No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk 9781478023234

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NO MACHOS OR POP STARS

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NO MACHOS OR POP ST RS A WHEN THE LEEDS ART EXPERIMENT WENT PUNK

GAVIN BUTT

Duke University Press  Durham and London 2022

 © 2022 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Arno Pro, Helvetica Neue, and Helvetica by ­Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Butt, Gavin, author. Title: No machos or pop stars : when the Leeds art experiment went punk / Gavin Butt. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021050347 (print) | lccn 2021050348 (ebook) | isbn 9781478016007 (hardcover) | isbn 9781478018636 (paperback) | isbn 9781478023234 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Punk rock ­music—­England—­Leeds—­History and criticism. | Post-­punk ­music—­Social aspects—­England—­ Leeds. | Punk culture—­England—­Leeds. | Punk culture and art—­England—­Leeds. | Art and society—­History—20th ­century. | Art—­Study and teaching—­Social aspects. | bisac: ­music / Genres & Styles / Punk | art / History / Con­temporary (1945–) Classification: lcc ml3534.6.g7 B88 2022 (print) | lcc ml3534.6.g7 (ebook) | ddc 781.6609428/19—­dc23/eng/20220414 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021050347 lc ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.g­ ov​/­2021050348

Cover art: Members of the Mekons and Delta 5 among fans and friends as pictured in Melody Maker, February 3, 1979. Photograph © Jill Furmanovsky.

 FOR KITTY, KELVIN, ANDY, JULZ, TONY, MARK— AND KATE

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CONTENTS ix .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Preface: Class Acts xv

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Acknowl­edgments

1 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Introduction: The Art School Dance Goes On

PART I AVANT-­G ARDE AND PUNK

23

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Beginning at a Dead End

56 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Anarchy at the Poly

01 02

PART II FORMING A BAND

75

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Punk Bohemians

105 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Debating Society 126

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

146

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

171

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Why Theory?

“No Machos or Pop-­Stars Please” Electric Shock

198 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Rehearsals for the Mutant Disco 225

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Epilogue: The Limits of Experiment—1981 and ­After

03 04 05 06 07 08

245 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Notes 267 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   SELECTED Discography 271 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   Bibliography

283

.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

Index

Contents

viii

PREFACE CLASS ACTS

T

he Three Johns w ­ ere one of my favorite bands in the mid1980s. Hailing from Leeds, this late-­period post-­punk outfit held my teenage imagination b­ ecause they made beatbox-­driven, Captain Beefheart–­esque ­music with lyr­ ics that as a burgeoning young Marxist I r­ eally got lost in. “Oh, t­ here’s a sun of mud,” sings vocalist John Hyatt on their 1984 a­ lbum Atom Drum Bop, “Oh the F ­ uture is rising, yes it’s rising / not a stone’s throw from t­ oday.” Growing up as I did in the stultifying small-­ town culture of the En­glish East Midlands, the idea of being on the cusp of a f­ uture that was all to play for was electrifying. But the quasi-­Bataillean image of a “sun of mud” was, at the same time, troubling. It was something I ­couldn’t quite work out. It seemed ominous. It left me with the creeping dread of a f­ uture whose brightness might be obscured (as the sun might be blotted out by a radioactive plume) or filled with a kind of weird gloomy brightness in which one might get bogged down or stuck. I was slowly waking up to what was happening u­ nder Thatcherism b­ ecause it felt proximate to me. I remember being s­ topped by police during the 1984–85 miners’ strike when they mistook my friends and me for flying pickets driving to the Nottinghamshire coalfields. The image of a sun of mud seemed right for the times. Listening to the Three Johns helped cast such realities in a broader imaginative landscape that, as an eighteen-­year-­old boy from a working-­ class f­ amily, I was quick to inhabit. My head was full of the fictions e­ tched in Hyatt’s sometimes opaque and absurd, other times more directly po­ liti­cal, lyr­ics. “Oh the mob expects malnutrition,” Hyatt continues to sing.

FM.1  The Three Johns, Atom Drum Bop (Abstract Rec­ords, 1984). Cover art by Terry Atkinson.

“Robots are guarding that old ribcage fashion / Flamin’ torches, pick axe ­handles / Looking down the water-­cannon of pop m ­ usic.” Then, going on to the chorus: “Rock and roll, rock and roll, rock and roll / ideological product”—­and genius, I thought—­“Rock and roll is pop m ­ usic / For the credit card hospital.” I ­really loved the irony of ­these lines. The Three Johns ­were holding up their sullied hands, signaling how the cap­it­ al­ist entertainment business could be treacherous and betray the intentions of even the most ardent lefty rockers. Th ­ ese lines also chimed with my own take on the mainstream 1980s pop industry which, by this time, I’d largely tired of as glossy cap­i­tal­ist distraction. But I w ­ asn’t drawn to the Three Johns solely b­ ecause of their avowed po­liti­cal stance, nor even simply b­ ecause I liked jumping around to their ­music, usually while drunk. They loomed large for me then ­because I also knew from reading the New Musical Express (nme) that two of the Three Johns went to art school. The art connection was unmistakably pre­sent on the band’s rec­ord covers, which featured paintings by Hyatt, drawings by Jon Langford, and work by the post-­conceptual British artist Terry Atkinson. Atkinson was then teaching in the fine art studios at the University of Leeds, where Hyatt and Langford had been his students. Together, the Three Johns (and one Terry) represented to me the world-­making possibilities of being at art school for someone like me who, at the time, was producing highly realistic oil paintings of scrapyards and still lifes of gardening implements for my art A level. Rather than more of the same, the Three PREFACE

x

Johns represented what might be pos­si­ble at art school: a ­f uture involving an “art” committed to progressive economic and social change and one reaching far beyond the confines of gallery walls. “rock n’ roll versus thaatchiism” proclaimed the slogan on the back cover of Atom Drum Bop, the Johns’ playful neologism nailing Thatcherism and Saatchi & Saatchi as symbiotic ills afflicting the times. On becoming a member of the professoriat several years ago, I reflected upon the contrast between the education system that furnished me with the skills to become a critical intellectual and academic and the transformed, marketized conditions of En­glish higher education inaugurated by the introduction of expensive undergraduate fees in 2012. Art-­school education, along with university-­level learning as a ­whole, was broadly state-­funded in the UK from 1962 ­until 1986. The 1962 Education Act instructed Local Education Authorities in ­England and Wales to “grant scholarships, exhibitions, bursaries and other allowances . . . ​for the purpose of enabling pupils to take advantage without hardship to themselves or their parents of any educational facilities available to them.”1 Though ­there was some means-­testing involved in the issuing of maintenance grants, based on the amount of parental income, ­there was a guaranteed minimum level of award issued to all students during this period, and no fees to pay. The minimum grant was abolished in 1984 by the Thatcher government, along with students’ entitlement to unemployment benefits during vacation periods, and restrictions on student access to housing benefits w ­ ere introduced. In the following years, successive governments further unpicked the social demo­cratic character of the 1962 funding settlement, introducing student loans in 1990 and fees in 1998 and fi­nally abolishing maintenance grants altogether in 2016. This means that, looking back, the period from 1962 to the mid-1980s could be viewed as a halcyon, and historically brief, period of state funding for advanced art education—­and more broadly for university-­level study— in the UK. It was also a period in which students from working-­class backgrounds enjoyed unpre­ce­dented access to it. ­These two ­factors—­public funding and working-­class access—­were, unsurprisingly, linked: the former, to a large degree, determining the viability of the latter. As Mark Banks and Kate Oakley concluded on the basis of their research into art schools and UK educational policy, “The working class artist rode the wave of the post-­war welfare settlement, as well as an emergent cultural sensibility that encouraged a radical break with tradition. To be an artist was to escape—­ and to become someone e­ lse. . . . ​Art students w ­ ere symbolic of a more motile class structure—­but where they ‘belonged’ was not yet certain. ­These

xi

Class Acts

new bohemians ­were in flight from proletarian tradition yet also contemptuous of middle-­class mores and ‘straight’ society.”2 In the 1980s East Midlands, it was similarly unclear to me where I was to ultimately “belong,” but I knew, at least, that I wanted to go to art college, based on how that looked to me as a fan of the Three Johns. So I applied to study fine art at Leeds. When I ­didn’t get in, I was crestfallen. Tail between my legs, I went to art college in London instead. I arrived ­there just as the tectonic plates of the higher education funding settlement ­were beginning to shift. Nevertheless, I was still able—­alongside ­others like me—to study without any hesitation about its affordability or anx­ie­ ties about a lifetime of debt: ­there ­were no fees to pay, I received a full local authority maintenance grant, I claimed housing benefits to cover my rent, and I even claimed the dole during the summer holidays. This funding system, and the education sector that went with it, are now long gone in E ­ ngland and Wales, replaced by a new one devised to pay for a vastly expanded rate of participation since the 1970s and 1980s. But, as Valerie Walkerdine perceptively put it in her own take on t­ hese issues, “One of the paradoxes of the current situation in Britain is that while ­there have never been more places in higher education, it has become more and more exclusive.”3 Bearing witness to this, a number of reports have recently identified how barriers to educational opportunity for working-­class ­people in the arts in ­England and Wales have persisted since the years of the so-­called postwar consensus—­notwithstanding progressive changes in society since then.4 Such inequalities particularly show themselves in the con­temporary demographic makeup of ­people in the creative industries. Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor’s findings are sobering on this score: “The proportion of young cultural workers [in the arts] from upper-­middle class backgrounds more than doubled between 1981 and 2011, from 15% to 33%. The proportion from working class origins dropped by about a third, from 22% to 13% over the same period. In 1981 ­there w ­ ere more young ­people from working class origins entering creative jobs than from upper-­middle class origins; this situation had reversed in 2011.”5 I therefore wanted to write a book about the time before 1981: to set out the conditions of cultural possibilities that existed in the not too distant past, ­little more than four de­cades ago, and which now seem in some ways very remote from the neoliberal conditions of con­temporary education. The original point of what has become No Machos or Pop Stars was to write a book that would explore the social and cultural conditions of art school on the eve of neoliberalism’s emergence as the customary horizon of ­expectations PREFACE

xii

in the UK. It would be impor­tant, I had thought, for the book to focus on who went to art school in this period and to assess in par­tic­ul­ar the significance of the mingling of p­ eople from dif­fer­ent social classes within the ­British art school system as a ­factor in bringing about the turn ­toward popu­lar music-­making within it, as well as other collective re-­visionings of art’s public purpose throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The book you are reading is, indeed, this book. But it is also something else—­which came as a surprise to its author during the course of its evolution. As I talked with former Leeds art students and art college lecturers—­ either in person or on a video call—­I was struck by the recurrence of narratives of disillusionment: expressions of feeling let down by art education, especially by the perceived shortcomings of pedagogy (or lack thereof); downbeat assessments of 1970s culture as in stasis or, worse, entropic decline; and accounts of acute instances of sexism and racism within studio culture. Hearing such t­ hings was particularly striking given how ­things looked for access arrangements in retrospect, perhaps through rose-­tinted spectacles: all well-­f unded materials and workshops and no fees to pay, courtesy of the beating heart of state welfarism. Perhaps the past was not—­ after all—­quite the dif­fer­ent country I had ­imagined it to be. Not that all the voices I heard struck such a culturally “depressive” tone. Many fondly remembered their student years as times of heightened activity and concurred with me about the desirability of ­there being a book written about it all. But the ­things they recall ­doing ­were not always ­because of the experience of art college—­some, I was told extremely pointedly, ­were in spite of it, critical as they ­were of the prob­lems endemic to its culture. The clashing of such “negative” and “positive” evaluations of art school experience ultimately moved me to tell a more dialectical tale of the 1970s and 1980s UK art school than the one I had envisioned: of how students turned to one another and to ­others beyond the institution to fashion alternatives to the moribund condition of the avant-­garde and to pull themselves out of the collective torpor of a stagnating post-1960s late cap­i­tal­ist culture. In charting the multiple paths of the differing artist groups whose stories are told in t­ hese pages, the book shows how artists contested art school agendas and navigated seemingly impassable creative cul-­de-­sacs, which loomed meta­phor­ically in the white-­painted boards and cell-­like structures of individual art students’ studio spaces, as much as they took inspiration and direction from lecturers. In this way, No Machos or Pop Stars has also become—at least in part—an extended study of modern institutional disillusionment and of how p­ eople band together in attempts to surpass it.

xiii

Class Acts

I did fi­nally get to Leeds, beginning my ma in the social history of art at the city’s university in 1989, where I was lucky enough to be taught by Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock. By the time I got ­there, however, the scene explored in this book had long ended. What follows stands as a belated attempt to understand what I had missed: to illuminate the conditions of an art school education that was historically receding and yet unusually fraught with, even vitalized by, the contradictory forces of social division that threatened to consume it.

PREFACE

xiv

ACKNOWL–­­ EDGMENTS

T

his book owes its existence to many ­people willing to share their memories and personal archives during the extended period of its preparation. My faith in the proj­ ect was fueled by the constant fillip of new ­angles and connections resulting from successive interviews, many leading to further exchanges and correspondence, some even to friendship. P ­ eople ­were generous in supplying me with access to personal documents and showed immea­sur­able patience with my per­sis­ tent requests for dates and names and inquiries to identify photo­graphs, recordings, and works of art. My thanks go to Ros Allen, Kevin Atherton, Terry Atkinson, Dave Ball, Sue Ball, Tony Baker, Fionna Barber, Jo Barnett, Raj Batra, Michael Bennett, Chris Bishop, Sutapa Biswas, Dave Bowie, Pete Brooks, Chila Kumari Burman, Hugo Burnham, Ramsay Burt, Jacqui C ­ allis, Shirley Cameron, Paul Car­ter, Sean Cassette, Dinah Clark, T. J. Clark, Andy Corrigan, Ron Crowcroft, Dennis De Groot, Frances Dean, Ian Dewhirst, Ian Duhig, Dick Durkin, Rose En­glish, Roger Ely, Paul Fillingham, Jacky Fleming, John France, Jackie Freeman, Wendy Frith, Barbara Frost, Green Gartside, Andy Gill, Tom Greenhalgh, Homer Harriott, George Hinchliffe, Tyrone Huggins, John Hyatt, Victoria Jaquiss, Gilly Johns, Mark ­Johnson, Robert Joyce, John Keenan, Jon King, Angela Kingston, Jon Langford, Kevin Lycett, Claire MacDonald, Graeme Miller, Roland Miller, CJ Mitchell, Tom ­Morley, Chris Neate, Tom O’Leary, Gill Park, Symrath Patti, Geraldine Pilgrim, Griselda Pollock, Andrew Poppy, Danny Pucciarelli, Fahim Qureshi, Jane Ralley, Raym Richards, Alan Riggs, John Ross, Julz Sale, Dave Seeger, Steve Shill, Tom Steele, Dave Stephens, Pete Suchin,

Sue Swift, Geoff Teasdale, Caroline Taylor, Sally Timms, Jamie Wagg, Janey Walklin, Simon Warner, Mark White, Dino Wiand, Alan Wilkinson, Gordon Wilson, Andy Wood, Sara Worrall, and Marie Yates. All shared information and insight without which this book would have been very much poorer. The dictates of arriving at the par­tic­ul­ ar focus of No Machos or Pop Stars have meant that some ­people’s contributions to this period of cultural history, kindly shared with me through interview, have been unavoidably minimized or marginalized h­ ere. For this I can only apologize and say that I hope to do fuller justice to their stories in ­future proj­ects. I would also like to particularly thank the following for supporting and enriching my archival research: Tony Baker for his website circaseventies​ .­blogspot​.­com, which gave me an early head start on ideas for what became this book; Keith Rowntree at the Archive and Special Collections, Leeds Beckett University; staff at Special Collections, University of Leeds Library; Barbara Frost at the Estate of Frank Tovey and Lloyd Lewis Kristian, Soft Cell archivist, for immea­sur­able help in tracking down and helping identify material; and Leonard Bartle at the National Arts Education Archive, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Thanks to Joanne Crawford and Wendy Frith for their hospitality in Leeds, and to Andy Lowe for the ridiculously long loan of his copy of Politics of Art Education. No Machos or Pop Stars was written across three successive academic appointments. I would therefore like to thank staff and students in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London; the School of En­glish at the University of Sussex; and the Department of Arts at North­ umbria University for their support of, and input to, this proj­ect. Par­ tic­u­lar thanks to Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun, who worked with me in organ­izing a series of public lectures on post-­punk culture at Goldsmiths in the autumn of 2014, and to Lois Keidan, who gave a response to my professorial inaugural lecture in 2017 at the University of Sussex. I also benefited from words of encouragement from Irit Rogoff, Simon O’­Sullivan, Lisa Blackman, Roger Burrows, Daniel Kane, Adrian Rifkin, Arabella Stanger, Ysanne Holt, and Martyn Hudson, which helped me think the proj­ect was worth ­doing. Mimi Haddon, Ben Highmore, and Matthew Cornford read the ­whole manuscript and provided invaluable and incisive feedback, which allowed me to see ­things to completion. Thanks are also due to ­Harriet Curtis, Eleanor Roberts, and Flora Dunster for their precision work as transcribers of interview material, and particularly to Flora, not only for the extent of her work in this area but also for her intellectual camaraderie

Acknowledgments

xvi

as we developed our respective, sometimes overlapping proj­ects alongside one another. All three universities supplied me with research expenses and periods of research leave without which the completion of this book would not have been pos­si­ble. Material in this book has been presented as talks and lectures in vari­ ous dif­fer­ent contexts, including the Association for Art History conference; the Keep It ­Simple Make It Fast conference, University of Porto; the Theatre Acad­emy, University of the Arts, Helsinki; the American Society of the Arts of the Pre­sent conference, New Orleans; Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; University of Westminster; the Extreme Rituals conference at the Arnolfini, Bristol; School of ­Music, Film and Media at University of Sussex; Queer Discipline, Kings College, London; Valand Acad­emy, Gothenburg; the Dirty Per­for­mances conference, Hessische Theaterakademie, Frankfurt; the ba Fine Art course at University of Brighton; Akademia Sztuki, Szczecin; bbc Radio 6 Art School ­music week; Department of Drama, Queen Mary; IPAK Center Summer School, Belgrade; and the Royal College of Art. Thank you to all ­those who invited me and who engaged with my work on ­these occasions. Special mentions go to my co-­presenters Jennifer Doyle, Tavia Nyong’o, and the much-­missed José Esteban Muñoz on the panel “Punk: From Los Angeles to Leeds,” Per­for­mance Studies International conference, Leeds, 2012 (where it all began); the late Donna Lynas for inviting me to or­ga­nize “Collective Creation between Welfare and Austerity” at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, in 2016; John Hyatt for allowing me the honor of participating in a symposium about his work at home Gallery, Manchester, in 2017; and Kassia Zermon for hosting a public lecture by me at the Rose Hill, Brighton, in 2017. Additional thanks to John Beck, Andrew Cappetta, James Charnley, Leon Clowes, Matthew Cornford, Rachel Garfield, Mimi Haddon, Seth Kim-Cohen, Naomi Salaman, and Matthew Worley for their correspondence and sharing of research around the themes of this book. Further research bearing on this volume was undertaken for two exhibitions: Bauhaus Imaginista, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019, and Still Undead: Pop Culture in Britain beyond the Bauhaus, Nottingham Con­ temporary, 2019–20. Thank you to my fellow researcher Mariana Meneses and curators Grant Watson, the late Marion Von Osten, and Cédric Fauq for making all this pos­si­ble and helping further shine a light on the global contributions of regional UK art education. Thanks also to Dave Stephens

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Acknowledgments

for helping elaborate my understandings of Leeds art education through an event we co-­organized at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in Brighton in 2019. I thank my editor at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, for his enthusiasm about the proj­ect and for his ­great suggestions, and Ryan Kendall, Chris Robinson, Matt Tauch, Lisl Hampton, and Andrew Ascherl for helping me finally bring the manuscript together. My friends have kept me g­ oing, in par­tic­u­lar Jon Cairns, Christabel Harley, Dominic Johnson, and Margherita Sprio, and huge thanks to Christabel for reading the ­whole manuscript and spotting a wayward chapter in need of excising. Love to Ernesto Mena Montes De Oca for being t­ here when I thought I was never ­going to finish the ­thing, the long walks with him and Ticu keeping me sane. Fi­nally, a number of ­people who ­were, or ­were to be, involved in the preparation of this book sadly died during the years of its gestation. These included Kitty (also known as Marian) Lux, member of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and Kelvin Knight of Delta 5, who passed away before we were able to confirm arrangements for interview. Then, in the final stages of manuscript preparation, Gang of Four guitar legend Andy Gill died unexpectedly in February 2020. It is so very sad that Andy ­w ill never read t­ hese pages a­ fter his input to their preparation. I owe gratitude to his w ­ idow, Catherine Mayer, in honoring Andy’s wish to allow materials from his estate to appear in this volume. Equally sadly, following this, Julz Sale, formerly of Delta 5, and Tony Baker of Household Name, also passed, adding to the roll call of losses among the people consulted for this volume. Beyond the p­ eople more directly involved, my former Goldsmiths colleague Mark Fisher died in 2017, and, more recently still, my dear friend Kate Love—an indomitable force in my life and product of the very art school system explored in ­these pages—­was taken from us early in 2020. The book is dedicated in memoriam to Kitty, Kelvin, Andy, Julz, Tony, Mark—and Kate.

Acknowledgments

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INTRO­­– DUCTION

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON Form is a plant that can grow anything it thinks about. A ­human plant has flowers with trunks inside. JEFF NUTTALL, LEEDS POLYTECHNIC FINE ART COURSE LEAFLET (1974)

So long as ­people remain fixated on themselves, they never see anything but themselves. FÉLIX GUATTARI, “TRANSVERSALITY” (1964)

A

rt student involvement in British pop ­music was so intense in the 1970s that Canadian rock critic Mary Harron, writing in Melody Maker on May 26, 1979, took it to be responsible for inaugurating a “second coming of British art-­rock.”1 Distinguishing it from an e­ arlier, failed phase of musical experiment in the 1960s, which only resulted in merging “bad rock m ­ usic with phoney art,” this second pass at mixing up avant-­garde and pop was, Harron judged, thrillingly successful. Originating in the northern En­glish city of Leeds, from a circle of bands made up of Gang of Four, Mekons, and Delta 5, this new phase of rock sought to reject conventional rock structures while keeping its fin­ger on a “common pulse,” encouraging fans to appreciate aesthetic invention while dancing to a Situationist beat. It strove to make ­music fans think in order to become self-­ conscious about the larger societal structures in which they w ­ ere caught,

Gang of Four photographed in the brutalist architectural surrounds of the Leeds University campus on the cover of Melody Maker, May 26, 1979. Photo: © Adrian Boot. INTRO.1 

even when borne aloft by freeing movements on the dance floor. Hearing lyr­ics about the profit motives of the cap­i­tal­ist entertainment industry, the gendering of interpersonal relations, and the bathos of lost ­labor time, all while jumping around, had the effect of turning the dance floor into a new kind of place: as Harron would have it, one where “dialectics met disco,” where the tendency to reflect on, and criticize, the constraints of modern life became symbiotic with ­music culture’s libidinal drive. It was in the creation of such a novel cultural mix, rather than in band members’ individual abilities to paint and draw, that the art school influence showed through. “What t­ hese groups have done is to introduce not the form or spirit of art, but theories of art into rock m ­ usic,” Harron continues. “Who would ever have ­imagined that structuralism and Marxist aesthetics would become an inspiration to rock ‘n’ roll? But that, however indirectly, is where the pre­sent values . . . ​are coming from.” Drawing on the teachings of “theory” in the art education experienced by a majority of ­these bands’ members, the critique of ideology in m ­ usic was able to be heard ­because of art school, which, perhaps somewhat against the odds, paved the way for it becoming a popu­lar sound in British and international youth culture. INTRODUCTION

2

But taking such a “conceptual approach to ­music” in the wake of vituperative punk was, Harron quips, “like ringing a leper’s bell.” It was so out of step with the would-be expression of an under-­or uneducated proletarianism supposedly found in punk ­music that wearing one’s art school training on one’s sleeve risked looking like a display of privilege or—­worse—­a statement of superiority (as one m ­ usic critic snarkily commented, Gang of Four’s m ­ usic “may sound fine to student leftists in Leeds Uni seminar rooms but to Joe Skin digging roads for Lambeth Council it’s just so much irrelevant gobbledegook”).2 “The Gang of Four,” Harron goes on, are “an art-­school band, but this, curiously enough, is not a correct ­thing to be. The m ­ usic that is emerging in Britain has carried on some of punk’s attitudes, and the words ‘art’ and ‘avant-­garde’ continue to be deadly insults—­ meaning effete, dilettantish, irrelevant to rock. The only prob­lem with this is that the new ­music is firmly grounded in art and the avant-­garde.” This sense of a contradiction, of a lack of fit between “art” and “rock” in Gang of Four’s m ­ usic extended to views of the band themselves as odd fish, if not interlopers in pop culture. Harron continues: “The Gang of Four ­don’t deny their art-­school training, but they obviously realise that it could be used as grounds for attack. I d­ on’t want to attack the Gang of Four—­far from it—­and the temptation is just to sweep the art school business u­ nder the carpet. But it should be talked about b­ ecause the Gang of Four and other new groups are influenced by art in a way that we have never seen before.” Harron lists the ­Human League, Scritti Politti, Monochrome Set, and Red Crayola to illustrate the bands she has in mind h­ ere (though the last was hardly “new” in 1979), claiming that “nearly every­one on the experimental side of rock right now furiously rejects any connection with art ­because that implies an elite cultural activity with no connection with real life.”3 Gang of Four, she ventures, ­were unusually open in talking about their art college roots, leading her to follow suit in the pages of Melody Maker. No Machos or Pop Stars ponders the questions that cluster around ­Harron’s perceptive understanding of a near-­paradoxical ontology for 1970s art rock: Why did so many art students form groups in the wake of punk, when being an art school band seemed like a dubious ­thing to be? How did it come to pass that art and avant-­gardism had become so discredited and yet, at the same time, so crucial to forging new forms in popu­lar culture? And how could outward signs of an art education, viewed h­ ere prejudicially as “effete, dilettantish, irrelevant to rock,” be borne as a virtue rather than a failing in pop culture?

3

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

This book follows Gang of Four (and Scritti Politti and ­others) to Leeds to find answers to such questions, not to the go-to Western cities customarily thought of as emblematic of experimental culture at this time—­New York, London, Manchester, Düsseldorf, Sheffield.4 This is ­because I want to delineate a dif­fer­ent genealogy for understanding art and ­music based on an exploration of the limits and possibilities of an art education, itself in the midst of a period of turbulent change at this time. The theoretical bent of the ­music of Gang of Four owed much, Harron notes, to the teachings of the fine art department at the University of Leeds, where two of the four band members had studied in the mid-­to late 1970s. The department underwent a decisive shift in pedagogical direction when, in 1976, the young social historian of art and former Situationist International (si) member T. J. Clark was appointed professor. Along with a team of staff including art historians Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, and (­later) John Tagg, alongside artist Terry Atkinson, the department began to draw in Marxist, feminist, and structuralist theory to the curriculum in order to challenge the ideologies of liberal humanist study that had persisted ­under more establishment administrations in previous years. This embrace of theory was building in progressive art institutions in Britain and the United States at the time and is what gave such bands an edge in being able to “attack,” as Harron put it, the “reactionary structures” of rock—­just as Clark and com­pany w ­ ere attacking similar structures in the art world. ­Later ­music bands, including the Three Johns and more obscure acts like Sheeny and the Goys, the Shee Hees, the Cast Iron Fairies, ­Really, and the Commies from Mars, alongside feminist art groups such as Pavilion, also had members who studied at the university and ­were variously impacted by the teaching ­there, as this book seeks to show. And yet the university was not the most famous art college in Leeds at the time, nor ­were the bands that came out of it the only ones to make an impact on the broader cultural landscape. World-­famous bands and little-­ known groups—­including electro-­pop, post-­punk, and experimental acts Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Fad Gadget, the Ukulele Orchestra of ­Great Britain, House­hold Name, Another Colour, Smart Cookies, Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon, and idid idid—­were peopled by students, and former students, of the fine art department at the university’s neighboring institution, Leeds Polytechnic. Members of some of ­these bands put down paintbrushes and picked up guitars and synthesizers to sing deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida and make electro-­dance ­music about “sex dwarfs,” taking forms of experiment and daring to the 1970s and 1980s ­music industry—­ INTRODUCTION

4

Scritti Politti on American Bandstand, December 28, 1985. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

INTRO.2 

even to American Bandstand and Top of the Pops (figure Intro.2). ­Others remained stubbornly “alternative” and remote from mainstream success. Members of all ­these groups passed through a late phase of avant-­garde art education in Leeds that the Polytechnic, since its inception in 1970, had carried over from its precursor institution, Leeds College of Art, in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s the Polytechnic became renowned for its libertarian approach to fine art education and in par­tic­u­lar student work in per­for­mance art. For progressive-­minded souls at this time the Polytechnic was “the most influential [art school] in Eu­rope since the Bauhaus,” according to painter Patrick Heron, while, for an increasingly hostile and reactionary UK tabloid press, it was the whipping boy for every­thing wrong with permissive culture and the avant-­garde.5 Singled out for supporting some of the wilder expressions of avant-­garde sensibility (including, infamously, for a piece of per­for­mance art involving the shooting of live budgerigars and mice—­more on that ­later), the Polytechnic came to achieve a degree of negative publicity unrivaled by almost any other UK art school during the course of the de­cade.6 Leeds art education thereby became an object on which a cultural outlook identified by Christopher Booker as definitive of the 1970s was projected: a de­cade in which “the first real death throes”

5

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

of the belief in ­human pro­gress could be heard.7 “In politics, in the arts or in almost any other field one considers,” he wrote from the vantage point of 1980, “the prevailing mood was one of a somewhat weary, increasingly conservative, increasingly apprehensive disenchantment.”8 Optimism and belief in the possibilities of progressive cultural change, so much a part of the de­cade prior, had dissipated by the 1970s: the counterculture seemed to have run out of steam or suddenly looked misguided; the idea of progressive anything from rock to Modernist architecture seemed discredited; and the avant-­garde looked increasingly moribund and elitist. Thus struck up a broad chorus of voices questioning the value and viability of avant-­garde art, not all of which ­were on the reactionary side of the cultural divide. Artists and art critics themselves, both in Leeds and elsewhere, came to won­der about ­whether or not the modern period of artistic experiment in the West had run out of steam. Looking back from its end point, art historian Edward Lucie-­Smith concluded that the 1970s “may well be seen as the de­cade in which the very notion of an avant-­garde, of a frontier of experiment which must always be pushed back, was fi­nally seen as untenable.”9 Such a perception was borne out by received opinion among art professionals as the de­cade drew to a close: “avant-­garde” and “art” ­were already dirty words as Harron began penning her article for Melody Maker. The question of what to do, therefore, in the wake of the avant-­garde having ended was one that rippled decisively through communities of UK artists in the 1970s and 1980s—or at least this is what this book contends. With a population of around 700,000 citizens in the 1970s (including outlying areas), Leeds was unusual in being a modest-­sized city with the resource of three dif­fer­ent types of institution offering courses in art practice: a university, a polytechnic, and a local art school, Jacob Kramer College, h­ oused in the old buildings of the Leeds College of Art on Vernon Street, which offered lower-­level courses of study in art and design. The city therefore offered to students studying ­there a range of perspectives and possibilities for imagining new, transformational paths beyond the cul-­de-­sacs of avant-­ gardism and a just response to the energizing challenge of punk. ­There was more to Leeds art education than a predilection for art theory. ­There was also more to Leeds itself. The city was undergoing a large-­ scale urban modernization program during the years explored in this book, at a time much ­later than in comparable UK cities. This “top-­down” initiative of city planners to transform it into the “Motorway City of the Seventies” coexisted uneasily with a very dif­fer­ent, even opposing, “bottom-up” form of urban renewal based in radical collective forms of social provision INTRODUCTION

6

and activism. Such realities offered multiple, contesting ways of imagining “the new” in urban and po­liti­cal terms beyond the purview of the city’s formal programs of art education. What follows tells the story of how students ­were drawn together, sometimes within and across the city’s art institutions, other times outside of their art educational bases, in responding to the challenges of making art a­ fter the avant-­garde. Drawing on the city’s vari­ous radical and alternative Left milieus, from the cooperative movement and Rock against Racism to the Workers’ Educational Association and feminism, the book shows how art students, armed with academic art theories and a l­ ittle punk attitude, took artistic experiment to the city’s F Club and Leeds Ware­house and, at least sometimes, beyond. In ­doing so, the book mines a central irony: of how—­and why—­for a ­limited time, institutions geared ­toward the shaping of exceptional, creative individuals (“artists”) and their elite productions came instead to be virtual factories for the socialized production of experimental forms of common culture.

ART INTO POP (REDUX)

According to Harron, this “second coming” of British art rock was superior to an ­earlier phase of musical output in the 1960s in which art and art education played a decisive role in shaping popu­lar ­music culture. The predominant drive before, she asserts, was to “force” rock m ­ usic into becoming something ontologically alien to it—namely, to try and make it over into “art” itself. “Rock ­music is not art,” she goes on, “but it can draw from art as long as this is done with re­spect for what rock ­music is.” But most 1960s art-­ inspired musicians tried instead “to ‘upgrade’ rock by treating it as classical ­music” and thus, according to Harron, ended up producing only “ghastly hybrids—­rock operas, guitar virtuosos, a­ lbums based on my­thol­ogy, [and] the gibberish that passed for poetic lyr­ics.” Though she ­doesn’t name names, output by bands like the Who and prog rock outfits Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, Van Der Graaf Generator, Yes, Rush, and even 1970s experimentalists like Henry Cow (though hardly an art school band) one might imagine within the crosshairs of Harron’s critical fire. Some scholarly voices disagree with Harron’s acid judgment of this e­ arlier phase of musical activity, but they nevertheless echo her in taking the 1960s as the first significant period in which the impact of British art education was felt within popu­lar m ­ usic culture. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne show

7

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

in their still-­important study Art into Pop, British art school education of the de­cade prior was responsible for importing a noncommercial artistic bohemianism into popu­lar, especially ­music, culture. Around 157 specialist art schools nationwide, including many regional art colleges and London institutions, produced gradu­ates who brought Romantic ideas of the artist and of artistic creativity out of the art studios and into 1960s culture.10 Even though “not all significant British musicians ­were at art school,” ­those who ­were “brought into music-­making attitudes that could never have been fostered ­under the pressures of professional entertainment.”11 Thus it was that an art school band like Pink Floyd came to set their face against generic pop musical form and industry commercialism. By their own account, they “­stopped ­doing twelve-­bar three minute numbers . . . ​[and] started d­ oing one chord ­going on and on.”12 Alongside this they created considered, elaborate visuals at live per­for­mances that departed significantly from the flashing excitement of mass entertainment and owed more, as John Walker notes, to art school experiments with light and sound at Hornsey College of Art.13 Similarly, John Roberts identifies the art school as a key institution in unleashing radical experiments in popu­lar song within the En­glish counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.14 For him, the presence of students ­there from working-­class and lower-­middle-­class backgrounds was decisive in supporting the artistic expression of lower-­class forms of indiscipline, temporarily freed from the yoke of employment (chapter 3 of this book includes more on the changing conditions of lower-­class access to art education as we move into the 1970s). For Frith and Horne, the experience of studying fine art for at least four years—at the state’s expense and at a remove from the cap­i­tal­ist imperatives of the workplace—­came to approach something like “the status of a lifestyle” for ­those ­going through it.15 The values of this lifestyle w ­ ere then “translated into the terms of popu­lar culture” by art school gradu­ates, making “bohemian solutions” relevant “to the ways ‘the kids’ made sense of their everyday lives.”16 In comparison, for example, with the United States, where “success was a job in New York” (according to Andy Warhol) and where art colleges ­were generally more geared to technical training, the remoteness from, even outright hostility to, commerce within 1960s UK art schools made them “the natu­ral setting for ideas of counter-­culture.”17 Given this, it was “natu­ral” for someone like Pete Townshend, for example, a student at Ealing Art College, to smash his guitar on stage—at least ­after hearing Gustav Metzger, the ­father of auto-­ destructive art, lecture about his work ­there in 1962. INTRODUCTION

8

­These institutions ­were able to foster such expressions of artistic autonomy as a consequence of being granted in­de­pen­dence from state control of their curricula following the first Coldstream Report into art education, published in 1960.18 An older regime of assessment, the national diploma in design, with fixed craft-­and skills-­based requirements, was phased out during the early 1960s and replaced by a diploma in art and design (Dip. ad), which gave institutions new freedoms to teach and assess according to locally determined priorities—as long as they held to some basic structural requirements pertaining to recruitment, teaching, and assessment. But this newly won in­de­pen­dence was soon threatened by the British government’s creation of the polytechnics in the late 1960s, which some saw as all-­too-­ quickly threatening art education’s gains through incorporation into larger multidisciplinary institutions. Writing in the Guardian in 1971 u­ nder the banner of “Murder of the Art Schools,” Heron defended the in­de­pen­dence of postwar British art colleges as the crucial ground of their success. It was art school autonomy, he proffered, which allowed them to operate as havens of experimentalism and which, in turn, gave rise to 1960s rock and pop bands, including the Beatles, and street styles that made Swinging London internationally admired and copied. Such wide cultural impact made justifying the resources spent on art schools an easier job, Heron ventured—at least for anyone disposed to do the sums: “If they added up the export earnings of the Beatles and the rest, not to mention ­those of the rag-­trade whose famous designers cream-­off scores of ideas all the time from the endlessly varying gear of the art students, they might just begin to see an economic justification for the ‘art school scene,’ not in spite of, but ­because of, its notorious freedoms and excesses.”19 Unfortunately for Heron, and arguably for the art schools themselves, this calculation was never arrived at. Indeed, only one year ­later, national discourse turned to doubting the value of such a 1960s-­style art education, not least querying its value for money. Indeed one journalist—in a bizarre, extreme, even offensive, analogy—­compared the goings-on inside one Leeds art college to those in Nazi death camps: “Art colleges are viewed by outsiders in much the same way as the German civilian population viewed concentration camps during the Third Reich: one knows they are ­there, and some strange t­ hings go on inside, but that is as far as it goes.”20 However inappropriate a comparison or breathtaking the euphemistic description (“strange t­ hings go on inside”), the inference is clear ­here: art schools had been given license to commit would-be gross horrors by dint of the ignorance of the general public. This presages the necessity of right-­w ing and

9

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

populist “exposés” throughout the period covered by this book, supposedly carried out in order to bring to light, and to “rectify,” the alleged misspending of taxpayers’ money therein. Even defenders of the art school sector w ­ ere beginning to have their doubts about the direction in which UK art education was ­going by the ­middle of the 1970s. Th ­ ere was l­ ittle ability to marshal a cogent raison d’être for it that every­one could get ­behind. The need for this seemed pressing by 1973 when art education looked increasingly like “an economic frill to be trimmed in hard times,” as Peter Lloyd Jones put it in the Listener.21 For Ken Rowat, painter and se­nior lecturer in fine art at Leeds Polytechnic, the prob­lem was one of art schools’ advocates being “too emasculated and inept” to defend themselves from “the sinister forces of economics and philistine administration.”22 Writing in the Guardian in February 1976, the year of punk, Rowat reflected on how “the very sector of further education which has been least hamstrung by medieval tradition is surrendering its relative freedom in return for a ba degree: the club badge of the materialist society.” 23 Thus he judged the ­great experiment of 1960s libertarian art education to have failed, fi­nally being nullified through incorporation into the normative structures and expectations of academia. The “chance to establish and justify within the public education framework a climate which would cater for that sprinkling of oddballs without which any society w ­ ill lose its collec24 tive soul” had, in his view, by then been squandered. Taking a pop at the technocratic rationale of the polytechnics, Rowat concluded, “What­ever art might be, one t­ hing is certain: it cannot be directed, planned, confined or mea­sured.” 25 Presumed to be radically unlike learning within town-­ planning, business, engineering, or the design subjects, art-­making was taken to be “inevitably subversive” and inimical to instrumentalized forms of learning required by a planned society.26 Significantly, and as Rowat attests ­here, it appears it was easier to speak about fine art education in the negative—­for example, as antithetical to the idea of workplace training—­than to account for it in more affirmative terms. This inability to come up with an alternative positive vision for teaching visual art was echoed by a much wider malaise within progressivist thinking in the mid-1970s. The po­liti­cal and cultural lodestars that had guided forward-­looking culture during the prior de­cade ­were dimming. The so-­called governmental consensus across parliamentary parties in the UK, which had supported the maintenance of a strong public sector and welfare state since the years of postwar reconstruction, was crumbling. The INTRODUCTION

10

impact of the 1973 oil crisis had hit hard the nation’s economic fortunes, already bringing in its wake reductions in public expenditure, despite the election of a ­Labour government in 1974. Cuts ­were made to local and national spending in the bud­get of 1975, and by 1976 the government negotiated a multimillion-­pound loan from the imf to ensure the country could pay its creditors and maintain Bank of ­England reserves.27 Prime Minister Jim Callaghan was unmistakably forthright about the sea change in po­liti­ cal thinking in his address to the ­Labour Party conference in 1976: “The cosy world which we ­were told would go on forever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending: that cosy world is gone.”28 This culminated on May 3, 1979, three weeks ­earlier than the publication of Harron’s article in Melody Maker, with the election victory of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party at the UK general election, adding to a sense, at the de­cade’s end, that the 1970s had all along been about the nation struggling to forge a new place for itself in a changing world.

THE “LEEDS EXPERIMENT”

No Machos or Pop Stars follows a select band of art school students—­and their compatriots—­who dared, for a time, to imagine ­things could turn out differently to what became Thatcherism’s neoliberal make­over for 1980s Britain. It tells the story of a dialectical entanglement of punk rock and art college radicalism through which both w ­ ere sublated, in the manner of the Hegelian Aufhebung, into artistic forms that variously attempted to plot alternative routes out of the crisis that had befallen postwar welfarism—­ alternative, that is, to avant-­garde art or rock industry business-­as-­usual. The story begins with the arrival in Leeds in the autumn of 1974 of the first art students for whom punk was to be significant and closes its historical win­dow in 1981 when the last of such students gradu­ate. For many members of this soon-­to-be punk generation, the ­earlier phase of art-­rock experiment so excoriated by Harron was already dead in the ­water. As Roberts puts it: By 1975–76, a­ fter the po­liti­cal downturn, the counterculture—­certainly what remained of it at the En­glish summer festivals—­had become a galumphing caravanserai of Edenists, tricksters, herbalists, Tofuism and recidivist Blues-­band bores, that harboured a lower-­middle class anarchist

11

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

line of least re­sis­tance, in which “rock” stood against the world in a dreary inflation of the Romantic mythos of the outsider; some of the bands continued (like Gong), but, ­there was no framing culture and set of expectations to renew what was being lost; and the ­music became awful in a softening of ­earlier glories. Even Henry Cow, the best of the best, could only stick it for a few years more, unable to survive financially, and eventually losing their way like every­one ­else.29

Similarly Benjamin Piekut, in his magisterial study of Henry Cow, notes how, as the de­cade wore on, the “post-1968 collection of social, technical, and institutional arrangements that could host a Henry Cow no longer operated, or no longer operated in the same way.”30 This meant that many mid-1970s teenage art students ­were already turned on to other t­ hings musically speaking: to pop, pub rock, and reggae rather than to avant-­rock—to Bowie and Roxy, Dr Feelgood and Bob Marley. What follows is the story of how the continuing enjoyment of, and investment in, popu­lar, even pop, ­music by 1970s art students—­once ignited by the advent of punk rock—­brought about a thoroughgoing reassessment of what, if anything, the avant-­garde could bring to the cultural ­table and how art and ­music might yet still productively meet up with one another. Pop m ­ usic and art school w ­ ere most certainly related in many a young person’s imaginary at this time. As artist and former Leeds student Jamie Wagg put it to me in an interview, David Bowie, for example, acted in some ways as a gateway figure to art school for his younger self. The musician’s self-­invention as Ziggy, the Burroughsian “cut-­ups” of his song lyr­ ics, his references to Andy Warhol, Lindsay Kemp, and ­others within his oeuvre, all gave “a ­whole generation of ­people permission to not go and get a trade, and not conform, and to not do the stuff that society asked you to do.” This made it feel like “­there was another way out” to Bowie’s fans like Wagg—­and that art school might be the place to go to actively pursue the path suggested by their pop idols. By the mid-1970s Leeds was still hanging on to its reputation as the chief UK provider of an avant-­garde art education. This was as a result of developments in the latter half of the 1950s, when the pioneering teacher and painter Harry Thubron, along with his associate Tom Hudson at Leeds College of Art, developed an approach known as Basic Research—­and what Thubron himself referred to as the “Leeds experiment” in art education.31 This bore similarities to, and a degree of connection with, the teachings of Basic Design elsewhere in the UK, including at Newcastle, Ipswich, INTRODUCTION

12

Ealing, Leicester, Cardiff, and Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.32 It broadly perpetuated Bauhaus models of education that predated it by treating art-­making as a heuristic pro­cess, through which students learned by creating forms and ideas out of relatively unrestricted experiment with materials, rather than being trained in the production of finished, and ultimately familiar, craft products and artistic styles. Although it was difficult to get information about the Bauhaus in northern ­England in the 1950s, scholars have noted that par­tic­ul­ar ele­ments of Bauhaus teaching—­such as Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook—­were picked up by Thubron and his associates as models for art teaching in Leeds.33 The attention that Klee gave to a quasi-­scientific, though in real­ity quite playful and poetic, exploration of the abstract qualities of line and form influenced Thubron’s view of the modern artist as a formal and technical innovator analogous to the engineer and scientist. For him, the visual artist’s role was to embrace an open-­ended exploration of the expressive possibilities of visual form across an array of media, including traditional painting and sculptural materials such as paint, clay, wood, and metal, but also newer materials and tools including plastics, photography, and modern printing methods. The broad orientation was progressive and experimental, as Thubron told the Guardian: “Students are not trying to give you what they think you are wanting, art as she is known. . . . ​The aim is to stop ­people d­ oing ‘art’ and to make it difficult for them to give you what has already been done in art.”34 Key to all of this was Thubron’s broadly antiauthoritarian approach to art teaching. Gone was the idea that students need slavishly reproduce the art of “­great” forebears (for example, by drawing mimetically from antique busts) or even that the master knew best. The “god” of Basic Research, instead, was the creative pro­cess itself. Only by making intuitive decisions in the flow of art-­making activity, responsive to the contingency of what was required by its peculiar and unrepeatable circumstances, could the artist fulfill their exploratory brief. All of this entailed, as Norbert Lynton recalls of Thubron’s time at Leeds, that “barriers between departments w ­ ere ignored. Even the barrier between faculty and students crumbled as intenser activity made for mutual regard. Teachers’ and students’ work alike became an urgent, priority business.”35 Hierarchies common to the master’s workshop ­were rejected, as was the customary top-­down, unidirectional flow of knowledge and expertise from teacher to student. In 1959 Thubron wrote: “Basic training . . . ​is a balanced course involving disciplines and freedoms that are relative to the individual. . . . ​­There are no answers other than t­ hose offered

13

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

by the student.”36 Indeed, as Thubron often put it, the point of teaching, as far as he saw it, was to help artists to “learn how to learn” for themselves.37 By 1970, the city’s College of Art had been incorporated into the newly founded and multidisciplinary technical institution, Leeds Polytechnic. But, despite the fears of some, the broad experimental ethos of the Thubron years survived in Leeds pedagogy well into the following de­cade and was to be continuously influential for a generation of students fired up by punk rock. This was chiefly a result of the appointment of Jeff Nuttall to the Polytechnic staff, who, dif­fer­ent in many ways from Thubron, brought a newly libertarian and provocative cast to it. James Charnley, in his compelling study of art education in Leeds, remembers that Nuttall’s presence “more than any other t­ hing defined the ethos of the Fine Art Department in the early 1970s.”38 As a poet, jazz trumpeter, painter, per­for­mance artist, and author of Bomb Culture, Nuttall embodied an ongoing polymathic reach of Leeds fine art. A writer and performer in the per­for­mance group P ­ eople Show, he was also as indebted to twentieth-­century avant-­gardism—to Cabaret Voltaire and the poetics of Comte de Lautréamont and Antonin Artaud—as he was to 1960s-­style events. Early ­People Show per­for­mances took the form of happenings that presented confounding “aesthetic juxtapositions” of imagery and action, designed to arrest traditional theatrical priorities of character development, plot, and the communication of a message.39 Nuttall had faith in the transformative power of aesthetics at a time when progressive politics, as far as he saw it, had become impotent—­principally ­because the 1960s had failed to overthrow capitalism or stop the Vietnam War. He maintained a soixante-­huitard opposition to the war into the 1970s, but by this time he believed only art, not politics, to be the antidote to it. For him, art’s radicalism resided in its ready ability to besmirch the logics of cap­i­tal­ist rationality and moral judgment. When a journalist for Look North on bbc tv in 1970 charged that the art of Leeds students was devoid of “sanity,” Nuttall, appearing before the steps of the Polytechnic H Block, shot back: “It has been claimed that the Vietnam war, which was much more expensive than the fine art department at Leeds, is a sane proj­ect. I think that is truly insane. Whereas I think the ­things we are ­doing h­ ere are sane.”40 In rejecting war, however, Nuttall was not rejecting vio­lence. Like some latter-­ day Marinetti, he saw the job of the avant-­garde artist as making new aesthetic forms by means of an aggressive destruction of the old, in the pro­cess producing a “violently intensified effect” to energize art’s audiences. “The policy” securing Leeds’s continuing reputation as home to the avant-­garde, writes Nuttall, was not, though, the solicitation of violent efINTRODUCTION

14

fect in art but “wide open liberty with all facilities of space, materials and machinery available to all students whose imagination was permitted to extend its range to film, per­for­mance, writing and tape composition, beyond the usual painting and sculpture. All you needed to be, at Leeds in the Seventies, was diverse. All that was forbidden was dull. The course was a kind of concert platform where sooner or ­later you had to do your turn.”41 In more official language, as evidenced in the quinquennial review document for ba (Hons) Fine Art in 1976, prepared for inspection by the Council for National Academic Awards, the preferred term for such a pedagogic approach, borrowed from the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, was “intermedia”: “Our belief that the development of a creative personality in each student can best be achieved by not necessarily linking his [sic] pro­gress to specific media at any point in the course, has been strengthened. . . . ​The inter-­ media approach has developed empirically and has grown increasingly relevant to student needs since the establishment of the Dip ad.”42 In the spirit of such an ethos of artistic creation, a purpose-­built though fairly low-­tech per­for­mance space was constructed in the early 1970s and John Darling (of per­for­mance group John Bull Puncture Repair Kit) was appointed to the Polytechnic in 1971 with the brief of setting up a small sound studio comprising tape recorders, amplifiers, speakers, mixers, microphones, Tandberg reel-­to-­reel tape decks, a reverberation unit, a turntable, and “a w ­ hole bunch of sound effects rec­ords.”43 Its purpose was to facilitate the making of soundscapes for use in per­for­mance art, but, in the wake of punk rock, it was destined to be used instead as a resource for the creation of (sometimes) popu­lar ­music—as we ­shall see—by members of bands including Soft Cell, House­hold Name, and Fad Gadget. Members of Gang of Four, Delta 5, and the Mekons, on the other hand, ­were aty­pi­cal among UK art students in the 1970s in studying their subject in a university department rather than in a polytechnic or in­de­pen­dent art school. At this point in time, Leeds was one of few universities in the country offering degree-­level courses in fine art, along with Reading, Newcastle, and the Slade School of Art in London. One of Thubron’s friends and associates, Maurice de Sausmarez, author of Basic Design: The Dynamics of Visual Form (1964), had been head of the department of fine art at the University of Leeds throughout the 1950s and translated some of Thubron’s precepts into the teaching ­there, making the city home to two institutions predisposed to experimental art education. However, de Sausmarez’s replacements through the 1960s and early 1970s—­Bloomsbury artist Quentin Bell and painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing—­did not maintain

15

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

the Basic Design ethos in the university studios. This resulted in a relatively conservative form of art education in comparison with the Polytechnic’s ongoing radicalism—at least u­ ntil the significant changes to the university’s provision wrought in the wake of T. J. Clark’s appointment in 1976.

ART AND PUNK: A SOCIAL HISTORY

No Machos or Pop Stars is split into two parts. The first and shorter, “Avant-­ Garde and Punk,” focuses on punk and pre-­punk collective experiment with nontraditional aesthetic forms at art school, particularly per­for­mance art, and the beginnings of art student disenchantment with avant-­gardism. The second and main part of the book, “Forming a Band,” chronicles the multiple groups that emerged from art school in the wake of the Anarchy in the UK tour arriving in Leeds in December 1976 and the possibilities that punk suggested for popu­lar forms of artistic experiment during a crisis of legitimacy in UK art education. It takes in the resources gained from state-­ funded art education, as well as the challenges to it, by bands variously espousing the virtues of pop and punk production, collectivism, Marxism, feminism, critical theory, per­for­mance art, antiracism, and club culture during a heightened period of politicization in the city. Academics have already seen in punk a subcultural response to the collapse of the postwar consensus and social crisis, but rarely has punk’s relationship to the art school and, more narrowly, the crisis of its value been given extended treatment.44 The best lit­er­a­ture on punk and post-­punk does address the relations between avant-­garde art and popu­lar m ­ usic but is less forthcoming about art school as enabler of, or context for, this influence—­ perhaps as a result of m ­ usic writers’ lack of knowledge in this area.45 Where art college has been acknowledged, as in the work of Frith and Horne, it is usually as breeding ground for the Svengalis and image makers that variously packaged bands to achieve Situationist-­like effects within spectacular cap­i­tal­ist culture.46 From Malcolm McLaren’s establishment-­baiting pre­ sen­ta­tion of the Sex Pistols to Vivienne Westwood’s and Bernard Rhodes’s creation of punk style, from Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s corporate pastiche in Fast Product to Tony Wilson’s appearances on tv’s So It Goes, the art school ele­ment of UK punk has been seen to express itself principally through postmodern forms of image management. ­Here it is the man­ag­er who becomes the quasi-­Warholian “artist” par excellence in shaping forms of appearance within media culture, regardless of ­whether such INTRODUCTION

16

man­ag­ers actually passed through art college as students.47 In the UK ­these man­ag­ers operated out of London, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Liverpool (Bill Drummond). Leeds did not produce a like figure at the time. John Keenan was the closest ­thing to such an impresario figure ­there (see chapter 3), but, though an impor­tant scene-­maker as founder and man­ag­er of the F Club and Futurama festivals, he was more committed to gig and venue promotion than band management.48 No Machos or Pop Stars therefore tells a dif­fer­ent story: of the self-­ organ­izing bands that predominated in West Yorkshire. It seeks to show how the formal inventiveness, debates, and sometime utopianism of an aesthetic education impacted new modes of creative association and collective working for art students as they turned their attention to making popu­ lar m ­ usic. I consider how Leeds art students ­were encouraged to work in untrammeled ways across artistic media and disciplines, and how this also sometimes seeded hopes for challenging or transcending forms of social division. In the pages that follow I therefore foreground “the band” itself as a form (a social structure) t­ hat art students variously sought to reshape in their attempts to de­moc­ra­tize the conditions of art’s production and consumption—­and even to consider it as prefigurative of alternative ways of organ­izing society. But just as materials can offer re­sis­tance to the realization of an artist’s vision (the sculptor’s stone too coarse, the paint­er’s colors too murky), I also attend to the obdurate materiality of social hierarchies that sometimes hindered the realization of art students’ dreams for “the group.” I do so in order to capture in granular detail how late 1970s and early 1980s art students grappled anew with the aesthetic and social experiments left unfinished by the 1960s counterculture that preceded them. As Simon Reynolds has reflected: “­There is something about the band as quasi-­family (upfront in names like Sly and the F ­ amily Stone and UK psychedelic under­ground band ­Family) that has a utopian, all-­for-­one, one-­for-­all quality, and also sets in motion all kinds of emotional and interpersonal dynamics and frictions that are productive, as long as the unit can keep it together. The Band, as in Dylan’s backing band that then become their own brotherhood, is another example—­banding together, the gang as micro-­utopia.”49 No Machos or Pop Stars worries away at the legacies of such groups and the tendency to see the art-­influenced ­music band as “equivalent in certain re­spects to the experimental ‘artists group.’ ”50 It considers how the band as a kind of micro-­utopia, as a space of “learning and self-­transformation,” came to be both problematized and reformulated in art school post-­punk—­and how

17

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

art education played a decisive role in providing the aesthetic, social, intellectual, technical, and economic resources, even the time, to achieve this.51 Even though the overall number of p­ eople ­going to art school, and to university, as a proportion of the population was small in the 1970s compared with con­temporary UK levels, the significance of the cross-­class and cross-­disciplinary activities made pos­si­ble ­there was magnified at a cultural level—as this book seeks to show.52 The period I consider was also significant for institutional reckonings with the politics of gender, race, and sexuality consequent upon the impact of feminism and gay liberation, antiracism, and the slowly increasing presence of ­children of the Windrush generation within student bodies in higher education. It was not ­until the late 1980s and early 1990s that globalization began to more extensively diversify international student recruitment to UK institutions, while successive changes to university funding conspired to make a higher education in the arts progressively less accessible to working-­class British students of all races, sexualities, and genders.53 Student consciousness of the elitist, class-­bound character of the art world—­and of sexism, racism, and homophobia—­drew critical attention to the limitations of a 1960s-­style art education, focused as it had been around the liberal cultivation of creative individuals. Students sought to or­ga­nize to change such ­things together—­ and this invariably involved acting in concert with ­those outside the walls of academia. In tune with this collective, even collectivist, mindset, sociologist Howard S. Becker wrote in his 1982 study Art Worlds, “Changes in art occur through changes in worlds. Innovations last when participants make them the basis of a new mode of cooperation, or incorporate a change into their ongoing cooperative activities.”54 This could almost have been a guiding script for diverse artist groups who followed trajectories that cut what Deleuze and Guattari would call “transversal” lines across customary vectors of discipline, expertise, audience, and industry in order to envisage and realize new “worlds” of artistic mutuality, production, and engagement.55 In this way, No Machos or Pop Stars offers an in-­depth case study of the transformed world-­making powers of art school groups as they persisted into the late 1970s and early 1980s. The critical awareness of college politics by art students was additionally fed by a general skepticism t­ oward institutionalized forms of education per se in 1970s technocratic society. From the publication in En­glish of Brazilian activist-educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 through Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) and the increasing knowlINTRODUCTION

18

edge of the 1960s antipsychiatry movement within the UK and Eu­rope, some 1970s radicals came to adopt a pointed, other times more fuzzy or inchoate, distrust of institutionally and nationally approved forms of education, including state-­funded art school.56 The book is therefore unlike most histories of art education, which tend to foreground the determining power of, for example, a celebrated teacher or a particularly innovative institution. Though what follows pays necessary attention to the importance of key pedagogues in Leeds art education and to the changing nature of educational provision in the schools featured, rather more attention is given to student attempts to slip the constraints of a state-­funded education in the strug­gle to forge vital experiments in popu­lar culture. The book pre­sents an extensive social history of an art school milieu in order to show how student in­de­pen­dence was born through critical, sometimes contesting, engagement with pedagogical authority. Oral histories of former students that have been conducted are the primary basis on which the book builds its account, capturing the logics of being in a band as a move within an art school or art world game—­even when the desired move is one of exiting that game. As a generally overlooked college scene, it is the subject of relatively ­little existing lit­er­a­ture but, where material is available, I have sought not to repeat its insights.57 Instead I concentrate on hitherto poorly covered or totally overlooked m ­ atters. I therefore do not attempt comprehensiveness in the pages that follow. For ­those who desire a fuller picture of the policy changes affecting art education in the period u­ nder consideration, readers are advised to consult Robert Strand’s exhaustive A Good Deal of Freedom (1987) and Dave Seeger’s “Changes Imposed on Fine Art Courses in Higher Education between 1960 and 1987” (1987). For an extensive top-­down account of the operations of Leeds Polytechnic, Patrick Nuttgens’s The Art of Learning (2000) is indispensable. What follows, in contrast, are bottom-up accounts—of the strug­gles to conceive a rationale for art and ­music at the impasse reached by the avant-­garde. A note on terminology: At vari­ous points in the book I use the term “post-­punk.” How we understand this term, and how it overlaps with and differs from “punk,” is a common subject of debate about m ­ usic ever since it was first used in print by m ­ usic journalists in 1978.58 But the debate has intensified more recently in the wake of Reynolds’s subject-­defining study, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005), culminating in studies by David Wilkinson and Mimi Haddon, and variously involves the making of genre, cultural, and po­liti­cal claims for post-­punk ­music as a category.59 No Machos or Pop Stars largely sidesteps such debates in the belief

19

THE ART SCHOOL DANCE GOES ON

that the term was not significant for makers of what might other­w ise be termed “post-­punk” m ­ usic in the locale and period u­ nder review and, as Haddon suggests, that it was anyway a term used rather more by m ­ usic’s critics and consumers.60 Since the focus in what follows is on art students’ self-­understandings as popu­lar ­music makers, I follow wherever pos­si­ble the terminologies and references used by them, w ­ hether in contemporaneous interviews or supplied subsequently within my oral histories.61 When I use “post-­punk,” therefore, I usually use it in a more straightforwardly periodizing way—to indicate that which came ­after punk—­rather than as any developed category of musical style or cultural outlook.

INTRODUCTION

20

PART I

AVANT– GARDE AND PUNK

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01 BEGINNING AT A DEAD END The ­great wave of “protest” and demands for “rights” which had once seemed likely to engulf the ­whole of Western society had markedly lost momentum. CHRISTOPHER BOOKER, THE SEVENTIES (1980)

A

s a new fine art student at the University of Leeds in 1975, Mark White found the crumbling architectural fabric of his new northern home city a startling change from his native southeast E ­ ngland—­startling b­ ecause once-­ significant buildings in Leeds ready to be pulled down already suggested the demise of the worldview that had created them: by the mid-1970s the looming structure of Quarry Hill flats had fallen into disrepair and was only half-inhabited. Originally a bold, large-­scale 1930s social housing solution to the prob­lem of extensive slums in that area of the city, the flats w ­ ere designed to roll out modern comfort and con­ve­niences to the city’s working classes—­inspired by similar visionary housing proj­ects elsewhere in Eu­rope, like the Karl Marx-­Hof in Vienna. But, due to a combination of structural, social, and maintenance prob­lems, by 1973 they w ­ ere judged by Leeds City Council to be beyond help, and in 1978 they w ­ ere demolished. As the building began to show its decrepitude, and its crumbling concrete panels and twisted steel w ­ ere fi­nally revealed by the wrecking ball, the failures of a postwar technocratic vision of a fairer

and more equal society ­were also, it seems, laid bare: in par­tic­u­lar, the state’s inability to supply sufficient levels of resourcing and management to make a winning real­ity of such dreams in the long term. “We ­were in this . . . ​world in which po­liti­cal consensus was breaking down,” White recalls. “What you saw was the death of Modernism. If you think of Quarry Hill flats as being an emblem of social cohesiveness, of Modernist architecture and progression—­all that was collapsing while we w ­ ere ­there.” White spent his first term living in Hunslet Grange—by this time another monument to the failure of Modernist municipalism. Built only seven years ­earlier in 1968, Hunslet Grange already showed evidence of poor construction issues and damp and cold prob­lems by the time of his tenancy. As a result families moved out in large numbers and ­were replaced by single occupiers and students on short-­term lets—­right up ­until the time it, too, was demolished in 1983. White recalls: Hunslet Grange . . . ​was a set of low-­rise, deck-­access flats on the Leeds Pontefract Interchange. Hard to let, ­really foul. You could see through the crack in our concrete wall. You could actually see the motorway interchange, that sort of ­thing. The condensation was appalling. You had what w ­ ere presumably at the time innovative ­things, like rubbish chutes. But they ­were never cleaned out. They ­were stuffed with rubbish top to bottom, pouring out: a sea of rubbish and dogs everywhere. . . . ​It was difficult for a lad from the South East. Beginning to understand the rest of the city was shocking in a lot of ways ­because it ­really was the end of something in Leeds in that period. And you ­couldn’t see what the beginning was ­going to be.1

Given such evident prob­lems, White was living in a building that acted as a daily reminder of the fallacies of modern planning. It made him feel like he was living in, or through, some kind of end time for planned f­ utures, even a dead-­end time (“you ­couldn’t see what the beginning was g­ oing to be”). This might seem surprising given that Leeds had been undergoing a major urban modernization program from the 1960s to the 1970s, remodeling the city’s image from Victorian mill town to the “Motorway City of the Seventies.” This technocratic proj­ect, involving architects, town planners, and local councillors in reshaping ­whole swaths of the urban landscape, was designed to enable better road transport within and beyond the city, thereby opening it up to enhanced opportunities for trade, leisure, and consumerism. Patrick Nuttgens, architect and then director of Leeds Polytechnic, has commented on the peculiar history of Leeds’s urban regeneration and its extreme impact on the face of the 1970s city: “Surprisingly Leeds was not seriously CHAPTER ONE

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1.1  Quarry Hill flats, Leeds, 1975. Photo: Charlotte Benton/ riba Collections.

Construction of Hunslet Grange, Leeds, 1968. Photo: Yorkshire Post/swns.

1.2 

bombed during the Second World War. Partly b­ ecause of that, it did not start to redevelop itself seriously ­until much ­later than other cities. That enabled Leeds to avoid some of the obvious m ­ istakes made in the course of hurried rebuilding in other places. But it also meant that when redevelopment did start, in the late fifties, it was a colossal explosion—in effect, nothing less than the rebuilding of the city.”2 Very much the modernizing technocrat, Nuttgens was optimistic about the potential outcomes of such heightened levels of regeneration activity in the city, at least more so than White.3 Critics, however, pointed to how the needs of local residents ­were often sacrificed on the altar of the planner’s vision. The Leeds Other Paper (lop), active in multiple campaigns to stop motorway and housing developments throughout the mid-1970s, vilified local and national government plans and gave priority and credence instead to the concerns of ordinary citizens. Headlines from the period are starkly indicative of lop’s po­liti­cal sympathies: “Quarry Hill and the Mad Council,” “Hunsletisation: The Planner’s Disease,” and “Motorway Jungle of the 70s.”4 The paper specifically singled out Hunslet Grange as a monument to the folly of Conservative and L ­ abour governments alike, reserving ire for Harold Wilson’s modernizing administration of the 1960s: “By 1967 . . . ​the white heat of the technological revolution was still supposed to be forging half a million new homes per year, and the government did not much care how they ­were built. Never mind the quality. . . . ​If Leeds Council was to do its bit to implement government housing policies then it had better get bulldozing—­and rebuilding. It was within this context that the 1,200 flats known as Hunslet Grange ­were conceived and born. They are, t­ oday, a soon-­to-be demolished monument to the ideology of their era and its aftermath.”5 In addition to protest and complaint, the scale of Leeds’s urban transformation also gave rise to a striking dystopian imaginary—of a place radically redrawn by an unreliable hand, thrusting old and new into ugly relation and uncertain f­ uture. Martin Bell, former Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds and, by the early 1970s, a lecturer in complementary studies at Leeds Polytechnic, referred to Leeds as “The City of Dreadful Something” (in a parodic riff on James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night) and penned a suite of poems attempting to capture the bleak emotional timbre of its urban realities: Pointed dust Whirled Mica glints CHAPTER ONE

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Grey sun shattered      Glaring Multi-­storey Car-­park Vacant Beetle shards     Acryline      Clutter the streets6

A sense of disconnect in ­these lines, “concrete” on the page, captures the peculiarly modern horror of an empty, unnatural, and fabricated environment—­littered, if not poisoned, by glinting, haphazard fragments of plastic and the offshoots of modern production pro­cesses. This dystopian vision, born of seemingly unfathomable or absent planning, is echoed also by White’s further words of recollection about Hunslet Grange: On the outside of it w ­ ere bits of the old [Victorian] rundown housing. ­Here and ­there ­were still some of the dirty brick pubs, surviving. Leeds was weird like that. Large areas of it felt like they had been bombed flat. But it was early ’70s dereliction rather than bomb detonation. You’d have ­these weird empty areas and old cobbled streets that d­ idn’t lead anywhere in the ­middle of which would be a single pub, still standing. It had that strange sense of apocalyptic dystopia about it: 1930s brick buildings, stone buildings, and odd bits of Modernism dropped in the ­middle. All seemed to be in an equal state of decay.

This “strange sense of apocalyptic dystopia” seems to have fed into a more general understanding among some Leeds-­based artists of ­there being no way forward, culturally speaking, at this moment in time. The fact that ­there ­were old cobbled streets leading nowhere only literalized a sense that previous routes w ­ ere no longer supported by their original rationales—­appearing instead somewhat absurd, cut off from the life-­world that made them sensible in the first place. A landscape so “weird” and “empty” was a curious place to start out from as an artist and from which to derive one’s bearings. Perhaps, instead, such an environment could have lent itself to a Situationist dérive encouraged by King Mob graffiti in London or the City Fun fanzine in Manchester—­perhaps all the more so given the presence at the University of Leeds of T. J. Clark, a onetime member of King Mob and of the si.7 Clark brought Situationist-­inspired critiques of the “spectacle” of

27

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

the modern city to students of nineteenth-­century French painting in his seminars at the university from 1976 onward, ­later making them a substantive focus of The Painting of Modern Life (1985). But, as White has astutely commented, t­ here was heavy “irony in sitting in lectures studying in g­ reat depth, for example, Manet’s ­Music in the Tuileries as a sign of the early development of Modernism . . . ​whilst outside Modernism was ­dying in street fighting, violent protest against progressive belief, and the evident collapse of the technocratic solution.” Even though it was by then a radical departure within bourgeois art history, the social history of art d­ idn’t address the unraveling realities of progressivism evident in the backdrop to the urban lives of Leeds students. “The con­temporary was never mentioned, even in the New Art History,” noted White. Left without an alternative way to read the city, White’s experience of the setting of his student years was downbeat from the start, typifying a cultural preoccupation with feelings of “disillusionment and gloom,” which became “defining qualities of 1970s British society.”8

SPECIAL PER­FOR­MANCE

Sometime in late 1976 or early 1977—it is difficult to be sure—­W hite and fellow university fine art students Andy Corrigan, Tom Greenhalgh, and Jon King made a stab at a “beginning,” despite the evident difficulty of making one at all. The form this took was a collectively realized piece of per­ for­mance art, made at a time just before all involved became musicians in soon-­to-be world-­renowned bands. The year 1977 was when King hooked up with Andy Gill, Hugo Burnham, and Dave Wolfson to create Gang of Four and Corrigan, Greenhalgh, and White (along with Kevin Lycett, Ros Allen, and o­ thers) formed the Mekons. But before this, the close-­knit group of students encountered a culture in the University of Leeds fine art studios largely unchanged from the years when the painter and curator Lawrence Gowing presided over the department as head and, before him, the Bloomsbury group biographer and historian Quentin Bell. King, Corrigan, and Lycett had begun their studies at the University of Leeds in the autumn of 1974, followed by White and Gill in 1975 and Greenhalgh in 1976. As T. J. Clark was not to take over leadership of the fine art department ­until September 1976, and the range of radical approaches consequent upon his stewardship w ­ ere not fully implemented u­ ntil the appointment of further new members of staff in September 1977, most members of ­these CHAPTER ONE

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Leeds University fine art, class of 1974. Top row: Kevin Lycett (second from left). Bottom row: Andy Corrigan (third from left), Jacky Fleming (third from right), and Jon King (far right). Courtesy of circaseventies​.­blogspot​.c­ om. 1.3 

bands had experienced a year or two of fine art education very much ­under the auspices of an establishment old-­guard. As a result, Corrigan, Greenhalgh, King, and White entered a studio environment that was still centered on painting and informed by the traditionally individualist ethos of fine art production—­despite t­ here being some l­ imited facilities for filmmaking and a member of staff, John Jones, who had made films on figures like Harry Thubron, Henri Matisse, and Kate Barnard.9 Per­for­mance art did not have a presence t­ here as it did only a few minutes’ walk down Wood­house Lane, on the other side of the city’s northern ring road, at the Polytechnic. What White and com­pany encountered at the university was also unlike the exceptional art pedagogy they had experienced as pupils at Sevenoaks grammar school in Kent, prior to arriving in Leeds. Th ­ ere they had been nurtured on collective proj­ects and radical ideas about modern art by White’s ­father, Bob, who was a teacher t­ here (except Corrigan, who had studied art at Liverpool College of Art). Offering a con­temporary and progressive approach to fine art teaching somewhat surprising for an En­glish

29

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

grammar school in the 1970s, Sevenoaks had instilled in its art students an open-­ended, questioning ethos of fine art experiment, which made them an ill fit for the more traditional orientation of the Leeds department. As Greenhalgh remembers, “From the moment I arrived in Leeds . . . ​I was ­really anti the idea of the individual artist. . . . ​I wanted to work collaboratively. . . . ​I was saying, I d­ on’t want to be d­ oing my own work. I want to work with other ­people. . . . ​So initially, just in terms of making artwork, it was a b­ attle in a way, to do anything. B ­ ecause how do you work collaboratively on a painting, for example? So instead per­for­mance was a ­really obvious way to start.” Special Per­for­mance was staged in the University of Leeds student u­ nion building in the winter or early spring of 1977. Named a­ fter a brand of cheap bottled beer (Federation Special Ale) that was served in the ­union bar, it was announced over the loudspeaker as an “exposé of Marxist dialectics in the debating chamber, only 20 pence. Bar extension applied for.”10 King recalls: The per­for­mance involved conversation and drinking, the second reducing the quality of the first. . . . ​We’d dragged in a ­table and dressed it as our shitty dining ­table. Mark was outstanding. I ­can’t praise enough his monologue about how p­ eople move from sweet to dry wines, as dreary as it sounds but [it was] acute and strangely melancholic. . . . ​We each talked about banal subjects u­ ntil we ran out of steam and someone e­ lse took over. I think I talked about how the traffic is sometimes busy but often not. The order of the day was to do something unremarkable, except in front of ­people, and not, so far as we could, “act,” and essentially to take up time without incident.

­There is l­imited photographic documentation of this one-­off event, which adds further details to King’s recollection. In figure 1.4 we see the “shitty” ­table, lined up with beer ­bottles, glass tankards, a packet of cigarettes, a k­ ettle, plates, plastic cups, and differing kinds of wrapped food. Corrigan sits to the left, looking pensive, staring into space, while White is in the ­middle at the ­table, looking askance but facing the audience. King is to the right of the photo­graph, hunched over (Greenhalgh is not pictured). In addition, two alarm clocks are vis­i­ble ­behind White’s right shoulder, perhaps underlining the fact that the passing of time is a particularly self-­conscious, intentioned ele­ment of the work. Two of the performers are wearing heavy coats and boots, indicating that it was prob­ably cold at the time of the per­for­mance (­these are unlikely to be ele­ments of theatrical costume). The per­for­mance space was a basement area with a single-­ CHAPTER ONE

30

Special Per­for­mance, Leeds University Debating Chamber, 1976–77. From left to right: Andy Corrigan, Mark White, and Jon King. Photo: Andy Gill. Courtesy of Jon King. 1.4 

glazed glass skylight, which, one imagines, would have quite literally let the cold in, adding to the bathetic feel of the work’s symbolic withdrawal from “warmly” entertaining spectacle. Another photo­graph (figure 1.5) shows that, additionally, a brass or iron bedstead was included within the space of the per­for­mance, which Corrigan reportedly climbed out of at some point during the proceedings to join the ­others on their seats. Thereafter, the drinking and the possibly scripted, possibly improvised exchanges began—­King, as we see him slumped in figure 1.4, appears to be reading from a script. ­There was also, at the beginning of the per­for­mance, a recording played of Another Party with . . . ​Victor Silvester, an lp of anodyne British ballroom ­music owned by one of the group. The rec­ord was “annoying,” Corrigan recalls, presumably b­ ecause it was a remnant of a bygone era that had long been irrelevant to British youth since rock and roll took over in the 1950s. Time appeared to slip away fruitlessly while listening—­a perfect complement to the deliberately inconsequential exchanges of the performers. The piece lasted for around an hour, though some ­people recall it feeling a lot longer ­because of its slowness and the lengthy pauses between dif­f er­ent

31

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

Special Per­for­mance, Leeds University Debating Chamber, 1976–77. Andy Corrigan. Photo: Andy Gill. Courtesy of Catherine Mayer.

1.5 

ele­ments.11 The last of ­these was the showing of a film, a projection screen for this purpose clearly vis­i­ble in photo­graphs of the event. King, Corrigan, and Kevin Lycett ran the university film society at the time and screened avant-­garde and under­g round work, including that of Andy Warhol, ­Michael Snow, and Jean-­Luc Godard. Corrigan and Lycett had already created their own underground-­type film, shot on a tea trolley along the Red Route in the Modernist part of the university’s campus, then renowned for being the longest corridor in Eu­rope. The film was “pretty good” according to King, since it successfully “occupied time without events,” in a manner akin to Warhol’s Empire or Snow’s Wavelength.12 Lasting around twenty minutes (depending upon the speed of projection) and shot entirely on Super 8 film, the film tracks a pass down the full length of the corridor at a slow, frame-­juddering pace. ­There is minimal editing, which sees shots of the corridor in front of the camera intercut with sideways takes capturing the long succession of win­dows (figure 1.6). If ­there is any narrative it is provided by the inevitable passage of the camera ­toward the corridor’s end: a blank white wall—­although, as it transpires, once reached, the camera then begins a return journey, ­after “the end” as it ­were, back along the corridor it has already traversed (figure 1.7). CHAPTER ONE

32

King, in a blog entry in 2010, champions Special Per­for­mance as a success: “Tom (Greenhalgh) passed out due to drink during the show, which was a shame as something actually happened. [But] the film ran, not many ­people came and it was a triumph.”13 The fact that something happened in a per­for­mance in which nothing (much) was meant to only partially marred the achievement of its aims it seems, at least in King’s eyes. The lack of a sizable audience (some estimates put it at about twenty p­ eople) is also celebrated as indicator of its avant-­garde virtue—­opposed as the avant-­garde often is to popu­lar reach and appreciation.14 Another surviving photo­graph (figure 1.8) shows empty seating at the event. T. J. Clark was reportedly among the small coterie of audience members. What White remembers as his “splendidly gnomic” characterization of the per­for­mance as “negotiating the aesthetics of tedium,” made in the immediate aftermath of the event, further sums up how its avant-­garde credentials might have been defined—­even if the observation was more “wonderful putdown” than positive evaluation.15 The per­for­mance is reminiscent of Gilbert and George’s 1972 video artwork Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk, in which we see its makers disconnected, emotionally switched off, depressed even. The only t­ hing they do with gusto during the twelve minutes of the video’s duration is pour the other a drink, hastening the onset of drunken oblivion—­the desirability of which resides at the dark heart of this comic work. Corrigan has said that the group knew of, and quite liked, Gilbert and George’s work at the time, and King reflects upon Special Per­for­mance in ways that resonate with Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk. “Mark,” King writes, “was the star of [Special Per­ for­mance]. He was—­and is—­a genius at describing a particularly British view of the world, tempered by disappointment and sexual frustrations, feeding a world-­v iew that finds misfortune in ­every beery, leery, glass.”16 In the lyr­ics to the Mekons’ “Never Been in a Riot,” King points out how White, whom he identifies as “a punkified John Betjeman . . . ​[,] miserably describes a depressing non-­evening out in the greasy spoon we always went to post clubbing.”17 The evident taste for bathos in this and other Mekons songs was already at play in Special Per­for­mance: an enactment of a morose, even depressive masculinity in its anticlimactic (non-)spectacle, in its slumped, underpowered troupe of performers, and in the pre­sen­ta­tion of images, sounds, and utterances that meta­phor­ically go nowhere. Lyr­ics to an early, unrecorded Gang of Four song, “The Times,” seem similarly preoccupied with downbeat experiences of the passing of time (“The t­ hings ­you’re ­doing are a useless waste of time / The ­things ­you’re saying are not

33

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

1.6  Still from Andy Corrigan and Kevin Lycett, Red Route (Super 8 film, 20 mins, 1976). Courtesy of Andy Corrigan and Kevin Lycett.

Approaching a dead end. Still from Andy Corrigan and Kevin Lycett, Red Route (Super 8 film, 20 mins, 1976). Courtesy of Andy Corrigan and Kevin Lycett. 1.7 

Empty seats. Special Per­for­mance, Leeds University Debating Chamber, 1976–77. Photo: Andy Gill. Courtesy of Catherine Mayer. 1.8 

worth the time it takes . . . ​Times you spend without end / Th ­ ings you do you think ­they’ll never end”).18 That Special Per­for­mance was an attempt to encapsulate, through the medium of per­for­mance art, a sense of disenchantment was certainly part of the group’s intention: “We tried to put together something which we felt would be hard-­hitting, incisive, and power­ful. And which had something to say about disillusion and nihilism.” But, White goes on, “largely I think it was incredibly long and astonishingly dull, and had no ­great viability at all, and certainly at the end we felt we’d reached a definite dead end, and that ­wasn’t the direction we needed to go.” And with, I think, his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he concludes: “Our attempt at per­for­mance art [had] all the incisiveness of Beckett and the power of Pinter, [yet] of course [managed to] successfully avoid both.” In a more stridently negative assessment of the work, Corrigan adds, devastatingly: “It looks like three drunk blokes ­really. I suppose we ­were trying to see what you could get away with. See what was good. We ­were just messing about r­ eally.” That a piece of collectively realized per­for­mance art is able to sustain such divergent views among its creators is perhaps symptomatic of how group energies ­were once spent managing opposing approaches to the purported impasses of early 1970s artistic culture. ­There was “a very disputatious mix,” White recalls, “a lot of arguing, a lot of discussion, a lot of thought about the world we found ourselves in. And from that came a search for form. . . . ​How do we start representing our unhappiness with the world? Is it through visual art? Is it through per­for­mance? What is it through?” How best to communicate dissatisfaction with, even dissent from, the values of a nation that seemed, by the midpoint of the de­cade, to be in irreparable decline?19 Making the answer to this question even more difficult to resolve was the poor standing in which White and his peers held that which had gone before them: the radical art and politics of the 1960s ­were seen to have failed, so too the twin isms of Modernism and progressivism, whose values had thus far underpinned many of the policies of postwar Western democracies.20 For White, the son of two left-­leaning parents committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a lot of the protest ­either that had gone before him in the 1960s or in which he had participated as a teenager seemed to have borne l­ ittle fruit by the mid-1970s ­because “we ­were still,” he recalls, “in a nuclear age.” That a desired aesthetic solution to such ills seemed elusive showed how the logic of the avant-­garde had become difficult to follow by this point: its game of innovation stalled, the next artistic “move” opaque to even ­those on the cusp of making it.

35

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

And so it was with per­for­mance art: both at the university and at the Polytechnic t­ here was a sense that the art form’s unsettling energies w ­ ere beginning to dissipate. West Yorkshire had been a nationally and internationally recognized regional hub for experimental per­for­mance in the late 1960s and early 1970s.21 In Bradford, Albert Hunt had developed the Bradford Art College Theatre Group, which staged pedagogically inspired productions in schools and in the streets and used nonprofessional actors, usually students of visual rather than theater arts. Meanwhile in Leeds, Jeff Nuttall’s pre­de­ces­sor Robin Page, along with George Brecht, had let loose a Fluxus sensibility within the studios of Leeds College of Art. By the early 1970s, Nuttall was joined at the Polytechnic by further staff members, including John Fox, founder of Burnley-­based alternative street theater group Welfare State International; John Darling, member of the Halifax-­based per­for­mance art outfit John Bull Puncture Repair Kit; and Roland Miller, per­for­mance artist and onetime performer with ­People Show. Members of this diffuse regional scene knew each other well and ­were often seen performing in each other’s productions, along with Shirley Cameron and Rose McGuire. Excepting Hunt, who favored more didactic works, most shared an interest in bringing avant-­garde art, especially Dada-­esque absurdities, to the street and to spaces of popu­lar ritual (to pro­cessional festivities, agricultural shows, tea parties, e­ tc.) in order to impact nonspecialist audiences—­ passersby unaware of, or unprepared for, encountering “art” in their path. As I have written elsewhere, this reached its apogee at the Polytechnic with student groups Soft Soap, Hesitate and Demonstrate, and Ddart in the early 1970s, but once members of ­these outfits graduated (in 1975) ­those left ­behind felt a lull in activity.22 “The spotlight has moved,” Nuttall wrote in the wake of the students leaving, “the energy level subsided.”23 Moreover, he thought, the ability of per­for­mance art to “restor[e] the public life-­ appetite by challenging or destroying expectations” was already “degrading” by the early 1970s.24 Ron Crowcroft, a fine art student who started at the Polytechnic in 1973, concurs about the winding down of once-­frenetic per­for­mance art activity at Leeds: “When I was a first year we would see the per­for­mance artists, Ray Richards [figure 1.9] and com­pany, ­doing stuff all the time and g­ oing crazy, travelling the world or living in upturned boats, like Clare [Watson] did. It was all ­going on. But ­there was nothing like that in the following two years. . . . ​The following two years ­were milder.” White concurs with Nuttall’s and Crowcroft’s assessment: “Per­for­ mance was . . . ​beginning to run down r­ eally, as a v­ iable form, or one felt it was, by the mid-­to late 1970s.” Special Per­for­mance was realized, then, CHAPTER ONE

36

1.9  Report on Ray Richards’s degree show, Yorkshire Post, July 2, 1975.

at a moment when the value of per­for­mance art was in doubt. For soon-­ to-be Mekons and Gang of Four members, per­for­mance art, it appears, was a stepping-­stone to making m ­ usic in bands. It was something that needed to be worked through rather than engaged in a valorized form in itself. It was only as a dead end, and one that needed to be pushed beyond, that it served any value. “We ­didn’t find our feet as a group ­until we started ­doing ­those per­for­mance ­things,” remembers Corrigan, with Andy Gill ­going further: “I associate [Special Per­for­mance] with the very early beginnings of us—of the Mekons and Gang of Four. It was ­people collaborating and talking and working ­things out together.” Per­for­mance art was both an end and a beginning.

“DIY SURVIVAL” IN THE H BLOCK

The university’s fine art department did not compare favorably with the Polytechnic in its offering of technical and other resources at this time. As Jane Ralley, a first-­year student in 1975, recalls, the relative lack of facilities was the basis of “huge” disappointment: “The university was very, very ill-­ equipped for practical art in comparison with Leeds Polytechnic. They only had about four Victorian ­houses with drafty, empty rooms for shared ­s tudios. . . . ​With ­great determination you could access some screen-­ printing equipment. Getting hold of canvas-­stretchers and hammers could take all morning. When I wanted to make sculpture, I was told, ‘­There might be a ­couple of welding canisters in the basement of number 22.’ ” Even though documentation exists in the university’s archive of contemporaneous block-­and screen-­printing presses, a film editing room, a photographic darkroom, and video equipment, students’ primary memories tend to foreground the predominance of life-­painting. “­There was ­little choice beyond life-­painting in the style of the Slade School,” recalls Ralley—­the Mekons/Gang of Four per­for­mance notwithstanding (figure 1.10). It was the only ­thing that was “easy to join” and was, she recollects, “extremely serious.” Her friend and peer Jackie Freeman, who also began her studies in 1975, concurs: “­There was a lot of emphasis on the Sickert type of approach: dots, flat areas of color. I felt that I got a bit pinched in trying to do all that.” Ralley and Freeman ­were ­later to become founding members of the band Cast Iron Fairies (figure 1.11), which brought humor and verve to early 1980s feminist politics, but the university fine art department around 1976 offered ­little to appeal to irreverent sensibilities. Ralley remembers giving up the life room: “It was when an CHAPTER ONE

38

1.10  Life studio, University of Leeds, 1975. Photo: Barry Herbert. Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, University of Leeds Library, lua/phc/002/48.

older student across the room said to me, ‘Would you mind changing your position?’ It was ­because my red shirt was disturbing the tonal values of her painting. I was discouraged by that!” But t­ here was one saving grace for Ralley and Freeman: her name was Emma Spina Barelli. The university art degree differed starkly from a post-­ Coldstream art college education, where art history only took up 15 ­percent of a student’s study time. Leeds University fine art students, by comparison, undertook usually around four lectures a week in the history of art, including ­those by Spina Barelli on Re­nais­sance art and Italian Futurism. “It was a very male-­orientated department,” recalls Ralley. “­There was very ­little attention paid to the w ­ omen or any of their concerns”—­especially so, perhaps, before the arrival of Griselda Pollock in 1977. “The only person who, from a ­woman’s point of view, was utterly inspirational was Emma Barelli. . . . ​She always used to come in late, breathing Campari and garlic over the first row, and sort of thumping the screen: ‘Look at t­ hese monks! Look at their asses! Hovering above the altar!!’ I thought, that’s my girl, I’m ­going to do Italian Futurism, b­ ecause it linked to Dada, which was part of my dissertation. So I did her Italian Futurism course, which was a gas. And at the end of ­every term you went for drinks and salami and Campari and had a talk about the term. It was marvelous.”

39

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

1.11  Cast Iron Fairies (left: Jackie Freeman; right: Jane Ralley), 1982. Photo: Phil Allen/Jane Ralley.

But, Spina Barelli aside, the university struck Ralley and Freeman as a largely stiff institution, dominated by the sense of entitlement of monied middle-­and upper-­class students (Henry Mee was in the same year as Ralley, Freeman, and some Mekons and Gang of Four members, l­ater graduating to become a portrait painter to nobility and the po­liti­cal establishment). Many pupils ­were sent to Leeds by Sevenoaks School, then a boys-­only direct-­grant grammar school that admitted a proportion of private, fee-­paying pupils alongside ones funded directly by the Local Education Authority. Though most Sevenoaks pupils ­were required to have passed the 11 Plus in order to be granted entry, such access arrangements made it pos­si­ble for boys from middle-­and working-­class families to attend for ­free alongside ­those from fee-­paying middle-­class families, including Greenhalgh.25 The local contingent comprised King and Lycett from the village of Kemsing in Kent: King’s f­ ather was an electrician, while Lycett’s ­mother worked for the rag trade. Both Lycett’s and Gill’s f­ athers ­were civil engineers, and Gill’s ­mother and both of White’s parents ­were teachers. Greenhalgh, originally born in Stockholm before his f­ amily settled in Sussex, was the only boarder out of this small coterie, coming from outside the region; his ­mother was an art teacher. To Ralley, however, even despite King’s relatively lower-­class origins (his ­father an electrician), he and o­ thers appeared to exist on the other side of a suddenly vivid class divide at Leeds University: I was from a single-­parent council ­house [near Luton], and so when p­ eople like the Sevenoaks gang told me that they w ­ ere wearing their granddad’s trousers b­ ecause they had no o­ thers, I simply believed them. Or if they ­were in an all-­in-­one boiler suit, as Andy Gill was, to my absolute consternation, at a disco—­where I thought you had to dress up—­I said, “Why are you wearing that, Andy?” And he said, “My clothes are at the launderette.” I just believed it all, ­because I had never come across the phenomenon before. . . . ​It took me quite a while to work out what the true story was ­there! I ­didn’t realize the gap [between classes] was quite so difficult to penetrate. It took me a long time to get the mea­sure of all that.

Down at the Polytechnic, Ralley recalls, “the w ­ hole vibe was very dif­ fer­ent, the ­whole class t­ hing was not t­ here.” Nuttall has concurred: “What was frequently daunting to students from the south [of E ­ ngland] was the predominance of working-­class kids from northern industrial cities, the so-­called woollybacks, with more interest in Tetley’s b­ itter than in clothes and transcendental drugs.”26 Nuttall is h­ ere referring to students from Lancashire

41

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

or Merseyside in his use of the derogatory term “woollybacks,” and t­ here is more than a whiff of northern masculine stereotyping in his recollection. Novel experiences of cross-­class exchange ­were fundamental to the nature of the learning environment in fine art at Leeds—­perhaps as impor­tant as its open-­ended intermedia pedagogy. This underlines the importance of working-­class participation in the arts more broadly in this period, which, as Claire MacDonald has powerfully argued, was responsible for “creating new directions for interdisciplinary art, [and] also of breaking down stifling bound­aries of class and tradition at the heart of British culture” in the 1960s and 1970s.27 Ralley therefore found the Polytechnic a more conducive environment for making art than the university. She made a friend t­ here in a fine art student from Manchester, Gilly Johns (­later to become bass player in Leeds band House­hold Name). “Every­body at the Poly who I met said you should talk to Gillian Johns. You two would get on r­ eally well. At the time I wondered why, ­because our work ­wasn’t ­really that similar, although we did work using figures. And f­ amily structures as well to some extent. So very female iconography. But we ­weren’t temperamentally similar or anything like that, and our work looked very dif­fer­ent. . . . ​But anyway, we got on well. ­Because we ­were both quite loud and mouthy.” In the mid-1970s the Polytechnic teaching staff ­were almost exclusively male save for experimental textiles artist Unn Sønju. The only other female member of staff, painter Kate Barnard, resigned her position in 1974. Harassment by male tutors was a real ­hazard for female students, who, in Johns’s class of 1976, totaled seventeen out of a forty-­five-­person year group (“I was an ardent feminist, so I w ­ ouldn’t let them get anywhere near,” remembers Johns). Such a gender imbalance in the student body, but especially within the teaching staff, made unreconstructed patriarchal attitudes a structuring pressure upon undergraduate art production throughout the period surveyed in this book and perhaps underpinned Ralley’s working relationship with Johns by providing necessary female solidarity in an environment marred by sexist attitudes.28 As Johns recalls, ­women students needed each other’s support in negotiating the authority of male judgment ­because “you had to be r­ eally careful then, you d­ idn’t want to be labeled as a Bolshie feminist and not be taken seriously.” Social attitudes ­toward sexism and conventional gender expectations ­were being broadly challenged by the mid-1970s, consequent upon the pressures of second-­wave feminism, but female students’ experience of Leeds in the latter half of the de­cade was soon to become blighted in another way CHAPTER ONE

42

Gilly Johns, Familial Association, lithograph, 1977. Courtesy of Gilly Johns.

1.12 

by the sustained campaign of vio­lence ­toward ­women by Peter Sutcliffe, the so-­called Yorkshire Ripper. His attacks began in nearby Keighley in 1975 and continued in and around the West Yorkshire area u­ ntil his capture in 1981. Twenty-­two ­women became victim of his attacks, thirteen of whom ­were murdered. As the de­cade wore on and Sutcliffe’s actions became ever more newsworthy, w ­ omen began to feel increasingly unsafe when out at night and constrained by fear of attack. This was to further fuel a sense of the city as a dystopian, even dangerous place and particularly so for the ­women on its streets. Mo Lea, an art student at the Polytechnic in the early 1980s, has written an account of surviving an attack by Sutcliffe, detailing the therapeutic role her art-­making played both in the immediate wake of the assault and in the de­cades since.29 But in the mid-1970s, surrounded by an almost exclusively male staff, Gilly Johns found better connections with the Polytechnic’s (male) technicians than with its lecturers. They w ­ ere her “saving grace,” she recalls, helpful and supportive in their skills-­oriented interests, while Ralley similarly found the Polytechnic a comparative embarrassment of technical riches for the support of art-­making when compared with the university. “I discovered ­there ­were five floors of facilities, from film to vacuum-­forming and welding to printing. The head of the studio [at the Poly], Sandy Weatherson, said I was welcome to work ­there as long as I could find a space in the main studio.” This was a large space in the Polytechnic’s H Block, which, as Johns recalls it, “was r­ eally like a big aircraft h­ angar in which you had to make your own l­ ittle space. . . . ​You kind of had to make it happen yourself. . . . ​W hereas Leeds University was dictated and followed a route, we [at the Polytechnic] had to make our own route. It was frustrating at times but then, ­because of all the in­ter­est­ing p­ eople ­there, it got exciting.” James Charnley notes that the purpose-­built H Block, which Leeds College of Art moved into in 1969, was to pick up “ira internment connotations” by the early 1970s, adding a dark undertow to its Modernist architectural semiotics.30 This only dramatized the degree to which the planner’s vision appeared, yet again, to have gone awry, echoing the failures of Quarry Hill and Hunslet Grange. Miles McAlinden, a tutor since the 1960s, thought the Polytechnic studios, and the ­hangar in par­tic­u­lar, a disaster for pedagogy from the very beginning: At first glance walking into the empty “­hangar” it could be easy and tempting for anyone to think or dream of the ­great ­things that could be achieved ­there. It whetted the imagination, stirred fantastic ideas of wonderful origiCHAPTER ONE

44

1.13 

Leeds Polytechnic fine art studios, 1981. Photo: Tom O’Leary.

nality. Yet the real­ity was something e­ lse, particularly with an annual intake of 40–45 students. . . . ​The acoustics w ­ ere deafening. It had been built as a factory not a studio. The noise level was intolerable. If someone dropped a hammer its sound reverberated around the studio. With the place full of students, the noise for many became unbearable. Every­one had to shout to be heard. As the wandering “­hangar” staff ­were essentially homeless [the new building ­didn’t make provision for staff offices] the pub with its mixed blessings became an “annex” for many tutorials. . . . ​Concentration was hard and a place to call one’s own difficult. . . . ​The consequence of this was that our intelligent students began to build their own enclaves. This seriously changed the studio visually making it resemble a “shanty town” or “refugee camp.” From the desired idea of creating an atmosphere conducive to teaching it quickly changed into a D.I.Y. survival course.31

This was interpreted by some students, including Johns, less as an inadvertent side effect of poor planning and rather more as course ethos (“We had to make our own route”). Ralley and Johns had an exhibition together at the Polytechnic Gallery in February 1978. Johns exhibited paintings and lithographs, and Ralley exhibited sculptural objects, including photographic documentation of a work called Guys made the year prior (figure 1.15). Ralley bought a number of Guys cheaply from Leeds schoolchildren, who had been using them to

45

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

Leeds Polytechnic H Block, 1970s. Photo: Archive and Special Collections, Leeds Beckett University. 1.14 

Jane Ralley, Guys, 1977. Photo: Jane Ralley. 1.15 

represent Guy Fawkes in the weeks leading up to Bonfire Night in 1977 (soliciting “penny for the Guy” as was custom in the 1970s). She made them stand up in the gallery by constructing wooden armatures for them, emphasizing their ungainly, threatening gait and appearance—­the menacing nature, perhaps, of its male grouping rendered somewhat pathetic. “They just about managed to be art (with a bit of support),” she wrote.32 Influenced by the 1960s Destruction in Art symposium, which she had heard about in her art history classes at the university, Ralley brought the work to a suitable close by throwing the figures (her “Art”) on a local community bonfire, aided by the kids who had made them in the first place, and together they watched them burn. Her photo­graphs of ­these figures, and of the pro­cess of their destruction, ­were accompanied in her gallery pre­sen­ta­tion by a quotation from Albert Camus’s The Rebel. Through this the gaze of the Guys was likened to “the empty stare which w ­ ill sum up all the gestures and all the stares of the world”—­a fitting formulation, Ralley recalls, which “seemed to me to describe perfectly the attitude of punk at the time.”33

“­THERE WAS NO AUDIENCE”

Not all the work coming out of the Polytechnic seemed quite so nihilistic or death-­driven however. The fine art department t­ here was renowned for a culture of permissiveness that, in the mid-1970s, resulted in work produced across a diverse range of forms: paintings, prints, sculptures, Fluxus-­ inspired street art, film, installation, per­for­mance, and post-­conceptual work (figure 1.16). Even though students w ­ ere beginning to become restless with perceived shortcomings of some aspects of the Polytechnic’s pedagogy by this time, ­there was still a wide diversity of studio activity, which made students feel a sense of artistic possibility.34 Ralley ­wasn’t the only university student who sought to surpass her own institution’s shortcomings by turning to the attractions of what was ­going on down the road. “­There was an openness and a freshness at the Poly,” Kevin Lycett recalls, “a feeling of ‘yeah let’s have a go.’ You’d be talking to ­people and something would be more likely to come out of a conversation with a student from the Poly than a student at the university.” Such conversations emerged out of connections made in social spaces outside of educational establishments, at nightclubs like Heaven and Hell on the city’s Headrow. Lycett remembered:

47

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

1.16 

Ron Crowcroft, ­These ­People Are Bizarre, 1975. Courtesy of Ron Crowcroft.

We fi­nally found this nightclub and the students from the Poly ­were ­going ­there as well. Historically, ­there’d been a complete iron wall between the Poly and the university, but when ­you’re in the same nightclub, dancing to the same ­music and drinking, you do end up talking, and that’s how it all started. T ­ here w ­ ere the usual parties and sex, out of which every­ thing started to flow. It was much more fertile than anything g­ oing on at university. My friends at university who ­were basically the ­people I came from school with and the rest of the students ­there w ­ ere unsympathetic. I ­couldn’t get anything ­going with them. . . . ​It was just inert. At the Poly ­people ­were up for ­things.

This ethos of “creative license” seemed more germane to what Lycett had come to expect, and hope for, in art education.35 Polytechnic student Robert Joyce proved especially impor­tant in this regard to Lycett and other early Mekons members (so much so that he was inspiration for a ­later Mekons track).36 Joyce hailed from a working-­class ­family in Huddersfield and had undertaken his art foundation course locally at Leeds’s Jacob Kramer College before starting the fine art course at the Polytechnic in September 1973. He worked across media freely and experimentally as a student, his output including works in installation, film and video, photography, poetry, and per­for­mance. Joyce remembers the challenge and rationale of the Polytechnic’s pedagogy thus: “It was like being CHAPTER ONE

48

thrown in at the deep end. It was quite difficult to get focused. . . . ​In fact I think the teachers ­were ­there to sort of stop you being taught, if that makes sense. They ring-­fenced you, they w ­ ere trying to ring-­fence your creativity, or some such idea. And not actually put ideas into your head. . . . ​I think they wanted you to teach yourself, involve yourself in finding ­things out.” In this way, Joyce suggests, students ­were shielded from tutorial intervention, from a presumptively ruinous imposition of the teacher’s authority upon students’ other­w ise ideally in­de­pen­dent and autonomous creative activity.37 Only this border (keeping tutorial “interference” out) was necessary for maintaining the sanctity and priority of Thubron-­esque self-­directed learning. All other divides w ­ ere ­there to be transgressed: especially t­ hose between disciplines and the ones separating individuals from each other. Lycett remembers Joyce as a “­really special person,” perhaps in large part b­ ecause, as Greenhalgh puts it, “he did a lot of r­ eally, r­ eally in­ter­est­ ing stuff. [As a result of getting to know Joyce,] the idea of ­doing a per­for­ mance became a completely normal t­ hing to do.” Lycett collaborated with Joyce on producing another performance art piece, along with input from further Leeds fine art students (Frances Dean and Ramsay Burt from the university and Jo Barnett from the Polytechnic). This work took place, in the Leeds University student u­ nion building, on June 23, 1977—­this time, in mj’s Coffee Bar. Lycett’s narrative of events, written for his degree show a year ­later, is matter-­of-­fact, minimal—in a manner typical of the textual documentation of per­for­mance art of the 1970s: the dignity of work This is in response to the strange notion that the quality of a work of art is somehow related to the amount of work spent on it. So we worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion ­doing: press ups ­running backwards and forwards and jumping on and off a chair then we showed tapes of this whilst humping around a monitor till exhausted and climbing up and down a ladder till likewise and fi­nally covering up our manhandled monitor with sand— a handful at a time.38

Actions such as the press-­ups, or rather their video-­taped pre­sen­ta­tion on a small video monitor, are vis­i­ble in surviving photo-­documentation (figure 1.17), as are the collective efforts of rolling a cumbersome video-­ monitor within the space of the coffee bar (figure 1.18).

49

BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

Press-­ups on the video feed (left: Burt; right: Joyce). Robert Joyce and Kevin Lycett (with Frances Dean, Ramsay Burt, and Jo Barnett), The Dignity of Work, 1977. Courtesy of Robert Joyce.

1.17 

“Humping around a monitor” (left: Dean; right: Burt). Robert Joyce and Kevin Lycett (with Frances Dean, Ramsay Burt, and Jo Barnett), The Dignity of Work, 1977. Courtesy of Robert Joyce.

1.18 

The Dignity of Work explored the relationship between live-­action and technological forms of repre­sen­ta­tion. This involved the videotaping of ­things done, sometimes with recordings played back ­after the event (as with the press-­ups on the monitor), at other times carry­ing the live feed of an action to a tv monitor concurrent with its undertaking. The latter is made particularly vivid during the monitor-­rolling part of the per­for­ mance, in which the live capture of the collective rolling pro­cess is fed through to, and seen on, the monitor as it itself is being rolled—­creating a self-­referential looping of action and repre­sen­ta­tion during a moment of its making.39 The Dignity of Work was produced at a time when, as Andy Beckett has detailed, the financial value of work in the UK economy was declining and the standard of living falling along with it.40 In this context, the idea of art-­ making as a pro­cess involving so much work, suggested both in the title of the per­for­mance and in the ways in which it makes forms of spectacle out of collective endeavor, would have been hugely resonant. Furthermore, the evident needlessness, even absurdity, of the artists’ exertions h­ ere confers an extra layer of doubt as to the value of their resulting activities—­making the work redolent of Special Per­for­mance’s inconsequential time-­wasting before it. But Dignity of Work became a watershed work for Lycett ultimately for other reasons: ­because of what he came to see as the relatively closed, small-­scale social world in which it operated. Echoing White’s take on the impasse represented by Special Per­for­mance, Lycett recalls that Dignity of Work “felt like a dead-­end”—in large part b­ ecause it failed to draw a sizable audience.41 “­There is a photo of us moving around this extremely heavy monitor and a guy sitting in the background just looking. And that was about the best you could hope for in terms of an audience. Somebody kind of looking.”42 The space of the coffee bar—­a public space, open to all on the university campus—­dramatized how the small size, even nonexistence, of an audience was a challenge to the avant-­garde’s presumption of cultural relevance. “­There was no audience,” Lycett recalls—or at least not one sufficient to underpin claims about art’s powers to radically transform society and culture.43 Documentation of Dignity of Work variously shows none, one, or, at the most, six audience members at any one time—or at least bodies in the vicinity. “­There ­were some serious prob­lems about why ­there was no audience and it was about where the avant-­garde had got itself at that point. It was extremely elitist, extremely obscure and ephemeral and very hard

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BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

Robert Joyce and Kevin Lycett (with Frances Dean, Ramsay Burt, and Jo Barnett; left: unidentified figure; and rolling [left] Burt, [right] Joyce) Dignity of Work, 1977. (left: unidentified figure; and rolling (left) Burt, (right) Joyce. Courtesy of Robert Joyce.

1.19 

to engage with u­ nless [the audience had] gone through a ­whole transformation of their way of understanding art.”44 Another photo­graph shows a lone female figure sitting quaffing a pint of beer, her body turned away from the exertions of the artists in her immediate vicinity, as if proving the avant-­garde’s defeat by the intoxicating pull of 1970s youth culture (figure 1.19). Lycett would rail against this, and try to rectify it, in a series of artworks that ­were designed to more directly solicit audience participation throughout 1977 and 1978 (figure 1.20). ­These included printed public provocations with blank sheets of paper supplied for public responses and walkabout participatory per­for­mance pieces in the streets of Leeds. This was at a time when he was finding it increasingly hard to reconcile his Left politics with a stark recognition of the prob­lem presented by the bourgeois condition of con­temporary art. In an attempt to engage a broader range of p­ eople in avant-­garde activity, he pasted a provocation entitled “We All Love Art” around the university campus, encouraging ­people to create art for themselves (figure 1.21). It contained the lines, “I . . . ​believe that it is crucially impor­tant to create an art that is directly revolutionary in its orientation and overtly po­liti­cal in its form and ­content . . . ​if this cannot be achieved then it is better to produce no art at all.” But in writing CHAPTER ONE

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Kevin Lycett, Art Lovers, 1977. Courtesy of Kevin Lycett. 1.20 

Kevin Lycett, We All Love Art, 1977. Courtesy of Kevin Lycett. 1.21 

thus he had backed himself into a corner—or indeed a (final?) dead end. Graffiti responses came back from two ends of the spectrum: from the scrawling of “I.R.A.” across the face of his provocation to the drawing of a male figure with a comically huge penis. ­W hether you opted to support Irish republicanism or to mock the pretension of the artist’s gesture the conclusion remained the same: “better to produce no art at all.”

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02 ANARCHY AT THE POLY All art constantly aspires ­towards the condition of ­music. WALTER PATER, THE RE­NAIS­SANCE (1888)

O

n December 6, 1976, punk came to Leeds in the shape of the Anarchy in the UK tour. The gig, at the Polytechnic Assembly Hall, was the first to go ahead as the organizers had planned. The Sex Pistols’ expletive-­ridden appearance on Thames Tele­v i­sion’s ­Today program, less than a week e­ arlier, had created a storm of outrage in the national media, expressed most famously by the Daily Mirror’s front-­page December 2 splash “The Filth and the Fury!” Pressured by such a vivid show of establishment indignation, university officials and councillors up and down the country moved quickly, banning the group from regional stages on the grounds that their would-be degeneracy, and sudden fame, might make up a potent enough cocktail to spark violent unrest among disaffected British youth. Prior dates in Norwich, Newcastle, and Derby had all been canceled on this pretext. But in Leeds, the gig had been booked by the student union, and in this town at least, the higher-­ups refused to intervene. City councillors not happy with this said letting the gig go ahead showed “society had lost its moral values.”1 But their sounding off was to no avail. In the end, the Leeds concert was one of only three of the original twenty dates to play as planned, along with ­those in Manchester and Plymouth.2 The event offered four bands on one bill—­with the Damned, the Clash, and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers alongside the Sex Pistols—­all

for the bargain price of £1.30. It was an electrifying chance to see three emergent London-­based punk outfits alongside a renowned, older act from New York’s cbgb scene. The gig therefore already promised value for money, but with the sudden storm of denunciations surrounding the Pistols, it quickly became a must-­see for the city’s rebellious youth. For a number of concert-­goers, however, it turned out to be more than just a ­great gig and is remembered as something like a road-­to-­Damascus moment that changed the course of their lives, inspiring them to go on and become musicians themselves shortly thereafter. This puts it alongside other near-­mythic Sex Pistols gigs, like the one held at Manchester’s Lesser F ­ ree Trade Hall e­ arlier that June, which has been credited with birthing bands Joy Division and the Smiths and being formative of the outlooks of, among o­ thers, post-­ punk advocates Tony Wilson and Paul Morley.3 ­Until now, however, the Leeds gig has unaccountably received l­ ittle attention. Green Gartside, soon-­to-be lead singer with Scritti Politti but then a fine art student at Leeds Polytechnic, was at the gig that Monday night, alongside many o­ thers who would soon form bands and start making m ­ usic in its aftermath or who became other­w ise impor­tant in the Leeds diy scene. Among them ­were many fine art students from both the Polytechnic and university: Andy Corrigan, Tom Greenhalgh, Kevin Lycett, and Mark White, who would go on to form the Mekons; Jon King and Hugo Burnham (the latter an En­glish student), who became half of Gang of Four; Marc Almond and Frank Tovey, who became synth artists Soft Cell and Fad Gadget respectively; Gilly Johns, bass player for House­hold Name; Jacky Fleming, ­later a feminist cartoonist and Shee Hees keyboardist; Paul Car­ter, who created experimental ­music in Southampton in the early 1980s as idid idid; and Shaun Cavell and Chris Neate, who deejayed and established club nights in New York and Leeds in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other fine art students undoubtedly went along, though without more extensive oral history research it is impossible to know the exact number. In addition to the art school milieu, also pre­sent w ­ ere Pete Brooks, a founding member of Impact Theatre Cooperative, and John Keenan, founder of the city’s F Club and a crucial figure on the Leeds m ­ usic scene ever since, alongside out-­of-­towners like Paul Metcalf, who was inspired to make ­music as “Victor Vendetta,” lead singer with Dewsbury-­based new wave band Psykik Volts. Paul Strohmeyer Gartside, only ­later “Green,” entered the Polytechnic fine art department for the first time in 1974, despite disappointing A-­level results a year e­ arlier. Unlike at other art colleges he had visited, where he saw much painting being done, the unconventional nature of the

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Paul Strohmeyer (“Green”) Gartside. Student profile picture, Leeds Polytechnic, 1974. Courtesy of Dick Durkin/Leeds Beckett University.

2.1 

p­ er­for­mance art coming out of the Polytechnic had sparked his interest. He had already become involved in communist politics and ideas of counterculture while a teenager in his hometown of Cwmbran, South Wales, and had subsequently become interested in conceptual art while an art foundation student at Newport College of Art. Given his outlook on life and on art, the department at Leeds Polytechnic seemed like a propitious place for him to go to. Gartside was, as Nuttall has written, carried to the city “on wings of expectation.”4 But the young Welshman, arriving in West Yorkshire with ­others from across the country, soon found ­things ­weren’t as he hoped. Gartside remembers, upon arrival, “­going as far as stretching a canvas, ­because every­body seemed to be stretching a canvas, and then sitting and thinking and abandoning it . . . ​whilst every­body ­else was busily getting on with ­doing what­ever ­they’d done before they got ­there, it seemed to me.” Every­body seemed to be painting, and very few p­ eople, as it turned out, ­were interested in per­for­mance. Even t­ hose that w ­ ere failed to impress the f­ uture Scritti Politti lead singer: much of it turned out to be “facile,” Gartside recalls. “I ­didn’t think it was very clever.” Upon arriving in Leeds he was hoping for “an education. I wanted discussion, I wanted ideas, I wanted to be provoked and stimulated and asked to account for myself and be engaged. But I ­wasn’t. Genuinely ­there was nothing ­really of any value I ­didn’t think.” But if the cultural promise of radical art, alongside the purportedly radical education that solicited it, both quickly palled for Gartside once in Leeds, the world of pop ­music, on the other hand, still held out a degree of revolutionary promise. CHAPTER TWO

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At the time Gartside had “a very inchoate idea of the vari­ous ele­ments of the [1960s] counterculture, and of its commitment to radical transformation,” which he had picked up from listening to the Beatles as a boy in Caerphilly.5 To him, pop m ­ usic was therefore “never s­ imple or trite” and instead “always a challenge and a stimulus to thought. . . . ​The possibility of other ways to live and behave that I saw in pop ­music and pop musicians,” he remembers, “was profound.”6 By the mid-1970s, however, the 1960s ­were long past, even if memory of them had not completely withered on the vine. When I met Gartside over coffee in 2015 he described in vivid terms the import of the night in question and how it caused a complete overhaul in his thinking about what to do as an artist. Not someone typically given to hyperbole or mythmaking, he says, “The w ­ hole idea of a night that changed your life sounds so ridicu­lous and unlikely,” but, with this par­tic­u­lar eve­ ning, “it certainly was the case, ­there’s no question about it.” Furthermore: That night was a kind of call that had to be answered; a decision had to be made about an absolute transformation in what was pos­si­ble, in what one should do, and what one could do, and what one ­ought to do. Right ­there and then. I know it sounds completely mad, but that’s what I came away thinking and feeling. The power and the shock, the exhilaration, and to some extent the fear, of being in that room—it was in all ways sensory, a complete shock to the system. . . . ​I remember ­going into the studio the next day and . . . ​I wrote something about it, about how the previous night had thrown what­ever I was ­doing into some sort of context or changed every­thing, and it went up on the wall.

Gartside protests the inadequacy of ­these words even as he utters them and seems worried at their capacity to betray him, perhaps b­ ecause, still a left-­wing materialist thinker, it seems “completely mad” to evoke religious overtones in describing a punk gig as any kind of “call” (and, implicitly, his subsequent turn to music-­making as some kind of “calling”). Nevertheless, he is adamant that the gig demanded a response from ­those pre­sent to it. “It was almost like one d­ idn’t have a choice. It w ­ asn’t like, ‘Oh, I think I might like to do this.’ One was compelled ­really”—­compelled, that is, to reassess the value of what­ever he had been ­doing hitherto and turn his attentions instead to the urgencies of making m ­ usic. What exactly he wrote and put up on his studio wall ­there is unfortunately no rec­ord of, but we do know that he was struggling to find the words, then as now, to express punk rock’s consequences for the logics of avant-­garde art. For Gartside, as for other artists in that audience who had driven themselves into ­meta­phorical

59

ANARCHY AT THE POLY

c­ ul-­de-­sacs and near depression by trying to create an engaging art out of the avant-­garde, the experience of that gig appeared to offer a route out. All of a sudden it made palpable a sense of ­things being pos­si­ble. Opinions are divided about what made the gig so remarkable and why, exactly, it was so inspiring. The Clash played first and, despite sound prob­ lems, they w ­ ere “the real revelation,” says Mark White. They seemed to have “in their pro­cess . . . ​an art sensibility ­going on. ­There ­were ideas, visual ideas, and ­really fine ­music ­going on,” which made them immediately appealing to him as an art student. They had, as Shaun Cavell recalls, “jumpsuits with painting all over them” and sprayed and stenciled lettering, which had been designed and executed by hand.7 “They r­ eally did rip the roof off the place,” White says. “I ­hadn’t ­really thought about being in a band beforehand. But you watched the Clash and thought, hang on a minute, this could work, this could be exciting. . . . ​They ­were the ones who made you think ‘we could be d­ oing something h­ ere.’ My sense was that it was or­ga­nized by them, along that in­de­pen­dent route. You could see this with the Clash, but with the Pistols you ­were never so sure. You felt that this was self-­built, self-­ made, for us.” Also, in comparison, the Sex Pistols, who played last, seemed musically uninteresting, like “speeded up Chuck Berry and heavy metal,” or, as Andy Corrigan spits, “just a rock band basically.” Jon King concurs, albeit sounding a slightly dif­fer­ent note: “I remember being disappointed with the Sex Pistols, ­because I remember thinking ‘Fucking hell, this is like Black Sabbath.’ . . . ​I ­really liked ‘God Save the Queen,’ and ‘Holidays in the Sun’ is a work of genius, but it was very conservative ­music.” King had seen Richard Hell and the Voidoids and other cbgb bands during his New York sojourn with Andy Gill ­earlier that summer and had come to appreciate the musical virtuosity of US bands. “What was annoying about New York punk ­music,” he says as one envious musician eyeing the achievements of his forebears, “is that they w ­ ere incredibly good musicians. . . . ​So the idea of ‘if you know three chords, form a band’ was ­really not part of their agenda.” Perhaps somewhat surprisingly given its diy image, it is punk’s musical competence that King remembers being struck by at the Anarchy gig: “You could see that the Clash ­weren’t like that [i.e., like three-­chord amateurs], the Heartbreakers ­weren’t like that, the Damned actually ­were accomplished, and in fact the Pistols had a ­couple of ­really efficient p­ eople playing drums and bass.” But the Clash as shining example of musical virtuosity was not uppermost in the mind of a soon-­to-be Mekon in the audience that night. Kevin Lycett recalls, “I thought the Clash w ­ ere appalling, pathetic pedestrian CHAPTER TWO

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John Lydon, Anarchy in the UK tour, Leeds Polytechnic, December 6, 1976. Photo: Graham Wood/Eve­ning Standard/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 2.2 

­idiots who wanted to do r­ eally well for themselves. I quite liked the Pistols. By that stage [of the eve­ning John] Lydon was ­really pissed off. I mean ­really, ­really pissed off. The heat coming off him was just atomic. The rest of the band just seemed like i­ diots, but he seemed to have something quite amazing.” So much so, in fact, that Jacky Fleming is reported as saying that she thought he was ­going to be the next David Bowie.8 ­Others, like Hugo Burnham, also responded to the more theatrical ele­ments of the Pistols and Lydon’s stage presence in particular—­perhaps ­because of a background in theater-­making himself. “He had an extraordinary amount of green snot, a ­great big green grolly ­going from his nose to his arm. Beautifully done, it was all so perfect. It was g­ reat theater. . . . ​The Pistols ­were rock and roll but just a bit faster and with strange clothes and some g­ reat lyr­ics. I mean it was Situationist rock and roll to the max!” Paul Car­ter agreed: Our first impression was that it was all pretty hilarious. Except for Johnny Thunders, the rest of the bands played short, sharp songs at breakneck speed, jerking around “as though ­they’d had an electric current shot up their arse,” I thought. I remember watching Dave Vanian [of the Damned] looking very impressive, striding around the stage in his makeup. Then ­after the Damned’s set, I noticed him walk past me looking less impressive—­

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quite short and appeared to be about fourteen years old. . . . ​Our post-­gig inquest verdict? The w ­ hole eve­ning was a real hoot and much more entertaining than most [of] the gigs we usually attended.

For John Keenan, who recalls the m ­ usic of Yes being much “too overblown” for him by this time (“I started playing Tales from Topographic Oceans and it made me feel sick”), punk was a welcome “wrecking ball,” knocking older stuff aside and “enabling ­people to come in on ground level again, to learn to play.” The Poly gig, he says, “was a bit like a maggot farm, ­people squirming everywhere, and jumping up. It was sweaty, and spit and all that. And I just thought yeah, I quite like this, it’s exciting. . . . ​The sense that you can do anything you want to do. And it d­ oesn’t m ­ atter if you can play, as long as the feeling is ­there. That’s what got me into it. I thought ‘­there’s definitely something ­here.’ ” Tom Morley, Polytechnic fine art student and l­ ater drummer with Scritti Politti, concurs that it w ­ asn’t ­really the ­music that was the ­thing, remembering Gartside coming back from the Anarchy gig with “his eyes kind of wide open. He ­didn’t say much about the ­music. He was just talking about the attitude.” And Lycett again: “It was the fact that the m ­ usic w ­ asn’t anything and they would just get up and do it. It was that that was so exciting.” So regardless of the perceived differences among the members of this small coterie—­whether ­people thought it was the Clash or the Pistols, or even the Damned, that ­were the most compelling band that night (though nobody remembers the Heartbreakers as a standout turn); w ­ hether it was the show of musical accomplishment or the lack thereof; or ­whether punk artifice, style, and attitude w ­ ere deemed the most explosive ele­ments of the experience—it was both the m ­ usic and something more than m ­ usic that appears to have been significant in reshaping the template of artistic possibility for ­those pre­sent. For Marc Almond, the Anarchy tour was part of a “real musical and artistic education for me.”9 ­Music was something that visual art students turned to, including t­ hose exposed to punk through other gigs in the city at the F Club and elsewhere throughout 1977, ­because it presented a complex amalgam of forms, affects, and values that appeared to be unmatched by even the wildest outliers of avant-­garde art. Artists turned to ­music, Lycett says, ­because “of a par­tic­ul­ ar set of coincidences” around the time of punk. “But it’s a profound misunderstanding to think that ­music is all that it was about.” B ­ ecause, ultimately, it was “a strategy or practice, a response to the incredibly barren and unpromising landscape” that mid1970s culture was perceived to be. CHAPTER TWO

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IN THE MEDIA EYE

Accounts like ­these, which foreground the transformative impact of the gig upon young p­ eople’s creative outlooks, sit somewhat uneasily alongside published reviews, which report an audience that is instead nonplussed about, if not outright hostile to, Lydon and his troupe of performers. The crowd w ­ ere “way too restrained,” writes Tony Parsons in an other­w ise glowing review of the gig in the nme. The lack of gusto greeting the Pistols in Leeds is contrasted unfavorably with their “pogoing London supporters,” revealing a prob­lem, Parsons implies, with “apathy and complacency” in West Yorkshire youth.10 Only a “smattering” of applause greets the arrival of the band on stage, alongside abuse (shouts of “fuck off!” and regionalist taunts of “London boys!”) and a few thrown objects. On a slightly more telepathic wavelength, Caroline Coon, in the pages of Melody Maker, posits that, by the end of the gig, the audience in Leeds was “left wondering what all the fuss is about.”11 But it was the more establishment-­oriented, clearly punk-­hating, Yorkshire Eve­ning Post (yep) that painted a picture most at odds with stories of the Poly gig as an exceptionally inspirational night. U ­ nder the headline “How the Sex Pistols Misfired,” and in what amounted to a would-be early obituary for punk, yep reporters wrote: “The ­great Sex Pistols’ myth exploded in Leeds last night when a vile, disgusting show was met with derision, scorn and hoots of laughter from scores of fans. Many walked out on the dreadful debacle at the Polytechnic and ­those who stayed ­were told by lead singer Johnny Rotten: ‘­You’re just a load of dummies. ­You’re dead.’ But, in fact, it was punk rock and its crude, mindless message that was d­ ying.” The paper crowed that the Pistols had failed to live up to “the group’s violent reputation for trou­ble,” reporting that “the apathy was such that excitement was virtually non-­existent.” “When the group waited among catcalls to do an encore, Rotten turned upon his fans and snarled: ‘Has the council banned you from clapping? If you d­ on’t like us you know where the exit is.’ ” A student u­ nion official is quoted to confirm that this is indeed what took place (“many ­people walked out”), and the overall verdict of concert-­goers, the yep went on to proclaim, “was unan­im ­ ous: ‘What a load of absolute rubbish.’ . . . ​‘It was the worst concert I have seen in my life.’ ”12 Of course, differences of opinion are expected at any gig. But, as Hugo Burnham has said, this “­wasn’t just another gig.” Even though some in the audience, including Burnham, would have known about punk already from reading the nme, and ­others had seen punk bands live before, the Anarchy

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tour, or more precisely the media furor that followed and framed it, suddenly catapulted all involved—­the bands, the audience, the journalists, and the ­whole punk road show—­onto a broader cultural-­political stage. “We knew what [punk] was about,” recalls Corrigan, “but I suppose we’d never seen it presented in that way, and with all the fury about it. That was new. ­Because in the summer of ’76 [when he’d seen the Pistols and the Damned at London’s 100 Club] ­there was a bit of fury about it, but it was ­really a bunch of poseur kids messing about. . . . ​It was nice b­ ecause you could relate to it as art students. But it ­hadn’t seemed to be that popu­lar.” By the time of the Anarchy tour, however, “it was something that was affecting every­body, it was in the popu­lar consciousness, as opposed to just being an elite London kind of ­thing.” Or, as Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones has put it, about the infamous ­Today interview with presenter Bill Grundy, “Before then, it was just ­music: the next day, it was the media.”13 ­After the band had been goaded into becoming a spectacle of delinquency by Grundy, the press continued to try to manufacture further instances of mediagenic, eminently reportable acts of vio­lence, even down to the bathetic level of a story about the band smashing a potted plant display at their ­hotel in Leeds, which was anyway “overblown” and initiated by further press taunts.14 Thus the Anarchy tour opened onto a charged mediasphere in which the lurid accusations of spectacular journalism became unusually exposed and contestable: so much so that they could be turned back upon their accusers. Malcolm McLaren did this perhaps most memorably when, in being asked during a Yorkshire tv interview to account for how being sick on stage and spitting at the audience could possibly be seen as setting a good example to the kids, he replied, “­People are sick everywhere. P ­ eople are sick and tired of this country telling them what to do.”15 The mediatized space of the Anarchy tour thereby provided the means through which one could imagine one’s own role or place in the making of counterhegemonic culture, of forging a world of values and attitudes at odds with the moralizing outlook of the New Right that was in ascendancy in po­liti­cal culture in 1976.16 One such ­humble form of revolt was readily available for punk concert-­ goers: personal sartorial style. In this, the Sevenoaks boys w ­ ere not to be outdone, even though not among the most fashion-­conscious in their milieu. As Jon King recalls, “Corrigan had spent a week’s food money that me, Mark [White—the soon-to-be Mekon], and he had pooled together on buying an earring. First of all he bought a silver penis earring to be

CHAPTER TWO

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outrageous, rather than the leeks and the potatoes for us to eat. Then he got this silver razor blade ­thing. So we turned up [at the gig] with the razor blade one. Kevin, not to be outdone, . . . ​de­cided to borrow one of Jacky Fleming’s tampons and tied it onto his earring. So he had an earring that was this tampon, and Corrigan had his ­thing.” ­There ­were lots of journalists in attendance, hoping to pen the next installment of the punk rock outrage-­and-­calamity story. “­There ­were a lot of press ­there,” King says, evident in the sheer number of photog­raphers shown in attendance that night (figure 2.3). “The Yorkshire Eve­ning Post turned up, and they ­were trying to find outrage everywhere. Every­one was being interviewed as to why they w ­ ere t­ here.” The results of the yep’s vox populi, perhaps not without heavy amounts of tendentious se­lection as we have already seen, ­were mobilized the following day for the paper’s critical coverage of the night. The report was accompanied by a black-­and-­white, now typical-­looking, photo­graph of Lydon hollering down a microphone and another photo, billed as a “punk rock fan at the concert”—­wearing a razor blade earring! (figure 2.4) Literally overnight Corrigan had been transported into the midst of the Pistols’ media circus, which was electrifying both for him and for his band of young would-be rabble-­rousers. King recalls, “So we ­really thought we had made it, or Corrigan had made it, we thought it was fantastic. . . . ​I think the ­thing about the Anarchy tour was you saw that ­there was a possibility of being ­really disruptive. . . . ​We ­were thrilled by being transgressive. That was what r­ eally drew us.” It was a glimpse into what it felt like to be caught up in the symbolic theater of it all. In addition to providing this opportunity to become a subject within the contested space of the media circus, the post-­Grundy fury also had the effect of bringing a novel kind of audience to the Polytechnic. As Car­ter remembers it, Most of the f­ aces ­were unfamiliar. Th ­ ere w ­ ere young locals from the town. Some had made the punk effort (like the one staggering around with a can of beer in hand, wearing a bin liner and his legs taped together with gaffer tape) while o­ thers looked like they possibly came from further afield and ­were more comfortable in their dress (like the one pulling off an old suit completely covered with safety pins). And then ­there ­were the usual bunch of Poly students who prob­ably came just to see what all the fuss was about. . . . ​I noticed Green Gartside wearing Morris dancer bells jingling around his ankles.

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2.3  Sex Pistols onstage at Leeds Polytechnic, December 6, 1976. Photo: Graham Wood/Eve­ning Standard/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

“How the Sex Pistols Misfired,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, December 7, 1976. 2.4 

The yep quotes out-­of-­towner Kevin Petch from Harrogate (“I only came to see what all the fuss was about”) to underline the student union view that “many ­people came out of curiosity as a result of the Sex Pistols’ reputation and the controversy surrounding them.”17 But if townies and out-­of-­townies, and even some Leeds art students somewhat remote from the punk m ­ usic scene, had been lured to the Polytechnic by their curiosities that night, so out-­of-­town insiders ­were drawn too, up the m1 from London to be ­there. As Chris Neate tells it, “I remember ­people coming up from London, who looked, I thought at the time, ­really good, who ­were followers. At the beginning, [punk] was an incredibly art school t­ hing; only ­later did it become about anarchy and kids d­ oing this, that, and the other. When it started, and was just Kings Road, Sex, and art school ­people playing guitars, it was quite an elitist t­ hing actually. That’s what I remember it as. It followed on from Roxy and Bowie, which ­were all very elitist ­really. They ­weren’t about average life or p­ eople.” So, at the first gig played u­ nder the auspices of the Sex Pistols’ new post-­Grundy notoriety, a diverse, even far-­reaching audience was pre­sent. Diverse both culturally and geo­graph­ic­ ally, it comprised members of a subcultural “punk” group alongside regular townies and art students—­all variously hailing from Leeds, the West Yorkshire region, and (at least) as far afield as London. Car­ter noted, “Pogoing youths slipping on beer and spit at the front intermingled with Poly students heckling and spitting ­because ­they’d read it in the Sun. We hung t­ owards the back to observe the goingson, drinking beer.” Also, members of the press made up a significant and vis­i­ble portion of the audience: “­There ­were photog­raphers snapping away at the punters and a few slightly older, more aloof and cool-­looking dudes and dudettes, who [Car­ter] took to be members of the m ­ usic press”—­ thereby expanding the audience beyond the ­actual bodies pre­sent in the room to the readers and viewers of the media coverage that they garnered in the days following. The a­ ctual size of the audience in the hall is surprisingly hard to tie down, given wildly discrepant reports. The Yorkshire Eve­ning Post reported that five hundred tickets had been sold in advance (the hall’s full capacity), although it estimated only three hundred p­ eople to be in attendance on the night. Testimonials also differ widely among punters: some recall long queues to get in, that all tickets ­were sold out, and that ­there was a “big, big audience, the place was packed out” (Cavell), while o­ thers remember it as quite sparsely attended (King: “It was quite empty”). Tom Greenhalgh even estimates the attendance as low as fifty to seventy-­five p­ eople, though

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Audience members at Anarchy in the UK gig, Leeds, December 6, 1976. Photo: Graham Wood/Eve­ning Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 2.5 

Audience at Anarchy in the UK gig, Leeds, December 6, 1976. Photo: Graham Wood/Eve­ning Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

2.6 

photo­graphs of the event suggest decidedly more than this (figure 2.6). Nevertheless, ­whether five hundred or fifty, the a­ ctual and virtual audience that the Anarchy gig brought to Leeds was of a kind that makers of avant-­ garde art in the city could hitherto have only dreamed about securing. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that artists in that audience felt jump-­started and already ­running in pursuit of new possibilities.

“ ­REALLY LADDY”

Anarchy’s “call” was soon to be answered, as we s­ hall see in the following chapters, by the creation of Leeds bands that variously took license from its diy example and irreverent snubbing of authority. But some ­people pre­sent that night ­didn’t ­really hear its call—­let alone answer it. Jacky Fleming said, “I think the main significance for me was that my friends ­were intrigued by the phenomenon. It w ­ asn’t a significant marker in my life.” In other words, her experience that night was as onlooker to the be­hav­ior of her friends rather than as rapt spectator to per­for­mances by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Th ­ ese friends ­were largely men: Lycett (her then boyfriend), Greenhalgh, King, Corrigan, and White. “I have a vague memory of the boys

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wearing tampons as anarchic earrings, to enter into the spirit of ­things,” she adds, suggesting that the earring episode might have meant comparatively less to her than it did to King, Corrigan, and Lycett. It is significant to note that Fleming was uninterested in joining in with its sartorial theater and that her appreciation of the gig’s importance is less than fulsome (particularly so as the Shee Hees, the band in which Fleming ­later played keyboard, arguably appeared demonstrably punky in the 1980s, involving dressing up, musical amateurism, and large amounts of irreverent humor). This may well be ­because she was simply less interested than the ­others in ­music at the time, seeing herself primarily as a visual artist. But her noted lack of excitement jars in the context of the welter of excited male testimony and the view of the gig as a significant game changer in life and art. Barbara Frost, then partner of Frank Tovey, was also in the audience that night. Along with Tovey and Hugo Burnham, she spent time with the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock a­ fter the gig at the Pistols’ h­ otel (Frost and Tovey had been students with Matlock at St. Martins in London before coming to Leeds). “I enjoyed it,” Frost says, “but it prob­ably had less impact on me than on p­ eople who had never seen them before. I’d seen the Pistols quite a few times already in London.” Other ­women who would soon become decisive players in the Leeds ­music scene, and who ­were enabled by punk’s example—­including Ros Allen, Bethan Peters, and Julz Sale of Delta 5, Marian Lux of Sheeny and the Goys, and Jacqui Callis of Another Colour—­were not in the audience (Sale and Callis ­were not even in the city, still yet to arrive in Leeds in the years following the Poly gig). ­Women ­were interested in and involved in punk, as we ­will see in the following chapters of this book, even if some of the key figures ­weren’t pre­sent at the Anarchy event.18 But some w ­ omen’s absence that night has to be reckoned with as po­liti­ cally significant: Claire MacDonald, l­ater a cofounder of Impact Theatre, recalls, “Well, I ­wasn’t ­there, and one of the ­really big reasons that I ­wasn’t was ­because I was a feminist. The Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten ­were seen by many w ­ omen as a r­ eally quite frightening manifestation of an already very macho culture.” At that point, she goes on, “we ­didn’t know what to do about it. We c­ ouldn’t ­really tell w ­ hether it was ­going to be very liberating or not.” Even if, as MacDonald said, “it turned out [punk] was very dif­fer­ent in many ways,” and that it d­ idn’t become as celebratory of fascistic vio­lence as some may have initially feared, at the time “I think we w ­ ere all trying to work out . . . ​where certain aspects of punk actually stood.” Echoing this, Jackie Freeman, ­later percussionist with Cast Iron Fairies, recalls punk CHAPTER TWO

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d­ idn’t appeal ­because it was “­really laddy,” and, resorting to more denunciatory language, a sixteen-­year-­old female Roxy ­Music fan from Leeds wrote to the letters page of Sounds on December 11, 1976: “I thought we w ­ ere trying to cut out vio­lence at concerts, football matches and wherever—­it’s ­those sick bastards [the Sex Pistols] who encourage it.”19 In bringing images of vio­lence and female sexuality together then—­ through the wearing of razor blade and tampon earrings, for example—­ punk’s “style of revolt” did its job in generating outrage from feminists and mainstream culture alike, as its equally provocative and ambivalent use of the swastika caused consternation among leftists.20 Its disruptive signifying force garnered punk detractors and followers, drawing wider impact by coming at the end of a year (1976) in which the national press had proved particularly excitable in venting disapproval of sexualized imagery in visual art. From the exhibition of tampon prints in the final-­degree show of Leeds Polytechnic student Mari Hobbs, reported in the Sunday Mirror, to the London showings of Mary Kelly’s so-­called “dirty nappies,” and the pornography and tampon sculptures of coum Transmissions, decried in multiple national tabloids, the stage had been set for punk’s end-­of-­year repre­sen­ta­tional assault on bourgeois codes of taste and decency, of which Corrigan’s and Lycett’s punk jewelry was but a minor part.21 Recalling F Club gigs the year following the Anarchy in the UK tour, John Keenan notes the popu­lar development of punk style: “The ­people who came [to the F Club] w ­ ere all creative kids, they would come with cake decorations for jewelry. Some of them ­were the Sun’s idea of punk, they thought they had to put a safety pin through their nose or wear a bin liner. But even the kids who started off like that started realizing that was uncool and came up with their own image. ­There was one lad, he had ­little plastic-­ looking, like, laminates all over him. But, as you got closer, you realized he’d cut out all the fannies from porn magazines.” By the summer of 1977, as the murders of the Yorkshire Ripper w ­ ere gradually becoming better known both nationally and across the West Yorkshire region, the violent power of punk style became unwittingly enhanced—at the increasing expense of what some already saw as its threadbare ethics.

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PART II

A

FORM– ING BAND

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03 PUNK BOHEMIANS Punk made it clear that class was not entirely repressed. TERRY ATKINSON, “RUDELY PREVAILED UPON” (1996)

It’s a punky reggae party / And it’s alright BOB MARLEY, “PUNKY REGGAE PARTY” (1977)

I

mmediately following the Anarchy tour’s stop in Leeds, t­ here was an explosion of new bands across the city, as t­ here was across the nation. The raw sound of punk m ­ usic live, coupled with the moral panic of its accompanying media circus, provided an object lesson in how to stick it to the man. How not to be a cap­i­tal­ist dope was lesson plan 101. It found willing students in young p­ eople up and down the country—­women and men, gay and straight, black and white, all feeling moved enough by punk to do something for themselves, regardless of their possession (or other­wise) of economic or cultural capital. Such egalitarianism was ultimately unevenly realized, checked by the per­sis­tence of exclusionary social structures and the cultural differences at play within punk itself (including the sexist and racist attitudes at large in Anglo rock culture in the 1970s).1 But, for some in the eye of the initial punk storm, it was the promise of an emergent, newly participatory, and creative body politic that felt electrifying at the outset— as much as, if not more so than, any aesthetics of revolt. Punk gave license to multiple kinds of diy initiative: ­people set up bands, released their own rec­ords, wrote and self-­published fanzines, created

their own clothes, set up club nights—­all of which quickly realized an in­de­ pen­dent infrastructure of punk production, built from the bottom up, by a largely youthful social bloc. As is now widely recognized, punk was a significantly working-­class phenomenon, like other youth cultures before it, but it also drew in middle-­class and aristocratic participants, as well as ­those from other marginal, even denigrated corners of British and American society.2 So even though its “community” did not comprise any straightforward underclass, punk did tend to be the voice of, or give voice to, ­those with the least social capital or cultural legitimacy.3 The son of working-­class Irish immigrants in London singing about “another council tenancy,” a British Somali ­woman with braces on her teeth sending up the “plastic” nature of modern life, a bewigged (then cross-­dressing) Atlantan celebrating “toilet love,” and a cross-­class community of anarchist musicians converging on an open h­ ouse in Essex—punk offered glimpses of what an alternative, more egalitarian body politic might look like, who might be in it, and what their participation might make pos­si­ble that more traditional white male elites had hitherto foreclosed upon. Even if punk style and m ­ usic was in some cases already a mass cultural product, constructed by Situationist Svengalis like McLaren, or it quickly became one, as argued famously by Dick Hebdige in Subculture, punk’s shared, in­de­pen­dent mode of production, and the social base upon which it rested, was not. For ­those at art school, chafing at the social and institutional limits of the visual art world, this social milieu appeared as a propitious context for waging anticapitalist strug­gle, w ­ hether informed by countercultural, anarchist, or socialist ideas—or a mixture thereof. Jon King, for one, remembers the art world as newly alienating ­after punk. He felt “a bit awkward” about being a painter “­because you ­were part of a gallery system.” Suddenly acutely conscious of the fact that “only well-­educated p­ eople of a certain class go to art galleries,” and that “no one of my ­family background ever went to an art gallery in their lives,” he remembers thinking, “God, this is so bourgeois. I’ve become the ­enemy. The pigs are standing up on their back legs and I’m one of them. . . . ​We thought ­we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to get together.” Along with Andy Gill, with whom he’d been ­doing acoustic renditions of Kursaal Flyers and Dr Feelgood–­type songs sung onto a cassette recorder, he sought out first Hugo Burnham, a university En­glish student, and then a hippy musician, Dave Wolfson, to form Gang of Four. The band played their first gig in the Cellar Bar at the Corn Exchange in Leeds in May 1977: King on vocals, Gill on guitar, Burnham on drums, and Wolfson on bass. At their second gig, at the university’s Tartan Bar, they shared billing with Severed Head CHAPTER THREE

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Gang of Four, 1979. From left to right: Dave Allen, Jon King, Hugo Burnham, and Andy Gill. Photo: © Adrian Boot. 3.1 

and the Neck Fuckers and the Mekons, the latter wheeled on stage on a beatup old sofa ludicrously masquerading as a “spaceship”—­the word bathetically scrawled on a piece of paper ham-­fistedly stuck to it.4 A ­ fter only a few gigs, Gang of Four bass-­playing duties w ­ ere taken over by Dave Allen, a working-­ class guy from Kendal, and the lineup stabilized—at least ­until 1980. Green Gartside and Tom Morley felt even more strongly about the limitations of the art world by 1977. In his fine art thesis written that year, Morley approvingly quotes the words of Terry Smith, a member of conceptualist collective Art & Language, to telegraph his and Gartside’s conviction that the art world, by this stage, had become irretrievably hidebound: “Culture has been expropriated. High, official, elite culture is used by the ruling classes as tickets of self-­definition by majority-­exclusion.”5 In contrast, punk appeared to promise majority inclusion. “[We] have already discarded the old tools of artmaking,” Morley goes on, “and are looking for/using more successful methods which achieve our aims. . . . ​This includes being directly involved with po­liti­cal work, [and] performing overtly po­liti­cal ­music in a (punk) rock band.”6 Sometime a­ fter the Anarchy gig in December 1976, Gartside had already persuaded Morley to spend his remaining student grant money on a drum kit rather than fine art materials. Morley became a drummer then and, alongside Gartside on guitar and vocals, teamed up with bassist Niall Jinks, Gartside’s Young Communist League friend from Wales, to form a band that would eventually become Scritti Politti. Playing their first gigs ­under the short-­lived name of the Against, they supported Leeds home-­grown punk band S.O.S. at the Cobourg pub on July 1, 1977, si­mul­ta­ neously discovering new possibilities in the practice of music-­making and in its attendant social world, which, for them, was soon to be populated with idealistic young socialists and anarchists. But talk of the rejection of art world elitism in ­favor of embracing the supposedly common culture of punk risks making such forays into music-­ making sound too lofty, as if driven by the purities of fervently held ideals and youthful princi­ples alone. Th ­ ere ­were also more prosaic reasons for reaching out beyond the academic milieu—namely, to recruit musicians. For even if punk ­wasn’t always about securing professional, even proficient musicians, it did require expanding beyond the art milieu to find sufficient ­people who at least had a modicum of fa­cil­i­ty with, or w ­ ere willing to learn to play, a specific musical instrument. Bethan Peters, a Leeds Polytechnic three-­dimensional design student, met Julz Sale, who arrived in Leeds in the autumn of 1977 curious about its punk scene. Sale had completed an art foundation course in Leamington CHAPTER THREE

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3.2  Scritti Politti, ca. 1981. From left to right: Tom Morley, Green Gartside, and Matthew Kaye. Photo: Paul Cox/Avalon.Red.

Spa but never took her formal study of art any further once in Leeds. Both quickly became involved in music-­making ­after getting to know members of the Mekons and Gang of Four, and they asked Ros Allen, a fine art student from the university, to join them in forming a band that would become Delta 5. They became a five-­piece outfit in late 1978 with the short-­lived addition of two associate members from the Mekons on drums and guitar. Their first gig was in Nottingham at the Sandpiper Club on November 24, 1978.7 A ­ fter the departure of their drummer and guitarist, the rest had to reach out beyond Leeds in order to stabilize the group’s membership. In May 1979 they recruited Alan Riggs and Kelvin Knight, working-­class men who left their jobs as an autoclave attendant at a hospital and a dispatch worker at Kay’s cata­log, respectively, to work full-­time in the band.8 Delta 5 ­were frequently associated with the art milieu b­ ecause of their connection with Gang of Four and the Mekons (described as “artsy,” for example, by Sounds) but, in fact, derived a majority of band members from outside of Leeds art institutions.9 They showed how “art school bands” ­were often inclusive of non-­art-­school personnel from the get-­go—as was the case also for Gang of Four and Scritti Politti. Sometimes this blurring of the art/non-­art line was hastened by young artists joining “townie” bands other­wise remote from academia. Marian Lux, a university fine art student, for example, initially became a singer with Severed Head and the Neck

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3.3  Delta 5, 1980. From left to right: Bethan Peters, Julz Sale, Ros Allen, Alan Riggs, and Kelvin Knight. Courtesy of Ros Allen.

Sheeny and the Goys, 1978. On van roof: John Hyatt; on the hood, from left to right: Dave Brown, John France, and Steve Shill; standing, from left to right: Rachel Benson (not a band member), Marian (“Kitty”) Lux, and Andy Sharpe. Courtesy of Dave Brown. 3.4 

3.5  Frank Tovey in a student production of Samuel Beckett’s Act without Words I, directed by Pete Brooks, June 1977. Video still. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

Fuckers, a Harrogate-­based band, in 1977 before returning to the art school milieu to form another band, Sheeny and the Goys, in 1978. Other bands, like Girls at Our Best!, often thought of as a “townie” rather than “arty” band, ­were actually made up of a number of ­people who had studied on an art foundation course at Jacob Kramer College between 1977 and 1978.10 Such trafficking of band personnel across the “town-­and-­gown” divide did not extend to all bands springing up in Leeds in the wake of punk. Working-­class punk bands like S.O.S. and Abrasive Wheels did not have any art school connections (the latter ­going on to be associated with the Oi! movement), and ­later post-­punk and goth outfits the Expelaires, the March Violets, and the ­Sisters of Mercy ­were also remote from the art school milieu (though members of the latter two bands did study other subjects at Leeds University). Andrew Eldritch of the ­Sisters of Mercy recalls ­there being “a very definite divide between art school uni types and the townies” at this time.11 The short-­lived Leeds Poly outfit Fans, comprising Frank Tovey on lead vocals and Jacqui Callis, Barbara Frost, Anne Tilby, and Marc Almond as backing singers, perhaps held up the “art” side of this divide. They played only one gig, in the Polytechnic Common Room on March 6, 1978, and “­really we just used to shout,” recalls Callis.

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Nevertheless, even if we acknowledge the existence of differences between “arty” and “townie” cultures at this time, it would be a m ­ istake to overemphasize them. This is b­ ecause, at least according to rock sociologist Simon Frith, punk’s greatest achievement was in creating a popu­lar form of bohemianism that sought at some level to nullify such distinctions—­ seeking the arty in the town and vice versa. Punk’s liberal solicitation of diy creativity was “the source,” Frith argues, “of punk’s politics: not, despite the best efforts of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Communists, and the National Front even, as the voice of unemployed youth, but as a strident expression of the traditional bohemian challenge to orderly consumption.”12 He quotes US ­music critic Robert Christgau: “Rather than a working class youth movement, punk is a basically working class bohemia that rejects both the haute bohemia of the rock elite [and, I might add, the art world] and the hallowed bohemian myth of classlessness. Punk ­doesn’t want to be thought of as bohemian, ­because bohemians are posers. But however vexed the question of their authenticity, bohemians do serve a historical function—­they nurture aesthetic sensibility.”13 Furthermore, Frith goes on, this “sensibility” created “a new sort of street culture: the inner-­city post-­domestic young, radical professionals, squatters and communes, students, non-­students living a student life, ethnic groups, gays, no one ‘settled down,’ every­one concerned to protest and survive.”14 In Leeds, this was made pos­si­ble for students, ex-­students, and unemployed youth (sometimes willfully unemployed by choosing to be in a band rather than to work) by the availability of maintenance grants for students and dole for the workless. In this sense, punk bohemia can be considered the rebellious, even ungrateful, child of welfarism. As Greil Marcus has put it, “Leeds has long been known for turning out radicalized college students; the University of Leeds and Leeds Polytechnic, plus the social freedom provided by endemic unemployment and easy access to the dole, have made pos­si­ble the kind of student/nonstudent bohemia where ­people can experiment.”15 Punk was also, Frith continues, “the first British youth cult in which the consumption and production of ­music ­were integrated. Artists and street followers came together in their concerns, and bohemian arguments became class arguments too.”16 This was evident in the punk and post-­punk club scene in Leeds, in which students and working-­class kids mingled, even as the divides between town and gown continued to throw up animosities and suspicions therein. The Stars of T ­ oday club, held at the Polytechnic Common Room over the summer months of 1977, set the template. Established by Graham Cardy, a member of Leeds band Mirror Boys, CHAPTER THREE

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Polytechnic fine art student Shaun Cavell (­later known as Sean Cassette), and soon-to-be legendary promoter John Keenan, Stars of ­Today set out to promote, and provide a stage for, “new wave” ­music and bands. Leeds punk fanzine New Pose, the voice of working-­class punk in the city, greeted it positively, if warily: “I think the art department have something to do with it. (Yeah that’s what I thought),” wrote the magazine’s founder, Martin Tisdall, but he noted that “[it] is ­really getting together as the weeks go by.”17 In its short run it presented gigs by national and international bands including the Vibrators, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, and the Slits, as well as local bands S.O.S., Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers, Mirror Boys, and Cheap and Nasty (the latter featuring the first ever stage appearance by Marc Almond at a gig as the band’s go-go boy). Jane Ralley, inspired by her art history classes on Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire, set up her own club night, diy-­style, at the Heaven and Hell club on the Headrow in Leeds city center, featuring Sheffield band Clock dva (figure 3.7). The F Club, the more renowned and longer-­running successor to Stars of ­Today beginning in 1977 and continuing into the 1980s, provided a stage for many punk, post-­punk, and (in the 1980s) goth bands that other­w ise ­wouldn’t have found such a ready place to play. Across vari­ous venues over the course of its existence it hosted gigs by Penetration, X-­R ay Spex, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, Big in Japan, and Cyanide, thereby bringing national and northern En­glish bands to an audience made up of a mixture of working-­class kids from council estates on the outskirts of the city and the student population.18 The F Club is credited by some for bringing “town” and “gown” together to such a degree that the very division itself, while not surpassed, became a generative social fissure across which a dynamic, living culture came to flourish. “The good t­ hing about the F Club was you had kids off the street mixing with students, fine arts students, the ­whole lot, all coming down to ­these punk nights,” recalls the club’s founder John Keenan. “It was a mixture of ­people, and in some ways the townie kids ­were learning from the art kids, but the art kids w ­ ere learning stuff from the townies. They ­were seeing a ­little bit of street-­wise as well, ­going on. ­There ­were a few real characters, and a few dodgy characters, but in the main the one ­thing that they had in common is that they ­were all into the scene, into the ­music, and that bound them together.” As Paul Car­ter remembers it, punk and the F Club w ­ ere transformative for how art students spent their time, the way they dressed, and how they behaved. Though they ­didn’t “turn into punks overnight,” he and his friends did begin “­going to ­every local punk gig we could through 1977 and 1978 and

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“Stars of ­Today” advertisement. New Pose, no. 1 ( June 1977). 3.6 

3.7  Clock dva performing at the Heaven and Hell nightclub, the Headrow, Leeds, 1978. Photo: Jane Ralley.

became members of the F Club (when it was at the Ace of Clubs).” He remembers seeing many bands t­ here and elsewhere across t­ hose years, including the Clash, the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Jam, the Vibrators, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Adverts, the Stranglers, Eater, the Cortinas, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Rezillos, X-­R ay Spex, Magazine, and the first Mekons and Gang of Four gigs. This change to his cultural pastimes also registered itself in dress (figure 3.8). “By mid-1977, my long hair had become a grade-1 spiky affair and my typical uniform consisted of straight jeans with the knees ragged out (à la Ramones), an old black V-­neck pullover with holes (which was actually my school uniform and way too small), monkey boots and a torn bomber jacket.” He also “took to getting into the crowds at gigs and jumping around, despite not being the most out­going person. Previously, I’d hated even g­ oing to a disco and you’d never see me on the dance floor.” Tony Baker adds that punk gave art students a sense of generational and cultural belonging, even if they ­didn’t necessarily identify themselves wholly with it: “When the art lot embraced punk, and p­ eople from the estates embraced it, it suddenly became this huge f­ amily I suppose, ­because we w ­ ere

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Paul Car­ter, ca. 1977. Photo: Mike Taylor. 3.8 

all part of something new. Not that art students w ­ ere punks particularly, but they painted their clothes and just embraced that type of ­thing. We ­were obviously trying to separate ourselves from the dinosaurs that had gone before.” The F Club was also the place that the Mekons got their big break on October 18, 1977. At least initially they ­were the proverbial art school band, given their deliberate “conceptual” approach to making m ­ usic without knowing how to play. ­After getting Keenan to agree to let them play as a support act to the Rezillos, Mark White, Kevin Lycett, and Tom Greenhalgh quickly put together a larger band, pulling in Ros Allen on bass and Jon Langford on drums, and threw together a set (Andy Corrigan was away). Allen was roped in b­ ecause it was understood she could play cello, CHAPTER THREE

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The Mekons, 1979. Back row, from left to right: Mary Jenner, Jon Langford, and Andy Corrigan; crouching, from left to right: Tom Greenhalgh and Kevin Lycett. Mark White out of shot. Photo: © Pennie Smith.

3.9 

and Langford happened to possess a drum kit. As a result of this per­for­ mance, only their second ever live outing, the Mekons w ­ ere the first of the Leeds post-­punk bands to be offered a recording deal—­w ith Bob Last’s Edinburgh-­based Fast Product label. “Never Been in a Riot,” the Mekons’ first single, was released on January 20, 1978. As a result of this, a Mekons John Peel session broadcast a ­couple of months l­ ater, and a general buzz around live per­for­mances by Gang of Four, who had begun to play often by this point, the nme ran a feature article in August 1978: “Leeds, Yorkshire—­Mill City, U.K. (i.e., This week’s Akron, Ohio).”19 Only a few weeks e­ arlier, Sounds had splashed on the m ­ usic coming out of Akron, asking if the m ­ usic of bands like Devo, Jane Aire and the Belvederes, and Tin Huey was “avant-­garde or the sound of cash registers.”20 That article was largely responsive to the release of Stiff Rec­ords’ Akron compilation lp, which had attempted to cash in on Devo’s popularity by, some have said, literally manufacturing a city scene.21 The nme’s branding of Leeds as the latest “Akron” was, to some degree, a further extension of m ­ usic industry scene creation, even as it gave the Mekons and Gang of Four their first serious level of national exposure and put Leeds on the map for post-­punk and new wave aficionados alike. Reading Tony Parsons and John Hamblett’s scene-­setting reports, t­ here is l­ ittle consideration of the impact of urban Leeds upon music-­making beyond a passing reference to the presence of the National Front on its streets—­taken to help explain the Mekons’ Left politics (more on that below)—­but no mention of art school. The implication of a West Yorkshire scene comparable to that of Ohio’s then—in which one might be able to “hear” the mill city like one supposedly could the “rubber” one before it—is not borne out by the journalistic copy.22 It remains mainly a figment of branding (as would be reprised the following month in an nme article on Cabaret Voltaire touting Sheffield as “This Week’s Leeds”).23 This is even before we begin to contemplate how nineteenth c­ entury the idea of Leeds as “Mill City” was and how, by 1978, it was vying for the city’s soul with the planner’s vision of “Motorway City” taking its place. Nonetheless, Parsons and Hamblett wax lyrical about Gang of Four’s then imminent single release, “Damaged Goods,” ­later released on Fast Product in October 1978, giving it enviable advance publicity.

CHAPTER THREE

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TOGETHER AGAINST

Stuart Laing has written that fundamental changes to British society in the 1970s made it difficult to continue to think of “culture” in the same way as in the de­cade before. ­After 1970, “the emergence as po­liti­cal and cultural-­ political issues of race, Ulster, the ­Women’s Movement (and sexual politics in general), major industrial conflict, nationalisms in Wales and Scotland and the gradual reappearance of the old En­glish North-­South split in prosperity and employment, all visibly refused that idea of a singular consensual national culture based on a white male middle-­class London which had characterized commercial marketing, the high cultural elite and the under­ ground scene alike at the end of the 1960s.”24 By 1976 punk’s excitable brand of youth culture had further widened the gap between the agenda of existing high cultural institutions (including art schools) and its proletarian diy street style. Established institutions—­like the media—­were simply hostile to such changes while ­others, such as the Arts Council, w ­ ere slow to pick up 25 on, and acknowledge, that t­ hings had changed. Thus it became necessary to develop “alternative” cultural spaces to address new community needs from the grass roots up. This was particularly the case in relation to the growing power of the far right in the latter half of the 1970s. ­After vio­lence at the Notting Hill Carnival and racist comments by Eric Clapton at a gig in Birmingham in the summer of 1976, the National Front (nf) began to mobilize on Britain’s streets, resulting in well-­reported conflagrations between nf supporters and detractors in Lewisham, South London, the following summer and across the country thereafter. A selective cata­log of West Yorkshire–­based vio­lence, reported variously in the Leeds local press, typified a national pattern of activity and included an attack on three ­people “from the arab world”; a firebomb attack on a gay information center; physical attacks on Socialist Workers’ Party and Young Communist League members; vio­lence against p­ eople assembled for an open-­air Right to Work meeting; and graffiti on the door of Red Ladder Theatre Com­pany’s rehearsal space (“Listen, red scum, ­you’ve got three weeks to get out or we burn you out”).26 The need to or­ga­nize opposition to the damaging impact of fascist organ­ization and racism was met by the founding of the Anti-­Nazi League in London in 1977, originally a specific campaigning group of the Socialist Workers’ Party, with dedicated local committees springing up around the country, including in Leeds in March 1978.27 Its remit was to campaign against the spread of racism and nativism within the British working class and to ­counter the violent presence of fascists and

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Rock against Racism poster display, Leeds Sound Bites, Leeds City Museum, 2018. Photo by the author.

3.10 

fascism in social life, particularly their influence upon the young. It was aided in this by its musical s­ ister organ­ization Rock against Racism (rar), a Leeds branch of which began operations at the Polytechnic in 1978. Rock against Racism gave an opportunity for black and white ­people to join together, and for Leeds art school bands to play, in supporting the antiracist cause.28 According to or­ga­nizer Paul Furness, the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5 ­were almost “house bands” at the Leeds rar Club across the years of its existence between October 1978 and the summer of 1981. 29 They shared billing with Jamaican-­style Mavrick Sound Systems and Leeds reggae band Bodicean (figure 3.11) in ways typical of mixed-­genre artist lineups at rar gigs nationwide.30 “It was predominantly white ­people” in the rar Club audience, recalls Homer Harriott of Bodicean, “­because the student cir­cuit was a lot of white students basically. Musically minded or creative white ­people.” But that ­didn’t mean it was po­liti­cally beyond the pale for participating black artists, even despite the ambivalence of white punk’s racial politics as identified by Paul Gilroy.31 “The scariest out of all that bunch we thought w ­ ere the punks,” Harriott goes on, “but we w ­ ere shocked to find they w ­ ere the major supporters of what we w ­ ere trying to get across. . . . ​They ­really appreciated what we ­were ­doing. It was nice to CHAPTER THREE

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know that we had that support from p­ eople that looked a bit scary.” Other contributors to rar activity included House­hold Name (figure 3.12), a band formed in 1979 and comprising Leeds Poly arts gradu­ates Tony Baker, Gilly Johns, Paul Staniforth, and Dave Lee. They appeared on the back of a lorry playing their post-­punk funk to crowds making their way on foot up Wood­ house Lane to Potternewton Park, Leeds, for the rar Northern Carnival against Racism on July 4, 1981. Tyrone Huggins, a university metallurgy student of West Indian heritage, remembers reading a poem by Trinidadian writer Paul Keens-­Douglas as his contribution to a rar gig in Leeds on a bill alongside Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Huggins also appeared on stage alongside Hugo Burnham and Graeme Miller (a student of Spanish) in a production of director Barrie Keeffe’s play Abide with Me, directed by Pete Brooks for Leeds University union’s Theatre Group in early 1978. Huggins, Miller, and Brooks l­ ater went on to found Impact Theatre Cooperative together, while Burnham was soon to become drummer of Gang of Four. Abide with Me thematizes the social exclusion of working-­class youth—­two white characters and one black—as they wait for tickets to gain admission to a cup final football match, ultimately without any success. The play ends with an ominous monologue, delivered with barely controlled rage by one of the players, in which the only kind of group belonging left to them is glimpsed in the prospect of post-­match vio­lence— of fans-­turned-­mob ­running rampant in darkened city streets. The irruption of violent racism between the characters t­ oward the play’s close raised further worries about the potential trou­ble ahead for the maintenance of social harmony as social bonds splintered across racial and ethnic lines. Students from British immigrant families studying art at Leeds oftentimes had to negotiate racial and ethnic belonging in its complex intersection with class identity, even if not always as violently expressed as in the closing scenes of this play. Such students ­were in a tiny minority in UK art education before the 1980s. Despite access to higher education being ­free, cultural and other educational f­ actors w ­ ere operative in preventing greater numbers of students of color from gaining entry, or even applying, to art college. Pressures and worries (not least parental) about the ultimate employment prospects for c­ hildren of immigrants kept arts enrollment figures low for global-­majority ethnic students, as did the deleterious effects of racism upon levels of nonwhite educational attainment, which stood in the way of entrance to university-­level study. Burchell Isaacs was the only black student in his fine art year group at the Polytechnic in the class of 1975; Chila Kumari Burman, a British Indian student hailing from Bootle,

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3.11  Bodicean at a University of Leeds gig, February 20, 1981. Victor Shaw (left, also known as Prince Sharky) and Edwin Thompson (right). Courtesy of Homer Harriott.

House­hold Name playing on the back of a flatbed truck at the Northern Carnival against Racism, Leeds, July 4, 1981. From left to right: Gilly Johns, Paul Staniforth, Dave Lee, and Tony Baker. Photo: Duncan Sloss. 3.12 

A student production of Abide with Me at Leeds University in 1978. From left to right: Tyrone Huggins, Graeme Miller, and Hugo Burnham. Courtesy of Hugo Burnham. 3.13 

3.14  In the Poly bar. From left to right: graphics students Chila Kumari Burman, Maggie Smith, Mary Penford (face hidden), and Paul Staniforth (third from right) alongside fine art students Veronica Nute (fourth from left) and Ed King and Marc Almond on far right. Courtesy of Tony Baker.

Merseyside, took graphic design (beginning her course ­there in 1976); and Fahim Qureshi, of Pakistani heritage, studied fine art ­there beginning in 1980. ­Things gradually began to change in 1981, when Sutapa Biswas became the first British Indian student to undertake the university’s fine art course and a small group of black and brown students took up places on the fine art course at the Polytechnic and began to make art together.32 Many students from immigrant backgrounds undertook technical and professional rather than arts and humanities subjects at this time. Given this, the relatively few students of color taking arts subjects tended to find themselves socially split across two or more peer groups in ways that white students experienced less often: between their (largely white) peers in fine art and global-­majority ethnic ones in, for example, engineering or the sciences. Burman recollects: “I did go to a ­couple of Indian Society events. . . . ​ I went to their h­ ouses and their halls of residences. The Indian students ­were d­ oing like pharmacy, medicine, and stuff. But students in graphics would say ­things to me like—­they ­were very sweet and they meant it totally harmlessly—­they’d say, ‘Chila, ­you’re ­really . . .’ They ­wouldn’t say, ‘­You’re not Indian.’ They’d say, ‘­You’re just one of us ­really ­aren’t you?’ And I’d

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look at them and go, ‘Yeah.’ But I’d think, ‘If only you knew.’ ” Burman goes on: “School was totally En­glish but I’d go home and it was totally Indian. I would phone my mum up in Liverpool speaking Punjabi but, as a student in Leeds, I was just, you know, immersing myself.” Such a split sense of identity between global-­majority ethnic belonging and “integration” into white society was similarly experienced by Qureshi into the early 1980s. He remembers hanging out with fellow fine art students and his tutor Geoff Teasdale in pubs like the Fenton and the Cobourg, taking part in drink-­fueled debates about art and class politics, while also spending time with his South Asian friends in the games room next to the Poly bar. The latter had pinball machines and was “where the British Pakistani students used to hang around and the very few overseas students that had come from India and Pakistan. They ­were ­doing engineering. They ­were from working-­class backgrounds, from Lancashire and Bolton. I connected with them as well.” Qureshi was born into a South Asian ­family in Bradford in 1960, subsequently settling in Luton, where his ­father worked on the production line for Vauxhall Motors. Qureshi’s negotiation of class and racial kinship within and outside art school was additionally reflected in his musical tastes: “big into punk, big into reggae.” ­Music took him to the F Club (to see punk bands) and to private h­ ouses to attend blues dances. Cross-­race and cross-­class forms of sociality w ­ ere central also to the transversal meetings of white art school bands and black reggae bands, of poetry readers and music-­makers, of socialist and antiracist politics, and of white and sometimes black audience members at rar gigs. But the forging of such bonds of solidarity and kinship ­were actively being challenged by 1970s racist hate-­mongers and right-­w ing agitators. Ros Allen recalls, “I’d never experienced racist vio­lence before I got to Leeds. I ­didn’t realize how rampant [the National Front] ­were t­ here.” Sometimes fascist gestures would be made, or vio­lence would break out, among audience members at Delta 5, Mekons, and Gang of Four gigs. ­W hether it was goose-­stepping or Sieg heiling, band members often felt beholden to respond: “I remember Julz kicking somebody in the head when they ­were d­ oing a Nazi salute in front of her on the stage. We gave as good as we got,” says Allen. Sale, for her part, recalls being “gobsmacked” when she heard audience members singing along to Delta 5’s “Anticipation” but, in lieu of the line “Anticipation is so much better,” hearing “Repatriation is so much better.” Such ­were the overt signs of post-­punk youth culture’s po­liti­cally fractured—­and fraught—­body politic, one where the left-­wing convictions of bands on stage could lead to clashes, literally, with the sometimes reactionary politics of fans, reminding CHAPTER THREE

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3.15  Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Delta 5 on a flatbed truck. Northern Carnival against Racism, Manchester, July 15, 1978. Courtesy of Ros Allen.

us that punk culture “on balance . . . ​was prob­ably no more or no less racist than the society that birthed it.”33 In Leeds, the development of a direct counterorganization to rar in the short-­lived shape of Rock against Communism and the fascistic politics of Leeds bands like the Dentists would appear to lend credence to such a view, even if their supporters ­were markedly fewer in number when compared to ­those of rar.34 Groups coming out of Leeds art schools, however, tended to see themselves as banding together in opposition to such or­ga­nized forms of reactionary politics, and members of the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5 often took active part in anti–­British Movement and antifascist street demonstrations (figure 3.15). The self-­perception of ­those band members who socialized regularly in the Fenton pub, located on Wood­house Lane between the university and the Polytechnic, tended ­toward the progressive. At this regular watering hole and meeting place for students and staff members at both educational institutions, “a typical night t­ here,” recalls Gill, “would be Mark White, Andy Corrigan, and [Polytechnic art student] Andy Sharpe . . . ​and ­they’d all be sitting ­there knitting. All three of them in a row. Marc Almond, I think he was a knitter as well, and ­there’d be Green Gartside over ­there, and sort of Gang of Four over ­here, and then ­there ­were vari­ous members of Delta 5. It was quite funny ­really to think about it.”

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The Fenton pub, Wood­house Lane, Leeds, in 2010. Photo: Rept0n1x at ­Wikimedia Commons. 3.16 

As a result, the Fenton also became known to right-­w ing extremists as the place where liberals, antifascists, and gay ­people hung out together (figure 3.16). On one occasion, on the eve­ning of May 23, 1978, it “got ­really, ­really scary,” recalls Allen, when the pub’s patrons w ­ ere attacked by known nf activists. “I think t­ here was a student u­ nion meeting, and we w ­ ere at the back near the back door.” Allen goes on: “And the next ­thing this almighty brawl broke out. ­There was a load of National Front supporters who’d obviously targeted the pub. Glasses ­were flying. I just legged it out the back.” As the yep reported it, “In the pub—­along with a large crowd of regulars—­were supporters of the Anti-­Nazi League—­and some members of the Gay Liberation Front. . . . ​One man was taken to hospital suffering from an injury to the eye, believed to be caused by a glass being smashed in his face. A young girl was hit in the face by an object as she walked in through the door.”35 Such attacks from outside only underscored the po­liti­cal desire of ­those within to stick together. Jon King remembers that the Fenton was “where the commies and the lefties and the lesbians and the gays all used to go. We all looked ­after each other, so we w ­ ere all friends. In this tiny ­little CHAPTER THREE

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shitty pub. . . . ​­There was definitely a sense of the po­liti­cal side of ­things involving sexual politics. . . . ​The gay liberation side was not very strong in the university nor in the Poly at that time, but we all knew we had to look ­after each other.”

ENMITY AND SHOEGAZING

However, that the Mekons and Gang of Four, and ­later Delta 5, came to be iconic of Leeds post-­punk led to simmering tensions within this other­wise would-be unified community. Among band members and Fenton regulars ­there was a widely shared gripe that the university bands ­were unjustly garnering all the recognition from outside the city. Hamblett does mention in his nme article the non-­university band S.O.S., who, along with Gang of Four, are credited as being “the first new wave bands to crawl out of the closet in the Leeds area.”36 However, it is also noted that, by 1978, they ­were “sadly defunct.” Local bands “­were r­ eally, r­ eally, r­ eally cross with us,” Kevin Lycett recalls. “A load of fucking poncey students, come to Leeds, start mouthing off, think they own the fucking place—­w hat about our bands?” The sense of injustice animating such a complaint was that ­music press recognition was only accruing to t­ hose already leading presumptively privileged lives. Many in Leeds, as we have already seen, reflected upon the grammar school origins of Gang of Four and Mekons members as proof of such privilege and of a class system alive and well in conferring recognition upon ­those already anointed to receive it. John France, a university history student and guitarist with Sheeny and the Goys, remembers, “­There was, ­after all, a very close connection between the posh school Sevenoaks and the fine art department at Leeds that would rival any connection between a public school and an Oxford college. A steady stream of privileged ­children went from Sevenoaks to Leeds fine art department. Some of us found this amusing at the time. It was rumored that t­ here was a baronetcy in Andy Gill’s ­family!” Regardless of how right or wrong such assumptions w ­ ere (about the class origins of Gang of Four and Mekons), some thought the proletarian stance of such bands ingratiating and false.37 Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers, for one, reportedly had a song, “Totally Futile Gesture,” which included the lyr­ics “Not enough to be dada / Anti-­art is just so bourgeois / Anti-­life is what we are / So we hang around in the ­union bar.”38 Lycett recalls the justness of some of this blowback: “All of ­those kids in a band, [thinking of members of bands like S.O.S.] if they ­weren’t in a band

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t­ hey’d have been a builder or driving a truck. They ­were what the Mekons thought they ­were about. But ­these ­people ­were it. They ­were absolutely ordinary ­people, completely unprivileged in any way, getting it together and ­doing it. Whereas the Mekons ­hadn’t worked. We ­were public schoolboys at the end of the day. Highly educated, highly privileged, and we knew how to play the game.” As Jez Alan of Girls at Our Best! put it in an interview with lop in 1981, when asked about the Leeds scene of a few years ­earlier, “It w ­ asn’t r­ eally Leeds that was getting attention, it was the Gang of Four and then the other groups ’cos they ­were all one big clique. They ­weren’t the Leeds scene, they w ­ ere just one small section of what was happening in Leeds.”39 Bands coming out of Leeds Polytechnic also felt aggrieved by what they saw as the Sevenoaks boys’ sense of superiority. Playing their first gig at a Christmas party in 1979, Soft Cell ­were a duo comprising fine art students Marc Almond and Dave Ball, originally hailing from middle-­class Southport and working-­class Blackpool, respectively (figure 3.17). Ball recalls referring to Gang of Four “and all that crowd” as “the shoe gazers . . . ​ ­because ­they’d all wear army surplus macs and Doc Martens and short hair and looked like they lived in the Soviet Union or something. It was all r­ eally serious even though, apart from Hugo Burnham, they ­were all middle-­class sons of stockbrokers from Sevenoaks!” Ball and Almond felt sufficiently motivated to write a song about the subject: “Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché.” It includes the lines: “When I’m depressed you’ll find me dressed / In waste disposal grey / In frigid blue I’ll tell you bleak’s / My favourite cliché.” George Hinchliffe too, a fine art student at the Polytechnic in the late 1970s and a founding member of the Ukulele Orchestra of G ­ reat Britain in the 1980s, bitterly recalls that “the focus on campus and at parties seemed to be ­those who ­were referred to with ­bitter humor as the ‘Sevenoaks wankers’ (or something similar). They ­were perceived as bourgeois kids who behaved as if they knew every­thing. Some of them became friends with ­those of us from dif­fer­ent backgrounds whereas o­ thers revealed or exacerbated prejudice in their treatment of o­ thers, even while feigning proletarian cred.” Such antagonisms turned around perceptions of social class, imbricated in Soft Cell’s case with attitudes t­ oward queerness, and w ­ ere symptomatic of how febrile punk bohemianism had rendered the question of class identity and of education. Underpinning such gibes was a lurking fear that, despite punk’s egalitarian solicitation of ­every person’s creativity, real­ity would turn out to ­favor, once more, the same privileged, middle-­or upper-­ class men customarily garlanded in scaling the heights of success. The only difference, this punk-­time around, was that such levels of success would CHAPTER THREE

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3.17  Soft Cell: Marc Almond (left) and Dave Ball. Leeds Polytechnic H Block in the background, early 1980s. Photo: Avalon.Red.

need to involve ele­ments of proletarian masquerade. (France remembers, “It was quite normal for the Leeds fine art crowd to avoid emphasizing their generally privileged origins.”) Such suspicions ­were understandable in the context of the stuttering economic realities of late 1970s Britain, which, as the authors of Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (1980) concluded, meant that ­people “must expect to see the inegalitarian tendencies that are inherent in the class structure progressively reassert themselves.”40 Some, like Hinchliffe, thought this had already happened, especially if one turned one’s attention to art school admission procedures. “­There was not much working-­class rebellion,” he reflects. “The university and the poly both required A levels and verbal felicity for admission at this point. In my view the old escape route for non-­academic or working-­class students who w ­ ere artistically talented to rise through the art schools was effectively closed. The climate was the beginning of the culture of privileging curating and art-­bullshit over art and artists.”41 Hinchliffe has a point h­ ere. With the implementation of the Dip. ad (diploma in art and design) in the 1960s, O-­and A-­level entry requirements ­were introduced into UK art education for the first time. Following the recommendations of the first Coldstream Report into art education in 1960, art education across the UK was thoroughly re­imagined.42 The

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old postwar model associated with the ndd (national diploma in design), which was craft-­based and focused on the teaching and assessment of traditional drawing skill and fa­cil­i­ty with technical media, was superseded by a more liberal arts approach, which treated the study of art as comparable to other university degree subjects. This entailed a sudden step-up in terms of entry requirements—to five O-­level passes or the equivalent mixture of O and A levels.43 By 1969 the majority of students in Dip. ad courses (some 80.6 ­percent) had achieved one or more A levels, compared with only 19.4 ­percent of ­those admitted with the basic requirement of O levels alone.44 In addition, the requirement that 15 ­percent of study time be dedicated to art history and complementary studies—­accounting, in turn, for 20 ­percent of the final degree award on the Dip. ad—­amounted to a generally more academic orientation for art education in the UK. This academicization was arguably completed when, in 1974, the Dip. ad was fi­nally brought into line with other arts and humanities subjects studied at university level by being converted into a ba (Hons) qualification.45 At the same time, this pro­cess distinguished degree-­level education in art from vocational teaching, which proliferated at “lower” levels of award, in pre-­diploma foundation courses and adult education classes, and was, by contrast, without national accreditation and required few or no General Certificate of Education (gce) examination passes to gain entry. The overall result was a demonstrably hierarchical, two-­tier art education system. As Lisa Tickner writes, “It shifted the social composition of the college population and it hardened the distinction between diploma students (superior, creative) and vocational students (lower-­class mechanicals).”46 Hinchliffe’s view, that “the old escape route” had been closed off for talented working-­ class students seeking to achieve a degree of social mobility through art education, was therefore not without foundation.

AN EDUCATED CLASS

Nevertheless, despite such fears to the contrary, working-­class students did continue to gain admittance to the 10 or 20 ­percent of “advanced” courses in art education in the UK well into the 1970s and 1980s—­whether through achieving the gce requirements or being admitted via the portal of the “exception.” As John Beck and Matthew Cornford put it, ­things ­were beginning to shift for working-­class admission ­under this system, but the game was not yet up: “Demanding five ‘O’ level passes is hardly an exclusionary CHAPTER THREE

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practice, but the introduction of minimum academic requirements does begin a pro­cess of regulation that shrinks the aperture through which the not so well educated malingerers, lateral thinkers and institutionally maladjusted could pass into a kind of alternative social space where dysfunction and waywardness could be conceived of as criteria for admittance.”47 This is borne out by the class composition of former students who supplied oral histories for this proj­ect: I estimate nearly half of interviewees, from an admittedly nonscientifically established range of contributors, grew up in working-­class families. This level of access was to continue u­ ntil 1990, when changes to the financial conditions for access to art school, rather than qualification requirements, made this aperture close still further: when the level of student maintenance grants was frozen and loans began to be phased in in their stead.48 As cuts to the public provision of higher education began to build over the succeeding years, so working-­class participation in art degree courses began to dwindle. Hinchliffe’s somewhat blue-­collar characterization of “art and artists” ­here—as other to a would-be white-­collar managerialism and its pseudo-­ specialized language of “art-­bullshit”—­perpetuates the idea of a division of manual and m ­ ental ­labor as a class division in the art world. For Hinchliffe, artists are understood as closer to artisans or craftspeople, as p­ eople who engage in manual forms of ­labor, in contrast to presumptively middle-­class pretenders who are versed in academic discourse and can only (at best) talk about, rather than make, art. As David Wilkinson has so perceptively argued, such a view was widely aired during the post-­punk years and underpinned an often ventured and would-be proletarian suspicion, even rejection, of intellectualized debate. Sometimes this extended to education, too, when viewed somewhat reductively as a middle-­class attribute. But such an “elision of education and culture with the ­middle class” tended to obscure, Wilkinson argues, the presence of ­people from working-­class backgrounds in education, in ­favor of reductively seeing it as a site of social mobility only and therefore as a route into the egghead ­middle class.49 More egregiously, perhaps, “the ideological attribution of manual, rather than m ­ ental, l­ abor to the working class” obfuscates working-­class participation in fashioning alternative social, po­liti­cal, and aesthetic formations made pos­si­ble by the intellectual and cultural capital gleaned through access to postwar educational institutions. By the late 1970s, the nature of educational institutions had been transformed in Leeds and the UK more broadly as a result of educators taking working-­class education seriously. Building on the advances of the early

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twentieth-­century Workers’ Educational Association (wea), figures like Raymond Williams in Oxford, Richard Hoggart in Hull, and E. P. Thompson in Leeds had brought about a revolution in extramural and so-­called university “extension” teaching in the 1950s. By rejecting the idea that working-­class lived realities and cultural tastes needed to be uplifted or corrected through receiving an education in the bourgeois traditions of high art and thought, a generation of scholars saw value in studying and learning from subordinated forms of working-­class life and culture.50 Hoggart, for example, wrote positively of the values that or­ga­nized working-­class life during his childhood in Hunslet, Leeds, in his Uses of Literacy (1957). But this ­didn’t mean that working-­class ­people should simply “stay sweet as they are.”51 The point instead was for them to learn about working-­class lives and values, and ­those of other classes, critically through study. The development of Basic Research teaching at Leeds College of Art was similarly impacted by progressivism. From the mid-1950s onward it was influenced by the demo­cratic spirit of Herbert Read’s Education through Art (1943), which foregrounded the importance of each individual’s personal development within artistic study rather than the inculcation, and reproduction, of traditional bourgeois aesthetic forms and values. And, by the time of the punk years, the Swarthmore Settlement in Leeds (originally a Quaker educational initiative) was rejuvenating adult education for working-­class study along socially committed lines that recalled the early years of the wea.52 Such developments made it contradictory to suggest that education, and literacy and verbal dexterity along with it, ­were somehow essentially class-­bound attributes, irreducible cultural markers of middle-­class professionalism. Nevertheless, the per­sis­tence of the idea of educated-­ness as a form of middle-­class cultural capital underpinned tensions around the growing importance of “theory” within art and art education. The turn to theory consequent upon conceptual art of the 1960s brought with it the vaunting of “verbal felicity” by a significant coterie of 1970s art students. For some—­ like members of Scritti Politti, the Mekons, and Gang of Four—­this was a necessary consequence of the need to critically interrogate bourgeois and romanticist assumptions about art ­going unchallenged in the discourse of art studios. Largely Marxist-­informed and allied to a leftist politics of social and economic transformation, it saw as one of its principal tasks in the art world to deconstruct the “myth of the inarticulate artist,” which was considered to sustain the reproduction of unexamined ideas about artistic “genius” and their mystifying effects upon understanding art’s conditions of CHAPTER THREE

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production.53 Ultimately such avowals of the value of talking and informed reflection in art education ran with the baton held aloft by the found­ers of the art theory course at Coventry School of Art and Design in the late 1960s. One of ­these found­ers, Terry Atkinson, had been appointed to a lecturing position at the University of Leeds in 1977 and was instrumental in perpetuating the importance of seminar-­based, theoretically informed discussion within art education t­ here well into the 1980s and 1990s (more on this in chapter 5).54 For Hinchliffe, however, such talk was symptomatic of the regrettable takeover of the fine art world by the chattering classes. In 1976 this alternative point of view was very far from reactionary. In fact, it was a differently fashioned progressive view of art education, one that also found expression in a 1976 bbc tv documentary, Art—to a Degree? This program foregrounded arguments similar to Hinchliffe’s and made by radical educationalists from Bradford and Hornsey Colleges of Art, among ­others. Continuing to chafe at the academic requirements brought about by the Coldstream reforms, tv viewers saw ex-­Hornsey activists like David Warren ­Piper and Bradford educators alike impugn the elitist, and professionalized, condition of mid-1970s degree-­level art teaching. In “chasing ­after [the] respectability” of university degree status, art education was chided for its increasingly “professional orientation,” supposedly evidenced in its promotion of “jargon” and specialized forms of language use.55 This was seen to be a prob­lem not only for t­ hose studying advanced-­level courses but also, and perhaps especially, for t­ hose students studying on more numerous, lower-­ level, nonaccredited courses, who—­the program’s contributors suggest—­ are left ­behind, and badly served, by such a two-­tier education system. That such types of language use in degree-­level art education could be alienating was an incontrovertible fact for some. Ros Allen remembers, “Jon Langford, Dinah Clark, and I ­were put off ­doing art when we ­were at Leeds [university] ­because of the conceptual ­thing coming from Terry [Atkinson]. We d­ idn’t fit into that. I felt very much a fish out of ­water in the art department as an artist, and I know Dinah and Jon have said they found their artistic voices ­after they left Leeds.” She goes on: “Being able to talk and argue: that’s why I think ­people like Jon King, Andy Gill, and Mark White got on so well with Terry. They came from a debating-­type of art department at Sevenoaks. They had the confidence and the knowledge to argue back and t­ hings. I ­didn’t feel I had that.” Even though Allen had been to an “aspirational” all-­girls’ school and was expected to “do academically ­really well,” she felt, she says, “unequal” in the Leeds fine art department.

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“I felt inarticulate. I do have trou­ble getting my words out, especially when I’m put on the spot. I get a bit tongue-­tied. I found that ­really hard and felt that I was a ­woman in a man’s situation.” Adding gender to the complexities of class around the issue of verbal felicity, Allen alerts us to how art “theory” was as disabling to some as it was enabling to o­ thers. “So I felt—­‘isolated’ ­isn’t the right word ­because I had a lovely group of friends but—­I felt isolated as an artist. I ­didn’t associate being in a band as being an artist at the time.”56 Allen says, “This ­thing with punk: just the fact that anyone could play ­music and it ­wasn’t about your sexuality so much, it was just about what­ever you ­were trying to say. Your creativity was more impor­tant.” For Allen and ­others at the university, punk provided a ready creative route out for t­ hose who felt alienated by the heavy amounts of art theorizing favored by some proponents of studio teaching. It also provided an opportunity to engage in a wider social and cultural arena than that of the 1970s art schools, which had become increasingly prone to charges of elitism since the 1960s sit-­ins failed to secure any lasting change to the Coldstream system. Being in a band meant students could work creatively with ­those beyond art school walls, to find audiences, inspiration, and fellow travelers in the city and beyond. This was as true for theory-­heads like Gartside as it was for ­those who felt antithetical to art theory’s raison d’être. This is why, as Dave Laing estimates, just ­under a third of punk band members turned out to be former art students.57 Given the class demographics in art education as set out ­here, such an observation cannot be taken as any kind of transparent indicator that punk was any less working class than it was usually assumed to be. Punk thereby provided multiple, simultaneous routes out of the impasses of art world avant-­gardism into an expanded, would-be egalitarian world of bohemianism. But as much as “the band” was an escape capsule for its members, making it pos­si­ble to break away from rejected, purportedly moribund forms of specialist endeavor in the art acad­emy, it was equally a kind of Trojan h­ orse that carried art school personnel and ideas out into common culture—­significantly transforming and enhancing their powers once decamped ­there.

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04 DEBATING SOCIETY I spent a lot of time looking at ­things from the past to understand the pre­sent. ANDY GILL, MY FAVOURITE WORK OF ART (2019)

J

im Dooley’s book Red Set begins its engrossing history of the Gang of Four with an account of a visit to New York undertaken by Jon King and Andy Gill in the summer of 1976. King had garnered funding to study the work of Jasper Johns, and Gill, somewhat unofficially, repurposed grant money he had received to study gothic architecture in northern France to subsidize his US sojourn. “The six-­week trip,” Dooley writes, “which involved visiting such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by day and frequenting the punk hub club cbgb by night, would mark a new beginning for King and Gill.”1 New experiences abounded. Seeing the work of American artists Johns, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre in uptown galleries and encountering the Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Red Krayola, Tele­v i­sion, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, and the Jam live in downtown venues was exciting and formative for both young men. “The mixture, or perhaps integration, of visual art and New York punk,” Dooley goes on, “would greatly inform and shape the f­ uture of Gang of Four.”2 Partly emboldened by the can-do attitude of the bands they saw and the easy sociability of ­people in the small coteries frequenting cbgb and the Palladium, for the first time, Gill and King began to take

Jon King in Mary Harron’s apartment, New York, 1976. Photo: Andy Gill. ­Courtesy of Catherine Mayer. 4.1 

seriously the idea of starting their own band. “I think the fact that we w ­ ere hanging out with all ­these ­people that ­were in bands, and actually some of them ­were legends, very much gave it a feeling of ‘It’s easy ­isn’t it? They can do it. We can do it. It’s not such a big deal,’ ” Gill has said. Before New York, Gill and King ­were already making ­music in Leeds but only as a pastime in their student digs. As King recalls, “We had two adjacent rooms in some horrible rented h­ ouse and Gill and I used to play. He used to play acoustic guitar. We had a cassette player and we’d sing songs into it, stupid songs, more like the Kursaal Flyers feel-­good kind of ­thing. It was genre ­music.” All this began to change on their return from Amer­ic­ a. But the shift to being more serious about music-­making went hand-­in-­ glove with their continuing interest in visual art, as Dooley points out. Back in Leeds, their fine art studies resumed: King for the third and Gill for his second year of undergraduate study. A recent recruit to the Leeds professoriat would soon pull them in a new intellectual direction and fundamentally shape the idea and realization of Gang of Four. They quickly discovered “the department had this new wunderkind—­Tim Clark.”

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ART HISTORY’S YOUNG TURKS

Timothy James (T. J.) Clark, a thirty-­two-­year-­old firebrand exponent of the social history of art, was appointed professor at Leeds and took up the position of head of the fine art department in autumn 1976—as Gill and King w ­ ere returning from the other side of the Atlantic—­only months before the Anarchy in the UK tour reached the city’s Polytechnic. His appointment represented a significant shift in the department’s direction, compounded by further staff appointments in autumn 1977 made at Clark’s behest: Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, art historians invested in feminist and Marxist methods of study, and Terry Atkinson, artist and former member of British conceptual art group Art & Language. “­There was something very crazy about my appointment,” Clark volunteers. It brought about “a total crashing of gears”—­a sudden lurch in the philosophical and practical priorities of the department and its teaching. Collectively the four new staff members, along with temporary lecturers Francis Frascina and Jonathan Adams and visiting artists such as Mike Baldwin and Mel Ramsden (both of Art & Language), ushered in “a paradigm shift” from a traditional studio-­ based culture to one that sought to challenge the habitual discourse and practice of art-­making in the wake of both the social history of art (Clark’s specialism) and conceptual art. Upon his arrival Clark was met with “basically an unreconstructed Slade” school approach in the studios, centering on the priorities of painting from the life-­model overseen by the Gregory Fellow in Painting, Paul Gopal-­Chowdhury. John Jones, who had been taught by Coldstream along with Euan Uglow at the Slade in the early 1950s, and John Kinnaird, from King’s College, Newcastle, taught alongside Gopal-­Chowdhury. Such a “Slade” approach to painting traded on the idea of art as a form of self-­ expression, where the value animating the quasi-­existential scenario of an artist facing their model in a life room was that of individual creative response. Clark remembers that the “crux” of the paradigm shift he and his colleagues brought about was that it turned critical fire on such individualistic models of artistic creation. “We w ­ ere coming to the end of the idea of art as a self-­expression,” Clark recalls. It was “absolutely bankrupt.” This model was to be surpassed by marshaling all the resources of a university fine art degree—­with substantive study in academic art history alongside studio practice—to address the con­temporary critical perspectives and shifting attitudes that ­were reshaping both areas of study by the mid-1970s: art-­making and the study of art history. The idea was to get

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students to draw upon debate about the changing face of art history to inform the making of con­temporary art and vice versa. A bold prospectus rationale, likely written by Clark sometime in 1977, put it thus: “In the recent past the practice of art has lost its familiar contours. It has proved increasingly difficult to disentangle ‘studio practice’ from the practice of art theory, of art history, of history, of criticism, of philosophy, and from pressing questions of the relation of art to po­liti­cal thought and its social relevance. The course at Leeds is designed to give the student an art education in this new situation; to put the making of images in contact with t­ hose other forms of knowledge which always touched and supported it, but which now stand in closest relationship.”3 Furthermore, it went on, “it should be emphasised that the art history content in all courses at all levels does not aim at the replication of a body of accepted knowledge, but represents a sustained attitude of criticism.”4 This valorization of a critical approach to study was preempted by Clark in 1974 when he posited it as a fundamental operative condition of the social history of art. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement about the onetime importance of dialectical thinking within the field of art history generally, and of “its power to open up a field of enquiry, to enable certain questions to be asked,” Clark bemoaned the decline of an inquisitive approach within modern iterations of the discipline.5 “Beliefs,” he maintained, had come to supplant a questioning attitude, “certain unquestioned presuppositions: the notion of the Artist, of the artist as ‘creator’ of the work, the notion of a pre-­existent feeling . . . ​which the work was ­there to ‘express.’ ­These beliefs eroded the subject: they turned questions into answers.”6 In contrast, Clark sought a renewed Hegelian approach to critical thinking that would revivify the explanatory power of art history and rescue it from anodyne irrelevance. “We have to discover ways of putting the questions in a quite dif­fer­ent form,” he wrote. “That is where the social history of art—my brief, my speciality—comes in.”7 One of the key questions to be asked in this way concerned the relationship between a work of art and ideology. Clark was motivated by a desire to surpass the false polarities of both Modernist and Marxist beliefs in art history—­that ideology is ­either an irrelevance to consideration of the aesthetic quality of an artwork or, its vulgar contrary, that that is all that a work of art is: a “picture” of the worldview of a par­tic­u­lar social class. Clark was invested in the idea that the work of art stood in “a quite specific relation to . . . ​ideological materials” and that it “takes a certain set of technical procedures and traditional forms, and makes them tools with which to CHAPTER FOUR

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alter ideology—to transcribe it, to represent it.”8 That a painting worked its materials—­pictorial traditions, pigments, images, the economic and social relations of its production—­meant that it could offer a unique purview of all t­ hese ­things if only the right questions could be asked of it. ­These might include “What exactly ­were the conditions and relations of production in a specific case? Just why are ­these par­tic­u­lar ideological materials used and not ­others? Just what determined this par­tic­u­lar encounter of work and ideology?”9 If such questions could be asked, and pursued in all their complexity, Clark maintained, “no enquiry could tell us more about how ideologies work. That, ­after all, is the scope of art history’s ambitions. Or . . . ​ ­ought to be.”10 Applying oneself to the study of art history in this manner led Clark to champion the power of “a close description,” which might, among other ­things, bring into view the class identity of the artist-­producer; how a par­ tic­ul­ar aesthetic form was arrived at; what it meant to spectators or segments of the audience; and what critics both said and (sometimes equally or even more significantly) did not say about it.11 Ultimately, the questions motivating such a description might be varied and multiple, depending on the nature of the work considered and its par­tic­ul­ar circumstances of production. Such questions invariably take us, Clark went on, “to the territory beyond ideology: they indicate the materials out of which ideology is made, and unmade; . . . ​I believe that access to ideology is always incomplete—­and it is the lack of finish that counts, in our explanation of an artist’s production.”12 Clark had already demonstrated this kind of procedure in his 1973 books Image of the ­People and The Absolute Bourgeois, which presented complex readings of, for example, Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans and the aporetic effects of painting, demonstrated by the range of uncertain, and socially significant, critical responses it solicited at a time of po­liti­cal uncertainty in France.

LE DÉJEUNER DANS L’ATELIER

King remembers being fascinated by Clark’s intellectual approach and, perhaps equally, being drawn to his youth. “Tim had this extraordinary, sometimes byzantine way of ­doing t­ hings but it was ­really in­ter­est­ing. So I’d come back [from New York] not sure what I wanted to do and then Tim and I got on r­ eally well. . . . ​He was only in his mid-­thirties or something. I think in some way Tim gravitated to the slightly troublesome p­ eople or

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rather we w ­ ere attracted to each other.” King remembers liking and getting on with Griselda Pollock, too, and being impressed with her feminist approach to the study of art and art history (not forgetting also that she “had some fantastic grass”). Gill, for his part, remembers Clark’s presence as a breath of fresh air given the vacuum he’d experienced the year prior, in the wake of Lawrence Gowing’s departure from the university. “­There ­wasn’t ­really any leadership,” he says, in his first year t­ here. “­There w ­ asn’t any professor. It was a bit of a vacuum . . . ​and then Tim Clark arrived. It was ­great ­because it was a bit of a surprise. The first ­thing that struck me was the quality of the lectures.” Clark taught a class on nineteenth-­century painting at Leeds in the late 1970s, including material that was to become the subject of his 1985 The Painting of Modern Life. Gill was struck by Clark’s close reading of individual paintings in ­these classes: Instead of ­going through lots of pictures saying ­we’ve got this and ­we’ve got this, he looked at one picture instead, and looked at it in extraordinary detail. Thinking about ­every aspect of it and all the echoes of its time to be found in it. And just its relevance and relationship to other forms of art that it borrowed from, knowingly or unknowingly. I’m thinking a lot about Manet now when I’m talking. But all of this was within a totally so­c io­l og­i ­c al, economic, po­l iti­c al context. Looking at Manet you could see how he was depicting a lack of belief in the old order, how modernity was [expressed through] a denial of previous hierarchical belief systems.

Clark’s approach spurred Gill to write his final dissertation on the artist’s work, quite a surprising choice of subject, you might think, for someone as heavi­ly invested as Gill was at the time in the punk m ­ usic scene. This took the form of an extended analy­sis of a single Manet work, the 1868 painting Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier, which led the budding musician to pore over the painting’s strange incoherence as the form of its repre­sen­ta­tion of modernity (figure 4.2).13 Gill drew attention to how Manet’s artistic forebears, including Jean-­Baptiste- ­Siméon Chardin, and prior traditions of picture-­ making, like still lifes, appear expressly borrowed in this painting, making an appearance only in order to be rendered “inexplicable.”14 Manet’s painting d­ oesn’t add up, Gill argued, neither stylistically nor narratively. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s work on money and the metropolis, he posited that an empty equivalency unites the dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the painting: from the roundly modeled hand of the central male figure and the flatness of his CHAPTER FOUR

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4.2 

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier, oil on canvas, 1868.

black jacket to the disconnected, blank stares of the three figures. All ­these conspire to make Manet’s painting a repre­sen­ta­tion of modern alienation in which every­thing appears flattened out, leveled by money, as if on display in a department store win­dow. “Déjeuner,” Gill wrote in his dissertation, “takes this image of a group of p­ eople and destroys any involvement between them. Not only are they an unlikely trio in their social standing (monied young man, female servant and bohemian) but ­there is no communication of any kind between them.”15 The sense of purpose evident in other con­temporary paintings of social groups is absent h­ ere, Gill argues, chiefly b­ ecause of the alienating impact of money on social relations. He quotes Simmel: “Money is concerned with what is common to us all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much?”16 ­Ultimately, Gill agrees with French critic Jules-­Antoine Castagnary that the Manet painting thereby negates the picturing of any moral or use value, leaving us with only an emptied-­out world ruled by exchange value alone (“I see, on a t­ able where coffee has been served, a half peeled lemon and some fresh oysters; ­these objects hardly go together. Why ­were they put ­there? . . . ​W hat is this young man of the luncheon ­doing?”).17

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Reflecting on what Gill calls the “meticulously composed, weird art historical assemblage” of Manet’s work, and the theme of social alienation at its heart, became expressly generative for the early thinking shaping the ­music of Gang of Four.18 “I started Gang of Four in the year that I started looking at this painting,” Gill told Laura-­Jane Foley in 2019 while discussing Manet’s work on her podcast My Favourite Work of Art.19 “A lot of the ideas that we talked about, that T. J. Clark was talking about, . . . ​informed the attitudes and words of Gang of Four.”20 Taking Clark’s class on Eu­ro­ pean art in his second year of study, 1976–77, and completing his dissertation by May 1979, Gill was immersed in the methodological priorities of social art history during the most formative period of Gang of Four’s history. In par­tic­u­lar, Gill remembers that the influence of Clark’s teaching “kicked in a­ fter our first gig [in May 1977]. I think more during ’78. I think that was prob­ably the key year when all this stuff came together. . . . ​Very few of the songs from that first gig lasted more than three or four months. From that point onwards, we started writing, getting more serious. . . . ​The first gig d­ oesn’t bear a huge resemblance to what ended up coming out on Entertainment! two years l­ ater. It had been pretty much transformed.” Leeds University art history classes significantly inputted this pro­cess of transformation. Building on Mary Harron’s take on this subject with which we began this book, we can now see how a song like “At Home He’s a Tourist” owes a seemingly unlikely debt to Clark’s approach. Released as a single on emi rec­ords in May 1979, the same month that Gill submitted his dissertation, the song lyrically reprises the themes of Manet’s painting. As critics like Kevin J. H. Dettmar have pointed out, the track pointedly skewers the alienating effect of cap­i­tal­ist culture industries.21 King sings: “At home he feels like a tourist / He fills his head with culture / He gives himself an ulcer.” And then: “Down on the disco floor / They make their profit / From the ­things they sell / To help you cob off / And the rubbers you hide / In your top left pocket.” From the home to the disco floor then, “culture” is rendered toxic, alienating. W ­ hether pop ­music is listened to on a domestic rec­ord player or while out dancing in a nightclub, the products of the cap­i­tal­ist culture industry are foregrounded as commodified, industrially produced forms of distraction, designed by the bad faith of their ideological appearance to make listeners feel freed from the shackles of the public world. As a con­temporary Gang of Four badge pointedly asked, “Is your leisure time private?”—­with an image of a rec­ord (“any rec­ord”) on a turntable (figure 4.3). The band already ­were holding up their sullied hands, CHAPTER FOUR

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4.3 

Gang of Four badge.

acknowledging the complicity of their music-­making in the very ­thing they sought to criticize (the world of Entertainment!). As in Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier, it is money or, more precisely, the commodity form that, once more, mediates all ­here: ­whether rec­ords (mediating the ­music heard on the dance floor) or condoms (mediating sex—­even the social relation itself). As they sing in “Natu­ral’s Not in It,” even when it comes down to sex and intimacy, social hierarchies and expectations continue to impose themselves: “Fornication makes you happy / No escape from society / Natu­ral is not in it / Your relations are of power.” And like with Manet’s fragmentary pictorial assemblage, this world of commodified relations finds expression in Gang of Four’s paratactical lyr­ics: the word “rubbers” is placed near “the ­things they sell” in a way that leaves the listener to work out for themselves how, if at all, such ­things fit together. Are “the ­things they sell” the rec­ords you buy as a result of a sweaty night of dancing? Are they the drink and drugs you consume to put you in the dancing, even erotic, mood? Or the rubbers themselves? Or are “the t­ hings they sell” all t­ hese ­things and more? Regardless, and as Dettmar so astutely comments, “a nameless malevolent ‘they’ hovers over the scene” in this song—­ “they” who sell what­ever.22

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4.4  Andy Gill, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976. Photo: Jon King.

This lyrical structure points to a similar compositional princi­ple underpinning Gang of Four’s ­music, itself a twisted echo of that underpinning Manet’s art. Just as Gill’s take on Déjeuner seeks to elaborate the “peculiar dislocation of its parts within the w ­ hole,” so Gang of Four strove to create unlikely musical compositions out of “dislocated” musical ele­ments.23 “At Home He’s a Tourist,” for example, features Burnham’s inventive drum arrangements, with fills at the end of ­every other bar, rave-up style offbeats in the chorus, and rumbling toms in the m ­ iddle eight, sometimes backed by the insistent pulsing of Allen’s bass, at other times (in the chorus) the bass scaling away, teetering on the melodic. Gill’s guitar drops in and out of the soundscape, making it sound expressly disjointed, scratching and cutting a path across the drums and bass, played out of time and arrhythmically across the groove. King’s vocals follow the rhythmic pulse in the verses, only to then spar directly with Gill’s guitar throughout the chorus. This complex interaction of band members, and each musical ele­ment, adds up to the feeling of a fractured, uneasy, and jagged compositional ­whole, which steers well clear of more conventional instances of rock communion—­ including that of near-­contemporaneous punk tunes like the Sex Pistols’ CHAPTER FOUR

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1977 hit “Pretty Vacant”: “­We’re so pretty / Oh so pretty / W ­ e’re vacant,” they all chant and strum in comparable unison.24 In composing the early Gang of Four sound, Burnham and Gill in par­ tic­u­lar would quarrel over the arrangement of the drums. According to Gill, this was not just for the hell of it (although Burnham remembers they would fight “over the price of a fucking Mars bar”) but “­because I had specific ideas about the beats that we’d be ­doing. The placing of almost ­every snare beat, kick drum, hi-­hat, open hi-­hat—it was all fought over. . . . ​ I’d be cajoling, begging, threatening, what­ever, to get the kind of beats in the position I saw them as being.” Though this might sound like petty disputes in countless other rock bands before and since, it is impor­tant to appreciate that Gill’s challenges to Burnham’s drumming w ­ ere driven by an attempt to refuse, and refigure, the existing genre expectations of rock ­music—­perhaps just as Gill had come to appreciate Manet’s troubling of genre painting within Clark’s lectures and seminars. Gill says, “It was pretty clear that the lyr­ics and the ideas that Jon and I ­were kicking back and forth ­didn’t bear much relation to what other ­people had done. They ­were sort of new. I strongly felt that the worst ­thing we could possibly do would be some kind of genre t­ hing, where we w ­ ere ­doing t­ hings ‘in the style of.’ ” He goes on: Basically, we had to start from scratch and construct our own language. I do strongly remember thinking “I love the Velvet Under­ground, the Stooges, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and James Brown. . . . ​But I’m not ­going to align myself with any one of ­these t­ hings.” Th ­ ings had to be rhythmic. I do think a bit like a drummer and play around with beats all the time. That often used to be my starting point. . . . ​But I wanted it to be surprising, to be exciting and make you want to, if not physically, then mentally jump around. . . . ​The one ­thing that joined every­thing together is that it was all carefully worked out. We ­were a bit anti the jamming idea.

Described thus, the pro­cess of composing a Gang of Four song appears more akin to the creation of a conceptual artwork—­led by schematic design ideas. Gill has decried the jam as something g­ oing “hand in hand with bluesy noodling about,” serving to reproduce the basic musical structure of the blues. On the other hand, he suggests, the band’s desire to construct its “own” language—as if from ground zero—­was more like the construction of a Frank Stella painting: paring ­things back in order to radically reor­ ga­nize some basic structural ele­ments of the art form.25 Gill had studied Stella’s paintings at the MoMA during his New York visit.

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Art history’s attention to avant-­garde creation of new forms, particularly though Clark’s studies of nineteenth-­century French painting, alongside the ideas approach of conceptual art, therefore helped pave the way for Gang of Four’s own (neo-)avant-­garde strategies in popu­lar music-­making. Manet’s example of “breaking down old hierarchies and old ideas” helped make it pos­si­ble to think a new musical approach that would eschew ele­ ments of rock and blues, which punk, despite its excitable theatrics, was seen to be a boring musical retread thereof.26 However, as with many avant-­gardist attempts to wipe the slate clean and start again, and as popu­lar m ­ usic scholar Mimi Haddon has so persuasively argued, Gang of Four’s attempts to make a “new” m ­ usic by eschewing dominant traditions of Anglo-­American blues and rock ended up borrowing from—­even appropriating—­forms of subordinated alternate traditions: African American funk, Jamaican dub reggae, and German krautrock.27 ­There was some consciousness of this among group members. Burnham recalls, “When Dave [Allen—­the bass player] joined the band we began pushing ourselves rhythmically to do stuff we ­were listening to, all the Funkadelic stuff. It suddenly made more sense to do ­things that ­were still incredibly rhythmic and incredibly danceable but off-­kilter.” Burnham also remembers being fond of reggae, having been a Trojan Rec­ords aficionado at school and being introduced to dub at university. Reggae, especially dub, acted as exemplar of how the band could experiment with off-­beat compositions and the creation of what might be heard as space—­a “hole” even—in Gang of Four soundscapes. This was particularly evident in the structure of the song “Anthrax,” which, according to King, “had ele­ments in it that we thought was dub reggae dropping out.” But even though borrowing ele­m ents from, for example, black-­ associated forms of m ­ usic that they liked, Gang of Four intentionally crafted their ­music to sound quite unlike the ­things borrowed, precisely by being translated into novel arrangements (by white musicians). Burnham, for one, remembers being alert to the dangers of mimicry and appropriation inherent within such forms of cross-­cultural musical borrowing: “I’d be counting all the time in my head how many bits and which bit is the off-­beat. All the while I’d be thinking, how can I make this sound more like [ Jamaican session g­ reat] Winston Grennan without sounding cod-­white-­ boy style.”28

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By 1977 such issues w ­ ere already being raised in the UK m ­ usic press in debates about punk’s relationship to reggae and the unequal levels of journalistic attention accorded to them.29 Racially and colonially charged relations between white-­and black-­associated art forms might have also been the subject of debate within the Leeds art history seminar rooms in discussions of, for example, Picasso’s debt to African sculpture in the development of cubism ­were it not for “class” being generally privileged over “race” as a category of analy­sis within the social history of art. From the autumn of 1977 onward, however, ­things began to change as Griselda Pollock taught classes that extended or critiqued Clark’s proj­ect by drawing in feminist analy­sis, making at least gender—if not race—an impor­tant consideration alongside class. Pollock taught a final-­year course, Theories and Institutions. “I was given,” she remembers, “carte blanche to introduce to the degree . . . ​every­ thing that I had brought with me” to Leeds. This included ways of learning organic to the 1970s ­women’s movement in London, including her experience of, and participation in, the collective r­ unning of newspapers, po­liti­cal campaigns, and feminist reading groups t­ here. Once relocated to Leeds, Pollock continued to participate in reading groups within the city, including a Foucault, a Lacan, and a Capital reading group. “­There was a concentration of lefties in Chapeltown” around socialist theater com­pany Red Ladder, which involved Chris Rawlence and Marsha Rowe (cofounder of Spare Rib), and another around Lee Comer, author of Wedlocked ­Women (1974), and feminist sociologist Janet Wolff on the other side of town. Many ­people in t­ hese milieus w ­ ere also living in collective h­ ouses. “­There was an experiment in social living. So if you went to somebody’s h­ ouse you’d find five or six p­ eople living t­ here, some teaching, some studying, some involved in social work and activities, ­etc., but ­there was a very strong sense that ­there was something outside of the institutions where p­ eople ­were po­liti­cally and intellectually educating themselves. We ­didn’t look to the university to do it.” Clark concurs: “The prob­lem [by the mid-1970s] was how on earth did this academic proj­ect fit with what had happened to you in the late ’60s and early ’70s? Was t­ here some way in which your c­ areer in academia could stay in touch with some of the ­things you hoped for and worked for five years before?”30 Pollock had a golden opportunity to test this out with the Theories and Institutions course, which, she says, “allowed all of the effects of that [extra-­ institutional activity] to enter into the curriculum.” Split across two terms,

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one focusing upon feminist interventions in art history and the other on Marxist and semiotic perspectives, the course emphasized how theoretical inquiry could reshape the discourse of fine art by changing its values and its hermeneutic priorities. Feminist readings ranged from art historical essays by Linda Nochlin (“Why Have Th ­ ere Been No G ­ reat ­Women Artists?”) and Lisa Tickner to the psychoanalytical film theory of Laura Mulvey and Elizabeth Cowie. Pollock’s lectures on this course ­were soon written up to become the now field-­defining work of feminist art history Old Mistresses (1980, cowritten with Rozsika Parker), which confronts sexist ideologies of artistic genius as structural impediments to the recognition of female artistic production. A question on the Theories and Institutions exam paper of summer 1978 encouraged students to critically reflect upon what might now be termed “institutional sexism”: “ ‘The fault lies not in our (­women’s) stars, our menstrual cycles, our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and education’ [Linda Nochlin 1972]. Discuss.”31 King remembers Pollock’s classes. I remember we talked about film studies, and she did one class—it was a film where a ­woman pre­sents herself and ­she’d got milk ­bottles in her hand, t­ here was a famous scene, and deconstructing that sitting t­ here I found very in­ter­est­ing [ Jayne Mansfield in the 1956 Hollywood rock-­and-­ roll musical The Girl C ­ an’t Help It]. Sexual politics we found r­ eally in­ter­ est­ing, for me and for all of us I think. But I particularly thought that was the t­ hing that was most in­ter­est­ing when that cohort [of Clark et al.] arrived ­because it was top, dead-­center the most impor­tant ­thing that was ­going on. You knew who your ­enemy was. But more than that, we knew that we w ­ ere the ­enemy.

Thus began an investment in feminist criticism (and self-­criticism) that would see King, and Gill too, explore sexual po­liti­cal themes as Gang of Four. Not that Pollock’s seminar room was the ur-­site of the band’s feminist consciousness tout court (Gill reflects that he “­didn’t have much contact with Griselda Pollock. . . . ​W here one initially picked up on that stuff I’m not sure”), but certainly the feminist appraisal therein of Mansfield’s cinematic image as constructed and fetishistic, and therefore disputable, is echoed by Gang of Four’s questioning approach to naturalized images of ­women. ­W hether Gang of Four’s feminism translated through to ­every level of the group’s be­hav­ior has been questioned, but from around this point onward, the group made concerted efforts to integrate a feminist outlook within their critical worldview.32 Gill recalls, “One of the big ideas of CHAPTER FOUR

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The back cover of Gang of Four’s “At Home He’s a Tourist” / “It’s Her Factory” single (emi, 1979).

4.5 

feminism . . . ​was this idea that what is considered to be natu­ral is, in fact, a man-­made ideology. That is a theme that goes through a lot of Gang of Four ideas.” This was especially evident on the track “It’s Her Factory” on the B side of the “Tourist” single. Gill notes, “Jon and I put together [the lyr­ics] from vari­ous ­things in newspapers. If ­you’re looking for overt sexism articulated brilliantly, newspapers are a good place to go. ­Today, or any point since newspapers began. In that song w ­ e’ve got clips of headlines. Back then it was often said that it was natu­ral for ­women to stay home and clean the floors while men ­were out earning the wage, and that it’s natu­ral for ­women to concentrate on child rearing. All t­ hose t­ hings w ­ ere often alluded to or repeated in newspapers.” “House­wife heroines, addicts to their homes . . . ​ Scrubbing floors ­they’re close to the earth” run some of the song’s lines, presumably derived from the tabloid press. The latter is repeated as a handwritten, questioning inscription on the back-­cover design of the single: “is ­women’s place close to the earth?” The Gang’s assured rejoinder: “we ­don’t think so!”33 (figure 4.5). This, in turn, is accompanied by cutout newspaper images of ­women weeping (at the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978), presumably to underline ­women’s ste­reo­typical representability as susceptible to emotion, alongside a cut-up image of Mono­poly money. The song title, “It’s Her Factory,” a legend originally culled from a double-­glazing advert featuring a photo­graph of a ­woman standing proudly

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4.6  Gang of Four, Entertainment! lp (emi, 1979).

before her 1930s f­ amily ­house, almost already performed a feminist critique of its own, indicating the home as “her” factory—­i.e., her place of work.34 “All we had to do was point this stuff out,” recalls King. Reiterating “It’s Her Factory” alongside an image of money on the back of the single made it plain: that ­women’s ­labor was habitually being overlooked and undervalued. To rectify this injustice the path was even clearer: “Wages for work, wages for housework,” says King—­echoing the 1970s feminist campaign of the same name.35 The figure of ­women’s ­labor, and the self-­understanding of one par­tic­u­ lar working-­class ­woman, became foundational to Gang of Four’s approach. ­After a gig in 1978 at Carlisle College of Art, where the warm-up acts ­were, somewhat incredulously, a stripper and a stand-up comedian, the group and the female entertainer started talking. Gill takes up the story: “It was pretty in­ter­est­ing. . . . ​She did all this stuff like: ‘Look, you d­ on’t understand. ­We’re all of us—­you, me—­we’re all in the entertainment business.’ And it was like, you know what, y­ ou’re right. And she said, ‘I earn three times what I’d get paid in a day job.’ . . . ​And that then sort of became part of the Gang of Four my­thol­ogy. That was the point where the penny dropped. . . . ​We felt it w ­ ouldn’t be just in­ter­est­ing but integral to our mission to kind of lay this bare.” Which is why their debut ­album was duly titled Entertainment!—­ replete with would-be jaunty exclamation mark.36

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Studying with Clark and Pollock meant being steeped in critical readings of culture, which King and Gill found readily transferable to situations outside of the formal study of art history. The band’s take on the culture industry and on sexist repre­sen­ta­tion in the mass media are only two instances in which Gang of Four’s indebtedness to the critical reading practices of art historical study are evident. “Looking at a painting [­after Leeds art history],” Gill has mused, “could be considered ‘cold.’ I think ‘cold’ is quite an appropriate word ­because old-­school art appreciation would be all ‘oh look at the beauty of this,’ you know, ‘­isn’t it moving.’ [The social history of art] is kind of the opposite of that. It’s g­ oing through it with a fine-­tooth comb: very considered and looking at it less as something to be just enjoyed.” This finds an echo in Gill’s perception of the “temperature” of Gang of Four’s sound. In an interview with Simon Reynolds, he says Gang of Four w ­ ere “against warmth” and that he deliberately created a “brittle . . . ​cleaner sound” by refusing to use valve amplifiers for his guitar.37 But, c­ ounter to a received image of Marxist and feminist critiques as being opposed to, or deconstructive of, plea­sure, Gill has insisted that such “cold” criticism be understood as enhancing appreciation rather than negating its satisfactions: “I’d argue that actually [the cold approach] increases the enjoyment, the more you tease out what’s ­going on [in a painting]. It’s then a short step from that [kind of art historical analy­ sis] to me and Jon using the same sort of approach to look at ourselves and our friends, our sex lives, and what ­we’re seeing on tv.”38 So, unmoored from the narrow fealties of inquiry into paintings, the social history of art encouraged Gang of Four to forge a second-­order, critical appraisal of the forms of 1970s society. “This sort of cold analy­sis . . . ​ was applied within the songs,” says Gill, “looking at a relationship and then saying, ‘I’m thinking it might be love but actually, no, it’s just about sex’ ” (as in a song like “Damaged Goods”: “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust”). It also extended to critical appraisals of the ­music of their forebears. Gill notes, “I remember sitting down listening to a Muddy ­Waters ­album and thinking how fucking exciting it was, electrifying and moving, but just thinking, ‘Oh, I just wish the words ­were better!’ ” Such an outlook led to the creation of what Reynolds has called “a kind of meta-­rock, radically self-­critical and vigilant.”39 Only two of Gang of Four went through a Leeds fine art education. But even so, this training ground was decisive for the group’s overall outlook and direction. Burnham agrees:

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4.7 

Andy Gill, tv study, ca. 1979. Courtesy of Catherine Mayer.

Iw ­ on’t say it was their band [Gill and King’s] but they drove how we developed. They had clear ideas—­and argued—­and then Dave and I would be learning whilst putting our own stuff in and being a part of it and arguing too. But I c­ an’t take away from the fact that without Jon and Andrew it w ­ ouldn’t have gone the way it did, but without Dave and I it w ­ ouldn’t have come out the way it did. . . . ​Musically and in other ways Dave and I ­were filters on what Jon and Andy did. They ­were incredibly smart, intelligent, particularly Jon—­and that’s not a diss on Andrew. Jon was one of the smartest, most eloquent, most well-­read men I’ve ever known. He brought all this and every­thing ­else to his art, to Gang of Four.

And in a slightly more critical vein: “But they ­were not ­great business guys. . . . ​That was always a l­ ittle bit of a t­ hing, you know, yes, brilliant, fantastic, but head in the clouds. Put one foot on the ground please, it’s what we need to do.” The pro­cess of debating and arguing—­through which musical and aesthetic ideas ­were translated into Gang of Four songs—­was unusually heightened within the culture of the Leeds University bands. Mekon Jon Langford remembers, “It was very rigorous, having debates about every­ thing: what you could and ­couldn’t do. It was all kind of lunatic and all tons

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of jargon and lots of inappropriately long words to describe the situation we ­were actually ­going through.” Such exchanges did not remain within the confines of the seminar or rehearsal rooms ­either; they often spilled out into the media with reported disagreements between band members, especially over po­liti­cal differences. For example, in a telling nme feature “Debate Goes On” in June 1980, Gill and King are reported as at loggerheads with one another over issues of communicative strategy, turning around a clash of opinion about Scritti Politti’s use of the concept of “bourgeois hegemony”—­King proclaiming it elitist b­ ecause it was “using a very rarefied intellectual language,” and Gill protesting, “It seems ­really crude to go through ­things word by word and say ‘Well, this word is inaccessible.’ ”40 Delta 5 and the Mekons would similarly air their differences in public.41 Even on their first appearance on national tele­v i­sion, the Mekons presented a most remarkable impression of unruly dissensus. During an interview with John Peel for a 1978 edition of the bbc documentary strand Omnibus, Mick Wixey, Simon Best, and Mark White play out a disagreement over ­whether the Mekons’ priority is supplying Mekons’ fans with singles, making a rec­ord com­pany product, or encouraging fans to spend money instead on their own equipment in order to make their own ­music.42 But despite such sometimes fractious exchanges, t­ here ­were rudimentary t­ hings upon which agreement was reached. Burnham also remembers, “We had t­ hose arguments and fights, w ­ hether over politics or m ­ usic . . . ​ but I d­ on’t think we ever argued about making p­ eople move and dance as well as think for themselves. We ­were a rock band. We loved the ­things we shared: ­Free, Dr Feelgood. I mean, for God’s sake, when ­those are your foundations you ­can’t be that weird! But then having also been growing up listening to Can or fucking Hawkwind or Beefheart, ­there’s weirdness as well.” The trick seemed to be how to allow something new to emerge out of the “disputatious mix” of being in a band without being too remote from rock business-­as-­usual that would make the band an impossible “sell.” But this was not always an easy line to tread: as Burnham puts it, channeling King, “Gang of Four never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” This was typified by their much-­discussed no-­show on British chart show Top of the Pops in 1979, turning decisively upon the group’s refusal to agree to a change with bbc gatekeepers to the lyrical content of “Tourist” for broadcast.43 Burnham reflects in hindsight that this was a m ­ istake, robbing the band of publicity they sorely needed to break through to a larger

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audience at the beginning of their ­career (which ­after all was the logic of their signing to major label emi). When I asked Burnham if this episode demonstrated how principled the band was at the time, he replied, Yeah, principled but bloody-­minded. We ­were living in a b­ ubble and saying, “Fuck it, w ­ e’ll show ’em, the nme ­will be ­behind us.” . . . ​We ­were being real sort of punks about it, during the run-­throughs, which c­ an’t have helped: Andrew in the dressing room had got all his strings and tied them in a knot then restrung it, so it was like “Oh, w ­ e’ll show them w ­ e’re not r­ eally playing.” R ­ eally how to piss off an agent of potential growth. The princi­ple, absolutely, all the way down the shitter.

However, somewhat despite this, the band’s culture of debate and disagreement was largely understood at the time by band members in positive terms, even as key to the po­liti­cal meaning of their sparring, jagged sound: that Gang of Four made it pos­si­ble to hear, and enjoy, the workings of a demo­cratic, disputatious collective as ­music. “Andy is against the guitar hierarchy in a band, where the guitar dominates over bass and drums, and I agree with him,” says Dave Allen in Melody Maker in 1979—in a rare moment of Gang of Four harmony. “My own style of bass playing is very percussive. It gives a rhythm, it’s not just something for Andy to put layers of guitars top [sic]. When Jon’s singing, he’s singing next to my bass playing, he ­doesn’t overshadow it.”44 This sense of individual players coexisting in musical proximity, of being given space for their musical “views” to be heard within Gang of Four arrangements, is echoed in Rob Worby’s particularly telling account of the sound of sister-­band the Mekons. Worby recalls: I remember ­doing the sound in cbgbs the first time we played ­there [in the 1980s]. I used to listen to each individual instrument and won­der how on earth they all fitted together ­because you’d have Steve and Lu playing ­really tight drums and bass, absolutely rock solid, and then over the top you’d have Johnny making the most terrible din, then Tom playing almost random notes on his guitar. I always said that Susie Honeyman played like the second violin part from a Beethoven string quartet and Jon and Tom and Sally kind of yelling over the top of it all. Each individual part was completely unique and ­didn’t seem to have anything to do with the ­whole but when you put it all together you had this amazing sound of the Mekons, which is just unfathomable ­really.45 CHAPTER FOUR

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Though ­there are clearly differences between the sound of Gang of Four and that of the Mekons, which might be characterized (somewhat falsely) as the difference between the structured and the shambolic, ultimately both are or­ga­nized according to a similar egalitarian princi­ple. Allen in the nme says, “It boils down to democracy. We [the Gang of Four] are actually four ­people. We ­don’t want to be seen in the same way as, say, Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Like Ian Dury has an amazing band, but ­they’re just a band—­ he’s the focal point.”46 Gill picks up this line of thinking: “If ­you’re on stage and ­people are coming to see you it seems inevitable that you’ll get treated as something special. I think it’s bad, right, but I c­ an’t see how to avoid it. Our responsibility is to examine that—­the ­thing about playing roles and being looked up to—­and work within that. The fact that we change roles onstage and p­ eople play dif­fer­ent individual instruments might, hopefully, encourage ­people not to regard us as ‘stars.’ ”47 What a curious, counterintuitive ­thing for a rock band to feel beholden to: a responsibility to examine the conditions of their very existence! That they should think critically about the framework of expectation into which they launched themselves, that they should “work within that” while, at the same time, hoping to change the minds of their audience—­all this was testament to the art school roots of Gang of Four. They felt “at home” in the alienating environment of the cap­i­tal­ist ­music industry—­but only in the manner of the titular “Tourist” of their song. The form of thinking that allowed them to feel like this, the dialectical approach to the study of art history, furnished band members with the ability to ask questions in the space of popu­lar music-­making and to devise new forms that would have been unthinkable without it. It resulted in a band—­and a ­music—­that, thrillingly, sounded at odds with itself.

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05 WHY THEORY? We used to go around having lots of arguments with ­people and that’s the most fruitful t­ hing we could do ­really. GREEN GARTSIDE IN “THE NITTY GRITTY ON SCRITTI POLITTI” (1979)

A

ccording to Terry Atkinson, the Leeds University fine art department played a marked role in the development of “something called ‘theory’ ” in 1970s art education.1 T. J. Clark, he recalls, “brought a view of ‘theory,’ holding it to be intimate enough with ‘practice’ for them to be indistinguishable.”2 Crucially, theory “was not art history,” Atkinson goes on, “its characteristic mark of identity was this negative one.”3 It was dif­fer­ent from it even as it shared some of art history’s intellectual resources: Marxist and feminist theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Atkinson’s teaching added to this intellectual mélange, bringing to the institutional ­table an autodidacticism that echoed that of Clark and Pollock but developed instead out of Atkinson’s years as member of the Art & Language group (a&l).4 Developing a thoroughgoing critique of ideologies of “possessive individualism” within the practices and discourses of art teaching in Britain and Eu­rope, Atkinson brought to Leeds a fa­cil­i­ty to mobilize the critical insights of analytical philosophy, the philosophy of science, and po­liti­cal economy within studio-­related discussion. This included bringing reference to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke into intimate relation with the traditional practices and discourses of art production.

As a University of Leeds student, Tom Greenhalgh remembers how Atkinson would hold forth on the subject of “drawing as an ideological resource.” I was completely intrigued by that. I used to go and listen to Terry talking and try and understand and engage with what he was saying. . . . ​I’d already been interested in a&l previous to that ­because the Art-­Language magazine they did was floating around. Ninety-­nine ­percent of it was completely over my head, but at the same time, I got more than irreverence. Their complete attack on the art establishment and the w ­ hole idea of the artist—that r­ eally chimed [with me]—­and also their collaborative way of working. . . . ​So when Terry started introducing John Locke, and the idea of possessive individualism, and the ­whole idea of the artist as an ultimate cap­i­tal­ist agent, all of that stuff I was immediately well into. That was in my second year. . . . ​ It d­ idn’t involve a g­ reat deal of production of artifacts by any means. But more talking and writing and stuff.

This turn to talking as a significant ele­ment of developing a con­temporary art practice was underlined within Clark’s overall approach. According to Atkinson, Clark’s conviction was “not so much that artists should learn to talk to each other” but rather that he “took it for granted not only that artists talked a lot, and talked a lot about art at that, but that how and what they talked about . . . ​was a major contribution to the character of any given practice.”5 But even if talking was a mundane ele­ment of all art teaching, the instituting of Clark and Atkinson’s par­tic­u­lar approach to interrogative exchange around art in the Leeds University studios was taken to be an “intrusion” into what was, “up to 1976, a pretty respectable department” of art.6 It made it a “local cockpit of the strug­gles” around theory and art and the latest iteration of what had been fought over at Coventry School of Art at the beginning of the de­cade.7 Above all, this “concern with language and art practice was,” Atkinson insists, “a fierce one.”8 This was played out at the level of departmental strug­gles between old and new guards in the studio (“It ­wasn’t supported by all the staff by any means”) but came to be particularly operative in novel forums with students that w ­ ere specially devised to discuss theoretical and critical issues. Most pointedly, t­ hese ­were not regular studio-­crits. They w ­ ere sometimes led by Atkinson alone, on a topic initiated by him (including the hopes and failures of 1950s and 1960s rock and roll), or they involved Atkinson and Clark, or, other times still, they would additionally include Polytechnic art students and staff members, including Jeff Nuttall and Geoff Teasdale.

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Terry Atkinson (far left) in the Leeds University fine art studios, ca. 1980. Photo: Barry Herbert. Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library, lua/phc/002/48. 5.1 

The connection with the Polytechnic was deliberately sought, ­Atkinson remembers, on the understanding that “the working-­class complexion of the Poly” might disrupt the “bourgeois-­ified input” from the largely middle-­class student cohorts at the university. But even ­there, the intention—at least as Atkinson relates it—­was to “intrude” into the culture of the university’s neighboring institution, not least b­ ecause of the romantic individualism of a lecturer like Jeff Nuttall, which permeated the culture of the Polytechnic studios. This intention, this hope, it seems, nevertheless ran aground on the realities of personalities and student ambitions. Atkinson continues: “It never happened b­ ecause Nuttall was impossible. A lot of the time he was fucking drunk. . . . ​He had a sycophantic group around him. And it turned out that the Poly was in much worse shape than the university ­because in many ways their working-­class students ­were just as influenced by the Sunday Times supplement view of what a ­career was as ­were university ones.” Participant memories of exchanges undertaken in such meetings paint a picture of a rambunctious, sometimes macho culture of intellectual contestation and irreverence.9 John Hyatt, for one, vividly recalls an encounter CHAPTER FIVE

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between Nuttall and his interlocutors, which resulted in the Bomb Culture author storming out of the meeting in tears. Nuttall had been hotly insisting that “Beethoven could have written his symphonies up a tree in the Congo” as hy­po­thet­i­cal demonstration of the proposition that g­ reat art be understood as transcendent of the social conditions of its day. ­After being contested fiercely by historical materialists Clark and Atkinson, a university student shot back, “But Jeff, that’s ridicu­lous!” According to Hyatt, “Nuttall was likely thinking, ‘Why is it ridicu­lous?,’ expecting some sort of highly intellectualized response,” but he was wrong-­footed by the student’s a­ ctual reply: “Well, b­ ecause he c­ ouldn’t get his piano up the tree!” In another instance, Atkinson remembers similarly chiding Nuttall during a heated exchange about Joseph Beuys’s per­for­mance with a live coyote, “I Like Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­ca Likes Me” (1974). Beuys’s claim that he could read the animal’s mind, affirmed by Nuttall during the course of discussion, was mocked by Atkinson: “We ­were Wittgensteinian skeptics. [We asked] w ­ hether the coyote had a fucking mind, let alone w ­ hether he could read it.” All this arguing would carry on for two hours or more and then, Hyatt remembers, “we’d go to the Cobourg (a pub down the road) and carry on till we ­were thrown out. They w ­ ere g­ reat eve­nings . . . ​so lively.” A culture like this—in which intellectual sacred cows w ­ ere ritualistically and fulsomely rejected, alongside the impact that such discussions had upon the making of art objects in the studios—­made studying the Leeds University course difficult, even for t­ hose like Hyatt, who found such talks energizing. “­There ­were twenty-­three p­ eople started in my year,” he recalls, “and nine finished ­because it was just, like, so hard. The hardest ­thing was the contradiction between learning all the theory and operating as a practitioner.” Many students in the year groups below Hyatt’s had s­ topped producing physical art objects, as the talking had both problematized and come to supplant the making of them (and t­ hose who did carry on creating ­things, Hyatt remembers, “did photo-­text,” not paintings or sculptures). For students who stayed the distance, the excitement of being at Leeds University at this time was in realizing that ­there was a “crisis of Modernism” and that the institution’s postconceptual pedagogy placed them at its heart. “I just happened to be in the place where the p­ eople that ­were taking [Modernism] apart w ­ ere,” says Hyatt. The daunting challenge of being ­there, however, was that t­ here ­were no ready answers to, nor routes through, this crisis presented to students. “When somebody’s completely dismantling the cultural structure, how do you actually add to it?” Hyatt

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remembers thinking. “I was trying to find an answer . . . ​trying to find a way out of the labyrinth.” Not all students responded so positively to the diagnosis of the post-­ conceptual condition of art as rehearsed within ­these seminars. Steve Shill, for example—­a peer of Greenhalgh in the class of 1976—­saw the per­for­ mance of intellectuality therein as somewhat specious: “Drawing as an ideological resource sounded to me like [Atkinson] just wanted to draw. . . . ​ [But he had to] throw in some fancy words to fob p­ eople off who said you ­couldn’t ­because it ­didn’t seem Marxist enough. It was just win­dow dressing, I think.” He also recalls Teasdale’s confrontational, take-­no-­prisoners attitude ­toward traditionally minded students as overly aggressive if not bullying: “One of the students in our year actually brought a painting of flowers and put it on the wall and every­one was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s ­going to happen?’ Teasdale said: ‘So what’s that then?’ and she said: ‘Well, I wanted to capture the beauty of nature.’ He retorted: ‘Oh yeah, beauty of nature? What about cancer? Is that beautiful then?’ ” The fact that the majority of staff attendees ­were male, on all but a few occasions, lent such exchanges a problematic gender politics and presaged feminist responses to the Polytechnic fine art course in the 1980s, which ­were almost to overwhelm it. Janey Walklin, also in the same year group, reflected more poetically upon Atkinson and com­pany’s pedagogical approach. In a haunting Chris Marker–­esque film, Art Workshop (1979), Walklin explored “expectations and alienation in art practice.”10 Through juxtaposition of the naive enthusiasm of schoolchildren taking an art class with the weary testimonials of Leeds fine art students, Walklin immersed her viewers in a filmic reverie about beliefs surrounding the practice of art-­making. Throughout we hear ­children and adults talk (about art), but the soundtrack is unmoored from any imagery of ­those ­doing the speaking. The effect is unsettling. As we listen we see university students—­including Hyatt and Greenhalgh and peers Marian Lux and Caroline Taylor (the latter a founding member of Pavilion, the feminist photography collective)—­variously leafing through books, pensively reading, listening to ­people talk, typing, smoking . . . ​and sometimes making art. Hyatt is filmed energetically making a charcoal drawing from a female life model who, by contrast, stares listlessly into the ­middle distance before also lighting up a cigarette (figure 5.2). The film appears to strug­gle with Atkinson’s proposition of drawing as an ideological resource, and certainly seems to engage it, “debating” it, perhaps, without ­going to the seminars, preferring dialectics without CHAPTER FIVE

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Still showing John Hyatt used in film Art Workshop (Fine Art Studios), 1979. © Janey Walklin.

5.2 

the drinking. Among other t­ hings, Atkinson can be heard on the film’s soundtrack decrying ideologies of individualism for the absence of active student presence in the studios (“I think ­these studios are desolated by it . . . ​by the fact that ­there is no sense of community except this sort of atomic individual of the artist who floats around”). But it is very far from clear w ­ hether his analy­sis is being affirmed or indeed blamed by the film for the creative torpor and uncertainty that appears to dog the artists on show. We hear the words of Lux equivocate about the value of life drawing, adding to this uncertainty. As we watch her type and light up a cigarette: “At the live class most Saturdays for three years we all became quite efficient, slick. . . . ​I hardly questioned the sense of the activity. Just went on drawing. Every­one agreed that I did it well. It is always gratifying to receive a pat on the back.” Then, in more damning vein, she says, “Looking back it might have been more profitable to have spent my Saturdays at the swimming pool—or better still—in bed.” Naive, unreflective enjoyment and a sense of purpose seem irretrievably lost in Walklin’s film, replaced by a rootless anomie. It is a portrait of a group of art students alienated from their raison d’être: learning about, and making, art.11 In a near-­contemporaneous

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photo­graph of a domestic interior, also by Walklin, we see Lux with one of her student parodies of the would-be rigors of conceptualism hanging on the wall: “masses and masses / masses and masses / masses and masses” reads the text unfolding, blankly, on the canvas (figure 5.3). Making ­music in a band turned out to be a ready antidote to what some experienced as the enervating weight of such theoretical “masses,” a Dionysian route out of theory’s seemingly Apollonian impasse. As Hyatt continues, being in a band “was about having fun, but it was also maybe about escaping from ­under the thumb of the theory a bit.” Shill concurs, perhaps on more absolute terms: “Frankly, something like the ­music was an escape from all of this. . . . ​We did it for a lark but we did it b­ ecause every­ body e­ lse was d­ oing it and it was fun and it was the punk era.” Purveyors of lively punk-­pop, Sheeny and the Goys sported Lux and Hyatt on vocals, Shill on bass, Dave Brown (another university fine art student) on drums, and university history student John France on guitar. Listening to archive recordings of the band’s par­tic­u­lar brand of manic musical mixing—­where the Ramones meet the Shangri-­Las—it is pos­si­ble to appreciate how Sheeny and the Goys offered a pick-­me-up to the ­labors of postconceptual discussion.12 “But [being in a band],” Hyatt goes on, “was also a practical way to use that theory in a form that would communicate to a wider public than the bourgeois art world.” More than ­simple alternative to theory then, the band could also be a potential carrier of a dif­fer­ent, “practical” way to use it. By the time Hyatt and his fellow band members ­were playing gigs in 1978, another group comprising recent Leeds Polytechnic gradu­ates was already well advanced in pursuing this more involved relationship between music-­making and theory.

FROM ART AND LANGUAGE TO M ­ USIC AND LANGUAGE

Green Gartside recalls his dashed expectations a few years prior as a student at Leeds Polytechnic. It seemed impor­tant to me obviously that we should be talking about what we ­were ­doing with this privileged education that we had. I ­didn’t ­really want to be ­there for three years being left to my own devices around ­people who w ­ eren’t asking any questions about the significance of their work. I was angry that p­ eople w ­ ere just painting willy-­nilly or playing silly l­ittle CHAPTER FIVE

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5.3  Marian (“Kitty”) Lux and Dave Bowie at home, Leeds, ca. 1980. Photo: Chris Wicks.

Sheeny and the Goys performing at the Sandpiper, Nottingham, 1978. Courtesy of Dave Brown.

5.4 

art referential games, oh man, all that stuff: ­either work that was terribly derivative or work that was too bound up with an uncritical kind of glee at art’s recent history and its follies. It w ­ asn’t ­really critical of it, it may have poked a bit of fun at it, but it was always like some sort of Python-­esque, schoolboy . . . ​I ­don’t know, d­ idn’t appeal. So I was angry at the p­ eople around me for not sorting it out, thinking “Why d­ on’t you stop? And sit down and think long and hard?”

As far as Gartside was concerned, the lecturers d­ idn’t help m ­ atters e­ ither. For him, the “anything-­goes” pedagogy of Nuttall and his fellows revealed the fallacies of 1960s progressivism by shielding “ignorance and idleness” in its blind pursuit of the holy grail of creativity and discovery.13 The “pathetic helplessness of art students” resulting from being left to their own devices u­ nder such forms of tutelage Gartside saw as a symptom of the art educator’s abdication of responsibility rather than a sign of any benign permissiveness.14 His solution to what he took to be the woeful state of institutionalized education was to become an autodidact: to begin reading “theory” in­de­ pen­dent of the Leeds course—­sometimes on his own, sometimes with ­others—in a bid to think his way out of the morass. “So I was thrown back on my own resources and left to intellectually and creatively fend for myself . . . ​which meant weeks, months, years spent largely alone in insalubrious circumstances struggling with texts that seemed willfully to elude comprehension—­and striving to find what the ramifications and consequences of ­those texts would be for me as an art student, as a musician and for my place on the left and my place in the world.”15 Gartside drew on ­things that he “would have come across in Wittgenstein, for instance, ­whether the language-­game argument or other t­ hings, or maybe I picked up on that from reading [ Joseph] Kosuth in The Fox [the US Art & Language journal].” He spent “hours and hours in the library reading tons of stuff and what­ever books I could lay my hands on.” Ultimately this was ­because he was able to find ­there “the means by which you could take a real pop at paint­ers and their ideas, the lumpen, common-­sense assumptions from the romantic tradition down about how artists have ideas and communicate them through their work. . . . ​It seemed to be the best use of my time at that point: to learn and understand this stuff. It was r­ eally the most impor­tant t­ hing I could be ­doing as an art student.” Gartside had friends who ­were, he remembers, “sympathetic” to his opinions, including fellow Polytechnic fine art students Denis Cullum and CHAPTER FIVE

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Tom Morley, though he suspects the majority of his peers likely found him “a pain in the arse, and possibly arrogant.” Morley recalls that Gartside was pretty exceptional as a Polytechnic fine art student given his studious application to the business of reading. He would “pretty much read [theory] and explain it to a few of us,” Morley reminisces. “His ability to read and absorb ­things and then link them and explain them and prophesize—it was something ­else. . . . ​Sometimes we would go to the pub and he would be frustrated in us that we c­ ouldn’t keep up. Although Niall [ Jinks] was his closest ally in that re­spect.” This meant that Gartside’s patterns of be­hav­ior ­were unusual, setting him adrift from expectations that the artist should be constantly beavering away in his atelier: “I’d be spending more time in the library, more time reading at home, and ­going in [to the studios] less often. [I was] feeling terribly guilty about that, slipping into a faintly depressive, nocturnal life where I’d get up late and sit at a ­table and read, wherever we w ­ ere living at the time. Quite often, with Denis Cullum, we’d sit down and try and get through Althusser together. . . . ​Lots of books we would try to read together, lots I would try to read on my own in the library.” Gartside goes on: “The lecturers ­were always saying, ­every three months, ‘Look, ­we’re ­going to throw you out,’ and their argument was always ‘­You’re not using your studio space.’ ” Initially causing him to feel adrift in the library or in his student flat, such intellectual studiousness latterly began to have a critical purchase within the Leeds course once Gartside was able to create a public forum for giving expression to it. He remembers t­ hings began to change once he got in touch with the artists from Art & Language. Gartside tells it thus: I got in touch with them and invited members to Leeds to give unofficial lectures. They c­ ouldn’t come to the Polytechnic b­ ecause I w ­ asn’t empowered. [So] I had to hire a room above a pub in Leeds and have ­these eve­ nings where artists and lecturers that interested me would be invited to come to Leeds. Initially ­there would be five or six ­people, but by the end of the time ­there the head of the Polytechnic [Patrick Nuttgens, the director] was turning up t­ here. They turned into incredible eve­nings, ­there was such bitterness afterwards. They ­were the high point of the course.

The kinds of issues and exchanges that molded t­ hese events are preserved in an article authored by Gartside, Morley, and Alan Robinson (the latter then a member of Art & Language), which appeared in print in a special issue of Studio International dedicated to the “Politics of Art

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Education” in 1979. Based on interviews with Polytechnic fine art staff and students (though Teasdale disputes any such interviews took place), the article contains apparent reporting of ­things said during one of Gartside’s extracurricular sessions. Criticism of Leeds Polytechnic’s approach to fine art education is fulsome throughout, characterized as developing student “in­de­pen­dence through neglect,” while Nuttall is pilloried for requesting students show their “uniqueness” in their art.16 The article involves heavy amounts of sarcasm, irreverent scoffing at staff ignorance, and personalized insult, which leave the reader in no doubt about the authors’ contempt for the individual agents of Leeds’s purportedly “radical” art education (so much so that large swaths of the text ­were redacted for fear of libel). More substantively—­and riffing on the Freudian-­Marxist thinking of Herbert Marcuse—­the article turns on the counterintuitive idea that Leeds’s permissive education might actually be fundamentally repressive, operating instead by “repressive omission.” “Hegemony,” Gartside, Morley, and Robinson write, “is heavi­ly exercised [in art education] through lacunae in definitions of course policy as well as the false-­consciousness attendant with fixed ste­reo­types in student and staff conversation. When every­thing is excluded from (notionally) useful conversation this is power canalization: legitimating princi­ples approved by a larger framework outside the course which is not critically examined in the course itself. . . . ​Repressive omission reduces the prospect of students appraising social institutions; the utterances issuing from ­those institutions; and the par­ameters by which student practice is ordered.”17 Serious conversation is thereby occluded, real inquiry stunted. The desired corrective to such forms of repression is a liberation of discourse: whereby students would become informed and “freed” through language to contest the rationale for habitual forms of practice maintained by the repressive system. Since language was thereby identified by Gartside as a site of strug­gle, as a means of exerting and contesting power, it is hardly surprising that he opted to pre­sent “a wall of writing” for his final-­degree show in the summer of 1977. This included his now-­lost musings about punk rock as a game changer for radical cultural production. Gartside says, “I remember [Geoff] Teasdale came in and stood reading it. He spent a c­ ouple of hours with it maybe. . . . ​I remember him sticking a matchstick, ­because it’s all on boards ­isn’t it, to mark as far along the wall he’d got in reading it. But he never came back to finish it. Who could blame him?” Nuttall recollects that Gartside actively took “a series of photo­graphs of staff, biros in hand, spiral notebooks CHAPTER FIVE

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poised, deciding on the numerical worth of students’ efforts” in a lightly intimidating bid to turn the t­ ables on the power and expertise of his assessors.18 He did this, Nuttall spits, “in blithe and perilous ridicule.”19 As a challenge to the authority of the Polytechnic staff, and of the assessment pro­cess more broadly, it seems to have at least caused Teasdale to draw in external Marxist scholarly expertise in the shape of Cliff Slaughter and T. J. Clark, both members of faculty at the nearby university, to help with assessment of Gartside’s textual output. Teasdale remembers Gartside’s texts as “on the extreme left and . . . ​uninformed” and requiring further expert opinion to help Polytechnic staff in their adjudications. In the end, Gartside graduated with a 2.1 degree (“they said I would have got a first had I . . . ​attended an art history class. I never did”), though Nuttall offers a dif­fer­ent recollection altogether. According to him, Gartside “refused a degree which he was never ­going to get anyway.”20 This result might have seemed like a small victory w ­ ere it not for the fact that by the time of his graduation, and certainly by the time of the publication of Gartside and Morley’s more thoroughgoing, excoriating assessment of Leeds art education in 1979, both young artists had moved on. The locus of the cultural strug­gle around language had shifted: from visual art to m ­ usic. Morley, u­ nder Gartside’s influence, had gone through a similar shift in his interests and thinking. In his undergraduate dissertation he fulsomely critiqued the w ­ hole body of artwork he created while a student at Leeds. W ­ hether realized as works of photography, sculpture, conceptual, per­for­mance, or mail art—­much of it included in his final-­year degree show alongside that of Gartside—­all ­were ultimately dismissed, at the behest of Morley’s self-­critical logic, as irredeemably elitist practices serving a culture of bourgeois self-­definition and exclusivity. So too the work of Ddart, a per­ for­mance art group comprising Leeds gradu­ates who had been subject to national media outrage in 1976 for receiving Arts Council money for a piece encompassing three men walking around East Anglia with a pole attached to their heads (figure 5.5). Morley bristled at the de­cadence and po­liti­cally counterproductive state into which he thought the Leeds avant-­garde had gotten itself: “In times of economic crises the media (tv radio and the press who pump out ruling class ideology) need a scapegoat to divert the public’s attention from the real issues of government mismanagement. . . . ​[Ddart] can forget about the spattering [sic] of applauding spectators when a report of their activity has been used [in the media] alienating the majority of the population even more from artists work [sic].”21 To Morley it seems art had become inimical to, even ­enemy of, the ­people.

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“­We’re Daft to Pay Up £400 for This Caper!,” Sunday P ­ eople, 1976. 5.5 

Hyatt’s suggestion, then, that popu­lar ­music could have presented a more propitious route for theoretical exploration than that pos­si­ble within art practice seems to precisely describe Scritti Politti’s move from polemicizing against the art institution to embracing a form of music-­making in which theory came to be indispensable. Gartside, Morley, and Jinks’s early per­for­mances in Leeds as the Against comprised a small set of punk numbers, including crude anarcho-­Left songs such as “Chucking Bricks” and “Abortion on Demand”—­about assailing banks and affirming a ­woman’s right to choose—­with l­ ittle to suggest the intellectual seriousness that was soon to characterize the band’s modus operandi. But before long, heavy-­duty doses of theorizing began to shape the band’s output as much as it had hitherto impacted their members’ art practice. Gartside says, “­Music was kind of like ­music and language. To me, at least, having somewhat exhausted the prob­lems of painting—­context, frame and what­ever ­else it could be—­and being unhappy with phi­los­o­phers and their work that w ­ ere usually called on to explain . . . ​the artist’s psyche and paint. M ­ usic and language, rock and roll and language seemed to be right up against it.”22 Gartside was thereby drawn to thinking long and hard about the possibilities of pop m ­ usic. Growing up as a young man in Wales, he already saw pop ­music as a ­thing that had “made home life bearable . . . ​the only place where I would have got any ideas that ran c­ ounter to the working-­class Tory t­ hing.” It was a counterweight, he remembers, to having “no books in the ­house, no conversation.” In the wake of his newly acquired theoretical self-­education in Leeds, Gartside was able to return to this ur-­scene of youthful world-­making but, the second time around, with a difference: now immersed in reading and discussion.

A NEW SYNTAX

Recalling the culture in which this came to make sense, in the environs of the North London squat to which Gartside, Morley, and Jinks had moved in the summer of 1977, Gartside noted that the most impor­tant ­thing was “finding new ways of ­going on” (itself a vernacular phrase favored by Art & Language). This was to be discovered by taking copious amounts of amphetamine and “staying up all night, reading and talking.”23 As Gartside remembers it: Theory continued to be impor­tant to talk about diy and post-­punk. The sound of post-­punk, the thought of a ­music that disrupted the conventions

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of pop ­music, the conventional structure of song, linear teleological melody, harmony and rhythm was more in keeping with, symptomatic of, analogous to, or exemplary of the ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze. The idea of a world without essences, a world of unstable meanings, fractured subjects, . . . ​the schizophrenic rebellion against capital, the idea that sense is complicit with common sense and common sense is tied up with bourgeois ideology—­this held sway with my extended band mates.24

Concepts w ­ ere thus impor­tant d­ rivers in shaping Scritti Politti’s early musical output. In par­tic­ul­ar, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of “hegemony” and “revolutionary praxis” ­were pivotal in allowing the band to develop an understanding of themselves as a po­liti­cal entity (“Hegemony” lending its name to a track released on the Peel Sessions ep in 1979). Seeing their job as musicians to involve struggling over po­liti­cal hegemony with the ruling class, t­ hey’d come to newly understand the “revolutionary” possibilities of “beat music” (as Gartside was fond of calling it) through reading Gramsci. A ­ fter Gramsci, revolution was considered achievable no longer through slavish adherence to the precepts of a Leninist vanguard but instead through the mass-­mobilization of an amalgam of oppressed social actors and forces, including contradictory alliances of progressive and reactionary ele­ments within a contingently transformative social “bloc.” Gramsci’s worldview therefore highlighted a politics of articulating forms of po­liti­cal and cultural contradiction as a route to lasting social transformation. Furthermore, for Gramsci, e­ very social actor could become a “philosopher”—­a non-­specialist designation in his thought—in recognizing the conditions of strug­gle necessary for overturning the po­liti­cal hegemony of the ruling class. Phi­los­o­phers could develop a “consciousness full of contradictions, in which the phi­los­o­pher himself, understood both individually and as an entire social group, not merely grasps the contradictions, but posits himself as an ele­ment of the contradiction and elevates this ele­ ment to a princi­ple of knowledge and therefore of action.”25 Phi­los­o­phers could be musician-­philosophers, even the philosopher-­band. Scritti Politti ­were named ­after Gramsci’s Scritti Politici.26 The band’s first single, the dissonant “Skank Bloc Bologna,” self-­released on the band’s own St. Pancras Rec­ords in November 1978, can be heard as a musical expression straining to find the language to represent—­and hold together—­the tensions and contradictions of just such a revolutionary agency. Deliberately structured like a musical collage, each ele­ment CHAPTER FIVE

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Cover of Antonio Gramsci’s Scritti Politici, first Italian edition, 1967.

5.6 

rubbing against another without the stabilizing frame of a harmonious ­whole, it pre­sents listeners with a fundamentally disjointed listening experience. The song flirts with dif­fer­ent musical genres, without committing ­wholeheartedly to any single one: t­ here is a rudimentary dub feel to the rhythm, to the looping bass and rim shots, but the insistent use of the open “hi-­hat” (actually empty metal film cans), the unruly, almost maniacally untutored glockenspiel (or what sounds like a glockenspiel), even some anomalous rock fills, create the sense of a rhythm section at odds with itself. This is even before we consider the angular-­sounding chords strummed on the guitar, which, on beat one, all but obliterate any skanking stroke on beats two and four. This is confusing, our expectation frustrated. Skanking, at least, appears to be at the song’s titular heart.27 Then, on top of all this, the vocals. Gartside has said that he was trying to pack in multiple layers of reference in the song’s lyr­ics, including to sexism, the plight of young p­ eople in inner-­city London, the example of Red Bologna’s civic leftism in the mid-1970s, and a critique of the romantic heroism of the Clash (“Rockers in the town with an overestimation”). ­These

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5.7  Scritti Politti, “Skank Bloc Bologna” (St. Pancras Rec­ords, 1978).

t­ hings ­aren’t communicated in any easily digestible or straightforward way. The song appears to turn around a single figure of a working-­class w ­ oman: about what she is told to do (“Tell her to work at Tesco’s / Tell her to stay at school / Tell her what’s pos­si­ble—­all day derision”); where she goes (“Out in the party pack”); and what she sees and fails to see (“Someone’s got a question that she ­doesn’t want to see”). But this sense of her singularity soon gives way to numerous characterless ­others referred to in the song’s layered, and shifting, refrains: from ­people asking questions and ­others not wanting to know or listen, to ­people with nothing to do or nowhere to go, and t­ hose without an answer, a clue, or hope. Listening to such lyr­ics, one forms an impression of some kind of sprawling, informal investigation, of questions being asked and answers sought, in and around everyday lives—­ and with which official societal organs of information, like the news media, are unable to help (“ ‘Thames at Six’ and it i­ sn’t an answer”). Among all this doubt and uncertainty, one ­thing, “something in Italy”—­Gartside sings reassuringly—is “keeping us all alive.” ­There’s “an attempt,” Gartside says, “to make more reference points in one song than the old-­fashioned way of treating song layout which is like treating songs like having conversations . . . ​recognising that songs a­ ren’t conversations or po­liti­cal tracts, and a new way of writing, of using language is necessary to maximise the potential . . . ​new rules of syntax if you like.”28 Gartside would write only a year ­later that in order for hegemonic society CHAPTER FIVE

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to reproduce itself, “stable, functional ‘communication’ is a ­priority. . . . ​ It must not have ruptures or ceasuras [sic] or inconsistencies. The rules of a society are embodied in the rules of its language. It is through common sense speech that we are reproached and directed.”29 But what sort of a language is uttered in/as “Skank Bloc Bologna”? How are listeners to make its ele­ments add up when the only guide to its “new syntax” is itself an unwieldy “collapsy” accumulation of signifiers: “Skank Bloc Bologna”?30 As Simon Reynolds has so perceptively pointed out, the song’s title is “wonderfully mysterious and evocative,” cramming in references to reggae (“Skank”), to Gramsci’s “alliance of oppressed classes” (the “Bloc”), and to the autonomous activities of urban radicalism in Italy (Red “Bologna” in 1977)—­all in one semantically over­burdened phrase.31 With such an unwieldy “key” for unlocking its logic, “Skank Bloc Bologna” compels listeners to strug­gle, to feel and think their way through its uneven musical soundscape and puzzling lyr­ics, as if becoming some new kind of “listening bloc” in the pro­cess. Or, at least, this is what the song might have hoped for (just like its makers, “livin’ on a notion and t­ hey’re working on a hope”). Equally of course, the song risks alienating a listening public who might be completely turned off by its near-­illegibility (“No one wants to listen and ­there’s no one wants to know”). It was a g­ amble. In an unpublished piece of writing, possibly written for the Young Communist League magazine Challenge around 1978, Gartside outlines the conditions for the creation of a demo­cratic body politic that “Skank Bloc Bologna” other­w ise tries to evoke through ­music and song. ­Here he argues for the necessity of alliances between Left po­liti­cal parties, specifically the Communist Party of ­Great Britain, and the creative forces of diy post-­punk culture: for “­there ­w ill be no revolution without rock ‘n’ roll,” he writes.32 Gartside chides t­ hose on the Left for not being t­ here for punk, at what might be described by Gramsci as an opportune, “conjunctural” moment for creating socialist democracy: 1977. Riffing on the roots reggae band Culture’s famous track, Gartside asks, “Where ­were we when the two sevens clashed?”: “The punk phenomenon was/is a disaggregated collection of ideas, standards and ideals, as ­w ill be any embryonic contra-­hegemonic consciousness. If the youth of the left deny the po­liti­ cal dynamism of such movements ­because they lack a socialist teleology (or immediately identifiable ‘progressive’ tendencies) then no organic mediation ­w ill take place to develop a new (youth) consciousness.” 33 He continues, “The new consciousness must be embodied in everyday social pro­cesses instead of remaining the preserve of party elites or of a

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Scritti Politti, ca. 1981. From left to right: Matthew Kaye, Green Gartside, and Tom Morley. Photographer unknown.

5.8 

discourse . . . ​sufficiently abstracted from everyday life . . . ​as [to be] experienced by ­people as meaningless.”34 Gartside’s approving reference ­here to an “organic” mediation telegraphs his belief in the urgent necessity of creating “alternative popu­lar forms of socialist democracy along the lines suggested by Gramsci”—­the potential for which is already evident to him in the huge numbers of “young ­people involved in the organ­izing, promoting, writing, playing, singing, performing, recording, pressing and distribution of ­music” in punk and post-­punk culture, and in the progressive alliance of white and black ­people created by the cultural fusion of the “punky reggae party.”35 Early Scritti Politti—at least ­until 1979—­actively sought to play their part in engendering such an organic ­people’s movement: by not limiting participation in “their” proj­ect only to the p­ eople who played in a band but also by extending it to ­those who squatted with them on Carol Street in Camden, who ­were members of the Young Communist League, who came to meetings to discuss Marxism, and, through a kind of open-­door policy, t­ hose who turned up at rehearsals, where “­people ­were at liberty to tell me that what­ever I was ­doing was not a good idea or that it was a good idea,” says Gartside.36 “We made ­music as collectively as we could,” Gartside recalls. “We would have meetings as often as we could, endless meetings in which we would discuss every­thing, every­thing was up for discussion, you know, ­every kind of note we played, every­thing we thought we should and s­ houldn’t do.” Such extended participation in the band’s proj­ect, alongside this ceaseless practice of questioning, made Scritti Politti a popu­lar—­though never CHAPTER FIVE

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populist—­kind of enterprise. The band’s governing ethos, though open in princi­ple to all comers, was never in ­favor of easily digestible or familiar forms, and, as such, it h­ adn’t traveled as far as one might think from its Art & Language origins. Gartside’s challenges to the power of established language games back at art school sought to interrupt the smooth flow of institutionalized language use ­there, theory corralled as a resource to question received ways of understanding and appreciating art. It was a belligerent, testy practice of contestation: of pushing customary cir­cuits of language use to the point of breakdown and “incommunicability.”37 So too was Scritti Politti’s working of music-­language: a ceaseless practice of pushing aesthetic and symbolic form to near-­collapse. A publicity photo­graph from 1981 (figure 5.8) shows how the band may have understood this themselves, surrounded by newspapers and language—or as Morley puts it, “by words, representing research, rigour, learning.”38 And in the midst of it all, Gartside proffers an open copy of Desire in Language by Julia Kristeva—so it can be clearly seen what he’s reading—­all while firmly holding the onlooker’s gaze. Gartside remained interested in how to “speak” as a subject, how one could use language without being betrayed by it, right into Scritti’s “new pop” period in the 1980s. Kristeva wrote of desire’s revolutionary capacity for troubling the subject’s assumption into its allotted place in the semiotic system. Gartside feared the language of pop ­music could be co-­opting of this potential. “­There is a difficulty,” Gartside wrote in a 1979 sleeve note, “for productive language in beat ­music where semiotic instability is a norm, is style, but . . . ​and it was a big but”39 His sentence cut right ­there, severed from closure.

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WHY THEORY?

06 “NO MACHOS OR POP-STARS PLEASE” The era of conceptual art—­which was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the ­Women’s Liberation Movement, and the counter-­culture—­was a real free-­for-­ all, and the demo­cratic implications of that phrase are fully appropriate, if never realized. LUCY R. LIPPARD, SIX YEARS (1973)

[The Mekons] may have Never Been in a Riot but ­they’ve certainly been to art school. PETE JOHN, “GRATING GRAF­TERS,” LEEDS STUDENT (1978)

M

ark White recalls taking two trea­sured books to Leeds upon g­ oing to study fine art ­there: Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 and The Whole Earth Cata­log. Even if not literally packed inside his suitcase, they accompanied him “conceptually, as it ­were,” to West Yorkshire and ­were an outward sign of the progressivist educational capital conferred on him by his Sevenoaks schooling. Jon King also recalls The Whole Earth Cata­ log as memorable among the “radical socialist, left-­w ing-­y, hippie kind of ­things . . . ​that w ­ ere left lying around the art department” during his pre-­ university education ­there.

Both the Cata­log and Six Years ­were “how-to” manuals: guides for the creation of alternative, in­de­pen­dent forms of art and living. Lippard’s book was a compendium of the ideas and practices of conceptual, land, and per­for­mance art, which collectively, according to its author, comprised attempts “to escape the frame-­and-­pedestal syndrome in which art found itself by the mid-1960s.”1 The radicalism of such artistic experiments, and the ontology of dematerialized “idea” art that they supposedly exemplified, was seen to inhere in their re­sis­tance to the commodity form and the art market and by extension to the ­whole “greedy sector that owned every­thing [and] that was exploiting the world and promoting the Vietnam war.”2 The Whole Earth Cata­log, though dif­fer­ent in many ways as a Californian counterculture magazine, was nevertheless also compendium-­like: a 450-­ page preinternet resource containing information on ideas, technologies, and methods for creating alternative socie­ties. Printed on cheap paper and proto-­punk in its avowed diy ethos, it furnished the reader with guides to gardening, arts and crafts, mechanics, design, building, and other proj­ects, as well as lists of in­de­pen­dent suppliers of books and materials that might be of use. The Cata­log’s subtitle, simply printed in lowercase letters, was “access to tools.” White and his immediate circle in Leeds—­including t­ hose who had been pupils at Sevenoaks and o­ thers who had not (such as Ros Allen, Bethan Peters, Andy Corrigan, and Jon Langford)—­approached being in a band, and the making of ­music ­after punk, as latter-­day explorations of a type of countercultural transformation at the heart of ­these two volumes. ­W hether consciously or unconsciously referencing them, the creation of bands such as the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5 can be understood as continuing the counterculture’s unfinished proj­ect of self-­determination well into the 1970s, albeit in full recognition of its failings the first time around. White reflects on how innovation in artistic form could be prized for being prefigurative of hoped-­for po­liti­cal alternatives: “I remember being fascinated by Six Years when I was at school and looking at the ways artists w ­ ere breaking down the art object and finding ways of making po­ liti­cal form out of it. I found that fascinating. But,” he goes on, “I never managed to get that to work myself, although I tried quite hard at vari­ous points. The previous art forms it seemed to me ­were irrelevant. Conceptual art seemed to be it, but I could never find a way of getting that form to work.” He remembers talking to Green Gartside in Leeds about his

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6.1  Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Praeger, 1973).

The Last Whole Earth Cata­log (Penguin, 1971). 6.2 

forays into conceptual art at the Polytechnic “and realizing that actually it ­didn’t work [for him] e­ ither.” Conceptual art had seemed to offer a form pregnant with critical potential to late-1960s and early-1970s artists, but by the mid-1970s, it was plain to even its most ardent supporters that its moment had passed. Writing in the postface to Six Years in 1973, Lippard herself sounds a note of disillusionment that would only become more shrill for White and Gartside’s generation a few years ­later: Hopes that “conceptual art” would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively “progressive” approach of modernism ­were for the most part unfounded. It seemed in 1969 . . . ​that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a Xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photo­graphs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a proj­ect for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded; it seemed that ­these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-­orientation. Three years ­later, the major conceptualists are selling work for substantial sums ­here and in Eu­rope; they are represented by (and still more unexpected—­showing in) the world’s most prestigious galleries. Clearly, what­ever minor revolutions in communication have been achieved by the pro­cess of dematerializing the object (easily mailed work, cata­logues and magazine pieces, primarily art that can be shown inexpensively and unobtrusively in infinite locations at one time), art and artist in a cap­it­ al­ist society remain luxuries.3

If, at the point when this was written, conceptualism’s wave had crested, by the mid-1970s it had most certainly crashed. The mix of innovative artistic forms produced at Leeds Polytechnic—­land art, environments, happenings, per­for­mance, idea art, and sound work—­which was raising conservative eyebrows in the early 1970s, in only a few years more began to look like a sign of artistic de­cadence even to self-­declared radicals. It looked like the bourgeois institution of art had withstood the would-be assault upon it by late-1960s artists, their revolutionary impulse now contained, sold out, and newly exploited within mid-1970s art market business-­as-­usual. But punk suggested a way forward—or out: “I suppose you could say,” reflects White, that “the Mekons w ­ ere a way of bringing Six Years and the Cata­log together. . . . ​I think an awful lot of the flailing around we did [as art

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students] was a search for form: What form is our disillusionment ­going to take? Quite how we ended up in bands, I’m not entirely sure. . . . ​We w ­ ere just flailing around trying to find some form that would represent, or bear witness to disillusion. Certainly this is what the Mekons w ­ ere d­ oing. . . . ​We never had the confidence that what we had to say would make any difference. . . . ​But we knew we had to say it.” Such an avowal of “flailing” around, and of one’s lack of confidence in the ability to change t­ hings, hardly amounts to a normative, thrusting construction of heterosexual masculinity and falls far short of an activist faith in transformative capacities of action. It is also the reason why the Mekons have frequently been viewed as blasted and defeated, even gloriously so, by their most supportive fans and critics. They are like “casualties of a defeated revolution,” writes Greil Marcus some years ­after punk rock fizzled and died. “­They’re like any losers who’ve won the gift of history,” only to find that it “reached its turning point and failed to turn.”4 Their first, shambolic-­sounding, single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was already talisman of what we might call their “given-­ness-­to-­lose,” released less than a week ­after John Lydon laughingly chided audience members at the last Sex Pistols gig on January 14, 1978: “Ever get the feeling y­ ou’ve been cheated?” The song is usually compared to the Clash’s ferocious “White Riot,” in which Joe Strummer aggressively sings of his desire for a “white riot” comparable to the black street re­sis­tance to heavy-­handed policing he witnessed at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. The Mekons, by contrast, sing, “I’ve never been in a riot / Never been in a fight / I’m always in the toilet / Missing out the noise.” ­Here the lyr­ics (penned by White) paint a picture of the band’s characteristically bathetic or deflated subjectivity, their seeming inability to rise to the call of history, or what Jon Langford has described, in another register, as their “art school wimpiness.”5 Elsewhere, in songs like “Where W ­ ere You?” or “­After 6,” the focus is on frustrated desire and the consolations of drink, even—­pathetically—­when that drink is a cup of tea (“­Kettle on and sit right down”). In “Dan Dare,” the sublimity and Otherness of outer space gives way to forlorn fantasy of how “nice” it would be to escape the earthly daily grind: “Outer space got no work / I ­don’t want to be a cosmic clerk / Outer space it’s a ­really nice place / Dan Dare—oh yeah.” But “the paradox of the Mekons’ m ­ usic,” Marcus writes, “is that their pathetic oppression . . . ​is never solipsistic.”6 What saves such songs from being an expression of abject powerlessness, even of despair, is that each

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Cover image of the Mekons, “Never Been in a Riot” (Fast Product, 1978).

6.3 

“is an attempt to find someone to talk to . . . ​to live not as an object but as a subject of history, even when that history has passed you by.”7 Or to put it a dif­fer­ent way: thinking too one-­dimensionally about the Mekons’ purported “failures” can blind us to their sustained exploration of the dialectics of group participation, where the hope for social change mingles with hard-­headed recognition of the forces that might block it. ­After painting, ­after per­for­mance art, even ­after punk: it is the social, relational form of “the band” that White and his compatriots mine the possibilities thereof. Their per­sis­tent attempts to talk to, and connect with, ­others through a peculiarly “open” iteration of the band structure is the form of the Mekons’ art—­decades before the advent of “relational aesthetics.”

NETWORKED GROUPS

During 1977 bands came together in the Leeds University art milieu within small, overlapping coteries of friends and involved the sharing and making—­and sometimes stealing—of equipment necessary for visual artists to begin playing ­music. Jon King recalls members of the Mekons and Gang of Four building their own pa system from scratch: “We ­were all sort of a gang, and we de­cided to build a pa system. Corrigan was the locus of

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this. First of all we got a book on how to build a pa at the library.” Andy Gill continues: We’d all chip in a c­ ouple of quid, and Corrigan would go and buy some speakers [from a military surplus store in Leeds] that had been used to broadcast ­under the wings of aircraft, propaganda or something, and literally military grade. We got them out of their enclosures and fitted them into speaker cabinets that Jon and I made out of old wardrobes. We literally flared the wood using a ­kettle, steaming—­sounds like I’m making this up—­and one of us would hold the wood over the ­kettle, and bend it, and it worked! We got the horns, flared horns. And mounted t­ hese speakers from the plane in them. And they worked brilliantly.

King says, “Corrigan and I, ­because he and I could both solder, we made the fuse for our amplifier out of a cigarette end and a wire, which we pulled out of a wire brush, that was the fuse.” The diy creation of their own pa was undertaken so they could put on their own gigs and so “we d­ idn’t have to r­ eally ask anybody for anything,” notes Gill. The demonstration of self-­reliance and in­de­pen­dent resourcing that went into building it—­“it’s that sort of Whole Earth cata­logue approach,” White reflects, “which allowed us to do that.” As regards musical instruments, some w ­ ere purchased cheaply, o­ thers stolen, most w ­ ere shared: “We’d acquired quite a lot of stuff,” King recalls. “It was a hassle to Hugo b­ ecause he was a genius at nicking stuff. He would go into a m ­ usic shop with a big art portfolio and take a splash cymbal off the shelf and just walk out. He was amazing at stealing! And we’d all share every­thing. We ­weren’t very proprietorial about t­ hese t­ hings. How could we be? Half of it had been nicked in the first place. And we had a Ford Transit van. . . . ​We lent it to anybody.” This sharing ethos also extended to the use of rehearsal space, which, as Jim Dooley tells it, was how the Mekons originally started out, taking advantage of the empty room and cast-­aside instruments during Gang of Four’s breaks from music-­making.8 By 1979 both bands shared the upstairs room in a ware­house space on Wharf Street in Leeds city center, additionally shared with Impact Theatre Cooperative, which only increased the level of infrastructural codependence between the bands (figure 6.4). Such ready “access to tools” also provided the opportunity that Bethan Peters and Julz Sale needed to establish Delta 5. Sale recalls, “It was basically Bethan and I that formed the band. We ­were the girlfriends [of White and Greenhalgh, respectively] ­going to the gigs, and we thought, well, sod this! . . . ​They had CHAPTER SIX

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6.4  Delta 5 in the Wharf Street rehearsal room, 1979. From left to right: Kelvin Knight, Ros Allen, and Alan Riggs (with Wilko Johnson cutout). Courtesy of Ros Allen.

rehearsal ­every night, they shared their instruments a bit, and we said well why ­don’t we do it? We ­don’t always have to be the girlfriends, do we? I ­didn’t know that Bethan could play anything. I was like, punk, hey, let’s do it! So that’s how it started.” Sale lived alongside Lesley Stiles and Marian Lux in Cromer House, a large privately rented Victorian property on the edge of the university campus, where King, White, and Corrigan also rented rooms. The ­house, along with another with multiple-­student occupancy in which Andy Gill and ­others lived, points to the near-­communal domestic arrangements underpinning membership of the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5.9 Their friendships and sexual relationships led to an expanded and shifting iteration of the pop group structure. Th ­ ere was some deliberate intention in ­doing this in the first instance, it seems, at least if the naming of Delta 5 is anything to go by. Ros Allen recalls that “Delta” was chosen b­ ecause it suggested a close relationship to both the Mekons and Gang of Four—as in the Viet­nam­ese network of rivers in the “Mekong Delta,” and delta being the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. That t­ here w ­ ere five band members made them Delta 5. “It was all very interconnected,” remembers Peters. “We ­were all ­going out with each other, mixed up like a big huge group

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of friends.”10 Corrigan additionally recalls, “We used to have a ­thing called the Mekon Delta 5 which was a sort of combo of ­people from the Mekons and Gang of Four and Delta 5. We would go out in any combination of ­people and do benefits and gigs. I can remember we headlined a fireman’s benefit at the Poly. . . . ​Dave Allen played the bass for that.” This invariably involved p­ eople switching roles and instruments between the more “distinct” band formations, challenging not only the integrity of each band’s identity but also the priority of musical competence gained therein. “I played drums on the first ­couple of Mekons shows,” Gill says, “just before Jon Langford was involved. And I’m not the world’s best drummer. But that w ­ asn’t the point.” Such porousness of band limits also extended to rec­ord covers, with Mekon Langford, for example, providing the artwork for Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business” and “Anticipation” singles (figure 6.5). Also, in the quasi-­Warholian repetitions of an image of a monkey with a typewriter on the back cover of the Mekons’ first ­album, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen (1979), we find, perhaps somewhat mischievously, an image of Gang of Four—as if to suggest that even an animal’s creative perseverance could ultimately reward it with Gang of Four levels of success (figure 6.6). Above all, though, carry­ing the image of a fellow band on your maiden a­ lbum voyage has to be read as a deliberate, public statement of affiliation with them (despite the disinformation circulating on the internet, which holds that the Gang of Four image was inserted in error by Virgin’s art department).11 The readiness of members of one band to work ­under the name of their close compatriots, or to have another band’s image appear in the artwork of their first release, demonstrates how the Leeds University groups, despite differences between them, favored a kind of open, networked, or affiliate structure of local creativity (Gang of Four, for their part, had already waved “Hello to Mekons” some two months e­ arlier on the inner sleeve of Entertainment!). The importance of such an expanded collective found its correlative in early attempts by the Mekons and Delta 5 to suppress individual band member identities, particularly as required by the m ­ usic press and the marketing imperatives of the m ­ usic industry. Members of both bands refused surnames when dealing with journalists, preferring instead to be referred to simply as, for example, Ros Mekon or Alan Delta 5. The Mekons, at the outset, even refused to be photographed, providing images of makeshift mannequins to the nme in lieu of any ­actual image of the band (figure 6.7), or appearing in photo­graphs with their friends in Melody Maker (figure 6.8) CHAPTER SIX

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Delta 5, “Anticipation” (Rough Trade, 1980). Cover illustration: Jon Langford.

6.5 

Back cover of the Mekons, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen (Virgin Rec­ords, 1979).

6.6 

in what was to become a failed attempt to fend off the industry compulsion for a band to have a unique “look.”12 Arguably a failure ­because, as Phil Sutcliffe tells it, in 1978 “nme and Sounds both issued them ‘No picture, no feature’ ultimata,” and the band had to “surrender the point.”13 But the following year, the band still seemed to be holding out for their princi­ ples when being photographed for the ­music press. ­Either they appeared through individual profile portraits, labeled in the manner of “Kevin Guitar Mekon” (figure 6.9) or “Mary Bass Mekon,” or, when they ­were pictured as a group, they rarely seemed to pose for the photographer, leaving him/her/ them to snap an image on the wing in the hope that it might capture them in toto. A caption in the nme on March 3 reads, “The Mekons line-up squeezes into the same pic. Just.”14 Such playful attempts to refuse posed images of the collective—­which might other­wise be readily fetishized by rock fans—­continue on the inner sleeve of The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen. The photography ­there decisively frustrates band worship by dint of being willfully grainy, blurry, and unspectacular. Four equally underwhelming images show what looks like a bunch of mates on a jolly rather than a rock band on the road (though admittedly the distinction might be a fine one)—­the images taken during a journey to Dublin to play at the opening of the Proj­ect Arts Centre. ­Here the band do pose for the camera, even making playful grins and expressions. But this is not to aid fans in identifying with individual characters, like “goofy” Paul or “cool” George on the cover of A Hard Day’s Night. Though it is pos­si­ble to identify some individuals more than once across the four photos, it is actually quite difficult to be sure, for ­there is no listing of band membership, no names given anywhere on the ­album’s packaging (which marks out a difference from the naming of individuals in the ­music press). ­After some digging, I have, through the per­sis­tence of scholarship, identified all pictured as (from left to right in the lower group portrait in figure 6.10): Mary Jenner (bass); Kevin Lycett (guitar); Tim Collins (soundman); Tom Greenhalgh (guitar); Phil Allen (roadie); Mick Wixey (man­ag­er); and Andy Corrigan (vocals). Other images on the sleeve also show Mark White (vocals) and Jon Langford (drums). That ­these images include the band’s roadie, their soundperson, and man­ag­er—­ usually counted as behind-­the-­scenes “support” staff and rarely, if ever, accorded equal visibility and value as “artists”—is further indication of the Mekons’ attempt to fashion a more demo­cratic, less hierarchical iteration of the band structure.

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“A Mekon publicity pic (the individual is not impor­ tant),” New Musical Express, August 1978. 6.7 

6.8  “The Mekons” among fans and friends as pictured in Melody Maker, February 3, 1979. Non-­Mekons members Joan Dawson (second from left) and Bethan Peters of Delta 5 (third from left) alongside Mekons regulars Jon Langford (third from right), Mick Wixey (second from right), and Kevin Lycett (far right). Photo: © Jill Furmanovsky Archive. 6.9  “Kevin Guitar Mekon,” New Musical Express, March 3, 1979. Photo: © Pennie Smith.

6.10 

Detail of the inside sleeve of the Mekons, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen.

SELF-­ACTIVITY AND RADICAL ORGAN­IZATION

Such expression of a collectivist ethos might usefully be understood in the context of Leeds’s radical activism. As scholar Tom Steele has argued, socialism, feminism, and aesthetic radicalism had deep roots in the city since at least the late nineteenth ­century, and, as a consequence of the 1960s counterculture, “other social movements flourished in Leeds including the Peace movement, Anti-­A partheid, civil rights and environmentalism.”15 What Steele calls the “Alternative Left” of the 1970s developed and extended the work of such forebears by founding numerous collective and cooperative organ­izations, including community theater group Interplay (established 1970); the Industrial Common Owner­ship Movement (icom) (established 1971), with a national training center at Beechwood College; Leeds Federated Housing Association (established 1974); the Leeds Other Paper (lop) (first published in January 1974); suma, the whole-­food group (established 1977); the feminist film group Leeds Animation Workshop (established 1978); Leeds Postcards (established 1979); and Impact Theatre Cooperative (established 1979). Red Ladder, originally a London-­based socialist theater com­pany, also permanently relocated to Leeds in 1976, adding to the critical mass of collectivist initiatives ­there.

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What made ­these vari­ous, in some ways incommensurate, organizations coalesce u­ nder the banner “alternative” was their investment in autonomous and in­de­pen­dent forms of activity: alternative to, or in­de­pen­dent of, established forms of party politics (such as the ­Labour Party or Communist Party of G ­ reat Britain), economic and cultural production, and learning and education. They generally favored local forms of participation as opposed to London-­based national organ­izations and international business models, though they w ­ ere often invested in alternative expressions of international16 ism. Alternative organ­izations ­were also broadly accepting of an ethos of experiment and amateurism in their approach to getting ­things done, and they privileged popu­lar democracy and the social owner­ship of enterprise. As John Quail, participant in the Leeds alternative press, puts it, “The participants [within lop] w ­ ere generally from the anarchist/libertarian socialist milieu but the approach was non-­sectarian and focused on ‘the self-­activity of the ­people’ from community campaigns, through new ­music and cultural happenings to industrial actions and local po­liti­cal shenanigans.”17 The “self-­activity of the p­ eople” was held up by many in such enterprises as the paramount aim and virtue of radical forms of collective organ­ization. The Greek phi­los­o­pher Cornelius Castoriadis was influential in the city at the time by providing a strong argument for the desirability of non-­ hierarchical forms of po­liti­cal organ­ization. The En­glish translation of Castoriadis’s Modern Capitalism and Revolution was republished in 1974 by the libertarian socialist organ­ization Solidarity, ­under the pseudonymous authorial identity of Paul Cardan. Its critique of orthodox Marxism from an anarcho-­Left perspective was red meat to ­those wanting to push past the limitations of existing Left organ­izations. Castoriadis critiqued bureaucratization as a key ill within the development of postwar capitalism: “Bureaucratization,” he wrote, “implies the ‘organ­ization’ and ‘rationalization’ of all collective activity from the outside. To the extent that it succeeds, it completes a pro­cess started by an ­earlier phase of capitalism: it renders all social life meaningless. It produces mass irresponsibility. Individuals begin to seek private solutions to private prob­lems. This is the inevitable corollary of bureaucratization.”18 Bureaucratized capitalism was thus held responsible for turning politics into the daily practice of only an elite class of specialists (government ministers, business leaders, trade unionists, po­liti­cal party members) while alienating the vast majority of ­people from it, leading ultimately to working-­class apathy and powerlessness. The answer to such a parlous state of po­liti­cal affairs, as far as Castoriadis saw it, was to rebuild

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a revolutionary po­liti­cal movement “from rock bottom” and to break radically from “all pre­sent organ­izations, their ideology, their mentality, their methods of action.”19 In aiming for the self-­management of production and of society by all its members (Castoriadis’s very definition of socialism), the necessity was to combat hierarchy wherever it was encountered as “the last ideological support for the ­whole cap­i­tal­ist system”—­even, or perhaps especially, when such hierarchies ­were to be found in workers’ organ­izations themselves.20 “I ­w ouldn’t say that other groups necessarily coalesced around [Castoriadis],” Gordon Wilson, another onetime member of the lop collective, recalls. “We felt ourselves as [only] one of a large number of ­leftist ­tendencies. . . . ​But we did see ourselves as committed to community strug­gles and workers’ strug­gles but also trying to maintain a fierce in­de­pen­dence from it all at the same time. Which ­wasn’t an easy line to tread.” In the context of such po­liti­cal ideas and practices, articles of art school faith left from more optimistic times in the de­cade prior c­ ouldn’t hope to retain their allure for fellow travelers of such thinking located in the art world. Cybernetic hopes carried by the notion of an artwork as organism or system, libertarian ones underpinning forms of unfettered individual expression, or faith in the radical potential of conceptual art—­all had, it seems, by this time largely found­ered on the rocky shores of bureaucratized real­ity. Appearing by the mid-1970s as expression of ­either a discredited technocratic elite and its totalizing systems of power and control (the machine work) or the atomized forms of disempowered individuals among the mass (the monadic work), or, as Lippard suggests, as simply marketized real­ity (the commodified immaterial work), hitherto radical models of art production looked shorn of relevance in a culture placing such a high priority on demo­cratic, collective forms of self-­determination. ­After punk, both the gallery world and the art schools allied to them began to look irredeemably elitist, unable to communicate with, or give expression to, the large youth audiences other­w ise electrified outside of them by groups such as the Sex Pistols and their ilk. Enter: the band-­work.

EQUAL BUT DIF­FER­ENT

As the Mekons, Gang of Four, and Delta 5 began to draw away from the art world—­hitherto the main cultural reference point for the largest number of p­ eople in ­these groups—­they transposed avant-­garde approaches to CHAPTER SIX

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The Mekons, ca. 1978: Mark White (left) and Andy Corrigan (right). Photo: Jane Ralley. 6.11 

art-­making, and a broadly critical outlook on established conventions, to the world of rock. ­Music industry standards, rather than visual art world conventions, thereby came to the fore as objects of criticism. Perhaps paramount among t­ hese w ­ ere hierarchical group structures in which the single white male—­usually in the shape of the lead singer—­formed the apex of a triangle, symbolically and even sometimes managerially, lording it over other band members and, in turn, the fans below them at its base. “Part of [our] disillusion was rooted in a deep distrust of the single white male authorial voice,” says White—­which, by 1975, had accrued po­liti­cally toxic cultural baggage still not totally dispelled by punk. In the wake of David Bowie’s now infamous predictions of fascist leadership for Eu­rope in 1975, and his ramblings about Hitler as “the first rock star,” Ziggy-­like front men, Thin White Dukes and their ilk had come to be viewed with trepidation— at least in certain po­liti­cally committed circles.21 All of this influenced the Mekons’ decision to sport two vocalists—­W hite and Corrigan—­rather than one, on the understanding, presumably, that more than one singer (or leader) secures a greater likelihood, if not guarantee, of remaining open to

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dissent and difference. Similarly, as Marcus notes of a live per­for­mance of the band, Delta 5 also troubled the usual singular focus on a lead singer: “[ Julz] d­ oesn’t work from the center of the stage, and she’s not the lead singer—no one is, and Bethan prob­ably does more of the singing than Julz. . . . ​Julz ­counters Bethan’s stare and completes it.”22 This attempt to deemphasize singular band members and the hero worship that could follow from it was also habitually tried out in Delta 5 per­ for­mances of “Triangle,” for example, where Sale and Allen would switch places between vocals and bass playing, or in Gang of Four per­for­mances of “It’s Her Factory,” where Burnham would typically deliver vocals, with Gill swapping drums for his customary guitar. ­W hether this worked in achieving the desired effect, however, is a moot point. ­W hether the striking impression of, for example, Gill’s Wilko Johnson–­esque stage theatrics could be countermanded by such minimal switching around of personnel is doubtful. And ­whether such changes worked to enhance the audience experience of the live event is also questionable. As one Leeds Other Paper reviewer of Delta 5 put it, “the interchanging of roles between the bass players and the lead singer . . . ​may have been a positive attempt to destroy traditional rock band formats, [but] it resulted merely in slowing the pace of the set.”23 Nevertheless, destroying “traditional rock band formats” was an impor­ tant feminist priority in the Leeds milieu. Julz Sale recalls: “Bethan and I noted that most w ­ omen who w ­ ere involved [in rock bands], if they w ­ eren’t the singer, they ­were the bass player. We wanted to play on that by having two basses: Ros was a bass player, and Bethan was a bass player. . . . ​We wanted to take the piss out of the fact that nearly e­ very punk band, or band around, that had a female in it, always played the bass.” As Helen Reddington has shown, the singling out of female instrumentalists in the ­music press of the time was often driven by the agendas of male journalists, usually resulting in patronizing or eroticized approaches to their contribution as female artists.24 One par­tic­ul­ ar issue of the nme from 1978 (figure 6.12) shows Gaye Black of the Adverts, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, and Ghislaine Weston of the Killjoys—­all bass players—­and the only photo­ graphs carried, ironically enough, on page three. Th ­ ere was an industry pattern not only to female participation in punk and new wave m ­ usic but also to the ways in which that participation was viewed and valued. It is hard to escape the notion, however, that perhaps the most striking example of the “only-­female-­as-­bassist-­syndrome” was sitting right in their lap in the Leeds milieu: the Mekons. Even though a most unusual CHAPTER SIX

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6.12 

Page 3 of New Musical Express, June 29, 1978.

rock outfit, unwieldy and expanded in terms of membership, as I have argued, t­ here was only one female Mekon during the band’s early years and she played bass: first Ros Allen, then Mary Jenner. Given the numerousness of the band’s overall membership, and the single female presence among them, it was almost as if the Mekons had taken a highlighter pen to pop ­music’s strictures on female participation.25 True, Allen’s and Jenner’s self-­ presentational and per­for­mance styles ­were very far indeed from a Suzi Quatro–­esque “rock chick” and even some distance from that of a Gaye Advert or a Ghislaine Weston. But the very fact that Allen became available to play in Delta 5 almost immediately ­after leaving the Mekons, at a time when Peters and Sale ­were thinking about forming a band that departed from the customary gendered structuring of rock band membership, was perhaps a synchronicity, an irony, too sweet to resist. Once in the band, it was impor­tant, Sale says, that Peters and Allen “had very, very dif­fer­ent sounds. Bethan’s was almost like a treble. Ros said she wanted hers so deep that it made you fart when it came out of the amplifier.”

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Playing off a “toppy” bass against a “bottom-­y ” one became trademark Delta 5 sound, which can be heard especially clearly on tracks “Mind Your Own Business” and “Anticipation.” This bass-­heavy sound underlined the band’s commitment to create a pulsing dance ­music, which also involved angular, spiky guitars and tumbling drums: “We’ve always been into the ­whole happy funky m ­ usic t­ hing and that’s very bass orientated,” says Peters.26 Allen remembers Peters in par­tic­u­lar being a big Parliament-­Funkadelic fan, while Allen listened to a lot of Bob Marley and the Wailers (though “I think I wanted to be more like Jah Wobble,” she says). As with Gang of Four, funk and reggae, alongside the Velvet Under­ground, provided further ideas for the formal composition of Delta 5’s ­music. “I’ve got a ­thing about held guitar notes,” Allen goes on. “­There’s a Velvet Under­ground song that does it, and they [the Wailers] do it on ‘Concrete Jungle.’ Something about that is just amazing.” This can be heard on Delta 5 tracks “Now That ­You’ve Gone” and “Make Up,” the former also reprising the off-­beat explorations so favored by Gang of Four. In addition to the novel sound of two basses, the band’s membership comprising three ­women and two men made them an unusual proposition in the late 1970s. It was on the basis of this that many took Delta 5 to be a band with a female or feminist agenda. Peters says, “Every­one called us a ­women’s band, which is kind of a misinterpretation, b­ ecause we always had two guys in the group.”27 This impression was also fostered by the fact that Delta 5’s vocals w ­ ere routinely—­and collectively—­female and that their lyrical content appeared to fulfill the feminist “personal is po­liti­cal” man­tra by addressing the micropolitics of interpersonal relationships. Songs like “Try” included lines that could be read without much effort as reflections on power strug­gles within sexual and romantic relationships: You ­don’t want to understand Try try You want me to agree with you Try try I tried and we got nowhere Try try You want to hear echoes You ­don’t see what I see [Repeat] Try try On first hearing, one might take this to be a heterosexual complaint song, the female vocal taking aim at a presumptively chauvinistic masculinity and CHAPTER SIX

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its typical refusal to recognize and accommodate difference—­especially when that difference is ­woman. The call-­and-­response structure of the song can be heard as an injunction to its presumptive male addressee to listen, to try to hear the singer’s point of view, acknowledge her desire and input into the discussion—­rather than only hearing “echoes” (of himself). Though, upon listening again, “Try! Try!” could also be heard as sometimes addressed to the singing subject herself (to which she responds, “I tried and we got nowhere”), as if we are hearing an at least partially internal monologue about just how trying attempts at communication are with her blinkered partner. Or, differently again, the lyr­ics actually speak an exchange, or a quarrel, between two ­people of dif­fer­ent, same, or indeterminate sex or gender ([Call] “Try! Try!” [Response] “I tried and we got nowhere”). As Lucy O’Brien puts it, Delta 5 thereby “took the call-­and-­ response sound of the ’60s girl group era and deconstructed it with caustic humour. . . . ​Much of Delta 5’s oeuvre was about the gulf between expectation and real­ity, the hit and miss nature of relationships, a sense of estrangement from the romantic ideal.”28 Marcus similarly characterizes the band’s output as “postpunk love songs. . . . ​The m ­ usic could almost be derived from the ­little dissertation on The Love Song as a Staple of Pop Language that Andy Gill read out of the murk of Gang of Four’s ‘Anthrax’ (‘You occasionally won­der why all t­ hese groups do sing about it all the time . . .’). Delta 5 continue questioning the love song without abandoning its form—­ but they fool with it.”29 Regardless of how exactly the band’s lyr­ics are read, they undoubtedly make legible the gendered power operating within personal relationships and how, played out within intimate exchanges, this renders problematic the valorization of “debate” elsewhere in the Leeds art-­punk milieu. The lyrics bring forth a troubling recognition that the ability to hear and value the opinions of ­others, especially ­those of ­women, ­couldn’t at all be taken for granted within 1970s patriarchal society. If “You ­don’t see what I see” is a statement of frustration, highlighting an inability to be heard, then it signals a troubling discursive bar to group participation if someone even refuses to see your point of view, let alone agree with you. Elsewhere, on “Mind Your Own Business,” they sing, “Listen to the distance between us,” as if the ­music of Delta 5, the ­thing heard if we succumb to the singer’s injunction, might be the sound of that distance. “Delta 5 songs are about distance between p­ eople,” writes Marcus. “They d­ on’t so much try to close t­ hose distances as make sense of them.”30 In d­ oing so their songs can be read as calling out the blindness to sexist be­hav­ior, oftentimes in unexpectedly

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funny ways, as in “You” (“Who took me to the Wimpy for a big night out? you! you! you!”). Other con­temporary Leeds University bands, like Sheeny and the Goys, had a similar mixed-­gender membership and w ­ ere informed by a playful feminist outlook—­though very unlike Delta 5 musically. Their name telegraphed not only a self-­consciousness of the band’s gendered makeup (one ­woman and four men) but also an assertion of Marian Lux’s Jewishness, in punk reappropriation of the anti-­Semitic slur “Sheeny,” distinguishing her ethnically from her gentile brethren (“the goys”). In original Sheeny songs like “You Let Me Down,” t­ here is a similar accusatory address to some of the Delta 5 songs (even though reportedly a song about the ending of a friendship between two w ­ omen), and clear feminist import of songs such as “(Ever Such) Pretty Girls” (referring to her m ­ other Lux sings, “She d­ idn’t tell me / That they d­ on’t like clever girls / Cos they like / Pretty Girls”). When advertising in Leeds Student for a replacement for John France on guitar in 1979, a­ fter he had left the city, Sheeny and the Goys unmistakably asserted what had by then become fundamental values in the university band milieu: “No machos or pop-­stars please.”31 But the brand of personal/gender politics that manifested therein was largely inclusivist, resistant to some of the more separatist forms of feminism beginning to develop elsewhere in the city at the time. The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, soon to be a nationally significant separatist group, emerged with the organ­ization of the first Reclaim the Night march in Leeds in November 1977: a response to police suggesting “curfews” for ­women at night, in a wrongheaded response to the reign of violent terror by Peter Sutcliffe, the so-­called Yorkshire Ripper. “­There was a feeling,” writes O’Brien in an evocative essay on the period, “that the macho male society which spawned Peter Sutcliffe tacitly condoned his activities, that ­there w ­ ere ‘innocent’ w ­ omen and prostitutes, the deserving and the undeserving” (Sutcliffe’s first victims ­were almost exclusively prostitutes).32 But whereas revolutionary feminism saw the po­liti­cal answer to male vio­ lence in the creation of women-­only spaces and the rejection of sexual and romantic relationships with men, sometimes in the name of “po­liti­cal” lesbianism, the late-1970s social milieu of Leeds art-­music was still largely integrated. The fact that bands with female members also counted men among their number (women-­only bands ­didn’t emerge in the city ­until the 1980s) tended to preclude such separatist politics. Per­for­mance art had

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also provided some w ­ omen in bands occasions for renegotiating gender relationships with men—for example, when Lux and Polytechnic student Alan Wilkinson painted each other nude for a live audience in the university’s debating chamber in November 1977.33 Ros Allen also recalls seeing nonnormative per­for­mances of masculinity by men as enabling for female agency: “I think what followed on from the punk t­ hing was this notion that anybody could get up and perform. Certainly, ­going to the Poly and seeing Frank Tovey and Marc Almond ­doing per­for­mance pieces . . . ​­there was some feeling that you could try anything. It’s difficult to say ­because the social surroundings ­weren’t very conducive, but it was incredible: you ­didn’t have to be able to play or read ­music to perform m ­ usic, and you ­didn’t have to be a bloke. ­There was a lovely mish-­mash of dif­fer­ent cultures and disciplines coming together at that time.” But “­there ­were lots of separatist feminists, and they ­were scary,” remembers Sale. “We ­were not affiliated with any feminist group. We did what we did. I ­don’t think that we ­were intentionally po­liti­cal.” Not that this understanding was necessarily shared by ­those in the audience at early Delta 5 gigs. It is easy to imagine how songs such as “Shadow,” and particularly the live favorite “Alone”—­w ith insistent lyrical assertion of a female need for the refuge of her own solitariness—­would have resonated strongly in the context of misogynist and violent forms of gendered relations in late-1970s public space.34 Sounds branded the band “Alone Together” on its cover in the summer of 1980 (figure 6.14). But, Sale goes on, “I think ­people have seen [Delta 5] in many ways that ­weren’t so strongly intended,” and, echoing the lyrical content of Birmingham-­based group the Au Pairs (“­You’re equal but dif­fer­ent”), she tells me, “I’ve always thought of myself as an equalist rather than a feminist.” Alan Riggs further pursues the point: “I think ­there was a shared understanding [in Delta 5] but I ­don’t know if we had a word for it at the time. I ­don’t know if we ever asked ourselves, ‘Are we feminists or are we not feminists?’ It was just, w ­ e’re all in it together.” Or, again, as Kelvin Knight writes in retrospect in 2006, “We ­were once asked to do a ‘­women only’ benefit in Leeds, which ­really was a step too far—­what ­were Al and me supposed to do, play b­ ehind a curtain? It was an age when sexism came to the fore and ­women in bands became the norm not a gimmick and quite rightly we ­were proud to stand alongside The Au Pairs, The Slits, The Bush Tetras, The Raincoats and so many ­others who changed ­things forever, but it ­wasn’t our reason for being—we just wanted to make ­people dance. End of.”35

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Delta 5, from left to right: Alan Riggs, Julz Sale, and Bethan Peters. Courtesy of Ros Allen. 6.13 

6.14  “Alone Together,” Delta 5 (Bethan Peters and Ros Allen) on the cover of Sounds, August 2, 1980.

A LESSON IN CONTRADICTIONS

The Mekons shared much of this partying, egalitarian ethos. “It was deliberate on our part that if anybody sneezed when they ­were in the rehearsal room we’d say they w ­ ere in the band,” recalls Lycett. “We ­were very open and inclusive. When we ­were recording if we thought somebody had something in­ter­est­ing to contribute we’d say, ‘Do you want to come along?’ ­There was a small core of about six ­people . . . ​but it was an open ­table.” Alongside such permissive access to rehearsals, the Mekons extended a similar open invitation for ­people to join them live onstage. White says: The big t­ hing about punk that p­ eople forget is that it w ­ asn’t just the band . . . ​ it was every­body. ­There ­were a lot of ­people in the Mekons, deliberately. ­There ­were an awful lot of p­ eople working with us, and we w ­ ere all the same. We w ­ ere all of equal weight. Also we saw ourselves as exactly the same as the audience. We ­were the audience. Often ­there ­were more ­people on stage than ­there ­were in the audience. But we ­were all on the same level, ­there was no barrier. ­There ­wasn’t a sense of an unequal balance of power, which is what we saw in the rest of the world.

Such an avowed commitment to an open-­access, commons-­type construction of band identity can be seen as a latter-­day attempt to realize the full “demo­cratic implications” of the “free-­for-­all” that Lippard saw as the unfinished business of the 1960s counterculture.36 The hope was that in vacating the stage as individual performers—­symbolically and sometimes in actuality—­the Mekons would provide an opportunity for ­people to liberate themselves from the atomized conditions of pop consumerism and divisive music-­industry hierarchies of “stars” and “fans.” Newly presented in this way, the Mekons’ stage would become a platform for the creation of a shared, socialized—if not socialist—­art form. Its operating egalitarian presumption: “Anybody watching us can do this too.”37 However, as the m ­ usic press w ­ ere quick to point out, such an idea was fine to propose in theory but difficult to maintain in rock practice. Once the open-­mic scenario was actually presented, members of the crowd sometimes took to the stage and started strutting, pretending to be stars, and other­wise lorded it over their onlookers—­thereby theatrically reinstalling the hierarchy of band over audience that permissive participation was designed to eradicate in the first place. Perhaps this showed just how far the Mekons had traveled from The Whole Earth Cata­log: that all you needed

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was “access to tools.” In 1979 they told Mary Harron, “We used to think that anyone could get up and do anything. But when that happens, and the audience comes on stage, you ­either get a horrible boring mess, or you get p­ eople playing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on the guitar, or pretending to be Blondie on the microphone. . . . ​To think that by opening up the equipment you thereby open up the ideology is just ridicu­lous.”38 But rather than proof of the inadequacy of their originary assumptions—­ and evidence of yet another Mekons failure—­the lack of fit between the band’s aspirations and the real­ity of their audiences’ be­hav­ior can be seen more positively as acknowl­edgment of the contradictions arising from being mired in cap­it­ al­ist conditions while, at the same time, striving to surpass them. Harron herself astutely summed this up in the pages of Melody Maker: “In the end the Mekons are a lesson in contradictions. About trying to work without hierarchies in a situation that imposes them, about trying to work from an ideological basis when rock m ­ usic, at its heart, has a mindless passion and energy that blows theory apart.”39 That in all their unruly, chaotic multiplicity, and the contradictions that dog their wouldbe progressive path forward, they teach us how to confront, if not fi­nally surmount, the stratification and social division that holds us back—­and to which we become inured.

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07 ELECTRIC SHOCK Fad is crying out loud at the deadening of sensibilities. PAUL MORLEY, “FADFOOLERY AND FRANK CONFESSIONS” (1982)

T

he Polytechnic art studios ­were steeped in the ethos of early twentieth-­century avant-­gardism. The “Leeds experiment” owed much to the achievements of turn-­ of-­the-­century Eu­ro­pean Modernism during the 1950s and 1960s, and throughout the 1970s Jeff Nuttall acted as proselytizer-­in-­chief for the virtues of Western avant-­ gardism right up ­until departing his lecturing post in 1980. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s infamous cele­bration of the use of macho vio­lence by Futurist artists (“Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man”) found clear echoes in Nuttall’s conception of per­for­mance art’s disruptive potential.1 Stemming from his ultimate disappointment with the 1960s countercultural revolution (“The Vietnam War was being permitted. I was unhappily wed.”), Nuttall wrote retrospectively in 1979, It’s one ­thing to watch a riot from the fifth floor of a building. It’s another to find yourself caught up in it. I wanted to conduct exactly this sort of excitement, to involve the public in the riot, not give them a safe viewpoint. . . . ​ I wanted to smash the impenetrable glass bulbs in which ­people ­housed their apathy. I was livid with rage and unspent energy and wanted to inflict it in order to energise the world at large. . . . ​I was not interested in any

theatre that gave ­people the immunity of darkness and anonymity. I was not concerned to perform voyeurs. I w ­ asn’t reviving Dada and the Theatre 2 of Cruelty. I was ­these ­things.

Nuttall wanted to channel his (male) rage into forms of art that, he hoped, would transform society by destroying ­people’s lethargy, which he held responsible for bringing about the downfall of the antiwar and cnd movements in the first place.3 As an educationalist he saw it as his duty, then, to encourage students to create “riots” of their own, “smashing” glass bulbs shielding apathy wherever they may be found. Nuttall’s fondness for such meta­phorical forms of destruction found literal outlet in a “sculpture” workshop he led for first-­year fine art students in 1975. Frank Tovey, a freshman student that year, wrote to London-­based girlfriend Barbara Frost about his first experiences of the teaching at Leeds. According to Tovey, Nuttall was straightaway uncompromising and up-­ front in his pedagogy, soliciting distinctly unorthodox approaches among the workshop’s participants. Tovey wrote: ­ oday we started working in the per­for­mance area. Jeff Nuttall [had us] T rig up all ­these pieces of junk i.e., gutted tele­vi­sions, dust bin lids, wheels, a wheelchair, a bollard, chairs, an old rusty pram, lumps of wood e­ tc. on lengths of string and hang them from the ceiling. . . . ​We ­were put in groups of 3 or 4 around t­ hese 3 junk heaps and told to “investigate the sound properties of the sculptures.” I’m not sure what Mr. Nuttall meant by that but we sure made a racket. Oh I forgot, all this was performed in the dark and, as a result, a ­couple of ­people got hit in the head with dustbin lids and I almost put my hand through a glass lampshade. Then we messed around with “­human sculpture within and around the structures,” and in all had a good time.4

Giving students license to engage in near-­heretical forms of artistic playfulness at the beginning of their studies, ones morphologically closer to acts of destruction than to acts of creation, demonstrates the disregard for conservative aesthetics and the sanctity of the art object at the heart of Nuttall’s approach. The intention to place students in a situation that would “not give them a safe viewpoint” (pos­si­ble injuries in the dark) would be anathema to risk-­averse twenty-­first-­century institutions, but in the mid-1970s, for pedagogues like Nuttall it was a desirable scenario through which students could grapple with being “caught up in the riot” from the outset. The possibilities for creating threatening-­sounding noise out of striking inanimate objects, CHAPTER SEVEN

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even hitting other ­human actors by ­mistake—­all in the dark—­suggested theatrical possibilities to Tovey only realized years l­ater as a Fad Gadget stage routine (and to which we ­will presently return). Likely in the wake of this studio exercise—it is impossible to know ­whether or not on Nuttall’s recommendation—­Tovey wrote out, approvingly it seems, citations from the Italian Futurists in the pages of his sketchbook. Marinetti is quoted (“­There is no more beauty except in strife”), The Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights’s encouragement to authors and actors in 1911 to “delight [in] being whistled at by the audience” is copied out in some detail (alongside qualifying acknowl­edgment that “every­thing that is whistled at is not necessarily beautiful or new”). Reference is also made to Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises, accompanied by a small pencil sketch of one of his noise-­making machines, the intonarumori.5 Significantly, Tovey also writes down the title of one of Marinetti’s 1933 radio dramas, both in Italian and En­glish, as if to underscore its significance for him: “Silences Speak Among Themselves” / “I Silenzi Parlano Fra Di Loro.”6 Listening to this drama, made up of recordings of babies crying and the sound of road-­ drilling interspersed with segments of quiet, it may be that Tovey straightaway happened upon a propitious exemplar for the direction of his ­future practice—­encouraging the young artist to consider a specifically modern beauty found in urban noise and sounds not conventionally valued within musical composition or conventional forms of “art.” Thus mid-1970s Leeds art students w ­ ere inducted into the ways of intermedia art, to pursue activity that might—­playfully, irreverently—be located somewhere between established disciplines: of sculpture, per­for­ mance, and ­music. Such intermedia or “per­for­mance art” had recently turned ­toward the pre­sen­ta­tion of confrontational or extreme situations at Leeds, typically involving the carry­ing out of some act of physical injury (of bodily cutting or marking) or including imagery of ­others in states of extremity. Students created provocative works that fully embraced the possibilities of avant-­garde shock tactics. Between 1974 and 1976, Dave Stephens, with a noose around his neck, stepped off a stool in the course of a monologue; Alan Stott slashed his arms with a razor blade and drew real blood in an apparent per­for­mance of “self-­harm”; Dave Hill live-­stitched the skin on his scalp; and in a per­for­mance in December 1975 called Cezanne in New York, performed by the group of students Russell Harris, Peter Parkin, Keith Cardwell, and Shaun Cavell, images of pornography and bondage w ­ ere projected onto a wall, causing consternation among 7 their peers.

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A page from Frank Tovey’s student sketchbook, 1975. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

7.1 

Ticket for entry to Peter Parkin and Derek Wain, Senseless, 1976. Courtesy of Sue Swift.

7.2 

This tendency to provoke audiences reached a high-­water mark just over a year a­ fter Tovey’s participation in Nuttall’s workshop. Senseless was staged by Parkin and a compatriot from Bradford Art College, Derek Wain, in the per­for­mance space of the Polytechnic on November 11, 1976. The piece had been secretly devised to ensure maximum impact on unsuspecting audience members, even though the pornographic close-up image of heterosexual penetration carried on the ticket for the event provided an impudent clue to its makers’ provocative intent (figure 7.2). Even fellow student Cavell, who was asked by Parkin and Wain to help out as a bouncer on the door, had no idea that the piece of per­for­mance art was ­going to unfold into a Nuttall-­style “riot.” Cavell remembers that at the beginning of the event the audience—­some one hundred or so fine art students and staff—­were sitting in theater-­style rows with minimal lighting. Then, as the lighting was increased, p­ eople began to be able to see a podium before them, “not much bigger than a dining t­ able and about thirty or forty centimeters high, with a rail around it on three sides.” At the same time, live “mice and budgerigars that w ­ ere being kept in place with small bits of fishing wire, tied round their necks, some on the podium, ­others on the rails,” became apparent. Polytechnic tutor Geoff Teasdale, in the audience, remembers that the budgies ­were on “some kind of T-­shaped stands” (and not on a continuous rail) and that they w ­ ere secured, only slightly less egre-

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giously, with fishing line around their legs, not necks. He also recalls ­there being “old tele­vi­sions with cathode-­ray tubes arranged in the per­for­mance area” and that it was quiet. Another audience member, George Hinchliffe, then a first-­year student, remembers a soundtrack being played—of Mrs. Mills, “very jaunty piano m ­ usic.” Marc Almond, Hinchliffe’s peer, remembers it specifically as “De Camptown Races” (“Doodah, Doodah”).8 “And then,” Cavell goes on, “Pete and Derek came in from the double doors on the other side of the room—­possibly from ­behind a curtain—­holding ­rifles in rather a sort of Patty Hearst pose.” Air r­ ifles it needs to be stressed, but ­rifles nevertheless. What ensued is disputed among ­those pre­sent. Some, like Cavell, remember that audience members straight away “began to get the idea of what was likely to happen”—­that the artists ­were about to shoot hapless animals—­and, shouting and screaming, began to physically intervene. Teasdale’s recollection was that in advance of this happening Parkin and Wain “each picked up an iron bar and smashed the tele­vi­sion screens.” Being vacuum-­sealed tubes, they imploded: “they ­were thick glass and produced a shock of violent noise. At which point the budgerigars started flapping, falling down and dangling by their wires.” Th ­ ere w ­ ere also goldfish in glass bowls, which also broke, leaving “goldfish flapping around on the floor,” creating a scene of distressed and ­dying animals. At this John Ross, a friend of Teasdale’s and former Leeds fine art student, leaped up from the audience. As George Hinchliffe narrates it: “I think Johnny Ross got up and said, ‘I’m not having this,’ and they had a bit of a dust-up on stage. And then I think Teasdale might have got up. So it became a bit of a shemozzle—­a fight. ­People ­were leaving, and other ­people ­were getting involved and shouting and arguing and pushing t­ hese guys around. I think they got roughed up a bit.” Amid the melee some recall shots being fired and animals killed. “I think they managed to shoot one or two of ­these animals,” says Cavell. “They managed to kill a budgie and a mouse or something.” O ­ thers ­were almost certain that this did not happen: “I remember looking at the cages, and thinking, ­these are real animals . . . ​ but none of them seemed to have been harmed at the point when the w ­ hole ­thing ground to a halt,” recalls Hinchliffe. But ­w hether animals ­were or ­weren’t shot during the fracas, vio­lence was ultimately visited upon t­ hose held responsible for threatening it: “­Later on that week the two students in question ­were severely beaten up, by ­people who had been sickened by the cruelty to animals.”9

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Complaints w ­ ere made by individuals pre­sent to the Polytechnic authorities, to the rspca, and to the police. This resulted in both artists being charged with ill treatment of, and causing unnecessary suffering to, twelve mice and six budgerigars (recalling an ­earlier brush between Leeds Polytechnic per­for­mance artists and the law in 1970).10 Ultimately Parkin and Wain ­were cleared of cruelty in court in May 1977 but ordered to pay a fine of £20 each for causing the animals undue suffering. The artists protested their artistic integrity, widely reported in media coverage of the case: “We ­were trying to put across the point that this is a violent country and that nobody cares anymore,” said Parkin, and “Art to me is an expression of my environment. If I portray a grisly image then you only have society to blame,” argued Wain.11 Nuttall too, called to testify in his students’ defense, spoke fulsomely of their avant-­garde gambit to show that a “modern, apathetic audience would sit passively and watch anything,” reportedly ­going on to say that Senseless could have been a “ ‘very neat and succinct piece of work’ but for the interruption of the audience.”12 The irony could not have been sweeter: an Artaudian attempt to shake presumptively slumbering spectators to consciousness “ruined” by the ethical actions of an audience moved to act decisively en masse. Proof positive perhaps that such confrontational strategies ­were, at the very least, liable to backfire or, worse, simply wrong in their presumption of endemic passivity in ­people. Cavell remembers that ­there was a “huge po­liti­cal backlash” within the Polytechnic as a result of this per­for­mance and its attendant negative publicity. “They pulled the staff in from the fine art department, and student activities w ­ ere severely curtailed. . . . ​We could continue d­ oing per­for­mance work, but every­thing had to be minutely detailed and scripted and submitted for approval before it could take place. . . . ​Nobody wanted to do this. Spontaneity was the word. We all maintained that in the production of all our work.” Jacqui Callis concurs. Beginning her studies in October 1977, she remembers few ­people actually making per­for­mances from thereon in, precisely ­because “every­body was being told that they had to produce scripts before they could do any per­for­mances. So ­people w ­ ere pissed off.” Indeed, Cavell recalls this as the beginning of the end for the era of radical art at the Polytechnic: “Certainly Leeds fine art changed thereafter. . . . ​I think that that per­for­mance ­really marked the end. They started to recruit a dif­fer­ent kind of student, who was then g­ oing to produce a more mainstream kind of work.” Teasdale puts it less stridently, though, nevertheless, broadly in agreement that ­things had indeed changed:

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“The Fine Art of Killing Budgies,” Daily Express, May 27, 1977.

7.3 

It would be fair to say that ­there ­wasn’t a conscious attempt to curtail what the students wanted to do. I mean, had the staff known what Parkin and Wain intended to do ­there would have been tutorial interventions saying, “­There’s no way y­ ou’re g­ oing to do that.” . . . ​So t­ here was some per­for­ mance proposal [introduced] that had to be validated. . . . ​You had to go to ­either Fox or Darling or Nuttall or whoever, myself, to say I intend to do this, is it all right? So ­there was some ele­ment of, I ­wouldn’t say control, but guidance, strong guidance.

DREAM-­LIKE CREATURES

Tovey had worked for a short spell with Cavell, Parkin, Harris, and Cardwell as a member of their group Nu/Age in the early months of 1976—­well before the riotous scenes of Senseless. Letters show that he was a full member of the group by late February, having worked on a four-­part per­for­mance piece at the beginning of that month entitled Keep in Touch, along with additional collaborators Judy Newton, Alan Selka, Barbara Frost, and Janet Moore. But, by the end of March, he seems to have gone off the idea of remaining a member. Tovey’s letters ­don’t tell us why, but Frost speculates that the group’s confrontational approach might not have sat right with him. “He ­wasn’t against confrontation and per­for­mances that made audiences uncomfortable, but I think that some of his fellow students had a rather, let’s call it, immature attitude of shock ­because you can. I think he was more in the camp of if ­you’re ­going to set up a confrontational situation you need to figure out how you and your audience are ­going to work through it.”13 Frost’s point ­here echoes Dave Laing’s discussion of shock tactics in One Chord Won­ders. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Laing distinguishes between two types of shock and shock response: a “traumatizing” and an “integrated” one. The former produces a “shock defence” ­because of an “inability to ‘digest’ shock content.”14 It is traumatizing ­because it shuts off and fails to learn anything from, or make meaning out of, an experience of shock. This is distinguishable from the other type, which “integrates the content of shock into experience by the recipient’s exposing him or herself more directly to the shock effect. For this to occur, the shock must be ‘cushioned, parried by consciousness.’ ”15 Tovey was beginning to strug­gle, perhaps somewhat inchoately, with such distinctions even as he desired to incorporate shock into his student art.

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Perhaps Tovey’s point of difference with the makers of Senseless around this issue could be traced back to his prized artistic role models. In the summer of 1974, while Parkin and com­pany made preparations to move to Leeds to start their studies, Tovey sat in the audience at a per­for­mance of Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers in London. As a son of a Billingsgate fish porter, Tovey was no regular visitor to the theater, but he had been drawn ­there by his love of David Bowie. Kemp’s role in the pop star’s life and work was an unmissable fact in the early 1970s, and any serious Bowie fan needed to find out more. In ­going along to see Kemp’s mime show, Tovey was expecting to see French men in striped T-­shirts and Pierrot masks perform amusing routines.16 But, based on Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, with its fantastical menagerie of underworld characters, gay sex references, and criminality, the show was unlikely to turn out that way. What Tovey actually saw he w ­ asn’t prepared for. It w ­ asn’t that Flowers was a veritable spectacle of gender nonconformity—­the cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” had anyway prepared him for that—­but that it presented its fabulous, otherworldly bodies as si­mul­ta­neously both erotically alluring and grotesque: as possessed of a new, uncanny form of glamorous attraction. They appeared exquisite in their pain and suffering, elevated by lives of criminality and “depravity”—­exactly as Genet would have wanted. With vaguely blasphemous scenes of crucifixion, sex, and vio­lence performed by cross-­dressed and near-­naked actors of a stylized beauty, Flowers was as scandalous in thematic content as it was striking in its visuality: the impact of ­every performed gesture magnified by stage lighting and a shifting collage of recorded and live m ­ usic. “It w ­ asn’t,” Tovey wrote some years l­ater, “stiff and awkward, as I had i­ magined, but colourful, exciting, and very impor­tant, sexy.”17 For Tovey, then, the possibilities of an alluring, queer, troublesome form of glamour were bound up with what per­for­mance could deliver its audience. Flowers, and Kemp’s work more broadly, remained a touchstone for Tovey throughout his time in Leeds. He undertook mime classes with the dancer in London during his first year, went to see a production of Mr Punch’s Pantomime in December 1976, and continued to pro­cess his experience of Flowers right up u­ ntil his final year. Kemp’s players morphed, he wrote in his final-­year dissertation, into “dream-­like creatures that floated before my eyes,” recalling how the production sent “electric shocks through [its] audience” with the use of “very subtle effects.”18 Kemp remained an exemplar of how maximal effects could be achieved through minimal, controlled gestures in per­for­mance. “Kemp’s own per­for­mance was throughout CHAPTER SEVEN

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most of the show like a strange vision sending r­ ipples through the hazy atmosphere by a single flutter of an eyelid or t­ remble of a lip.”19 Though he returns over and over again in his student sketchbooks to Kemp’s com­pany (­there are numerous notes and clippings), Tovey’s continued preoccupation is less “traumatized” and rather more “integrated” as it makes Kemp into a totem for the possibilities of a differently calibrated use of shock than that prized by Tovey’s fellow students. Only a m ­ atter of weeks a­ fter the riotous scenes provided by Senseless, Tovey joined a loose affiliate group of student/graduate actors and directors who coalesced around the Leeds University union Theatre Group and began to develop his work among them somewhat at a remove from the priorities of the fine art studios. The group often staged productions in the Riley Smith Hall on the university’s central campus and in the small space of the Workshop Theatre connected to the university’s ma En­glish course. In early December 1976, a large-­scale production of Cinderella, written by Ian Duhig and directed by Jenny Barnett, was the first of a number of theatrical productions outside of the fine art course in which Tovey participated in order to find his per­for­mance legs. Barely a week before the Anarchy in the UK tour arrived at the Polytechnic, Cinderella gave Tovey an opportunity to put into practice some of what he had learned from Kemp. With a face painted in garish stage makeup, the liberal use of white greasepaint on his face redolent of performers in Flowers, he performed a striptease-­style balloon dance (figure 7.4). Tovey described it thus: “I started off dressed in a tight see-­through body stocking to which lots of balloons w ­ ere tied. I adorned a wig and trashy w ­ omen’s make-up. During the mime I tried to swat a bee with a pink plastic fan (a pin attached) while attempting to dance. Each time a ­couple of balloons burst I would cover myself with the fan and, trying to hide my embarrassment, carry on dancing. Eventually all the balloons are gone and, in my panic, the wig falls off. I cover my head with the fan and slowly sink to the floor.”20 Leeds Student reviewers seemed ambivalent about the resulting spectacle, seeing it as contributing a “superb ­after midnight ‘mod-­erotica,’ albeit rather sadly put across with a meaningless, near naked balloon dance.” 21 Tovey ­didn’t seem overly perturbed, however. He thought theater audiences might not be “ready” for mime, being uneasy with dramas without spoken dialogue, but seemed pleased nevertheless with the opportunity to hone his craft.22 Tovey appeared in the Workshop Theatre three months l­ ater with a decidedly more ambitious solo per­for­mance work, The Loopy, which comprised a series of mimes set within an overall conceptual framework. Some

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7.4  Frank Tovey in Ian Duhig’s Cinderella, Workshop Theatre, December 1976. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

pieces irreverently invoked the Marceau school of mime, including a per­ for­mance involving a penis puppet resembling Bip the Clown, Marceau’s most famed character, replete with trademark sailor’s suit, floppy top hat, and ­rose (Tovey thought the French artist’s mimes “­little more than clever tricks”).23 Tovey took another French mime, Jean-­Louis Barrault, as guide to darker preoccupations with the medium, citing him approvingly in his dissertation: “We prefer to live in a world drowned in noise than in the real world where a kind of silence unavoidably leads to Nothingness . . . ​or to God . . . ​two notions equally terrifying. To become conscious of the present is to become conscious of death, for the pre­sent is continuous death.”24 “In my per­for­mances,” Tovey went on, “I ask the audience to die for a while with me. . . . ​The closer we become to lifelessness the more we can appreciate the sensations of living, moving and dreaming.”25 Such a proximity to lifelessness, at least at the level of a per­for­mance conceit, was central to the mime finale of Tovey’s Loopy show: a five-­minute sequence, “The Dance of the Loopy,” itself adapted from a 1954 short story by Richard Matheson.26 Set in a f­ uture 1997, a­ fter a world war of an unspecified nature, the story turns around the experience of four young ­people, high on drugs and drink and speeding cars, and their spectating of a macabre dance CHAPTER SEVEN

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of “the loopy.” The lup—­lifeless undead phenomenon—is a monstrous legacy of germ warfare, showing itself in dead troops found “erect and performing . . . ​spasmodic gyrations”: ­a kind of zombie, pathological dance. Matheson regales us with the horror of being compelled to spectate such a twisted freak show, focusing on the ethical plight of teenage heroine Peggy, torn between, on the one hand, peer pressure from “friends” to enjoy the show’s outrageous frisson and, on the other, her discomfort and bodily reactions, which tell her in no uncertain terms to take flight. ­Running the gamut of indicators of alarm—­all jolting heartbeats, tightening throat, and nauseous stomach—­Matheson is at pains to point out that it is her body that protests at such ugly spectacle. It is Peggy’s body language—­alarmed reactions to, and queasy double of, the loopy’s own jerky movements—­which speaks out against the twisted world in which she finds herself. Tovey must have hung on Matheson’s ­every sentence: ­here was a rich, albeit fictional, account in which per­for­mance’s capacity to menace its viewers is registered viscerally in the gut responses of its spectators—­all more Antonin Artaud than Marcel Marceau. Tovey’s adaptation of this story, performed ­under uv lighting, presented a short bodily enactment of the lup-­y dance. Choreographed by Barbara Frost, the piece was largely shorn of Matheson’s narrative and dialogue in ­favor of Tovey’s pre­sen­ta­tion of a dance per­for­mance, appearing in a specially created web-­like garment designed to glow and exhibit jerky movements ­under the lighting (figure 7.5). Overall the piece lasted just u­ nder seven minutes. The “backstory to the lup was given as program notes [figure 7.6] and in the mc’s voiceover,” Frost recalls, the latter featuring on a recorded audio soundscape that augmented the work’s live ele­ments. ­After a rudimentary guitar-­and-­drums-­only treatment of the Troggs’ “Wild Th ­ ing” (which slips unaccountably into the Velvet Under­ ground’s “Sweet Jane”), the recorded voiceover warns audience members (­there is the sound of an ex­pec­tant crowd) that what they are about to see is not “for the faint of heart or the weak of ­will,” before a chant begins, a crowd baying “loophole for loopys.”27 Then comes a tribal, irregular beat, played out on floor toms and accompanied by jagged, electronic keyboard sounds before . . . ​silence. During this sonic interregnum Tovey/the lup began to stir and twitch, and, once the beating drums returned, spartan and yet voluminous in the space, the dance of the loopy began, building ultimately to a frenzy of motion and crashing cymbals. “The effect of the spider-­web costume,” Frost remembers, “being the only vis­i­ble presence u­ nder uv light, combined [with] the

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Frank Tovey, sketches for The Loopy, 1977. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey. 7.5 

Frank Tovey, program for The Loopy, 1977. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey. 7.6 

unseen physical presence of the dancer in a small space, would have been intended to create the discomfort in an audience that Frank often sought.”28

­TOWARD FAD GADGET

Though no photographic or video documentation of this per­for­mance exists, a soundtrack recording remains.29 Listening to this, it is pos­si­ble to imaginatively conjure the work’s uncanny effects: moving between clamorous crowd noise and crashing drums to dead silence; between stillness and movement; a per­for­mance so garishly bright (the garment) and yet deep in shadow (a barely perceptible h­ uman body); and the fictive conceit of a juddering undead agency played out in real time and space—­all too close for comfort in the basement space of Leeds University’s Workshop Theatre. This seems to have been Tovey’s latest response to the alien allure and queer sexiness of Flowers: a freak show centering on his shockingly defamiliarized body. The Loopy’s finale comprised ele­ments that would continue to be impor­tant to Tovey as he moved into the world of pop m ­ usic and that he inventoried in his sketchbook thus: “strobe, loud ­music, voices, live percussion, ele­ment of danger.”30 But before graduating Tovey worked on further proj­ects that would provide a lasting influence on his mature work. He worked with Frost again on a suite of photo­graphs in 1978, which experimented once again with the possibilities of deforming and reforming (the image of ) a ­human body, shot in a makeshift studio in the home they shared in Autumn Place. Frost was ­behind the camera, Tovey in front of it. Frost remembers: It came out of conversations that we’d had about “What are the limits of what you can do with your own body?” Alongside considerations of the aesthetics of the ­human body, the idea that w ­ e’ve been landed with classical statues, like the Venus de Milo, as a beautiful ­thing: when that ­wasn’t its original form. We w ­ ere experimenting with what could be done, in terms of stretching, hiding, distorting his body. I think if you w ­ ere d­ oing it now you’d end up with some conversations about the issues of images of disability, and the politics of that. But that ­wasn’t r­ eally part of it at the time.

Some netting, as seen in figure 7.7, forms a minimal backdrop, other­w ise the lighting, courtesy of h­ ouse­hold lamps, is arranged to create a sense of foreboding: an expansive, dramatic gloom, out of which looms Tovey’s garishly lit form. CHAPTER SEVEN

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7.7 

Frank Tovey in Autumn Place, Leeds, 1978. Photo: Barbara Frost.

7.8 

Front cover of Fad Gadget’s “Back to Nature” (Mute Rec­ords, 1979).

The images are redolent of avant-­garde experiments in photography that predate them, including Bauhaus experimentalists Gyula Pap and Grit Kallin-­ Fischer. Frost’s camera relishes rendering the intelligibility of Tovey’s body uncertain: muddying distinctions, for example, of ­human and non-­human form or blurring the line separating beauty from ugliness. One year ­later two shots from this suite of images, reproduced in black and white, adorned the cover of the inaugural single release by Fad Gadget “Back to Nature,” which, in turn, anticipated photo­graphs of further otherworldly Frank Tovey/Fad Gadget incarnations, the artist’s body covered in shaving foam or tarred and feathered, gracing the pages of the early 1980s ­music press. Frost remembers that the Autumn Place images initially surfaced out of conversations between herself and Tovey but extended also to exchanges with Marc Almond and another Polytechnic fine art student, John Lester. They discussed “how ­people feel about their bodies from the inside, and what ­people see from the outside” (Almond and Lester also appear before the camera in an extension of this series of works).31 Almond was gay, “quite nelly in some ways,” recalls George Hinchliffe, while Lester, according to his friend Sue Swift, was “about six foot four” and someone who “nearly always wore a kaftan. I would describe him as both male and female.” She goes on, “I think he had a lot of confusion about how he identified.”

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7.9  John Lester, 1978. Photo: Frank Tovey. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

Bodies such as t­ hese ­were hypervisible in the streets of 1970s Leeds and ­ ere therefore expressly vulnerable to homo-­and transphobic vio­lence w ­there while, at the same time, commanding a power to disturb and upset. Sue Swift, again, recalls that “you would go into a pub with John Lester, and get ex-­boxers and t­ hose sort of guys feeling r­ eally threatened by him. ­There ­were always ­people having a go. He got quite a lot of stick in Leeds ­because he w ­ asn’t masculine enough. ­There was a lot of prejudice at that time. Marc got quite a lot of stick just walking down the street.” Tovey perhaps suffered less unwanted attention when out and about given his comparatively heteronormative male appearance, but as an active bisexual at the time, he identified broadly with the gender nonnormativity of queer culture (helped along by Bowie). Frost remembers, “[Tovey] ­wasn’t often quite as floaty and fey (if that’s the word) as some of his influences [i.e., Kemp], but neither was he interested in being as butch, hairy, and macho as some of the other students and tutors.” Frost, for her part, was left to negotiate the dangers of being a ­woman on the streets of a city terrorized by the Yorkshire Ripper. The photographic proj­ect therefore offered all involved CHAPTER SEVEN

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an opportunity to re-­present bodies normally solicitous of discrimination and vio­lence as vehicles instead of punk defiance. Another Tovey student production, undertaken again in collaboration with Frost but additionally with Pete Brooks, Robert Burstow, John France, Ed King, Lesley Stiles, Steven Tandy, and Charles White, paved the way for the emergence of Fad Gadget more fulsomely. A theatrical adaptation of Ann Quin’s Modernist novel Berg, it was Tovey’s final-­degree show, staged in May and June 1978. The proj­ect came about by happenstance, as Frost tells it: When we ­were at St Martin’s we ­were messing around ­doing photo­graphs and he de­cided to dress up as a ventriloquist’s dummy. . . . ​A ­couple of years ­later he’s in Leeds, and he’s in a book shop, and he encounters this cover and he is suddenly looking at his own face [figure 7.10]. This is exactly what Frank looked like at the time. . . . ​He just found this book and thought, shit, I’m on the cover of a book! He bought the book, read it, liked it. . . . ​So this just got developed into a play effectively.

By the time of this, his third and final, year of study, Tovey had “gone back to working with tape recorders and ­music and had done some sort of soundtrack stuff for his own per­for­mances and for other ­people. So that interested him in terms of this production—­producing the soundtrack for it,” Frost goes on. “Then, between us, we developed a script from the book.” Subsequently Brooks was asked to direct it (though a broken arm prevented him from g­ oing through with it) while other students w ­ ere drafted to help with the soundtrack and the lighting and to perform roles alongside Frost and Tovey. The result was a master class in the creation of uncanny effect through Berg’s careful mixing of ele­ments of visual theater with affecting electronic soundscape. The novel tells the story of a man, Alistair Berg, who, changing his name to Greb, goes to the seaside to track down his absent ­father, Nathan, in order to kill him. Along the way, Berg is able to miraculously gain Nathan’s trust while, duplicitously, killing his ­father’s pet budgerigar (what did the 1970s have against budgies?) and gaining the affection of his girlfriend—­all in pursuit of the final (or forever deferred?) moment of murdering him. The novel is extremely dark, casting doubt upon the sanity of its lead character, through whose eyes the reader is made to see. The uncertainties that cloud the novel’s narrative coherence are fundamental to it, the weight of which, in Tovey’s hands, was transferred to the poetic ambiguities of a mimed pre­sen­ta­tion (Berg is played mute) swollen

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7.10  Cover of the 1977 Quartet edition of Ann Quin’s novel Berg.

with affective registers by an electro-­ambient soundtrack. Drone ­music, rising and falling in volume, creates a pervading, pulsing sense of unease emboldened by the uncanny doublings of identity throughout: Berg and his ­father appear sartorially similar (even though played by dif­fer­ent actors) and a lifeless puppet and the play’s lead character mirror each other even as the former is held in a stranglehold (suggesting psychological tension within?). Berg represented a significant shift in the priorities of Leeds fine art per­for­mance only a ­little more than a year a­ fter the pre­sen­ta­tion of Senseless in the Polytechnic’s per­for­mance space—­the venue also for Tovey’s production. CHAPTER SEVEN

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7.11 

Frank Tovey, Berg, publicity still, 1978. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

ELECTRIC SHOCK

“When I was at art college I did per­for­mance art. When I created Fad Gadget, I carried on with this per­for­mance ele­ment, and was very much into the use of shock tactics, as a means of confronting the audience, seizing the attention,” says Tovey.32 Beginning as a solo enterprise ­after graduating and moving to London, “Fad Gadget” was the vehicle that enabled Tovey to shift from per­for­mance artist to synth-­pop recording artist, signing to Mute Rec­ords in 1979. Inspired by the minimalist electronic sounds of the Normal’s 1978 single “Warm Leatherette/T.V.O.D.,” Tovey glimpsed a way of channeling his college concerns into pop m ­ usic. The Normal’s m ­ usic appealed b­ ecause, like Berg and The Loopy, it too was based on a dystopian literary source (in this case J. G. Ballard’s Crash). It struck the right (psychopathological) tone in subject m ­ atter. It reveled in the death-­driven eroticism of modern-­day cyborg realities—in car crashes and the sci-fi horrors of h­ uman bodies as direct receptors of tele­v i­sion signals. Not only was pop m ­ usic in sympathy with Tovey’s concerns but, in terms of its cultural reach, it promised a potentially wider audience than was pos­si­ble in making per­for­mance art. “I d­ on’t want to appeal merely to an elite crowd,” Tovey told Paul Morley in 1982. “That’s why I left per­for­mance art. When I was at college in Leeds

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7.12  Cover of Fad Gadget, “Ricky’s Hand” (Mute Rec­ords, 1980).

d­ oing per­for­mance I had a captive audience. . . . ​I see very ­little appeal in just performing for the trendy arty type.”33 Fad Gadget’s 1980 release “Ricky’s Hand” exulted a similar narrative darkness to his college per­for­mances: a gothic tale of a h­ uman hand with malevolent intentions all its own. Unbeknown to its owner (the titular Ricky), the hand engineers a bout of drunk driving, a crash, and ultimately Ricky’s death—­plus a macabre liberation of sorts (“The hand lying severed at the side of the road”). F ­ ree at last? Tovey’s vocal delivery is low register, emotionally detached (perhaps taking his cue from singing styles on releases by the Normal and Kraftwerk). The song’s take-­home is a horror parable of machismo: “Slamming the door it grasped the wheel / Now Ricky’s full of man appeal.” The idea of intoxicated masculinity as literally and psychoanalytically death-­driven channels both Crash and Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto”—­the latter perhaps still on Tovey’s mind some five years a­ fter Nuttall’s Polytechnic workshop. A pastiche of an industrial ­hazard warning on the single’s cover design makes this male self-­destructiveness even more vivid, a pint glass spilling “corrosive” beer onto a schematic of a ­human hand (figure 7.12). Alongside the voice and the synthesizer, the recorded sound of a Black & Decker v8 double-­speed electric drill, a continuation of Tovey’s preoccupation with creating soundscapes in the Leeds Polytechnic sound studio rather than any apprenticeship with conventional musical instruments, punctuCHAPTER SEVEN

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ates the synth-­pop continuum with the suggestion of an unruly, electrical harm lying in wait in every­body’s domestic toolshed. It was this feature of Tovey’s recording output, both as Fad Gadget and ­later in collaboration with US noise musician Boyd Rice, that was to earn him credit as a pioneer of “industrial” ­music.34 Creating his pop identity through the invention of a nonhuman persona—­“Fad Gadget”—­was continuous with Tovey’s already established interest in the deathly life of ­things (Tovey has said the name was “meant to sound like some product you’d find in a supermarket, something throwaway”).35 For his first per­for­mances ­under the new moniker (in 1979), Tovey took to the stage with only a tape recorder, a keyboard, a microphone, and, friend Edwin Pouncey recalls, “a tea trolley I think it was.”36 But it became quickly apparent that in order to be able to continue as a performer, as well as a recording artist, Tovey would need the help of a band to play instruments in a live setting, leaving him f­ ree to concentrate his energies upon vocal delivery and his soon-­to-be athletic stage theatrics. The routines Tovey undertook as Fad Gadget between 1980 and 1984 drew variously upon the shock strategies explored at Leeds, veering between the Kemp and Nuttall axes of shock, between both “traumatic” and “integrated” approaches, particularly as they drew in ele­ments of body art. On several occasions, Tovey harmed himself in the course of his exertions, splitting his head open from beating a drum with it (figure 7.13) and snapping the tendons in both heels from grossly misjudging a stage jump. Tovey’s rationale for such antics, offered to Morley, sounds fundamentally Nuttallian, if not Ballardian: “When I first started I used to hurt myself a lot onstage. I thought that by being onstage it would make me feel more alive. . . . ​ [Physical] pain makes you feel that ­you’re real. . . . ​­There is a certain sort of numbness that p­ eople feel and they need to look for real­ity, to place themselves in society.”37 An art of vio­lence, ­here masochistically inflicted on the artist’s own body rather than upon unsuspecting budgerigars, is what Tovey advocates as necessary to smash the glass bulbs of apathy (or “numbness”) with which we began this chapter. Some critics usefully pointed out how such aspects coexisted with Kemp-­style sexiness even within a single per­for­mance. For example, in 1984, Melody Maker’s Steve Lake notes how a live per­for­mance in Munich saw Tovey in full-on Nuttall mode, all smashing glass and danger to members of the audience: “Fad Gadget drags his way t­ oward my end of the bar. Drags himself forward on his belly all the way along the length of the ­counter, pausing only [to] smash beer glasses on top of his head. . . . ​Glass splinters

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7.13  Fad Gadget performing at the Clarendon ­Hotel, London, June 27, 1980. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

spray the face of a girl next to me.”38 Seemingly unconcerned by the plight of his fellow audience member, Lake also notes a simultaneous erotic aspect alongside such Nuttall-­style vio­lence. “Decked out like a Sherwood Forest peep show in ripped-up leggings and tunic over a body stocking and codpiece, Fad Gadget proceeds, screaming and drooling, wiggling his ass, grinding his groin back and forth.”39 Even though noted, the focus on the performer’s ass proved too much for this male journalist, soliciting both homophobic riposte and judgmental sneer at Tovey’s art school origins: “His ass ­doesn’t do much for me, although permanently illuminated by spotlights, it seems to be the very subject of the show. . . . ​I’ve been watching it wiggle, wiggle, wiggle and jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, as if in some private semaphore passing messages to his loud disco-­ish backing group. Frank seems to be turning himself on . . . ​much as a dog I used to know. . . . ​W hat the animal lacked, I now realize, was a pedigree in Per­for­mance Art, a damn useful license for just about any aberration.”40 In order to reassert his authority over the “aberrant” spectacle before him, Lake insists—­damningly—­that a Fad Gadget per­for­mance offered nothing to spectators lucky enough (and old enough) to have had “the privilege of watching Mr Iggy Pop CHAPTER SEVEN

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beat himself up on stage” in the 1970s.41 Lake’s write-up thereby exhibits Benjamin’s “traumatic” shock defense: closing off the possibilities of a meaningful engagement with a presumptively aberrant queerness, leaving only snide and high-­handed denigration in its stead. Other voices tell a dif­fer­ent story. Sometime in 1982, C. J. Mitchell, now a London-­based live art producer, went to a Fad Gadget gig at Edinburgh’s the Venue, a nightclub above the Edinburgh Play­house: I think Fad Gadget’s second lp had just come out. . . . ​­There was this sense of not having any idea what the show might be like. We ­were right down at the front. The main ­things that I’m remembering from the gig are the first few minutes, where the band are on stage but Fad Gadget himself is sort of assuming a persona, which is very still and stately. He’s in one position standing, staring out at us. I think he was quite formally dressed. And he had a walking stick. This takes a few minutes to unfold. . . . ​He slowly starts to advance t­ owards the audience, with the stick pointing out, and he’s coming ­towards me. And this stick is slowly getting closer and closer to my forehead. He’s locked me eye-­to-­eye, and as he’s coming closer. I can see that ­there’s an electrical wire from the end of the stick ­going up his sleeve. I have no idea if that means I’m g­ oing to get some kind of electric shock in my forehead. I break eye contact to look at my friend who’s standing right next to me, at which point he [Tovey] moves away from me and starts ­going ­towards someone ­else. . . . ​And, I ­don’t know the name of the song that they sort of immediately go into, but during the song he whacked this walking stick on the stage and it’s like a contact-­mic-ed ­thing, it just becomes part of the sound. And so, part of the song is this sort of big hits on the floor. Even though it’s just a walking stick ­there’s this ­really amplified racket coming out of it. I remember being im­mensely disappointed that he moved away from me, although also ­really relieved, ­because I just thought “Shit what the hell is this electrical wire signifying?” I mean it w ­ asn’t like the wire was immediately vis­i­ble. I just happened to catch sight of it and it freaked me out.

The recounted memory h­ ere, detailed and stark even more than thirty years ­after the event (the testimony was supplied to the author in 2013), details an “integrated” response to Fad Gadget’s shock tactics—­and distinct from Lake’s. Mitchell was experiencing the shock of discovering per­for­mance art for the first time at a pop concert. “It was a few years before I was ­going to any theatre or per­for­mance at all,” he continues. “This w ­ asn’t in my sphere of reference in the slightest.” Neither was t­ here much pre­ce­dent for it in

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7.14  Fad Gadget on stage, 1981. Courtesy of Estate of Frank Tovey.

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what he had experienced of the world of rock and pop. “Other than knowing about ­people like David Bowie ­doing very theatrical ­things on stage, most of the stuff that I was into musically was much more straightforward in terms of what the performers ­were ­doing.” Tovey was certainly channeling Bowie’s epoch-­defining 1972 per­for­ mance of “Starman” on Top of the Pops, breaking the fourth wall for all ­those sitting at home as “Ziggy” pointed directly at them, at least via the camera (“I had to phone someone so I picked you-­oo-oo”). Breaking the fourth wall again in Edinburgh by stepping from the stage directly into the audience, Tovey “picked” Mitchell by locking his gaze in a mesmerizing and yet terrifying embrace—­daring him to hold it and remain subject(ed) to the ­bearer’s menacing electrified overture. What Mitchell was also witnessing, however, unbeknown to him, was the distance that an art education could travel by the early 1980s. Mitchell guessed that Tovey’s electric cable was at some level wired in to Bowie, but he c­ ouldn’t have known that it was equally plugged in to the shock aesthetics of Leeds Polytechnic fine art. As Fad Gadget beat his stick on the stage floor, and the sound of its electrically mediated crash-­contact was heard through the venue’s pa system, what Mitchell was also listening to was the popularization of avant-­garde aesthetics and the reverberating, magnified echo of Tovey striking sculptures in a mid-1970s En­glish Polytechnic.

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08 REHEARSALS FOR THE MUTANT DISCO Much of the best work being produced ­today seems to fall between media. . . . ​We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant. DICK HIGGINS, “INTERMEDIA” (1966)

In ­music the ele­ments used in a composition are relatively unimportant in themselves, however their relationships and differences are; one ele­ment can be anything but the second of two cannot be the first. GEORGE HINCHLIFFE, INSTRUCTIONS FOR DEHBYE (1979)

T

ovey experimented with audio recording, and assembled his per­for­mance soundscapes, in the confines of a small purpose-­built sound studio on the balcony of Leeds Polytechnic’s ­hangar space. Part-­time lecturer John Darling, an artist-­member of performance art group the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, was man­ag­er of this unusual audio resource. He introduced both himself and the par­tic­u­lar ethos governing the studio’s use in a handout prepared for first-­year fine art students in the mid-1970s:

I have worked with recorded sound for some years now in conjunction with per­for­mance, painting and sculpture exhibitions, environments and with sound as a creative medium in its own right. I am not an electronics engineer and know ­little about the insides of the machines I use—­I am interested in what can be done with sound and how to get it done. Since working in Leeds, I have slowly built up a small, basic sound recording studio in the corner hen hutch on the balcony of the Main Studio. This fa­cil­i­ty can be used by yourself in a number of ways: 1. I can teach students recording techniques ­etc and particularly how this idiosyncratic studio works. Remember this takes time and I am a lousy explainer. 2. The studio and myself can be used as a ser­vice area. You may have a job in sound to be done but d­ on’t necessarily want to get involved in d­ oing it yourself. I ­will do the job for you. . . . 3. The studio has some equipment available for loan—3 portable mains tape recorders; a pa system with two microphones and tape input. . . . 4. General—­This studio is not an E.M.I. or Decca professional recording studio. I’m not r­ eally interested in working with would-be Rock ’n Roll Stars who spend their time moaning about how the set up is so inadequate for their undiscovered talents. It is a place where you can learn basics, try out ideas or get a reasonable quality recording done on a ser­v ice basis. Bear in mind limitations on space, equipment, sound proofing, my time and sanity.1

Reading ­these “instructions for use” retrospectively, it is striking that, circulated only a year before the punk rock explosion of 1976, they anticipate much of its diy, “can-do” attitude and rejection of (musical) expertise. Darling is up-­front about his lack of technical know-­how from the very beginning, affirming instead his interest in naive experiment, in seeing what can be done—­through trial and error, perhaps—­w ith technologies of sound recording. The resource is explic­itly offered to students as support for intermedia artistic experiment, where sound is conceived “in conjunction with per­for­mance, painting and sculpture exhibitions, environments.” It would be pos­si­ble, Darling goes on, to approach sound in­de­pen­dently as a “medium in its own right,” but he cautions against conceiving the studio as any kind of launchpad for ­careers in the rock and pop industry. This was, in part, ­because its founding intention favored the production of what would ­later be called “sound art”: post-­Cagean explorations of sound and noise intended for pre­sen­ta­tion within gallery-­based installations or constructed

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environments rather than conventional forms of freestanding musical composition.2 Another reason that the sound studio was “not an E.M.I. or Decca professional recording studio” was simply that it was too modest a resource, both in scale and quality of equipment. The Polytechnic’s fine art quinquennial review document of 1975–76 carries an exhaustive list of the equipment, comprising mainly Revox, Ampere, and Tandberg reel-­to-­reel tape recorders, a Vortexion mixer, a turntable, a reverb unit, and a small collection of microphones, amplifiers, and speakers (figure 8.1). The four-­ channel mixer was certainly primitive in comparison with major-­label recording studios, underlining the fact that the Leeds resource was devised for creation of audio collages comprising the l­ imited number of component ele­ments made pos­si­ble by the channels of the Vortexion (figure 8.2). Typically sounds captured by microphones or from rec­ords played on the turntable (including vinyl sound effects discs reportedly held ­there) would be inputted before being, sometimes, minimally modified by use of the reverb unit. A new plugboard was installed in the early 1980s, multiplying the number of pos­si­ble audio channels, but even in the ­later stage of the sound studio’s operation (it was mothballed sometime in the early to mid-1980s), its Heath Robinson–­esque ethos remained unmistakable.3 Its overriding raison d’être was to create surreal or unnerving juxtapositions of sounds and sound sources, to revel in sonic edges and absurdist sound continua, rather than to birth seamlessly produced, commercial-­ready rock and pop industry outputs. Darling’s lack of interest in pop ­music was echoed in the more fulsome criticism of it by his Polytechnic colleague Jeff Nuttall. In the pages of Bomb Culture, Nuttall castigated pop for betraying the promise of the 1960s counterculture by becoming hopelessly complicit with the forces of “Mammon.” The Beatles ­were taken to be symptomatic of the prob­lem: in packaging up the resistant practices of art, protest, and pop in a single commodified image of late 1960s rebelliousness, they only succeeded, Nuttall asserted, in garnering apathetic and presumptively listless consumers of it.4 Nuttall remained a lifelong 1950s-­style beatnik with a faith instead in the under­ground—in the improvisatory art of jazz (he played the trumpet) and what he took to be avant-­garde art’s continuing capacity to unsettle, even into the 1970s and beyond. Visitors to Leeds who conducted short courses or special lectures around practices of sound and m ­ usic across the de­cade reflected such interests. They included jazz musicians Mike Westbrook and John Pashley, experimental composers and musicians Gavin CHAPTER EIGHT

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Equipment inventory of the Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Sound Studio. From the 1976 “B.A. (Honours) Fine Art, Quinquennial Review” document produced for the Council for National Academic Awards.

8.1 

Vortexion four-­ channel mixer-­amp. 8.2 

Cover of Mike Westbrook Orchestra’s Citadel/Room 315 (rca Rec­ords, 1975). 8.3 

Bryars, Edward Cowie, and Ron Geesin, and avant-­garde “nonmusicians” like Brian Eno and Genesis P-­Orridge. On the cover of his classic 1975 release Citadel/Room 315, Westbrook can be seen peering through the win­ dow of the Polytechnic’s Room 315, when he was a visiting artist ­there in 1974 (figure 8.3). By the time of punk, occasional figures from pop culture ­were invited to speak, including Tony Wilson and John Peel (“I remember [Peel] playing the Ramones and ‘New Rose’ by the Damned,” recalls Tony Baker), though ­these ­were largely exceptions that proved an other­w ise avant-­jazz rule. Dave Ball remembers being drawn to the sound studio right from the beginning of his Polytechnic studies in 1977—­even though he was enamored of pop ­music in a way not shared by his new art college tutors. As detailed in his memoir Electronic Boy (2020), before arriving in Leeds he CHAPTER EIGHT

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had become immersed in the fractured, kaleidoscopic world of 1970s m ­ usic and subcultural styles, pulled in dif­fer­ent directions by the seemingly irreconcilable requirements of identity and group belonging, of mutually exclusive tastes in tunes and forms of dress. As a teenage Northern Soul boy he danced at Blackpool’s clubs to songs like “Sliced Tomatoes” by Just ­Brothers, while harboring a burgeoning love affair with electronic m ­ usic in Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, before also finding himself fired up by the “anger and energy” of punk rock.5 Ball had no inkling at this stage about how to reconcile such culturally discrete t­ hings. But, writing of the first two of ­these, he reflects retrospectively that it had been a pivotal moment in his life when “two kinds of m ­ usic I ­really liked began to fuse in my mind, like a mathematical, algebraic equation or a r­ ecipe: northern soul + synthesisers = xyz? In five years I would have the answer.”6 That answer would be Soft Cell and a worldwide hit single, “Tainted Love.” Art school, in the interim, was to be formative in helping Ball understand that such a solution could even be pos­si­ble. “As soon as I was enrolled [at the Polytechnic],” he writes, “I set about finding my own spot in the huge studio space. ­There ­were partitioned-­ off areas on the ground floor. . . . ​In the corner was a huge, blacked-­out, performance-­art area. Upstairs in the mezzanine ­there w ­ ere lots of ­little rooms to choose from and a sound studio. I positioned myself right next to it so I always knew what was ­going on inside.”7 The equipment aside, Ball puts the finishing touches to the picture of the sound studio as a rudimentary form of provision: “The look was completed with egg boxes and unpainted, perforated hardboard panels on the walls and ceiling for soundproofing. It was just how I i­ magined an old radio ham’s shed would look.”8 This seems to have been attractive to a young man already nursing a maverick interest in diy electronics a­ fter spending time in his electronic engineer ­father’s garage. “To make some extra money,” Ball recollects, “[my ­father] used to build fruit machines. And ­they’d always be in our garage. . . . ​I think that’s prob­ably where my interest in ­actual machines started, when I think about it. . . . ​I built my first amplifier when I was 15, from scratch. Drilled out the chassis. It was a valve amplifier that lasted for two weeks before it blew up.” Ball remembers that he began “just interested in sound. I preferred messing about with sound rather than paint, ­really. You could book the studio for a week, and you’d sit on your own with the tape machines, and I was just experimenting. Messing about with it, learning about it.” Darling, he recollects, was the only tutor on the fine art course team that he ever remembers learning

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Dave Ball in the corridor outside the Polytechnic sound studio, ca. 1980. Photo: Tom O’Leary.

8.4 

anything from, even though the studio he presided over “­wasn’t designed for interlopers like me to try and write pop songs.”9 By 1978 Ball had used some of his student grant money to buy additional electronic equipment (a Melos tape echo chamber, a flanger, and, significantly, his first ever synthesizer, a MiniKorg 800 dv), which allowed him to build compositions through primitive overdubs in the sound room: “I would rec­ord a synth and Stylophone in one pass onto one Revox, then play that back through the mixer into the other tape machine while playing over the top.”10 The results, according to Ball, w ­ ere “strange ultra-­low-­fi/sci-fi pop ditties and instrumentals entirely for my own amusement.”11 And then one day, while I was in the studio, ­there was a knock on my door—­“Can I come in for a chat, Dave?”—­and it was Marc. He’d heard ­these bleepy strange sounds out of the room, and he said to me “Would you do the m ­ usic for some of my per­for­mances?” And I thought yeah, fantastic, ­because it would mean it getting used for something. . . . ​I would provide the soundscapes and weird quirky songs, and then he would do his CHAPTER EIGHT

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live show with that as part of it. . . . ​And that was when it suddenly became “We should do this as a ­thing!”

LESSONS IN JUXTAPOSITION

In the pages of a book published the same year that Soft Cell made their debut live appearance at the 1979 Polytechnic fine art Christmas party, Nuttall wrote a reflection on the compositional princi­ples under­lying ­People Show, the performance art troupe Nuttall was involved with in the late 1960s and 1970s: The Cage-­derived idea that if you juxtapose a number of concurrent actions which are carefully unconnected which have no common theme, no common concern, which are, in rational terms, dislocated, well then ­those concurrent actions ­w ill render another abstract. The interrogation ­will become noise with all the musical properties of a language one d­ oesn’t speak. . . . ​Dod’s bleeps ­were, on this occasion, abstract anyway. That’s what ­music is. Meaningless. That, as Pater said, is the condition to which all art aspires, to rid itself of meaning, achieve the purely aesthetic, to create a structure completely outside the materialist structures of the world, a behaviour completely outside the trite actions of survival, to sew immortality into the very fabric of life.12

­ ere is, perhaps, much to take issue with ­here.13 But of immediate releTh vance: “Dod” is John Darling, who had been a member of ­People Show too—­a number of years before he became the Polytechnic’s sound studio man­ag­er. Darling’s “bleeps,” in their abstractness, are unreadable, Nuttall says, devoid of a linguistic message: a strange kind of m ­ usic approaching better the condition of a noise—or, if a ­music at all, one expressed in a “language one d­ oesn’t speak.” As such, Darling’s sounds clue us in to the defamiliarizing bent of avant-­garde aesthetics. Unlike Nuttall’s fellow P ­ eople Show-­ers who had inherited conventional values of “communication, entertainment, character, message, plot” from backgrounds in theater, the author of Bomb Culture writes approvingly instead of “aesthetic juxtaposition as a basis for composition.”14 Drawing heavi­ly on the practice of collage in early twentieth-­century Eu­ro­pean art, Nuttall saw the job of the avant-­garde artist as to render the everyday strange, to leave it unhinged. Riffing upon Lautréamont’s famous phrasing of the surrealist encounter as a chance meeting on a dissecting ­table of a sewing machine and an umbrella, the exciting

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prospect for Nuttall was “[ Juxtaposition] on its own. No theme. No association. No truth to be read between the images. Just the aesthetic spin off. Place a fish next to a lawn-­mower, sulphur next to sandpaper, a Boy Scout next to a pen knife next to a cotton wool swab—­sparks.”15 Darling’s bleeps w ­ ere not, perhaps, radically unlike t­ hose heard by Almond upon passing Ball at work (play?) in the sound studio. “The squelches, squeaks and swoops I overheard fascinated and excited me. I felt they w ­ ere just what I needed for my per­for­mances.”16 For Nuttall as for Almond, such noises sounded new, sufficiently uncodified, and lacking in easy readability—­ all of which made them suitable components for avant-­garde work. Ball’s untutored, lo-fi use of a synthesizer, it seems, was partly what made ­these bloops just so. “Up u­ ntil then I had never actually seen a synthesizer,” Almond recalls. “It was still a unique and exotic instrument, normally confined to t­ hose groups with flash keyboard wizards experimenting in progressive sounds. But now it was beginning to make its way into teen­agers’ bedrooms.”17 By 1978 they ­were more cheaply and widely available. (Ball’s Korg cost him £450 second­hand. Ironically, the drummer from prog rockers Jethro Tull was the previous own­er.)18 So nonexpert use of relatively primitive recording technologies in the Leeds sound studio and the growing availability of electronic instruments made new sonic experiences pos­si­ble. Crude overdubs “juxtaposed” recorded tracks (hardly seamless, as one could hear the muffling of the first input against the sharpness of the one over it) and tape splicing became a way of creating va­ri­e­ties of rough audio collage in which the “cuts” between sonic samples could be heard, even paraded. A weeklong workshop led by Ron Geesin at Leeds Polytechnic in 1979 was particularly generative for students moving inchoately in such directions. Geesin was most famous as a collaborator with Pink Floyd on Atom Heart ­Mother and had produced a 1970 ­album with Roger ­Waters, ­Music from the Body, incorporating recorded sounds of the body alongside conventional musical instrumentation. Ball recalls that he was delighted by Geesin’s visit and bought his Electrosound, Volume 2 in order to better appreciate the Scottish composer’s experimental approach to electronic sound and media. “I visited his workshop in the studio and he did a fascinating demonstration of creative tape editing and how to distort, manipulate and warp pre-­recorded sounds by magnetising random metallic objects strategically placed on the tape.”19 George Hinchliffe remembers, “Geesin had an infectious enthusiasm for using tape as a creative medium.”20 Working in a small group of students, along with Ian Wood, Lyn Otter, and Patrick Goodall, Hinchliffe recalls CHAPTER EIGHT

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The first notes of Dehbye, spliced audio tape, 1979, by George Hinchliffe and Ian Wood. Photo: © George Hinchliffe.

8.5 

­ aking a final piece at the end of the workshop that included “­running the m recording tape all around the studio between two reel-­to-­reel tape recorders . . . ​ in order to rec­ord a signal on the first machine, and then play back that section of tape much ­later from the playback head of the second machine.”21 The result was fed through a sound mixer, with a fader, and new sounds continually added to the first machine. “The effect was an additive one,” Hinchliffe goes on. “If the faders w ­ ere set carefully then the ‘old’ sounds would gradually fade away in the ongoing mix, while the ‘new’ sounds would be prominent. . . . ​ This had the result essentially of tape echo, but with an extremely long period of repeat. This would be easy to achieve with digital technology t­ oday but the combination of homespun techniques and reasonably good recording equipment enabled us to achieve something which was not a common sound and not easy to achieve at that time.”22 Ball, for his part, recalls playing to Geesin the early Soft Cell track “Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché” at the close of the week’s activities, “which featured a tape delayed drum loop, my pink noise topline synth and Marc’s brilliant lyr­ics taking the piss out of the ‘post-­punk’ shoegazing brigade.”23 Geesin approved. In the wake of this, Hinchliffe and Wood went on to create a work called Dehbye made up entirely of audio samples spliced together on an extended tape loop and or­ga­nized according to a conceptual structure.24 The resulting work, in all its jaunty absurdity—­a “musical” composition derived from roughly abutting saxophone, strings, piano, and orchestral recorded samples alongside occasional voices of bbc announcers—­most

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strongly recalls W ­ aters and Geesin’s rhythmic collage of recorded bodily sounds and anticipates the penchant for bathetic, irreverent couplings and sonic collage in their ­later work as both Ukulele Orchestra of ­Great Britain and the Woo-­Hin Collective. It also anticipated the soon widespread practice of audio sampling in 1980s m ­ usic and use of the sequencer. Hinchliffe remarks that, ­today, Dehbye “sounds a ­little quaint, old-­fashioned but not quite intelligible, like . . . ​an obscure Dada poem from a WW1 exile.”25 But, in 1979, its rough-­hewn audio collage allowed one to hear the possibilities of a structured approach to unorthodox sonic composition.

PUNK THEATER

The making of such unusual connections in the sound studio resonated strongly with the transgressive collision of signifiers evident in contemporaneous student theatrical productions. Almond had arrived in Leeds a year ­earlier than Ball, in September 1976, from Southport Art and Technical College and, like Tovey, a­ fter the debacle of Senseless had become involved in per­for­mances in the university theater scene. The Workshop Theatre staged numerous early twentieth-­century Dada cabarets and German Expressionist plays alongside riotous Shakespeare productions during a fertile period of activity between 1976 and 1979. Buoyed along perhaps by Bowie’s Low and ­imagined parallels between Weimar de­cadence and the depressed realities of post-­punk Leeds, Almond had begun his own apprenticeship in avant-­garde aesthetics—­through the making of theater and per­for­mance art rather than composing sound and m ­ usic works. A ­ fter a successful production of Georg Kaiser’s Gas in 1976, Macbeth was given a transgressive edge by featuring a naked Marian Lux as one of the three witches, alongside Hugo Burnham and Ian Duhig (an En­glish student) in black jockstraps and chain mail as Banquo and King Duncan, respectively—­all, Burnham recalls, “moody and expressionist in style.” For the nightclub scene in a production of another Kaiser play in December 1977, From Morn to Midnight, a twenty-­minute cabaret sequence borrowing shamelessly from Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret featured Almond as one of the ladies of the chorus and Burnham as emcee (figure 8.6). Almond also appeared in a production of E. E. Cummings’s Him, in a humorous turn as Mussolini: “It was sort of sketches,” remembers Pete Brooks. “I just remember Marc playing Mussolini ­because he was quite ­little. Mussolini obviously ­wasn’t very ­little. So it was . . . ​this very camp Mussolini.” Almond appeared onstage (figure 8.7) CHAPTER EIGHT

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From Morn to Midnight, directed by Mike Patterson, December 1977. Marc Almond is far right and Hugo Burnham is second from left. Courtesy of Hugo Burnham.

8.6 

Him production still (Marc Almond on far right), ca. 1978. Courtesy of Soft Cell/Chris Smith @ Renegade ­Music. 8.7 

sporting a greasepaint military tunic with Iron Cross alongside incongruous repre­sen­ta­tion of shirt collar and tie—­all painted directly onto Almond’s naked torso. Coupled with this w ­ ere a­ ctual leather items: jacket, bullwhip, underpants, and knee-­length high-­heeled black boots. To complete the look ­there is a Ziggy-­style “flash,” also painted onto his skin, just above his groin—­perhaps a wry comment on Bowie’s disastrous flirtation with fascism only a few years before. Seemingly anarchic, this, and other productions like it across the Workshop Theatre scene, abounded in would-be scandalous juxtaposition: the outrageous pre­sen­ta­tion of brazen nakedness and fetish-­wear in “respectable” theater; incongruous sartorial codes (male identity and feminine heels, military and subcultural forms of adornment); and the irreverent crashing of high cultural seriousness (Shakespeare, world history) with youth culture (pop ­music and subcultural street style). The milieu around the Workshop Theatre constituted a permissive petri dish in which the broader social and artistic connective tissues of Leeds’s alternative arts ­were cultured. Students and former students from a diverse range of subject backgrounds, alongside nonstudents, ­were involved, helping Almond connect with o­ thers beyond the Polytechnic. Brooks, Lesley Stiles, and Claire MacDonald (all of whom studied En­glish at the university), Tyrone Huggins (metallurgy), Graeme Miller (Spanish), and Steve Shill (fine art) ­were all involved in the scene before forming Impact Theatre Cooperative in 1979. Other shows featured Jacky Fleming (who studied fine art), Burnham and Dave Wolfson of Gang of Four, Lux and John France of Sheeny and the Goys (the latter who studied history at the university), and Frank Tovey. Music-­based per­for­mance styles, such as Lux’s knowing showgirl persona within Sheeny and the Goys, ­were honed within this theater milieu, including her “in­de­pen­dently rotating breasts [that] kept the audience well entertained.”26 As Claire MacDonald puts it, “She could have been a Weimar, or a Brechtian or a Dadaist kind of singer . . . ​very vibrant and winning, but tough.” Nuttall notes that “dislocated juxtapositions [­were] the stock-­in-­trade of the Dada and Surrealist movements”—­the dramatic focus of so many of the university theater productions—­but, by this time, so too w ­ ere they 27 the modus operandi of punk style. “The subcultural bricoleur” in general, writes Dick Hebdige in Subculture (1979), “like the ‘author’ of a surrealist collage, typically ‘juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities (i.e., ‘flag’:‘jacket’; ‘hole’:‘teeshirt’; ‘comb’:‘weapon’) on an apparently unsuit-

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able scale . . . ​and . . . ​it is t­ here that the explosive junction occurs’ (Ernst, 1948). Punk exemplifies most clearly the subcultural uses of ­these anarchic modes.”28 That is, by 1976, punk had found a way to magnify the aesthetic scandals rooted in avant-­garde compositional princi­ples of early twentieth-­ century collage and postwar assemblage within subcultural street style and popu­lar ­music. “Although it was often directly offensive (T-­shirts covered in swear words) and threatening (terrorist/guerrilla outfits) punk,” Hebdige goes on, “style was defined principally through the vio­lence of its ‘cut ups.’ Like Duchamp’s ready-­mades—­manufactured objects which qualified as art ­because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items—­a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a tele­vi­sion component, a razor blade, a tampon—­could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion.”29 Almond’s solo per­for­mances (or at least ­those devised by him and staged in collaboration with fellow students) worked this heady confluence of avant-­garde and punk collage/bricolage. The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima, for example, performed in 1977 at the White Elephant Gallery, a small venue actively promoting per­for­mance art in the Hyde Park area of the city, was, according to Pete Brooks, “Marc ­doing this very de­cadent, vaguely narrative cabaret per­for­mance ­thing.” But mainly, he says definitively, it was “about images.” Almond similarly remembers it as part dreamlike ritual, part camp cabaret, all in pink, grey, black and white. It was based on an anonymous poem called “The Vampire Cat of Nebashima” [sic], a twisted fairy tale. The per­for­mance featured a ­great deal of blood, strange surreal masks and swastikas. Huw Feather had travelled up from his design course in Nottingham to play Anton LaVey. . . . ​Dressed in a skullcap and sporting a black beard and a long cloak, he recited the Satanic Laws. In the interval I performed a punk number called “The Pussycat Song,” accompanied by a thrashy guitar and tape loops I’d recorded myself. I was dressed in a pink pussycat hat. For the climax I smeared cat food all over my naked body.30

Such an anarchic constellation of practices, colors, and images—of per­for­ mance, sound, and song; blood, masks, and swastikas—­even of materials and aromas (bodies, cat food), seemed to be reaching for transgressive form. “Well, it was 1977,” Almond goes on. “I assume I was imagining this constituted some kind of punk expression.”31 To realize such multimedia productions required artistic collaboration (in this instance with Feather). Related works like Zazou, a per­for­mance

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about an “androgynous nightclub singer,” ­were similarly realized by drawing in input from ­others, from fellow art students Anne Tilby and Ed King as coperformer and musician, respectively.32 Almond reciprocated by working on the proj­ects of o­ thers. Along with King, he appeared in a campy Barbarella-­c um-­P ink Narcissus-­style film, Glamerama, made by Sally Bairstow, playing evil leader of a fictional e­ nemy organ­ization, bdsm—­ the Biological Department for Stopping Machismo. Almond, decked out in fetishist suspenders and plastic torso harness, terrorizes Bairstow with a plastic toy dinosaur ­water pistol, all to an electro-­soundtrack of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots.” “When I first met Sally,” Almond reflects, “she was dressed in leather biker gear from head to foot, and her ­whole life was styled around The Avengers, The Man from ­uncle and their like. We hit it off immediately.”33 Such connections ­were the hoped-­for result of an ethos of juxtaposition also underpinning decisions about recruitment within the Leeds course.34 From such a mix, as with the crashing together of images and sounds from dif­fer­ent media in a work of avant-­garde art, it was hoped “sparks” might fly from the student body.

MUTANT SHOW

Early Soft Cell per­for­mances worked a rich seam of aesthetic juxtapositions that Ball and Almond discovered between the overlapping scenes of experimental composition, per­for­mance art, theater, and punk m ­ usic, which could be encountered all within the immediate environs of their place of study. At the Polytechnic Common Room in 1979 and Cosmos nightclub in 1980, in addition to Almond on vocals and Ball on synthesizer and electronics, Steve Griffith was brought on board as Soft Cell’s third art student member. Griffith was responsible for projection of visuals in the live setting, an idea borrowed from Throbbing Gristle, ­Human League, and Cabaret Voltaire, according to Almond, though equally redolent of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable before them (figure 8.9).35 The projected visuals included images of “industrial landscapes, the neon lights of Soho, city buildings, motorways, smashed and demolished radios, shop dummies” (figure 8.10), as well as Ball’s Super 8 footage of New York and Blackpool (“all tacky gift shops”).36 Further visual ele­ments included the Soft Cell neon sign and a handout “illustrated song sheet,” which showed indebtedness to Kraftwerk’s own onstage neons and drawn repre­sen­ta­tions of songs on the inner sleeve of Trans-­Europe Express (1977) (figure 8.11). CHAPTER EIGHT

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Marc Almond, Zazou, per­for­mance, 1978. Courtesy of Soft Cell/Chris Smith @ Renegade ­Music. 8.8 

Soft Cell live at the Cosmo Club, Chapeltown, Leeds, 1980. From left to right: Almond, Ball. Photo: Tom O’Leary. 8.9 

8.10  Soft Cell live at the Cosmo Club, Chapeltown, Leeds, 1980. Photo: Tom O’Leary.

Soft Cell illustrated song sheet, 1979. Drawing by Dave Ball. Courtesy of Soft Cell/Chris Smith @ Renegade M ­ usic. 8.11 

Ball remembers talking with a friend in the Fenton about “how Soft Cell could play gigs as t­ here was only Marc on vocals and me on synth. . . . ​ We ­were at a loss what to do in a live situation. Then it came to me: we’d just have the reel-­to-­reel tape recorder on stage.”37 Thereafter the Revox became a fixture at early Soft Cell per­for­mances, proudly displayed as a signifier of pop’s new means of production and extending the band to a kind of cyborg four-­piece (including Griffith). It visibly ushered into live pop ­music a juxtaposition of live and recorded sounds already familiar within avant-­garde happenings and per­for­mance art. Almond writes in his autobiography that Nuttall was “a milestone figure in my learning,” driving him, like Tovey before him, to explore the value of shock in his art.38 “The more extreme, shocking, visceral and disturbing a per­for­mance was, the more he applauded and enthused. It was he that steered me . . . ​in this direction.”39 Nuttall also seems to have enabled an exploration of the possibilities of juxtaposing ­people in the pedagogic situation of the Leeds fine art course. It was not for nothing that the per­for­ mance group he founded in 1966 was called ­People Show: “as improbable a collection of wayward oddballs as one could find engaged on any single endeavour in the late sixties.”40 As Nuttall himself has observed, his intentions for P ­ eople Show w ­ ere that it would embrace the unrehearsed nature of a happening; that it would cleave ­toward a form of “subjectless juxtaposition” whereby no single agent, not one person making up the “­People” shown, would reign sovereign over it; and that out of the resulting chaos of assembled intentions, movements, sounds, and images something new, connected, vital could be realized—­even if only for the duration of a per­ for­mance event.41 Leeds Polytechnic fine art sometimes succeeded in bringing about such results, birthing unlikely, almost unimaginable connections—­including Almond and Ball as the “odd ­couple” of synth-­pop (Almond: gay, short, emotional, and voluble; Ball: straight, tall, quiet, and technical) and with an operative ethos that was, at least initially, highly redolent of ­People Show’s shambolic happenings. Almond tells of a particularly disastrous Soft Cell outing at Crocs nightclub in Essex on January 31, 1981, where the band distinguished themselves from their new pop brethren (Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode, Visage, and Ultravox) by spectacularly imploding due to poor sound and distorted backing tapes.42 Paul Fillingham, a Leeds Polytechnic fine art student, describes in approving terms a related collapse occurring only a few months e­ arlier at the Cosmo club in Leeds in November 1980. “­Towards the end of the set, one of the cine projectors failed, plunging half

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of the stage into darkness as Griffiths tugged away at live cables snaking between beer crates. It was pure theatre. Marc, oblivious to the chaos, kept singing along to the four-­track reel-­to-­reel whilst Ball tweaked the controls of his Korg synthesiser, approximating the improvised saxophone wail that often characterised the sounds emanating from the Poly sound studio.” Such “pure theatre”—­a theater of disarray perhaps—­was taken as a sign by Fillingham of Soft Cell’s avant-­gardism and rejection of polished industry professionalism.43 Perhaps what Almond appreciated most, though, about Nuttall was that his tutor’s aesthetics w ­ ere continuous with his personal style. “He revelled in being a slob—­large and overweight, unkempt and slovenly. He wore a checked flat cap, and constantly tried to shock us by exposing his small, rather walnut-­like penis.”44 Though readily acknowledging such be­ hav­ior as problematic, as “bullying and intimidation,” it seems Almond preferred to see the wayward outsider in Nuttall rather than the villainous harasser of ­women that ­others saw.45 Instead, his tutor’s slovenliness seems to have appealed as totemic of a life lived adrift from conventional ideals of beauty and moral rectitude. Almond wrote approvingly in his autobiography, “To me t­ hings could be both ugly and beautiful—­the paradox of beautiful ugliness. Ugliness was simply inverted beauty: individuals’ flaws and scars are their unique features, their identity: that beauty is my preference—­the broken nose, the twisted mouth, the missing teeth. I identified with strug­gle.”46 As a flamboyant gay man contending habitually with everyday instances of homophobia in 1970s En­glish society, he had, himself, grown accustomed to social abjection. B ­ ecause of this, Almond developed an affinity for ­those living at odds with, or outside of, valorized social norms and idealized forms of appearance: “I love the broken parts of our bodies and souls, the misshapes, the flaws, the ugly traits of a personality, and so am drawn to the damaged, the displaced, the socially lost. It’s what I was, and [writing in 1999] what I could so easily have remained.”47 A poster (figure 8.12) for one of his student per­for­mances, produced collaboratively with fellow student Gilly Johns, allegorizes the scary prospect of creating or inhabiting identities beyond idealized gendered forms (of, e.g., athletically muscled men), while also seeming to relish the likelihood that any desired new “face”—­born of brokenness or transformed by surgery—­might turn out to be Eraserhead-­style freakish, even frightening. An early Soft Cell song, “The Girl with the Patent Leather Face,” released on Some Bizzare ­Album in 1981, lyrically luxuriates in empathic connection CHAPTER EIGHT

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8.12  Gilly Johns, photo silk screen poster for Marc Almond’s “Glamour in Sqalour [sic],” 1979. Courtesy of Gilly Johns.

8.13  Soft Cell, Mutant Moments ep (back cover design by Marc Almond) (A Big Frock Rekord, 1980). Courtesy of Lloyd Lewis Kristian.

with just such a freakish social outcast and her “shiny” face. In lieu of any stated politics by the band, such empathy gets as close as Soft Cell ever do to any kind of social credo (the band are frequently characterized as apo­ liti­cal, even by themselves). “You can laugh, point at me / They do it all the time / But how would you like it if you had / A face like mine,” sings Almond, from the “girl’s” point of view. The band had already thrown in their lot with mutant identity a year e­ arlier, in the visual horror style of Almond’s portrait of them on the back cover of their debut self-­released ep, Mutant Moments (figure 8.13). The opening strains of “The Girl with the Patent Leather Face” also sound a note of sci-fi horror, but as the song unfolds that is turned on its head: the true horror h­ ere being the treatment the girl receives from the normals (“A target for the freaks and creeps / A reject of the ­human race”). The lyr­ics are accompanied by Ball’s buzzing electronics and manipulated sounds, recorded in the Polytechnic and engineered in Darling’s home studio in Yorkshire. Ball remembers it being made “with a c­ ouple of Revoxes, a toy Chinese instrument that I put a pick up on for that clanging sound, a Korg synth and a Rhythm Master drum machine. It was a ­little black box that had the usual bossa nova/jazz/disco/pop presets, but only one or two of ­those ­were usable.”48

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DANCE CLASS

Almond graduated with a 2.1 degree in the summer of 1979 and Ball the following year with a 2.2. “To be quite honest, by the time I was finished I ­wasn’t ­really that both­ered,” recollects Ball. “I’d de­cided I ­wasn’t ­going to be an artist, painter, what­ever. We’d made a pact, Marc and I, that we w ­ ere ­going to concentrate on the band. . . . ​I was just glad to leave at that point.” Ball had put together a final show of paintings, objects, and films, broadly influenced by pop art and Warhol: “Bits of films I’d done in New York, and stuff I’d done on Blackpool promenade, of all the tacky goods shops, the fluo­rescent signs and cheap, crappy shit. Lots of trashy, pop kind of images, ­really.” Accompanying t­ hese he played “the early Soft Cell backing tracks, without Marc’s vocals. . . . ​It was Soft Cell without Marc, [but] with the slide and the projection show.” Almond, for his degree, presented “a kind of ‘greatest hits’ compilation” show of his per­for­mance art titled Twilights and Lowlifes. Almond has subsequently complained of not being awarded the first-­class degree he thought he deserved: “Jeff Nuttall and Jeff Teasdale [sic] said they considered me to be very self-­sufficient as an artist, and felt that they ­couldn’t award me a first as I ­wasn’t ­going on to a master’s degree. Despite their assurances, I felt cheated.”49 So, for both recently graduated artists, embittered by their educational outcomes, the attractions of the art world began to pall. Almond says: We w ­ ere a bit tired of the arty side of ­things by then, . . . ​three years and we’d seen every­body just trying to be outrageous and shocking. Stapling budgies to boards and smashing up bowls of goldfish. . . . ​It was just getting very boring. . . . ​I believe in putting over your art and ideas to as wide a variety of p­ eople as pos­si­ble. You should be accessible. ­People should be able to understand what the hell ­you’re on about. I know it’s compromising but I think you should entertain to educate. Not preach to the converted.50

Art college, and the art scene, seemed cloistered in a way that pop culture did not in 1980. This renewed interest in reaching beyond the art world, in moving from art to pop, necessitated rethinking par­tic­u­lar ele­ments of Soft Cell’s act. In one of their first interviews in the ­music press in March 1981, they spoke to Betty Page: Marc: “­We’re using films, live, but cutting down on the length. We used to have two films ­going continuously all the way through the set, but now we ­really like ­people to get involved in moving about and actually dancing.”

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Dave: “­People ­were just standing t­ here watching the films.” Marc: “They ­didn’t know what to watch—­I was ­running about all over the place, the ­music was ­going on, films ­going on, ­people would stand ­there gawping. ­We’ll cut down, just have 20 minutes of film. We like clipped, shortish sets.”51

­ ere we capture Soft Cell at a point of transition: moving away from the exH tended duration of avant-­garde works t­ oward the shorter attention spans of the entertainment industry. (“Goodbye to self-­indulgent, de­cadent, hour-­ long exhibitionistic per­for­mances. Hello to self-­indulgent, de­cadent, three-­ minute-­long exhibitionistic per­for­mances,” Almond jokes.)52 But also Soft Cell are h­ ere on the point of shifting from contemplative forms of art appreciation, away from a situation in which the juxtaposition of ele­ments on stage is consumed by a stationary, somewhat “removed” viewer, ­toward audience members actively involved, moving their bodies, dancing. In the same interview, Almond champions the critical point of their song “Chips on My Shoulder” to emphasize the social significance of the band’s newfound appreciation of dancing: “[The song is] a dig at a specific crowd in Leeds who are very ­middle class, the long mac brigade,” he says—­twisting the knife (again) into Gang of Four and the presumed seriousness of their milieu.53 “They sloganeer, say t­ hings like ‘­music’s not to have a good time to, you ­can’t have a good time, what about Cambodia, what about Vietnam,’ they thrust t­ hese books of war atrocities at you and say, ‘go on cry, d­ on’t you feel awful.’ ”54 In comparison, Almond says, “Chips,” even though itself a complaint song about fellow Leeds miserable-­ists, is other­wise “very happy” with an unashamedly “discoey beat” to dance to.55 During 1980 and 1981, Ball and Almond became increasingly drawn to dance ­music and club culture ­because of its potential not only for the development of the Soft Cell proj­ect but also ­because it seemed to be the place where t­ hings w ­ ere happening culturally. According to Tim Lawrence, across the Atlantic, US dance culture in the early 1980s was g­ oing through a “spectacular period of mutant exploration.”56 It was a time “defined by its shift into sonic convergence and mongrel transformation . . . ​[and which] witnessed musicians champion a form of postgeneric freedom that all but forgot to codify its sounds.”57 In New York this entailed drawing in to club­ land art forms not normally encountered ­there: “dj-­ing and live ­music along with, variously, themed happenings, video and film screenings, per­ for­mance art, and art exhibitions.” This musical and artistic shift in dance-­ floor culture also “reflected and reinforced,” Lawrence goes on, “parallel CHAPTER EIGHT

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social developments” by bringing w ­ omen, gays and lesbians, Latinx and black ­people to the fore in club culture in ways that “facilitated encounters between revelers from diverse backgrounds, their interactions anticipated and supported by the compound sounds that surged throughout the city.”58 Almond’s and Ball’s memoirs offer detailed accounts of this period in Leeds, and similar developments—­albeit on a smaller scale than in New York.59 Although both band members ­were signing on for unemployment benefits ­after leaving the Polytechnic, continuing the effective state funding of Soft Cell’s activities by means other than student grants, Almond also famously took work as a coat-­check at the Warehouse—­Leeds’s premiere dance club. The Ware­house was renowned for bringing American influence to the north of E ­ ngland, first, through playing disco m ­ usic and, second, through hosting visiting US djs like Dan Pucciarelli, who introduced live mixing of rec­ords to British clubs (no dj talking between tracks). Interviews from the period with Almond and Ball detail how an exposure to dance m ­ usic, particularly to the electronic dance m ­ usic of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–­produced “I Feel Love,” was a game changer for the development of Soft Cell’s sound: “Marc had been working at Leeds Ware­ house in the cloakroom and they w ­ ere playing a lot of New York disco. . . . ​ So we ­were getting more and more into ­music with a heavy dance beat and heavy basslines. That’s how ‘Memorabilia’ came about, it was directly influenced by all that and us deliberately ­doing something a bit more clubby.”60 Almond then joined forces with fellow Polytechnic fine artist Chris Neate, who graduated in 1978, to run new club nights at the Ware­house, first on Monday nights, Digital-­Disko, and ­later on Fridays, White Savage Night. Almond and Neate deejayed at both nights (figure 8.14), spinning an unusual mix of tunes, and soon built a reputation for the club as home to northern En­glish “freaks.” As then Ware­house dj Ian Dewhirst remembers it, “You’d get incredibly well made-up and outrageous w ­ omen, both lesbian and straight, and then likewise the guys. If I was ­going to be churlish, I’d say the freaks definitely came out on Marc’s night. [When I was deejaying ­there] I found an in­ter­est­ing way to bring the Was (Not Was) rec­ord in, ‘Out Come the Freaks.’ I mean, that kind of says it all.” Almond himself wrote, in a partly retrospective report on the Leeds club scene published in the nme in 1982, “It was a ­battle for who could wear the most make-up and most acres of material. Boots 17 c­ ounter was desolated and on the dance floor local luminary Roxy (figure 8.15) danced like a dervish wearing the entire contents of his bedroom and living room put together.”61

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8.14  Marc Almond (left) and Dave Ball at Leeds Ware­house, ca. 1981. Photo: Avalon.Red. 8.15 

“Roxy” at the Ware­house, early 1980s. Photo: Roy Chaplin.

Poster for Digital-­ Disko, 1980. ­Artwork by Chris Neate. 8.16 

Almond’s and Neate’s taste in ­music gradually became more eclectic as they became more experienced party throwers. Digital-­Disko began as largely electronic, as a surviving flyer details: “­Human League, Ultravox, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic [Orchestra, but also] Roxy [­Music]” (figure 8.16). The Friday nights, on the other hand, ­were markedly more musically varied. Another flyer inventories: “Marc and Chris playing funk, mutant disco, rockabilly, salsa, electronic and all forms of mutant dance ­music!” Alternatively: “White/Funk : Electronic : Disko : Cha-­Cha : Rockabilly : Soul” (white funk refers to the crossover sounds of bands like James White and the Blacks). As Dewhirst, again, remembers it, such a mix would also habitually include post-­punk tracks amid the melee: You’d be guaranteed to hear the Cramps, or Killing Joke—­you could hear every­thing from rockabilly, very fast, aggressive stuff, to classics like “A Forest” by the Cure, or “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” but also the most avant-­garde electronic stuff. That’s what Marc and Chris did. They had eclectic taste. And also, the in­ter­est­ing ­thing is that they ­were quite into disco rhythms. So again, you d­ idn’t have that normal rock versus disco type, they realized what the drum was all about, and they also tended to like Giorgio Moroder

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productions, they tended to like ridicu­lous Eu­ro­pean gay rec­ords. So it was a real melting pot.62

Thus art college gradu­ates Almond and Neate, alongside Ball (Soft Cell frequently played the Ware­house during t­ hese years), can be seen to have created what amounted to their very own P ­ eople Show on the dance floor—­w ith an ethos of musical juxtaposition and social mixing at its heart. Page writes, “What Marc would r­ eally like to see is kids Northern Soul dancing to Soft Cell—­every­one from new romantics, skinheads and soulboys to mill girls, secretaries and bank clerks.”63 Ultimately, the dance floor was i­ magined by Almond and ­others as a space where the hopes of avant-­garde juxtaposition could be revivified as mutant conjunctures in street style and in the inclusive, no-­holds-­barred coming together of popu­ lar m ­ usic’s tribes across differences of identity. The opportunity for social mixing was enhanced by the smaller size of Leeds (as compared with London or New York) meaning that you could easily “traverse Leeds, you could walk from one side to the other comfortably in 10 minutes,” says Dewhirst. Almond fi­nally tells Page of the club’s working-­class patrons: “­There’s a hellish housing estate in Leeds called Seafront [Seacroft], the ­people that come from ­there are the ones that ­really dress up, go out in frills and makeup, have a good time and by the end of the eve­ning their frills are soaked in light and ­bitter! ­There’s one who’s a miner by day that spends his eve­nings making outfits on a sewing machine. No—­I think he uses a staple gun! But he looks ­great.”64 A sewing machine in a chance encounter with a staple gun. Staples holding together the kaleidoscopic ele­ments of a look, a sound, a society: where “leather” + “face,” “northern soul” + “synthesizers,” and “art gradu­ates” + “working classes” equaled a good time for all—­even a new pop democracy. On September 5, 1981, Soft Cell’s electronic cover version of Gloria Jones’s “Tainted Love” went to number one in the British singles chart. As it did so, the sound of such conjunctions could be heard across the nation by generations huddled around tv sets showing Top of the Pops. It was the mutant’s moment.

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EPILOGUE

THE LIMITS OF EXPERIMENT —1981 AND ­AFTER

E

ager to break the news of Soft Cell reaching number one on the singles chart, the Yorkshire Eve­ning Post splashed the “former fine art students” on its front page on September 2, 1981.1 Speaking volumes about the yep’s priorities, the paper reported that the band had completed a “rags to riches story by topping the pop charts with their first hit single” and celebrated the prospect of “a more luxurious life” for the “Leeds duo,” which would see them leaving ­behind their financial strug­gles on the dole.2 In a rash of further reports, Yorkshire Post papers continued to marvel at, and affirm, the trappings of instant wealth and material success that the pop industry appeared particularly ­adept at conferring upon the local boys made good. “Soft Cell Pays High Dividends,” cried one headline, and, in mock empathy with the difficulties of the band’s newfound fame, another smirked, “It’s a Hard Life at the Top (of the Pops) for Soft Cell.”3 The securing of such material forms of success came to be seen as increasingly desirable as the 1980s got u­ nder way, as the public priorities of state welfarism gave way to Thatcherism’s newly sanctioned morality of private accumulation. In this context, the Post, celebrating Soft Cell on such terms, appeared as an early standard-­bearer of emergent neoliberalist sensibilities, putting its drubbing of the Sex Pistols and pop culture from some five years e­ arlier well b­ ehind it. Or perhaps it was the other way round: that by 1981, pop ­music had itself put the Sex Pistols—­and the avant-­garde—­behind it, pivoting from being a vehicle of situationist provocation to one whose smooth

E.1  Soft Cell hit the headlines of the Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, September 2, 1981.

embrace of cap­i­tal­ist materialism made it the best advertisement that British conservatism could hope for. If this w ­ ere so, then the broadly shared ambitions of the artists explored in this book—to take the transformative strategies and possibilities of avant-­garde art into pop—­would have to be judged a failure. But it is impor­tant to acknowledge ­here, as the late cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall argued, that the value of popu­lar form is not exhausted within the levels of fame and financial reward that (sometimes) accrue to its purveyors, but it also extends to it as a privileged cultural location “where the popu­lar imaginary gets itself expressed.”4 On this understanding, popu­lar ­music and pop culture have to be reckoned with not only as artistically or eco­nom­ically significant phenomena but also as demotic forms of po­liti­ cal consequence through securing the identifications of their numerous consumers. Producers of popu­lar culture are presented, therefore, with the broadly transformative possibility of intervening in the popu­lar imaginary, of influencing it or other­w ise changing its terms or values. Such, at least, ­were the ambitions of artists explored in this book (King: “I wanted to change the world”). Significantly, some even contemplated studying at the ­Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham ­under Hall’s tutelage in order EPILOGUE

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E.2  Marc Almond on Top of the Pops, 1981. Photo: Avalon.Red.

to develop such understandings of popu­lar culture as an alternative to making it.5 But all this is in full recognition that popu­lar culture was not, and is never, a space of moral purities (in contrast to fantasies of high culture perhaps) but rather one comprising, as Hall would have it instead, a “dirty, compromised, commercialised, overridden world” in which meanings are constantly being strug­gled over and contested.6 So despite their evident commercial success, Soft Cell’s art school ethos made them a somewhat incongruous presence in the early-1980s pop industry. From Almond’s brazen queer appearances on Top of the Pops—­his camp theatrics variously adorned with bangles, heavy eyeliner, or s&m black leather and studs—to the provocation of their 1981 “banned” “Sex Dwarf ” video, the band continued to mine the power of the Nuttallian riot as they moved into the mainstream. The banned video involved transgender performers, an actor with dwarfism, orgiastic nudity, interracial eroticism, and sides of beef and live maggots alongside Almond in fetish gear and Ball in a bloodied butcher’s apron wielding a chainsaw. The band worked with young video director Tim Pope to bring all ­these ele­ments together in

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making their very own “video nasty.” Designed explic­itly to provoke, much like Senseless before it, it quickly succeeded in causing a media brouhaha in the tabloid press and thereby extended the reach of Leeds per­for­mance art into the early 1980s.7 Almond was quoted as saying at the time, “We see Soft Cell as a commercial band and the other side of us which is much more unacceptable. Especially in ‘Sex Dwarf ’ which is much talked about. It’s horrendous and disgusting. Soft Cell as it is tackiest . . . ​ultimate tack.”8 Above all, the duo viewed themselves as “an art college band” fetched up in the unlikely place of pop superstardom, their operative ethos placing them frequently at odds with standard industry marketing strategies and forms of publicity.9 “We ­were so bloody minded about every­thing,” recalls Almond. “We ­were . . . ​belligerent art students wanting to sabotage ­things . . . ​for ourselves more than anything ­else.”10 By 1981, Soft Cell had been joined by Scritti Politti, who had changed their approach ­toward what became known as a “New Pop” strategy, resulting in the latter’s single release “The ‘Sweetest Girl,’ ” which grazed the lower echelons of the UK chart (greater commercial success awaited the band a few years l­ ater a­ fter a lineup change and a new look). Simon Reynolds credits journalist Paul Morley with being the first to explic­itly elaborate “New Pop” priorities in print, which turned around the belief that it was “both pos­si­ble and imperative to take on the mainstream and beat it at its own game.”11 As we have seen, such a belief also underpinned Gang of Four’s decision to sign to emi, albeit with the caveat that they w ­ ere less enamored of “pop” ­music, and its staple “the love song,” than their former Leeds stablemates. Gang of Four never achieved the levels of commercial success secured by Soft Cell and Scritti Politti in the singles charts (though the band’s ­album sales ­were certainly not nothing), so the success of New Pop strategies among Leeds art school bands would have to be viewed as patchy at best (especially if we include noncharting acts Delta 5, Fad Gadget, and even the Mekons in the calculation). But it was certainly an impor­tant change from the position of an “audience-­less” avant-­garde with which we began this book, and it fulfilled much of the promise of punk’s mass reach, which excited many members of ­these bands upon first sensing it at the Polytechnic back in December 1976. In advance of any full reception-­study of the bands surveyed in this book (an undertaking beyond its purview), assessments of ­these bands, and their approaches to the ­music industry, ­were already u­ nder way at the hands of a second wave of art school m ­ usic acts that began appearing in the city in the early years of the 1980s.

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On August 14, 1981, only weeks before Soft Cell hit the number one spot, the bbc broadcast Ian McNulty’s A Town like New Orleans?, a forty-­ minute documentary exploring the Leeds m ­ usic scene.12 Taking a snapshot of its subject at the time, the program eschewed coverage of any of the bands considered thus far in this book and, instead, featured now comparatively little-­known, even obscure acts: jazz outfits the Jack Bennett All-­ Stars and the Zero Slingsby Quintet; an Irish folk band, the Roscoe Players; electro-­oddball Howard Sarna; experimental soundscapers the Commies from Mars (including Steve Shill from the recently disbanded Sheeny and the Goys); and art school new wave band Another Colour.13 The program’s accompanying press material suggested that ­there ­were more than two hundred live bands operating in the city at the turn of the de­cade and that ­there ­were “thousands of musicians—­ignored by both tele­vi­sion and the ­music industry alike—­playing live m ­ usic for fun and very l­ ittle money.”14 “Funny, ­there ­were no blacks among the many groups in Leeds,” wrote a Daily Mail tv reviewer, pointing out the blatant irony of the absence of nonwhite bands in McNulty’s se­lection of interviewees—­particularly given the program’s title.15 A Town like New Orleans? also turned away from featuring Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Delta 5 as, by this time, they had been lionized by the serious ­music press (if not r­ eally by tele­v i­sion). Moreover, Gang of Four, Delta 5, and at least some members of the Mekons had left the city for London by this time (Gang of Four in 1979 and Delta 5 in early 1981).16 Scritti Politti and Frank Tovey had already paved the way (in 1977 and 1978 respectively) in moving to London to secure recording contracts with Rough Trade and Mute and garnering a degree of national attention, while Soft Cell, though still living in Leeds, ­were not long to leave for London also (by 1982). Thus, by the time A Town like New Orleans? was broadcast, the “first wave” of Leeds post-­punk art bands, the primary subject of this book, had largely left the city to seek new opportunities in the capital. As Andy Beckett argues, it was during the early years of the 1980s that London’s “modern dominance of Britain . . . ​started,” backed by the City’s financial industry, which was then acquiring “a new transatlantic rawness and swagger” alongside privatizing models of urban regeneration exemplified by the London Docklands Development Corporation.17 In moving to London, Scritti Politti, for example, came to be largely associated with it by ­music critics, thereby obscuring their links with Leeds (this continuing up to recent times: in 2005 Reynolds dubbed early Scritti members of “the

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London vanguard”).18 Even a band like Soft Cell, who garnered national attention while still living in Leeds, tend to be associated by the media with London’s Soho district or New York nightclubs more heavi­ly than with their art school beginnings. Compounding this, scholarship and media alike have often largely ignored Leeds when addressing the ­music of this period, and this despite the sometime focus on regional UK scenes.19 Set against the backdrop, then, of an exodus of bands from West Yorkshire to a capital city so transformed and a relative critical indifference to the Leeds scene, ­those “left ­behind” turned to reassessing priorities in a Northern ­England blighted by the flip side of Thatcherite economic renewal: industrial decline.

THE SECOND WAVE

One such band, Another Colour—­comprising two recent art gradu­ ates from the university, John Hyatt and John Diamond, and two from the Polytechnic, Jacqui Callis and Andy Wood, along with the latter’s ­brother Bruce—­typified the outlook of a second generation of left-­field art school acts made up of ­those graduated by 1981. Deciding to remain in Leeds and continue the work of punk bohemia at the state’s expense by other means—by drawing the dole rather than spending student grants—­ Another Colour wished to further explore what they saw as the unfinished business of self-­organizing band production begun by ­those before them. “We d­ idn’t see ourselves as a rock band,” Callis recalls, principally, it seems, ­because of band members’ antipathy ­toward the ­music industry. “I would think the Gang of Four had similar talks. . . . ​Every­one was playing the same gigs. We played Rock against Sexism, Rock against Racism, you know, ­you’re on the back of a truck, we w ­ ere always playing t­ hose sorts of gigs. But not Soft Cell, for instance. They wanted to be part of the ­music business.” They joined in with the outlook of bands from the first wave who ­were more heavi­ly invested in forms of po­liti­cal solidarity and mutual aid, most often expressed in the playing of benefit gigs. Callis and Andy Wood had been living alongside members of Gang of Four, Delta 5, and the Mekons in a large housing association property in the northwest of the city, so they w ­ ere intimate with the university bands’ outlooks. So much so that Wood chose to work his way out from ­under their influence by writing his final-­year dissertation at the Polytechnic on Gang of Four’s “belly of the beast strategy”—­one embracing the mainstream EPILOGUE

230

Another Colour, ca. 1980. Left to right: John Hyatt and Andy Wood. Photo: Jackie Freeman. E.3 

E.4  Another Colour, ca. 1980. Left to right: Jacqui ­Callis and Bruce Wood. Photo: Jackie Freeman.

Right to Work benefit advertisement, Leeds Other Paper, January 1981.

E.5 

­ usic industry in order to change it from the inside.20 Wood’s skepticism m ­toward this approach is evident in his versioning of the cover image from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! ­album in his dissertation, where the original exploiting “cowboy” figure is identified with “emi” (crudely scrawled over the word “cowboy”) and the fooled “Indian” with “Gang of Four” (figure E.6). Writing in Leeds Other Paper, Another Colour also disassociated themselves from any search for a new sound, making their self-­understanding more postmodern than avant-­garde: “We attempt to find the best musical form, using any of the pre­sent forms available, to complement the content of the lyr­ics. Therefore questions like ‘Who are you influenced by?’ miss the point and notions of avant-­gardism (being the ‘new sound’) are redundant.”21 They ­were more interested in ways of working “amongst ourselves and with other people/bands/organisations/outside of the pre­sent loose title of Another Colour.”22 Often playing on the same bills as Another Colour, House­hold Name explored a related a­ ngle on the productive possibilities of group creation. They self-­released a 12″ punk funk single in 1981 before fizzling out in 1983, but not before some members had diversified in forming an overlapping print/design collective, Propaganda Unlimited. As Tony Baker puts it, “Propaganda Unlimited was based in an old biscuit factory, and had modelled itself on Warhol’s Factory, although it was more a space of productivity than bohemian social centre. It ­housed a darkroom, print workshop, rehearsal space and studio for the personal work of the collective, who, as well as working on commercial proj­ects, also exhibited together.”23 They also made Rauschenberg-­esque screen-­printed T-­shirts, which w ­ ere sold at House­hold Name gigs. Sometime ­later, in 1984, some members went on to form Dada-­ist cabaret band Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon.24 The early 1980s also saw the birth of Marian Lux’s new band, R ­ eally, with two gradu­ates from Leeds College of M ­ usic, Dave Bowie and Mark Creswell, and M.R.A., formed in 1980 by graphic design student Chris Bishop, university politics gradu­ate Andrew Rod­gers, and Paul Browning. By the time of the broadcast of A Town like New Orleans? in the summer of 1981, Hyatt’s new band, the Three Johns, was born, with Jon Langford from the Mekons on guitar and (eventually) Phillip Brennan as the third “John” on bass. And a group called the Smart Cookies, a five-­piece act including art students Paul Fillingham, Russell Fisher, and Bob Smith among their number, came out of early-1980s recording sessions in the Polytechnic sound studio and, as such, ­were one of very few ­music bands to be formed by students actually studying at Leeds art colleges ­after 1981.

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E.6  A page from Andy Wood’s 1981 Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art dissertation. Courtesy of Andy Wood.

House­hold Name, 12-­inch single cover, 1981. Photo and design: Tony Baker. E.7 

­Really: (from left to right) Dave Bowie, Marian (“Kitty”) Lux, and Mark ­Creswell. Photo: © Janey Walklin. E.8 

The Shee Hees in the Cardigan Arms, Leeds, ca. 1984. From left to right: Victoria Jaquiss, Sally Timms, and Jacky Fleming. Photo: Jon Langford. E.9 

Most new Leeds-­based acts with an art college connection formed in the years immediately following 1981 tended to include members who had graduated e­ arlier, including ­those in all-­female band the Shee Hees (figure E.9). Comprising ex–­art student Jacky Fleming on keyboards, schoolteacher Victoria Jaquiss on bass, and Sally Timms, former student of modern languages and business studies at Leeds Polytechnic, as the guitarist (all supplied vocals), the group prided itself on covering uncool and cheesy pop tunes (e.g., Bobby Vinton’s “To Know You Is to Love You” and Lionel Richie’s “Hello”) and delivering standards like “Walk on By” at an almost unbearably high pitch. All of this “was prob­ably a response to all the male bands that ­were springing up,” says Fleming, who had studied alongside Jon King, Kevin Lycett, and ­others at the university in the class of 1974. “I imagine that’s what we ­were d­ oing. To have an all-­female band at that point playing atrociously was quite subversive.” Other gradu­ates of the pre-1980s student years ­were exploring related ideas within a small Leeds diaspora, which kept the spirit of Fluxus and Dada alive in experimental forms of ­music production, for example, across Southern E ­ ngland. Jane Ralley and Jackie Freeman joined up with o­ thers in London to form the Cast Iron

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Fairies in 1981, another all-­women band that got a rave review in Spare Rib; while Paul Car­ter formed a band called idid idid playing low-fi electronica in gigs in his native Southampton; and Ron Crowcroft, as solo artist and as a member of duo the Modern Farmers, produced experimental sound pieces on cassette for the in­de­pen­dent label vec Audio Editions from his base in Bognor Regis.25 Ralley recalls that the Cast Iron Fairies ­were “art-­ based anarchy and revenge on that ­whole Sevenoaks cool punk scene.” Back in West Yorkshire, however, one of the most salient concerns of this second wave of artists, Callis recalls, “was decentralization. . . . ​It was about moving ­things away from London. You can do it in Leeds, you can put your own rec­ord out, you can pick up an instrument, and do it yourself. . . . ​It’s the song and the idea that’s impor­tant. . . . ​It was demystifying the ­whole ­music industry. . . . ​That’s what I loved about it, you know.” It was about trying to forge new conditions for regionally autonomous forms of cultural production. Current scholarship has, perhaps somewhat belatedly, begun to catch up with ­these priorities by addressing scenes remote from locations usually credited by historians and critics as centers of punk and post-­punk activity. Matthew Worley, for one, has explored how provincial UK scenes beyond Manchester and London flowered by dint of the “infrastructures” that made t­ hings pos­si­ble: rec­ords shops and clubs, local in­de­pen­dent rec­ord labels, fanzines, and ­music venues.26 Questioning the central importance granted to, for example, the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Lesser ­Free Trade Hall in Manchester within historical narratives of UK punk, he points to how “similar—if less renowned—­tales may be told elsewhere, as interest piqued by the ­music press led young minds hot-­wired by a gig or a freshly-­acquired 7-­inch single to seek co-­conspirators with whom to make a noise and make a culture.”27 This book has deliberately involved the crafting of “similar,” “less renowned” tales—­for example, in its account of Leeds’s very own, and hitherto overlooked, Sex Pistols’ ur-­scene. Leeds was connected to the national picture insofar as audiences ­there ­were exposed to touring bands like the Sex Pistols at city venues including the Polytechnic and the F Club, and it possessed other infrastructural ele­ments outlined by Worley as necessary for a sustainable local scene, such as Jumbo Rec­ords in the Merrion Centre. But in other ways its arts scene was, relatively speaking, cut off, geo­graph­i­cally and culturally remote from metropolitan London and lacking in infrastructure. Some groups self-­released rec­ords (such as Soft Cell and House­hold Name) and found recording facilities in Leeds,

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but ­those who signed recording contracts did so with companies outside the city, in Edinburgh and London.28 ­There was l­ ittle option, therefore, to make it “big” in Leeds, as opposed to in Manchester, for example, which had Factory Rec­ords and tastemakers like Tony Wilson proselytizing about local talent on Granada tv’s So It Goes. But if Leeds had a deficit in rec­ord companies and media advocates, it had a relative surfeit of something not included on Worley’s list: the cultural capital, and space and technical resources, that its singular mix of avant-­gardist and radical art schools afforded ­those who came in contact with them.

FINAL ASSESSMENT

In A Town like New Orleans? Callis and Wood appear, amid the paraphernalia and noise of art-­making in the Polytechnic studios, in the months leading up to Wood’s graduation (Callis had already left a year e­ arlier). Wood complains to tutor Geoff Teasdale about the “intellectual prejudice” at large in Leeds art schools—­both at the Poly and “up the road” at the university—­which, he charges, is responsible for the lack of recognition afforded their output as fine art students involved in the “par­tic­u­lar practice called rock and roll.”29 “­Because it’s not high art, b­ ecause it’s involved with mass culture . . . ​it’s always been seen as something subsidiary to our studies, not r­ eally part of what ­we’re about,” he complains.30 But “it’s serious,” he goes on. “It’s not fun, it’s a practice that w ­ e’re involved in on an eight-­hour-­ a-­day basis. It i­ sn’t something we do in our leisure time.”31 Teasdale, speaking self-­consciously before the tv cameras, ­counters that the Polytechnic’s pluralist approach to art pedagogy “indicates to students . . . ​that any kind of activity which is ideologically sound in terms of cultural intervention . . . ​is a valid course of study.” In a considered, retrospective assessment made in 2007, Teasdale contends that he was “forced” into this principled position of radical openness by “a liberal tradition of the British art school based in some concept of the avant-­garde” that was well established at Leeds as a result of the influence of Page and Nuttall from the 1960s onward.32 Driven by an overriding priority to let students “do what they want,” it suggested that anything they wished to pre­sent—up to and including what Teasdale calls “petty bourgeois, anarchic stupidity”—­could thereby be “described as within the definition of ‘fine art.’ ”33 As a result,

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“it’s very, very difficult to ask anyone, including myself, what fine art is or what the term means,” he goes on, “­because if it’s inclusive of every­thing it becomes undefinable. I was forced into the position of saying ‘Well if you say every­thing’s in, it’s got to be in.’ ”34 What we see played out for the tv cameras in A Town like New Orleans?, and throughout the pages of this book, is the drama of this idea breaking up in practice. Wood and Callis seem distrustful of Teasdale’s apparent openness to their work and frustrated at being misunderstood as fame-­hungry rock and rollers: “We have a lot of prob­lems as a band b­ ecause we ­don’t see ourselves as an aspiring, struggling, sort of rock and roll band. I think we see ourselves much more as a working unit, who are trying to locate themselves within dif­fer­ent sorts of mode of production.” Wood’s Marxisant idiom is indicative of his indebtedness to the critical practice of Art & Language and, echoing Gartside some years before him, is used to champion the cultural possibilities of nonhierarchical forms of collective action—­which he takes to be beyond the pale of the individualist art agenda. For his final-­degree show Wood hung typed analyses to the wall castigating “art man­ag­ers” for being “the most annoying obstacles to any self-­activity.”35 Alongside this, Wood, without seeking permission from any of his tutors, publicly exposed their written reports on his work to “damning, piss-­taking” assessments and parried them with “justifications” of Another Colour from fellow band members, including Callis arguing against received ideas of being in a rock group. Such direct and irreverent challenges to the authority of art college staff, and to the assumptions informing the assessment pro­cess, demonstrate the degree to which the development of art school band activity appeared ultimately incongruous within the contexts of an art-­educational institution. Tom Greenhalgh, who also graduated in 1981 but from the university fine art course, confronted similar prob­lems: “I was trying to do something that dealt, in some way po­liti­cally, with . . . ​the environment I was in, with what being an art student at Leeds University in 1981 was about. And the best that I could think of,” he says, “was to paint portraits of vari­ous members of the staff ” (figure E.10). ­These included works featuring Pollock, Atkinson, and Clark (Clark as Che Guevara) alongside an installation of band documentation resulting from a year Greenhalgh spent out from his studies recording and touring with the Mekons (figure E.11). “In the end,” he recalls, “it was a bit too sort of cheeky . . . ​[and] it ­wasn’t ­really developed very well. . . . ​I got a 2.2. . . . ​I was kind of disappointed with that but not surprised.”

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Painting of T. J. Clark. Tom Greenhalgh, University of Leeds degree show, 1981. Courtesy of Tom Greenhalgh.

E.10 

Mekons pre­sen­ta­tion (publicity material, rec­ord covers, drum kit). Tom Greenhalgh, University of Leeds degree show, 1981. Courtesy of Tom Greenhalgh. E.11 

I venture that Greenhalgh’s degree pre­sen­ta­tion is more revealing than he realizes: showing us just how unbridgeable the gap had become between art college lecturers and the world of post-­punk m ­ usic. Even though Clark remembers playing a Gang of Four rec­ord for a generally appreciative Michael Baxandall, the visiting university examiner and Re­nais­sance art history specialist, dif­f er­ent generational attitudes t­ oward such t­ hings as class and culture, artistry and industry, and the importance of audiences made it perhaps look more like a chasm than a gap between them. In his failure to convincingly connect the dif­fer­ent ele­ments of his exhibition, Greenhalgh demonstrated how culturally incommensurate high art and pop m ­ usic had become—­even though, ironically, the latter, as we have seen, owed many of its ideas and practices to the history of avant-­garde art. By 1981, some of the key pedagogues that had s­ haped the punk and post-­punk generation of Leeds art students had left the city, most notably Clark (who left for Prince­ton in 1979 and eventually Harvard) and Nuttall (who became a lecturer in Liverpool in 1980). A ­ fter years of falling investment in art education and collapsing government belief in the subject’s importance, the progressive diminution of art college resources reached crisis levels, particularly at the Polytechnic, where exiting staff members w ­ ere not replaced. As Dave Seeger writes, “­There w ­ ere no appointments or replacements to staff who left, retired or died (regardless of how crucial their role had been) between 1970 and 1981.”36 Reduced funding of the studio and technical infrastructure alongside ­these effective staff cuts threatened the provisioning of “wide open liberty . . . ​beyond the usual painting and sculpture,” which Nuttall and com­pany had made Leeds famous for.37 Other staff remained, however, and some “new blood” was added (particularly at the university with the arrival of photography theorist and historian John Tagg), but it was clear that Greenhalgh’s attempt to make an exhibition that addressed what “being an art student at Leeds University in 1981 was about” was undertaken just as the conditions of cultural possibility w ­ ere beginning to shift again. Significant social and institutional changes w ­ ere afoot in 1981 that resulted in the politics of gender and race becoming more pre­sent in the life of the city and certainly within art college agendas than they w ­ ere in previous years. Only months e­ arlier, in January, Peter Sutcliffe was fi­nally caught by police a­ fter his six-­year campaign of gruesome vio­lence. The arrest came as a huge relief for w ­ omen across the region, who had been living ­under a reign of terror, but it also gave rise to much anger about, and critical reflection upon, the values of a society that had allowed the killer

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Chila Kumari Singh Burman, If ­There Is No Strug­gle, ­There Is No Pro­gress—­ Uprisings, 1981. © Chila Kumari Singh Burman. All rights reserved, dacs/Artimage 2021. Photo: Tate Photography. E.12 

to remain at liberty for as long as he did.38 And only weeks ­after Green­ halgh’s degree show, Chapeltown was ablaze in a summer of race “riots”— or insurrections—­which revealed endemic prob­lems with racism across the country.39 Together ­these events catalyzed years of institutional disquiet in the city’s art schools as students turned to confront alleged sexism and racism in studios and cultural bias in seminar rooms. Female students’ criticism of male art school staff be­hav­ior was on the increase, particularly at the Polytechnic, and students like Sutapa Biswas began to question the Eurocentric teaching at the university. This period of activity culminated in 1984 when “sexual favours” w ­ ere alleged to have compromised the integrity of the Polytechnic fine art examination pro­cess that year.40 An internal inquiry was set up, but that ­didn’t stop the fallout from media coverage of the crisis risking closure to the Polytechnic’s course.41 Ultimately no changes ­were made to the graduating results and the course continued on—­albeit with significant changes made to the program of study and to its leadership. ­These years saw the founding of the feminist photography proj­ect Pavilion in Leeds in 1983 by a group of former students of fine art in the city EPILOGUE

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and the emergence of a group of student-­artists comprising individuals ­later impor­tant within the British black arts movement.42 And so a period of activity involving art students coming together informally and sometimes more concertedly within groups to pursue shared concerns began to show a dif­fer­ent direction for collective forms of art school activity to ­those which have been the subject of this book. In some ways, such endeavors to surpass the limitations of the avant-garde continued the work of the art school ­music culture covered ­here but resulted instead in critical forms of visual art production: in photography and photo-­text work, painting, and per­for­mance.43 Art began rediscovering its dissident purpose in Leeds colleges just as the musicians w ­ ere leaving the building.

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NOTES PREFACE

1 2 3 4 5

Wilson, Student Grants, 7. Banks and Oakley, “The Dance Goes On Forever?,” 46. Walkerdine, “Coming to Know.” Hillman and Robinson, Boys to Men; and Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor, Panic! Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor, Panic!, 17. The authors pre­sent a complex picture and acknowledge that the changed structure of the British economy since the 1980s accounts for much of the recent variation in absolute numbers of ­people from dif­fer­ent class backgrounds working in the arts. Even so, they also pre­sent the grim finding that the proportion of ­people from dif­fer­ent social classes in arts employment in 2011 had not improved at all since 1981, with upper echelons of society continuing to be disproportionately overrepresented and lower ones significantly underrepresented therein.

INTRODUCTION

1

2

3

Mary Harron, “Dialectics Meet Disco,” Melody Maker, May 26, 1979, 17. All subsequent citations of Harron are from the same source and page ­unless other­wise indicated. Garry Bushell, “Notes from Up a Bourgeois Cul-­de-­sac,” Sounds, October 6, 1979, 43. Reynolds notes that some punk “diehards”—­which could include the likes of Bushell—­accused art school experimentalists “of merely lapsing back into what punk had originally aimed to destroy: art-­rock elitism.” Rip It Up and Start Again, xvii. Her boldest example of denial is Fast Product’s Bob Last, who, she writes, “began to foam at the mouth” when accused of taking his operational strategies from Dada and Andy Warhol. Harron, “Dialectics Meet Disco,” 17.

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

See Taylor, Downtown Book; Savage, ­England’s Dreaming; Wilson, 24 Hour Party ­People; Esch, Electri_City; and Fish, Industrial Evolution. Patrick Heron, “Murder of the Art Schools,” Guardian, October 12, 1971, 8. See “Living Picture Ends Up in Court,” Daily Mail, November 24, 1970; Byron Rogers, “Progressive Art or Subsidised Freak Out?,” Daily Telegraph Magazine, April 14, 1972, 9–12; Anthony Delano, “Roll Up and See the Concrete ­Music Man and the Baking Ford,” Daily Mirror, May 5, 1972; “­We’re Daft to Pay Up £400 for this Caper!,” Sunday ­People, March 7, 1976; and “The Fine Art of ­Killing Budgies,” Daily Express, May 27, 1977. Booker, Seventies, 5. Booker, Seventies, 5. Lucie-­Smith, Art in the Seventies, 121. The figure of 157 art schools is drawn from the research and expertise of John Beck and Matthew Cornford. In correspondence with the author, Beck notes A. J. Peters’s 1967 assessment of the number of art education institutes: “The number of maintained art establishments has decreased from 207 in 1946–7 to 157 in 1964–5. About 70 ­were believed to be attached to technical colleges.” Peters, British Further Education, 70. I am also indebted to Beck and Cornford, Art School and the Culture Shed. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 86. See also Walker, Cross-­Overs. Cited in Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 96. Cited in Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 96. See Roberts, Red Days. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 28. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 60–61. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 48. ­There are notable exceptions to my generalizing comments about art education in the United States ­here, most significantly the experimental Black Mountain College, which ran for twenty-­three years ­until 1956. Ministry of Education, First Report. Heron, “Murder of the Art Schools,” 8. Rogers, “Progressive Art or Subsidised Freak Out?,” 10. Jones, “Art Students and Their Trou­bles,” 65. Ken Rowat, untitled article, Guardian, February 10, 1976, 15. Rowat, untitled article, 15. Rowat, untitled article, 15. Rowat, untitled article, 15. Rowat refers to art in this way in Omnibus: Art—to a Degree?, bbc broadcast, November 11, 1976. See Beckett, When the Lights Went Out, 171–77, 331–35, 339–45, and 353–57, for further details. As Beckett notes, the imf deal subsequently required huge cuts to public expenditure between 1977 and 1979. ­These turned out to be unnecessary ­because, Beckett argues, the government was misled by incorrect

Notes to Introduction

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28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

247

assumptions in 1976 about the UK’s borrowing requirements and ­really ­didn’t need the sizable loan it ended up having to pay back. Callaghan, “Leader’s Speech.” This speech paved the way for the monetarist policies of the Thatcher government ­after 1979. Roberts, Red Days, 23. Piekut, Henry Cow, 383. See Manson, Willy Tirr, 34. See Thistlewood, Continuing Pro­cess; Bracewell, Re-­make/Re-­model; Westley and Williamson, “William Johnstone”; and Crippa and Williamson, Basic Design. Forrest, “Harry Thubron,” 190–94. Michael Parkin, “Techno-­Artist,” Guardian, February 13, 1964, 8. Lynton, “Harry Thubron,” 170. Leeds College of Art, Basic Research, 4. Askham and Thubron, “Case for Polytechnics.” Charnley, Creative License, 146. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 17. Look North, bbc tv, November 22, 1970. Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 64–65. Leeds Polytechnic, “B.A. (Honours) Fine Art Quinquennial Review,” 2. Dave Ball, personal communication with author, July 16, 2015. See Worley, “Shot by Both Sides”; and Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion, 58–60. See Haddon, What Is Post-­Punk?; Hebdige, Subculture; Laing, One Chord Won­ders; Marcus, Lipstick Traces; and exhibitions including Panic Attack: Art in the Punk Years at Barbican Art Gallery, London in 2007. Reynolds is the outlier among ­these sources in accounting for the specifics of art school influence at vari­ous points within his Rip It Up and Start Again. See Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 129–61. For an account of McLaren’s formative art school years, see Savage, ­England’s Dreaming, 23–57. Though McLaren went to numerous art colleges (Croydon, Goldsmiths, and Saint Martins) and Bob Last studied architecture, Vivienne Westwood reportedly only lasted a term at Harrow School of Art and neither Rhodes nor Wilson studied art. Wilson presided over the Factory in Manchester while denying Warhol as progenitor for his own initiatives. As Savage details, the Situationist International was more pressing and influential for Manchester post-­punk than American pop art. Savage, “Fac 1–50.” To be clear: I am suggesting not that Leeds bands ­were without man­ag­ers or promoters but rather that ­those who did have them ­were managed from outside Leeds itself. Bob Last, in Edinburgh, worked with Gang of Four in Leeds and Scritti Politti once relocated to London, and Stevo and Daniel Miller in London worked with Soft Cell and Fad Gadget, respectively. Mick Wixey, the Mekons’ man­ag­er, was the exception in residing in Leeds—­though hardly a

Notes to Introduction

49 50 51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59 60 61

McLaren-­esque figure. For more on Stevo’s promotion of Soft Cell for Some Bizzare Rec­ords, see Clowes, “Depeche Mode and Soft Cell.” Simon Reynolds, correspondence with author, January 18, 2020. Roberts, Red Days, 12. Roberts, Red Days, 13. Though I do not have exact comparative figures for students studying art and design, Mark Banks and Kate Oakley note that, following the expansion and globalization of British higher education in the 1990s, “The UK has seen a growth in undergraduates wanting to study subjects related to the arts and cultural industries, with a 30% growth in ‘creative arts and design,’ between 2003/4 and 2011/12.” Banks and Oakley, “The Dance Goes on Forever?,” 49. See Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor, Panic! See also Tess Reidy, “Is Studying the Arts the Preserve of the ­Middle Classes?,” Guardian, August 31, 2018, https://­ www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­education​/­2018​/­aug​/­31​/­how​-­working​-c­ lass​-­arts​ -­students​-g­ et​-­locked​-o­ ut. Becker, Art Worlds, 309. My thinking in this book is indebted to Félix Guattari’s radical approach to group-­working in clinical psychiatric institutions and to his magisterial study of demo­cratic energies in mid-1980s Brazil, the latter conducted with the collaboration of Suely Rolnik. See Guattari, “Transversality”; and Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil. Illich, Deschooling Society; Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Charnley’s Creative License and Rooney’s Thin Air offer useful accounts of the history of fine art education at the Polytechnic. Belinfante and Pollock’s exhibition Lessons in the Studio gave a useful overview of fine art at the university over a seventy-­year period. Further print sources within popu­lar ­music studies, rock journalism, and pop-­star autobiographies variously touch on Leeds art school bands: Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 111–13, 117, 199; Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure, 78–79, 83, 95; O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?,” 29–31; and Whitney, Hit Factories, 99–100, 102–3, 108–9, 117. Books on Gang of Four by Dooley, Red Set, 57–73; and Lester, Gang of Four, 17–18, have useful information. Almond, Tainted Life, 55–79, 84–87; Ball, Electronic Boy, 67–96; and Parsons (Tony Baker), From Now ­Until Yesterday, 15–46, all provide compelling accounts of art student life at Leeds Polytechnic. For an account of early uses of the term post-­punk, see Haddon, What Is Post-­ Punk?, 25–42. Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure; and Haddon, What Is Post-­Punk? Haddon, What Is Post-­Punk?, 14–17. This volume is written in American En­glish except regarding band names, which are referred to throughout as plural collective nouns. The latter is customary of the British En­glish used by the book’s interviewees and within the material cited from ­these and other British sources.

Notes to Introduction

248

CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNING AT A DEAD END

1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17

18

249

My emphasis. Nuttgens, Leeds, 56–57. Nuttgens does, however, end his narration of a 1973 tv program, In Search of a City—­about the renewal of Leeds—on a note of ambivalence: “I think that Leeds has at last rediscovered itself and can look at itself again. Is this to be the model of the modern city? Catering for new needs but retaining some of its past. If so, what sort of city ­w ill it be? A city of work and money? A city of faceless blocks and ­human misery? Or the city of ­people, the city of man?” “Motorway Jungle of the 70s,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 3 (1974), 1; “ ‘Hunsletisation’—­The Planner’s Disease,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 5 (1974), 4–5; and “Quarry Hill and the Mad Council,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 6 ( July 1974), 1, 3. “Goodbye at Last! The Story of Hunslet Grange—­Technocrat’s Dream, Resident’s Nightmare,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 224 (May 21, 1982), 10–11. Bell, Complete Poems, 137. For details of the Situationist-­inspired beginnings of Manchester post-­punk and its roots in Cambridge radicalism at the beginning of the 1970s, see Savage, “Fac 1–50.” Thear, “Self-­Sufficiency Movement and the Apocalyptic Image,” 131. His films included Drawing with the Figure (1963), Matisse—­A Sort of Paradise (1969), and Kate Barnard (1973). Corrigan, correspondence with author, September 8, 2017. Gill: “It was very long and very slow. It had very, very long pauses. And then Tom would belch or something.” According to King, it was also produced with a view to being screened at the band’s gigs, in the manner of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, as many members of the Mekons and Gang of Four ­were big Velvet Under­ ground fans. See King, “Gang of Four and Mekons Assault Hegemony.” King, “Gang of Four and Mekons Assault Hegemony.” We should not, however, discount a level of playfulness in King’s mature appraisal of his younger artistic achievements, especially given his published reservations about avant-­gardism in the ­music press of the late 1970s. I learned from Clark, however, that he has no recollection whatsoever of being pre­sent at this per­for­mance. King, “Gang of Four and Mekons Assault Hegemony.” King, “Gang of Four and Mekons Assault Hegemony.” The Mekons’ lyr­ics run: “I was in this late night café / I was eying up the till / When in comes the British Police / Getting their bacon grill / Getting their bacon grill! / Getting their bacon grill!” “The Times,” lyric sheet, Jon King, personal archive.

Notes to Chapter One

19

Andy Beckett writes that “declinism was an established British state of mind, but during the mid-­seventies it truly began to pervade the national consciousness.” He details writers from across the po­liti­cal and cultural spectrum who variously embodied this trait at the time, from Patrick Hutber’s The Decline and Fall of the Middle-­Class (1976) and Tom Nairn’s The Break Up of Britain (1977) to style commentator Peter York’s writing in Harpers & Queen in 1978. See Beckett, When the Lights Went Out, 177–78. 20 So much so in the UK, in fact, that “by 1960, as one critic has put it, ‘Modernism had become the official architecture of the welfare state.’ ” Hanley, Estates, 105. 21 See Meryle Secrest, “The Per­for­mance Is Now in Pro­gress,” Washington Post, May 18, 1969, K6; and Henri, Environments and Happenings, 118–24. 22 Butt, “Without Walls.” 23 Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 89. 24 Nuttall, “Per­for­mance Art,” 22. 25 ­There was a sliding scale of fee remission in many such schools at the time. Greenhalgh recalls that his ­family may have received some “help” in paying for his attendance ­there as a boarder. Greenhalgh, email correspondence with author, November 22, 2017. 26 Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 65. 27 MacDonald, “All Together Now,” 149. 28 For more on the broader history of ­women students and feminism in UK art schools see Robinson “­Women, Feminism, and Art Schools.” 29 Lea, Facing the Yorkshire Ripper. 30 Charnley, Creative License, 76. 31 McAlinden, “Leeds Is the Opportunity.” 32 Ralley, correspondence with author, November 22, 2019. 33 Ralley, correspondence with author, November 17, 2019. 34 Ron Crowcroft’s personal papers evidence student unhappiness with the lack of tutorial support and the focus on assessment of the final-­degree show rather than on continuous forms of assessment in 1975. Crowcroft studied at the Polytechnic from 1973 to 1976. Crowcroft, personal archive. 35 This is Charnley’s characterization of the ethos of Leeds Polytechnic in Creative License. 36 Jon Langford remembers him as a “huge and looming figure” and inspiration for “Roger Troutman,” an early-1980s oddity included on the Mekons’ I Have Been to Heaven and Back: Hen’s Teeth and Other Lost Fragments of Unpop­u­lar Culture, Vol. 1 (Quarterstick Rec­ords, 1999). 37 This is echoed remarkably closely by McAlinden’s reported comments about Leeds College of Art pedagogy in the 1960s: “We are only creating an environment. We are only a fence to keep stupidity out and let them grow.” Cited in Secrest, “American in Leeds,” 207. 38 Lycett, personal archive.

Notes to Chapter One

250

39 The play between live per­for­mance and videotaped action was something that Joyce had tried out a few months prior in an exhibition at the Breadline Gallery in West Leeds in March 1977. The Dignity of Work is, in turn, redolent of the reflexive use of technology in British artist Stephen Partridge’s 1974 video artwork Monitor. 40 “During the mid-­seventies, the median monthly disposable income of British ­house­holds, allowing for inflation, which had been growing robustly in the early years of the de­cade, began to wilt.” Beckett, When the Lights Went Out, 176. 41 Lycett, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” 42 Lycett, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” 43 Lycett, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” 44 Lycett, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” CHAPTER TWO: ANARCHY AT THE POLY

“Pistols Get Their ­Orders: No Swearing in Leeds,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, December 6, 1976, 1. 2 Only seven gigs ­were played in the UK, including four rearranged or additional concerts added to the three that went ahead as planned. See “Punk Storm Grows,” Melody Maker, December 11, 1976, 4; Julie Burchill, “And ­After All That, the Dear Lads Tussle with the City ­Fathers,” New Musical Express, December 11, 1976, 6; and Savage, ­England’s Dreaming, 267–75. 3 See Nolan, I Swear I Was ­There; and Sarah Walters, “Four Manchester Bands We Owe to the Sex Pistols’ Lesser ­Free Trade Hall Gig 40 Years Ago,” Manchester Eve­ning News, June 3, 2016, https://­www​.­manchestereveningnews​.­co​.­uk​ /­whats​-­on​/­music​-­nightlife​-n ­ ews​/­sex​-­pistols​-­free​-­trade​-­manchester​-­11423565. 4 Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 64. 5 Gartside, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” 6 Gartside, in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” 7 ­These clothes are prominently featured in their tele­vi­sion interview with Janet Street-Porter on the London Weekend Show, broadcast just over a week ­earlier on November 28, 1976. Bernie Rhodes, the band’s man­ag­er, and bass player Paul Simonon, an ex–­Byam Shaw School of Art student, ­were responsible for the production of the band’s look. 8 As reported to the author by Tom Greenhalgh. 9 “Leeds was a real musical and artistic education for me. It seemed, at the time, like the biggest city in the world and ­there was so much ­going on, particularly in terms of ­music—­I remember seeing the [Sex Pistols’] Anarchy tour ­there (in December 1976), for example.” “Interview: Marc Almond,” Yorkshire Eve­ ning Post, August 13, 2009, https://­www​.y­ orkshireeveningpost​.c­ o​.­uk​/­whats​-­on​ /­music​/­interview​-m ­ arc​-­almond​-­1–2223623. 10 Tony Parsons, “Blank Generation Out on the Road,” New Musical Express, December 11, 1976, 33. 1

251

Notes to Chapter Two

Caroline Coon, “Punk! On Stage!,” Melody Maker, December 11, 1976, 18. Steven Kendall and Howard Corry, “How the Sex Pistols Misfired,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, December 7, 1976, 16. 13 Savage, ­England’s Dreaming, 260. 14 The ­hotel’s duty man­ag­er said, “It’s been blown up out of all proportion. I’ve been on duty all weekend and, as far as I’m concerned, nothing happened” (“Pistols Get Their ­Orders”). See also Savage, ­England’s Dreaming, 268. 15 Savage, ­England’s Dreaming, 268. 16 Savage refers to the developing New Right discourse at this time: ­England’s Dreaming, 253. 17 Kendall and Corry, “How the Sex Pistols Misfired.” 18 In London the example of the Sex Pistols “put a fire u­ nder an awful lot of p­ eople. Men and w ­ omen,” recalls Gina Birch of the Raincoats. Bell and Howe, Dayglo, 43. 19 “Pistols Shock Horror!,” Sounds, December 11, 1976, 34. 20 For a wary take on the politics of the Clash in a left-­wing magazine, see “The Clash in Leeds and the Politics of Boredom,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 56, May 28–­ June 10, 1977, 13; and for more on the politics of punk, Worley, No ­Future. 21 Ken Yates, “Mari’s Shocker,” Sunday Mirror, June 27, 1976, 11. 11 12

CHAPTER THREE: PUNK BOHEMIANS

1 2

3

4

For more on both of ­these ­things see Reddington, The Lost ­Women of Rock ­Music; and Sabin, ‘ “I ­Won’t Let That Dago By.’ ” For the classic academic approach to analyzing youth cultures, including punk, as stylistic expressions of working-­class identity, see Hebdige, Subculture. More recent studies have rendered more complex the class composition of punk groups: Laing, One Chord Won­ders, 121–25. ­Others have foregrounded individualistic expression over and above collective class identity: Muggleton, Inside Subculture. ­Others still have explored the uneven nature of punk’s po­liti­ cal expression: Worley, No ­Future. As Hebdige puts it, “Punk claimed to speak for the neglected constituency of white lumpen youth[,] . . . ​‘rendering’ working classness meta­phor­ically in chains and hollow cheeks, ‘dirty’ clothing (stained jackets, tarty see-­through blouses) and rough and ready diction.” Hebdige, Subculture, 63. Writing on New York punk’s “musical mutations,” Glenn O’Brien points out that they “happened in a community of art students, sexual minorities, self-­exiled mid-­ Westerners, and refugees from the old world.” O’Brien, “Punk Is New York, New York Is Punk,” 96. This could be read as a kind of pathetic, failed identification with the sci-fi world-­making of Parliament’s 1975 Mothership Connection ­album. Parliament ­were also an open and shifting collective of players, just like the Mekons, and a listening plea­sure for some members of the Leeds band. I am grateful to Mimi Haddon for suggesting this link to me. For more on the early Gang of Four gigs, see Lester, Gang of Four, 26–27; and Dooley, Red Set, 78–79. Notes to Chapter Two

252

5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27 28

253

Morley, “­Doing High Culture,” 49. The article originally appeared as Terry Smith, “Without Revolutionary Theory,” Studio International 91, no. 980 (March/April 1976): 134–36. Morley, “­Doing High Culture,” 58. The initial lineup included Jon Langford on guitar and Simon Best, who worked for Fast Rec­ords, on drums. It has also been reported that Knight was a “jelly-­orange maker in Terry’s choco­late factory” before joining the band. Phil Sutcliffe, “Delta of Venus,” Sounds, August 2, 1980, 29. Sutcliffe, “Delta of Venus,” 28. For details, see “Jez Pritchatt,” Leeds Arts University, accessed December 9, 2021, https://­www​.­leeds​-­art​.­ac​.u­ k​/­alumni​/­our​-­alumni​/­a​-­z​/­jez​-­pritchatt​/­. Mark Andrews, “Life before Alice: Andrew Eldritch, Leeds and the Birth of the ­Sisters of Mercy,” Quietus, November 17, 2016, https://­thequietus​.­com​ /­articles​/­21215​-­sisters​-­of​-­mercy​-­leeds​-­andrew​-­eldritch​-­interview. Frith, “Punk Bohemians,” 536. Frith, “Punk Bohemians,” 536. Frith, “Rock and Leisure,” 267. Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” 155. Frith, “Rock and Leisure,” 267. “New Wave Night,” New Pose, no. 1, May 1977, 13. For an analy­sis of F Club audiences, see Spracklen, Henderson, and Procter, “Imagining the Scene and the Memory of the F-­Club.” Tony Parsons and John Hamblett, “Leeds, Yorkshire: Mill City, UK,” New Musical Express, August 5, 1978, 7–8. Pete Silverton, “The ­Music of Greater Akron: Rubber City,” Sounds, June 17, 1978, 13–15. See Rydbom’s account of the role of Liam Sternberg in producing the Akron scene, even in filling out the compilation lp with one-­off tracks by acts created specifically for that purpose: Akron Sound, 103–8. For related analy­sis of con­temporary press responses to m ­ usic from Cleveland, Ohio, and Sheffield, South Yorkshire, see Haddon, What Is Post-­Punk?, 132–59. Andy Gill, “Cabaret Voltaire: Sheffield—­This Week’s Leeds,” New Musical Express, September 9, 1978, 12, 15, 21. Laing, “Politics of Culture,” 30. For example, Naseem Khan published a report in 1976 drawing attention to the lack of consideration for grassroots “ethnic minority” arts by British policymakers and funders. See Khan, The Arts That Britain Ignores. “The National Front,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 74 (February 17–­March 3, 1978), 4; and “Fascist Vio­lence on the Increase: Gays Driven Out by Ultra-­Right,” Leeds Student, October 6, 1977, 5. “Anti-­Nazi League Launched,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 75 (March 3–17, 1978), 10. For more on this see Furness, “The Leeds Club”; and Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, 204–27.

Notes to Chapter Three

29 Cited in Leeds City Museum, “Rock against Racism.” 30 For more on the history of sound systems and reggae bands in 1970s Leeds, see Ellie Montgomery, “Black ­Music in Leeds: The Rise of Sound Systems and the Advent of ‘Pirate’ Radio,” Gryphon, November 2, 2018, https://­www​ .­thegryphon​.­co​.­uk​/­2018​/­11​/­02​/­black​-m ­ usic​-­in​-­leeds​-­the​-­rise​-o­ f​-­sound​ -­systems​-­and​-­the​-­advent​-­of​-­pirate​-r­ adio​/­; and Danny Friar, “Rewind ‘n’ Come Again: 50 Years of Leeds Reggae,” Mas Media—­Leeds Carnival (blog), November 27, 2018, https://­leedsmasmedia​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2018​/­11​/­27​ /­rewind​-n ­ ​-­come​-­again​-­50​-­years​-­of​-­leeds​-­reggae​/­. 31 Gilroy, ­There ­Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, 159–64. 32 In 1981 Symrath Patti, Raj Batra, and Pat Forbes began their studies in ba fine art at the Polytechnic, hoping to engage an intellectualized discourse around the making of art and racial and cultural identity. Instead ­these students quickly experienced the cultural limitations of Leeds studio-­based art discourse and even, in some instances, ­were subject to outright instances of racism. They collaborated with other Polytechnic students, and some university students, in developing work somewhat in­de­pen­dently from tutorial guidance. 33 Sabin, “ ‘I ­Won’t Let That Dago By,’ ” 212. 34 For more on Rock against Communism in Leeds, see Garry Bushell, “Rock against Cretinism,” Sounds, March 10, 1979, 10; and Worley, No ­Future, 153–54. 35 David Bruce, “It’s ‘Hell’ as Front Gang Invades Pub,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, May 24, 1978. 36 Parsons and Hamblett, “Leeds, Yorkshire,” 8. 37 See Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure, 82–83, for an account of the “working-­or lower-­middle class” upbringings of members of Scritti Politti and Gang of Four. As I suggested in chapter 1, it would be more accurate to characterize the origins of the Sevenoaks milieu as solidly ­middle class, with the exception of the working-­class background of Jon King. 38 As recounted to the author by John France, former guitarist with Sheeny and the Goys. He recalls Marian Lux relaying the lyr­ics to him. 39 Don Dare, “Interview with Girls at Our Best!,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 171, May 15, 1981, 9. 40 Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, and Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure, 276. 41 Hinchliffe, email correspondence with the author, February 10, 2018. This observation is echoed by Charnley, who concludes his book Creative License by saying that the influence of conceptual art and art theory on the 1970s art institution generally reinforced “the intellectual at the expense of the intuition and discovery through ­doing: know what over know-­how; the triumph of the curator over the creator.” Creative License, 257. 42 Ministry of Education, First Report. For more on this see Strand, Good Deal of Freedom, 8–14. 43 The requirements ­were as follows: “(a) five subjects at ‘O’ level; or (b) three subjects at ‘O’ level and one other subject at ‘A’ level; or (c) two subjects at

Notes to Chapter Three

254

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

‘O’ level and two other subjects at ‘A’ level; or (d) three subjects at ‘A’ level provided ­there is evidence that other subjects have been studied.” UK Department of Education and Science, Structure of Art and Design Education, 20. UK Department of Education and Science, Structure of Art and Design Education, 61. “The National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design merged with the cnaa (The Council for National Academic Awards) on 1 September 1974. The Diploma in Art and Design which was awarded by the ncdad has now been superseded by the award of a cnaa ba (Hons) degree. ­Until further notice entry requirements to cnaa degree courses in art and design remain the same as ­those for admission to the Dip. ad courses. Students already on course at the date of the merger, ­will, on successful completion of their courses, have the option of being awarded ­either the Dip. ad with Honours or the ba with Honours; students admitted ­after 1 September 1974 ­will be awarded the ba (Hons).” Department of Education and Science, UK, Education and Science in 1974, 13. See also Strand, Good Deal of Freedom, 139–53. Tickner, Hornsey 1968, 43. Beck and Cornford, “The Art School in Ruins,” 63. See Hutchings, “Financial Barriers to Participation.” Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure, 53. The classic foundational texts of British cultural studies that exemplified this outlook are Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the En­glish Working Class; and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950. Hoggart, Sort of Clowning, 136. For more on this see Steele’s impor­tant Swarthmore’s ­Century. Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, quoted in Salaman, “Art Theory,” 165. For more on the Coventry course see Salaman, “Art Theory”; and Dennis, “Strategic Anomalies.” Quoted variously in Omnibus: Art—to a Degree? My emphasis. Laing, One Chord Won­ders, 167–68.

CHAPTER FOUR: DEBATING SOCIETY

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

255

Dooley, Red Set, 17. Dooley, Red Set, 18. University of Leeds Special Collections, Fine Art Undergraduate Prospectus, 48. University of Leeds Special Collections, Fine Art Undergraduate Prospectus, 48; my italics. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 249. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 251. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 250.

Notes to Chapter Four

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32

Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 251. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 252. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 253. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 252. Clark, “Conditions of Artistic Creation,” 252–53. Gill, “Negation of Values.” Jon King wrote his dissertation on American minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Unfortunately, no copy survives. The word is Castagnary’s. Cited in Gill, “Negation of Values,” 18. Gill, “Negation of Values,” 25. Gill, “Negation of Values,” 25. Gill, “Negation of Values,” 18. Gill, “Negation of Values,” 31. Gill, “Andy Gill on Édouard Manet.” Gill, “Andy Gill on Édouard Manet.” Dettmar, Entertainment!, 87–96. Dettmar, Entertainment!, 94. Gill, “Negation of Values,” 4. Thanks to Mimi Haddon for clarification of my musical analy­sis in this passage. Gill, in Reynolds, Totally Wired, 111. Gill, “Andy Gill on Édouard Manet.” Haddon writes, “Post-­punk’s identification with dub-­reggae was neither an unencumbered post-­colonial socio-­musical unification, nor was it a purely colonial one; the nature of the relationship between the two genres . . . ​exceeds and problematises ­these two positions.” Haddon, “Dub Is the New Black,” 285. Wurster, “Gang of Four’s Solid Gold.” Dick Hebdige sent a letter to the nme charging the paper’s journalists with a failure to cover reggae adequately: “As long as the blacks who dictate change from under­neath remain invisible and unacknowledged the ‘new wave’ ­will cruise along the same old exploitative lines as it’s always followed.” Dick Hebdige, “Letters,” New Musical Express, July 29, 1977, 46. Thanks to Matthew Worley for drawing my attention to this source. Clark was briefly a member of Situationist International in the 1960s. See Gregory Seltzer, “Situationism and the Writings of T. J. Clark,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 129. University of Leeds, “Fine Art iva.” In 1979 King reflected, “­People have accused us of being ‘too male,’ but I think we look quite assexual [sic] on stage. We certainly reject the ste­reo­typed macho poses. Like, that coat I wear is baggy and shapeless and Andy never uses the guitar as a phallus, which is one of rock’s sexist assumptions—­cock rock. It’s impor­tant that we ­don’t become the sexual ste­reo­type of a male band.” Cited in Adrian Thrills, “The Year of the ­Great Leap Four-­wards,” New Musical Express, January 20, 1979, 8. For a critique of Gang of Four’s feminism see Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure, 96.

Notes to Chapter Four

256

33 Emphasis in original. 34 The original image was reproduced on a related publicity poster for the single, reproduced in Dooley, Red Set, 204. 35 My italics. Wages for House­work was an international feminist campaign in the 1970s calling for the recognition of ­women’s domestic activities as work and for recompense for it in the form of fair wages. 36 For a compelling appraisal of Entertainment! and an analy­sis of the “Brechtian” approach to the cover art of their first Damaged Goods ep, see Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 118, 121–23. 37 Gill, quoted in Reynolds, Totally Wired, 110. 38 For a useful discussion of critics’ responses to plea­sure in Gang of Four’s ­music, see Wilkinson, Post-­Punk, Politics and Plea­sure, 86–90. 39 Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 112. Chris Bishop of Leeds band M.R.A. recalls that in the 1980s “the ­thing that struck me was the intellectualisation of white musical endeavours, but [that intellectualisation was] not attributed to black ­people. A subtle form of racism.” Gill’s intellectualized reading of Muddy ­Waters is undeniably caught within the sweep of Bishop’s charge. 40 Charles Shaar Murray, “Debate Goes On,” New Musical Express, June 21, 1980, 7. 41 See Paul Rambali, “The Group Who Fell to Earth,” New Musical Express, March 3, 1979, 7–8; and Sutcliffe, “Delta of Venus,” 28–29. 42 Sharp, Rec­ord Machine. 43 For a detailed account see Dooley, Red Set, 122–25. 44 In Harron, “Dialectics Meet Disco,” 18. 45 In Baker, Mekons Leeds. 46 Cited in Thrills, “Year of the ­Great Leap Four-­wards,” 8. 47 Thrills, “Year of the ­Great Leap Four-­wards,” 8. CHAPTER FIVE: WHY THEORY?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

257

Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 61. Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 61. Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 61; my emphasis. See Atkinson and Baldwin, “Art Teaching.” Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 64. Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 62. Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 62. Atkinson, “Rudely Prevailed Upon,” 64. In addition to what I list below, Hyatt recounts a further, hilarious tale turning around a mondegreen about Karl Marx in another similar meeting; see A Miscellany, “Earnshaviana,” 141–42. Walklin, correspondence with author, November 11, 2019. Walklin also recalls making a photo-­text work with Lux during t­ hese years that reflected critically upon the Art & Language group. Walklin correspondence.

Notes to Chapter Five

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Thanks to John Hyatt for latterly making t­ hese recordings available to me. Sheeny and the Goys never had a rec­ord deal and therefore never released any recordings during their period of activity. Robinson, Strohmeyer-­Gartside, and Soviet, “Show Us Your Uniqueness,” 46. Robinson, Strohmeyer-­Gartside, and Soviet, “Show Us Your Uniqueness,” 46. Fellowship speech at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015. Robinson, Strohmeyer-­Gartside, and Soviet, “Show Us Your Uniqueness,” 46. Robinson, Strohmeyer-­Gartside, and Soviet, “Show Us Your Uniqueness,” 48. Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 65. Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 65. Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 65. Morley, “­Doing High Culture,” 36–37. Gartside, “Green Garthside [sic]”; my emphasis. Gartside, “Green Garthside [sic].” Gartside in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” Quoted in Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism, 35. Gramsci, Scritti Politici. Thanks to Mimi Haddon for suggestions to improve my musical analy­sis in this passage. “From the Pressing Plants to the Concert Halls We Want Some Control,” interview with Scritti Politti, 1979, ­After Hours, accessed October 15, 2019. http://­www​.­aggressiveart​.­org​/­aof​_­files​/­interviews​/­aof​_­interview​_­p1​-­10​.­htm. “Scritto’s Republic.” Gartside refers approvingly to the sound of bands like the Raincoats and the Desperate Bicycles as “scratchy-­collapsy” in “From the Pressing Plants.” Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 200–201. Gartside, “Where ­Were We When the Two Sevens Clashed?” Gartside, “Where ­Were We When the Two Sevens Clashed?” Gartside, “Where ­Were We When the Two Sevens Clashed?” Gartside, “Where ­Were We When the Two Sevens Clashed?” Gartside in Butt, Gartside, and Lycett, “Post-­Punk Artschool.” “Scritto’s Republic.” Morley, personal communication with author, September 7, 2020. Morley, personal communication with author, September 7, 2020.

CHAPTER SIX: “NO MACHOS OR POP-­STARS PLEASE”

1 2 3 4 5 6

Lippard, Six Years, viii. Lippard, Six Years, xiv. Lippard, Six Years, 263. Marcus, “Return of King Arthur,” 332. Quoted in O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?,” 32. Marcus, “Return of King Arthur,” 333–34.

Notes to Chapter Five

258

7 8 9

Marcus, “Return of King Arthur,” 334. Dooley, Red Set, 70–71. Cromer House was also the unwitting supplier of the “spaceship” wheeled on stage during the Mekons’ first ever appearance at the Tartan Bar. In fact a sofa and “borrowed” for the occasion, it was further example of how the Mekons corralled only the most unprepossessing ele­ments of their social world to create their bathetic public appearance as a band. “The sofa was many ­things,” White recalls. “It was supposedly a spaceship, but it was also some sort of comment on the death of technology, ­these guys wheeling on a sofa with ‘spaceship’ written on it. You could say it was a critique of the ludicrousness of standing on stage and trying to make a point. You could say it was something to do with the idea of three grubby students sitting in a flat on a sofa. . . . ​You have to have a sofa in any sitcom idea. But, basically, we did it ­because we thought it was funny. ­There was an inherent ludicrousness, being wheeled in on this sofa.” 10 Quoted in Goldman, Revenge of the She-­Punks, 45. 11 “No of course it ­wasn’t a muck up by Virgin: some enjoyable disinformation along the way somewhere. When thinking about the cover we wanted to give a nod to Gang of Four and that seemed a ­simple way of ­doing it. Maybe slightly backhanded, the images on the back are of course some of the many unsuccessful attempts by the monkey to type the works of Shakespeare.” Mark White, correspondence with author, April 25, 2018. 12 The mannequin Mekon publicity image is carried in Parsons and Hamblett, “Leeds, Yorkshire,” 8; and the picture of the Mekons’ friends (including Jon Langford, Mick Wixey, and Kevin Lycett) adorns the opening page of Mary Harron’s “Blows against Individuation,” Melody Maker, February 3, 1979, 17. 13 Phil Sutcliffe, “Mekons: Songs of Innocence and Experience,” Sounds, May 26, 1979, 26. 14 Rambali, “Group Who Fell to Earth,” 7–8. 15 Steele, “For a New Jerusalem.” 16 For example, icom was very interested in learning from local models of demo­ cratic participation in Africa and elsewhere, and the Leeds Trades Club would hold regular public meetings about issues such as the politics of socialism in Latin Amer­i­ca. 17 John Quail, personal communication with author, February 6, 2018. 18 Cardan, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, 3. 19 Cardan, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, 91. 20 Cardan, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, 93. 21 For more on Bowie’s flirtation with fascism see Reynolds, Shock and Awe, 547–53. 22 Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” 152. 23 “Delta 5—­rar Club,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 111, August 17–31, 1979, 13. 24 Reddington, Lost ­Women of Rock ­Music, 48–56. 25 A note on the back cover of the Mekons’ 1982 release, The Mekons Story on cnt Rec­ords, lists additional female members including Jacky Fleming, Joan

259

Notes to Chapter Six

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39

Dawson, Fay Fife, and members of the Raincoats and Au Pairs. This might suggest that the female presence in the Mekons in the band’s early years was not, as I indicate h ­ ere, quite so singular at all. This extra female roll call does indeed muddy the ­waters and is perhaps symptomatic of the difficulty of being definitive about Mekons membership at any point in their history. It should not, however, detract from the fact that Allen, and then Jenner, ­were more central and vis­i­ble as female figures in the band’s lineup than the ­others listed ­here. Quoted in Adrian Thrills, “Rock and Roll Rants and the Personal Dance,” New Musical Express, March 15, 1980, 33. Quoted in Goldman, Revenge of the She-­Punks, 44. O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?,” 31. Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” 152. Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” 153. Leeds Student, October 19, 1979, 9. O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?,” 35. Leeds Student described the Lux/Wilkinson per­for­mance thus: “Two naked artists painted each other beneath harsh lights and the gaze of the audience which, at set intervals, was itself subjected to the forbidding gaze of two TV cameras. The visages of ­these indiscriminately selected voyeurs ­were made to participate in the proceedings. The result was an eerie communion between the focal protagonists and the ubiquitous eyes of the onlooking crowd.” Ian Oxford, “Nude Communion,” Leeds Student, November 25, 1977, 10. O’Brien gives a particularly luminous account of how the m ­ usic of groups like Delta 5, and especially that of the Au Pairs, was heard by embattled feminist-­ identified audiences in a culture of sexualized vio­lence and re­sis­tance to it. The lyr­ics of Au Pairs singer Lesley Woods ­were particularly resonant: “Her stance chimed with the Leeds feminist audience partly ­because it seemed so uncompromising.” O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?,” 34–39. Quoted in Delta 5: Singles and Sessions. For a related treatment of the “post-­punk commons” of the Leeds scene, see Butt, “Being in a Band.” Unnamed Mekon quoted in Harron, “Blows against Individuation,” 17. Harron, “Blows against Individuation,” 18. Harron, “Blows against Individuation,” 18

CHAPTER SEVEN: ELECTRIC SHOCK

1

2 3

Also “Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.” Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 21. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 29. “The recovery of the senses was central to Nuttall’s proj­ect,” writes Gillian Whiteley. “To see Nuttall’s desire for affect as merely gratuitous, purposefully

Notes to Chapter Six

260

misogynist, or purely as a reaction to the social conditions of con­temporary life, misses its complexities and its grounding in an explic­itly po­liti­cal perspective.” Whiteley, “Sewing the ‘Subversive Thread of Imagination,’ ” 122. 4 Letter to Barbara Frost, October 21, 1975. Estate of Frank Tovey. 5 Frank Tovey, student sketchbook. Estate of Frank Tovey. 6 Frank Tovey, student sketchbook. Estate of Frank Tovey. 7 For more on the “per­for­mance of extremity” in 1970s art see Johnson, Unlimited Action. 8 Almond, Tainted Life, 61. 9 Almond, Tainted Life, 62. 10 This per­for­mance involved tutors Roland Miller and Tony Earnshaw, along with four students, being charged with disorderly conduct for a street per­for­ mance outside a block of flats in Hunslet in 1970. 11 “Fine Art of Killing Budgies.” See also “Audience Beats Up Stars of Shoot-­ a-­Budgie Show,” Daily Mail, November 17, 1976, 3; “Fury at Budgie Horror Show,” Daily Mirror, May 27, 1977, 11; “ ‘ Work of Art’ Involved Animal Deaths,” Guardian, May 27, 1977, 30; and “Budgie Killers Had to Flee from Angry Audience,” Daily Telegraph, May 27, 1977, 3. 12 “Fine Art of Killing Budgies.” 13 Barbara Frost, personal communication with author, November 28, 2019. 14 Laing, One Chord Won­ders, 96. 15 Laing, One Chord Won­ders, 96. 16 ­There is a note to this effect in one of Tovey’s Polytechnic sketchbooks. He ­wasn’t alone in thinking this. In his review of Flowers in the Sunday Times, Richard Buckle wrote, “I kick myself for having been kept away from Flowers for so long by . . . ​a distaste for the pallid pathos of mimes like Marceau, whom I presumed Kemp would resemble.” Quoted in Lindsay Kemp, 28. 17 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication”; emphasis in original. 18 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication.” 19 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication.” 20 Frank Tovey, student sketchbook. Estate of Frank Tovey. 21 Val Armson and Lee Goldsmiths, “Intense,” Leeds Student, December 3, 1976, 10. 22 Frank Tovey, student sketchbook. Estate of Frank Tovey. 23 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication.” 24 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication.” 25 Tovey, “Non-­Verbal Communication.” 26 Matheson, “Dance of the Dead.” 27 In Matheson’s short story ­there is a “loophole” in the law that allows for the lup-­y to be performed in public, providing it is done in the interest of scientific exploration. 28 Frost communication. 29 Held by the Estate of Frank Tovey. 30 Frank Tovey, student sketchbook. Estate of Frank Tovey.

261

Notes to Chapter Seven

31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

For more on the extended range of ­these images see Butt, “Bedsit Art in the Leeds Experiment.” Simon Reynolds, “Cult Heroics: Frank Tovey,” Melody Maker, June 28, 1986, http://­www​.­rocksbackpages​.­com​/­Library​/­Article​/­cult​-­heroics​-f­ rank​-­tovey. Paul Morley, “Fadfoolery and Frank Confessions,” New Musical Express, January 23, 1982, 11. Tovey recorded an a­ lbum of experimental ­music with Rice in London in 1981 utilizing sampled and recorded sounds of nonmusical instruments and objects. It was released in 1984 as Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing on Mute Rec­ords. Tovey and Rice also performed live at the ica, London, in March 1985. For more see Strasse, “Fad Gadget: Part Seven.” Quoted in “Frank Tovey by Fad Gadget Documentary.” Quoted in “Frank Tovey by Fad Gadget Documentary.” Morley, “Fadfoolery and Frank Confessions,” 10. Steve Lake, “New-­Fangled Gadget,” Melody Maker, April 28, 1984, 26. Lake, “New-­Fangled Gadget,” 26. Lake, “New-­Fangled Gadget,” 26. Lake, “New-­Fangled Gadget,” 26.

CHAPTER EIGHT: REHEARSALS FOR THE MUTANT DISCO

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

John Darling, typescript handout, Estate of Frank Tovey. For more on the genealogies and nomenclature of “sound art” see Toop, “Sonic Boom.” Darling left the Polytechnic in 1980. Nuttall’s comments on the Beatles can be found in Bomb Culture, 123–25. See also Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 47–77, for perhaps the author’s most forthright and extended critique of rock and pop culture. Ball, Electronic Boy, 61. Ball, Electronic Boy, 55. Ball, Electronic Boy, 68. Ball, Electronic Boy, 71. Ball, Electronic Boy, 71. Ball, Electronic Boy, 86. Ball, Electronic Boy, 86. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 18. Marxist critiques of Modernist ideas of art, and of the autonomy of the aesthetic, posited such arguments as Nuttall’s as “idealist.” See chapter 5 for more details. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 18. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 17. Almond, Tainted Life, 76. Almond, Tainted Life, 76. Ball, Electronic Boy, 85–86, for an account of his purchase and its previous owner.

Notes to Chapter Seven

262

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

263

Ball, Electronic Boy, 94. George Hinchliffe, email correspondence with author, October 22, 2020. Hinchliffe correspondence. Hinchliffe correspondence. Ball, Electronic Boy, 94. The instructions for creating Dehbye ­were: “Choose a tape speed; pick up 16 bits of sound, all lasting half a second each (cut up, complicated, ­simple, single sound, drone, multi-­layered ­etc. anything ­will do),” and then edit and manipulate them according to an extended shifting structure. For the full instructional “score” and musical notation, see “Dehbye and Beyond.” Hinchliffe correspondence. Lesley Stiles, “Fans, Comics, Glands,” Leeds Student, March 10, 1978, 12. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 18. Hebdige, Subculture, 106. Hebdige, Subculture, 106–7. Almond, Tainted Life, 62–63. Almond, Tainted Life, 62–63. Writing in retrospect in the late 1990s, Almond reflects critically, in par­tic­u­lar, upon his “punk” use of the swastika: “Swastikas . . . ​­were always the most misguided and offensive images of punk, dangerously attractive in their immediacy, but should have been consigned to history where they belonged.” Tainted Life, 60. See Tainted Life, 63, for Almond’s account of Zazou. Almond, Tainted Life, 65. As Ron Crowcroft remembers it, “They [the course team] picked p­ eople to make an in­ter­est­ing class. They ­didn’t pick ­people for a specific purpose. ­There ­were some crappy paint­ers, super realists, t­ here ­were sculptors ­doing wood sculptures. They had such a mix and blend. And that’s what they wanted, to throw ­people together.” Almond, Tainted Life, 84. Almond, Tainted Life, 84. Ball, Electronic Boy, 92. Almond, Tainted Life, 61. Almond, Tainted Life, 61. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 20. Nuttall, Per­for­mance Art: Memoirs, 19. Almond, Tainted Life, 103–5. Paul Fillingham, “Soft Cell—­Cosmo Club, November 1980,” Dream Targets, accessed August 19, 2020, http://­www​.­dreamtargets​.­com​/­soft​-­cell​-­live​-­at​-­the​ -­cosmo​-­club​-­1980​/­. Almond, Tainted Life, 61. Almond, Tainted Life, 61. “Jeff Nuttall had a reputation,” Robert Joyce reflects, “for chatting up female students in lifts and ­things.” Almond, Tainted Life, 59.

Notes to Chapter Eight

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64

Almond, Tainted Life, 59. Ball in “Soft Cell Interview.” Almond, Tainted Life, 70–71. Almond quoted in Tebbutt, Soft Cell, 32. Betty Page, “Soft Cell: Sweet Cell ­Music,” Sounds, March 21, 1981, 19, http://­ www​.r­ ocksbackpages​.c­ om​/­Library​/­Article​/­soft​-­cell​-­sweet​-­cell​-­music. Almond, Tainted Life, 79. Page, “Soft Cell.” Page, “Soft Cell.” Page, “Soft Cell.” Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 460. Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 460. Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 460–61. Almond, Tainted Life, 80–84, 86–87, 90–92, 93–94; Ball, Electronic Boy, 105–8. Ball in “Soft Cell Interview.” Marc Almond, “The Marc Almond Club and Cloakroom Guide to Leeds by Night,” New Musical Express, July 10, 1982, 6. As Lawrence notes, similar eclectic princi­ples of genre-­and art-­mixing ­were undertaken in New York dj and club culture at this time at downtown institutions like Danceteria, Hurrah, and the Mudd Club. A gradu­ate of fine art at Leeds Polytechnic, Shaun Cavell, by then ­going by the name “Sean Cassette,” was instrumental in this, beginning as a dj in Leeds at the Corn Exchange and Stars of ­Today Club in 1977. For an account of Cassette in New York see Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 53–56. Page, “Soft Cell.” Page, “Soft Cell.”

EPILOGUE

1 2 3

4 5

6

“Top of the Pops! It’s Leeds Duo at No. 1,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, September 2, 1981, 1. “Top of the Pops!” Reginald Brace, “Soft Cell Pays High Dividends,” Yorkshire Post, February 3, 1982, 10; and Howard Corry, “It’s a Hard Life at the Top (of the Pops) for Soft Cell,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, September 16, 1981, 6. Quoted in Back, “Stuart Hall in Conversation.” Green Gartside has said, “I never give much thought to what happens next in my life but I kind of assumed I would go and read some more books somewhere. ­There was some talk about ­going to Birmingham Centre for Con­temporary Cultural Studies.” Polytechnic student Andy Wood also had plans to study ­there ­after graduating his ba Fine Art in Leeds (more on that below). Quoted in Back, “Stuart Hall in Conversation.”

Notes to Chapter Eight

264

7

John Earls, “Marc Almond Discusses Soft Cell’s Shocking ‘Sex Dwarf ’ Video, Which Remains Banned ­after 38 Years,” New Musical Express, February 20, 2019, https://­www​.­nme​.­com​/­news​/­music​/­heres​-­why​-­soft​-­cells​-­38​-­year​-­old​ -­video​-­is​-­still​-­banned​-­as​-­marc​-­almond​-­discusses​-­shocking​-­sex​-­dwarf​-­2450261. The video can periodically be found in vari­ous shifting places on the internet. 8 Quoted in Simon Tebbutt, “House of Porn,” Rec­ord Mirror, May 29, 1982, 18–19. 9 Almond in Evans, Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. 10 Evans, Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. Almond says, “I ­don’t want ­people to think of me as a face to be stuck on a bedroom wall. I find that a ­little bit false to me, ­because I take a joke out of all that sex symbol image. You ­couldn’t exactly call me Hunk of the Month!” Quoted in Lynn Hanna, “Out Come the Freaks,” New Musical Express, May 8, 1982, 11. 11 Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 364. 12 McNulty Media, A Town like New Orleans? 13 Steve Shill was joined by university Spanish gradu­ate Graeme Miller in forming the Commies from Mars. More the musical wing of Impact Theatre Cooperative than a freestanding ­music outfit, in 1982 the duo recorded soundtracks for the tele­vi­sion stop-­motion ­children’s animation series The Moomins. In 2016 Finders Keepers Rec­ords released ­these recordings, accompanied by extensive sleeve notes, describing them as “homemade electro-­acoustic, new age, synth-­driven, proto-­techno, imaginary world m ­ usic.” 14 McNulty Media, “A Town like New Orleans? City, bbc2 (1981),” https://­ mcnultymedia​.­co​.u­ k​/­​?­s​=t­ own+like+new+orleans. 15 Mary Kenny, “The Making and Breaking of Street M ­ usic,” Daily Mail, August 15, 1981. 16 The Mekons temporarily ceased operations in 1982 a­ fter White, Allen, Greenhalgh, and Corrigan left Leeds, with Langford and Lycett staying on in the city. The band started up again with a new lineup in 1984 to play benefit gigs to support the British miners’ strike. 17 Beckett, Promised You a Miracle, xviii. 18 Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 198. 19 Nick Crossley’s study of post-­punk networks, for example, focuses on Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, and a documentary tv series exploring city-­based ­music scenes in the UK ­after punk overlooks Leeds in ­favor of London, Manchester, Coventry, Sheffield, Glasgow, Belfast, Derry, Dublin, and even Rhyl in North Wales. Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion; and Goodwin, Smashing Hits! An exception to this tendency is Whitney’s book Hit Factories, 95–117. 20 Wood cites Chris Schuler’s use of the “belly of the beast” meta­phor in Wood, “Notes ­Towards a Critique of Popu­lar ­Music,” 15. 21 Don Dare, “Another Colour: The Non-­Interview,” Leeds Other Paper, no. 165, April 3, 1981, 8.

265

Notes to Epilogue

22 Dare, “Another Colour,” 8. 23 Quoted in Parsons, From Now Until Yesterday, 73. 24 For an extensive insider account of both bands, and of the broader scene alluded to ­here, see Baker’s self-­published 2014 book, Between Truth and Lies. 25 For more on the Cast Iron Fairies, see the ­Women’s Liberation ­Music Archive, accessed September 23, 2020, https://­womensliberationmusicarchive​.­co​.­uk​ /­m-​ ­r​/­; for idid idid, see SoundClick, accessed September 23, 2020, https://­ www​.­soundclick​.­com​/­artist​/­default​.­cfm​?­bandID​=­1242259; and for Ron Crowcroft, see Forced Exposure, accessed September 23, 2020, https://­www​ .­forcedexposure​.c­ om​/­Artists​/­CROWCROFT​.­RON​.­html. 26 Worley, “ ‘I ­Don’t Care about London.’ ” 27 Worley, “ ‘I ­Don’t Care about London.’ ” 28 Gang of Four, the Mekons, Soft Cell, Fad Gadget, Scritti Politti, and the Three Johns all signed to London-­based major or in­de­pen­dent rec­ord labels. Initially, the Mekons and Gang of Four w ­ ere signed to Edinburgh’s Fast Product label. 29 McNulty Media, A Town like New Orleans? 30 McNulty Media, A Town like New Orleans? 31 McNulty Media, A Town like New Orleans? 32 Teasdale in Baker, Mekons Leeds. 33 Teasdale in Baker, Mekons Leeds. 34 Teasdale in Baker, Mekons Leeds. 35 Artwork in Wood’s personal archive. 36 Seeger, “Change Imposed on Fine Art Courses,” 12. 37 Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness, 64. 38 As Nicole Ward Jouve argued in her 1986 book “The Streetcleaner,” Sutcliffe was not the only one to blame: “Perhaps Society had also conspired in the murder of ­women.” Jouve, “The Streetcleaner,” 30. 39 For a compelling account of the Chapeltown disturbances as a form of black insurrection, see Farrar, Strug­gle for “Community,” 229–39. 40 “ ‘Sex-­Favour’ Row over Degrees,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, October 30, 1984. 41 “Boss Backs Bid to Save Poly Course,” Yorkshire Eve­ning Post, April 1, 1986. 42 The key figures h ­ ere, in re­spect to Pavilion, w ­ ere Shirley Moreno, Dinah Clark, Caroline Taylor, Sara Worrall, Sue Ball, Angela Kingston, Poppy Alexander, Rowena Jackson, Cathy Jacobs, and Helen Kozich; and in regard to the making of art addressing race, colonialism, and cultural difference, Polytechnic students Symrath Patti, Raj Batra, and Pat Forbes worked together and in sometime association with university students Sutapa Biswas and Isabelle Tracy ­until 1984. The histories of both of ­these artistic groupings, and their significance within art education and art practice, remain to be fully explored. 43 See Moreno, “Light Writing on the Wall”; and Pollock, “Art, Art School, Culture.”

Notes to Epilogue

266

SELECTED DISCOG – RAPHY Included h ­ ere are recordings by artists whose membership included fine art gradu­ates from the University of Leeds and Leeds Polytechnic. Selected original UK releases up to 1981 are included, excepting where material recorded before 1981 was released a ­ fter that date or where artists would other­wise be excluded from listing. Singles in more than one format (i.e., 7-­inch and 12-­inch) are only entered once, and compilations or rereleased material is largely omitted. John Peel Session recordings by Gang of Four, the Mekons, Delta 5, Scritti Politti, and the Three Johns are available online.

7-­INCH SINGLES DELTA 5. “Mind Your Own Business” / “Now That ­You’ve Gone.” Rough Trade,

1979. DELTA 5. “Anticipation” / “You.” Rough Trade, 1980. DELTA 5. “Try” / “Colour.” Rough Trade, 1980. DELTA 5. “Shadow” / “Leaving.” pre, 1981. FAD GADGET. “Back to Nature” / “The Box.” Mute, 1979. FAD GADGET. “Ricky’s Hand” / “Handshake.” Mute, 1980. FAD GADGET. “Make Room” / “Lady Shave.” Mute, 1981. FAD GADGET. “Saturday Night Special” / “Swallow It Live.” Mute, 1981. GANG OF FOUR. “Damaged Goods” / “Love like Anthrax” / “Armalite ­Rifle.” Fast Product, 1978. GANG OF FOUR. “At Home He’s a Tourist” / “It’s Her Factory.” emi, 1979.

GANG OF FOUR. “Outside the Trains ­Don’t Run on Time” / “He’d Send in the

Army.” emi, 1980. GANG OF FOUR. “To Hell with Poverty” / “Capital (It Fails Us).” emi, 1981. GANG OF FOUR. “What We All Want” / “History’s Bunk.” emi, 1981. MEKONS. “Where ­Were You?” / “I’ll Have to Dance Then (On My Own).” Fast Product, 1978. MEKONS. “Work All Week” / “Unknown Wrecks.” Virgin, 1979. MEKONS. “Teeth” / “Guardian” / “Kill” / “Stay Cool.” Virgin, 1980. MEKONS. “Snow” / “Another One.” Red Rhino, 1980. M.R.A. “I Am a Monument” / “Breathless.” Kapac, 1983. SCRITTI POLITTI. “Skank Bloc Bologna” / “Is and ­Ought the Western World” / “28/8/78.” St. Pancras, 1978. SCRITTI POLITTI. 2nd Peel Session: “Scritlocks Door” / “opec-­Immac” / “Messthetics” / “Hegemony.” St. Pancras/Rough Trade, 1979. SCRITTI POLITTI. “The ‘Sweetest Girl’ ” / “Lions a ­ fter Slumber.” Rough Trade, 1981. SCRITTI POLITTI. “Asylums in Jerusalem” / “Jacques Derrida.” Rough Trade, 1982. SOFT CELL. “A Man Can Get Lost” / “Memorabilia.” Some Bizzare, 1981. SOFT CELL. “Tainted Love” / “Where Did Our Love Go.” Some Bizzare, 1981. SOFT CELL. “Bedsitter” / “Fa­cil­i­ty Girls.” Some Bizzare, 1981. THREE JOHNS. “En­glish White Boy Engineer” / “Secret Agent.” cnt, 1982. THREE JOHNS. “Pink Headed Bug” / “Lucy in the Rain.” cnt, 1982. ­ALBUMS, EPS, AND 12-­INCH SINGLES DELTA 5. See the Whirl. pre, 1981. DELTA 5. Singles & Sessions 1979–1981. Kill Rock Stars, 2006/2019 (US release). FAD GADGET. Fireside Favourites. Mute, 1980. FAD GADGET. Incontinent. Mute, 1981. GANG OF FOUR. Entertainment! emi, 1979. GANG OF FOUR. Solid Gold. emi, 1981. GRAEME MILLER AND STEVE SHILL. The Moomins. Finders Keepers, 2016. HOUSE­HOLD NAME. “Indoctrination” / “Lynch Mob Tactics” / “Reassurance

1–100” / “World Paranoia.” House­hold Name, 1981. MEKONS. The Mekons. Red Rhino, 1980. MEKONS. The Mekons Story 1977–1982. cnt, 1982. MEKONS. The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen. Virgin, 1979. SCRITTI POLITTI. 4 “A Sides.” St. Pancras/Rough Trade, 1979. SCRITTI POLITTI. Songs to Remember. Rough Trade, 1982. SOFT CELL. Mutant Moments ep. A Big Frock Rekord, 1980. SOFT CELL. Non-­Stop Erotic Cabaret. Some Bizzare, 1981. SOFT CELL. Non-­Stop Ecstatic Dancing. Some Bizzare, 1982. THREE JOHNS. “A.W.O.L.” / “Rooster Blue” / “Image or an Animal” / “Kick the

Dog Right Out.” Abstract, 1983.

Selected Discography

268

THREE JOHNS. “Men like Monkeys” / “Two Minute Ape!” / “Windowlene” /

“Marx’s Wife” / “Paris-­Forty One.” cnt, 1983. THREE JOHNS. Atom Drum Bop. Abstract, 1984. THREE JOHNS. “Do the Square ­Thing” / “Zowee!” / “World of

the Workers” /

“Kinkybeat.” Abstract, 1984. UKULELE ORCHESTRA OF ­GREAT BRITAIN. (Ever Such) Pretty Girls. Ukulele Orchestra

of ­Great Britain, 2015. Titular track by Marian (“Kitty”) Lux, originally performed by Sheeny and the Goys. VARI­OUS ARTISTS (including Soft Cell). Some Bizzare ­Album. Some Bizzare, 1981. VARI­OUS ARTISTS (including the Three Johns and House­hold Name). Enemies of the State, vol. 3 of Worst of the 1 in 12 Club. 1 in 12 Rec­ords, 1984. VARI­OUS ARTISTS (including the Shee Hees). Systembeatwo, vol. 5 of Worst of the 1 in 12 Club. 1 in 12 Rec­ords, 1985. CASSETTES AND CDS BRIAN ASPRO. ­Music for bbc2 Documentaries. Stick It in Your Ear Tapes!, 1982. IDID IDID. Moloko Plus / Moloko Dub. No label, 1982. IDID IDID. Love Theme from

Jacqueline. Stick It in Your Ear Tapes!, 1985.

­REALLY. ­Really. No label, 2013. RON CROWCROFT. Untitled. Mundane Tapes, 1980. RON CROWCROFT. Das Ist. Litanic, 1981 [Germany]. RON CROWCROFT. Overarm Delivery. Vec Audio Edition, 1982 [Netherlands]. RON CROWCROFT. Mundane Recordings 1980–1985. Vinyl-­on-­demand, 2016

[Germany]. SOFT CELL. The Bedsit Tapes. Some Bizzare, 2005.

BOX SETS FAD GADGET. Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey. Mute, 2006. CD and DVD set. FAD GADGET. Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey. GANG OF FOUR. Gang of Four 77–81. Matador, 2020. SOFT CELL. Keychains and Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story. Mercury Rec­ords,

2018.

269

Selected Discography

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BIBLIOG – RAPHY INTERVIEWS WITH THE AUTHOR

All uncredited citations from ­these individuals are taken from the following interviews.

Allen, Ros. Skype, September 1, 2015. Atkinson, Terry. London, September 14, 2017. Baker, Tony. Leeds, May 29, 2012. Ball, Dave. London, July 15, 2016. Bishop, Chris. Skype, July 12, 2018. Bowie, Dave. Skype, February 13, 2018. Brooks, Pete. London, March 17, 2015. Burman, Chila Kumari. London, June 12, 2013. Burnham, Hugo. Skype, October 10, 2014. Burnham, Hugo. Skype, October 12, 2014. Callis, Jacqui. Skype, February 1, 2013. Cassette, Sean. Skype, February 9, 2018. Clark, T. J. London, May 29, 2019. Corrigan, Andy. Skype, September 5, 2017. Crowcroft, Ron. Facebook video, February 9, 2018. Dewhirst, Ian. Skype, July 9, 2018. Duhig, Ian. Skype, May 3, 2019. Fillingham, Paul. Skype, May 12, 2017. Fleming, Jacky. Otley, May 28, 2012. France, John. London, March 9, 2016. Freeman, Jackie. Skype, February 20, 2018. Frost, Barbara. London, February 15, 2013. Gartside, Green. London, February 10, 2015.

Gill, Andy. London, May 14, 2013. Gill, Andy. London, June 3, 2013. Greenhalgh, Tom. Skype, September 16, 2017. Harriott, Homer. Skype, October 9, 2019. Hinchliffe, George. Skype, September 22, 2017. Huggins, Tyrone. London, October 10, 2014. Hyatt, John. Manchester, May 29, 2012. Johns, Gilly. Skype, September 11, 2018. Joyce, Robert. Skype, September 29, 2017. Keenan, John. Leeds, August 5, 2015. King, Jon. London, March 13, 2015. Kingston, Angela. Skype, September 29, 2017. Langford, Jon. London, March 28, 2013. Lycett, Kevin. Leeds, May 29, 2012. MacDonald, Claire. London, February 26, 2013. Mitchell, C. J. London, March 8, 2013. Morley, Tom. Skype, February 1, 2018. Neate, Chris. Brighton, November 1, 2017. Neate, Chris. Brighton, February 20, 2018. Pollock, Griselda. Leeds, November 5, 2015. Qureshi, Fahim. Luton, May 28, 2015. Ralley, Jane. Skype, July 28, 2017. Riggs, Alan. Skype, November 3, 2017. Ross, John. London, March 5, 2013. Sale, Julz. Skype, October 3, 2017. Sale, Julz. Skype, October 9, 2017. Seeger, Dave. Skype, April 24, 2020. Shill, Steve. Skype, March 25, 2013. Swift, Sue. Skype, July 21, 2018. Teasdale, Geoff. Rawdon, March 6, 2015. Timms, Sally. Skype, September 5, 2017. Wagg, Jamie. Skype, April 6, 2017. White, Mark. Skype, September 15, 2017. Wilkinson, Alan. Skype, February 12, 2018. Wilson, Gordon. Skype, February 23, 2018. Wood, Andy. Skype, October 8, 2014. Worrall, Sara. Skype, September 23, 2015. SPECIALIST ARCHIVES AND PERSONAL COLLECTIONS

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282

INDEX Note: page numbers followed by f refer to figures. Adverts, the, 85, 162–63 Allen, Ros, 28, 70, 79, 86, 147, 153, 162–64, 260n25; on the National Front (nf), 94, 96; on per­for­mance art, 167; theory and, 103–4. See also Delta 5; Mekons Almond, Marc, 57, 93f, 95, 167, 206, 208–12, 219–24, 227–28, 265n10; Anarchy in the UK tour and, 62; Cheap and Nasty, 83; Fans, 81; Frost and, 187; “Glamour and Sqalour,” 217f; Nuttall and, 215–16; on “punk” use of swastikas, 263n31; on Senseless, 176; Zazou, 211, 213f, 263n32. See also Soft Cell Another Colour, 4, 70, 229–30, 231f, 233, 239 Anti-­Nazi League, 89, 96 Artaud, Antonin, 14, 183 art college, 9, 16–17, 219, 236, 241; Gang of Four’s roots in, 3; post-­Coldstream, 39; radicalism and, 11; students of color and, 91; Tovey and, 191. See also Soft Cell art education, 3–4, 10, 12, 14–16, 18, 29, 100, 197, 266n42; avant-­garde, 5, 12; class demographics in, 104; Coldstream Report into, 9, 99; falling investment in, 241; immigrant students and, 91; Leeds, 5–7,

19, 108, 121, 136–37, 248n57; lower-­class access to, 8; Lycett and, 48; popu­lar ­music and, 7; theory and, 2, 102–3, 126; in the United States, 246n17 art history, 39, 100, 107–10; 116, 121; bourgeois, 28; feminist interventions in, 118; Gang of Four and, 125; social, 112 (see also social history of art); theory and, 126 Art & Language group (a&l), 78, 107, 126–27, 135, 139, 257n11; critical practice of, 239; The Fox, 134; Scritti Politti and, 145 art world, 18, 76, 78, 82, 103–4, 132, 160; Almond and, 219; Clark and, 4; conventions of, 161; ­labor and, 101; theory and, 102 Atkinson, Terry, 4, 103, 107, 126–31, 239. See also Art & Language group (a&l) A Town Like New Orleans? (McNulty), 229, 233, 238–39 Au Pairs, the, 167, 260n25, 260n34 avant-­garde, 3, 5–7, 12, 33, 51–52, 60, 228; impasse of, 19; Leeds and, 14, 137, 238; logic of, 35; pop (­music) and, 1, 215, 225–26 avant-­garde aesthetics, 197, 205, 208

Baker, Tony, 85, 91, 92f, 202, 233, 266n24 Ball, Dave, 98, 202–4, 206, 208, 212, 215–16, 218–21, 222f, 224, 227. See also Soft Cell Barnett, Jo, 49, 50f, 52f Basic Design, 12, 16 Bauhaus, 5, 13 Beckett, Andy, 51, 229, 246n27, 250n19 Bell, Quentin, 15, 28 Benjamin, Walter, 179, 195 Best, Simon, 123, 253n7. See also Mekons Biswas, Sutapa, 93, 242, 266n42 Bodicean, 90, 92f bohemianism, 8, 82, 98, 104 Bowie, Dave, 133f, 233, 235f Bowie, David, 12, 67; flirtation with fascism, 161, 210, 259n21; Low, 208; Tovey and, 180, 188, 197 Brooks, Pete, 57, 81f, 91, 189, 208, 210–11. See also Impact Theatre Cooperative Burman, Chila Kumari, 91, 93–94, 242f Burnham, Hugo, 61, 63, 70, 91, 92f, 208–10. See also Gang of Four Burt, Ramsay, 49, 50f, 52f

Charnley, James, 14, 44, 248n57, 250n35, 254n41 Clark, T. J. (Timothy James), 4, 16, 27–28, 106–10, 137, 239; Gang of Four and, 112, 114, 116, 121, 241; Nuttall and, 129; Pollock and, 117–18; Situationist International and, 256n30; Special Per­for­mance and, 33, 249n15; talking and, 127; theory and, 126 Clash, the, 56, 60, 62, 69, 85, 141; politics of, 252n20; “White Riot,” 150 class, 241; art world and, 18; composition of punk groups, 252n2; divide at University of Leeds, 41–42, 97; politics, 94; race and, 117; ruling, 140; social, 98, 108; structure, 99; theory and, 104 Clock dva, 83, 85f club culture, 16, 220–21, 264n62 Cobourg pub, 78, 94, 129 Commies from Mars, 4, 229, 265n13 conceptual art, 58, 102, 107, 115–16, 146, 147–49, 160, 254n41 Corrigan, Andy, 28–35, 38, 60, 64–65, 69–71, 86, 95, 147, 151–54. See also Mekons counterculture, 6, 8, 11, 17, 147, 169, 200; Gartside and, 58–59; Leeds and, 158 Crash (Ballard), 191–92 Crowcroft, Ron, 36, 48f, 237, 250n34, 263n34

Cabaret Voltaire, 14, 83, 88, 212 Callis, Jacqui, 70, 81, 177, 230, 231f, 237–39. See also Another Colour capitalism, 14, 159 Cardwell, Keith, 173, 179 Car­ter, Paul, 57, 61, 65, 67, 83, 86f, 237. See also idid idid Castagnary, Jules-­Antoine, 111, 256n14 Cast Iron Fairies, 4, 38, 40f, 70, 237, 266n25 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 159–60 Cavell, Sean (Sean Cassette), 57, 60, 67, 83, 173, 175–77, 179, 264n62 CBGB, 105, 124; bands, 60; scene, 57

Dada, 39, 97, 172, 208, 210, 236, 245n3 Damned, the, 56, 60–62, 64; “New Rose,” 202 Darling, John, 15, 36, 179, 198–200, 203, 205–6, 218, 262n3 Dawson, Joan, 157f, 260n25 Ddart, 36, 137 Dean, Frances, 49, 50f, 52f Dehbye (Hinchliffe and Wood), 207–8, 263n24 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 140 Delta 5, 1, 15, 79, 80f, 90, 97, 123, 152–54, 160, 168f, 229–30; “Anticipation,” 94, 154, 155f, 164; anti-­fascism of, 94–95;

avant-­garde art, 6, 11, 36, 62, 69, 200, 212; history of, 241; logics of, 59; popu­lar ­music and, 16 avant-­gardism, 3, 6, 104, 233; disenchantment with, 16; King and, 249n14; Soft Cell and, 216; twentieth c­ entury, 14, 171

INDEX

284

counterculture and, 147; feminism and, 167, 260n34; interchanging roles in, 162; “Mind Your Own Business,” 154, 164–65; ­women members, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 140 Dettmar, Kevin J. H., 112–13 Dewhirst, Ian, 221, 223–24 Dignity of Work ( Joyce and Lycett), 50–52, 251n39 Dooley, Jim, 105–6, 152 Dr Feelgood, 12, 123 dub, 116, 141, 256n27 Duhig, Ian, 181, 182f, 208 elitism, 78, 104, 245n2 Fad Gadget, 4, 15, 57, 173, 189, 191, 193–97, 228, 247n48, 266n28; “Back to Nature,” 187; “Ricky’s Hand,” 192 Fast Product, 16, 88, 245n3, 266n28. See also Gang of Four; Mekons F Club, 7, 17, 57, 62, 71, 85–86, 94, 237; audiences, 83, 253n18 feminism, 7, 16, 18, 158, 250n28; Gang of Four and, 118–19, 256n32; second-­wave, 42; separatist forms of, 166 Fenton pub, 94–97, 215 Fillingham, Paul, 215–16, 233 Fleming, Jacky, 29f, 57, 61, 65, 69–70, 210, 236, 259n25. See also Mekons; Shee Hees Fluxus, 15, 236 Fox, John, 36, 179 France, John, 80f, 97, 99, 132, 166, 189, 210, 254n38. See also Sheeny and the Goys Freeman, Jackie, 38–41, 70, 236. See also Cast Iron Fairies Frith, Simon, 7–8, 16, 82 Frost, Barbara, 70, 81, 172, 179, 183, 186–89. See also Tovey, Frank funk, 116, 164, 223; punk, 233 Funkadelic, 116, 164 Futurism, 39, 171, 173 Gang of Four, 1–4, 15, 28, 57, 76–79, 88, 153– 54, 229; “Anthrax,” 116, 165; “At Home

285

INDEX

He’s a Tourist,” 112, 114, 119f, 123; “Chips on My Shoulder” (Soft Cell) and, 220; Clark and, 106, 112, 116, 241; class origins of, 97–98, 254n37; counterculture and, 147; EMI and, 228; “Damaged Goods,” 88; Entertainment!, 112–13, 120, 154, 233, 257n36; F Club and, 85; Fast Product and, 266n28; feminism and, 118–19, 256n32; “It’s Her Factory,” 119–20, 162; Last and, 247n48; Mekons and, 152; “Natu­ral’s Not in It,” 113; per­for­mance art and, 38; plea­sure and, 257n38; Red Set (Dooley), 105; Rock against Racism (rar) and, 90, 94–95; song composition, 114–15, 122, 124–25; theory and, 102, 121; “The Times,” 33–35; Velvet Under­ground and, 114, 164, 249n12 Gartside, Green (Paul Strohmeyer ­Gartside), 57–59, 78, 95, 139, 141–45, 258n30, 264n5; Anarchy in the UK tour and, 57, 62, 65; “Politics of Art Education,” 135–37; theory and, 104, 132, 134–35; White and, 147–49. See also Scritti Politti gay liberation, 18, 97 Geesin, Ron, 202, 206–8 gender, 165, 167; class and, 104, 117; imbalance, 42; nonconformity, 180; non-­normativity, 188; politics of, 18, 130, 166, 241 Gill, Andy, 28, 41, 76, 95, 97, 122f, 152–54; Atkinson and, 103; Clark and, 107, 110, 112, 114, 121; Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier (Manet) and, 110–12, 114; on Muddy ­Waters, 121, 257n39; Pollock and, 118, 121; Special Per­for­mance, 38, 249n11; stage theatrics of, 162; visit to New York, 60, 105, 115f. See also Gang of Four Girls at Our Best!, 81, 98 Gramsci, Antonio, 140, 141f, 143–44 Gowing, Lawrence, 15, 28, 110 Greenhalgh, Tom, 28–30, 33, 41, 49, 57, 67, 152, 239–42, 250n25; Art Workshop (Walklin) and, 130; Atkinson and, 127; Fleming and, 69. See also Mekons

Griffith, Steve, 212, 215–16. See also Soft Cell Guattari, Félix, 1, 18, 248n55 Haddon, Mimi, 19–20, 116, 252n4, 256n24, 256n27, 258n27 Harris, Russell, 173, 179 Harron, Mary, 1–4, 6–7, 11, 112, 170, 245n1. See also King, Jon; Mekons Heaven and Hell nightclub, 47, 83, 85f Hebdige, Dick, 76, 210–11, 252n3, 256n29 Henry Cow, 7, 12 Heron, Patrick, 5, 9 Hinchliffe, George, 98–101, 103, 176, 187, 206–8. See also Dehbye; Ukulele Orchestra of ­Great Britain homophobia, 18, 216 Horne, Howard, 7–8, 16 House­hold Name, 4, 15, 42, 57, 233, 235f, 237; Rock against Racism (rar) and, 91, 92f Huggins, Tyrone, 91, 92f, 210 ­Human League, 3, 212, 223 Hunslet Grange, 24–27, 44 Hyatt, John, 80f, 128–32, 139, 230, 231f, 233, 257n9, 258n12. See also Another Colour; Sheeny and the Goys; Three Johns Ian Dury and the Blockheads, 85, 91, 125 ideology, 108–9, 119; bourgeois, 140; critique of, 2; ruling-­class, 137 idid idid, 4, 57, 237, 266n25 Impact Theatre Cooperative, 57, 70, 91, 152, 158, 210, 265n13. See also Commies from Mars Industrial Common Owner­ship Movement (icom), 158, 259n16 intermedia, 15, 42, 173, 199 Jacob Kramer College, 6, 48, 81 Jam, the, 85, 105 Jenner, Mary, 87f, 156, 163, 260n25. See also Mekons Jinks, Niall, 78, 135, 139. See also Scritti Politti

John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, 15, 36, 198 Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon, 4, 233 Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, 56, 60–62 Johns, Gilly (Gillian), 42–45, 57, 91, 92f, 216, 217f. See also House­hold Name Jones, John, 29, 107 Joyce, Robert, 48–49, 5of, 52f, 251n39, 263n45 Kaye, Matthew, 79f, 144f Keenan, John, 17, 57, 62, 71, 83, 86. See also F Club Kemp, Lindsay, 12, 181, 188, 193; Flowers, 180, 261n16. See also Tovey, Frank King, Ed, 189, 212 King, Jon, 28–29, 41, 76, 97, 106, 151–53, 226, 254n37, 256n13; Anarchy in the UK tour and, 60, 64–65, 67; Atkinson and, 103; avant-­gardism and, 249n14; Clark and, 107, 109, 121; Fleming and, 69–70, 236; Pollock and, 110, 118, 121; Special Per­for­mance, 30–33; visit to New York, 60, 105, 106f; The Whole Earth Cata­log and, 146. See also Gang of Four Knight, Kelvin, 79, 80f, 153f, 167, 253n8. See also Delta 5 Kraftwerk, 192, 203, 212 Laing, Dave, 104, 179 land art, 147–49 Langford, Jon, 86–88, 103, 122, 147, 150, 154, 156, 157f, 233, 250n36, 253n7, 259n12, 265n16. See also Mekons Last, Bob, 16, 88, 245n3, 247nn47–48. See also Fast Product Lautréamont, Comte de, 14, 205 Lawrence, Tim, 220, 264n62 Leeds College of Art, 5–6, 36, 44; Basic Research and, 12–13, 102; pedagogy, 250n37 Leeds Other Paper (LOP), 26, 158–60 Leeds Polytechnic, 14, 38, 42–45, 45f, 46f, 47, 58, 99f, 149; Gartside and, 132–139; per­for­mance art and, 5, 36–38, 167,

INDEX

286

171–179, 211; student recruitment and, 212, 215; Sex Pistols and, 56–57, 59–69; sound studio and, 192, 198–205. See also Nuttall, Jeff; Teasdale, Geoff Leeds Ware­house, 7, 221, 222f Lester, John, 187–88 Lippard, Lucy, 149, 160, 169; Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 146–48 Locke, John, 126–27 Lux, Marian “Kitty,” 70, 79, 80f, 130–32, 133f, 166, 208, 210, 233, 235f, 254n38, 257n11, 235f; Sale and, 153; Wilkinson and, 167, 260n33. See also ­Really; Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers; Sheeny and the Goys; Ukulele Orchestra of ­Great Britain Lycett, Kevin, 28, 29f, 41, 47–52, 69–71, 86, 97, 169, 236; Anarchy in the UK tour and, 60–62; Art Lovers, 53f; Red Route, 32, 34f; We All Love Art, 54f. See also Mekons Lydon, John “Johnny Rotten,” 61, 63, 65, 70, 150 McAlinden, Miles, 44, 250n37 MacDonald, Claire, 42, 70, 210. See also Impact Theatre Cooperative McLaren, Malcolm, 16, 64, 76, 247nn46–47. See also Sex Pistols Magazine, 83, 85 man­ag­ers, 17, 247n48; as artists, 16, 156. See also Rhodes, Bernard (Bernie); Wixey, Mick Manet, Édouard, 114, 116; Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier, 110–13; ­Music in the Tuileries, 28 Marcus, Greil, 82, 150, 162, 165 Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso, 171, 173, 192. See also Futurism Marley, Bob, 12, 115, 164 Marxism, 16, 144, 159 Matheson, Richard, 182–83, 261n27. See also Tovey, Frank: The Loopy Mekons, 1, 15, 28, 87f, 123–25, 149–54, 156, 157f, 160–61, 169–70, 230, 240f, 259n9,

287

INDEX

259n12, 265n16; class origins of, 97–98; counterculture and, 147; Fast Product and, 88, 266n28; F Club and, 85–86; female members of, 162–63, 259–60n25; Joyce and, 48, 250n36; “Never Been in a Riot,” 33, 88, 150, 151f; per­for­mance art and, 38; The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, 154–56, 158f; Rock against Racism and, 90, 94–95; theory and, 102; Velvet Under­ground and, 249n12 Miller, Graeme, 91, 92f, 210, 265n13 Miller, Roland, 36, 261n10 Mitchell, C. J., 195, 197 Modernism, 24, 27–28, 35, 129, 149, 250n20; Eu­ro­pean, 171 Morley, Paul, 57, 191, 193, 228 Morley, Tom, 62, 78, 79f, 135–37, 139, 144f, 145. See also Scritti Politti National Front (NF), 82, 88–89, 94, 96 Neate, Chris, 57, 67, 221, 223–24 New Right, 64; discourse of, 252n16 Normal, the, 191–92 Nuttall, Jeff, 36, 41, 127–29, 171–73, 179, 205–6, 210, 241, 263n45; Almond and, 215–16, 219; Bomb Culture, 14, 129, 200, 205, 262n4; Gartside and, 58, 136–37; idealism of, 262n13; pedagogy of, 134, 136; Senseless and, 177; Teasdale and, 238; Tovey and, 175, 192–94; Whiteley on, 260n3. See also ­People Show Nuttgens, Patrick, 24, 26, 135, 249n3; The Art of Learning, 19 O’Brien, Lucy, 165, 260n34 Orton, Fred, 4, 107 Page, Robin, 36, 238 Parkin, Peter, 173, 175–76, 177, 179–80. See also Senseless Parsons, Tony, 63, 88 Pavilion, 4, 130, 242, 266n42 Peel, John, 123, 202 ­People Show, 14, 36, 205, 215

per­for­mance art, 16, 35–36, 38, 151, 173, 191, 208, 211–12; club culture and, 220; Leeds Polytechnic and, 5, 15, 58; Lippard and, 147; pop ­music and, 195, 215; textual documentation and, 49; University of Leeds and, 28. See also Almond, Marc; Ddart; Fad Gadget; intermedia; John Bull Puncture Repair Kit; Nuttall, Jeff; ­People Show; Senseless; Special Per­for­ mance; Tovey, Frank Peters, Bethan, 70, 78, 80f, 147, 152–53, 157f, 163–64, 168f. See also Delta 5 photography, 13, 48, 187, 243; feminist, 130, 242 (see also Pavilion); of The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen (Mekons), 156 Pink Floyd, 7–8, 206 Pollock, Griselda, 4, 39, 107, 110, 117–18, 121, 126, 239, 248n57 polytechnics, 9–10 Pop, Iggy, 105, 194 pop m ­ usic, 12, 112, 210; Ball and, 202; British, 1; female participation in, 163 (see also Mekons); Gang of Four and, 228; Gartside and, 58–59, 139–40, 145; high art and, 241; Nuttall and, 200; Sex Pistols and, 225; Soft Cell and, 215; Tovey and, 186, 191 post-­punk, 16, 19–20, 81, 237, 241, 248n58; art school, 17; culture, 94, 143–44; Digital-­Disko and, 223; dub reggae and, 256n27; F Club and, 83; in Leeds, 82, 88, 97, 208, 229, 260n36; Manchester, 247n47, 249n7; networks, 265n19; theory and, 139. See also Delta 5; Gang of Four; Mekons; Soft Cell: “Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché” progressivism, 28, 35, 102, 134 punk, 3, 6, 16, 19, 62, 67, 75–76, 82, 116, 149, 167, 169, 212, 252n2; art students and, 11, 85; inclusiveness of, 78; the Left and, 143–44 (see also Gartside, Green); New York, 60, 105; politics of, 252n20; racism and, 95; style, 71, 76, 210–11; UK, 237; ­women in, 70, 104, 153, 162. See also cbgb; F Club; post-­punk; Ramones; Sex Pistols

punk rock, 11–12, 14–15, 63, 65, 136, 150, 199, 212; avant-­garde art and, 59; Ball and, 203 Quarry Hill flats, 23–26, 44 queerness, 98, 180, 187–89, 193–95, 227 Qureshi, Fahim, 93–94 race, 117, 242, 266n42; politics of, 18, 89, 241 racism, 18, 89, 91, 242, 254n32, 257n39; antiracism, 16, 18 radicalism, 11, 14, 16, 147; aesthetic, 158; Cambridge, 249n7; urban, 143 Raincoats, the, 167, 252n18, 258n30, 260n25 Ralley, Jane, 38–42, 44–47, 83, 236–37. See also Cast Iron Fairies Ramones, 85, 105, 132, 202 ­Really, 4, 233, 235f Red Ladder Theatre Com­pany, 89, 117, 158 reggae, 12, 94, 116–17, 143–44, 164, 254n30, 256n27, 256n29. See also Bodicean; dub; Gang of Four; Marley, Bob Reynolds, Simon, 17, 19, 228, 245n2, 247n45; on Gang of Four, 121; on Scritti Politti, 143, 229 Rhodes, Bernard (Bernie), 16, 247n47, 251n7 Rice, Boyd, 193, 262n34. See also Tovey, Frank Richard Hell and the Voidoids, 60, 105 Riggs, Alan, 79, 80f, 153f, 167, 168f. See also Delta 5 Roberts, John, 8, 11 Rock against Racism (rar), 7, 90–91, 94–95, 230 Rowat, Ken, 10, 246n26 Roxy ­Music, 12, 67, 233 Sale, Julz, 70, 78, 80f, 94, 152–53, 162–63, 167, 168f. See also Delta 5 Scritti Politti, 3–4, 5f, 57–58, 78–79, 102, 139–40, 144–45, 266n28; bourgeois hegemony and, 123; class background of, 254n37; relocation to London of, 228–29, 247n48; “Skank Bloc Bologna,” 140–43. See also Gartside, Green; Jinks, Niall; Morley, Tom

INDEX

288

sculpture, 15, 38, 137, 172–73, 199, 241; African, 117 Senseless (Parkin and Wain), 175, 177, 179–81, 190, 208, 228 Sevenoaks School, 29–30, 41, 64, 97–98, 103, 146, 147, 237, 254n37 Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers, 76–77, 79, 83, 97 sexism, 18, 42, 119, 121, 141, 167; in art schools, 242; institutional, 118 Sex Pistols, 16, 56–57, 63–67, 160, 225, 237, 252n18; Anarchy in the UK tour, 16, 60–65, 66f, 69–71, 75, 78, 107, 181, 251n9; last gig of, 150; “Pretty Vacant,” 115 sexuality, 104; female, 71; politics of, 18 sexual politics, 89, 97, 118 Shee Hees, 4, 57, 70, 236 Sheeny and the Goys, 4, 70, 80f, 81, 97, 132, 133f, 166, 210, 229, 258n12 Shill, Steve, 80f, 130, 132, 210, 265n13. See also Commies from Mars; Sheeny and the Goys shock tactics, 173, 179, 191, 195. See also Fad Gadget; Tovey, Frank Simmel, Georg, 110–11 Situationist International (si), 4, 27, 247n47, 256n30. See also Clark, T. J. (Timothy James); post-­punk Slits, the, 83, 167 Smart Cookies, 4, 233 social history of art, 28, 107–8, 117, 121. See also Clark, T. J. (Timothy James) socialism, 158, 160, 259n16 Socialist Workers’ Party, 82, 89 Soft Cell, 4, 15, 57, 98, 99f, 205, 212–16, 219–21, 224–30, 237, 266n28; “Bleak Is My Favourite Cliché,” 98, 207; “The Girl with the Patent Leather Face,” 216, 218; “Sex Dwarf ” video, 227–28, 265n7; Stevo and, 247–48n48; “Tainted Love,” 203, 224 s.o.s., 78, 81, 83, 97 Special Per­for­mance, 30–36, 38, 51 Spina Barelli, Emma, 39, 41 Staniforth, Paul, 91, 92f, 93f

289

INDEX

Stars of ­Today club, 82–83, 84f, 264n62 Steele, Tom, 158, 255n52 Stella, Frank, 105, 115 Stiles, Lesley, 153, 189, 210 Sutcliffe, Peter, 44, 71, 166, 188, 241, 266n38 Swift, Sue, 187–88 Tagg, John, 4, 241 Talking Heads, 85, 162 Taylor, Caroline, 130, 266n42. See also Pavilion Teasdale, Geoff, 94, 127, 130, 136–37, 175–77, 219, 238–39 Thatcherism, 11, 225 theory, 2, 4, 102, 126–27, 129, 132, 134–35, 145; art, 6, 103–4, 108, 254n41; critical, 16; film, 118; ­music making and, 139 (see also Scritti Politti); rock ­music and, 170 Three Johns, ix–xi, xf, 4, 233, 266n28 Thubron, Harry, 12–15, 29 Tickner, Lisa, 100, 118 Top of the Pops, 5, 224, 172–75, 179–82; Almond and, 227; Bowie and, 197; Gang of Four and, 123 Tovey, Frank, 167, 188, 208, 210, 215, 229; Berg, 189–91; Fans, 81; Frost and, 70, 172, 186–87, 189; The Loopy, 181–86, 191f; Nuttall and, 175, 192–94; Rice and, 193, 262n34. See also Fad Gadget; Kemp, Lindsay Ukulele Orchestra of ­Great Britain, 4, 98, 208 University of Leeds, 23, 26–28, 30, 39f, 82, 92f, 103, 240f; fine art department, 4, 15. See also Atkinson, Terry; Clark, T. J. (Timothy James) Velvet Under­ground, 115, 164, 183, 249n12 Vibrators, the, 83, 85 Vietnam War, 14, 147, 171 Wain, Derek, 175–77, 179. See also Senseless Walklin, Janey, 130, 132, 257n11; Art Workshop, 130–31

Warhol, Andy, 8, 12, 32, 219, 245n3, 247n47; Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 212, 249n12; Factory, 233 ­Waters, Muddy, 121, 257n39 ­Waters, Roger, 206, 208 Weston, Ghislaine, 162–63. See also Adverts, the Westwood, Vivienne, 16, 247n47 White, Mark, 23–24, 26–29, 41, 86, 95, 151, 161, 169, 259n9; Atkinson and, 103; on the Clash, 60; counterculture and, 147; Fleming and, 69; Lippard and, 146, 149; “Never Been in a Riot,” 33, 150; Sale and, 152–53; The Whole Earth Cata­log and, 146, 152. See also Mekons; Special Per­for­mance Whole Earth Cata­log, The, 146–48, 152, 169

Wilson, Tony, 16, 57, 202, 238, 247n47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 126, 134 Wixey, Mick, 123, 156, 157f, 247n48, 259n12 Wolfson, Dave, 28, 76, 210. See also Gang of Four Wood, Andy, 230, 231f, 233, 234f, 238–39, 264n5, 265n20. See also Another Colour Wood, Ian, 206–7 Workers’ Educational Association (wea), 7, 102 Worley, Matthew, 237–38, 256n29 X-­R ay Spex, 83, 85 Yes, 7, 62 Yorkshire Ripper. See Sutcliffe, Peter Young Communist League, 78, 89, 143–44

INDEX

290

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