Wired For Punk

I've just finished reading an absolutely outstanding book – England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. England’s Dreaming is generally regarded as the definitive account of the Sex Pistols and the rapid rise and collapse of British punk rock. It’s one of the few books I've read where the comments on the sleeve heaping plaudits and praise on the author and the book are totally spot on. Well, apart from one that described the book as ‘achingly funny’. That I couldn’t agree with. Unless you liken the Sex Pistols – as the unpopular face of this once-controversial musical strain – to the kind of farce that Spinal Tap so cleverly conveyed, there was very little humour to be found in this book. Certainly there was something delightfully shambolic in Malcolm McLaren’s ultimately unsuccessful bolting together of Machiavellian political meddling and pseudo-Dada agit-art, but as far as I know it was never intended to be funny.

Prior to England’s Dreaming, I’d been reading I Swear I Was There, which recounts the story – in a much less sophisticated manner than Savage’s eloquent discourse – of the two Sex Pistol’s concerts at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the impact that the first concert had on the Manchester music scene, spawning the likes of Buzzcocks and Joy Division. Up next in my reading list is Fashion Is A Passion, which is Pat Gilbert’s equally-definitive story of the Clash.

I find the whole concept of punk so incredibly alluring, perhaps because I was born in 1976, punk’s Year Zero, and was therefore far too young to have been able to participate in this incredible period of music. I have no doubts, however, that if I’d been born a decade and a half before I'd have embraced the sound of punk wholeheartedly. I may have even formed a band. Who knows? Perhaps it’s the disappointment at not having been there the first time around that makes me so intrigued by firstly the music, but secondly the reaction that straight-laced conservative folk had to the aggressive sound of a genuine teenage riot; perhaps it’s because punk is the closest we’ve got in the past thirty years to the creation of rock ‘n roll back in the fifties with its similar effects on the youth (excitement) and adults (fear). Nothing in music subsequently has had anything like this impact.

This all said, I can’t stand the Sex Pistols. Perhaps it’s because their entire genesis and portrayal was handled by McLaren, described in Savage’s tome as a failed artist desperately seeking to make a reactionary mark on culture in some – any – way, and so I can’t help but think of the Pistols as a contrived, constructed entity in much the same way as any of the manufactured pop boy and girl bands which are a recurring theme in the last thirty years of music’s chequered history. Aside from a couple of genuinely outstanding songs, the Pistols should have received virtually no attention whatsoever, but McLaren made damn sure that his puppets received the lion’s share of punk’s dim limelight. Aside from cultivated controversy and a confrontational attitude, musically the Pistols were worthy of less acclaim than some of the worst bands to be heard on the seminal punk compilation of the time, The Roxy, London WC2.

In actual fact, aside from a fondness for Buzzcocks, which has more to do with their pioneering independent aesthetic, the musical output of much of UK punk fails to move me. What is far more appealing is the New York punk scene which developed around iconic clubs like CBGBs on the now rapidly-gentrifying Lower East Side. The Ramones, while at first listen a loud, moronic and childlike band, were in their own formulaic way deconstructing classic rock ‘n roll in a disciplined, Calvanist, manner which is every bit as ‘arty’ as the NYC bands that those art-rock plaudits are more generally heaped upon – Television, Patti Smith and so on. New York punk had genuine connections into the city’s reactionary art scene which leant their punk credibility and conviction. In comparison to UK punk, NYC punk had a sense of purpose and self-belief which UK punk lacked, explaining why New York’s protégés have endured whereas UK punk’s forerunners rapidly shuffled away from their aggressive stance with a veritable sense of near-embarrassment. This lack of longevity can be attributed directly to McLaren whose vision of a punk aesthetic was driven by a brief period of interaction with the New York Dolls who, though important, were the goofball model for the Pistols.

I mentioned above that my attraction to punk was driven by missing out the first time. The issue I had growing up was that my ears could not tolerate loud, guitar-fuelled music. In fact, my route to punk arose from an interest in techno music and electronica which itself grew out of a love of synthpop from my earliest music purchases. Techno, in particular the minimalist techno generated by the likes of Richie ‘Plastikman’ Hawtin was for me a natural distillation of the synthetic sounds which excited me in electronic pop. I used to think that my ship-jumping from the nagging sounds of the dancefloor to punk was unusual, but I've since come across many people who made the same journey.

It happened during my first year at university; I’d spent more money than ever on records by the tail end of that year and my appetite for dance music, from a listening perspective alone and not a club-going one, was at an all-time high. My friends worried that I was spending too much on records that I was only buying on the strength of vaguely knowing the label, and they were probably right. I was in the Our Price store in Colchester’s town centre with my friend Kit when I came across a copy of Pink Flag by Wire in the racks. Wire had come to my attention before, during their eighties electronically-augmented era when they were signed to Mute Records (then, as now, my favourite label), and I’d read in Vox or Select or some other now-redundant rag that Pink Flag was an excellent album; perhaps I was hung over or just looking for an excuse to spend yet more money that I didn’t have, but despite Kit’s cautionary attempts to curb my spending that day, Pink Flag was bought, bagged and on my stereo within a couple of hours.

In the straight-ahead, mechanistic curt little punk tracks like ‘Field Day For The Sundays’ I found similarities between punk rock’s rhythmic repetition and techno’s endless cycles of regular beats and hooks. In Colin Newman’s vocals I found similarities to Underworld’s Karl Hyde; Newman, too, was and still is heading up the Swim~ label which explored his own interest in electronica and the techno of the likes of Gez ‘LFO’ Varley’s solo works. Pink Flag opened my eyes and ears and gradually my interest in electronic music was replaced by more and more guitar-based music. I even recorded a copy of the album for my younger sister, then enjoying her own musical epiphany thanks to Pink Floyd and The Beatles. I wrote in the accompanying note that I thought it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard and that Menswe@r’s ‘Daydreamer’ wouldn’t have existed without Wire’s ‘Lowdown’. Natalie thought it was too heavy for her, whereas I just found it thrilling.

The attraction for me of Wire as an entry-point into punk rock was that they were actually anything but punk; while Pink Flag nods to the nascent punk scene, Wire were much more informed by artistic sensibilities; Newman had built a relationship with Brian Eno, whereas Graham Lewis remarked that the band were principally influenced by Marcel Duchamp. This was refuted by other members of the band, but you don’t have to listen to Pink Flag for long to hear tracks that leant toward experimentalism and delineated structures which would bait and goad the punks when delivered live. The following two Harvest albums, Chairs Missing and 154 further moved the quartet away from their contextually convenient punk routes toward more extreme aesthetic gestures, culminating in a series of shows at Holborn’s Cochrane theatre wherein they wore their art colours defiantly on their sleeves.

Wire, unlike some of their more well-known punk contemporaries, have endured. Their most recent album, Send, was a thrilling and uncompromising record and Newman’s Githead project has further blended his love of oblique lyrics with art-rock backdrops. Githead’s second album, Art Pop, could not be more appropriately named. Wire’s continued existence owes much to the reasons explored above for NYC punk rock’s longevity – artistic, rather than rebellious, roots and an ‘attitude’ or ‘way of life’ informed more by musicality than confrontational opposition. UK punk could never survive while the bands’ only offering was to challenge the old guard. It’s satisfyingly ironic that Johnny Rotten’s reaction against the dinosaur rock and experimentation of Pink Floyd via a defaced T-shirt should have been suppressed so quickly as punk lurched effortlessly and uncontrollably into art’s embrace.

Hotels : Part 2

A while ago I booked a weekend at the Hilton Manchester Deansgate Hotel, and in an earlier missive explained how difficult the booking process was, and naturally how little confidence I had that the weekend would be a success after those experiences. Well, the weekend was last weekend, and I'm pleased to say that it passed without major mishap and was a great weekend all told.

Well, kind of.

The hotel itself, situated at the south end of Deansgate is certainly impressive, or rather the building in which it is housed – the 47-storey, 171m Beetham Tower – is impressive. As we drove into Manchester on the M60, we saw a huge structure rising majestically on the horizon with a curious jutting addition on one side, rather evoking memories of a certain upended Tetris tile. At first I assumed it wasn't as tall as it looked and that as we approached it would appear far smaller. Not used to seeing skyscapers like the Beetham Tower in isolation – it's far and away the tallest structure in Manchester after the CIS Building on Balloon Street, and stands out more so due to the comparatively low concentration of tall buildings in Manchester compared to, say, Canary Wharf. It's sleek, modern and both one of the tallest mixed-use buildings in the UK (the upper twenty-odd stories are residential) and one of the tallest buildings outside London. It's also one of the thinnest skyscrapers in the world (from the side), measured by the proportion of height to width. And so, generally being the kind of person to get excited about tall buildings, when we got a little closer and saw the Hilton logo emblazoned half-way up, I was quite excited.

Problem number one came in the shape of the parking at the hotel – there isn't any, but there is an NCP next door. Except that unless you arrive with the workers at the start of the day (coincidentally when the check-in staff would laugh at you and tell you to come back later), you've a cat in a hot place's chance of getting a space. We found ourselves in another car park adjacent to this one in a converted railway shed, then realised just how far away from the hotel we actually were, quickly worked out how many trips we would have to make from car to hotel room along a not inconsiderable stretch of Deansgate just to move into our room, and emitted a loud groan. The receptionist, when we finally got to the desk, suggested that concierge might be happy to help us with our bags from the car, except that the thought of trying to make idle chit-chat with a stranger, plus the requisite tip he would no doubt expect, really didn't appeal. I enquired why it was that the hotel didn't have a drop-off point, at which the receptionist gestured at the building workers toiling away in the warm Manchester sun outside, on what would become the drop-off point. Not helpful. I reckon the parking / luggage lugging cost me about an hour of my stay. What perhaps irked me more than the absence of a convenient drop-off area was the insouciant ignorance of the receptionist, who, when I asked whether there was a quick way from the car park to the hotel shrugged his shoulders and said 'I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the parking around here – I don't drive.' Not what you'd expect.

Aside from room that afforded views out of the city rather than over it, the room was fine, but not what one could describe as outstanding. There was a distinct feeling of style over substance, as if Hilton had attempted to load a heap of contemporary features you'd expect to see in smaller, more modish hotels, into the Deansgate Hotel. To the uninitiated, the inclusion of Villeroy & Boch white ware or an LCD TV could be seen as the height of hotel eloquence, but when placed in one of the pokiest bathrooms I've ever seen it just smacked of trying to be clever. For practical illustration, it was impossible to get to the toilet without fully opening the door, walking into the room, then closing the door behind you, as the toilet was situated behind the door; the door would then swing shut of its own accord, neatly boxing you in – tidy, I grant you, but also rather claustrophobic if so afflicted.

A point, not of the hotel’s doing but worth pausing over nonetheless, would be the comedic and frustrating art of trying to participate in any sort of evening activity – watching the television, eating a meal, listening to music – without waking a child who goes to sleep at 7.00 and who is in their cot in the corner of the room. Well, that point became a rather unfunny joke as our young daughter took an absolute age to settle into a deep slumber, requiring us to stay resolutely out of view and immobile so as not to catch the attention of a creature suddenly more inclined to wanting to play at all hours of the night rather than be her usual soporific self. We resorted to eating dinner in the room, in the dark no less, with me slumped halfway down in a large chair with its back to her travel cot so as to become as close to invisible as possible with Seren trying to find any conceivable way of getting our attention; this may sound funny, but it put paid to any audible conversation I can tell you, and thus we had two very early trips to bed faced with the impracticalities of trying to do anything else. For the (topical) record, at no point would we have considered leaving Seren in her cot while we escaped to the bar or restaurant. Never have, never would.

I have long been of the opinion that the quality of a hotel may be judged solely on one factor – not the attentiveness of the staff, not the amenities or proximity to a city centre, but the quality of room service meals. We enjoyed two beautifully-presented meals on our second night that tasted as good as they looked in their bone-white square bowls on night-black trays. However, my specific room-service measure is a simple one, but one which hotels I've stayed in consistently fail on – the warmth of toast served with a room service breakfast. Whether it was because of the height of the building and therefore the vast distance from kitchen to room, but the toast was stone cold by the time it reached our table; similarly, the butter was practically frozen, leaving you trying to forcibly spread this onto toast which is breaking up and turning to crumbs as your knife presses down aggressively upon it. So zero points for that I'm afraid.

And then there was check-out. Having moved the car closer to the hotel I was not at all concerned about the distance from room to car which plagued our first day, but we decided to extend our stay and requested a late checkout, which we were duly granted without charge. Pleased that we could enjoy the city for a little longer in the knowledge that we'd be able to get back into the room, freshen up, change Seren's nappy and not have to leave bags either unsafely in our car or with concierge, we wandered around a very quiet Manchester, making a beeline for various sites of significance to Factory Records and took ourselves to a Pizza Express next to the old Free Trade Hall (mental note – do not take a child to a cavernous, echo-y building if other diners are to enjoy a peaceful prandium).

When we tried to get back into our room, we discovered that our keys had been cancelled. A maid quite innocently let us back into the room, prompting us to wonder whether she'd have done that irrespective of whether it was actually our room or not. When we came to check out properly, the receptionist advised us that we'd in fact settled and checked out already. 'Bonus!' I thought to myself. 'We've got ourselves a free stay.' And then they swiped my card again, leaving me with a somewhat queasy feeling that I'd take a look at my next credit card statement and discover that I'd have been charged twice.

Our weekend in Manchester provided a number of learning points for us about trying to combine parts of our old, largely responsibility-free former lives, with parental duties. More importantly than that, however, it has reminded of just how wrong large hotels can be in so many disparate areas. Manchester Deansgate was a classic mistake of judging a book by its cover – great from the outside, but lacking in some basic areas when you open the cover.

Art

Like sport, I hardly excelled at art when I was at school. This, I fear, may be of some disappointment to my father, who had himself attended art school, and perhaps also to my mother who was very good at drawing. This lack of proficiency rather coloured my later views toward art, and I’m sure at some point I must have regaled my ex-girlfriend (herself something of a dab hand with a paint brush) about the inherent subjectivity involved in appreciating art, and the pretentiousness of some artists and their work. I probably also tried valiantly to argue the case for music as art, and probably failed.

I enjoyed drawing as a child; I was particularly good at creating line-drawn pictures involving very small, very detailed objects and characters, but as soon as I was no longer drawing for pleasure, I disliked the skill terribly. Painting was a messy chore, and hampered still further by my colour blindness. I remember one Friday afternoon at High School where our teacher, the spelling of whose name I can no longer recall but it was similar to Fraggle, asked us to mix paints and come up with a spectrum in the form of a pie chart. Despite the difficulty of me being able to identify the differences between shades of red and green (the result being a sludgy flat brown mess), she kept me behind after class until it was complete. On a Friday. I think I had a dentist appointment that evening too, which I only got to by running hell for leather out of the school gates.

And thus my early experiences of art left me feeling somewhat negative on the subject. However art has a certain pull and over the years I have found myself drawn to this area more and more. One of the things that awoke in me an interest was the 1994 Underworld album Dubnobasswithmyheadman; Underworld are part of the Tomato design collective, and the sleeve featured what seemed like random fragments of sentences repeated and overlaid so as to obscure parts of the words and create jagged shapes. It seemed so simple and yet so intriguing, and so in very poor imitation I created some similar images using one of our university PCs. Around the same time I found myself drawn to M.C. Escher’s geometrically-warped pieces, but in general any interest in art I possessed was very much leaning toward modern works rather than traditional oil portraits or watercolour landscapes.

Working in London arguably affords anyone with an interest in art of whatever form the perfect opportunity to see excellent works of historic and cultural significance. We are awash with galleries of every shape or size covering any area of the artistic spectrum. In the Tate Modern we have gained a populist masterpiece housing all sorts of unusual works that works as a place for kids to visit right through to the connoisseur, those seemingly polar opposite groups that should mix as well as oil and water (colours). But there is no snootiness here. No surprise to find therefore that this is the most visited art gallery in the world. If I’m feeling pretty energetic, it’s possible for me to leave my company’s offices on Old Broad Street and walk across London Bridge and along the South Bank to the Tate Modern, pitch up for some reflection in the Rothko room (anyone who’s ever listened to the second Joy Division album would find a certain resonance therein), hop over the river on the Millennium Bridge and be back at the office all within an hour’s lunch break. But, hey, what it all means I have no idea.

There was a work being ‘exhibited’ in Milton Keynes in September which I think I do understand. Artist Wolfgang Weileder, along with construction engineers R. Bau and students from a local college were involved in Transfer Project, which ran in the plaza outside Milton Keynes station. Transfer Project saw the group constructing an exactly-sized replica of the boxy Milton Keynes Gallery’s external structure by constructing one wall after the other, and deconstructing the previous wall so that the entire structure was never complete at any one time. As my only passage through the plaza was early morning and early evening, I never saw anyone actually working on the project, and so it was quite enthralling to notice the changes that had been made on any given day.

And therefore for once I am prepared to offer an interpretation of a piece of art. For me, with its constant construction and deconstruction, Transfer Project is the embodiment of ‘impermanence’, a subject I’ve been mulling over for much of my adult life. Nothing in this life is permanent; even the apparently most enduring things are, in the grand scheme of things, over in but an instant, and this is what Weileder’s project represents for me. It also echoes the current trend in architecture toward buildings with a defined lifespan. Gone are the days of projects being built to last; instead buildings are erected with the explicit intention to raze them to the ground and start again some two or three decades later. A friend who works as a property fund manager once told me on a journey on foot through the City that there are office buildings in the Square Mile being pulled down and replaced only twenty years after they were first constructed, that the current elaborate schemes under construction may only exist for a maximum of twenty years until city planning decides that more space is needed and that buildings should reach higher than the current limits dictate.

Impermanence is a frightening subject when considered, morbidly reinforcing one’s mortality and all-too-brief existence upon this earth, and there is a further echo of this in the flat, largely featureless and blank structures of Weilder’s walls when they are constructed; hollow, lifeless, silent. The walls are sheer with the exception of holes where the windows and doors of the actual Gallery would go; whereas the actual MKG is painted a lively, lurid pink and has a roof structure evoking a buoyant wave, Transfer Project is sheer greyness. Perhaps it is also a reaction against the flat concrete, glass and steel buildings evident elsewhere in Milton Keynes.

But then again, maybe it’s just a pile of adult-sized Lego bricks in an otherwise empty space normally utilised as a rudimentary skate park by local youths.

Frustratingly, just before the project ended in mid-October, I walked past the security fence slowly enough to read the description of the installation posted by the Gallery. Apparently Weileder is chiefly interested in the relationship between the temporary and the permanent. At first I thought to myself that for once I had correctly interpreted a piece of art, and I was momentarily elated; this elation rapidly turned to disappointment some seconds later when I realised that my interpretation of the piece above was actually informed by a cursory trip to the artist’s website earlier in the month.

Therefore, my dear friends, you have just read an article that is frankly pointless, banal and irrelevant.

But I guess if you wanted to be highly subjective you could actually call that art.

Fast forward a few months to June, and you would find me being escorted around the Royal Academy of Art on Piccadilly for this year’s Summer Exhibition, which the company I work for has sponsored for the past two years. There is, of course, much here that I do not understand whatsoever, much that I find pointless, but also much that my eye lingers over. The architecture area in Gallery IV is fascinating, and David Hockney’s enormous Bigger Trees Near Water painted on no less than fifty canvases is breathtaking but to these unappreciative eye is so awe-inspiring simply because of its scale.

In Gallery IX there is a piece which once again prompted me to ponder the briefness of our existence, I Just Have To Have You Here A Little Longer, an encased dresser made entirely of cake, sugar, colouring and a tiny bit of wood by artist (patisserie?) Rachel Mount. For the odd sum of £16,320 this piece can be yours, but it will presumably at some point rot away into nothingness.

For me, I’ll stick with my purchase of item 269, The Artists’ Gate by Neil Woodall, not because it is trying to say something to me, but because I happen to think it looks nice. It’s also cheap, tasteful, pastoral and unchallenging, proving that art from this most renowned and esoteric of exhibitions – 239 years and still going strong – can also be appreciated by art dunces like myself.