Whatever Gets You Through The Night

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

by Simon Frith

In the end, Eric Clapton's summer wasn't so hot. He played holiday camps where the heat rose off the bingo cards with the stench of stale greed and afterwards he fell asleep listening to his own album. He had drunk too much and slept uneasily. Bad dreams. Foreigners slipping silently across the beaches, black men coming to get their riffs back. In Birmingham E.C. cracked. He addressed the audience, warned them of the dangers, recommended Enoch Powell. The audience wasn't amused and neither were the music papers. Later, poor old Eric wrote to Sounds to apologize.

Meanwhile, at Reading's Annual Festival of Blues, Jazz and Rock, angry long hairs booed and beer canned thp Diamonds and U.Roy, Virgin's reggae acts. A West Indian was stomped by hippies and the racist slogans would've made Clapton pause. When the same acts appeared at London's Lyceum, crowd power had a different color. White couples stuck uneasily together. Purses were snatched, pockets picked and one by one London's rock venues are refusing to book reggae.

What it's all about, I think, is not race but cult. England's always had the most cultish of rock fans and the troubles start when a cult reaches for a mass audience. When Eric slipped into his irritated populist racism, he'd forgotten the origins that his fans still carry round with them. Clapton's faithful followers are pre-Cream even, old blues cultists who still honor Eric for leaving the Yardbirds. And if there's one thing that blues cultists are sure of it's that the blacks are alright. There's an understandable feeling of inferiority involved —blues are black—that old blues people like the Stones have never lost; the only escape, viz John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac, is into white Californian blues, a move which the Stones, bless 'em, have never made.

For Eric Clapton, who has maintained blues loyalties through all his moves (I mean, wasn't he suffering, even in the top ten ?), for Eric to stand on stage and say blacks weren't alright wasn't just silly, it was traumatic. This wasn't any old dumb Brummy audience; it was a Clapton audience, people who, thanks to him, listened to real blues and real reggae too and sniffed at the foolish pop fans who thought that "I Shot The Sheriff" that Eric wrote was pretty neat.

Rock stars forget how nutty their fans are. Britain is populated by quietspoken bank clerks who when they get home change like Clark Kent in their closets into blues freaks and soul freaks and reggae freaks and Elvis freaks and Dead freaks and even Van Der Graaf Generator freaks, my God. They stay true even if no one else does and sellout is their key critical concept. Elvis's British fan club has been anticipating his first British appearance for twenty years now and without a flicker of doubt. Northern soul freaks know that soul music stopped in 1967 even if soul musicians didn't. For crissakes, this week even the national press is celebrating Buddy Holly's fortieth birthday.

The results of all this are bizarre, I suppose, but not just bizarre. It may be an odd ambition to own every record made in Tennessee in 1956, to tape every r'n'b record ever made, every note blown by Charlie Parker, to dance to nothing out Motown, to be the world's leading authority on Kim Fowley, but there are people in Britain who have and do and are all these things and if it's lunacy it's also awe-inspiring. Difficult for a critic, though, I admit. Last year I made the mistake of writing a chapter on Motown for a book on soul. I was slagged by every soul freak who could get into print. One review spent three columns listing all the Motown acts I hadn't mentioned. I hadn't heard of any of them.

On the other hand, think of all the facts around! If the Stones depended on the lunacy of British collectors for their original inspirations so do historians, and it is no accident that the definitive history of rock, Charlie Gillett's Sound of the City, is British or that we've now got the definitive Encyclopaedia of Rock (in three volumes, no less). I don't actually know if anyone who doesn't know already wants to know where Freddy Cannon was born but that brings me back to cults and the mass audience.

This year, for whatever reasons, they decided that it was time for reggae to move from cult to mass. The music press was keen enough 'cause they don't know the difference anyway but a few things were forgotten on the way. For a start, reggae might have been a cult for white folks but it was something else for West Indians and they weren't all safely across the Atlantic. Real reggae nuts have mastered over the years the art of digging it unobserved, white pop fans at the Lyceum hadn't and the pickings were easy and seemed kinda legitimate—what was whitey doing here if not slumming?

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Add to this that you can't merge obsessions. I can't think of anything sillier than expecting reggae acts to wow a festival, Reading, which is the last remaining annual get-together of the followers of the great late Sixties cult of Cosmic Long Hair. If the response to the Diamonds was frenzied in its hostility, it was nothing nearly as frenzied as the attempt to get Van Der Graaf back for another two hours of musing profundity. The whole point of cults is No Change and someone should've remembered that in the days when only skin-heads liked reggae they hated hairies and hairies hated reggae right back and weren't about to groove to U. Roy just because he was on Virgin and NME's where-it's-at act for 1976. 1 bet right now that reggae as a genre will never make it on a mass white rock basis even if the odd Wailer does.

The punk cult I'm less sure about. In some strange way Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith and the Ramones and the Runaways reached us as punks from across the sea though they seemed to bear no relationship to one another. Live at CBGB's, Television's single, expensive imports in cult shops make no sense without knowing who's there back in New York, and England's own punks get a solid London hype which comes over to us provincials as a faded punk chic. The Sex Pistols are the act that seems to have been settled on as the One To Make It. They may be real, maybe not. But their next move is from London club cult to mass pop audience. They're going to sell out and they're going to be offensive and they're going to get bottled and that's when I'm going to get interested.