England Brimstone and Treacle (Chapter Twelve).

Just so the BNP people visiting the site know where we stand.

I’ve just had a conversation with a bloke called Ferdie.

You know how it is, you’re sitting on Maze Hill station waiting for your train up to Plumstead with your mate James, nice sunny day for a change, when the geezer two plastic seats down from you in what passes for a shelter, the guy you’ve just helped out by telling him that, yeah, there are trains running today even if there is nothing up on the board, the guy who's given you the obligatory hard-luck story about having lost his bus pass and is now sipping his can of Tennant’s Super as you quite resolutely stare at the ground suspecting he’s going to hit you up for money, suddenly strikes up a conversation.

The country’s going down the shitter as there are too many immigrants. Up in Woolwich, specifically, there are too many Africans, too many Somalians, they’re destroying the traditional British way of life, they don’t have any respect, they don’t want to assimilate, they’re undermining the country’s values. Tony Blair is to blame and nobody can see that he and the Labour party don’t give a shit about the working man. The guy’s called Ferdie. Ferdie says that the only parties he has respect for are the BNP and the Green Party. At least they stand for something.

My ears prick up at this point. Up to then I’ve been leaving James to “handle” the conversation, which he’s been doing quite nicely with a series of non-commital “yeah mates” mindful of the fact that this may not be Ferdie’s first can of the day and that he has a big scar running along his left cheek and terminating at the corner of his mouth. A pretty serious scar. I’m interested for two reasons, firstly as I’ve always suspected that the BNP and the Green Party are going to make big gains in the near future, the only parties capable of capturing any kind of fallout from the long dire years of Thatcherite Centrism and largely because a local Green councillor I work with has often said that traditional, disillusioned Labour voters will often, when canvassed, say that they’ll vote BNP first choice, Green second if anyone stands in their ward. The second reason is that Ferdie’s black.

So we start talking politics. Unusual enough for anyone to strike up a politically based conversation anywhere in civilian life these days, even more unusual for you to get a largely pro-BNP, forty year old black guy of Jamaican extraction getting into it with you. Ferdie is sure that a lot of BNP supporters wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with a black member, that there may be initial hostility but eventually once the shared values/ “Britishness” was acknowledged, then skin colour as such would become unimportant. This is largely a Blairite rhetoric of “values”, of course, though I don’t mention this and I can sense Ferdie imagining a kind of Rainbow British National Party. He thinks that in order to get elected the BNP will have to get disaffected second and third generation working class blacks and Asians on board. I nod along, keen to hear more.

And there is more. It’s not just this though, it’s the way immigrants are driving down wages. Ferdie’s brother is a painter and decorator. The going rate for a painter and decorator these days, so his brother’s boss has informed him, is forty quid a day. It used to be seventy. Ferdie’s brother can’t live on forty quid a day but Polish labourers who are, short-to-mid term, going to sleep three to a room and send the surplus money back home can. From seventy a day to forty a day? We’re going backwards! Ferdie’s prediction is that ten years down the line London is going to be even more of a radically ghettoised shit hole than it is now. After all, the authentic Brits are leaving for Australia and South Africa in droves and the people who are coming in are all waves of cheap labour from the benighted parts of the earth. It’s a feasible vision of the London of the future that Ferdie spys but doesn’t quite express. A series of barracks, all vestige of the overarchingly social or cultural gone, turned over exclusively to business and largely populated by unassimilated immigrants all working to undercut each other in “the race to the bottom.” Why even bother moving your business around to find the cheap labour. The unfettered movement of capital and labour? Save on expenses. Let them come to you.

The conversation then drifts off to the Iraq war and talk of the Illuminati, at which point my heart sinks a bit. Conspiracy theories and the BNP. It speaks volumes about the death of the Left. Then he’s getting off at Woolwich and we’re left looking at each other, James and I. What is our response to this discourse which, if it came from the mouth of a white guy of similar age would have us screaming racist and condemning him as the worst of the worst?

There’s an extent to which the fact that it’s a black guy, and a working class one at that saying these things that allows us, as white semi-liberals to listen with a degree of sympathy. Ferdie’s “black racism” (which is what his friends call it) if it really is that and not just despair with the prevailing Neo-liberal ethos looking for expression and finding the Left incapable of channelling it for him (he’s always voted Labour apparently, but wouldn’t anymore) is a head spinner and also disabling to a degree. There’s a part of me that feels I have to grant credence to views that, were they coming from a working class white guy I would immediately and violently dismiss. Is that racism on my part, some spurious “authenticity” I’m granting to Ferdie’s voice, that I feel I have the right to deny to others, or is it just the sheer novelty of it? Maybe it’s also that it allows me access to a discourse that otherwise is too contentious and too tainted to really engage with. Immigration. Any idea of “Our Culture”, a bedrock culture that needs to be protected in the face of a discourse of cultural motility and how closely that might align with a Neo liberal agenda. It’s also because there is pathos in Ferdie’s desire for a multicultural BNP that would restore British Values, look after British Jobs and support British Culture, an element that just wouldn’t be there if he were white. Ferdie’s problem may be that he’s simply more working class than he is black, that his identification is much more strongly with his class and his nationality than with his roots and his “ethnicity.” British, working-class, black. In that order.

It’s a strange and difficult, oddly moving conversation that I’m still puzzling over and getting down here in order to think over it some more when James rings me and tells me that his best friend Jodi, also black, knows a couple of other black BNP supporters. We think they may all be Jamaicans and it’s some anti-African thing (I mean but EVEN SO!) but that’s quickly scotched. The idea that the BNP is picking up votes from the Left is nothing new, that they’re doing so irrespective of ethnicity seems absurd, but then, isn’t this the stubborn ineradicable trace of class cutting through identarian politics? Suddenly the idea of a multiracial, anti-immigrant and determinedly mono-cultural British National Party is looming in my head and I don’t know what to do with it. Suddenly, vertiginously, I feel that all the old categories, all the old assumptions and allegiances, really are dead and that bizarre, counter-intuitive new political formulations are springing up.

Ten years down the line, really, what is this place going to look like?

The worst piece of writing in the history of humanity?

Harpya - Raoul Servais

SING HARPY!


Much recent talk about a particular quality of voice has chimed in with a post that I’ve long intended to write but have never quite got round to ((fail to) see also The Minutemen/ The Associates versus the Blue Orchids). A post on Crass and what I like most about them, if like is the appropriate word. Eve Libertine’s vocals.

Nor am I going to write it here, but I am going to begin to start tentatively approaching an attempt to possibly think about it a bit.


First off all I’m assuming that THAT voice is currently being defined negatively, as a lack of either grain or sweetness, it neither rasps nor purrs, by its absence of any promise of consolation. It may beckon to you but it is not inviting you into any kind of carnal/sensual embrace. What’s exciting in THAT voice, it’s allure, is not the prospect of getting your rocks off, not the prospect of some good loving and a slice of home-made cherry pie, not the prospect of relief and gratification in this world, but a dangerous enticement to you to slip instead into a different and alien realm. Precisely because of its lack of grain, its disembodied quality, it must be coming from some beyond. A promise of incarnation but not carnality. It’s the voice at the threshold. It’s an occult voice. Shamanic. White-puritan-voodoo.




The frisson of Grace Slick’s vocals in “White Rabbit” then is the hauteur, the sense of the initiated leading the novitiate by the hand into a new universe of pleasure divorced from physicality. It’s a non-democratic voice, it is in fact a “stars” voice, in the sense of old-time, pre-Rock and Roll “stars”, impossibly distant and diamond-bright, and it seems to me right to suggest that there is a lineage from Showtunes and old time Showbiz here, something in the phrasing, the clipped consonants and orotund vowels, its assertive self-possession, carrying with it still the trace of the oratorial that rock and folk’s appeal to blue-collar and grassroots had to dispense with. The underlying masochism of the fan/star relationship is invoked, the impossible otherness, the sense of a parallel universe, a separate order of being from which the fan is permanently excluded. The erotic charge in this is well captured in the phrase that exposes the bedrock of the star/fan dynamic: “ontological envy.” The witchiness in it is not red and gold African-earth mother blackness, not Sun worshipping at all, but precisely the realm of the White Goddess, the dark, Moonstruck pre-Christian world of the European unconscious, the primal depths re-illumined by LSD, the subterranean world into which Slick will lead you.

Hence the voices anti-sensual allure. It isn’t the Lotts’-wife numbness of Nico’s frozen borderline, the narcissism of trying to make an object of oneself, to free oneself from power or desire, using smack to calcify the flesh and drain away interiority, rather the voice is both threatening and inviting, irresistible and destructive, the Siren song. In its least dramatic, most heavily mediated aspects this combination is something like “minxishness” at its most extreme it’s the dominatrix. The dominatrix is also a cosmological figure, who through ritual, ceremony and arcane insight transports the submissive into other worlds. This is the feminine principle in it’s properly chthonic aspect, anti-oceanic, not a formless, boundary-dissolving swell or excess, nor woman as the bearer of the “wise wound” attuned to the eternal circadian truths of decay and regeneration, but instead a Lilith sculpted from the hard, frost-limned glitter of black European earth.

Now for me this particular voice reaches a certain kind of peak in Crass’ Eve Libertine and particularly in the astoundingly heretical “Reality Asylum,” a long verbal assault addressed to Christ himself which, though it was written by Penny Rimbaud, is inconceivable without Libertine’s absolutely frigid, aristocratic delivery. This is primal Eve addressing her usurper. Obviously Libertines’ voice is extremely limited, she can’t sing at all in fact but in it’s a-sensual aspects it is kind of definitive. It’s a forbidding voice and absolutely a classed voice, plumy, public-schooled sterility that freezes the blood and withers fruit on the vine. A clinical voice, forensically cut-glass. The voice of a certain type of English social-sadist.

It’s oddly Victorian sounding, horribly prim and priggish, absolutely immured in declamatory Calvinist righteousness. In fact there is something, thoroughly, disconcertingly Dickensian about Crass, especially Libertine in combination with Steve Ignorant’s ragged guttersnipe sneer, but this Victorianism is appropriate when you consider Crass’s obsessive relation with Thatcher. Libertine is a kind of Anti-Thatcher, the same sexless, high-handed stridency, the same contempt for weakness, the same ability to cut the men down to size but wedded instead to old-skool Anarchism rather than Neo-liberal individualism and proving ultimately that there's not much difference between the two. “You alone can do it, there is no authority but yourself,” she tells us at the end of “Yes Sir, I will,” in a weird echo of Thatcher’s "There’s no such thing as Society.”

Remember, she was "Thacher the Milk Snatcher." A Harpy Indeed!

RatAtRATR at the Pyramid Club circa 1986 part 2

RatAtRatR in the Pyramid Club circa 1986

for.. errr...me...what a surprise!

The Associates - White Car In Germany (Rare)

For Owen!

PUBLIC ENEMY HAZY SHADE OF CRIMINAL

Public Enemy - Welcome To The Terrordome

Public Enemy - By The Time I Get To Arizona

Public Enemy: Five Dimensional Ju-Jitsu for your eardrums.

La Hija del Mariachi - Cucurrucucu Paloma

Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucu Paloma

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM IMPOSTUME INDUSTRIES

Foul, hypocritical, rascist bullshit.

sad news.

Leonard Cohen-First We Take Manhattan

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I don't like your fashion business mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'd really like to live beside you, baby ...

And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I'm ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I am guided

Ah remember me, I used to live for music
Remember me, I brought your groceries in
Well it's Father's Day and everybody's wounded
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

now with spanish subtitles!

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows

About twelve years ago I went to Oxford to visit Brendan, a friend I had lived with at University, three or four years before. Despite our differences we'd had a shared interest in drinking and talking about how important our futures would be. Other, more mundane aspects of our characters, our taste in clothes and music, the fact that I studied an Arts degree and that he was doing Sciences, were unimportant. We had recognized each other as men-of-destiny in our chosen field.

Essentially we were no different to a lot of young, reasonably smart, naïve young men. We thought we’d re-write the rulebook. That life, when we got to it, would simply not be able to contain or resist us. Our charm and energy would sweep all before us. Instead, the moment University was over we both floundered, went into crisis, took on a series of badly paid jobs, drank even more, tried to figure out just how life could be so oblivious to our evident, if unproven brilliance.

Brendan, whose sense of self-esteem was tied into his social standing, his line of work and how much money he had coming in, pulled himself out of the nosedive first and went off, after a year or so, to take an MA in Manchester. I on the other hand, being more “artistic” and Other-directed, with all my sense of self-worth based on how well I thought I could write, stayed doing those shitty, dead-end jobs, worrying away at a novel in the evenings and catching up on all the reading I’d missed out on while actually at University, due to having invested the majority of my time in the vastly more important undertaking of dazzling those around me with my wit.

Time ticked by and four or five years post-graduation Brendan was living in Oxford and working for a biotechnology company as a salesmen, making, by my standards, an exceptionally good living and always happy to take me out for a weekend’s drinking should I be able to scrape up the National Express fare down there from Leeds. One Saturday night, mid–Summer sometime, we ended up in a Wine Bar-ish place in the centre of town, absolutely pissed, on the tail end of a solid day’s drinking and pub-philosophising. I held this kind of place in utter contempt but was prepared to patronise it for the sake of more booze and so I pulled up a seat at the bar, drank stolidly, hunched into myself, feeling it was necessary to project my disapproval to all those around me vacuously having a good time, unaware of the transparent, formulaic stupidity of their every word and gesture. At this point I had waist-length hair and was probably wearing a pair of very ripped combat trousers and Army boots. No-one struck up conversation with me. I guzzled pints, I sneered, I affected bored haughtiness as I gazed around, casting a cold, Olympian eye on all I surveyed. Meanwhile, Brendan copped off.

All well and good for him. I was in a relationship anyway, and I certainly wasn’t at all bothered by not being found desirable by anyone in a place like that. Brendan made plans to meet up with this new, potential girlfriend the next day, quite gallantly not wanting to leave me on my own for the evening, and so around Two we went back to his place to keep on drinking, dissecting and disposing of all the world’s idiocies on through to the early hours of the morning.

The next day, the Sunday, we woke up relatively early, still half-drunk, and drove off at Brendan’s customary colossal speed to a pub in the leafy outskirts of the city, parking up in the middle of nowhere, then traipsing over a few fields until we found the place and met up with Emma, the girl from the night before, and a few of her friends, some conservatively dressed, unsexy, glasses-wearing types. Brendan and I got our customary pints of Guinness and then we all went outside to sit at one of the big, round wooden tables, enjoy the sunshine, get to know each other a little.

I maintained a discreet distance, as, after all, I wasn’t going to see any of these people again, we clearly had nothing in common, I had a shocking headache and, primarily, we were all just there to buffer the meeting between Brendan and Emma. I drained my pint, felt better, nipped off to the Bar to get another, anticipated a pleasantly detached few hours of getting drunk and scrounging cigarettes with half an ear leant to the usual, strained, middle-class chit-chat, most of my real effort invested in whatever story I was currently writing in my head. They blathered on, I drifted off, it was all going fine, until…..

“And what do you do for a living?” the girl sitting beside Brendan asked him. There were six of us around the table, two couples, one aspiring couple, me.

“I sell software for a biotechnology company, here in Oxford, “Oxford Molecular” Brendan replied. Then, reflexively, “And you?”

She was a pale, chubbyish girl in her earlier twenties, wearing a blouse and with glasses. "Oh! I’m a Picture Restorer,” she explained. “ I did my degree in Art History and then an MA in Restoration and I work at one of the big auction houses up in town,” she told him. Then she looked to her left, to her boyfriend, who was also pale and chubbyish, with a neat haircut and a polo shirt.

“I run my own company at the moment," he began, but the rest of his contribution was lost on me, as I suddenly realised what was going to happen. Each of us, in turn, was going to announce what we did for a living. It was Emma next. She was, it transpired, working as a researcher at the Guardian. Very nice. My eyes flicked up off my pint, which I’d suddenly found myself scrutinising, to the girl next to her. One look and I knew there was no chance that this girl did anything mundane. Sure enough, she worked for a major publishing house. Next came the coup de grace. Her boyfriend, an insanely academic–looking Young-Fogey in bifocals was forced to admit that while he wasn’t working at the moment, he did have a bloody good excuse, which was that he was doing a PHD in Philosophy, something related to Hegel, I believe, at some unpronounceable but intensely esteemed college or other at Oxford Uni.

All eyes, insouciantly enough, were now on me. The wheel had almost turned full circle. I was, perhaps unaccountably, smiling. There was a painful, sublime comedy even I couldn’t deny in the remorseless build-up, as we went around the table, that had reached it’s peak in the declaration that the man beside me was an authentic, an indisputable intellectual of the highest order, whereas I was five years out of scraping through my degree and….well, what exactly was I doing for a living, these days?

Various options for managing the situation had presented themselves to me in the usual rapid-fire fashion of a mind-in-panic as the moment had drawn nearer. I could lie, or at least bend the truth substantially and say, “I’m a writer,” but this would have been naked hypocrisy, as I had always railed against people who claimed to be painters or filmmakers when they didn’t make a living out of it, plus I knew they would immediately ask me if I had published anything and the fact that I hadn’t would make this claim ring loud and hollow across the space between us. I considered simply saying that I was “between jobs” and using the time to work on a novel. Or to tell them what I did in fact do, but qualify it by mentioning that it was temporary of course, invoking my deep knowledge of literature, aspirations and commitment to writing as a counterbalance. Finding someway of making sure they knew I’d been to University too. Maybe not Oxford, but an authentic University nonetheless.

I leaned back in my seat. It wasn’t even midday yet and I was already quite drunk. I suspect I looked a mess. How I could possibly explain everything I would have needed to say? I couldn’t. Whichever way I went there would be shame and awkwardness, but still, there was also something to relish in it too.

“I work in a warehouse in Leeds. As a warehouse assistant,” I told them.

There was a predictable pause and a polite fixedness of expression. Only I was smiling.

“And do you enjoy…..that?” one of the girls asked me, holding the information out in front of herself, trying not to find it too disagreeable.

“No, of course not” I said, my voice expressing as much bemusement as I could manage. What a silly question. “ No, I don’t enjoy it at all.”

There was another longish pause then Brendan manfully waded into the silence, offered to get everybody another drink and the conversation was immediately caught up in the relief of technicalities, of who-wants-what and do-they-do-that-here? as I busied myself with Guinness and kept my head down, rolling a cigarette.

And as I rolled it I knew that I’d write this thing that had just happened to me down one day, this little sequence of events. Oxford, Summer sometime, 1995, but that I’d wait a while, so that when I finally did I wouldn’t have to labour the ending and explain precisely what it was I was feeling as they chatted breathlessly away among themselves and as Brendan returned from the bar with a tray crowded with drinks. Because I’d address this story to you and because you do understand it exactly, because you know it intimately, that mixture of shame and pride that is as close to anger as it is to laughter, don’t you? You know it well enough, as well as anybody.

You can feel it, can’t you? Even now.

Worth watching

David Bowie - Word On a Wing + Stay - 1976 Rehearsal