Good Old-Fashioned Racism

Ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses. We have something to celebrate. Racism, that scourge of centuries past, is gone and gone for good. This is great news! Cheers! Well done everybody!

Jeremy Clarkson knows what I'm talking about. It's been widely reported that the Top Gear presenter has been suspended by the BBC after punching his producer and calling him a 'lazy Irish cunt'. Apparently Clarkson was drunk and annoyed by his food options. In darker times, this might have been seen as a violent racist assault. But, as I write, 925,796 people have signed a petition calling for his reinstatement. Charlie Houghton from Chelmsford remarked 'Jeremy is a bastion of light in a dark PC world' and 1,666 people have 'liked' this remark. Which is fine because, in our new enlightened times, this isn't racist at all; it's a blow against political correctness.

This has been swiftly followed by the BBC Trust, wisely observing that when the Top Gear team used the word 'Pikey' they weren't being racist. Nor were they being racist in 2008 or 2009 or 2012, when they used the term as an insult. This used to be a racist term to refer to Gypsies and Travellers, but that was when there was such a thing as racism. Now it harmlessly refers to something that's nasty and poor and working class, so no one can possibly be offended by it.

This comes hard on the heels of the team having made the word 'slope' (to refer to an Asian man) non-racist by transforming it magically into 'typically ebullient, rather wonderful tribute to a beautiful, hidden country'; their triumphant reclaiming of the formerly-racist idea that a typical Mexican is a 'lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf' into something that's funny and definitely not racist; Clarkson also cleverly magicked the racism out of the word 'nigger' by insisting he didn't say it and then, when footage emerged of him saying it, explaining that he didn't say it, he merely didn't try hard enough not to say it, which is a difference that definitely makes sense and means he isn't racist.* Anyway, how could he be a racist? According to his friend A A Gill, 'Jeremy does not just present, he comes up with the ideas, he also writes the scripts. All those jokes and that banter are not off-the-cuff wit'. See? He wrote these supposed racial slurs beforehand. Ergo, not racist.

I guess the problem is some people seem to be stuck in the seventies, when there used to be racism. But to those people I say, come into the twenty-first century! Scrap your Ford Cortinas! Leave your Gentle Giant LPs behind! You'll like it here! The water's lovely! No one is a racist!

Nigel Farage knows what I'm talking about. He has recently declared that racism was a problem 40 years ago but it isn't any more and that is why we don't need race discrimination legislation. UKIP as a party is 'colour-blind', he said. That basically means that, like Clarkson and everyone else nowadays, they're not racist. Now, of course, some people might start saying that UKIP are colour-blind in the sense that 'you don't see many people of colour at a UKIP conference' but you know who those people are?

Racists.

Yes, the only people who still cling to racism, are a few sad, sad people who long for the olden days of racism and so they try to find it everywhere, even when it doesn't exist. A good example of this is journalist Michael Crick, who asked the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom why, of the 270 people on the cover of the UKIP conference brochure (titled 'Changing the face of politics'), there were no black faces. Godfrey Bloom immediate spotted that he was talking to a racist, called him out on it, and, for good measure, wisely attacked him with a pamphlet. Don't believe me? Take a look:

Racists are people who notice racism, the big silly racists.

Rozanne Duncan knows what I'm talking about. UKIP Councillor for Thanet District Council (sorry, former UKIP Councillor), she was filmed for the BBC documentary, Meet the Ukippers, declaring that 'there is absolutely no way I am a racist' - and illustrating this by referring to a couple she knows and gets on with 'I don't if they're Indian or Pakistani - it doesn't matter to me'. You see? Colour blind! She wisely knows that the difference between India and Pakistan is completely insignificant and not worth her attention (India and Pakistan, you should follow her excellent example). She also went on to explain:

the only people I do have problems with are negroes - and I don't know why. I don't know whether there's something in my psyche or whether it's karma from a previous life or whether something happened to me as a very very young person and I have drawn a veil over it because that sometimes happens, doesn’t it?'.

Basically, she's not a racist, she just has an irrational fear and hatred of black people. See? Makes perfect sense. In fact, she's typical of UKIP voters, 49% of whom say they are racially prejudiced, but 64% of whom are 'not racists', which is definitely statistically possible in this non-racist world.

Malky Mackay knows what I'm talking about. The former Cardiff City manager sent text messages referring to people like South Korean footballer Kim Bo-Kyung as 'Fkn chinkys' and said of a Jewish football agent 'Go on, fat Phil. Nothing like a Jew that sees money slipping through his fingers' and lamented of a selection of transfer targets 'Not many white faces amongst that lot but worth considering'. While he was forced by the racists of this world to apologise, fortunately he also explained to rest of us that this was not racism. How could it be? Racism doesn't exist. It was, in fact - as if he had to point this out! - 'friendly text-message banter'.

The brilliant thing about banter is that it immediately neutralises offensiveness. Once upon a time in the bad old days, if you called someone a poof or a nigger or a paki or a bitch or a yid, they'd be really offended, but now you follow this up by explaining it was banter and they'll laugh along and probably go for a pint with you. If only people had known of the awesome power of banter back in the olden days of yore! When the police were accused by the Macpherson report of institutionalised racism, they could have just explained that it was institutionalised banter and then everyone could have gone for a pint. Those landlords who put 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs' or the MP Peter Griffiths who gained the seat of Smethwick with the slogan 'If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour' or when Thatcher on World in Action grabbed the National Front vote by talking about British people being 'swamped by people with a different culture', they should all have just pointed out that this was banter, just pulling your leg, and you should lighten up and get a sense of humour and then everyone would have gone for a pint.

David Coburn knows what I'm talking about. The UKIP MEP referred to Scottish Government's External Affairs Minister as 'Humza Yousaf, or as I call him, Abu Hamza'. And in case you think he was basically saying 'all Muslims are the same and they're all terrorism-supporting fundamentalists', you couldn't be more wrong because it was just a 'stupid joke'. Banter, see?

In fact a lot of UKIP candidates know what I'm talking about. Joe Quirk bantered on Facebook that 'dogs are more intelligent, better company and certainly better behaved than most Muslims' Andre Lampitt, star of an UKIP election broadcast, banteringly tweeted that 'Muslims are animals their faith is disgusting their prophet is pedophile' and that 'Most Nigerians are generally bad people I grew up in Africa and dare anyone to prove me wrong'. Ron Northcott, a UKIP candidate in Plymouth, suggested on Twitter that 'Asian Muslims groom our white girls, now they rape our boys. Jordanian Paralympians commit sex offences. We need to reclaim our country' a priceless bit of banter echoed by James Elgar, UKIP local election candidate in Egham, who proposed: '#ThingsAsianBoysDo groom and rape underage white girls, stab and rob innocent old white people, bomb innocent white people #EctEctEct', which his father patiently explained to the PC killjoys was just 'banter'. And then there's Magnus Nielsen, a Camden Council UKIP candidate, who banteringly bantered that Islam was 'organised crime under religious camouflage [...] created by a man called Muhammad who was a gang leader of criminals'. 

William Henwood, UKIP council candidate in Enfield, was similarly bantery when he suggested Lenny Henry should go and live in a 'black country'. I mean, it's so obviously a stupid comment, it can only be a joke, unless you think he's a thick racist, which he can't be because racism doesn't exist any more. The same is true of Stourport-on-Severn councillor Eric Kitson's obviously hilarious Facebook comment about Muslim women that we should 'Hang um all first then ask questions later'. Look, he even spelled a word wrong as a clue to how funny he was being. The PC brigade missed another spelling clue when they condemned Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected for UKIP on Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, simply for saying 'islam is a cancer that needs eradicating ­multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camals that’s their way of life'. I mean: 'camels'. Come on, it's obviously brilliantly witty.

There are many more such humorists in the UKIP, clearly the funniest party in Britain. If we could only get a sense of humour, we'd realise that we are living in the best of all possible non-racist worlds.

* If we are to understand the disappearance of racism, it's important to understand how this works. Nobody is a racist, but sometimes, for various reasons, they say things which may be perceptually indistinguishable from racism for quite other reasons, as when Kerry Smith, UKIP Councillor in Essex, referred to 'poofters' and to a Chinese woman as a 'chinky bird', not because he's a racist, but because he was on 'a strong morphine based prescription medication for a back injury'. When Nigel Farage said he would be very concerned if a Romanian family moved in next door, he wasn't racist, he was tired. Morphine and sleep-deprivation have a notorious tendency to make people say racist-style things that are not actually racist. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

There were things you could criticise about 'political correctness'. There may have been overzealous and naive instructions that went out (though no one has ever found any evidence of being genuinely being told not to sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' or the banning of black bin liners). It may be that the kinds of debates that 'political correctness' generated in the 1980s encouraged a kind of 'victim culture' that meant that 'being offended' was considered a more significant hurt than it is.

For me, the most unfortunate legacy of 'political correctness' was the emphasis placed on banning certain words and replacing them with others. Don't get me wrong: it's obviously a good thing when we are all made aware that language can be an instrument of oppression and a key component of systematic abuse. But sometimes it can feel as if the battles against racism or in favour of sexual equality or disabled rights has just been reduced to a matter of word choices that don't offend people. And that's not politics, that's etiquette. Or, more properly, that's part of politics, but without anything else, it's just etiquette.

And it's the prim, humourless aspect of etiquette that has been seized upon by the racists and homophobes and misogynists and body fascists as the stick to beat the left with; by 'the left' I mean something generous - anyone who genuinely cares about these inequalities, who thinks it is a matter of injustice when a group's human rights are compromised. Now, my memory of those times is that I first heard the phrase 'political correctness' being used as a joke by people on the left as a way of drawing attention to and correcting any excess of rigidity, humourlessness, or simplification. But it's been turned against us to characterise the left as lacking humour.

As the examples above show, it's not the left that lacks humour, but it's the right - the far right - that seems to mistake hatred for hilarity. None of the comments above is funny. They are all, in both sense, witless. 

But here's the strange thing. That failing of political correctness - occasional, not systematic - of turning complex political issues into mere word-swapping is now the stock-in-trade of the far right. They exchange 'anti-racism' for 'political correctness'; they swap out 'racism' and they swap in 'banter'.

There's a strange parallel between UKIP and the Conservative Party: both seem to be in the business of denying their central beliefs. The Tories will consistently tell you they are friends of the NHS, that they love the public sector, that they want it to flourish, when the key figures in the Government (certainly the Tory side, but some in the Lib Dem side too) have grown up with an ideological belief in reducing the state to the bare minimum and turning its functions over to the private sector.

Similarly, while UKIP constantly deny being racist in any way, its appeal is to the racist instincts in this country; no one in the country gives the slightest shit about their economic policy or what they'd do with defence. UKIP and its supporters just care about stopping immigrants coming in, for wholly racist reasons (there are no good economic or cultural reasons to care about that). And so many of its supporters and candidates and spokespeople reveal themselves, on a weekly basis, to be racists, to have racist views, to have racist pasts (a letter written by one of Nigel Farage's schoolteachers in 1981 showed concerns that as a boy he was, a fascist, a racist, given to singing 'Hitler-Youth songs').

Perhaps the most successful piece of political correctness in modern politics has been to swap the words 'British National Party' for 'UK Independence Party'. Let's see things for what they are. UKIP is one of those aberrant atavistic upsurges of bigotry and hatred that seems to accompany periods of economic hardship every forty years (1930s, 1970s, 2010s). UKIP are a good old-fashioned racist party.

Game

In 2002, the then-Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith visited a sink estate in Easterhouse, on the eastern outskirts of Glasgow. Easterhouse is one of the most deprived areas in Europe and IDS was shocked by what he found there. Until that moment, he admitted, he had not appreciated the terrible conditions in which some of his fellow citizens live, the depths of poverty from which so many are unable to free themselves, and the systematic failure of the political class to address these conditions. In what has been called his 'Easterhouse Epiphany', IDS pledged to commit Tory policy to alleviating the conditions of the poorest, the most excluded and forgotten in society, to enable all people to participate in and contribute to their communities. No one should ever be left behind. No one should suffer this way. Welfare wasn't working and it must be made to work for these people. This was compassionate conservatism writ large. Iain Duncan Smith looked broken and humbled as he left the estate. Some thought they even saw him crying.

IDS or Mr Burns, not sure which, at Easterhouse

Flash forward a decade and Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary since 2010, is indeed presiding over a radical rethink of welfare. He has introduced the bedroom tax, which means that people in the Easterhouse estate, who happen to have a spare room, but have no prospect of renting it out or selling up, have had their benefits clawed back. In 2013, IDS introduced a new policy of 'sanctioning' benefit claimants - or, put another way, cutting people's benefits altogether - if they are judged fit for work or to have failed to seek work with sufficient ardour. In the first eight months of the new scheme, 553,000 people had their benefits 'sanctioned'. These included a man sanctioned for not applying for jobs online who was illiterate and did not know how to use a computer, people with long-term physical or psychiatric disabilities who were suddenly redescribed as healthy and then sanctioned when they couldn't hold down jobs. Job Centres were urged to meet targets for reducing benefit claimants but told not to describe these as targets. The Tories boasted about the numbers of people coming off benefits, while all around the country, for the first time in decades, food banks became a normal part of the civic landscape. While the introduction of Universal Credit exploded in a miasma of ill-thought-out computer chaos, IDS railed at the 'shirkers' and 'scroungers' who want 'something for nothing'. The target of this policy is not the poor, whatever he says; it's the new Tory electorate, the self-made men and women who infuriate themselves with fantasies of welfare dependents, the undeserving poor buying flat-screen TVs and taking exotic holidays on handouts provided by the taxes stolen from honest hardworking people by a spendthrift bleeding heart government. 

I thought of this Easterhouse Epiphany as I was watching Game, the latest show at the Almeida, directed by Sacha Wares, designed by Miriam Buether, and written by Mike Bartlett. The audience for Game is divided into four groups, and ushered separately into the theatre. On your way in you are given a set of headphones and you sit in a small 'hide' facing a row of windows with the blinds down and three television monitors. The play begins as the blinds go up and we see that we are peering into a two-storey open plan house, where a couple, Carly and Ashley, are looking round. We slowly come to understand that the house is part of a scheme; this couple will be given the house and paid a small income. But for what? In parallel with this, David is being interviewed for a job in some kind of hospitality role ('the clients, when they get here, they'll expect a safe, professional, five-star reception'). These two worlds come together in the second scene; Carly and Ashley have moved in and now paying clients have the opportunity to shoot them with tranquilliser darts. The house is the centrepiece of a theme park, a rich man's urban safari, where the poor are there to be ogled at, humiliated and shot. We see a group of city boys, a rowing elderly couple, a birthday outing, someone from the Katie Hopkins school of cultural altruism, and the disenchanted owner of the complex all taking aim at the poor. Some years into the project, when Carly and Ashley have had a growing boy, he too becomes a target. David, meanwhile, feels worse and worse about his role in this 'entertainment' which brings about his own vertiginous personal decline. 

The show is not literally or even metaphorically about Iain Duncan Smith or this government, though I couldn't help reflecting that the real story of the Easterhouse Epiphany is that IDS peered into the homes of the poor, wreathed in piety, only to punish and humiliate them to please the wealthy.

Game is a fascinating condensation of a number of different elements in the culture: not just the 'targeting' of the poor and the lionising of the rich, but the century's obsession with home ownership, Cameron's recent display of magnanimity in proposing starter homes for the young, the voyeurism of reality TV, internet pornography, Benefit Street, Gamergate, military adventurism, and the ubiquity of images of sexualised dead young women (in Nordic Noir and beyond). In a way it's a companion piece to Bull, in which two alpha office workers bully and humiliate their colleague for their own benefit and, well, just because they can. Bartlett and Wares are tapping into the brutality of the current culture, its blaming and stigmatising of the poor (welfare cheats), immigrants (welfare tourists), and southern Europeans (welfare addicts). Game is both a fantasy and an all-too-plausible picture of the imminent present.

But it's also a performance about theatre and its audiences. There's been a strong post-war tradition of putting the poor, the marginalised, the excluded on our stages. It starts, at least, in the late 1950s with Shelagh Delaney and Theatre Workshop's taste in new plays and with Wesker's Trilogy at the Royal Court, and it continues through Bond's work, the D H Lawrence trilogy in the late 1960s, through Matura and Keeffe and Dunbar, and it continues right up to Ian Rickson's period as AD of the Royal Court and beyond. (I remember going to the Court in early Autumn 2001, when the main house had Leo Butler's Redundant and upstairs Judy Upton's Sliding With Suzanne. As I waited in the queue to pick up my tickets, the man in front was asking what was on at the theatre. 'Downstairs,' said the Box Office assistant, 'we've got a gritty play about poverty, teenagers, family breakdown, and underage sex'. 'And Upstairs?' asked the punter. 'Yeah, pretty much the same,' she replied coolly.) There are excellent reasons for bringing the lives of the excluded and marginalised onto the stage. It forces the typically rather well-off Royal Court audience to pay attention to lives it might usually not encounter. It gives a platform and a voice to their concerns and fragilities and world view and way of life. But it's more complicated to think what the (well-off) audience gets from this. Is it noble social concern and a spur to more highly developed altruism? Or do we get some atavistic pleasure in seeing people suffer? These questions are raised very sharply by this production. At one moment, a visitor to the hide is Ashley himself. He has saved up to buy a session that will mean he can guarantee that he will not be looked at; he just wants a little unPanoptical time, but he pleads with David not to look either. David is reluctant; he has his instructions, but he turns his back anyway and the blinds come down. But the video monitors stay on, leaving us with a choice: do we also metaphorically turn our backs or do we continue to watch?

This is of a piece with the Almeida's investigations of audience and spectatorship over the last year - Mr Burns, Little Revolution, Our Town, and The Merchant of Venice all, in different ways, draw attention to the nature of our spectatorship. Mr Burns by the connections it required us to make between the three acts; it and Merchant of Venice forcing us to negotiate their compelling, challenging juxtapositions of high and low culture; Little Revolution in the breaching of the theatre, the location-specific juxtaposition of Islington and Hackney and the complicated tautologies of Alecky Blythe's verbatim presence; Our Town in the overlay of British accents and the US location, and then the shift from symbolic to iconic signification in the third act. That shift was prefigured a couple of months earlier by Tim Crouch's Adler & Gibb at the Royal Court (well, actually, everything by Tim Crouch), which reminds me that a reflection on the nature of spectatorship and representation has been a driving force in a lot of interesting recent work I've seen, from James Macdonald's elegant directorial sidestepping of graphic violence in his production of The Wolf From the Door to Ellen McDougall's Idomoneus at the Gate both of which treated its audience as intelligent people who could watch a piece of theatre creatively and imaginatively. The Belvoir Wild Duck at the Barbican was, like Game, a play in a box, which, in itself, draws attention to acts of spectatorship. There we watched the characters as if they were lab rats, the windows protecting stage from auditorium and auditorium from the state, until, in the final heartbreaking minutes, the actors appear directly before us, without protection, for a scene of unbearable emotional nakedness and grief. I thought also of a couple of Frantic Assembly shows: Rabbit - mostly performed in a perspex box - and Peepshow - we sat looking into a house - which then makes me think that the whole 'fourth wall' tradition of theatre since Naturalism is all about us peering, in complex and contradictory ways, into other people's houses. Here, in Game, we're almost always entirely voyeurs, looking in; it's a one-way view - us watching them - except for the rich visitors who become our avatars in the game and once again implicate us in the cruelty.

This is the most precise thing about Game, the way in which it manipulates and foreground and troubles our desire to watch, our habits of watching. I'm not usually very impressed by theatre that tries to 'implicate' its audience, which is usually a way of lazily generalising about who we are. This show, however, gives us choices and offers us dilemmas which we have to decide upon, resolve, hold together throughout. The moment-by-moment ethical dilemmas presented by the play are real because, even if we're not actually partaking in the fiction, we still have to think whether we want to look at semi-naked actors engaging, for instance, in fairly realistic sex acts. There's a deep equivalence between the decision in the fiction and there decision in the theatre and I found myself, time and again, nervous of my own reactions, checking, as we say now, my privilege.

Where the play is less precise is about the fictional game. First, I found the idea that such a game would ever exist implausible. That's not a killer problem as I don't think there would ever be Rollerball or a Hunger Games or a Sex Olympics but I can still enjoy the idea. I do think some have atavistic and violent feelings towards the poor and would like to express that in shooting at them. I think the play fits well into a current tradition of presenting our near-future as teetering on the edge of nihilistic violence (Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., Wolf From the Door, Pomona, Men in the Cities even). In those plays, the violence is incredible but presented seriously; it's a kind of challenge. But Game is different; it seems to have a commitment to the plausibility of its world. Through the guide character of David, we are supposed to have a real-world horrified reaction to the fictional world's game. But this doesn't work, first, because the idea is basically implausible. I don't think it's a failure of imagination on my part, or any excess of sunny optimism, to think that the outcry at such a proposal would make it impossible to run it. But also, as the play goes on, we become aware that the Game is losing money; people aren't signing up to do the shooting. So is Mike Bartlett saying that we're heading to a world where we would shoot at the poor? Or that we wouldn't? 

And then there's the character of David. There are at least two Mike Bartletts. There's the Mike Bartlett who writes about bad people: Bull is a good example, but also Contractions and Love Love Love and more. He's brutally accurate about horrible horrible people; he's unflinching in his depiction of them. He doesn't care about redemption or giving them flashes of goodness. He just shows them in all their disgusting, bullying, complacent, horror. He's remorseless and precise and unsentimental. And then there's the Mike Bartlett who writes about good people, in plays like Earthquakes in London, 13, or even King Charles III. This Mike Bartlett is visionary, messianic, broad, naive, beautiful, inspiring, and utopian. The good people are noble, brave, they make an impossible stand against the dreadfulness of the world, they seek positivity where all around is cynicism. I like both of these Mike Bartletts very much; I think they are each magnificent writers but I'm not sure the two men get on very well. The positive Mike Bartlett makes negative Mike Bartlett seem thin and cynical; the negative Mike Bartlett makes positive Mike Bartlett seem wishy-washy and sentimental.

Here, we have negative Mike Bartlett taking responsibility for writing the visitors to the Game and positive Mike Bartlett in charge of the David story. But the David story is a slow burn, about the gradual release of feeling, in which we need to piece together David's story from flashes and hints and moments; it makes scenes with visitors to the game seem rather superficial - they start nasty, stay nasty, and just unfold in their nastiness. The characters are, by comparison with David, rather one-note and can sometimes feel like stereotypes. This didn't matter in Bull, where the horrific pleasure is watching the remorseless logic of the bullying, but here it feels like we 'get' the visitors within a moment and the scenes lack dynamic.

Conversely, the brutal power of negative Mike Bartlett's scenes strip the power of the David scenes. It encourages us to doubt his motivations; why does he start having qualms? What part of 'you'll be running a game where rich people get to shoot tranquilliser darts at the poor' didn't you understand? And if we don't get his 'journey' we certainly aren't going to buy the ending. SPOILER ALERT: David waits until Ashley and Carly have left, then goes into the abandoned house and, haunted by images of his own tour of duty, shoots himself. SPOILER OVER. This is a real muddle. Is it the game that has triggered his memories? In which case, the game is kind of accidental (anything might have triggered it). What happened on the tour of duty? We never find out, so it's hard to know if that's the real story of his mental breakdown. Why does he feel he has to kill himself? If it's guilt about his participation in the game, well, why didn't he understand the game from the start; if it's a more general mental collapse, then it's not necessarily the game that should be blamed. To be honest, it felt entirely imposed on the play, which I think might have been stronger left as the working through of the dynamics of a cruel theme park, with David keeping his concerns to himself. 

I think there's something a bit undecided at the heart of Game. The production is wonderful; Miriam Buether's design is stunning; the video and sound design (borrowing the Katie Mitchell team) is pin-point sharp; Sacha Wares has wrangled all of these elements with tremendous assuredness; and Bartlett's dialogue is splinter-sharp as always. But the solidity and clarity of all this only go to emphasise that underneath this building there are shallow foundations. I'm guessing that Game is not destined for a major afterlife - purely because of the logistics of putting the thing on - which is a shame, because I think there's a grimly exciting political and theatrical idea here and another iteration of the play might bring that out more fully.

Gutted

This afternoon a fire broke out at the Battersea Arts Centre in South London. The fire spread quickly and it seems that soon flames were tearing through the whole building. There are reports that the roof of the Grand Hall collapsed. The tower fell back into the building around 5.00. Residents are reported to have watched the conflagration in tears.

My Twitter timeline this evening was united in heartbreak. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Battersea Arts Centre to British theatre. It is one of the few theatres in London that has consistently championed experimental performance of all kinds. The companies and performers I've first seen there have gone on to become some of the most significant in the wider culture, from Frantic Assembly to Matt Lucas and David Walliams. The scratch nights (probably 1000s over the last three decades) gave a chance for companies to develop new work in an environment that was protected and supportive but also at the heart of our theatre culture. Did they invent the scratch night? I think they did. And that's spread through the theatre. I last went there to see Christopher Brett Bailey's This Is How We Die, one of the most extraordinary shows of last year. Only today I was licking my metaphorical lips in anticipation of the Taking a Stand season (Chris Thorpe, Coney, Mark Thomas, Chris Goode, Kaleider, Freedom Theatre and more) which was planned to provide a theatrical commentary to the General Election campaign. I worked there - vaguely - in the early 90s, lighting a show for a company set up by university peers (were they called Fast Food Zoo? I forget). Punchdrunk, Forced Entertainment, Raffaello Sanzio, so many shows, so many amazing shows. Through the nineties, the building was run by Tom Morris who went from there to the National and steered it towards collaborative work, devising, working with site-specific, dance, physical theatre, puppetry and more. He co-created War Horse, so in some ways the BAC has changed the mainstream.

Thankfully, it seems no one was injured but the building looks to be terribly damaged.

Let's help. Can you spare £10? I bet you can. What about £20? Why not contribute now? We can help make this extraordinary, beautiful theatre rise from its ashes and carry on feeding and sustaining our theatre.

CLICK HERE.

Nostalgia

One of the most delightful things about the Web is its responsiveness to nostalgia. Suddenly want to see that KP Discos advert from the late 70s? No problem.  Vaguely remember a daytime kid's drama about children who foil a plot to steal Peregrine Falcon eggs? You're welcome. Remember how one Christmas you wanted, more than anything, a Mobile Exploration Lab in the Micronauts range? Here it is. The Web gives us the Immortality of Things. What was lost is ever found. 

Is this an opportunity for nostalgia or the end of nostalgia? Nostalgia is an eighteenth-century compound word derived from the Greek for homecoming (νόστος) and ache (ἄλγος).  It's an ache for home. Now it captures a sense of memory and loss; a fond memory of some past time and the pain of knowing it can never be recovered. But the Web recovers everything. You vaguely remember a terrible Sunday-morning religious show for kids? There you go.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud reports watching a child playing with a cotton reel; he would throw the reel away shouting 'fort' ('gone') and would retrieve it shouting 'da' ('there'). Through an ingenious series of phonetic substitutions and associations, Freud comes to believe that the boy is playing out a traumatic event from his childhood: the loss of the mother (that is, the moment where the boy realises that his mother is separate from him and that therefore his own unity with her is limited and finite; and therefore, fundamentally, that his own desire cannot be infinitely satisfied). But he is playing out the disappearance of the mother by re-enacting it with a fantasy of her return. For Freud, this is not a fantasy of pre-oedipal unity, but a way of making adulthood possible. By adding a fantasy of her return, the boy can accept the necessity of her disappearance.

I've always thought that this is a brilliant text about narrative. We re-enact the inevitable losses of our lives but make it possible to face them by giving them a happy ending. The reason why it's a complex story is that it suggests that the ending is necessary but not essential: that is, we need the ending to make the narrative bearable, but this does not mean that we over-write the main story with its ending. The happy ending is not conservative in the sense that it replaces the complexity of real conflict with a fantasy of reconciliation; the ending does not displace or dispose of the anxieties of the narrative - on the contrary, it makes them possible. In Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, a study of women readers of romantic fiction, Radway discovers, to her surprise, that the readers, when selecting which novel to read, often check the last page first to ensure it has the required happy ending. In other words, narrative surprise is not needed. Closure is required, but not in sequence; the happy ending is a precondition of everything else happening. The ending is what lets everything else get started.

Yesterday, I remembered that, as an early teenager, I had a tape recorder. It's the one in the photo above, a Phillips D6410 Cassette Recorder. It's a large flat tape player and recorder with separate bass and treble controls (woo!) and, very excitingly, pitch control, so you could adjust the speed of playback. It has a large panel which actually contains two different speakers and it also featured an 'electret' condenser microphone, which, to my ears, was far better than the tape recorder I'd had before (a much slimmer shape, about as wide as the five buttons).

I loved this tape recorder. I took it everywhere. I played music on it. I recorded the Top 20, like everyone. I occasionally recorded little plays. I once made a tape of songs (of my own composition FFS) for my brother's birthday. But I also used it to record 'stuff'. By which I mean I used to document the world around me. I sometimes left it recording when friends came over. I swear, this was not about spying: it came from an odd, early-teenage sense that the world was slipping away from us. Things happen and they go and they are unrecoverable and this seemed perplexing and intolerable to me. And so I recorded as much as I could. I recorded lots of stuff off Top of the Pops. I still remember listening to one particular episode and enjoying the peculiar juxtaposition of The Specials' 'Too Much Too Young' and Kenny Rogers's 'Coward of the County'. I recorded episodes of Porridge and Dad's Army and Steptoe and Son. Once they showed First Men on the Moon, the 1964 movie starring the incomparable Lionel Jeffries, and I taped it and added my own live narration during the longer dialogueless action sequences. I hung a microphone out of the window and recorded traffic and I labelled the tape 'Traffic, Kennington, 1st August 1981'. I didn't ever listen to it, obviously; I'm not a maniac. It was enough to me that it had been recorded.

Was this about defeating death? It might have been - for me, anyway. I think that was the age I started worrying about death, struggling to get my head around the finitude of a life, that you live and do things and want things and hope for things and then one day they end entirely and disappear. It may have been a bit prompted by the death of my great-grandmother and, later on, worries about nuclear war (my experience was exactly, uncannily captured by Gary Owen in his 2002 play The Shadow of a Boy). But maybe it was just growing up and thinking for myself. The thing about death that most disturbed me was the big perspective, the thought that all this, the actual daily experience of my life, would one day be gone. And if it would one day disappear, why did it need to happen now? What difference would it make to do or not to do? To be or not to be? I wonder - I don't know - if I started recording things as a response.

But if Freud is right, it's not that recording was a compensation for the loss of the everyday, it's the recording that made it the everyday possible. Not that I ever listened to the recording of traffic, but the thought was that it was possible, in principle, to listen made it unnecessary to hear them. It was mutely recording the world that let me live and, as a corollary, allowed me not to listen to those tapes. By imagining that we can transcend death, we can transcend the need to transcend death and we can live.

When I found a formula of words on Google that called up an image of this machine, I felt my heart beat faster seeing it. You probably just see a clunky, design-dated tape player. But I see that picture and I remember the smell of it, the elegant rise of the tape holder, the (slightly plasticky) feel of pressing down the buttons, the sound made by pulling out the carrying handle. I get a full-body emotional response to this funny-looking thing. It's a mixture of pleasure and of pain: a flood of those pleasurable feelings and the pain that I can't see it. I found one on eBay and for a moment, I was actually going to buy one (until I realised I no longer have any cassettes or use for it). Most of all though, when I saw the image, I got a memory-wash of setting the machine down on a level surface, pressing record & play and knowing that whatever I did or said, the sound would be held, contained, preserved. I remembered that feeling. In a way, what I experienced, looking at that image, was a nostalgia for nostalgia.

And here's another thing. I took that to school of a few times and one day I put it in my locker, but when I came back, it was gone. These weren't the lockers you see in American High School movies with, like, keys and whatnot. These were just wooden cupboards with doors. And obviously, someone came into the classroom, someone who had seen my Phillips D6410 and had taken a shine to it, and they stole it. And when I told my mum, she was sympathetic. She said she'd buy me a replacement - and not just a replacement, but something even better, the latest model. Something that did stereo? Maybe, who knows, something with a radio too? So we went to Tottenham Court Road to get another tape player. I made her walk up and down that road and go in and out of every hi-fi shop but I couldn't find one I liked. Nothing could compete with the machine I'd lost. Until we were walking past one store (near the site of the UFO Club in the sixties, I now think) and I saw it, I saw it. I glanced through the door and saw it sitting in a glass cabinet. My D6410. We went in. I didn't need to inspect it, though the guy behind the counter wanted to sell it to me. And we bought it. The machine I thought had been lost by some hideous thief, I managed to get back. Against all the odds. Fort. Da.

So when I look at this picture, I have nostalgia for nostalgia for nostalgia. And, if Freud is right, that means this displacement activity, this seeking out of traces, this attempt to catch dying memories by the tail, may be a way of making us live, make us live fully, acknowledging that though our life can be recorded over, it must be recorded first.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

I said a while ago I might try to write about every Dylan album in order. And then nothing for eight months. At this rate, I'll be talking about Time Out of Mind in 2049, so here's me trying to  get on with it.

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And BOOM, there it is. Not much more than a year after his okay-but-nothing-that-special debut, Dylan arrives. If he weren't popular music's most shape-shifting performer, you'd almost say that on The Freewheeling' Bob Dylan, he is now complete, but Dylan is never complete. All we can say is that now he becomes visible in his energy, his mercurial gifts, his genius. It's a breathtaking collection. After a fortunate last-minute shuffling of the contents by Columbia Records, he's abandoned most of his cover versions and it's his own songwriting that seizes our attention. And what songwriting: 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall', 'Masters of War', 'Don't Think Twice It's All Right', 'Blowin' in the Wind', 'Bob Dylan's Dream', 'Girl From the North Country' all on one album? Ridiculous. His first album is mainly filled with Dylan's covers of folk and blues songs; here he's still engaging with that tradition but in a new way. In each song here, he's channelling, borrowing, stealing, adapting from the folk tradition and turning it into something genuinely original and strange and haunting. Take 'A Hard Rain', which takes a pinch of the Scottish ballad 'Lord Randall' (which you can listen to here, sung by the Dylanphobic Ewan MacColl) but turns it into something visionary, apocalyptic, vast and frightening. 'Masters of War' takes the outlines of a tune from the late-medieval ballad 'Nottanum Town' and makes it a blast against contemporary warmongers, whose power is enhanced by its harnessing of a thousand years of folk tradition (and two thousand of messianic teaching).

What emerges so strongly in this collection is exactly that yoking together of opposites: contemporaneity and ancient wisdom, urban sophistication and backwoods simplicity, modern leftism and Old Testament fire. The most immediately striking development on this record is the 'finger-pointing' songs, as he called them: suddenly, probably under the influence of his radical girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, he's found politics.

An atmosphere of folky leftishness courses through these songs, but I hear a balance, maybe a tension, between the political voice of a generation and something more egoistic, more personal. The hipster in-crowd jokiness of 'Talkin' World War III Blues' or the contemporaneous out-take 'Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues' have a certain throwaway quality; the latter exists in a horribly muddy version on the Witmark Demos (Bootleg Series Vol 9) but sounds kind of great in a live Carnegie Hall recording from October 1963 on The Bootleg Series Vol 1 - it gives you a strong sense of the community that were there to support the work, hear and approve the sentiments; they lap up the jokes and the references. There he introduces the song with the words 'an' there ain't nothin' wrong with this song' a sly little self-congratulatory reference to the fact that the song was banned by The Ed Sullivan Show which only added to Dylan's folk celebrity. Weirdly, though, the lines that got him banned - 'Now we all agree with Hitler’s views / Although he killed six million Jews / It don’t matter too much that he was a Fascist / At least you can’t say he was a Communist!' - he doesn't actually sing at the Carnegie Hall (nor at the Philharmonic Hall a year later on Bootleg Series 6). I wonder if he senses that the venom they suggest overwhelms the politics; they are add odds with the wry irony of the rest of the song, which he sings in the kind of hick voice he likes for his talking blues songs (see 'Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues' for another good example), which makes for bluntly mild humour but those lines cut with a serrated edge. They seem to me to emerge less from a wry observer, as the rest of the song does, as from a personal venom. 

In a song like 'Masters of War' the venom is all. It's a remarkable sign of Dylan's cocky confidence that, aged only 21 when he recorded it, he can marshall words to denounce the military-industrial complex and not sound like a flea on the back of an elephant. The song builds in verbal confidence, actually. The first two verses are pretty standard stuff, but a new turn is announced at the beginning of the third: 'Like Judas of old / You lie and deceive / A world war can be won / You want me to believe' is a nice working together of hellfire preacher and postwar pacifist. Two verses later we get the most caustic dismissal yet: 'You ain't worth the blood / That runs in your veins.' Immediately this personalisation of the masters of war is pressed home: 'Let me ask you one question / Is your money that good / Will it buy you forgiveness / Do you think that it could?' The final verse is where the savage contempt and condemnation reaches its peak. Oddly, one might think, for a song so contemptuous of war, Dylan (or the character-singer of the song) is wishing for the death of his enemy. It's interesting that it feels finely balanced between an invocation of hellfire and damnation but also personal contempt and the politics somehow emerges in the space between them:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

'Pale afternoon' is particularly brilliant, isn't it? And the great thing, musically, is the way Dylan's worked the song around a single chord that hammers away through the song, with the vocal line taking these leaps up the range that almost provide the key changes and seem to pile hatred on hatred, fire on fire. It's a dropped D tuning, which he does a bit elsewhere on this record, but then tightens up the strings by using a capo on the 3rd fret. Basically, it gives the accompaniment this sound of a nervous clattering drone, that is a key part of the song's remorseless battery.

But if you think that's good, 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall' is a whole new world. The legend is that Dylan turned up to a folk event organised by Pete Seeger at the Carnegie Hall in September 1962 where all the acts were limited to ten minutes and three songs each. 'What am I gonna do?' asked Dylan. 'One of my songs is ten minutes long.' The song seems to have been written, unusually for him at that time, as a poem on the page with no idea whether or how to turn it into song. But by the time of the Carnegie Hall, it's a folk masterpiece. The song has a simple structure: one figure asks a young man (maybe his son) what he's been doing, and the young man responds with a series of unsettling, deranged, dislocated images, all of which are precise, ambiguous and troubling. None of them are directly literal; they are all allusive, elusive, surreal, immensely suggestive: 'a highway of diamonds with nobody on it', 'one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'', 'a young woman whose body was burning'. Honestly I could quote the whole song; in fact, when I wrote Static, at one moment we wanted a vow from the dead husband Chris that would be translated into and only performed in BSL. I wrote a piece that vowed eternal devotion, that kind of eternity that only the speaking dead can promise, and I drew on this song for the structure and even for one line. This is a treasure chest of verbal riches and establishes a songform that Dylan returns to right through his career: the list-song where a basic motif is obsessively elaborated in various ways. In this, there's a direct link between 'Hard Rain' and, say, 'It's All Good' on Together Through Life 46 years later.

Musically, he's using that dropped D tuning again, which this time lets the low D act as a drone through almost the entire song, with the churning rhythm pounding through, insisting in the accumulation of images. In the final verse, Dylan himself makes an appearance, vowing to go out and sing the song and make a change. The title, to which every verse returns, is beautifully ambiguous: a warning, a prediction, or a threat. The song seems to have preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis but it finds a moment there, the hard rain resonating with fears of nuclear fallout. But it could just as easily be a warning about the judgment of God. There's a pretty direct connection to the Beats and a poem like Allan Ginsburg's 'Howl' with its long lines and epic accumulation of details.

'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright' is venom again, this time to a girlfriend who he's leaving. Dylan is very good at writing devastating goodbye songs (think of the brilliantly waspish put-down at the end of Positively 4th Street 'I wish that for just one time / You could stand inside my shoes / You’d know what a drag it is / To see you') and of course the sheer contempt of 'Idiot Wind' ('Idiot Wind / Blowing every time you move your mouth / You're an idiot, babe / It's a wonder you still know how to breathe'). Here we have each verse delivering a withering judgment on his ex's failings building to the casual dismissal ('I ain't saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better but I don't mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time / But don't think twice, it's alright') which is about as passive-aggressive as you can get. Interestingly, though, the song changes in tone in its various incarnations. In the 1964 version (Bootleg Series 6) he seems to be playing it for laughs. I shall ignore the awful cod-reggae version he gives us on Live at Budokan but the rendering on Before the Flood is a startling reinvention; it's still just him a guitar and harmonica, but here the yelps and yells make it sound like a man who is protesting too much. It becomes a song about self-deception and loss.

It's the strongest of the personal songs on this record (he sounds like he's having tremendous fun on 'Bob Dylan's Blues', certainly more fun than I'm having on that song), though 'Girl From the  North Country' runs it pretty close, Dylan singing with the sun on his face somewhat against the increasingly dark lyric. It begins asking that we pass on a message but ends in the belief that she's forgotten him entirely. It has some affinities with 'If You See Her, Say Hello', 12 years later. The melody and vocal are peerless; they've had their thunder stolen by Simon & Garfunkel, the pre-echoes of which unbalance the song to the modern listener, but this is one of his greatest love songs.

I like the bluesy 'Down the Highway' which sounds like Dylan trying to channel Robert Johnson and doing so with some success, ringing guitar and all. It's got a laconic wit to it rather than Johnson's horrified desolation. It's one of several songs for Suze Rutolo, the most direct reference to her being 'My baby took my heart from me / She packed it all up in a suitcase / Lord, she took it away to Italy, Italy'. Rutolo had indeed taken herself off to Italy, to Dylan's annoyance. I like the little, puzzled repetition of Italy; it partly sounds like he's not sure he said it clearly enough ('Iddly'), or that he can't quite believe where she's gone ('Italy'??). 

The iconic song that I haven't mentioned yet is the record's opener, 'Blowin' in the Wind'. I don't know what I think. The song doesn't really touch me, somehow. Maybe it's over-familiarity (in my inner-London primary school, we used to sing it in assembly...), but also the rhetoric seems a bit, well, windy. There are things I like about that: the title is ambiguous, isn't it? Is it that the answer to all these questions is obvious if you listen to the way the wind is blowing (because you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, right?); or does it mean that the answers to these questions seem to scatter in the winds? Is it a song of conviction or desperation? I guess it was seen as the former, but the latter seems as plausible. I like the 'Yes and...' structure of the verse, which has an insistence to it that gives it moral authority. The melody is great; on the first album, I noted a favourite guitar figure, the descent from C down to the A in the bass with a D on top of it. It peeks up all through the first album but now the whole song is built around it those descents giving it a melancholy air, even as it seems to warn those negligent of others' suffering. But still, I just don't quite connect with it. While elsewhere on this record, the images seem to me vivid, concrete, jagged and strange, these images seem to strain for wisdom. Give me 'A Hard Rain' any day.

For me the record fizzles out a bit at the end. 'Corrinna, Corinna' is an elegant arrangement of the standard that swings gently with the addition of a stand-up bass and some lightly jazzy guitar and Dylan in crooning mode (see also Nashville Skyline and Shadows in the Night), but it's thin as paper. Things don't improve with 'Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance' with its messy guitar and harp and hiccupping buckaroo vocal. The title of 'I Shall Be Free' suggests a protest anthem, but actually it's a jokey song about his successes and failures with women. Maybe you had to be there, but compared to 'It Ain't Me, Babe' or 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' which are genuinely laugh out loud songs, it feels a bit too uncertain in approach to get a laugh.

I should say, I've always thought this was one of his best guitar-playing records (the picking on 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright' is amazing, as it is on 'Girl From the North Country') but reading around, it seems Bruce Langhorne was responsible for 'Don't Think Twice'. The demos on Bootleg Series 7 and 9 are nowhere near as accurate and the timing is also much more variable when Dylan plays it. Listening to it again, I think it's one of the best-recorded records Dylan released; there's a real warmth and intimacy to the voice and the guitar sound; it sounds full and rich. It captures the smoky rasp of his voice, the details of his wonderful phrasing. You can hear the breath in the harmonica too. It's a confident, intimate record and it's impossible not to love. Dylan is discovering that he can do anything and he does everything.

And the rest...

Of the contemporary recordings that didn't make it to this record, there's a clutch that show his sudden interest in the blues. 'Standing on the Highway' is another Johnson soundalike, though it's wise and knowing rather than haunted and visceral; 'Poor Boy Blues' sounds to me like a rather aimless retread of some blues motifs. (Are we supposed to speculate why the po' boy is cryin’? There's not enough compulsion in there to make me really want to know.) 'Worried Blues' is a sweet, country folk rendering of a standard without much Dylan in it to my ear. 'Quit Your Low Down Ways' is the best of the bluesy out-takes, a vengeful gospel-tinged recording with a great, gruff vocal showing off his repertoire of blues attitudes.

'The Death of Emmett Till' is his first go at a topical song. Well, I say topical. Emmett Till was murdered eight years before this record came out so it's hardly hot off the press, but at a time when the civil rights movement was gaining such powerful momentum, it was a timely reminder of America's recent history. The song re-uses the chord sequence from 'House of the Rising Sun' off his first album, just capoed at the third fret. It's a good chord sequence for this song that seems to keep forcing the point forwards, telling a dreadful accumulating story without ever quite resolving anything. Dylan at first described the song as one of his best and later as 'bullshit' and I'd say it's somewhere in between. Rather better is 'Oxford Town', which actually makes it to the record and has the merit of being genuinely topical (written within a month of the segregationist battles at the University of Mississippi); it's a jaunty tune with a snarl in its lip.

There are much lighter tunes here too. I love 'Walkin' Down the Line', which I feel slightly uneasy about because it's a light skiffle-pop tune, but there's a carefree humour and world-worn knowingness about the song that elevates it. Apparently in the 1980s, when Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead, the Dead requested this song to an incredulous Dylan, but why the hell not? It's full of ideas and has a generosity of spirit. 'Ballad for a Friend' is a country blues with some nicely minimalist bottleneck guitar which begins bucolic and ends darkened by grief. 'Mixed Up Confusion' is a mixed up confusion of a sardonic folk lyric with an incongruous hillbilly honkytonk backing; recorded and released as a single apparently at the behest of his new manager, Albert Goldman, it is a pretty poor thing. Much better is 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time', another lament for his absent girlfriend, but this one strikes a less self-conscious note, with its open D (I think) tuning giving an insistent D on the 1st and 4th strings through all the chord changes, a sharp clear expression of heartbreak that cuts through any distractions. The Witmark demo is beautiful and elegantly laid down but the live Town Hall performance that he released on his Greatest Hits Vol 2 is even better, more heartfelt, the slightly out-of-tune guitar seeming to add to its fragility. It's a very sweet pastoral ballad, and it's hard to believe it's the same man who wrote 'Don't Think Twice'. Some think it's a bit sickly, including Dylan himself, though it's nothing compared to the schmaltz of 'Kingsport Town', a kind of cowboy ballad that he would only find a way to make his own on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. 'Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie' is Dylan's first attempt to write a Guthrie-style outlaw song and again he'd only really make that work on the title track of John Wesley Harding. Some hate that but, well, I’ll explain what I like about it when I get there. There’s some affectionate fun with the clichés of the genre here  (‘He had a reputation as the gamblin'est man around’) but it's rather thin stuff. The Witmark demo is a little strained and has much less humour and swagger than the Freewheelin’ outtake. 

If anything shows the extraordinary talent taking shape in Dylan around this time, we only need to point to the fact that he could write a song as remarkable as 'Let Me Die In My Footsteps' and leave it off the album. It got its first official release 31 years after it was recorded on Bootleg Series 1. It's a beautiful, dignified, moving song that again balances the personal and political; Dylan is watching people digging fallout shelters to prepare for war and insists that he will not go underground but will stay above to enjoy the beauty of the world while he can. As such he is again condemning the warmongers, partly for whipping up fear but implicitly, too, for being prepared to destroy everything that is good about the world. The melody is simple and resonant, the rising note on 'before I go' ringing out being particularly stirring. Why he left it off is unclear, though on the Witmark demo, recorded at the end of 1962 he gives up three verses in claiming that 'it's a drag - I sung it so many times'. I guess he just got bored of it, or felt that 'Blowin' In the Wind' and 'Masters of War' kind of covered the area.