FLEETWOOD MAC, Tusk
from Unknown Pleasures: Great Lost Albums Rediscovered booklet, free with Melody Maker, 1995
[director's cut version]
by SIMON REYNOLDS
If anyone remembers Fleetwood Mac's Tusk at all, it's as
the surprise flop sequel to 1977's Rumours. A soft-rock masterpiece (gorgeous melodicism charged with the emotional carnage wreaked by the inter-band tangle of break-ups and infidelities), Rumours was also an unprecedented blockbuster, selling a staggering 21 million copies worldwide. In America (where FM were just made for FM radio), the LP was even huger: 31 weeks at Numero Uno in the Billboard Charts (that's two-thirds of a YEAR!) and total sales that, at 14 million, still make it America's second best-selling LP ever. In the USA, Rumours was what happened instead of punk; even in Britain, where FM radio barely existed, it was the album in every suburban hi-fi cabinet, right next to Dark Side Of The Moon.
And so, by the fall of 1979, a tremendous head of anticipation had
built up vis-a-vis the long-awaited follow-up. Los Angeles' Mayor Tom Bradley
even made October 10th Fleetwood Mac Day to celebrate its release. Two years in
the making, Tusk had swallowed up an astronomical, and back then virtually unprecedented, $1 million. Instead of Rumours # 2, though, fans were confronted with a sprawling double album, dense with detail, alternately over-done and oddly incomplete, and seemingly devoid of hits. Record biz insiders
dubbed it "Lindsey's folly", a monument to the hubris and
Brian-Wilson-complex of de facto producer Lindsey Buckingham (the guy who'd originally turned around the one-time Brit-blues band's ailing fortunes, when he and his folk-rock-maiden lover Stevie Nicks had joined in '74). Sheer post-Rumours momentum resulted in solid sales of 4 million, although whether anybody who rushed out to buy Tusk on its day of release made it through the four sides more than once is a moot point (the number of mint second hand copies in circulation suggests otherwise). A virtual radio black-out completed the sense of non-event.
Tusk ranks as one of the great career-sabotage LP's in pop history, alongside The Clash's Sandinista, ABC's Beauty Stab and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique; one of those albums by bands apparently on a creative and commercial roll who nonetheless wilfully confound their audience, motivated by artistic frustration, or fucked-up/fucked-off confusion, or simply because they've succumbed to a kind of collective death-wish.
The album that Tusk most reminds me of, though--as anti-populist refusal of the soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled exercise in superstar experimentalism--is Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, there's the same obsessively nuanced production, the same oddly disjointed rhythms; mood-wise, the same consumer-unfriendly aura of uncertainty (offputting to punters who felt they'd propelled their heroes up into the dizzy heights, and that the least they could do is sound like they were having fun). Hell, even the same two year gap between megahit (Stand, in Sly's case) and its down-tempo sequel. Tusk is soft-rock's Riot, a band's trademark sound fractured by the same forces of out-of-control fame and fortune that sent Sly spiralling off into paranoia and addiction; the document of a band half-defeated by, half-struggling against the soul-destroying poisons of luxury, sycophancy and party-powders. It's white So-Cal suburban blues.
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You only have to look at the record to get a pungent whiff of
not-rightness. Something's askew, from the oblique cover (an expanse of dun
and beige textures, with a B/W snap of a dog savaging someone's ankle), to the even then terribly dated '70s prog packaging (inner sleeves within inner sleeves,
trompe l'oeil, pseudo-surreal photos of the band) to the obtuse, inscrutable title (the perennial jester Mick Fleetwood's l'il joke, 'tusk' being his personal
slang for the male sex organ). The not-right aura was positively trumpeted
by the title-track single that trailed the LP, a daft little ditty whose mock-tribal rhythms, peculiar 'found sounds' in the back of the mix that sound like a restive mob, and pompous, punctilious horns (courtesy of the University of Southern
California Trojan Marching Band, recorded live at Dodger Stadium) now strangely
make me think of Faust at their silliest ("The Sad Skinhead", maybe). A 'novelty' hit, and doubtless by dint only of the blind-loyalty of the fans, "Tusk" sounded, to this 16 year old PiL-head, exactly like the hippy dinosaur drivel I'd read punk had set out to destroy. Mind you, I'd probably have felt the same about Faust, back then.
So I never actually heard Tusk the album at the time; but a few months
later I astonished myself by tumbling head-over-heels for "Sara", the Stevie Nicks song that provided Tusk's one bona fide hit (in the USA, anyway). Gushing out of the radio in, I guess, early 1980, the single's gold-dust rush of sound was the perfect aural analogue of the song's central, arresting image: "drowning/in the sea of love/where everyone would love to drown". Unaware of the metaphor's ancient history--which goes back through Romanticism's wombadelic dreams of "the sea of seas", through Zen, perhaps all the way to primordial memories of when life emerged from the briny deep--I was hooked by that line, and the oozy, swoony way Stevie sung it. I'd felt that oceanic impulse, the urge to merge, to be subsumed in the plenitude of "us" rather than stranded within the paucity of "me". Drowning in the sea of love--yeah, I could go for that.
Of course, it never occurred to me to buy the single; hard-earned egg-stall
money was reserved for 'relevant' releases, e.g. Gang of Four's second LP Solid
Gold (whose dessicated drudgery I now wouldn't submit myself to if you paid me).Only when time enough had elapsed for the punk-indoctrination to fade, and I
could actually listen to forbidden fruit (e.g. Led Zeppelin), did I actually buy
Tusk, along with pretty much everything else Stevie had breathed on. I'd gotten this mad notion that Nicks' lachrymal, lump-in-throat (headful-of-snow?) voice was a precedent for the clotted, inconsolable-ness of Kristin Hersh.
Those who supervise admission to the Canon of Rock do not take Ms Nicks seriously, to put it mildly: "mooncalf", "space cadet", "hippy-chick" are the sort of pejorative hurled her way. And it's sort of understandable: how seriously can you take someone who named her publishing company Welsh Witch Music? Who--for her last interview with a UK rockmag--had her personal affects transported, at her own expense, to the photographer's studio, where her boudoir was
painstakenly recreated? In mitigation, I might propose her as the American Kate Bush (the same fascination for mythopoeic fancy, Celtic lore and old Albion). Actually, I'd rather up the stakes and make the case for Stevie as a pre-punk Liz Fraser, blessed with a voice so language-liquidising, so milk-and-honeyed, it's almost edible, definitely pre-Oedipal. Not only does Tusk contains two of Nicks' greatest songs--"Sara" and "Beautiful Child"--it also catches the Voice at its most perfect blend of husky and luscious, poised midway on the long dying arc from the nymph of "Dreams" (1977) to the rock survivor of the '80s/'90s, when age and abuse had worn her pipes down to a Marianne Faithfull croak.
A word of warning: the CD of Tusk contains a sacrilegiously truncated
edit of "Sara". Avoid this travesty and hunt down the vinyl dubble, for the full
six-and-a-half minute glory. Siphoning sheer nectar from her throat, Stevie is cradled in Buckingham's shimmerscape production--cascades of scintillating acoustic guitars, susurrating plumes of angel-breath harmonies, drums that seem to billow in out and of the mix (I imagine a totally wired Buckingham, hunched over the mixing desk, Lee Perry with a Cali perm and chest hair poking out his open shirt). At the second verse, there's a key change, the rhythm shifts to an uncanny urgency, it's like we've passed through the looking-glass; Stevie's singing becomes modal as she falls into reverie. The lyrics are elliptical, but charged with dream-time vividness: "I think I had met my match/he was singing/and undoing/the laces". The chorus is more affirmative, less otherwordly, then the song plunges back again through veils of gossamer haze into the mystic-zone; so liquefacient and iridescent is Stevie's voice, as she sings "the starling flew for days", it seems to chime and twinkle. Then the chorus--just a little too uplifting--and the song cruises off into a glorious slow-fade. I've never been able to figure out what "Sara" is about: is it a love-song to a woman, or a strange account of some kind of emotional
menage-a-trois, or just a mystical hymn to Love itself, its oceanic powers to
dissolve boundaries? Actually, I don't really want to know.
Elsewhere on Tusk, Stevie's in her Billie-Holiday-of-FM-radio mode.
The tale of a ships-passing-in-the-night tryst with an old flame, of consummated lust and unrequited love, "Beautiful Child" is exquisitely written, from the tentative, aching, dagger-in-your-heart melody to lines like "your eyes say 'yes'/but you don't say 'yes'", and it's framed in another bejewelled
Buckingham arrangement. The final stretch never fails to crush the breath out of me: a roundelay of double-tracked Stevie, plus backing harmonies, with all the voices repeating the lyrics from the last verse in counterpoint. The effect is like the heart is literally broken, a clockwork device gone out of synch, or like the lover's inner monologue is in 'random shuffle mode': self-confounding thoughts tread on each other's tails, clash and overlap, furrowing out a locked-groove of unresolvable anguish. All this is emphasised by the fatalistic trudge of the rhythm section as the song fades (yet paradoxically mounts in intensity)--like leaden steps that take you further and further into exile-from-paradise.
"Storms", the third and last Nicks gem, is also on the
angel-with-a-broken-wing tip. Drizzled in honeyed guitar, Stevie casts herself
as an elemental wild-child: "never have I been a calm blue sea/I have always
been a storm". "Angel" plays on the persona she established with "Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)", the Celtic witch who "rules her life like a bird in flight",
the proto-feminist sprite forever eluding male grasp. "Sisters Of The Moon"
harps on the Woman-as-Mystery shtick too, but the stompin' stodge-rock brings to mind unwelcome images of Stevie whirling her scarves around onstage, and when she
belts, there's a glottal wobble that reminds you why so many people regard her as
kin to Kim Carnes et al, as opposed to unacknowledged precursor to Hersh, Fraser, Merchant and Archer (Tasmin, that is).
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And what of Fleetwood Mac's other two singer/songwriters, Christine McVie
and Lindsey Buckingham? (It's ironic that the band are named after the rhythm
section, although Mick & John's supple, poised grooves--schooled
in the British blues-boom--are vital to this music's sway, the way it breathes).
I've never cared much for Christine McVie's air-freshener tones.
Greil Marcus hailed her as "the premier white female singer of the ['70s]" and even "rock's answer to Lorelei" (the siren of Germanic legend whose dulcet tones lured Rhine boatmen to shipwreck). But for me, her clarity of expression wholly lacks Stevie's grain-of-the-voice viscosity. (It seems appropriate that before marrying McVie she was Christine Perfect). Still, she has sung some of FM's (the band and the medium) prettiest songs, and on Tusk she has one stone killa in the baleful "Brown Eyes", a song trembling with the tentativeness of someone on the edge of falling in love but who's been burned too many times before. Elsewhere, McVie whips up her usual meringue of diabetic harmonies for songs like "Honey Hi".
As for Lindsey--eight songs and total hegemony over the mixing-desk make
Tusk his album, really. The production is credited to
"Fleetwood Mac (special thanks from the band to Lindsey Buckingham": is that a hint of sarcasm, or just Buckingham insisting on pre-eminence? Cramming every cranny of the soundscape with detail, fanatically tweaking the minutiae, overdubbing 'til the cows come home, Buckingham earns his special mention, and then some. In his guide to albums of the '70's, Dean of American rock-crits Robert Christgau notes the surreptitious avant-gardism at work here: the way the "passionate dissociation of the mix" means the music works "like reggae, or Eno--not only don't Lindsay Buckingham's swelling edges and dynamic separations get in the way of the music, they're inextricable from the music, or maybe they are the music."
All this is particularly evident in the placing and dislocation
of the drums and in the intricate lattice-work of the harmonies. This So-Cal hallmark, from the Beach Boys to the Eagles, is on Tusk taken to an almost pathological pitch of complexity: on "The Ledge", peculiar acoustics turn the harmonies into a vocal labyrinth, while the backing voices on
"That's All For Everyone" overlap, intertwine and converge in 3D,
like the celestial geometry of close-formation jet aerobatics. Buckingham
is also a bit of a bitchin' guitar player: dig his hornet-in-your-earhole fuzz solo on "Not That Funny" (Faust again, this time "It's A Bit Of A Pain"), or
the gently weeping C&W filigree that adorns "What Makes You Think You're
The One" (where Buckingham's saccharine sneer is reverbed like John Lennon on "Instant Karma").
Buckingham's songs--which I don't respond to as emotional statements
so much as peculiar sonic objects--range from lurching ballads encased in
wedding-cake arrangements to an odd strain of hillybilly boogie, like
the 1.58 minute canter of "That's Enough For Me" (imagine Carl Perkins filtered through Boston's "More Than A Feeling").
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Back in '79, Greil Marcus was one of the few critics to defend Tusk, decrying its disappointed reception as sure and sad proof of "the growing conservatism of the rock'n'roll mainstream", and declaring that "the stand Fleetwood Mac has taken with Tusk is as brave as that Bob Dylan took with John Wesley Harding --braver, maybe, because Fleetwood Mac cannot rely on Dylan's kind of charisma, or on the kind of loyalty he commands.... With its insistence on perceptions snatched out of a blur, drawing on (but never imitating) Jamaican dub and ancient Appalachian ballads, Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John Le Carre's moles--who planted in the heart of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him, and takes him for granted".
Perhaps this is to attribute too much to a record only half of which really withstands close scrutiny. Still, Marcus' inclusion of the Tusk piece in In The Fascist Bathroom [aka Ranters and Crowdpleasers], his anthology of punk-related writings, is a striking feat of recontextualisation. Only 30 pages later comes a treatise on PiL's Metal Box. There are unlikely parallels between Tusk and Box: both were long-awaited double albums released late in '79, with bizarre packaging; both were essays in anti-rockism shaped by the input of dub; both were attempts (probably semi-conscious in Fleetwood Mac's case) to sidestep an audience's expectations and tamper with one's own mythology. But Marcus' juxtaposition appeals to me especially, because Metal Box was the absolute soundtrack of my angst-wracked adolescence, while "Sara", an 'aberration' in my punk-conditioned taste, was a brief glimpse of something ("the sea of love") beyond the prison-cell of misery-me.
The closest thing Britain had to North American FM radio at the time was, oddly, Beacon Radio in Wolverhampton - until it was forcibly turned by the then regulator into something much closer to what you'd now expect from BBC local radio (extraordinary that British regulators ever had that power, but they did).
ReplyDeleteInteresting to think of Le Carre being read and respected in the United States at all, because the subtext of his work - which was surely already becoming apparent, though I grant that it became more blatant later, to the point where it virtually became the whole text in itself - is so obviously that having to fight the Cold War (and, eventually, the Islamic world) in the name of, and subordinate to, American pop culture was such a national humiliation that being on the other side mightn't have been so bad after all.
In the end I tend to feel that Le Carre's nihilism is poisonous (to bring this somewhere near topic, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was running on BBC2 just before the release of 'Tusk'), but it has very clear roots in romantic nationalism which resents the whole of modern culture - appealing enough (I know this from direct personal experience) that the case against it has to be strong and without holes.
On re-reading the above:
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's not so surprising that Wolverhampton should have had the most wannabe-American of the early UK commercial stations, considering that it voted so heavily for Brexit (and considering that Caitlin Moran is from there: her constant invocation of pop and rock in the Murdoch ex-broadsheets to make Europhobic political points was one of the main things "Carmodism", as it was once called, was getting at in its inventor's mind).
On second thoughts (and influenced by your own writing on related matters) I can't help thinking that Le Carré appeals to the PBS crowd *precisely because* of the reasons I mentioned, not despite them: his clear resentment at Britain's subordinate status and at having to fight the Cold War more and more on the side of pop as time went on (he has said that he considered defecting to the USSR when in the British security services, probably around the time of rock'n'roll first hitting the UK, "but not for political reasons", which is an original way of saying "Elvis bloody Presley" I suppose) would clearly appeal to such people, who as we know (and as you have discussed before) tend to be profoundly embarrassed, ashamed and guilt-ridden apropos their own country's global impact. Indeed I actually had to get the Region 1 DVD of the least-known British TV adaptation of his work ('A Murder of Quality') - 14 years after its US release, it's *still* never been on Region 2 - and the BBC's adaptation of 'A Perfect Spy', which is the ne plus ultra of that whole self-disgust syndrome, was produced in association with the A&E network.
I would have to suspect that 'The Wall' is pop and rock's closest approach to that worldview really: when Roger Waters sings "I've got 13 channels of shit on the TV to choose from" (when that seemed a vast amount to anyone from the UK) it's really the same gin-soaked, resentful ex-public-schoolboy vibe as Magnus Pym, alone in a Devon hotel room, finally blowing his head off. Anti-Semitism - half-shire Tory, half-Corbynite (if there is even a difference) - always seems to be the link, the key.
hello Robin
ReplyDeletehow's it going?
i miss your writing
drifting a long way from the above (which drifted a long way from Fleetwood Mac), what do you think of Midsomer Murders? become (belatedly, owing to post-hospital convalescence) fascinated by it, starting with the earliest episodes from the late 90s. So macabre and gruesome, with (early on) strange themes of incest and transphobia, and a persistent play-within-a-play theatricality that is charmingly middlebrow and quasi-clever, like the writers are accessing half-remembered sixth-form schooling in Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre. Watching I felt like it was a glimpse into the id of Brexit Britain. Apparently it's the only TV show that Paul Dacre watches. Yet i couldn't hate it because it's filmed largely in a part of Britain right near where i grew up and where my mother lives. Indeed an early episode uses the much used (in film and TV) duck pond and stocks of Aldbury, a village between Berkhamsted and Tring that is part of my childhood.
it's one of the UK's most successful exports, i believe it's shown in something like 120 countries worldwide, and creates a most deceptive view of what the country is like. or perhaps not - the plots involve affluent, cold-hearted, money-minded and status-obsessed people for the most part.
Never watch it, can't imagine I would have any time for it, possibly my mum watches it sometimes. You know there was a racism row apropos comments by its producer some years back, right?
ReplyDeleteI've been planning a relatively longer piece for my long-dormant blog, but whether I'll actually do it is another issue entirely. I wouldn't think of Brexit as wholly a shire thing, though - it's true that anti-EU sentiment *was* linked with such places 20 years ago, but quite a few places regarded as twee and affluent (Tunbridge Wells, Winchester, Cotswold, Cheltenham, Harrogate) voted Remain, as did a lot of affluent parts of the south-east. Meanwhile there were massive Leave votes in a lot of depressed post-industrial areas, and the more working-class southern areas in which I have lived were more than 60% for Leave. These places are considerably more dominated by US pop culture and Sky TV than nearby areas which were for Remain - certainly Dorchester, a town which might be considered more Midsomer Murders-esque by some, was probably narrowly for Remain - and whatever working-class pride I ever had in Weymouth & Portland died that terrible night and cannot be revived. This is what I found so wrong about Marcello Carlin's TPL piece "about" the Three Tenors (and I think he'd now agree that he made a mistake bringing it back; his heart clearly wasn't there anymore) - he seemed to be equating Brexit with a desire to pretend rock music had never happened, when I regard Brexit as (nobody will be surprised to hear this from me, I know) in very large part a *product*, a *result* of rock music and the geopolitical alignments it imposes, its dismissal of Europe as a fogeyish, irrelevant old world. It comes not from a rejection of rock music but from an acceptance of it, and (as stated above) plenty of the places where you'd think what I call the Elgarisation of Rock since Blair has been slowest, has been most resisted, voted Remain. If Marcello's argument had been correct, then Doncaster would have to be more classical/opera-orientated than Harrogate, Dartford more so than Tunbridge Wells, Portsmouth more so than Winchester, and make those suggestions in pubs in the three first-named places in those pairs and you'd be lucky to escape with your life. Indeed I was taken as a child to the old Saturday morning children's classical concerts on the South Bank and we felt like we were the only people from our own, ultimately heavily Leave-voting, part of the London commuter belt ever to go; meanwhile Remain-voting parts of that belt seemed to be very well-represented.
I think part of the reason why so many 1960s British TV film series - made in colour chiefly for export, and playing on the global appeal of the 'Swinging London' cult which, in retrospect, feels more like a last burst of empire than a true start of anything new - were shot in Hertfordshire was that Lew Grade's empire was based at Elstree. But other non-ITC series were filmed there; Catweazle definitely was (and The Avengers probably was).
I do get very disheartened by the fact that most of my favourite songs in the current UK chart - the belated mainstreaming, appropriately enough through the streaming economy, of UK rap/grime/Afrobeat - are the least likely to appear in any of the charts from other countries which I look at online. I think it's significant that Drake alone has brought this stuff into the US mainstream - Canada, through the Commonwealth, has closer ties than the US to the countries where these musics (and dancehall of course) originated, and generally more awareness of modern Britain: the thought of people like Giggs & Skepta, who he uniquely brought onto the Hot 100, even *existing* here doesn't seem as faintly funny in Canada as it tends to in the US.
It's like ... the Three Tenors project may be viewed by many cynically simply as a triumph of marketing, but it was the single most successful sale of the European canon to an Anglosphere pop-culture audience that there has been since that canon began to be seriously questioned (and, terrifyingly, 1990 is rapidly becoming longer ago than the beginning of that serious questioning was *in* 1990) so I honestly don't see how it can represent Brexit more than any number of UK number one albums (the vast majority, in fact) which, at least implicitly and often explicitly, are about the *overthrow* of that canon. I've never in my life felt that level of betrayal from a writer I respected. Much of his previous writing had been strongly in the tradition associated with me - for example, stating of Meat Loaf & John Parr's "Rock'n'Roll Mercenaries" that it represented "everything that was wrong with the 80s, and rock music, *and not necessarily in that order*" (my emphasis) - but in one of his last ILX posts as "Dingbod Kesterson", Marcello had suggested that Conservative politicians had never really believed in the ideology of what I call the Rock Right, and only pretended to because it "played well in Basildon", a claim very much from the same place as the "haw-haw, Cameron really listens to Elgar" bullshit incarnated by the Three Tenors piece. So you see the confusion built into him.
ReplyDeleteI am also definitely out of sympathy with the tendency of the same Leftists to play down the fact that the likes of Winchester, Cheltenham & Tunbridge Wells voted Remain, and similarly refuse to admit the centrality of depressed former heavy-industrial areas (epicentres of "good" small-c conservatism to them) to the Leave vote, or the significant role played in it by the completely unexpected resurgence of the old Bennite Europhobe tradition (which was never, ever, mine; indeed the more I consider these things, the more I think the Labour tradition as a whole, on this matter at least, was never really mine anyway).
You might also be interested in this YouTube channel, if you've not seen it already: http://www.youtube.com/user/treffynnon19/videos - although I prefer to remain uncredited, I am the hidden hand behind it, in that I provide most of its files (although many of them were sent to me by others, most frequently an incredible collector called Martyn Graham, and plenty come from an internal logging collection made at the BBC itself). As you probably know, I sailed too close to the legal wind and lost my own channel (and quite a bit of what was on it - the Alan Clarke / Alan Bennett / Lizzie Dripping stuff at least - has appeared on DVD in its own right, so I tend to avoid drama now).
ReplyDeleteI promise this will be the last post, but I suppose I'm saying: if the places regarded as the most stereotypical heartlands of "why oh why oh why" letters to the Telegraph voted Remain (Winchester admittedly is now a university city so probably shouldn't be categorised with the others I mentioned), then I think that alone shows that Brexit *must* be less that, and more rawk'n'rawl "Europe's the dead stuffy old world", than a lot of people think it is
ReplyDeletewow that youtube channel looks amazing
ReplyDeletedon't know where to start with watching - i might try the one about 1974 rock bands!
no worries about the commenting
There was a companion programme about the Sweet up originally, but the entire programme got flagged for copyright reasons (sod's law; the only time this has happened). I have a follow-up programme made two years later about both the Sweet & Renia as they found themselves in 1976, but didn't send that for fear that there'd be similar copyright objections.
ReplyDeleteCouple of things to talk about re. the YouTube channel: there are certain people I don't want to appear, or even be alluded to, on it, lest it excite the creepy anorak denialists. I have a full 'News Review' from 3rd October 1982, for example, which I'd absolutely love to be up but the climax is Rolf Harris at the (hey, topical!) Brisbane Commonwealth Games, so you see the problem (although I might just send it now and ask for it to be edited down, because the rest is vital). And I've never uploaded an August 1981 news bulletin because it features Status Quo fans at Donington flying the Confederate flag, and I had a horrible experience on a TV forum once where certain people suggested "this was OK because the Daily Mail was less influential, you don't understand the context of the time" - wilful I-was-alright-Jack, the same bullshit argument ("I wasn't a victim of racism so it didn't exist") used by the Savile denialists. My inspiration, really, was always sitting in the British Library alongside an MLE-speaking teenager who'd clearly been asked by his school/college to research tabloid coverage of the Falklands but was having to be told everything, and my intention was to give people like that some sort of context as to how they got where they are and how they might want to get out of it (and subsequent events have clearly shown that that generation, and especially his part of it, has the strongest desire to get out of it). Even the one long burst of testcard that's up there (and which I sort of wish wasn't because it's clearly getting more views for all the wrong - "simpler time"? Tell that to anyone who knew Blair Peach - reasons) is justified, in my mind, as a means of giving such people some sort of indication of just how different Britain was even when Britfunk, maybe the earliest UK music that wouldn't seem completely archaic to them, was happening. How many of them are actually watching it is another question, of course ...
Generally I would characterise a very large number of Leave voters, probably the majority, as the sort for whom rock has been completely absorbed to the point where they see absolutely no difference at all between its origins and their own, but for whom hip-hop has to be separated from its own country of origin so as to rationalise their simultaneous hatred for it and idolatry of a bleached media concept of the USA (which those who once decried rock largely did not have). This is why I like to say that Leave voters think rock was invented in Piddletrenthide and hip-hop was invented in Vienna - the simultaneous outrageousness of such suggestions coupled with the horrifying thought that mass thought processes depend on people pretty much believing them. And it is people like that who provided the 61% Leave vote where I live, the only part of Dorset with a significant working-class Labour vote. Those who *do* know about Thomas Hardy or William Barnes live in other parts of Dorset, and many more of them voted Remain. It came much more from people having no real traditions of their own than from wanting to cling to such things: if you do have your own traditions, you don't *need* to hate other nations and cultures.
Hi, can you tell me the photographer please Simon who took these black and white headshots?
ReplyDeleteWe would love them as prints?
Thanks
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