Deviation Street Issue 3 by deviationstreet101

ARCHIVE

LIQUID LIQUID

DAVID BYRNE BACK PAGE |

GEOFF DUNLOP

RICHARD McGUIRE

PURYEAR AND BASQUAT PAGE 10 |

PAGE 8 |

DEVIATION STREET THIRD ISSUE | FRIDAY, MAY 24, 2019

RICHARD MCGUIRE INTERVIEW Things are great. The book was launched at the NY Art Book Fair along with an exhibition. First at MoMA/PS1, out in Queens, and then an expanded version of the show at Alden Projects in Manhattan. The exhibitions and book all center around the years 1979-1982. At that time I was designing the posters and records sleeves for my band (Liquid Liquid) and I was also making “street art”. The band posters were usually printed (offset or silkscreened) in editions of around 100. The street art were hand made originals , part stencil / part drawing, and always made in an edition of two, I would paste one on the street and keep the other copy for my archives. The band posters use a lot of collage elements and are often playing around with type, the street art has a rougher look, I made the stencils by ripping newspaper and painting them with spray paint and drawing text with a crayon. The show and book also include photographs taken in 1979 of my work in the streets of lower Manhattan. It’s been fun for me

to see all this work again, I’ve never seen it all together at the same time before! I moved to NYC (from New Jersey) on July 3, 1979. I know the exact date because I kept a journal. Two days after I arrived I was out pasting up drawings in the street at night, I did this regularly for the next few years. One of the first people I met was Keith Haring, it was at a party at the loft of the artist Jenny Holzer. Keith started to curate shows in clubs, he always invited me to be part of what he was doing. I met Jean Michel Basquiat at a loft party too, we were both playing on the same bill. That night his band was called Test Pattern (later the band was called Gray). I was a fan of his SAMO graffiti, so to me he was already a star when we met. He was also familiar with my street drawings so we bonded over that. We showed in a few group shows together as well. Al Diaz, Jean-Michel’s SAMO graffiti partner was a good friend as well, he also played percussion on a few of the Liquid Liquid records. MCGUIRE, PAGE | 8

“I’ve always had a lot of different interests, and one project always led to the next. After I finish something I feel it’s best to switch it up to remain fresh. I can equate it to being a farmer and rotating crops.” MCGUIRE

SNAPPED ANKLES ALBUM REVIEW BY JON GORDON Snapped Ankles ‘Stunning Luxury’

YONIC ALBUM REVIEW

TED MILTON INTERVIEW

Is there such a creature as ‘the sound of 2019’? Music writers are always looking for hooks to hang things onto, inventing scenes and genres where none previously existed and of course musicians are also prone to doing this, although more often than not it’s about the Right Noise, something that has changed little since 1979 and the first Cabaret Voltaire EP. Today, things are different; striving for pure originality is widely recognised as an exercise in futility as the perceived limits of what the basic band format can achieve is recognised to have been fully achieved, mostly by very obscure Californian indie bands of the latter part of the preceding decade. This doesn’t mean that no one should stop making an effort, it’s just that nowadays fewer people care about ‘originality’ than

JOHNY BROWN INTERVIEW

The fact that I’ve written about Band of Holy Joy more than any other band, says a lot about their power to continually, provoke, inspire, move and create beauty in times of darkness. Ridiculously consistent in their abilities: no matter the shifts and changes in personnel and approach, this is not a smooth ride and nor should it be. BoHJ respect their listeners and know our time is precious so should not be wasted. But this is never some po faced experiment in boundary breaking. It’s a living, breathing account of the terrors, and yes, joys of life, with Mr Johny Brown as your guide, PAGE | 12

Andreas Dorau ‘Das Wesentliche’ (Tapete Records) Unlike practically every other German electronic musician you ever heard of, Andreas Dorau has had a certain ambition throughout his now approaching four decade career. Releasing experimental music of a kind that requires an element of commitment on the part of the listener just hasn’t ever really been for him. While his contemporaries went for hard edged

previously. So if you’re going to make an enervating, agitational and virulent electropunk album, it’s maybe slightly easier today than in the mythical heyday of the early 80s, a time before polyphonic synths and when releases on the Rough Trade label were numbered in double figures. What’s really good about Snapped Ankles is that they already know all this and aren’t averse to signposting their influences to those that are ‘in the know’, elitist pranksters that they indisputably are. The Residents, Devo, the Membranes, actually Cabaret Voltaire and other lesser known although no less well regarded electronic pioneers are all getting a mention in here somewhere. Fast forward a bit and the late 90s also had its share of experimentalists in the likes of Add N To X, Atari Teenage Riot, Miss Kittin and others. The spirit of the sequential anodisers of two

techno and lengthy improvisations, Dorau remained true to his own single minded indie visions, and has never hidden his desire for mainstream success, albeit on his own artistic terms. Beginning with 1982’s ‘Fred Vom Jupiter (released in the UK on Mute records), Dorau has consistently presented himself as an entertainer rather than a creature of the indie electronic underworld, with a persona that’s nearer to that of Sasha Distel than of Blixa Bargeld. Formerly signed to the hugely influential Bureau B label, Dorau’s newest album is released on the slightly more indie friendly Tapete records, where you can also find releases by the Monochrome Set, Lloyd Cole and Comet Gain, amongst others, artiste whose musical preferences have perhaps also led to their pursuing artistic satisfaction regardless of consequence. ‘Das Wesentliche’ translates as ‘The Essentials’, and isn’t as the title might suggest a com-

decades ago can also be heard on ‘Stunning Luxury’, an album of barely hidden depths designed to entrap the wary.

kles own imaginations, a cryptic response to the bleary cynicism of 2019 itself.

Essentially, Snapped Ankles have got a stonking great PA through which to broadcast their thrumming, churning synth drum and bass overload, and touching on everything from soft jazz to hardcore club techno in the process. This would make for a decidedly better than average instrumental album in itself but what seals it for Snapped Ankles is their wordage. Taking a cue perhaps once wielded by Captain Beefheart, the lyrics that accompany the music of ‘Stunning Luxury’ are a collection of randomised statements and garbled expressions of urban squalor, with titles like ‘Delivery Van’, ‘Drink And Glide’ and ‘Dial The Rings On A Tree’, words whose syllables develop associations and invent a landscape that belongs entirely to Snapped An-

If you’re up for this sort of thing, you might wish that more albums were this good at what Snapped Ankles are choosing to do. It sounds loud enough to rock the speakers without being overwhelmingly crazed, the rhythms are skewed in a way that could provoke actual dancing, and if you can prevent yourself from playing ‘spot the arpeggio’ or making detailed comparisons with Edgar Varese, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Eno, you might actually enjoy listening to ‘Stunning Luxury’, an album that succeeds both despite and because of itself. It’s even a bit ‘original’.

pilation of some of Dorau’s career highlights. There does seem to be a concept of some kind at work here though.

similarly repetitive ‘Instant Magic’ whose lyric consists of the phrase ‘you think you’re instant magic’ provide some insight regarding the German lyrics, songs whose words subtly undermine the summery pop vibes of the music.

‘Dinge Konnen Sich Andern’ opens the album and lasts all of one minute and fifteen seconds, and like just about every other song on the album it sounds like a demo track for a future Eurovision entry, whether sung by Dorau or not. Unashamed pop melodies are the order of the day round at chez Dorau, taking in doo-wop, surf pop, schlager and actual disco. Now, my spoken German isn’t fantastic, to the point where, while visiting Dusseldorf in 2007 I went into a chemists to buy some shaving equipment and had to be told by the shopkeeper that I was in fact asking for a pencil - so I won’t attempt to translate any of Dorau’s lyrics, although fortunately for your reviewer at least two of the songs are sung in English. Firstly, ‘Hey Tonight’ and its ‘tonight ain’t the night’ refrain and then the

‘Stunning Luxury’ can be found on all the usual music streaming services.

It seems as if the idea behind ‘Das Wesentliche’ is Dorau’s own reimagining of some decades old ‘greatest hits’ compilation album, and his way with a pop tune is a skilfully adept one, whatever it is he’s actually singing about. Krautrock enthusiasts may choose to demur when presented with his reconstructions of 60s,70s and 80s chart hits but it’s difficult to deny his songwriting abilities and intrinsic feel for what makes a great pop song. And what I know about ‘Das Wesentliche’ is only half of the story as it is available as a double vinyl release with twice as many tracks as my review copy. The hits just won’t stop coming for Andreas Dorau.

JIMMY GALVIN INTERVIEW

“Abso”fucking”lutely !! I’m an army of one the system hates real individuals”

DMITRY SOKOLENKO RUPERT/ HENRY X

DIANE ARBUS

EXHIBITION REVIEW

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Deviation Street,Third Issue

DEVIATION STREET THE THIRD ISSUE

ell here we are with Issue 3 of Deviation Street - proving, in some small way, that print is not actually dead, just emerging from some other place. It’s taken us a while to get here, less hare more tortoise - from our stapled Issue 1 to our full colour, perfect bound Issue 2 and now to our new broadsheet format of Issue 3 …. we think it suits us.

To get here we have gone about things in our own meandering and stumbling way. Not to purposely pursue some “Road Less Travelled” but simply because it’s the only way we know, like the routes most of us take in life. Either way, thanks for getting this, we have a humdinger of an issue for you. Where to begin? With a manifesto of course, courtesy of sound grafter and wordsmith Johny Brown, who says: Fuck it, we burn and shine with rage and so we do, one way or another and maybe some days we shine with joy and generosity of spirit, too. We follow our intuition with Henry X who offers up a Prayer for Europe before we head towards the East West Schism in a café inside the Vatican City and come out into shape-shifting cultural landscape populated by faces and names

known and unfamiliar. Each and every one united in that they/we are driven, for whatever reason, to create, produce some manifestation of self-expression and interaction with the world around. Be it Arbus, Brown, Browne, Basquiat, Galvin, McGuire, Milton or Yonic, we aim to bypass those clichéd notions of taste and style which we find so confining and thus we arrive at a place that is our destination. Welcome to Deviation Street Number 3 There are a great many people to thank for helping to bring this issue into production, so to all those who have contributed in one way or another - be it articles, reviews or those of you who’ve simply been there, whatever the weather. Thank you to Arlo, Arran, Broose, Den, Dmitry, Dora, Gavin, Geoff, Gill, Henry, Jane, Jimmy, Jon, Kate, Katie, Kev, Mark, Pammi, Sarah, Scarlet, Sophie, Simon, Sveta and Tristan. Also not forgetting Dan at Dog Tunnel Records, Fringe Arts Bath and Iian at Longwell Records Editor in Chief - Brian Gibson Designer - Tristan Buckland

URL links to deviation street articles online Yonic https://tinyurl.com/y56qgyh2 Diane Arbus https://tinyurl.com/y2tgp6z9 Jimmy Galvin Interview https://tinyurl.com/y4hxgxaq Jimmy Galvin Review https://tinyurl.com/yxv2vjxm Slurred Words review https://tinyurl.com/y5lklsnj East West Schism https://tinyurl.com/y6z6bwfh Den Browne story https://tinyurl.com/y28qgp8k Puryear Basquiat https://tinyurl.com/y5ptph9r

THE NEON PRIMITIVES BELIEVE THE NEON PRIMITIVES BELIEVE The Neon Primitives believe… The Neon Primitives believe in a different way out. The Neon Primitives believe in light and noise. The Neon Primitives feel like a spell has darkened and muted the land around them. The Neon Primitives believe it is up to themselves to break the spell that surrounds. The Neon Primitives know that many amongst them are drowning in angst and sadness. The Neon Primitives know that most of us are addicted to the screen on our phones, the buzz in the air, ensnared in the slinky web of social media and the like. The Neon Primitives know what it’s like to be lost to the lie. The Neon Primitives realise many other good people have holed up off grid, dependent on a new lonely isolation, are giving up on the power of communication and good of community. The Neon Primitives wish to take

their cause to the streets to spread the word of the Joy of the beat and the ragged soul that burns light in the heart of man. The Neon Primitives know time, they want to reclaim space, they are after the freedom they once knew. The Neon Primitives shout out to all would be calumniators to take heed of complacency and the straight life and never give up the fight. The Neon Primitives know that misfortune will prevail and chance and luck forever seem tilted against the humble folk, as sure as politicians priests and corporations score the eternal win. The Neon Primitives say fuck it.

The Neon Primitives accept that doubt may afflict them, as they fall to scuzzy temptations and absurd obstacles along the way and for sure like all wanting fragile souls they have many failings. The Neon Primitives know the true prize is within grasp. The Neon Primitives know that the true prize is the moment they gather all the wayward clans around them, the lost beats, the blessed outsiders, the forgotten soul boys, the tatty glam merchants, all righteous cosmopolitan scum everywhere. The Neon Primitives will celebrate righteously when all will be on board and together they will sail.

The Neon Primitives understand that through the darkest days the blackest nights all true Urban Pagans, all devout Electric Pilgrims will define themselves by the light they know shines hard and beautiful within their heart worn poetry riddled souls.

The Neon Primitives are plotting a course out of the darkness.

The Neon Primitives believe in skewed rock and roll and the eternal beat culture still.

The Neon Primitives believe in a different way out.

The Neon Primitives shine and burn and rage.

The Neon Primitives believe.

The Neon Primitives are sailing to the island of light. The Neon Primitives believe in light and noise.

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Deviation Street,Third Issue

Dmitry Sokolenko East West-Schism OLIVER CHERER Jon Gordon Review

Summer 1978. A café in the Vatican.

SAVE THE DATE June 2, 2019 A Private Preview and Art Auction for Planned Parenthood Keyes Gallery 53 Main Street (adjoing American Hotel), Sag Harbor Courtsy of Artist Linda K. Alpern Curated / Pamela Willoughby Organized / Bronte Zunis FEATURING WORK FROM April Gornik, Amy Zerner, Aureole Torres, Barnett Suskind, Bert Stern Trust, Betty Parsons, Blaire Seagram, Bronte Zunis, Cat Yellin Rebennack, Christine Newman, Christopher Charveriat, Cynthis Talmadge, Cyril Christo-MarieWilkinson, Dalton Portella, Delta 2, Dorothy Frankel, Elaine Marinoff, Janet Goleas, Jay Miriam, Joe Garvey, KaranHoblin, Kenny Scharf, Kevin Emerson, Linda K Alpern, Lynn Charveriat, Marcia Resnick, Marissa Bridge, Martine Langatta, Mary Heilmann, Matt Magee, Maynard Monrow, Melinda Hackett, Melinda Zox, Michael Halsband, Michael Holman, Michele Dragonetti, Nathan Slate Joeseph, Noel DeLesseps, Pat Place, Paton Miller, Peter Dayton, Randy Polumbo, RJ Supa, Robin Gianis, Rory Geves, Ryan Cronin, Sally Egbert, Sarah Prescott, Steve Miller, Tara Israel and Tracy Harris. For questions and to RSVP emial pamela.willoughby@gmail.com

Pinocchio and the future Pope John Paul I are sitting at a table in the café. The futurePope John Paul II is standing at the bar. Since there is no security camera in the café in1978, everything we’ll write about here is based on the notes and sketches of Pinocchio. The future Pope John Paul I is licking stamps and writing out addresses on envelopes. Inthe envelopes are invitations to his installation. The future Pope John Paul I is smilingand occasionally looks over at Pinocchio, who is intently reading a book by Mark Twain. Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad enters the café and, taking in all that’s happening, seeing the future Pope John Paul I licking his own stamps, drops his jaw in surprise. Headdresses God, “My Lord, why is it that the future Pope himself must lick his ownstamps?!” God’s answer is unknown, because Metropolitan Nikodim falls down dead inthe café, on his back, arms outstretched, with his head facing north, and doesn’t evenhave time to close his mouth. The future Pope John Paul I looks at the body ofMetropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, smiles, and continues licking stamps. A scion of Aristotle Onassis walks into the café, trips over the body, and falls down. Hegets up, approaches the bar, and orders a single espresso from the future Pope JohnPaul II. The future Pope John Paul II says from behind the bar, “That’ll be one millionlire.” The scion of Aristotle Onassis says (in an American accent),“Oh

Oliver Cherer ‘I Feel Nothing Most Days’ (Second Language Records)

my gosh, this is the bestespresso I’ve ever tasted. Here is a million dollars. I’ll buy everything here!”

to Nikodim.

“But that’s not enough to buy the Vatican!” says the future Pope John Paul II.

servants of God are cutting,” says

“Look what a strange figure those Pinocchio.

“Lord in Heaven,” says the scion of Aristotle Onassis . “I meant just the café! Whoknows? It might be useful to me in this life, and it’s not too much to pay for such greatcoffee – the café could be mine!” “Oh, and by the way, is the Vatican for sale?!”

“It seems to me they are forming

The future Pope John Paul II says, “How would I know? I’m not the Pope yet.”

“Yes, that’s true, says the future

The future Pope John Paul I looks over to the bar, smiles and goes back to licking hisstamps. The scion of Aristotle Onassis opens his mouth to order another cup of coffee, but can’t get enough breath and falls down dead, his face to the floor, his head facingsouth and his arms outstretched. He also fails to close his mouth. The soles of thescion’s fantastically expensive shoes are touching the soles of the not so nice shoesbelonging

“What sense is there in these

some Cyrillic letter,” says the future Pope John Paul I.

“It looks like a “Ж,” says Pinocchio.

Pope John Paul I.

deaths?” asks Pinocchio.

The future Pope John Paul I finishes licking the thirty-third (XXXI-

II) stamp, smiles andanswers Pinocchio, “We’re not meant to understand God’s meaning.” Words Dmitry Sokolenko

It can seem as if every time I read a music review I’m confronted by yet another invented genre description, and doing my pre-typing research on Oliver Cherer I find his music described as ‘Folk Noir’, which is difficult to say quickly, a phrase that conjures images of all manner of gothic gloomery, swing jazz played with the emphasis on minor chords, and that had me conjecturing how one or two bands - Sisters Of Mercy, Echo & The Bunnymen and The Fall among them - would have sounded had they only used acoustic instruments. Maybe Oliver Cherer also considers how certain songs would sound when performed without the amplification and effects pedals. Some of the songs on ‘I Feel Nothing ...’ were composed in the mid-80s, so we shouldn’t underestimate either his commitment or understanding of how some songs can sound when removed from their original conceptions. The mood may appear darkened and low key, but there’s a lightness of touch around the ten tracks on Cherer’s third full length release that doesn’t perhaps easily lend itself to labelling. Opening track ‘Weight Of The Water’ is played and arranged with a deftness that signifies a lot of various talents at work here, between the pacing of Cherer’s voice over an unobtrusive rhyth-

mic backdrop, and a tremendous clarinet solo from Elaine Edwards (I’m fairly sure it’s a clarinet). As introductions go it’s a highly persuasive one, a song that recalls everything I like about Guy Garvey, Leonard Cohen and Arthur Lee, in varying amounts. It’s also a song that could prove difficult to follow and ‘A Small Town’ is something of a coda to it, less reliant on mood altering wind instruments and a more prosaic lyric : ‘dawn in a small street in a small town / never ending grey’, a seemingly unremarkable scene to which Cherer and his backing band give a studied eloquence. With several decades of writing music under his belt, Cherer’s music contains an assuredness that lets him approach ideas and styles on his own terms, so that whenever he drifts toward folk rock, psychedelia or summery pop vibes the overall ambience of ‘I Feel Nothing ...’ is never broken. A sudden bluesy guitar break, a slight upturn of the reverb pedal, that clarinet again, the entire sound is a verging on minimalist throughout the album and while the song tempo doesn’t appear to alter from one track to the next, that just gives the ten songs a cohesion that makes ‘I Feel Nothing ...’ a far from noir-ish experience. Laid back and reflective, certainly, and as the final notes of ‘The Girl On Top Of The Tree’ fade into the distance, you’ll only want to play ‘I Feel Nothing ...’ all over again.

THE POETRY OF HENRY X Hymn For Europe In the continent and at home Grown men argue like kids Over power and riches T he weak pray to fake shrines, with intentions aligned With the crimes as seen in the media Politicians seen fighting over who can be seedier Immigrants basically walking meat The richest 1% putting their feet up Europe comprehensively beaten up Ive had quite enough of the lying Time I am buying to rhyme Against corporate crime and the slime Dribbling down like drip down economics Leaders all chronically distant Europes operating system All capitalism stuck in a rut Best to have a dead brain And hate for Italy and Spain Theres a sinister reminder Theres no solace when the Middle East’s behind ya’ Not when the greedy and corrupt are insiders From Germany to Switzerland, Sweden and Spain We’re offroad again Through fields bleeding immigrants pain In this game we are blinded in fights with elites Just to be pounded by bleats from rich sheep And the abuse from the consumerist weak Alarm bells ringing Europe singing not in harmony Where is the answer? A continent bleeding With angels seething Can we ever believe? Turn Europe around For the Euro and pound Answer me clearly Have we a future really?

Who is Henry X ? What do we know about him. A man amidst the idiocy and the beauty of this world in which we live, who dares to write and perform his poetry. Deviation Street presents Henry X and his thoughts on Beauty.

Beauty I have no beauty. Beauty is outside. My mind destroying my face and soul, And yet I feel a warmth unrivalled As views let me know there is greatness Unseen by many for fear of self ridicule. There may be beauty hidden within Like a mine of gold on a hillside bleak But never strike out at this beauty For it is a rarity in a McDonalds world Piercing into consumerist mediocrity. Find me beauty and I will pay for this With an artists only tender The warmth of wisdom, An intelligent aim Placed only on the true

HENRY X

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Deviation Street,Third Issue

DIANE ARBUS BY BRIAN GIBSON

so no need to be guided from pillar to pillar to postscript. Nevertheless, the temptation is to impose some sort structured way to navigate this open labyrinth. Any attempt to move in such an orderly fashion falls apart by the time you reach the third photograph as you find yourself intrigued by the picture in another row, then another, then another… Maybe as an adult breaking away from the confines of her childhood, this is how Arbus navigated her way through New York and its people. Moving from one location/person to another, from photographing the interior of a movie theatre and its audience or a close up portrait of a tattooed man to a meat market to photograph a pig hanging on a meat hook or a bunch of kids wearing monster masks . It’s all very tangible this moving from one thing to another. Arbus had the ability to cut across societal divides, shifting between the unique and the seemingly mundane but never dull. Back in the gallery a photograph of film star Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula appears on a TV screen as series of black and white lines,

whilst elsewhere a barely recognisable wax work of James Dean stands in a curtained booth. What they have in common is the notion of a life that is absent of life, such stars are reduced in stature. Here the unknown and unseen are the ones who

very much alive, the female and male impersonators, the unspoken faces and facets of the street a world away from her own upbringing, yet physically so near. Her creative process of seeing and being seen is perhaps best captured in her images

It’s really terrific, London’s South Bank. The lines and textures of those cool concrete greys; the monumental and imposing Brutalist architecture that manages to be both simultaneously ancient and 1950s sci fi British vision of the future? Or maybe it’s just the shear absurd weightiness of the place with its giddy gravitational pull of Culture. Either way, I’m here to see the Dianne Arbus exhibition at the Hayward Gallery titled: in the beginning and fea-

turing over a 100, mostly vintage, prints made by the Dianne Arbus herself. It’s a show that I wouldn’t want to miss. The exhibition itself occupies the upper gallery and the paragraph on the white wall at the top of the stairwell provides visitors with a brief introduction to her work and the exhibition. What sticks in my mind is the bit that says “From the start Arbus saw the street as a place full of secrets waiting to be fathomed.” Growing up in New York, and coming

from a wealthy well-protected world, the streets of Manhattan and beyond must have been places of familiarity and forbidden intrigue. The images from 1957 to 1962 are simply framed and captioned, relatively small maybe (no larger than A4 in size) and are displayed on a grid of white rectangular pillars front and back. There’s no chronological order to this part of the exhibition, which is actually quite refreshing for an artist of this magnitude,

of children, often in mid thought, a kid about to cross the road, another in a crowd on the shoulders of an adult , a kid in black face or young kid in a hooded jacket pointing a toy gun ,all looking directly at the camera ,at Diane Arbus the photographer

who notices them as they are. These are images on the cusp of becoming art works which I think is when her work is at its most interesting. You get a sense that Dianne Arbus is finding her way through her own emo-

tional/psychological landscape through the lens of a camera and in the darkroom. You sense her fascination of meeting people from different walks of life, openly scrutinising them and letting them be themselves and you also become aware of just how

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Deviation Street,Third Issue

influential and important she was to other photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Arthur Tress, Andre Serano and Nan Golding . Accompanying this array of early 35mm camera work and on the other side of the gallery are her more familiar square format images from 1962 and 1970. These were presented as a boxed edition in 1970, a year later Dianne would end her own life. This reality is not so much overlooked as not particularly dwelt upon. Is such a tragedy even relevant to the work? as viewers we make our own conclusions. These images are technically more accomplished, bigger, sharper, more composed, they have become photographic “artworks”. A more graphic style is evident, in the 1967 image of Identical Twins, two girls in black dresses are symmetrically posed against a white background, their

white stockinged legs contrast against a darkened wall. It’s a compelling image that still draws you in, time and time again. The eerie ambiance of the twins is a motif that would later be used in the film The Shinning by director Stanley Kubrick, who started off as a still’s photographer. In this part of the gallery we see that The Hooded Boy with Hand Gun has evolved into a more shocking photograph of A Boy with Toy Hand Grenade. It’s an image that immediately gets your attention, Munch’s expressionist Scream in the vessel of a child, in the distance almost silhouetted a mother or nanny pushes a pram whilst a skipping child holds onto the hand of another guardian. Some people could argue as to its contrivance but to me that feels a bit like someone de constructing your favourite teenage

anthem. I can still remember the impact this image had on me when I saw it in a Sunday Supplement whilst delivering newspapers in my early teens, it made me think differently about photography. Yet, the strongest image in the show in my opinion is the astute and prophetic image that is streets away from the hustle and bustle of New York City. It is a night time scene of a beautifully lit fairy-tale castle that pre-dates the notion of gentrification and Disneyfication. Titled A castle in Disneyland, Cal 1962 it is devoid of people, the only living creature is a solitary white swan gliding silently across the darkened water, the absence of children and childhood appears sinister, it’s a Neverland that looks like the gateway to Hades. I find it incredibly chilling.

Kid in a hooded jacket aiming a gun, N.Y.C. 1957. of Diane Arbus, LLC.

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Deviation Street,Third Issue

JIMMY GALVIN

INTERVIEW

It wasn’t that long ago that Sarah Harrington reviewed the release of Jimmy Galvins’s solo piano CD A Million Seconds Makes 11 Days . A beautiful album of warmth and tranquillity that flows seamlessly and leaves you wanting more at the end. If the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Eric Satie, and the piano tracks from the Diva film soundtrack float your boat then your in for a treat with his album. Deviation Street was fortunate to catch up with Jimmy a man of passions and integrity who is not only a musician but also a visual artist over a soya chai latte and cappuccino in some cafe somewhere to ask him some questions about his work, his likes and a whole lot of other stuff...it’s a fascinating interview so ...read on reader... read on..... D.S. Not only are you a musician you’re also a visual artist, how does that work out/come about? Jimmy: It was always there I don’t think you choose these things I

and I am writing and producing a talented young guy in Bristol called OISIN the missing link of sly Stone and Prince. D.S. You were on Radio 4 s loose ends a short while ago playing your music , how was that experience of playing live on the radio.

know that sounds like a cliche Iv’e never steered off course it’s do or fucking die end of……. D.S. How would you describe each activity and what are you working on at the moment . Jimmy: I’m always on as in working it never stops and I like it that way right now I am working on new work for a show I want to put on in my hometown of Bristol called SPIRITUAL DATA and 4 albums two of which are classical, a solo piano album and album for soprano voice and strings of neo classical works ,and an album of new songs WORLD REFUGEE

Jimmy: Amazing really enjoyed it as it took me out of my comfort zone playing live on BBC RADIO 4 they recorded it live and the show has an audience of a million listeners it felt great walking down Regent Street in London afterwards and sitting in a cafe watching the world go by D.S. The CD of your your piano work is out now , where can people buy it. Jimmy: It’s easily available to get either on ITUNES or AMAZON as downloads or signed hard copy CD signed with limited edition set of 4 art cards via my site http:// www.jimmygalvinmusic.com I post worldwide and sold tons after the RADIO 4 slot ! D.S. Surviving as an artist or a musician can be a precarious business at the best of times and you manage to combine the two. What do you think of the current support for artists. Jimmy: There is none due to Tory cuts and the arts are not valued anymore its extreme it’s either crap community art that gets all the arts funding or the top end of the art market where the same people dictate and make all the money I don’t subscribe to any of it i totally get when William Burroughs said “ All artists need to create their own currency” that means you have to be authentic which the modern world hates we live in the dumbest dumbed down cultural wilderness of all time look at our world leaders these are all metaphors for exactly where we are at in terms of world politics it all starts with culture followed by the immediate knock on effect of the political landscape these are dark times the most ignorant in my lifetime art used to be the authentic voice that could really change peoples lives but

that power is gone now its all about tokenism making stupid people famous we get the leaders we deserve I say all artists have to be activists it’s not Trump that scares me he’s just an opportunist who most probably can’t believe how dumb people are who made him the most powerful man in the world ,its the system , or lack of education that enabled his journey to the political seat of power he holds now that’s what we need to worry about same in the UK everything in art and music and politics has been to reduced to the one liner the hagtash that’s why Brexit exist we need to call these people to account or we are really fucked. D.S. The term “Creative Industries” gets put about in conversation about the “arts” Do you consider it to be inclusive Do you see your self as being part of a creative industry. Jimmy: No I am not part of anything I remember reading an interview with Dennis Hooper years ago saying” If you took the money out of art 99% of the fakes who claim to be artists would crawl back to their shit fucking lives leaving the 1% “ its tough as you come across so much bullshit in this game it saddens me as its blocking real change when I was younger living my shit white trash council house existence I naively thought that I would meet all these beautiful souls who create art and music who really want to make a difference but it’s been the complete opposite I never cease to be amazed at peoples egos and no talent fuckwits who have got lucky with nothing to say or any real talent but this is the age where those people have the platform unlike the 1960s or 1970s ironically we need the authentic voices now more than ever but as Bob Marley said “When your being real everybody hates you but when your fake everybody loves you and that’s the problem with the world” D.S. Your’e a self taught mu.sician and painter which requires high levels of tenacity and self discipline , Do you think some people have certain pre conceived ideas about this . Do you think you blow peoples prejudices apart? Jimmy: Abso”fucking” lutely !! I’m an army of one the system hates real individuals there is a subtext to all current artistic narratives and most of it is just patronising shit like dumbed down “Art for all “ why ? that’s consumerism and that holds no interest for me we are the only species who pay to live on this planet so the world for most is just an ex-

tension of that what we need are authentic voices of excellence aiming for the intellectual and spiritual higher frequencies to activate us to higher forms of consciousness the world doesn’t have to be dressed up like a suicide it really could be incredible but life / death suffering is just another currency for the same people to perpetuate and exploit most humans are in the un-awakened state of existence religion is now political and the top end of the art world reflects this perfectly so much money being made when the people who created it were doing so to seek a connection to their own lives a quest for something deeper but then it gets totally lost as 99% of all the major art dealers/ critics /museum curators wouldn’t know what a great piece of art is without the price tag, if they knew so much about it how come they can’t make it themselves ? as they are rarely true mavericks but business people in dreadful tight skinny trousers whose arrogant speak inspires confidence in those other fakes around them those kind of people despise real culture so yes going back to your original question the type of art and music I make causes more problems for the people in the art world I encounter as its a very white middle /upper middle class playground and they always presume that I must be one of them and are always uncomfortable with me as I am not playing the game for most

artists it’s just a career move now and the powers that be like those kind of people who are all playing the game just like them so what we get 99% in all museums and galleries worldwide is a very anodyne approach to appease social media criteria and the masses Kim Kardashian has over a 100 million followers than the Louvre in Paris so we are all dumbed down to worship nothing just to keep chasing the empty dream you will never reach it’s a sad time for “humankind “I want “Kindhuman “ to be a prominent narrative and that’s the subtext of all great art and music it changes your life !! Francis Bacon never gave a fuck about the shit fake art world and his greatness can never be hijacked by them. DS. What are you top 10 album influences 1/ Marvin Gaye “ Whats going on” 2/ David Bowie “Hunky Dory” 3/ Van Morrison “Veedon Fleece” 4/Roxy Music “ Stranded” 5/ Frank Sinatra “ In the wee small hours of the morning” 6/ Frank Sinatra “ Only the lonely “ 7/ Prince “ Sign’O the times” 8/ Ryuichi Sakomoto and Alva Noto “Summvs “ 9/ Antonio Carlos Jobim “ Wave” 10/ Tim Hardin “Hang onto a dream”

Friday, May 24, 2019 | 7

Deviation Street,Third Issue

ALBUM REVIEW Words by S.R.N. Harrington. “It’s all about the air in the room and how you connect to the instrument and how you play it and how it comes across” said Jimmy Galvin in an interview with Macprovideo. Air, stillness, authenticity. That’s what I’ve taken from Galvin’s most recent album A Million Seconds Make Eleven Days. Galvin is a visual artist, a selftaught pianist and musical composer living in Bristol. He has composed for the BBC and Channel 4 and displayed his works alongside the likes of Sir Peter Blake, Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley. This album proves to be no less impressive; recorded in one take in the space of two hours with no breaks – save for one song re-recorded. Jimmy Galvin hears the mistakes on the album, and you are invited to try to listen out for them too. This is, after all, what real and honest music sounds like. Honesty is the key to this album, and speaking to Jimmy revealed the open-eyed and open-armed

man that I was anticipating.The clear contrast between Galvin’s bold, in his own words, “in your face big hard visual statements” and the careful, intricate music he creates is clear and at times a little astounding. He switches between visual art and music depending on where he feels his creativity lies that day. But Galvin sees both music and art as a device to allow us to reflect, he sees both as a way to “change the perspective about how people see and engage with the world”. Where his visual art screams at its observer, his music whispers; Galvin’s music challenges you with its raw simplicity. In this album Galvin offers neither himself nor the listener a hiding place; remastered at Abbey Road Studios by Andy Walters, the album’s live sound makes a participant rather than an observer out of its listener. You are not sat at home listening, you are in the room with Jimmy while he plays, and time moves by. A Million Seconds Make Eleven Days is reminiscent of the poignant clarity of Erik Satie, but the underlying current remains – time is moving on. A man ever fascinated by the impact of time, Galvin cast the scene back to 1980s New

York when discussing the role art plays in today’s society. Back then, art and music “happened in spite of no money. These days it’s all about tokenism, it’s about buying a lifestyle and not creating one.” And so Galvin holds fast to the art and music that he believes in; the art and music that is not there to monopolise but to centralize. Time. Time is the key here, the silences he leaves us suspended in and the notes that are trickled into the listener’s ears. Where the album urges the listener to consider time in the immediate sense it also models clean, matter of fact creating for a younger generation. The artists marooned in a consumerist culture denounced so heartily by that Galvin; he prescribes, quite simply, the honesty he himself lives by. “I would humbly say to anyone if you really believe you have something worthwhile to say then don’t ever compromise, that’s all you ever really have it’s about being honest when so much is fake these days. If you are driven and have that creative drive then listen to your heart.” A Million Seconds Makes Eleven Days is available via ITUNES or AMAZON as downloads or signed hard copy CD signed with limited edition set of 4 art cards via his web site http://www.jimmygalvinmusic.com

8 | Friday, May 24, 2019

Deviation Street,Third Issue

RICHARD MCGUIRE INTERVIEW

Q1 You’ve been incredibly busy, with the two back-to-back exhibitions at Alden Projects and MoMA/PS1 as well as a pending book launch Hows it all going ? Things are great. The book was launched at the NY Art Book Fair along with an exhibition. First at MoMA/PS1, out in Queens, and then an expanded version of the show at Alden Projects in Manhattan. The exhibitions and book all center around the years 19791982. At that time I was designing the posters and records sleeves for my band (Liquid Liquid) and I was also making “street art”. The band posters were usually printed (offset or silkscreened) in editions of around 100. The street art were hand made originals , part stencil / part drawing, and always made in an edition of two, I would paste one on the street and keep the other copy for my archives. The band posters use a lot of collage elements and are often playing around with type, the street art has a rougher look, I made the stencils by ripping newspaper and painting them with spray paint and drawing text with a crayon. The show and book also include photographs taken in 1979 of my work in the streets of lower Manhattan. It’s been fun for me to see all this work again, I’ve never seen it all together at the same time before! Q2 Its simply not possible to sum up your creative trajectory in a few lines. Your work has encompassed: music, animation street art, comics , illustration, books and exhibitions Did I leave anything out ? I’ve always had a lot of different interests, and one project always led to the next. After I finish something I feel it’s best to switch it up to remain fresh. I can equate

it to being a farmer and rotating crops. Q3 Going back to beginnings I guess this started with being in the band Liquid Liquid who were signed up with hugely influential NY label 99 Records who were at the fore front of No wave and Garage scene with the likes of The Bush Tetras and ESG . Exciting times ?? 99 Records (pronounced Nine Nine) started as a tiny shop in the West Village, at 99 MacDougal Street. The shop was run by Ed

Bahlman and Gina Franklin. The shop was split down the center, selling clothes on one side and records on the other. It was a place you could go and hang out and meet people. Ed had a turntable on the counter and would play things he thought you should hear. I remember after one of our early shows meeting Glenn Branca, he told me that 99 Records was releasing his album. I was soon down at the store presenting a cassette of a few songs. I think The Bush Tetras single: Too Many Creeps was the second record released, that song was such

Liquid Liquid records.

I moved to NYC (from New Jersey) on July 3, 1979. I know the exact date because I kept a journal. Two days after I arrived I was out pasting up drawings in the street at night, I did this regularly for the next few years. One of the first people I met was Keith

Haring, it was at a party at the loft of the artist Jenny Holzer. Keith started to curate shows in clubs, he always invited me to be part of what he was doing. I met Jean Michel Basquiat at a loft party too, we were both playing on the same bill. That night his band was called Test Pattern (later the band was called Gray). I was a fan of his SAMO graffiti, so to me he was already a star when we met. He was also familiar with my street drawings so we bonded over that. We showed in a few group shows together as well. Al Diaz, JeanMichel’s SAMO graffiti partner was a good friend as well, he also played percussion on a few of the

where. I have to put the binoculars down or I will see too much. Easier to write about occult meanings. Fascist undercurrents. Gothic ripples. A love of order. Harder to write about unbridled joy. Love. Embracing life. Arriving at camp. Fire already lit. Putting up tents. Not going to lie. Looks like there will be no shortage of drugs. Festival without the irritation of having to go to see music. There have been a few last minute dropouts. Solid group though. The missing will be missed. They will want us to have a good time. So we will. We do. I receive a text from my best friend deep into the night/morning. There is a new life. Fucking buzzing. Years are now death and life. More life. Hidden within banter weaved amongst the words are real conversations about actual things. We only really know each other as a group because of rap music. It’s true. As good a reason

as any. Possibly better than only really knowing each other because we work for the same hedge fund ,went to the same schools and share an interest in rugby and sniff. THE WOODS. THE WOODS. THE WOODS. Wallop wraps. Bags of brown crystals. Mellow little beans. Stinking bags of delicious pengy piff. Etizolam tincture. Takes the edge off. Ready for some rudimentary sleep. Keys open doors. Degrees open doors. Apparently. University. Soon. WTF. Not sure if ready. I can only write like this. Do not footnote. Steal ideas but do not credit. The only honest way. Human Geography. Relevant. Too fucking relevant. 35. Open day fills me with fear. I have a human that I love to help me negotiate my own landscape of worry. I still worry. Can’t quite get my head around the concept of attempting to apply scores to knowledge. It’s how it works and I will have to just get on with

that.

a hit you heard it everywhere!. Ed released the first ESG record right before ours. We often played on the same bill with them, they were one of my favourite bands at the time. Q4 You were also contributing to the street art of the time . Who were you hanging out with ?

RUPERT - WOODS Utility poles. Telephone wires. A corridor through bracken and trees. Day slowly becoming night. Sun held in the gap between the poles, the wires and the treetops. Sky in graded colours. An America from the films somewhere on the border between Kent and Sussex. Rushing. This place isn’t a place at this specific moment. It’s an idea I can move through. We can move through. There are still rules but they are less real here. Almost anything goes. Within reason. There is no reason. Most of the lads are now dads. Dads gone wild. A manageable wilderness. Short drive to supermarket for restocking. Copy of the Mail on every table. Bad coffee. A sugary bun. Civilisation. Flushable. Escaping Lewisham took an eternity. Creeping out through the deep

blue borough. Lee Green. Initial supply pick up. Already surreal. Shop arranged to confuse. Shaving the edge of Greenwich. M25 calling. A familiar landscape. Hidden industry just off the junctions. Re-purposed farms. Airstrips. Somewhere to fix the boat. Strip out the museum. Insurance money flooding into fields of wheat. Running off in summer rain. Out to sea. Offshore. Shell companies. Home counties. Away days. Executive motor full of tents. Last minute car hire. Tinted windows. Don’t ding the car. That’s a bag right there. The rest of our party are already at the pre-arranged location. I’m not raving. I’m drowning. This isn’t the late 80’s. Early 90’s. Summer of love. Summer of Grenfell. Acid attacks. Moped gangs. Elections. Afrotrap. Cold lager. Sudden downpours. Clifftop walks. The week before walking from Dover to Deal. Mobile phone in France.

Body in England. The white cliffs. Trite observations begging to be made. Brexcetera. Raptors circle. No bluebirds. Rumours of cliff mines supplying the whole of South and East London with dodgy hooter. Trafficked labour from Medway towns undercutting the commuters from Calais. Farage buzzes us menacingly in a Spitfire as we eat Waitrose-sourced lunch looking over The Channel. Time to move on. The walk ends in the pub. As ever. Boy racers. Drift culture. House prices along the Kent coast. Arriving back into Stratford International. We had almost been to the Continent. Continental lager tops. Apt. We unload the car. Parked up just off the road. The lane. The sort of place where my imagination immediately goes to Range Rovers and bullet riddled windows. Real life Essex gangland cliches superimposed onto Sussex. MR James. A view from the hill. There is darkness every-

Q5 As well as creating the bass line for the track Cavern ( which if readers didn’t know was appropriated virtually verbatim by Grand Master Flash into their infamous hit White lines) you also produced the graphics for the band . Did you study graphics ? I designed all the posters and record sleeves for the band, I’ve always been interested in graphics but at school I was making sculpture and studying art history. It was while at school that I formed the band, it happened casually, just jamming with friends. At that

Green. We cook food on an open fire. We eat well. Even out here we exercise privilege. To say I think about this when I’m out there doing it is probably false. Just exist. The second day and night are the ones. Magic. Everything set up. Nothing to worry about. A quick dip into the real world then back deep into the deep green. I started this with a description of a place and idea and non-place. This is where we are now. Little group broken off. Light playing tricks on everything. Gentle rushing. We move off the land we know. Along a footpath. Up a hill. This is ours. It’s not. But really. It. Is. Ours. The entire Weald in the palm of our brains. At least in mine. Someone lies down on a small grassy slope beside the path and casually chops out a few lines. There is every chance that people will walk past but this is splendid isolation.

Friday, May 24, 2019 | 9

Deviation Street,Third Issue

vertising. My HERE comic circled back around and had a bigger life as a graphic novel. The work in this exhibition and book has only really been seen the first time round in a fleeting moment. In their day these posters and drawings were up on the streets for 2448 hours before they were covered up by something else. They were designed to be ephemeral. I am so happy that I had the foresight to save them and to also have them photographed while hanging in the street. It’s a time capsule of a moment in New York that is long gone. Q9 Having worked in so many creative areas do feel like those different elements of your creativity are coming together . Revisiting this work was important for me, it’s where I started and reconnecting to that source has been very satisfying. Having

RUPERT - WOODS Nobody walks past. Intruders do intrude sometimes. Dog walkers. Cyclists. They see us. I wonder if we are discussed over dinner. Or forgotten. Better to forget. Until next year. Unless this is the last time. This is discussed. There will be other times but possibly somewhere else. I am somewhere else already. I am somewhere else right now. I am back in London. Not adjusting to the pace. Currently in edgetime. Edgespace. I watch the trees in the wind from the window. Looking into the park across the road. I spend two days finishing off the weed bag. Small and pure. Walking through the park. Along the canals. The other river. Should people (me) even attempt to write about stuff like this? Overestimate the importance. Destroy the mag-

stage the band was very primitive and improvisational it was called: Liquid Idiot. It was entirely instrumental with a different line up of members, I was playing keyboards, and a guitar with an odd tuning, an occasionally a clarinet, Scott Hartley was playing drums. Later the two of us became more interested in forming a more structured band, then Sal (Principato) joined on vocals, and Dennis (Young) on marimba and that became Liquid Liquid. The sound evolved and became more groovy, we referred to what we were going for as “body music” or sometimes “big beat”, we were following our own instincts but there were a lot of influences in the air: Funk, Reggae, early Hip Hop. The Grandmaster Flash/ White Lines saga, is too long a story to tell here. There is a poster in the show (and book) that reads: LIQUID LIQUID $5.00 Cavern, 9/I7, it’s from 1981. It’s made to look like a common poster you would see in a supermarket window. I made it for a show we played at a short-lived club called Cavern, the admission price astonishingly was only $5.00. We debuted the song Cavern there as an encore, we didn’t yet have a

name for the song, so we kept referring to it as the song we played at the Cavern and the name just stuck.

land be worshipped? There is too much blood and soil in paganism. I need more than science because I will never understand it all. I need more than religion because I will never understand it all. I do not need to understand any of it. I REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND. Each step along the path creates new worlds. New words. I wake up. Second time awakening here. Last breakfast at camp. Melancholy of taking down a camp. There is bound to be a word for this. Ask Macfarlane. Melancholy of the end of small scale anarcho-communist living experiment fuelled by decent quality food and drink and other. Luxury. You all deserve this. Or your version of it. Personally I don’t see why this can’t be all the time but I guess it can’t be for some reason or another. Work. Money. I would willingly tear down everything to replace it with this. Or a version of this.

For everybody. UTOPIA IS BACK BABY AND THIS TIME IT’S NEAR CROWBOROUGH. I am William Morris. I am not William Morris. News from over there. Let’s go over there. As a child the best days for me were the unsupervised days. Allowed to run wild. Playing out on estates in Bermondsey. Playing out in fields and woods near Higham. Smashing the fuck out of a caravan. Getting onto the construction site. I was not a fearless child. I am not a fearless adult. But I fear less because of those times when we were allowed to make mistakes. I still need space for my mistakes. Give me a life sized space for my mistakes. I don’t climb trees. Under tree cover the light rain barely makes it to the forest floor. Benevolent nature. I assume we are all here for similar but different reasons. To see each other. To get away. To have a very good time. To think or not think as needed.

Q6 You make the switch from band to graphics and get into the world of comics via Raw Magazine where you started using computer software as part of your work . This work subsequently lead to the ingenious and elegantly drawn 1989 book Here which caused quite a stir . The centre spine forms the corner of an room which on the turning of the page occupies different time zones past present and future and within each setting smaller sections of rectangular frames are placed here and there from other times . For example A room in 1983 bears witness to two men fighting each other by the fire place in 1910 whilst by the window a voice emits from 1720 a few meters away across the room a bubble of speech from 1820 floats above the static 1980’s standard lamp. As a concept of time and being in the Here it works incredibly well . Was it around this period when you started to produce work for the New Yorker Magazine ?

By 1984 the band eventually ran its course and imploded like most bands do. Somewhere along the way I discover RAW which was this over-sized comic magazine, it was really exciting graphically with loads of international artists. I went to see one of the editors (Art Spiegelman) give a talk and I came away wanting to try making a comic myself. So I pitched an idea and they published it. That was the original six page version of HERE, it was published in 1989. I made my first New Yorker cover in 1993, and I’ve worked fairly regularly for them since. In 2014 a reinvented book length version of HERE was published. It took me a while to find my way back into it and figure out how to expand it, I didn’t want to just add pages to the original strip. I did about a year of research, before any of the art work. The entire story takes place on the location of where I grew up, but over millions of years and far into the future. There have been over twenty translations of the book so far. Q7 How do feel about the recent

demise of magazines such as Village Voice and Interview . Do you think that magazines and books have a future .? It’s a shame that magazines are dying out. I think it’s scary to have things only exist in a virtual way, without a support system of technology things could be lost forever. I don’t really have much faith in technology. There is a reason books have survived this long, they are relatively cheap to produce, they are portable, they don’t require a power source, and they contain entire worlds! Q8 Just like Here your own body of work seems to occupy different time zones. Things that went under the radar at the time are now being experienced and valued by an audience who are discovering different aspects of your work for the first time. That must be very exciting . It’s strange how the audience for the Liquid Liquid music has only grown over time, the records have been re-issued roughly every ten years or so. Recently the songs have been used in films and ad-

this work seen again and putting it in context of the time and getting such a strong reaction has been reaffirming. I can see the connections of all these different aspects of my work more clearly with distance. Q10 Whats Next ?? I have a few ideas for projects that have been brewing for a while. I have another exhibition up right now at The Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, that will be up until January 2019. It’s a collection of small sculptures I made over the previous year and a ten page “visual essay / art comic”, that was made for the catalog that I also made into large prints. I would love to make another book, another film, maybe even record some music there is always something that needs to be done. Words by Brian Gibson

ic. Just a weekend camping. THE WOODS. The woods, though. Time outside time. Book idea. Political party expands franchise to include small children. Stands on policy of nationalisation of Alton Towers. Thorpe Park. And so on. Landslide. Grip of power tightened through appealing to demographics. Eventual fascism. As always. This time created by my hypothetical fictional and your fictional actual children. Throw the idea into the fire. NATIONALISE THE THEME PARKS. Try not to talk about politics. Talk a bit about politics. Try not to talk about football. Talk a lot about football. LADS LADS LADS. It’s emotional. I cannot write about nature in the way someone who really knows about nature can. I am not sure what that tree is. What that birdcall was. I experience nature as a mystery. An occult series of symbols to project fears and belief onto. Should the

To remember people who we have lost. When I got the news I was leaving the basement exhibition space I was working in. The cliché. Too young. We hadn’t spoken for quite a long time. There is guilt about that. Defining moments of teenage life from parties and drugs to art and music. We sat in Spoons. Talking about the past. There was a photo album. We worked out some songs. GG Allin. I was trying to get some jungle in there. The funeral and the piss up were surreal. Wesley Willis soundtracking the last moments in the crem in Mortlake. Even in death there was that chaotic life grabbing death hungry energy. So much sadness yet I had a fucking great time. Honestly. Devastated at the same time. A complex legacy. I will treasure those years. The piss and the milk in the bottle. The time I had to punch you multiple times in the face then smash a lamp to stop you being a prick.

The multiple times you backed me up in stupid situations. The multiple situations we found ourselves in. The arguments about politics/ religion/philosophy that eventually made our friendship difficult to maintain over distance. There is a tree in the woods planted for someone else who is not here anymore. It is visited every time. I think about death. All the deaths. The lives. All the lives. The new ones. The old ones. The ones I’ve lived. The ones they live. I am grateful to have lived and to be living still. I am grateful to have people to share it with it. Utility poles. Telephone wires. A corridor through bracken and trees. Day slowly becoming night. WOODS. DEDICATED TO ALL PEOPLE AND THINGS THAT MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING. Words Rupert

10 | Friday, May 24, 2019

Deviation Street,Third Issue

MAKING IT

Geoff Dunlop, artist curator and filmmaker, responds to the work and lives of two very different kinds of artist – MARTIN PURYEAR, who is representing the United States at the next Venice Biennale, and JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, whose stratospheric celebrity and financial impact are greater than ever, three decades after his death.

first encountered the sculpture of Martin Puryear on visits to the States in the mid-1980s. How different these still, silent, mysterious objects seemed to be from what was all around me. Those were the most febrile of times, when artists were treated like rock stars and the Saturday cruise around the SoHo galleries was as much to do with being seen as about looking at the art on the walls. The few Puryear pieces I came across back then had a seriousness about them, even a sobriety, that contrasted audaciously with the smashed plates, the expressive outpourings of paint and the urgent acts of self-presentation that reflected the mood of that moment. Those were the glory days of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution (now moved on from farce to tragedy) and the seething nights for the chosen few who could glide with ease into the Paramount Club. Martin Puryear’s precisely crafted sculptures, in such unrevolutionary materials as bent and woven wood, appeared to come from a place far away from Lower Manhattan, in both geography and time. I warmed to them immediately, and I wanted to see more. This felt like a counter-vision to bottle-spinning obsessions of the masters of the universe, a quieter, more reflective way of addressing the world around us. Not only the world of appearances but of values. How strange they would have looked in Gordon Gekko’s apartment. My rare encounters with Puryear’s work in subsequent years added to my sense of respect and affection for this unusual artist. But it also left me frustrated that there must be so much more to see, and to get to know. For the past 20 years I have lived in rural south-west England, and Puryear’s sculpture has never been likely to show up there. But he has hardly been exhibited in London either. And, unfortunately, my trips to New York and beyond have failed to coincide with the big presentations of his meticulous art and craft, most notably the epic MoMA retrospective of 2007. Martin Puryear may be considered a master in the States but, on my side of the Atlantic, he is a private passion. How exciting then to discover (recently) late last year that the Parasol Unit had put together the first London retrospective, over the two floors of its elegant and contemplative gallery, just off the City Road. By ironic coincidence, this is an area close to London’s ever-encroaching financial district, still expanding at a pace that reminds me of the eighties at their most rapacious. I chose the timing of my first visit to the Puryear exhibition with care. I resolved to take an extended detour on my way to the opening of the blockbuster Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective, at the Barbican nearby. I had always linked these two wildly contrasting artists in my mind because, when I had first encountered the sculptures of Martin Puryear, I was in New York to direct sequences for a series of films on art and ideas in the 1980s, commissioned by Channel 4, London and WDR, Cologne. The New York artists I was

focusing on included Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke and Eric Fischl … all of them still today impressive survivors in the frantic race of reputation. But the artist on my list who fascinated me most was Basquiat, the teenage graffitist who had gatecrashed his way onto the New York art scene and become (almost)miraculously rich and famous by his early twenties. Now, some 30 years after his tragically premature death, Basquiat’s fame, and the dazzling amount of dollars that his art can generate, have turned him into an even more fantastical figure. My linking together of Puryear and Basquiat is more than the result of a casual coincidence. Both are artists of colour. And both, in their vastly different ways, explore the themes of cultural identity, of belonging and exclusion…themes of pressing significance in our times, and of (particular) continuing interest to me. Yet, despite what connects them, what is most obvious about these two artists is how different they are from each other, in character and effect. The noisy, confrontational, untutored, erratic but expressively powerful paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat are bristling with both explicit and elusive texts. So very different from the mute, precise, fabulously crafted, enigmatic yet totally confident sculptures of Martin Puryear. These works only ever imply. They never directly state. In (his) Puryear’s own words: “I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them.” Puryear does make subtle reference to specific histories and injustices, but he also creates art that seems to evoke a common experience, beyond nationality, creed or colour. Not to exclude questions of identity but to expand on them. To refer to what we share as well as what sets us apart. * The generously proportioned, high-ceilinged gallery at Parasol Unit, where the larger Puryear sculptures were displayed, is backed by a wall of glass. This looks out onto trees, a pool drenched in greenery and, at the time of the exhibition, more Puryear sculpture. The impact on me of all this sensory immersion was immediate. It was like walking into an outstanding architectural interior or hearing the opening passages of an immersive piece of music. I became attentive, concentrated, blissfully calm. These are the kind of reactions many of us hope to experience in the presence of art but, of course, they can never be forced. They come to you when they –and you- are ready. In this room was the expected wood, both bent, woven and carved, and metal of various kinds. Wherever I looked I saw evidence of unhurried handcraft and studied concentration. Incongruously, I experienced feelings I might find in a room of early renaissance paintings and sculpture…not because of any likeness in the artworks but because of the still concentration such objects generate, and their (mood) sense of proximity to the act of making.

Puryear’s work reaches far beyond an imagined Italy at its most civilised (and, of course, rapacious). He evokes, perhaps unintentionally, villages in contemporary Africa, temples across Asia, natural phenomena almost anywhere. And he seems to echo intense rituals and mundane daily habits from unnamed cultures somewhere out there, or perhaps deep within our collective memory.

red Big Phrygian (2010-2014), with its happy shape and droopy top, that did it. This apparently light-hearted piece carries serious associations with European history and the universal struggle for liberty. In fact Liberty herself wears a hat of this shape and colour, in the spectacular painting by Delacroix, where she leads the people of revolutionary Paris through the barricades. When you have been encouraged to notice them once you can spot Phrygian caps all over the place, on classical Greek vases and tombs, on medals and coins, on paintings by artists as diverse Rembrandt and Picasso. In Puryear’s hands that soft, woollen headpiece grows to 5ft high and is carved from cedar. This disruption of scale does not undercut the contemplative qualities of the work but magnifies them. Nothing said, much implied.

Somewhat to my surprise, I quickly found myself smiling as I walked among the larger pieces on the ground floor. It was the bold

Scale is also a question surrounding a small, pedestal piece called Shackled (2014). The title instantly evokes a history that remains

alive and challenging, the slavery that lies at the foundations of almost every one of the modern states of the Americas and which surrounds us still, wherever we are. I assume that Puryear’s shackle is not copied from an actual, historical fixture -it looks more like a creative invention, inspired in part by natural forms, possibly feline- but it nevertheless carries the dead weight of oppression and injustice. It certainly disrupted my blissful mood. Looking into the archive, you find the artist reusing and rescaling shapes throughout his career. The form of Shackled has, in the past few (couple of) years, been exploded into the colossal Big Bling (2016). This 40ft-high translation recently towered over Madison Square Garden, in New York, and Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia. The solid iron has become tiered wood, contained by what appears to be linked fencing, topped by a gold-leafed ring. Despite the explosion of size, the original associ-

ations do not appear to have been abandoned but, once again, magnified. In this work we are now confronted with the complexities and contradictions of the Big City. We have come closer then to the territory of Jean-Michel Basquiat. His was most definitely a world of bling. He’d never have worn diamonds in his teeth nor a gold chain but he’d certainly indulge himself in a stretched limo when he was in the mood, and he would freely order eye-wateringly expensive meals for whoever was in his entourage that night. His was a more bohemian version of bling. When I met him he had recently, and infamously, been portrayed on the front cover of the New York Times Magazine, barefoot, in a paint-spattered Armani suit, with the cool effect topped by his trademark crown of abbreviated dreadlocks. Basquiat (He) was then at the pinnacle of his (success) (many would think notoriety), rich enough to hand out a fistful of dollars to panhandlers

Friday, May 24, 2019 | 11

Deviation Street,Third Issue

wrote a formal poem in his truncated life. His magical power was to fuse the inarticulate and the articulate, to great effect. Jean-Michel’s inarticulacy was not, I believe, a dumb act of cynical manipulation, as it was said to be by several contemporary critics, most notably the usually astute Robert Hughes. In an ungenerous and unfair posthumous appraisal, Hughes attacked the recently deceased creator of paintings that had walked off the walls of fashionable galleries, still wet. He called him “a wild child, a curiosity, an urban noble savage - art’s answer, perhaps, to the Wolf Boy of Aveyron. Basquiat played the role to the hilt.” Hughes continued: “It was a tale of a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics… Basquiat never looked like he was turning into a painter of real quality. His ‘importance’ was merely that of a symptom.” At the time, I thought this appraisal was quite simply wrong. And I still do. Paintings with the eloquence and charge of the many unhelpfully called Untitled (1982 - 87), or the more specific Philistines (1982), or Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta (1983) arrest me as much now as when I first saw them. Their command to us all to “pay attention” to the neglected and the underrated, to the despised and the abused, is as effective –and necessary- now as it was thirty years ago. Jean-Michel could be charming, generous, a delight to be around, but a lot of the time he could be a ballbreaker, nasty, selfish and single-mindedly on the make. But, in both good times and bad times, his vulnerability and fragility were there for all to see. Even the way he held the pencil, oilstick or brush could look like evidence of inner torments and his uncertainty about his true status in the world he was so desperate to succeed in.

he passed in the street, and with more than enough ready cash to fuel the drug habit that was soon to kill him. Basquiat had dropped out of both education and home life as a teenager, and slept and hustled for a while on the streets of Manhattan. Then he spent a few months of recovery in Brooklyn, in a benign school for the hard to teach. In his months as a student at Cityas-School, he mostly drew and wrote for his own pleasure. In the process, he created his graffiti alter ego, SAMO. To be more accurate, he co-created SAMO with his schoolmate, Al Diaz. But when SAMO’s sharp comments on New York life started to create a buzz that reached the attention of the local news sheet, Village Voice, and even The New York Times, Al Diaz found himself excluded from the partnership. SAMO was no longer a sardonic commentator on the SoHo scene, he was becoming an integral part of it.

Puryear had got himself educated to the hilt – at the Catholic University of America, Washington, the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, Stockholm, and at Yale. In his early twenties he volunteered for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. While there he studied wood and metalworking in the local tradition, and in Sweden he was tutored by a master cabinet maker. Then he plunged into the art and craft traditions of Japan. None better. But, for all this learning, Martin Puryear never lost his independence of spirit. At the time of his first struggles to make a living from his work, the prevailing orthodoxy was minimalism. I saw some of his early, pared down objects upstairs at Parasol Unit. (Yet,) It struck me that, despite their simplicity of form and economy of material, these are crafted objects that reveal the hand of the maker and the latent force of his presence.

A generation earlier, the young

He said, back in 1987: “I never did

minimalist art, I never did, but I got real close…I looked at it, I tasted it, and I spat it back out. I said, this I not for me. I’m a worker. I’m not somebody who’s happy to let my work be made for me and I’ll pass on it, yes or no, after it’s done. I could never do that.”

respected for its intellectual rigour, and its proximity to global capital. The ticket for the fourmonth show proved as hot as any curator, or gallery management, could desire. People who have seldom been near an art gallery queued to get in.

I was also impressed (struck at Parasol Unit) how strongly all the sculptures in this exhibition felt connected to each other. The labels might have placed them 30 years apart, but they dissolved the time that separated them. One line of consistency running through all the work I saw was the implicit connection to nature, and to handmade objects that are both useful and durable.

Recent sales have made it obvious that Jean-Michel Basquiat still gets through to the limited class of people who can find a hundred-million bucks to buy a painting but, much more importantly, he now engages a new generation of people, without wealth or status, who were born after he died, yet who share his need to challenge the rigidities of race, gender, privilege and other pre-defined identities.

When I moved on from the Parasol Unit to the Barbican, the glass-walled jungle of the gallery’s hospitality zone made an ideal setting for the Basquiat bash. Exotic, stylish, democratic. I have seldom seen such a rich mix of race and class and generation in a gallery

The Basquiat Barbican retrospective lacked one of the sizzling, bravura canvases that will ensure Jean-Michel’s place in the canon, but it made a convincing case that he was a citizen poet of unique brilliance, even though he never

I don’t believe that comparisons with geniuses he so admired, such as Parker and Gillespie, Holiday and Young, are farfetched. Like them, Basquiat was an outsider at the court of the rich and the oblivious while being, at the same time, a flagbearer on the seemingly endless march from enslavement to (full) emancipation. Flagbearers, of course, are easy targets in battle. The celebrity musicians never lost their fear of being directed to the goods elevator at the rear of the grand venue where they were performing, rather than to the marble entrance hall where their posters were displayed. And the young celebrity painter never lost his habit of getting his smart putdown in first, to defend himself from the quick dismissal and condescension that always stalked him. If you study archive footage and photographs of Jean-Michel you’ll see shadows of pain, fear, disconnection and defiance cross his face frequently. When I asked him on camera whether it was a coincidence that so many of the thousands of faces in his paintings looked angry, he replied: “I’m not out to frighten people…” Then I asked whether there was any anger in him. He said: “Of course there is. Of course there is.” But when I followed up with, Q: What are you angry about? He went silent. In the achingly long gap that followed, with the camera still running, all those expressions and more crossed his face. Finally, he uttered: “I don’t remember.”

For more than 30 years now I have reflected on that answer. Part of me considers that he had taken so many drugs to steel himself for this serious (as opposed to celebrity) interview that he may have blanked out and forgotten the question. Another part wonders whether his few years of success had tossed him into a world where you could be rebellious but you couldn’t cross a line that alienated your best customers and most influential critics. But my final speculation –the one I am most convinced by- is that he was working so hard to face so many different directions that he could no longer remember the right way to look, or even who precisely he was. He had lost his identity, if he had ever really gained it. Certainly, he was only a couple of years away from complete disintegration, on canvas and within himself. The interview concluded simply: Q: Black people in this country get a rough deal. Is that part of what your work’s about? A: “Yeah, I have to say so, yeah.” Martin Puryear has been careful to avoid such direct discourse about imposed definitions of identity. He has not detached himself from the daily struggles of race and class to escape their implications, but to concentrate on becoming a worker. Someone who can make stuff rather than be forced to talk, and strike postures. Even the most prestigious interviewers struggle to get through to him. When I look at pictures of Martin Puryear I see someone at one with himself, quiet, inward, even a little guarded – not because he is scared of being abused but because he is unwilling to trap himself in a tangle of words, his own or anyone else’s. He recently refused my request to make a film with him. Politely of course, but definitely, he wrote: “…although I am moved by Mr Dunlop’s interest in my work, I simply have no desire to appear in a film, or to be the subject of any kind of profile.” Let the work speak for itself. Let the act of communication be embedded in the object. Robert Storr, one of the most eloquent commentators on the artist and the philosophy that defines him, has made the point with compelling eloquence: “Of major sculptors active today, Martin Puryear is, in fact, exceptional in the extremes to which he goes to remove the personal narrative from the aura of his pieces. Nevertheless, he succeeds in charging them with an intense and palpable necessity born of his absolute authority over and assiduous involvement in their execution. “The desire for anonymity is akin to that of the traditional craftsman whose private identity is subsumed in the realized identity of his creations rather than being consumed in the pyrotechnic drama of the artistic ego.” Martin Puryear’s reticence and modesty have not denied him being honoured at the White House (by its previous incumbent), nor tributes at the Whitney, MoMA and now Venice. This international accolade defies the grotesque neo-nationalism that currently stalks the corridors of power. And so, in its very different way, does Jean-Michel Basquiat’s status as the most highly-priced American artist at auction, ever. Both expressions of an American greatness that can inspire, rather than make you feel sick. Geoff Dunlop is an artist curator, filmmaker and writer. He lives in Somerset. www.geoffdunlop-artworks.com geoffdunlop@gmail.com

12 | Friday, May 24, 2019

Deviation Street,Third Issue

JOHNY BROWN INTERVIEW

· What does live performance mean to you?

· Has the guiding aim of BoHJ been to drag the listener out of their monotony induced unreality?

With a spoken word ep, Slurred Words, out now and the next BoHJ record, Neon Primitives (spoiler alert: it’s utterly great) on the immediate horizon I’ve set him some occasionally intrusive questions, looking at the new album’s inspiration and considering where BoHJ fit in a world where a place on a Spotify playlist streamed in H&M is the height of success. Normally when considering a band with a 30 plus year history thoughts turn to the past, but as Holy Joy are burning so brightly right now, there wasn’t really any need.

Everything.

The guiding aim, in the beat sense, has always been to encapsulate the holiness of life lived fully, to be aware as possible, to be open to adventure, to love all the mad joyful experiences, and articulate these feelings through word and sound and beat, to narrate a kind of outsider working class derived lifestyle, to keep jumping, keep stylish, and never get caught, and use a kind of indie music as the prime vehicle of expression, that’s the guiding aim. · What are the positives and negatives of losing yourself deep in the music? When every now and then you realise you are lost, totally lost, within the music you are making or dancing to, but still find you are moving within the shifting rhythm, and keeping the words on the line, and the trance of the thing is taking you higher and the noise around you kind of bursts your mind with a light that is brighter / stronger than any drug you’ve taken yet, that is a totally beautiful thing, a positive thing, the negative is knowing it’s there but you are unable to access it.

Geosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere, that’s the terrain. · Who are the Neon Primitives?

BY SIMON HEAVISIDES Photography - Inga Tilere

Make Way for the Neon Primitives...

· What role does the physical environment/psychogeography have in terms of inspiring you?

However I’m going to totally disagree with this 5 rhythms nonsense I’ve just spoken of and state something else... Music is not for losing yourself in, quite the opposite I’d say, most days its best use is as a beautiful low key practical God sent tool to help through the mundane difficult messed up days of no tomorrow, and better still a guide post, a recognition thing, a lighthouse, a series of signs to see through dark and lonely times, for articulating feelings, for realisation, and finding oneself. A soundtrack to daydreams too... · Musically, who is guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine? Eric Anderson · Name a few of the transformative gigs have you’ve seen over the years: Warsaw / Penetration / Adverts. Guildhall Newcastle June 77. Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Old Vic Waterloo. October 81. Test Dept / Diamanda Galas Albany Deptford 84 Nina Simone. Paris Olympia 89. WAR Jazz Cafe Camden 94. Diane Cluck Resonance Radio Studios 2004 Carla Bozulich Resonance Radio Studios 2005 Nina Zivancevic poetry reading Belgrade 2005 Rothko Ivy House 2019 (kind of observed first hand within, astounding!) These are the most intense transformative performances witnessed that I can think of offhand.

Those in love with light still, who joyfully acknowledge the darkness of the current time, who see the art and the beauty in the detritus and waste surrounding us, and want to make something out of it / a very conventional six piece beat group plying a lost and lonely trade. · Looking back over the last 20 years how do you feel music’s place in people’s lives has changed? It’s kind of a lazy given that music is mere a spotified soundtrack to people’s daily lives and dramas these days, aural wallpaper, sonic brocade, cacky curtains, but I still see enough people buying vinyl intently, listening to the songs keenly, living the words righteously, keeping the faith. I’m on the board of a mental health charity, Keychanges, in Islington, and run songwriting sessions for people with LD and i know music to the people I work with isn’t wallpaper, music is the house, is the street, is the city, is their world, their universe, it’s bedrock and dreams and life, it’s everything. Me too, I never want to lose that feeling or relation to music, to the words and to the sounds. I love Bandcamp, I love YouTube, I love Resonance Radio and NTS Radio too. I love the new Klaus Blatter album and I love the Regas record deck we’ve just bought, on which I play my Vic Godard and Comet Is Coming albums. · Where do you see the future of music? Honestly don’t know, don’t care, there’ll always be a guitar knocking about, and a radio, and a

broadband link, somewhere. · Is the internet both a facilitator for access to art and music but also a block to people’s genuine engagement? I love the internet, love trawling for hours, love skipping through youtube, and must admit I waste far too many hours on Facebook checking out videos that friends have posted and laughing at the beautiful shite they post, I love connecting with long lost long thought forgotten friends too, but I still prefer the pile of books by my bed. Reading John Higgs’s Watling Street at the moment, love it, lent to me by my pal Jim Crabtree, and that’s distracted me from a Saul Bellow novel, just finished John King’s Slaughterhouse Prayer which has steered me right back to the faith I lapsed in a few years ago, which is Veganism. Check it out, its the strongest most repugnant most righteous and reasoned book i’ve read in years. How i’d still like Band Of Holy Joy songs to be. · Where would BoHJ fit on a Spotify playlist? Well, there is one, it popped up the other day, someone sent me the link, it was quite a thrill to hear 30 years of songs back to back... · What advice would you give the Johny Brown of 1983? Do it! · It’s 1988, Warner brothers or whoever offer you a million pounds and a guaranteed hit in return for relinquishing all creative control, do you take it and where would you be now? Ha! Not sure. It would have been a band and manager decision, I would have went with whatever the decision was. I have a feeling, we would have turned it down, we were being offered decent ad-

vances then anyway. Of course the entirely smart thing would have been to fuck the band right off, sign that devilish deal, buy myself a decent house that would have lead to other property dealings thus ensuring my future, and once the attempt at a hit had crashed and burned, gather together what meagre wit respect and dignity I had left and carried on making Holy Joy music as normal. That was never going to happen though, i’m entirely idealistic and stupid and the idea of Warner Brothers offering BOHJ a million pounds is a most laughable concept. · The mass of men (and women) lead lives of quiet desperation... discuss with reference to the effect of the social media age. The people I know on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets are loud as fuck and noisy as hell and always making a show of themselves. But yes, the mass of men and women... I look around me with a sense of quiet bewilderment, things change so quickly these days, and so many of us are finding ourselves lost to those changes, with no real chance of having our voices heard, no great movements or unions looking out for us anymore, so in that great unsettling sense, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was... · Do you have hope for society or are we on a one way ride to shallow oblivion? I have hope for society. There are great things to be had still and people to talk to, and look up to, and be with, and be around... Less so for the planet we walk on mind, but, who knows, we’ll see... Hopefully a spirit will prevail, Slurred Words is out now on Dog Tunnel Records, Neon Primitives follows on 7th June via Tiny Global Productions.

Friday, May 24, 2019 | 13

Deviation Street,Third Issue

TED MILTON INTERVIEW

Blurt I love the sound of it, such a good name for a band that produces such a sound Blurt formed back in 1979, taking up in 1980 one side of A Factory Quartet which showcased 4 bands Drutti Column , The Royal Family and The Poor and Kevin Hewitt being the others. (Fact 24) released between Joy Divisions 7-inch Love will Tear Us Apart (Fact23) and their debut album Closer (Fact 25). Blurt fronted by Ted Milton born 1943 a man of all ages, still going strong and touring with his band at the close of 2018 conjuring up youthful playfulness with ancient calling … Ted Milton ..such a good name…. a name with an earthy esoteric feel about it, Albion historic and poetic and we at Deviation Street get to ask him mid tour a few questions We start by simply asking: . How are you Ted Thanks for asking! So Far So Good! As well as being the founder and front man of Blurt you are also a poet and a puppeteer, that’s quite a mix and obviously being creative is important to you. and now your back on tour with a busy schedule switching back and forth between mainland Europe and the UK, how’s it going? Yes quite busy these days - the combo is on form One of my most treasure possessions was a copy of the 1969 poetry anthology The Children of Albion in which you have several poems. The book was very much part of something attributed to the notion of a counter culture. How did you get into the book and do you keep in touch with any folk involved in its creation? The Children Of Albion - Yes I rather fancied myself as a poet back in those faraway days - my hair was shoulder length & my glasses were dark - I’d read Ginsberg & the beats & Sartre & Mayakovsky & listened to Parker & Co - you get the picture!

loops stripped back sound, primal vocals and of course your both playing the same instrument. Apparently neither of you had heard of each other but somehow arrived at similar place, musically performance and label wise .. In the years that have followed did you guys ever meet up. Would you want to?

Pete Brown - I’ve met up with him a couple of times in the last six months - bizarre how well we get on - exactly as in 1066... When I lived in Stroud I used to bump into Horowitz regularly in The High St Spike Hawkins? Was he in the anthology? I went to his funeral a little over a year ago...It was the first time I’d (not) seen him for about 50 odd years... There is one poem of yours titled Waiting in The Tate (The nation’s most costly waiting room) . firstly I assume that you had to pay to get into the Tate back then to see the Turners but my question is What are your current thoughts on the “Arts” caught between cuts and branding. The Arts? Funding? Now that there isn’t any (except paradoxically opera) branding, as you seem to imply, is what it’s all about... Can you tell the difference between the advertising industry & the so-called arts world? I live in Deptford epicentre of The Aspiring...Everywhere you look there’s a Moby Dick in a small pond...I wouldn’t like to exclude myself of course, I’ve really got some form... As I understand it you took up the Sax some time later and formed Blurt in the late 70’s. What was the motivation/ Inspiration to do so? Sax? I’d become frustrated with the puppet milieu - my friend Herman showed me an alto & I fell in love...

them as he did with Blurt - I dont know - I doubt it Youve managed to straddle that shift from an open psychedelic esoteric towards a harsher more urban punk ethos . What are your thoughts on this? I had a very attacking approach - quite punk - though I never listened to that genre - now I do when I saw Sid Vicious’ s performance of “My Way” I got it I’d been listening to Bebop, Ornette, R n B (as in Howling Wolf etc), R n R as in Presley, Little Richard, Middle Eastern & African music, Bartok... Blur’s first records were on Factory who had also recorded ESG from the New York. ESG were also on the same New York based label (99 Records ) as Richard Mc Guires Liquid Liquid and No Wave saxophonist James Chance . People often make comparisons between the choppy rhythmic

Puppetry .....Always seems to invoke a sense of trepidation in me, not knowing what these animated 3D figures might do in the next moment , whereas sculpture as large and abstract as it can be is like the beast tamed , a trophy. Are you still making puppets, doing performances, making films? Puppetry? Rarely these days...May get back to it...The genre has such a wonderful and largely unexploited potential to be hideously offensive... What about cultural ventures, any such diversions when touring? No time when touring for cultural experiences any more edifying than the graffitti viewed in sordid dressing rooms. Words by Brian Gibson

Your brother Jake as well being the drummer in Blurt was previously in the ultimate festival band Quintessence . In what way were they ( if any ) influential to your approach to making music , performance. Quintessence - zero to do with Blurt as an influence - I never listened to that band - I might have seen it once - maybe Bro Jake drummed the same way with

Yonic: pertaining to a form that resembles female genitalia; a lady-version of ‘phallic’, if you will. Didn’t know that? You’re not alone. If you’re still reading after the words ‘female genitalia’, then welcome aboard. of the earliest origins of humour that we know about is in the mockery of authority [...] so you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.’ (‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’, Vanity Fair) And yet here she is, holding her own in a male-dominated playing field without mimicking the blokes may the spirit of the wonderful Victoria Woods shine upon you, lady. My main question for Yonic was whether she’d incurred much heckling, and although she told me she has a pre-prepared heckle rap, the opportunity to use it is yet to present itself. ‘Thing is,’ she says, ‘because I’m only taking the piss out of myself, and I’m literally singing my most embarrassing truths there’s not much ammunition for conflict.’ Although, I for one, would love to see what happens to the man that heckles during her self-loving song about labia. That’s not to suggest that the crowd is a bunch of angry women. There were plenty of men there

SLURRED WORDS ALBUM REVIEW

ith the daily assault of the digital age eating away at any remaining time for quiet reflection, a spoken word record feels even more exotic and maybe for some anachronistic…Here we have one of those rare beasts, recorded live in analogue, the vinyl cut individually in real time using a hand lathe. I feel almost ashamed that I’m listening via Soundcloud… The concept is about as intimate as you can get and really depends on the speaker’s ability to draw a listener in, until very quickly you forget the act of listening and are simply there in the moment processing someone’s thoughts and observations as they’re shared with you.

YONIC The music of Yonic is born from the idea of celebrating ladies, their bits and most importantly promoting a sense of self-acceptance. An anti-folk singer-songwriter rooted in feminism, Yonic puts forth her own embarrassing truths to look you in the eye as if to say ‘hold your head up, lady, everyone’s body is just as gross and brilliant as yours.’ Her new album, Lips Unsealed, does not disappoint. The album itself took over two years to complete; it includes a love song to her armpit hair and a song called Smelly Fannies that champions an understanding of your body in its natural state. Aside from frank and downright necessary education, Alma, the face behind Yonic is a very skilled musician. Her story-telling is reminiscent of Lily Allen both in style and honest British accent; her fingerpicking style is lively enough to keep the pace of the songs interesting but not so far that you are distracted from what this bard of female anatomy is trying to say. I saw Yonic play at the Bath Comedy Festival and become transfixed on the idea of female comedians and why there aren’t many. Christopher Hitchins argued that ‘one

Yeah I did meet James Chance about 10 years ago - he gave me his latest cd & wondered if I’d like him to sign it...Jesus! There were comparisons made at the beginning - but Blurt’s evolved over the years - I think his (excellent) style has remained more or less consistently the same - quite wise commercially as its turned out..

too. No one is saying be a vegan, or how dare you own a razor? All you are being told is: hey, we all fart.

But if you think this album is simply about laughing then you’re missing the point. PMDD is actually a really beautifully written song, it exemplifies the musical unpredictability which Alma denotes to her influence from the Beatles. Not to mention, PMDD is an important subject which most people know very little about (it’s actually PMDD awareness month, get reading). So while we think of candid male comedians laughing at the plain fact that the human form is a joke in itself; Yonic achieves this with astonishing beauty, honesty and smile that says ‘we’re both beautiful.’ Check it out and join me in the queue of people wanting to go for a pint with this lady. Words by Sarah Harrington

There are few artists who I can imagine having the power to keep me transfixed using an ambient sound bed and the power of their words and delivery. Johny Brown is of course not your average artist and if anyone could pull this off its him. I’m pretty sure he would never waste our time by hitting the record button without something pressing or inspired to impart and for that I’m grateful. Slurred Words is therefore a record to be approached with anticipation rather than caution. Johny likes to provoke and prod at the fabric of everyday life, questioning what we take for granted. He’s never been afraid to show himself in an unfavourable light and wouldn’t spare the rest of us either, but what he never lacks is compassion. Through the music of the Band of Holy Joy he’s regularly shown us his ability to take a step back from the unstoppable yet often unnoticed changes that sweep us forward to some uncertain future and to remind us to consider what it means it be human. Slurred words carries on that work. Danny Pockets feels like an elegy, not just to the artist but for the things we’ve lost, and continue to lose, as a society. Johny’s eye for the mundane details of everyday life, the shut down shop, the discarded blue carrier bag floating in the breeze, allows him to appreciate the risks we face when the prevailing direction is one of profit-seeking efficiency and a shallow lack of soul. We miss the simple details and end up in this, ‘branded new age of contrivance and style’. In many ways Slurred Words feels like a meditation on communication and art, in particular, how

can we rise above banality to contribute insight, ‘I grasp for certain words as I try to say something of worth’. It’s a reminder that a lot of people have a lot to say, but very few give us anything beyond vapidity and cliche. Don’t worry though this is Johny Brown speaking, so we’re never going to be too far away from acid humour and self-deprecation, whether it’s via getting your loyalty card stamped in Costa Coffee or observing god laughing and pissing in the gallery. As he wryly observes with a sly wink, ‘you have the light in your pocket, but the battery is about to die. You know how it is.’ Along the way, he frankly acknowledges his desire for extremes and concedes his path has been far from straight. Johny knows you need something at the heart of your existence to at least approach making it worth something, however fleeting. Finding it can be tough, and perhaps that’s one of the biggest burdens we have in our short lives, maybe that’s where the art and the communication come in. For Johny, there’s the conclusion that, ‘an hour on the makeshift stage, that would do’. There’s much that’s unconventional about this record, from its defiantly cottage industry production to the content, including the fact that’s it’s a limited edition that’s not strictly numbered, but will not make it past 100…probably best to order now in that case. DS: You can order your vinyl copy of Slurred Words and more via Dog Tunnel Records https://tinyurl.com/y5qxovl6 - and don’t forget their Fb page h t t p s : / / w w w. f a c e b o o k . c o m / DogTunnelRecords/?tn-str=k*F

Photography - Dog Tunnel Studios BY SIMON HEAVISIDES

14 | Friday, May 24, 2019

Deviation Street,Third Issue

DUST AND DRUMS BY DEN BROWNE IMAGES BY BRIAN GIBSON

was light when we woke up, but I could tell it was early from the lack of noise. I looked outside, no sign of anyone else. No-one had bothered to keep the fire going, no surprise there. There was a watery tinge to the air, and although the sun shone thru the weak grey streaked sky, there’d be rain later. I felt hungry, but there wasn’t time for that now. My back felt stiff too, but rest could come later. We made our way down the usual path, enjoying the silence, broken only by bird-song, while we could. From our position up on the hillside I could see strangers down at the bottom of the trackway. Some of the local men, by the look of their garb and beards. We’d come in peace, but not all made us welcome. I touched her on the arm, and indicated with a leftward nod of my head that we should look for another way. We found a faint track thru the bushes that brought us into a field the other side of the copse of trees. For a moment we stood transfixed as a buzzard hovered overhead, and then we were jolted out of our half-sleep by a rabbit hurtling across the path in front of us. At last we made it to the trees and set to gathering the precious dry wood for the fire before the weather changed. Wet or green wood would be useless later. Any relief we felt as we slowly made our way back up the hill to the camp was soon banished - our detour had been spotted, and one of the men blocked our path, “Take our wood again and you’ll be sorry - you and her...” Summer of ‘89 - we were a decade into the Thatcher Dictatorship, and for anyone living in the city, life was generally No Fun. If you didn’t buy into the money and materialism culture, you were suspect. Meanwhile dissenters, squatters and the like were being banished to the Reject Zone. The pubs of South East London were increasingly dominated by a new life-form - the Thatcher Youth, with their plastic and their wedge, so easily surrendering the previous generations’ radicalism and sense of community the moment the Iron Lady cynically waved a few fivers in their direction. In the seventies it had been easy to take it for granted that there’d always be a freak zone in the city, maintained and catering for the disaffected, the creative and the unwaged. Now as I looked around at the shell-suits, perms and base-

ball caps all about, I’d wonder where all the dreamers, activists, idealists and anarchists had gone. Su and I toiled as drones for the local council. This enabled me to pay for a dingy bed-sit, while she had a top-floor flat in a tower-block rookery. In the time I’d known her she’d had her energy and humour drained by a series of break-ins - the thieves operated to a well-worn timetable: see who’s got a job and will be out during the day, do the business, and make a note to come back in a few months, time when the insurance

had come thru and there’d be new stuff to nick. So when some old mates across the river in the Grove asked if we wanted to come to the Treworgey festival in Cornwall with them, it was too good an opportunity to miss - the prospect of some free time and the chance to laugh together again. Bill and Lyn were psychedelic veterans of many a festival, but were now trapped in the concrete situation of a smack-ridden estate and an increasingly beleaguered life on benefits. So it was no surprise to arrive and find no sign of the promised van hire, or to realise that it fell to us to cover the cash deposit. Still, there was a real excitement as we loaded up, chattering like kids set free from school. Soon we were heading along the fabled Westway. Once we got past Hammersmith and Chiswick to the start of the M4 we saw the first hitch-hikers waiting in the dusty sunlight. The festival hopefuls stood out a mile. We could only wave in passing, as the van was full. Bill and Lyn were up front, while we sat in the back with Liam, a street-wise old hand from the Grove - generally an amiable guy, but capable of flashes of temper. Then there was Steve - a middle-aged Californian who was already becoming tiresome with his monologues and superior attitude, and his partner, Polly, an incongruously pale young Gothette who barely spoke. Apparently he’d out-freaked us all, which meant endless lectures about Be-Ins at the Golden Gate Park in Frisco - you name it, he’d been there before anyone else. To prove the point, he’d got a bag full of t-shirts he’d screen-printed to sell at the festival, all celebrating things that had happened twenty years earlier. On we drove into the fading sun. As the evening came on, the roads cleared of suburbanites on the home run and we could soon see who else was going our way. We exchanged hoots and waves with other hired vans, re-conditioned post-office vans and ambulances, and single decker buses of every shape and size, all coming together in summer migration. Eventually we left the motorway and headed thru the night, before sinking deep into a maze-like world of trackways and narrow winding roads as darkness yielded to the new day. Beautiful views were abruptly terminated as we’d plunge into another steep-hedged lane, the van’s suspension groaning as we bounced around in the back. First light helped us to spot the discreet little signs showing the way near the festival. We scraped our way round another corner and saw what looked like two escapees from Blade Runner holding a farm gate closed across the road. We pulled up...Did we want any acid? they enquired. Now we’d crossed the border into the temporary free zone. One of the lookouts jumped in and directed us up to a near-empty field close by the main travelers camp. We’d felt pretty hard-core getting down there mid-week, but others had been there for weeks already, preparing the site and getting in the mood. If I’d been wondering where all the freaks had gone, now I had my answer. It was like the first time I’d seen graffiti’ed subway trains in New York in the seventies - but now it was like a vast herd of the trade vehicles I’d grown up with had somehow collectively evolved into a new mutation of post-punk psychedelia and

urban escape. Flags danced in the morning breeze with the smoke of the first fires of the day. It was a relief to escape the confines of the tin-can van at last. I jumped out, and in typical city vs country karma, put my foot in one of the few undried cow-pats and splattered on to the ground. I took in our surroundings. We were on a hillside, rising on one side of a gently wooded valley. The fields were bounded by old tall hedges, which marked out the land in ancient patterns. This was repeated on the other side of the valley. The bottom of the valley in between was still mainly hidden in the mist, but as the sun penetrated the clouds, we could see a mirage-like picture of tall tepees and larger tents emerging from the trees, half-hidden like some medieval encampment. The ground had been hardened by the dry weather, but eventually we scraped away the cow-dung and sheep-shit and battered our way thru the scrawny grass and chalky subsoil to put up our tents in a circle, allowing space for a fire in the middle. Just as we were drifting off I was practically choked by exhaust fumes filling the tent like a badger-cull. I looked out to find a massive, gleaming white camper van parked about six inches away from us, and a family of four with matching mullets came into view. I was about to go into pissed-off South London mode - “You’re having a laugh, arent’cha?” - when I realised the absurdity of the situation. It was like being the only person upstairs on a bus, only for someone else to get on and sit right next to you. They’d gone when I woke up. In short order we made two discoveries: a water supply in the form of a tap hiding in the nearest hedge - crucial, given a general shortage of water on the site. We also found there were no toilets provided. Glamping hadn’t been invented yet. We soon discovered the two other constants of the place - dust and drums. The drought had baked the red West Country ground to the point that any movement would break the surface. We watched as a bus and truck headed up the field to the travelers’ camp. By halfway they were lost in a sub-Saharan cloud of churned up dust that gradually blew over our way, getting in everywhere it wasn’t wanted. But the dust quickly became a great equaliser, as everyone got marinaded in it, whether they wanted to or not. The dustclouds swirled to a never-ending rattle of drums drifting down from the main field. The drum-beats became like the weather, always there but altering in pace and volume according to the time of day or night. I’d lost touch with the festival scene around the time of Dylan & Blackbushe in ‘76. Punk had happened since then, so hippie long hair and beards had gone for the most part, replaced by a kind of unisex Mad-Max-on-Acid look: clothes mostly black, sturdy laced up boots, hair generally shaved at the sides with a modified Mohawk

on top &and optional swirly pigtail at the back - although variations on dreadlocks were popular too. We soon got to be mates with the people parked up nearest to us, fellow refugees from South London. They had a fire-pit which provided a near constant supply of excellent veg curry, day and night. They favoured a look of head shaved at the front & sides, while sporting a tied-back tangle of thin dreads at the back, giving a kind of psychedelic pterodactyl look. Day and night the field teemed with black-clad traveller kids and a never-ending call of “Hash for cash” There was a very open atmosphere, as people came by offering their wares, or detecting a cup of tea on their brew radar. At night a couple of resourceful guys would come by bearing a bottle of tequila on a silver tray, serving it with the requisite salt and lemon. We’d marvel at how they’d maintain their balance, without a single spill, as they made their way from fire to fire. Then there were people selling flares - long wooden staves liberally soused in wax at one end. When a few of these were impaled in the ground they’d give off a good light for hours, and added to the hunter-gatherer atmosphere. Then there were specialised trades like the Hot-Knife Men, usually swarthy guys on account of the mass of fire-blackened, hash-tempered blades they’d carry with them. Other enterprising folk would wander the fields with plates and trays of hash-fudge or space-cake. Sometimes there was a suspicious vibe from the hardcore towards us weekenders, but mostly it was cool. A fragmentary tale emerged of the pre-festival scene there. Depending on which variant you heard, the farm owner had been unable to cope and had a breakdown, or the promoter had done a runner with all the money, leaving the field crew to be paid in Special Brew. Some said it was the farmer’s son, hoping to put on a festival while his folks were away on holiday. Whatever, all the uncertainty had led to various service providers pulling out in fear of not getting paid - hence the lack of loos. There was also a thuggish private security firm somewhere in the mix. They’d stolen a serious amount of hash from the travelers, although it was eventually recovered - by negotiation or after a pitched battle, depending on who you asked. Over a brew we got talking with a young Irish kid, Danny. He asked me if I knew anyone who’d like to buy a horse. I thought this must be drug-slang, but no, a few minutes later he was back with a beautiful white mare, leading it by the simplest of bridles. We met him again the next day. “Did you sell the horse?”, I asked. He lowered his eyes sheepishly, before telling us that, sure, he’d sold the horse. But other people had spotted the transaction, followed him all evening, got him drunk and waited for him to pass out. He’d woken up lying penniless in a ditch.

At nightfall one of the buses nearby set up some speakers and played acid house til first light. On the way down I’d dreaded that the festival was going to be a time-warped reunion of gnarled old heads playing “Dark Side of the Moon” on their 8-tracks. This was all very different - as were the bus’ occupants: a much younger crew than most of the people we’d met so far, generally clad in white, and centred around Tim, a youth who looked like he’d stepped out of a William Blake etching, or time-travelled from the Neolithic era, casually dropping in en route to Avebury or the next seasonal gathering. We called them “the Shining Ones.”

have a knack for being annoying. One night round the fire I’d ended up buying a couple of his psychedelic t-shirts. I gave him his cash, smiles all round. The next morning he came over and told me that he’d been out of it and got the prices wrong, so in fact I still owed him a tenner. If you need money, just say so, I told him, but don’t give me that wheedling crap. The dispute between the two men was apparently the continuation of some old row, Liam sneering, “That’s always the fuckin’ way with you, it’s all so small-scale tenner here, fiver here, you think people don’t notice. I worked you out way back - just stay out of my way unless you want a slap”

Some nights there’d be untold sound-systems going simultaneously, broadcasting the latest Detroit techno sounds and many other soon to be criminalised “repetitive beats” over the hedges and across the fields. We’d lie in our tent or sit watching the embers of our fire, usually assisted by a livener of speed from the Shining Ones, and contemplate the absurdity of going back to work and

“Well, I don’t know why you gotta be so goddamn primitive man...” spluttered Steve indignantly

our little hutches in the city.

started dismantling their tent. He proceeded very slowly, in the hope that someone would step up for him, but before long they were gone.

To be honest, the best times were before the festival proper started & the place got filled up with the weekend crowd. We’d sit around our fire, as the 808 beats pulsed around us, smoking with Tim and his mates, who were convinced the sky was teeming with UFO’s. Across the other side of the valley, a road crested the hill in such a way that any headlights hitting the clouds would produce strange flashing light-patterns in the sky. “Oh man, did you see that?!?” they’d cry out, “They’re really putting on a show for us...” The weekend brought more people and more vehicles, churning the dust into a dry red tsunami with every movement. On the Saturday I woke up to find Liam and Steve doing their best to bring the city - or rather the Elgin pub in the Grove - to the country. I’d noticed some alpha-male nonsense between them a couple of times already and could see this was going to have to play out to its end. Steve was exclaiming indignantly, “What - you want to fight me man?! I can’t believe you guys!”, he shrugged, darting a bewildered smile at the Gothette, who was staying well clear. I wondered if I should intervene, but knew it would only postpone things. Steve was just one of those people who - deliberately or not -

Liam stepped forward, fists clenched. Steve quickly made a pacifying gesture and looked over at me, hoping for support. I ignored him, and before anyone else said anything, he’d moved back to his side of our circle, grunted “We’re leaving” at Polly, and

Despite the attractions of life in the field, we did get to hear some great music that weekend - Hawkwind, naturally - and Loop and Misty in Roots being extra good. There was a sense of adventure as we’d make our way down the hill, and join the throng of people progressing up the lanes to the various stages in the nearby fields. In an urban context, this would have been a tense affair of people jostling for space on the pavement. Here, we made our way through the high-hedged sunken lanes, bounded by dried-up ditches on either side, steep-sided and thorn deep. Under darkening skies benign policemen would see us on our way. We’d noticed white-shirted pairs of cops in the field earlier on. This raised the hackles of some of our new friends, who remembered all too well the atrocity of the Beanfield in 1985, when Thatcher’s shock troops had been unleashed. But these were local cops, laid-back and anxious to avoid any conflict, especially when so out-numbered and in such a remote location. We’d see them proceeding across the fields at a set time every afternoon as if taking the air, keeping to the paths and maintaining a strictly blinkered eyes-ahead direction. Given our self-imposed sleep-dep-

Friday, May 24, 2019 | 15

Deviation Street,Third Issue rivation regime, and smoking dope from the moment we woke up, time and place became less firmly-fixed than usual. Sometimes the place felt like a medieval fair, but at others, a strange stillness would seem to descend & there seemed something outof-place about this hillside now awash with people, cars and amplified sounds, like a kind of future-shift. It was the high-water mark of the cruise missiles/ Greenham Common era. I was convinced that it was only a matter of time till our leaders brought war on us, so it was easy to slip into seeing this as some kind of post-nuclear gathering, after the missiles and air-bursts had done their work, Bristol and London no more, survivors instinctively fleeing to the countryside. One afternoon we decided to explore and wandered down to one of the smaller stages - although it was really little more than a metal framework covered with a tarp. There was no actual raised stage, tho someone had thoughtfully put some old carpets down for the musicians. All this was set in a kind of miniature valley more like a fold or wrinkle in the earth - at the bottom of a steep grassy slope. Trees overhung the stage area, framing it like a little woodland theatre, and providing some welcome shade from the sun. There was a cluster of small, ornately painted caravans arranged on one side. It was all like the setting for a living Hermann Hesse story to be enacted before us. I was expecting a magician to appear, or some shape-shifting creatures to go through their repertoire of changes, but had to be content with a couple of jugglers. I noticed a thin, bearded guy, wearing a kind of belted tunic, with a leather pouch at the waist and felt another medieval time-slip coming on, like the tale of Danny and the horse. After a while I worked out what he was doing as he methodically worked his way around the little enclosure, eyes intent on the ground, with the occasional swoop to gather something from the dust. He was meticulously collecting up roaches and part-smoked joints for later recycling. Eventually he worked his way round to where we were sitting, darting forward to seize a tab lying bySu’s foot. I was all for living outside the money machine, but something bugged me about this - maybe it was the nuclear thing this time, too much like scratching around in the ruins for crumbs of surviv-

al. Or maybe it was the two small children with him, trained to pick up anything he’d missed or to run ahead, scouting for rich seams of drug detritus. I rummaged in my pocket and broke out a bit of hash, and offered it to him, “Look, there you go man...” He looked at me thru piercing eyes, shook his head, and moved on silently. The great thing about events like this was the random element, and letting yourself go enough for it to find you. For all the impressive names on the bill, we were about to hear the best music of the weekend from a group I’d never even heard of. We’d noticed a group

quietly setting up their gear, and soon one of them stepped forward to announce, “We’re the Oroonies, we’re from Bristol”, before launching into an hour of some of the most extraordinary music I’d ever heard. A dense, powerful, kaleidoscopic mix of Eastern-flavoured spacey rock, with all the drive and power of Hawkwind, but with a real lightness of touch, sweeping us away to an intergalactic casbah. I laid back & looked at the clouds towering over us, and felt that I could easily reach out and touch them if only I could sit up. Then I had a feeling like vertigo, or somehow falling back into the earth. I looked at the patchy grass around me, and for a moment thought it was like a green blanket I could wrap around me. I didn’t want to drift off and miss any of the music, but when I thought about it, I had no idea whether they’d been playing for a few seconds or all day. Looking around at the twenty or thirty people around us, I seemed to recognise them all, and in the same way, there was a dislocated deja vu about our surroundings. I’ve been here before. I’ve always been here, so have they, this is what we do - the ground seemed to be feeding me information, stirring & connecting with the ancient shared memory, following the rising and setting sun across the hills, and through river valleys. This was the timeless life - dust and drums, fire and water, man and woman, life and death – and it would never stop til the last hill had been levelled and concreted over.

On the last night Su and I dropped some Green Eyes party acid. Soon the scene round the camp-fire felt claustrophobic. There’d been a strange atmosphere all day there. Eventually I got the story - two of our number had developed smack habits back home, and had convinced themselves that coming to the festival would be a life-affirming way to cleanse themselves and re-connect with older trippy values. I couldn’t imagine a worse scenario to start cold-turkeying having to scrape for even basic resources, and seeing everyone else having a great unstrung-out time. They’d run out of the last gear they’d brought with them, and sat shivering and forlorn by the fire. Knowing there was nothing we could do, we made our excuses and left.

By the time the trips came on, we’d followed the throng and ended up by the main stage. The Climax Blues Band were playing, and sure, they were good at what they did, but the music felt earthbound after the Oroonies, and being in the crowd felt too restrictive. We wandered back until we found an open stretch of grass and sat down in a clear patch amid the accumulated festival litter. The trips were pretty mild, but we were in a good mood again and just enjoying have a laugh together, joyfully sparking off each other’s words and thoughts. Sal nudged me and nodded, indicating someone heading purposefully our way. As it was the last night of the festival proper, a lot of the dealers were

flogging their remaining gear cutprice before the punters upped and left. I tried to collect my thoughts, so I could tell the guy - pleasantly but firmly - thanks, but we’re sorted. There was something different about him though the pressed jeans, the crisp white Rainbow Warrior t-shirt, or the natty green head-band around his fair hair. As he came up to us, I realised - he’d just been beamed in from the Planet Clean. It was days since we’d seen anyone who hadn’t been encrusted in a mould of red-dust and mud stains. We exchanged greetings. I waited for the offer of cut-price hash-forcash, but it never came. Su offered him her joint. He took one drag, before shoving it back at her as if he had more pressing things to do. “So, you’re having a good time then?” he asked I nodded and smiled back. The question was too obvious to require a verbal reply. “Leaving tomorrow, I suppose?”, he continued, before indicating the ground around us, “Doesn’t all this shit here bother you?” It was too beautiful an evening for anything to bother me much, so I shrugged and smiled weakly. Su laughed, and indicating the vast spread of paper plates, cups, half-eaten food and drink cans all around us, said “Well, it isn’t all

ours you know...” I found this funny too, but we’d played into the hands of the fuming eco-warrior “That’s why the planet’s fucked - people like you...”, then putting on an exaggerated Gormless Hippy voice, “’Oh man it’s not my problem, don’t bring me down’, let someone else deal with it”, before turning his attention back to me, “I suppose you two are tripping?” I remembered how the grown-ups would grumble about ‘dumb insolence’ when I was a kid, and limited myself to a nod. He rummaged in his back-pack, pulling out a handful of something dark and shiny that left a black after-image in the sunset sky. When his arm

came to rest, he thrust a black bin-liner at each of us, “Come on, get off your fucking arses for once and do something!” Yes, I know he had a point, but the self-righteous scout-master on steroids approach was never going to work. Su started laughing again, “Is it ok with you if we save the planet a bit later?” He turned angrily to me, “How about you then?” I really did want to clear up some of the crap, just not at that moment. He was at his bag again. I started back as he produced a long piece of metal with a sharp point at the end. “Oh no, misjudged it,” I thought, “He’s going to attack us...” Instead he turned away, jabbing frenetically at the ground, spearing plates and cups in all directions, before shoving them into his bin-bag, occasionally turning to give us indignant glares like some New Age Captain Mainwaring. As darkness fell, he gradually shrank into the distance, till all we could hear was the occasional crunch of speared polystyrene. The fire had gone out when we got back, though Liam was sitting there disconsolately with a beer, the casualties having retired to their tent. Next morning we tried to psych ourselves up for the grim return to the city. Right on cue the

weather had changed, salty rain blowing in from the coast under a grey sky. Most of the crowd had left overnight, along with most of the traders, and we had a fruitless search for any breakfast. When we got back to the camp, Bill and Lyn emerged grey-faced and announced that - unless we could

get them some gear or methadone - they were in no fit state to drive back, and in any case the van wasn’t due back til Tuesday, so what’s the hurry?. I tried to explain that back in the real world we were due back at work the next day & reminded them that we’d paid for the thing in the first place. So we ended up blagging a lift from the Shining Ones, who dropped us off in Launceston near the coach station. I joined the queue to the enquiries desk, and eventually reached the front. The assistant ignored me and beckoned to the next person in line to step forward. As I started to protest, I noticed a sign on the wall, “New Age Travellers not welcome here” When I went to the wash-room, the face that looked back from the mirror looked like a wanted poster. Beware this man is dangerous and believed to be sleeping rough. Do not approach under any circumstances. I couldn’t make much impression on the ingrained dirt on my face, but after a shave I looked presentable enough to be re-admitted to the straight world, and allowed to buy our tickets back to the Work Zone. The cramped coach seat felt like a crash-course in returning to a life back in the world of rules & restrictions. As we were about to get off the Shining Ones’ bus in Launceston, Tim had said “Why not stay with us man?” and move on to the next festival with them. It sounded very attractive. Su shook her head - she’d run out of her allergy medication. On such little things does fate depend sometimes... I’d gone thru Victoria coach station numb, on autopilot, and saw Su back to her place. It was only when I got back to my confined little cell that it all hit me. After a week living in the open, reverting to natural rhythms of life, I felt like a wild animal being put back into its zoo cage. It was all too quiet. I missed the endless background commentary of the drums, the smell of cooking and fires burning, the laughter of free children running about, the anticipation of the night ahead that rose as twilight fell. It had been all about sunrise, collecting firewood, getting food and water as and when we needed them, not when we were told to. The sun and moon had led the way, the sky our television. There were no drums or red dust clouds here, only exhaust fumes and sirens. I ran a bath and got in. The wa-

ter turned a dark reddish-brown straight away. I wanted to hang on to this physical reminder of where we’d been and lie there absorbing the Cornish soil. After a while I got out and ran another bath. When I got in the same thing happened again. This time I lay back in the dark water and let my mind float away back to the hills, lanes and fields. Next morning I woke with the first sunlight, and for a moment thought, right, wood or water first?, before realising where I was, the dull shabby carpet making a poor substitute for green grass and the touch of the land. As a kind of mini-protest, I went to work wearing one of Steve’s trippy t-shirts, not that anyone noticed. At tea-time one of my colleagues asked, “Well, did you have a nice time in Cornwall? What was the hotel like?”

I awoke and could hear sounds all around me in the camp. My senses gradually followed suit. I heard the crackle of the fire but also a hiss - and the acrid edge to the smoke confirmed that some fool had used green wood. I could hear the women and children, but no-one else. As I sat up, pain surged through my back like I’d been kicked. I’d hurt my back dragging firewood through the trees the day before and could barely move. It would pass, I knew, but for now I was dependent on the others and a burden in strange territory. When I didn’t recover right away, the others started to lose interest. Some complained at having to do my share of the work. I was fully awake now. She had already left my side and preferred the company of the other women. I looked outside and realised that the others had gone looking for food without me. This was a bad sign. Soon it would be time for us to head for the great gathering at Summer’s End, and I knew that I was in danger of being left behind, and condemned to a winter of hunger and ill-fortune. (for Su Grant, 1960-2016) Words: Den Browne Images: Brian Gibson

ARCHIVE David Byrne Talking Heads January 27th 1978 Photo By Brian Gibson