Part 6 (1/2)

Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011).

June 2011.

'I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting,' Laura Oldfield Ford has said. 'The need to doc.u.ment the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.' The city in question is of course London, and Ford's Savage Messiah offers a samizdat counter-history of the capital during the period of neoliberal domination. If Savage Messiah is 'diaristic', it is also much more than a memoir. The stories of Ford's own life necessarily bleed into the stories of others, and it is impossible to see the joins. 'This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and reconfiguring.' The perspective Ford adopts, the voices she speaks in and which speak through her are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity. Savage Messiah uncovers another city, a city in the process of being buried, and takes us on a tour of its landmarks: The Isle of Dogs...The Elephant...Westway...Lea Bridge...North Acton...Canary Wharf...Dalston...Kings Cross...Hackney Wick...

In one of many echoes of punk culture, Ford calls Savage Messiah a 'zine'. She began producing it in 2005, eight years into a New Labour government that had consolidated rather than overturned Thatcherism. The context is bleak. London is a conquered city; it belongs to the enemy. 'The translucent edifices of Starbucks and Costa Coffee line these s.h.i.+mmering promenades, 'young professionals' sit outside gently conversing in sympathetic tones.' The dominant mood is one of restoration and reaction, but it calls itself modernisation, and it calls its divisive and exclusionary work making London safe for the super-rich regeneration. The struggle over s.p.a.ce is also a struggle over time and who controls it. Resist neoliberal modernisation and (so we are told) you consign yourself to the past. Savage Messiah's London is overshadowed by the looming megalith of 'London 2012', which over the course of the last decade has subsumed more and more of the city into its ba.n.a.l science fiction telos, as the Olympic Delivery Authority transformed whole areas of East London into a temporary photo opportunity for global capitalism. Where once there were 'fridge mountains and abandoned factories' out of Tarkovsky and Ballard, a semi-wilderness in the heart of the city, now a much blander desert grows: s.p.a.ces for wandering are eliminated, making way for shopping malls and soon-to-be-abandoned Olympic stadia. 'When I was writing the zines,' Ford remembers, 'I was drifting through a London haunted by traces and remnants of rave, anarcho-punk scenes and hybrid subcultures at a time when all these incongruous urban regeneration schemes were happening. The idea that I was moving through a spectral city was really strong, it was as if everything prosaic and dull about the New Labour version of the city was being resisted by these ghosts of brutalist architecture, of '90s convoy culture, rave scenes, '80s political movements and a virulent black economy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters. I think the book could be seen in the context of the aftermath of an era, where residues and traces of euphoric moments haunt a melancholy landscape.'

All of these traces are to be eliminated from the Restoration London that will be celebrated at London 2012. With their lovingly reproduced junk-strata, overgrowing vegetation and derelict s.p.a.ces, Savage Messiah's images offer a direct riposte to the slick digital images which the Olympic Delivery Authority has pasted up in the now heavily policed, restricted and surveilled Lee valley. Blair's Cool Britannia provides the template for an anodyne vision of London designed by the 'creative industries'. Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn't just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra. A familiar story. Take the Westway, West London's formerly deplored dual carriageway, once a cursed s.p.a.ce to be mythologised by Ballard, punks and Chris Pet.i.t, now just another edgy film set: This liminal territory, cast in a negative light in the 70s was recuperated by MTV and boring media types in the 90s. The Westway became the backdrop for Gorillaz imbecility, bland drum & ba.s.s record sleeves and photo shoots in corporate skate parks.

Cool Britannia. Old joke.

's.p.a.ce' becomes the over arching commodity. Notting Hill. New Age cranks peddling expensive junk. Homeopathy and boutiques, angel cards and crystal healing.

Media and high finance on the one hand, faux-mysticism and superst.i.tion on the other: all the strategies of the hopeless and those who exploit them in Restoration London...s.p.a.ce is indeed the commodity here. A trend that started 30 years ago, and intensified as council housing was sold off and not replaced, culminated in the insane super-inflation of property prices in the first years of the 21st century. If you want a simple explanation for the growth in cultural conservatism, for London's seizure by the forces of Restoration, you need look no further than this. As Jon Savage points out in England's Dreaming, the London of punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, s.p.a.ces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once those s.p.a.ces are enclosed, practically all of the city's energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There's no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. 'Free time' becomes convalescence. You turn to what rea.s.sures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of pinched-face drones plugged into iPods.

Savage Messiah rediscovers the city as a site for drift and daydreams, a labyrinth of side streets and s.p.a.ces resistant to the process of gentrification and 'development' set to culminate in the miserable hyper-spectacle of 2012. The struggle here is not only over the (historical) direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and ha.s.sling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Savage Messiah is about another kind of delirium: the releasing of the pressure to be yourself, the slow unravelling of biopolitical ident.i.ty, a depersonalised journey out to the erotic city that exists alongside the business city. The eroticism here is not primarily to do with s.e.xuality, although it sometimes includes it: it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a world beyond work can however briefly be glimpsed and grasped. Fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like smoke, walks that have no particular direction and go on for hours, free parties in old industrial s.p.a.ces, still reverberating days later. The movement between anonymity and encounter can be very quick in the city. Suddenly, you are off the street and into someone's life-s.p.a.ce. Sometimes, it's easier to talk to people you don't know. There are fleeting intimacies before we melt back into the crowd, but the city has its own systems of recall: a block of flats or a street you haven't focused on for a long time will remind you of people you met only once, years ago. Will you ever see them again?

I got invited up for a cup of tea in one of those Tecton flats on the Harrow road, one of the old men from the day centre I work in. I took him up Kilburn High Road shopping and watered the fuchsias on his balcony. We talked about the Blitz and hospitals mostly. He used to be a scientist and wrote shopping lists on brown envelopes dated and filed in a stack of biscuit tins.

I miss him.

I miss them all.

Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first touch and tactility is crucial to the experience: the zine doesn't feel the same when it's JPEGed on screen Savage Messiah seems like something familiar. The form itself, the mix of photographs, typeface-text and drawings, the use of scissors and glue rather than digital cut and paste; all of this make Savage Messiah seem out of time, which is not to say out of date. There were deliberate echoes of the para-art found on punk and postpunk record sleeves and fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s. Most insistently, I'm reminded of Gee Vaucher, who produced the paradoxically photorealistically delirious record covers and posters for anarcho-punk collective Cra.s.s. 'I think with the look of the zine I was trying to restore radical politics to an aesthetic that had been rendered anodyne by advertising campaigns, Sh.o.r.editch club nights etc.,' Ford says. 'That anarcho-punk look was everywhere but totally emptied of its radical critique. It seemed important to go back to that moment of the late '70s and early '80s to a point where there was social upheaval, where there were riots and strikes, exciting cultural scenes and ruptures in the fabric of everyday life.' The 'return' to the postpunk moment is the route to an alternative present. Yet this is a return only to a certain ensemble of styles and methods nothing quite like Savage Messiah actually existed back then.

Savage Messiah is a gigantic, unfinished collage, which like the city is constantly reconfiguring itself. Macro-and micro-narratives proliferate tuberously; spidery slogans recur; figures migrate through various versions of London, sometimes trapped inside the drearily glossy s.p.a.ces imagined by advertising and regeneration propaganda, sometimes free to drift. She deploys collage in much the same way William Burroughs used it: as a weapon in time-war. The cut-up can dislocate established narratives, break habits, allow new a.s.sociations to coalesce. In Savage Messiah, the seamless, already-established capitalist reality of London dissolves into a riot of potentials.

Savage Messiah is written for those who could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be. They are the unregenerated, a lost generation, 'always yearning for the time that just eluded us': those who were born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow; those who watched the Miners' Strike with partisan adolescent eyes but who were too young to really partic.i.p.ate in the militancy; those who experienced the future-rush euphoria of rave as their birthright, never dreaming that it could burn out like fried synapses; those, in short, who simply did not find the 'reality' imposed by the conquering forces of neoliberalism liveable. It's adapt or die, and there are many different forms of death available to those who can't pick up the business buzz or muster the requisite enthusiasm for the creative industries. Six million ways to die, choose one: drugs, depression, dest.i.tution. So many forms of catatonic collapse. In earlier times, 'deviants, psychotics and the mentally collapsed' inspired militant-poets, situationists, Rave-dreamers. Now they are incarcerated in hospitals, or languis.h.i.+ng in the gutter.

No Pedestrian Access To Shopping Centre Still, the mood of Savage Messiah is far from hopeless. It's not about caving in, it's about different strategies for surviving the deep midwinter of Restoration London. People living on next to nothing, no longer living the dream, but not giving up either: 'Five years since the last party but he held his plot, scavenging for food like a Ballardian crash victim.' You can go into suspended animation, knowing that the time is not yet right, but waiting with cold reptile patience until it is. Or you can flee Dystopian London without ever leaving the city, avoiding the central business district, finding friendly pa.s.sages through the occupied territory, picking your way through the city via cafes, comrade's flats, public parks. Savage Messiah is an inventory of such routes, such pa.s.sages through 'territories of commerce and control'.

The zines are saturated in music culture. First of all, there are the names of groups: Infa Riot and Blitz. Fragments of Abba, Heaven 17 on the radio. j.a.pan, Rudimentary Peni, Einstrzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Spiral Tribe. Whether the groups are sublime or sub-charity shop undesirable, these litanies have an evocative power that is quietly lacerating. Gig posters from 30 years ago Mob, Poison Girls, Conflict call up older versions of you, half-forgotten haircuts, long-lost longings, stirring again. But the role of music culture goes much deeper in Savage Messiah. The way the zine is put together owes as much to the rogue dance and drug cultures that mutated from Rave as to punk fanzines; its montage methodology has as much in common with the DJ mix as with any precursor in visual culture. Savage Messiah is also about the relations.h.i.+p between music and place: the zine is also a testament to the way in which the sensitive membranes of the city are reshaped by music.

This sombre place is haunted by the sounds of lost acid house parties and the distant reverberations of 1986. Test Department. 303. 808. Traces of industrial noise.

The roundhouse was easy to get into, and the depot itself, disused for years is lit up with tags and dubs.

You can hear these deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping across the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces. Mid summer, blistering heat under the concrete, Armagideon Time(s), a hidden garden, to be found, and lost again.

Superficially, the obvious tag for Savage Messiah would be psychogeography, but the label makes Ford chafe. 'I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-cla.s.s men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fas.h.i.+on, I've had about fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.' Rather than subsuming Savage Messiah under the increasingly played-out discourses of psychogeography, I believe it is better understood as an example of a cultural coalescence that started to become visible (and audible) at the moment when Ford began to produce the zine: hauntology. 'The London I conjure up...is imbued with a sense of mourning,' Ford says. 'These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates.' So many dreams of collectivity have died in neoliberal London. A new kind of human being was supposed to live here, but that all had to be cleared away so that the restoration could begin.

Haunting is about a staining of place with particularly intense moments of time, and, like David Peace, with whom her work shares a number of affinities, Ford is alive to the poetry of dates. 1979, 1981, 2013: these years recur throughout Savage Messiah, moments of transition and threshold, moments when a whole alternative time-track opens. 2013 has a post-apocalyptic quality (in addition to being the year of the London Olympics, 2012 is also, according to some, the year that the Mayans predicted for the end of the world). But 2013 could also be Year Zero: the reversal of 1979, the time when all the cheated hopes and missed chances are finally realised. Savage Messiah invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks of an occupied London: Perhaps it is here that the s.p.a.ce can be opened up to forge a collective resistance to this neo liberal expansion, to the endless proliferation of ba.n.a.lities and the h.o.m.ogenising effects of globalisation. Here in the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels of consumerism one might find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.

Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys' So This is Goodbye.

k-punk post, March 4, 2006.

s.p.a.ce comes as standard with the Junior Boys. The synthpop that inspired them remained attached, for the most part, to the three-minute format; 'extended' remixes were a concession to the imperatives of dance. Only one of So This is Goodbye's 10 tracks is under four minutes. s.p.a.ce is integral, not only to their sound, but to their songs. s.p.a.ce is a compositional component, a presupposition of the songs, not something retrospectively inserted at a producer's whim. The pauses, the imagist-allusiveness of the lyrics, the breathy phrasing would not work, or make much sense, outside a plateau-architecture imported from dance; crushed into three minutes Junior Boys' songs would lose more than length.

House references are everywhere: the t.i.tle track is gorgeously, oneirically poised on a honeyed Mr Fingers' plateau, and it is not only the arpeggiated synth which drives many of the tracks that is reminiscent of Jamie Principle. Yet the LP does not sound either like House or like most previous attempts to synthesize pop with House. So This is Goodbye is like House if it had started in the wilds of Canada rather the clubs of Chicago. Too many House-pop hybrids fill up House's s.p.a.ce with business, hectic activity. On Vocalcity and, to some extent The Present Lover, Luomo did the opposite: dilating the Song into an unfolding driftwork. But the Luomo LPs were more pop House than pop per se. So This is Goodbye is, however, very definitely a pop record; if anything, it's even more seductively catchy than Last Exit.

The obvious difference between So This is Goodbye and its predecessor is the absence of the tricksy stop-start stutter beats on the new record. If Junior Boys' inventiveness is no longer concentrated on beats, that is a reflection as much of a decline of the surrounding pop context as it a sign of the JB's newfound taste for rhythmic cla.s.sicism. Last Exit's reworkings of Timbaland/Dem 2 tic-beats meant that it had a relations.h.i.+p with a rhythmic psychedelia that was, then, still mutating pop into new shapes. In the intervening period, of course, both hip hop and British garage have taken a turn for the brutalist, and pop has consequently been deprived of any modernising force. Timbaland's beat surrealism became water-treading repet.i.tion years ago, displaced by the ultra-realist thuggish plod of corporate hip hop and the ugly carnality of crunk; and 2 Step's 'feminine pressure' has long since been crushed by the testos-terone-saturated bluntness of Grime and Dubstep. That skunk-fugged heaviness remains the antipodes of the Junior Boys' cyberian, etherealised, plaintive physicality; listening to the Junior Boys after Grime or Dubstep is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope smoke out onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain. A lung-cleansing experience. (Significant also that those other ultra-heteros.e.xual post-Garage musics should have bred out the influence of House, while the Junior Boys return to it so emphatically.) But the removal of rhythmic tricksiness perhaps also indicates something of the scale of the Junior Boys' pop ambitions, which are best seen as the pioneering of a New MOR rather than another attempt at New Pop. If there is no cutting edge, then it makes more sense to abandon the former margins and refurbish the middle of the road. The Junior Boys' songs have always had more in common with a certain type of modernist MOR Hall and Oates, Prefab Sprout, Blue Nile, Lindsay Buckingham than with any rock. Modernist MOR is the opposite of the discredited strategy of entryism: it doesn't 'conform to deform', it locates the alien right in the heart of the familiar. The problem with current Pop is not the predominance of MOR, but the fact that MOR has been corrupted by the wheedling whine of Indie authenticity. In any just world, the Junior Boys, not the drippy moroseness of James Blunt nor the earthy earnestness of KT Tunstall, would be the globally dominant MOR brand in 2006.

Ultimately, though, So This is Goodbye sounds more middle of the tundra than middle of the road. It's as if the Junior Boys' journey into North America Endless has continued beyond the late-night freeways of Last Exit. It's like the first LP's city lights and Edward Hopper coffee bars have receded, and we're taken out, beyond even the small towns, into the depopulated wildernesses of Canada's Northern Territories. Or rather, it's as if those wildernesses have crept into the very marrow of the record. In The Idea of North, Glenn Gould suggests that the North's icy desolation has a special pull on the Canadian imagination. You hear this on So This is Goodbye not in any positive content so much as in the songs' gaps and absences; the gaps and absences that make the song what they are.

Those crevices and grottoes seem to multiply as the alb.u.m progresses. The second half of the alb.u.m (what I hear as the 'second side'; one of the most gratifying things about So This is Goodbye is that it is structured like a cla.s.sic pop alb.u.m, not an extras-clogged CD) diffuses forward motion into trails of electro-c.u.mulae. The t.i.tle track sets stately synths against the anticlimactic urgency of Acid House's Forever Now: the effect like running up a down escalator, frozen in an aching moment of transition. 'Like a child' and 'Caught in a Wave' immerse the agitated drive of the LP's signature arpeggiated synth in a vapour trail of opiated atmospherics.

The reading of Sinatra's 'When No-one Cares' is the knot which holds together all of So This is Goodbye, a clue to its modernist MOR intentions (lines from the song 'count souvenirs', 'like a child' provide the t.i.tles for other tracks, almost as if the song is a puzzle the whole alb.u.m is trying to solve). So This is Goodbye's songs bear much the same relation to high-energy as the late Sinatra's bore to big band jazz: what was once a communal, dance-oriented music has been hollowed out into a cavernous, contemplative s.p.a.ce for the most solitary of musings. On the Junior Boys' 'When No-one Cares' beats are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only by the dying-star flares and stalact.i.te-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.

The Junior Boys have transformed the song from the lonely-crowd melancholy of the original Frank at the bar staring into his whisky sour, happy couples partying obliviously behind him (or in his imagination) into a lament whispered in the wilderness, icy-breathed into the black mirror indifference of a Great Lake at midnight. It is as cosmically desolated as the Young G.o.ds' version of 'September Song', as arctic-white as Miles Davis' Aura. 'When No-one Cares' is one of my favourite Sinatra songs, and I must have first heard it 20 years ago, but with the Junior Boys' version which makes the catatonic stasis of the original's grief seem positively busy it is as if I am hearing the words for the first time.

Sinatra's No-One Cares (which could have been subt.i.tled: From Penthouse to Satis House) was like pop's take on literary modernism, an affect (rather than a concept) alb.u.m, a series of takes on a particular theme disconnection from a hyper-connected world with Frank the ageing sophisticate adrift in the McLuhan wasteland of the late 50s, Elvis already here, the Beatles on the way (who is the 'no-one' who doesn't care if not the teen audience who have found new objects of adoration?), the telephone and the television offering only new ways to be lonely. So This is Goodbye is like a globalised update of No-One Cares, its images of 'hotel lobbies', 'shopping malls we'll never see again' and 'homes for sale' sketching a world in a state of permanent impermance (should we say precarity?). The songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with leave-taking and change, fixated on doing things for the first or the last time. 'So This is Goodbye' is not the t.i.tle track for nothing.

Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of ma.s.s (old) media technology the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness. 'I've flown around the world in plane/ designed the latest IBM brain/ but lately I'm so downhearted', Sinatra song on No-One Cares' 'I Can't Get Started'. Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce. Every town has become the 'tourist town' alluded to in So This is Goodbye's final track, 'FM', because now at home everyone is a tourist, both in the sense of permanently on the move but also in the sense of having the world at their fingertips, via the net. If Sinatra's best records, like Hopper's paintings, were about the way in which the urban experience produces new forms of isolation (and also: that such ma.s.s mediated private moments are the only mode of affective connection in a fragmented world), then So this is Goodbye is a response to the cyberspatial commonplace that, with the net, even the most remote spot can be connected up (and also: that such connection often amounts to a communion of lonely souls). Hence the impression that, if Sinatra's 'When No-one Cars' was an unanswered call from the heartless heart of the Big Apple, then the Junior Boys' version has been phoned-in down a digital line from the edge of Lake Ontario. (Is it accidental that the term 'cybers.p.a.ce' was invented by a Canadian?) So this is Goodbye is a very travel sick record. It expresses what we might call nomadalgia. Nomadalgia, the sickness of travel, would be a complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness for home, nostalgia. (And what of the relation between nomadalgia and hauntology?) It's entirely fitting that the final track, 'FM', should invoke both 'a return home' and radio (not the only reference to that ghost-medium on the alb.u.m), since internet radio with local stations available from any hotel in the world is perhaps more than anything else the objective correlative of our current condition. A condition in which, as iek so aptly puts it, 'global harmony and solipsism strangely coincide. That is to say, does not our immersion in cybers.p.a.ce go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although ”without windows” that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe?' ('No s.e.x Please, We Are Post-humans', munication. Some of Penman's disquisitions on email are accompanied by images of postcards the poignant tactility of this obsolete form of correspondence all the more affecting because the senders and addressees are now forgotten. Greie, meanwhile, produces skeins of electronica that provide Content with a kind of sonic unconscious in which terms and concepts referred to in the images and the voice track are refracted, extrapolated and supplemented.

One of the first phrases cited in Greie's soundwork which resembles sketches for unrealised songs is a quotation from Roy Batty's famous speech in Blade Runner: 'If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.' This is a phrase Penman has made much of in his own writings on recording, technology and haunting and it brings us to the other meaning of 'correspondence' Content plays with: correspondences in the sense of connections and a.s.sociations. Some of these are underscored by Pet.i.t in his dryly-poetic text; others he leaves the viewers to make for themselves.

One of the most gratifying aspects of Content, in fact, is that by contrast with so many contemporary television doc.u.mentaries, which neurotically hector the audience by incessantly reiterating their core thesis, Pet.i.t trusts in the intelligence and speculative power of the viewer. Where so much television now involves a mutual redundancy of image and voice the image is slaved into ill.u.s.trating the text; the voice merely glosses the image Content is in large part about the s.p.a.ces between image and text, what is unsaid in (and about) the images.

The use of a German actor and musician and the many references to Europe in Content reflect Pet.i.t's childhood which, as he describes in the film, was partly spent as a forces child in Germany. But it also reflects Pet.i.t's long-standing desire for some kind of reconciliation between British culture and European modernism. Pet.i.t has described Content as an 'informal coda' to his 1979 film Radio On (recently reissued on BFI DVD). With its strong debt to European art cinema, Radio On projected a rapprochement between British and European film that never happened a rapprochement antic.i.p.ated in the 1970s art pop (Kraftwerk, Bowie) used so prominently in that film. Pet.i.t imagined a British cinema that, like that music, could a.s.sert its Europeanness not by rejecting America, but by confidently absorbing American influences. Yet this future never arrived.