There's a parallel between the charcter of Richard in Dead Man's Shoes
(2004) being a soldier, and the film being released a year after Iraq,
three after Afghanistan. Like Northern Ireland there is a lot of horror
waiting to come out: nobody talks about Northen Ireland today, and
barely anyone talks about Afghanistan or Iraq. The topic is taboo. There
are no comforting myths to emerge from the War on Terror: in a great
act of collective memory it has been entirely forgotten. The BBC have
rewritten their history in an attempt to reinforce the commonsense
"nobody could have wanted this" storyline that will eventually become
the true story, if any story at all. In Dead Man's Shoes (2004)
Richard visits supernatural, violent justice on the lowlifes who killed
his brother. It is a film about the importance of taking responsibility:
slaying the guilty, and once becoming guilty yourself in the process,
seeking self-terminarion. Richard's justice is moral: his enemies are
the lowest degenerates of the working class, druggies and immoral scum.
They even listen to the wrong music, hip hop rather than the tasteful
alt-Americana or wistful folk supplied by Warp. Whatever the intention a
trawl of youtube comments reveals commenters seem to have incorporated
the film directly alongside the likes of Death Wish and Dirty Harry:
they deserve it, every one. The post-apocalyptic state of Britain is
well described, casual violence, isolation, and no future, propaganda
for any leftist reading; the solutions however, a culling of the
irressponsible and devolved, is straight out of the right's playbook.
The old embers of political struggle were fading out in the early 2000s,
a strange period when the organizations and individuals the left
assumed were allies began advocated wars they knew could only have the
consequences they did if they had any idea of history. Even the BBC
couldn't be trusted anymore. The feedback can be observed in popular
militarism (which will likely die with the wars) and the stark reactions
to send in the army in response to 2011's riots.
The prediction buried within Edge of Darkness (1985) and GBH
(1990) was that Britain (England particularly) had become occupied
territory: an alien colonizing force was manipulating what seemed like
organic commonsense developments for the good of the colonizer's. Dead Man's Shoes is a depiction, along with elements of GBH, about
how the colony should be policed and what should make up the policeman.
Detatchment, responsibility, and a calm repose are what is required.
After a time, as in Kenya, the Congo, or elsewhere, the violence flows
naturally. The battles of the
80s and 90s dramas are done with, more history than ever in the wake of
the totem of that era's death: with the natives broken and scattered,
what becomes of us next?
"The night-time economy can bring many benefits to an area,
but how can councils ensure that it's properly managed? Get it right, and the
night-time economy can boost your financial prospects locally, enhance the
sense of community, in your area and also improve local services during the
day. But if councils get it wrong, a community can be plagued by antisocial
behaviour and alcohol-fueled violence."
"The panel learned that the town centre was seen, by some
influential key players, as the ‘engine room of the local economy’ and the
future economic success of Middlesbrough is tied up with the performance of the
town centre. Developing a more diverse evening economy can bring many opportunities
and economic success to the town in terms of job creation, attracting
businesses and people and altering the image of the town."
By the cashpoint, half past 1. Idling about waiting for friends to restock on
money so we can go back into the club and carry on drinking. Lad slumped at a
distance from the cashpoint: head lolling about, clumsily try to manipulate a
smartphone. We eye him and walk on by; offer sage advice, for example “You
wanna watch that mate, someone’ll have it off yeh” or the sturdy, “Are yeh
alright?” Can’t quite remember what I
said but it might have been “You want to get yourself a taxi home.” Think later
that I should have maybe done something more for him, helped out; try and fight
the idea it’s his own stupid fault for getting in a state. He isn’t there when
we roll out a few hours later into the pizza shop; hopefully he didn’t come to
any harm. Wonder where his friends were.
Second floor near the bar; guy in a dark coat appears. Starts
talking to me (his accent Eastern European?) quite friendly-like: he’s clearly
fucked. You can see from his face the links between body and brain have been disjointed
by intoxication; seen this sort in here before and don’t like it. Friends
return and we proceed towards the ground floor to meet up with others, dark
coat following. He grabs one of my friends by the throat and holds him against
the wall at the top of the stairs; we don’t make a move, appreciating the precarious
situation. Dark coat turns to me and inquires of my friend whose throat he’s
got his fingers wrapped around: “Do you know him”. Indeed I do. He releases him
and wanders off after giving me a friendly ‘cya around’ sort of gesture. Friend
who’d been restrained turns to me and says “Who the fuck was he, did you know
him?” No, but I did feel worried for him: if he’d tried that when the friend we
were going to meet on the ground floor was about, the one who’s been drinking
since about 4, he’d have ended up at the bottom of those stairs without a
doubt.
Outside, the smoking area. A friend has been chatting to a
girl we’ve met: plenty of people floating about, smokers, black-coated bouncers,
hi-visibility coppers in the distance. Guy turns up amongst the four of us: “That’s
my girlfriend.” Friend who was walking to her replies “Alright then.” Guy
(never do find out if he is her boyfriend, the girl’s edgy and starring with
quite appropriate disapproval) acts quite genially but in no certain terms
offers to fight all three of us: “Bring your two friends”, he says to my friend,
“they don’t mean anything to me.” We’re frankly stunned, the guy’s fairly
out-of-shape looking, and obviously the worse for drink but even still you’d
have to be a lot more drunk than this to embark on something as plainly idiotic
as this. Eventually the situation is defused in the way these things are and we
drift off. See the girl again that night on her own: understandable.
Very late in the night/early in the morning. Cooling towers,
chemical works, orange flaring from towards Dormanstown. Too tired to speak or
say anything or look at anyone. The taxi skirts its way through what’s left of
the little Hercules of British industry in the sad pre-dawn as we are driven
ages for no reason to drive to an outer suburb to drop a friend off. It’s only
when I’m this tired and this drunk that I start thinking about inanities: my
dad’s stories about working at a steel foundry and a warehouse amongst the
stacks in the now carved-out and ‘redeveloped’ docklands; Ridley Scott’s
memories of the industrial skyline and its impact on the imagery of Blade
Runner; the permanent orange glow just beyond the Eston hills.
There’s still industry here but it’s no more convincing than
when the Deputy Prime Minister visits a shop floor somewhere: this is what Britain
still does the news and the politicians are telling you, it’s all about the classics,
the cars and airplane engines and so on. What they would find it difficult to
say is that the real action is behind me in the town centre: young men and
women leaning against walls with tears in their eyes; a broken bottle arcing
down a face leaving red memories and lost sight; three police kicking a man in
the gutter and hefting him into the back of the van with the rest. A utopian
idea in the 1990s about clubs suggested they could become zones of alternative
reality, fuelled on E-nergy and rave optimism/hedonism. Dream on.
This article deals
with the loose period 1987-1994. It could just as easily have gone in ‘Faces’,
but I assume most people who follow one decade blog follow all three.
In December 1990, tunnelling machines knocked through a
final section of chalk, and an Englishman and a Frenchman were able to shake
hands deep under the seabed. It came as a surprise to me, because Europe had always
seemed further away than that. Culturally speaking, at least, Britain’s real
neighbour in the eighties was the United States of America. This was about more than sharing a common
tongue, or the politics of the ‘special relationship’. If Business Ontology
(the belief that everything in society should be run as a business) is a
dominant ideological position today, then the 1980s enjoyed a particular
variant on the theme: everything in society should be run as a business,
because that’s how they do things in
America. ‘American’ was for long time a straightforward synonym for
progressive, modern, desirable.
The plutocracy-celebrating soaps Dallas and Dynasty
enjoyed huge ratings. Channel 4 launched their American Football programme in
1982 (with the marketing blitz reaching peak levels in 84-85), perhaps
reasoning that association rules football was in irreversible decline and that
a gap existed for a flashier, more commercially minded rival sport. Others
who’d been thinking along the same lines had taken over football clubs in this
period, pushing their ‘inevitable’ club mergers and price rises, struggling to
understand why the enduring popularity of football was failing to generate the
money that washed around in American sports.
Irving Scholar floated Tottenham Hotspur on the stock
exchange in 1983, and Spurs were also ahead of Manchester United in the area of
omnimerchandising - catalogues packed
with everything from bedspreads to pencil sharpeners were doing the rounds in
my school playground as early as 88-89. Alan Sugar picked up Scholar’s ball and
ran with it through the early 90s. But Tottenham were always makeweights among
the ‘Big Five’, and they never made the step up to globe-spanning giant, in
either sporting or marketing terms. The
football modernisers of the 80s could say they were ahead of their time, and
that’s true to an extent. ‘Ahead of your time’ isn’t necessarily a compliment,
given that businessmen are supposed to understand their audiences.*
This first wave of Americana had broken by the end of the
decade. Between rave, Italia 90, and Thatcher’s defeat over Europe, we’d seemingly
found enough confidence to stand by ourselves for a while. But while the ‘official’,
media-narrative grip of America had been broken, the process continued on an
everyday level all over provincial Britain. The metropolitan media, and the
creative/artistic world, didn’t really pay much attention to this (except occasionally to exhibit a sniff of disdain, before moving on to more important
things). When Brett Anderson posed behind the slogan ‘Yanks Go Home,’ he and
the writers were referring to one pond-crossing musical genre, not to the
Americana the rest of us could see everywhere we went.
Kids who’d grown up on the osmotically influential cultural
touchstones of mid- 80s America (Back to the Future, Michael Jackson) found
themselves spending their adolescent leisure time in a passable imitation of
this dream-country. In the late eighties and early nineties, every town in
England grew bowling alleys, shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, and ice rinks,
while the kids who spent their adolescence in these places almost invariably
did so dressed in American leisurewear. The films showing at the new cinemas
were, almost without exception, American. Even the two standout British
successes of the period (A Fish Called Wanda**, Four Weddings and a Funeral) were
set in a tourist’s theme park version of Britain, and had American female leads.
The theme parks, of course - a collection of sodden fields
outside Lowestoft became home to Pleasurewood Hills (properly: ‘Pleasurewood
Hills American Theme Park’, with a cuddly beaver mascot). In Ilkeston, a venue
once known as ‘Britannia Park’, which had been ‘a celebration of British
culture’ (tiresome echoes of both 2000 and 2012 there), was replaced with the
American Adventure Park, its themed zones covering everything from the Aztecs
to the Wild West. It fell into disrepair, zone after zone being closed down and
dismantled, before it gasped its last in 2005. The pathos of the overgrown site
made it a briefly popular location with urban exploration/hauntology types.
Older and wiser, we can look back and sneer at our
Americanised leisure options, but there’s no denying how exciting all of this
was to pre-adolescents at the time. Like the transition to Post-Fordist
capitalism, this was something we wanted,
something we asked for. When the out-of-town
mall opened, when the local chain video store became a Blockbuster (with attendant
Jelly Belly concession) – it’s not hard to see how it all seemed fantastically exotic
to a child growing up in a depressed city, let alone a small provincial town. Those
who weren’t fortunate enough (in the days before the internet, when you really
needed a gatekeeper: a friend’s older
sibling, or a sarky bloke in a record/video shop) to stumble across a suitable
subculture remained in the world of leisurewear and consumption***. ‘We’ pitied
them, or reviled them – in the 80s, they might have been casuals; in the 90s,
they embraced the American tendency (not that they would necessarily have
admitted this) and became ‘townies’. Later, with an added dose of arrogant,
frightened bravado; ‘chavs’.
With this proselytising
done on the ground, the modernisers had a more receptive audience to their attempts to reshape British sport. The FA launched the Premier League in 1992, supposedly
(charitably) in order to head off a breakaway by the leading clubs, and invited
bids for exclusive broadcasting rights from pay-per-view as well as terrestrial
channels. Sky TV, who had hitherto struggled to make an impression on the British
market, narrowly won out (the anecdote goes that, with ITV’s final bid on the
table, Spurs chairman and satellite dish salesman Alan Sugar left the room to
make a phonecall. Not long after he returned, Sky upped their bid by just
enough to win).
The aesthetic of those early Premiership years was a strange
one. The footballers themselves were still distinctly 80s-looking – relatively
skinny, legs unwaxed, wave haircuts, the odd survivor with facial hair. The grounds were, for
the most part, in the same condition they'd been in for decades. The Sky presenters addressed us from
rickety chipboard studios perched up in the gods of places like Boundary Park,
in the age before stadia were designed with executive boxes and media suites as
priorities. But the continuity viewers could see on their screens wasn’t the
point. What they were told they were
seeing was something new and revolutionary, year zero, a whole new era in
sport.
Sky’s presentation was jarring, to begin with. In those
first few weeks they showed us the ‘Sky Strikers’, a dancing girl posse in
puffa jackets, who gamely went through their routines to near-unanimous baffled
silence (folk memory suggests massed, hostile booing, but this doesn't come out in the clips), while inflatable Bart Simpsons careened around them. As for Sky’s
actual game coverage, hyperbole ruled and negativity was verboten. Andy Gray became a comedy routine staple for
his heroic insistence that every single game was a thriller.
The 80s were hardly a golden era of kit design – Hummel and
Umbro in particular were responsible for plenty of overdesigned horrors. But it
was only in the Sky years that football kit manufacturers really began to push
the boundaries of creativity. There was a tendency toward gimmicky colouring
and detailing, on away shirts most of all. Forming a neat parallel with the
wider cultural trend, this took root most easily at modest provincial clubs. Tranmere? Teal and purple
diagonal halves. Hull? Tiger stripes.
Aston Villa (okay, not exactly provincial, but the Midlands were culturally
quiet at the time) enjoyed a green and black striped effort with a big red
yoghurt company logo on the front. Manchester United’s most famous kit of the
era, the Newton Heath 1893 tribute strip, was hardly ahistorical, but still fit
the template – gratuitous green and a lace-up collar. The team who were wearing
these shirts were backed by an off-pitch media and marketing operation far
beyond anything Spurs had tried to do in the preceding years.
By 95-96, it all seemed to fade away. At the Euros, the St George’s Cross replaced the old-Establishment
symbol of the Union Jack, and England lost in the quintessential ugly, commercial
away strip (supposedly chosen because it went well with jeans), leading a
stampede back to more familiar designs. Outside football, too, the flood of tacky
Americana into provincial Britain seemed to come to a halt. The conventional wisdom
on the subject would hold that Britpop and the YBAs (and so on, and so on)
restored our pride in our own cultural produce, while the subsequent election
of a moderately pro-EU government resulted in a cultural turn from the distant
west to our immediate neighbours to the east. Alternatively, more cynically, we
could hypothesise that the modernisers became more savvy to their target market,
trimming away the overtly American edges of their wares to appeal to British
punters. There’s a figment of truth in these arguments. The music charts began to look more to Europe, two key late nineties trends being the cheesy Europop of the Vengaboys et al, and French House. The American-style building
developments of 1997 onwards had more of a sensitive, European sheen (compare
this Walmart-style big box http://www.flickr.com/photos/moldovia/4541916322/in/pool-1432312@N21/
with this http://www.flickr.com/photos/32723111@N04/3059927002/in/pool-1432312@N21/)
– but these explanations still skirt over an uncomfortable truth.
Sky’s 1992 Premiership coverage struck everyone as
needlessly American. Today’s equivalent – Sky rolling out their sponsored ‘Grand
Slam Sunday' idents – is, if anything, more brash and overblown, but doesn’t carry
the same feeling of otherness. Britain is like
that now. In the 1980s, the gap
between American leisure culture and British ground zero was unbridgeable,
partly because of cultures of resistance that still existed on the ground. In
the early 1990s, the poles had moved closer together, but the juxtaposition was
still striking. By 2000, the discontinuity had been completely smoothed over. Britpop’s
claims of patriotic triumph couldn’t be more hollow. American leisure culture
is now so seamlessly worked into our lives that we no longer notice it. The
‘Yanks’ didn’t go home. We met the enemy, and we were them.
*A common trope of the time was club chairmen who’d taken
power on a raft of ambitious promises eventually turning against and publicly
abusing their own fans, fairly explicitly blaming the supporters’ luddite
mindlessness for the failure of their own ill-conceived schemes.
**‘Wanda’ bore a not-quite-sequel – ‘Fierce Creatures’ –
about a brash, know-nothing American business guru who takes over a ramshackle
British zoo. This ‘slick but clueless American business moderniser’ character
was an archetype in British comedy throughout the period under discussion.
***Confusingly enough, kids who did belong to a subculture spent their free time in most of the
same places, but they made more of a show of not enjoying them.
