LETTER FROM BRITAIN

LETTF.R FROM BRITAIN

DEPARTMENTS

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED HIT PAY DIRT

by Cynthia Rose

'Recession rock' on the radio (cf. "My City Was Gone," "Allentown" or "Out of Work") may call forth condemnations from America's urban mayors-many, I notice, on holiday in Florida at the time of com rnent-in The Wall Street Journal. But t'aint so in Britain; we had a billion har bingers of No Future back in the late `70s and now that we've arrived where it isn't we have synthpop by the school-full.

That’s right; as Elvis Costello is fond of remarking lately, every kid in Britain is still in some band—it’s just that they can’t afford guitars anymore. Casios and the correct couture have remained constants on the music scene all through ’82.

With the synth syndrome has come renewed prominence for the art colleges of the U.K., whose long association with pop continues. Just cast an eye back over the previous twelve months—their influence pervades, fyom Roxy’s Avalon through ABCfrom the Institute of Contemporary Art’s phenomenally successful Urban Rap art show (which showcased post-punk cartoonery) to ventures such as Club Scopitone.

London’s Club Scopitone is a disco /, which mixes sounds “from Sinatra to 23 Skidoo” with seven separate screens’ worth of filmed images. The mind-boggling rock batrage is the/ work of five ex-filrh students who wish to “disrupt the ordinary | narrative modes of viewing while listening, v in order to make people pay more attenl tion to the visual iconographies.” Uh-huh.

But/don’t laugh too soon—Club Scope has successfully dragged its three slide projectors, four 16mm machines, three 8mm monsters and extensive collection of rpck videos—many American—not just round the London club circuit but also out to Slough, Oxford and Birmingham.

The clothes and club scenes continue to feed off one another, even though (most , Yanks haven’t quite copped to this) almost all the London niteries are held in the same sites—which simply rent themselves out every night of the week to separate outfits. Multi-media precursor to Club Scope, for instance, was “Vi,ew From the Reel World,” which took place in Dean Street’s Gargoyle Club. On other evenings that same venue plays host to hip gay disco The Lift,' dope-smokers’ paradise The Batcave (drag cabaret and bands from Marc Almond’s Mambas to the Meteors), or the Soul Furnace—six dollars’ worth of dance floor discoed into action by vintage Motown.

Gulliver’s Club in London also boasts its “Northern Soul Nite,” its own multi-media eve (The Groove Tube club on Mondays), and personal hip credentials in the form of Richard Strange’s The Slammer: a onceweekly soiree where you can fancy yourself a poet, performance artist or merely participant in a “happening” (The Event Group and Klaxon 5 have thus far starred). The other major haunt is Gossips—one of London’s oldest sites and one which hosts the un-hip"Gaz’s Blues Sessions (Mondays) as well as the popular Gold Coast Club, with its wide-spectrum African pop playlist, and the Some Chicken Club—where fortune tellers, “agony aunts” and a manicurist keep the idle listener amused.

The capital’s black population still favor the All Nations Club or the newer Nightmoves (both in deepest Hackney) for nonreggae live shots. But the honkies’ cult craze is currently The Dirt Box—a spacious basement located next door to a declasse tourist attraction known as “The London Dungeon.” The Dirt Box is aptly named at a point when the only real resurgence in live music is lowdown, three-chord punk practiced by groups like Sex Gang Children, GBH (police slang for “grievous bodily harm”), Actified, Alien Sex Fiend, Ritual, Discharge, and Brigandage. This movement—which has produced one dreadful, unrepresentative compilation LP called Just When You Thought It Was... Quiet—includes also the re-formed Vibrators plus some long-lived ’70s punkers like Chelsea and U.K. Decay. They often seem to be mounting at feast some alternative to the ethics of syntho-slop, but a little investigation puts paid to that.

Take the very new Brigandage, for instance. The member who affects a top hat like the one Tom Petty wore onstage at Reading years ago—to prove he wasn’t a punk—attends the Royal College of Art, actually. He’ll tell you all about the club THEY run (called Our Living Room, it takes place at the sniffy-but-passe Le Beat Route). He’ll also explain the “brigandage” is “Victorian for thieving—so we finally get around to writing a song about robbing people.” Gee.

But again—don’t laugh! “Dickensian” and “dirt” are the joint buzzwords for today (another big London gay club is called The Trash Can). “Nobody wants to look rich,” say those influential people at PX clothing emporium—the folks who costume many of those pop persons we export to you. Their “Hard Times Dickensian Poor Girl” look consists of top hats paired with long fake dreadlocks and long, sloppily-printed frocks and coats—topped with plenty of scarves and finished with fingerless gloves. You can see the look filtering into boutiques like Boy, Review, Robot, PW Forte, Deluxe, DeMob, Swanky Modes and Street Theatre.

Hanging about on a lamppost in front of Street Theatre, of course, was what eventually got Culture, Club’s George Dowd “discovered”—and he’s the real mascot of the New Dirt. (Though Swanky Modes, a consortium of female “designers,” are also long-time rock groupies; their part-time salesgirl Bette Bright finally married into Madness and succeeded in transferring her emplbyers’ design enthusiasm from spandex to “poor-look Russian greatcoats”). “I feel almost guilty when I think I may have helped start all this garbage,” grinned Pop, appalled at the prospects of the “new punk,” and having coasted in on two equal-to-the legend sellout shows at london^ Venue. Petty, on the eve of his world tour, took a more basic view: “Rock music can really suck, right? What’s ‘really popular’ everywhere is for the most part pretty awful. ”

TURN TO PAGE 60

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 18

Even Vivienne “Fashion is and emotion” Westwood, partner of M. McLaren, has dived into dirt—only it’s Bloomingdales’ money from Manhattan behind her new store in snobbish St. Christophers’ Place. It’s called Nostalgia of Mud (no kidding!), and it features a bubbling pool in the centre of the floor, plus battered paintings and rubble wrapped in plastii and strewn about. For spring, Vivienne says she envisions rock-steady clients like BowWowWow’s Annabella pr Malcolm’s Buffalo Girls in NoM’s “hobo look”: again, top hats. The Nostalgia of Mud top hats are made of straw and have had their giartt tops ripped off; the loose string sweaters which accompany them are going to set American buyers back $250 each when Westwood exports them to New York.

George Dowd and Culture Club’s designer, Susan Clowes, graduated from South London’s Camberwell Art College in 1979. Her specialty is screenprints—the kind you see on many a concert-going chest as well as on Culture Club. Clowes says she designs for England’s new dolly birds as “dollymops.” That’s Dickensian slang for the seamstresses who once slaved by day over silk clothes for the rich, butwere forced by their low wages to prostitute themselves come nightfall. (Channel Four just told us. all about them in a docu-drama entitled Song of the Shirt, which may have inspired Ms. Clowes).

What does pop’s Princess Di, Clare Grogan, have to say about all this Victoriana? (We already know the real Princess of Wales favours Victorian velvets, chokers and lace to the tune of $250,000 in taxpayers’ monies p-er annum). “Oh,” says la Grogan. “I still buy from Top Shop; I just wish they’d let me endorse something.”

Clare, of course, favours England’s Other Alternative for women: sugar and spice and everything nice—get your ya-yas from a rah-rah. Just like Banarama before Ms. Clowes got hold of them; thank God for the few female toasters like Rankin’ Nancy or Sharon from Lewisham (or even the all-woman reggae band Amazulu). Those Human League tootsies have set British womankind back a good hundred years before Dickens and not everybody here thinks it’s so cute to play poor.

As for the hype about hangouts, it says something when Nightclubbing king Iggy Pop spends Christmas in town and can’t find a decent spot to step out to (he finally resorted to have an ear pierced). And for suppositions about synthesize? superiority, just refer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers\ pre-Christmas sellout/wipeout of Weimbley Arena, where a full house rioted to the refrain of “Refugee” without benefit of airplay, current chart hits or a sumpathetic press. Somebody out there still likes the sound of guitars—and that means more than just three chords and a grudge.

“If you’re not in a place all the time,” shrugged TP, “you’re gonna pick up on preconceived notions. I mean, / wouldn’t single out the Marquee as ‘London,’ but to a lot of people back home London is the Beatles and polka dot shirts in Carnaby Street, or the King’s Road punks and his sorta down-at-heel chic.”

“The healthy thing about England to me is that they’re always scramblin’ for an idea; it’s so disposable. I mean, the lifespan of a group here is what—three or four weeks? It’s really, fast and you gotta be constantly hittin’ a new lick or you’re old news.”

Petty turns to stub out his cigarette; behind him on a marble bust in his spacious Carlton Tower hotel room sits not a tbp hat, but a black Englishman’s bowler. Ah so! x