Full Interview with Rachael Cloughton for History of Art Scotland, who published it online in History of Art Scotland in a much edited form in September 2010.
Rachael Cloughton - Who do you consider a good critic?
Neil Cooper - It depends what sort of critic you mean. There are different types,
from broadsheet journalism and tabloid journalism to specialist
publications, and then there are academic critics. All are doing
different things, and all in their own contexts are as valid as each
other, but I’m not academic in any way, shape or form, so can only
really talk about criticism from a broadsheet newspaper or arts
magazine point of view.
To be honest with you, though, I don’t read nearly as much criticism as
I probably did before I started doing what I do. That’s partly to do
with a time thing, and partly to do with being really easily led and
not accidentally mimicking whoever you’ve just been reading. I’ve
consciously had to stop reading certain things because of that. The
best example was when I was reading the collected criticism of Kenneth
Tynan, who was the enfant terrible of theatre criticism during the
fifties and sixties. I’d been sent the book to review, and to be honest
I’d never read him, because I tend to steer clear of these sacred cows
who everyone seems to adore. I remember at college everyone going on
about the actor Anthony Sher’s book, To Play The King, which was a kind
of extended diary of his experience rehearsing and playing Richard The
Third. I started it and was just appalled, because he just seemed to be
bursting into tears and splitting up with his boyfriend all the way
through it.
But Tynan’s stuff was quite interesting, written in this flamboyant but
ornate style. After reading some of it, I had to file a piece for the
paper, and within seconds the phone went, and it was my boss telling me
that what I’d sent was completely impenetrable, made no sense at all
and could I rewrite it please. What I’d done by accidentally trying to
write like what I’d just read, was to completely over-egg things in a
way that was completely inappropriate.
But to answer the question, I tend to read factual books, largely
music-based, more than individual criticism, unless it’s Paul Morley in
the Observer or something. Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming was great,
and all Morley’s books are in there, going right back to Ask, his book
of old NME interviews. I’ve just been reading David Toop’s latest book
on sound and Richard Strange’s autobiography. John Harris’s book on the
Brit-pop/Blair era, The Last Party was really good. Bill Drummond’s
book, 45, is fantastic, although that’s more memoir than criticism,
Greil Marcus’ books are great, Andrew O’Hagen’s book The Missing is one
of the best none-fiction books I’ve ever read, Simon Reynolds’ Rip It
Up and Start Again is essential, as is his blog, as well as other blogs
like The Quietus and Your Heart Out.
Michael Bracewell’s book England Is Mine I loved when it came out, as
it looks at a lot of the pop cultural iconography that I grew up with.
In terms of older books, one of my bibles is Bomb Culture by Jeff
Nuttall, the poet, artist, art teacher and musician, which is a
first-hand account of the sixties. Nuttall’s last book before he died,
Art and the Degradation of Awareness is a lacerating account of the
contemporary art scene. Albert Hunt’s Hope For Great Happenings is
another bible. Hunt taught at Bradford art school, founded a
performance/theatre group there, and ended up working with the director
Peter Brook on the 1968 anti Vietnam play, US. Again, these aren’t
really criticism, but they’re great writing and have great ideas, and
are really important historically. In terms of magazines I buy The
Wire, which is up and down, dip into Frieze which is the same, get the
Guardian where I like Alexis Petridis, Simon Hattenstone and Adrian
Searle, although I’m thinking of switching to the Indy since the
Guardian started supporting the Lib-Dems, and I buy the Herald if I’m
in it, although I probably should buy it more, just to get more of a
sense of who I’m writing for.
I get Map and The List, obviously, both of which I write for. I used to
quite like The Idler in terms of attitude as much as content, and I
read Viz comic, which I know isn’t really applicable in terms of the
question asked, but which is something I reckon influences me as much
as anything else. I’ve just noticed on my bookshelves there are four
books about The Fall. That’s really quite sad, isn’t it. I have this
private theory that Mark E Smith is the greatest theatre director since
the Polish guru Tadeusz Kantor, and that in terms of onstage
interventions they were both doing the same thing, so maybe I’ll write
one about that one of these days.
I find it odd, I have to say, that both in art and literary criticism
artists and novelists review each other’s work. I think the book
industry is by far the worst offender here, in that you’ll an author
whose novels are published by Jonathan Cape, say, who reviews another
novelist of the same generation on the same imprint, and then a few
months later the second author returns the favour for the guy who
reviewed their book, and so on. What you end up with is a lot of books
with favourable quotes from high-profile authors who are all published
by the same people.
In the art world it’s a bit different, because there seems to be more
of a crossover, because artists have to multi-task for economic reasons
or whatever, but again you sometimes read high-profile artists
reviewing their mates from the same gallery. Now I’m sure they’ll have
a different kind of insight into the work, and I know friendships and
relationships in tight-knit artistic circles are inevitable, but you
really have to keep some kind of professional distance, however big a
fan or a friend you may be. Because one of these days, if you’re honest
and have integrity about what you do, you might have to say something
not terribly flattering about them, and if you’re too close that’s
going to hurt both parties.
You have to remember that, unless you’re writing a text or an essay for
a gallery publication or catalogue, which are really doing something
different and are more partisan, you’re not writing for the artist or
the curator, but for the reader. Sure, let’s not be naïve and pretend
that something that’s potentially such a niche subject is going to be
read by the masses, but largely by specialists and professionals with
some kind of vested interest. But even there, if you’re serious about
what you do and aren’t solely interested in networking, you have to
keep your distance, and cut through some of the bullshit in terms of
how some events are mythologised by the people who put them on.
The critic’s job is threefold. You have to say what something is, what
it says it’s trying to do, and whether it achieves it or not. Beyond
that, there are the much bigger historical, social and political
contexts and cultural connections to be made, though in a 280 word or
500 word review, you’re quite often only scratching the surface. That’s
fine, though, they’re pointers for further reading if anyone can be
bothered to continue with the dialogue, which is what a review is the
starting point of. No, that’s not true, actually. The work you’re
writing about is the start of the dialogue, the review attempts to
define that critically, and whatever follows out of that continues the
discourse.
In broadsheets, and most other places too I imagine, you have to get
all this down in a clear, informative and constructive way, and in a
way that is a lively and, if appropriate, entertaining read. To some
extent you’ll be dictated to by what you’re writing about, but you
still have to use your own voice, which you obviously don’t find
immediately, but comes through experience and from being absorbed by
whatever you’re interested in.
Mind you, the sort of nepotism in book and art reviews happens in music
as well. I’ve seen writers who are in bands review records and gigs by
artists who run the record label that releases the band’s records. For
some reason some publications are willing to be complicit in that sort
of nepotism, but for me those sorts of reviews aren’t to be taken in
any way seriously.
This job is a pretty promiscuous one really, in that you’re moving
fairly quickly from one thing to the next, and while you might fall in
love with something, the next thing the people who made it do might not
be so good, so you fall out of love, and, if you want to extend the
metaphor, end up being disappointed, betraying them and finding
something better, effectively trading them in for a younger model.
That’s the case with interviews as well. For the time you’re
interviewing someone, they’re the most interesting, fascinating and
funniest person in the world. As soon as you’ve written it up, that’s
that, game over, next please. That’s not as callous as it sounds, it’s
just how it is, for me at least. I know some people who become best
friends with their interviewees, but for me that would just get messy.
Whenever I’ve interviewed mates it’s always been awkward, and they
always moan about whatever I write, no matter how nice it is, so I tend
to try and avoid it. Then there’s obituaries, which, and it sounds bad,
I love writing. If you’re going to do an obituary justice, you have to
write as though you’re the chief mourner.
RC - Which critics did you read when you were young?
NC - NME was my bible growing up. It had such a profound influence on my
generation of people who were interested in art and pop culture that
it’s hard to equate with the glossy comic it became. At that time,
which was the late 1970s and early 1980s, just after punk, which has
now become historicized as a style called post-punk, there seemed to be
so many ideas flying around that if you were curious your mind was
opened up to everything.
So you had Paul Morley, Julie Burchill and Ian Penman all writing for
NME at roughly the same time. You tended to latch onto writers who were
interested in the same sorts of thing as you, dependent on what you
heard on John Peel that week, or quite often you’d read about a band
before you’d even heard them and just knew that you’d like them. As a
big for instance, I read about Joy Division before I ever heard them.
It was a review of their first album, Unknown Pleasures, in Sounds
rather than NME oddly. And there was something about the way it was
written, I think by Dave McCullough, who was Sounds’ equivalent of Paul
Morley, and probably something about the grainy photograph that went
with it of these four slightly haunted looking young men, that made my
stomach churn like a washing machine with nervous excitement.
When I actually heard them, which was probably a matter of days, they
sounded exactly like I’d imagined them from the review. Then when I saw
them, that was something else again. But imagine the power of that, all
from reading a review.
The same thing happened after reading a review of the Young Marble
Giants album, and one of The Pop Group albums. That one was by Ian
Penman, who from memory namedropped everyone from Nietzsche to
Jean-Paul Sarte to (probably) Jean Braudillard. Deeply pretentious, and
you realise now that these writers who were actually only a few years
older than me were probably feeling their way around the Penguin Modern
Classics canon just as much as I was, but to read that in a review of a
record was a phenomenal eye-opener. It showed that music didn’t exist
in a vacuum, but was connected to politics and philosophy and other art
movements, and most of all was about ideas that you didn’t always get,
but that was why they were so thrilling. They were opening a door into
other worlds.
Of course, you don’t realise then how much something you’re reading or
listening to or watching is going to affect everything you do and how
you think and see the world for ever after. Then you’re just doing it,
and accidentally getting the best education a young man starting out in
the world can get.
But there was Paul Morley, writing these big off-the-wall articles that
equated pop music with art and post-modernism in a way he’d perfect a
few years later when he co-founded ZTT Records, and asking Jerry Garcia
of the Grateful Dead, who did fifteen-minute songs, if he’d heard of
Fire Engines, who did fifteen-minute sets. Morley’s probably my most
long-term influence, even though sometimes these days he can border on
the self-parodic. But anyone who can write a hundred page article about
Michael Jackson, as he did in the second issue of Loops magazine, which
is a magazine co-produced by Domino Records, and is getting back to
some of the more expansive writing of the old NME, or an entire book of
left-field music history based on an imaginary car journey with Kylie
Minogue, is infinitely more interesting than someone giving a five star
review to a record by the boss of his record label, which,
incidentally, I’ve seen happen.
Then there was Julie Burchill, who’d just write these most scabrous
slag-offs of all the perceived sacred cows, and as it turned out,
although it opened a door for her, probably didn’t like the music that
came out of punk very much. That didn’t matter, though, because she
wrote so well. I remember one column she wrote in The Face in 1984
called ‘The Rage Is Beige,’ which was about how music was neither black
nor white anymore, and cited the likes of Prince and Madonna as
examples of this. At that time, remember, there were serious
demarcations between black and white music, between indie and dance
music, and there was a huge outcry when Stuart Cosgrove started writing
about rap and hip-hop in NME, which up until then had been the ultimate
preserve of serious young white men in long macs.
Then again, there was a similar thing a couple of years ago when a
black act headlined Glastonbury, so I’m not sure how far we’ve come,
but Julie Burchill nailed how music was getting all mixed up in a way
today I suppose we’d call cross-genre, but then predicted the, ha!,
indie-dance crossover that would happen in the early 90s. Also, she’d
start going on about how great the historian AJP Taylor was, which
would open another door. These days, disagree with pretty much
everything Julie Burchill says, but she does it with such wit and style
that I could forgive her anything.
There’s a brilliant book called In Their Own Write, which is an oral
history of the music press from the 1950s up until the last few years,
and which speaks to all the main players across the years. It’s funny
to think that people like Garry Bushell and Danny Baker started out in
the music press. In fact, Danny Baker started out on the original punk
fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, which is mad.
Funnily enough, I’ve ended up meeting both Morley and Burchill over the
last few years, both of which were a real fan-boy thrill. Morley had
been doing a reading from his book, Nothing, which is about his dad’s
suicide, and a friend had interviewed him on the phone, so we got him
to speak to Morley after the reading, and we ended up in the Café Royal
upstairs, which is now the Voodoo Rooms, with him. It was funny,
because on the TV in the bar there was a documentary about Billy
Mackenzie, the singer of The Associates, who’d killed himself a couple
of years before, and who Morley had championed in his NME days. Morley
said that night that it was funny, because a lot of his favourite male
singers were Scottish; Mackenzie, Paul Haig from Josef K, and Davy
Henderson from Fire Engines.
Meeting Burchill was something else again. A few years ago Tim Fountain
had written a play about her which was at the Assembly Rooms as part of
the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and which she was coming up to see. I
was given the dream gig of basically hanging out with her for a day or
so and writing about it. I’ll never forget her walking into the
Assembly Rooms bar, with her fringe covering her face, totally
self-conscious. Then she spoke a mile a minute, was uber-smart and
could turn from little girl to bitch in an instant. It was exhausting,
but full of incident and colour, and watching the play with her was
fascinating. Not as fascinating as watching Tim Fountain’s other play,
mind, which was about his personal experiences of online dating through
gay contact sites, which he’s use live during the play, so the show
different every time, with updates of his success rate during the
Fringe. Burchill thought this was disgusting, and talked all the way
through it saying as much. I’m used to staying quiet during shows, so
was pretty mortified. It all made for great material, mind.
My other big influence growing up was fanzines. All that DIY Xeroxed
stuff really appealed, although some of the writing I found a bit
leaden. In Liverpool there was a mag called Merseysound, which the
clue’s in the title as to what it was about, which covered the
Liverpool music scene in a newsy, informative, cheap and cheerful sort
of way with reviews and interviews that were okay, but a bit too
chummy. There was also a zine called Breakout, which I started doing
reviews for when I was about seventeen or so. That was the same sort of
thing, and was run by a guy who also put on evenings of ‘alternative
entertainment’ at a place called the Left Bank Bistro, which was on
Matthew Street where the Cavern and Eric’s, the club that spawned Echo
and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and the first post punk wave of
Liverpool bands, had been, and which later became the John Lennon bar,
where rather bizarrely you needed to wear a tie to get in.
The big zine in Liverpool, though, was The End, which started writing
about football as well as music, and was less knowingly arty, I
suppose, than the stuff I was into. It had jokey articles on training
shoes and haircuts and came from a scally culture. It was co-founded by
Peter Hooton, who went on to sing with a band called The Farm, who had
a hit or two in the early 1990s, and pre-dated the swathe of football
fanzines that came up in the 90s. It had an ‘in’s’ and ‘out’s column
which was a hilarious piss-take of the kind of fashion barometers you
still get in the Guardian magazine today.
It also influenced other zines. I remember buying a zine at a gig once
called Attack on Bzag, which was like a Yorkshire version of The End,
with ‘in’s’ and ‘out’s’ column and everything off this mouthy little
fella, who turned out to be James Brown, who a few years later started
writing for NME, and later still founded Loaded magazine, which took
all the scurrilous ideas from zines like The End and Attack on Bzag,
then put them together with pictures of girls off the telly with not
many clothes on, and hey presto, New Lad culture is born. You can say
what you like about the soft porn mag it became and the other mags it
spawned which were far worse, but for those first few issues of Loaded
there was some fantastic writing. It leant to a gonzo style, which I’ll
say more about later, but it was terrific stuff.
Back to my influences, however, and the zine I read most was a thing
called City Fun, which came out of Manchester and was produced
fortnightly, like a more lo-fi version of the sorts of listings
magazines we have now, but with ten times more attitude. I’ve still got
most of them, and its interesting watching it develop from a really
scrappy photocopied thing that was badly typed and was held together
with one staple in the corner and had what must’ve been about ten
different live reviews of The Fall, to this well put-together and
well-laid out thing that had really good design that used all these
retro images, and was really sarcastic and sneering about Factory
Records, music and art in general, and had a really bitchy gossip
column about what must’ve been a really small scene, and yet managed to
be what at the time reads as really articulate and clever, but which
was probably really pretentious. I suppose studenty would cover all
bases, if that’s not too pejorative a term. Most of this attitude came
from Liz Naylor and Cath Carrol, who were editors during its liveliest
period, and even though I was in another city and had nothing to do
with anything in it, I just lapped it up, especially when they’d do
things like for the issue that tied in with the 1981 royal wedding,
they’d have a drawing of Prince Charles and Princess Di taken from a
famous photo of the time, but doctored so that Charles had his hand
inside Di’s blouse..
What interested me as well was that none of the articles were by-lined,
but in the spirit of collectivism there was a box on the back page
listing all the contributors. Sometimes these included people like Mark
E Smith or Dick Witts, who played in a band called The Passage, was
Music and Dance Officer for Merseyside Arts and brought Merce
Cunningham to Liverpool, took over from Tony Wilson on What’s On, and
who ended up running the Camden Festival and writing a very readable
and very funny history of the arts council called Artist Unknown, and
is now a lecturer in Edinburgh University’s Music department. So you
had to guess who might have written what, which was fun.
What also interested me was that City Fun wasn’t just about music, but
had film, theatre and art in there as well as politics. James Anderton,
who was a right-wing Christian, was Greater Manchester’s Chief of
Police at the time, so beyond the bitchiness there was something real
to kick against. So City Fun was a kind of community paper for the
Manchester arts scene as was, I guess, and was one of the early signs
of things broadening out and treating arts and culture in a way that
was both intelligent and scurrilous at the same time. Other zines that
did that were Printed Noises, and Debris, which I bought off someone
one night in the Hacienda long before the whole rave thing started, and
when it was still a little bit rubbish, and which I found out later was
the DJ Dave Haslam’s magazine. Glossy magazines like The Face came
shortly after, but City Fun was the pioneer. ID as well, which started
as a zine sold at clubs, and only later became the permanently winking
glossy we know today.
Myself and a guy called Dom Phillips started a zine called (sigh) The
Subterranean, after the Jack Kerouac novel, which Dom was a fan of. I
wanted it to be like City Fun, but we didn’t have a clue really, and it
only lasted one very badly laid out issue which had been typed up by
someone with dyslexia before we fell out. Dom went on to edit Mixmag,
and I think now lives in Brazil.
The next thing that did if for me after City Fun was much later, and
was Julie Burchill’s magazine, which was called the Modern Review.
Again, this was a scurrilous but brilliantly written take on pop
culture that even had stuff by Burchill herself doing stuff when she
could be bothered. That came in two periods. The first was in a sort of
folded-up broadsheet thing, and was really hard to find unless you
subscribed, because the distribution was rubbish. But that was when
Burchill was married to Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young was also on the
team.
That all ended when Burchill left Landesman for Charlotte Raven, who
became editor of Modern Review’s second incarnation, which was a more
conventional regular magazine format, and which coincided with the
arrival the Spice Girls, Britpop and all that. Again, its attitude was
brilliant; petulant, spoilt, attention-seeking and arrogant. It was
bankrolled by raven’s millionaire father, but lost a fortune, and when
Burchill and Raven split up, that was that, really.
Before all that, though, I’d picked up a secondhand copy of The New
Journalism, the volume edited by Tom Wolfe, and which featured the
likes of Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson, Truman Capote and loads
more. The over-riding premise of the book was that the novel was dead
and that journalism should be written in the same way as fiction, with
a narrative and an authorial voice rather than something dry and dull.
So you had Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which had him
following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on a bus around America
doing lots of drugs.
Then you had Thompson’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which had
Thompson racing round America doing lots of drugs in a style that
became known as gonzo, where the author is at the very centre of the
story and quite often is the story. Lester Bangs was the master of
this, great big rambling essays where he got close to his subjects and
hung out with them. In Britain Nick Kent did this in the 1970s, and his
book The Dark Stuff is great the first time, but I’m not really sure
you can write like that today. Thompson at his best, however, was a
breathless read, but loads of younger writers try to imitate that
style, but end up looking silly because they’re not as good as Thompson
was in his prime. Loaded had tons of that kind of stuff, where a journo
would end up missing flights, doing drugs and getting lost in the
desert in pursuit of some band or other. Anyone can get access to drugs
and bands today if they want to, so reading about it is really boring.
Other stuff I’ve read that’s been important includes John Berger’s Ways
of Seeing, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Mythologies by the
semiologist Roland Barthes, which has the best intellectual
justification of professional wresting ever in it. Oh, and there’s
Simon Garfield’s book The Wrestling, which is an oral history of
British wrestling, and how this end of the pier entertainment ended up
being taken off TV in the 1980s. It’s a heartbreaking read, fabulously
well-written.
Beyond all this, though, was an intense interest in what was going on
around me that was the big influence, and if you don’t have that
interest in the first place, then you’re probably as well not
bothering. I still despair after packing a bunch of wannabe journos
from Edinburgh University off to see a play at the Royal Lyceum Theatre
in Edinburgh called Laurel and Hardy, which was an impressionistic play
by Tom McGrath about the slapstick double act from the movies just
after the silent era, and which had originally been done at the
traverse in the 70s. I got them all to do a mock review, and at least
they all handed something in, which doesn’t always happen with these
things, which is a real shame, because the students who don’t bother
handing stuff in for whatever reason, I don’t know, maybe they think
they know best, are generally the ones whose work needs the most
attention.
But about half the Laurel and Hardy reviews that were handed in opened
with variations on the line of, ‘Well I’ve never heard of Laurel and
Hardy, but I’m not sure this play has anything to say to my
generation,’ and so on. Now, there are several things going on here.
First of all, and leaving aside the ridiculous notion that a play
somehow has to be responsible for a younger generation when that’s
patently not what it’s been written for, if you’ve never heard of
Laurel and Hardy, what planet are you on? And if you really haven’t
heard of them, why didn’t you think to use the simplest research tool
you have at your fingertips called the internet and find out from there
who they were?
Secondly, and by the same token, fair enough if you don’t know the
play, but why didn’t you look into its history and who the writer is?
Because of its subject matter the play tends to get done a fair bit,
and Tom McGrath is a really important figure with a really interesting
life, who was a crucial part of the 1960s counter culture, edited Peace
News and International Times, read at the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poetry
reading with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow,
which later became the CCA, brought Miles Davis and Sun Ra to Glasgow
for the first time, was part of a performance art group, and that was
all before he started writing plays, and when he did they were on at
the Traverse in the seventies and eighties during a really interesting
time.
So that was what staggered me most about that exercise, the complete
and utter lack of curiosity in the subject they were supposed to be
criticising. They didn’t even have the gumption to try and crib from
the programme notes, so that was all very disappointing and surprising.
I mean, what were they being taught at Edinburgh University, and why
were they still behaving like school-children who needed led by the
hand to everything? Infuriating, really.
Oddly enough, in my experience it’s the exact opposite with art college
students. Art students are so interested in their given subject that
they sometimes lose sight of anything beyond it, which is brilliant in
terms of their practice, but any attempt to translate it in any kind of
written form can sometimes make it read as exclusive, obfuscatory and
at times downright indecipherable.
For a publication with a general readership not necessarily focused on
the arts, that’s a turn-off from the start. Even with a specialist
publication, you have to be clear about what it is you’re saying.
Having said that, though, writing about visual art you can tend to be
more lateral than other artforms, just because I suppose by its very
nature it lends itself to that kind of approach. Writing texts or
essays for shows, for instance, which is something I’ve only done a
little bit of, and which I don’t regard as criticism, but as this weird
hybrid that allows you to think outside the box in a way that relates
to the thing it’s nominally ‘about’, is really interesting. On the one
hand, you have to be quite factual and put everything in historical and
contemporary context, but at the same time there can be a
discursiveness or an abstraction to the way it’s written.
By the same token, though, some of it can be terribly dry and something
that’s all researched thoroughly as if it’s an academic essay, but
which has no heart or insight beyond what’s already been set down and
absorbed. Research is wonderful, especially if it’s about something you
don’t necessarily know much about, but which can end up sending you off
on all these interconnected tangents. On its own, though, it’s really
dull. I only really learnt to research when I accidentally started
writing obituaries, which is something I oddly enjoy doing, but which
you’re effectively becoming a kind of chief mourner paying your
respects, so have to be hyper-sensitive, both to historical fact as
well as trying to capture some kind of essence of the person you’re
writing about.
But in terms of being exposed to culture, for me, growing up in the
north of England at the time I did I was really lucky. It was all
comics and TV for me. That was my cultural education. From Marvel and
DC comics, you don’t realise it at the time, but you’re being opened to
these fantastical science-fiction worlds which, in a post 1960s
climate, was all about identity, masks and a black and white mythology
of heroes and villains with very interesting psychological make-up all
living in this parallel universe.
There was a book by the science-fiction writer Phillip Jose Farmer
called Doc Savage – His Apocalyptic Life, which took as its starting
point Doc Savage the action hero and Man of Bronze from 1930s pulp
novels who Marvel had done a comic book of on the back of a film with
Ron Ely, who’d played Tarzan on TV, playing Savage. What Farmer did was
link all these comic strip worlds together and imagine Doc Savage as
this dualistic martyr of mixed sexual leanings who hung around with
this band of brothers with whom he saved the world, and whose attitude
towards women was ambivalent to say the least. Which is all a bit of a
head-fuck when you’re twelve.
But I’d already started writing stuff down even before that. The
earliest I remember was one year, just before Christmas, and me and my
sister were about to take a train from Liverpool to a place called
Immingham, which is near Grimsby, to live with my Dad. Not long before we
had to leave, there was a programme called Clapperboard on, which was a
film programme for kids, and which I remember used to go on about
Disney and the Children’s Film Foundation a lot.
The one that was on that day was looking at how comic characters had
transferred to the movies. Now, today, with Spiderman and Iron Man and
Wolverine or whatever, that sort of thing is ten a penny, but at that
time I think it must’ve consisted mainly of the 1960s Batman film, the
really campy one that took from the TV series, a 1940s Superman serial,
and I think there was a Captain America serial as well, maybe Flash
Gordon, stuff like that.
But we nearly missed the train because I had to see the end of this
programme. Once on the train, which we caught by a hairsbreadth, I
must’ve had some kind of exercise book with me, and I think a pencil,
and I just writing down all these things that I’d been thinking about
that had been in the Clapperboard programme. Screeds and screeds of it,
describing the film clips and how they related to the actual comics,
and I just remember getting totally absorbed in it. I’m not pretending
it was sophisticated and incisive in any way, because I’m sure it
wasn’t and was just the random thoughts of a ten or eleven year old,
and if you wanted to psychologise it you could say it was more about
deflecting whatever else was going on by creating your own world or
whatever, but thinking about it, that was probably the first piece of
criticism I ever wrote.
Much later, when I’d started going out to see bands, I’d go home and
sit up all night writing these lengthy reviews, just for myself really,
with no idea of how you ever got something published, even in a
fanzine, let alone a paper or a magazine. I just did it instinctively.
It’ll probably turn out to have been some kind of autism or OCD once
I’ve gone, but it’s just something I’ve always done.
But it was TV that really did it. Bear in mind at that time there were
only three channels, and that BBC 2 was the arty station, and was the
only place you could see foreign films with subtitles. Bear in mind as
well that then it took five years before a film could be shown on TV
for the first time. The result of that was all these films that had
been made in 1971 or 1972, when there was a lot of free-thinking going
on, didn’t appear on TV until the late 1970s, so there was this weird
time-lapse that meant a lot of people growing up were subverted by
stuff from the generation up from them.
For me it was If… and O Lucky Man, Silent Running and Dark Star, Deep
End and The Final Programme, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and
Violet Noziere, Two Lane Blacktop and One day In The Life of Ivan
Denisovitch, Get Carter and Blow Up. That was the dramatic end of it,
these dark little films full of ideas and silences, but beyond that it
was all about Tony Wilson.
Tony Wilson read the news on Granada Reports, and even then you knew
there was something not quite right. There was something sarcastic
about him, and he seemed to sneer when he read the headliners, as
though it was all one big joke only he was in on. All the other
presenters did features on canals or hill-walking, but Wilson did a
programme within Granada Reports called What’s On, which was on a
Thursday teatime, and which was an arts and entertainment magazine
programme, which had excerpts of stuff that was happening, and which
usually finished with a band. It was eventually put on late night and
extended to half an hour, all of which gave rise to So It Goes, a more
obtuse version of the same thing. Between those two programmes Wilson
put on the first TV appearances of the Sex Pistols, The Fall, Joy
Division, Buzzcocks, Magazine, Blondie, Devo and god knows who else,
Ted Milton from the band Blurt doing this weird puppet show, or John
Cooper Clarke doing poetry that sounded like a mix of working man’s
club cabaret and performance art.
There were pieces too on toasting, where reggae singers do their own
thing over versions of records at sound-clashes, and I remember Gilbert
and George being on doing all their living sculpture stuff. Bear in
mind a lot of this stuff was all on at 6.15pm after the main regional
news stories. How Wilson got away with it I don’t know, but that
must’ve turned on an entire generation who weren’t old enough to go out
to see stuff yet, but had a head start in a way that made you think it
was probably all going to be like that when you did.
Then once Factory Records started coming to prominence through Joy
Division and everything else, and you started putting two and two
together, and realised that the same guy off the telly was the person
running what at the time was the coolest record label on the planet,
that was when everything started to make sense. You had Peter Saville’s
record sleeves that took from constructivism, and showed that a record
could be a piece of art on both an aural and a visual level, which
again gets you interested in other things, and other worlds open up
almost by default.
Two compilation albums spring to mind on that score. One was a cassette
called From Brussels With Love, the title of which was obviously a play
on words from the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love. The
other was a double vinyl album called Fruit of the Original Sin. Both
were put on the Belgian label, Les Disques du Crepuscule, who were
connected to Factory, whose bands like A certain Ratio and The Durutti
Column appeared on them both, as did Scottish bands like Orange Juice
and The French Impressionists.
But there was also stuff like ambient instrumentals by Harold Budd and
Michael Nyman, and what we’d now call sound art pieces by Bruce Gilbert
from Wire. On From Brussels With love there was a twenty minute
interview – in French – with the actress Jeanne Moreau, and on the
other side there was one with Brian Eno, who at that time, which was
only seven years after he’d left Roxy Music even though it felt an age
away, had not long proselytized the whole idea of ambient, and was
probably just starting to work with Talking Heads. On From Brussels
With Love, there was an interview – again in French - with the
playwright and novelist Marguerite Duras, who was a crucial figure in
the nouveau Roman school of writing, and who pops up in pictures of
parties in Edinburgh during the 1960s writing conferences and so on.
There was also a live spoken word recording of William Burroughs, whose
novels make total sense if you put them in his voice, and someone
playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune, which was the first time I’d ever
heard Debussy. So beyond bands, you’ve suddenly got all these different
artforms rubbing up against each other in this delicious way that makes
it feel like a movement, even though it clearly wasn’t. But to give all
this the gravitas of more formalised artforms suggested someone
understood the long term significance of all this.
Then when Channel Four started in 1982, and you’d have seasons of films
by Fassbinder and Godard, late night programmes of new video art and
full-length performances by Pina Bausch. For a while it was a real
cultural experiment, putting left-field art into the living room and
exploring the limits of what a television programme could be. Of
course, some of it was nonsense, but it was just full of ideas that I
know other people of my generation who are now artists or curators or
writers were hugely influenced by.
Once you’re interested in all of this, and once you start going out to
see stuff first-hand beyond a TV screen, it becomes something else
again. I realised recently that the first three bands I ever went to
see were Joy Division, Magazine and The Fall. All Manchester bands
oddly enough, and all with different forms of theatricality attached.
Even though I almost certainly recognised the importance of them all,
you’ve no idea that in thirty years time just how they’re going to be
historicised as crucial signifiers of how pop culture turned out.
Beyond that, and the Liverpool bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and
Teardrop Explodes, both of whom at the time were being co-managed,
albeit I suspect in a very loose way, by Bill Drummond, who would go on
to the KLF and the K Foundation’s burning a million quid moment, and
who was probably partly responsible for the visual aspects of the bands
stage shows involving camouflage and netting and so on, there was other
stuff going on.
There was a club called Plato’s Ballroom, which only ever happened
about eight times every other Wednesday and then monthly throughout
1981, but which the organisers said was an attempt to make gigs more
interesting, and to get art out of the galleries. That manifested
itself in an old chicken-in-pa-basket cabaret club called Mr Pickwicks
as this attempted happening, where the first night you’d get New Order
playing what must have only been their seventh or eighth gig after Ian
Curtis killed himself ass the headline act supported by two other
bands, Section 25 and Send No Flowers.
Inbetween all this you’d have a poet and some performance art involving
a man trying to get out of a coffin-shaped box while a spoken-word tape
loop played, while over incendiary records by The Pop Group and
Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, - which I
thought was remarkable and was probably the first time I’d heard
sampling on what was basically a sound-collage or a Burroughsian cut-up
applied to dance music – there’d be screenings of Bunuel’s Un Chien
Andalou and loads of these short homo-erotic films about bikers and
sailors by Kenneth Anger, while the people running the club, who called
themselves the Situationalist (sic) Youth Collective – one of whom,
incidentally, went on to manage Happy Mondays, which could start me on
a riff about how the audience-performer relationship was democratised
on the dancefloor, but another time - would put coloured acetate and
stuff in front of the lights to make it even more interesting, and
which was pure Mark Boyle stuff at UFO in the sixties in retrospect.
Another night there was a jazz dance troupe and a Wild West show. Jah
Wobble played what was probably his first live show since he left
Public Image Limited, Cabaret Voltaire played when they were still a
trio at their experimental peak. There was more performance art
involving a man taking his clothes off on the dance floor and putting a
bucket of coloured water over his head.
Everything seemed up for grabs and was totally experimental. I realise
now that this sort of Happening wasn’t a new idea, and dated right back
in part to Andy Warhol’s original Factory, then back further to the
original Cabaret Voltaire club the Dadaists started in Zurich. Showing
films and stuff on club nights is quite commonplace these days, but in
that post-punk climate, for me to see the power of the live event that
I’d only previously seen on a TV screen, and then not much, was
mind-blowing.
Sorry, I realise this is a ridiculously long answer, but what I suppose
I’m trying to get over is the inter-connectedness of everything,
and how some things can influence everything you do, both in life and
work. You don’t realise when you’re thirteen, fourteen or fifteen that
a book, a record, a comic, a TV show, a gig or whatever that you
stumble across and become interested in for whatever reason, you don’t
realise that, especially in this job, it will trickle down into and
inform all your ideas and responses and ways of thinking. So I suppose
what I’m saying is, stay true to your obsessions from an early age,
because they’re going to be your lifeblood. I’m sure I’ve probably
missed something out.
RC - Has the role of the critic changed?
NC - Totally, I think. When I started, it was the fag-end of the 1980s,
early 1990s wave where critical theory and media studies courses had
trickled down into the workplace and there was still something of a
media boom. Bear in mind it wasn’t that long ago before that that the
idea of getting a gig review of a small club show into a broadsheet
would’ve been unthinkable, so I suspect those doors had been opened up
by the generation of writers who’d come through the music press and
moved into broadsheets.
At that time there was no computers, no internet and no culture of
blogs, Twitter or Facebook. These days, because of that sort of access,
everyone’s a critic, or at least they think they are.
Of course, we could go right back to the 1950s and 1960s, when theatre
critics like Kenneth Tynan were regarded as God. Those days are long
gone, and quite rightly so, some might say. There are still quite a few
critics around, alas, who, despite not being fit to lick Tynan’s boots,
still actually believe they are God, and behave accordingly.
RC - Is it better to be an informed intellectual or an amateur? (Orson
Welles)
NC - Informed amateurs are fine, and that’s where some of the best blogs
come from. It’s the uninformed amateur I worry about. The sort of
blogger – or even broadsheet journalist – who opens a piece with a
phrase like ‘Well, I didn’t know anything about this band/artist/play
before I went in to see them, and now I still don’t' just makes me stop
reading. Then there’s the type who thinks the minutiatie of their life
is more interesting than what they’re supposed to be writing about, as
in, ‘I was feeling quite tired when I left the house, and the rain
didn’t help, and the bar was packed when I got to the venue. Then I got
stuck behind someone really tall, and my pint was off, so all in all it
wasn’t a good night, really, although the band were quite good.’ Sorry,
mate. I’m not interested.
We’ve all been there, mind. I still cringe when I recall going on The
Usual Suspects, BBC Radio Scotland’s then arts review programme that
eventually morphed into what’s now The Arts Café, having been packed
off to the opera amongst other places. While my colleagues gave
informed critiques of the staging and the music, I suddenly heard
myself enthusiastically uttering on live radio the words, ‘Well, I’ve
never been to an opera before but I thought it was great!’ Which was
tragic. They should’ve frog-marched me out of the studio there and then
on the grounds of me being a fraud.
But maybe I’m being a tad unfair here, because I know some of the
appeal of the zine culture that came out of the Riot Grrl movement,
especially, was all about creating a sense of community by being quite
open about your personal traumas, and in that context it makes sense
and produced some really valuable work, but if it’s just some posh
tosser desperate to be part of some mythical scene whining on about how
he’s great mates with someone he once met at a boutique music festival,
as a reader I couldn’t care less.
Blogs do make you write in a different way, though, I’ve found. I’ve
only dipped a very cautious toe into the blogosphere, and while I’ve
enjoyed it, I found I was distracted pretty quickly. It’s a much more
personal way of writing for some reason, much more discursive, possibly
because there’s no real framework in terms of word-counts and such-like
except for those you impose on yourself. On the one hand, a blog is
useful as an archival tool to send out into the world a record of all
your published material. This is especially useful if some grumpy sub
has hacked your copy from the bottom up so your original review now
ends mid sentence halfway through the second of the three paragraphs
you wrote – this actually happened, to my review of a PJ Harvey and
John Parrish gig. You can also put full versions of stuff you’ve had to
cut yourself for space reasons, the director’s cut or the twelve inch
extended version if you will.
A blog is also useful to pursue other, lengthier forms of writing. I
started writing a series for a blog in America that started off about
music in Scotland, but which ended up criss-crossing between music,
politics and other stuff from now that relates to stuff both in
Scotland and in Liverpool from thirty years ago. I only did three, and
we imposed a cap of a thousand words on each, so you’ve got these
cheesily tacked-on false cliffhanger endings like it’s a Saturday
morning serial or something, but I’d like to go back to it eventually.
But criticism is as fluid thing, and you have to adapt, both to
changing situations in terms of formats and outlets, and to the stuff
you’re writing about. I decided early on that I wanted to write about
theatre with the same enthusiasm as someone might write about pop
music, and if I was writing about music, I wanted to invest it with the
same intellectual gravitas and respect as theatre or any other of the
high arts did. This wasn’t a new idea, I know, and probably came from
my reading of the Modern Review, the slogan of which was ‘Low Culture
For Highbrows.’
I found out very quickly, however, that each artform tended to dictate
how you write about it, although I’m not entirely sure that’s still
true today, especially in the visual arts, where forms are blurring
into each other more and more. Having said that, maybe it’s just me,
because these days I’m writing about art and music as much as I am
about theatre and performance, and everything blurs into each other. Or
at least that’s the feeling I get. Music and art have certainly crossed
over for a long time, and visual artists seem to becoming more
interested in performance.
Once again, this isn’t a new idea, but I think by coming from a
primarily performative background I’ve accidentally stumbled onto a way
of writing or a set of references that straddles all these worlds.
Whether that’s a trend, a generational thing or something else, I don’t
know, but it’s certainly really interesting for me at the moment.
RC - What matters most, good writing or good observation?
NC - Both. You can’t have one without the other. You can observe as well as
you like, but if you can’t translate that into any kind of readable
text, then there’s really not much point to it. Similarly, you can
write like a dream, but if you’ve nothing to say or if you don’t know
your subject or have no instinctive insight into whatever it is you’re
looking at, then you’re as well not bothering.
Criticism, at least in broadsheet terms, isn’t about writing an essay.
It’s about interpreting something and translating it in a way that
captures the essence of a work’s successes and failures and might make
people sometimes violently disagree with you, but which is as valid as
anything else.
RC - What are the main rules for writing criticism?
NC - Be good. Be curious. Watch, listen and learn. Read lots. See lots. Find out what you're passionate about. Be curious. Do your homework. Get
your facts right. Spell people's names correctly. Do not bring your
personal prejudices to the table. Do not think that you’re more
interesting or important than the thing you’re writing about, because
you’re not. Be honest. Don’t toady. Never think you’re above being
edited. Love what you do. And never ever lose touch with your own sense
of ridiculousness. Art, music and theatre can be wonderful,
life-changing things, and criticism is a serious business that should
take what its critiqueing equally seriously in terms of rigorous
intellectual engagement and discourse. But you’re not going down the
salt-mines for real. The coal-face of popular culture is actually quite
a fun place to be, so enjoy it, and sometimes if it’s necessary hate it
as well. In terms of opinion, there’s no such thing as wrong and right.
After that, you’re laughing, really.
ends
Rachael Cloughton - Who do you consider a good critic?
Neil Cooper - It depends what sort of critic you mean. There are different types,
from broadsheet journalism and tabloid journalism to specialist
publications, and then there are academic critics. All are doing
different things, and all in their own contexts are as valid as each
other, but I’m not academic in any way, shape or form, so can only
really talk about criticism from a broadsheet newspaper or arts
magazine point of view.
To be honest with you, though, I don’t read nearly as much criticism as
I probably did before I started doing what I do. That’s partly to do
with a time thing, and partly to do with being really easily led and
not accidentally mimicking whoever you’ve just been reading. I’ve
consciously had to stop reading certain things because of that. The
best example was when I was reading the collected criticism of Kenneth
Tynan, who was the enfant terrible of theatre criticism during the
fifties and sixties. I’d been sent the book to review, and to be honest
I’d never read him, because I tend to steer clear of these sacred cows
who everyone seems to adore. I remember at college everyone going on
about the actor Anthony Sher’s book, To Play The King, which was a kind
of extended diary of his experience rehearsing and playing Richard The
Third. I started it and was just appalled, because he just seemed to be
bursting into tears and splitting up with his boyfriend all the way
through it.
But Tynan’s stuff was quite interesting, written in this flamboyant but
ornate style. After reading some of it, I had to file a piece for the
paper, and within seconds the phone went, and it was my boss telling me
that what I’d sent was completely impenetrable, made no sense at all
and could I rewrite it please. What I’d done by accidentally trying to
write like what I’d just read, was to completely over-egg things in a
way that was completely inappropriate.
But to answer the question, I tend to read factual books, largely
music-based, more than individual criticism, unless it’s Paul Morley in
the Observer or something. Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming was great,
and all Morley’s books are in there, going right back to Ask, his book
of old NME interviews. I’ve just been reading David Toop’s latest book
on sound and Richard Strange’s autobiography. John Harris’s book on the
Brit-pop/Blair era, The Last Party was really good. Bill Drummond’s
book, 45, is fantastic, although that’s more memoir than criticism,
Greil Marcus’ books are great, Andrew O’Hagen’s book The Missing is one
of the best none-fiction books I’ve ever read, Simon Reynolds’ Rip It
Up and Start Again is essential, as is his blog, as well as other blogs
like The Quietus and Your Heart Out.
Michael Bracewell’s book England Is Mine I loved when it came out, as
it looks at a lot of the pop cultural iconography that I grew up with.
In terms of older books, one of my bibles is Bomb Culture by Jeff
Nuttall, the poet, artist, art teacher and musician, which is a
first-hand account of the sixties. Nuttall’s last book before he died,
Art and the Degradation of Awareness is a lacerating account of the
contemporary art scene. Albert Hunt’s Hope For Great Happenings is
another bible. Hunt taught at Bradford art school, founded a
performance/theatre group there, and ended up working with the director
Peter Brook on the 1968 anti Vietnam play, US. Again, these aren’t
really criticism, but they’re great writing and have great ideas, and
are really important historically. In terms of magazines I buy The
Wire, which is up and down, dip into Frieze which is the same, get the
Guardian where I like Alexis Petridis, Simon Hattenstone and Adrian
Searle, although I’m thinking of switching to the Indy since the
Guardian started supporting the Lib-Dems, and I buy the Herald if I’m
in it, although I probably should buy it more, just to get more of a
sense of who I’m writing for.
I get Map and The List, obviously, both of which I write for. I used to
quite like The Idler in terms of attitude as much as content, and I
read Viz comic, which I know isn’t really applicable in terms of the
question asked, but which is something I reckon influences me as much
as anything else. I’ve just noticed on my bookshelves there are four
books about The Fall. That’s really quite sad, isn’t it. I have this
private theory that Mark E Smith is the greatest theatre director since
the Polish guru Tadeusz Kantor, and that in terms of onstage
interventions they were both doing the same thing, so maybe I’ll write
one about that one of these days.
I find it odd, I have to say, that both in art and literary criticism
artists and novelists review each other’s work. I think the book
industry is by far the worst offender here, in that you’ll an author
whose novels are published by Jonathan Cape, say, who reviews another
novelist of the same generation on the same imprint, and then a few
months later the second author returns the favour for the guy who
reviewed their book, and so on. What you end up with is a lot of books
with favourable quotes from high-profile authors who are all published
by the same people.
In the art world it’s a bit different, because there seems to be more
of a crossover, because artists have to multi-task for economic reasons
or whatever, but again you sometimes read high-profile artists
reviewing their mates from the same gallery. Now I’m sure they’ll have
a different kind of insight into the work, and I know friendships and
relationships in tight-knit artistic circles are inevitable, but you
really have to keep some kind of professional distance, however big a
fan or a friend you may be. Because one of these days, if you’re honest
and have integrity about what you do, you might have to say something
not terribly flattering about them, and if you’re too close that’s
going to hurt both parties.
You have to remember that, unless you’re writing a text or an essay for
a gallery publication or catalogue, which are really doing something
different and are more partisan, you’re not writing for the artist or
the curator, but for the reader. Sure, let’s not be naïve and pretend
that something that’s potentially such a niche subject is going to be
read by the masses, but largely by specialists and professionals with
some kind of vested interest. But even there, if you’re serious about
what you do and aren’t solely interested in networking, you have to
keep your distance, and cut through some of the bullshit in terms of
how some events are mythologised by the people who put them on.
The critic’s job is threefold. You have to say what something is, what
it says it’s trying to do, and whether it achieves it or not. Beyond
that, there are the much bigger historical, social and political
contexts and cultural connections to be made, though in a 280 word or
500 word review, you’re quite often only scratching the surface. That’s
fine, though, they’re pointers for further reading if anyone can be
bothered to continue with the dialogue, which is what a review is the
starting point of. No, that’s not true, actually. The work you’re
writing about is the start of the dialogue, the review attempts to
define that critically, and whatever follows out of that continues the
discourse.
In broadsheets, and most other places too I imagine, you have to get
all this down in a clear, informative and constructive way, and in a
way that is a lively and, if appropriate, entertaining read. To some
extent you’ll be dictated to by what you’re writing about, but you
still have to use your own voice, which you obviously don’t find
immediately, but comes through experience and from being absorbed by
whatever you’re interested in.
Mind you, the sort of nepotism in book and art reviews happens in music
as well. I’ve seen writers who are in bands review records and gigs by
artists who run the record label that releases the band’s records. For
some reason some publications are willing to be complicit in that sort
of nepotism, but for me those sorts of reviews aren’t to be taken in
any way seriously.
This job is a pretty promiscuous one really, in that you’re moving
fairly quickly from one thing to the next, and while you might fall in
love with something, the next thing the people who made it do might not
be so good, so you fall out of love, and, if you want to extend the
metaphor, end up being disappointed, betraying them and finding
something better, effectively trading them in for a younger model.
That’s the case with interviews as well. For the time you’re
interviewing someone, they’re the most interesting, fascinating and
funniest person in the world. As soon as you’ve written it up, that’s
that, game over, next please. That’s not as callous as it sounds, it’s
just how it is, for me at least. I know some people who become best
friends with their interviewees, but for me that would just get messy.
Whenever I’ve interviewed mates it’s always been awkward, and they
always moan about whatever I write, no matter how nice it is, so I tend
to try and avoid it. Then there’s obituaries, which, and it sounds bad,
I love writing. If you’re going to do an obituary justice, you have to
write as though you’re the chief mourner.
RC - Which critics did you read when you were young?
NC - NME was my bible growing up. It had such a profound influence on my
generation of people who were interested in art and pop culture that
it’s hard to equate with the glossy comic it became. At that time,
which was the late 1970s and early 1980s, just after punk, which has
now become historicized as a style called post-punk, there seemed to be
so many ideas flying around that if you were curious your mind was
opened up to everything.
So you had Paul Morley, Julie Burchill and Ian Penman all writing for
NME at roughly the same time. You tended to latch onto writers who were
interested in the same sorts of thing as you, dependent on what you
heard on John Peel that week, or quite often you’d read about a band
before you’d even heard them and just knew that you’d like them. As a
big for instance, I read about Joy Division before I ever heard them.
It was a review of their first album, Unknown Pleasures, in Sounds
rather than NME oddly. And there was something about the way it was
written, I think by Dave McCullough, who was Sounds’ equivalent of Paul
Morley, and probably something about the grainy photograph that went
with it of these four slightly haunted looking young men, that made my
stomach churn like a washing machine with nervous excitement.
When I actually heard them, which was probably a matter of days, they
sounded exactly like I’d imagined them from the review. Then when I saw
them, that was something else again. But imagine the power of that, all
from reading a review.
The same thing happened after reading a review of the Young Marble
Giants album, and one of The Pop Group albums. That one was by Ian
Penman, who from memory namedropped everyone from Nietzsche to
Jean-Paul Sarte to (probably) Jean Braudillard. Deeply pretentious, and
you realise now that these writers who were actually only a few years
older than me were probably feeling their way around the Penguin Modern
Classics canon just as much as I was, but to read that in a review of a
record was a phenomenal eye-opener. It showed that music didn’t exist
in a vacuum, but was connected to politics and philosophy and other art
movements, and most of all was about ideas that you didn’t always get,
but that was why they were so thrilling. They were opening a door into
other worlds.
Of course, you don’t realise then how much something you’re reading or
listening to or watching is going to affect everything you do and how
you think and see the world for ever after. Then you’re just doing it,
and accidentally getting the best education a young man starting out in
the world can get.
But there was Paul Morley, writing these big off-the-wall articles that
equated pop music with art and post-modernism in a way he’d perfect a
few years later when he co-founded ZTT Records, and asking Jerry Garcia
of the Grateful Dead, who did fifteen-minute songs, if he’d heard of
Fire Engines, who did fifteen-minute sets. Morley’s probably my most
long-term influence, even though sometimes these days he can border on
the self-parodic. But anyone who can write a hundred page article about
Michael Jackson, as he did in the second issue of Loops magazine, which
is a magazine co-produced by Domino Records, and is getting back to
some of the more expansive writing of the old NME, or an entire book of
left-field music history based on an imaginary car journey with Kylie
Minogue, is infinitely more interesting than someone giving a five star
review to a record by the boss of his record label, which,
incidentally, I’ve seen happen.
Then there was Julie Burchill, who’d just write these most scabrous
slag-offs of all the perceived sacred cows, and as it turned out,
although it opened a door for her, probably didn’t like the music that
came out of punk very much. That didn’t matter, though, because she
wrote so well. I remember one column she wrote in The Face in 1984
called ‘The Rage Is Beige,’ which was about how music was neither black
nor white anymore, and cited the likes of Prince and Madonna as
examples of this. At that time, remember, there were serious
demarcations between black and white music, between indie and dance
music, and there was a huge outcry when Stuart Cosgrove started writing
about rap and hip-hop in NME, which up until then had been the ultimate
preserve of serious young white men in long macs.
Then again, there was a similar thing a couple of years ago when a
black act headlined Glastonbury, so I’m not sure how far we’ve come,
but Julie Burchill nailed how music was getting all mixed up in a way
today I suppose we’d call cross-genre, but then predicted the, ha!,
indie-dance crossover that would happen in the early 90s. Also, she’d
start going on about how great the historian AJP Taylor was, which
would open another door. These days, disagree with pretty much
everything Julie Burchill says, but she does it with such wit and style
that I could forgive her anything.
There’s a brilliant book called In Their Own Write, which is an oral
history of the music press from the 1950s up until the last few years,
and which speaks to all the main players across the years. It’s funny
to think that people like Garry Bushell and Danny Baker started out in
the music press. In fact, Danny Baker started out on the original punk
fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, which is mad.
Funnily enough, I’ve ended up meeting both Morley and Burchill over the
last few years, both of which were a real fan-boy thrill. Morley had
been doing a reading from his book, Nothing, which is about his dad’s
suicide, and a friend had interviewed him on the phone, so we got him
to speak to Morley after the reading, and we ended up in the Café Royal
upstairs, which is now the Voodoo Rooms, with him. It was funny,
because on the TV in the bar there was a documentary about Billy
Mackenzie, the singer of The Associates, who’d killed himself a couple
of years before, and who Morley had championed in his NME days. Morley
said that night that it was funny, because a lot of his favourite male
singers were Scottish; Mackenzie, Paul Haig from Josef K, and Davy
Henderson from Fire Engines.
Meeting Burchill was something else again. A few years ago Tim Fountain
had written a play about her which was at the Assembly Rooms as part of
the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and which she was coming up to see. I
was given the dream gig of basically hanging out with her for a day or
so and writing about it. I’ll never forget her walking into the
Assembly Rooms bar, with her fringe covering her face, totally
self-conscious. Then she spoke a mile a minute, was uber-smart and
could turn from little girl to bitch in an instant. It was exhausting,
but full of incident and colour, and watching the play with her was
fascinating. Not as fascinating as watching Tim Fountain’s other play,
mind, which was about his personal experiences of online dating through
gay contact sites, which he’s use live during the play, so the show
different every time, with updates of his success rate during the
Fringe. Burchill thought this was disgusting, and talked all the way
through it saying as much. I’m used to staying quiet during shows, so
was pretty mortified. It all made for great material, mind.
My other big influence growing up was fanzines. All that DIY Xeroxed
stuff really appealed, although some of the writing I found a bit
leaden. In Liverpool there was a mag called Merseysound, which the
clue’s in the title as to what it was about, which covered the
Liverpool music scene in a newsy, informative, cheap and cheerful sort
of way with reviews and interviews that were okay, but a bit too
chummy. There was also a zine called Breakout, which I started doing
reviews for when I was about seventeen or so. That was the same sort of
thing, and was run by a guy who also put on evenings of ‘alternative
entertainment’ at a place called the Left Bank Bistro, which was on
Matthew Street where the Cavern and Eric’s, the club that spawned Echo
and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and the first post punk wave of
Liverpool bands, had been, and which later became the John Lennon bar,
where rather bizarrely you needed to wear a tie to get in.
The big zine in Liverpool, though, was The End, which started writing
about football as well as music, and was less knowingly arty, I
suppose, than the stuff I was into. It had jokey articles on training
shoes and haircuts and came from a scally culture. It was co-founded by
Peter Hooton, who went on to sing with a band called The Farm, who had
a hit or two in the early 1990s, and pre-dated the swathe of football
fanzines that came up in the 90s. It had an ‘in’s’ and ‘out’s column
which was a hilarious piss-take of the kind of fashion barometers you
still get in the Guardian magazine today.
It also influenced other zines. I remember buying a zine at a gig once
called Attack on Bzag, which was like a Yorkshire version of The End,
with ‘in’s’ and ‘out’s’ column and everything off this mouthy little
fella, who turned out to be James Brown, who a few years later started
writing for NME, and later still founded Loaded magazine, which took
all the scurrilous ideas from zines like The End and Attack on Bzag,
then put them together with pictures of girls off the telly with not
many clothes on, and hey presto, New Lad culture is born. You can say
what you like about the soft porn mag it became and the other mags it
spawned which were far worse, but for those first few issues of Loaded
there was some fantastic writing. It leant to a gonzo style, which I’ll
say more about later, but it was terrific stuff.
Back to my influences, however, and the zine I read most was a thing
called City Fun, which came out of Manchester and was produced
fortnightly, like a more lo-fi version of the sorts of listings
magazines we have now, but with ten times more attitude. I’ve still got
most of them, and its interesting watching it develop from a really
scrappy photocopied thing that was badly typed and was held together
with one staple in the corner and had what must’ve been about ten
different live reviews of The Fall, to this well put-together and
well-laid out thing that had really good design that used all these
retro images, and was really sarcastic and sneering about Factory
Records, music and art in general, and had a really bitchy gossip
column about what must’ve been a really small scene, and yet managed to
be what at the time reads as really articulate and clever, but which
was probably really pretentious. I suppose studenty would cover all
bases, if that’s not too pejorative a term. Most of this attitude came
from Liz Naylor and Cath Carrol, who were editors during its liveliest
period, and even though I was in another city and had nothing to do
with anything in it, I just lapped it up, especially when they’d do
things like for the issue that tied in with the 1981 royal wedding,
they’d have a drawing of Prince Charles and Princess Di taken from a
famous photo of the time, but doctored so that Charles had his hand
inside Di’s blouse..
What interested me as well was that none of the articles were by-lined,
but in the spirit of collectivism there was a box on the back page
listing all the contributors. Sometimes these included people like Mark
E Smith or Dick Witts, who played in a band called The Passage, was
Music and Dance Officer for Merseyside Arts and brought Merce
Cunningham to Liverpool, took over from Tony Wilson on What’s On, and
who ended up running the Camden Festival and writing a very readable
and very funny history of the arts council called Artist Unknown, and
is now a lecturer in Edinburgh University’s Music department. So you
had to guess who might have written what, which was fun.
What also interested me was that City Fun wasn’t just about music, but
had film, theatre and art in there as well as politics. James Anderton,
who was a right-wing Christian, was Greater Manchester’s Chief of
Police at the time, so beyond the bitchiness there was something real
to kick against. So City Fun was a kind of community paper for the
Manchester arts scene as was, I guess, and was one of the early signs
of things broadening out and treating arts and culture in a way that
was both intelligent and scurrilous at the same time. Other zines that
did that were Printed Noises, and Debris, which I bought off someone
one night in the Hacienda long before the whole rave thing started, and
when it was still a little bit rubbish, and which I found out later was
the DJ Dave Haslam’s magazine. Glossy magazines like The Face came
shortly after, but City Fun was the pioneer. ID as well, which started
as a zine sold at clubs, and only later became the permanently winking
glossy we know today.
Myself and a guy called Dom Phillips started a zine called (sigh) The
Subterranean, after the Jack Kerouac novel, which Dom was a fan of. I
wanted it to be like City Fun, but we didn’t have a clue really, and it
only lasted one very badly laid out issue which had been typed up by
someone with dyslexia before we fell out. Dom went on to edit Mixmag,
and I think now lives in Brazil.
The next thing that did if for me after City Fun was much later, and
was Julie Burchill’s magazine, which was called the Modern Review.
Again, this was a scurrilous but brilliantly written take on pop
culture that even had stuff by Burchill herself doing stuff when she
could be bothered. That came in two periods. The first was in a sort of
folded-up broadsheet thing, and was really hard to find unless you
subscribed, because the distribution was rubbish. But that was when
Burchill was married to Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young was also on the
team.
That all ended when Burchill left Landesman for Charlotte Raven, who
became editor of Modern Review’s second incarnation, which was a more
conventional regular magazine format, and which coincided with the
arrival the Spice Girls, Britpop and all that. Again, its attitude was
brilliant; petulant, spoilt, attention-seeking and arrogant. It was
bankrolled by raven’s millionaire father, but lost a fortune, and when
Burchill and Raven split up, that was that, really.
Before all that, though, I’d picked up a secondhand copy of The New
Journalism, the volume edited by Tom Wolfe, and which featured the
likes of Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson, Truman Capote and loads
more. The over-riding premise of the book was that the novel was dead
and that journalism should be written in the same way as fiction, with
a narrative and an authorial voice rather than something dry and dull.
So you had Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which had him
following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on a bus around America
doing lots of drugs.
Then you had Thompson’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which had
Thompson racing round America doing lots of drugs in a style that
became known as gonzo, where the author is at the very centre of the
story and quite often is the story. Lester Bangs was the master of
this, great big rambling essays where he got close to his subjects and
hung out with them. In Britain Nick Kent did this in the 1970s, and his
book The Dark Stuff is great the first time, but I’m not really sure
you can write like that today. Thompson at his best, however, was a
breathless read, but loads of younger writers try to imitate that
style, but end up looking silly because they’re not as good as Thompson
was in his prime. Loaded had tons of that kind of stuff, where a journo
would end up missing flights, doing drugs and getting lost in the
desert in pursuit of some band or other. Anyone can get access to drugs
and bands today if they want to, so reading about it is really boring.
Other stuff I’ve read that’s been important includes John Berger’s Ways
of Seeing, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Mythologies by the
semiologist Roland Barthes, which has the best intellectual
justification of professional wresting ever in it. Oh, and there’s
Simon Garfield’s book The Wrestling, which is an oral history of
British wrestling, and how this end of the pier entertainment ended up
being taken off TV in the 1980s. It’s a heartbreaking read, fabulously
well-written.
Beyond all this, though, was an intense interest in what was going on
around me that was the big influence, and if you don’t have that
interest in the first place, then you’re probably as well not
bothering. I still despair after packing a bunch of wannabe journos
from Edinburgh University off to see a play at the Royal Lyceum Theatre
in Edinburgh called Laurel and Hardy, which was an impressionistic play
by Tom McGrath about the slapstick double act from the movies just
after the silent era, and which had originally been done at the
traverse in the 70s. I got them all to do a mock review, and at least
they all handed something in, which doesn’t always happen with these
things, which is a real shame, because the students who don’t bother
handing stuff in for whatever reason, I don’t know, maybe they think
they know best, are generally the ones whose work needs the most
attention.
But about half the Laurel and Hardy reviews that were handed in opened
with variations on the line of, ‘Well I’ve never heard of Laurel and
Hardy, but I’m not sure this play has anything to say to my
generation,’ and so on. Now, there are several things going on here.
First of all, and leaving aside the ridiculous notion that a play
somehow has to be responsible for a younger generation when that’s
patently not what it’s been written for, if you’ve never heard of
Laurel and Hardy, what planet are you on? And if you really haven’t
heard of them, why didn’t you think to use the simplest research tool
you have at your fingertips called the internet and find out from there
who they were?
Secondly, and by the same token, fair enough if you don’t know the
play, but why didn’t you look into its history and who the writer is?
Because of its subject matter the play tends to get done a fair bit,
and Tom McGrath is a really important figure with a really interesting
life, who was a crucial part of the 1960s counter culture, edited Peace
News and International Times, read at the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poetry
reading with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow,
which later became the CCA, brought Miles Davis and Sun Ra to Glasgow
for the first time, was part of a performance art group, and that was
all before he started writing plays, and when he did they were on at
the Traverse in the seventies and eighties during a really interesting
time.
So that was what staggered me most about that exercise, the complete
and utter lack of curiosity in the subject they were supposed to be
criticising. They didn’t even have the gumption to try and crib from
the programme notes, so that was all very disappointing and surprising.
I mean, what were they being taught at Edinburgh University, and why
were they still behaving like school-children who needed led by the
hand to everything? Infuriating, really.
Oddly enough, in my experience it’s the exact opposite with art college
students. Art students are so interested in their given subject that
they sometimes lose sight of anything beyond it, which is brilliant in
terms of their practice, but any attempt to translate it in any kind of
written form can sometimes make it read as exclusive, obfuscatory and
at times downright indecipherable.
For a publication with a general readership not necessarily focused on
the arts, that’s a turn-off from the start. Even with a specialist
publication, you have to be clear about what it is you’re saying.
Having said that, though, writing about visual art you can tend to be
more lateral than other artforms, just because I suppose by its very
nature it lends itself to that kind of approach. Writing texts or
essays for shows, for instance, which is something I’ve only done a
little bit of, and which I don’t regard as criticism, but as this weird
hybrid that allows you to think outside the box in a way that relates
to the thing it’s nominally ‘about’, is really interesting. On the one
hand, you have to be quite factual and put everything in historical and
contemporary context, but at the same time there can be a
discursiveness or an abstraction to the way it’s written.
By the same token, though, some of it can be terribly dry and something
that’s all researched thoroughly as if it’s an academic essay, but
which has no heart or insight beyond what’s already been set down and
absorbed. Research is wonderful, especially if it’s about something you
don’t necessarily know much about, but which can end up sending you off
on all these interconnected tangents. On its own, though, it’s really
dull. I only really learnt to research when I accidentally started
writing obituaries, which is something I oddly enjoy doing, but which
you’re effectively becoming a kind of chief mourner paying your
respects, so have to be hyper-sensitive, both to historical fact as
well as trying to capture some kind of essence of the person you’re
writing about.
But in terms of being exposed to culture, for me, growing up in the
north of England at the time I did I was really lucky. It was all
comics and TV for me. That was my cultural education. From Marvel and
DC comics, you don’t realise it at the time, but you’re being opened to
these fantastical science-fiction worlds which, in a post 1960s
climate, was all about identity, masks and a black and white mythology
of heroes and villains with very interesting psychological make-up all
living in this parallel universe.
There was a book by the science-fiction writer Phillip Jose Farmer
called Doc Savage – His Apocalyptic Life, which took as its starting
point Doc Savage the action hero and Man of Bronze from 1930s pulp
novels who Marvel had done a comic book of on the back of a film with
Ron Ely, who’d played Tarzan on TV, playing Savage. What Farmer did was
link all these comic strip worlds together and imagine Doc Savage as
this dualistic martyr of mixed sexual leanings who hung around with
this band of brothers with whom he saved the world, and whose attitude
towards women was ambivalent to say the least. Which is all a bit of a
head-fuck when you’re twelve.
But I’d already started writing stuff down even before that. The
earliest I remember was one year, just before Christmas, and me and my
sister were about to take a train from Liverpool to a place called
Immingham, which is near Grimsby, to live with my Dad. Not long before we
had to leave, there was a programme called Clapperboard on, which was a
film programme for kids, and which I remember used to go on about
Disney and the Children’s Film Foundation a lot.
The one that was on that day was looking at how comic characters had
transferred to the movies. Now, today, with Spiderman and Iron Man and
Wolverine or whatever, that sort of thing is ten a penny, but at that
time I think it must’ve consisted mainly of the 1960s Batman film, the
really campy one that took from the TV series, a 1940s Superman serial,
and I think there was a Captain America serial as well, maybe Flash
Gordon, stuff like that.
But we nearly missed the train because I had to see the end of this
programme. Once on the train, which we caught by a hairsbreadth, I
must’ve had some kind of exercise book with me, and I think a pencil,
and I just writing down all these things that I’d been thinking about
that had been in the Clapperboard programme. Screeds and screeds of it,
describing the film clips and how they related to the actual comics,
and I just remember getting totally absorbed in it. I’m not pretending
it was sophisticated and incisive in any way, because I’m sure it
wasn’t and was just the random thoughts of a ten or eleven year old,
and if you wanted to psychologise it you could say it was more about
deflecting whatever else was going on by creating your own world or
whatever, but thinking about it, that was probably the first piece of
criticism I ever wrote.
Much later, when I’d started going out to see bands, I’d go home and
sit up all night writing these lengthy reviews, just for myself really,
with no idea of how you ever got something published, even in a
fanzine, let alone a paper or a magazine. I just did it instinctively.
It’ll probably turn out to have been some kind of autism or OCD once
I’ve gone, but it’s just something I’ve always done.
But it was TV that really did it. Bear in mind at that time there were
only three channels, and that BBC 2 was the arty station, and was the
only place you could see foreign films with subtitles. Bear in mind as
well that then it took five years before a film could be shown on TV
for the first time. The result of that was all these films that had
been made in 1971 or 1972, when there was a lot of free-thinking going
on, didn’t appear on TV until the late 1970s, so there was this weird
time-lapse that meant a lot of people growing up were subverted by
stuff from the generation up from them.
For me it was If… and O Lucky Man, Silent Running and Dark Star, Deep
End and The Final Programme, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty and
Violet Noziere, Two Lane Blacktop and One day In The Life of Ivan
Denisovitch, Get Carter and Blow Up. That was the dramatic end of it,
these dark little films full of ideas and silences, but beyond that it
was all about Tony Wilson.
Tony Wilson read the news on Granada Reports, and even then you knew
there was something not quite right. There was something sarcastic
about him, and he seemed to sneer when he read the headliners, as
though it was all one big joke only he was in on. All the other
presenters did features on canals or hill-walking, but Wilson did a
programme within Granada Reports called What’s On, which was on a
Thursday teatime, and which was an arts and entertainment magazine
programme, which had excerpts of stuff that was happening, and which
usually finished with a band. It was eventually put on late night and
extended to half an hour, all of which gave rise to So It Goes, a more
obtuse version of the same thing. Between those two programmes Wilson
put on the first TV appearances of the Sex Pistols, The Fall, Joy
Division, Buzzcocks, Magazine, Blondie, Devo and god knows who else,
Ted Milton from the band Blurt doing this weird puppet show, or John
Cooper Clarke doing poetry that sounded like a mix of working man’s
club cabaret and performance art.
There were pieces too on toasting, where reggae singers do their own
thing over versions of records at sound-clashes, and I remember Gilbert
and George being on doing all their living sculpture stuff. Bear in
mind a lot of this stuff was all on at 6.15pm after the main regional
news stories. How Wilson got away with it I don’t know, but that
must’ve turned on an entire generation who weren’t old enough to go out
to see stuff yet, but had a head start in a way that made you think it
was probably all going to be like that when you did.
Then once Factory Records started coming to prominence through Joy
Division and everything else, and you started putting two and two
together, and realised that the same guy off the telly was the person
running what at the time was the coolest record label on the planet,
that was when everything started to make sense. You had Peter Saville’s
record sleeves that took from constructivism, and showed that a record
could be a piece of art on both an aural and a visual level, which
again gets you interested in other things, and other worlds open up
almost by default.
Two compilation albums spring to mind on that score. One was a cassette
called From Brussels With Love, the title of which was obviously a play
on words from the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love. The
other was a double vinyl album called Fruit of the Original Sin. Both
were put on the Belgian label, Les Disques du Crepuscule, who were
connected to Factory, whose bands like A certain Ratio and The Durutti
Column appeared on them both, as did Scottish bands like Orange Juice
and The French Impressionists.
But there was also stuff like ambient instrumentals by Harold Budd and
Michael Nyman, and what we’d now call sound art pieces by Bruce Gilbert
from Wire. On From Brussels With love there was a twenty minute
interview – in French – with the actress Jeanne Moreau, and on the
other side there was one with Brian Eno, who at that time, which was
only seven years after he’d left Roxy Music even though it felt an age
away, had not long proselytized the whole idea of ambient, and was
probably just starting to work with Talking Heads. On From Brussels
With Love, there was an interview – again in French - with the
playwright and novelist Marguerite Duras, who was a crucial figure in
the nouveau Roman school of writing, and who pops up in pictures of
parties in Edinburgh during the 1960s writing conferences and so on.
There was also a live spoken word recording of William Burroughs, whose
novels make total sense if you put them in his voice, and someone
playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune, which was the first time I’d ever
heard Debussy. So beyond bands, you’ve suddenly got all these different
artforms rubbing up against each other in this delicious way that makes
it feel like a movement, even though it clearly wasn’t. But to give all
this the gravitas of more formalised artforms suggested someone
understood the long term significance of all this.
Then when Channel Four started in 1982, and you’d have seasons of films
by Fassbinder and Godard, late night programmes of new video art and
full-length performances by Pina Bausch. For a while it was a real
cultural experiment, putting left-field art into the living room and
exploring the limits of what a television programme could be. Of
course, some of it was nonsense, but it was just full of ideas that I
know other people of my generation who are now artists or curators or
writers were hugely influenced by.
Once you’re interested in all of this, and once you start going out to
see stuff first-hand beyond a TV screen, it becomes something else
again. I realised recently that the first three bands I ever went to
see were Joy Division, Magazine and The Fall. All Manchester bands
oddly enough, and all with different forms of theatricality attached.
Even though I almost certainly recognised the importance of them all,
you’ve no idea that in thirty years time just how they’re going to be
historicised as crucial signifiers of how pop culture turned out.
Beyond that, and the Liverpool bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and
Teardrop Explodes, both of whom at the time were being co-managed,
albeit I suspect in a very loose way, by Bill Drummond, who would go on
to the KLF and the K Foundation’s burning a million quid moment, and
who was probably partly responsible for the visual aspects of the bands
stage shows involving camouflage and netting and so on, there was other
stuff going on.
There was a club called Plato’s Ballroom, which only ever happened
about eight times every other Wednesday and then monthly throughout
1981, but which the organisers said was an attempt to make gigs more
interesting, and to get art out of the galleries. That manifested
itself in an old chicken-in-pa-basket cabaret club called Mr Pickwicks
as this attempted happening, where the first night you’d get New Order
playing what must have only been their seventh or eighth gig after Ian
Curtis killed himself ass the headline act supported by two other
bands, Section 25 and Send No Flowers.
Inbetween all this you’d have a poet and some performance art involving
a man trying to get out of a coffin-shaped box while a spoken-word tape
loop played, while over incendiary records by The Pop Group and
Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, - which I
thought was remarkable and was probably the first time I’d heard
sampling on what was basically a sound-collage or a Burroughsian cut-up
applied to dance music – there’d be screenings of Bunuel’s Un Chien
Andalou and loads of these short homo-erotic films about bikers and
sailors by Kenneth Anger, while the people running the club, who called
themselves the Situationalist (sic) Youth Collective – one of whom,
incidentally, went on to manage Happy Mondays, which could start me on
a riff about how the audience-performer relationship was democratised
on the dancefloor, but another time - would put coloured acetate and
stuff in front of the lights to make it even more interesting, and
which was pure Mark Boyle stuff at UFO in the sixties in retrospect.
Another night there was a jazz dance troupe and a Wild West show. Jah
Wobble played what was probably his first live show since he left
Public Image Limited, Cabaret Voltaire played when they were still a
trio at their experimental peak. There was more performance art
involving a man taking his clothes off on the dance floor and putting a
bucket of coloured water over his head.
Everything seemed up for grabs and was totally experimental. I realise
now that this sort of Happening wasn’t a new idea, and dated right back
in part to Andy Warhol’s original Factory, then back further to the
original Cabaret Voltaire club the Dadaists started in Zurich. Showing
films and stuff on club nights is quite commonplace these days, but in
that post-punk climate, for me to see the power of the live event that
I’d only previously seen on a TV screen, and then not much, was
mind-blowing.
Sorry, I realise this is a ridiculously long answer, but what I suppose
I’m trying to get over is the inter-connectedness of everything,
and how some things can influence everything you do, both in life and
work. You don’t realise when you’re thirteen, fourteen or fifteen that
a book, a record, a comic, a TV show, a gig or whatever that you
stumble across and become interested in for whatever reason, you don’t
realise that, especially in this job, it will trickle down into and
inform all your ideas and responses and ways of thinking. So I suppose
what I’m saying is, stay true to your obsessions from an early age,
because they’re going to be your lifeblood. I’m sure I’ve probably
missed something out.
RC - Has the role of the critic changed?
NC - Totally, I think. When I started, it was the fag-end of the 1980s,
early 1990s wave where critical theory and media studies courses had
trickled down into the workplace and there was still something of a
media boom. Bear in mind it wasn’t that long ago before that that the
idea of getting a gig review of a small club show into a broadsheet
would’ve been unthinkable, so I suspect those doors had been opened up
by the generation of writers who’d come through the music press and
moved into broadsheets.
At that time there was no computers, no internet and no culture of
blogs, Twitter or Facebook. These days, because of that sort of access,
everyone’s a critic, or at least they think they are.
Of course, we could go right back to the 1950s and 1960s, when theatre
critics like Kenneth Tynan were regarded as God. Those days are long
gone, and quite rightly so, some might say. There are still quite a few
critics around, alas, who, despite not being fit to lick Tynan’s boots,
still actually believe they are God, and behave accordingly.
RC - Is it better to be an informed intellectual or an amateur? (Orson
Welles)
NC - Informed amateurs are fine, and that’s where some of the best blogs
come from. It’s the uninformed amateur I worry about. The sort of
blogger – or even broadsheet journalist – who opens a piece with a
phrase like ‘Well, I didn’t know anything about this band/artist/play
before I went in to see them, and now I still don’t' just makes me stop
reading. Then there’s the type who thinks the minutiatie of their life
is more interesting than what they’re supposed to be writing about, as
in, ‘I was feeling quite tired when I left the house, and the rain
didn’t help, and the bar was packed when I got to the venue. Then I got
stuck behind someone really tall, and my pint was off, so all in all it
wasn’t a good night, really, although the band were quite good.’ Sorry,
mate. I’m not interested.
We’ve all been there, mind. I still cringe when I recall going on The
Usual Suspects, BBC Radio Scotland’s then arts review programme that
eventually morphed into what’s now The Arts Café, having been packed
off to the opera amongst other places. While my colleagues gave
informed critiques of the staging and the music, I suddenly heard
myself enthusiastically uttering on live radio the words, ‘Well, I’ve
never been to an opera before but I thought it was great!’ Which was
tragic. They should’ve frog-marched me out of the studio there and then
on the grounds of me being a fraud.
But maybe I’m being a tad unfair here, because I know some of the
appeal of the zine culture that came out of the Riot Grrl movement,
especially, was all about creating a sense of community by being quite
open about your personal traumas, and in that context it makes sense
and produced some really valuable work, but if it’s just some posh
tosser desperate to be part of some mythical scene whining on about how
he’s great mates with someone he once met at a boutique music festival,
as a reader I couldn’t care less.
Blogs do make you write in a different way, though, I’ve found. I’ve
only dipped a very cautious toe into the blogosphere, and while I’ve
enjoyed it, I found I was distracted pretty quickly. It’s a much more
personal way of writing for some reason, much more discursive, possibly
because there’s no real framework in terms of word-counts and such-like
except for those you impose on yourself. On the one hand, a blog is
useful as an archival tool to send out into the world a record of all
your published material. This is especially useful if some grumpy sub
has hacked your copy from the bottom up so your original review now
ends mid sentence halfway through the second of the three paragraphs
you wrote – this actually happened, to my review of a PJ Harvey and
John Parrish gig. You can also put full versions of stuff you’ve had to
cut yourself for space reasons, the director’s cut or the twelve inch
extended version if you will.
A blog is also useful to pursue other, lengthier forms of writing. I
started writing a series for a blog in America that started off about
music in Scotland, but which ended up criss-crossing between music,
politics and other stuff from now that relates to stuff both in
Scotland and in Liverpool from thirty years ago. I only did three, and
we imposed a cap of a thousand words on each, so you’ve got these
cheesily tacked-on false cliffhanger endings like it’s a Saturday
morning serial or something, but I’d like to go back to it eventually.
But criticism is as fluid thing, and you have to adapt, both to
changing situations in terms of formats and outlets, and to the stuff
you’re writing about. I decided early on that I wanted to write about
theatre with the same enthusiasm as someone might write about pop
music, and if I was writing about music, I wanted to invest it with the
same intellectual gravitas and respect as theatre or any other of the
high arts did. This wasn’t a new idea, I know, and probably came from
my reading of the Modern Review, the slogan of which was ‘Low Culture
For Highbrows.’
I found out very quickly, however, that each artform tended to dictate
how you write about it, although I’m not entirely sure that’s still
true today, especially in the visual arts, where forms are blurring
into each other more and more. Having said that, maybe it’s just me,
because these days I’m writing about art and music as much as I am
about theatre and performance, and everything blurs into each other. Or
at least that’s the feeling I get. Music and art have certainly crossed
over for a long time, and visual artists seem to becoming more
interested in performance.
Once again, this isn’t a new idea, but I think by coming from a
primarily performative background I’ve accidentally stumbled onto a way
of writing or a set of references that straddles all these worlds.
Whether that’s a trend, a generational thing or something else, I don’t
know, but it’s certainly really interesting for me at the moment.
RC - What matters most, good writing or good observation?
NC - Both. You can’t have one without the other. You can observe as well as
you like, but if you can’t translate that into any kind of readable
text, then there’s really not much point to it. Similarly, you can
write like a dream, but if you’ve nothing to say or if you don’t know
your subject or have no instinctive insight into whatever it is you’re
looking at, then you’re as well not bothering.
Criticism, at least in broadsheet terms, isn’t about writing an essay.
It’s about interpreting something and translating it in a way that
captures the essence of a work’s successes and failures and might make
people sometimes violently disagree with you, but which is as valid as
anything else.
RC - What are the main rules for writing criticism?
NC - Be good. Be curious. Watch, listen and learn. Read lots. See lots. Find out what you're passionate about. Be curious. Do your homework. Get
your facts right. Spell people's names correctly. Do not bring your
personal prejudices to the table. Do not think that you’re more
interesting or important than the thing you’re writing about, because
you’re not. Be honest. Don’t toady. Never think you’re above being
edited. Love what you do. And never ever lose touch with your own sense
of ridiculousness. Art, music and theatre can be wonderful,
life-changing things, and criticism is a serious business that should
take what its critiqueing equally seriously in terms of rigorous
intellectual engagement and discourse. But you’re not going down the
salt-mines for real. The coal-face of popular culture is actually quite
a fun place to be, so enjoy it, and sometimes if it’s necessary hate it
as well. In terms of opinion, there’s no such thing as wrong and right.
After that, you’re laughing, really.
ends
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