Tuesday, October 31, 2006

From C86 to Pete Doherty - How Did We End Up Here?

Everyone loves a good old reminisce, even cynical old musicians and journalists. Every one loves a 'Best Of' list to argue over, Christ knows there are enough of the bloody things on telly and in idea-short magazines (hell, even Socialism stands accused there). People love nothing more than to get all hacked off by what the ‘kids’ are into now, before donning the rose tinted specs and harking back to when music was ‘real’, like it was when they were a bit younger - just witness the current fascination with ‘nu rave’ (a couple of glo-sticks and an airhorn don’t make you rave anymore than long hair and a beard make me Jesus). Nothing drives people backwards through their record collections than a good old-fashioned anniversary. This year, then, is 20th anniversary of C86; basically just the name given to a cassette given away by the NME, though over the years, it’s come to represent the scratchy lo-fi ‘shambling’ bands of that time. Last week alone Manic Street Preacher Nicky Wire talked brilliantly in The Guardian about the impact of C86 on him and his band-mates in the Welsh Valleys in the aftermath of the miners strike, while over at Time Out, Simon Reynolds mused about the scene’s significance today. The phrase that keeps getting bandied about in association with C86 (the cassette and the just reissued, slightly historically revisionist CD version) is “the birth of modern indie music”.

Thing is, how can that be? Has no one noticed that 20 years on, “modern indie music” appears to be pretty much solely the domain of ‘Potty’ Pete Doherty - drug pincushion, tabloid bete noir and troubadour of questionable talent? There he is again, on the front of the papers (the cover of the NME today – again!!!), too busy porking super models to sing in tune, too busy getting fucked up to wipe away the blood and snot from his sallow face, a duet with The Streets documenting – you guessed it - tabloid life and the horrible spiral of drug abuse that befalls famous people with too much money and attention. Old Pete, new record out, another piece of self-pitying 6th form poetry written out in his bed-sit, probably scribbled away in his own blood, whilst he sits there waiting for the next court case where the judges will be too star struck to ever send him down (did anyone else think that last hearing was a pretty terrifying view of our judicial system?)

More amazingly of all in “modern indie music” is Pete’s roll as skag addled pied piper, leading his bastard children up the charts. You name ‘em – any jangly indie band from Razorshite to The Kooks are there in the charts bothering the likes of Girls Aloud and Scissor Sisters and Justin and Christina, actual living breathing pop stars, the kinds of people your mother might have heard of. (NB the abominable likes of Shit Patrol don’t count in any of this as they are basically Deacon Blue twenty years on – actually, possibly thanks to them we’ll be due a Deacon Blue revival soon - cheers you fuckers). Teenage tearaways The View, the perfect example of distilled Doherty, were pictured in the NME snorting vodka, after one of them had previously been pulled in by the cops whilst driving round with Potty Pete in their hometown of Dundee. Compare this kind activity to the bands of the C86 era. The strongest poison you’d imagine people glugging down was a Panda Pop. How can the likes of McCarthy, The Wedding Present, Big Flame, The Shop Assistants, et al - those trusty stalwarts of the Peel show, those carrier bag clutching, fanzine welding ‘indie kids’ - have spawned gnarly old Pete? Bands like McCarthy and Big Flame wore their fiercely leftist politics on their sleeves. These days it seems like no one banging out the indie hits of today seems to give a flying fuck about anything - witness Johnny Borrell's incredible performance at Live 8 - shirts off for the starving Africans, lads!

Quite what the significance of the anniversary of C86 is in 2006, I’m really not sure. Modern ‘indie’ music, from the way I see it, the Pete-and-all-his-imitators version, seems to stem more from the point when Oasis steamrollered everyone, making guitar music the domain of humourless Stone Island clad terrace lads. That’s the point at which ghosts of The Smiths (a band who overshadowed C86’s every step, from bad haircuts to lack of success with women) were finally laid to rest and drug culture became an acceptable part of the mainstream, something no indie band and no figurehead of the rave scene ever managed to do. They made it acceptable to the point that when Noel went to No 10, Tony Blair could joke with him about his preferred stimulants without the Thought Police crashing in to cuff Gallagher senior and march him off to the Tower.

Actually, perhaps that’s the root of modern indie music right there, the point at which Tony and Noel G can laugh about drug abuse in Downing Street, the point that politics and humour and a sense of humility were removed from music, ironically, back there in Blair’s finest hour, the point at which "modern indie music" adapted to this me-me-me, dog eat dog culture we have today. Maybe, while that meeting was going on down in Whitehall in all the bunting of the New Labour victory, somewhere at home in middle England, a teenage Pete Doherty sat taking notes, planning his own self-destruction...

Monday, October 30, 2006

In Other News...

  • That said, it is British Sausage Week so all not lost...
  • We Thought The British Parliament Had It's Problems...

    Rolling Stone continues to rage against the current US administration - great cover piece this issue about how far corruption spreads through Congress. Frankly, this makes for pretty terrifying reading...
  • Inside The Worst Congress Ever
  • Wednesday, October 25, 2006

    Sobering Thought For The Week... "Humans Living Far Beyond Planet's Means" says WWF

    by Ben Blanchard, Reuters via commondreams.org

    BEIJING - Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

    Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.

    "For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

    "If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.

    People in the United Arab Emirates were placing most stress per capita on the planet ahead of those in the United States, Finland and Canada, the report said.

    Australia was also living well beyond its means.

    The average Australian used 6.6 "global" hectares to support their developed lifestyle, ranking behind the United States and Canada, but ahead of the United Kingdom, Russia, China and Japan.

    "If the rest of the world led the kind of lifestyles we do here in Australia, we would require three-and-a-half planets to provide the resources we use and to absorb the waste," said Greg Bourne, WWF-Australia chief executive officer.

    Everyone would have to change lifestyles -- cutting use of fossil fuels and improving management of everything from farming to fisheries.

    "As countries work to improve the well-being of their people, they risk bypassing the goal of sustainability," said Leape, speaking in an energy-efficient building at Beijing's prestigous Tsinghua University.

    "It is inevitable that this disconnect will eventually limit the abilities of poor countries to develop and rich countries to maintain their prosperity," he added.

    The report said humans' "ecological footprint" -- the demand people place on the natural world -- was 25 percent greater than the planet's annual ability to provide everything from food to energy and recycle all human waste in 2003.

    In the previous report, the 2001 overshoot was 21 percent.

    "On current projections humanity, will be using two planets' worth of natural resources by 2050 -- if those resources have not run out by then," the latest report said.

    "People are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources."

    RISING POPULATION

    "Humanity's footprint has more than tripled between 1961 and 2003," it said. Consumption has outpaced a surge in the world's population, to 6.5 billion from 3 billion in 1960. U.N. projections show a surge to 9 billion people around 2050.

    It said that the footprint from use of fossil fuels, whose heat-trapping emissions are widely blamed for pushing up world temperatures, was the fastest-growing cause of strain.

    Leape said China, home to a fifth of the world's population and whose economy is booming, was making the right move in pledging to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent over the next five years.

    "Much will depend on the decisions made by China, India and other rapidly developing countries," he added.

    The WWF report also said that an index tracking 1,300 vetebrate species -- birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- showed that populations had fallen for most by about 30 percent because of factors including a loss of habitats to farms.

    Among species most under pressure included the swordfish and the South African Cape vulture. Those bucking the trend included rising populations of the Javan rhinoceros and the northern hairy-nosed wombat in Australia.

    Tuesday, October 24, 2006

    Boris Yeltsin, clearly not the first or the worst...

    It being A) Tuesday and B) just North of lunchtime, here at Socialism towers our minds are already racing towards the pub - any pub, anywhere. Were this to go to it's logical conclusion, the rest of day/week/month will inevitably be written off in the usual haze of Breton Cider, vodka, packets of Tavern Snacks and rolled up tenners - hence why we're now busy chaining ourselves to our desks until hometime. This is a ritual that happens most days. Anyways, it's good to know that it's not just us caught in this particular maelstrom - hell, in the former Soviet Union, it's clearly been such a problem in the past that there was an entire genre of propaganda posters dedicated to discouraging people from wasting their lives down the boozer, or (much better) with a bottle of white spirits permanently smacked to their lips. This website is an archive of anti pisshead posters - our favourite is the one where the woman appears to have sold her child to buy (admittedly a bloody huge bottle of) booze. Thanks loads to Biddy & Sonny for this link!
  • Bottom's Up; Budem Zdorovy!
  • Monday, October 23, 2006

    I'm The Night Train, Ready To Crash And Burn, I'll Never Learn

    We've all been there - caught short, having to crouch down or whip it out in a dark alleyway after departing the night bus at the wrong stop. Yes, toilet stops sometimes come upon us with no prior warning, just a wave of nausea and desperation like Renton in Trainspotting... that said, this dude seems to be taking things to another level. As part of our on going Honorary Socialists of 2006 survey, this guy is already coming in pretty high and we don't even know his name or his motive. And, let's face it, this story can only get better when it gets to court.
  • A strangled good attitude to the British Rail defecator...
  • Great piece from Entertainment Weekly...

    Owen Gleiberman on the demise of CBGBs last week... this is from www.ew.com...

    "In case you hadn't noticed, the 20th century, after several years on life support, finally expired earlier this week. The beautiful, doddering old century — remember rebellion? punk rock? bohemian dreams? the days when people bought real estate to live instead of living to buy real estate? — died not with a bang or a howl or even a whimper but with a weary shrug of ''Good riddance.''

    I refer, of course, to the closing of CBGB, the greatest and most famous and influential and talked-about rock & roll club in the 50-year history of rock & roll. (Apologies to the Cavern Club, launch pad of the Beatles, which has to be reckoned a close No. 2.) Technically, CBGB wasn't the birthplace of punk; that would be my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., where Iggy Pop and the MC5 unleashed their anarchy in the USA during the mid-'60s. But in 1973, when CBGB founder-manager-guru Hilly Kristal (who personally preferred country music) began to allow his stage to be used as the showcase for a new kind of generational snarl, the club quickly became punk's great, dirty, noisy nursery, home to the wailing feedback-and-buzz-chord tantrums of the Dead Boys and the Plasmatics and the Ramones and Patti Smith, to the feverish art rock of Television and Talking Heads, to the sublimely romantic power pop of Blondie. But what if they shuttered a monument and nobody cared?

    Apart from a handful of disgruntled East Village nostalgia groupies, wearing their T-shirts of outrage (fight the power, kids!), almost no one could muster anything beyond an eyeroll of cynical apathy for the shuttering of CBGB. In the weeks leading up to the final show, which was headlined by Patti Smith this past Sunday night, the point was made, over and over again, that the club was now a shadow of its former self; important bands no longer played there, and hadn't for years. The venue's demise was written off as just another casualty of the insanely skyrocketed New York real estate market — though, in fact, Kristal owed just $75,000 on the place, and the conflict that closed it down wasn't a battle with greed-head condo developers. It was with the adjoining homeless shelter whose proprietor held the lease. That said, punk always wore its live-fast-die-young-and-don't-give-a-f--- ethos on its torn, ragged sleeve. To mourn the end of CBGB, to view it as an occasion for sentimentalizing the bad old days of safety pins, puke on the floor, and speed-rock anthems that took less time to play than it did to go to the bathroom, would seem an act of profound wimpiness.

    And so here was Richard Hell, former leader of the Voidoids (who once enjoyed their day and night on the notoriously skewed CBGB stage), penning an editorial in the New York Times in which he playfully saluted the fact that the fabled club was now scheduled to be moved — brick by brick? graffiti scrawl by graffiti scrawl? — to Las Vegas. Las Vegas! Home of the Disneyfication of the world! True, one could make the case that there's something quintessentially punk, something very Johnny Rotten-on-Tom Snyder, about a former hellion like Richard Hell celebrating the transplantation of CBGB to Las Vegas. It's sort of like putting Sid Vicious' dog collar in the Smithsonian — an idea so terrible, so wonderfully wrong, that it's almost right.

    CBGB, by the end, wasn't more than a symbol of its former glory anyway, so who cares if it's now history? Yet let us consider, for a moment, why a symbol can matter, and why the fact that CBGB was pressed into closing its doors may say as much about punk, about the life and death of underground culture in America...may say as much about us as the club ever did when it was alive. ''There's new kids with new ideas all over the world,'' said Patti Smith before her set on Sunday. ''They'll make their own places.'' Sure they will, but the question raised by our numbly robo market-survey music industry is: Will those kids ever be heard? Will they get a chance, like the CBGB upstarts once did, to make sounds that reverberate around the planet?

    It was a place that became as famous for its dingy, bat-cave-in-the-wall infrastructure as it ever was for its music. When you stood in CBGB and looked toward the stage, staring down that long cramped horizontal bar, there was something about the layout, about the whole claustrophobic feng shui of the place (combined, in the early days, with its scuzzy clientele of punks and derelicts), that made it feel, in the words of the critic James Wolcott, like a ''subway train to hell.'' People came from all over the world to experience that dank, encrusted-with-legend interior, to live in it for a night. You can call it an accident that CBGB was housed on the Bowery, but what the low-rent setting gave the place wasn't just a whiff of local skid-row color. In the '70s, the bands that slithered on stage, in their spikes and acne and home-dyed hair, were like vipers that had crawled in from the gutter outside, and that meant that nothing — no radio whore, no uptown hipster tastemaker — could gussy them up. The place discovered its freedom in that cracked-concrete, urban-swampland setting, where no money was expected to be made and therefore no money was at stake.

    That's one reason you can't move CBGB to Vegas. As a physical space, it's part of the Bowery, part of the New York streets. But since there's no denying that the club, in any creative sense, faded away a long time ago, what, exactly, should have been done with it? Am I saying that I wanted to see it converted into a museum, a leather-bar version of the Hard Rock Café, with Blondie Burgers on the menu and waitresses in torn-fishnet uniforms?

    Well, perhaps that would have been preferable, in a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame world, to chaining its doors and paving it over. The end of CBGB was greeted, from the moment it was announced, as a fait accompli: an inveitable consequence of the housing market, of the yuppification of everything, of time marching on. But, in fact, the way that these things work, it was anything but inevitable. With a little more of a push from the pop-music aristocracy, from local zoning officials, from Hilly Kristal (who, admittedly, was tired of the damn place), from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who winked at preserving it), from old Television fans or young Ramones fans...with a little bit of a push, who knows what might have happened? Just as a single person reveals him or herself even in apathy, taking action by not taking action, New York City, and maybe America, revealed its feelings about what CBGB represents by not taking enough action to save it.

    Perhaps I'm prejudiced because I happened to recently take my first trip to Rome, a city where 2,000-year-old ruins jut up from the streets like urban heirlooms, revered like the priceless national DNA they are. If Italy could save the Colosseum and the Pantheon, then surely we could find it within ourselves to preserve several thousand square feet of a dank, grungy, history-spattered rock club that, like the Sun Records studio in Memphis, was the home of some of the most revolutionary and exciting pop culture this country ever created. I can't resist the thought that in letting CBGB slip into oblivion, so that no one will ever get another chance to stand inside that subway train to hell, we are burying the importance of what rock & roll ever meant, and what it could mean again."

    Thursday, October 19, 2006

    Issue 4 finally at the printers, 6 months overdue - did we learn anything?

    Well, I can safely say in the time since we started putting this rag together (think it was sometime in April, though the dates and places are all blurred now), we have learnt...

    ...that you can produce a quality magazine, print it on recycled paper with no carbon emissions, with vegetable based ink for the same money you can do it on horrible forest destroying Nazi paper...

    ...but it's still the most stressful thing in the world to raise the money to do so...

    ...the best records released in six months in the middle of 2006 sound like demented slightly past the sell by date punk rock ("I'm A Rat" by Towers Of London) or Blue Oyster Cult (the Midlake album - people keep saying Fleetwood Mac - trust me, it's BOC dude)...

    ...and the best gig was by The Cult...

    ...the people who worked with us on the rag are the most patient, nicest bunch of people we've ever met (some we've never met too) who have displayed unlimited trust towards us that humbles us daily...

    ...the trailer for the '300' film is way cool...

    ...the Thames and Hudson Underground Press Book proves that although we sure weren't the first, but, thankfully, we surely won't be the last...

    ...the singer of Jet is one of the best blokes ever...

    ...the drummer is cool too...

    ...Beck's records are too fucking long - who EVER needs 17 tracks?????...

    ...waiting for the man seems to take longer year on year...

    ...that might be the Congestion Charge though...

    ...and, finally, the most important thing the last six months have taught us is, however desperate, never ever under any circumstances marry Heather Mills... believe me, we've thought about it too...