Meat on the bones and Bass under the floorboards

Alex Blackmore's small scale sculptures of pop culture tribes are accumulating detail and character. There is meat on the bones and more than a hint of demeanour. I'm seeing the austere anti-glamour of

the Eighties, taking a step back from of the social-realist wing of punk and into the bookish, mushroomy activism of post-punk. 

Meanwhile, here is Jon Donohoe in Sheffield adding bass to my soundtrack for Jim Alexander's attic animation. 

  

 

Phil and Fiona: John Peel Ears

This is  Fiona Ogilvie (front, in black) and Phil Musker (beard)  in Ulverston with the popular singing group Meat Raffle.

Fiona and Phil have the open ears and curiosity that they had as kids. 

They find things by going to look for them. They travel, they go to sampler shows and  all-dayers, in search of something they don't know about. One discovery leads to the next. Their internet is a source of information rather than music. They find shape shifting and amorphous scenes inhabited by pools of do-ers and activists,  villages of musicians, designers, t shirt people, putting on festivals without name bands or even headliners. There are echoes of counterculture; of Co-ops and communal living, ways of doing things that have risen out of both necessity and nous, a determination to be in control of the vehicle; an insistence on fleshy, real time relations within overlapping scenes; a pleasure in operations on a human scale, with a core audience that is big enough to maintain you and small enough to get to know.

They never miss a support act.

They still have what Phil called  their John Peel ears.

NOW...Reverb writer and pal Geoff Cox and me met up with them for a few beers with a view to collaboration of some sorts . After , Geoff said this, and sent this diagram /score...

Hi John,

I’ve been thinking about what I’d be interested in chasing via the Reverb project, stuff we’d be able to include other folk in and discover some interesting ideas. I’ve been doodling a first pass at what that content might be - the diagram atttached is a big-picture take. If you think this is where we should be going I’d be happy to refine some questions for each of the 7 areas, though I’m not sure we’d need much more to get folk talking?

Anyone out there fancy getting involved?  artspacebarrow@gmail.com

Wind-up.

 A few years ago a call from Cecil Sharp House sent me across town  to collect a collection of folkdance and tune 78s from a house clearance.   Our pal Bob Spencer in Barrow has just done some sterling work work on greasing and springing the REVERB wind-up gram, and I'm now digitising them for Gordon Jones at Furness Tradition and digging into the history of the sessions with the Help of the Vaughan Williams library.

Deathcleaning. Where is thy Sting album?

 

So, Carl Flint emails me saying here was a guy selling old fanzines on his stall on Chesterfield Flea Market...(see photo). Mostly British but a few international ones as well. I didn't buy any, he says. as I'm trying to cut back on those sort of purchases in the interest of death-cleaning

He's fine by the way, and so am I..

I only heard that Death Cleaning is a thing quite recently. Might have been from Carl. It's a Swedish thing, a rational and civilised preparation for the inevitable that takes the onus off family and probably makes you feel a bit more in charge of things. It'd also be a good way to ensure that anything embarrassing gets deffed before you do, like that Sting Live lp with the blobby painting on the cover  or the tubes of panic -purchase Pile Cream. 

(We've all been there. It's nothing to be ashamed of.) (Pile Cream, not Sting.) 

It's in the air.  I've  had quite a few  discussions regarding souvenirs etc, about what you keep and what you don't and why. A few people had made a conscious decision to dump drawers full of stuff, but I don't think anyone referred to Death Cleaning though, they just let the  conversation trail off....

Turns out there's a tv show about it too...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/06/the-gentle-art-of-swedish-death-cleaning-a-rare-tv-show-that-will-change-your-life-for-the-better

I have been doing it myself. The drawing portfolio regularly gets the treatment, drawings get screwed up and dumped, leaving clouds of charcoal dust hanging. The reasoning is that someone, one day, will have to go through this stuff. And not through familial obligation either.  Its going to either be someone who volunteers, or a Professional.  I'm trying to get a head start on it, getting rid of the rubbish, anything I don't rate. I suppose it would be easier on the poor sod who gets the job if I got rid of the good stuff, so there was only obvious rubbish there. I'm not really sure how he's supposed to know the difference.

Anyway obviously I desperately want these fanzines, but I'm not going to be around Chesterfield on any thursday coming up. Luckily my friend Androo Wobble is, and is good enough to wander down and grab me a selected bundle. Androo has excellent judgement on these matters so it'll be a good selection, and something to mystify whoever has to one day drag out whatever is under my bed.  Many thanks youth.

Walking Headless

A busy few days. Alex's figures are taking on some extra layers of clothing and a bit of what todays young people, (or their parents) call Attitude.  Heads next, and then a coat of matt white for printing.  We've been talking to a firm who can print these, so a small edition will be coming your way. 

Meanwhile, Jim is working on mouth shapes so that his animated figure can sing...
 ...and we have a further Flypaper ready, another one looking at the Prittstick Jungle of fanzine publication and illustration, as a companion piece to the RED zine ish, with former NME illustrator Carl Flint. 

 

 

Here's to you, Messers Robinson.

The AOIRE / John Hall show at Full Of Noises will be rescheduled as soon as we can, and in the meantime John is writing this in the third person to let you that he has not been idle , and has taken delivery today of these items, which will form part of the presentation.

Loaned by Robinson's Brewery of Stockport, these original 1980s ashtrays will be used to light the room, in ways, and for reasons, that will become apparent.

John would like to thank Gillian Hannan of Robinson's Customer Services, and Joanne Clayton-Brown of the Hope and Anchor, Ulverston. Gillian tells us that she used to drink at the Grain and Grape, when she was about 16. As John is sure did many of the people that will read this and hopefully see the show.

Alex Blackmore. Pop Tribes. Work In Progress, and The Dressing Up Box.

 Alex Blackmore is working on a series of figures representing historic youth culture tribes.  Drawing on photos and his own recollections, he's producing these sculptures for scanning and 3D printing as an edition.

Alex tells us that the "Grey green stuff is Milliput & the green stuff is called greenstuff" and that "It sets a bit like chewing gum thats been chewed & stuck under a table." Which seems appropriate.

Each new pop tribe is first feared, then mocked and then commodified by the industry it seeks to undermine and by the culture it seeks to transcend. 

In the mid 60s, Coach parties toured the Haight Asbury and viewed the Hippies and street people from behind plexiglass, as Exotics in an updating of the 19thC World Tour, condensed and relocated within US borders. Meanwhile the more affluent hippies were doing something comparable in Nepal or Afghanistan, although they did at least get off the bus and talk to people. The ones who stayed home would carry mirrors with which to return the gawps of those coach parties. In early 80s London, several postcard series appeared showing kids in mohawks and studs in front of the Commons or Guardsmen, flipping the bird; "Greetings from London." They were the new Pearly Kings. "Consider yourself part of the furniture"

As representations of these tribes become more frequent they are reduced to basic signifiers. By now, Hippy is a necklace and a pair of round specs, Punk is a circled A, Mod – or the movie spin-off revival versh -a Spitfire decal on a parka. The complexities of Rave are reduced to a Smiley, or just the use of the word "Rave."

Each is launched intact, loaded with private language and behaviour codes, but an often unclear demarcation; Early Ted was rooted in a post war appropriation of Edwardian Brit finery, but owed a share of its swagger to a pre-rock'n'roll America, through cinema depictions of riverboat gambler chic and the exaggerations of Zoot . Punk pillaged Fetishware and Rocker styles in a fusion of transgressive folk devilry. The more photogenic end of Brit Hippy and the Underground indicates a Pre-Raph tendency.  Lace and velvet brushes against capes and Victorian militaria in search of Arcadia. Guinevere in Wonderland. Those round specs - Granny Glasses - hinted at the required hinterland of  wisdom and unworldliness, preferable to the harder edge provided by the contemporary Harry Palmer Hornrim.*  Only the Modernists of the late 50s - tech-heads, ears wide open, in a constant and exhausting state of self-appraisal and re-invention - can be said to be entirely of their own time.

Once the tribe is in orbit, there is a jettisoning of much of what got it up there in the first place. Its wit is diluted and coarsened; spokespeople (men, usually) are promoted and invited to the top tables. Edge doesn't stand a chance. It vanishes by design, through excessive handling, through the very processes that aid each new cult's ascendency to its tabloid demon high-waterline. 

 That unclear demarcation is now a given; we cheerfully loot the dressing up box, mixing and matching, punk rockers with flowers in our hair. 

In a time when images float freely, and yet have greater weight and influence than actual experience, we read each other by means of references, allusions, and allusions to references. 

 And now of course, nothing goes away. What's in the dressing up box is also in the Retro shops, online and on what remains of the High Street. Retro is now itself an attitude of mind, rather than a step on the way to one.

You are what you adopt.

The contents of the Dressing Up box still reward attention; clues to lineage can be found, bits of arcane cultural salvage can be bolted together and cranked into life, and ridden to more explicit connections which are harder to commodify, and harder to appropriate. 

 The problem lies in who is doing the digging and what they do with what they find. The Underground, the Punks and the more idealistic of the Ravers were trying to build something. The best of them made their move outside the mainstream. They pulled up alongside it, and boarded. And if they didn't actually take the wheel, they had a positive influence on the direction of travel. 

 If history, in a  post-truth world, can be reduced to images, floating unanchored in uncharted waters, then it can be appropriated and enlisted to any end, by people who really, really want to take the wheel. 

* I know, because I have a pair of each.