This helps to maintain a kind of inside/outside distinction true believers
versus dilettantes in a way. That's not a criticism .But I am interested in that
dynamic of maintaining a group of kind of "purists against tourists".
I wasn’t sure how
easy to understand the book needed to be, and how much insular terminology to
use; one of the first readers of a very early draft wrote back to me and said
‘Do you want non-tribe people to read this?’, thinking that no-one outside
would be able to follow it. Then I read an interview with David Simon, who
wrote ‘The Corner’ and ‘The Wire’ and he said, essentially, that in his opinion
you no longer need to worry about an audience not understanding anything they can
google, and that he doesn’t feel the need to translate all the terminology,
because anything the audience aren’t sure about can be looked up in minutes. I
decided that knowing a particular tune or cultural reference wasn’t important,
as long as the *emotion* that the tune or reference was supposed to trigger was
clear from the context and the text. There have been nice reviews from people
who totally into other scenes – house, jungle, whatever – saying they recognise
the feelings even if they don’t recognise the specific bit of techno being
described. It’s been strange seeing some confused reactions from reviewers to a
world they don’t understand. A local literary magazine said readers might be
‘shocked by the nihilism on display’, which was weird because I don’t think the
book is nihilist at all – indeed I think it’s quite positive about community,
love, and collective endeavour for mutual gain.
Again, the
impulse behind the book was to try and capture the reality of being there,
dancing at that time, and there wasn’t really an intention to exclude – after
all the cliché is more-or-less true: it didn’t matter who or what you were, if
you were happy, joined in, and weren’t a dick you’d be welcomed with open arms by
groups of people and treated with kindness. There was a certain amount of inverted
snobbery about people slumming it with the party crew then heading back off to
Daddy’s big house, but to be honest even that snobbery melted on the dancefloor
more often than not.
There's been a lot of rave nostalgia recently and a
lot of "mourning" its lost utopian possibilities etc not exclusively
by the middle aged harking back on their glory days. Why do you think it was so
important to so many? Do you see anything of equal importance having happened
in the intervening twenty-ish years?
I think a lot
of this is just a matter of timing,
in that there are now a generation of high-profile writers, academics, and journalists,
who are all of an age where they would have lived through raving, either as
full-on participants or observers, and are now in positions where their voices
are heard, and this then seeps into the general cultural conversation, even
among people who are younger. There was a certain amount of post-Cold-War naive
optimism in the early 90s on the basis that as we now all felt less likely to
die in a nuclear holocaust, there was a faint possibility things might actually
turn out okay – and that naivety is quite appealing from a distance. Obviously
twenty years of grim neo-liberal economics and authoritarian politics has
screwed that idea into the ground, so again it’s looking back to something that
was, in hindsight, more hopeful for the future than our current cultural state.
I think the wistfulness is understandable, to be honest, because for all the
bullshit and oppression experienced by people back then, it was nothing
compared to the tactics, legislation, and equipment available to the state and
private interests now to fuck with us all, young and old. Inevitably, there is
a sense of looking back at a time when you could get away with stuff the state
would quash now without a second thought and without it even getting a mention
on the news.
There is a
certain amount of cultural stasis as well, a recycling of past highs,
particularly in music, where it feels like the
‘breakthrough-roughly-every-decade-and-a-bit’ didn’t happen in early 2000s, for
a variety of reasons. At some point the music industry decided that they could feed
the hype-machine by just cycling between guitar/indie/rock music and
dance/electronic music every few years, re-selling the same sounds as something
new with just enough time elapsed for plausible denial. Early dubstep was great
fun – ‘Lost City’, ‘Officer’, and tunes like that – but to me a lot of it
sounded like superbly produced digi-dub being played stupendously loud: not a
bad thing, but not that new either. Grime was interesting for a while, then ran
out of steam. And now of course we have all of the worst bits of dance music –
big trance synth stabs, terrible house-y vocals, and wobble-bass-drops –
smushed together and selling to millions of teenagers. (I am of course aware
that I am hideously old now, and that I would, rightly, have been laughed at if
I’d told a kid with his head in a bassbin at DMZ in 2005 that he wasn’t having
a life-changing experience…)
I think there
are loads of good scenes out there, hyper-local crews putting on dances in
their corner of the country, but I do wonder whether the internet has limited
our horizons as well as broadening them. You can now become so aware of
everything happening on your doorstep, and beyond, that you don’t actually need
to experience it in the flesh; you don’t need to drive to London
or Leeds or down to Lizard Point for a rave so
scenes don’t get a chance to spread slowly through participation. Instead we can
watch a video, download a mix or two, and that’s that. And, in the same way
that 24-hour rolling news has made us actually less well informed and instead
full of conjecture and bullshit, the deluge of music, video, images, and words
unleashed by the web has created an environment that is toxic to any kind of
underground culture actually developing, as every scene that looks even vaguely
interesting is hyped, examined, categorised, and assimilated within seconds of
being identifiable. The market machine is just another part of the capitalist
economy, and simply seeks to extract as much value as possible from its raw
materials – in this case any new means of cultural expression – as quickly as
it can and for maximum profit; it does feel like a process that erodes the
value of the products it is packaging and selling, and that the more
hyperactively efficient the process becomes the more the reasons music moves us
are diminished.
The period 92 to 95 was pretty depressing politically
(though I am not advocating what came after) but still, to be in your late
teens/early twenties at the time was still relatively comfortable compared to
now. How much do you think rave culture, the weekender, the excess was
predicated on a welfare state, cheap rents, lowish youth unemployment, networks
of squats, accessible higher education etc.
I absolutely agree with this; at the time
life felt tough but compared to now it was a piece of piss. In terms of social
and political power there is no real difference to now – the occasional
explosion of action (CJA protests/student riots) are still covering up a depressing
lack of political leverage for anyone who isn’t either born into money and
power, or exceptionally lucky – but at least living a life that avoided a lot
of the shite was an option if you worked the angles right. It simply wasn’t
possible for the free party scene and all the associated cultures to carry on
the same way in the late 90s. We were literally outlawed in the Criminal
Justice Act, along with a tonne of other alternative lifestyle and causes, all
as part of the ongoing class war between the rich fucks who own everything and
run everything, and the working (and non-working) classes who are trying to
salvage a bit of fun from whatever’s left over. It’s a class war that hasn’t
finished and is visible everyday, from the obscenities of pay in the financial
sector compared to kids of workfare for £50 quid a week, or a granny having her
meals on wheels cut to twice a week versus the corporate capture of policy-making
that leads to tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for the rest. The
privatisation of public space, the outsourcing of law and order, and the
undercurrent of hatred in British life of anything strange or ‘other’ or
foreign - all of this makes it much harder to build an alternative life. There
are obviously loads of parties that still go on, but they seem smaller and
weirder and darker – I mostly hear about free parties in Bristol from my neighbours’ cider-punk son. I
feel fucking old these days so instinctively find young people annoying, with
all their energy and good looks and jaunty hats, but at the same time I feel a
lot of sympathy – what a shitty time to be trying to find your feet as an
adult, let alone having fun and meaningful experiences along the way.
There's
a famous-ish line in Trainspotting about "new people on new drugs", and
Spannered ends with thoughts of the future. what do you think were the implicit
assumptions about "generation ecstasy" and how it would
shape the future. My sense at the time was there was a sense that "after
this nothing will ever be the same." What do you think the
assumptions about the future were at that point?
It always felt to me like a very insular
euphoria – early on certainly it felt there was no sense of any impact (or
desire to impact) on outside world. As the 90s went on politicisation was
forced on scene and lots of people who would otherwise have been largely
apathetic about politics were pushed into it by seeing their friends and family
beaten by police, fucked over by the judicial system, or outlawed in their own
country by venal politicians. I think that sense of things never being the same
was correct to an extent, in that personally
things were never really the same for the individuals and the groups of
individuals having a shared experience at a party. But at the time, for me
anyway, there was little thought of the future – the focus was always on the
fierce now implicit in the form, in the combination of music, people, and
dancing that only existed for each of the specific moments of that specific party.
Consideration of the future was always about how to try and extend those
moments for as long as possible, because when they happen they feel truly amazing.
"On a political level, the serial began with Harold Wilson's election campaign of 1964, and it was finally scheduled to be broadcast at a time when the country was once again poised to restore an idealistic, revitalised Labour party to power.
The cycle of positivty leading to seemingly inevitable cynicism may be Flannery's way of predicting the ultimate demise of traditional idealology as the driving force of British politics. This is an assumption that would have seemed unthinkable when the play was originally written, but now seems a realistic possibility in light of 13 years of New Labour and a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.
In 1996 Flannery admitted he would be voting for Tony Blair's New Labour in the forthcoming election. "I'd love to believe that a New Labour victory would start a clean-up in politics, but I'm afraid they'll be trapped by the very institutions that support them."
The lasting message of Flannery's serial is, however, clear and positive: betrayals by our institutions and politicians may be inevitable, but the society built on friendship surpasses and transcends them all."
Marcus Hearn, Our Friends in the North: Viewers' Notes
