Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie

The year is 2003. I’m sitting in the backseat whilst my mum and dad ride up ahead. Behind me stowed in the boot of the car is a collection of boxes. These boxes contain clothes, books, memorabilia and my record collection. At the tail end of school, I had just got into music. Whilst everyone else in the 6^th form was a wannabe Garage MC, I was different. I wasn’t the same as them. I walked a different path. I took the road not taken. I was into Coldplay. And in my school to be into any kind of guitar music made you counter-culture. So in the boot of the car are my Coldplay LP’s and a rare bootleg copy of their complete B-sides. I was aware that every self-respecting music fan would have a copy of Parachutes and Rush of Blood to the Head, but I knew no one would be so fortunate as to own the illegal rarities album. In possessing this sought after piece of music history, I was confident it wouldn't be long before women were at my door requesting to be part of an intimate listening experience.

GIRL: Are you the man who has an album of Coldplay B-sides?

ME (affecting Bogart cool): I might be baby doll. It depends who's asking?

GIRL (purring sensuality in my ear): I’m asking.

ME (no longer affecting Bogart cool, but being Bogart cool): I might know such a man.

GIRL (biting lip in a way that connotes ‘I want you’ rather than ‘Get me a tissue, I didn’t mean to do that): I don't suppose you know where I could meet such a man?

BOGART (I’ve morphed into him now): He’s standing here, looking at you kid.

GIRL: (swoons)

Fade Out

I taught Bogart what he knew.

I arrive at university wearing my blue Coldplay t-shirt. The t-shirt design is très cool with the band’s name spelt with a periodic table motif. Ingeniously I knew the t-shirt would be a conversation starter: I wouldn’t have to regale people with anecdotes to confirm my status as arbiter of cultural taste, the apparel would do it for me. Entering the flat, I was greeted by another lad wearing the cover art to a band I had never heard of. “Coldplay, eh. Nice one. I'm Jim.” Looking under the landfill of slogans that adorned his top, I read the band’s name: “Radiohead, eh. Nice one. I'm Ryan.” Who were Radiohead? I thought I had the whole catalogue of Indie music in my plastic crate: David Gray’s White Ladder, Turin Brakes’ The Optimist LP and the complete works of Chris Martin. I wasn't overly concerned though; they were obviously a new band; it was nice anyway to meet someone into guitar music.
 
After I had unpacked I knocked on Jim’s door and he welcomed me in to look at his room. What I saw changed my life. All over the walls were posters. Posters of musicians I had never heard of. Bowie in one corner. Morrissey in the other. Next to him, Jarvis Cocker. Beside him, Nicky Wire. Under him, Bjork. To the side of her, Suede. Across from them, Robert Smith of The Cure. All of these pull-outs had come from magazines I'd never heard of, entitled Melody Maker and NME. Seeing those images was my Road to Damascus moment: the point where I stopped persecuting my ears and started embracing the word of Morrissey. Every journey begins with a single step, walking into that room and seeing those eccentrics was mine.

Jarvis can't get away from chipped wood.

 
For months after, what played out between Jim and me was the Indie music equivalent of Educating Rita. Instead of Frank using his study to educate Rita, Jim would soundtrack our games of Pro Evolution Soccer to the albums of Indie past. During those afternoons I was acquainted with strangers that would go on to be my best friends: The Queen Is Dead, The Stone Roses, The Bends and Screamadelica. Like Rita, I had found what I'd been missing, and I was going to make it my mission to catch up on everything I'd missed. I bought Q, NME, Uncut, The Word; listened to Steve Lamacq; read online fanzines and used friends as lending libraries to educate myself on this music that truly spoke to me.  

I was blind, now I can see. You made a believer out of me. I'm movin' on up now. Getting out of the darkness. My light shines on. My light shines on.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been watching Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie, following a recommendation from Jim. (Educating me on music is his vocation; just because I’m not next door to him anymore isn’t going to stop him.) The documentary presented by Mark Radcliffe, broadcaster and former producer on the John Peel show, tracks Indie music’s growth from the bedroom business record labels to the genre's burgeoning sales and increasing marketability.

Mark Radcliffe

 The first episode introduced me to labels I had never heard of: Postcard, Mute and Industrial; along with labels I had: 2 Tone, Rough Trade and Factory. Initially at least, all of these were run on a shoestring budget with the emphasis being on art over commerce. Tony Wilson, Factory Record’s impresario, famously lost money from the multi-million selling single, Blue Monday – the reason? the cover sleeve cut to resemble a floppy disc cost so much that they lost money on every record sold. These were businesses that weren’t run solely for profit but for love. Hilariously, Pete Waterman of Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW) also features: despite representing platinum selling artists, Kylie and Jason, they were still technically an independent label; consequently, the bizarre juxtaposition of seeing Jason Donovan sit alongside Jesus and the Mary Chain on the Indie Music Charts was an all too common feature.

Mark Radcliffe begins the retrospective by asking what is Indie: is it music independent of a major record company? is it a mindset? is it an aspiration? For me, it was a lifeline. I was a shy outsider at school unable to relate to the laddish culture around me; how I wish then I had Jarvis and Morrissey to guide me through those years, to make the social estrangement I felt feel normal, to make my decision to reject machismo and embrace books feel like the right one. But hey, what difference does it make? Non, je ne regret rien. I have them now. And I ain't ever going to let them go. 

The final episode of Music for Misfits: The Story of Indie concludes next Friday, BBC 4 at 10pm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't Need The Sunshine

The seaside has always been a special place for me. Every summer my family and I would go to Swanage. Swanage was where my mum was born and where my Nan lived. It is also home to Jonathan Ross- at least in the summer- so my mum continues to tell me. For two weeks every year we would wave goodbye to the Home Counties and set up home in Hardy country. Having made the trip so many times, the journey was as much a part of the holiday as the holiday itself: getting lucky on the M25, an easy ride on the M3 (“God’s road,” according to my Dad), a smooth passage on the M27, then the real work would begin: the longueur of the serpentine A road. (It was our Highway 61 and like Dylan we had been there before.)  Its 60mph speed limit a sleight of hand trick, a deception designed to make you think that you’re tearing tarmac when in all actuality you’re treading treacle on a limbo trail to nowhere. On escaping the Bermuda Triangle, we would start queuing in Sandbanks for the ferry. Being British, I love a queue. It gives me valuable daydream time. (My daydream time like the bee is currently under threat. I remember a time when I could dissolve into my imagination, making fantasia of my subconscious: images of lifting the FA Cup or flirting with Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs would play out on my dream reel. Now as a classroom teacher, I don’t get a minute to myself. I think here’s my chance; I’ll have a little stare out of the window, and then just as I'm about to go through the turnstiles of my imaginarium, I see a fight that I have to go and split up.)

Making our passage across the waves, the drawbridge of the ferry was lowered and we'd disembark. Journeying down the hill, we see what we came for: there in all its splendour is the sea. Invariably, the sun would be shining on it, making diamonds out of water. Across the seafront we'd go, then up through the town where the search for the parking space would begin. Sometimes the Gods would be shining on my dad's company car and the vehicles would part to fit the four wheeled longboat; other times the Gods didn’t get the memo and we’d have to circle potential vacancies before an occupancy could be found.  

Unloading the boot, we would run down the alley, throw open the gate and make our way through the garden, approving the recent botanical upgrades. Nan could hear the gate from the kitchen and was there ready and waiting to throw out kisses like a winning fruit machine. Then love dispensed with, she gathered herself and returned to the task of making us feel at home. My Nan’s hero was the Queen; like her she was born with a sense of duty, a belief that the needs of others should be put before herself. Every time we went there, there were chocolates waiting for us in the spare room. More often than not, it would be ‘Misfits’: chocolates that were misshapen on the assembly line and consequently re-packaged and sold on at a cheaper price. Just because they were malformed, they weren’t any less delicious. In many ways the ‘Misfits’ chocolates were the confectionary equivalent of an Aesop Fable teaching us not to judge something on appearance.

In the evening we would all sit down to enjoy my Nan’s cooking. A regular at the WI my Nan knew how to cook. She was a one woman restaurant: Head chef, maître d’ and waitress. If you tried to help, you were paid short shrift. There would be a full main course served on the kind of plate that Alan Partridge would bring to a hotel buffet. Also, you would get multiple pudding options: ice cream and jelly, melon and brown sugar, blackcurrant cheesecake and cream. For a woman living on a state pension, she made it go a long way.

Then in the morning, it would be the beach. No matter the rising costs, my family would always have a beach hut. While other families would enjoy a place in France, we would have a place on the sand. Chairs out and windbreakers erected, the land was ours; shovels readied to ward off invaders. And there we stayed: from dawn ‘til dusk. The intervening hours filled with games of boules, bat and ball and beach cricket. On hot days I would run into the sea, believing that the temperature outside the water would match the temperature inside the water; I was sorely mistaken. Out I would run into the arms of the approaching towel – like an exhausted marathon runner blanketed at the end of a race.

Why am I talking about this? Because this week I’ve been reading John Osborne’s Don’t Need The Sunshine. I first heard about John (I know its customary to refer to artists by their last name, but 
Osborne is such a lovely, familiar chap that the forename seems more appropriate) whilst reading Stewart Lee’s article on the government’s latest attack on the BBC. In the piece, he mentioned how on a drive home he listened to a new young writer called John Osborne, whom had left him and his family spellbound. On listening he cried, knowing that no other media would broadcast something of such beauty. Being an admirer of Lee's work, I listened to the Radio 4 broadcast and agreed wholeheartedly that it was something entirely special. In the show John spoke about four different seaside holidays: it begins in Scarborough where he’s teaching at a summer school, goes back in time to recollect a childhood holiday on the Isle of Wight, then onto university where his friends enjoyed a day trip in Wales, before ending in Southwold with a paean to pier plaques.

I loved Osborne’s voice and language. His love for people shines through in his work and reminds me a lot of comedian, Daniel Kitson, who also makes heroes out of the ordinary, magic out of the mundane. Looking online, I noticed there was a book version of the Radio 4 show so ordered it immediately. The Radio 4 show is a fine distillation of the book: the hit singles to the albums if you will. But the book is rather beautiful too. Where the radio show felt more poetic with vignettes flitting in and out of one another, the book reads more like a Bill Bryson travelogue. I laughed at the description of two-penny pushers and beach family cricket; but I also learnt loads about how the railways helped popularise the seaside, then when the going got tough turned its back on it. By the end of the book, you're left worrying that what you've read is an eulogy to a dying tradition.

This year my Nan passed away. She was a lady who swam in the sea, come rain or shine, up until the age of 80. A few months ago, my parents and uncle scattered her ashes in the water. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I believe in symbolism; I love the fact that their action means she'll continue doing what she loved. Now she's gone, there's the risk that our attachment with Swanage might go too. Fearing this, my mum and dad have talked about buying a caravan or flat there, which will ensure the seaside stays in our family for generations to come. If this plan comes off, I’d like to think in the Year 3000 the heirs to our noble line will be down on that beach, arguing over umpire calls in the millennium-long tradition of beach family cricket.

John Osborne's Don't Need The Sunshine is available to buy from all good retailers.

This is England

This week Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was hauled over the coals for refusing to participate in our national anthem. In refusing to sing a song of subjugation he was branded unpatriotic and disloyal. For Conservatives, patriotism is about honouring timeworn institutions; it is about kowtowing to history and acknowledging that because something is old it is therefore worthy. Not once in this national anthem are the people of the country mentioned; it’s all about the big man in the sky and the privileged one on the throne. Moreover, for a nation that says ‘Never again’ every November 11th, the hymn is a paean to militarism. If it sounded half as good as Rule Britannia, I might accept it, but it doesn’t: instead it sounds like a Daily Mail reader’s burp put to six verses. Is this what England is? A country enthral to God and the Queen?

No, a better representation comes in the aptly named, This is England.

The series begins with Toots and the Maytals, a Jamaican Ska Band, soundtracking a montage of England in 1983. This is an England in upheaval: from Poll Tax protestors clashing with police to the Falklands being returned to Britain, the year was a decisive one for Thatcher. With public unrest over inequitable taxation, she was close to being shown the door, but with victory in a faraway land Thatcher’s name was changed almost overnight to ‘Maggie’ - our mother and saviour. In fact, Thatcher is the silent character in the This Is England series: her mucky handprints are all over the character’s hardships as they feel the pinch of her economic and military campaigns.

Shaun Fields is a character that receives a bloody nose off the back of Thatcher’s iron fist. The film begins with a photo of Shaun’s father, a victim of the Falklands, on the mantelpiece. Having lost his father, Shaun is spiritually lost: alone and friendless, he kicks out at the world. Hope though comes in camaraderie and when Woody, a goofy gang leader, sees Shaun hurting he plays the part of surrogate, offering the boy direction and friendship. Accepted in the gang, Shaun must now look the part: being fans of Ska culture, this means Shaun is shorn like a sheep and made to sport a skinhead, much to his mum’s chagrin. To be accepted into the church of the walking bass-line though, he must undergo his confirmation and pledge his life to Doc Martins - this anointment takes place in a hilarious shoe shop scene. The first half of the film reads like a comedy – and it is. The second half of the film is anything but.

You see, the term gang is a misnomer for Woody and the guys. Their only brush with criminality is smashing up derelict buildings and smoking a bit of draw. Consequently, they simply aren’t equipped to deal with the nefariousness of Combo, an old friend just released from prison. Feeling unloved by family, society and country, Combo declares war on anything he defines as un-English: Thatcher’s phoney wars and immigration being two of them. Rejected by all and sundry, his fire and brimstone prophecies are compulsive viewing. Bewitched by his dark arts, Shaun and some of the other boys follow Combo’s fervour and become unwitting soldiers of nationalism. Woody, older and ever so slightly wiser, knows Combo is dangerous, but is too hamstrung by meekness to do anything about it. Therefore, in the battle for the boys’ soul, the devil wins. The consequences of Combo’s victory are brutally realised at the end of the movie.

That was just the film. 

This Is England’s characters have avoided the hangman’s noose by being granted a reprieve on TV. In This is England ’86 and '88 the focus widens from Shaun to include Woody and his girlfriend, Lol. Shaun has survived his racist conversion but suffers a hangover when his mum brings home a Pakistani shopkeeper. The struggle to accept his mum’s mixed-raced relationship may be a metaphor for a nation that for a long time couldn’t see past colour. His story though of teenage tantrums appears smaller when we see the struggles of Lol and Woody. 

Woody is suffering from that perennial twenty-something problem of losing your identity to a job: the brown overalls of factory floor manager don’t match Woody’s previous career as a colourful character. Assimilated into the machine, he becomes boring to the principled Lol. 

Lol is experiencing greater problems than anyone. Her father’s return has sent her free-falling. Where previously she was headstrong, now she is silenced. The menace Johnny Harris brings to the role is truly frightening. Sporting a bald patch and intimidating growl, we watch in horror as his lies make a hero of him and a liar of Lol. Seeing a brilliant, spirited woman blunted by evil is hugely dispiriting. As uneasy as this is to watch, it does give rise to some of the best acting ever committed to TV. Vicky McClure is one of Britain’s finest actors and her scenes as Lol confirm this. Her character’s seek for salvation is utterly heartbreaking and shows how child abuse doesn’t just destroy the child but the adult too. The scene where she reveals her past to a kind nurse is in my eyes one of the great moments in acting. Instead of chewing scenery, McClure reveals Lol through nuanced shifts in body and expression, making her descent into invisibility even more tragic.

Last week ‘90 began. It has the same clash of comedy and drama that its predecessors enjoy. A hilarious split-screen phone conversation between Woody and his stuffy parents shows Meadows can do sunshine as well as rain. However, with it being set during 90’s Rave Culture, you get the feeling storm clouds are gathering; with the vultures of addiction circling the dance floor, threatening to destroy the gang’s halcyon days.

Ultimately, Meadows documents England as it is. It is not the land of hope and glory. It is a land where Rule Britannia has created a false sense of superiority and subsequent racism. It isn’t a country of bowing to your superior. It is a land of misrule where our great dramatists, from Shakespeare to Meadows, can write heartbreak one minute and a cock joke the next. It is a country that has embraced disparate people and cultures to make ‘its’ people and culture better. God? The Queen? England doesn’t need them. Why? ‘Cos we have each other.

This is England '90 continues on Channel 4, Sunday 9pm.

Parks and Recreation

The best sitcoms are about the friction between little people and big dreams. It is a tradition as old as time. Tony Hancock, Basil Fawlty, David Brent and Alan Partridge all have egos too big for their towns. Pumped on self-importance, we laugh as life deflates them. Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope is both of and antithetical to this tradition. Being the Deputy Director of the Pawnee City Department of Parks and Recreation, her plans to be the first female President seem starry-eyed; however as unrealistic as her aspirations may be, we admire her because - unlike the said males- she is actually good at her job. The problem isn’t so much with her, rather the team around her.

Trapped in the province.

 Joining Leslie in her war against red tape is Parks and Recreation Director, Ron Swanson, a man who believes the state sector should be bulldozed to the ground with the subsequent clean-up sold to the highest bidder. Ron is akin to Catch 22’s Major Major, in that you can only have a meeting with him when he’s not there. Essentially, his work routine is a game of hide and seek where the job never finds him. If having a work-shy superior wasn’t hard enough, Leslie has to cope with subordinates who have made a full-time job out of shirking responsibility. Tom Haverford is one such underling: as a child of Hip Hop, Tom has been raised to believe in glitz and glamour. Realising his world is now a government cubical, he spends time devising business plans that are beyond his capabilities - in essence a Richard Branson with a Northern Rock account. Another one of her charges is intern April Ludgate. Interns are today’s capitalist success story: poorly paid but thankful for gainful employment, they work with a fervour that borders on the insane, so desperate are they for that elusive permanent contract. Well, April isn’t that kind of intern. If it takes more muscles to frown than smile, then April is the ripped face of apathy. Only Jerry, a rotund civil servant, offers anything in the way of good ideas, and he isn’t listened to because he once mispronounced the word ‘murial.’ Driven to create better parks for the townspeople, Leslie will not let these road blocks get in her way. Against her ‘Yes I Can’ enthusiasm, resistance is futile: the job can either be done now or immediately. Her team, part afraid, part in thrall to this zeal, join together to make her plans come true.

Leslie and her team.

It is this togetherness that makes the sitcom so special. I don’t think it is the funniest sitcom of all time, but it is immensely likeable and charming. At the last Comedy Awards, Johnny Vegas complained about the sneering state of sitcom: how Ricky Gervais’ atom bomb of ironic racism and disabalism has continued to pollute the comedy landscape. In his speech he praised Paul Whitehouse for creating characters that championed ordinary people. Parks does the same. Leslie Knope is the unrecognised face of civic duty: the people who collect our rubbish, clean our streets, open our libraries, improve our towns. She is a totem of what can be achieved when your passion out-rivals your connections. In a world of cut-backs and kickbacks, she perseveres.

In Leslie Knope we trust.      

Parks and Recreation is available on Dave, Monday 8pm.

1984

I’m 16-years-old. I’m in my Nan’s spare room (I’m here because it’s the summer holiday). I’m lying in bed. On the floor is my Sony Discman. The disc spinning inside: Elbow’s debut, Asleep in the Back. (When considering the band's recent output of over-produced melancholia, Asleep is a curiosity. Incongruous to the rest of their work, the album is a horror show put to audio: it sounds like an abandoned building that's lights have been punched out by poverty and paranoia. It scares the shit out of me.) While the soundtrack spins in my ear, my eyes are making a movie of the letters beneath. In my hands, 1984: Orwell’s dystopian nightmare of surveillance and interrogation. In having Guy Garvey provide the score for this read, I've made a rod for my own back: Orwell’s landscape becomes more disturbing when coupled with the album; Garvey’s soundscape becomes more distressing when coupled with the book. Like Special Brew and Absinthe, the two shouldn’t be put together. Impervious to consequence, I make a tall glass of the two and toast oblivion.

I’m now 30-years-old. I’m in the Playhouse Theatre, readying myself for Headlong’s adaptation of 1984. A poster warning audiences that the performance contains scenes of gunshots and blood and torture has freaked my girlfriend out. (She hasn't read the book and my three word synopsis of 'brutality,' 'horrifying' and 'disturbing' might not have helped.) It also re-assures patrons that the animals used in the production are under the governance of specialist handlers. This detail is evidence that the mind games have already begun. Most people in the theatre are aware of the book: when they read the sign, they think ‘rats.’ Questions began to abound: Is the actor going to go ‘method’ with the final scene? Are we about to witness a Bush Tucker trial live on stage? The boy in me, one predisposed to adrenaline, immune to fear smiles; the man, on the other hand, checks his brow and prays for safety.

Together, we begin our ascent to the viewing gallery to watch the torture unfold. On the staircase we’re addressed by an usher, warning us there will be no re-admittance, that there is no interval, that the play is 101 minutes long. The denial of a break is an inspired decision. Just as Winston’s subjugation is total and unrelenting, so is ours. There will be no half-time succour of ice cream and Facebook to retain equilibrium; no, Winston’s world will be our world until the curtain says otherwise.

The play begins by plunging us into darkness. (The disorientating use of lighting will be a recurring motif throughout the play.) When the lights do arrive, Winston Smith, centred, sits at a desk penning a journal. He is just out of a sight of a telescreen, an apparatus of control that allows the State to look in on you and observe your behaviour. In 1984, a diary is a weapon of rebellion, anything that allows someone to register the past is suppressed- the past after all is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The state of Big Brother does not want people to know of difference.  An understanding of the past gives people a context with which to scrutinize their present: the objective of a totalitarian state is to be impregnable to such scrutiny. Although the details of Winston’s diary are cold and dead-eyed, documenting bland observations, it is the start of his spiritual awakening.

 The next scene took me by surprise. Instead of tracking Winston’s growing defiance, we’re transported to a book group, whose attendees debate the book. For people who haven’t read the source, this does not appear in the novel. Initially, I thought this scene was pat-on-the-back postmodernism, discussing the author’s work. Instead they’re doing something that is totally in keeping with the story. At the back of 1984 is a little-read appendix that documents the fall of Big Brother; its first sentence reads (‘Newspeak was the official language of Oceania.’) Was shows the system and its language collapsed and in its place was a return to thought and freedom. The main story is a bleak predictor of fascist rule, but the appendix is Orwell’s positive belief that tyranny can be overcome. The book group, therefore, takes place in a post-Big Brother world. Delightfully, the production nods at how some things have improved (the language of the people has been restored and returned back to the people) and how some things haven’t changed (people are still in thrall to the screens: this time though its mobile phones, not telescreens).

The book group

Other than this addition, the play stays largely loyal to the text. That’s not to say Headlong’s adaptation is regurgitation; it’s far too imaginative for that. For instance, a scene is repeated three times to show the deadening malaise of living in a system opposed to expression. Winston goes to work and is told day after day the same anecdote by a colleague. Alongside this recollection, a cleaner scrubs the floor with the taut gestures of a machine – under Big Brother people have become automatons, incapable of intimacy and thought. Another inspired moment is when Winston enters into an affair with another State worker, Julia. Finding sexual refuge in the back room of an antique shop, the audience becomes the State, observing the unfolding rebellion on an overhead telescreen. What makes the production truly revelatory though is its staging of the iconic torture scene. Do those rats make an appearance? You’ll have to go along to find out.

Thank God, this kind of torture doesn't exist now.

1984 has finished its London run, but the production re-commences its tour in Bath on the 9^th September.