STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©
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STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©
VOLUME 1 ISSUE 10 Cover star: Jonathan Glazer photographed by Jill Furmanovsky Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Commercial Director Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@tack-press.com
Assistant Editor Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com
Advertising Manager Chris Jones chris@tack-press.com
Editorial Assistant Edward Moore edward@jocksandnerds.com Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Fashion Editor Marcus Love New York Editor Janette Beckman janette@jocksandnerds.com
Staff Writers Paolo Hewitt, Chris May, Andy Thomas, Mark Webster Staff Photographer Ross Trevail ross@jocksandnerds.com Designer Colin Christie Sub Editor Guy Weress Original Design Phil Buckingham Interns Will Grice Maria Sagun Financial Director Graham Steele accounts@jocksandnerds.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@tack-press.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Contributors Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala, Emily Ames, Katrina Baer, Savannah Baker, Dean Chalkley, Kevin Davies, Harris Elliott, RJ Fernandez, Emma Freemantle, Jill Furmanovsky, Orlando Gili, David Goldman, Kat Green, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Owen Harvey, Adam Howe, Willem Jaspert, John Marchant, Karen Mason, Laura Mazza, Cameron McNee, Donald Milne, Mischa Richter, Miss Rosen, Liam Saint-Pierre, Gemma Shane, Robert Wyatt Special thanks to Bar Italia, Soho baritaliasoho.co.uk; Mark Baxter at Mono Media; Edward Brennan at the White Horse Tavern, New York; Bayode and Claire Oduwole at Pokit pokit.com; Jon and Tea Pollock; Dionne and Victoria at Stoke Newington School; Tendring District Council; Dr Zimmerman and the staff and students of Antelope Valley College, Lancaster CA Jocks&Nerds Magazine, Tack Press Limited, 283 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AS Telephone +44 (0)20 7739 8188 jocksandnerds.com facebook.com/jocksandnerds Twitter: @jocksandnerds Instagram: @jocksandnerdsmagazine Jocks&Nerds is a free magazine published four times a year, printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk If you would like a copy delivered to your door contact us at subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Postage prices UK £5, Europe £10, North America £12, RoW £14 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Jocks&Nerds is published by Tack Press Limited ©2013 s
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138–145 CULTURE: John Byrne is Scotland’s greatest living artist and playwright
80–81 BULLETIN: Levi’s Red is back after a seven-year sabbatical p112
Contents
82–91 CULTURE: Joel Meyerowitz
146–147 BULLETIN: Lyle&Scott celebrates its 140th anniversary with two new lines
92–95 PROFILE: Afrikan Boy has a
148–155 CINEMA: Robert Capa pioneered the war photographer’s role and co-founded Magnum
has created some of the most important street photography of the last 50 years new album out; afro-grime has grown up
14–19 SEEN: The Edwardian Drape
Society is keeping the style and ethos of the Teddy boy alive
96–103 STYLE: Soho Struts Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala
156–163 STYLE: Palmdale
20–35 NEWS: Books, exhibitions,
104–111 COVER STORY: Jonathan
164–169 HISTORY: Fritz Kahn took
36–45 PEOPLE: Only built for
112–123 SPORT: East End Boxing
46–49 DETAIL: The Players Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason
124–129 MUSIC: Sun Ra is still
music, gear and stuff to get stuck into this spring Cuban links
50–55 GALLERY: South Beach
documents the annual spring-break partying in Miami 58–65 CINEMA: Martin Hannett was a musician and producer who shaped British music
Photographs Cameron McNee Styling Marcus Love
Glazer has a new film out that mixes classic cinema with surveillance
scientific diagrams to new heights
170–171 BULLETIN: John Smedley
Sportswear brings archive pieces into the 21st century
has been instrumental in shaping the noble sport
172–177 CINEMA: 20 Feet from Stardom celebrates the forgotten role of backing singers
influencing music on the 100th anniversary of his birth
178–181 CULTURE: White Horse
130–137 STYLE: Tommy Flanagan
Tavern was Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole
Photographs David Goldman Styling Marcus Love
182–185 MUSIC: Ben Watt is still looking for new challenges 186–189 SPOTLIGHT: Rockers
66–73 STYLE: Pardeep Singh Bahra
International is the last record shop selling vinyl in Kingston, Jamaica
Photographs Dean Chalkley Styling Harris Elliott
190–191 ICON: The Pork Pie Hat isn’t just for rude boys
74–79 CULTURE: Peter Blake is still
excited by new music and ideas
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SEEN
The Edwardian Drape Society Photographs Orlando Gili Words Edward Moore
Teddy-boy fashion was arguably the first British youth style movement. As far back as 1951, working-class chaps had begun bastardising the elongated tailcoat of Edwardian dress into an extreme, rebellious silhouette. Within a couple of years, these street peacocks were being discussed in the red-top newspapers of the day, where they were first given the moniker ‘Teddy boys’. Sixty years later and the look is still arresting; one can only imagine how these street dandies stood out back
then. Post-war rationed England was a dour backdrop for energetic, liberated teenagers. “Our dress is our answer to a dull world,” one cried out from Tottenham’s Mecca Dancehall in 1954. Today the spirit and style of those originat ors is kept alive by Ritchie Gee, president of the Edwardian Drape Society (TEDS). A lifelong devotee, he shifted from mechanic’s apprentice to manage Teddy-boy band Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers, and also set up the Tennessee Club, where Teds and
rockers of all persuasions gather in harmony for these lively nights. After all these decades, one wonders if style agitators will ever again surpass the provocation and excitement that Teddy boys brought to the streets and clubs. The Wildest Cats in Town Weekend takes place 4-7 July tennesseeclub.net crazycavan.com colintaub.co.uk edwardianteddyboy.com
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Frank Knuckles, 70, vice president of the Edwardian Drape Society, wears suit by Colin Taub What’s so special about TEDS? Like-minded people with that dangerous 1950s look. Describe TEDS in three words. Ambassadors of Style. What’s your favourite movie? Rock Around the Clock.
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SEEN | The Edwardian Drape Society
Fulham Phil, 55, carpenter, wears suit by Colin Taub What’s so special about TEDS? It reflects the style of the original Teddy boys from the 1950s. Who’s your favourite musician? Bill Haley. What’s your favourite movie? Rock You Sinners.
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Ritchie Gee, 60, president of TEDS, wears suit by Colin Taub; shoes by Colin the Shoe Man Mad Andy Munday, 59, landscape gardener, wears suit by Colin Taub; shirt by Thomas Nash What’s so special about TEDS? The camaraderie throughout the world. Cars and bikes with fins and chrome. Describe TEDS in three words. Sharp as tack. Who’s your favourite musician? Bill Haley and His Comets. What’s your favourite movie? Badlands.
What’s so special about TEDS? It is preserving the style and image of the early 1950s Teds. Describe TEDS in three words. Cool. Sharp. Hot. Who’s your favourite musician? Gene Vincent. What’s your favourite movie? Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
SEEN | The Edwardian Drape Society
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Bernie wears denim tuxedo by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; vintage hat from Stetson, courtesy of Hobo Hats.
Levi’s Vintage Clothing denim tuxedo
When a denim-clad Bing Crosby was refused entry to a Canadian hotel back in 1951, denim was still considered the preserve of cowboys and working men – certainly not appropriate attire within the cozy confines of a social establishment. When news of this reached Levi’s, the company famously created a denim tuxedo for Crosby, replete with a corsage of its famous red tabs. Levi’s Vintage Clothing has, finally, plundered the archive to remake this unique jacket. levisvintageclothing.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Gemma Shane Words Edward Moore Club Manager Bernie Katz Location The Groucho Club, 45 Dean St, London W1 thegrouchoclub.com
NEWS
Brent Atchley, ‘Backside Disaster’, New Orleans, 2006
A Life in Transition by Brian Gaberman
Brian Gaberman manages to capture the sheer exhilaration and gravity-defying magic of skateboarding like no other photographer, and having travelled extensively with the Element skating fraternity for the past seven years, A Life in Transition is a beautiful document to that world. But why the title? “My life has two very different halves,” Gaberman explains. “On one side, I travel the world with a bunch of young skaters, having adventures, getting stuck in a van listening to bad rap music and breathing too much smoke, all the while making pictures of a thing I love very much. On the other side, when I’m at home, I’m living a very grounded, slow-paced life as a father, small-scale farmer, permaculture student, and artist. The two halves stand in great contrast to each other; I’m in a constant state of transition.” elementbrand.com gaberman.com Words Edward Moore
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Fred Perry Blank Canvas by Jamie Reid
Jamie Reid is probably most familiar for his collaborative work with the Sex Pistols. He worked with the band for four years, creating the cover art for Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and ‘God Save the Queen’. Always staunchly independent, Reid’s work is driven by his political, social and spiritual convictions. It’s this unrelenting British rebel spirit that attracted Fred Perry to invite him to collaborate on their latest Blank Canvas series. His three designs are inspired by Reid’s previous work and his publishing house Suburban Press. fredperry.com jamiereid.org
NEWS
Photograph John Marchant Words Edward Moore
The Photobook: A History Volume III
Photography is all around us; everywhere we look, and with advances in smartphone technology, today we are all snappers. So, sometimes it is hard to step back and take notice of something increasingly ubiquitous. The acclaimed Photobook series, now on its third volume, aims to do just that. Curated by British photographer and collector Martin Parr and curator Gerry Badger, this weighty tome highlights the variety of genres within the medium and helps create an understanding of the role photography plays in our lives. phaidon.com
Vespa
When Piaggio launched the Vespa (Italian for ‘wasp’) in 1946 it was marketed as an affordable mode of transport for a nation with a blighted post-war economy. The manageable price tag meant it was available to teenagers; useful for mobility and freedom but, more importantly, brilliant for posing, especially with a girl on the back, her arms around the driver’s waist. These young Italian ‘poseurs’, in turn, influenced UK mods who loved the clean Italian lines. This book charts the history of this little scooter from its humble beginnings. prestel.com
Words Edward Moore
Words Edward Moore
This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk
Chat Rap, 1983, directed by John Scarlett-Davis
This April, the British Film Institute hosts a season of 20 films by key figures from the post-punk era, including Grayson Perry, John Maybury and Cerith Wyn Evans, looking at protagonists such as Siouxsie Sioux and Leigh Bowery. The festival opens with a live performance by post-punk industrial maestros 23 Skidoo against a backdrop of their 1982 Seven Songs video by Richard Heslop. bfi.org.uk Words Edward Moore
w w w. b a r b o u r. c o m
NEWS
Night Bus
Night Bus is the first feature from director Simon Baker. As any Londoner will tell you, the night-bus journey is one of chance encounters and intrigue. “I like characters,” explains Baker. “And through open casting, I based characters around the chosen actors’ strengths and qualities.” Simon slickly confines his varied ensemble of actors, which allows for emotional, dialogue-driven vignettes. nightbusmovie.com Words Edward Moore
Blue Rondo à la Turk
When the pop world went all frilly shirts and angular eye make-up in the early 1980s, one band came along – decked in zoot suits and arched eyebrows – trying jazz, funk and Latin grooves out in the pop-mad marketplace. Blue Rondo à la Turk was a 10-piece band comprising vocalists Christos Tolera and Jocks&Nerds associate editor Chris Sullivan, and guitarist Mark Reilly, among others. Their remastered debut album Chewing the Fat, with remixes by Andrew Weatherall and Faze Action, is out in June. Photograph Katrina Baer Words John Patrick
Notch London
Alan Ma and Christian Sanderson met while working at Firetrap and set up menswear label Notch with a common desire to make hard-wearing, functional clothes. “Understated yet stylish – comfortable yet polished, unique yet highly wearable,” as creative director Christian puts it. Noting demand for choice in menswear, they make “immaculately constructed clothing with clever, not in-your-face detailing”. notchlondon.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Gemma Shane Words Edward Moore Screenwriter Danny Chan dannychan.uk@gmail.com
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Mark Reilly, Christos Tolera and Chris Sullivan
Wax and Levi’s Made&Crafted
When Levi’s Made&Crafted wanted to translate the surf, sea and moonlit reverie of its summer collection, the company turned to hip east-coast independent surf magazine Wax. Far from the stock image-infested affairs these magazines can often become, Wax is a beautifully crafted and carefully curated operation that extends stylistically far beyond the confines of the magazine’s subject matter. readwax.com levismadeandcrafted.com
NEWS
Photograph Janette Beckman Words Edward Moore Creative Directors Zak Kluck, David Yun and Aeriel Brown
Caps: One Size Fits All
Put together by Steve Bryden, streetwear guru and co-founder of sneaker website Crooked Tongues, this book takes a look at the multifaceted appeal of the trusty cap. “The cap is such an important piece of apparel that it gets overlooked by mainstream fashion,” he explains of Caps: One Size Fits All. “This has been the case for the last 20 years but I feel it’s now at an alltime high. I wanted to catalogue this movement in the book.” prestel.com crookedtongues.com Photograph Kat Green Words Edward Moore
Steve Bryden, author
DIY/Underground Skateparks
Skating is, for most, an amateur affair – hanging out with friends near home. Irish photographer Richard Gilligan has spent four years travelling Europe and the US taking studied portraits of the wealth of homemade skateparks used by skating’s majority. His series of images, often without people, makes a prosaic companion about skating and human leisure and interaction. richgilligan.com prestel.com Words Edward Moore
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NEWS
Pipe Dreams by Alan Aldridge
One of the great art directors of the 1960s, Alan Aldridge worked with the likes of the Beatles, and his designs graced Penguin book covers. His life’s been just as colourful as his kaleidoscopic artwork: in this romping book he regales with stories of prison in France and lunches with Picasso. spellbindingmedia.co.uk Words Edward Moore
Margate Meltdown
It’s been 50 years since the famous Bank Holiday clash between mods and rockers in Margate, and the Margate Meltdown is an annual commemorative ride from London’s Ace Cafe to the seaside resort. The animosity no longer exists but Ace Cafe owner and Meltdown organiser Mark Wilsmore says things never change. “The music, the clothes and terminology change with each generation; the drive, passion and emotion is constant. Dig down a little and we all find we’re either a mod or a rocker.” The Margate Meltdown takes place on 26 May ace-cafe-london.com Words Edward Moore
Francis Bebey Psychedelic Sanza Tracks 1975–1982
Francis Bebey moved to Paris from his home in Douala, Cameroon in the mid-1950s to study music at the Sorbonne. But it was as a writer that he first gained acclaim. He won the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noir for his novel Le fils d’Agathe Moudio (Agatha Moudio’s Son, 1967) and then wrote extensively on traditional African music, starting with Musique de l’Afrique (African Music, 1969). A broadcaster and songwriter before turning to electronic music, he wanted to break down colonial attitudes towards Africa with technology, and spread an appreciation in the west of the music he loved. The result was, perhaps, the opposite – alien, fourth-world music way ahead of its time, as chronicled on 2012 compilation African Electronic Music 1975-1982. He spoke of how the sounds of the electronic equipment were elastic, “like they were moulded from the new materials like nylon, rhovyl, polyester”. The studio became Bebey’s playground as he embraced the new possibilities of ‘sound-on-sound’ layering of. While there were certainly other African electronic pioneers, such as William Onyeabor of Nigeria, Bebey’s work stood alone – pure, experimental minimalism that still sounds progressive today. Thumb pianos, African percussion, keyboards/drum machines and odd time signatures mixed up to mesmerising effect in what was hugely prophetic music. bornbadrecords.net Words Andy Thomas
Style Wars 2
When Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver released their film Style Wars in 1983, graffiti was still a marginal, young art form. Today, there is a global army of taggers and artists commissioned by companies and pasting ideas and messages onto the urban landscape. So, it comes as little surprise that a couple of young European guys, informed about graffiti’s history, should wish to pay homage to this groundbreaking film. Enter Style Wars 2, created by Veli Silver (no relation) and Amos Angeles, who have travelled the world to document graffiti today and explore its role and meaning. stylewars2.com Photograph Janette Beckman Words Edward Moore Graffiti Writer Devi
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www
NEWS
Tommy Hilfiger True to the Blue
Still a teenager, Tommy Hilfiger’s first foray into fashion involved selling bell-bottoms from the trunk of his car with his buddy in 1968. This quickly developed into a chain of stores, People’s Place, in upstate New York. With no training, Hilfiger was soon designing men’s clothes for the store. The eponymous brand was born, and both blue denim and a stylised ideal of the American lifestyle were to be central to its success. ‘True to the Blue’ is a new collection paying homage to both. tommy.com Photograph Chris Tang Styling Gemma Shane Words Edward Moore Denim heads Lindsey K Aliksanyan lkalka.com and Olatunji Sunmolah sambalux.com
Under the Influence: John Deakin and the Lure of Soho
The art critic John Russell said John Deakin’s portraits “had a dead-centred, unrhetorical quality. A complete human being was set before us, without additives.” It’s a wonderful assessment of a man who bitterly engaged with life. Although he had worked for Vogue (and was fired twice), Deakin’s favourite subject was people. He spent time taking photographs on the streets of Rome and Paris before falling in with the 1950s Soho set; lording it at The Colony Rooms with Francis Bacon and chums. It is this period of his life that is the focus of an upcoming exhibition. Under the Influence: John Deakin and the Lure of Soho runs from 11 April to 13 July thephotographersgallery.org.uk Words Edward Moore
Original Peter
Named after a cult 1970 jazz record by Mike Westbrook, Original Peter was conceived over a late-night conversation between record collectors Jonny Trunk and Ed Griffiths. “We saw that in the past 20 years, the standard record bag had not changed, it’s still just a plain old bag made of cheap, black nylon,” says Jonny, of Trunk Records. “We wanted something more fitting of the more stylish, cultured record buyer.” Handmade by Brady Bags in Walsall using double-layered waterproof canvas and saddle leather, the Record Hunting Bag’s as stylish and resilient as a pair of old brogues. originalpeter.com Words Andy Thomas Photograph Orlando Gili Record Collector Jonny Trunk
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Girl in Café, late 1950s
Nick garcia PiTTsbURgh shOP ThE TROPicaL shiRT aND DEsOTO DENiM aT ELEMENTbRaND.cOM PhOTO by ELEMENT aDvOcaTE: bRiaN gabERMaN
@ELEMENTbRaND @ELEMENTEUROPE
NEWS
The Way of the Dodo
Any Londoner with a penchant for analogue cinema will be familiar with the Aladdin’s cave of a shop on a nondescript high street in north London run by an unassuming, middle-aged gent called Umit. His shop is up to the rafters with 8mm and 16mm films, VHS tapes, projectors and all kinds of old cinema and home-movie paraphernalia. Umit and film-maker Liam Saint-Pierre also run film night Ciné-Real in Hackney, playing classic movies on 16mm prints. The Way of the Dodo is Saint-Pierre’s documentary that tells Umit’s story as he fights to keep his passion and business alive. cine-real.com liamsaintpierre.com Words Edward Moore Photographs Liam Saint-Pierre
Denim Style by Horst Friedrichs East of Eden, 1955
Jocks&Nerds contributor Horst Friedrichs continues with his series of photographic books looking at style through subcultures. His latest, focused on denim, reveals the enduring appeal and cacophony of styles of this most alluring of fabrics through up-close and personal portraits. Denim Style is out in April prestel.com horstfriedrichs.com Words Edward Moore
James Dean
Dead by age 24 with only three starring roles under his belt, it’s remarkable that the public’s fascination with James Dean seems just as strong today as it was over 50 years ago. Now, his three famous films have been restored and will be in cinemas, most liking viewed on the big screen for the first time by not one but two generations. Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden and Giant are in selected cinemas in April parkcircus.com Words Edward Moore
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Rafe, Old Empire Motorcycles, wears jacket by Edwin
NEWS Slam Kicks
The humble basketball shoe, first designed by Converse in 1917 – the All Star – has risen to be the most appropriated of all sports shoes. Everyone – from PRO-Keds to Adidas and the enduring Nike Air Jordan franchise – has seen their designs move from the court to the feet of the style-conscious around the world. Slam Kicks: Basketball Sneakers that Changed the Game charts changes in styles over the past 100 years. rizzoliusa.com Words Edward Moore Photograph courtesy of Rick Telander
Polar Bear
Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland were the conjoined terrors who ten years ago reinvented jazz in London with their irreverent aesthetics. The latter were raucous and rockish, the former loose and dreamy. Both included drummer Sebastian Rochford (Polar Bear leader), saxophonist Pete Wareham (Acoustic Ladyland leader) and bassist Tom Herbert. Acoustic Ladyland is no more, but Polar Bear – now including second saxophonist Mark Lockheart and laptopist Leafcutter John – will release its fifth album, In Each and Every One, on The Leaf Label on 24 March. As spacious as its predecessors but more intense, it’s another blast of fresh air from a band that habitually rings the changes. polarbearmusic.com theleaflabel.com Words Chris May Photograph RJ Fernandez
Brazil: The Beautiful Game
As Brazil gears up to host this year’s World Cup, Christopher Pillitz’s book Brazil: The Beautiful Game serves as a timely reminder of the greatest footballing nation’s indelible passion for the game. After two decades photographing Brazilians at play, Pillitz’s images show everyone from barrio kids, monks and prisoners having a ‘kick about’. prestel.com Words Edward Moore
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ELMC.CO
PEOPLE
Kitten and the Hip
Ashley Slater is no ordinary trombonist. He was, in fact, once a trombonist in the regimental band of the Royal Scots, having moved to the UK from Canada via California. Things really started to happen in the 1980s when he joined hot jazzer collective Loose Tubes; after a gig at London venue Ronnie Scott’s, he was offered the chance to record his own project – funk conglomerate Microgroove, whose single ‘Walkin’ was remixed by Norman Cooke in 1993. This association provided Slater’s most commercial manifestation yet – he became one third of Freak Power with Fatboy Slim’s alter ego and the ‘Bass Cadet’, Jesse Graham. Now, his new live act enlists the singing, writing and performing skills of Kitten Quinn. Having established themselves over the last couple of years as a colourful and evocative live act – and with three singles in 2013 – Kitten and the Hip deliver a debut album this year on Pedigree Cuts. A mixture of tango, polka, big band, dub and ska, all underpinned by electro beats, the title also formally welcomes Slater’s latest collaborator: Hello Kitten. Hello Kitten is out 1 April kittenandthehip.com pedigreecuts.com Photograph David Goldman Words Mark Webster
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Ninja Star
Coconut shells were the building blocks that got Ninja Star started in this trade as a kid. Now at 45, DIY jewellery-making’s still his game. In his teens, Ninja was using forks to make “dem ting, ya know”, keeping it all metal. Gold and silver, leather and stones; these are his favourite materials now. The last thing Ninja made? A leather cuff with a gold border and ganja leaf, made of bone and two gems. sav@geejam.com Photograph Savannah Baker Words Edward Moore
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Eothen Alapatt
As manager of West Coast label Stones Throw, Eothen Alapatt, aka Egon, was responsible for coordinating influential cratedigging LPs like 2001’s The Funky 16 Corners, which saw Peanut Butter Wolf ’s label diversify from its hip-hop roots towards deeper funk. And that is the direction Egon took with his new label Now Again, releasing lost music by the likes of L.A. Carnival and Ebony Rhythm Band. But the label really became known for its international psych-funk with releases from as far afield as Indonesia and Iran. More recently he has been responsible for signing contemporary bands – ranging from the free funk of the Heliocentrics to the modern Californian soul of Myron & E. Meanwhile, his Red Bull Music Academy ‘Funk Archaeology’ column is essential reading for cratediggers wanting to get a little dustier. nowagainrecords.com Photograph Tim Hans Words Andy Thomas
Robert Randolph
“For most folks, pedal steel guitar stops with country music,” says Robert Randolph, leader of New Jersey’s the Family Band. “But for me, growing up in the African-American Pentecostal Church, there’s nothing strange about a black American playing pedal steel. It’s been a big part of our church music since the 1940s. I learnt to play it in church.” In the American Pentecostal community, pedal steel music is known as “sacred steel”. With the Family Band, Randolph has taken it in a secular direction. His recent Blue Note album Lickety Split is an amped-up, joyous, Saturday-night mix of rock, funk and gospel. Earlier this year, Randolph executive-produced the Concord label’s Robert Randolph Presents the Slide Brothers, a showcase for some of the older sacredsteel players. “These were the guys who inspired me to take up the instrument,” says Randolph. “They started the ultra-soulful trend that I’m still trying to play. I didn’t start this music any more than Stevie Ray Vaughan started the blues. We’re both just trying to get something heard.” Randolph and the Family Band played Ronnie Scott’s in August. They hope to be back in London in a bigger space this spring. robertrandolph.net Photograph Janette Beckman Words Chris May
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PEOPLE
Gerald Short
A serious collector-turned-dealer of rare vinyl, ‘Jazzman’ Gerald Short set up his label in the mid-1990s – seeing the crowd reaction to one of his obscure 45s at a Munich club finally convinced him there was a market for a 45s reissue label aimed at the deeper end of the jazz, soul and funk spectrum. That track was Kathleen Emery’s ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ and was typical of the early output of the label. Always immaculately pressed with that all-important, sharp logo, Jazzman Records’ limited presses made them even more in demand. Label offshoots like Soul 7 and Popcorn have become equally soughtafter, and the label has since branched out by reissuing equally rare LPs – including the Holy Grail series of private-press releases by the likes of Uncle Funkenstein and Ohio Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble. The progression to new artists was a natural one and has so far seen stellar LPs from the Greg Foat Group and the Sign of Four. The label’s motto ‘We Dig Deeper’ has seen Gerald held at gunpoint in New Orleans and mugged in Milwaukee in his search for vinyl. He remains one of the most respected diggers on the world scene and we’re thankful he continues to share that deep knowledge through his many releases. jazzmanrecords.co.uk Photograph Orlando Gili Words Andy Thomas
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Vernon Reid
A New York resident since 1960, guitarist Vernon Reid – founder of rock band Living Colour and a founding member of campaigning collective the Black Rock Coalition – was born in London. “I was less than two years old when we left,” says Reid, “so I don’t remember a thing. I started out in a place I don’t remember. When I’m in London it seems like a ghost city. It’s slightly unsettling. Not in an uncomfortable way. But it’s weird.” Is the anglicised spelling of Living Colour a nod to Reid’s birthplace? “Actually, I spelt it like that because I thought it looked cool,” he says. “For an American, there’s a hint of mystery in spelling ‘color’ the British way.” The Black Rock Coalition was set up in 1985 to fight record industry perceptions that authentic rock music could only be made by white musicians. It is still needed, says Reid. “Race, ethnicity and tribe are all big muddles. The panic of mixing, the panic of what happens across the tracks. These things take decades, maybe centuries, to unravel. The BRC is still busy.” A new Living Colour album will be released this year. livingcolour.com blackrockcoalition.org Photograph Janette Beckman Words Chris May
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PEOPLE Stone Foundation
Bass player Neil Sheasby and singer Neil Jones are the driving force behind Stone Foundation, an ‘undiscovered’ band with five albums and a serious live CV under the belt. “We’ve been chipping away at our little niche,” said Sheasby late last year before a gig supporting the Blow Monkeys and Dr Robert. “We’re part of that long tradition of Brits into American soul music. That’s our basic influence, but we wanted to put our own take on it. We also grew up with bands like Dexy’s [Midnight Runners], the Jam, Elvis Costello.” All well and good, but with the two Neils it doesn’t have to be just done, but done right. “We’ve been knocking at the door a few years now,” continues Jones, “but it’s come together and feels absolutely right. From when we supported the Specials onwards, things started to click.” Since those shows in 2011 they’ve supported the Selecter and recently toured Japan, and their Hammond and horn-driven sound is where they want it, supplemented on the new album by an impressive array of guest singers – Andy Fairweather Low, Carleen Anderson, Dexy’s Pete Williams, US import Nolan Porter, Dennis Bovell weighing in with a remix, and our own Paolo Hewitt with a poetic interlude. “We had a few false starts,” says Sheasby, “but we constantly wrote songs while we evolved the sound. Now, we think we’re there.” To Find the Spirit is out on CD and vinyl on 10 March. The band is currently touring the UK stonefoundation.co.uk Photograph Chris Tang Words Mark Webster
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Robert Saloman
“A trade in prison, a craft throughout the years of experience and the art which remains,” summarises Robert Saloman on the progress of his career. As a builder, carpenter, artisan and craftsman, Saloman is a multidisciplinary professional working with a range of materials. Learning his trade behind bars in his youth, Saloman’s skills now takes him all over England, working for the National Trust and a range of private clients. His latest efforts include the restoration of a 400-year-old farmhouse in Tring, Hertfordshire, and an 18th-century dovecote. Aside from his various projects, Saloman also spends time working on his London-moored canal boat. robertsaloman.co.uk Photograph Emma Freemantle Words Edward Moore
Alex Reinke
You’re sure to be greeted with a grin at the door of Alex Kofuu Reinke Horikitsune’s underground studio. He’s a happy guy but tradition’s a serious thing, and Alex is steeped in the stuff in a unique way. His master is Horiyoshi III, the greatest irezumi artist alive. German-born Alex was the first westerner to learn irezumi (traditional Japanese tattooing) under apprenticeship and, with a year-long waiting list, is sought-after by westerners wishing to take irezumi’s long path. “My artist name, Horikitsune, was given to me by my master,” Alex says. “It means ‘carving fox’. He saw my family crest, with its two foxes, and named me after them.” Interested in karate at age 12, Alex was given a book on irezumi designs. He sketched dragon after dragon, koi after koi, and soon found himself with a passion and the skill to match. When he’d saved enough to start on his own body suit, he sought out Horiyoshi III who, though initially reluctant to take on an apprentice, accepted Alex into his family in 1998. Alex attained his mastership in 2001, going on to join Frith Street Tattoo in 2008. He went his own way a few years ago. “It’s a great shop and always bustling,” says Alex. “I, on the other hand, needed silence and tranquility.” Osen II is out now through Alex and fellow irezumi artist Matti Senju Sedholm Horimatsu’s publishing house Kofuu-Senju. horikitsune.de kspublishers.com Photograph Ross Trevail Words Edward Moore
42
PEOPLE Moses Boyd
London drummer Moses Boyd picked up the sticks at the age of 13 and discovered jazz soon after. Delving into the music of Duke Ellington and the greats, his main inspiration was jazzfusion drummer Tony Williams – but Moses also looked closer to home for inspiration. A Tomorrow’s Warriors Jam Session regular at Spice of Life in Soho, he was introduced to British jazz players. The Trinity Laban student was soon playing alongside original Jazz Warrior, bassist, educator and Tomorrow’s Warriors founder Gary Crosby, as well as other titans of British jazz like Denys Baptiste and Soweto Kinch. Crosby became something of a mentor, and playing alongside him gave Boyd maturity and style beyond his years. At the age of 22, he now leads various ensembles like an old master, his deft rolls, inventive rim shots and complex rhythm shifts as impressive as his arrangements. facebook.com/moses.boyd.7 Photograph Orlando Gili Words Andy Thomas
Diggs Duke
The name Diggs Duke is somehow perfectly suited for Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide radio show. It’s a moniker that would sit just as easily in the musician credits on one of those Reid Miles-designed Blue Note covers as it would a hype chart of neo soul. The truth is, the music emerging from the Washington, DC musician sits somewhere between those two schools. “Diggs Duke takes an avant-garde beatmaker’s approach to making soul music… Frank Ocean meets Madlib and iconic pianist Andrew Hill,” said Peterson, whose Brownswood Recordings has rather aptly released Duke’s new LP Offering for Anxious. diggsduke.com Photograph Janette Beckman Words Andy Thomas
PEOPLE
Shabaka Hutchings
There was a time when the biggest compliment you could give a British jazz musician was to say he or she sounded American. No longer. Neo-Americanism is fading fast. London bandleader, saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings is among a generation of players shaping a new aesthetic. A regular performer with Brit-jazz pioneers Polar Bear, Hutchings’ band Sons of Kemet won the 2013 MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act. The group’s debut album Burn explores Hutchings’ Caribbean heritage in the context of modern British urban culture. “Living in London, there isn’t time to care about traditional definitions of the music,” says Hutchings. “We’re not Americans, so we don’t have to carry that cultural flag. We might have learned from American exponents, but then you realise that it’s actually their music. You have to create your own. Culture is always in flux. It’s something you can change.” Hutchings’ other band The Comet is Coming – its name taken from an old BBC Radiophonic Workshop recording – promises to shake jazz definitions up again. The group’s debut album will be released later this year. shabakahutchings.com Photograph Chris Tang Words Chris May
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Will wears jacket by Members Only; trousers by Polo Ralph Lauren; sweater by Paul Smith; trainers by Converse. Joe wears sweater by Hackett; shorts by Pringle; shirt by Sunspel; trainers by Superga.
46
DETAIL
The Players
Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Grooming Emily McEwan using Bumble and Bumble and Kiehl’s Styling Assistant Rhianna Alvarado Sportsmen Will Grundy and Joe Location Stoke Newington School, Clissold Rd, London N16 sns.hackney.sch.uk
Will wears jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; sweater by Russell Athletic Archive. Joe wears jacket by Pringle; sweater by Russell Athletic Archive.
Joe wears jacket by Baracuta; tank top by Polo Ralph Lauren; shirt by A.P.C. Will wears jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; trousers by Paul Smith; sweater and shirt by Hackett.
DETAIL | The Players
Will wears jacket by Penfield; sweater by Russell Athletic Archive; shorts by Paul Smith. Joe wears jacket by Baracuta; trousers by Pringle; sweater by A.P.C.; shirt by Sunspel.
49
GALLERY
South Beach Photographs Jamel Shabazz Words Miss Rosen
UBW happens every Memorial Day weekend at Miami’s South Beach. An annual hip-hop festival held in the tradition of the legendary Freakniks of the 1990s, it has become the spot for people to show out. The events attract a mix of ballers and babes who spend a week partying in private villas and clubs up and down luxurious South Beach. Celebrating the start of summer, UBW attracts upwards of a quarter of a million
people every year, ready for fun in the sun and sex on the beach drenched in shots. Performers have included Flo Rida, Mr Vegas, Shaggy, Bow Wow, Funkmaster Flex, Fat Joe and Pitbull. Photographer Jamel Shabazz has brought his camera down to South Beach five times since 2004, each year imbuing his work with the same generosity of spirit, pride and humility that is at once exuberant, sexy, and
effortlessly charming. These shots are well situated in Shabazz’s larger body of work, nuzzling comfortably between his energetic West Indian Carnival shots and New York City street portraits made famous in his blockbuster 2001 monograph Back in the Days. Shabazz, a Brooklyn native, explains his Miami series as “a continuation of my work from the 1980s and 1990s; to show how life was – the culture, the
style, the personality. In the 1990s, I was documenting GreekFest at Jones Beach [NY ]. I did that for five years; it had the same type of energy – the cops, the music, the bikes, the fashion, the women. This is why they go down to Urban Beach Week.” “The energy was phenomenal just arriving at the airport. There were young people, students who were just out of school. It has a positive spirit;
a really good vibration. There is no negativity. There’s gang culture, and crews all in red or blue – and they walk by each other without conflict. There is a good balance of men and women.” Shabazz makes it a habit to connect with his subjects on a personal level. His photographs remind us of this, like nothing else; that despite the diversity of ethnicity, culture, and custom, there’s something that unites these people.
“Each image is a visual record of the countless encounters I have with young people,” he says. “Since picking up my first camera nearly 35 years ago I was intrigued by how people in my community represented themselves. As time passed, I embarked on a selfimposed assignment to document the people around me. I’ve been fortunate to meet many wonderful and diverse people from around the globe, and > 51
GALLERY | South Beach
each experience enriched me in ways that far surpassed what I had learned in history books.” Shabazz is thus witness to several truths at the same time, documenting both the positive energies and cultural pride of the hip-hop generation living the high life – and the darker side of America, as it exists in the relationship between the public and police. Shabazz stays independent, never aligning with a single group but always moving between different societies and circles. Carrying The Art of Peace in one pocket and The Art of War in the other, Shabazz can transcend society’s boundaries. He has certainly born witness to the heavy hand of authority at Urban Beach Week. As it became infamous for its parties, police altercations increased, with stop-and-frisk tactics resulting
in hundreds of arrests for disorderly conduct, intoxication and drug-related activities. Tensions between police and
‘IT HAS A POSITIVE SPIRIT... THE NEGATIVITY IS A RESULT OF THE POLICE’ attendees came to a head with the fatal shooting of Raymond Herisse in 2011. Police opened fire on his car – of 116
shots, 16 hit Herisse. Four others were wounded. All victims were unarmed. Shabazz observes, “The negativity is a result of the police. You can see it. I documented it on Collins Avenue. The police were stopping cars at gunpoint, pulling them out onto the floor, then they let them go. They did it over and over again. Their tactics were aggressive. But I understand the perspective. I study them and engage them in conversation. Cops witness so much violence and have a disdain for the culture; they can’t put aside their personal feelings and prejudices, especially when they don’t want to be there. They think they have probable cause to approach with their guns drawn. I don’t agree with that. I think they’re overreacting.” Shabazz’s UBW series is a chapter in his lifelong documentation of > 53
GALLERY | South Beach
African-American culture. His photographs literally capture the next generation; he recognises that he and his subjects are travelling a similar and well-worn path. “There’s a large population from Brooklyn that goes down to Urban Beach Week every year. I saw faces that reminded me of people I knew; it turned out I had photographed their mothers and their fathers back in the days. These were children of the 1980s; they all had the book.
“There were moments down in South Beach when I would go into a slight depression, wondering what the future would hold for those that stood before my lens. I couldn’t help but think about the countless young people I had photographed in the past that had fallen prematurely. Upon capturing my subjects, I wished them the best and departed often with a firm handshake, knowing I would not see many of them again, but feeling satisfaction knowing
I had recorded an aspect of their lives that would withstand the test of time.” Shabazz has truly come full circle as he plans a new book of this work, which offers an honest and compelling look at the world he bears witness to – each photograph a second of his life. South Beach: Another Path by Jamel Shabazz is out in May jamelshabazz.com 55
Johnathan Joseph aka DJ Spoony, DJ, broadcaster and producer, member of UK Garage DJs, The Dreem Teem
Gavin Watson, photographer. His work includes the books Skins, Skins & Punks and Raving ’89 shootgroup.com
Kickers Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross
Inspired by the freewheeling spirit of change in the late 1960s – and, in particular, the Paris student riots and the musical Hair – Kickers stomped onto the scene in the early 1970s, a splash of bright colour and youth in a dour, beige world. With a distinctive cleated outsole and inspired by jean design, it is hardly surprising that the Kick Hi has been adopted by key youth tribes in the UK throughout the past 40 years. Neither bovver boot nor rude-boy shoe, the Kickers shoe was first notably adopted by casuals in Liverpool in 1977. Since then, Kickers have been a staple, adorning the feet of ravers, Madchester baggies and smooth UK garage fans. Today, a pioneering generation of go-getting creatives is making new footsteps in their Kickers. Jocks&Nerds’ series of interviews Footprints: A Walk Through Five Decades of UK Style and Subculture – in association with Kickers – will launch the new jocksandnerds.com this spring kickers.co.uk 56
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Kevin Sampson, author of Awaydays and authority on casuals culture redunionfilms.com
Hal Hudson, manager of drum-and-bass artist Benny Page bennypagemusic.com Savannah Baker, stylist. Has worked with Rita Ora and Lana Del Rey savannahgbaker.com
Ian Tilton, photographer. A key figure in the Manchester scene, he has worked with the Stone Roses, the Smiths and Inspiral Carpets, among others iantilton.net
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CINEMA
Martin Hannett
The Factory Sound. Manchester. The Invisible Girls. Joy Division. Martin Zero Words Andy Thomas Photographs courtesy of John Cooper Clarke and Chris Hewitt
alongside Joe Meek, Phil Spector and the other producer geniuses of the 20th century sits the lesser-venerated Martin Hannett. He passed away in 1991 aged 42, having created a sonic signature through studio innovations and original use of electronics, leaving behind a set of recordings that proved enormously influential. Although best-known for his echo-laden Factory Records productions, his contribution to Manchester’s music scene goes back to the 1960s. A new documentary – He Wasn’t Just the Fifth Member of Joy Division – by old friend Chris Hewitt, seeks to tell his real story. “I wanted to get past the stereotype that Martin was invented at the same time as Factory,” says Hewitt. “He wasn’t just a product of punk – he had a wider scope.” Born James Martin Hannett in Miles Platting, north Manchester in 1948, his obsession with sound began as a teen. “There were small electronic shops at the bottom of Oldham Road and Rochdale Road in Manchester and I’d be dispatched with incomprehensible notes to hand over in their murky depths and come back with some crucial bit of equipment,” his sister Julie told Hewitt. He had a huge record collection and listened intensely to their production on his high-end equipment. While his peers enjoyed Simon & Garfunkel’s melodic pop on Sounds of Silence, young Martin’s ears were tuned to the echo chamber used at the CBS studios where it was recorded. While studying chemistry at the University of Manchester Institute and Technology (UMIST) and inspired by the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, Hannett picked up the bass, his first
instrument. He played with a few groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first to make a name being Spider Mike King. “I lived above a record shop in Rusholme and Martin lived around the back,” says drummer Bruce Mitchell. “Martin and Mike used to play together. I had a basement and we put egg boxes around, and [they’d] bang away down there forever.” Mitchell, as an offshoot of his band Greasy Bear, also dealt high-end equipment out of GB Audio. “Sound was more important than anything to Martin,” says Mitchell. “He would go without food and save up to buy a piece of equipment. He’d be able get first shout on the latest gear, like the Quad 405 current-dumping amplifier – that was very exotic then, very hi-spec and Martin had to have it. He wanted to try every new thing and analyse it.” Hannett met another important collaborator at a Soft Machine gig he was promoting in 1971. “Martin had graduated but was still working with the student social secretaries at UMIST putting on various gigs,” recalls Steve Hopkins. “He wanted cannabis for the band and a mutual friend called me in as ‘someone who might know someone who could oblige’ – which was indeed true. We got on instantly.” Through the pair’s shared love of music and sonic experimentation, a musical partnership began. “Our friend flagged the fact I was a keyboardist, which got him excited and we set up a date to visit his pad and have a jam,” says Hopkins. Hannett joined promotion collective Music Force soon after. “It was like an agency putting together all the bands on
a roster and then booking them out,” says Mitchell. “It was set up with a proper constitution but it was all quite alternative then. I was a hippy; Martin was more obscure than a hippy.” With Music Force co-conspirators Tosh Ryan and Lawrence Beadle, Hannett launched Rabid Records from a room in Cotton Lane. Both entities were vital building blocks in the musical future of the city, as critic Jon Savage explains: “Punk didn’t spring out of nowhere. There was an alternative scene and structures before then. And Martin was a big part of that in Manchester.” Hannett became an inhouse producer for Rabid working on the first releases by Slaughter & the Dogs and Jilted John, an early Graham Fellows incarnation. He also honed his production skills for theatre group Belt and Braces Roadshow Band, as well as on an avant-garde electronic soundtrack to science-fiction cartoon All Sorts of Heroes, co-written with Steve Hopkins. His first production of note – under the moniker Martin Zero – was the Buzzcocks Spiral Scratch EP in January 1977. “Martin was the only person we knew in Manchester that was known as, or called themselves, a producer,” singer Howard Devoto says. But Hannett felt restricted by the sessions. “I was trying to do things and the engineer was turning them off when I looked round: ‘You don’t put that kind of echo on a snare drum!’” he told Savage. “It was never finished. I’d have whipped it away and remixed it but he erased the master because he thought it such rubbish.” The Hannett-Hopkins partnership was cemented when their collective the >
59
Invisible Girls provided the music for John Cooper Clarke’s Disguise in Love. “One of Martin’s big ambitions was to form a collective of talented musicians who would work together on diverse projects with different front men and women,” says Hopkins. “He called us the Invisible Girls, and occasionally the Cheese Nightmares, which didn’t catch on so well.” The group would variously include Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column and 10cc drummer Paul Burgess. “Martin always recognised that different musicians brought different vibes and he was a keen talent-spotter. He gave musicians space to try out ideas and tended to record everything. If he was getting something that he felt was too ordinary or dull, he devised methods for getting musicians out of their comfort zone. But there was no formula; everything was very spontaneous,” says Hopkins. Disguise in Love was the first of three Clarke LPs the Invisible Girls played on, including 1980’s definitive Snap Crackle & Bop. Behind the Salford punk poet’s street musings (that reached their zenith on ‘Beasley Street’), they created an innovative tapestry of sound and texture that Hopkins says was influenced by everything from the Radio 4 shipping forecast to Pierre Henry. “It was highly experimental,” he says. “The sounds themselves were becoming as important, if not more, than the harmonies and melodies of before. So, goodbye organ solo and hello distorted, mangled piano. “On ‘I Don’t Wanna be Nice’, for instance, the effect that sounds like a crazy steel band is just a delay echo on the vocals coming through Martin’s favourite device, the Marshall Time Modulator.” Hannett’s famous reverb was achieved by using the studio’s lift shaft as an echo chamber, just as Joe Meek created his trademark reverb in a bathroom. “Martin loved echo; he’d try anything and everything,” says Hopkins. “He once dragged us up a three-mile hill in Saddleworth just to record him performing a poem in an old quarry.” With much more in common with experimenters like Meek and Spector than the homogonous three-chord punk bands that would follow in the wake of the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks, Hannett 60
yearned for experimental outlets for the sounds in his head. “They were different from punk,” he told Jon Savage on first hearing Joy Division. “There was lots of space in their sound.” His first work for the band was two tracks from A Factory Sample, alongside Cabaret Voltaire and the Durutti Column. Recorded at Cargo Studios in October 1978, ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’ were, in the words of Factory biographer James Nice, “a huge leap forward for both band and producer… elevating the raw post-punk power they produced onstage towards pure sonic architecture.” The sound owed a lot to a new piece of Hannett equipment: the AMS Digital Delay. It would be just one of the tools used to create his production ‘thumbprint’ and what became known as the Manchester Sound. He told Savage:
‘HANNETT WAS WEIRD AND SCARED THE HELL OUT OF US’ “When digital effects came in at the end of the 1970s, there was a quantum leap in ambience control. You had as many flavours as you could invent. You could whack it into little attention-grabbing things, into the ambient environment.” The synthesisers that became studio staples included the Transcendent 2000, ARP Omni and ARP 2600. Hannett’s experimentations with those synths can be heard on Maverick Producer, Genius and Musician released on Hewitt’s Ozit label. He loved experimenting, pushing technology to the limit. “If instruction books said don’t ever turn anything beyond this setting, the first thing he’d do was turn it beyond that setting to see what happened,” says Hewitt. Helping him with the gadgets was old UMIST friend, ‘electronics genius’ Martin Usher – who worked closely with Joy Division and later New Order. “Two things that spring to mind were hooking up a Mini Pops drum machine to an external drive
source,” he says, “and our eternal search for the compressor to make the bass sound like it was knocking on wood.” Fixated on finding the sounds in his head, Hannett’s studio eccentricity is the stuff of legend. “Play faster, but slower,” he told A Certain Ratio, in the studio to record ‘All Night Party’. “Martin was a comical guy and frequently obscure,” says Mitchell. “His sense of humour was sometimes incomprehensible.” In the new documentary, late Factory Records boss Tony Wilson provides an insight into Hannett’s techniques: “As well as the great soundscapes and his incredible work on that, he had this sociological work in the studio whereby he would put groups under incredible pressure, and would actually pull their brains around, sort of surrealistically, and get things out of them.” Steve Hopkins recalls his partner’s infamous studio riddles: “I understood his off-beam, surreal descriptions of musical styles; not every musician could tolerate that... [but] his penchant for producing chord sequences or melodies by a random number generator could be frustrating.” While Hopkins may’ve understood Hannett, others found him baffling at best. “Hannett was weird and scared the hell out of us. At one point he just climbed under the desk and went to sleep,” OMD’s Andy McCluskey says. His production of ‘Electricity’/’Almost’ in 1979 riled the singer: “Our version of ‘Almost’ was really tight and poppy, but he’d laid it back and covered it in echo. It was a pop song and he turned it into this totally lethargic ballad.” In his quest for his own sound, he is often portrayed as dismissive of other ideas. “Martin was quite secretive,” says Hewitt. “He liked to experiment in the control room, so it was almost like the musicians were a less important part of the equation.” Joy Division and New Order’s Peter Hook later outlined to the NME the strain at their sessions: “In the studio, we’d sit on the left, he’d sit on the right and if we said anything like, ‘I think the guitars are a bit quiet, Martin,’ he’d scream, ‘Oh my god! Why don’t you just fuck off, you stupid retards.’” But whatever his relationship with musicians, there’s no doubting the brilliance of the music he was producing
CINEMA | Martin Hannett
Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and Martin Hannett at Cargo Studios, 1979
during this time, music founded on his own compulsive and boundary-pushing work ethic, an ethic that would create one of Factory’s true masterpieces. Recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, the monumental first Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures was released in its legendary Peter Saville radio-wave sleeve in June 1979. Martin Hannett’s first album for the band was loved by Tony Wilson and the press, but hated by Joy Division – except for singer Ian Curtis. “The production inflicted his dark, doomy mood over the album,” said guitarist Bernard Sumner. But Jon Savage reflected the album’s critical acclaim, calling it “a definitive northerngothic statement: guilt-ridden, romantic,
claustrophobic”. The band he had first seen live “were very, very loud, and hard and heavy. So Unknown Pleasures, when I first heard it, was quite a shock. It was very much produced with Martin as the auteur,” which included using the studio elevator as an echo chamber. “I went into Strawberry when Martin was recording,” explains Savage. “And I remember him putting a Leslie speaker in the lift and was recording it. And that became the start of ‘Insight’. So I was aware that Martin was into effects and ambient sounds. And also the noise of the room, which is very important when you are thinking about Joy Division, because they reflected the environment they were in. That would very much have been
Martin’s doing.” The album’s ambience also had other sources, as Savage says. “He used to smoke shed loads of dope and it was very strong. I would always get super-stoned when I was with him. And we’d drive around forgotten bits of Manchester late at night – completely fascinating, derelict parts of town.” And he also looked above for inspiration. “He loved science fiction, like Dr Who, and he subscribed to Omni, which covered all things to do with aliens, space and futuristic inventions,” says Hewitt. Apart from an enduring love of echo, Hannett’s distinctive drum sound also became key. “Martin wanted everything recorded separately, so we started with the bass drum – literally just the bass > 61
John Cooper Clarke surrounded by Rabid Records co-founders Lawrence Beadle, Tosh Ryan (front) and Martin Hannett
drum and me,” says Stephen Morris, whose almost robotic drums were both stark and soulful, “then the snare again, then the hi-hat again.” The Syndrum was also used regularly as Hannett developed his sound. Some Joy Division credit must go to Chris Nagle, whose name appears on so many Factory releases. “None of the other engineers at Strawberry were willing to work with him,” Nagle said. “On our first day, I was informed that ‘the first rule is there are no rules.’” Martin Usher was another 62
figure central to Hannett’s vision. “I don’t think of myself as ‘influencing’ Martin – people didn’t do that,” he says. “He had ideas, ideas expressed as needs. From my perspective, his needs were to build or customise equipment to do things he wasn’t able to do with ‘overthe-counter’ equipment – a frustrating activity, since he was never satisfied, there was always something else.” Hannett’s second LP for Factory was The Return of the Durutti Column, recorded at Cargo in August 1979.
“Martin arrived with these great big black cardboard-fronted machines, synthesizers,” Wilson recalls. “For two days, he did nothing but create strange rhythm/noise tracks. Occasionally, Vini [Reilly] would strap on the guitar and play some notes onto the tracks. But it was hard to get Martin to notice as he pored over the primitive electronics.” Released in 1980 in its sandpaper sleeve, Return was haunting and majestic, with Reilly’s distinctive guitar arpeggios held in space by Hannett’s electronic trickery
CINEMA | Martin Hannett and experimental use of drum sounds. “Martin used that digital delay not as a repeat echo delay, but to make a tiny millisecond that came so close to the drum it was impossible to hear,” says Reilly – who later brought in Bruce Mitchell to drum. “I would never have thought of that. No one else would. I don’t know how he could have possibly envisaged the final sound.” The LP has been reissued by Factory Benelux with insightful sleeve notes, including this from John Brierley: “Vini would come in to listen to playbacks and then back into the studio but he got no feedback as to whether what he was playing was good, bad or indifferent. Martin was far too engrossed in his Time Modulators and AMS Digital Units.” Closer, recorded in March 1980 at Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row studio, was to be Joy Division’s final studio album. On 18 May, Curtis committed suicide. Its release in July saw universal acclaim but Hannett had lost a friend. “He was one of those channels for the gestalt. A lightning conductor,” he said of Curtis. “Everyone found it hard after Ian died, and I think Martin took it very hard,” says Savage. “Nobody knew how to cope with it – this was pre-therapy days. It was a very different time.” Hannett would later call Closer his most ‘mysterious’ work. “The content is much more cohesive, much more accurate, much more powerful,” he said. “Closer is a very complicated and sophisticated piece of music,” says Savage, “much more in the European classical tradition as well as much more layered. Unknown Pleasures sounds like a band new to the studio, playing live, then being treated to fuck. Whereas Closer sounds like a group who know what they’re doing in the studio and are collaborating with the producer. It’s an amazing record.” The glacial, epic sound of tracks like ‘Decades’ and ‘The Eternal’ was the result of the sonic alchemist making full use of his massing equipment. Stephen Morris, who described his drumming on Closer as ‘a disco tribal thing’, explained how Hannett and the band pushed their studio toys to the limit: “The unusual noise that I like the best is on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. I had a Simmons SDS-V and a Synare 3, which we got out and put it through this horrible fuzz box.”
A few months after Closer’s release, band members played their first gig as New Order. Tony Wilson’s attention had meanwhile turned to his other favourite Factory band. A Certain Ratio’s cassetteonly The Graveyard and the Ballroom included the austere funk of ‘Do the Du’ and ‘Flight’, two of his heaviest productions. “Martin certainly took them by the scruff of the neck,” says Savage. “I thought ‘Flight’ was the best thing he did with them. He slowed them down and got space in their sound, which, again, is important.” Hannett described the Factory Sound as having ‘a certain disorder in the treble range’ and you can certainly hear it on ‘Flight’. It was later released on a two-track EP with one of his most experimental
‘THE PRODUCTION INFLICTED HIS DARK, DOOMY MOOD OVER THE ALBUM’ Factory releases on the flip: a serious slab of mutant Latin funk, ‘Blown Away’ anticipated the band’s later explorations. Their love of Latin music would further when they joined New Order and Tony Wilson for a famous trip to New York. It was to prove a pivotal few weeks for Factory, with nights spent at clubs like Paradise Garage and the Funhouse providing inspiration for the Hacienda. But it was a much less inspiring time for Hannett. Alongside four gigs on the east coast, he had studio time booked at EARS Studio in New Jersey. As well as producing New Order’s first single ‘Ceremony’/‘In A Lonely Place’, the plan was for Hannett to produce a whole LP for ACR. The studio didn’t meet his needs, though, and the sessions were cut short with him subsequently mixing at Strawberry. The spare studio time would be given to three teenage girls from the Bronx who Wilson had seen support ACR. Hannett’s production of the three
ESG tracks ‘Moody’, ‘UFO’ and ‘You’re No Good’ would become their signature tracks, ominous funk that sounds as raw and alien today. Lead singer Renee recalls the sessions with Hannett: “It’s funny because everyone talks about him, and I’ve seen 24 Hour Party People, but this was not the guy I met. He was calm, he was respectful. I had no idea who he was, that he was this big important producer, because he was just a cool guy. He took me in and showed me around the mixing boards and after we’d record something he’d ask if I liked it.” The 7” EP was released on both Factory and 99 Records and New York and Manchester grew closer when the band was invited to play the Hacienda’s opening night. Sadly, the tensions between Hannett and ACR boiled over back in England when he insisted on separating the funk drums of Donald Johnson, which were the backbone of ACR’s sound. To Each was Hannett’s last job for them. But one listen to the spacey inflections and heavy use of snare on ‘Gum’ and you can hear he left his mark. While they’d end up one of Factory’s most distinctive bands, ACR had initially been dismissed as Joy Division copyists, as had Factory rival Section 25. “That was a problem all the Factory bands had, in that Joy Division were so big and, of course, there was the unanimity in sound, because of Martin,” says Savage. But the Sheffield group – who later created club classic ‘Looking from a Hill Top’ – had their own austere sound that would reach a peak on one of Factory and Hannett’s most darkly atmospheric recordings. Packaged in one of Peter Saville’s exquisite sleeves, Always Now is a masterpiece of northern post-punk dread. Drummer Vin Cassidy explained how Hannett dragged every shred of creativity out of them: “He encouraged us to expand on what we originally thought we were going to do. And he told me the most important sound to him was the snare drum.” Other lesser-known Factory acts Hannett would produce included Crispy Ambulance and Brussels-based postpunk act the Names, and while he was, of course, feted for creating the Factory Sound, he also worked for other labels. Produced at a number of studios across London, Magazine’s The Correct Use of Soap was released on Virgin in May > 63
CINEMA | Martin Hannett
1980. Hannett considered it his best technical work, and it found him at his most enigmatic. “Martin moves in his own mysterious way,” Howard Devoto told a journalist. “A lot of musicians find it hard to work with him; he doesn’t communicate well. He sits like Buddha behind the mixing desk, untouchable.” Around the same time, he was given the chance to explore his love of echo (and guitar overload) with London synth-reggae band Basement 5. The dub version of their album 1965-1980 found Hannett exploring new sonic avenues. “It was the most difficult production, I must say, the heaviest,” he told Dutch music magazine OOR. “It has been the most physical album that I’ve ever done. Made me feel like I’d been carrying bricks around. Heavy work. Putting the bass lines in the right place. But it was good.” It was certainly one of Hannett’s most urgent productions, perfectly in touch with the band’s message. While Basement 5 would slip away into cultish obscurity, another band Hannett worked with would go on to fill stadiums. U2 had been fans since Unknown Pleasures and he seemed the obvious choice when they were seeking a darker sound. “Martin Hannett was a genius,” Bono said. “He looked like Dr Who and was into technology. He had harmonisers and things we had never heard of.” In the end he would only produce one track – ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ – before being sidelined for the more conventional Steve Lillywhite for their 1980 debut Boy. It was a major knock back and one can only wonder how monumental U2’s debut LP would have been with Hannett at the controls. Another band that found Hannett too experimental were the Psychedelic Furs, who also turned to Lillywhite after Hannett produced four tracks, including ‘Susan’s Strange’. A far more successful Hannett outing was Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, which reached 25 on the album charts. This incarnation of the Invisible Girls included Vini Reilly and Buzzcocks guitarist John Maher alongside Hannett and Hopkins. It was a wonderful LP of post-punk synthpop best captured on ‘Dream Sequence 1’. In the NME at the time, Pauline Murray 64
recalled the sessions with Hannett: “He just seemed to have a knack of putting everything in the right setting. He works in a totally different way to any other producer we’ve recorded with.” Hannett’s production of Movement (1981) was to be his last for New Order. “He taught us what to do very early on. We learnt the actual physics of recording from him… but in the end there was too much compromise from both sides,” Peter Hook told The Face in 1983. While it was dismissed as ‘terrifically dull’ by one critic, Jon Savage remains a fan. “I really like Movement. I can understand why the band hated it because I think Martin was getting quite difficult at that time. But I think it’s a great record and very underrated.” Meanwhile, Hannett’s
‘HE WAS WAY UP THERE AMONG THE GENIUS PRODUCERS’ production of the band’s ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ 12” would provide a clue to how New Order might have sounded with Martin as they moved more heavily into dance music. “‘Everything’s Gone Green’ was a pivotal record,” says Savage. Released on the Factory-associated Belgian Les Disques du Crépuscule label, the Names ‘The Astronaut’ was to be his last production for Factory until the late 1980s. With Hannett separated from New Order, Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio, his relationship with Factory now became feudal when, as a shareholding director, he issued a High Court writ against the other partners. The lawsuit claimed the company had been “seriously mismanaged… without his consent or knowledge”. Tony Wilson later claimed it was Factory’s refusal to buy an expensive Fairlight synthesiser while duly ploughing money into the Hacienda that led Hannett to take the action. The case dragged on for two
years, eventually settled out of court, and would be both emotionally and financially devastating for Martin. What followed was a decline into heroin addiction. “One significant, and serious, aspect of working with Martin is that you were dealing with a junkie,” says Usher. “This gradually reduced his capacity to work, to earn and generally manage his affairs.” His 1985 studio time with a pre-fame Stone Roses was described as ‘a disaster’ by singer Ian Brown. But another Manchester band on the cusp of something special would provide a far more rewarding outlet for Hannett. The Happy Mondays’ manager Nathan McGough explained at the time why they chose him for 1988’s genredefining Bummed. “I loved Hannett’s production of Unknown Pleasures and Closer… we wanted that kind of exotic, spatial dynamic that Martin brings.” Fuelled by the regular servings of ecstasy the band plied him with, Hannett proved a perfect choice for their most psychedelic LP. He went on to produce the Madchester Rave On EP, its mix of dance and rock much copied by a series of bands more than eager to jump on the bandwagon. One band unfairly lumped in with what became known as the ‘baggy sound’ were Manchester’s New Fast Automatic Daffodils, whose ‘Get Better’ is one of Hannett’s lesser-known productions. But by the time he entered the studio to add a dose of psychedelic noise, he weighed 165kg after turning heavily to alcohol in a bid to stay off heroin. Martin Hannett died from heart failure in Manchester in April 1991. “He was way up there among the genius producers,” says Jon Savage. “He had a good brain, he was funny and intelligent and saw things. He had vision and it was just a real shame that he fell out with Tony Wilson and Factory.” Martin Hannett: He Wasn’t Just the Fifth Member of Joy Division is out on DVD ozitmorpheusrecords.co.uk Martin Hannett – The Redemption memorial event is at Gorilla, Manchester on 10 April thisisgorilla.com
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STYLE
Coat by McQ by Alexander McQueen; trousers by Lanvin from Matches; shirt by Dunhill; belt by Vivienne Westwood.
Pardeep Singh Bahra Photographs Dean Chalkley Styling Harris Elliott Photographic Assistants Tom Griffiths and Simon McGuigan Styling Assistant Diana Antunes Production Lo and Behold loandbeholdproductions.com
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Jacket and shirt by Richard James; sunglasses by Black Eyewear; sash by Griffin; jewellery by Vivienne Westwood.
Jacket by By Walid; waistcoat by Dunhill; shirt from The Vintage Showroom; sunglasses by Paul Smith; bow tie by Art Comes First.
STYLE | Pardeep Singh Bahra
Suit and shirt by Vivienne Westwood; shoes and sunglasses by Paul Smith.
Jacket by Paul Smith; shirt by Art Comes First; sunglasses by Black Eyewear; belt from The Vintage Showroom.
STYLE | Pardeep Singh Bahra
Jacket and bag by Paul Smith; trousers by Vivienne Westwood; shirt by Dunhill.
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Suit and shoes by Paul Smith; shirt by Art Comes First; scarf by Vivienne Westwood.
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Jacket from The Vintage Showroom; trousers by Vivienne Westwood; shirt by Art Comes First; sunglasses by Black Eyewear.
CULTURE
Peter Blake Pop Goes The Easel. Ian Dury. Dartford Rhythm Club Words Mark Webster Photographs Robert Wyatt
It’s a small door in a big set of double gates, the kind you’d see at the entrance to a builder’s yard; and a couple of hours after Sir Peter Blake had welcomed us into his incredible workshop in Hammersmith, I’d learned that he might easily have ended up doing the same thing for the past 50 years – as a fella plying his trade in the building business. That didn’t happen. Sir Peter will be 82 this summer, 50 years after he was “released as a painter”, as he put it to me over a cup of tea in the small kitchen to the side of his labyrinthine Aladdin’s cave. By 1954, having spent a year embracing the meticulous teachings of the Royal College of Art, he asked himself the question, “Where should I go?” he told me. “And that’s when I started painting Children Reading Comics, Badge Merit, On the Balcony... what led to pop art”. In 1961, pop art arrived. Sir Peter featured in Ken Russell’s documentary Pop Goes the Easel (BBC, 1962) and won the John Moores Junior Painting Prize, which led to his first one-man show at the Portal Gallery in London. One of England’s genuine stars was born, a man whose work has always been going somewhere – but, just as importantly, perhaps, understands where it is coming from. He is a man whose art wears its heart on its sleeve. 74
Blitz Kid “I was seven when World War II started. I was evacuated a couple of times. I was in London for the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, when it all happened, so I lost that bit of my life – between seven and 13. My dad was an electrician, and that’s the way I would have gone. Art didn’t come up. There were virtually no books in both houses I was evacuated to. My mum and my dad, if it’d been later, would have gone to art school. My dad loved to draw – he did little drawings of trains for us, which were his great love. And my mum would now have gone to fashion school. She’d come down from South Shields to be a seamstress.” No School Like the Old School “At the end of the war – because of how evacuation worked – I took the exam for the grammar school in Dartford, and I didn’t get in. So then I took the exam for the tech in Gravesend, and did. I had an interview there, with no intention of going to art school, but they said they had one as part of the college, and if I fancied that, then to pop around the corner and do a little drawing. So, at 13, I got into their junior art department for three years. And from there I did an intermediate year – the equivalent of a foundation course now – in 1950. And that was its
last year. A tradition that went back 100 years. It was a tremendous education. You learned silversmithing, woodwork, joinery, clay modelling, stone carving – all vocational skills. You had to choose a craft, and mine was Roman lettering.” Signwriting’s Loss… “It was recommended to me that I’d never make a living as a painter, and I was told I should do a commercial art course. Halfway through that, though, I tried for the Royal College of Art, for their graphic design school. I sent them a little painting... and I got accepted for the painting school.” Teenage Kicks “By the age of 17, I was going to the Dartford Rhythm Club, which was basically a traditional jazz club. Then bebop happened, and I was at the birth of that. Loved it! Then I used to come up to Club Eleven, Club 51 – so I was in at the birth of British modern jazz in London. And I was a big fan of Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists. But I was also going to the wrestling with my mum, and watching Dartford first, then Charlton Athletic. And we’d go to the speedway – so I was still living this northwest Kent working-class life and going to art school at the same time.” >
In his studio in west London
CULTURE | Peter Blake Civvy Street “I did National Service from 1951-53 so I arrived at the Royal Academy in 1953 never having been a painting student – so as well as being this kid coming up from Dartford, there was this whole convoluted background to me getting there. There were a few things I’d done in college, a few things in the RAF, and I was starting at school with [painter and stage designer] Johnny Minton teaching me. So, there I am – a halfformed graphic designer. And I didn’t have a painting destiny, but I’m a painter with skills a lot of painters don’t have – like lettering. It put me in a unique position, but it also left me open to be kicked. But in 1953 you were still getting people coming in from the army. And you were getting a mixed bunch for the first time. Like in the National Service, you were getting a broad range. Because that Labour government of the time gave grants to everybody, you could do it. It was a sociological change. Poacher Turns Gamekeeper “In 1957, I got a scholarship for a year to study popular painting in Europe [the first Leverhulme Research Award]. When when I came back, I started doing bits of teaching. First at Gravesend, where they took me as a bit of a favour, then by 1960 I was teaching at St Martin’s on a Monday – Observational Drawing; Tuesdays teaching illustration at Harrow School of Art, and I taught at Walthamstow [Art College], where Ian Dury later appeared. It was in 1964 that I got the job at the Royal College.” If the Badge Fits… “Self Portrait With Badges (1961) was a contrivance. It was a theatrical setting pretty much based on that [Antoine] Watteau painting of the clown in a white suit [Pierrot]. And the wearing of denim back then, as I was, wasn’t done. The one person we knew was Jackson Pollock in the 1940s, who had denim trousers, dungarees. And a teacher at Gravesend went to America and came back with some denim. I bought a workman’s bib and brace and cut the top off. They were basically sort of denim, and I made a pair of jeans. In 1956 I bought my first denim jacket. So, in 1961, to wear a denim suit – well, people just didn’t! 76
“And then there was wearing the badges. No adult wore them, you know. Unless they were a member of the golf club. And not children’s badges. I think, looking back, I was communicating information about myself. Mind you, one of those badges said I was ‘Madly for Adlai’ [Stevenson, Democratic US presidential candidate 1952 and 1956]. I wouldn’t have known who Adlai was! But stylistically, it was part of a long tradition – of Watteau, but I was also influenced by Stanley Spencer, by Ben Shahn and the magical realists. It was one of the stirrings of pop art.” Target Practice “The First Real Target was a comment on American art from the 1950s. They had been calling it the ‘roundel’, or a ‘circular motif ’ – they had posh names
‘IN 1961, TO WEAR A DENIM SUIT – WELL, PEOPLE JUST DIDN’T!’ for it. I thought, well they’re just targets, really. So I went to a sports shop and just bought the Slazenger version, stuck it down and asked the question. That became part of the invention of pop art. Breaking new ground. Making new ways of working. That’s my contribution, I suppose. And of course, the target then started as part of the mod tradition.” Beat That “I went to the 2i’s [Coffee Bar, then in Old Compton Street, Soho] to check it out. I wanted to see Tommy Steele, but he wasn’t playing that day. I had a cup of coffee, anyway, had a look in the basement. I was going to the Flamingo all-nighters by then – I probably saw the Rolling Stones’ first gig. Mick [ Jagger] is from Dartford, of course. He was at school with my brother. “And an old friend who’d gone into television got me in to see the Beatles in rehearsal for their first TV appearance,
and they let me stay for the show. Billy Fury was top of the bill. The first time I met John Lennon, we had a conversation where he said I shouldn’t have won that junior prize in 1961. He said [artist and first Beatles’ bass player] Stuart Sutcliffe should have won it. John started off being rude. And carried on being rude.” Red Hot Pepper “My art gallerist was Robert Fraser, who was close friends with the Stones and the Beatles. Frankly, he was probably supplying their drugs. And he suggested to Paul, I think it was, why don’t you use an artist to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s [Lonely Hearts Club Band]. He said there’ll be tons of psychedelic covers, so why not use a, in italics, ‘fine artist’, and do something different? “As a graphic-design artist, I’d done mock-up record covers, but influenced by the line drawings on Blue Note covers, so this was going to be different. We then all got together and Paul and the boys had already established Sgt. Pepper’s as a story – that the Beatles had finished – and they were now going to tour as the Lonely Hearts Club Band. So when I first talked to Paul, he’d got a photograph of his dad in a band. So his thinking was there. My contribution, pretty much, was how to do the crowd. Once we got into it, we pretty much had carte blanche. I did it with my first wife Jann Haworth. She built most of it. And that’s been controversial in itself. I was offered the gig, it was my concept. But [ Jann] did a lot of the work. She did more than I did making the stuff. “And looking back, [that record] was clearly the end of something, and the start of something new. It was meant to be the first double album, but the record company had already put it out. And I’d had the idea of releasing it like an old Christmas stocking, you’d get a gift bag with each one – but the label said that was going too far. So I made the cut-outs and things to go in what was now an empty sleeve pocket. So that solved the problem – you got a free gift!” Chilly Pepper “My upset with it at the time was simply that I felt I’d been stitched up. Robert Fraser had the contract, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have read it. >
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He’d have been too stoned, for sure. If he had read it, he could have put in a clause that I got, say, a penny a copy. So there were no royalties. And he also signed away my copyright. And you never lose the copyright. “So the quarrel later was, was he my agent, and did he have the right to sign it all away? The law said he did. I got paid 200 quid. The people who were doing the flowers would have got more. And there was discontentment. I’d have liked a bit more appreciation, a bit more involvement in its success. Certainly there were times when I was totally broke and you could see other people’s fortunes getting bigger. “You couldn’t help but think it would be nice to have a share in that, and I still feel that now. But it’s in the past. It doesn’t worry me. But you can’t forget, because it comes up in every interview.” He laughs – well, actually, Sir Peter Blake giggles. “But it has to.” Rustic Charmers “In the 1960s, it was all enormous excitement. I never did drugs, which I expect you know, so for me it was the football that was fantastic, the music was fantastic, the art was fantastic. But by the end of the decade it had literally all happened. You felt the time was over. “So there was a general exodus from London. Some went to East Anglia – oddly enough, where the YBAs [Young British Artists] seem to have gone – but a lot of us went to the West Country. In the village where I lived, over 10 years there, I bought the old station, a stretch of line, the stationmaster’s cottage, the signal box, a small farm, a granary and a small Wesleyan chapel. And it all came to less than £10,000. I was buying buildings to preserve because no one wanted them. I still own the chapel. “And there was this whole ley-line hippy thing, and I guess the drug thing got stronger. And it was from there that the Brotherhood of Ruralists evolved. We all got together for dinner one night, chatting about art, and we played a game of ‘Which Pre-Raphaelite painter would you be?’ (More giggles.) ‘I know! Happens everywhere – throw your keys in the middle!! But out of this friendship came the idea of some kind of grouping. We weren’t a commune, 78
but more having the feeling of being cut off from the art world and realising these were fellow spirits. And I’d gone back to a bib and brace by then, and my hair was as long as it ever got. My beard
‘IT’S TIME NOW. I’M 81, WHICH THESE DAYS CAN BE YOUNG, BUT IT’S STILL OLD’ a lot fuller. I looked a good old hippy. “We met every solstice – in winter we’d feast, in summer we’d have a picnic. And for about five years we’d take some cottages in Coombe in Cornwall and all go on holiday. And different writers and
musicians would visit. And the critics hated the idea of it. I once said that sentimentality was a valid reason to paint. I was almost lynched!” London’s Calling... Again “Part of the Ruralists is that we had our own school called The Looking Glass – I was illustrating Alice in Wonderland at the time. And someone came one day, he was just divorced, and he brought his kids, and my wife had an affair with him, and we split up. I moved into the stationmaster’s cottage, had a bit of a breakdown and smashed everything up. I got on the train back to London, luckily we still had a flat there. That was the summer of 1979. But a year later, I met Chrissy [Wilson] and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. But that’s a whole other story.” The Who, Where and Why “I remember [the Who’s then manager] Chris Stamp, after they were the High Numbers and were going to become the
CULTURE | Peter Blake Thought for Food “Live Aid was Bob’s [Geldof ] idea for a little gig that quickly grew up. Then he wrote the song [‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’] with Midge Ure, and Bob phoned me and asked if I’d do the cover. I said, yeah sure. And he said, good, we need it the day after tomorrow. I finished on a Friday, and it was in the shops by the next Friday. On the day of the Band Aid recording, we were in the studio, and it was only the people working who were there. Everyone came in one at a time. And I was the only other one in there, with Chrissy, as each of them did it. So, you know that heartfelt line that Bono does, the one that sort of made the song and him? I’m just sitting there drawing him as he’s doing it. It was an extraordinary moment that no one really knows about.”
Who, wanted them to be the pop-art band. And they found the target, the medals, the Union Jack, they even found the chevron in one or other of the paintings. It’s what they became. “So, after I’d returned to London in 1980, the Who were touring the States, and I took Chrissy to LA and we saw them five nights in a row. They asked me to do what would basically be their last album, in a way [1981’s Face Dances]. And my concept was to break it up into four rows of four, and four artists do each of the members. I asked all the best artists in London including Francis Bacon. I’ve got a letter in my library from Francis saying, ‘I don’t do this kind of thing’. Well, there were no fees. The Who were going to throw us all a party, and there would be 50 quid for expenses. So I sent Francis the 50 quid! And he sent that back. It’s a shame that album was somewhat overlooked, that not many people know about it. In fact, the first painting David Hockney did in that style is on there.”
For Love of the Game “I have to be interested in what I’m asked to do. Like, quite soon after Sgt. Pepper’s, the Gibb brothers asked me to do a [Bee Gees] cover. But it just wasn’t appropriate. I’ve never done one I didn’t want to do. There has to be a rapport. “It’s like with Paul Weller, I’d first seen him at Band Aid, chatting away with Marilyn. He eventually got my number and phoned me out of the blue. Now, I wasn’t a strong fan of his bands – I knew of them, and I liked them well enough. But I didn’t really know much about them. But this was a solo album [1995’s Stanley Road], so when he asked I thought of a cover idea that was never used for a band called Landscape. So, I asked him, ‘What are your favourite things?’ Also, I still had this idea in my head of a child holding up a photo of himself as an adult – this impossible, surreal situation. That all became the project. Paul and I are close friends now. “It’s just like when Noel Gallagher asked me to do one [for compilation Stop the Clocks, 2006]. I mean, you’re not going to say no, are you? But if I was pushed on the whole Blur/Oasis thing, I’d have to say Blur. But I like what they do. Noel knows that.” Peter the Painter “The first day I met Ian Dury, I was only a young lad, 28 years old. And I wouldn’t have really been much older
than them [Dury and his fellow students at Walthamstow Art College]. And I had a kind of rule for myself then, that it wasn’t right to have to leave the house before 9 o’clock. Wherever I was going! To get from Chiswick to Walthamstow then was two trains and the 123 bus from Manor Park – even that’s about an hour. So I arrived late and they told me my students were taking an outdoor drawing class. And they pointed to where they were going to be. So on the way, well, I had a hangover, so I went into a boozer and there at the bar were what was definitely three young art students. And I thought they had to be from my class. But instead of telling them off, I bought them a few drinks. And Ian was one of them. We bonded from that moment, we were friends for his time there. And because they had such great teachers at Walthamstow, in 1963 they provided 10 applications to the Royal College and nine got in, out of 25 across the country – including Ian. So when I joined the College as a teacher in 1964, I worked with him for two years.” A Line is Drawn Under it “I’ve been asked a couple of times over the years [about a biography] and if I do it, what I’d like to do is something with Genesis Publishing [with whom he collaborated on Eric Clapton’s book and album 24 Nights and Brian Wilson’s That Lucky Old Sun], and I’d do it as a series of sheets rather than a book. So, one sheet might be my childhood with typed bits, and drawn bits, bits of photographs. It would be in keeping. “Ten years ago, I didn’t want there to even be a book about my art. Because I felt – or hoped – that what was going to come next would be the best. It’s time now, though. I’ve let there be a couple of art books, because it’s kind of complete. Oddly enough, I feel I’m at the end of it. You reach a certain point where you can actually see death. All your life, you know it’s there, then you can see it. I’m 81, which these days can be young, but it’s still old. There are nights when you go to bed and wonder if you’ll wake up. But my mum lived ‘til she was 92, so maybe I’ll have another 10 years?”
BULLETIN
Levi’s Red
Photographs Willem Jaspert Styling Adam Howe Words Edward Moore Photographic Assistant James Frew 21st-century Pioneers Joseph and Mia Howe Location The Joe Strummer Subway, Edgware Road, London W2 subwaygallery.com
Levi’s experimental label Red is back after a seven-year sabbatical. Started in 1999, it’s the lab that spawned Levi’s famous Twisted jeans and Engineered Garments, and it’s also fair to credit Red with helping to bring Levi’s Vintage Clothing label to the fore, capitalising on a newfound interest in classic denim. Levi’s XX head of design Miles Johnson explains the creative process for 80
new line Lined Red. “You couldn’t make a collection like Red without an archive like the one we have at Levi’s,” he says. “We looked at early patterns from the 1870s and 80s when our products were worn as protective outer layers, then at how we push the boundaries with modern denim fabrics and construction methods.” The result is a micro-range for women and men, with soft-silk
linings, light cotton-flannel wadding and unusual dyeing techniques. Levi’s Red is available at LN:CC, London and 290 Square Meters, Amsterdam ln-cc.com 290sqm.com
Mia wears jacket, jeans, shirt and shoes by Levi’s Red. Joseph wears jackets, jeans and shirt by Levi’s Red; shoes by John Moore for Work Not Work; socks, stylist’s own.
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CULTURE
Joel Meyerowitz
Tony Ray-Jones. Mad Man. Robert Frank. Fifth Avenue. Garry Winogrand. Cape Cod Words Chris May Portrait Mischa Richter Photographs courtesy of Joel Meyerowitz
A pivotal figure in American photography for 50 years, Bronx-born Joel Meyerowitz began his professional life as a Mad Man, working as an art director for Fifth Avenue advertising agency Business Image in the early 1960s. He quit the agency and took up full-time street photography following a chance encounter with Robert Frank on a 1962 photo session. Over the next 15 years, Meyerowitz shot almost daily on Fifth Avenue, a street which continues to hold a special fascination for him. After the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, Meyerowitz had exclusive, unrestricted access to Ground Zero, spending nine months documenting the scene. A selection of his photographs was published in 2006 as Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive. Best known for this and his street work, Meyerowitz is a master of landscape photography, too – an early champion of colour film, he began shooting landscapes in Cape Cod in the 1970s. His book Cape Light (1979) is a considered a classic of the genre. Another, more recently added, strand is his photography of “pure elements” – earth, fire, water, air – shot without the familiar trope of a horizon line. Reproduced on a large scale, the prints offer an immersive experience. Meyerowitz spent 2013 in Europe – Tuscany and Provence – but is based at home on New York’s Upper West Side.
Before you joined the agency through which you encountered Robert Frank, did you study visual arts at college? I did. I went to a university that was not known for art, Ohio State University. I was there from 1955-59, mainly because I was a swimmer and I hoped to be on the swimming team. They had perhaps the best team in the US at that time. I went there not on a scholarship but with hopes of becoming an Olympic contender. I lost the berth to a better swimmer by a few tenths of a second. I studied art, art history and medical illustration. I got involved with drawing cadavers. I met the man who ran the only medical illustration department in America and he convinced me to do that as well as painting. So on the one hand I was making loose, abstract paintings, and on the other I was drawing tight, careful, anatomical renderings. It was good discipline. But it wasn’t until that meeting with Frank that you turned to photography? Absolutely. Photography did not exist for me as an art form, at first. It was a commercial resource or a documentary field. I was a painter, so it was below my aspirations and my horizon. But the way Robert moved that day – I think more than anything, the way he moved and took photographs at the same time – was a springboard for my imagination. I owe him a lot. He opened my eyes.
Which photographers were important influences when you were starting out? There were two. How much they were influences and how much was friendship is hard to discern. But within days of quitting the agency and beginning to photograph, I took my film to a lab and when I went back to pick it up, next to me on an adjacent light box was a furry young guy, pretty much my age, who was looking at his slides while I was looking at mine. The two of us were obviously novices and puzzled by things and we began to converse. And it was Tony Ray-Jones. He also was working as a designer, at CBS Records, which was just down the block from my office. It was another significant encounter. We made a pact. We enjoyed talking to each other and neither of us had a vocabulary or any kind of knowledge or experience; we were fumbling along together. And we went shooting for a good year and a half, working the street parades in New York as a laboratory, learning how to be invisible and fast, get the best exposures, and discover the appropriate distances from which we could take photographs. We learned our chops with each other. We were more or less equals and between us we developed a language for discussing colour which, though fairly innocent and insufficient, nonetheless gave us strength to go out on the street and try again and see if we could make interesting pictures. >
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New York City, 1974
The other person was Garry Winogrand. He was 10 years my senior but I bumped into him on the subway. We were both coming back from visiting our parents in the Bronx and we got talking. He said, ‘I’ve seen you on Fifth Avenue when I’ve been photographing there.’ He invited me to his house and I looked at his work, and it was really eye-opening, not just to see him working but to see the product of this voracious appetite for photography. Garry himself wasn’t that well formed, he’d been more or less a commercial photographer with a passion for the streets. He was just finding himself then, too. In a way, I became a buddy. He was going through a hard time, with a divorce and kids to raise. My wife and I became sort of surrogate parents for the children, to help Garry out with the effort of that. It bonded us and we were very close for five years, until he moved out west. 84
Did you have any photography tuition or were you entirely self-taught? I did it all myself. At the beginning it was just making exposures, and if it was
‘EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE TOUCHED WITH GESTURAL TRAGEDY wrong, seeing whether there was too much or too little light and figuring out how to change that. Then when I started to print black and white a year later, I
bought an enlarger, made a dark room for myself, and figured it out. A couple of years later, maybe 1965, Garry, in an effort to try to consolidate his thinking about photography rather than the pure physicality of it, decided to hold some classes in his apartment. He asked if I would be involved in it, so that I could keep the dialogue moving – I was more verbal than he was, though I wasn’t necessarily more knowledgeable about the craft or the history. So it was more or less a discussion group – not so much a class where you learned things, but a forum for Garry to try to illuminate his thought processes and give us a chance to try and find a language. As an aside, we all owed a lot to John Szarkowski [director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 1962-91]. He was the stimulant in that era. He was just head and shoulders above anybody else in his capacity to
CULTURE | Joel Meyerowitz
Paris, France, 1967
understand every kind of work that the medium offered, and to write about it in illuminating, philosophical and poetic ways. I think all of us were trying to raise the level of our discourse because of John. He singlehandedly changed the course of contemporary photography. What attracted you to street shooting in particular? You had watched Robert Frank, after all, working indoors. There’s two things. Because I worked at the ad agency I had been to a couple of studio fashion shoots and it was mindnumbingly boring. Wind machines, stylists, pieces of string holding dresses out as though they were blowing in the wind. It all seemed so tedious and narcissistic. I didn’t think of it as photography, it was like catalogue copy.
But when I left the location that day and went out on the street, everything there looked different. You know, you’ll come out of a film sometimes, maybe a Fellini film, and suddenly the world outside is peopled by Fellini characters. So I stepped out on that street and suddenly every simple gesture – hailing a taxi or bundling up a kid in their coat or carrying heavy shopping bags – everything seemed to be touched with gestural tragedy or humour or whatever. I’m a native of New York and I’d grown up on the streets and my pop was a real observer of human behaviour and a commentator on the pratfalls that were ready to come. He would always say to me, ‘Watch this, watch this!’ and boom, somebody would bump into somebody else. He had quick eyes and I
think it was just a natural native instinct I got from him. The street was where life was. And particularly because as a 23 and 24-year-old, when I would look out the window of my office, which was on Fifth Avenue, I could see down on the street the swarm of humanity. I’d be just desperate to dash down there at lunchtime and wander the streets – even before I was a photographer – looking for signs of life I might want to use as stimulus for a painting. The street called purely out of basic instinct. Why has Fifth Avenue always had a particular pull on you? Well, it’s New York’s great boulevard. For me, it’s the sexiest street in the world. I’ve been all over and there’s no other street that has the particular > 85
Mรกlaga, Spain, 1966
New York City, 1963
CULTURE | Joel Meyerowitz
energy Fifth Avenue has, that mix of high and low. It catches the light, its axis is north-south, and it’s wide and it gets bathed in strong sunlight and hard shadows. It just sparkles. I remember once seeing a man step out of his limousine wearing a very bespoke tailored suit and at the same time, trudging across his path, was some beaten-down black messenger who was obviously mentally deficient – he was babbling to himself and drooling – and they crossed paths right in front of me. And I thought to myself, here it is. You were an early champion of colour photography. Why was there such strong resistance to it in the 1960s? Was it simply about print quality or was it deeper than that? That’s the essential question. Why was there such a prejudice on the so-called serious side of the medium? I think it derived from several things. Colour film, just prior to the 1960s, was rated at an ISO of 10. So it was very slow and if you worked with it in the studio you had to have strong light. If you used it out of doors you had very slow exposures. So it wasn’t always reliable to describe events. Printing presses in particular, though they could do colour, didn’t use a lot. Only advertisers seemed to. And people who had a bit of money and had their wedding photographs. So it was seen as a tool of commerce or consumer culture or sometimes journalism. But it wasn’t taken seriously as an art object, and the prints were not very good quality, they were murky in general. And nobody was exploring it. The only reason Tony and I shot in colour was that we were too naive to know better. By 1962, colour film had just advanced in speed. You could get an ISO of 25, so it more than doubled. And you could get it processed and back the same day. It was most important to me, as I wasn’t printing myself to start with, to see what I had photographed and I
didn’t want to wait a week for it. So it was really a simple decision. But it also nourished us because when we looked at the photographs we learnt something about how colour influenced both the moment of recognition and the result we got. It was its own event within the larger event. So, Tony and I began to understand there was something there that no one else was talking about. It’s like kids today picking up video cameras and loading their film on a computer – they can do it, it’s available to them, and their innocence allows them to explore sound and time and cutting together imagery, adding music, doing everything the elasticity of film allows.
‘BASICALLY, THE PLEASURE I GET FROM SEEING HAS NOURISHED MY LIFE’ You once described yourself as shy. When you started, was it difficult to get out in the street and photograph total strangers? Is that one of the reasons why you and Tony Ray-Jones worked alongside each other? You’ve hit it right on the head. One way of dealing with shyness is to confront it. You can turn any deficit into something positive if you recognise it. I didn’t know how close to get or what my rights were or what I even wanted. But the street parades gave us camouflage. The parade acted as a screen when you were taking a picture – people thought you were photographing the people in the parade with the flags and the floats, when really we were photographing the onlookers.
The event disarmed them, so we could be in their critical space, two feet away and taking photographs up close without them reacting in any kind of negative way. And in that way we were able to steel ourselves and make a persona that wasn’t aggressive but was stealthy and yet charming and innocent. We learnt a kind of character that we could project, each of us in our own way, and it was a useful cover. And I’m not shy now. It’s been suggested that Vivian Maier, because she used a Rolleiflex held and focused at waist height, could get inside a subject’s critical space without them necessarily realising she was there. I agree. It’s a deception. Looking down is a wonderful feint, like when a boxer feints. You seem to be looking elsewhere. Vivian Maier was also a schoolmarmishlooking person; people didn’t anticipate any kind of negativity. That projection was, I believe, a great asset for her. Slightly goofy, dressed decently, not shouting or crazy. She fit in very well. She once answered a child’s question by saying, “I’m a sort of spy”. How would you describe what you do to a child? I wouldn’t think of myself as a spy. Basically, the pleasure I get from seeing has nourished my whole life. If I was to describe it to kids I’d say something like, “Look at that, look at how beautifully the light falls on that, look at that stride somebody has, that energy.” I’m basically searching for beauty in the moment. And beauty in an ineffable, personal way. Because I think there is a sort of beatitude all the time, and it lights up our entire intelligence when we see something that offers itself to us. I was once involved in a photo session with a distinguished London dance photographer and a choreographer. There was a dancer on either side of the stage. The photographer asked the choreographer which dancer to focus > 87
London, England, 1966
the shot on. “Neither,” he replied. “I’m interested in the space between them.” That seems to be your concern, too. I’m so glad you said that. It’s the core of my aesthetic. It’s easy enough to put a person, an object, an event at the centre of a photograph and hit the bullseye. The camera is so centripetal in that way. “Oh look, I got a picture of a dog, a flower, a face, the sunset.” Captured in the middle of the frame. It doesn’t take any brains to do that. It’s almost like just pointing at something. The language of that is relatively infantile and/or simplistic. But to see the relationship between unrelated things, once a frame is put around them, you charge the space with a potential of meaning. Because you have cut 75 degrees out of the potential
360 around you. So that space, and the intuition about what you are seeing right then, is loaded with potential. It offers, at least to my way of thinking, several positive charges. The first thing is looking at the photograph through these random fragments contained within the frame. And the second – and I think this is the heart of it – is the contradiction that while a photograph describes everything in it precisely, there always seems to be an ambiguity about what it means. So, in the street photography I try to make, and the passion I have for that kind of life – and it doesn’t just happen in the street, I respond this way to nature too – this ambiguous charge that a welldescribed thing makes, that to me is the potential of modern photography.
Another feature of your street work is that the physical distance between you and your subject is often greater than the norm, so the field of view is wider and the composition more complex. Was that conscious, or something that developed incrementally, organically? That is a really exquisite question. When I was working on the streets with Tony, the seduction of everything was to see how close you could get, how far into the human spaces you could work. And then in 1964 I took a road trip around America – everybody follows in the footsteps of Robert Frank at some point. You’re searching for the identity of a country and yourself in it, your role in it, just like Robert showed us you could do – so I found myself photographing from a moving car periodically. I also
CULTURE | Joel Meyerowitz
Florida, 1967
found myself in huge Western spaces in which people were diminutive and spaces grand. And yet I would feel the impulse to make a photograph of them. Two things happened when I came back to New York. I printed hundreds of photographs and I showed them to Garry right away. Garry had had a Guggenheim [Fellowship] that year – there’s a book published about Garry called Winogrand 1964, from this trip. He had gone south, I had gone north. When we reached California we spent a week together and went to Vegas, then he went north and I went south. When I was showing him the pictures back in New York there were quite a few that had big space in them, the subjects were further away. And I was talking about how important this was to me and he didn’t get it. He thought they were too far away. I could understand that and in
some cases agreed. And then I showed the work to John Szarkowski at MoMA. That was part of the ritual – every photographer was welcome in the department, they’d bring in their work
‘I THINK THERE IS A SORT OF BEATITUDE ALL THE TIME’ once or twice a year and sit down with John. He was a great fisherman and we brought our fish in for inspection. So anyway, I went in to show John these puzzling, problematic pictures, which I myself was questioning. And
John looked at them and he said to me that the sign of maturity, one of the steps photographers go through, was learning to let go and step back. He said just to consider it as part of your evolution right now. I said, “But Garry doesn’t like it so much.” And he said, “Garry doesn’t know everything.” It was a wonderful validation. Because I knew that space was a character in the image and that space has profound things to communicate, in relation to the way people inhabit and move through space. Space has colour and temperament and light, it’s the theatre in which all things happen. I was really enlivened by the recognition that space has force, that it’s not empty. I understood that in some kinetic way; my particular empathy with human life had been formed out of space as well as people. It’s hard to put things like that into words when you’re > 89
CULTURE | Joel Meyerowitz
young, but the recognition is beyond words. It’s something that is so visceral that you just know, it just feels right. How wonderful that John Szarkowski had such an open door. Oh yes, and nobody since. In fact, last week I met Quentin Bajac, who took up the post of chief curator of photography at MoMA last January – just when I left for a year in Europe. I wanted to see him and talk to him. One of the things we talked about was John’s policy. I said what a great asset that had been to the department, to be able to talk to people, rather than have a gallery dealer just send you a bill of goods. Quentin is forming his own view of how to develop the department. He is a very generous guy, I think he will be a great director. I was struck by something you said in the early 1980s about photographing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. You said, “I can’t make aesthetic work out of other people’s deprivation.” One sees a lot of journalism about war, poverty, crime and desperation. Yet it’s all treated with a degree of aesthetic framing. I understand it completely. You put a frame round something and you want to make it interesting. But in a way, there’s some negligence there. I know it’s uplifting at times and that it can help, but to put yourself in that position repeatedly, you risk becoming inured to the emotional content of it. So I was saying I was not willing to do that, that I’d rather deal with ordinary life and try to make visible the qualities of ordinary life that can be telling – the struggle of living and the pleasures and joys as well, and the absurdities. A more Beckett-like vision of the world, maybe. Received wisdom says that the value of a piece of art is in direct proportion to its bleakness. Much of your work confounds that notion. There’s always been great suspicion in the art world about beauty and joy. As 90
if art has to be mordant to be important. But, you know, I am who I am. I see the world and I take pleasure from the gifts the world is holding invisible until I pass by. I don’t think joyousness is everything, [I have] dark, mysterious, brooding photographs. But there also needs to be a chance for recovery, because the world brings us down all the time. We see hardships everywhere we go. A note of tenderness or uplift is important. So, why should I limit myself to the dreadful when, in fact, one is trying to commune with the entirety of the world?
‘THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN A GREAT SUSPICION IN THE ART WORLD ABOUT BEAUTY AND JOY’ Do you have strong views on digital versus film? I do. I’m finished with film as of last summer. Because I use a large-format view camera I always used film. But for the last couple of years I’ve also used a large-format digital Leica, and the quality is equal to a large-format film camera. I’ve been digitising work with a scanner since 1992. I was way ahead of probably everybody in the photo world in being a proponent of scanning and preparing a database of my work. I’ve had digital cameras since the late 1990s, but they were all crap. They slowly started getting better and then made an exponential leap in the last few
years. These new Leicas are amazing instruments. In Europe last year, I had my view camera with me, and film in the freezer, and I never once used it the entire year. I was making everything with the Leica. And probably, being on the move, without my New York assets, in terms of processing and everything, I was able to see everything I did every couple of days and I had a big printer, so I was able to print everything myself whenever I wanted. I was, in a way, more connected to my work than I’d been for many years. The sabbatical turned out to be a deeply pleasing, total experience of living, seeing, photographing, editing. I was much more integrated. Aside from the US State Department’s travelling 9/11 exhibition, you have not had a solo show in London yet. What are the prospects of a retrospective? Well, a lot of photographers of my generation, we’ve been around so long that people take us for granted and don’t bother checking the new work. But I’m hoping. I’ve been in touch regularly with Simon Baker [curator of photography and international art at Tate], and he likes my work. He did a show about an aspect of my work in Japan last summer and did a little book about it. So maybe in the future, someone will get wise and put on a retrospective of my work. I have a travelling retro show that was in Paris recently and broke all records. So hopefully some young curator will come along sometime and dig up the fossils and say, ‘Look at this!’ Joel Meyerowitz, with an introduction by Colin Westerbeck, former photography curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, is out on 24 March phaidon.com joelmeyerowitz.com
Los Angeles Airport, California, 1976
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PROFILE
Afrikan Boy YAM. Deptford. Afro-grime. MIA. King Sunny Adé Words Chris May Photographs Chris Tang
According to Willie Lynch, an early 18th-century slave owner in the US state of Virginia, there was a trick to controlling slaves. In a speech to a meeting of his peers, Lynch claimed the trick was to set the slaves against each other and so distract them from the real enemy. It was the age-old imperial policy of divide and conquer, on a local scale. Anachronisms in Lynch’s speech – which only came to light in the 1960s – suggest it is probably a hoax. But its central thesis rings true, and that is why Olushola Ajose – AKA Afrikan Boy, and Shola or A.B. for short – mentions it. We’re discussing the tensions between Britons of Caribbean and African heritage, how a lot of it has dissipated – first on the grime scene in the early 2000s, and more recently by afrobeats. “In primary school in Deptford,” says Shola, “it was all dancehall, reggae. Nobody listened to African music, 92
it wasn’t cool. You had to go to your parents’ record collection to find it. I wanted to be called Jeremiah and be like the Jamaican kids, cos they were cool. But they used to call me Ollie – ‘Ollie, Ollie, tits in a trolley, balls in a biscuit tin’. It was the Willie Lynch syndrome still ringing out. “I saw the change in secondary school, around 2003. Everyone started to be proud of where they came from. Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, wherever. And slowly African music was getting played. I don’t know what else drove the change, but grime was part of it. As someone who was in it, going through it, being Afrikan Boy, grime was about choosing to be proud of my heritage.” I am speaking to Shola at his friend Adio’s home studio near Warren Street, where he’s mixing his debut ABCD (Afrikan Boy Compact Disc), due out in March. Rich and varied, the album shows how comprehensively Shola has
grown as a lyricist and musician since Afrikan Boy’s 2006 breakout single, ‘One Day I Went to Lidl’. A miniature masterpiece with lyrics about shoplifting in low-end shops, it was quintessential grime: dead basic, unvarnished and catchy. And funny. Humour continues to infuse Shola’s music, but eight years on, more serious social observation sits alongside it. ABCD tracks include ‘Show Me Your Leader’, ‘Made in Afrika Born in the UK’, ‘Visa’, ‘Kunta Kinte’ and last summer’s Fela Kuti-inspired ‘Hit Em Up’. ABCD will be out on Shola’s label YAM (Young, Ambitious, Motivated), which is also the name of the clothing brand he set up a year or so ago. Born in Newham in 1989, Shola was brought up in southeast London. When he was six, his family returned to Lagos for six months. “I have faint memories,” he says. “There was a hole in the road with two planks across it. If I’d fallen in I wouldn’t have been able to get out. >
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Yemi Alade-Lawal, manager, Adio West, producer, and Afrikan Boy
And there were masquerades, people in masks. I remember them chasing me. I haven’t been back to Nigeria since.” Shola’s parents had left Nigeria when his mother became pregnant with him. “They literally ran away,” he says. “My mum didn’t dare tell her father she was pregnant. He was a Christian preacher and she was 18. It was like the daughter of a preacher couldn’t give birth in a manger. The influence of the Christian 94
missionaries was still really strong for my parents’ generation. But my dad was a cool guy, smoked weed, a musician. They went to France first and settled in the UK a few months later.” Shola began making music in the early 2000s. “It was the golden era of grime,” he says. “It was entangled with my social circle. Me and my friends all used to write lyrics in class. That’s where ‘Lidl’ came from. Tinie Tempah
came from the same part of Plumstead, we’re the same age. Everyone was part of their own little crew and went to youth clubs and wrote lyrics. That’s when I found my voice. Grime was my grounding in how to make music, how to put a verse, how to put a chorus, understanding the basics.” Shola doesn’t consider himself a pure grime or a pure afrobeats artist; he’d call his style ‘afro-grime’. “I wasn’t born with the voice of Michael Jackson, or had a formal musical education,” he says. “It’s a craft I’ve taught myself. But very early on I understood that I needed to have my own thing, my own unique spitting point. And that was Afrikan Boy. Me talking about being an African in the UK. ‘Lidl’ was pure grime, but with an African accent, which coloured it. It was playing on the way a Jamaican would tease a Nigerian and vice versa.” ‘Lidl’ became a hit through club play and word of mouth. There was little radio. “When grime was buzzing,” says Shola, “all the grime guys were on pirate radio. But I never did it, because most of the pirates were in east London. I never really ventured to east London or other areas because of the postcode wars that were happening. They were evident and strong. There were a few stations in south London but I was young and I didn’t really venture out too much.” Afrikan Boy’s name spread further when M.I.A. latched on to ‘Lidl’ and invited Shola to guest on ‘Hussel’ on her album Kala. A remix of her track ‘Paper Planes’ – now featuring Afrikan Boy – followed, as did tour work supporting M.I.A. in 2007 and 2008. “I could have signed a record deal after ‘Lidl’ came out,” says Shola. “EMI approached me, M.I.A. wanted to sign me to Zig-Zag. But I didn’t because I didn’t feel ready. I was only 16, 17. It was a good move because at that age I would have just been in the grinder and out again straight away. Now I know more. I’ve had a lot of experiences.” Instead, Shola enrolled at Brunel University in 2008, graduating three
PROFILE | Afrikan Boy
years later in psychology and sociology. He carried on making music but it was necessarily on the back burner. Before ‘Hit Em Up’ in 2013, his last major solo success was ‘Lagos Town’ in 2008. But while he was at uni, Shola went through changes that have informed ABCD. First came his awakened interest in African music. “I grew up on Fela Kuti, Sunny Adé and Shina Peters,” says Shola. “My dad loved Fela. I didn’t appreciate it when I was younger, but as I grew older I found myself discovering African music all over again. And that is showing more heavily in my music now. The spirit of Fela is definitely what carries ‘Hit Em Up’. I started it when I was at uni. It’s an homage even though it’s hip hop, not afrobeats. Now that I’m more knowledgeable about music I don’t just listen to Fela to hear African music. I listen to him to hear music, how rich it can be. Fela’s music is really, really rich – fantastic instrumentation, fantastic lyrics. I didn’t get that when I was a kid. Maybe my [six-month-old] son will. I always sing ‘Trouble Sleep Yanga Go Wake Am’ when I rock him to sleep.” University changed Shola in other ways too. There are, for example, greatlooking dancers in his recent videos, but an absence of gratuitous costumes and choreography. “When I was younger,” says Shola, “making a music video with all the fly girls, that was exciting. But now that I’m older and married, I look at it from a different angle. And my music isn’t like that. It would be out of place now. But the girls have to look their best. With the ‘Hit Em Up’ video, my wife criticised me for not having the girls’ hair on point. That’s because in a music video you want to make sure that everybody looks great. But you don’t have to look like a slut to look great. If I had a daughter, I’d want my videos to be something she could watch.” Gone, too, is Afrikan Boy’s casual use of ‘nigger’ in his lyrics. “I have used it,” says Shola. “It’s a good word to use phonetically in rap lyrics, it makes a good sound. I wrote a song called ‘From
a Nigger to a God’. But now I try not to use it. I’m consciously omitting it. I don’t say it to people – that whole nigger this, nigger that thing – whereas I might have done a few years ago. I’m battling that. I’ve been part of the problem, now I’m part of the solution. Some say they use it to reclaim it. I saw this interview with Jay-Z on Oprah. She said you shouldn’t use the word, and Jay-Z was saying he was taking the power out of it. Other people say that it’s only a word. But its history makes it more than just a word.” ‘You Don’t Really Hear Me’, from 2011, the year Shola graduated from Brunel, was an early example of ABCD’s explicit political strand. “That was more
‘I WAS ONLY 16, 17. AT THAT AGE I WOULD HAVE JUST BEEN IN THE GRINDER AND OUT AGAIN’ aggressive,” says Shola. “It was speaking about something I felt was at fault, asking questions. It was challenging the perception of Africa in Europe and the US, rapping from an African point of view. The lyric was a combination of things I’d written in my book, that I cut and pasted, that had the same tone: ‘I’m from the place where the skinny brothers die, affiliated with AIDS, the kids just multiply, rolling with AK, smoking weed from eleven, life’s more than a game when the doors are locked in heaven’, and ‘You’ve seen the skeleton babies and skeleton mommas, talk about Oxfam adverts, it’s all flies and tears’.” “I’ve got a chance to get that sort of message on radio now. ‘Hit Em Up’
opened a door. Radio 6 gave it huge support. Lauren Laverne championed it. It went from C-list to B-list to A-list. That was amazing, a blessing. So I know a bit more about how radio works now, how to get my music to the DJs.” It’s time to let Shola get back to the mixing desk. Before I go, he returns to Willie Lynch. “My wife is Jamaican,” he says, “I can see the Willie Lynch thing in her and my parents’ generation, the way they grew up when Africans and Caribbeans were divided. So silly. I love dancehall music and reggae music, and my wife loves African music, and now everyone’s more open. It feels different. It’s no longer, ‘Oh, you’re an African bum scratcher,’ and all those childish things that perpetuated the divide. All that’s fizzled away – not completely, but there’s so much going on that you don’t have to worry. There’s more knowledge of each other, from both sides. The divide narrowed a bit more at his son’s naming ceremony. “My son’s named Oluwaremilekun Oluwafikayomi Olushola Marley Ajose,” says Shola. “We chose Marley because he was born while we were listening to ‘Redemption Song’. It reflects his Jamaican heritage. During his naming ceremony, which was a traditional African ceremony, my parents’ friends were saying, ‘What does this Marley mean? What does it stand for?’ And my wife’s parents’ friends were meanwhile being introduced to African culture. My mother-in-law ate African powdered yam and she liked it; and she brought Jamaican dumplings and curry goat and my aunties were trying that out. I liked that. Maybe, in a small way, bridging the divide.” ABCD is out 21 April on YAM Records wegoyam.com yammm.co.uk
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Milo wears jacket by Tourne de Transmission; jeans by Levi’s Made&Crafted; T-shirt by Levi’s; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Simão wears jacket and T-shirt by Levi’s Made&Crafted; trousers by Religion; hat, stylist’s own; watch by Rolex.
Soho Struts
Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala Grooming Despina Economou using MAC Photographic Assistant Oana Damir Hustlers Milo Anthony Whittaker miloni2@hotmail.co.uk and Simão Borges simaob@hotmail.co.uk
STYLE
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Simão wears top by Gabicci; jeans by Levi’s; sunglasses by Versace; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Milo wears top by Gabicci; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; sunglasses by Ray-Ban; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog.
STYLE | Soho Struts
Sim達o wears shirt by Marni; trousers by Acne; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Milo wears shirt by Marni; trousers by Dsquared2; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog.
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STYLE | Soho Struts
Milo wears shirt by Missoni; tracksuit bottoms by Acne; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Sim達o wears jacket, shirt and trousers by Victor&Rolf; jewellery by The Great Frog.
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Sim達o wears shirt, trousers and sunglasses by Prada; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Milo wears top and sunglasses by Prada; trousers by Missoni; jewellery by The Great Frog.
STYLE | Soho Struts
Milo wears jacket by Tourne de Transmission; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog. Simão wears jacket by Levi’s Made&Crafted; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog.
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Milo wears cardigan by Maison Martin Margiela; trousers by Victor&Rolf; shirt by Versace; hat by Berluti; watch by Rolex; jewellery by The Great Frog.
Sim達o wears jacket by Valentino; sunglasses by Prada; neckerchief by Berluti.
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COVER STORY
Jonathan Glazer Theatre Design. Guinness. Rabbit in Your Headlights. Sexy Beast. Stella Artois Words Chris Sullivan Portrait Jill Furmanovsky
Originally educated in theatre set design, Jonathan Glazer is today regarded as one of the most intelligent and inventive movie directors working in the UK. Like overseas contemporaries Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, Glazer is able to tell emotionally engaging stories without following literal, linear narratives. This is evident in the body of advertising and music-video work he created in the 1990s, and abundantly so in his three features, starting with acclaimed 2000 debut Sexy Beast. His musical client list reads like a Who’s Who of 90s alternative Britannia: Blur, Radiohead, UNKLE, Jamiroquai, Massive Attack, Richard Ashcroft, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. His Guinness ad ‘Surfer’ (1999) was voted Best Ad of All Time in a Channel 4/Sunday Times poll in 2002; other corporate clients include Levi’s, Wrangler, Volkswagen and Nike, while his run of projects for 104
Stella Artois/Diageo is legendary. What ties these disparate formats together is Glazer’s ability to engage his audiences cerebrally and visually to communicate a parable or story in a 90-second vignette. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that he’d graduate to directing feature films. Sexy Beast was a success both critically and at the box office; the New York Times’ AO Scott wrote: “Rarely has the romance of middle-aged married love been depicted with such quiet heat. Sexy Beast delivers not only sensation but also, more remarkably, feeling.” Viewers mostly remember the psychotic villain Don, played by a cast-againsttype Ben Kingsley (who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar). With his second film Birth (2004) – starring Nicole Kidman and stylistically influenced by the likes of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock – Glazer proved that his unique eye can see the surreal
and the dramatically beautiful in the terribly ordinary. Since 2007, he has worked seriously on his comparatively experimental third feature, Under the Skin, and Jocks&Nerds caught up with him over dinner at the Groucho Club ahead of its April release. Congratulations on a superb film. How’s it gone down so far? Venice was interesting. It’s a frightening thing to show your film because, when you make a film, really, you make it for yourself. I find it strange that, in reality, you have to then show it to other people. The thing about Venice is that you have to sit through it – in some festivals you can go to the bar and wait it out. I liked the reaction in Venice. It was mixed. There was booing and clapping in equal measure. I’d like to think it was equal, anyway. It was a vigorous response, quite divided. I thought that was a good sign. >
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Odyssey, 2002
I was surprised how mixed the reviews were. Half of them gave the end away. This guy at the Independent hated it. The moral is not to believe reviews. How did you get Scarlett Johansson to play such an unusual role, anyway? I can’t remember where I first met her but we’ve chatted a bit over the years. It wasn’t until we were working out how to shoot the film that we fully embraced her. Shooting with someone well known was hard to get the head around. It was just the surveillance thing – I thought, this is going to be great, she’s got it all, and putting her in Glasgow is already ‘alien’ anyway; that’s a lovely narrative. If you put any girl from LA in Glasgow they’d be freaked out. This is a film about an alien. If you’re going to make a film with any credibility, we have to see the story as she sees it. Immediately, you’re narrowing the language you can use. You can’t have her putting her feet up at the end of the day, saying, “Fuck me! You know what, me ones and twos are killing me!” You must stick with her point of view. 106
People have asked if I read the book the film is based on but I haven’t. I rarely read new books and am not a sci-fi fan. Same. I serial-read certain authors like Hermann Hesse and I’m still catching up on stuff from the last century. I read Nabokov, Hesse, stuff like that. I’m not going to read modern fiction because I’ve got such a hole to fill.
‘WHEN I MAKE A FILM I LIKE TO BE FREE OF ANY INFLUENCE’ Any favourites you could mention? I love Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and also Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Do you keep up with films? I used to be ravenous for films, books and music but you get to a point where
you have to stop. When you make a film you don’t want any contemporary influence at all, so I haven’t seen many for six or seven years. I know there are great films out there but when I make one I like to be free of any influence. You have to do your own thing. And your film isn’t like anyone else’s. It’s got its own thing. How true is it to the book? The book is really very different. There’s no one set piece of the book that’s in the film. What interested me was the story from the point of view of the central character. Walter Campbell, who wrote the script with me, never read the book. How did you work on the film? We had a good storyboard and, in the end, the script wasn’t long, about 49 pages. Because we’d turned it over so many times, we knew what we wanted from it. I went up to Scotland with the margins of the scenes we had but also with freedom to just play within those margins. I love to work like that. There’s no ‘This line has to be delivered
COVER STORY | Jonathan Glazer
Surfer, 1999
in order to make sense of that’. It’s the ‘feeling’ of the scene. How would you describe the film? I’ll describe it as… well, do you know those sorts of films you see when there’s three people snoring at the back of the Renoir cinema? It’s one of those. Someone compared it to The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg. I like that film but I feel the only comparison is that they are both aliens on Earth. But its nothing like it, really. The club scene was excellent. It’s rare you see good club scenes in films. All
those tacky birds. That’s what it’s like. That was all part of the whole surveillance thing. It was shot in a real club in Glasgow with real people. Did they know what you were doing? No, we did it with hidden cameras. Did anybody recognise Johansson? Probably. Tell me about the surveillance aspect? Was that used throughout the movie? All her driving around is surveillance, all hidden cameras. The geezers she pulls over to talk to don’t know they’re being filmed. They just think they’re being
asked directions. They’re all random. Nothing was rehearsed or staged. The reactions are their real reactions. Well, that’s even better. It’s so real. Well, that’s because it was. I was thinking that the actors looked very authentic. Where’d you get them? No, they are all real. The nightclub’s all real. There were only a few actors in the production. She had to interact with people. This is probably the first time then that reality has been married so well with fiction in a movie. > 107
Rabbit in Your Headlights, 1998
There’s a long tradition of shooting on the streets, from the 1950s and 1960s, and Murnau’s Sunrise [A Song of Two Humans] from way before – so I don’t think there’s anything new about it. What I think is interesting is that she’s a Hollywood star and she’s ‘interacting’. In some scenes, the script was written as we went along. She had that perfect west London posh-girl accent. Mum’s a producer, dad’s in PR. She was spot on. All that was part of the lie. It was just putting her in that reality and just ‘witnessing’ what Scarlett in disguise, in that character, in Glasgow, was like. It’s a great idea. Did her involvement make it easier to fund? Oh yes. It made it way easier to fund. It sounds to me like a hard movie to sell. How do you even begin to explain your film to anyone? It is so unique. 108
It was a very hard movie to sell, yes. When she came on board, commercially, it was a meaningful bit of casting. To be honest with you, she knew exactly what she was getting involved with. She was
‘BANDS HAD MORE FREEDOM BACK THEN TO DO WHAT THEY LIKED’ fantastically committed; a real pleasure to work with. You know when you’re working with someone devoted to the work and what you’re doing. There’s a long tradition of movie stars coming
to Europe and making very unusual films they’d never make in Hollywood. Is she really pleased with the movie? She seems to be. She said normally she makes a film and sees herself on the screen and recognizes what she’s doing; but with this she didn’t. It must be such a strange thing. Well, the mixed reviews are better than people saying “I didn’t mind it”. As you said, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea; it’s not Love Actually. I think what we were interested in doing was going from the reality of the street. Witnessed reality and not set up. Putting that cheek-by-jowl and flooding that in to that black space. It’s like coming to the edge of the world or something. What did she do to these people? We decided these aliens wanted us for something – but what is unclear. But Scarlett was great at all that, I liked her
COVER STORY | Jonathan Glazer
Sexy Beast, 2000 Courtesy of Park Circus/Film4
very much. She’s a funny actress, she reminds me of Lauren Bacall a bit. Who you worked with on Birth, right? She was amazing. She was everything you’d want her to be. Very funny woman. When you were young did you watch a lot of her films? I did, with my dad. I had a drink with Lauren Bacall once in some whisky bar. It was great. When I walked in, the pianist was playing the theme from Casablanca. She was sitting there with her drink, all eyes on her. Then the guy finished playing and the music stopped. Everyone clapped and she looked up and said,“Why are you clapping? Ingrid Bergman was in Casablanca, not me!”
When you made Sexy Beast, did you cast against type on purpose? Ray Winstone as, for once, supplicant. And Ian McShane as the mob boss was a great idea. A complete contrast to his pin-up past and his role in Lovejoy. What I loved about Ian McShane in Lovejoy was he just looked like he didn’t want to be there. Sexy Beast was a great film to make but, again, I’ve got to put that down to the script. I was lucky. I pointed the camera at a great script. How was Ben Kingsley to work with? He looked like he enjoyed himself. He ate it up. After that, perhaps people expected you to do the same thing. But you didn’t.
After Sexy Beast I was offered a lot of ‘Hollywood’ stuff. I felt like I wanted to try my own thing, whether people would like it or not. It was more important for me to do that than pursue a career. So I did Birth. Are you influenced by anyone from the past? Anyone you’d recommend? Yeah, loads of people. Film is like music in that there is great music for all the different genres. Robert Bresson is remarkable and ever relevant. I love his work. He’s an absolute master. I like the poets of the cinema. I like Jean Vigo. Then there’s FW Murnau, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro¯ Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Stanley Kubrick. > 109
How did you see all these films? On VHS, mostly. The films I got into with my dad were the ones he loved and I loved, films with classical storytelling. Directors like Sidney Lumet, John Schlesinger and David Lean. I love all those films. But I never went, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to some art cinema and watch the double bill by... you know?’ I never had that. Federico Fellini was the one that really impressed Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! What is it about Anderson? He had a nice mental edge to him. When I started seeing that stuff, I was thinking, ‘Really? Can you do that?’ I hadn’t really seen evidence of that from what I’d been exposed to. I guess it just got my curiosity. That and art college. You studied theatre design, didn’t you? Yes, at Trent Polytechnic. Most people on that course went on to do something completely different, actually. Why is that, do you think? We had a lecturer who, by sheer force of personality, was really inspiring. He was quite militant and political, and he demanded that you read and saw things that weren’t on the curriculum. You directed plays and then began directing music videos in the mid1990s. What was that like? Bands had more freedom back then. They could go off and do whatever the fuck they liked. Also, the medium of the music video hadn’t really been fully formed yet. It was still in flux. They hadn’t landed as a format somehow. They were still finding out what it was. You came at the right time. Often the videos contain the band singing and some obscure visual narrative. Your video for Rabbit in Your Headlights knocked me sideways. You said pop promos could be like art videos. Ha. Actually, that was banned too. Nothing like being banned to give your career a hoist, eh? What did they think? 110
James Lavelle? Rabbit was Thom Yorke on vocals and James. James was fully fucking supportive of it. It was like an art film. Did you ever think of going that way, the art route? I did a thing for an exhibition at the Haunch of Venison gallery, something I really enjoyed, with Jason Pierce from Spiritualized. He wrote this song ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space’. I came up with an idea for music as light. It was kind of interesting. What was the first ad you directed? It was for Kodak disposable cameras. It
‘TO THIS DAY I DON’T REALLY THINK OF MYSELF AS A FILM-MAKER. I MAKE FILMS’ was terrible. I remember editing it and the agency came in and cut it to pieces. I was like, ‘You can’t do that, I’ll take my name off.’ And they said, ‘What name?’ Was it the Guinness surfer ad (1999) that gave you a kickstart? Those ads by you, Tony Kaye and Frank Budgen are still really enjoyable to watch. I wouldn’t have anything going on in advertising had Tony Kaye not came along. He did remarkable work. The people who really gave him his wings were the same guys that gave me my first shot in advertising. Who were they? Walter Campbell and Tom Carty. They were the team. They were genuine. They were great risk-takers, mavericks. They protected the work from all the noise. It’s incredible how few of those people are really around.
You’ve got to have balls to do it. You’re only as good as your last advert, really? These boys made it all possible for Tony Kaye before me and, of course, Walter is the guy I wrote Under the Skin with. This ‘Directors Who Need to Make More Films’ list on IMDB has you at #1. People don’t realise they take such a long time. Would you make more if you could? I want to spend as much time as I can with my kids. I don’t want to miss their growing up. Not a bit of it. But also, to this day I don’t really think of myself as a film-maker. I make films. I’m not that keen on putting a title on it, whatever it
COVER STORY | Jonathan Glazer
Under the Skin, 2014
is. I think that if you’re going to make a film, it’s going to take a lot out of you. How long did this one take? From start to finish, about 10 years. It was an 11-week shoot. A year editing. I love the editing. It kills you but I love it; it’s a wonderful place. That’s a lot of time, to keep that level of concentration on one subject. But if you keep that concentration… if you find a subject that is fertile enough to keep your attention. I don’t want to spend a minute on something I don’t want to do. I’d be happy to spend 10 years on something I do.
You’re here to leave a legacy. I know my attention has to be taken by something that I love. It’s the only thing I’m going to be good at. I’ll only do well if I can’t put it down. You have to put your neck on the line. You do. I’ll put my neck on the line for something I believe in. We have to do what we believe in. Do you go out to look for things or do you wait for them to jump out? Do you have a backlog of stuff in the wings? It’s like waiting for something to come in the room and put its feet up and say, ‘Go on, then.’ I’ve got to be taken over
by something. It could be anything. It might not be a film. I’m sort of circling a few ideas but something will land and I’ll know that’s it. Then I’ll go off on that journey. I’m not going to rush it; it’ll come to me. How do you feel now? It’s funny doing this film, funny having a film out. Fuck me! It’s really odd. Under the Skin is out 14 March undertheskinmovie.com Sexy Beast is screening at BFI Southbank 18–27 April parkcircus.com bfi.org.uk 111
SPORT
East End Boxing Pedlar Palmer. Maurice Hope. Daniel Mendoza. The Krays. Lord Douglas
Words Mark Webster Portrait Chris Tang Photographs Robert Wyatt Styling Adam Howe Photographic Assistant Giorgio Murru Styling Assistant Mia Howe Boxers Tim Agbetile and Mark Taylor Coaches Wendall Henry and Gary Cooke Location Repton Boxing Club, The Bath House, Cheshire St, London E2 reptonboxingclub.com
“The East End wasn’t only turning out boxers. It was turning out cabaret stars, film stars, politicians, entrepreneurs. The only way out was your talents. And there was a wealth of talent.” Stephen Powell is landlord of The Globe in Morning Lane – what you might call a proper old boozer – in Hackney, east London. It also happens to be something of a shrine to boxing. Perhaps not surprising, given Powell is president of the London Ex-Boxers Association, a post filled by his mum before him, and initially by his dad and ex-professional boxer, Frank. One wall in particular is covered with various images celebrating the noble art and, appropriately enough for the pub, it duly acknowledges the sport’s global appeal: Muhammad Ali is up there a few times; there’s a print of the Manassa Mauler, Jack Dempsey, the giant American heavyweight champ of the 1920s; and a 1972 group shot taken in a gym, entitled ‘Philadelphia Greats’, that features local heroes such as Chico Vejar, Rocky Graziano, Sandy Saddler and Jake LaMotta. 112
But pride of place goes to pictures of a series of men who came out of the neighbourhood and went on to great things. Those images sit above an old poster promoting a night of boxing at Leyton Baths, with fights featuring two young new talents from Bethnal Green, Ronnie and Reggie Kray – as if to just remind us what part of the world we’re in. First, there’s a print of one Pedlar Palmer of Canning Town; born in 1875 and the son of an Essex bare-knuckle champion, the picture proudly proclaims him the ‘box o’ tricks’. Then, continues Powell: “That’s Terry Marsh, light welterweight champion of the world, from Stepney. John H Stracey, world welterweight champion, from Bethnal Green. Maurice Hope, originally from Antigua, boxed out of Hackney, world middleweight champion. OBE as well. Then there’s Dennis Andries, also from Antigua, and he became the first British boxer to win a world title three times; Hackney. Charlie Magri, flyweight champion; Stepney. Nigel Benn, out of West Ham, middleweight champion. And that’s Lennox Lewis, heavyweight
champion of the world, from Forest Gate but grew up in Canada. He was Olympic champion as well.” It is a proud and prolific catalogue of boxing success but, of course, not something that could necessarily be considered exclusive. However, given that the sport was formally organised and developed in London, and the East End was the pool from which it drew the men who would provide the action, it is a unique pedigree. That “wealth of talent” Powell refers to has been crucial to the sport’s growth – and the culture in which it has emerged is equally so. As he says, “In Cuba, there’s a boxing ring on every corner. Look at the fighters they turn out, and all because of the poverty. You’ll usually find boxers come from that background. Same with Liverpool, Glasgow. Anywhere you had docks.” In London, the docks began to be developed in the 1700s as a thoroughly modern concern, and a huge engineering operation meant many thousands of hands had to get dirty making it happen. And those people would find themselves crammed, as if in a ship’s hull, into the >
Stephen Powell, landlord of The Globe in Morning Lane pub globepube9.com
Tim wears gown by Adidas; shorts by Everlast; boots, model’s own.
>
SPORT | East End Boxing
Mark wears vest and shorts by Adidas; gloves by Lonsdale. Tim wears T-shirt by Margaret Howell; shorts by American Apparel; boots, model’s own; gloves by Everlast.
East End. “If you want to be pedantic about it, the East End starts at Aldgate pump and ends at Mile End Gate – where the Blind Beggar pub is,” says Powell, citing another infamous Kray landmark. “The bankers, those in the Square Mile, lived west and north of the City of London, but the migrants that came to dig out the docks, they had little builder’s houses. And those who worked for the gentry also lived in the East End. The population got big. And for a lot of them, a way of supplementing their wage was to take up boxing professionally. “There was also boxing at the boys’ clubs that started to spring up, especially when the Jewish immigrants came. They wanted to better themselves, look after their kids, give them things to do. And the most famous one in the 1700s was Daniel Mendoza, who kicks it all off.” 116
Mendoza was born in the East End in 1764 and was only 5"7' but went on to be middleweight champion of Britain
‘THEY WERE CALLED SCHOOLS OF ARMS THEN, RATHER THAN GYMS’ and heavyweight champion of the world. His is almost the template for the classic boxing story. The working-class lad from
immigrant stock who fought his way out of the slums, got familiar with royalty (it’s said he was the first Jew to speak to King George III), earned fortunes, lost fortunes, became sort of a sideshow and then died broke at the age of 72. But as Powell says, “He was small, you see. He had to be careful.” He perfected a way of fighting that helped him avoid being hit by his frequently bigger, stronger opponents. This, at a time in the sport when standing and allowing yourself to be hit was seen as a natural consequence of competing. His 1789 book The Art of Boxing is the volume credited with helping turn boxing into a ‘science’. However, it would be decades before it started to display the features of the sport we know today, and even then had to be dragged kicking and screaming into modernisation and its attendant >
SPORT | East End Boxing
Mark wears vest and shorts by Adidas; trainers, model’s own; socks by Topman. Headgear by Adidas; bag by Adidas Originals; gloves by Lonsdale; jackets, on hanger, by Nike.
Tim wears T-shirt by Margaret Howell; gloves by Everlast. Wendall wears T-shirt by Repton 1884. Mark wears vest by Adidas; gloves by Lonsdale.
SPORT | East End Boxing
Tim wears T-shirt by Margaret Howell; shorts by American Apparel; gloves by Everlast.
Tim wears vest by Nike; shorts by Everlast.
Gary wears T-shirt by Repton 1884; tracksuit bottoms by Adidas; sweater by Everlast; pads by BBE Boxing. Tim wears T-shirt by Gant Rugger; shorts and gloves by Everlast
rules, regulations and organisation. “It changed in the 1890s with the founding of the National Sporting Club,” says Powell. “Prior to that, it was the Pelican Club – they were all nuts, that mob!” The Marquess of Queensberry published the rules that would became the bible for organised boxing in 1867, but the gentlemen of note who attended the Gerrard Street club in the West End – of which he was a prominent member – had little interest in the controls he wanted to introduce. “Half the fights weren’t genuine,” says Powell. “There wasn’t really anyone in control. It was in total disarray, which led to the Pelican Club being closed down because fights were brutal – all bare-knuckle and in a small area. They’d come up from the East End, no training, all illegal, all for the fun of the rakes. It got the Hooray Henries in trouble, and it got them thrown out of Gerrard Street.” “So, the secretary of the club found some premises on King Street, Covent Garden,” says Powell, describing an area that’s very definitely no longer ‘society’ and on the cusp of where working-class London takes over, with the notable
exception of the Square Mile. “They put together a committee, got some backers and set up in a building that backed on to a theatre. So they had sitting rooms, reading rooms, a restaurant, snooker, billiards – but that theatre at the back meant they could put on boxing nights. “Queensbury would’ve been there, Lord Lonsdale became a president and started the Lonsdale Belts. They introduced little 4oz gloves. It really was the first home of British boxing, and the birth of modern boxing. Boxers came from all over the place – don’t you worry about that! – but they could always draw on those working-class boys from just along the road. They provided the biggest, most successful amount.” As the Victorian era came to an end and the Great War loomed, the East End began to flourish. The York Hall in Bethnal Green – one of the most famous of the small-hall boxing venues – didn’t open until 1929, but there were plenty of others, prior to its arrival, to sate the boxing fan’s appetite, as well as plenty of places for young men to learn their craft. “They were called Schools of Arms then, rather than gyms,” says Powell, “and they
could be anywhere: in old stables, a room over a pub. Then there would be drill halls for ex-servicemen. But the boxing halls had gyms attached to them, too. Because they had fighters attached. Contract men.” Boxing halls in east London would provide entertainment much in the way music halls always had, continuing to do so until cinema started to capture both imaginations and big entertainment venues. And from one such hall emerges another true-life fairytale that seems to sum up the East End’s boxing history. “Premierland took over as the number-one East End venue when the Wonderland burnt down,” says Powell of a venue that opened around the turn of the century at 100 Whitechapel Road but fell victim to fire in 1911. Almost inevitably, this was shrouded in mystery after tales emerged of the partners in the enterprise falling out over money. But it did lead to one partner opening Premierland that same year, just around the corner in Back Church Lane. “On boxing nights, men would turn up and park all along the road,” Powell says. “And kids, just like at football, used > 119
Mark wears top and T-shirt by Adidas Originals; shorts by Adidas; trainers, model’s own.
Mark wears shorts by Adidas.
SPORT | East End Boxing
Tim wears gown by Adidas.
to look after them for sixpence. Judah Bergman looked after Victor Berliner’s car, the general manager and a big name in boxing. This kid came and sat on the car wing, and Judah told him to get off it. And he wouldn’t. So there was a fight. Berliner came out, saw them fighting, and when it got broken up he told them, ‘Don’t fight out here. If you’re going to fight, fight for money. There’s a shilling in it.’ So he put them on, first fight. Berg got the better of the other kid, and from thereon he was Kid Berg.” Bergman was 14 years old when this happened and in 1930 the ‘Whitechapel Windmill’ beat renowned Cuban ‘Kid Chocolate’ to become world junior welterweight champion. He moved to the USA, became a film stuntman, and reportedly had an affair with Mae West. Running in parallel to the pro game was the sport’s equally powerful amateur competition, and many fighters emerged
from clubs set up in what was a great wave of Victorian philanthropy. One of the most famous in east London was the Eton Manor Boys Club, started by some
‘EVERYONE IS AS ONE. THERE AIN’T A WRONG’UN IN HERE, THEY’RE ALL EQUAL’ old Etonians who were making money just a stroll – but effectively a million miles – away, in the banks. They built a social club, The Wilderness, on Hackney
Marshes, effectively where the Olympic Park now stands – wholly appropriate, if you consider that the first man to win consecutive gold was born there in 1892. Harry Mallin – “a wonderful boxer, good left-hand fighter” says Powell – won a handful of national and European titles and gold medals in the middleweight division in the 1920 and 1924 Games – an achievement yet to be surpassed. Six years before Mallin was born, Repton Public School in Derbyshire also did its bit for the impoverished boys of the East End by setting up Repton Boys Club; 160 years later, Repton is possibly the most celebrated amateur boxing club in the world. Now housed in a Victorian bath house close to its Bethnal Green origins, it oozes fight history. As if to square the circle, among the hundreds of pictures of Repton boxers on its walls, there’s a poster for a fight night that echoes the one at the Globe. It’s for > 121
Wendall wears T-shirt by Repton 1884; tracksuit bottoms by Porsche Speedster. Gary wears T-shirt by Repton 1884; tracksuit bottoms by Adidas; sweater by Everlast. Tim wears vest by Repton 1884; shorts and gloves by Everlast. Mark wears sweater by Carhartt WIP; shorts by Adidas.
SPORT | East End Boxing
Wendall wears sweater by Nike; tracksuit bottoms by Porsche Speedster; trainers by Adidas. Mark wears T-shirt by Gant Rugger; shorts by Adidas; trainers, model’s own; socks by Topman. Tim wears T-shirt by Christopher Raeburn; shorts by Folk; boots, model’s own.
a Freddie Foreman Promotion at Manor Place Baths. Topping the bill: two old Repton boys, the ‘non-stop punching machine’ Ronnie Kray and ‘a champion in the making, class act’ Reggie Kray. No doubt more importantly to the club, John H Stracey and Maurice Hope are here again among a very long list of members who went on to be both amateur and professional title-holders. Gary Cooke is one. “I started coming down here when I was 13,” he says. “I was getting in a bit of trouble, and Billy Taylor, the old trainer, got me in.” Cooke is now a senior trainer at the club and is very much aware of Repton’s reputation. “I was in Mexico four or five years ago,” he says. “And I’m at a bus stop with my
kids. A fella’s tapped me on the shoulder, little Mexican geezer. I’ve got a Repton shirt on. He’s just shaped up (in a boxing stance). He couldn’t even speak English, but he smiled, because he recognised the name. Everyone knows Repton across the world. I was in a gym in New York, it happened. We went to Lagos. Scary place, but everyone was our friend.” Plenty of clubs and gyms are, of course, part of the east London boxing story. Not far from Bethnal Green, for example, Peacock Gym and West Ham Boys Amateur Boxing Club (founded in 1922) continue to see local boys – many of whom have arrived from much farther afield – become fighters of repute. But none can boast Repton’s history, hand
in padded glove with its reputation for giving local boys a chance to use their talents. “Everyone is as one,” says Cooke. “There ain’t a wrong’un in here. They might be wrong’uns outside, but in here they’re all equal. Everyone gives up their time to help each other. I’m a cab driver and I’m in here! I love it.” Repton Boxing Club is 130 years old reptonboxingclub.com londonexboxers.org.uk repton1884.com
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MUSIC
Sun Ra
Saturn. Fletcher Henderson. Solovox Words Chris May Portraits Kevin Davies
The father of afrofuturism and the missing link between Duke Ellington and Public Enemy, Sun Ra has become the most mythologised jazz musician since Charlie Parker, and much of the mythologising began with Ra himself. He took pains to obscure his birth – as Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914 – maintaining that he was from Saturn. His real name, he said, was Le Sony’r Ra and he’d been sent to Earth to revive the culture of the prebiblical people of Egypt, the Ancient Blacks, and so bring peace and harmony. His legacy is as much philosophical and political as it is musical. In most respects other than their genius, Ra and Parker were opposites. Parker put the epic in epicurean. He was an on-off (mostly on) heroin user from his mid-teens until his death, a heavy drinker and compulsive womaniser. He gulped amphetamines and barbiturates by the handful. His short life was duly characterised by extreme behaviour and chaos. Ra, six years older than Parker – whom he outlived by four decades – was hostile to drugs, a declared teetotaller and a vegetarian. A secret sufferer of the testicular condition cryptorchidism, he was probably a virgin when he died in 1993. His long life was characterised by focus and discipline, qualities he also demanded of his band members. “My music is about dark tradition,” Ra said. “Dark tradition means a lot more than black tradition. There’s a lot of division in what they call ‘black’. I’m not into division. I’m into coordination, discipline and tradition.” Alongside such transparency, Ra also made spectacularly gnomic statements, 124
which were seized on by his detractors in the jazz establishment. “Did you ever see Star Wars?” he asked writer Francis Davis. “It was very accurate.” In his lifetime, most observers dismissed Ra as, at best, a prankster and, at worst, a con artist. How, they asked, could a serious artist come out with such stuff? What these (mostly white) critics failed to understand was the historical role of science fiction in African-American culture, where it was long employed as a metaphor in the struggle for Earthly liberation. If black people could not find equality on Earth, suggested this tradition, why not try to find it on another planet, in another dimension? Ra’s persona made better sense to them. Poet and polemicist Amiri Baraka, whose Black Nationalist beliefs were shaped more by historical determinism than by cosmic intervention, nailed Ra’s legacy. “Sun Ra’s consistent statement, musically and spoken,” wrote Baraka in a 1996 tribute, “is that this is a primitive world. Its practices, beliefs, religions are uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the past… That’s why Sun Ra returned only to say he left. Into the Future. Into Space.” The Arkestra was an outsider band leading a hand-to-mouth existence for most of Ra’s life. But Ra did it his way, whatever the monetary consequences. In 1973, for instance, after 20 years recording for his own, chronically underfunded El Saturn label, Ra was offered his first big break. Impulse, the home of John Coltrane during his peak years and still the most influential label in jazz, wanted to sign Ra and rerelease his back catalogue of at least 30 studio
albums. Signing would ensure efficient distribution in the US and Europe and, almost certainly, decent money, which Ra and his Arkestra had yet to enjoy. The deal collapsed when Ra rewrote Impulse’s draft contract. His revised sixth paragraph is representative: “Similar Rights on Planets Other Than Earth: Company agrees that all rights discussed in paragraph five above, as well as all rights of distribution and retail sales, on planets other than Earth (including but not limited to Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter, and Mars) shall belong to Sun Ra.” As Impulse’s house producer, Ed Michel, put it later: “It was just too far out for the lawyers.” Ra continued releasing music almost exclusively on El Saturn until the end of his life, in homemade sleeves and often with manufacturing runs of only a few hundred copies. He put out around 120 full-length albums. But beyond a small, devoted audience, he sometimes struggled to give them away. If you want to buy an original vinyl pressing today, however, you can pay more than £2,000 for a 45rpm single. LPs are pricier. Although he’s widely associated with free jazz, Sun Ra’s repertoire included a large body of straight-ahead swing (he worked as an arranger for bandleader Fletcher Henderson in the 1940s), doo-wop, R&B, blues and the Arkestra’s trademark space-chants. He was an early adopter of electronics, buying one of the first Solovox keyboards in 1939, and was using light shows and fantastical costuming a decade before acid rock came along. His music moves a broad spectrum of people. Here are nine of them. >
Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra began its eclectic life as Sun Ra tribute band the Cosmic Engineers “Sun Ra was the underground giant of 20th-century African-American music. He was a master jazz and classical pianist combining jazz with European avant-garde electronic music and Afrocentric rhythms, and inventing a fantastic manifesto of poetic jive talk to explain it all. He said he came from Saturn to educate the human race in music and was so creative he made that almost believable. That had a political message too – that black people were generally excluded from the space race, which was big at the time. Maybe he was ridiculing the white man’s delusions of making an impact on the vastness of outer space, saying that he personally could have just as much influence in space, with his keyboards. If so, he had a point. Maybe he was also saying that the European avant-garde was an assimilation of Africa anyway, with Picasso influenced by African art, and percussive sounds and rhythms being central to African music, so there was nothing new about abstract art or music. If so, he had another point. “I first became aware of Sun Ra in the 1960s. It took me years to realise the importance of rhythm in listening to good free jazz. I got into Sun Ra again in the early 1990s through cratedigging for breaks and rare grooves. I started listening to the whole albums and DJing this kind of music – Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Alice Coltrane – at a club I had called Chazz in the Egyptian room at the Atlantic Bar in Piccadilly. The club combined jazz and chess, with a few ardent chess heads. No one from the press was remotely interested. I also had a little band called Jazz Odyssey, after the Spinal Tap song, based on jam sessions I organised at the Wag Club, playing a hip-hop take on this kind of music. But it disappeared quite quickly in a small cloud of ganja smoke. The Spatial AKA Orchestra was and is a much larger, hopefully more together, version of that, really – although in the spirit of Ra we have now moved on quite a way from just doing Sun Ra music, taking in new territories, from library music to ska, and somehow joining some strange dots, I hope. 126
“I saw him at The Venue in Victoria when he still had quite a large orchestra, sometime around ‘Nuclear War’, I think, in the 1980s. It was mind-blowing. I remember them filing round the stage doing those little jumps every four bars. “Looking back now from the 21st century you realise there was a whole lot more to Sun Ra’s music than the free jazz for which he was eventually best known in Europe. At the moment I’m listening to his early stuff from the 1940s and 1950s. I’m only now finding out he was also an incredible producer and musical director, in some ways a sort of US Lee Perry, producing lots of amazing records with other artists. There’s a Fantastic Voyage compilation called A Space Odyssey and the first CD contains some incredible stuff.”
Keyboard player Dr Kay leads Norway’s Ra-inspired Dr Kay & His Interstellar Tone Scientists. “Sun Ra is a living creature throughout the universe. His cosmic presence fills us with joy, with colour, with interest in the astral possibilities. By adorning garments of the stars, and speaking the language of dance, he opened the portal to a new plane of existence – where there is no distinction between so-called serious and popular music. Music is the source of dreams. Entertainment is a path to true enlightenment. Spiritual peace is only obtainable on the road to uninhibited expression. I am honoured to live in the same temporal universe as the master magician, confusing the shackles of mundane living and letting us all experience the greatest place that mankind never created: space.”
MUSIC | Sun Ra
Saxophonist Marshall Allen joined Sun Ra in 1958. After Ra’s death, he became the Arkestra’s musical director “With the Arkestra today, I try to keep the spiritual side of Sun Ra’s music alive. That isn’t hard, because the deepest experience in my life was Sun Ra. He taught me to play music, be creative, and do it for a reason, not just for fun. To do that, you had to discipline yourself and study, study, study. Right from the start, for every hour on the bandstand, we spent dozens – in the early years, more like weeks – rehearsing. “When I took over, I’d seen the way he did things and I tried to do them like that too, trying to keep that sound, that feeling that Sun Ra taught us. We do the old songs and I’ve added new ones, to keep it fresh. I’ve changed little things. I can’t write like Sun Ra, but I can write my own melodies, and we’ve got all kinds of different styles in the band, so it all fits into the package. Back in the day I’d remember lots of combinations of instruments and sounds Sun Ra used, but as time goes by, some of it goes out of your mind. But I remember the spirit completely and that is what it’s all about. “Sun Ra was a visionary. Back in the 1950s, before the space programme, he was telling the band that men would one day be walking on the moon and sending rockets to Saturn and all those places. He made songs about it. Some of it seemed possible, some of it seemed far-fetched, but you’d listen and take it in. Sun Ra never said you had to agree with him, just think about it. The things I didn’t believe, I just said nothing. “But the funny thing is, some of the things I didn’t believe are happening now. Other stuff – transmolecular travel and space aliens and other dimensions – maybe that stuff will happen one day, too. He always told us his music was for the space age. You’d say, ‘What about today?’ He’d say, ‘It’s not for today, it’s for the future.’”
After leaving Soft Machine in 1967, Daevid Allen founded Gong, a band inspired by Sun Ra and the Arkestra “In 1959, I was 20 years old and living in Melbourne, a fledgling beat poet and jazz guitarist doing poetry and jazz in a working band. One lucky day, in a second-hand box of jazz LPs on Lonsdale Street, I came across my first Sun Ra Arkestra album and had a future-flash of my own destiny. “Music from an exotic planet played by an extraterrestrial? Zap! I had been initiated into science fiction at the age of seven while hallucinating on a curious outback medication for the mumps. “Musically and conceptually, that album was unlike anything else. It was probably the only copy in Australia, which in the late 1950s was culturally similar to the late 1940s in the rest of the world. Originality was everything to me and I embraced it wholeheartedly. On leaving Australia in 1960, it was lost forever, but I remembered the name of the sax player, Marshall Allen. He was hot! The circle completed itself in Paris a year ago, when I performed for the first time with Marshall. He is my new friend, inventor and mentor. He
‘OBSERVERS DISMISSED RA AS, AT BEST, A PRANKSTER; AT WORST, A CON ARTIST’ is diminutive and serious, yet a lighthearted and mercurial conversationalist. He twinkles with a kindly accessibility. Soft-spoken, thoughtful and humming bits of tunes. He dresses elegantly, sports a dyed beard and has the huge, pendulous earlobes of a Hindu sage. And man, he can play!”
A founding member of Hawkwind, Nik Turner’s latest album is Space Gypsy “I got into Sun Ra in a big way after I saw him do a gig in Chicago in 1973. Hawkwind was on tour with John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. After the gig, I met some girls and they said, ‘Do you want to come to a club?’ And they took me to see Sun Ra. He had about 15 musicians onstage. All dressed up – robes, space hats, incredibly theatrical. It wasn’t a big club and there were probably more people onstage than in the audience, but it was very free and everybody was bubbling and he raised everybody’s spirits. It was awesome. That’s what I found about Sun Ra – he lifted people, which is what I try to do. I followed him more closely after that. In 1978, after I’d left Hawkwind, I stayed in Egypt for a while and spent time in the Great Pyramid, recording flute music. It came out on the album Xitintoday by Nik Turner’s Sphynx. Ra’s influence was there. “When we started Hawkwind we were only dimly aware of Sun Ra, but there were strong parallels. The sonic experimentation, light shows, costumes, theatrical stage presentation, the whole space-travel thing. And like Ra, we played a lot of benefit gigs. We didn’t know much about him, and I’m sure he didn’t know anything at all about us, but we were on the same wavelength. It was the spirit of the time.” >
MUSIC | Sun Ra
A near neighbour of Sun Ra in the 1960s, saxophonist Archie Shepp toured with the Sun Ra All Stars “I got to know him around 1961, shortly after he’d arrived in New York. The Arkestra pretty much kept to itself then, but Sonny and I both lived near each other on the Lower East Side and I’d sometimes see him in the street. I remember one Sunday evening, I was buying a newspaper on the corner. He saw me and said, ‘Everybody worships God, but if it were up to me, I’d worship the devil.’ I thought that rather peculiar. But then I remembered that the slaves, who worshipped the African orishas, were seen as worshipping the devil. I thought it strange Sonny was making that connection but perhaps he was going back to the slaves and the gods they worshipped. He was commenting on life and the irony of things, I suspect. “When I was with the band in autumn 1983 it was called the All Stars. I thought of myself as just a sideman, because in Sonny’s band, you knew you were working for him, not with him. I mean, the guys who worked with Sun Ra were under his charge. They did what he told them to do. The funny thing was, whenever the reviews came out they read as though he and I were coleaders, like we were calling the shots together, when in fact it was entirely him. I think it must have been because I was better known than the other guys in the band – though I didn’t think of myself that way. One day he came to me and said, ‘We got a bad review last night.’ I said, ‘What do you mean ‘we’ got a bad review? It’s your band.’ I began to think that maybe I should have asked for more money. “Sun Ra was a father and a mother to the musicians in his band. He gave a lot to his audiences, but I think he gave as much to the people who were directly connected to him. Some of the guys had big problems, with drugs and so on, and they stayed with him in part because he 128
was able to control impulses that they on their own were unable to control. He had some very fine musicians who had been in jail or been living the life on the streets. It was that kind of a mix. He was important not just as a musician but as a social worker. “He had his enforcers. I remember one afternoon before a gig in Germany I went onstage to try something on the
‘IT WAS ABOUT RESPECT. IT WAS ABOUT LOOKING AT MUSICIANS AS ANGELS’ piano. There was nobody else around. Suddenly this guy came onstage and he said to me, “Sonny doesn’t like anybody to touch his piano before he does.” I was a little annoyed, but I stopped playing. To get along with Sonny you had to go along with him. I realised he’d sent this guy up. He probably thought I was going to knock the piano out of tune. “Sonny had his ways. But on the whole he was a great man and a very original person, and working with that band was memorable for me, musically.”
Producer Jason Yarde plays saxophone with the Spatial A.K.A. Orchestra “Sun Ra was an all-encompassing musician – a composer, arranger, bandleader and keyboard player. His example encouraged me to think like that too, in the way Duke Ellington did. Like Ellington, Ra preferred to work with people for a very long time. Some of his key band members were with him for decades. Ellington’s band was rather like a family and Ra’s really was a family. I mean, he actually shared a house with his musicians. When they weren’t gigging or rehearsing, they spent a lot of time together just working on music, creating a specific sound. Music develops much further if you can do it like that. “As much as Sun Ra is associated with the free side of jazz, when he spoke he seemed to dwell more on the need for discipline in his musicians. It may seem counterintuitive to non-musicians, but you need high levels of discipline and focus to play free jazz, especially when you’re operating in a big band. But Ra didn’t only play free jazz. You can plot a course of musical development from what he initiated straight through to many of today’s afrofunk, soul-jazz, cosmic-dub and everything-in-between bands. Ra’s music traverses the whole timeline of black musical expression. The Art Ensemble of Chicago called its music ‘Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future’, and that describes Sun Ra well, too. It’s a testament to Sun Ra’s vision that the Arkestra is still going strong today, decades after his physical departure from our Earthly plane.”
Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has been a Ra devotee since the 1970s “The first time I met Sun Ra was in the 1980s at the Bottom Line in New York. We went backstage and I talked to him a little bit, but he was in his own zone to such a degree that I felt like this dinky little boy. A few weeks later, I went to what was advertised as a Sun Ra Lecture at the Knitting Factory. I was sitting waiting for it to start and all of a sudden I could hear Sun Ra talking but couldn’t see him. You could hear his voice getting closer. He was outside on the stairway and he was already talking. He’d started his lecture before he arrived. He came onstage mid-monologue and continued for 45 minutes. He moved through tangents of interest that he had about these cultures that he called the Ancient Blacks, how they need to be respected in modern culture or otherwise there’d be hell to pay. It was a wonderful lecture. Then the Arkestra came marching in and played some rousing music. When they exited, they came past my seat and I felt two hands on my shoulders. I turned and Sun Ra was in my face, smiling. He bent down to my ear and said, ‘Sing the cosmo song’. He’d recognised me from weeks earlier at the Bottom Line. ‘Oh, there’s that kid.’ “I had discovered Sun Ra in my late teens, around 1976 or 1977. I’d recently moved to New York and I was heavily into punk, people like James Chance & the Contortions. He would talk about Sun Ra in interviews. The message I received was one of subversion. I discovered Sun Ra had a punk aesthetic long before punk had been invented – he’d worked in a totally independent, do-it-yourself framework with little finance since the 1950s. He had his own Saturn and Thoth labels and he released literally hundreds of records. I thought, this guy is so much more punk than punk rock even pretends to be. “Then I started to go see him play and I just fell in love. The music was beautiful and all the players were fascinating and romantic and wonderful. You never knew what he was going to do. Sometimes he would do a Disney programme, a Count Basie programme, or he’d do a really far-out free-jazz programme, or he’d play solo. To my
good fortune, I lived down the block from the Knitting Factory when it opened in Houston Street and he played there often. I’d already started collecting his records. When Sonic Youth were on tour I’d scour the bins in record stores in every place we visited. The records were pennies for pounds at that time, though they’re rare as hen’s teeth now. “Sun Ra stood apart because he had such eccentricity. He was writing books of poetry that referenced Egyptology and the Ancient Blacks, but he didn’t come across on the bandstand with the language and demeanour of Black Nationalism. He was very gentle and very sweet and he had humour. When he spoke about racism being evil and racists going to burn it was almost funny, and it was across the board – it was all about respect. It was all about looking at musicians as angels, as communicators from another world. “The last time I met Sun Ra was in July 1992, when the Arkestra shared the bill with Sonic Youth at a concert in Central Park. It was one of his last performances. We knew he was ailing and sure enough he was in his dressing room in a wheelchair, smiling but not talking. He was ill but still had a beatific presence. My brother took a photo of me kneeling and talking to him. And to this day I’m ringing my brother and saying, ‘Where is that fucking photo?’”
Trumpeter Steven Bernstein is a regular on NYC’s mutant-jazz scene “When I moved to New York in 1979, I started hearing the Arkestra on a regular basis on Friday nights at Squat Theatre. We’d wait on 23rd St and eventually a gaggle of cars would barrel up, make a quick U-turn, pull up in front of the Squat and the Arkestra would come piling out. The scene was like something out of those clown-car sequences in old movies. And I remember an outdoor summer concert in 1981 on the Lower West Side that featured an oiled-up bodybuilder with a boa constrictor wrapped around his body. That band had electric guitar and a Brazilian percussionist. Sun Ra kept evolving – and he still is. I did a double bill with the Arkestra last year. I was amazed at how the band still sounded like Sun Ra. After the show I said to Marshall Allen that, after all my years of arranging and transcribing, I could say this band sounded just like Sun Ra, but I couldn’t identify exactly why, harmonically, orchestrationally and so on. Marshall just smiled. ‘I know,’ he said.” As part of celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of Ra’s birth, the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Marshall Allen, will perform at the Barbican on 31 May barbican.org.uk sunraarkestra.com
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STYLE
Leather coat and jewellery by Hollywood Trading Company; trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; denim jacket by Lee 101; T-shirt by Paul Smith; hat, model’s own; sunglasses by John Varvatos.
Tommy Flanagan Photographs David Goldman Styling Marcus Love Styling Assistant Jessica Draper
Jacket by Issey Miyake; shirt by Mr Freedom; hat by Stetson; sunglasses by John Varvatos; necklace, model’s own.
Jacket by Stephan Schneider; trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; shirt by Prada; hat by Lock&Co.; sunglasses by John Varvatos; jewellery by Hollywood Trading Company.
Coat, stylist’s own; jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; boots by John Varvatos; sunglasses by Persol.
STYLE | Tommy Flanagan
Shirt and cane, stylist’s own; jeans by John Varvatos; jewellery by Hollywood Trading Company.
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Shirt by Hollywood Trading Company; jeans and boots by John Varvatos; sunglasses by Persol.
Jacket and scarf by Mr Freedom; overalls and sunglasses by Hollywood Trading Company.
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STYLE | Tommy Flanagan
Jacket by Hollywood Trading Company; jeans by Edwin Jeans; T-shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; boots, sunglasses and scarf by John Varvatos; hat by Lock&Co.
Jacket by Vivienne Westwood; shirt, stylist’s own; sunglasses by Hollywood Trading Company; necklace, model’s own.
STYLE | Tommy Flanagan
Jacket and shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing Orange Tab; jeans and boots by John Varvatos; hat, glasses and jewellery by Hollywood Trading Company.
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CULTURE
John Byrne
Trutti Frutti. The White Album. The Slab Boys. Peggy Ramsay Words Chris May Portrait Ross Trevail Photographs of Mr Byrne’s artwork courtesy of John McKenzie
As long as there’s been an art market, there’ve been art hoaxes. In 1496, a young Michelangelo sculpted a sleeping cupid and buried it in acidic earth to take on the appearance of antiquity, thus increasing its value – but not all hoaxes are just about making money. William Boyd wrote the fictional biography Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 in 1998, intending to expose the art world’s pretensions. Co-conspirator David Bowie hosted the book’s publication party. While none of the critics and curators invited to the party claimed to have known Tate well, none admitted ignorance of him either. Scottish painter and playwright John Byrne staged his hoax at the Portal Gallery in Mayfair’s Cork Street in 1967. It was a successful attempt to get a foothold in Britain’s Londoncentric art world. “I had previously visited London and traipsed round all the galleries in Cork Street,” says Byrne. “And I got the bum’s rush every time. Then the penny dropped. I realised the galleries were just shops and I had to give them some sort of hook to get people interested. I devised this little plot. The idea came from a magazine article I’d read, titled ‘The Innocent Eye’. It was about naive art and the Portal was featured in it. “So I sent them a painting and told them it was by my father, Patrick, who I said was a 72-year-old ex-busker and 138
self-taught naive painter. They wrote back and said, ‘This is interesting. Can we see some more and get in touch with your dad?’ I told them he was totally unreachable, living in a beach hut in the wilds somewhere, and I was acting on his behalf. They went for it. But my wife at the time, Alice – she hated any sort of subterfuge. She told me I had to confess to the gallery. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll still give you the show. We’ll call it ‘Patrick Byrne: The Primitive Painter’. If anyone asks you anything, say you’re self-taught and a one-time busker.’ “Vogue sent Marina Warner to interview me and David Bailey to photograph me. The Observer came up and interviewed me. I enjoyed it all hugely. Then I was outed in a letter in The Observer from the deputy registrar of the Glasgow School of Art. ‘Far from being a primitive,’ he wrote, ‘Byrne was the most gifted pupil we’ve ever had.’” Byrne has gone on to become one of Scotland’s most feted – and singular – painters. In 2007, he was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy. This summer, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will mount a major retrospective of his work. Also a successful playwright, Byrne emerged in 1977 with Writer’s Cramp, a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe. He followed it up at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre a year later with The Slab Boys – the first in a trilogy of plays including
Cuttin’ a Rug and Still Life, and to which Byrne added a fourth part, Nova Scotia, in 2008. His television writing includes 1987 BBC rock‘n’roll comedy series Tutti Frutti, which boosted the careers of Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson. Its 1990 follow-up, the darker Your Cheatin’ Heart, starred Tilda Swinton, with whom Byrne would subsequently live until 2005 and who is the mother of his two youngest children, twins Honor and Xavier. Apart from a seven-year period in the 1990s when he and Swinton lived in World’s End, Chelsea, Byrne has lived in Scotland. I meet Byrne at the Edinburgh home he has shared for the past seven years with his partner, theatre lighting designer Jeanine Davies. We talk in Byrne’s studio, which resembles a walkin cabinet of curiosities, packed with works in progress, books, magazines and memorabilia – and a house rabbit, which spends the next two hours curled up in front of the wood-burning stove. Thoughtful, softly spoken and at ease with himself, Byrne has a childlike aura of wonder and innocence. He likes an occasional roll-up. “I believe life is for enjoying,” he has said. “Unlike most Scottish men of my age.” Byrne is good company. The time flies by. Byrne was born in Ferguslie Park, Paisley, 10 miles west of Glasgow, in 1940. It was a long way, in every sense, from Cork Street. Ferguslie Park was >
Miss-Match, 2013
CULTURE | John Byrne known as ‘the worst slum in Europe’ and Paisley as ‘the murder capital of Scotland’. Byrne’s mother was regularly away in hospital being treated for schizophrenia. “The first memory I have of my mother being ill was when I was six or seven,” he says. “We were living in a room and kitchen in a tenement in Mill Street, which has been demolished now. I remember watching from the window as she was taken away on a stretcher into an ambulance. And then one of ambulance men came back and fumigated the house, because they thought she had diphtheria and was hallucinating. I was totally mystified as to why that was happening. “When my mother was in hospital, I lodged with my grandmother or my aunt Helen or my uncle Pat, who was a bookie in Govan. I went to six or seven different schools. My father stayed at his mother-in-law’s in Paisley. He wouldn’t have been able to look after me – he couldn’t even make himself a cup of tea. Most men couldn’t then. “My father worked in the shipyards. He was about 5’1” but he was a strong guy. He was what they called a holderon. He’d hold the red-hot rivets steady while the other guy hammered them in. He was one of 16 or 17 siblings – he couldn’t remember exactly how many – and one of only four who survived into adulthood. I remember his mother was tiny, his height. She wore black clothes down to her ankles and men’s boots and smoked a clay pipe. She lived in a room and kitchen with gas lighting in Govan.” Does Byrne remember his childhood as being unhappy or deprived? “No, no, I had a luxurious childhood,” he says. “I wanted for nothing. I was utterly spoilt by my mother. She was my servant. My father was always in work. I remember one time that they were on strike, but otherwise there was money coming in.” For as long as he can remember, Byrne was keen on drawing. “My mother swore I’d been drawing in my pram,” he says. “I remember when I was about 12 doing a copy of the ‘Sacred Heart’ painting which hung above our fireplace. It was in colour and I copied it out in pencil, and my mother proudly showed it to my father when he came home. They were spellbound, they really were. They were unlettered in art but
they could see how close it was to the original. I could always do that, make accurate reproductions. “My parents were so encouraging. My mother would take me to a proper art shop in Paisley. Brown’s Art Shop. Mr Brown was a wee man who wore a waistcoat, collar and tie and a bonnet in the shop. I remember one day my mother took some of my drawings with us to show Mr Brown. She was going to buy me a couple of brushes from the counter display. And Mr Brown looked at the drawings and he said, ‘Hang on, missus,’ and went out the back. He came back with some sable brushes, which were expensive. And he put them on the counter and he said, ‘Mrs Byrne, you can’t keep a good man down.’ I always remember that, it became my watchword
‘A DANDY NEEDN’T BE SMART, A DANDY CAN BE SCRUFFY. PUNKS WERE DANDIES, TOO’ line and I have never been daunted by opposition, neglect or whatever.” Byrne was also an avid reader from an early age. “Between them, my mother and father got a couple of dozen newspapers and magazines every week,” he says, “from the Spectator and the Listener to the Hotspur and Eagle. My father took a showman’s newspaper called the World’s Fair, a thick fortnightly magazine with adverts for light-up bow ties and vacancies for trapeze artists and obituaries about leading showpeople. He’d never been involved in fairgrounds, but he read it from cover to cover. He must have enjoyed immersing himself in another world, a world of fantasy. I was the same. I used to get Plays and Players long before I’d thought of writing plays. “There was a wonderful children’s
library in Paisley that I used a lot. I was such a library freak that when I later lived in Renfrew I took out so many books I forgot to take them all back. I had 12 years’ worth of books. They waived the fine, they were so glad to get them back. Took them away in two big bags. I was mad about reading, still am. I haven’t read a novel for 40 years, but I read loads of novels then. I love a good book. I’m an addict. And I’m a very slow reader, it takes me six months to read a book. I’m rereading Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica at the moment. It’s my third reading of it.” Byrne’s celebrated sartorial style also began early. “I dress as an individual,” he says. “It started in primary school. A couple of guys had jerseys with collars on them. Knitted woollen jerseys, grey. I really, really wanted one of those. My grandmother got wind of this and bought me a green tartan jerkin, which I loved. But it was really the jersey I wanted. And I remember wearing an artist’s smock when I was about six. “In my plays, nobody wears anything by accident. When you see a character come on stage, you should know their history from the garments they wear. That’s why I have recently gone back to the period of the Teddy boys – of whom I was one – and done a series of paintings of them – not portraits from life, just made up. But I hate fops. Unlike dandies, fops are just show-offs. A dandy needn’t be smart, a dandy can be scruffy. Punks were dandies, too.” Byrne was a bright but rebellious pupil who left school aged 17, without completing his Highers, the Scottish equivalent of A-levels. “My mother and father were both in hospital,” he says. “My father with a perforated ulcer, my mother just with the usual. I had been banned from taking my Highers because I was cheeky. I told a teacher he couldn’t teach. The colour drained from his face. He told me to get out. You didn’t say that to a teacher in the 1950s. Many’s the time I got the strap. “The first job I tried to get was with another Mr Brown in Paisley. He was a commercial artist and he did the posters for the Scala and Kilburn cinemas. They were upmarket cinemas and the posters were huge things, hand-painted from stills from the films. I showed him some > 141
Music Man, 2013 West End Serenade, 2010
of my drawings but he said he didn’t have any vacancies. I think he was a bit jealous of me. Anyway, he suggested I go to Stoddard Carpets [in Elderslie] and learn how to design carpets. Stoddard made wonderful, wonderful broadloom Axminster carpets. Before you became a designer, you had to be a ‘slab boy’, mixing up the colours. It was like an apprenticeship. There were big drums of colour and you had a marble slab with a shallow dip in the middle; you put the powdered colour on and mixed it with water and gum arabic. One day, I brought in a copy I’d made of a Titian portrait and one of the women designers said, ‘You should go to art school.’ She told me to get a form and sit the exam. “The entry form said that people of ‘exceptional talent’ might be allowed entrance without Highers. I applied and they let me in.” Back then, of course, college education was free throughout 142
Britain. Students received ‘maintenance grants’ from their local authority. Byrne started at Glasgow School of Art in 1958, graduating in 1962. It was a good time to be there. The school was headed by painter and conservationist Douglas Percy Bliss, whose 18-year spell as director would conclude in 1964 – by which time GSA was recognised as among the top art schools in Britain. “It should have been three years, but it turned into four,” says Byrne. “I was a difficult student – I would occasionally drink too much. Also, I refused to take some of the exams at the end of the first year. It was a general year in which you did drawing, still-life painting, weaving, bookbinding, architecture, all the crafts. I refused to do the bookbinding and weaving exams, and even though years later they still used my architectural drawings as an example of how to do things, I never took the architectural
exam. So they kept me back, I had to repeat the first year. Then I specialised in drawing and painting.” Early on, Byrne began to specialise in portraits, particularly self-portraits, the strand of his painting for which he is best known. “Self-portraits are more interesting to me,” he says. “I’ve done them since early childhood. Because I’m curious about why I’m here in the world, and that’s reflected in the portrait. There’s been a constant running question ever since I can remember: why are we here, what is the purpose? It’s not spelt out as baldly as that, but that’s basically it. It’s an investigation. It’s got so little to do with vanity. It’s got something to do with it, because it’s about the way I look, but I don’t approach it from a vain perspective.” Byrne’s interest in literature and painting dovetailed neatly in the mid1960s. “Alan Aldridge, the art director
CULTURE | John Byrne
Tree, Cloud, Hedge, 2013
at Penguin Books, commissioned a cover from me in 1965. It was for John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. It was my first professional cover. After he left Penguin, Alan asked me to do the frontispiece for his own book, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. There was a rumour that I had also done the sleeve for the Beatles’ White Album. I confess I didn’t hurry to scotch that rumour. Richard Hamilton actually did it. But the legend survives to this day.” Byrne’s next major exhibition was in 1975 at Glasgow’s new multimedia-art centre and counterculture hub, Third Eye Gallery. Poorly promoted and bumped at the last minute as the Third Eye’s debut art exhibition, the show was not a success. “I sold one picture,” says Byrne. “And I’d worked on the show for ten months. I’ve rarely sold pictures in Glasgow, funnily enough, they’re no big fans of mine.” Byrne did not exhibit his paintings in public again for 17 years. By 1975, in any case, writing was already taking up much of his energies. Unlike his painting, Byrne’s writing
La Bête Rouge, 2013
was entirely self-taught. “I had no formal tuition at all,” he says. “My interest in playwriting came about when I was 14. I watched a TV dramatisation of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. I was so carried away that I went straight
‘NOT A WORD WAS CHANGED; THEY KNEW I WOULD COME AND MURDER PEOPLE’ to the library the next day and got it out. I was amazed, I had no idea how a play was set out on the page. “I’d always listened to plays on the radio. The first I heard was Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix too Frequent. I was
absolutely transported by that. It was magical. And The Lady’s Not for Burning, too. That title was the origin of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘The lady’s not for turning’ speech, which was written by another playwright, Ronald Millar, who was a huge fan of Fry. Another great playwright I listened to on the radio as a child was Terence Rattigan. The Browning Version is still one of the great, great English plays. It’s totally and utterly heartbreaking. Rattigan fell out of favour when John Osborne and the other ‘angry young men’ emerged in the 1950s. But in the last couple of years he has begun to get the respect he’s owed. I used to bang on about Terence Rattigan but it took David Mamet to rescue him.” Mamet made a film of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy in 1999. Talking to Byrne, it is clear that his painting and writing have prospered not due to any grand plan, nor by bending to the dictates of fashion, but because he has followed his muse wherever it has led him, regardless of the consequences. Luck and good judgement have played > 143
CULTURE | John Byrne
their parts, too. Byrne the dramatist benefited enormously from being represented by Peggy Ramsay, the doyenne of British theatrical agents. “She was my agent from Writer’s Cramp in 1977 until she died,” says Byrne, “though there was an interlude when I was with Harriet Cruickshank. Peggy was a wonderful, eccentric person. She read everything you sent to her and she’d give it to you straight. She’d phone you up and say, ‘This is dreadful, darling, you can’t put this on,’ and she’d put the phone down. You were told. When I came to write Writer’s Cramp, I phoned her up – I didn’t know her – and said I wanted to send her a play. She said, ‘Alright,’ and hung up on me. “After I’d sent the script I got a postcard from her, in spidery writing which I managed to read with difficulty, and it said, ‘This is wonderful, I’m going to send it to the Royal Court Upstairs and the Tricycle. I’m off on holiday for two weeks and I expect you to write another play for my return.’ So, two weeks later to the day, I phoned Peggy up and said, ‘I’m going to send you a play, it’s called The Slab Boys. It’s got a beginning, a middle and an end’. She said, ‘Oh, how fucking bourgeois, darling.’ But she loved it, she always loved that play. “At the time, the Traverse had the Slab Boys script but wouldn’t give me a date. So I rang up, on the back of the success of Writer’s Cramp, and asked for the script back. They said, ‘Please give us five minutes.’ Then they rang back and said, ‘Rehearsals can start in April and first performance in May.’” Byrne’s invitation to write Tutti Frutti was another stroke of good fortune. “It arrived out of the blue,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting it at all. I was totally skint at the time, I had no work at all. So I latched on to it. But I knew how TV people liked to rewrite scripts and I wasn’t going to tolerate that. I told Bill Bryden [executive producer] that he couldn’t change one word. He promised not to, and he was as good as his word. He was the best producer I ever worked with. He never interfered.” His aversion to meddling producers and directors was well known by the time Tutti Frutti came along. “I am a 144
stickler about that,” he says. “I’ve done it by the time I hand the script over. I’ve thought about all the possible variations of every speech and every word, and I don’t want a word changed. My reputation has preceded me in the theatre, I’m so draconian about it. On day one of the read-through of The Slab Boys at the Traverse in 1978, I stood up and said, ‘I’ve thought about every fucking word of this and this is draft 17. You cannot improve it, you cannot change it, you cannot interfere with it.’ Same with Tutti Frutti. Not one word was changed. Because they knew that I would come in and murder people.” Byrne’s most recent fusion of art and writing is his large-format children’s novel Donald & Benoit (2011), published in the US by Universe Publishing. It
PEGGY SAID, ‘OH, HOW FUCKING BOURGEOIS, DARLING,’ BUT SHE LOVED IT is a gorgeously illustrated seaside tale of “friendship, ingenuity and hope” involving a boy and a talking cat. Byrne and Swinton were an item from 1990 until 2004, when Swinton began a relationship with young painter Sandro Kopp. Byrne remained on affectionate terms with Swinton and Kopp, and in 2009 a spate of prurient tabloid coverage, led by the News of the World and the Daily Mail, deliberately misinterpreted this to suggest the trio were living in a ménage à trois. “They doorstepped us here,” says Byrne. “It’s not pleasant to be targeted and to have your private life splashed all over the fucking tabloids. I never read a word of it, though. You survive it but you’re bruised in the process. It was hell. But I’ve got over it now. It’s distanced from me. Thankfully I met Jeanine and we love each other. And we get
on famously with Tilda and Sandro.” Donald & Benoit carries a dedication to “Honor & Xavier’s beloved mother, whose unswerving belief in this book resulted in [its publication].” It was around the time of this trial by tabloid that Byrne, who had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, returned his MBE. “I got it in 2001 and gave it back in 2009,” he says. “The reason it was late was because I couldn’t find the bloody medal. I’d moved out of the big house with Tilda and it was packed away somewhere and I wanted to make the point by returning the actual fucking medal. Then I found it in a box in the garage and ran straight upstairs to write to Tony Blair. I was so against that. We’re still reaping the whirlwind now.” Two hours have slipped by like 20 minutes, and I have to catch the train back to London. One final question. Is Byrne going to vote “yes” in the referendum on Scottish independence? “Not necessarily,” he says. “I took offence, because it hurts my livelihood and art, when the government banned smoking onstage. It augurs badly for Scottish independence. You never see a SNP Member of Parliament at a theatre. They’re philistines. They’ve no idea. I have a sympathy for independence but I don’t have sympathy for philistines. Theatres are ventilated, the smoke goes straight up into the fly tower – what are they talking about? So, I don’t know if I’ll vote yes or no. It’s emblematic of a deeper philistinism. To go to the lengths of banning smoking on stage, they’re idiots, total idiots. So I cannot trust them with anything else. They’ve lost me as a supporter.” An exhibition of John Byrne’s work is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 14 June to 14 September nationalgalleries.org Uncle Varick is at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh in May edtheatres.com/kings The Three Sisters and Colquhoun and MacBryde are at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow later this year tron.co.uk openeyegallery.co.uk
Sleepyhead, 2013
BULLETIN
Lyle&Scott Photographs Donald Milne Words Edward Moore Golfers Ludovic Meaby and Julian Vallardes Urruela Location St Andrews, Scotland
Messrs William Lyle and Walter Scott began their eponymous label 140 years ago in the Scottish Borders town of Hawick. From humble beginnings, Lyle & Scott was, by the 1950s, creating knitwear for Christian Dior. The 1960s then saw the introduction of the brand’s
golden-eagle logo and the beginning of a long association with golf: smart styles for the fairways that were later adopted by the early casuals, who embraced Lyle & Scott for its neat lines and bold use of colour. In celebration of its anniversary, Lyle & Scott is launching two new lines:
the 1960 Collection acknowledges that era’s slim silhouettes, while Lyle & Scott 140 is an 11-piece tartan collection in “sedate Scottish tones, berry, blue, black” featuring the original ‘L&S Ltd’ logo. lyleandscott.com 147
CINEMA
Robert Capa
Gerda Taro. Dephot. Ingrid Bergman. Magnum Photos. John Steinbeck Words Chris Sullivan Photographs © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
In 1938, the UK’s Picture Post called 25-year-old Robert Capa “the greatest war photographer in the world”. He covered five armed conflicts in 10 countries, shot 70,000 negatives and left behind an extraordinary record that told not only of the darkness of war but of hope in humanity. “I worked with Capa a lot,” wrote author and former war correspondent John Steinbeck. “His work itself is the picture of a great heart and an overwhelming passion. No one can take his place. He could photograph motion and gaiety and heartbreak. He could photograph thought. He captured a world and it was Capa’s world.” Robert Capa was born Endre Erno" Friedmann on 22 October, 1913 on the Pest side of Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Júlia, owned a successful fashion business; his father, Dezso", was its head tailor. She was the matriarch – shrewd and demanding – he was a well-dressed reprobate who loved drinking, gambling and women. She believed hard work would get you everywhere. He believed connections, charm and chutzpah were enough. Shortly after his birth, the first world war started and its repercussions would haunt him forever. In 1918, Hungary was declared an independent republic, then transmogrified into a communist state. Fascist paramilitants took to the streets to beat up and kill communists and Jews. Dubbed the White Terror, it 148
was an era Capa would never forget. At age 17, he briefly joined demonstrations against the right-wing regime and was courted by the communists. “[A Communist Party rep] found that I was a fuzzy-headed intellectual with five half-digested books and a bourgeois father,” he wrote in Slightly Out of Focus (1947). “I found his views far less radical than I’d hoped. I decided not to join the Communist Party.” Early the next morning he was woken by “two rather big gentleman in bowler hats”. They took him to the police station and beat him unconscious. “When I awoke,” he wrote. “I was lying on the floor in a cell. A lot of names were penciled on the wall; the last two, ‘Sallain’ and ‘Furst’, were two young Hungarian communists who, after returning from Moscow, had been caught and executed.” The police chief ’s wife was a customer of his parents and his father managed to persuade the officer to release Capa on condition that he left Hungary. Thus, a young Capa arrived in Berlin in August, 1931. He studied journalism until his parent’s financial aid stopped entirely and he was forced to leave college. He almost starved, while around him the Nazis and their brownshirted antagonists created havoc. As a foreign leftist Jew, Capa was certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he persevered in a beleaguered Berlin. He found a job at photo agency Dephot, first as an errand boy, then a dark-room
assistant. He didn’t have to wait long for his break. “The newspapers carried a story that Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky would speak to students in Copenhagen,” he wrote, “but all their photographers were covering events in Germany, so they sent me.” His photographs of the event were published in Der Welt Spiegel. He was 19 and, sadly, his good fortune would be fleeting. Hitler was soon Chancellor of Germany and, being Jewish, Capa was forced to leave. “Berlin seemed suddenly very unfriendly,” he wrote. He eventually arrived penniless in Paris and soon met fellow photographers André Kertész, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He fell in love with German-Jewish photographer Gerta Pohorylle and in these tough times, the couple realised they’d sell more photos as “successful American photographer” Robert Capa; Hungarian for ‘shark’, ‘Cápa’ had been Friedmann’s high-school nickname and sounded not unlike director Frank Capra. ‘Robert’ is believed to have been inspired by Hollywood actor Robert Taylor, who Capa bore some resemblance to: dark features and hair, and broad shoulders. He ultimately took the name while Gerta took hers from Japanese artist Taro¯ Okamoto, becoming ‘Gerda Taro’. In August 1936, they went to cover the Spanish Civil War. The Falling Soldier, Capa’s photograph that captures the moment a loyalist soldier is killed by >
Capa in Naples, 1943 photographed by George Roger
CINEMA | Robert Capa
New immigrants disembarking from the SS Theodor Herzl near Haifa, Israel, 1949–50
a bullet, was published around the world to huge acclaim. Capa had arrived. “I doubt he knew he’d captured the moment until he saw it published,” reflects John Morris, his editor at Life. “I think it was a painful subject for him. Who wants to profit from the death of another man – a comrade, if you will?” Capa himself said, “It’s not easy to stand aside, unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.” In July 1937, Gerda was crushed to death by a tank near Madrid while on assignment at the Battle of Brunete. Capa’s grief led him to work in China before returning to Spain a few months later. Picture Post devoted an eight-page feature to his coverage of the battles of the Segre and Ebro. Milton Wolff, of the US volunteer Abraham Lincoln Battalion, said of Capa: “You can’t talk about the Spanish Civil War until you see the photographs of Bob Capa. He’d be there with his camera, and the bombs would be falling all around him. His 150
photos were published all around the world and it was the first time people saw what the fascists were doing, and so people like me came from all over
‘HE KNEW YOU COULD NOT PHOTOGRAPH WAR BECAUSE IT IS AN EMOTION’ to fight them. The camera was Bob Capa’s weapon.” But Capa toiled with the ethics of his role, as highlighted in his journals. “Slowly, I am beginning to feel more like a hyena. Even if you know the value
of your work you think everyone thinks you are a spy or are trying to make money out of their misery,” he wrote. Many of his Spanish shots tell of the consequences of war rather than the war itself. Women flee bombs, children look forlornly for their parents, a mother and daughter look up at the bombers overhead. His images underscored the human cost of armed conflict. “Capa knew what to look for and where to find it,” wrote John Steinbeck in Popular Photography. “He knew, for example, that you could not photograph war, because it is an emotion. But he did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child. His camera caught and held emotion.” Capa returned to Paris; it was 1939 and war in Europe was imminent. The French Communist party had a curiously pro-Nazi stance and, having previously lived in Berlin, Capa knew his situation was untenable. His mother and brother had moved to New York after his father’s death and Capa decided to join them. After a marriage of convenience to secure US citizenship, Capa went to Mexico for Time while waiting for his immigration paperwork to be finalised. “We chased politics and various stories all over Mexico,” recalled Time’s Holland McCombs in conversation with Capa biographer Richard Whelan. “When we were in town we chased the nightspots, the cafe society, hangouts where the girls were. We ‘dated’ a lot.” In August, 1940, Trotsky, who was in hiding in Mexico, was assassinated. Capa had arrived just in time for the exiled Bolshevik leader’s funeral. Later that year, Capa went to cover the Blitz for Time. He chose to report it by focusing on a single family – the Gibbs, a working-class family living in Lambeth, south London. The work was entitled The Battle of Waterloo Road and Capa more or less moved in, spending all his time with them as they tried to carry on regardless as German bombers decimated their city around them. ‘You didn’t see him taking the pictures,” explained Lily Gibb. “You knew he was there but he wasn’t up your nose. He then joined US troops fighting the Germans in Tunisia and followed onto Sicily for the Allied invasion and
seven gruelling months with the army as they struggled for Italy. “I dragged myself from mountain to mountain, from foxhole to foxhole, shooting mud, misery and death,” he wrote. “Every five yards a foxhole and, in each, at least one dead soldier.” When they finally reached Naples, the Allies entered unopposed. “Taking pictures of victory is like taking pictures of a wedding ten minutes after the departure of the newlyweds,” he said. “I walked along the deserted streets, unhappy yet glad I had such a good excuse for not taking pictures. The narrow street leading to my hotel was blocked with a queue of silent people in front of a schoolhouse. I entered the school and was met by the sweet sickly smell of flowers and the dead. In the room were 20 primitive coffins, not well enough covered with flowers, and too small, to hide the dirty little feet of children – children old enough to fight the Germans and be killed but just a little too old to be in children’s coffins. These children of Naples had stolen rifles and bullets and had fought the Germans for 14 days while we’d been pinned to the Chiunzi Pass. These children’s feet were my real welcome to Europe. I pointed the lens at the faces of the prostrated women, taking little pictures of their dead babies until finally the coffins were carried away. Those were my truest pictures of victory.” Back in a London awash with war correspondents waiting for the imminent invasion of France, Capa holed up at the Dorchester where he threw a party for Ernest Hemingway, whom he had met during the Spanish Civil War. “Capa conveyed a sense of inner euphoria,” recalled actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. “You could not offend him. Some didn’t like his wild appearance or his self-confidence and tried to put him down but, after a few minutes, gave up. He always seemed to be having fun and people wanted to join in.” He once gambled away $2,000 (£40,000 in today’s money) at Sun Valley resort in Idaho. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “It’s good for me. Now I have to work harder.” But gambling was his life. “The war correspondent has his stake – his life – in his hands,” he wrote. “I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in
Boys discussing the Tour de France, Paris, 1939
On a train between Memphis, Tennessee and Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1940
the first wave,” of D-Day troops crossing the English Channel to France, the successful Allied manoeuvre that meant the beginning of the end of the second world war and Nazi Germany. Capa was the only photographer in the initial surge. “The sea was rough and we were wet before the barge left the mother ship,” he wrote. “In no time, men started to puke. But this was a polite – as well as a carefully prepared – invasion and little bags had been provided for the purpose. The water was cold and the beach still more than 100 yards away. The men from my barge waded in the water… I saw them fall back as the bullets hit them and I had to push past their dead bodies to get by. I made for the nearest metal obstacle to hide behind and frantically shot frame after frame.” Unfortunately, the world never got to see most of Capa’s pictures from that day: a nervous dark-room assistant
ruined 95 of his 106 negatives; all the salvaged images were published by Life. The greatest record of one of history’s most remarkable battles was lost forever. Capa continued with Allied forces as they advanced to Paris. Soldier Walter Bernstein recalled his encounter with the fearless photographer. “Shells were dropping all around us and I jumped into a ditch and this man jumped in next to me. He was very calm and started talking about Tolstoy. You’d hear bombs exploding and screams but he paid no attention. When the shelling stopped he said goodbye and left. I never saw him again. I asked a soldier who he was and he said it was a photographer called Robert Capa.” Capa recalls arriving in a liberated Paris. “It was the most unforgettable day in the world. Every Parisian was out in the street to touch their first tank, to kiss the first man, to sing and > 151
Press photographer, Tour de France, 1939
to cry. Never were there so many people so happy so early in the morning.” Next, he joined the 17th Airborne Division as they parachuted into enemy territory. He was the second jumper behind the regimental commander. At 10.30am on 23 March, 1945, 600 feet above the Rhine, his life flashed before his eyes. “The bullets starting hitting the plane like pebbles,” James Conboy recalls. Scores of helpless soldiers were ripped apart by German machine-gun fire. “Capa was fearless, even reckless. He’d go to any lengths to get the shot. Many didn’t make it to the ground alive. I couldn’t have done what he did, we could shoot back. He had only a camera; you can’t defend yourself with a camera.” In Leipzig, where the last of Hitler’s stormtroopers were holed up, Capa took one last picture of a young corporal firing a machine gun at German snipers. “I clicked my shutter – my first picture in two weeks, and the last one of the boy. He slumped back into the room, his face not changed apart from a tiny hole between his eyes... I had the picture of the last man to die.” Capa was 32 and the war was over. What to do now? He was at the Ritz with writer Irwin Shaw when he saw actress Ingrid Bergman walk past. He sent a note to her room explaining that he’d have liked to send her flowers and take her to dinner but could not afford both. She, of course, could not help but be charmed, and a relationship ensued. Back in Hollywood, Bergman starred 152
Member of the French Camel Corps, the Meharists, Tunisia, 1943
alongside Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s Notorious; Capa was the on-set stills man. He embraced the party lifestyle. During the war he’d become friends with directors John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler, Billy Wilder,
‘THE CAMERA WAS BOB CAPA’S WEAPON’ and Anatole Litvak, who said, “After only two weeks here, Capa is getting invited to parties it took me 10 years to get invited to.” But all was not well in Tinseltown. As friend, screenwriter Peter Viertel explained, “He was socially
acceptable, famous, good-looking and single, but he was not happy.” As Capa attested, “Hollywood was the biggest mess I ever stepped into.” Bergman was ready to marry him but, as he said, he was not the marrying kind. “I am a newspaper man. And it is good to be lonely and stay in lonely hotels.” Bergman claimed Hitchcock based Rear Window on her relationship with Capa. Back in Paris in 1947, Capa, along with photographers Cartier-Bresson, Chim Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, founded Magnum Photos, one of the first cooperative photography agencies and, today, by far the most revered. Cartier-Bresson once claimed Capa named them, “because whenever we met he would open a bottle of champagne”. Shot in the leg while covering the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Capa vowed never to cover a war again, focusing his
Local politicians returning home after a visit to Mexico City, 1940
Ava Gardner on the set of The Barefoot Contessa, Tivoli, Italy, 1954
lens on the likes of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s wife recalls, “He’d come and stay for two weeks and spend all day with you and let you get on with what you were doing. He didn’t seem like a photographer. Nothing was posed. He would entertain you and it was fun to be with him.” Back in Paris his gambling reached new heights. He spent all of his time at the races. He borrowed Magnum money for his bets and, when he won, refunded the office. But he was rarely there. He popped in to make calls and pinch the bottoms of the attractive young gals who kept the office running. He conducted business in the cafe downstairs. He’d discuss big stories and where Magnum
should place them while playing pinball, a Chesterfield dangling from his mouth and a drink by his side. Magnum’s Erich Lessing said, “You’d be standing behind him and he’d be tilting the pinball, and he’d shout, ‘I think you should go to Germany and do a story!’ He did this many times with me.” When Pierre Gassmann, whose lab processed Magnum’s photos, came for payment of an outstanding bill, Capa suggested Gassmann bet the money on a hot tip he had. Gassman refused. But Capa was right and was able to settle the bill with his winnings. Magnum’s reputation was growing and photographers such as Ernst Haas, Eve Arnold and Elliott Erwitt joined.
Robert Frank, whose work documented everyday life in America, was keen to join too, but Capa thought him difficult and lacking in humour. “He wouldn’t work well with us here,” was his retort. By the 1950s, Capa was tiring of the “superficial” world he operated in. As he once said, his life consisted of “none of the good things, just the material ones”. Likewise, the mental scars of war were starting to show. His friend Irwin Shaw wrote at this time, “Only in the morning does Capa show that the tragedy and sorrow through which he has passed have left their marks on him. Then he drinks down a strong bubbling draft, puts on his afternoon smile and sets out carefully, light-headed, to these places where this homeless man is at home.” In 1954, he received an invitation to show his work in Japan. “He took many photographs of children when he was in Japan,” recalls Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota. “And these images really struck a chord with me as they were all taken from the eye level of the children, so he’d had to kneel down to take the shots. This explains enough about Capa as a human being.” While there, Life asked him to cover the First Indochina War in Vietnam. “I called him and told him he didn’t have > 153
Chinese watching a battle between Japanese bombers and Chinese fighter planes, 1938
to go,” said John Morris, Magnum’s executive director. “This isn’t our war.” His family was distraught, but he needed the money and was worried that David Douglas Duncan, already covering the conflict, was eclipsing him as the world’s greatest war photographer. He arrived in Hanoi on 9 May just after Dien Bien Phu had fallen to the Viet Minh. Two weeks later, he leapt off the jeep he was travelling in with French troops to get some photographs of the advance. “For a long, indecisive minute, he crouched behind the protective bulk of our jeep,” wrote Scripps-Howard correspondent Jim Lucas. “He was ready to leap back or spring ahead, as if testing the temper of the Viet Minh fire. He decided he would risk it.” Capa’s famous dictum was, “If your 154
pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” This for him was a moral sanction: if you’re going to photograph
‘IT IS GOOD TO BE LONELY AND STAY IN LONELY HOTELS’ people dying, you share their danger. An hour later he stepped on a land mine. He was 40 years old. He was offered a military funeral at Arlington
but his mother declined, saying, “He was not a soldier but a man of peace.” Capa was buried in a Quaker Cemetery just outside of New York City. At his memorial service, photographer Edward Steichen stood up and said a few words. “He understood life,” he said. “He loved life intensely. He gave richly of what he had to give to life... [He] lived valiantly, vigorously, with a rare integrity.” Two films about Capa are in production Close Enough, directed by Paul Andrew Williams and Waiting for Robert Capa, based on Susana Fortes’ novel, directed by Michael Mann A book, Capa in Colour, is out now prestel.com
CINEMA | Robert Capa
Lapp family, Norway, 1951
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Austin wears jacket, shirt and belt by Hollywood Trading Company; jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; boots, stylist’s own.
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Palmdale
Photographs Cameron McNee Styling Marcus Love Styling Assistant Britteny Austin Desert Kids Martin Evans, Tim Grahek, Ronnie Meza, Brandt Robin and Austin Wilder-Tramell
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Tim wears overalls by Hollywood Trading Company; shirt by Levi’s Made&Crafted; sunglasses by Persol.
Martin wears jacket and belt by Hollywood Trading Company; jeans, stylist’s own; cardigan by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Sunspel.
Ronnie wears jacket and shirt by Hollywood Trading Company; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; trainers by Converse; watch by G-Shock; socks by Uniqlo.
STYLE | Palmdale
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Brandt wears jacket, stylist’s own; jeans and shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shoes by Hollywood Trading Company; sunglasses by Ray-Ban.
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STYLE | Palmdale
Austin wears jacket and jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Levi’s Made&Crafted; hat and boots, stylist’s own.
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STYLE | Palmdale
Martin wears jacket, shirt, boots and hat by Hollywood Trading Company; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Sunspel.
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Brandt wears jacket, shoes and belt by Hollywood Trading Company; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; T-shirt by Sunspel; scarf, stylist’s own.
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HISTORY
Fritz Kahn
Kosmos. The Friends of Nature Club. Albert Einstein Words Chris Sullivan
On first encounter, the diagrammatic illustrations of Fritz Kahn might seem the work of a rather advanced surrealist, a colleague of the great collagists John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters, perhaps. But Kahn, though working in the era of surrealism, was, in fact, a German-born scientist, philosopher, gynaecologist and author. He used his artworks – especially those contained in his greatest books, the series Das Legen des Menschen (The Life of Man) – to explain and decipher anatomy and biology for the masses. Now, having languished in obscurity for decades, his work is at last seeing the light of day. A magnificent tome, simply entitled Fritz Kahn, beautifully printed and presented, is a fitting testament to this genius polymath. Kahn was born in September 1888 in the university city of Halle, southwest of Berlin. His father, a devout Jewish doctor and writer, moved the family to Hoboken, New Jersey but returned to Germany soon after. Kahn was seven. They settled in a wealthy Berlin suburb where his brilliance was soon noted. He studied medicine and liberal arts and was lecturing to adults by age 16. He, meanwhile, penned articles for national newspapers on aviation and astronomy. Kosmos, a scientific magazine published by Stuttgart’s Franckh’sche 164
Verlagshandlung’s ‘Friends of Nature Club’ (‘Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde’), commissioned Kahn to write a state-ofthe-art science book that was accessible and engaging to the public. This was 1914’s Die Milchstrasse (The Milky Way), followed by Die Zelle (The Cell) in 1919. Alongside Kahn, science writer Hanns Günther (who predicted the world’s energy-supply problems in 1931) and engineer and author Heinz Richter were responsible for Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung’s growing reputation as a champion of rationalisation. By 1914, Kahn was a qualified doctor, specialising in gynaecology and working at a private clinic in Berlin. His career was looking rosy until the assassination in Sarajevo of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the subsequent war, which impacted the lives of millions of Germans. The young Kahn served on the front, digging out bullets, cutting off limbs and saving lives in the trenches, mortars squealing overhead. The end of the war signalled a new world order, as the ruling class structure of the 19th century made way for a new lust for rationalisation and knowledge, and Kahn, resident of freethinking Berlin, was at the forefront of this information revolution.
His next book, 1920’s Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (The Jews as a Race and Cultural People), challenged another prevailing German disposition – antiSemitism – and did him few favours with the establishment. However, Berlin was still the epicentre of massive social, cultural and political change in the 1920s and 1930s and this environment undoubtedly influenced Kahn’s work. The Life of Man consists of five books published between 1922 and 1931. They are mind-bogglingly rich in unwritten pictorial metaphors. One reviewer has written that Kahn “illustrated every statement with a picture that knocked a hole in the skull of even the most slow-witted reader”. The series would indeed cement Herr Doctor’s rep as a genius of international renown. The series’ best-known illustration is ‘Der Mensch als Industriepalast’ (‘Man as Industrial Palace’). Infinitely subversive, humorous and surreal, it transforms the human body into a busy factory. The head, arms and torso are sliced vertically to expose a complex maze of industrial activity, with each compartment performing a function, as overseen by the endeavours of tiny humanoids (in suits and ties, white lab coats or boiler suits, depending on their >
Fritz Kahn, Berlin, c. 1914 Š Tashen
Der Resonanzfang (Resonance access) © Fritz Kahn/Zentralbibliothek Zürich, box 18/Taschen
Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) poster © Franckh/Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co.KG/Taschen
hierarchical position within the body’s functions, muscles, nerves and organs). Each part of the body has its own avatar: the intestines, a fast-moving hydraulic production line; the eye, a plate camera replete with bellows; the brain, a series of offices full of files and desk clerks, and so on. Further down, a worker in a bib and brace works with a shovel pushing the food down into the digestive rooms while the muscles are 166
seen as a series of camshaft belts. It’s comparable to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, which depicts a future world where workers appear like parts of a huge machine. Soon after, life would imitate art when the German nation fell blindly into step with the grotesque call to arms of the Nazi Party. Kahn’s illustrations are the blueprint for all educational diagrams since, and their style has been copied and pastiched
time and time again, though he himself never drew a single one. Like many artists, Kahn (or his publisher) employed a coterie of anonymous illustrators and graphic designers to translate his vision onto paper. It is impossible to ignore the similarities between Kahn’s scientific diagrams and contemporary art of the day, particularly the work of dadaists and surrealists, such as Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex (1922), George Grosz’s Republican
HISTORY | Fritz Kahn
Was sich in unserem Kopf abspielt, wenn wir ein Auto sehen und „Auto” sagen (What goes on in our heads when we see a car and say “car”.) © Fritz Kahn/Taschen
Automatons (1920) and Giorgio de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses (1916). Whether the eccentric Khan knew the art world looked to his work for inspiration, or vice versa, is unclear. He continued for years to decode the human body in his seemingly never-ending series of experimental illustrations; in one diagram of the torso he compared the human body to an aquarium. “If you were to tap the body fluid from a man it would be possible to keep seahorses in it,” says his accompanying text. “You could pump the water from a seahorse aquarium into a man and he would live happily ever after. The similarities between body fluid and sea water go beyond mere coincidence and are one of the most solid pieces of evidence for the marine origin of all earthly creatures.” People loved it. Kahn’s fans included Bauhaus superstars Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer and Hannes Meyer, while the great philosopher Otto Neurath considered him an equal. But his prowess was not restricted to the visual image; his prose had a ring to
it too. “The researcher stops at the rigid circle of his microscope’s field of vision,” he wrote, describing an imaginary trip through the bloodstream in a 1923 editorial. “But we, we are poets, and who will forbid the imagination to travel to
‘THE BLUEPRINT FOR ALL EDUCATIONAL DIAGRAMS SINCE’ magical realms over lands and over seas. Like the hero of the ‘last fairytale’ we become smaller and smaller until at last we stand microscopically tiny, mini Lilliputians on the bank of the vein stream and see cells drifting past us as
big as the barques [three-masted ships] of men.” Pretty out there for a biology feature, one has to say. He continues, “We pass through the labyrinthine landscape of the nostril with its steaming marshes, drift through the canyons of the ear, carved deep into the rocky bone, climb with the sinews and ligaments from the high mountains of the skull down into the regions of the throat.” Then there’s his graphic illustration of daily hair growth that shows a flapper gal in a pinafore surrounded by a strand of hair that envelops her body. “The human body produces 100 feet of hair substance every day. If this were to converge into one single hair, that hair would grow by one inch every minute.” In 1931, Kahn slipped off to the Arctic and then the Sahara. He began work on what would become his life’s passion, The Natural History of Palestine. Upon his return to Germany, he was confronted by a vastly changed political landscape. His medical accreditation was revoked in 1933. Pursuing his Zionist dream, Kahn ended up in Jerusalem and > 167
HISTORY | Fritz Kahn
opened a graphic design studio, Hayad (The Hand), where he created works on the theme of school hygiene. He was deeply involved with the creation of the state of Israel and became a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, its first president. He settled in Paris while, in Germany, the Nazis forced his publishers to cut all ties, and his books, being the work of a known Jew, were seized, burned and put on the list of ‘undesirable writings’. Still the unstoppable Kahn, with the help of old colleague Hanns Günther and Zurich publisher Albert Müller Verlag (who supported many an exiled Kosmos author), managed to churn out Unser Geschlechtsleben (Our Sex Life), his biggest success. A typical diagram from the book compares sperm to rockets and another, ‘Erection (Technical-schematic representation of the male erection system)’, illustrates how erotic stimuli (a naked lady) passes through the brain, “overcomes inhibitions such as fear of impotence, hurries through the spinal cord to the erection centre which, by means of a nervous mechanism, fills the corpora cavernosa with blood”. Kahn was once again on the move when the Germans took Paris. He fled to Bordeaux in 1939 and was interned as an anti-Nazi spy. Somehow, his wife Erna Schnabel facilitated his release and Albert Einstein contacted an American, Varian Fry, who’d set up the Emergency Rescue Committee with $3000 from an heiress Mary Jayne Gold, with a mission to save people persecuted under the Nazi regime. Fry took at least 2000 people (including avant-garde intellectuals, writers and working-class Jews) over the border to Spain, to the safety of neutral Portugal, then to New York by boat. Kahn, like countless others, was grateful and amazed that an American Protestant would risk his life so selflessly. Kahn was one of a swelling number of brilliant European Jews arriving in America with nothing. He was lucky; 168
his books, having been translated, were becoming increasingly popular. In 1942, he worked with celebrated designer Harry Roth to create the manual First Aid: A Basic First Aid Course. Of the human body, Kahn wrote, “Imagine a car manufacturer who says, ‘You’re buying a car that you’ll be able to drive for 75 years and all you’ll need to do is give it some water and petrol every day. If properly run, this car will run without a break for 75 years.’ You would consider such a boast the ravings of a madman, but the human body can do this. The heart, no bigger than a fist, pumps day and night, without stopping,
‘HE BELIEVED IN MAN AS AN INDIVIDUAL WHO DOESN’T CONFORM TO IDEOLOGIES’ 106 gallons of blood an hour. The sole of the foot walks 20,000 paces a day and never wears out, not developing cracks, and remaining watertight till the last.” Though Americans loved his work, new projects failed to materialise and so he returned to natural history. In 1949, he teamed up with Müller Verlag again and produced Das Atom (The Atom), a book that explored the atom and its role, carefully explained the exchange of force twixt protons and neutrons, quantum leaps and radioactive isotopes. This was followed by Das Buch der Natur (The Book of Nature) three years later. Its arcane imagery, an undoubted influence on the graphic designers of the day, was copied relentlessly. Dubbed
‘atomic art’, it became a constant feature in US magazine and interior design. In 1956, the 68-year-old Kahn moved to Switzerland. By now, his work and ideas were deemed old-fashioned. However, in 1962, he developed a large coffee-table version of The Human Body. Later, he worked with Yale-trained art director Ulrich Ruchti, and their design visions conflicted. Designer Helga van Roey recalls that Kahn, now aged 75, “had to be reined in or things would have gone too wild”. It seems it was the last straw for Kahn. He moved to Denmark and worked on a variety of self-funded projects. Unwell, in 1968 he journeyed to Switzerland for the winter and died at Locarno, aged 80. His ashes were scattered over Lake Maggiore. Kahn’s illustrations allowed ordinary people to view and understand hitherto mystifying worlds. Though his work sometimes garnered contempt from contemporary intellectuals, it performed a massively important didactic function. People became connected with their own bodies and understood their organic nature. Kahn believed that the human mind knew no bounds and that through will, performance and understanding, technology and science could better humanity. He also believed in man as an individual who doesn’t conform to pre-existing ideologies, but grows in harmony with nature. Undeniably ahead of his time, Kahn’s work has, for many years, fallen into oblivion. Once again, though, the world is now able to realise his huge contribution to science, conceptual thought and the arts. Fritz Kahn by Thilo von Debschitz and Uta von Debschitz is published by Taschen taschen.com
Viermal um den Erdball! (Four times around the globe!) Š Fritz Kahn/Taschen
BULLETIN Sweater and tracksuit bottoms by John Smedley.
John Smedley Sportswear Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Grooming Emily McEwan using Kiehl’s and Bumble and Bumble Words Edward Moore Styling Assistant Rhianna Alvarado Sprinter Jace Moody at Next Location Stoke Newington School, Clissold Rd, London N16 sns.hackney.sch.uk
John Smedley’s legions of fans range from the luxury fashion brands that use their services, to dapper geezers who know that understated quality can often be the boldest of statements. Which should all come as little surprise, considering Smedley’s machinery and knowledge is unsurpassed in the UK.
What is surprising is that Smedley itself has always, it may be said, been rather unnecessarily humble regarding its skills and products. However, the company has recently rediscovered a sportswear range dating back to the 1930s (when tennis was the rage) that incorporated a jaybird logo not seen for
decades, and this has inspired an apparel range that acknowledges the styles of the past while indulging the bold colours of today. johnsmedley.com
Top, shorts and polo shirt by John Smedley; trainers Feiyue.
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CINEMA
20 Feet from Stardom Kings of Rhythm. The Blossoms. Lady Grinning Soul. Gil Friesen. Brown Sugar. Darlene Love. Phil Spector Words Chris Sullivan
If you’ve ever sung along with the backing vocals on a lauded tune, as opposed to the lead, you’re not alone. Consider Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’, David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ and the Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ – all fine, enduring recordings improved immeasurably by backing singers. “People love the backing singers,” says Janice Pendarvis, who has sung with Bowie, Steely Dan and the O’Jays, among many others. “Just think of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ with that line: ‘And the coloured girls go doo do doo do doo...’ There’s a power to these girls who stand on stage and sing. You lose your own persona because you’re trying to mesh your sound with the other voices. That is awesome.” Of course, many would say the very thing that defines ‘backing’ vocalists is their distance from the limelight but, as new documentary 20 Feet from Stardom illustrates, it can be undeservedly far. Director Morgan Neville says the subject matter wasn’t immediately obvious. “The 172
idea came from my producer Gil Friesen, who ran A&M Records for 20 years,” he says. “He’d gone to a Leonard Cohen concert, smoked a joint and got fixated on Cohen’s backing singers. He was wondering what their story was, so he mentioned it to me. And as I’ve done a lot of music docs and I’m a bit of a record geek, it seemed worth looking at.” Neville has actually directed dozens of music documentaries, like Search and Destroy: Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power (2010), Johnny Cash’s America (2008) and Respect Yourself: the Stax Records Story (2007). On the face of it, he seemed the right one to finally reveal backing singers as the invisible heroes of the industry. “The weird thing is there were no books, websites or articles about them,” he says. “They are shockingly invisible and, as such, that became the story. It’s tough, because if you say, ‘Name songs with great backup vocals,’ most people can come up with just a few. Your brain isn’t programmed to think about them. You watch footage of Ray Charles and
see them but no one had catalogued it. It was like retraining your eye and ear to get used to looking for them. And I only touched the surface.” Most backing vocalists before the 1970s not only weren’t photographed, they weren’t even credited. As anyone who has worked in a studio will attest, artists or producers will frequently ask backing vocalists to improvise, then perhaps harmonise with that ad-lib. Often this will become the hook, the melody we sing along to, the one that sells the song. To not credit that artist or withhold their dues is to say that providing the winning refrain for a huge pop song doesn’t really matter. “You end up doing all the hard work on a the song,” explains Darlene Love, who sang for Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and Elvis, to name a small few. “The musicians come in, play their part, then go home. When we first started, the producers depended on us. We loved it. We were really creating something. It was our job to make them sound good.” >
Mick Jagger and Lisa Fischer, 1995
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Claudia Lennear and David Bowie, Sigma Studios, 1974
Love and her colleagues in the 1960s and 70s don’t themselves recall who sang on what, when and where. “You could do three or four sessions a day – Sinatra in the morning, Sam Cooke in the afternoon, Sonny & Cher at night. And we never got residuals until 18 years ago. But you know what? Good things come to good people! I think 50 years ago they didn’t think we were important. They found out; like anything else, over time people were interested to find out who was singing in the background.” Love was born Darlene Wright in southwest Los Angeles in 1941; she was already singing professionally with girl group the Blossoms while in high school and would later sing back up on Sinatra’s ‘That’s Life’, Betty Everett’s ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)’ and a lot of James Brown material. Like many 20th-century American vocalists, Love started singing at church. “My father 174
was a minister,” she says. “We grew up in church the first 15 years of our lives. I didn’t have a choice but to sing.” The Blossoms were some of the first black backing vocalists. “[White-girl backup singers] couldn’t do anything without sheet music,” says Love. “We’d walk in and people would wonder what we were doing there. Once we explained we weren’t the domestics, they’d hand us the sheet music and we’d hold onto it and pretend to read it.” “It came to a point,” Stevie Wonder says in the film, “They needed singers who were free to express themselves and didn’t need to sing exactly what was on the paper.” Thus, the black backing singer’s rise is also the rise of rock’n’roll soul, and Love epitomises the milieu. “We sounded really white until Darlene came in,” says original Blossom Fanita James. “She brought that raw gospel sound and everyone wanted us.”
In 1962 the Blossoms attracted the attention of one Phil Spector, leader of the Teddy Bears, who in 1959, aged 19, penned, performed and sold a million copies of ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’, inspired by the inscription on his father’s tombstone. As an apprentice to Lieber and Stoller, he co-wrote ‘Spanish Harlem’ for Ben E King, played guitar on the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’, then formed three groups, one of which, the Crystals, hit number one with Gene Pitney’s ‘He’s a Rebel’. But the Crystals didn’t sing a note, and didn’t even hear it until it topped the charts. Spector had pulled in the Blossoms but credited the Crystals, who could never match Love’s throaty delivery and thus mimed the song for the rest of their career. “It was my first lead vocal, I was 18,” says Love. “It hurt when people said how great the Crystals were on it. I was mad. Then I sang ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’,
CINEMA | 20 Feet From Stardom
Jack Nitzsche, Darlene Love and Phil Spector, Gold Star Studios, 1963
my song, that I worked hard on – and he did it again! He credited the Crystals and it was a hit. But I did a lot of songs for Phil that came out under different names. He was building a monument to himself. It was always a Phil Spector session, not Darlene Love or the Ronettes, or whatever. He was great to work for in the early days but he was so successful that he became a jerk.” She’s not exaggerating, as Neville says. “For years he didn’t pay her, so she sued him in 1999 and won, but was only able to recoup 10 years of royalties. Phil kept Darlene in a box. Her best stuff was coming out, but not under her name. He could have made more allowing her to be the star she is, but he just couldn’t do it.” As Bruce Springsteen says in the film, “It’s a bit of a walk, from back by the drums. That walk to the front is complicated.” But many backing singers don’t want the responsibility and complications that come with being the frontperson. Lisa Fischer has backed the Rolling Stones in the studio and on tour since 1989, topped 1991’s R&B charts with ‘How
Can I Ease the Pain’ and then won the Grammy for the best performance by an R&B artist. “I love singing backing vocals and really enjoy being a part of the team,” she says. “Even as a child, I loved to see the likes of Chaka Khan
‘HER BEST STUFF WAS COMING OUT, BUT NOT UNDER HER NAME’ and Earth, Wind & Fire, but still focused on the backing vocals. That is what I’ve always wanted to do.” Neville points out that the frontman is a different beast, one who craves the limelight – while the backing singer is more of a team player. “Some singers
don’t have that ambition,” he explains. “To be a backing singer needs a different mentality, you have to support the lead and not take over. But solo success is about luck and timing, it’s not about talent, and it’s different for everybody. I had a montage of singers giving their reasons why they didn’t cross over and they gave excuses: my A&R man got busted on coke, or the studio burnt down – and it’s all bad luck and timing.” Of course, some people would say that if you want to see the price of fame, hang out with a famous person. “I’d love to be financially set up, but I couldn’t go for that other part,” says Fischer. “I like to be able to walk down the street, go shopping, sit in the park. I see Mick, Sting and Tina; in order to walk outside and do what normal people do, they need a bodyguard. I was on tour once with the Rolling Stones, and Keith [Richards] got up at 4am on a beautiful Sunday morning just so he could take a walk on his own. I think those who start young, like Mick [ Jagger] don’t know a lot else. I was in my early thirties when I had success, so I had something to > 175
compare that to. If I’d started aged 18, I might have a different perspective.” “A lot of great backing singers don’t feel comfortable taking that leap,” adds Springsteen, “which is a conceptual leap and not physical. They don’t have the narcissism or ego that it takes.” Take Claudia Lennear, for example. “You don’t have to be able to lead – but if you can, that’s another skill set,” she explains in her gentle Californian accent. “But I think to be a really sought-after backing singer, you have to, first of all, understand your environment.” Lennear began in Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. He called her out of the blue and asked her to join. Tina and the Ikettes were a sexy combo: skimpy mini dresses, Cleopatra hairstyles and crazed synchronised dance routines. “The girls were fantastic,” reports Bette Midler in the film. “Tina was a force of nature but the girls were no slouches either.” “Ike was a father figure to me,” says Lennear. “And before that, a very special person in rhythm and blues. He made the first rock‘n’roll record, ‘Rocket 88’, with the Kings of Rhythm. But Ike had a system – if you didn’t match up to the standard he wanted, or you hit a wrong note, you’d get a fine. It was just how business worked at that time among African-American bands. Spector did the same thing. If you’re a professional and you do make an error, then he’s going to notice it as a band leader.” Lennear’s career coincided with the British Invasion: bands that immediately cottoned on to the idea of black-girl backing singers, and she was the catch of the day. “It was 1968,” says Neville, “the year the Stones recorded in the US for the first time.” This new wave of British bands, mostly former mods or blues fans, found themselves in the US, playing and hanging with their heroes. It was only natural to pull in backing singers and give their sound more ‘soul’. But did they simply purchase that soul? ‘Tainted Love’ singer and Marc Bolan’s ex-wife Gloria Jones says backing singers were saved by the UK rock fraternity. “I wouldn’t have known who Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters were if Jagger hadn’t explained to me,” smiles Lennear. “I grew up in Rhode Island, the music we were getting there was mostly like Bobby ‘Blue’ 176
Darlene Love with the Blossoms and Marvin Gaye, the TAMI Show, 1964
Bland. I didn’t know about the Delta blues until I met Mick and Keith. They gave it a spin and sold it back to us. “The atmosphere was one of mutual admiration that produced incredible results,” says Lennear, who also sang with Humble Pie and Joe Cocker. “I loved working with Joe. It was one big
‘I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE DELTA BLUES UNTIL I MET MICK AND KEITH’ party on stage. Someone would play something and we’d follow. That was the greatest part about singing with the British rockers. They gave us freedom. Nobody sat us down in the studio and told us, ‘You sing this, you sing that’.
You just listened to the track in the headphones and sang what you felt.” Bill Wyman says Jagger’s ‘Brown Sugar’ lyrics were inspired by Lennear, who the Stones met when touring with Turner in 1969. Lennear chuckles. “I’ve just accepted that. I was a friend at the time and everyone attributed it to me; deep down in my heart I believe it. I was about 18 or 19.” Bowie also wrote ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ from Aladdin Sane about Lennear. “We were good friends,” she says. “Later people were saying, ‘Did you know David wrote this song about you?’ and I couldn’t believe it. He had always said I’d influenced him. Maybe it would have been nice if they’d written a song for me to sing!” Lennear graced the pages of August 1974’s Playboy, in a spread called, aptly, ‘Brown Sugar’. “It was wonderful to work with Hugh Hefner,” she recalls. “They were great times – women’s lib, burn your bra, experimentation. Playboy was one of the best decisions I ever made. After all, it’s all about exposure, no?” But Lennear and her colleagues added something to music far removed from the pages of Playboy, something
CINEMA | 20 Feet From Stardom
Merry Clayton, 1971
that had taken centuries to gestate, a certain indefinable something that came straight out of the bible-belting churches of the American South. “The backup came out of the church and was secularised and stuck on the stage,” says Springsteen. “There’s that guy out front testifying and the crowd amening back. David Bowie called on that sound for Young Americans. These singers bring this world with them.” All the vocalists featured heavily in 20 Feet from Stardom have experienced different career paths – most having fallen foul of budget cuts and falling record sales. “It’s not a level playing field,” says Sting in the film. “Its not about talent, its about circumstance.” The once-sidelined Darlene Love’s career hit the pan and she cleaned houses to earn a crust. After hearing
her song on the radio while cleaning a toilet, she moved to New York and her career was resuscitated, in part due to the patronage of David Letterman. After her second album stalled, Lisa Fischer became disillusioned with life out front and turned her back on a solo career. She remains one of the most respected and successful backing singers in the world. Merry Clayton, who sang so impeccably on the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, released three albums, sang lead on the Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’ and still does the odd session. Claudia Lennear had a record contract and sang ‘Everything I Do Gonna be Funky’ but, with a daughter to care for, ducked out and now teaches college literature and grammar in California. “I came to a fork in the road and music wasn’t in it,” she says. To this day she regrets quitting.
The effect of 20 Feet from Stardom is already being felt and the girls are, at last, receiving long-overdue attention, respect and adulation. Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Judith Hill and Lisa Fischer sang the US national anthem at this year’s Rose Bowl. “It has been a wonderful experience for all of us,” concludes Lennear, “and I speak to Gloria Jones, Merry Clayton and Lisa Fischer all the time and we all have the same sentiment. It’s all music when you boil it down; you’re not trying to be the lead singer, you’re a backing singer, someone who collaborates, who blends, who can produce something that will affect someone emotionally.” 20 Feet from Stardom is out on 28 March twentyfeetfromstardom.com 177
Edward Brennan, owner of the White Horse Tavern Brennan worked on the waterfront, loading and unloading ships. He bought the bar in 1967 when the previous owner called time. It was a wreck, the floor having caved in.
CULTURE
Benjamin Oliver, photographer He assisted Annie Liebowitz and Barry Lategan, who he regards as major influences on his work. benjaminoliver.com
Jacket by Levi’s Made&Crafted; jeans by Levi’s; sweater by Sunspel; boots by Red Wing Shoes.
White Horse Tavern Photographs Janette Beckman Styling Laura Mazza Location White Horse Tavern, 567 Hudson Street, New York City, New York 10014
The White Horse Tavern opened in 1880 in New York’s West Village and has long provided a magnet for creatives and the politically disenfranchised alike. Union members and socialists would gather here in the 1950s to discuss their agendas and to plot actions. But it’s the literary and music worlds that have made this establishment
a culture mecca. Jack Kerouac, who lived in the building for a while, was frequently barred. Norman Mailer, Jim Morrison and Hunter S Thompson all put in some serious drinking here, while poets and freedom fighters like James Baldwin and Bob Dylan would come for a dram or two and to chew the fat. The White Horse was also a second
home to Dylan Thomas during his last few sodden years in New York. It’s said he drank 18 whiskies one night, just a few days before his premature death. His patronage is marked by a portrait that hangs in the bar today.
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Harry Bruinius, author He is the Christian Science Monitor’s New York staff writer and editor. His first book, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, was published in 2006.
brown-bear.com
Sweater by A.P.C.; trousers by Billionaire Boys Club; shirt by Alexander Olch.
CULTURE | White Horse Tavern
Ben Burgess, Jr, author His latest novel is called Monster. Times Have Changed and Life is Strange is a collection of his poetry. He is an active performer of spoken-word poetry. facebook.com/benburgessjr
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MUSIC
Ben Watt EBTG. Bernard Butler. Lazy Dog. Buzzin’ Fly Words Mark Webster Portrait Owen Harvey
In hindsight, it was a doozy of a question to open with. But the fact is, I’d just finished reading his new book tracing the back story of his parents, Romany and Tom (published in February by Bloomsbury), and so evocative and, at times, forensic were his words and thoughts on their lives before he came along – “the golden years you have to piece together”, as he puts it in the book – I was inspired to cut to the chase. I asked Ben Watt if he thought there was a sense of destiny in the manner in which his career has evolved? And for the first but not the last time in our conversation at his office in Clerkenwell, he thought seriously about the question. “I’m trying to think without giving an off-the-cuff answer,” he said, peering out the window, where answers can so often just go drifting by on the breeze. Ben Watt has, as he also says in the book, been “lucky enough to be making a living out of self-expression” since he left the University of Hull more than 30 years ago – initially solo, with albums for Cherry Red, and for two decades from 1982 as half of Everything but the Girl. The other half was, of course, Tracey Thorn, who remains, to this day, the actual other half. His career has grown in different directions, some of which may, in the cold light of day, seem incongruous, while others simply hark back to earlier parts of his creative life. But, root and branch, the inspiration behind it all is grounded in his parents’ aforementioned ‘golden years’; when dad was a successful jazz musician, and mum a hardworking showbiz journalist. 182
Or as Watt put it, having considered his answer, “there’s a natural process of osmosis where you absorb your parents’ ideas and influences, just from the little things they do.” But, “the person I was actually aware was working was mum.” This is a crucial element for him. Aside from music, those other branches of his life include label owner, DJ, club promoter, radio broadcaster and now author of two books (Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness came out in 1996), all of which seem to have a more logical alignment with his mum’s impact on his life. “My mum’s work always seemed quite functional,” he says. “She was proud of what she did and thought she got good stuff out of people she spoke to. But she still had deadlines to hit, the right quote to get. Do it, and on we go. I don’t think there was ever a sense she was pouring her heart out on the page. She never had the time or opportunity, because she had to earn the money.” In Romany and Tom, this conflict between a working mum and a dad whose creative career had ended plays heavily on his parents’ relationship, as well as Watt’s journey of rediscovery of them. His former big band-leading dad, who came down from Glasgow to play music in London, had a career that was, in contrast to his mum’s, “dormant”. “He was in decline when I grew up. He was just the man around the house. He was the house husband who I learned had had a jazz career.” Tommy Watt did indeed have a career; he was a live performer and bandleader with several recordings
under his belt. It was something he’d have loved to pass down to his son. “He hoped I might end up a jazz guitarist,” says Watt. “When I bought my first guitar, the first thing he did was buy me a Joe Pass album, thinking, ‘Go on mate, do that!’ But by that time I’d heard John Martyn, and that spoke to me more as a teenager. So it was quite clear I was going down that route.” Nevertheless, even if his old man was not going to sell him on the music, perhaps that “osmosis” manifested itself more clearly in their social time together. Although Tommy was out of the game, he remained a strong supporter, and they happened to be in just the right part of London for Watt to spectate as well. “He used to take me to The Bull’s Head,” Watt recalls – the legendary jazz venue near where they lived in Barnes, west London. “And we’d listen to jazz. He was just a drinker in the bar, chatting to the other musicians. But for a brief moment he had been one of them, and his flame had burned pretty bright. “The fact that I’d spend my Sunday lunchtimes with him, doing something different from going fishing or whatever – it was a magical place, as a kid. Being allowed to look inside that world.” And it slowly became evident why his dad was by then a bystander with a drink in his hand in Barnes, rather than onstage. “I’m aware of my dad’s trajectory, if you like, that he suffered from depression; I have too, on and off through my life,” he says. “But I’m damned if I’ll go down the same route. I know perfectly well it’s not only on you, but everyone around >
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you. I’m going to stay on top of it all, not let it drive me into the ground. Find a channel for my creativity”. He found that channel early on and always knew it was a serious pursuit. “Even at school I wanted to get up on stage,” he recalls, “but it’s funny – even from a young age, I was never, ever interested in being famous through it. “I thought it was just a fascinating way to connect with people. That, for me, was what was interesting, that you could get that kind of dynamic with people – by saying something truthful, or by giving a good performance. That seemed to cut out all the other crap.” However, finding the moment where he nails the ‘dynamic’ doesn’t necessarily mean Watt can, or ever did, relax. Again, it seems clear to me that this thoughtful, quietly spoken man is made up of those still waters that run deep. “Being on stage,” he continues, “playing a note, my automatic second thought is, ‘was that what I meant?’ There’s always the voice.” “Learning to live in the moment, to enjoy the enthusiasm of the crowd and release yourself from the nagging voice on the shoulder is something I’ll always strive for. You feel a fraud, inauthentic. And that’s heightened in front of 2,000 people, because you think, ‘Fucking hell! These people have spent money to come and sit here. Have I done my best?’” The road to Watt’s electronic future began with Todd Terry’s seminal 1995 remix of ‘Missing’ from Everything But the Girl’s new eighth album, Amplified Heart. What followed was the dancified Walking Wounded (1996) and work on Massive Attack’s ‘Protection’. In 1998, Watt and Jay Hannan instituted deephouse night Lazy Dog at Notting Hill Arts Club, which lasted until 2003 and ultimately spawned Watt’s record label Buzzin’ Fly. And he found he was a DJ. “The thing that really intrigued me about DJing when I first started getting into it seriously was that the occasion is bigger than the DJ,” says Watt. “The real star of the show is the party itself. That mood you start to feed the fire of. You throw logs on, it builds and turns into something with its own momentum. “It’s all about the dancers, the lights, the alcohol and the drugs – it’s about the whole social ritual of this thing, and you, the DJ, are just the person keeping 184
it ticking over. Which is why I loathe this increasingly popular enthusiasm for DJs on stage, where the audience faces the altar of music. I find that sort of sickeningly pseudo-religious.” Watt and Hannan “DJed on the floor and under the stairs, and you were there in amongst everybody, you’re chatting, exchanging ideas, the needle’s jumping, there’s sweat dripping on the vinyl. And for me, someone who’d spent 15 years on stage, I loved that barrier being removed; I was piecing something together with people’s pre-recorded pieces of music.” DJing has been put aside in recent years as Watt prioritises writing, his solo music project, and “travelling”. “Missing the family,” he says. “Going to bed again at six in the morning. Not getting any younger... the pragmatic things of DJing were getting me down.” “And the scene’s changed,” he says.
‘I TRY NEVER TO GUESS WHERE I’LL BE; I TRY TO LET IT TAKE ITS COURSE’ “The stuff Jay and I were playing in the early days of Lazy Dog and Buzzin’ Fly was coming back into favour – a deep, soulful sound. And people were saying to me, ‘Watt, you’d better get out the old Lazy Dog records’. And, really, I didn’t want to do that. I don’t want to play it all again to sustain my career. If there are 21-year-old kids out there who want to discover it, they should play it. Not me.” Staying fresh seems to be the theme underpinning Watt’s approach to much of his work. Whether that’s conscious on his part (leave them wanting more?), he doesn’t dwell on it. “I’m very aware that I seem to climb one ladder and there’s another in front of me. I’ll get to the top, perhaps even halfway, and I’ll be thinking, ‘You know what, I want to try something else’. I’ve never really been satisfied with the end result of things.
“Like, writing songs with Bernard Butler was absolutely thrilling,” he says. Hendra – made with the former Suede guitarist and produced by Ewan Pearson – will be released in spring. “That was partly because nobody knew what we were doing. We’d be sitting down in my basement and I’d be thinking, ‘Just wait! Just wait ‘til you hear this!’” A big part of his process is a need to remain instinctive, which clearly informs how projects begin and end, at whatever point that do. “I try never to guess where I’m going to be, I let it take its course,” he says. “Buzzin’ Fly, for example, never had an agenda. We thought no more than three months in advance. And if you’d have told me 18 months ago I’d be parking the label, with a book out, on tour with Bernard Butler – I’d have said ‘What!?’ But these things fall into place.” Helping the process along since college days in Hull is Tracey Thorn. They married in 2009 and are raising a family; she also records for Watt’s Strange Feeling Records and they are clearly very much, if anything ever was, an item. Yet Watt is aware that perhaps, and not unlike the previous Mr and Mrs Watt, they’re not exactly peas in a pod. “I mean, sometimes I get jealous of Tracey,” he laughs. “The acclaim that surrounds her work seems to always be within a steady confine. People like her songs, and her voice, now her writing. She’s on this sort of track, she’s always sort of looked the same. She’s selfpossessed. She is who she is. “I’ve always been the more volatile one, more moody, more changeable, always wanting to try new ideas – for better, for worse. I’ve made bad records, I’ve made good records. I’ve made bad decisions, I’ve made good decisions. That seems to be my way.” Romany and Tom is out now bloomsbury.com The album Hendra is out 14 April carolineinternational.com benwatt.com
MUSIC | Ben Watt
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SPOTLIGHT
Rockers International Photographs Savannah Baker Words Emily Ames
Is it the beat of reggae – its one-drop rhythm seemingly unchanged over the years – that has served to crystallise our image of Kingston, Jamaica? For many, the view of the city has remained fixed in a The Harder They Come/Bob Marley 1970s Rastafari time warp. One almost expects to descend on the Caribbean island’s capital and find an unchanged Jamaica; groups of men in tailored trousers, and rastacaps, fortuitously slamming down dominos, sipping on rum in a smoke-filled room. The perpetual importance of Jamaican music – King Tubby, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – breathes life into the flat, black-and-white images of jukeboxes, sound systems and record stores that stare back from coffee-table books and Tumblr feeds. Digitisation has enabled the images and sounds of 1970s Jamaica to be uploaded, shared and therefore etched into our minds, but so too has it made a key component of the island’s music industry redundant. The reality is that Kingston is a modern-day metropolis. The city still lives and breathes music. But while sound systems (mobile parties) continue to entertain Jamaican revellers almost every night, the record stores – and along with them, their communal 186
culture – have become almost extinct, as in the rest of the world. In the 1970s, Bob Marley wasn’t simply a global star; he made reggae the soundtrack of social and political empathy. Even today, in the furthest reaches of the traveller trail, Marley’s music is the universal language. As Jamaica’s Gleaner wrote in April 1978: “Jamaica has always had a music industry way out of proportion with its size and small population. Kingston’s recording industry is probably the third largest in the world. There are no exact figures, but a reasonable guestimate would be that between 40-50 45rpm records are released each week in the peak seasons of July-August and December-January, and during major international and national events like Kingston’s recent peace truce. The figure does not include records released by independent artists or producers.” As the presses stamped out hot new releases in plain cardboard sleeves, record stores sprang up to service the growing supply. “Orange Street is the music street and that’s the street that sells the beat,” sang Prince Buster in ‘Earthquake’. It heads north from Ocean Boulevard up to Cross Roads, drawing a border between uptown and downtown. By
the 1970s, the latter was established as reggae music’s ground zero, rewarded with sound systems on every corner. As warfare between the two main political parties – the Jamaica Labour Party and People’s National Party – played live on its streets, the recorded sounds of their homegrown freedom fighters became the new soundtrack of the ghetto. Orange Street had played a large role in Jamaica’s musical development since the 1960s; it was home to reggae legends Dennis Brown and Prince Buster and adopted home to musicians and musiclovers frequenting the over-abundance of studios, record stores and pressing plants. It was Kingston’s own Denmark Street, or Music Row in Nashville, and its tenant list over the next four decades would read as a Who’s Who of Jamaican music. Lee Perry’s Upsetter Shop was on the corner of Orange and Charles streets while a few doors down, producer Sonia Pottinger – owner of label Treasure Isle – set up a pressing plant. Bunny Lee’s record shop was at 101, Prince Buster’s at No. 121, Sir JJ Johnson’s at No. 133 and in 1976, Augustus Pablo’s Rockers International shop opened at No. 135. Producer Herman Chin Loy gave multi-instrumentalist Horace Swaby the name Augustus Pablo and started >
SPOTLIGHT | Rockers International
using the young artist on records. Pablo became famous in the 1970s for his ‘Far East Sound’, achieved by playing minor keys and, notably, the use of a melodica. Peter Holdsworth, of UK reissue label Pressure Sounds, remembers Pablo as a “notoriously difficult character” but “a musician from a tradition of immensely talented soloists dating to the 1960s”. Until then, the melodica had not been used in Jamaican music; it was used to teach children to play the keyboards. He was the one who elevated its status. Initially an instrumentalist, Pablo’s first big Jamaican hit was 1972’s ‘Java’. Later, he moved into production, creating one of the seminal Jamaican records of the 1970s, King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. Released on his label Rockers, it was the album’s success that allowed Pablo to distribute Rockers’ own records from his prime spot on Orange Street. Today, somewhat dishevelled, the street is a shadow of its former self; the faded Dennis Brown mural and signs of closed shops and studios bear testament to the hotbed of musical activity it once was. Despite being of a dying breed, going months without a sale, Rockers has remained open. Pablo died in 1999 at the age of 44, but his family continues to run the shop with the assistance of 188
manager Mitchie Williams. Despite its isolated (and dangerous) downtown location, and the local life that buzzes around it, it is now mainly a tourist attraction, a chance to catch a glimpse of Jamaica’s famous history. “We keep it original as possible; you’ll find no sliding electronic doors here,” explains
‘WE KEEP IT ORIGINAL AS POSSIBLE; YOU’LL FIND NO SLIDING ELECTRONIC DOORS HERE’ Mitchie, laughing, with a nod to the swinging iron doors painted in Jamaican colours. Posters “that would probably turn to powder if you tried to touch them” line the windows out to the pavement, while inside, the walls are lined with LPs, stickers and posters
from the last four decades of Jamaican music. Augustus Pablo vinyls East of the River Nile, Frozen Dub and King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown are stacked on the floor and stuffed in shelves, the original pressings laid out in a glass cabinet. For many, the records of the golden age remain untrumped. “A part of me thinks it was just a perfect storm,” says Holdsworth. “You had great players, great studios, great producers and an attitude. There was something in the atmosphere where people were being incredibly creative. Nowhere else were sounds made like the ones coming out of Jamaica at the time.” While it would be unfair to wish that Jamaica had not moved on – its record industry has been appropriated to fit in with the times and it continues to flourish and influence music worldwide – as ‘Keep on Dubbing’ plays out in Rockers and images and sounds from your computer screen become reality, you’d be forgiven for being nostalgic. Because for a moment, like our photos, you are able to stand suspended in time, in a snapshot of golden-age Jamaica. augustuspabloworld.com
Left Field NYC
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ICON
Pork Pie
Words Chris Sullivan Photograph Orlando Gili Rude boy Fode Sylla, managing director of Touba Distribution toubalondon.com
Perhaps the most rapscallion titfer ever to grace a cranium, the pork-pie hat is (and always has been) the chosen headgear of the common-or-garden hepcat – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Desmond Dekker, Malcolm X, Tom Waits; the list goes on. The pork pie first surfaced in 1820s England: simply a round, brimmed hat with a crown resembling the top of a British pork pie, it hasn’t changed much in the last 200 years. Favoured by young, fashionable New Yorkers in the 1900s (who oft turned the brim up on one side) it was popularised by silent-movie star Buster Keaton, who was rarely seen without one. So fond was he that his fedoras and trilbies were often turned into trademark super-flat pork pies with the aid of a steaming kettle and asbestos fingers. In 1964, he guessed that during his career he and his wife Eleanor had made thousands of pork pies – most of which he gave away to admiring fans. Thus the ‘pork pie’ was a part of the American vernacular by 1934 – a fundamentally British commodity soon to become an integral part of the jazz aficionado’s and musician’s portmanteau. It was especially popular among those who favoured the zoot suit – zooties, buzzin’ cuzzins, reefer-blowing, sharpedup alligators – with a wider brim and a fat band that often held a feather. 190
Consequently, America’s top jazzers – Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon and Babs Gonzales (also the author of Boptionary, the dictionary of jazz speak) made the hat their own. Legendary tenor man Lester Young was so fond of it that Charlie Mingus called the song about his demise ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’. It is his dark, wide-brim pork pie that opens Gjon Mili’s famous film Jammin’ the Blues (1944); saxophonist Illinois Jacquet and trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison don paler versions throughout. Subsequently, it became the only hat for any self-respecting urban barfly. A straw version could easily be substituted in summer, goatee optional. In the 1950s, the pork pie crossed over to US campuses. Esquire, in 1954 feature ‘Head Man’, stated that “the pork pie, surviving its remarkable name, continues as a great favourite, especially in company with tweeds and flannel get-ups.” Embraced by Ivy Leaguers, it, in turn, inspired the cool-school jazz musicians then copied by the likes of Bing Crosby, Martin and Sinatra. By the late 1950s, jazz cats such as Wes Montgomery and Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis had pioneered the ‘jivey Ivy’ look, a subtle dislocation of the norm that saw sharp high-leg Sta-Prest trousers under shawl-collared knits, black ties, white shirts and pork pies with brims shrunk
to a stingy one inch. This characteristic early-1960s soul-cat ghetto style soon made its way to Jamaica, where ska boys such as Prince Buster, Derrick Harriott and Alton Ellis were upon it like a rash. Ergo, back in the UK, mods, skinheads and suede boys would consider no other headgear. In 1979, Jerry Dammers, with his band the Specials and label 2 Tone, reignited the sprit and style of ska. Once again, the pork pie was pushed into the mainstream; everyone from pre-teen skins to Only Fools and Horses’ Mickey Pearce was in on the act. However, such overexposure did not corrupt the hat’s ineffable style or its past credentials. In the early 1980s, the pork pie was, once again, adopted by rockabillies in the UK and jazzers, trendies and pop stars on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, it’s still a class act. It is no accident that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan stuck the hat (albeit the typical jazzman style) atop evil protagonist Walter White. As George Frazier wrote in 1963: “What is so nice about men’s clothing is that their obsolescence is never obligatory… they do not go out of style very swiftly.” Rather a suitable comment for the pork pie. lockhatters.co.uk
Hat by Lock&Co.
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