Jocks&Nerds Issue 17, Winter 2015

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE

WINTER 2015 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 17

©

“We owe it to our sisters who have no voice - and no chance to be heard - to speak up.”

LENA HEADEY

£5.95

www.jocksandnerds.com

DON’T SEND A LETTER TO SANTA. HE DOESN’T HAVE ANY OF THIS STUFF.

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STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©

VOLUME 1 ISSUE 17 Cover Lena Headey photographed by Alan Clarke, styled by Mark Anthony Bradley Coat by PS by Paul Smith menswear; suit by Paul Smith menswear; spotted jacket by Kenzo, stylist’s own; top by Marks&Spencer; shoes by Prada menswear, stylist’s own; earrings by Laura Lee Jewellery; socks by Pantherella Retouching and colour management by Complete Colour Services completeltd.com Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com

Assistant Editor Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com Editorial Assistant Edward Moore edward@jocksandnerds.com Junior Designer Anna Holden anna@tack-press.com Financial Department Rob Horne and Bryan Kemsley accounts@tack-press.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@tack-press.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com

Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Fashion Editors Marcus Love, Richard Simpson 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 Music Events Programmer Stuart Patterson stuart@jocksandnerds.com

Advertising Manager Fiona Wallace fiona@jocksandnerds.com Commercial Manager Tack Studio Nina Akbari nina@tack-press.com Project Coordinator Tack Studio Elizabeth Jones elizabeth@tack-press.com Head of Editorial Tack Press Oliver Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com Commercial Director Tack Press Chris Jones chris@tack-press.com

Sub Editor Rosie Spencer Original Design Phil Buckingham

Contributors Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala, Mark Anthony Bradley, Maria Cardona, Alan Clarke, Dustin Cohen, Sophie Coletta, Kevin Davies, Horst Friedrichs, Orlando Gili, David Goldman, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Martin Holtkamp, Adama Jalloh, Elliot Kennedy, Phil Knott, Kumiko Kobayashi, Karen Mason, Vincent Oshin, Klaus Thymann, Paul Vickery, Simon Way, Robert Wyatt Special Thanks Scott Borne at Sinking City Records sinkingcityrecords.com, Rudy Budhdeo at Son of a Stag sonofastag.com, Ben Chancellor, Pete Davies, Tim Field, Jane Hansom, Timothy John at Rouleur magazine rouleur.magazine.co.uk, Michiko Koshino at Studio 74 michikokoshino.co.uk, Wiesia Kuczaj at Fusion Media fusion-media.co.uk, Night&Day Café nightnday.org, Ross Parlane and Dan at RPB Northern Quarter Barbers, Manchester rpbnq.com, Tom Shaw 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 published four times a year, printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk To subscribe go to jocksandnerds.com/subscriptions 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 © 2015

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Contents 12–23 SEEN: 229 The Venue hosts some of the UK’s flyest B-boys and B-girls 24–40 NEWS: This winter’s roundup 42–48 PEOPLE: Our portfolio of movers

and shakers

50–57 PLACE: Toronto is rapidly

becoming Canada’s cultural hub

58–63 DETAIL: Slippur Shipyard

Photographs Janette Beckman Styling Richard Simpson

104–109 MUSIC: 79rs Gang is a band of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians showcasing their music to the world 110–121 SPORT: Glacier Trekking is a universal activity with an environmental message 122–133 COVER STORY: Lena

Headey is using her profile to highlight inequalities and social deprivation suffered by women around the world

looks at sartorial codes employed around the world

134–141 CULTURE: Sign of the Times was a clothes shop and clubnight in 1990s London that brought together some of the city’s creative influencers

72–75 CINEMA: Chet Baker was

142–149 STYLE: Justin Dean Thomas

64–70 GALLERY: Fashion Tribes

the epitome of California cool jazz

76–83 STYLE: High Beech

Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Karen Mason

84–85 BULLETIN: Perry Ellis America

brings back to life the seminal 1980s designer’s diffusion line

86–91 PROFILE: David Whiteing

has dressed some of the most famous film characters and musicians of the last 40 years

92–103 STYLE: Northern Quarter

Photographs Robert Wyatt Styling Richard Simpson

Photographs Phil Knott Styling Vincent Oshin

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170–173 BULLETIN: Bianca Saunders’ debut fashion collection explores BritishCarribean identity 174–179 MUSIC: The Seeds came out of the Californian garage scene of the 1960s, coining the phrase “flower power” 180–187 STYLE: Cupids

Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason

188–193 HISTORY: Paul Robeson

150–155 CINEMA: Fire Music is a

documentary exploring the importance of free jazz 156–163 STYLE: Okamoto Kyodai

Photographs Martin Holtkamp Styling Kumiko Kobayashi

was an actor and social activist whose tireless work helped ignite the Civil Rights movement

194–195 BULLETIN: Grenfell is a

classic British clothing company that has recently opened a new factory in London

196–199 SPOTLIGHT: Stamps are used

164–169 HISTORY: Walker Evans

documented the social shifts in 20thcentury America and pioneered new photographic techniques p12

for so much more than simply paying for postage

200–205 MUSIC: Rumba is a Cuban percussive music influenced

by African rhythms 206–207 ICON: The Fisherman’s

Sweater is a practical garment that highlights local pride

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p50

now open at R eD CH U RCH stR eet L A M B ’ S con du i t

R EGE n t St R E Et

SL oA n E S QuA R E

SEEN

229 The Venue

Photographs Paul Vickery Words Edward Moore Photographic Post-production Sanjay K

For the past year, photographer Paul Vickery has been creating his ‘True Hip Hop’ series. The photographs document a small group of hip-hop dancers who revolve around Parisian promoter David ‘D-lo’ Vilo’s events, held regularly at 229 The Venue in central London.

“D-lo’s events attract like-minded people who respect hip-hop’s roots and come to do serious battle on the dance floor,” says Vickery. “The dancers at these events tend to be young, highly

focused, working-class kids. They embrace hip-hop as a way of life and want to make their own mark too.

These are the kids who dance to live.”

Vickery is planning to exhibit the photographs in London in 2016.

The next What You Got?, an annual dance competition hosted by D-lo, is at 229 The Venue, Great Portland Street, London W1 in April facebook.com/dlo.entertainment

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SEEN | 229 The Venue

Ramelle Williams AKA Remz, 24, popping dancer, from Birmingham Describe your style.

A lot of vintage stuff mixed with new school stuff.

What’s so special about London hip-hop dancing?

It has the best of the best competing, which is very inspirational.

Describe London hip-hop dancing in three words.

Inspirational. Beautiful. Art. Who are your favourite muscians?

Tinie Tempah, Kendrick Lamar, Labrinth and Tame Impala.

What’s your favourite movie?

Superbad.

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BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES HATTERS

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH HATTERS

F O U N D E D 1 6 7 6 . LOCK HATTER S.CO.U K

SEEN | 229 The Venue

Tobi Balogun, 22, B-boy dancer, from Carlow, Ireland Describe your style.

Vintage meets sportswear/streetwear.

What’s so special about London hip-hop dancing?

A lot more events and opportunities, as well as the range of people of different backgrounds you meet.

Describe London hip-hop dancing in three words.

Fun. Competitive. Exciting.

Who’s your style icon?

Jerry Lorenzo.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Elhae.

What are your favourite movies?

Stomp the Yard and the Step Up series.

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25 Henrietta Street Covent Garden, WC2E 8NA

47-49 Charlotte Road Shoreditch, EC2A 3QT edwin-europe.com

SEEN | 229 The Venue

Nima Diorio AKA Phaze or Soulja Crook, 20, krump dancer, from South Korea Describe your style.

Street, hip-hop, smart, funky, rugged.

What’s so special about London hip-hop dancing?

The unity, the support, the culture, the freedom.

Describe London hip-hop dancing in three words.

Unity. Freedom. Raw. Who are your style icons?

Michael Jackson, James Brown, Boogie Frantick, Tight Eyez. Who are your favourite muscians?

James Brown, Michael Jackson, NWA, Snoop Dogg and Eminem.

What are your favourite movies?

Rize, Stomp the Yard, Straight Outta Compton, Avatar, The Dark Knight.

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SEEN | 229 The Venue

Tashan Lewis AKA Trademark, 19, popping dancer, from London Describe your style.

I like to express music using groove and control.

What’s so special about London hip-hop dancing?

It’s a family and we all learn off each other. We welcome anyone and have healthy competition at the events, communicating through battles, videos and cyphers.

Describe London hip-hop dancing in three words.

Interesting. Inspiring. Fun. Who’s your style icon?

I feed off everyone.

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nixon.com

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SEEN | 229 The Venue Louiseanne Wong, 24, freestyle dancer, from Hong Kong Describe your style.

Pretty diverse. One day hipster, one day preppy, another day old school hip-hop.

What’s so special about London hip-hop dancing?

It’s lively. There are jams happening everywhere. Dancers take training quite seriously and battles are always mind blowing to watch, especially when your homie is in the spotlight.

Describe London hip-hop dancing in three words.

Diverse. Exclusive. Experimental.

Who’s your style icon?

Lydia Paek and the Korean girl band 2NE1.

Who are your favourite muscians?

Chet Faker, Björk, Senking, Tokimonsta, Låpsley, Lianne La Havas, John Mayer, Wes Montgomery, the Underachievers, Missy Elliott.

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J Crew Redchurch Street Store

With six successful London stores already behind it, American brand J Crew recently opened its largest menswear-only store on east London’s Redchurch Street. Over the past couple of years, Redchurch Street has become a Mecca for brands and retailers looking to create an outlet in east London, where many of the capital’s creative community work and live. The new J Crew store - close to 1,000 square feet in size presents the brand’s Ludlow suiting collection and workwear-inspired Wallace&Barnes range. Staple pieces (most notably J Crew’s famed shirts), brand collaborations under the In Good Company banner, and curated one-off pieces such as watches and jewellery give the store an independent feel that invites patrons to discover unique pieces alongside classic American styles.

J Crew, 58 Redchurch Street, London E2 jcrew.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Words Edward Moore Store Manager David Bray

NEWS

Jacket by Baracuta; top, stylist’s own.

Baracuta D4 Jacket

Historically, Baracuta jackets have offered protection against wind and rain, whilst retaining a lightweight and comfortable fit. All the brand’s jackets are much loved by motorcyclists and scooterists, but the G9 - more affectionately referred to as the Harrington jacket - has been particularly coveted by a range of subcultures, including mods and skinheads. Having last year developed a raincoat-style garment named the G10, Baracuta has now launched the D4, a jacket aimed specifically at its motorcycling and scootering fanbase. Teaming up with Dainese, a brand that specialises in protective motorcycle wear, Baracuta developed the D4 as an update of its existing G4 jacket. The D4 is made from a specially developed material that incorporates removable padding on the elbows and shoulders, offering protection without compromising on style. baracuta.com dainese.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore Scooterist Gwyn Jones

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NEWS

Dominykas Brazys, student, wears coat

by Mackintosh x Hyke; sweater and trousers

by Neil Barrett; shoes

by Bass; hat by Lock&Co.

Mackintosh x Hyke

Although the names of designers Hideaki Yoshihara and Yukiko Ode may not roll easily off the tongue for western fashion audiences, that is not to say that the pair are upstarts or, for that matter, unknown.

Yoshihara and Ode founded their Green label in 1998.

The brand was hugely successful in their native Japan and was stocked in independent fashion boutiques across the country. But when Ode became pregnant in 2009, she and Yoshihara decided to call time on Green. Three years later, they returned with Hyke, a new brand that quickly garnered praise for its simple, monochromatic and sharp-lined silhouettes. Having previously worked with Adidas, the duo have now partnered with Mackintosh for several seasons, with this season seeing the first menswear range to emerge from the collaboration. mackintosh.com hyke.jp Photograph Orlando Gili Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala Words Edward Moore

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OFTEN IMITATED. NEVER BETTERED. T H E

O R I G I N A L

S I N C E

1 9 5 0

15AWC1142

NEWS Daido Moriyama

Renowned for his grainy and gritty photographs of Japanese life, Daido Moriyama has spent half a century using his camera to reflect the changing values of postwar Japanese society. Working mostly on the street, Moriyama shoots stark and unconventional photographs that reflect his interest in how Japan’s post-war American occupation, and increased external influence on Japan, has diminished the country’s traditional sense of identity, while the behaviour of its citizens has become freer and more impulsive.

Daido Moriyama In Colour is out on 26 January rizzoliusa.com An exhibition of the same name opens at Fondazione Fotografia, Modena, Italy, on 6 March fondazionefotografia.org ‘Daido Moriyama: Daido In Tokyo’, an exhibition of colour and black-and-white photographs, opens at Foundation Cartier Bresson, Paris, on 5 February fondation.cartier.com Words Edward Moore

Photographs courtesy of Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

Stuart Patterson Tour

Jocks&Nerds’ music events programmer Stuart Patterson will DJ at two venues in Brazil this January – D-Edge nightclub, São Paulo, followed by a Rebel Waltz party with DJ Murray Richardson at Alto Vidigal, a club in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.

Stuart Patterson plays at D-Edge, São Paulo, on 15 January and at Alto Vidigal, Rio de Janeiro, on 16 January d-edge.com.br facebook.com/altovidigal Words Edward Moore

The Alto Vidigal club, Rio de Janeiro Photograph courtesy of Alto Vidigal

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x RANKIN

oliverspencer.co.uk

NEWS

Turnbull&Asser x Davida Helmet x Joel Clark

Turnbull&Asser, the gentleman’s shirtmaker and clothier, has collaborated with motorcycle brand Davida on a series of helmets, designed by artist Joel Clark.

The collection includes four unique, handmade designs, such as the NY-LON helmet, which features New York and London skylines and is based on a necktie design. turnbullandasser.com davida.co.uk joelclarkartist.carbonmade.com Photograph and Styling Marcus Agerman Ross Dandy Jackson Burke Words Edward Moore

Helmet by Turnbull&Asser x Davida x Joel Clark; dressing gown, trousers, shirt and cravat by Turnbull&Asser; sunglasses by Kirk Originals; cane from James Smith&Sons.

Forever Paris

A new title from Flammarion looks at the joys of the French capital in the first half of the 20th century. Forever Paris includes portraits of the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Nina Simone and Miles Davis in the city, as well as photography of the Champs-Élysées, Luxembourg Gardens and the Eiffel Tower. The book features 120 photographs – many previously unpublished – from the American photojournalism archive Keystone Press Agency, founded in 1891.

Forever Paris is out on 1 February flammarion.com Words Edward Moore

The ‘Petit Poulbots’ (Little Urchins) of Montmartre, Paris, circa 1950 © Keystone-France

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PARIS / JANUARY 22-26, 2016 / SEPTEMBER 2-6, 2016 PARIS NORD VILLEPINTE

BE HIGHLY INSPIRED IN PARIS

WWW.MAISON-OBJET.COM

INFO@SAFISALONS.FR SAFI ORGANISATION, A SUBSIDIARY OF ATELIERS D’ART DE FRANCE AND REED EXPOSITIONS FRANCE / TRADE ONLY / DESIGN © BE-POLES - IMAGE © DR - ZIMINDMITRY

NEWS Louis Vuitton: The Spirit of Travel

No other brand evokes the bygone exoticism and grandeur of travel quite like Louis Vuitton; images of glamorous celebrities, royalty and maharajahs followed by retinues of matching monogrammed luggage are part of our collective psyche. The brand was founded in the mid-19th century when French trunk-maker Louis Vuitton created the first flat-bottomed trunks that were easily stackable.

Previously, luggage had been rounded to let water run off, but Vuitton instead made his trunks airtight and used fabrics that protected the trunk and its contents from the elements. His idea took off and imitators quickly came onto the market. To make his luggage identifiable, Vuitton created the LV monogram, a symbol that is as famous today as it was then, and which still stands as a mark of quality and status. A new book, Louis Vuitton: The Spirit of Travel, takes a look at the company’s history from its first designs right up to the present day.

Louis Vuitton: The Spirit of Travel is out on 4 January flammarion.com louisvuitton.com Words Edward Moore

Sacred elephants during an official ceremony, Baroda, India, 1920s © Archives Louis Vuitton/Vernon Studios

The Vintage Showroom: An Archive of Menswear

Following on from last year’s A Collection from the Vintage Showroom, the Vintage Showroom has now compiled a second book: The Vintage Showroom: An Archive of Menswear. A London vintage clothes store and archive, the Showroom is used by the likes of Karl Lagerfeld for research and inspiration.

The new book looks at menswear categories such as tailoring and sportswear, using the Showroom’s archive pieces to tell the story of men’s sartorial and practical clothing.

The Vintage Showroom: An Archive of Menswear is out now laurenceking.com Words Edward Moore

German winter flying suit

by Karl Heisler, 1940s Photograph Nic Shonfeld

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CONTACT: STREETWEAR@DICKIES.COM

SINCE 1922

NEWS

Shinola London Store

Less than a year since opening a store on Soho’s Newburgh Street in Soho, Shinola has outgrown its central London outpost. To accommodate its expanding range and various instore events, the Detroit-based leather goods and accessories brand is moving into larger premises a few doors down. Amongst the attractions in the Soho store over the past year has been a six-month long project with Jocks&Nerds magazine, Community of Craft, which brought a unique selection of craftspeople into the store to demonstrate their expertise and sell their wares.

Shinola, 28 Foubert’s Place, London W1 shinola.com

Elle Lenses, shop assistant, wears jacket by Shinola x Golden Bear; scarf, watch and bag by Shinola.

Aaron Williams, shop assistant, wears jacket by Shinola x Golden Bear; sweater, beanie and watch

by Shinola; shirt, model’s own.

Steve Davies Studio

Starting out at The Duffer of St George in the 1990s, Steve Davies was instrumental in setting up men’s retailer Present in east London before moving on to work at Hardy Amies. Given this pedigree in the British menswear industry, it comes as no surprise that Davies is now launching his first menswear collection under the Steve Davies Studio label for spring 2016. Dubbed Material Boy, the collection is inspired by Davies’s love of contemporary architecture and modernist furniture. As Davies explains, the collection aims to offer “the finest product[s] made in the UK and Japan, using British, Italian and Japanese fabric, mixing and matching and using traditional Japanese techniques in a modern way.” stevedaviesstudio.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Steve Davies wears suit

by Steve Davies Studio; sweater by Jil Sander; shoes by Steve Davies Studio x Trickers.

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Photograph Chris Tang Words Edward Moore

NEW STORE OPEN 11 DRAY WALK, OLD TRUMAN BREWERY LONDON, E1 6QR WWW.GHBASS-EU.CO.UK @GHBASS1876

NEWS

Carven Homme

Barnabé Hardy was recently announced as Carven’s new creative director and he releases his first collection for the brand this season. Starting his career in 2000, Hardy built his reputation in his native Paris, where he worked for Nicolas Ghesquière at both Callaghan and Balenciaga, as well as for Karl Lagerfeld on his own line.

Alongside these positions, Hardy has continued to design his own collections, as well as working as a fashion editor and lecturer. carven.com Photographs Horst Friedrichs Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore Barista Rapolas Rimeika

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NEWS

Gieves&Hawkes x Orlebar Brown

After the famed Scottish explorer David Livingstone died in Zambia in 1873, his body was returned to London. Here, it laid in repose in the Royal Geographical Society at 1 Savile Row, a site that has been home to Gieves&Hawkes since 1912. To celebrate Livingstone’s exploits, Orlebar Brown has collaborated with Gieves&Hawkes to create an explorerinspired collection. It includes Livingstone’s hand-drawn maps on utilitarian clothing, a pith helmet, safari jacket, desert boots and multi-pocket utility vest. gievesandhawkes.com orlebarbrown.com Photograph and Styling Marcus Agerman Ross Words Edward Moore Traveller Jackson Burke

Tunic and shorts

by Gieves&Hawkes x Orlebar Brown; sunglasses by Persol.

Performing for the Camera

An exhibition at Tate Modern will look at the relationship between performance art and photography.

‘Performing for the Camera’ will feature photographs of performance works by Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama and Merce Cunningham; profiles of famous collaborations between photographers and performers, such as Eikoh Hosoe and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata; and a look at how photography has changed approaches to performances for the stage, as seen in works by photographer Boris Mikhailov and sculptor Charles Ray. ‘‘Performing for the Camera’, an exhibition on performance art and photography, opens at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 on 18 February tate.org.uk Words Edward Moore

Grace Jones being painted by Keith Haring, 1986 Photograph Andy Warhol © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 2015 / Artist Right Society, New York and DACS, London

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NEWS

Merz B Schwanen Decade T-shirts

Peter Plotnicki, the man behind Merz B Schwanen, has made it his mission to bring back the quality and allure of traditional men’s undergarments. Having sourced a traditional knitwear manufacturer in Germany’s Swabian mountains, Plotnicki has spent the past few years creating T-shirts, sweatshirts and various other knitted men’s staples that feel comfortable, light and beautiful against the skin. Inspired by the design techniques employed between the 1920s and 1950s, Plotnicki created a range of T-shirts that make use of these historical techniques, as well as referencing the styles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. merz-schwanen.com Photograph Orlando Gili Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala Words Edward Moore Dominik Magloire, personal trainer, wears T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen; trousers by Neil Barrett; shoes by Bass; bracelet by Miansai. Novemto Komo, artist, wears T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen;trousers by Maison Kitsuné; trainers by Nike x Comme des Garçons novemtokomo.com Lexton Elliot, personal trainer, wears T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen; trousers by Neil Barrett; scarf, stylist’s own; bracelet by Miansai.

Atip Wananuruks, stylist, wears jacket, shorts and top

by Soar; trainers by Y-3. atipw.com

Soar

Tim Soar, the man behind new running brand Soar, has had a long and varied career. In the 1980s he collaborated with fabled graphic designer Neville Brody to create Post, an interiors company. At the same time, Soar worked as a DJ and set up a music consultancy agency, Music Concrete. Through this, he collaborated with clients as varied as Adidas, Fendi and Ian Schrager Hotels. Soar has worked as a fashion designer since 2006 and, an avid runner, he releases his first running collection this season. soarrunning.com Photograph Orlando Gili Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala Words Edward Moore

Richard Blair

“Hearing those big Colombian hand drums for the first time was a revelation, one of those moments when everything you thought you knew explodes out into fragments, revealing a whole new world.” So says Richard Blair of his time working as an engineer at Real World Studios for the Totó la Momposina LP, La Candela Viva, in 1992.

The London DJ and producer was inspired to take a holiday in Colombia and ended up staying there. “Colombia was a violent and dangerous place,” says Blair, “and perhaps that focused the mind on the important stuff… love, eating, drinking, singing and dancing. I was surrounded by warm and loving people and I could see no reason to go back to London.”

When he did return in 1996, it was to record the pioneering Southern Star album, mixing the tropical rhythms of cumbia with the electronic sounds of the dance floor.

But for his latest LP, Supernatural Love, he has gone for a more organic feel. “Bored by the homogeneity of modern dance beats, we decided to see if it was possible to make a record without electronic drums or even a bass drum,” says Blair. “To make beats with hand drums, seeds and shakers, kalimbas and driving melodic vocals.”

Recorded with his group of Colombian musicians known as Sidestepper, the LP was inspired by the bohemian neighbourhood of La Candelaria in downtown Bogotá.

Supernatural Love by Sidestepper is out on 5 February realworldrecords.com Photograph Maria Cardona Words Andy Thomas

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PEOPLE

Damien Sanville

When Parisian Damien Sanville set up Close-Up in 2005, it was a modestly sized video rental library on east London’s Brick Lane. Now located on nearby Sclater Street, Close-Up Film Centre is home to a 40-seat cinema screening 35mm films, a café and bar, an expanded film library, and its own magazine, Vertigo.

While Close-Up has achieved a successful expansion, Sanville emphasises the difficulties of running an independent cinema. “Today, things are snappy and quick,” he says. “It seems hard to bring people together to a cinema every night…

There’s a reason why, over the last three decades, repertory cinemas and smaller independent cinemas started to disappear.

It wasn’t just the rent increase, although it’s a fundamental aspect. It’s the way in which people access and watch films.

Through smart phones and social media, companies make sure everybody is constantly distracted and entertained. Younger generations are being told what is interesting through these platforms and are losing their curiosity and commitment to cultures like cinema.”

Sanville recounts a story about a girl in her twenties who said she was not aware of many of the films championed at the centre, and asked how he would convince her to watch these films.

“I said, there is a point where it’s your responsibility to make yourself more curious,” says Sanville. “That was a tipping point for me because it was symptomatic of younger generations. Saying, I really need you to hold my hand and take me through the whole thing.”

A film season on Akira Kurosawa is at Close-Up Film Centre, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 throughout December Close-Up will host an evening on experimental filmmaker Karel Doing on 11 December and a screening of Easy Rider and The Wizard of Oz on 31 December closeupfilmcentre.com Photograph Kevin Davies Words Edward Moore

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PEOPLE Ms Charm Taylor

“I was born landlocked, but New Orleans raised me, allowed me to be liberated,” says singer Charm Taylor, originally from St Louis, Missouri. “New Orleans is immersed in music and art, and has its finger on the pulse of something old.

It’s the inspirational, the experimental, and the elemental – because we are several feet below sea level.”

Her first EP, ‘The Road Within’, was released in May, soon followed by her debut solo album of the same name, available now on download. If you get the chance to see her live, you are warned: “When they pull me in, they’re going to get louder, they’re going to get tribal, they’re going to get something more in the vein of high art.” mscharmtaylor.com Photograph Simon Way Words Mark Webster

Felix

DJ Felix made a name for himself at the age of 19 after releasing the house single ‘Don’t You Want Me’ in 1992. The track reached number six in the UK singles chart – launching his career as a DJ and producer.

As a teen in Chelmsford, Essex, Felix’s first love was soul and funk, “which I managed to hear on Essex radio in the evenings,” he says. “I was really influenced by my brother, who, being six years older than me, was far more mature in his musical tastes.”

By the age of 15, Felix was already getting his first DJ gigs around Chelmsford. He discovered hip-hop after listening to the likes of Run-DMC and Public Enemy, and started producing hip-hop beats with his friends. “We were forming our own little crews and the UK sound became our main pride,” he says.

“London Posse and Demon Boyz were the best.”

He later encountered Chicago house and found his niche. “I was a bit resistant to it at first, it seemed a bit too glam and mainstream… but once I heard Acid Tracks [by Phuture] from my mate Tyrone, I was completely sold.”

‘The Next Shot’ by Felix, featuring Roc$tedy is out on 28 December felixmusik.com Photograph Tim Hans Words Edward Moore

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PEOPLE Nile Marr

Nile Marr has good musical pedigree.

His father, the singer and former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, named him after the inspirational Nile Rodgers of Chic, one of his favourite guitar players, and a good friend.

Since 2012, the young man Rodgers calls his “soul son” has been performing as singer for the trio Man Made, along with Callum Rogers and Scott Strange.

The group have gone from playing gigs around the Manchester area to supporting the likes of Jake Bugg and playing Leeds and Latitude festivals.

The band released their first EP in November, ‘Bring Some’, which coincided with a UK tour that included several dates sharing the bill with dad Johnny. The band’s debut album is expected for release in summer 2016.

‘Bring Some’ by Man Made, is out now manmadeband.com Photograph Ross Trevail Words Mark Webster

David Gledhill

Souls is the latest project of producer David Gledhill, reimagining vocal tracks recorded by folk music collector Alan Lomax during the first half of the 20th century. “Whilst browsing through music on Spotify,” says Gledhill, “I stumbled across a little record company [Document Records] who had spent the past 25 years releasing compilations of [Lomax’s] American field recordings. I then spent the next year listening to hundreds of these recordings, trying to find ones I could work with.”

The first single from Souls is ‘I Wait For You’, featuring a vocal recording by an unidentified female. “Through my research, we know that the recording was made during Alan Lomax’s trips to Coahoma and Mississippi between 1941 and 1942,” says Gledhill. “I would love to find out who she was.”

Souls’s single ‘Satisfied’ is out in February facebook.com/onetwomanyrecords soundcloud.com/soulsarehere Photograph Ross Trevail Words Edward Moore

PEOPLE

Kei Kagami

When working on a fashion collection, designer Kei Kagami avoids external distractions, allowing his inspirations to come from within. “When I decide what I should do, I always analyse myself,” he says.

“What am I interested in? What makes me angry? What impresses me most? What do I feel beauty from at the moment?” While locked up in his studio in north London’s Holloway, the only contact he has with the outside world is watching the BBC news twice a day. He also has a family of squirrels that regularly roam around his studio.

Born in Kofu City, Japan, Kagami’s interest in punk at an early age led to a curiosity in fashion. After moving to Tokyo to study architecture and tailoring, he was exposed to designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake. After graduating, he chose a career in fashion rather than architecture, moving to London in 1989 to work for John Galliano and doing a fashion MA at Central Saint Martins. “It wasn’t really a matter of fashion or architecture, as long as it related to space and structure,” he says. “But with architecture, you have to work with many people until a building gets completed. I knew I was not good at that, so I thought better not to go for architecture. Having said that, I lately designed the YKK showroom as an architect and I enjoyed working on it very much.”

Kagami is a creative consultant for YKK, the Japanese zip brand whose east London showroom opened on 4 December. artisanwerks.com/kei-kagami-official Photograph Ross Trevail Words Edward Moore Location YKK Showroom, 154 Commercial Street, London E1 ykkeurope.com

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DJs Phil Asher and Stuart Patterson Friday 29 January Number 90, 90 Main Yard, Wallis Rd, London, E9 5LN 7pm–midnight Free entry

PLACE

Toronto

Words Mark Webster Photographs Simon Way

Something that was cited several times during the course of my recent trip to North America was that, along with New York and Chicago, the third fastest-growing city is Toronto, capital of Ontario and the most heavily populated metropolis in Canada.

And they’ve got the Windy City in their sights.

Make your way into the city centre from the airport, with Lake Ontario filling much of your vista as you look to your right, and you can see that Toronto is reaching for the sky.

Shimmering fingers of high rises are being unfurled in the heart of the city from fistfuls of building projects. Many of these are condos into which pour a constant stream of youthful Torontonians.

50

Yet, once you actually get in amongst this scattering of shiny new squares and oblongs, you find a city that not only happily displays its age of nearly 200 years, but also contains a richly diverse mix of citizens, all of whom help make Toronto a fascinating place to live and visit.

The Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff ) has played a large part in creating a buzz for the city. For five years, its new home, the Tiff Bell Lightbox, has dominated the corner of King Street West and John Street – breathing new life into a building that was once a car park owned by acclaimed director/producer Ivan Reitman’s parents. Both Czech Jews, his mother had escaped Auschwitz, while his father had been a resistance fighter. They

emigrated to Toronto to build a new life, which ultimately led them to owning the property that was donated to the festival for its new home. “We are in a glass and steel tower, but right there are those great Victorian buildings,” points out Tiff ’s artistic director Cameron Bailey, as we sit chatting inside the spectacular HQ. “And there’s the streetcar. This whole area was factories, slaughterhouses…

Now we’ve got app creators. Where once they processed food, now they process ideas.”

Bailey arrived in Toronto as a young boy via London and his parents’ home of Barbados, but is staunchly committed to being a son of Toronto. “It’s the only place on the planet I feel fully at home,” he says.

Cameron Bailey, artistic director of Toronto International Film Festival tiff.net

He has been part of the internationally renowned film festival since 1990. The event was founded in 1976, as Bailey says, “with the idea of reflecting the multiculturalism here.

They were already noticing that. They went to Cannes and thought, let’s do this more like us. And what they did that was different from the beginning was to make the festival populist, as opposed to elite – not a high church of cinema, as those festivals had started as. Our biggest award was always the People’s Choice. People telling each other what they thought, not us telling them.”

Bailey also happily admits that even in the time since he became involved 15

years ago, “I’ve seen the festival grow up alongside the city. For a long time Toronto was, as one of our famous authors put it, ‘a good place to mind your own business’. It was quiet. It was strange. People didn’t do stuff outside.

“When we got our first outdoor restaurant patios, it was a scandal for a while. Now everything’s changed, mainly due to migration. The Europeans – Italians, Spanish, Greek – that moved here after the war, they liked the outdoors, were more demonstrative. Then there were different waves – from the Caribbean, where my parents come from, Asia, Africa, Latin America. And now in a way, Toronto is the world.”

Tiff is the perfect event to hold up as a mirror to that notion. It takes place each September in the Bell Lightbox as well as cinemas around the city’s downtown area and in street events. In 2012, it attracted films from 72 countries, while the last festival brought nearly half a million people into the city, including thousands from the media as well as the film industry.

It is seen by many as second only to the event that inspired it in the south of France.

But while the festival is globally important, Bailey feels it still does its business on its own terms. And those terms again seem to have a strongly symbiotic relationship with its city. > 51

Avi and Bob Ross, general manager and owner of the Rex Hotel therex.ca

“We need to try and improve it every year, but we’re not trying to grow it,” says Bailey, when I ask whether there’s a worry the festival could end up getting too grand to remember why it started. “Generally better, not necessarily bigger. Well, bigger in that we moved down here into this building, but that’s because we wanted to help create a neighbourhood. New hotels, restaurants, things that can grow around us and breathe life into this part of the city.”

It is this approach that has also helped make Toronto such a popular destination as a film location. “In the film Chicago, we were Chicago,” says Bailey, laughing. He goes on to explain that “because we think we’re very welcoming”, many stars who show up to work here often stay on for a while.

There’s a kind of acceptance here. You can come in here as a bad-assed movie 52

star, do your whole red carpet thing, but then go off and have your own little party. Brad Pitt did that, went to a tiny restaurant on Dundas Street West and nobody gave him any static about it.”

This is the festival that puts the people first, and again Bailey feels that’s a spirit that is also an inherent part of the city it calls home. “There’ll be all these new buildings,” he says, pointing at the new structures springing up behind the 150-year-old street opposite.

“But you can’t simply dismiss these glass and steel towers. It’s the people who are in them. They’re shiny boxes, but inside they’re shiny people.”

Back along Queen Street West, at the junction of Saint Patrick Street and just east of Spadina Avenue – the thoroughfare that acts as the natural divide across the city – the Rex Hotel sits at the heart of the area where once heavy industry drove the engine that

kept Toronto moving. And the Rex was a place that, in turn, helped to keep the workers fuelled all the way back to its birth 85 years ago.

“My father bought the place in 1930, I’ve been here since 1965, and my son Avi, the last dozen years,” Bob Ross tells me, in between ensuring that Rob, who has worked in the bar for more than 25 years, is on top of the customers who are floating in and out of the handsomely traditional bar. It has nostalgic pictures and posters plastering the walls, and a small stage in the corner that looks ready for action. This particular area of the hotel started out as a men’s clothes store when Ross’s father acquired it, which faced on to Queen West. Then, when it finally became part of the hotel, it acquired the art deco frontage that Ross and his son brought back to life in more recent times, and which makes it a startling stand-out building on the street.

But in its original manifestation, “this was a working man’s watering hole,” says Ross. “Just beer. And this was a rough and tumble kind of area. Hard drinking – there was a tremendous amount of laughter, people were having a great time, then a fight would break out. Then more laughter. Another fight…”

The Rex is part of Toronto and its history while also helping to make a change, but unlike the Tiff building it has been doing so from within, from the start. “As the area was changing, and changing for the better I feel, so the beer halls were disappearing,” says Ross. “So I decided to put jazz in. I was looking for something to do here. The people had become more sophisticated in their tastes. And I’d always loved jazz, I had quite a few jazz musician friends, so when I suggested the Rex as a venue, a few hopped right on.

So in between the [ice] hockey games, we’d have jazz.”

Over the years the Rex has seen such luminaries as Wynton Marsalis, Maceo Parker, Harry Connick Jr, Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman find a spot on the tiny stage, alongside a conveyor belt of Canadian and international talent. “And you have to remember, we put on 18 jazz shows a week,” says Ross’s son Avi. “It’s very professional – we are right up there.

One of our mottos is that this has to be a place where jazz musicians will come and listen to jazz.”

PLACE | Toronto

Matt Robinson, designer and owner of the menswear store Klaxon Howl klaxonhowl.com

Being the most recent Ross at the Rex, Avi has a stronger sense of how Toronto has changed around him.

But, as he says with a smile, “I don’t think I’ve necessarily seen that drastic a change in the demographic, because there’s nothing really rapid with people from here. But there is the large urban renewal that is taking place fast. It wasn’t so long ago that one of the benefits of rooms on this side [he gestures out into Queen West] is that you could see the CN Tower. The fast pace of building is the real change around us.”

“And it’s brilliant,” adds his father.

“The fact that the downtown is so alive.

And the fact we’re still here, that we restored this as we have, I’m being congratulated all the time for not selling out to some store. We’ve had offers to leave. But my son loves it.

And it gets me out the house.”

Travel two kilometres west from the Rex and you’ll reach Matt Robinson’s menswear store, Klaxon Howl. “We’re

‘THE REX HAS SEEN THE LIKES OF MACEO PARKER AND HARRY CONNICK JR’ sort of the old guards of the neighbourhood,” he tells me as we walk around the bustling emporium, tucked

away discreetly in a back alley behind the new shop of Canadian shoe design legend John Fluevog. “West Queen West – kind of a stupid name,” says Robinson. “But it’s probably something of the new Brooklyn. And I’ve been in the business since 1993. I had a shop called Number 6, which was a bit of a mix of English and American streetwear – like Burro, Duffer, Hope&Glory and 6876, beside Triple Five Soul, Freshjive, those kinds of labels. We were the ones doing that here. In sleepy old Canada.”

Robinson’s eye for vintage, sports and in particular military wear has been honed since he was “a little kid”.

“There’s pictures of me in a beret and battle dress, pretending I was Montgomery,” he tells me. “And I went to military school at a young age – shipped off for three years.”

But as his teens and 20s came around, > 53

“so I got into the subcultures, but of course there’s a place for all of this in there.”

For the past decade, Klaxon Howl has been a mecca for rare vintage, while in the last few years Robinson has been supplementing it with his own clothing range that complements the original gear (“I can tweak it a bit. Bodies are different now. But with vintage thread, on original machines”); with cavalry twill trousers, chambray over shirts and classic sweats, all cheek by jowl with 1960s camouflage and 1940s hunting jackets. “And our stuff is made the way the old stuff was,” he adds, proudly.

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This trick of combining the old with the new to create something different reflects how the city has been changing around him since he first moved into the area in 1978. On his end of West Queen Street – which runs across town, cutting through two or three main thoroughfares – old neighbourhood stores and bars now boast smart cafés, restaurants and local designer shops as the folks next door.

Of course, with all that comes the cry of gentrification, and Robinson himself, who has remained staunchly at the heart of the changes, can certainly see that side of the argument.

“My shoppers were the people who used to work in the old bars and restaurants – and the artists, art directors and architects who used to live down here because it was cheap,” he says. “But on every corner now, there’s a crane. Something is being dug up, something is being knocked down.

There’s development going on. The people who have lived here like I have, have never seen it before.”

However, what Robinson can also see is the natural flipside to that coin, which is helping to make Toronto a destination city for not only the long weekender, but also the new citizen.

PLACE | Toronto “And they’re going to the Basquiat show, the Andy Warhol – these things never used to come here – and they’re going to the bars before and after watching bands. To say these people aren’t from around here is not accurate.

These ARE the downtown people.”

If there is a place in Toronto that has perhaps quietly been getting along with being the microcosm of the city’s renaissance, it is the area known as Kensington Market. If you are in the downtown area, and take a turn off either Spadina Avenue, College Street, Bathurst Street or Dundas Street, you will immediately find yourself in a century-old bustling village within a city, with a block of covered stalls at its heart, and an ever-shifting flux of shops, bars, eating houses and people surrounding it.

And for Nobu Adilman, it is the Toronto he is not only most familiar

Nobu Adilman, TV writer, and Daveed Goldman, musician, creators of the music project Choir! Choir! Choir choirchoirchoir.com

“It means around here now, the parents who live in the suburbs, maybe first generation Canadians, they’re getting their kids these new lofts in downtown.

The people we used to call the nine-ohfivers [a telephone area code] are now the four-one-sixers.

“So now they inhabit downtown.

They’re the people who walk up and down the street, drink in the coffee shops, patronise the boutiques. But they are also the ones that mean we now have a massive music festival, that our fashion week has grown from ‘we’ve lost our sponsor, we’ve lost our venue’ to being part of an international set up, and on the map.

‘TORONTO HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PERFECTLY GREAT MEDIUMSIZED CITY’ with, but also where he feels most at home. “Kensington Market is where, back in the 1940s, Jewish and Italian immigrants came to build their homes and this market,” he says. “It was a place for people of not many means to come. And it’s where I’d come as a baby, with my mum, who was an immigrant from Japan. It was really raw. And now look – we’re sitting here in a friendly, hipster beer emporium.

But you know, I’m still here. And it remains the one part of the city that’s really still fending off overgentrification – there’s a fierce independence that exists here and I think you can see more of that old spirit of Toronto in this area than anywhere else.”

Nobu Adilman’s father was Sid Adilman, an entertainment writer. With his brother Mio, Nobu started writing

and making shows for Canadian television. Another strand of his work made him a professional consumer for a while, and gave him firsthand insight into how the city was changing around him. “I was Toronto food editor last year for an online mag called Eater, and it showed me a different viewpoint of the city – just how much money was pouring in. I know there’s money, you can see it. But Toronto had always been a perfectly great medium-sized city and it felt like we were reaching a bit too far. But it is happening in a major way, and people are coming here to do things from inside and outside the country.

That does come with problems, like the gridlock. And we don’t yet have all the infrastructure. But we’re still growing fast, we’re not in a bubble any more.”

“I look at this city, and I think it’s almost the future, ahead of the curve,” says Adilman’s friend Daveed Goldman, a musician and songwriter who “came in from Montreal 15 years ago, which up until recently people saw as the cultural centre of Canada. And by a long shot. Toronto was very much the second city. Now it has become the hub of Canada. And around here, this is like Manhattan’s lower east side.”

Adilman nods in agreement. “This is where I come from, so perhaps I feel it more personally, but I do see the advantages, the positives,” he says.

“Like Daveed is always saying, ‘You can get things done here.’ And you only have to walk the city. There’s an influx that affects the place that is really inspiring. But the foundation of who we are is still here.”

Which of course is the principle at the very centre of Toronto’s growth into a genuine destination choice for a weekend, or for life. It is a city that is encouraging people to become citizens, and in the process create an environment by either introducing new ideas, or preserving great old ones, so that more people will come and be part of the process. And in its own way, the project that Adilman and Goldman fell into as an experiment around four years ago encapsulates that perfectly ‘Choir! Choir! Choir!’ began as an idea, spread through social media, to see if there would be interest in getting like-minded people together socially to sing contemporary music.

This has now evolved into a collective of Torontonians that meets twice a week at Clinton’s Tavern (so the > 55

Crossword and Jesse Ohtake, founders of the Academy facebook.com/academypresents crosswordmc.com

choir’s original motivation has remained intact) on Bloor Street West, but also now performs at various events across the city, as well as welcoming wellknown musicians to sit in with them.

From humble beginnings it has effectively taken over Adilman and Goldman’s life, but as Adilman points out, the concept of the project continues to succeed in what it set out to achieve. “I sent a guy in Egypt a video of what we do and he said, ‘Holy shit – that’s so diverse.’ And that was the greatest compliment I could have got. People from their early twenties to their late sixties, all different backgrounds. Fucking A. That’s the Toronto I want to see.”

Another music project in the city, run by two-man team the Academy, is also looking to give a platform to the diverse artists of Toronto. The Academy comprises Crossword, a songwriter and performer, and his partner Jesse Ohtake, who proudly tells me he was one of the first people to put John Legend at centre stage with a concert in Toronto. They are organising and promoting events 56

because, as Crossword says, “There are so many artists who are trying to do great things in Toronto. They’re people we believe in, we like their sound. And we’re not the only ones.

I feel there’s a lot of ‘us’ out there.

We’re definitely a community of that.”

‘THERE IS DEFINITELY SOMETHING IN THE WATER OF LATE’ The night I caught up with them, they were running their monthly Hustle event (with DJs playing a mixture of house and funk, and featuring live showcase performances) at the Piston – one of a clutch of fine live music venues and bars that can be found on Bloor Street West, which is just a mile or so out from the downtown area.

The Piston, like its neighbouring venues, provides music for a crowd that grazes a street bristling with options.

And it is that atmosphere, which seems to be permeating through the city, that has got Crossword’s juices flowing.

“I’m born and raised here,” he says, “and I can tell you there is definitely something in the water of late. And I feel like there aren’t any boundaries here made on superficial terms. Like, groups of people form... and it doesn’t seem to matter what neighbourhood you’re from. I’m Persian/Iranian, but I’m first generation. And my reality is that my circle of friends is multiethnic, multi-racial. I call it the beauty of history. But never forget where you come from.”

Across the city, heading west and close to the shore of Lake Ontario, is an expansive area that was clearly created to sate Toronto’s civic pride. Dominated by the Princes’ Gates, built in 1927 to commemorate a royal visit, the area is known as Exhibition Place and is the home of massive festivals throughout the year. As well as providing facilities for Nascar Racing, it is the home of

PLACE | Toronto

Connor Brown, winger for the Toronto Marlies ice hockey team marlies.ca

Toronto FC and the Canadian national football team, and where the Ricoh Coliseum was built in 1921 to house, among other things, agricultural events and horse display shows.

But since 2005, it has been part of another great Canadian cultural tradition – ice hockey. The Toronto Marlies play in the American Hockey League and are the ‘feeder team’ to the National Hockey League’s Toronto Maple Leafs. And one of their up-andcoming talents, currently learning his trade with the Marlies, is 21-year-old winger Connor Brown.

After a game against New York rivals the Albany Devils – and with local junior hockey teams now playing on the ice where their heroes had just pulled off an overtime victory – Brown explains how playing this sport, for your hometown team, is something that’s in the blood. “I’m from a suburb called Etobicoke, where probably every

kilometre there’s a hockey rink, for anyone who wants to play. And like the majority of Torontonians, as a kid, I wanted to be a Maple Leaf. So the chance to get drafted... it’s pretty exciting. Playing with the Marlies, like for so many guys, it’s a stepping stone.”

What’s more, it is also a great access point if you want to see what ice hockey is all about live, in all its high-tempo, heavy-hitting glory. The Coliseum can house 8,000 spectators, which is a lot at this level of the game. And they do attract big, but not capacity, crowds for the American Hockey League, which means not only will you be ensured a seat, but also a raucous atmosphere and a high standard of performance – as well as a more tactile access to a sport that is still a natural part of the Canadian DNA. “This is a great spot to play,” says Brown. “There are a few great little hideaways like this still. You can get

real close to the people. And my friends love it. Although I’m past playing this part of the sport, a bunch of them still like to go out for a midnight ‘shinny’ [the traditional name for pick up games of pond or ice hockey]. They’re still in love with it. That’s where they get their fix.”

So, whether you are looking to discover something as woven into the city’s fabric as ice hockey, or to see how this place is incorporating some of the finest that the rest of the world has to offer, Toronto is emerging as not only Canada’s leading cultural light, but also one of the planet’s most compelling destinations.

For more information on visiting Toronto go to seetorontonow.com The Jocks&Nerds team flew to Toronto with Air Canada aircanada.com

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Ledfoot wears jacket

by Moncler; sweater

by Paul&Shark; earrings, necklace and ring, model’s own.

DETAIL

Benjamín wears jacket by Aigle; tracksuit bottoms

by Stone Island; top

by Norse Projects.

Slippur Shipyard

Photographs Janette Beckman Styling Richard Simpson Casting Wiktoria Joanna Ginter and Smutty Smiff at Wildcat Productions Muscians Benjamín Árnason nattmordur.com, Ledfoot ledfoot-gothicblues.com and Fróði Ploder soundcloud.com/ottomaniceland

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Fróði wears jacket by Blauer; trousers by Dunhill; top by Agnès B; shoes by GH Bass; belt, stylist’s own; socks by Falke.

DETAIL | Slippur Shipyard

Fr贸冒i wears jacket by CP Company; jeans by Wood Wood; top by Fred Perry; shoes by GH Bass; socks

by Burlington.

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Fróði wears jacket by Stone Island; trousers by Dunhill; top by Levi’s Made&Crafted; boots by Red Wing Shoes; socks by Burlington.

DETAIL | Slippur Shipyard

BenjamĂ­n wears jacket by Norse Projects; tracksuit bottoms by Stone Island; top by Fred Perry; trainers

by Ralph Lauren; socks

by Falke.

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GALLERY

Fashion Tribes Words Chris May Photographs © Daniele Tamagni

Milan-based photographer Daniele Tamagni’s new book, Fashion Tribes: Global Street Style, is the follow up to his eye-poppingly beautiful photo-essay Gentlemen of Bacongo. In the earlier book, published in 2009, Tamagni used a mix of reportage and portraiture to document the sapeurs, the flamboyant street dandies of Congo-Brazzaville and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In his latest book, he expands on the theme by chronicling sartorially refined and, to varying degrees, politically aspirant subcultures in Myanmar, Cuba, Bolivia, Botswana, South Africa and Senegal.

Tamagni also returns to Brazzaville and the sapeurs. Originating in the late 1970s as the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, the sapeurs are dedicated to transcending economically deprived everyday reality by acquiring and flaunting high-end Parisian tailoring. Regency dandy Beau Brummel once said that if your clothes attract attention, you are overdressed.

The sapeurs think otherwise. So do Tamagni’s subjects in Rangoon, Havana, La Paz, Gaborone, Johannesburg and Dakar: the book’s unifying thread is the search for identity and visibility among otherwise “unseen” people. Tamagni portrays them with respect for who they are, where they live and what they dream of for the future, and his contextualised portraiture allows the reader to pick out a wider story from the details in the backgrounds.

“It’s not just a book about clothes,” says Tamagni, during a stopover to London. “My aim was to go deeper, to look at the wider social and historical context. The clothes become like a weapon, in a positive way, to demonstrate who the wearers are and what they want, which is to be free. Fashion Tribes is more complex than Gentlemen of Bacongo because it 64

looks at seven very different cultures and peoples across the world. In choosing countries not usually associated with fashion, I wanted to offer an overview of globalised style, and also to record the resistance to, and preservation of, traditions. There are differences from location to location – the punks of Rangoon have a more political and revolutionary direction and can have a lot of trouble with state authorities, while the metal heads in Gaborone are more about expressing style and identity in a new way, not in a specifically African way. What brings them all together is the affirmation of individual identity.”

On this sample of seven subcultures, it may be significant that those in the three most authoritarian regimes are those that are most radically resisting local norms and traditions, and have adopted imported styles and semiology that clearly signal the desire for social revolution. In Havana, the inspirations are brand names and logos associated with American capitalism.

In Brazzaville, it is haute-bourgeois Parisian elegance. In Rangoon, it is 1970s British punk. At the other end of the authoritarian-democratic scale, in La Paz, the costumes of the cholitas are joyous enhancements of Bolivia’s traditional peasant clothing.

Any apparently direct relationship between authoritarianism and imported style iconography may, however, be an over-simplification. In Botswana, a stable democracy, heavy metal style has been transplanted without mediation from Britain, despite the inadvisability of wearing neck-to-toe leather in Botswana’s sweltering heat.

In the mid-1970s, with the songs ‘Gentleman’ and ‘Johnny Just Drop’, Fela Kuti ridiculed the adoption of European suits and ties, and of African American funk ’n’ soul style, by Africa’s new middle classes, offering both

practical and philosophical objections.

The songs predated Brazzaville’s sapeurs and Gaborone’s metal heads, but these movements’ lower positions in their countries’ social hierarchies aside, Kuti could have been singing about them. Four decades on, the culturally corrosive post-colonial mindset Kuti was attacking has been replaced by self-confidence and the sense of African identity: modern Botswanans can come on like Iron Maiden without demonstrating any sort of cultural inferiority complex.

As one of Tamagni’s South African subjects says, “You can come from the dingiest place, but it’s about how you are going to see yourself, as trash or gold. It’s how you are going to present yourself to the world that matters most.”

Tamagni’s photographs for Gentlemen of Bacongo made an immediate impact on European and north American culture. In London, Paul Smith was among the first to pick up on them, writing an introduction to the book and assembling his spring/summer 2010 womenswear collection around it. By 2014, Gentlemen of Bacongo had also inspired a Solange Knowles music video and a long-form TV commercial from Guinness, among many other manifestations. Fashion Tribes does not, inevitably, have the same degree of revelatory intensity as the first book, but it, too, is a work of power and great beauty. Looking at Tamagni’s photographs, and reading the captions by their subjects, is a welcome antidote to modishly dystopian predictions for the future: the sense of style on display is a morale booster not just for its adepts, but also for the rest of us.

Fashion Tribes: Global Street Style, a book on international subcultures

by Daniele Tamagni, is out now abramsbooks.com

Havana, Cuba

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Tembisa Revolution dance group, Johannesburg, South Africa

Sapeurs, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo

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GALLERY | Fashion Tribes

Edith, Hellrider and Dad Monsta King of Darkness, Afro metals, Gaborone, Botswana

Burmese punks, Rangoon, Myanmar

Jerry Moeng from the Smangori Dance Crew, Johannesburg, South Africa

Havana, Cuba

Cholitas, La Paz, Bolivia

GALLERY | Fashion Tribes

Xaley-fashion girl, Ngor Plage, Dakar, Senegal

69

GALLERY | Fashion Tribes

Smarteez collective, Johannesburg, South Africa

Vintage Crew dance group, Johannesburg, South Africa

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presents

Echoes Starting Thursday 4 February Jocks&Nerd’s Echoes series returns for a ten week run.

Each week a guest DJ, instrumental in shaping London’s club soundtrack over the past three decades, will be playing.

Ace Hotel London, 100 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6JQ | 7pm–midnight | Free Entry For more information visit jocksandnerds.com

CINEMA

Chet Baker

California Cool. Gerry Mulligan. Stan Getz. Bruce Weber.

Words Mark Webster

It would seem fitting that, in the wake of Don Cheadle’s heartfelt tribute to Miles Davis in the new biopic Miles Ahead, a project motivated by a similar set of emotions has just been completed and is in the process of picking up distribution. Born To Be Blue stars Ethan Hawke and is the tale of Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter and singer whose lifestyle drew as much attention as his art – and who died on a pavement in Amsterdam in May 1988 at the age of 58, having fallen from the window of his hotel room.

It is reported that when police went to the room to investigate, all they found of Baker’s was a tragically perfect eulogy to what had been a haphazardly creative, and painfully self-destructive, life – a glass containing a needle and a mixture of heroin and cocaine, and his trumpet case.

Baker’s body was returned from Holland to be buried in a cemetery in Inglewood, Los Angeles County.

A short distance from here is Hermosa Beach, where I once stumbled on a small bar/club called the Lighthouse, recognising the name from one of my favourite albums – recorded there live in 1972 for Prestige by jazz organist Charles Earland and replete with thumping, funky riffs and searing horn lines. It couldn’t have been further away from what the Lighthouse, with Baker front and centre in it, was to become infamous for 20 years earlier; namely as the de facto birthplace of west coast cool jazz.

In Graham Marsh and Glyn Callingham’s luscious book California 72

Cool: West Coast Cover Art, the great jazz writer Brian Case sets the tone for how the Pacific coastline became a final destination after the second world war for many jazz musicians and the associated coterie of fans, artists and poets – Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road, written in the early 1950s, is effectively a modern history book, in that sense – and how the associated record labels Contemporary and Pacific’s album covers “emphasised fun and sunshine in primary colours. The west coast looked like a theme park.”

Among the covers featured in California Cool is that of the 1956 Pacific Jazz Records release Chet Baker & Crew, which features the ensemble kicking back on a sailing boat while captain Baker, in a short-sleeved shirt, slacks and sporting a crew cut, hangs nonchalantly by one hand from the rigging, trumpet pressed to his lips.

He would later often dream of sailing off into the sunset on a similar vessel, with his girl and an enormous amount of heroin by his side.

Chet Baker was one of that regiment of west coast cool jazzers who weren’t actually from around those parts. He was born Chesney Henry Baker in Yale, Oklahoma, on 23 December 1929 to father Chesney Baker and mother Vera, who fondly nicknamed her son ‘Chetty’. It could be argued that Chet’s life began to unfurl almost immediately. His father was a musician who could never make music pay, and fell from job to job while drinking heavily to numb what seemed to be his abject sense of failure. This

was something he also endeavoured to suppress by taking it out physically on both his long-suffering wife and his growing son. Vera doted on her Chetty from day one, and could never really let him go, even as the decades of relentless misadventures, failed marriages and a whole slew of broken relationships rolled by like a production line.

However, at the age of 16, by which time the family were living near Hermosa Beach, he did find one way of wrestling himself free from the grasp of his mother and the violent indifference of his father – by joining the army. And it was here that Baker discovered that he had a gift, and that is most definitely the word. He didn’t have to work hard at it, if at all. He had played a little trombone, then picked up a trumpet as a child, as well as being a member of the church choir. But by the time he ended up posted to San Francisco during his second stint in the army, he was displaying an innate skill for playing as well as singing jazz that was impressing older musicians, genuine aficionados and promoters at the various small gigs he managed to pick up along the coast and in LA. It was a journey that ultimately took him back close to home, with an honourable discharge in his back pocket, and a place in the band that was to turn him into a genuine jazz superstar.

Back in New York in the late 1940s, when Miles Davis was inventing a new style, one of his collaborators was a brilliant baritone saxophone player, composer and arranger from Queens called Gerry Mulligan. In 1952, >

Open Door jazz club, New York, 1955 Photograph Carole Reiff

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Boston, 1966 Photograph Lee Tanner

Mulligan decided it was time to try his luck in California and found himself with a residency at the Haig jazz joint on Wilshire Boulevard, where on the Monday night jam sessions, Baker began sitting in. Ultimately this led to the famously piano-less quartet that quickly became the very embodiment of west coast cool jazz. But as can frequently happen when you scratch below the surface of relationships, cool was the last word you’d use to describe them. And often right at the heart of the angst, resentment and bitterness in this particular liaison – the frantic flapping feet below the graceful swan – was Baker. His ego, fecklessness and voracious appetite for getting high were certainly contributing factors, but perhaps also the fact that he found it all just came so easily to him – both the playing and the adulation.

Mulligan was no stranger to drugs himself, though, and it could be easily argued that his time away from the group on a related prison sentence is what caused Baker to decide not to rejoin him and instead launch out on his own. Which, as far as Mulligan would have been concerned, made perfect sense, as he always felt that the young pretender wanted to be “king of the hill”. He also seemed to sum up his resentment of the pretty boy of the outfit when he dismissed the magnetic 74

charm of his voice as “that’s just the way he sang; he didn’t know any other way to sing”.

But this didn’t stop the two of them sporadically, always tetchily, and probably out of necessity, working

‘CHET WOULD PLAY WITH LIGHTNING SPEED; HE WAS MYSTIFYING TO MOST TRUMPET PLAYERS’ together across the decades. Which also happened with another of the great young guns of the scene, and the man who introduced bossa nova to the world, Stan Getz.

They were briefly in a band together as young men, and also roomed together, which came in handy

for getting their fix. But again, Baker’s seemingly self-centred attitude, indolent arrogance and effortless ability to be the star on the stage, regardless of the billing, at one-time caused Getz to walk out mid-gig.

All of which, plus many more encounters and exploits, are painstakingly documented in the brutally brilliant biography Deep In a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker

by James Gavin.

Herb Alpert (who would go on to turn the Tijuana sound into pop gold while also forming the great A&M Records label) recalls seeing Baker in Mulligan’s LA band when Alpert was 17 years old: “Chet would play with lightning speed [and] was mystifying to most trumpet players, because we all got the sense he didn’t practise.”

While as a vocalist, as Gavin says in his book, “to many of Brazil’s greatest musicians and singers, his name was hallowed. The original Chet Baker Sings had made its way there in the 1950s, traded among such pioneers of the bossa nova as Carlos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, Nara Leão, Oscar CastroNeves and João Gilberto.” Another great bossa nova singer who came along a little later, Caetano Veloso, says Baker “was one of my biggest influences” and started out by trying to mimic his style.

Then of course there is the legion of fans that kept Baker constantly on the move, searching for gigs to earn wages for fix after fix and avoid all of his problems – which could be anything from a jilted wife or lover, disenchanted, ignored offspring, unpaid musicians, abused friendships or much worse than all of that for Baker himself, dealers he had crossed. In 1968, it is believed that was the reason he was beaten up while living in San Francisco, causing him to have his already rotting teeth replaced by dentures. It stopped him playing for two years, but it is argued in some quarters that he actually came back better, brandishing a flugelhorn and, as he was weakened by his increasingly hardcore habit, sitting in a comfy chair on stage.

On his constant travels, New York was frequently home over the years, but not necessarily as a high point.

Very early on in his career, for example, his notoriety earned him a month-long residency at the legendary Birdland venue where he was welcomed by Dizzy Gillespie in their two-week stint

CINEMA | Chet Baker

together, but then shunned for the next two by the man whose playing he most adored, Miles Davis. But more often than not, New York was just the city where he was down and out, regularly finding it hard to get work as his relentless pursuit of drugs and resulting convictions meant his all-important cabaret card would be taken away from him and he could not play for a living.

So it was not amongst his fellow Americans but rather across Europe that he was really made to feel at home through his thirties and onto his untimely death. It gave Baker the audiences and circumstances in which he could flourish. His enigmatic, daring nature, disarming appearance (even when the drugs made him prematurely haggard and scruffy) and still frequent flights of skilful, stylish performance had fans putting food on his table, bedrooms and houses at his disposal and even prescriptions in his pocket from a small retinue of enamoured doctors. And the ones that didn’t, he’d simply just grab a handful of blanks and fill them out himself.

However, even though his audience seemed to lap up the man who performed life without a safety net, the authorities were often not so enamoured. This really hit home in the country that perhaps took to him most fondly, when in April 1961 a trial of Hollywood proportions took place in Italy to put Baker in jail. He ended up getting around 18 months – which he actually seemed to treat as something of a sabbatical – but it was the words of the public prosecutor that seemed to encapsulate the man stood before him in the dock. “Face of an angel, heart of a demon,” proclaimed Fabio Romiti, adding, “Trouble comes to anyone who touches him!”

And yet... in 1989, the posthumous release of celebrated photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber’s beautifully brutalist film that charted the last three years of Baker’s life, Let’s Get Lost, earned the director an Academy award for best documentary. But more personally for Weber, it put him in direct contact with a lifelong hero, and cost him a personal fortune

in the process, as he effectively paid for Baker to exist. And this did not end at his death, because that funeral in Inglewood that saw the man who embodied an entire musical movement return to his spiritual home was paid for by Weber. But he probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. Because for him, like it would seem it was for many of his relations, friends, fellow musicians and fans, love can be blind.

And if Baker could evoke anything, it was a sense of romance. As Weber explained in the press release for the film, “It all started many years ago when I first met [his partner] Nan. Over a bottle of wine during our first dinner together we discovered our favourite record was an old Chet Baker album from the 1950s called Let’s Get Lost. I ordered two more bottles of wine and we fell in love.”

Born To Be Blue, a biopic starring Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, is out in UK cinemas in 2016 ifcfilms.com

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STYLE

Lloyd wears top and bib tights by Adidas; gloves by Madison; helmet by Lazer; glasses by Oakley.

High Beech

Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Karen Mason Photographic Assistant Will Robinson Cyclists Amy Greenland, Lloyd Gray and Ryan Lamb Bicycles Condor Fratello, Condor Italia RC and Condor Leggero, courtesy of Condor Cycles, 49-53 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 condorcycles.com London flatmates Amy Greenland, Lloyd Gray and Ryan Lamb are emblematic of the continuing growth of the road cycling trend in the UK. A fashion designer, architectural technologist and financier respectively, each has discovered the joys of cycling through personal experience – whether inspired by a parent or as a practical solution to commuting in a large metropolis. What they all share, and this seems true of all those who get into the saddle, is passion and dedication, seeking out ever more challenging routes and committing to their rides whatever the weather.

‘Cycle Revolution’, an exhibition that celebrates cycling’s upturn in popularity in the UK, is at the Design Museum in London until 30 June 2016 Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 designmuseum.org

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Amy wears jersey, 3/4-length tights and arm warmers by Adidas; gloves and winter collar

by Rapha; helmet by Lazer.

Lloyd wears waterproof shell, bib shorts, leg warmers, shoes, socks and gloves

by Rapha; helmet by Lazer.

Amy wears jersey, shorts, base layer, tights, socks and gloves

by Madison; shoes by Shimano, model’s own; helmet by Lazer; glasses by Oakley. Ryan wears winter jacket, bib tights and gloves

by Assos; shoes by Rapha; helmet

by Lazer; glasses by Adidas. Lloyd wears jersey, bib tights, base layer, socks and gloves by Madison; shoes by Rapha; glasses by Oakley.

STYLE | High Beech

Ryan wears jersey

by Rapha x Liberty; hat by Rapha.

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Ryan wears jersey

by Adidas; cap by Rapha. Amy wears jacket and cap by Hoy Vulpine.

Ryan wears jacket and hat Hackney GT. Lloyd wears jersey and hat by Hackney GT.

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STYLE | High Beech

Ryan wears jersey, bib tights and gloves by Le Coq Sportif; helmet by Lazer; hat and shoes by Rapha; socks, model’s own; glasses by Oakley; water bottle by Condor Cycles. Lloyd wears jersey, bib shorts, arm warmers and gloves by Le Coq Sportif; socks by Madison; shoes by Rapha; helmet by Lazer.

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Ryan wears jersey, bib tights, shoes, hat and gloves by Rapha; helmet by Lazer. Lloyd wears waterproof shell, bib shorts, leg warmers, shoes, socks and gloves by Rapha; helmet by Lazer. Amy wears gilet, bib shorts, jersey, tights, gloves, overshoes and winter collar by Rapha; helmet by Lazer; glasses by Adidas.

STYLE | High Beech

Lloyd wears base layer and arm warmers by Hackney GT; bib tights by Rapha; helmet by Lazer.

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Jacket, trousers and shirt by Perry Ellis America; sweater

by Carhartt WIP; hat, stylist’s own; sunglasses, model’s own; scarf by Hermès.

BULLETIN

All clothes by Perry Ellis America; sunglasses, model’s own.

Perry Ellis America Photographs Elliot Kennedy Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore Tailor Raashid Hooks thehookscompany.com

After Virginia-born designer Perry Ellis launched his menswear line in 1980, he joined the likes of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren as a leader in American fashion. In 1984, he created Perry Ellis America with Levi Strauss. Featuring a mix of chunky knits, hefty denims, poplin shirts and khakis, the brand incorporated Ellis’s relaxed, modern designs with a patriotic sensibility.

Perry Ellis America reflected the American ideology of the 1980s: liberal, cosmopolitan and forward-thinking.

After the brand’s showroom was opened in 1984, it launched a campaign shot

by eminent photographer Bruce Weber.

The shoot’s models were young Americans, lounging in hammocks and speedboats. This was Ellis’s romantic vision of the United States, but it was one that was short-lived.

In 1986, at the age of 46, Ellis died from an Aids-related disease.

But, while passing away only six years after launching his brand, Ellis’s ability to reflect the American ideal through clothing has continued to be recognised. In 2016, under creative director Michael Maccari, Perry Ellis America will relaunch in Europe.

The collection, which features a wide range of casual wear, has successfully recaptured Ellis’s unique vision.

“This collection is a classic take on American sportswear,” said Maccari for the brand’s launch. “Focusing on go-anywhere dressing, always looking forward for inspiration while referencing its spirited roots.”

The new Perry Ellis America collection will be available in selected House of Fraser stores and online from mid-January perryellisamerica.com houseoffraser.com 85

PROFILE

David Whiteing Jack Nicholson. Beau Brummell. Saving Private Ryan. LSD. Adam Ant. Words Chris May Portrait Orlando Gili

If you like film, the chances are that you know the work of British costumer David Whiteing, even if you don’t recognise his name. Whiteing’s credits include Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, Tim Burton’s Batman, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and George Clooney’s The Monuments Men. His job titles have included costumer, military costumer, wardrobe master, military wardrobe master and wardrobe supervisor.

Whiteing prefers to call himself “crowd master”, one of his specialisms; another is military uniforms. He has looked after principals, including Jack Nicholson, Peter O’Toole and Dustin Hoffman, but generally he plays the quartermaster.

Bertolucci once said to Whiteing, “Dave, your life is a B-movie.” It has certainly been an unusual one. Born into a working-class south London family in 1944, Whiteing’s occupations, in chronological order, have included barrow boy in Brixton market, office boy in an ad agency in Berkeley Square, two years as a fence builder in the Australian outback, four years seeing the world as a merchant seaman based in Antwerp, menswear shop assistant in London’s King’s Road, a year as a fully paid-up acid head in Mill Valley outside San Francisco, theatrical costumer at Bermans&Nathans, and a world tour with Adam Ant, whose dandifiedhighwayman look he created. Jack Nicholson kept him financially afloat when a bad motorbike crash stopped him working for a year. He is a dandy and a raconteur. One of the few things he has not done is get married, though he once came close with camera director Anne Parisio, still a close friend. The go-to wardrobe master for a director looking for historical accuracy, Whiteing is as in-demand as ever. Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron is among his credits this year.

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Whiteing lives in Crystal Palace, in the south of London, where we meet at neighbourhood bistro Café Saint Germain.

When did you become drawn to films?

When I was a young boy living in Camberwell. There were five cinemas near us. You could watch films all the time. The early 1950s was austerity Britain, really grim. Growing up among the south London bomb sites, America, especially Hollywood, seemed like another planet to us, a golden place.

Errol Flynn was one of my heroes.

And Fred Astaire. I thought that, as far as style went, Astaire was it.

When did your particular fascination with clothes and costumes begin?

Even earlier, I think, with the military uniforms anyway. My father had been the batman to a brigadier in France during the war, and when I was about five I can remember him opening up this magical Gladstone bag and going through his memorabilia. He’d say, ‘You know, Dave, when I was moving up the front…’ and my mother would chip in, ‘The only thing he moved up the front was an ironing board.’

We lived in a basement flat, no proper bath, just a tin one you had to boil water for and fill by hand. But my mother, being an ex-dancer, had these delusions of grandeur. She was of Russian extraction. She’d say, ‘I was forced to live like this, my family had money once, we were related to the Romanovs, and I ended up marrying your father because we were penniless.’ Well, that’s what we were told. Practically every workingclass person would have some tale like, ‘We’re related to Lord so-and-so, we’re the legitimate heir of whoever.’ She met my father when she was dancing in the variety theatres which were dotted around all over London. My father was a fabulous social dancer. My

mother said he thought he was Rudolph Valentino and Jack Buchanan all rolled into one. They met in one of the theatres. He became infatuated with her and he’d be in the front row practically every night.

When I was about 14, my parents paid for me to go on a school trip to Paris. As far as clothes went, it was a turning point. I was a kind of teddy boy then. But the students who showed us round were from the Sorbonne and wore the new Italian look. Polo neck jumpers, loafers, quite long hair cut in the Italian style. We were in our suits and crepes and feeling very out of date.

After Paris, I just spent everything on clothes. In Brixton, where I worked as a barrow boy on Saturdays, there were a lot of little clothes shops selling the Italian look – three-button Perry Comos and so on.

What was your first job after leaving school?

When I was growing up, there was a lot of rivalry between me and my father. I never wanted to get my hands dirty like him – after the war, he had become a painter and decorator. So I got a job as an office boy in an American company called Grant Advertising in Berkeley Square. I did that for a couple of years and then when I was 17 I went to Australia, where I had a sister living in Melbourne.

To encourage immigration, the Australians had a scheme where you could get there for £10. It was a oneway ticket and they didn’t give you your passport back for two years.

I got a job putting up fences in the outback. It was fun, but after two years, London was calling. This was 1963. Someone told me you could work your way back on a ship. So I walked around Melbourne docks for about three months. Finally, I found a boat that would take me, the Nimbus, which looked like a ghost ship, the Marie >

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actually thought about you and your individuality. Which is so important, especially now when we’re fighting streamlining and mediocrity. For me, to dress up each day, which I do, as all my friends do, is a special thing.

Whiteing on the set of The Last Emperor, Forbidden City, China, 1986

Celeste. We saw all these amazing places – Venice, Marseille, where I went to some incredible clubs and saw the original French mods with natural, early Rod Stewart hairdos. I spent all my money buying clothes.

When we got to London, I took a few days’ leave and signed on again.

I thought, why not, I’m enjoying myself.

We went up to the Baltic. On the way back I signed off in Antwerp and I got a flat there, an attic in a beautiful old 17th-century house. Fabulous.

Underneath was a club called Danny’s Bar, which was full of transvestites, entertainers, sailors. Up the road was an office where you could sign on to the ships. You’d look at the list and think, I’d like to go there. South America or wherever. I saw the world. I did this for four years, until about 1966.

Which as it happened was a good year to return to London.

Indeed. When I came back I bumped into an old friend who said, ‘We’ve got this place in Redcliffe Gardens, Earls Court, with a lot of art students. It was fantastic. I got into the scene. Fashion and music was all changing and art students were heavily involved. I ended up working in various shops owned by [menswear designer] John Michael.

One was the Westerner in the King’s Road. It was decked out like an American hardware store. At that time King’s Road wasn’t the sad place it is now, it was buzzing with independent shops and people with amazing style.

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Then I got into the semi-hippy scene and hung out at places like Granny Takes a Trip. I used to wear Edwardian clothes. Rupert Bear trousers, frock coats, which you could buy at Lord Kitchener’s Valet in the King’s Road, frilled shirts. It was how I’d always wanted to dress. And now you could get away with it.

‘I SPENT THREE DAYS ON A GREYHOUND BUS IN A JOHN STEED SUIT’ Did you think of yourself as a dandy?

Because of my mother’s background, I’d say I was more of a theatrical dandy.

Beau Brummell was my hero. In 1972, I went to Caen [in France] and laid a wreath on his grave. He was the maestro. He stripped away all the layers and made this very simple style.

Everything was understated. They’ve finally put a statue up to him in Jermyn Street, which I always doff my hat to.

When I see people with style, I always congratulate them. I think, my god, you’ve put this together, you haven’t necessarily spent vast sums, but you’ve

What took you to America in 1974?

One of my closest friends had gone to San Francisco. He rented a little Spanish hacienda in Mill Valley, just north of the city, up in the redwoods.

He invited me over there. I spent three days on a Greyhound bus in a John Steed suit, which by the time I arrived in San Francisco looked more like something out of Laurel and Hardy.

And I spent a year there enjoying the delights of various hallucinogenics and basically living off money my friend’s stepfather had sent him.

In the evening, we’d go to a couple of clubs in Mill Valley and then drive into San Francisco to a black club called the Olympus. I remember one night I was wearing a white suit, white hat, two-tone shoes, The Great Gatsby basically, and we were tripping on ‘windowpane’ [LSD]; and all these black guys in the Olympus, wearing stack heels and big hairdos and coats with big fur collars, all strutting their stuff. From there we’d maybe drive back and go up to a place called Fairfax, where the Grateful Dead hung out, aand be on the beach skimming stones when the sun came up. Night became day and day became night.

One day, I was in bed with this Swedish-American girl, reading Wind In the Willows on acid. And I thought: this is the land of the lotus eaters, I’ve got to get out of here. I just flashed on it: I’ve got to get off the carnival float, I’ve been on it too long, I’ve been hedonistic for too long, it’s wake up time. I came back to England and went straight to a friend who had an amazing place by the river in Putney. I remember knocking on the door. I was totally wired. And he just said, ‘There’s a room for you.’

When I’d recovered, it was time to get a job. Someone said there was a job going at Bermans&Nathans, the theatrical costumiers, in Camden.

I’d learnt a bit about military costumes, from my dad first of all. I was shown round the military department by this wonderful old character, Bob Worth.

A fantastic guy, been in the business since the 1920s. I look around and there

PROFILE | David Whiteing

Whiteing on the set of Memphis Belle, RAF Station Binbrook, Lincolnshire, 1989

was this panorama of military costumes.

He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I love it.’ He said, ‘Can you start on Monday?’ I said, ‘I’m not that genned up.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, son, you’ll pick it up.’ And that was it.

So Bermans&Nathans was your stepping stone into film work?

Yes, and into music videos. In 1981, I did a promo video for some really good friends of mine, Dr Feelgood, for the single ‘Violent Love’. It was very much the Hoagy Carmichael look.

Around this time I got involved with the New Romantics. I once got refused entrance at Blitz, by either Steve Strange or one of his compadres. This one occasion I’d got dressed up as Noël Coward. Cravat, breeches, hair slicked back, very thin moustache and a monocle. And he said, sorry, old boy, too many Noël Cowards tonight. There was an awful lot of fashion snobbery at Blitz, there was this in crowd who hung around with Andrew Logan, this fashion coterie, who rejected you if they didn’t know who you were or you hadn’t made it. Later in 1981, I did the ‘Stand and Deliver’ video for Adam Ant and all of a sudden it was like an open door.

Adam had come into Bermans one Friday. James Dean-style glasses, Chesterfield coat, a little cheroot and a Seditionaries T-shirt showing two cowboys with their cocks out, leather

trousers and a pair of Vivienne Westwood bondage boots. He said, ‘Have you got any outfits from The Charge of the Light Brigade? I thought, now you’re talking. Because I’d seen The Charge of the Light Brigade like 30 times, I’d got into that whole thing about military dandies. I said, ‘I’ve got David Hemmings’ outfit behind my desk.’ So I started dressing him up.

And he was very creative, he had quite a lot of input into the look.

Some time later he wandered in again. He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to come on a world tour, do you want to come?’ I asked Bob Worth what I should do. He said, ‘Go on, son, do it, there’s always a job here if you want it.’ So I said, ‘Yes.’ Bob was my mentor, really. He started me on the tricks of the trade. He said, ‘The first thing you’ve got to learn, Dave, is to put the costumes away. That way you can find them when you need them again.’ He was an old hand, he’d worked in the costume business since the 1920s.

He’d done classics like Where Eagles Dare, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far. That was the first movie I worked on, in 1977.

I did a lot of styling for pop promos at Bermans. One was Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Bark at the Moon’. It was a pretty amazing video directed by Mike Mansfield, who threw the whole of Hollywood’s horror films traditions in for three minutes.

What has been your most challenging assignment in film business?

Each one is like climbing a mountain.

Even though you’re genned up about the costumes and you’ve done the research, you never know until the day of the shoot how it’s going to go. You know on the first day what the director’s like. They’re like Roman emperors, they’re all slightly mad. If they want something you give it to them. The worst thing you could say to a director is, ‘It’s not ready.’ If you keep a camera waiting, you’re finished, you’re more or less escorted off the set.

I think the hardest and one of the most enjoyable jobs was Saving Private Ryan [released in 1998]. I was what they called the quartermaster. On location [in Ireland] we were given this big area, run by the Irish Reserve Army.

I was the wardrobe master for 1,000 Irish reservists. Two hundred of them had to wear wetsuits under their

uniforms because they were going to be in the water a lot and it was bitterly cold. For weeks, they’d all come back soaking wet. But we had a team of people who took the clothes and put them in dryers, and when they turned up again at 4am it would all be dry.

We had to get 500 of them dressed and on the beach by 7am. This went on for several weeks.

Then one day, there was some sort of accident where the soldiers all ended up out of their depth and soaked from head to toe. No one drowned but some of them got very ill with hypothermia.

The next morning I was up at 4am as usual and at 5am I’d still not seen anybody. No one knew what was happening. Then this colonel came along, very polite and softly spoken.

He said, ‘Good morning, Dave. As you’re probably aware, you won’t be seeing the lads today due to a slight problem yesterday.’ They had this big meeting with [Steven] Spielberg and it was made sure that it wouldn’t happen again.

Of all the people you’ve worked with, who do you think of most fondly?

The kindest person I’ve ever met, who has a great humanity to him, is Jack Nicholson. When I had a motorbike accident [in 1995], I couldn’t work for 15 months, and he sent me money to keep me going. He found out I’d had this major accident and immediately he was on the phone to me at King’s College Hospital. I said, ‘Do you want me to ring you back?’ He said, ‘Dave, I think I can afford this call.’ When I was released from hospital, I was so down, because my leg was in plaster, and when I got home there was this envelope and a cheque for $5,000 or $10,000 with a note saying, ‘Dave, keep on going.’ Every so often he’d send another cheque.

I had got to know Jack through a very good friend of mine, Martin Summers, who knew him quite well in the 1970s. They used to have these amazing parties in Chelsea and Jack was a regular visitor when he was over here. I mentioned this to Bob Ringwood, a lovely designer, when he was working on Batman [1989] and he said, ‘Would you like to come and look after Jack Nicholson?’ As soon as we met at Tommy Nutter’s, where he was having some clothes made, we clicked. > 89

Whiteing with Jack Nicholson on the set of Batman, 1989

I was given X amount of money per day and we had an office in Soho, where I was using my motorbike to travel round to all these obscure places looking for something to do with Jack’s character, the Joker. Like braces with skulls and crossbones, dice cufflinks.

Sometimes I’d be carrying £5,000 or more in cash in my pocket. I’d be in my leathers and I’d go into somewhere like Burlington Arcade, where I’d be looked at up and down, and I’d say, ‘I’ll have those braces, in fact I’ll have three.’

And they’d say, ‘How do you want to pay?’ And I’d bring out this huge wodge of cash, which is always a great lever.

It brings a lot of smiles.

Budgetary control was looser then.

On King Ralph [1991] I went out with Peter O’Toole one day looking for garments with £12,000 cash. We managed to spend most of it in a day, including in John Lobb, where he had his shoes made. At the end he said, ‘Do we have any change?’ I said, ‘Indeed you do.’ He said, ‘Then we’ll have tea at the Ritz.’

What else has changed in your part of the film business?

There’s a lot more care taken with costumes these days, a lot more 90

attention to detail. There are so many anoraks out there that you have to get it right. If you watch some of those fantastic 1950s British movies, like The Colditz Story, you think, hey, they’ve got the uniforms all wrong, this is just after

‘WE’RE FIGHTING MEDIOCRITY. TO DRESS UP EACH DAY IS A SPECIAL THING’ the war, why have they got it wrong?

But I always go for atmosphere. You can have the most wonderful costumes in the world, but there’s got to be atmosphere. With friends of mine, who are also total uniform anoraks, the films we like are anachronistic hokum like Where Eagles Dare. Clint Eastwood with those sideburns, Richard Burton’s

hairstyle. It’s ridiculous, but it’s got atmosphere and it’s a great movie.

Do you still think of yourself as a dandy?

I take care with my dress. I wouldn’t say I dress up every day. But even the everyday workwear has to be a look, too. A French 1940s look, or a New York 1950s look. Yesterday, when I was preparing some ham soup for my nephew, I thought I’d have a 1930s soup-kitchen look. So I wore an old work shirt and a pair of Levi’s with braces and a flat cap. I’ve got a very large wardrobe. There’s one part I call the Bunker, where I’ve got my suits.

It’s a bit like a pyramid, it goes on; a labyrinth. The only trouble with me is, late at night if I’m looking at an old film, something will tell me I used to have a tie like that and I will get up and take the place apart looking for it.

I have so many changes of costume.

It’s like that play, Six Characters In Search of An Author. That’s me. Not because I’m trying to escape from Dave Whiteing. I’m fully aware of what I’m about. But to go out, I’ve got to look individual. I don’t want to look like I’ve stepped off a film set, but it’s important to me for getting through the day. It just makes me feel better.

PROFILE | David Whiteing

Adam Ant, 1981. Whiteing helped create Adam Ant’s Dandy Highwayman look Photograph Richard Young/Rex

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STYLE

Karina wears coat by APC; trousers by Norse Projects; jacket by By Malene Birger; shirt dress by Isa Arfen.

John wears double-breasted coat by Richard James; coat by Mackintosh.

Northern Quarter

Photographs Robert Wyatt Styling Richard Simpson Grooming Ross Parlane at RPB Northern Quarter Barbers rbpng.com Photographic Assitant Kate Hayward Couple Karina Orlova and John Taylor, guitarist and singer in the Young Guns weareyoungguns.com

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Karina wears jacket and shirt by Emporio Armani; earrings, model’s own.

John wears coat by Calvin Klein Platinum; trousers by Caruso; shirt

by Richard Anderson; tie, stylist’s own. Karina wears suit by By Malene Birger; shirt by Agnès B; cravat and cravat ring, stylist’s own.

STYLE | Northern Quarter

John wears coat by Calvin Klein Platinum; shirt by Richard Anderson; tie, stylist’s own. Karina wears suit and pocket square by By Malene Birger; shirt by Agnès B; cravat and cravat ring, stylist’s own.

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STYLE | Northern Quarter

John wears top by Gucci, stylist’s own; earrings, model’s own. Karina wears coat and shirt by Agnès B.

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Karina wears coat and shirt by Agnès B; trousers by By Malene Birger; jacket

by Paul Smith Black; shoes by Chie Mihara; cravat and socks, stylist’s own. John wears double-breasted coat by E Tautz; trousers and shirt

by Caruso; coat by Mackintosh; shoes by Crockett&Jones.

John wears doublebreasted coat by Richard James; coat

by Mackintosh; shirt and tie by Paul Smith; earrings and rings, model’s own.

STYLE | Northern Quarter

John wears coat by Gieves&Hawkes; shirt by Richard Anderson; earrings and ring, model’s own; tie, stylist’s own. Karina wears coat by Agnès B.

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John wears doublebreasted coat by Richard James; coat

by Mackintosh; shirt and tie by Paul Smith; earrings and ring, model’s own.

STYLE | Northern Quarter

John wears coat, shirt and tie by Caruso.

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Karina wears coat by Agnès B; trousers by Emporio Armani; jacket by Scotch&Soda; shirt by Paul Smith.

STYLE | Northern Quarter

Karina wears coat by Hobbs; trousers by Agnès B. John wears coat by Gieves&Hawkes; trousers by Dunhill; camel coat by Calvin Klein Platinum; shirt by Agnès B; scarf by Tootal.

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MUSIC

79rs Gang Mardi Gras Indians. Tootie Montana. Bo Dollis.

Words Andy Thomas Photographs Dustin Cohen

“Big Chief Theodore Emile ‘Bo’ Dollis sat at the bar nursing a drink.

In an adjacent room tambourines and drums thumped as a crowded circle of people sang,” wrote Ned Sublette in The World That Made New Orleans.

“Two men danced, gesticulating at each other from opposite sides of the room.

One brought his arm down from high above his head way down low, in diagonal motion. The Wild Magnolias were running down the signals they would use, and the songs they would sing on Mardi Gras Day.” Similar scenes would have been going on across New Orleans in the lead up to that February’s carnival, when the Mardi Gras Indian gangs do battle in their extravagant hand-sewn costumes.

As seen in Christopher Levoy Bower’s recent documentary We Won’t Bow Down, these battles, taking place far away from the traditional Mardi Gras parade, can often get seriously heated. But the violence of the early days of the Mardi Gras Indians (when killings were commonplace) has largely been assigned to history, and today the battles are a statement of black unity. As with hip-hop in the 1970s, when gangs dropped their weapons to compete on the mic or on the floor, the battles of the Mardi Gras gangs revolve around creativity. As a member of the Blackfoot Hunters Gang says in We Won’t Bow Down, the focus is on “competing with each other with needle and thread instead of killing each other”.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the unity of the community is more important than ever. After years of battles, Big Chief Jermaine Bossier of the Seventh Ward Creole Hunters and Big Chief Romeo Bougere of the Ninth Ward Hunters signed a peace treaty. “Jermaine was from the Seventh Ward and I was from the Ninth Ward and we used to have a lot of conflict, so 104

we came together to say we are going to put all our differences to one side,” says Romeo Bougere over the phone from New Orleans. The result of the union is the 79rs Gang, whose debut album Fire On the Bayou is the most important Mardi Gras Indian LP since the Wild Magnolias self titled release from 1974.

“I consider myself to be one of the best singers in the city and so does Romeo.

So we decided to make good music instead of fighting,” explains Jermaine Bossier from his home in the Seventh Ward.

Fire On the Bayou is an altogether more roots-based affair than the Wild Magnolias’ New Orleans funk LP. “Most of ours songs come from the slave times,” says Bougere. “Listen to the lyrics of ‘Shallow Water’, that’s all about the slaves having to follow the shallow water to escape.” Released on Sinking City Records, the album is one of the first times the pure spiritual music of the Mardi Gras Indians has reached outside of its community. “You have to give Bo Dollis [the late Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias] credit for bringing the Mardi Gras funk music to the world, but the traditional stuff was always kept underground. So what we are trying to do is bring the traditional stuff to the forefront so people can really get a feel of what we feel doing Indian practice every Sunday,” says Bossier. “I’m not trying to look down on anybody who has gone before,” says Bougere, “but I feel like our music is more important because we are giving out a message, so everybody knows the struggle we went through to become this.”

The history of the Mardi Gras Indians goes back to the most brutal days of slavery. “Back in the day the slaves escaped from their masters and hooked up with the Native Indians,” says Bougere. As Michael P Smith wrote in his 1994 book Mardi Gras

Indians: “Harsh circumstances brought about many alliances of necessity that gradually developed into functional friendships and coalitions.” In the years that followed, the Native Indians helped slaves live off the land in Maroon camps on the outside of the city. “They got together in the camps and started to show each other how to do things and so started to learn from each other,” says Bougere.

This began a long period of mutual support and cultural cross-pollination.

“They found they had a lot in common,” says Bougere. “I mean both the Natives and the Africans beaded.

And they came together and shared what they knew and that has been passed down to us.” Much of what happened in the early days, by its very nature, is shrouded in mystery. But it is believed that the freed slaves of New Orleans began to ‘mask’ as Indians, as a tribute to the Native Indians who had helped them. “What we have always done is impersonate the Native Americans, but we have come a long way from what it used to be,” says Bougere. “In the beginning of course they didn’t have the products or finances that we have. Everything was limited back then, they weren’t able to get the glass rhinestones and all those things we use today. So they would use eggshells, cardboard boxes and turkey feathers. They used to save things and find things to create something beautiful.”

The costumes of these ‘gangs’ or ‘tribes’, with their huge feather-plumed headdresses, sewed patches and intricate beading, became ever more elaborate over the years. “Some people still use turkey feathers and some of those old things but it’s changed a lot,” says Bougere. “Technology has changed everything and also nowadays we have a much wider variety of material and >

Big Chief Romeo Bougere of the Ninth Ward Hunters and Big Chief Jermaine Bossier of the Seventh Ward Creole Hunters are Mardi Gras Indians, carnival revellers from New Orleans.

After years of rivalry between the two tribes, they reconciled to form the 79rs Gang

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Romeo Bougere started masking (dressing up for carnival) in 1989. His outfit, assembled from beads, stones and canvas, took 10 months to make

MUSIC | 79rs Gang things we can choose from to make our costumes look more elaborate and pretty.” When thinking about the beauty in these costumes it’s important to remember that, as Ned Sublette says: “prettiness, like sewing, is a manly attribute in Indian culture.”

It was as a child that Bougere was first exposed to this culture. “I’ve been an Indian since 1989,” he says. “I was four years old, and I started sewing when I was eight. It’s definitely a family thing. My father was Big Chief Rudy of the Ninth Ward Hunters. He was grooming my brother to be the Big Chief but he didn’t want to take that on. So the next person to step up in line was me. And I wasn’t going to let something I love go to waste, that was never going to happen. I don’t live like that.” Bougere took on the role of Big Chief in 2003 after his father passed away. “I was only 18 years old so had very limited experience. But I did what I had to do and got into some very difficult situations, but from every situation I learned something,” he says.

The Mardi Gras Indian tribes are made up of a number of positions who support the Big Chief. This includes Spy Boy, whose role it is to look out for the arrival of the other gangs, and Flag Boy, who signals the arrival of the gang to the Big Chief with the gang flag (an elaborate staff decorated with feathers).

They are both positions Bougere has held. “I ran Spy Boy one time,” he says.

“I was a little boy so I really couldn’t handle it. Then in 2002 I became the Flag Boy. And so I started sewing my own suit in 2001 because carrying the gang flag is a dominant position. So I made a real nice suit for that.”

Jermaine Bossier was also inducted into the Indian culture early in life. “My great uncle Percy Lewis was Big Chief of the Black Eagle Gang from uptown in the Third Ward and I started sewing when I was 12 years old,” he explains.

It was through the late Tootie Montana that Jermaine learned much of what he knows now. “I started masking [dressing up] with the Yellow Pocahontas and Big Chief Tootie Montana in 1996,” he says. “I ran Spy Boy with them and then, in 1999, I ran Flag Boy for a gang called Trouble Nation. When the Chief of Trouble Nation died, we carried on for a while but then I decided to branch off and started my own gang, Seventh Ward Creole Hunters, in 2009.” I ask Bossier about the challenges of

becoming a Big Chief. “One of the biggest challenges is getting your neighbourhood behind you,” he says.

“They have to see you work. You have to have a reputation, that’s how you get the neighbourhood behind you – through your suit and the work you put out on the street.”

There was one figure thought largely responsible for moving the Mardi Gras Indians away from physical violence to aesthetic competition. “The late great Tootie Montana changed everything, so when we meet today we compete through the beauty of the costumes rather than war and fighting,” says Bougere.

“There used to be a lot of fighting going on. Don’t get me wrong, we still get into disagreements and have altercations, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was. As a child I saw some really wild things.”

‘INSTEAD OF FIGHTING ALL THE TIME, NOW IT’S WHO CAN SEW THE PRETTIEST SUIT’ Bossier feels similarly about the importance of the late chief of the Yellow Pocahontas Gang. “Tootie Montana, man, he was the chief of chiefs and he totally changed the Mardi Gras Indian gangs,” he says. “At one time it was all about who was the baddest chief and who was the baddest person and Tootie changed it to who was the prettiest. We still have a few confrontations here and there because this is a warrior culture. But instead of fighting all the time, the main thing now is who can sew the biggest and most pretty suit, who can have the most beads on the suit and all that to become the biggest and prettiest chief in the city.”

Thousand of dollars and even more hours are now put into making the suits, created from scratch each year.

“Making an Indian suit comes from your heart,” said the late Larry

Bannock, chief of the Golden Star Hunters. “You have to be on fire.” I ask Bougere how he decides on the themes to be used in the suit each year. “It’s changed a lot. Back in the day I used to just pick beautiful pictures, but nowadays I build my suit as to how I feel,” he says. “I create my suit around the things I am going through, about what I have dealt with and what I’m feeling. I want my suit to tell a story.

I want you to be able to feel what I’m going through from the images that I give.” Although old folk tales are still told through the suits, it’s a culture that reflects the times the Indians are living in. “During [Hurricane] Katrina they had helicopters flying over dropping water to people, so in my last suit I drew me some helicopters and sewed those in,” says Bossier.

Creating the suits for each year begins the day after the Mardi Gras celebrations. “It’s dedication, that’s basically what it is,” says Bougere.

“I hold down a job from Monday through to Sunday and work all day long and I have two kids, so I can get really tired. But you know that you have to put in five hours with the needle and thread. If not, then you know you are not going to make Mardi Gras. And believe me that’s the worst feeling ever, knowing that you should be there. And you can’t blame anybody but yourself because you’ve put some things before being an Indian, when you should have been sewing instead of playing around.

But I’ve been doing it for so long it’s natural for me. I get home at seven in the evening, I sew for another five hours and then I crash. That’s my everyday lifestyle.” It’s a similar story for Bossier. “I do four to five hours a day,” he says. “Then as it gets close to carnival I will do six or seven hours.

So it’s a lot of sewing, but it’s something you have to make time for. It don’t matter what you have going on man, you are going to get that suit on. But when you finish and you put that suit on you are like king for the day. The rest of the tribe is pretty, but you are the Big Chief man. You have people you’ve never seen before coming up to you and kissing you on the cheek and stuff. It’s a beautiful thing man, it really is, to put on that suit and to be pretty.”

So how does Bougere feel when he finally gets to put the suit on after a year of work? “There’s no other feeling like it in the world, no other feeling,” > 107

he says. “There is nothing greater than when you put your suit on and stand in front of someone. When you have that costume on, there are so many people that are looking at you and who’ve looked forward to you being there at Mardi Gras. It’s like you own the streets for that day. When I rep my hood and see the way the Ninth Ward believes in me and they know I’m coming – that’s such a beautiful feeling.” In We Won’t Bow Down we hear many of the Indians talk about the spiritual significance of wearing the suits. “There are times I put on my costume and I’m singing and you could actually walk up to me and stand there for like five minutes and I wouldn’t even remember you being there,” says Bougere.

The Mardi Gras Indian battles take place far away from the traditional parades. “As in colonial times, they still deny outside authority and refuse to subject themselves to the financial burdens and humiliation of being monitered and controlled by the city,” wrote Michael P Smith. “We take the back streets,” says Bossier. “We don’t go down St Charles [Avenue] and all that.

I haven’t been to a carnival parade for years, because I’m always getting ready with my Indian suit. So yeah, we always take the back streets. Like I said, it’s a real territorial thing, but also a neighbourhood thing. So you go to the old people that can’t leave the house for carnival and you show off for those people. You bring carnival to them.

Not only that, but at times things can get confrontational and you don’t want the police bothering you. So that’s where we do our battling – on the back streets of New Orleans.”

Mardi Gras Indian music was born from the interactions between Africans and Native Americans in the drum circles of Congo Square in the 18th and 19th centuries. “They started to learn from each other and combined the different styles of the African and Indian drumming,” says Bougere. The African beat at the heart of Mardi Gras Indian music has been traced back to the Congo. “In what we do there is a beat called the bamboula beat, and that has been with the Mardi Gras Indians since they let the slaves have their drum circles in Congo Square,” says Bossier.

“That one beat has stayed in the city for over 200 years, and that’s the same beat we use today. They freed the slaves on Sunday to play their music and that’s 108

the day we have our Indian practice and you can always hear that sound – the same African beat.”

The polyrhythmic patterns that developed through the gatherings in Congo Square were accompanied by chants using a patois that you can hear today in the music of the 79rs Gang.

“The language that we use is a mixture of African and Louisiana creole and a little bit of Native American,” says Bossier. One of the chants, Jock-A-Mo (a battle cry), made its way into popular culture through the Dixie Cups’ 1965 hit ‘Iko Iko’, a version of James ‘Sugar Boy’ Crawford’s ‘Jock-A-Mo’. And the music of the Mardi Gras Indians runs deep through African American music of the 20th century. “The beat and lyrics of Mardi Gras Indians have inspired and informed the music of a host of New Orleans players, including Jelly Roll Morton, Dr John, Fats Domino,” wrote Michael P Smith.

‘THAT ONE BEAT HAS STAYED IN THE CITY FOR 200 YEARS. IT’S THE SAME BEAT WE USE TODAY’ Yet as Ned Sublette wrote: “Few people outside New Orleans had ever heard of the Mardi Gras Indians before the 1970s.” With their self-titled LP for Polydor in 1974, the Wild Magnolias were the first Mardi Gras Indians to reach beyond the workingclass black neighbourhoods of New Orleans, with traditional songs such as ‘Handa Wanda’ set against a funk beat. A similar LP by the Wild Tchoupitoulas followed in 1976.

With interpretations of Mardi Gras Indian songs such as ‘Hey Pocky A-Way’ and ‘Indian Red’, the LP featured the Meters (who also recorded an LP called Fire On the Bayou in 1975) as backing band and the Neville Brothers on vocals.

More recently, David Simon’s post Katrina love letter to New Orleans, the HBO television series Treme, brought us a little closer to the spiritual and social traditions of the Indians.

In one of the most poignant scenes, we see Albert Lambreaux (played by Clarke Peters) donning his chief ’s suit in the middle of the night. “Oh chief, that’s pretty, that’s real pretty. I was wondering if I was ever going to see something like that again,” replies one of his neighbours in the deserted street outside the chief ’s bar. But despite the horrors of Katrina, it’s a tradition that refuses to die. “You have to give [Mayor] Ray Nagin credit for that, because after Katrina he opened the city back up for carnival when the rest of the country was saying don’t do it,” says Bossier. “He let us come home and continue to do what we love doing. And once he opened the city back up, it was up to us to make sure the culture didn’t die. And so we did whatever we had to do to make the culture go on.” It’s a culture that continues to connect with the new generation, upholding the traditions of their ancestors.

Christopher Levoy Bower captured the contemporary culture beautifully in We Won’t Bow Down. His idea was to create “a real street-level, verbal history version of a documentary on the Mardi Gras Indians, one that would incorporate everyday Indians”. And with the 79rs Gang travelling to London this January to perform at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards, the ancient and modern traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians are reaching a new audience. “After years of conflict and getting into it all the time, me and Romeo came together and have just done our thing,” says Bossier. “And now y’all want us to come to London, which is just beautiful man.”

79rs Gang play at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 22 April to 1 May nojazzfest.com Romeo Bougere will be at New Orleans Mardi Gras 9 February 79rsgang.com

MUSIC | 79rs Gang

Jermaine Bossier started masking in 1996. His outfit, assembled from ostrich and turkey feathers, beads, rhinestones and canvas, is inspired by traditional African dress. It also references the red ants that were running through his house

SPORT

Glacier Trekking Photographs Klaus Thymann Styling Richard Simpson Words Mark Webster Trekkers Haukur Ingi ‘Hawk’ Einarsson, Vésteinn Fjölnisson and Klaus Thymann

If competitive sport tends to need a uniform environment – quite literally, a level playing field – then in turn, natural landscape is the perfect arena for athletic pastimes that are not about the coming first, but simply about the being there.

While popular activities such as outdoor running and wild swimming are physical experiences to sate both body and soul, you might argue that neither provide quite as extreme a challenge as trekking the planet’s glaciers – yet, as photographer Klaus Thymann explains, not only can it be experienced without any specific expertise, but these otherwordly places can be accessed relatively easily.

Thymann went with guide Haukur Ingi ‘Hawk’ Einarsson into Iceland’s Vatnajökull National Park. “With Iceland, proximity is everything,” says Thymann. “As I always say, it is the closest you can get to remotest.

It is really close to Reykjavik. And it is not just the one glacier, it’s an icecap.

There are several glaciers there. It’s almost like you have the fist, and you have the fingers. So you trek, you drop down some rocks, you use some rope.

But it can be very easy. It’s quite unlike anything else. The ash, the ice – it’s incredible.”

For Iceland, it is significant that opportunities are being provided to explore such an extraordinary part of the world. While once it was seen as something of a party destination, then infamously a banking disaster, 110

it is now realising its most natural asset.

This is important for the country itself, as well as for the bigger picture at the forefront of Thymann’s agenda.

Thymann is the man behind Project Pressure, “which is a charity I founded a little while ago. And we use art as an inspiration to get people to engage with climate change,” he tells me. “So we commission artworks, and we use a whole range of them to capture the glaciers because they are our key indicators of climate change. They’re scientifically a good thing to use, but they also look beautiful when you photograph them. So you can capture people’s imagination. If you visit them, trek them, collect your pictures, your stories – whatever you can bring home from the natural environment and put in front of the world, that can hopefully only inspire people to do what’s right.”

And Hawk has very much the same take on it, as a committed glacier trekker himself. “We all grew up around here,” he says of the team that formed the local guide service Glacier Adventure. “And we really try to emphasise the geology, so that we can connect it to climate change.

We hope that after people take part they think about how they can make a difference in the world.”

That heightened level of awareness on a global scale is of course a wonderful by-product of glacier trekking, but Hawk is also keen to emphasise the “natural joy” in trekking.

Thymann picks up on this point too,

describing the personal, visceral experience that only being there can possibly provide. “What you don’t realise, and what you don’t see in the pictures, is how completely noisy a glacier cave can be,” he tells me.

“Most caves develop with water flowing through them, which creates a draft.

Then you get hot air coming down in summer and it starts to melt from the inside. So you have an insane amount of running water, in a tunnel that is rock hard so it resonates every sound. In the pictures you see, to communicate with each other Hawk and I were literally shouting in each other’s faces.

“If I’m out there just to experience glacier trekking as an activity in itself, to some extent that is a good thing, because you don’t hear other people chatting. You are immersed in the experience. I always say to people, really, just go.”

Project Pressure, founded by Klaus Thymann, is a charity documenting the world’s vanishing glaciers project-pressure.org Glacier Adventure is a local guide service, owned by Haukur Ingi Einarsson and Vésteinn Fjölnisson, which provides glacier tours in Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland glacieradventure.is The Jocks&Nerds team flew to Iceland with Wow Air wowair.co.uk

Hawk wears sweater by Lacoste; trousers

by Berluti; hat by Paul Smith.

SPORT | Glacier Trekking

Klaus wears sweater

by PS by Paul Smith; tracksuit bottoms by McQ by Alexander McQueen; roll-neck sweater by Johnstons of Elgin; boots and gloves, model’s own.

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SPORT | Glacier Trekking

Vésteinn wears coat by Wooyoungmi; trousers by Vivienne Westwood Man; sweater by Paul Smith; roll-neck sweater

by Calvin Klein Platinum; boots by John Varvatos; socks, stylist’s own.

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Vésteinn wears coat

by Belstaff; trousers

by McQ by Alexander McQueen; sweater by Berluti; boots by Hermès.

SPORT | Glacier Trekking

Klaus wears coat by CP Company; sweater by Belstaff.

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VĂŠsteinn wears coat by Moncler; trousers by Vivienne Westwood Man; boots by John Varvatos.

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SPORT | Glacier Trekking

Hawk wears jacket by Barbour; trousers by PS by Paul Smith; gilet by Stone Island; scarf, stylist’s own; ring, model’s own.

Klaus wears coat by E Tautz; tracksuit bottoms by McQ by Alexander McQueen; V-neck sweater by Berluti; roll-neck sweater by Calvin Klein Platinum; boots by Pal Zileri.

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Hawk wears coat by Mackintosh; trousers by PS by Paul Smith; sweater by Canali; boots by Moncler; socks, stylist’s own.

SPORT | Glacier Trekking

Hawk wears jacket by Moncler; trousers by Berluti; sweater by Canali; boots, model’s own.

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COVER STORY

Lena Headey

Game of Thrones. Sarah Connor. Pema Chödrön. The Brothers Grimm.

Photographs Alan Clarke Styling Mark Anthony Bradley Words Sophie Coletta Hair Bianca Tuovi at CLM Hair & Make-up using Bumble and Bumble Make-up Jo Frost at CLM Hair & Make-up using Nars Cosmetics

Lena Headey arrives at London’s Groucho Club carrying a baby harness and a handbag full of rye bread, a fact she nonchalantly shrugs off with a grin, saying, “All the things one might need,” before folding herself into one of the maple-coloured sofas. It’s the morning after the photoshoot for this piece, a long day on the streets of east London. Headey is in good spirits, but having arrived here on the tube, she’s feeling weary of voyeuristic commuters. It’s a predicament that comes with starring in one of the most popular television shows of the moment. “It still feels really weird to be stared at,” she says.

Headey is no stranger to being a subject of the gaze. During the final episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones, which aired earlier this year, her character Cersei Lannister – stripped naked and relieved of her long blonde hair – was subjected to a penance walk through the streets of her hometown, while being pelted

with rotting fruit, spit and four-letter words by hundreds of onlookers. Filmed in the tourist-filled city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, where the HBO series predominantly shoots between spells in a studio in Belfast, Headey spent three 14-hour days filming the eightminute sequence. Soon after the scenes were aired, it emerged she had used a body double, Rebecca Van Cleave – a revelation that was met with bizarre outrage from some of the show’s fans, who declared they had been denied an authentic depiction.

“I have my reasons,” Headey says of her decision. “I’m such an emotional being that I knew if I was naked, really and truly, I would have just got really aggressive. I would have felt deeply protective of myself.” She scrunches her face into an antagonistic expression and seems to swell to twice her size.

“I would have been like that about it – ‘What are you fucking looking at?’

It would have got to me. And I didn’t want Cersei to be like that, because

it’s the one moment where she is like, ‘What is happening to me?’ So Rebecca was able to have whatever face she needed to get through that because she was naked, and I was able to use my being and my face to convey what I believe Cersei was thinking.”

It’s significant that Headey is willing to admit the limitations of human expression when often we expect so much of those living out the narratives on our screens. “I think I learn by watching people,” Headey says. “Like, seeing something and thinking, I don’t want to become that.

Some actors get a terrifying amount of money for doing films, and sometimes they become these narcissistic people who think they’re anointed because of it.”

Headey is a lot of things over the course of our conversation – gregarious, outspoken, delicately funny and serious – but never once gives any impression of superiority. Her responses are often littered with self-deprecation, or biting >

Jacket and trousers by Lanvin menswear from mrporter.com; shirt by Vivienne Westwood Man; earrings and necklace by Laura Lee Jewellery.

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COVER STORY | Lena Headey

Coat by Caruso menswear; trousers by Vivienne Westwood Man; shoes by Paul Smith menswear; socks by Pantherella.

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Suit by Ami menswear from mrporter.com; shirt and pocket square by Paul Smith menswear; tie by Topman; earrings

by Laura Lee Jewellery; waistcoat, tie clip and belt, stylist’s own.

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Jacket by E Tautz menswear; sweater by John Smedley menswear; hat by Lock&Co; earrings

by Laura Lee Jewellery.

COVER STORY | Lena Headey

sarcasm that could easily be mistaken for sincerity. At one point she leans over and motions towards a Stella Vine painting on the wall, a garish portrait of a man wearing glasses and a perturbed expression, and says, “That’s how I feel most mornings.” One of her many tattoos is a Pema Chödrön quote inked in a black serif font on her ribs that reads: “Can’t we just return to the bare bones, can’t we just come back.”

She talks animatedly about her current cultural highlights: the American TV series Transparent (“it’s funny and charming and everyone’s fucked up”); Shane Meadows’ film saga This Is England (“brave and exciting”); the 2011 film Tyrannosaur (“fucking dark as shit but incredible”); and a book she’s currently trying to get hold of about chain-smoking, cross-dressing matriarchs in Turkey. Ten minutes after I leave, my phone flashes with a text – a screenshot of the IMDB webpage for the Ukrainian film The Tribe, a disturbing portrayal of a violent uprising at a boarding school for the deaf that Headey had recommended but forgotten the name of.

Born in Bermuda in 1973, Headey grew up in Somerset and then Yorkshire. Her first acting role – playing a young Mary Crick in an adaptation of Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland, alongside Jeremy Irons and a 15-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal – led to her securing a role in James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day, which went on to receive eight Academy Award nominations. Later there was Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm and 300, a blockbuster retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae between Persia and Greece. The film grossed $70m in three days. More recently, she played Sarah Connor in the television spin-off of the Terminator films, and ruthless drug lord Madeline Madrigal in a remake of violent metropolis dystopia Dredd.

“I really like to go for an ugly – not ugly, I hate saying that – but somebody who’s driven by something other than being granted access for beauty,” says Headey. “There’s such a high value on beauty still, more than anything. I’m acutely aware of it, that hasn’t changed.” There’s a gender divide in that too, I suggest.

“Yeah, there are successful men who

aren’t conventionally beautiful. You begin to go, I think you’re beautiful because you’re incredible, and I don’t think the same is offered to women.”

Headey’s ability to deconstruct the pristine, immaculate looks that betray so many performances is perhaps what makes her so rewarding to watch.

There’s often an element of humour behind the gravity of her characters too, delivered through the nuanced arch of an eyebrow or a glinting eye.

“I do love playing camp villains,” she admits with a laugh. Scripts she receives, she says, are rarely earthshattering, but her solution to that is to actively create these roles, rather than wait for them to be delivered.

Having recently acquired the rights to H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s moving memoir about the year she

‘I LOVE THE DARKNESS AND BY THAT I JUST MEAN BROKEN PEOPLE’ spent rearing a goshawk in the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, Headey plans to re-imagine it for the screen, taking on both creative and performing roles. “It’s just got this shattering simplicity about it,” she says.

There’s simplicity too, in Headey’s own creative process as a performer, which seems both modest and pragmatic.

She often watches herself back, but only as a means of self-editing and improvement. “Sometimes when you’re feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t necessarily translate,” she explains. She works from her own emotional history, and often likes to visualise an entire fictional history arc for the characters she plays. Roles, she adds, are getting more interesting as she gets older.

“Who knew women were interesting?

Especially after 40.”

A lot of female roles are so often defined by their gendered bylines: as wives, mothers, daughters. In Game

of Thrones, Cersei’s femininity is wielded both as an aside to her position as a conniving anti-heroine, and as a means of manipulation. “Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon; the best one’s between your legs,” she advises a young female protagonist, Sansa Stark, in an early episode. But it is also her roles as wife, mother and daughter that give the character empathy. “I think everybody, even the darkest of the dark, must have a glimmer of light there,” Headey says.

“And that’s intriguing too, taking someone despicable and somehow making their empathy universally appealing. I quite like that. I don’t want to set out to make a character liked, but it’s quite interesting when you start to feel sorry for someone. I just play it honestly. It’s just what I see.”

Is she ever driven by fear? “Maybe.”

Headey pauses to consider. “I just think I go for things that have depth, that I can get lost in. I love the darkness, and by that I just mean broken people.

The emotional journey is what I love.

I’m more scared about reading, ‘She’s beautiful’, because I don’t want that pressure, I don’t want to do it. I did that when I was younger. I had no idea when I was starting out, I just thought, ‘I have to say yes to that lipstick.’ I can’t be arsed with it now. I can’t sit there thinking, ‘Am I good enough?’ because for me that’s an exercise in vanity.

I’m drawn to the truth and ugliness and the dark. More interesting things.”

She refers to a recent interview with Nicole Kidman in which the actress recalled a friend once telling her she couldn’t get into acting because she wasn’t a very good liar. Kidman had responded by saying it was exactly the opposite. “That’s exactly how I feel,” says Headey. “Lying is bad acting. You see it; it’s painful to watch.

It always makes me giggle.”

Game of Thrones is part of a larger renaissance being enjoyed by American television. Compared with the overbearing white hegemony that still permeates much of cinema, its increasing receptiveness to diversity both on and off screen has provided a platform for interesting, complex narratives. As the director Steve McQueen recently pointed out, in the case of film, an actor or director invites audiences into the public sphere of the cinema to experience > 127

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COVER STORY | Lena Headey

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what they’re presenting; whereas with television the viewer plays the role of the host, within the private sphere of the home. There’s something interesting about this reversal of power and the shift in vulnerability that comes with that. The cult following Game of Thrones enjoys, Headey agrees, is possibly a direct result of this intimate relationship between character and audience, and the way it’s compacted between day-to-day mundane existence.

It would be easy to settle into the security that comes with being part of such cultural institutions as HBO, but Headey, who currently lives in LA, admits that she’s still drawn to the distinct grit of British film. “Dirty old indies, that’s what I grew up in,” she says. “I miss what I feel like we once did really well, that honesty. There’s a heartbeat here. Even coming back here and walking around it just lights me up. That’s what translates into our films, or it did. I think it’s still there, there’s people still pushing that Brit flick. That’s what I love and admire.

Then we got all a bit soft and middle class. I think we started to make money by putting films into America, and the market for that wants really posh English people who have lots of issues.”

Headey has previously described herself as a publicist’s nightmare, though she says that she’s now finding it increasingly less difficult to be forthright. “I don’t care any more,” she says. “What I love about someone like Maisie Williams,” she adds, referring to her 18-year-old Game of Thrones costar, “is that she’s at such a young age and she’s grabbed social media and her position. She’s using it for great causes.

I just cheer her on, it’s brilliant. She isn’t bending to any expectation of her gender. I love that about her.”

“On the shoot yesterday it was great,” she continues, “because no one was going, ‘It’s a soft dress and a soft lip.’ I feel really fake when I’m sat in a gown and someone’s facing you asking you to do a wistful look.

I can’t fucking do it.”

This outspoken nature lends itself to good causes too; a cursory scroll through Headey’s Twitter feed, followed by more than half a million people, reveals, between tweets about jetlag and nipple tassels, links to fundraisers for Syrian refugees and petitions to ban 132

SeaWorld from breeding captive orcas.

She’s appeared in campaigns for NOH8 and Peta. In May this year, she penned an open letter to her then unborn daughter, embracing her freedom of choice and calling for a wider attention to human rights for girls and women across the globe. “Geography dictates my freedom as a woman, geography and the women before us who fought for our equal political voice,” she wrote.

“The inequality that is all too prevalent all over the world is so great and so frightening. We owe it to our sisters who have no voice, and no chance to be heard, to speak up.” She reiterates her point today. “Human ‘rights’, that word in itself says it all,” she says. “There’s a requirement there. There’s still a long way to go worldwide, but we’re really

‘GEOGRAPHY DICTATES MY FREEDOM AS A WOMAN AND THE WOMEN BEFORE US WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR VOICE’ entering a new generation of thinking.

If either of my children turns out to be gay or feel like they’re in the wrong body, there’s no shame there, I won’t allow it. That makes me really happy.”

I’m interested in Headey’s thoughts about inequality within her own industry, particularly the Hollywood gender pay gap, highlighted by last year’s Sony hacks that began a lengthy, tumultuous dialogue on the matter; and a recent statement by Jennifer Lawrence about the fact that female actresses often fail to negotiate contractual wages so as not to seem spoilt or greedy. Headey is quick to make jokes about male to female nudity

ratios, before getting serious. “It’s horrid,” she says. “But I think pay grades in other occupations are far more frightening. I’m such a lucky fucker. Thrones has allowed me financial security and allowed me to help people I love, buy a home. I don’t know…

There are other issues. I’m very aware that I’m treated differently. Completely and utterly. If an actor’s a twat, oh he’s just being a bloke, but if a woman stands up for herself because something is unfair or she needs some help, she’s being difficult. I remember Monica Bellucci saying to me once, something along the lines of, ‘I’d rather be thought of as a bitch and get what I need.’

At the time I was like, ‘Fuck, those are harsh words,’ but now I understand what she meant. She doesn’t seek to be loved by everyone, she’s like, ‘I just want to be treated fairly.’ And yeah, I think to a point, if you’re young and you’re considered beautiful everybody fawns over you, but as you get older you become more invisible and therefore when you are demanding then you’re a bitch. Youth and beauty, and often being a man, seem to erase that.”

Even if the looming threat of invisibility is a pressing one, it won’t be holding Headey back any time soon.

“There are a lot of things I want to do,” she says. “I want to open a florist and a vintage shop. I also want to direct and produce, and I’m seriously laying the foundations for that. I feel like I’ve got a lot to say through film, and possibly documentaries. A lot drives me and keeps me up at night; things that concern me. My brain doesn’t stop. It’s endless, and now as I’m getting older, I think, I should have thought about that earlier. I was probably attracted to this for very naive reasons. I thought, oh god, this would be amazing, and then it became my job, and now I just have to find what interests me. But it’s just a job.” A beat passes, before she adds, “First and foremost I am a mum, and that overrides everything.”

Games of Thrones, starring Lena Headey, returns to Sky Atlantic in spring sky.com Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, directed by Burr Steers and starring Lena Headey, is out on 12 February lionsgate.com

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CULTURE

Sign of the Times Acid House. Leigh Bowery. Beautiful Bend. Björk. Kensington Market. Suburban Genius.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Kevin Davies Photographs courtesy of Fiona Cartledge and Jeremy Deller

“I went to the Sign of the Times party at Brixton Academy and I couldn’t believe it,” says British artist Jeremy Deller. “I took pictures there and at other parties and began to hang around at the shop because I was unemployed and had nothing else to do.”

A new book, Sign of the Times – A Celebration of Early ’90s Club Culture, features the photographs Deller took while working at the influential Sign of the Times shop in London in the early 1990s. “There are pictures of people who became huge figures in their own right and then people who aren’t around any more, so there is a historical element to it,” says Deller.

The snaps taken by the wide-eyed clubber, and future Turner Prize winner, capture the energy and creativity of London’s acid house scene. Some of those featured in the book include Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and friends blowing kisses at the camera, an incredibly young looking Alexander McQueen, and legendary performance artist Leigh Bowery in a rubber gimp outfit shaking hands with a young clubber. In that last picture you get a sense both of the glamour and democracy of the Sign of the Times’ dance floor.

A teenage punk at the Roxy in 1977, Fiona Cartledge – who went on to set up Sign of the Times – spent the early to mid-1980s working around the markets of London. “I had survived that 134

whole period running stalls at Portobello and Camden,” she tells me in a Peckham pub with Deller. At the age of 27 she thought her nightclubbing days were over. “I had been amongst subcultures since I was 15 and I was always into underground scenes,” she says. “After punk, I had been through the 1980s rockin’ scene and then warehouse parties like Dirtbox and clubs like Taboo and the Mud. So by 1988, I really was thinking of settling down. Then these kids started coming down to Camden Market and they were wearing very different clothes to us.

We were in vintage denim, leather jackets and Junior Gaultier and stuff like that, and they were wearing Chipie, Chevignon and all these really cool, baggy clothes in very lurid colours.

I really had no idea why they were dressed like that. So I asked my friend Stephen Bradley and he said, ‘Fiona it’s acid house, it’s the new thing, you have to get involved.’ I was like, ‘No I’m 27, I’m too old for all that.’”

Cartledge became immersed in this new scene after a visit to Shoom in south London. “Stephen, who sadly passed away at the beginning of the year [and who the book is dedicated to], took me there for the first time,” she says. “The atmosphere was unlike anything I had ever come across before.

Everyone was going mad and hugging each other and there was just this incredible feeling of warmth and

passion. It was very inspirational.

So many people who came out of that club did something incredible with their lives. I really do owe Sign of the Times to Shoom and to [DJ] Danny and Jenny Rampling.”

Cartledge opened the Sign of the Times shop in Kensington Market in 1989. Her idea was to bring the energy of the acid house parties into the shop.

“With the Kensington Market shop I was trying to recreate a rave atmosphere so I wanted it to be very colourful and intense,” she says. “As well as clothing, we had toys, fanzines, cassette mix tapes, and a large space for flyers.” Located on the first floor of the market next to Vision hairdressers (where Leftfield’s Paul Daley worked) and a few stalls down from Johnson’s The Modern Outfitter, the tiny shop was an assault on the senses. “Paul Shobbrook did the decor and the walls were covered with silver foil which was inspired by Warhol,” says Cartledge.

“Paul made a giant anarchy sign out of smashed mirror and recreated Niki de Saint Phalle mobiles which hung from the ceiling. I went to Camden and bought loads of Star Wars toys to hang all over the shop, and we had troll toys on the floor. It was bonkers and deliberately so and became a talking point. Some people even dropped acid especially to visit us.” What made Sign of the Times so unique was its heady countercultural mix – with London acid >

Fiona Cartledge, founder of Sign of the Times with the artist Jeremy Deller

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Fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Andrew Groves, Hanover Grand nightclub, London, 1993 Photograph Jeremy Deller

Bobby Gillespie, frontman for Primal Scream, and friends, Canal Brasserie wine bar, London, 1991

house fanzine Boy’s Own next to Encyclopaedia Psychedelica, and sacrilegious T-shirts by Big Jesus Trash Can hanging beside Joe Bloggs baggy jeans, as worn by Happy Mondays. “It just all went in there in one crazy mess, and you either got it or you didn’t,” Cartledge told fashion writer Charlie Porter.

Deller certainly got it. Unemployed after leaving London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, one day he went to Kensington Market to drop off a flyer.

“I had an exhibition of photographs at a gallery in Hammersmith,” he tells me. “I went around the market with the flyers and came across Sign of the Times. At the time I was a total suburban loser and had no idea about any of this kind of stuff. I really didn’t know anything or anyone. London was not a place I used to go at the time. So I gave a bunch of flyers to the woman in the shop and that turned out to be Fiona. When I left the shop she came running after me saying, ‘I know those girls on the front of the flyers.’” The two girls were from the band Shampoo dressed in Superbabe tops bought from 136

the shop. This got him and Cartledge talking and she suggested he come to one of their parties to take photographs.

“I really couldn’t believe that first ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ party at Brixton Academy,” says Deller. “Everyone, apart from me, was really dressed up and looked amazing. It also wasn’t just the cool people from inside the London scene. You could tell a lot of these people were from a long way out and were really into this. The atmosphere and the whole look of the place really was great. I had been to clubs like Taboo when I was at university, but I had stopped doing that and had only really experienced indie discos or indie raves. But this was proper grown up clubbing. People took it very seriously in a very hedonistic way and really made a big effort.”

What really inspired Deller was how mixed the crowd was. “A lot of what made the parties great was these regular people really putting a lot of thought into their outfits, next to well known people and others who would go on to become very famous. Everyone seemed

to be on the same level really,” he says.

“There were no hierarchies and everyone could just do what they wanted. That was how it felt to me – just very free and permissive. I liked it a lot. The atmosphere they created was very important to me and influenced me. There was also a really mad mix of music; it was all over the place.

I really appreciated that bizarre mix of music and everyone dressing up.”

One of the other party collectives to share the same sense of theatre was Beautiful Bend (at Central Station in King’s Cross) hosted by artist Donald Urquhart and drag legend Sheila Tequila, with resident DJ Harvey. “They had massive connections with us because Sheila Tequila was one of my best friends,” says Cartledge.

“Their parties were amazing,” adds Deller. “They had these brilliant themes [such as Tales of the Potting Shed and My Daughter’s Wedding Left a Lot To Be Desired], and flyers that were like magazines with these stories in.

They took a lot of care with that club, a lot of work went into it.”

Take a look at the flyers for the Sign of the Times parties (designed by Paul Shobbrook) and you can sense the same attention to detail. “The reason these clubs were so special was you had people with incredible imagination there,” says Cartledge. “We weren’t doing it for the money but there was this real sense of healthy competition.

Everybody wanted to outdo each other – not in a bad way but in a very creative way. You wanted your flyer to be the best one, and for you to have the most interesting line up. I was always very conscious of that when I was doing the parties. They always had to be more exciting than the one before.”

As well as taking photographs at the parties, Deller also started working in the shop. “I think I was just a trusted person, relatively sensible and didn’t indulge, so I was seen as quite a safe pair of hands,” he says. “It was great for me as it was a scene I really liked and I had never really been part of a scene before. London was always a place that I had never been able to penetrate so this was my opportunity to do that.”

The shop provided constant inspiration for Deller and his art. “You had all the flyers and the culture of the fanzines – I loved all that ephemera,” he says. “It was also just a really good place to work because everyone passed through the

CULTURE | Sign of the Times

Bikini, from the pop group Link&Bikini, Iceni nightclub, London, 1992 Photograph Jeremy Deller

Sign of the Times party, Brixton Academy, London, 1992 Photograph Jeremy Deller

doors and you never knew who would come in next. I met a lot of people there.”

Like the shop, the lavishly staged parties, with themes like The World of Suzie Wong and Night Boat to Cairo, became a breeding ground for talent. “The thing about fashion before the mid-1990s was it came from the markets and from the clubs. That’s where stylists would go to use clothing for shoots, so it was where all the fashion crowd would get inspiration,” says Cartledge. “And that is what the book reflects, that everything back then came from scenes rather than being dictated to like it is now by the big fashion labels. Rather than being top down, in those days it went from the grass roots up. It wasn’t a corporate culture, it was an independent culture with shops like us, Duffer of St George, Bond and Mash and we all worked with each other and helped each other.”

It was the young clubbers themselves who designed many of the clothes worn at the parties. “That’s how I found a lot of the designers,” says Cartledge.

“When we did the parties a lot of the girls, and boys in fact, would make clothes especially for the night. And I would see them in their outfits and

commission them for the shop. That’s how I met Olivier van der Velde, who did all the distressed cheesecloth clothes that became really big. It was all about taking a chance back then.”

For Cartledge, the fashions at the parties were dictated very much by the

‘FASHION BEFORE THE MID-1990S CAME FROM THE MARKETS AND THE CLUBS’ music being played. “I would go out and listen to a set by someone like Andrew Weatherall and that would inspire me in what clothes to buy,” she says. “It’s hard to explain but it was like an osmosis born out of this passion.

That’s how it was for me.”

Sign of the Times opened an additional shop across the road from Kensington Market at Hyper Hyper in 1993, and shortly after opened another store in Covent Garden. “The Covent Garden shop was very theatrical,” says Deller. “And there would be these wild parties – real abandon. It was a very glamorous scene; but very dirty glamour. And again that great mix – old punks doing glamour. But it was all proper and not pretentious.” The Covent Garden store was opened by Björk in a typically riotous party that was snapped by Deller. “It was Fran [ Jackson, manager of the Kensington Market shop] who we have to thank for introducing us to Björk,” says Cartledge. “She got chatting to her and it turned out she was on her own and a bit lonely in London by herself so she started coming down the shop for a chat. We knew that was quite a big deal having Björk open the shop so we had paparazzi there and of course that gave us loads of publicity.” With more and more big names passing through, Sign of the Times was soon transformed from a cultish DIY stall to one of London’s leading fashion boutiques.

“Isabella Blow came into the shop with > 137

Chemical Brothers gig, Stringfellows nightclub, London, 1995 Photograph Jeremy Deller

Night Boat To Cairo party, Brixton Academy, London, 1992 Photograph Jeremy Deller

Kate Moss and photographer Steven Meisel and took clothing for the Babes in London shoot in Vogue that featured Plum Sykes, Bella Freud and Honor Fraser,” says Cartledge. “That changed everything and we were featured regularly in the fashion press after that. We were just everywhere, it was completely bonkers.” Check copies of The Face from that period and you’ll find Sign of the Times in the credits to many of the fashion shoots.

It was during this heady time that Deller got one of his most important breaks. Under the name Suburban Genius, he started selling his infamous tabloid T-shirts there like ‘My Booze Hell’ and ‘My Drug Shame’. “I did a whole bunch of those T-shirts but those two were the most well known because they were worn by famous people,” says Deller. “They were very simple pieces of pop art really.” So how did he feel when he saw people wearing the T-shirts out?

“It was amazing, I thought it was great,” he says. “It was such a vote of confidence in what I was doing. The people wearing it didn’t think it was an artwork and they didn’t know who I was. They just wore it because they liked it and that was the thing I liked about it. They bought it for the right reasons because it was right for them, not because it might be worth something one day.” Watching how 138

people interact with his work continues to inspire Deller. “Seeing how people look at it and react to it – that is very important to me,” he says. “And those T-shirts were a really good immediate way to get satisfaction.”

Deller would go on to create a wildly eclectic and thought-provoking body of work, examining British cultural and political history through

‘IT’S ALMOST LIKE THE BRITISH DISEASE TO BE OBSESSED

BY YOUTH CULTURE’ its people, icons, myths and folklore.

“Deller has opened up more new ways of working than any other artist of his generation,” says Ralph Rugoff, director at London’s Hayward Gallery. “He has always done things in his own way: taking his art into the public realm and doing things that didn’t look like art,

whether they were bumper stickers or T-shirts.” The use of slogans, which first appeared on those T-shirts, would recur in his future work, as seen at his major retrospective, ‘Joy in People’, at the Hayward Gallery in 2012.

“Slogans have really never gone away for me,” Deller says. “I can’t draw but I can come up with interesting words, sometimes like those nicked from tabloid newspapers.”

His time at the shop selling his own T-shirts coincided with the Young British Artist explosion. “Some of those artists have kept their integrity and some have been happy to sell out,” says Deller. “They all had different paths from obscurity to multi-millionaires.”

Rugoff, who curated ‘Joy in People’, explains how Deller differed from his peers in the 1990s. “At a moment when young British artists typically launched their inaugural shows in vast, industrial warehouse spaces, Deller surreptitiously staged his first exhibition in his parent’s house whilst they were away on holiday.”

In the same spirit as Sign of the Times, much of Deller’s work has been collaborative – from his 1,000-person re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave (the most brutal confrontation of the 1984 miners’ strike) to his procession of the people of Manchester through the city. “A lot of people work with

CULTURE | Sign of the Times

Jeremy Deller at a Night Boat To Cairo party, Brixton Academy, London, 1993

Leigh Bowery, Brixton Academy, London, 1993 Photograph Jeremy Deller

Sheila Tequila, vintage clothing dealer, Björk, singer, and Donald Urquhart, artist, Covent Garden, London, 1994 Photograph Jeremy Deller

groups, but it’s all very worthy and not that interesting. Jeremy puts his finger on things and touches nerves in the national psyche,” says Rugoff.

“It’s always good to work with other people who really know what they are doing,” explains Deller. “It’s also much more fun working with people than doing it by yourself. That was the thing I liked so much about Fiona – she was very generous with her contacts and all her mates and she always helped me.

If I wanted to find out about something she would tell me who to talk to. So that taught me to be generous, because that comes back to you. I mean if Fiona hadn’t been like that I wouldn’t be sitting here now. It’s so important to share things and to put people in touch with each other.”

One of those Deller has regularly collaborated with is Ed Hall, whose Trade Union-style banners have been used in Deller’s works such as Procession in 2009 and Folk Archive in 2005. Folk Archive, made with another regular collaborator, Alan Kane, charted the

many corners of British creativity through its people – from clown museums to mechanical elephants.

“Artists can think they are the only creative ones around, which is obviously not the case,” Deller said in Middle Class Hero, a Culture Show special on BBC2 in 2012. “There is all this other stuff going on that isn’t going on in Shoreditch.” The democratisation of art is central to much of Deller’s work – just look at Sacrilege, his life-size bouncy castle recreation of Stonehenge.

It’s a sense of fun and mischief he shares with Cartledge, who once hired a pink zebra-striped bus to stage a protest against fashion week. “It was a glamorous protest about the lack of young designers,” she recalls. “Jeremy took the photos, it was very funny.”

Another recurring theme in Deller’s work is connections across culture and through time. Rugoff calls him “a social cartographer tracing neglected ley lines of cultural history”. “I’ve always been interested in youth culture and in social history,” says Deller. “It’s almost like the

British disease to be obsessed by youth culture, but in a good way.” Of one of his most famous works, The History of the World from 1998, Deller says, “I drew this diagram about the social, political and musical connections between house music and brass bands.

It was also about Britain and British history in the 20th century and how the country had changed from being industrial to post-industrial.” I ask him why he chose to document the historical importance of the acid house scene. “The rave thing was really interesting because that started during Margaret Thatcher’s reign, so it felt like a mass communal sigh of relief for young people,” he says. “And with that work I was trying to make a nostalgia for something that had only just finished. Almost instant nostalgia, but also placing the music and culture in a historical timeline, and showing how music and social history are so closely connected.”

The project was the visual inspiration for Acid Brass, his breakthrough project > 139

Ted Polhemus and Rebecca Tomlinson at the Fashion Terrorism protest, London Fashion Week, 1994 Photograph Jeremy Deller

from 1997 that saw the Williams Fairey Brass Band perform acid house and techno classics. “What was so surprising about that was how easy it was to do,” says Deller. “The band had no idea what acid house was and when they went on stage for the first time in front of a young audience, you could see they were quite afraid. But because they played so well they thought it was amazing. And they went on to play Lovebox and places like that. I got a lot out of that as well. I like being around musicians, in rehearsal rooms and recording studios when you can hear people working things out.”

More recently, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air in 2014 continued in a similar vein, examining the impact of the industrial revolution on British pop culture. Connections across time and culture is also something that has constantly enthused the ex-punk and converted raver Cartledge, now seeking inspiration from a new generation of creators. “Fashion has changed so much and it’s dictated by a corporate mentality,” she says. “But I’m seeing some incredible young designers now coming through Instagram, creating their own looks but selling it direct and cutting out the middlemen. And that reminds me very much of what we 140

did. It’s that element of risk and the unexpected where the real excitement comes from. Also what we did back at Kensington Market was all built on a synergy between the businesses.

And you can see that today here in Peckham at places like Holdron’s

‘ARTISTS CAN THINK THEY ARE THE ONLY CREATIVES WHICH ISN’T THE CASE’ Arcade and around the Bussey Building. I also think that open mindedness was a theme in the early 1990s, and I see that as similar to the visual digital explosion today through platforms such as Instagram.”

With all things 1990s being reassessed in the latest wave of ‘retromania’, the forthcoming book

Ben Eine, street artist, and Fiona Cartledge, Kensington Market, London, 1994 Photograph Jeremy Deller

provides a window into the real creativity of the time. “I knew even then it was an important scene so I was more than happy to take pictures of it.

I definitely recognised the importance of documenting it,” says Deller. “One of the things that came to light since I found all these pictures in a box is how few people took pictures back then,” adds Cartledge. “This was before Mixmag and publications like that so when I started posting these pictures on Facebook people were like ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know pictures from that time existed’. So when the whole 1990s thing came around I realised I had this amazing archive of that period just sitting in a box. I really didn’t realise how rare these pictures were. So it was only really in the last year or so that I’ve come to realise how unusual they are.

I’m so glad we’ve got this archive.”

Sign of the Times – A Celebration of Early ’90s Club Culture is out on 4 February wildlifepress.com The exhibition ‘Rave Spirits by Sign of the Times’ is at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Street, London EC2 in early 2016 redgallerylondon.com

CULTURE | Sign of the Times

Jeremy Deller and Vanda Smith modelling T-shirts by Deller’s label Suburban Genius, 1994 Photograph Gary Wallis

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Jacket by Noah; trousers by Carhartt WIP; shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.

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STYLE

Coat by Lardini; trousers by Polo Ralph Lauren; jacket from the Quality Mending Co.

Justin Dean Thomas Photographs Phil Knott Styling Vincent Oshin

Justin Dean Thomas is a singer/songwriter based in New York. His music is a mix of R&B, rock’n’roll and folk. He is currently working on his debut album, planned for release in March.

Guest muscians include Andy Rourke ex-bassist of the Smiths. soundcloud.com/justindeanthomas

Jacket by Baracuta; trousers by Death to Tennis; sweater by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shoes by Red Wing Shoes; belt and socks, stylist’s own.

STYLE | Justin Dean Thomas

Jacket by Lee; tracksuit bottoms by Sunspel; shoes by Red Wing Shoes.

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Jacket from the Quality Mending Co; jeans by Polo Ralph Lauren; sweater by Carhartt WIP; shoes by Dr Martens.

STYLE | Justin Dean Thomas

Jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.

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STYLE | Justin Dean Thomas

Coat by Lardini; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shirt and boots by Dr Martens; sunglasses from the Quality Mending Co; rings, model’s own.

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Coat by Lardini; jacket

by Death to Tennis; rings, model’s own.

CINEMA

Fire Music

Free Jazz. Sun Ra. Val Wilmer. Punk. Ornette Coleman.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Janette Beckman

“Free jazz is liberation, is the excitement of the new and the now.”

So said Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore in the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a documentary on jazz’s most radical offshoot, ‘Fire Music’. Directed by filmmaker/drummer Tom Surgal, with Moore and guitarist Nels Cline as executive producers, Fire Music tells the story of the free jazz revolution.

“It just seemed like there had been so little documentation of this music,” says Surgal, from his home in New York. “Up to this point there has been no real cinematic focus and I felt like the time was right to make this film.

I guess I was correct in that assumption, as in the course of making this film six of my interview subjects have died.”

So why does he feel like there has never been a film like this before?

“I think to some extent it’s this whole revisionist trend that is championed

by Wynton Marsalis and his cronies, in conjunction with critics like Stanley Crouch,” he says. “They have done everything they can to write this era of jazz out of history, to eradicate it altogether and to deride its cultural significance.” The most glaring oversight in Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series for TV in 2001 was the radical musicians who tore up the conventions of bebop to explore free improvisation. “That was the most obvious example of what I’m taking about,” says Surgal. “A 20-hour documentary, which Wynton Marsalis was the main consultant on, that went thoroughly into depicting every other era of jazz except the avant-garde and the free jazz.”

Even major figures such as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, who Surgal calls “the original architects of the movement”, became a footnote for Burns, a classicist who saw the 1960s as breaking the creative line of the art form. But rather than being the 150

museum piece that Burns seemed to suggest, jazz would make some of its most progressive statements in the liberating noise of improvisation. “To play jazz totally free and organic was a gesture whose time had come in the 1960s. It was social and political for reasons involving race, fury, rage, peace, war, love and freedom,” wrote Moore in his influential ‘Top Ten From the Free Jazz Underground’ for Grand Royal magazine in 1995. “This was definitely a music that was reflecting the mood of the times,” says Surgal. “It was a music that was coming out of the civil rights movement and the black nationalist movement. We are also talking about the ascent of the anti-war movement.

And you can hear that in the wailing saxophones and pummelling of drums.”

Surgal’s film seeks to rewrite the script through many of the figures that have previously been sidelined by the jazz historians – players such as trumpeter Bobby Bradford, sideman to Ornette Coleman in the 1960s. “Just imagine what it would be like to be in New York in 1959 in the wake of the death of Charlie Parker, who’s still alive in everybody’s head,” he says in Fire Music. “And you come to town and say, ‘Well all that’s really wonderful but what about THIS!’” Surgal first had his ears opened to free jazz as an inquisitive teenager.

“I actually got into jazz when I was 13 years old and hearing a particularly impassioned interview with Rahsaan Roland Kirk,” he says. “At that time he was leading the Jazz and People’s Movement and they were storming local radio talk shows in the New York area, to demand more jazz on the airwaves. He was extolling the virtues of John Coltrane and Archie Shepp and people like that. Something about it mesmerised me and it enticed my adolescent mind. That was it and I started to buy lots of these records, surveying the titles and teaching myself.

Because it was in the 1970s I was able to see a lot of artists in their prime.”

At the time there was very little coverage of the scene, which made Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life such an important book when it was published in 1977. “There were very few people writing about the new music in America,” says Surgal. “I used to religiously read Downbeat and I can’t remember reading anything about Albert Ayler or anyone like that. What was interesting about As Serious As Your Life was that it took an English woman to write about this important part of the only indigenous American art form of the 20th century.” Apart from Ekkehard Jost’s Free Jazz from 1974, it was the first book to do justice to the revolutionary music of artists such as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, whose 1965 LP for Impulse!

Records gives this new documentary its title. In the introduction to her book, Wilmer wrote: “The music of black Americans has always been free. It is the white critics and the media, it seems to me, who want to chain it.”

Ignored or derided by most critics at the time, the new music also created divisions within jazz.

“What is conventional and traditional is always going to be the easiest path to follow,” says Surgal. “I think free jazz was similar to punk in that it was actually rejected by many traditional musicians at the time. Some embraced it, like Max Roach and Charlie Mingus.

But it definitely engendered a kind of division among the jazz ranks.”

Sidelined by the jazz establishment, these players had to create their own infrastructure. “So many people talk about the whole DIY methodology in relation to punk, but it was really the free jazz guys to first take their professional destinies into their hands,” says Surgal. “They had to play in alternative venues: schools, coffee shops, community centres.” >

Fire Music director Tom Surgal with Thurston Moore

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John Coltrane, saxophonist, 1966 Photograph © Chuck Stewart Jazz Photographs, courtesy of Archives Centre, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, multi-instrumentalist, 1960s

This DIY approach also saw the growth in self-financed independent American jazz labels such as ESP-Disk in New York and Delmark in Chicago.

“Again people have made such a big deal about indie rock, but it really all began with indie jazz,” says Surgal.

“I’m not saying free jazz was a model for punk as such, but there are so many interesting parallels. You can definitely see correlations when you look at labels like Delmark as well as ESP.” The original DIY jazzman was Sun Ra, who founded his El Saturn Records label in Chicago in 1957. But it would be wrong to think the new music in the 1960s was only released on indie labels.

“Although the so-called ‘new thing’ was mostly featured on small independent labels, there is a large body of work also available on major labels like Atlantic, Impulse!, Arista, A&M and Blue Note,” says Surgal.

Impulse! was home to the most exploratory work of Coltrane, who Surgal thinks of as the godfather of the free jazz movement. “By the mid1960s, Trane was the most successful jazz recording artist of all time, arguably selling more records than anyone, with the possible exception of Miles Davis. Then at the height of his 152

fame, he completely aligned himself with the ‘new thing’,” he explains.

“He embraced poly-tonality and started to augment his hallowed quartet with radical innovators like Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders. In the process, he was met with derision from both critics and

‘FRANCE RESPONDED TO THE RADICAL SOUND DURING ITS OWN PERIOD OF UPHEAVAL’ the general public and was dubbed antijazz. But the scorn failed to deter him and he continued on his progressive path right up until his untimely death in 1967. He secured major label deals for artists and did more to help

generate interest in the ‘new thing’ than anybody else.”

Despite the support of labels such as Blue Note and Impulse!, by the end of the decade, many American avantgarde jazz artists were forced to look abroad for recognition. “In the fall of 1969, free jazz was reaching a nadir,” wrote Thurston Moore in Grand Royal.

“Traditionalists were outraged by men in dashikis and sandals just blowing their guts out creating screaming torrents of action. Such musicians could get no bookings beyond the New York loft set, though the French avant-garde embraced the scene wholly.”

So how key was Paris to the free jazz movement at the time? “Paris in 1968 was very important,” says Surgal.

“The French really responded to the radical sound coming out of America during their own period of social upheaval. I think they felt it was like the soundtrack to the revolution.” Of all the groups to play in Paris during that turbulent period, it was the Art Ensemble of Chicago who made the biggest impact. “They were very well received there and went from relative obscurity in their hometown to being on the cover of Le Monde and playing giant festivals opposite Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. They were regarded to be as important as rock stars,” says Surgal. Anyone familiar with that period in Paris will immediately think of BYG Actuel.

“The label managed to lure the musicians to Paris in 1969, most of whom were already overseas having just participated in the Pan-African Music Festival in Algiers,” says Surgal. BYG Actuel released more than 50 LPs of free jazz between 1969 and 1972.

CINEMA | Fire Music

Rashied Ali, drummer, Village Gate nightclub, New York, 1970 Photograph Lee Santa

Archie Shepp, saxophonist Photograph Monette Berthomier Barry Guy, cellist, 2003 Photograph Marcel Meier

“What’s fascinating about that label is how many LPs they recorded in a 10-day period,” says Surgal. Artists to record for the label included Sunny Murray, Anthony Braxton, Don Cherry alongside the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Archie Shepp. In 2000, Thurston Moore co-curated a Jazzactuel collection for the Get Back label that had also reissued much of the imprint’s back catalogue.

While Paris became the home of the American avant-garde, other European countries created their own homegrown free jazz. As well as interviews with many of the surviving American pioneers, the film also highlights how the new music took hold in Europe.

“These guys didn’t care so much about playing ‘jazz’ as ripping their guts out with high energy, brain-blowing NOISE,” wrote Thurston Moore in Grand Royal.

“Everywhere had their scenes but it really seemed to take hold in Germany, England and the Netherlands,” says

Surgal. “What I found in interviews with people like Barry Guy [London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra] and Keith Rowe [British improvisation group AMM] that was very interesting was, although they were inspired by the American model, they didn’t want to just duplicate what was going on in the US. They wanted to pay homage to it and be inspired by it while creating their own language in the process. For example, Günter ‘Baby’ Sommer in east Germany [best known for his work with the group Synthesis] told me they didn’t want to rip off the black men so started to reinterpret old German folk songs. In the same sort of way that American be-boppers would play variations on Broadway melodies and old blues forms. It’s like in one of the interviews when [Dutch drummer] Han Bennink says there is no music they would not employ. He says, ‘No way was Derek Bailey or Evan Parker [British free jazz players] going to play the blues.’”

Peter Brötzmann from Germany was one of the most important players to emerge from the European jazz scene. “Brötzmann is a fascinating figure, a self-taught musician, who is also a professional painter, and an artist’s assistant to Nam June Paik.

He also interned with Karlheinz Stockhausen,” says Surgal. “The singular ferocity of his attack and his rich tone quickly established him as a galvanising force of the European avant-garde. Some people have theorised that German players like Brötzmann were attempting to musically eviscerate their Nazi fathers.”

In 1968, he recorded the LP Machine Gun with an octet that included both Evan Parker and Han Bennink. A year later he founded FMP (Free Music Production). “That was one of the principal labels to present the new emerging European avant-garde,” says Surgal. “Another was Incus, an artistrun label founded in east London by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Tony > 153

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, 1960s Photograph Lauren Deutsch

Oxley. The British scene probably created the most inaccessible sounds to come out of Europe and people were not clamouring to document it. Critics actually dubbed it insect music or washing machine music.” Similar scenes emerged across Europe supported by independent labels such as ICP in Holland, Moers Music in Germany, and Hat Hut in Switzerland.

In the US, the 1970s also saw an explosion of new independent labels such as Milford Graves’ IPS, Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell’s StrataEast, Rashied Ali’s Survival, and Tom Albach’s Nimbus West. The same DIY spirit had also seen the emergence of jazz collectives across the country.

“There were many artist concerns that took root in very specific regions,” says Surgal. “You had the Black Artists Group in St Louis that was comprised of people like Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill. That was based around the community centre of a newly constructed housing complex.

A community organiser actually solicited artists to be part of a nascent programme. Then in New York you had the Jazz Composers’ Guild, who actually tried to unionise the avantgarde to help improve their lot.

While in LA, there was the UGMA [Underground Musicians Association] led by Horace Tapscott, who developed their own systems of pedagogy and community outreach. And of course you had the AACM in Chicago.”

Formed in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians 154

coined the phrase ‘Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future’. Co-founded by pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall and composer Phil Cohran, they became perhaps the most famous of all the collectives, spawning the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

“The interesting thing about the AACM was that they were a lot more organised than the other collectives,” says Surgal. “In an interview with me, Oliver Lake said that when he went to Chicago he was really impressed with their organisational skills and their mentoring programmes. He said it had never really occurred to him to put on shows until he went to Chicago.”

New York in the 1970s also became the home of the loft jazz scene. “That was a time in New York when rents were cheap,” says Surgal. “I think Sam Rivers said he paid a few hundred dollars a month for his place. There were various other lofts all over downtown Manhattan: Rashied Ali’s place Ali’s Alley; John Fischer’s Environ, Joe Lee Wilson’s Ladies’ Fort, and Jimmy Garrison also had a spot.”

It was during New York’s loft scene of the 1970s that the young Surgal got his education in free jazz. “There was so much great musical activity going on then, it was an incredible time to be in New York,” he says. “It was Sam Rivers’ Studio Rivbea that for me was the epicentre of the whole loft scene.

Impulse! ultimately released a triple record set entitled Wildflowers that chronicled what was happening at

Rivbea. And that whole loft scene somehow captured the public’s imagination and it started to get a lot of media attention. That was the one era when the music started to generate a lot more interest.”

The loft scene also created a great migration with musicians from other collectives moving to New York. “That’s another thing I wanted to touch on,” says Surgal. “A lot of the Midwest contingent like the guys from the Black Artists Group and the Chicago guys moved to New York. And many of them became big names there. The Art Ensemble of Chicago secured a major label deal, as did Anthony Braxton.

And that of course did a lot more to stimulate interest.”

Free jazz would reach a new audience in New York through the no wave scene, as documented by Thurston Moore’s essential book No Wave: PostPunk. Underground. New York 19761980. “The no wave scene is how I got to know Thurston,” says Surgal. “I art directed a movie [Vortex] that Lydia Lunch starred in from 1981. That was our connection. And it’s interesting because when I first heard Lydia I thought, I can hear some free jazz elements in this music, but it was all very naively done. Then I start to find out that James Chance was totally versed in Albert Ayler, and Mark Cunningham from Mars was totally a student of all this stuff. And then Luther Thomas used to play with James Chance and you had the band Deadline with Phillip Wilson who did a record with Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe. So you did have interactions.

But I don’t think a lot of free jazz enthusiasts would have liked much of this music.”

But Surgal recognises that scenes such as no wave, and the whole noise movement with artists such as Merzbow, have been important in exposing people to improvised music. “When I was younger I was very myopic and I was a huge jazz snob until my early twenties,” he says.

“And then punk rock hit and that made me see links between different kinds of music. You look at all the aggression in punk and there are so many visceral similarities with free jazz.”

It’s a music that has continued to evolve – from the cross-cultural improvisation of Orphy Robinson’s Black Top in London to the

CINEMA | Fire Music

Art Ensemble of Chicago, New York, 1975

Scandinavian scene with stalwarts such as Mats Gustafsson. “There are of course a lot of other younger people playing this music and continuing on the tradition,” says Surgal. “But many of these original exponents are still in their artistic prime. So I would encourage everyone to go out and see people like Evan Parker, Trevor Watts, Keith Rowe, Oliver Lake, and whoever else they can. Because it’s not like a dead language, the geniuses are still amongst us and we need to engage them while they are still here.”

As for Moore and Surgal, they have continued to explore their own paths of free improvisation. “I have played all my life,” says Surgal. “But it actually took Thurston to get me into playing seriously again fairly late in my life. It was quite a funny story. I was helping him out on a record he was producing that was Rudolph Grey’s Mask of Light [released on both New Alliance Records and Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label in 1991]. I was doing the drum production and EQing and all that. Anyway, at the session Rudolph had forgotten that he had also been asked to continue for a piece for a Matador Records compilation. He asked Rashied to play

some more but he had his drum sticks all packed up. So at that point Thurston volunteered my services. So that was it really. Rudolph and I ended up being in a band together for years called the Blue Humans. Thurston ended up

‘CRITICS ACTUALLY DUBBED IT INSECT MUSIC OR WASHING MACHINE MUSIC’ securing us a record deal and produced the session. Then I started playing with Thurston in a duo configuration.” That spawned the LPs Klangfarbenmelodie and Not Me, while their trio alongside William Winant resulted in the albums Live to the City and Piece For Jetsun Dolma. “Around the same time I

co-founded the band White Out with Lin Culbertson [Surgal’s wife] and Thurston,” adds Surgal. “He put out three of our albums and performs regularly with us, and is featured on the album Senso, a quartet recording that also included Jim O’Rourke.

So yes, I owe a lot to Thurston.”

Along with fellow producer Nels Cline, Moore has also been instrumental in the crowdfunding campaign for Fire Music. “I did the Kickstarter because I had been doing everything myself and I decided I needed to take it to the next level by raising some more funds,” says Surgal.

“So I called on Thurston and Nels to really help promote my cause. And they did a lot to disseminate things. They have been great.” So what does Surgal want the film to achieve? “I would love for the film to be approved by the jazz intelligentsia. But at the same time I want to turn people onto this music who know nothing about it. I really do believe it’s enriching music that people can only benefit from hearing.”

The documentary film Fire Music is currently in post-production firemusic.org 155

STYLE

Tatsuya wears haori jacket, kimono, haori-himo and obi

by Y&Sons; hat and bracelet, model’s own; glasses by Solakzade; fan by Ibasen; umbrella by Fox Umbrellas; rings from Solakzade Jeweler; gloves by NK Classic Inc; bag

by Globe-Trotter Japan. Rio wears haori jacket, kimono, sandals, haori-himo, obi and tabi socks by Y&Sons; shirt

by Yohji Yamamoto; hat and bag, model’s own; glasses

by Solakzade; fan by Ibasen; rings from Solakzade Jeweler.

Okamoto Kyodai Photographs Martin Holtkamp Styling Kumiko Kobayashi Kimono Dresser Manabu Adachi Hair Eiji Sato Make-up Nao Yoshida Photographic Assistant Ben Beech Styling Assistant Eri Wada Location Homeikan Ryokan homeikan.com

Brothers Rio Okamoto, 32, and Tatsuya Okamoto, 33, are eyewear designers and the founders of Solakzade, a vintage eyewear boutique. Initially a showroom in Osaka, Japan, Solakzade opened its first store in Tokyo in 2012. In 2015, Solakzade opened an antique jewellery boutique Solakzade Jeweler in the same building, and also launched its own eyewear line, which produces sterling silver and solid gold frames.

Solakzade, B1F, Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 4-29-4 solakzade.com

Rio wears kimono and obi by Y&Sons; shirt and scarf by Semoh; glasses by Solakzade; watch, model’s own; rings from Solakzade Jeweler; fan by Ibasen.

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Tatsuya wears gown by The Sakaki; yukata and obi by Y&Sons.

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STYLE | Okamoto Kyodai

Rio wears yukata, obi and geta by Y&Sons; tenugui by the Sakaki; rings from Solakzade Jeweler.

Tatsuya wears haori jacket, kimono, haori-himo and obi by Y&Sons; glasses by Solakzade; bracelet, model’s own; rings from Solakzade Jeweler.

STYLE | Okamoto Kyodai

Rio wears jacket by the Sakaki; trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; top and socks, stylist’s own; glasses by Solakzade; stole by Faliero Sarti; watch, model’s own; rings from Solakzade Jeweler; hat, on ledge, by Lock&Co from CA4LA.

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Tatsuya wears cape by Norwegian Rain; kimono by Y&Sons; shoes by Hender Scheme; socks, stylist’s own.

Rio wears coat, kimono, sandals, umbrella and tabi socks by Y&Sons.

STYLE | Okamoto Kyodai

Tatsuya wears jacket, trousers and shirt by Yohji Yamamoto; glasses by Solakzade; stole and socks, stylist’s own; rings from Solakzade Jeweler; book cover by Hender Scheme; fan, on floor, by Ibasen.

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HISTORY

Walker Evans The Crime of Cuba. Ralph Steiner. The FSA. Pop Art. Hart Crane.

Words Chris May

It is, the American business magazine Fortune said in 2005, “the most famous story we never told.” In 1936, Fortune had commissioned the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee to go to Alabama and document the lives of cotton sharecroppers. The sharecroppers, whose lives had for centuries never risen above subsistence level, were in the 1930s being further blighted by the Great Depression.

Grinding poverty was widespread.

Evans and Agee drove south from New York one June afternoon and were gone for two months. Evans returned with forensically revealing images of the impoverished farmers, Agee with apocalyptic prose. It was strong meat, too strong for Fortune.

Editors there felt that the story would alienate their readers, who, then as now, were the chief executives of large corporations. Fears of cancelled subscriptions and withdrawn advertising loomed. When asked to submit a less confrontational treatment of his text, Agee, who described himself as “a great deal more a communist than not”, refused. Fortune spiked the story.

Evans and Agee’s work did, however, eventually make it into print. In 1941, it was published as a book. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was a succès d’estime – the critic Lionel Trilling called it “the most realistic and important moral effort of our generation” – but it only sold around 600 copies. The depression was over, a world war was on, there were new urgencies. But in 1960, two years after Agee’s posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued. This time it struck a chord and sold well.

It has inspired repeated revisitation.

And Their Children After Them, in which the photographer Michael Williamson and the writer Dale Maharidge retraced Evans and Agee’s steps, won a Pulitzer in 1990.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, along with similar documentary commissions Evans undertook between 1935 and 1938 for America’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), the federal agency tasked with combating rural poverty, remains the work for which Evans is best known. It casts such a long shadow that it has tended to obscure Evans’ other work, which spans five decades beginning in the 1920s. That is now being corrected, with the publication of Walker Evans: Depth of Field, a sumptuous and definitive monograph put together

by John T Hill, Yale University’s first director of Graduate Studies in Photography – a friend of Evans and following Evans’ death, the executor of his estate – and Heinz Liesbrock, the director of Germany’s Josef Albers Museum and a highly regarded writer on American art and photography.

Either side of those three years chronicling the lives of America’s rural poor, Evans photographed New York construction sites and subway passengers, Tahitian beaches, manual workers in Cuba, American vernacular and neo-Gothic architecture, barber shops and petrol stations, hand-painted advertising signage and other Americana. His aesthetic embraced constructivist-influenced shots of civil-engineering projects through to reportage and on to what would later become tropes of pop art, a style he anticipated by three decades. His images of America, human and inanimate, are perhaps his most valuable legacy. Evans’ near contemporary, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, wrote, “If everything in American civilisation were destroyed except Walker Evans’ photographs, they could tell us a good deal about American life.”

The appeal of Evans’ work endures, in part, because even on assignments such as the one that produced Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he avoided

producing mere agitprop. He approached every assignment, even the most mundane, as an artistic endeavour. Even his FSA portraits are cool and dispassionate. Their objectivity gives them integrity and their artistry gives them a perverse beauty. “I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time,” Evans once wrote, “until I discovered I didn’t need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.’’

Evans was born on 3 November 1903 in St Louis, Missouri. His father was an advertising man and the family was relatively well off. It was also peripatetic, as Evans senior moved from one employer to another. Evans first became interested in photography around the age of 14, when the family was living in Toledo, Ohio. He had a box camera and developed his film in the bathroom. “I was both graphic and visual in school, as well as literary,” Evans said later. “And I was always drawing. For example, in school we were supposed to draw some maps.

I couldn’t stop drawing maps and I made fine maps. I just went on and on and on.”

Evans’ first professional ambition, however, was to become a writer. In 1926, he went to Paris, then a magnet for young American novelists, and spent a year there and travelling in Europe.

Returning to the US, he became part of a New York literary circle that included the writer John Cheever, the poet Hart Crane and the writer (and co-founder of New York City Ballet) Lincoln Kirstein. He worked for a stockbroking firm on Wall Street until the stock market crash of 1929, which more or less obliged him to become self-sufficient as a writer and, increasingly, a photographer.

Self-taught, he was fortunate early on to make friends with Ralph Steiner, a successful photographer, who mentored him, lent him equipment and taught him the rudiments of technique. >

Walker Evans, self-portrait, New York, 1928 Photograph Š Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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New York, 1938 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York subway, 1938-1941 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

From the start, Evans was determined to approach photography as an art form.

As Hill and Liesbrock write in Depth of Field, Evans had a “magical knack for doing one thing while being observed doing another. He was the consummate artist travelling incognito as a journeyman photojournalist”.

Critical recognition followed. In 1938, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) put on a retrospective exhibition with a complementary publication, American Photographs. It was the first MoMA exhibition to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans joined Time magazine as a staff writer in 1945 and was an editor and frequent photographic contributor on Fortune from the late 1940s to 1965, when he left to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale. At Fortune, he repaid Steiner, at the time down on his luck, for his earlier help by giving him assignments for the magazine, which reignited Steiner’s career.

During Evans’ life, photographic technology evolved dramatically. In the 166

1930s, much of his work was taken on a large-format, 8 x 10-inch camera, with lights and a tripod. After his stint with the FSA, he exchanged the set up

‘EVANS HAD A MAGICAL KNACK FOR DOING ONE THING WHILE BEING OBSERVED DOING ANOTHER’ for a more portable and less obtrusive 35mm camera with a fast lens, better suited to a new strand of work as

a “penitent spy” secretly photographing subway passengers. “He could use any sort of photographic equipment you handed him,” says Hill. “He instinctively seemed to know what could and could not be done and what could best be done with a particular item. He had a wonderful feel for that.”

In 1973 and 1974, Evans took up the recently introduced Polaroid SX-70.

Evans had a longstanding aversion to colour photography, partly induced by the technical shortcomings of colour film during his lifetime. “Colour tends to corrupt photography and absolute colour corrupts it absolutely,” he wrote.

“There are four simple words for the matter, which must be whispered: Colour-photography is vulgar.” But he qualified this by adding, “When the point of a picture subject is precisely its vulgarity or its colour-accident through man’s hand, not God’s, then only can colour film be used validly… [But] almost always, colour can be used well only by a photographer who is an artist of perfect taste.” Evans continued taking photographs, many of them

HISTORY | Walker Evens published in Fortune, almost until his death on 10 April 1975.

All this is discussed in Hill and Liesbrock’s Depth of Field. The two men speak to me on the phone from the Josef Albers Museum, where they are putting the finishing touches to a retrospective exhibition of Evans’ work, due to open two days later.

I begin by asking how Evans himself regarded his work for the FSA. “I think he’d have to say that the FSA work was among his best,” says Hill. “But it became a burden, because nobody would look before or after that.

Nobody saw the inventiveness or the fountain of ideas that came out of his tenure at Fortune magazine, for instance. He generated so many important ideas there. But he couldn’t escape the fact of the FSA work. He said it was a period of high intensity, he said he was white hot and he was working at top speed. I think everything came together to make it an ideal formula for him. He was only very loosely supervised, nobody was on site, he had no tight brief and he was allowed to do what he wanted.

I think James Mellow got it exactly right in his wonderful biography when he said, Walker had a subsidised freedom. Most of his work during his entire career was work for hire. Yet whatever he was given to do, he made it into his own thing.”

“He was able to get paid but he was still able to do what he wanted to do as an artist,” says Liesbrock.

“Like his work in Cuba, which was commissioned by the publisher of Carleton Beals’ The Crime of Cuba.

When he accepted the assignment, Evans made it clear that he didn’t even want to read the book. He said, ‘I’ll go there alone. I don’t even want to meet the writer. I’ll do what I think has to be done and then you can do with it whatever you want. But I want to make one point. My work has to be shown separately from the text. Either before the text or afterwards but not intermingled. It’s a statement in its own right.’ And for the FSA, they expected more of a propaganda thing, to show the good that the New Deal projects like their own were doing and that the money that flowed into their programmes was being well spent.

They wanted propaganda to raise more money or to get more political and public support. And Evans turned

Havana, Cuba, 1933 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1929 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

that, as far as his own pictures were concerned, into his own direction.”

Evans combined the lifestyle of a successful New York photographer inhabiting a privileged social milieu with something like an explorer’s affinity for the work, craft skills and artistic expression of working people.

“He went to London to have his shirts, his suits and his shoes made,” says Liesbrock. “In fact, when he died, he was in debt to his tailor in London.

In my circle, he once said, ‘It’s just not right to pay your tailor until one year after delivery. You just don’t do that.’ He was extremely aware of style, how you should dress yourself, how you should appear, how you should speak.

“On the other hand, he was not at all interested in high-bourgeois culture.

He said, ‘The street has become my museum, I think museums themselves are bad for you. I’m tired of highly developed art, I don’t want to be taught anything. Everything is in the street.’

He thought real life was with the poor people, or with the uneducated people, with their idea of beauty. His interest in hand-painted signage, or how Portuguese fishermen furnished their

bedrooms, this apparently inarticulate sense of beauty really got underneath his skin. He thought that was way more interesting than going to museums.

Or take his photographs of vernacular American architecture. He was interested in how carpenters and masons, who had not gone to an architectural school, how they built houses out of experience, and how they introduced their own sense of beauty into their buildings.”

“He felt that canals and bridges and all of those things were important for artists to observe,” says Hill, “because they were the things that were happening today. He believed that you shouldn’t look back towards what’s romantic, that you should look to what’s to hand right now. I think his interest in tools and machinery and architecture, especially vernacular architecture, all speaks to that.”

There was an unattractive side to Evans, which was made worse by heavy alcohol use. In his biography, published in 1999, James Mellow lists several examples of Evans’ ability, even relish, to be wounding or judgemental. Of his friend and mentor Ralph Steiner, Evans > 167

Christmas Angel, 1973 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art New Haven, Connecticut, 1974 Photograph © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

once wrote, “Like all superior Jews, he has married an inferior Nordic who has pushed him in the wrong direction.” Of HG Wells, he said, “Not a poet, not an artist, not an historian. Just a goddam little socialist.” When Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, Evans wrote to a mutual friend, “Don’t let this upset you. Crane was a goner long ago, as you will remember.” Of a reunion with his mother’s relatives, he wrote: “I got an immediate impression of false teeth, dandruff, adenoids, varicose veins and halitosis of the eardrums… How fatal it has been that all the women have ruled the men right out of their masculinity, independence, courage, will and at last, brains even.’’ When divorcing his wife, Jane, Evans wrote to her, “From now on I will consider you dead.”

“He had a dark side and he was well aware of it,” says Liesbrock. “He could not stand happiness, I would say.

As John says, Walker always wanted it both ways. Like a Janus figure. He knew what he wanted, he knew what he thought was right, especially in art, and apparent contradictions never bothered him. He was certain he knew the artistic truth he was after.”

“It’s very hard to characterise a man who is so complex,” says Hill.

“I compare him to a railway conductor 168

who can move from one carriage to another. Each group of friends is limited to its own particular carriage and they can’t move into the other carriages. But the conductor can move from one carriage to another and have

‘THE STREET HAS BECOME MY MUSEUM. I THINK MUSEUMS THEMSELVES ARE BAD FOR YOU’ a completely different persona with each of these separate groups of friends.

Robert Frank observed that very sharply early on, when he arrived unexpectedly at a hospital where Walker was recovering. He was entertaining some very fancy ladies and it was abundantly clear that Robert

was not welcome. Walker later said to him, ‘You can’t do that to me. You have to tell me when you’re coming.’

Hewas a very personal man, he was a very secretive man in a way.

“He was also a very curious man, very inventive, he was open to new ideas.

He was, I think, a genius. He seemed to have incredible forward vision. He told me once, looking at a photograph he’d made of a torn movie poster, ‘In 1930 I invented pop art.’ And if you look at that image, it’s Roy Lichtenstein but 30 years earlier. But he very rarely talked about photography, he would much more likely talk about film or theatre or literature.

He came from a literary background and that infused his work and his life.”

The book Walker Evans: Depth of Field is out now prestel.com The accompanying exhibition is at the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany, until 10 January albersfoundation.org It will travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from 19 June and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, from 29 October high.org vanartgallery.bc.ca

HISTORY | Walker Evens

Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931 Photograph Š Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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BULLETIN

Ashley Scott Medusa, graphic designer, wears all clothes by Bianca Saunders; boots, model’s own.

Bianca Saunders Photographs Adama Jalloh Styling Bianca Saunders Words Edward Moore

For her 2015 BA graduate collection at Kingston University, Bianca Saunders explored her British-Caribbean roots.

Featuring six looks, the collection is named ‘London is the Place for Me’, after the song by Lord Kitchener, and draws influences from past generations of Caribbeans living in London.

When researching for her collection, Saunders first looked at the rude boy style and its influence on British fashion – inspired by Harris Elliott and Dean Chalkley’s ‘Return of the

Rudeboy’ exhibition in London in 2014. Other areas were music, politics and the immigration of first generation Caribbeans to the UK. But, while these sources were useful references, Saunders felt she needed to look deeper for her core idea. “After speaking to my tutor Andrew Ibi, he suggested that I should make it personal and actually interview people,” she says. “I interviewed Sam King, who was the first black mayor of Southwark and also fought for the RAF in the

second world war. I then interviewed my mother’s cousin. He told me the story of his mother who owned a stall on Deptford market, selling lace curtains. She travelled several times a year between Jamaica and America and had five sons who later became a funk band called Headline. This story formed the narrative for my collection and helped me bring together all the themes.” biancasaunders.co.uk

Jerome Kodjo, model, wears all clothes by Bianca Saunders; shoes by Clarks Originals.

Shadrach Noel, student, wears all clothes by Bianca Saunders; shoes

by Clarks Originals; suitcase, stylist’s own.

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Ashley wears all clothes

by Bianca Saunders.

Jerome wears all clothes by Bianca Saunders; shoes by Clarks Originals.

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BULLETIN | Bianca Saunders

Shadrach wears all clothes by Bianca Saunders; shoes by Clarks Originals.

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MUSIC

The Seeds

Garage. Muddy Waters. Source Family. Little Ritchie Marsh.

Words Chris May

“I’ve never liked the idea of putting on some music before sex,” says Iggy Pop in Pushin’ Too Hard, a documentary about Los Angeles garage band the Seeds. “But if I was gonna put on some music to have some sex with, I’d put on the Seeds.”

Pushin’ Too Hard is an engrossing, assiduously researched history of the Seeds, major players in LA’s garage scene from early 1965 to mid-1967, and a band overdue for rediscovery.

The film, produced by Alec Palao and directed by Neil Norman, takes its title from ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’, a Top 40 hit for the Seeds in 1966 and a record that sometimes appears in the longer bestever rock-singles lists. Written by Sky Saxon, the Seeds’ lead vocalist, chief songwriter and de facto leader, the song is a young man’s plea to his girlfriend to back off, stop thinking about settling down, and enjoy the moment. Raw and stripped down, punched out over a primeval beat, the disc is the essence of garage rock. Another single, ‘Can’t Seem To Make You Mine’, is just as striking, and with their first two albums, The Seeds and A Web of Sound, both released in 1966, the Seeds were one of the few 1960s LA garage bands who successfully spread the undiluted, seven-inch-single spirit of garage over both sides of an LP. In Pushin’ Too Hard, veteran LA disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, never best known for understatement, says the Seeds “invented” garage. No solitary band did that, but along with Love and the Doors, the Seeds were at the style’s sharp end during the two or three years immediately before the LA music scene turned to long-form acid rock. Love and the Doors made the transition but the Seeds didn’t: the band’s third album, Future, released in July 1967, was widely dismissed 174

as an ersatz version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, though it was recorded months before the Beatles’ disc was released and there was nothing ersatz about the quantities of acid that Saxon was putting away. He is credited by those around at the time as the person who coined the phrase “flower children”, but Future was unconvincing.

By abandoning the directness of their original style, the Seeds lost their mojo and then their audience.

Saxon had had to work hard to persuade the Seeds to record Future – in the film, keyboardist Daryl Hooper and guitarist Jan Savage suggest the band eventually decided he might get it “out of his system” if they went along with it just once. In much the same way, Brian Wilson had to drag the Beach Boys towards his psychedelic masterpiece, Smile, also intended for release in 1967, but replaced at the last moment by the sanitised Smiley Smile.

But while Wilson was traumatised by his experience, Saxon was unfazed

by Future’s reception. Wilson became a heavily sedated, near-catatonic recluse, and is still in therapy nearly 50 years on. Saxon continued to be a blazing, out there, magnificent, unapologetic, evangelising astral-traveller until he died in 2009, leading a succession of bands including the Starry Seeds Band, Sky Saxon & Firewall, the Hour, Wolf Pack, Fast Planet, Back to the Garden, King Arthur’s Court and Shapes Have Fangs, and attempting serial revivals of the Seeds with a variety of line-ups.

But after Future, the Seeds began to fall apart. Jan Savage and drummer Rick Andridge quit first, followed by Daryl Hooper. All three more or less retreated from the music world.

All this is captured in Palao and Norman’s film, using contemporary performance and interview footage,

an archive interview with the late Andridge, and recent interviews with Hooper and Savage. Palao has also put together the Seeds’ ongoing recordreissue programme, released in Britain on Ace/Big Beat Records on licence from GNP Crescendo, the Seeds’ label from 1965 to 1969 under Neil Norman’s father, label founder Gene Norman.

Pushin’ Too Hard premiered in LA last year and Palao and Norman plan to bring it to London and Manchester in spring 2016, but dates and venues are still to be confirmed. Along with Hooper, Savage, Andridge, Iggy Pop and Bingenheimer, key interviewees include the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston, Love’s Johnny Echols and record producer Kim Fowley.

There is also substantial post-Seeds footage of Saxon. The narrator is Pamela Des Barres, a member of the late 1960s, Frank Zappa-sponsored girl group the GTOs, and author of the memoirs Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up and I’m With the Band.

The backstory: As a definition, ‘garage rock’ has become something of a movable feast. Originally, garage bands were so called – though only retrospectively – because so many of them were said to have formed and rehearsed in the garages of their parents’ suburban homes. They were the contemporary American version of the beat groups of Britain’s early to mid-Beatles years and they shared the same aesthetic: heart-on-sleeve lyrics laden with personal pronouns, visceral delivery and simple instrumental arrangements that favoured guitars distorted through a fuzzbox, the whole thing delivered over a relentless dance floor beat.

But while most British groups put >

Jan Savage, Sky Saxon, Daryl Hooper and Rick Andridge,1967 Photograph courtesy of GNP Crescendo Records

175

Alabama, 1967 Photograph courtesy of GNP Crescendo Records

guitars at the forefront, in garage bands organs were often upfront too. After the Beatles broke through in America in 1964 and the British invasion began, a new wave of garage bands emerged for whom British groups such as the Stones, the Who, the Animals, the Yardbirds and the Zombies became the major formative influence.

As with the beat groups, if garage bands aspired to make a record, it was a seven-inch single, not an LP. And if they had a hit, they generally had only one. Typically, the best album format for garage was a compilation of various artists’ singles, and chronicler Lenny Kaye did the style proud when he collected 27 key singles on Nuggets, a double album released by Elektra in 1972 and later expanded into a four-disc CD boxset.

During the mid-1960s, there were garage scenes in all sizable US towns and cities, and a particularly strong one in LA – a city entirely made up of suburbs and houses with en-suite garages. LA-based garage bands who charted in 1966 alongside the Seeds included the Leaves (‘Hey Joe’), the Standells (‘Dirty Water’), Love (‘7 and 7 Is’), the Music Machine (‘Talk Talk’) and the Electric Prunes (‘I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)’).

In late 1966 and early 1967, as acid rock emerged in San Francisco, some of the LA bands, such as the Doors and Love, successfully evolved into full-blown, long-form, psychedelic outfits and abandoned the immediacy of singles for albums.

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Garage rock is frequently called proto-punk. But while the energy, simplicity and raw sound of garage resembles punk, garage was never iconoclastic: it did not threaten the status quo, much less promulgate social rebellion. Most garage bands sang about standard teen subjects such as problems with girls, and this being America, cars, and more girls. The handful of girl bands simply flipped the gender coin.

SAXON CAME UP WITH ‘FLOWER MUSIC’ AND ‘FLOWER CHILDREN’ The Seeds were formed in LA

by Saxon, Hooper, Savage and Andridge in 1965. Like the Doors, another vocals/keyboards/guitar/drums quartet, they had no full-time bassist.

In the studio, Harvey Sharpe played the instrument on most of their recordings. Live, Hooper played basslines on a Fender keyboard, much as keyboardist Ray Manzarek added basslines for the Doors.

From the start, Saxon was the dominant personality in the band. Born in 1937, he was older than most LA garage musicians, including Hooper,

Savage and Andridge, most of whom were baby boomers. He also had some previous experience, albeit unsuccessful, in the music business. Most importantly, Saxon was driven: he believed he was a genius and he ached to be a star.

Without undervaluing the contributions of the rest of the band, it was Saxon who brought the magic.

Born Richard Marsh in Salt Lake City, Saxon grew up in a devout Mormon family who hoped he would become a deacon in the church. But in 1958, a convert to secular rock’n’roll, he relocated in LA. He made a few singles as Little Ritchie Marsh before changing his name to Sky Saxon. Prior to the Seeds, he formed the Electra-Fires and Sky Saxon & the Soul Rockers.

The Seeds’ first break came in autumn 1965, when they were signed by GNP. It was an unlikely signing. Gene Norman had founded GNP (which stood for Gene Norman Presents) to release recordings of his jazz concerts, much as his near-contemporary, fellow jazz-promoter Norman Granz had founded Clef and Norgran. GNP was best known for albums by swing, bop and post-bop artists such as Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown, Gerry Mulligan, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington.

In the liner notes for the Seeds’ reissued debut album, Norman is quoted as saying: “I enjoyed the intensity of the Seeds. Besides, they were very original for the time. Not only the long hair, but the music was different. It was a long way from what I originally worked with… But the important thing about music is sincerity. I understood that they really believed in what they were doing.

Everybody else had turned them down.”

From their first single, 1965’s ‘Can’t Seem To Make You Mine’, onward, Norman supported the Seeds’ wish to record only original material.

The Seeds’ second break came in the summer of 1966, when they became the quasi-house band at Bido Lito’s, a small but scene-setting basement club on Cosmo Alley off LA’s Sunset Strip.

It was also a home to Love and the Doors. ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’, originally released in 1965, when it made little impact, was successfully rereleased on the back of the Bido Lito’s residency.

It was during this period that Saxon came up with the expressions “flower music” and “flower children”. In a

MUSIC | The Seeds contemporary interview on LA radio station KBLA, he said: “Flower music is today. Society’s great but we’ve had a lot of wars in the past. I’d rather see happiness. Flower music means flower children, flower girls, it means be happy, it means love, it means colours. Flowers are really groovy.” Around this time, the Seeds began to take their stage presentation more seriously. Saxon had already adopted the capes that would later become part of his increasingly biblical appearance, augmented by robes and a long beard. Hooper, and for a while Andridge, favoured a dandifiedhighwaymen look. Savage gave a nod to his Native American roots.

The Seeds were at their commercial peak during the first half of 1967, until Saxon shot them in the foot with Future. A fourth album, A Full Spoon of Seedy Blues, released in November 1967 and credited to the Sky Saxon Blues Band, featured the Seeds alongside members of Muddy Waters’ band, including its guitarist, Luther Johnson, and harmonica player, George Smith.

It had been recorded a year earlier and had liner notes by Waters, who had been introduced to Saxon by Love’s Arthur Lee. But if Saxon hoped Full Spoon would ride the blues-rock wave led by Paul Butterfield and John Mayall, like he had intended Future to ride psychedelia, the move failed. Again, the album neither convinced the Seeds’ core audience nor found them a new one. A fifth LP, the last released by the original line-up, was the faux-live Raw & Alive: The Seeds in Concert at Merlin’s Music Box (1968), which recaptured some of the vitality of The Seeds and A Web of Sound. But by then it was too late.

The rise of acid rock was a key factor in the fall of the Seeds. Alec Palao, speaking from his home in El Cerrito, California, says: “The Seeds began to be seen as dumbed-down teenybopper rock in comparison. And to be fair, Rolling Stone [the mouthpiece of the new music] was getting started just as Sky started doing what he did best – indulging himself. By the time they did the ‘live’ album, they’d sort of lost momentum. They’d dissipated that huge following they had on the West Coast. And then there is the Lord Tim factor, too. There is only so much hype the media can take and he hyped them past the stratosphere.”

Lord Tim Hudson, who the Seeds took on as their manager in late

The Seeds on the 9th Street West TV show, Los Angeles, 1965 Photograph courtesy of GNP Crescendo Records

November 1966, had a colourful cameo-role in the Seeds’ story. Born in Prestbury, Cheshire, Hudson relocated to the US in 1965. A motor-mouthed hustler, he appointed himself a British lord and reinvented himself as a close friend of the Beatles. His first gig was with San Diego radio station KCBQ, reporting on a Beatles tour. Back in England in the 1980s, Hudson was for a short while the manager of Ian Botham, and, says Palao, was the spinner behind the cricketer’s spell in the tabloids as a weed smoker.

As the Seeds’ manager, Hudson began well, working radio and TV stations with his finger hard down on the flower-music button. Less promisingly, he persuaded the band to look more groomed. “I called it going plastic,” says Savage in Pushin’ Too Hard. “Cut your hair, clean up your act, look the same as everybody else.

I thought that was a big sell out.”

Hudson was “the biggest mistake we ever made”, says road manager Richard France a few minutes later. “We were going to sign with the Beach Boys’ management but we signed, got stuck with, Lord Tim instead.”

“Hudson’s is a hilarious story,” says Palao. “He wrote a book about it [From the Beatles to Botham, published in 1990]. He writes about how he

discovered the Moody Blues, hung out with the Beatles, how he moved to America and was a top radio DJ, discovered the Seeds, and was meant to marry Dean Martin’s daughter – as though Dean Martin would allow this longhaired British idiot in his coterie – and so on. He was kind of an overbearing guy from what I understand, and he basically wore out his welcome with a lot of radio station programmers. He did a bunch of other things in LA, like run a restaurant, and then he went back to Manchester and in the 1980s resurfaced in the media as Ian Botham’s manager.

He was the one behind the Bothamsmokes-a-joint story. He bought himself a peerage so he could genuinely call himself a lord and he married a rich American. I think he flits between Palm Springs and Manchester today.

“He’s not in the movie because when I approached him he wanted total creative control, half a million dollars up front, etc. And as I started talking to people who were actually around the band at the time, it became clear he was as responsible for the band’s demise, at least in the record-buying public’s eyes, as anything else. Every email he sent me, he’d have this line at the bottom – I have a New York lawyer – like a veiled threat. I decided it wasn’t > 177

Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1965 Photograph courtesy of Daryl Hooper

Performing at the Magic Mountain Music Festival, Mount Tamalpais, California, 1967 Photograph John Goddard

worth it. And after reading his book, I realised what he had to say was just overblown and it was all him and Sky. The ultimate professional Englishman.”

Hudson’s time as manager – which lasted until February 1968 – coincided with the break-up of the original quartet, which Hooper says was caused

by Saxon’s habitual use of acid. “Sky fried his brain,” says Hooper, on the phone from his home near Sacramento.

“That’s what broke up the group. There were other things, like problems with the management. We might have been able to get through that. But we couldn’t deal with Sky after a while.

He was too far out for the rest of us.

He kept going off on tangents. Talking to him was like trying to reason with a six year old. Plus he kept trying to bring other musicians in. And we had a sound, so we didn’t like that at all.”

Tensions in the band were worsened

by Saxon’s decision to cut back on live work. His songwriting royalties meant he could survive without going on the road, while the rest of the band relied on touring for a large part of their income. Andridge and Savage quit in 1968/69. Hooper followed a year or so later, after playing on the Kim Fowleyproduced single ‘Fallin’ Off the Edge of My Mind’/‘Wild Blood’, the last one on GNP, and a couple of singles released by MGM in 1970.

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“Then Sky got into a cult,” says Hooper. “I wasn’t really in touch with him after that. I didn’t see him again for years. I became a music teacher. He might have called me a couple of times, but he’d become too weird for me.”

Saxon retreated to his Malibu home, hosting 24/7 bacchanals, but lost the

‘SKY’S IN THE BACK OF THE BUS WITH ARTHUR LEE GETTING STONED ON WHATEVER’ house around 1970 when he was hit by the Internal Revenue Service for years of unpaid income taxes. He then became a full-time member of a spiritual commune called the Source Family, based in the Hollywood Hills. The commune was led by a restauranteur from Hollywood called Jim Baker, who had given himself the new names Father Yod and YaHoWha,

and who gave Saxon the name Sunlight.

In 1973, Baker sold his restaurant and moved the commune to Hawaii. Saxon went with them. Baker died in a hanggliding accident in 1975, but Saxon remained associated with the Source Family – which as cults go seems to have been a benign one – until his own death.

In 1989, Saxon, Hooper, Savage and Andridge briefly reunited as the Seeds. “Some promoter managed to talk us all into getting back together,” says Hooper, “and we did a little sevenday mini-tour. It was great playing to audiences again. But it brought up all the bad stuff too. Sky’s in the back of the bus with Arthur Lee and they’re just getting stoned on whatever, and he’s being late for everything. So there was no way I was going to get back into all that again. The mini-tour was enough. And then at the end of it, we didn’t get paid. Well, luckily, we’d got half the money up front but that barely covered the expenses. It was typical.

I enjoyed playing for audiences, but all the other BS that was going on, no.”

In 2008, Saxon lived for a few months in London’s Camden Town, still trying to revive his career and hanging out at Out on the Floor, Michael Marshall’s record shop in Inverness Street, and the Good Mixer, a nearby pub where Amy Winehouse

MUSIC | The Seeds

Daryl Hooper, Jan Savage, Rick Andridge and Sky Saxon, 1967 Photograph courtesy of GNP Crescendo Records

and the Libertines were regulars. Later that year, he collaborated on new songs and recordings with the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.

On 25 June 2009, Saxon died of heart and renal failure in a hospital in Austin, Texas. At the time of his death, he was about to join a US package tour featuring reformed versions of the Seeds, Love and the Electric Prunes.

In July, members of the Smashing Pumpkins, Love and the Electric Prunes performed a tribute concert at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.

Saxon was not someone you would necessarily choose to get stuck in a lift with, but he is remembered fondly by the people who knew and worked with him. He was a one-off, he had charisma, and everyone says he was a kind and gentle person. And, despite a lot of ridicule, he stuck to his sociospiritual beliefs. “Someone told me earlier that we were ahead of our time and I think we really were,” he said in a 2008 interview. “And I think that maybe I wrote all those songs, or channelled them, back then so they

could be used now as some kind of ammunition. Like Bush is getting 3,000 new war planes. I don’t know what he’s gonna do with them, bomb the earth?

Well, I hope not, but what I think is that, if he’s building 3,000 warplanes, then I’m just gonna write 3,000 songs.”

“To some, Sky was the archetypal rock’n’roll loony, continuing to flog a dead horse,” says Des Barres in Pushin’ Too Hard. “To others, he was a psychedelic prophet who lived to share his message of love and peace with the world. Either way, there will only ever be one Sky Saxon.”

Rick Andridge died in 2011.

Daryl Hooper still teaches music and recently began performing with the revived 1960s garage band the Chocolate Watchband, in which Alec Palao plays bass. Jan Savage lives in Oklahoma and advises on Native American affairs in the region.

How does Hooper account for the revival of interest in the Seeds?

“I’m finding out that a lot of it has just kind of been there,” says Hooper. “And younger people are discovering that

there is some great music from the 1960s. I think they’re tired of what’s out there, it’s so contrived. And the way it’s recorded, tiny bits at a time which you glue together on a computer. When the Seeds recorded we were playing live in the studio. It was the real thing. Sure, you got a few takes, a few chances, you might do an overdub or two, but it was basically live. I think that’s the attraction and I think that’s why it’s lived on for so long.”

Palao agrees. “What hurt the Seeds at the time is also, I think, what has given them their longevity.

That minimalist school may not have fit in with the long jams and the way music was getting more complicated in the late 1960s, but as time has passed, those qualities have become increasingly attractive.”

Pushin’ Too Hard, a documentary about the Seeds, screens in the UK in late summer. A recording of the film’s soundtrack is out in early spring pushintoohard.com acerecords.co.uk 179

STYLE

Ryan wears jacket by Baracuta; jeans by Nudie Jeans; sweater by Ben Sherman; trainers by Converse. James wears coat by Our Legacy; jeans by Nudie Jeans; sweater by Sunspel; boots

by David Preston Shoes. Sid wears coat by Tiger of Sweden; jeans by Blk Dnm; shirt and tie by John Varvatos; shoes, model’s own. Jake wears coat

by Baracuta; jeans by Nudie Jeans; sweater by John Smedley.

Cupids

Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Production Victoria Pugh Cupids are a four-piece band from Oldham, Greater Manchester. The group is composed of Sid Cooper (guitar and vocals), Ryan Comac (bass and vocals), Jake Fletcher (guitar and vocals) and James Cardus (drums). After a successful tour in October, Cupids recently released two singles, ‘Money’ and ‘A Study in Extremes’.

Cupids perform at the Deaf Institute, Manchester, on 19 December, followed by a string of UK gigs in January and February. thedeafinstitute.co.uk cupidsband.com

181

Ryan wears coat by Mackintosh; jeans by Nudie Jeans; sweater

by Ben Sherman.

182

STYLE | Cupids

Jake wears coat by Mackintosh; sweater by John Smedley. Sid wears jacket by Maison KitsunĂŠ; sweater by John Varvatos.

183

Jake wears jacket and sweater by John Varvatos.

184

STYLE | Cupids

James wears coat by Wooyoungmi; sweater

by Sunspel.

STYLE | Cupids

Jake wears coat by APC; sweater

by John Smedley. James wears coat

by Wooyoungmi; sweater by Sunspel.

Ryan wears coat by Won Hundred; trousers by Tiger of Sweden; sweater

by Ben Sherman; hat by Lock&Co. Sid wears coat by Soulland; sweater by John Varvatos.

187

HISTORY

Paul Robeson

Steve McQueen. Here I Stand. The Rhondda Valley. McCarthyism. Othello.

Words Chris May

Once a hero whose name was known to millions, the African American singer, actor and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson has become almost a footnote in history. For many people today he is remembered only for his definitive recording of Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River’, from the musical Show Boat, in which he took a principal role on stage and screen. But Robeson’s tireless campaigning against racism, and for the rights of all working people, has been mostly forgotten outside activist circles. From the late 1920s to the 1950s, to the increasing detriment of his career, Robeson combined his professional life in Hollywood and on West End and Broadway stages with sustained, high-profile, political agitation. Based in Britain for much of the time from 1929 to 1939, he marched in south Wales in solidarity with unemployed miners, with whose communities he established a life-long bond, and gave morale-boosting concerts for anti-fascist fighters on the front line of the Spanish Civil war.

Robeson made the first of several visits to the Soviet Union in 1934 and spoke glowingly of his experiences there. He was never a member of the Communist Party, but his enemies routinely labelled him one. In 1949, he was hauled before the notorious US senator Joseph McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where, despite the probable consequences, he refused to take refuge in his right to silence under the US constitution’s 188

Fifth Amendment. He was instead openly contemptuous of his interrogators. Following the hearing, he had his passport revoked, was blacklisted in Hollywood for five years, and only regained his passport in 1958, by which time his health and his career had both been fatally undermined. For all this and more, Robeson remains a hero.

Less palatably, Robeson was also an uncritical supporter of the Soviet Union’s mass-murdering leader Joseph Stalin. He refused to withdraw his allegiance even after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the revelations made about his excesses by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. More about this later.

After decades in the doldrums, Robeson’s profile is set to rise again.

At an awards ceremony for 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen announced that his next film would be a biopic about Robeson. McQueen is developing the movie in collaboration with the veteran civil rights campaigner, singer and actor Harry Belafonte – who, like Robeson, put his political principles before his career and also suffered the consequences.

Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on 9 April 1898, the youngest of five children. There was little in his childhood and teenage years to suggest the campaigning life that was to come with adulthood, although his parents’ backgrounds and family history

prepared the ground. His father was a runaway slave and his mother came from a Quaker family that had taken an active role in the fight against slavery. His maternal great-greatgrandfather, Cyrus Bustill, was, in 1787, a founder member of the Free African Society, the first African American mutual-aid organisation.

Academically and athletically gifted, in 1915 Robeson won a scholarship to New Jersey’s prestigious Rutgers University, only the third African American to be admitted. He graduated with honours and excelled in the college’s football, baseball and basketball teams. He later wrote that his teammates in the football squad “tried to kill” him, dislocating his shoulder, tearing away his fingernails and breaking his nose. In his autobiography, Here I Stand, published in 1958, Robeson said that he dealt with this by remembering his father’s advice that “I had to show that I could take whatever they handed out… That this was part of our struggle”.

After graduation, Robeson studied law at Columbia Law School from 1919 to 1923, and went on to work in a lawyers’ office. He left after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. “I never take dictation from niggers,” she said. Rather than find a job with another law firm, Robeson decided to become a professional actor and singer, pursuits that he had had experience of in college and community dramatic societies. >

189

Paul Robeson and Dr John ET Camper protesting at Ford’s Theatre, Baltimore, Maryland, 1948 Photograph Paul Henderson

It was a good move. Robeson had innate performing talent and powerful stage charisma, and his career took off rapidly. In 1924, he landed the lead role in a New York production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

In 1925, he appeared in his first movie, the African American director Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul. Later that year, he made his first visit to London, where he got rave reviews for his performance in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. By the late 1920s, Robeson was big box office in Britain and in the US. In 1930, he took the title role in a West End production of Othello, opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona. When Robeson took the role to New York, the production ran for nearly 300 performances, making it the longest-running Shakespeare play in Broadway history.

As Robeson’s star rose, his stand against racism and promotion of social justice became more entrenched.

In 1928, he took a principal role in a British production of the musical Show Boat, during which he famously changed a line in ‘Ol’ Man River’ from “I’m tired of living and scared of dying” to the more defiant “I must keep fighting until I’m dying”. During his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, 190

he told the press, “Here I am not a negro, but a human being for the first time in my life... I walk in full human dignity.” He went on to say that “the power of the Soviet Union will become an important factor in aiding the colonial liberation movement”.

‘HERE I AM NOT A NEGRO BUT A HUMAN BEING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE’ Later in 1934, Robeson donated his earnings from two theatre productions to support Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany, which was then still being hailed as a “bulwark against communism” by right-wing politicians and anti-semites in Britain.

In 1937, at a Paris rally in support of

anti-fascist volunteers fighting in Spain, he said, “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice.” In 1939, in New York, he took the lead part in the radio premiere of Earl Robinson’s Ballad For Americans, a cantata that dared to celebrate the multi-racial composition of the US. Robeson began his association with the coal workers of South Wales while he was in Show Boat in 1928, after meeting a group of unemployed miners who had marched to London to draw attention to the hardships endured by themselves and their families.

He visited South Wales many times between 1929 and 1939, giving benefit concerts in Cardiff, Neath and Swansea.

“I first understood the struggles of white and negro together,” Robeson wrote in his autobiography, “when I went down into the coal mine in Rhondda Valley and lived amongst them.” In 1938, he visited the front line in the Spanish Civil War. Later that year, he sang to the 7,000 people who attended the Welsh International Brigades Memorial at Mountain Ash to commemorate the Welsh volunteers who had fought and died in Spain.

Robeson told the audience, “I am here because I know that these fellows

HISTORY | Paul Robeson fought not only for me but for the whole world. It is my duty to be here.”

In 1939, he starred in Pen Tennyson’s film The Proud Valley, about a black miner moving to South Wales.

When the second world war ended in 1945, Robeson became increasingly marginalised in the US. His opposition to racism had already made him a hate figure in the ‘yellow press’ (the contemporary term for sensationalist tabloids), and his statements in support of the Soviet Union fanned the flames.

With the end of the second world war, the Soviet Union, once lauded as a brave ally, was, almost overnight, vilified as an enemy. The ‘Red Scare’ was emerging, Robeson was named ‘The Kremlin’s Man in America’, and Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were beginning their rise to infamy.

As the Cold War heated up, Robeson – conveniently both black and red – made a perfect hate figure for the rightwing, white establishment in the US. Following his attendance at the Soviet-sponsored 1949 Peace Conference in Paris, 85 of Robeson’s upcoming US concert hall performances were cancelled and two interracial outdoor concerts in Peekskill, New York, were attacked by racist mobs.

State police stood by and watched, refusing to intervene. Robeson responded by saying, “I’m going to sing wherever the people want me to sing and I won’t be frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else.”

Robeson’s passport was revoked by the US government in 1950. For eight years he was unable to travel or work abroad. During this time, he studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein to discuss the prospects for world peace, published his autobiography and sang at New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 1953, he held a concert at Peace Arch Park on the US-Canadian border, singing to a gathering of around 40,000 people. In 1957, he made a radiophone broadcast from New York to a conference of Welsh miners. He made his last concert tour in 1960, to New Zealand and Australia.

In worsening health, Robeson retired from public life in 1963.

Unable to attend a Carnegie Hall tribute concert on his 75th birthday, he sent a recorded message declaring: “I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide

Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Robeson in Othello at the Savoy Theatre, London, 1930

cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood.” He died on 23 January 1976, aged 77, in Philadelphia.

Robeson’s courage in attacking the injustices done to African Americans, and his support of workers’ rights in the US and beyond, is indisputable. But it sits incongruously with his uncritical support of Stalinism. It has been estimated that during Stalin’s 30-year rule, from the mid 1920s until his death in 1953, more than 16 million Soviet citizens died as a result of executions, conditions in the Siberian labour camps, enforced internal displacement, and mass starvation brought about by an agricultural policy designed to eradicate the relatively well-off kulak class of peasant farmers (condemned en masse by Stalin as counter-revolutionaries).

Some commentators have excused Robeson by saying that the worst he was guilty of was naivety. After all, many other western intellectuals, from the 1930s onwards, took the view that Stalin’s ‘so called’ crimes were fictions fomented by hostile elements in the US

and Europe. Other commentators have sought to exonerate Robeson by pointing out that hindsight is a wonderful thing. There is some truth in both defences, but ultimately, neither fully stacks up.

Robeson publicly defended Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, his post-second world war annexation of sovereign eastern European countries, and he and his successors’ brutal suppression of independence movements in those countries during the 1950s and 1960s.

He defended the Soviet army’s crushing of the pro-independence civilian uprising in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. He sought to excuse all this on the grounds that, “during revolutionary times, injustice to some individuals must always be expected, however much to be regretted.” Twenty years earlier, Robeson had remained silent about the 1935-36 Italian occupation of Ethiopia, during which Stalin supplied the invading Italian armoured divisions with petrol, a policy that had led to protest marches in Harlem. > 191

Paul Robeson in a film production of the Eugene O’Neill play The Emperor Jones, 1933 Photograph Edward Steichen

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HISTORY | Paul Robeson

Peggy Seeger and Paul Robeson singing in Trafalgar Square, London, 1960

To Robeson’s credit, during a 1948 visit to Moscow he made attempts to investigate Stalin’s treatment of Soviet Jews, a disproportionate number of whom he knew had been executed or sent to the Siberian gulags. At a Moscow concert he sang, in Yiddish, ‘Zog Nit Kaynmal’, the resistance song of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation of the second world war.

On arrival back in the US, however, Robeson told journalists that the Soviet Union had “done everything” to uphold the rights of its ethnic minorities. In a posthumously published essay, he wrote that public criticism of anti-semitism in the Soviet Union would play into the hands of its enemies in the US, who were seeking “an excuse to launch a nuclear attack on the Russian people”.

As noted, Robeson was not alone among Soviet sympathisers for his refusal to see, much less to acknowledge, any failings in Stalinism. In a way, his position was analogous to the support many Africans gave to Ugandan president Idi Amin in the 1970s. They were prepared to put aside, or disbelieve, Western media reports of Amin’s tyranny because he stood up to Britain and other one-time colonialist governments. Fela Kuti even put a photo of Amin on the back cover of his 1975 album Everything Scatter, alongside those of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sékou Touré,

as one of his African heroes. But Kuti soon saw the light, having witnessed the realities of life in a Soviet puppet regime on a visit to East Berlin in 1978.

Ultimately, none of this detracts from Robeson’s personal bravery and achievements in fighting racism in the US and elsewhere. But it is part of the bigger picture and can’t be

‘THE ARTIST MUST ELECT TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM OR FOR SLAVERY. I HAVE MADE MY CHOICE’ ignored. How rounded a portrayal Steve McQueen’s movie about Robeson turns out to be remains to be seen, but the director is not known for brushing over awkward facts.

McQueen first became aware of Robeson when he was 14 years old. A neighbour used to give him books and magazine articles he thought might be of interest, and one day put a cutting

about Robeson through the letterbox.

“It was about this black guy who had been in Wales singing with these miners,” says McQueen. “Not knowing who Paul Robeson was, this black American in Wales, it seemed strange.

So then, of course, I just found out that this man was an incredible human being. His life and legacy was the film I wanted to make the second after Hunger [McQueen’s 2008 movie about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands]. But I didn’t have the power then, I didn’t have the juice.”

McQueen has made Robeson the subject of a previous artefact, 2012’s End Credits. The camera scrolls through documents detailing the FBI’s persecution of Robeson, while a voiceover reads out excerpts. The art critic Adrian Searle described it as “a chilling record of the exercise of power, and Robeson’s equally concerted effort to fight against it”.

Paul Robeson’s posthumous recognition is long overdue.

Submissions for the Paul Robeson Awards, a competition for aspiring filmmakers who represent the African-American and African diaspora, are open for the Newark Black Film Festival 2016 until 26 February newarkmuseum.org Director Steve McQueen is currently working on a biopic about Paul Robeson 193

BULLETIN

Jacket by Grenfell for Bluebird; trousers by Brooks Brothers; sweater by John Smedley.

Grenfell

Photographs Horst Friedrichs Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore Artist and Photographer Chris Hogg chrishoggphotography.com Car 1954 Austin-Healey 3000 courtesy of Graeme Hogg

In 1924, English motorist Malcolm Campbell set his first land speed record at 146.16mph. This was one of nine times he would break the record in his lifetime – also breaking the water speed record four times. With every record he broke, Campbell did so in blue cars or boats all named Bluebird.

Aside from a world class racer, Campbell was also a dandy and favoured cloth made by the British brand Grenfell, founded in 1923.

Produced from a close-woven cotton twill, the fabric was designed to withstand wet and cold weather 194

– initially made for the explorer and missionary doctor Sir Wilfred Grenfell. Its resistant material was perfectly suited to Campbell’s exploits as a racer, as it would help repel wind and water while he was travelling at high speeds.

For its spring/summer 2016 relaunch, Grenfell has created a collection inspired by Campbell, in collaboration with the Campbell family and Bluebird. Many of the garments in the 12-piece collection, such as the record suit, car coat or field jacket, come in the same shade of ‘Bluebird

Blue’. The clothing has been made at Grenfell’s east London factory from the brand’s proprietary cloth – a 600 thread count cotton gabardine.

The Grenfell for Bluebird collection will continue in future seasons, taking further inspiration from the career of Malcolm Campbell as well as his son, Donald, who broke eight world speed records on water and land in the 1950s and 1960s. grenfell.com

Jacket by Grenfell for Bluebird; trousers

by Carhartt WIP; sweater

by Ben Sherman; trainers

by Converse.

195

SPOTLIGHT

Postal Union Congress £1 stamp, designed by Harold Nelson, United Kingdom, 1929. Courtesy of Stanley Gibbons King Edward VIII, designed by Eric Gill, United Kingdom, 1937

Stamps Words Chris May

Does any other song evoke the pain of parted lovers better than ‘Please Mr Postman’, a number one hit for Motown’s Marvelettes in 1961?

“Wait! Oh yes wait a minute Mister Postman/Wait! Wait Mister Postman/ Please Mister Postman look and see/Is there a letter in your bag for me/Please, please Mister Postman/Why’s it taking such a mighty long time/Since I heard from that boyfriend of mine/There must be some word today/From my boyfriend so far away/Please Mister Postman look and see/Is there a letter a letter for me/I’ve been standing here waiting Mister Postman/So patiently/ For just a card or just a letter/Saying he’s returning home to me… So many days you passed me by/You saw the tears standing in my eye/You wouldn’t stop to make me feel better/By leaving me a card or a letter.”

In the analogue age, songs dealing with love as seen through the prism of the postal service were common fare. Letters had mojos. People wrote or received them every day, sharing emotions as well as information. The year after the Marvelettes’ success, ‘Return to Sender’ was a hit single for Elvis Presley and the genre carried on 196

plucking at heart strings until the rise of digital communications in the 1990s.

Wilco’s ‘Box Full of Letters’, in 1995, was among the last, classy examples.

Hitting the send button on an email doesn’t have quite the same magic.

Before the information revolution, children learnt about history, geography, flora and fauna, and first felt the romance of distant cultures, by collecting stamps, so beginning an often lifelong fascination with them.

Governments used stamps to encourage patriotism and promote nationhood, publicise policies, celebrate national achievements or support charitable causes. But today, children rarely write letters or, in Britain, collect stamps, and governments rely on other platforms for propaganda.

Like movies shot on film stock or physical methods of music distribution, the long-term survival of stamps as functional objects is under threat. As part of a fightback begun by postal authorities around the world, the US Postal Service recently published statistics showing that letter writing is a more secure form of communication than email. But such actions won’t turn the tide. Meanwhile,

the letter writing that continues to exist is increasingly being facilitated by franking machines rather than stamps.

The history of postage stamps is relatively short. The modern postal system began in 1840, when Britain issued the world’s first stamp, the Penny Black. Postal reformer Rowland Hill convinced the government that the existing system, in which the recipient paid a charge based on distance, was no longer fit for purpose. With the introduction of Hill’s stamps, the sender prepaid a charge based on weight. Other countries were quick to follow – among the first were Brazil in 1843 and the US in 1847.

The content, design and production of stamps have changed radically since the 1840s. Along with their price, early stamps typically showed pictures of ruling monarchs or presidents; historical anniversaries and national heroes followed in the late 19th century; haute-bourgeois culture was introduced in the first half of the 20th century, popular culture in the second half. Production methods have followed advances in printing. Early stamps were made from engravings; modern stamps can use die-cuts or even holograms. >

‘15 years of Space Age: Humans’, Russia, 1972

Soviet Union stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the USSR/Mozambique Treaty and 25th anniversary of the founding of the Mozambique Liberation Front, Russia, 1987

Polish stamp commemorating the Moscow Olympics, 1980

United Nations stamp, 1976

‘Talking stamp’, Bhutan, 1972.

Courtesy of Stanley Gibbons

World’s first cork stamp designed by João Machado, Portugal, 2007

Tom of Finland stamp, Finland, 2014

The craftsmanship needed to design and print stamps is often underestimated, but it is comparable to that of the miniature portraitists of the 17th and 18th centuries, who packed a world of beauty, nuance and detail into a space often no bigger than a thumbnail. Early stamp designs used one or two colours, serif typefaces and ornate frames; designs using lighter colours, sans serif faces and streamlined frames followed in the mid-20th century; stamps using the full palette of colours and custom typography are now standard. Designs themselves have been influenced by art movements since the late 19th century. Arts and crafts, art nouveau, art deco, social realism and futurism have all inspired stamp design as, more recently, has pop art. Leading artists, sculptors, illustrators and typographers have designed stamps, including, in Britain, Eric Gill, Arnold Machin and David Hockney. Most world-ranking artists and craftsmen, 198

from Émile Gallé and Peter Carl Fabergé to Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, have had their artefacts reproduced on stamps.

The world is definitely ready for a Grayson Perry-designed series of stamps, and if that happy day arrives, Perry won’t be the first maverick to have been employed by the congenitally cautious committees responsible for commissioning. Gill aside – it is unlikely that the civil servants who commissioned him in 1937 had any inkling of his sexual proclivities – the most idiosyncratic was probably the American Burt Todd, who set up Bhutan’s stamp-issuing programme in the 1950s. Bhutan’s stamps were intended to raise money for the improvement of the country’s infrastructure, after the World Bank refused to give a loan. Todd had no experience of selling stamps on the international collectors’ market and so relied on unusual ideas to generate

publicity. His most famous innovation was a range of ‘talking stamps’, miniature records that could be played on a record player. Other Todd novelties included 3D printing, scented stamps, sculptural stamps and stamps printed on silk or steel foil.

As the generations who wrote letters and used stamps pass away, the days of collecting, too, may be numbered. Not that Stampex, Britain’s twice-yearly stamp fair launched in 1953, or Stanley Gibbons, Britain’s leading collectablestamp retailer and auctioneer, are feeling a chill just yet. In the year ended March 2015, Gibbons’ group turnover was £56.5m. Not surprising when you consider the price some stamps can fetch. Last year at Sotheby’s in New York, an 1856 British Guiana OneCent Magenta sold for £5.6m.

Founded in Plymouth in 1856, Gibbons moved to London in 1876, setting up shop in Gower Street, close to the British Museum. In 1891, the shop moved to the Strand, where it continues to be based.

The same year, the company began publishing Gibbons Stamp Monthly.

Gibbons’ valuation catalogues, first published in 1857 and updated annually, are the standard reference books for collectors and traders. Stanley Gibbons stores have recently opened in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Vince Cordell is Gibbons’ director of British philately. Like most of his colleagues, he began collecting stamps as a child. “When I started,” says Cordell, “there were probably stamp clubs in every school.

Today’s children aren’t as interested in collecting as earlier generations were.

You speak to any kid now, if they can’t plug something in, they’re not interested. Some of it is because of the way they teach geography and history today. When I was at school, when you did geography, stamps from around the world were part of the learning process. Now, when my kids do geography, they’re doing surveys of how many people went into a local supermarket.”

Cordell says that the declining interest in stamps among younger generations hasn’t affected Gibbons’ bottom line: “Children don’t have a lot of money to spend, so they have never been a big piece of our business. We

SPOTLIGHT | Stamps

Kosovo, which officially declared independence in 2008, is one of the most recently recognised independent states. This stamp is from 2000

Kangaroo Collector designed by Kim Sung Sil, Republic of Korea, 1975

Pope John Paul II, Vatican City, 1978

deal mostly in older postage stamps, in rarities of what’s already been and gone. Collectors tend to be men of a certain age. And they don’t really like all this new multi-coloured rubbish, they like the classic, simple look of antique stamps. Every year, Gibbons Stamp Monthly runs a reader poll to choose the best stamp designs. And year after year, the best-ever British design is the 1929 Postal Union Congress £1 [showing an imperious George V alongside Saint George fighting the dragon], commemorating the congress in London that year.”

And, Cordell points out, British stamp collecting’s ageing, predominantly male, customer base is not being replicated globally. Big cross-generation and cross-gender markets exist elsewhere. In 2014, it was estimated that there were more than 20 million stamp collectors in China. “At a recent fair in Singapore,

there were loads of women collectors,” says Cordell. “And I’ve done fairs in Delhi and Berlin where they ship

‘THERE ARE MORE THAN 20 MILLION STAMP COLLECTORS IN CHINA’ dozens of coach loads of kids in. It’s unbelievable. At another fair, in Rome, there were lots of young men walking round with their girlfriends on their arms. If that happened over here, if you said to your girlfriend, ‘We’re going to

a stamp show,’ she’d probably give you a slap round the face. The hobby is perceived differently wherever you go.”

And stamps can still stir passions, if not necessarily that of Marvelettestype love. Earlier this year, the US Postal Service announced it would not be issuing any new stamps for Christmas showing a Christian religious figure or symbol. Predictably, headlines such as “Is the Postal Service Declaring War on Religion?” followed in rightwing newspapers and broadcast media.

Stamps as functional objects may be in decline, but as collectable artefacts and investment objects, their future continues to look bright.

Stampex, a fair for stamp dealers and collectors, is at the Business Design Centre, Islington, London N1, 17-20 February thephilatelictraderssociety.co.uk stanleygibbons.com

199

MUSIC

Rumba

Havana. Batá Drums. Santeria. Matanzas.

Words Andy Thomas Portraits Kevin Davies

“It was after listening to Latin records at clubs like Dingwalls, hearing the batá drums and then starting to read about the roots of the music that made we want to go deeper into the traditions,” Stuart Baker, founder of Soul Jazz Records, told me in an interview for Straight No Chaser magazine in 2006. I was talking to Baker about his new series of AfroCuban music, shortly after my own trip to Havana. The DJ spinning the Latin dance records that so inspired Baker at the north London club Dingwalls was Gilles Peterson.

The London DJ and BBC radio presenter first witnessed the power of rumba while playing Latin records to the jazz dancers at Camden’s Electric Ballroom in the early 1980s. “A really important record for me was the Jerry Gonzalez LP Ya Yo Me Curé and his version of ‘Evidence’ by Thelonious Monk,” says Peterson. “And then going to Hitman Records in Lexington Street [in Soho] and getting a lot of salsa records. So that was also a way into rumba, but it really was that Jerry Gonzalez record that stuck with me and still really resonates today.”

Peterson, who founding Brownswood Recordings in 2006, travelled to Cuba in 2008 with Havana Cultura (an initiative for the promotion of contemporary Cuban culture) to produce the LP Havana Cultura: New Cuba Sound. “When I first went to Cuba I hadn’t produced as such.

I’d been working from a different perspective, whether it was as a DJ or on the radio,” says Peterson. “So it was quite challenging for me at first to find my role and gain confidence.

And François Renié from Havana Cultura and [pianist] Roberto Fonseca 200

were really important for me there.”

In 2011, Peterson returned to the legendary Egrem studios in Havana, with co-producers Vince Vella and Sinbad, to record the LP Havana Cultura: The Search Continues. “The idea of these projects was to really unearth new singers, musicians or rappers,” says Peterson.

One of those artists was Daymé Arocena, who earlier this year released the LP Nueva Era, the latest record in the Havana Cultura/Brownswood project. This 22-year-old singer is testament to the continued importance of rumba to the new generation of Cuban artists. “What I love about Arocena is that she is so proud of her rumba heritage and is a real positive ambassador for young Cuban culture,” says Peterson. Like most rumba singers and musicians, Arocena is also deep into her Santeria studies. “At school, I also sang Santeria songs,” she said at the time of her LP’s release. “It’s the official Cuban religion for me; I studied its beautiful energy, all the elements from the sea, the wind and the earth.”

Santeria (or Lucumí) is the syncretic religion that emerged when African slaves in Cuba masked their own orisha spirits through Catholic saints.

Carlos Aldama, founding member of the folkloric ensemble Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, and master of the batá drum, explains the importance of Santeria. It was, he says, “an important element of cohesion, strength, identification, and pride, and has become a philosophical base for black Cubans in their resistance against slavery and then in their later struggle against racism.”

Searching for the deeper spiritual roots of Cuban music on his subsequent

trips to Havana, Peterson found it not in the bars or clubs of Old Havana, but in the neighbourhood rumba parties.

“It was just so powerful, I really thought, this is where it’s at and this is where the soul is. It was like going to an early jungle rave or an Aba Shanti/Jah Shaka sound system,” he says. “To begin with, my trips were pretty much limited by the time I could spend on these projects, so I had to get my head down and just do music. Over the years I was just kind of learning as I was going along, but the one thing that kept calling me was the rumba.

I was hearing it on the side streets and through someone’s window or at some Santeria ceremony I couldn’t access.

It was everywhere. And I started to go to these sessions around Havana and just thought, this is what we should be doing. So I really wanted to find out about the roots of this culture.”

Inspired by his encounters with rumba, Peterson travelled back to Cuba last summer to make a documentary with filmmakers Charlie Inman and Ben Holman. The aim of the film, titled Havana Club Rumba Sessions: La Clave, is to explore the roots of rumba and how the younger generation are updating the ancient traditions.

“It was so important to do this documentary about a subject that really hasn’t been captured on film before,” says Peterson. “If you go onto Youtube or look anywhere really there is very little on rumba. We have only touched the surface, but we’ve had to make sure we report it right and it’s 100 per cent credible.”

As an outsider trying to find out more about Afro-Cuban devotional music and its closely related secular styles, you can often come across >

DJ Gilles Peterson and percussionist Crispin Robinson at Brownswood Recordings Photograph Kevin Davies

201

Congo player Chano Pozo, one of the first Cuban musicians to bring rumba to the US in the 1940s and 1950s

complex and sometimes conflicting information. To help guide Peterson through the spiritual connections of rumba and to open doors to the culture, he invited Crispin ‘Spry’ Robinson (aka Adé Egun) to join him on the trip. Percussionist for Galliano in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Robinson is a deep student of rumba and an Omo Aña, or initiated batá drummer.

Alongside Peterson’s Cuban guide Daymé Arocena, Robinson was vital to the success of the project. “Crispin was incredible. I knew he was absolutely into the culture hard and had basically changed his whole life to follow his babalawo [priest] instincts,” says Peterson. “He has spent years over there, learning and actually becoming a leader in the art and music. And he was the reason this whole thing was possible. He took us to places we would never have got into. It’s quite a closed society, particularly the Santeria side.

And it was really important to report it well and report it right, and this would never have happened without him.”

Rumba is secular music but it’s inseparable from Santeria and the other Afro-Cuban spiritual practices of Abakuá and Palo. “It’s almost unthinkable that anyone heavily involved in rumba wouldn’t have strong affiliations to one or more Afro-Cuban religious traditions,” says Robinson.

“Of all the top rumba groups now, almost everyone is initiated into one of the religious traditions. Lucumí [Santeria] is probably more widespread than Palo or Abakuá but they all 202

overlap. It’s not like you have to choose one or the other. It’s very porous. But these traditions are so deep and take so much time to master in order to lead a ceremony, or lead the drumming or singing, that people tend to focus mainly on one.” It’s not unusual then to find a rumbero doing a street dance session one day and then their religious music the next. So, as Peterson says,

‘EVERYTHING YOU HAVE INSIDE YOU AS A HUMAN, YOU EXPRESS THROUGH THE DRUM SKINS’ “The influence of the sacred spreads throughout rumba.”

The roots of rumba in Cuba run deep. “I don’t think there is any other music that is as embedded in the soul of its people as rumba,” says Peterson.

It’s been that way for well over a hundred years. “The rumba, with its intricate cross rhythms, started to take shape in the 19th century in Matanzas,” wrote Isabelle Leymarie in her book

Percussionist Carlos Aldama, co-founder of rumba ensemble Conjunto Folklorico Nacional de Cuba, and artist Umi Vaughan

Cuban Fire. “Then at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid societies often made up of rumberos, among them Los Congos de Angunga, La Violencia, Los Colombianos, and the famed Bando Azul competed with each other in Matanzas.”

So, to get to the roots, Peterson and Robinson travelled 70 miles from Havana to Matanzas, the port town where rumba was born with the arrival of the slave ships. In Matanzas they met Arocena and Diosdado Ramos Cruz, from one of the most famous rumba groups, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. While in Matanzas they caught a backstreet rumba session, where the homemade cajón drums were a reminder of rumba’s beginnings and the improvisation that is at its heart.

As Domingo Pau from Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba explains in the film: “In colonial times, black people weren’t allowed to play drums for fear it would cause slave mutinies, so they played on boxes.” The rumba played in the courtyards of Matanzas is markedly different to the furious music we heard at sessions in Havana. “The rumba from Matanzas is very gentle,” explains Diosdado Ramos Cruz. This was just one of many revelations for Peterson during his trip. “I had no idea of these differences before I got there,” he says. “That is where it was so brilliant, because you just start noticing these subtle differences of it all. For example, the way it’s a lot slower in this small port town – if Havana is London then Matanzas is Bristol.”

MUSIC | Rumba The three styles of rumba found in both Havana and Matanzas are guaguanco, yambu and columbia.

As we see in the documentary, each style is built around the rhythmic pattern of the clave. “This is the key, it’s what keeps everyone locked in time,” explains Peterson. These two sticks are believed to have originated from pegs discarded from the slave ships. “The clave can neither be given nor bought. One is born with it, it is a question of feeling,” said the great conguero Carlos ‘Patato’ Valdes. But it is the interlocking African rhythms of the different drums that give this music its spiritual power. “All the drumming in Cuba comes from the sacred [African] drum music,” says Robinson. “A lot of the drum rhythms used are based on language. Yoruba is a tonal language so the drums imitate the melodic contours of speech. So in Nigeria [part-home to the Yoruba people], if the drums start to play an orisha [Yoruba spirit] praise poem then everyone would recognise and respond to it. That’s the roots of batá drumming.”

Alongside the traditional three drums used in rumba (the quinto, tumbador and tres dos), many groups today will feature the most sacred of African drums, the batá. “These days nearly all the top rumberos play the batá,” says Robinson. “The batá drums are essentially sacred drums that are played in orisha ceremonies.

And originally that was the only time they were ever played, until the 1970s when Cuban jazz-fusion groups like Irakere started using batá.

“And then it spread out into rumba with people like Pancho Quinto, one of the great rumberos who died about 10 years ago. He started playing batá drums and opening out the rhythmic language of rumba. And now nearly all the drummers in the contemporary groups, from Clave y Guaguancó and Los Muñequitos de Matanzas to Osain del Monte and Rumberos de Cuba who feature in this film, they have all learned batá. They master batá and that gives them this huge palette and aesthetic approach of how to build energy and use timing and all these things. The drum is a very powerful instrument and particularly the batá.”

One of the most poignant moments in the film is in Matanzas, when the crew are shown the first batá drums

Singer Daymé Arocena Photograph Kevin Davies

to arrive in Cuba from Africa. “Seeing those sacred drums was incredible,” says Peterson. “It was like finding the holy grail. It was just one of those moments in my life when I thought, how the hell did I get here?” The owner of these sacred batá drums was Kole, a friend of Robinson’s whose great Uncle ‘Chachá’ was one of the founders of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas and the inheritor of these sacred drums.

“When I did my first initiation ceremonies into [the religion] Ifá I did that with Kole, so he’s one of my oldest friends in Cuba,” says Robinson. “I also spent time with Chachá and when he died he passed the drums down to Kole. So I really wanted to show them to Gilles. It also connected to Gilles and his jazz thing; as we discovered making the film, Chano Pozo had played rumba with Chachá in that room.”

Of all the orishas communicated to by the drums, the rum-drinking, music- and dance-loving rebel Changó – god of thunder in Yoruba mythology and owner of the batá drums – is perhaps the most popular. “Changó was actually a historical figure who lived in the 14th century and he was the alaafin [king] of the Oyo Empire,” says Robinson. “The Oyo were very powerful right up until the 19th century, which is why Changó worship spread so far and is powerful everywhere from Cuba to Brazil. But it’s also about male virility, because he’s very flashy and powerful and

connected with the drums, so he’s a favourite with a lot of men. Just like Oshun, the orisha of the river, femininity and fertility – a lot of women love her.” Syncretised with the Catholic Santa Barbara, Changó has been immortalised in many Cuban dance records, including Celina Gonzalez’s ‘Que Viva Changó’ from 1949 and Mongo Santamaria’s 1955 LP Changó.

Throughout La Clave we hear musicians talking about how rumba is the root of all Cuban music. “It’s the tree that all the other genres branch out from,” says Diosdado Ramos Cruz.

But because of its ghetto status, rumba has always been marginalised or misrepresented. For this reason, it has remained underground, despite its huge influence on Cuban music and beyond.

“Rumba singers have had a profound effect upon vocalists such as Machito, Cheo Marquetti, Miguelito Valdés and Benny Moré,” wrote Leymarie in Cuban Fire. And rumba has had a similarly far-reaching impact on 20th-century music outside of Cuba. “I was reading this book recently and it charted the history of music in New York throughout the 20th century,” says Peterson, “and you forget how huge the Latin touch was to the mainstream, whether it was Tito Puente or Pérez Prado. Latin music, once it came in with Chano Pozo in the late 1940s, changed American music of every type.

From the bebop to the big bands, it all goes back to Pozo coming out of Cuba > 203

to America and bringing the rumba.”

And as Robinson says, “All that drum music from Cuba is the source material, it’s the DNA of all the rhythms that came through popular music.”

What was most evident from my own experience of Havana’s rumba parties was how the ancient rituals had been passed down through the generations. In the courtyard of El Gran Palenque one Saturday afternoon, I caught a performance by Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba. As the intense rhythms and the calls of the akpwon (chanters) filled the early evening air, bottles of rum were passed around as devotional grandmothers in white Santeria dresses shared the floor with their Kangol-clad granddaughters.

The next day we headed for Callejón de Hamel, an atmospheric side street in central Havana where rumba sessions go off every Sunday, amongst the art and sculptures of Salvador González. “The first time we went there we saw this really heavy session,” says Peterson. “It was proper for me and that is when I really thought that this is what we should do doing.” One thing that is clear as soon as you hit one of these sessions is that style is something Cubans take very seriously. “There’s some really brilliant old school looks going on, for example with the Jamaican thing,” says Peterson. These parties that take place across the black neighbourhoods of Cuba are truly family affairs – where music, dance and storytelling continue to link modern-day Cubans to their African roots and bind the community together.

Another heavy session we witnessed during our stay in Havana was by Clave y Guaguancó, at the Peña del Ambia’s folkloric gathering Noche de Rumba. Founded more than 50 years ago, Clave y Guaguancó is one of the few rumba groups to receive global recognition, performing at the Womad festival in 2003. During his trip, Peterson visited rumbero vocal legends including Amado Dedeu, director of Clave y Guaguancó, who explains to Peterson how he considers the first rumba songs to be the oldest forms of rap.

Another key figure in promoting the wider recognition of rumba was Gregorio Hernández Ríos, who died in 2012. Better known as El Goyo, he was a founding member and instructor with Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba.

204

In 1998, he featured with Grupo ObaIlú, on the LP Santeria for Soul Jazz.

In the liner notes to Grupo Oba-Ilú’s subsequent 2007 LP for Soul Jazz, Drums of Cuba, El Goyo also provided a fascinating insight into Abakuá. This secret men’s society emerged amongst slaves in Cuba in the mid-19th century, and like Santeria has had a profound impact on its music and culture. “In every rumbero, there’s an Abakuá,” said El Goyo. “Abakuá for me was a place where I could speak and be listened to… where the white who put me down could not enter. There was a lot in it for me spiritually… as well as having brothers who would provide for me.” Peterson got his own taste of the culture in Matanzas through a rooftop session with Javier Campos Martinez and a group of old Abakuá guys. There he learned of the oral traditions of the Abakuá that are the basis of the vocal competition between rumba singers.

‘IT’S THE DNA OF ALL THE RHYTHMS THAT CAME THROUGH POPULAR MUSIC’ As we saw at sessions such as Sabado de la Rumba and at Callejón de Hamel, dance is equally important both spiritually and communally to rumba. “Dance is instrumental in communication between the human and spirit worlds in the beliefs of many religious groups in Cuba,” wrote Yvonne Daniel in her book Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba. “Recreational dance [also] serves to balance difficult daily conditions in a technologically limited and politically isolated society.” In La Clave, Jennyselt Galata Calvo, one of Havana’s leading rumba dancers, explains the connection between the drummers and dancers that make the rumba parties really go off. “It’s all related. Everything you have inside you as a human, you express through

the drum skins,” she says. “As a dancer, it’s the same, you use your body to exemplify all your religious experiences.”

Of the three styles of rumba dance it’s columbia, the competitive solo dance, that really sets the rumba parties on fire. It’s fast and furious with echoes of jazz dance and Chicago footwork.

“It’s an easy comparison to make I guess, but it’s all I’ve really got to go back to because dance is such a big part of our own culture and the whole movement,” says Peterson. “So going back to our roots, dancing has always been such a massively important part of it. And that goes right back to Electric Ballroom, which was very sophisticated in terms of the moves they were coming up with. And it’s a similar thing with the Chicago footwork stuff. So when I was going to these rumba events and I was seeing the dancing going on, I was thinking, it’s just the same as what we’re doing, except it’s the organic root of it all. And for me to watch them battling each other just as they do in the jazz dance sessions – that’s where I saw the parallels.” It’s also a dance movement that is in constant transition thanks to the new generation.

Contemporary young groups are similarly updating the musical traditions, taking rumba from the streets and into the clubs. “When we started to get deeper into this with the filming, I noticed how the younger generation are spinning it their way and reinventing and making it more ghetto and that is fascinating,” says Peterson.

As Robinson has discovered playing alongside these younger rumberos, it’s a music that is in constant transition.

“These guys are into their hip-hop and stuff and are contemporary young men and women, but are also really connected to these really beautiful underground African institutions that have been off grid for a long time,” he says. One of those groups is Rumberos de Cuba. “For me it’s really important that we conserve the fundamental basic rhythms, and on top of that play around a bit,” says their director Rodolfo Chacón in La Clave. “We’re not just doing it like in the 1950s. We’re playing traditional rumba, with a few small innovations, because music is like language, it changes with time. So we’re artists from this time.” Of all the new groups it is the fierce Osain del Monte that are pushing rumba into the most exciting direction. “Yes they

MUSIC | Rumba

Rumba dancers in El Gran Palenque, Havana

are the most powerful and are the ones we really want to get over to the UK, so I’m really gagging to get that organised on the back of this film,” says Peterson.

With groups such as Rumberos de Cuba, Osain del Monte and Timbalaye (also featured in La Clave), rumba is moving on and connecting with the reggaeton generation. It was through these groups that Peterson had the idea to create another strand to the project.

Working with players from across Havana’s rumba scene, he recorded a number of jam sessions at Egrem Studios. “As a record it’s really interesting because it’s a real collaboration between the various different groups,” says Peterson. “We went over all the different rumba circuits, from the more commercial to the street side to the more traditional, and got them together at Egrem, where we recorded with some singers. So it was really great. The other fundamental part of this project is to make a connection between the roots of rumba and to see how that could translate into a dance floor context in 2015.” To do this he has brought

in producers including Motor City Drum Ensemble, Max Graef and Glenn Astro to rework the tracks. “We have got them to reinvent rumba and it’s really interesting what everyone has come up with,” says Peterson. “And I think we’ve got a very good album out of it all based on the jam sessions with all these different rumba groups at Egrem.”

On our travels across Cuba we picked up many cheap CD-Rs from groups we had seen, such as Clave y Guaguancó and Irosso Obba. But as you might expect, the quality of the recordings was often poor and with little background information. Which makes the recording side of this project even more important. “We had tried to bring the rumba into the project before.

For example, on the first album we had a track, ‘La Revolución del Cuerpo’, where we use a rumba group for the rhythm track,” says Peterson. “So I really wanted to catch it, but I found it was really difficult to capture the vibe of the rumba in the studio because it’s a live thing, and a momentary thing.

In fact I don’t think anyone has recorded it that well before. So the

whole idea of the LP was to really put our energy into capturing the real essence of rumba.”

And with La Clave hitting screens across the world early next year, rumba will finally get the exposure it deserves.

“I’m very proud of it and think it’s really balanced between being deep and also explanatory enough for it to be accessible,” says Robinson. “And for people who really know this stuff they will be really pleased. For example, the Abakuá people we meet, they are some of the heaviest guys in Cuba. People who know about this stuff will be blown away. A lot of the people on screen are some of the most important figures in Cuba and in the world for this stuff.

So hopefully we did a good job.”

Havana Club Rumba Sessions: La Clave, a documentary on rumba by Gilles Peterson in collaboration with Havana Cultura, is out in February A compilation of music from the film is out on 12 February gillespetersonworldwide.com havana-cultura.com

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ICON

Fisherman’s Sweater Words Chris May Photograph David Goldman

Although today it has a parallel existence as stylised casual wear, the fisherman’s sweater started life as the most practical of workwear.

The garment began its life in fishing communities in Britain and France around 800 years ago, after Arab craftspeople working in Spain introduced knitting to Europe. It then spread north through the Baltic to Scandinavia, picking up design variations on the way. Mostly made by the mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen, the sweater was also made by fishermen themselves, for whom knitting was a natural extension of the familiar tasks of making and mending nets – jobs that required considerable manual dexterity.

Wherever they were made, traditional fisherman’s sweaters shared some of the same design specifications.

A high neck and long length were the norm, for extra warmth. Some designs were more functionally efficient than others, and the guernsey, also known as the gansey, is the zenith of the genre.

The gansey was first made in Guernsey in the early 16th century, when the Channel Island ports of Guernsey and Jersey were given licences to import wool from England. Ganseys were knitted in thick yarn dyed a distinctive deep blue, later known as navy blue.

Jerseys were made with thinner yarn and in a range of colours. Distinctions have blurred over time, but, in general, ganseys have kept their tough and practical character, while jerseys are more associated with fashion wear.

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The gansey came into its own in the mid-16th century, when, under Elizabeth I, Britain established itself as a global maritime power: if the country was to have an effective navy, its sailors needed warm, waterproof clothing. Elizabeth herself wore ganseys, although hers were heavily embroidered with silk. The traditional working garment acquired a unique set of specifications, some designed to maximise weather-proofing, others to increase safety at work. Tightly spun, five-ply wool, knitted on fine needles and dipped in protective oil, produced a sweater that was virtually wind- and waterproof: well-made ganseys were said to “turn water”. The high-necked collar combined with tight hem and cuffs gave added weatherproofing.

A snug fit reduced the risk of getting tangled in nets and tackle, which could be fatal for the wearer. Sleeves stopped short of the wrists for the same reason.

The gansey was knitted flat and tubular, with the same patterning back and front, so that it could be worn either way round, useful if it had to be thrown on below deck in the dark. Diamondshaped underarm gussets made for ease of movement. Until well into the 20th century, fishermen had two ganseys: one that was rarely washed, so as to retain its weather-proofing oil, to be used at work; while the other was kept for Sunday best.

So functionally focused is the everyday gansey that it might have been invented by Stone Island’s visionary engineer-designer, Massimo Osti, had

he been around in the 16th century.

The garment complies with Osti’s cornerstone belief that form must be wholly dictated by function. So practical was the gansey that in the late 18th century, Horatio Nelson ordered that the garment be issued to all members of the British navy.

The association with the British armed forces continues today: tank and infantry regiments, as well as naval units, include ganseys in their basic kit.

Most fisherman’s sweaters feature cable-knit ribbed patterning: the additional thickness increases the retention of body heat. Traditional patterning, usually incorporating nautical motifs such as ropes, nets, anchors and waves, also gave clues to the origin of each sweater, sometimes indicating the actual parish in which one was knitted. This has led to the probably fanciful idea that motif design was deliberately localised by knitters so that, should a drowned fisherman be washed ashore with his face decayed or eaten away, it would help with the identification of the body. While bodies may on occasion have been identified in this way, it is hard to believe that women in superstitious fishing communities would tempt fate by including such a feature in their menfolk’s clothing. The idea may have originated in a popular Edwardian-era play, Riders to the Sea, by the Irish dramatist JM Synge, in which the body of a dead islander is identified by the hand-knitted stitches on one of his garments.

Scott Ogden, cofounder of Dawson Denim, wears sweater and jeans by Dawson Denim; boots by Red Wing Shoes.

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