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Monday, September 16, 2024
Test Dept - The Unacceptable Face of Freedom - Bishop's Bridge Railway Depot - Melody Maker April 5 1986
2 comments:
Phil Knight
said...
Test Dept were one of those bands you didn't have to actually listen to, because you knew exactly what they were going to sound like from their name and image. I suspect that they were anathema to anybody who had actually done an industrial job; who had heard clanging all day; who experienced cranes and chains as prosaic everyday realities.
They were probably one of the few bands that could have benefited from a sense of irony, from a bit of post-modernism. In fact, there is probably some mileage in comparing them to Ghost Box/Scarfolk. Test Dept as a last gasp of the post-war consensus, verging on the hauntological but refusing to succumb to it, to admitting that that world was over.
That's an interesting idea - the refusal to mourn.
Have you seen any of those Patrick Keller films, like London and Robinson in Space. I think there's a third one called something like Robinson in Ruins. There are sort of essays about the urban landscape and changes and the politics behind, with this wry narration by Paul Scofield about a fictional character, a researcher called Robinson. The second one is not limited to London but wanders around the U.K. - and one of the arguments, or polemics in it, is that contra to the notion of de-industrialisation happening in the 1980s, there remained into the 90s a surprisingly large amount of manufacture and making-stuff going on in the UK.
They are great films, especially the first one - documenting all this stuff that doesn't often get captured in the urban landscape, or if it does, it's almost by accident, in old sitcoms with exterior footage or drama series where they are looking for a bleak backdrop.
And I think they belong to a small canon of hauntological films. Alongside Saint Etienne's Finisterre, which is fairly transparently an imitation of Keller.
2 comments:
Test Dept were one of those bands you didn't have to actually listen to, because you knew exactly what they were going to sound like from their name and image. I suspect that they were anathema to anybody who had actually done an industrial job; who had heard clanging all day; who experienced cranes and chains as prosaic everyday realities.
They were probably one of the few bands that could have benefited from a sense of irony, from a bit of post-modernism. In fact, there is probably some mileage in comparing them to Ghost Box/Scarfolk. Test Dept as a last gasp of the post-war consensus, verging on the hauntological but refusing to succumb to it, to admitting that that world was over.
That's an interesting idea - the refusal to mourn.
Have you seen any of those Patrick Keller films, like London and Robinson in Space. I think there's a third one called something like Robinson in Ruins. There are sort of essays about the urban landscape and changes and the politics behind, with this wry narration by Paul Scofield about a fictional character, a researcher called Robinson. The second one is not limited to London but wanders around the U.K. - and one of the arguments, or polemics in it, is that contra to the notion of de-industrialisation happening in the 1980s, there remained into the 90s a surprisingly large amount of manufacture and making-stuff going on in the UK.
They are great films, especially the first one - documenting all this stuff that doesn't often get captured in the urban landscape, or if it does, it's almost by accident, in old sitcoms with exterior footage or drama series where they are looking for a bleak backdrop.
And I think they belong to a small canon of hauntological films. Alongside Saint Etienne's Finisterre, which is fairly transparently an imitation of Keller.
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