Читать книгу The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Michael Bracewell - Страница 5

It was back in the winter of 1988 – a dark, wet, spiteful afternoon, with the thin rain blown in sudden gusts. Looking down from the penthouse of some mansion flats in Warrington Crescent – it was a real penthouse: there was a roof terrace, and a spiral staircase and everything – you could just make out, in the failing light, the dripping shrubs and sandy little paths of the big private garden that ran behind the length of the entire block.

This elegant oblong of trees and lawn – a Central Park in miniature, transplanted to west London – looked desolate now, with drifts of sodden leaves rising up like sullen brown waves towards the damp-blackened timbers of a trellis. In summer, the same lawn had been scorched white, and peopled throughout the long afternoons by squads of charging, tumbling toddlers, running riot in the dusty sunshine. But now it was early December, and, against the gathering dusk, the tree-tops looked like crooked black fingers, clawing at the lowering sky.

The window panes held darkness. Probably, somewhere down there, forgotten and forlorn, there would be a child’s abandoned tricycle, or a brightly coloured ball, begrimed by weeks in a flower-bed. Something or other, at any rate, to send you one of those sudden jabs of melancholy that quickly casts a shadow across your hopes; some trite but troubling symbol of lost innocence, reminding you, in abstract, of youth and opportunities thrown away (a whole summertime, it seems, of opportunities squandered) – wasted in a mess of jobs and plans and relationships, which had seemed, at the time, to put the kick in life’s chutney.

Beyond the twilit barrier reef of the facing houses, you were aware of the rush-hour traffic, inching ill-tempered towards Marylebone and Marble Arch – the dreary scraping of the windscreen wipers, the black cabs shuddering in an endless jam. Here we were at the tail end of the 1980s, children of the late Fifties and early Sixties, beginning to feel the odd twinge of the thickening process of early middle age, but still young enough to want to carry the fight to the enemy; to emulate the Balzacian hero, staring down on the city of Paris, to declaim, ‘And now you and I come to grips!’

But what, exactly, right now, was there down in the city to come to grips with? The heroism of the war-cry had been replaced by a kind of Mock Heroism, which had declared itself (out of nowhere, too – a sudden hesitancy in the voice, skidding a few tones from manly authority to punctured confidence) only at the moment of announcing the challenge.

Or were the vocal cords simply learning the cadences of irony? Everything had gone all slippery, like spilt mercury; and when the tweezers of criticism tried to pick up a trend or a product or an event it seemed to split up into cunning little sub-sections of itself, scattering hither and thither with a wanton disregard for any singularity of purpose – any one meaning. And this was because everything, it seemed – all the bits and pieces of contemporary culture, from architecture to mineral water – had become semiotic Phenomena; the seismic impact of which, rippling across the surface of the culture, could be placed under the niftily scientific label of Epiphenomena. In the lab of semiotics (you could imagine that it looked like the Clinique counter in a big department store) everything was significant, busily signifying something – it was all signage.

By the end of the 1980s, small things seemed to articulate big things (fascism, fast food and Madonna, for instance, could be studied and assessed within the same academic language – at times within the same sentence); while big things (the burgeoning processes of globalization, for example) were almost too big to see, like those patterns in the desert you can make out only at 37,000 feet.

The penthouse had a main living room that was maybe the size of one and a half tennis courts. The walls were painted a matt shade of pale dove grey, as was the surround of the fireplace, which didn’t imitate Georgian classicism (the style of choice for the Eighties make-over of Edwardiana) so much as pun on it, and then cross out the pun – like making a painting that looked like a painting and then painting over the painting, frame and all, with one colour that was the same shade as the wall.

The lighting, too, was subdued. It came from a neat constellation of dimmer bulbs set into the ceiling, and conveyed – what? A submarine light that made distances difficult to gauge; it made the vast room appear cosy and cold, simultaneously. If you were feeling the jab of melancholy it could seem like the twilight of indecision.

And then, there they were, the two of them: a pair – a brace – of Culture-vulturing City Slickers.

With his back to the big sash window, seated in a grey vinyl cube of a chair, sipping his tea without looking up from the cup, and frowning – a trick he had learned during his brief stint as a chartered surveyor, working in Carlos Place opposite the Connaught Hotel – a critic and curator of high seriousness, Andrew Renton (one of the first – if not the first – art-spotters to identify the gathering nestlings of Young British Art), had just made the statement that ‘culture is wound on an ever-tightening coil’.

He was speaking with reference to the peroxide crew-cutted female vocalist Yazz, who – solely on the strength of her summer Number One, ‘The Only Way is Up’ – had just earned herself an hour-long documentary entitled ‘The Year of Yazz’. And his point was that culture – mass-market popular culture, in particular, as the latest delectable truffle of the age – was being assessed and assimilated into the various strands of media with increasing speed. The brainy end of the fashionable media, especially, were being swift to set their hounds on the trail of the Gilded Truffle: that signifier, punctum, bull’s-eye that changed weekly – sometimes even hourly – but that seemed to sum up the age in one bite …

‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ or A Short History of Cultural Commodification in the 1990s

Picture, if you will, the slack-jawed derision with which Little Richard or Elvis Presley might have greeted an announcement, in 1959, that comedy or cooking was ‘the new rock and roll’. ‘No suh! Ah don’ like it!’ With pianos to straddle and trousers to split, neither of these great architects of the Pop Age would have deigned so much as to give the idea a second thought. That any rival phenomenon could pinch the mantle of rock and roll, or parade around in its borrowed crown, would simply have been unthinkable. Rock and roll defined the modern age, and nothing else would do.

This happy state of affairs managed to last, in Britain, until the start of the current decade. Then, in 1990, when the country was still watery-eyed and winded from being punched below the intellect by the Recession of the late Eighties, the great surge of public fervour for England’s chances in the World Cup of Italia 90 gave birth to the latest catchphrase in analytical shorthand: football, we decreed, was ‘the new rock and roll’.

And the media were swift to authorize this radical shift in value judgements. Unlikely celebrity pundits such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ignatieff were wheeled out from behind their hitherto bookish identities, to dabble in populism and turn the tears of a pre-lapsarian Gazza into a kind of weeping effigy for the burgeoning church of Laddism Nouveau. That soccer should be ‘the new rock and roll’ was a triumph for the zeitgeist surfers, providing as it did a sinewy little label that could be easily adapted to a whole succession of ensuing phenomena that appeared to define the state of the nation.

Barely had rock and roll itself had time to acknowledge this sneaky jab to its noble jaw, when the success of Luciano Pavarotti, whose rendition of ‘Nessum Dorma’ as the ‘’ere We Go’ of Italia 90 had brought Puccini to the High Street, inspired the heretical suggestion that opera, in fact, was the new rock and roll. And, as the latest speculation on what brand of cultural activity might best reflect the national temper, kept buoyant in the ether of popular enthusiasm by various combinations of tenors through the early 1990s, opera might well have been the new rock and roll had it not been usurped by the reinvention of stand-up comedy.

Comedy became the new rock and roll when Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer took the trappings of psychedelic dandyism and applied them to what seemed like an imagining of Morecambe and Wise on helium. Suddenly, released from the humour of political correctitude that had kept many young comics on the raised awareness cabaret circuit, British comedy exchanged jokes about Margaret Thatcher for cartoon surrealism and an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of the early 1970s. All too soon, by way of Vic and Bob, Harry Enfield, Sean Hughes and Frank Skinner, comedy’s claim to being the new rock and roll seemed assured when Newman and Baddiel, of ‘The Mary Whitehouse Experience’, played sell-out shows at Wembley Arena – thus conquering the ultimate venue of rock and roll itself. This triumph of comedy over pop and football – as the new rock and roll – would be compounded by the fact that many young comedians would discover secondary careers as celebrity panellists on TV quiz shows about pop and football.

But no sooner had the new generation of young British comics settled down to a collective reign over the national mood, than out of the comparative obscurity of Goldsmiths College and warehouse exhibitions in London’s East End came the pronouncement that contemporary art, festooned with ironic chutzpah by the youthful practitioners of neo-conceptualism, had in fact taken over from comedy as the new rock and roll. There was even the suggestion, as young British artists became famous for making sex- and death-obsessed conceptual jokes with ironic punchlines, that art had become the new rock and roll by being the new comedy.

But if BritArt was a cultural co-product of BritPop, as suggested by Arena magazine, then the international success of Oasis would remind the nation that rock and roll, actually, was the new rock and roll and always had been. And that would have been the end of it – except for the fact that ‘BritCulture’ had inspired the media to reinvent Swinging London, and with it a restaurant and gastronomy boom that made cooking, in fact, the new rock and roll. (Other than a faint flurry of excitement around the contractual arrangements of Zoe Ball and Andy Peters, which had threatened to suggest that being a children’s television presenter was the new rock and roll, the issue had never been clearer.)

By the autumn of 1996, with new expensive restaurants opening all over London, each one a tribute to the luxurious styling revealed on the pages of Elle Decoration magazine, and with braised artichoke hearts on wilted rocket being concocted nightly on British television, anyone who could poach an egg in a minimalist interior was on the cutting edge of culture.

So what might be the next rock and roll, in 1999? Answer: Designer Witchcraft. It was only a short step from the luxurious mediation of herbs, olive oil and shaved truffle, which typified the cult of the neo-Foodie, to the cleverly styled photographs of natural ingredients and state-of-the-art spells that appeared in the velvet-covered publishing sensation of winter ’97, Hocus Pocus: Titania’s Book of Spells.

In a stroke of sheer brilliance, in terms of marketing, at least, Hocus Pocus took the visual language of Elle Decoration and ‘Alastair Little’s Italian Kitchen’ and applied it to a practical guide to white magic for the New Women of the urban cognoscenti. With spells for wealth, health and a happy love life, this was New Age sorcery for the Bibendum generation, as though Titania herself were sprung from the womb of the Conran Shop, tutored in the Aveda school of minimalist aromatherapy and sent on her mystic way to heal the hearts and guide the heads of high achievers bored with Prozac and the Marie Claire problem page.

With a rival publication, How to Turn Your Ex-boyfriend into a Toad, selling equally well, the cult sensation was building up to a juicily media-friendly phenomenon. And this latest challenge to the increasingly materialistic and somewhat chauvinistic procession of phenomena that had comprised the new rock and roll – each one describing a further return to the demonized and elitist values of the 1980s, only dressing down now in the name of populism – brought about the triumph of female spell-weaving which conjured up the Spice Girls. Bred in the magic test-tubes of advanced marketing, the Spice Girls are a comma in the history of cultural commodification: they bridge the gap between virtual reality and legalized cloning. Both of which might yet be the new rock and roll.

The brief December twilight gave way to the hostile blackness of a winter’s night. Even the sodium orange of the streetlights seemed to be sucked into the darkness, leaving just a gleam of a tangerine mist, hanging in the trees. Inside the apartment, barely audible, came the sound of some difficult modern music – sudden, pedal-dampened piano chords, a jagged crescendo … On the low black coffee table, which was varnished and polished to such a sheen that it looked as though it was lacquered, was the box of the CD – some pieces by Pierre Boulez.

‘… plunk.’

This was anxious music – culture-vulturing city slicker music. It sounded as if someone were trying very carefully to extract a snooker ball that had become stuck beneath the strings in a grand piano. But how to describe a culture-vulturing city slicker? Well, it was all based on a drawing. This is what you got.

In the first place, this winter’s dusk, it felt like the end of something. Like the Russian play where the collapse of an entire social order is announced by the snapping of a violin string. Perhaps the Eighties were exhausted, too, the pneumatic self-confidence of the decade’s rhetoric slowly beginning to deflate. (And these are observations about a certain, single aspect of an era – that aspect being the effervescent mist that shivered and tingled just above the fizzy bits of the zeitgeist.)

The latter half of the 1980s had seen the beginnings of destabilizing cultural status and blurring aesthetic boundaries. Terms such as ‘accelerated’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘dystopic’ were in currency, conveying the sense of a new, volatile, high-speed culture – the future was beginning with the ruination of history. From the Alessi kettle to your average maroon and turquoise balustraded business park office building, the Three Ps of post-modernism were making their presence felt: punning, plagiarism and parody. What larks Pip, old chap, what larks.

As if to mark the moment, the ‘semiotext(e)’ booklets by or on the principal cast and chorus of post-modern thinking (and that little bracketed ‘e’ said it all, somehow) from Baudrillard, through Foucault to Virilio, had neat, uniform, black covers – were aesthetically exquisite handbooks of the avant-garde – and somehow seemed emblematic of the sheer fashionability, at that time, of critical theory. They had frankly funky titles such as Pure War or Foucault Live, and generally sexed up the dusty world of critical theory in much the same way that business publishing would get down and groovy a decade later – in fact, the two facelifts would be linked.

Here, also, was the idea of the city itself becoming a critical theoretical text: a sort of moodily lit, sci-fi urban landscape, articulating the semantics of cultural meltdown. And the language (jargon, jive talk, call it what you will) of this latest criticism was very romantic, in a New Romantic sort of way, as it seemed to conflate the rhetoric of science with the imagery of dandyism, positing the critic as a kind of chic urban guerrilla über-technician, carrying out missions of anthropological field work.

This seemed also to echo – be a consequence of, in terms of image – that era of the late 1970s which the singer with the Human League, Philip Oakey, would describe in 2001 as ‘the alienated synthesist period’ – the chisel-faced romantic, playing musique modern(e) in a grey room. Urban infrastructure and information theory to the critical theorists (they were landscape poets, by temperament) of the middle to late 1980s, was what the Lake District had been to Victorian Romantics, the mountains of Nepal to a traveller on the Magic Bus, or the peaks of Bavaria to Pantheist seekers of the Sublime.

(The 1980s would also see the menus of fashionable restaurants employ a kind of lyric poetry, further Sublime, in the descriptions of dishes: ‘shards of baby halibut wrapped in a fluffy cardigan of raspberry coulis, dancing on a mist of chives …’ In the Nineties, he-man chefs like Marco Pierre White (think Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life, shouting at crows and kicking over easels) and the rugged snappiness of cucina rustica would be a neat indicator of the general push towards Authenticity – the triumph of ingredients over adjectives. But the list-based poetry of food description would endure, largely on the packaging of supermarket premium-range thermodestabilized theme snacks.)

As the Nineties arrived, the sites for this critical theoretical romanticism would expand outwards, across the decade, from the city (from the capital, in fact) to engage first with ideas of suburbia, then provincial urban hinterland, and ultimately the nowhere-zones of service-area Britain – the edges of motorways and mirror-glassed retail parks. By the start of the twenty-first century (as the novelist Jeff Noon would assert about the regeneration of Manchester) entire cities would seem like one big shop: a mono-environment of white-laminated MDF shelving, brushed-metal light fittings and natural-effect bleached oak floors – the whole thing defined by the total consumer experience. Subsequently, the school of romantic critical theory would become fixated on a whole new landscape, of brands and logos and commerce: the poetical Sublime of business culture, corporations and the Internet.

But that was all ten years around the corner. What about the culture-vulturing city slickers, where did they come in? From a schism, in fact. The contortions of critical theory towards the end of the Eighties – as ideas, as fashion, as informants of advertising, arts education and retail culture – could be said to have divided a generational sensibility.

On the one hand, applied post-modernism in culture and commerce would come to seem like one of the voodoo arts carried out by the Demon Kings of yuppiedom – a grand denial of Content, grating and dicing the sanctity of Meaning into little more than a bucketful of marketable pixels, hand-sorted by media-sodden focus groups. A grand liberation, perhaps. On the other, there was the sense in which the cultural climate that had allowed post-modernism to flourish – a sudden explosion of media, technology and image making – was also, somehow, more than anything, well … like the end of something: a realization on that dreary December evening, those pedal-dampened, difficult chords, that snapped violin string …

These opposed opinions were well illustrated in the world of contemporary art.

Through the middle to late 1980s, the rise to prominence of young Scottish painters from Glasgow School of Art – most notably Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski – had delivered a muscular, enigmatic body of deeply literary painting that seemed to articulate – literally depict – the anxiety, doubt and confusion of a twilit, pre-post-modern generation. The aesthetic and philosophical agenda of these painters could seem like an update of that concerning the Neo-Romantic artists of the 1940s (John Minton et al.), which has been aptly labelled by the historian Dr David Mellor to include ‘nostalgia and anxiety, myth-making, organic fantasies’.

As such, these young Scottish artists were also the last gasp (for a while, at least) of a particular artistic sensibility, honed and empowered through atelier skills, responsive to the history of painting. In their different styles, both Campbell and Wiszniewski seemed to focus on the character, or type, that Peter York might once have described as ‘the neurotic boy outsider’: the romantic, aesthetic, self-questioning young man, existentially challenged and a teensy bit self-obsessed. Campbell’s stock character at the time was a kind of lost rambler – dressed somewhat in the clothes (grouse-moor tweeds at a glance) that ex-Skid turned model and TV presenter, Richard Jobson, had worn during his ‘Armory Show’ poet phase – and crossing a landscape of self-contradicting signposts and strange, semi-mystical features. Wiszniewski – in his paintings from the mid-Eighties, at any rate – depicted limp-fringed, sensual-mouthed, pretty-eyed young men wearing white shirts and tie, collar loosened, like Rupert Brookes or Rupert Everetts of the modern city. As with Campbell’s ramblers, these romantic, alienated young men appeared caught in a cat’s cradle of contradictory, entropic states. (Both painters looked remarkably like their chosen characters – archaically handsome in a Georgian kind of way.)

A powerfully atmospheric colour drawing by Wiszniewski from 1986, ‘Culture Vulturing City Slickers’ might be said to sum up this particular era: two of the painter’s urbane, entranced young men, immobile and strangely allegorical (one of them is clasping an affectionate alligator) against a dowdy, bronze-coloured twilight, which settles like sediment on Town Hall architecture and period streetlamps. But allegorical of what?

The young men are caught in the sunset of anxiety perhaps – as Damien Hirst’s massively influential ‘Freeze’ exhibition (one of the starting whistles for the 1990s) with its deft and super-self-assured rearranging of intentionality, was barely a couple of years away. For with ‘Freeze’ (not to mention its epiphenomenal seismic impact) the artist would seem to lose the right to fail. No more anxiety, no more lost young men. Wiszniewski’s City Slickers have an air, if not of doomed youth, then of youth in a kind of psychological transit camp of the emotions, stuck between Either and Or – rigidity or flux, spirituality or nihilism.

In the catalogue for Wiszniewski’s exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, held in the winter of 1987, the artist is described as a part of ‘the New Image Glasgow phenomenon’; it is also suggested ‘that a condition of ambiguity is more appropriate to the spirit in which’ Stephen Campbell’s pictures are painted. Here, then, was the phenomenon of a condition of ambiguity – the culture-vulturing city slicker position.

Represented by the Marlborough Gallery and Nicola Jacobs Gallery, respectively (Albemarle Street and Cork Street), Campbell and Wiszniewski both caught the Eighties art prices boom. It was one of the ironies of the period – during the Ascent of the Demon Kings of Yuppiedom – that paintings depicting states of anxiety, stasis or confusion should have made big money off the enterprise economy. But neurotic art tends to sell well during times of Boom Economy, cf. the cost of a Warhol during Reagan’s presidency.

So then what? The phenomenon of ‘New Image Glasgow’ more or less disappeared, its ethos in decline. The painters didn’t sink without a bubble, but almost: they became Newly Marginalized as Reactionary, or whimsical, which would become the stock Nineties way of dealing with cultural opposition.

From this point on, to the closing years of the Nineties, Tom Wolfe’s phrase about the art scene of the late Sixties, and ‘Cultureburg’s’ need to be ‘cosily anti-bourgeois’ would seldom seem more relevant. For throughout the Nineties, as the margins became the mainstream – typified by television comedy and the mediation of Young British Art (the latter, in fact, being a complex and eclectic generational grouping of artists, who happened to comprise, as a phenomenon, a good story) – so the newly perceived Reactionary (for instance, a certain kind of painting itself being considered reactionary) would become the New Margins – the anxiety dumps, the unfashionably alcoholic, the not Post Anxiety …

When you saw those culture-vulturing city slickers, sitting there in the submarine twilight, you could have had the feeling that they’d been there for ever, and would just stay in one place, immobile, entranced … Would anything – as Pierre, with a slight, upward twitch of his right hand, summons up another staccato, slippery snooker ball, clunky chord – ever disturb them?

BritPop Revisited

To anyone over thirty, drifting with a faintly puzzled expression towards the reflectiveness of early middle age, the phenomenon of BritPop and its expansion into the BritCulture of neo-Swinging London could be tantamount to discovering a premature liver spot and being seized with a sense of one’s own mortality. Suddenly, popular culture, as the freewheeling go-kart of carefree youth, seemed to be pronouncing its disaffection with even those members of the older generation who had cut their teeth on Bowie’s glam angst, rallied to the energizing bloody-mindedness of punk and pursued the vertiginous mutations of ambient dance music with something more than casual interest. BritPop, as a vivacious new player in popular culture, seemed to source from past pop in a way that could bring on a chronic attack of déjà vu in anyone who could remember, however vaguely, the originals.

This was youth flaunting the shock of the old, and they did it with style and wit. True, there were going to be some other diversions on this magical mystery tour down memory’s dual carriageway, from the cul-de-sac of ‘nouveau romo’s’ reawakening of New Romantic synth-pop to the lay-by of Easy Listening revivalism, but BritPop was the real picnic at the end of the journey. And it was strictly for the kids – even if the adults tried to join in.

But the liberty of youth, as Elizabethan sonneteers never tired of mentioning, is a short-lived condition. The transatlantic triumph of the Spice Girls repositioned the banner of youth supremacy yet again. Liam and Patsy, as the John and Yoko of the National Lottery generation, might well be officializing the triumph of Brit-Culture on the cover of Vanity Fair, but it’s the navel-pierced girl power of Spice Girls that is really calling to the pocket-money. Spice was the fastest selling CD of 1996, and America had already fallen to the charms of its performers. The younger sisters of TopShopPop seem poised to oust the elder brothers of BritPop, thus marking yet another revolution of pop’s indefatigable loop, in which the prayers and protests of one generation are translated into the language of the next. Sally might wait – to paraphrase Oasis – but the Spice Girls won’t. And BritPop, in retrospect, for all its dismissive swagger, might prove to have been more subtle than we thought.

The story of BritPop all began, really, with Suede’s suburban urchin poetry of love, lust and loneliness on the streets of contemporary London. Suede were from Haywards Heath, and their mixture of limp-wristed petulance and deeply depressed meditation owed as much to the musical style of David Bowie as it did to the poetic anatomizing of Britain that had been put forward by Morrissey. They were like a pink marble mezzanine, generationally, between the melancholy notions of Britishness delivered by late indie groups, and the boyish exuberance that took off with BritPop proper. Suede, sexually ambiguous and dead clever, were the end of one pop sensibility and the launchpad for the next. And they wrote some great songs: ‘On a high wire, dressed in a leotard, there wobbles one hell of a retard …’ The oldies, at a pinch, could relate to that.

But by the time that the BritPop princelings Supergrass, with a rubber-mouthed assurance that touched on the brattish self-confidence of the adolescent Mick Jagger, had rocketed up the pop charts with the simple slogan ‘We are young! We are free!’, it seemed as though a historic marker had been planted with jaunty arrogance in the massive sandbank of sensibility that separated the consumers of pop who were born in the early 1960s, from those who had first blinked into the light towards the middle of the 1970s. What was being proclaimed was a kind of heritage pop, in which the styling and values of an earlier England – the England of the Beatles and brand-new Wimpy Bars – was evoked by Thatcher’s grown-up children to offer a cultural database of received ideas of Britishness, from which a response to the realities of Major’s classless Britain could be impishly composed. For the kids, it was rather like running riot in an interactive museum of English popular culture. BritPop, importantly, seemed to lack the anxiety and self-referring irony of the pop that had come just before it. It seemed, somehow, deeply materialistic.

But pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the landscape of the national mood and marking those points where the major trade routes of social trends are traversed by the underground tunnels of the zeitgeist. In the case of BritPop, the phenomenon as a whole could be seen to combine an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of its practitioners’ adolescence, with the born-again maleness of laddism nouveau.

This was demonstrated by Oasis, who just missed literalizing, by a single letter, their justifiable claim to enjoying yet another annus mirabilis in 1996, when a Gallagher brother mimed the insertion of his Brit Award into his backside. The maleness of BritPop took the healthy irreverence of the young Beatles and mixed it with a dollop of Viz comic’s reactionary humour. And, once again, both BritPop and the laddism of Viz – or Loaded – seemed to be yearning for the freedom of a second adolescence in a younger and less complicated Britain.

In their vastly differing ways, the superstar groups of BritPops – Oasis, Blur, Supergrass and Pulp – were reworking the pop heritage they had inherited as teenagers. Fairly soon, it would be claimed that if Oasis were inspired by the Beatles, then Pulp were impersonating the Kinks, Supergrass were doing a passable imitation of the Spencer Davis Group and Blur were somewhere between the Small Faces and Georgie Fame. Small wonder that the movement should rally to a reinvented Paul Weller as the godfather of Mod revivalism. As Tony Parsons remarked in his review for Prospect magazine of Martha Bayles’s Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music: ‘BritPop is traditional rock. Its appeal is that it is at once shiny and new while also replete with nostalgia – pop music is coming home.’

And BritPop was coming home at a time, during the slow recovery from the Recession of 1990, which had seen the end of designer elitism and the fetishing of new technology as a viable chassis for the pop and Fleet Street style press. As the adult heirs of Thatcher’s Britain, more or less force-fed the reality and consequences of rampant cultural materialism, it seemed as though the BritPop kids could only look back to an England before Prozac and a pop before post-modernism. As their one-word names suggested, these groups were half in love with the simplicity of a Sixties childhood or Seventies rites of passage, when the colours on colour TV were too hot to watch without eye-strain, and the tank-topped dolly birds of situation comedy were bubbling with suggestiveness to the damp innuendo of their mutton-chop-sideburned suitors. Hence the assertion by Simon Reynolds, in his essay on BritPop for Frieze magazine, that the movement could not justify its label as ‘the new Mod’ because it was based almost entirely on personal and cultural nostalgia. The original Mods would sooner have handed back their button-down shirts than admit to a nostalgia for anything.

Partly an infantilist comedy of recognition, and partly a defiant rejection of cultural anxiety, BritPop put forward a pop ethos that Blur summed up in the title of their CD, Modern Life is Rubbish. With a founding theology of apolitical infantilism, the movement had distanced itself from both the multiculturalism of dance music and the white nihilism of grunge’s screamed de profundis from the teenage bedrooms of middle-class America. What BritPop promised, with a disingenuous simplicity that belied its subtle protest, were some catchy tunes and a rattling good time.

As such, amid the fiscal neurasthenia of the early 1990s, in a pop cultural climate that revived archaic notions of gender and sexuality by turning young men into lads and young women into ‘babes’, BritPop was attempting to reclaim a lost innocence on the one hand, but indulging a new hedonism on – or with – the other. Or, to quote Blur, the complexities of sexual politics could be reduced to the seemingly infinite chant of ‘Boys who like girls who like boys’, and so on. And so BritPop, in many ways, was like a suburban teenage party as it might be reconstructed by today’s young adults from their memories of youth.

But despite its seeming espousal of a wanton dumbness, a few BritPop tracks were both musically accomplished and lyrically clever.

For all its opacity and pouting, the movement produced some glorious pop moments, from Pulp’s ‘I Want to Live Like Common People’ to the thunderous title track of Oasis’s second CD, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, which confounded its detractors with their impassioned articulations of defiance in the face of modern life’s rubbish. At their best, these were serious and sincere pop songs, which used archaic formats and styling to pass comment on society as they found it. The message, in BritPop, was subordinate to the medium – a neat reversal of the up-front conscience raising of traditional protest songs.

This mixing of intentions was much in evidence on Pulp’s controversial Sorted for Es and Whizz, which was seized upon by anti-drugs lobbyists to represent a massive misjudgement on the part of the group with regards to its ambiguous handling of a sensitive subject. It might have been one small step for Jarvis Cocker on to Michael Jackson’s heavily defended stage at ‘that’ awards ceremony, but it was a mighty leap for BritPop as the scourge and cartoon folk devils of the transatlantic pop establishment. Rooted in the past but sniping at the present, BritPop made its political points by never referring to politics. Noel or Damon might offer a cursory nod to New Labour, but there was none of the community knees-up and flag-waving which had typified the politicized pop events laid on by Red Wedge or Rock Against Racism during the early years of the 1980s. Rather, the politics of BritPop were summed up in the lyrics of Oasis’s ground-breaking single ‘Whatever’ (1994), with its demand for personal freedom – ‘I’m free, to do whatever I, whatever I choose,’ – being snarled by Liam over Noel’s evocative homage to the reversed orchestration on the Beatles’ psychedelic nursery rhyme of 1967, ‘I am the Walrus’. And, ironically, this plea for individualism would breed a new breed of conformism within BritPop’s massive fan base. In the end, the democracy between the performers and fans that punk had attempted to instigate, and that dance music simply took for granted, was wholly dismantled by BritPop’s reawakening of an earlier rock and roll orthodoxy. Jarvis and Co. might have been the Citizen Smiths of modern Britain, but their triumph lay in a powerful coalition between media and marketing.

As BritPop spilt over into the ‘BritCulture’ of BritArt and the heavily over-mediated ‘neo-Swinging London’, as championed by British glossy magazines from GQ to the Telegraph Magazine and Elle, so a new aristocracy of wholly metropolitan socialites, art dealers, PR gurus and restaurateurs would benefit from the mini-boom. For Noel and Liam Gallagher, from the depressed suburb of Burnage, south Manchester, there must have been a delicious sense of victory in realizing that the old escape route from working-class drudgery through football or pop was still open – and it could still make the toffs dance to their tune. As is traditional in English popular culture, from Mick Jagger’s charming of the British aristocracy, the yobs were calling the shots to the snobs. Hence Noel Gallagher, on the television programme ‘TFI Friday’, displaying his neatly shoed foot to a fawning Chris Evans and barking the one word, ‘Gucci’. BritPop had not merely come home, it was thinking of buying the house. Which was rather why Liam Gallagher cancelled an American tour.

What did become evident, however, was that by invoking both the sound and sensibility of English popular culture of earlier eras – be that the High Psychedelia of Sixties opulence or the cheerful cheesiness of Seventies kitsch – the ultimate destination of BritPop’s targeted revivalism was a kind of ‘virtual’ pop, in which the stars and the fans appeared like holograms of their distant and mutated originals. And, ironically, the Beatles themselves would release what amounted to a ‘virtual’ single, ‘Free as a Bird’, with Lennon’s vocals collaged into new material, just as Oasismania was nearing its peak. With a sigh of relief and a power surge on the National Grid, the country was once more united in its traditional twin obsession with northern working-class pop and the Royal Family – Princess Diana having screened her ‘Panorama’ special just minutes after the world première of the Beatles’ virtual video. This, if ever there was one, was a triumph for Sixties revivalism, and the Beatles had descended as though from Pop Heaven to anoint Noel and Liam – within air-space of Royalty – as the successors to the original BritPop throne.

BritPop, as a media phenomenon attendant on the supposed rivalry between Blur and Oasis, had arrived at a time when years of Conservative government had all but conditioned several generations of young people into believing that politics were irrelevant – save as a distant force of despotism, reflexively acknowledged in a half-hearted way to challenge the legality of raves or keep homeless people in the streets. Now, it would seem as though the maturing establishment of BritPop can either follow the formulaic patterns of rock orthodoxy – the ‘difficult’ new album, solo projects, rumours of overdose, and, to quote Blur, ‘a big house in the country’ – or batten down the hatches in the face of the Spice Girls and the pre-teen pop parade.

Like Boyzone and Take That before them, the Spice Girls are an arch-conservative construct whose media-friendly sex appeal is shot through with the commonsensical philosophies traditionally ascribed to well-behaved but fun-loving teenagers. The Spice Girls are naughty but nice, with a vote-winning dash of cosmetic militancy. Need we look any further than the coy chorus of, ‘If you wanna be my luvah, first you gotta be my friend’ to realize that they follow in a long line of safe pop phenomena that stretches all the way back to Cliff Richard and his pals in Summer Holiday? If BritPop plundered from pop’s past, in the name of Prog Mod revivalism, then the Spice Girls look back to the Mop Top era of Beatlemania, before the music turned weird, and the youthful Fab Four were cheeky professionals on the stage of the Royal Variety Show.

And so this latest phenomenon in British pop is retreating yet again, in terms of its ethos, from the psychedelic garden of 1968 to the positive Eden of 1964. After all, the Spice Girls approached Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, to create their first full-length feature film. Who knows, if BritPop gives way to girl power then Britain might need the Spice Girls like Russia needed a communist Elvis. They could yet become the official state pop of advanced democratic consumerism – the sound of a bright new Britain.

‘… on an ever tightening coil …’

In the big grey apartment, the submarine light seemed to turn moss-green. The grey-painted frame of one of the tall sash windows rattled suddenly, buffeted by the wind. There were going to be some changes around here. During the next ten years, certain … ideas would emerge from the culture, pretty much organically, the sheer brute force of which would take some getting used to. The list would run something like this:

1. Throughout the 1990s, many of the very qualities being demonized as evil Thatcherite 1980s acquisitive competitive cultural bullishness – the whole yuppie arrogance of ‘greed is good’, for instance, or ‘second is nowhere’ – would be simultaneously rehabilitated by popular culture, media and advertising as ‘Attitude’.

2. Pop, for the most part, would cease to be a venue for new ideas and become a site for recycling old ideas.

3. Anxiety and doubt, as an energizing force within cultural practice, would be domesticated and disarmed by a) the comedy of recognition and b) market-formatted cultural production. The effect of these factors produced a culture that appeared to have been designed, by media, retail and advertising. Contemporary art would become fixated on issues of pre-mediation and mediation itself.

4. Brute Authenticity would replace Brute Irony as the temper of the zeitgeist.

5. A consequence of the above would be a pan-media return to gender stereotyping.

6. As the 1990s became fixated on brands and retail culture, so the Trojan Horse of cultural materialism would be Infantilism – seducing the consumer with cosy treats: the caffe latte and the loft conversion. By the year 2000, frothy coffee would appear to be the multi-purpose signifier of urban, credit-based consumer society – the Death by Cappuccino effect.

7. In the 1990s, the cross-cultural pursuit of Authenticity would also provide the ‘bread and circuses’ (most importantly, Popular Factual Programming – ‘reality’ and ‘conflict’ TV – an obsession with ‘celebrity’ and confessional journalism) with which to distract the consumer from the sheer fragility (as demonstrated by the near civic panic during the petrol shortages) of consumer society.

8. This obsession with Authenticity would declare realism to be synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

9. As a site for cultural production, all aspects of the middle classes would be deemed toxic, if not radioactive.

10. By the year 2000, Call Centre Britain would be firmly established. The rhetoric of advertising and retail – the slogans of the Benign Corporation (‘Because Life’s Complicated Enough!’, ‘Every Little Helps!’, ‘What Can We Do to Make It Happen?’) would be based on an idea of intimacy, empathy and personal contact with the customer. The reality behind the rhetoric would be a culture of endlessly deferred accountability, in which there was no one, ultimately, whom the consumer could challenge as responsible for the fair running of The System. Translated into the dynamics of a family, the consumers became children (remember the Trojan Horse of Infantilism a little earlier on?) to the parents of the Benign Corporation, who promised comfort but handed out abandonment.

11. The end result of these ideas would be the feeling that, we, the consumer democracy, were in fact post-political – and afflicted with a Fear of Subjectivity.

The lost young men of Campbell and Wisniewski just didn’t seem hip to the Attitude of the Nineties – they were too awkward, too obscure, too strait-laced, too fey. As culture-vulturing city slickers, all they could do was carry on sitting there. Sighing, perhaps. Fairly soon, all the elitist smarty-pants twiddly bits of Eighties post-modernism – Style Culture, atria, nouvelle cuisine, Jeff Koons – would be declared (in public, at any rate) An Enemy of the People.

The culture of self-conscious artifice had been replaced by a culture of self-conscious authenticity. And as the margins of culture were fed into the conservative, market-dictated flow of the mainstream, it would take some fancy footwork to remain oppositional. But oppositional to what? What did the term mean nowadays? In many cases, the only way to become culturally confrontational was to make a choice to cease your cultural production – to culture strike, as the writer, punk historian and activist Stewart Home would declare and demonstrate.

Howard Devoto

Of all the icons assembled in the pantheon of punk, Howard Devoto could most probably lay claim to being the most enigmatic and the most revered. He was described by Pete Frame (the creator of the Rock Family Trees) as ‘the Orson Welles of punk’, and pronounced in a tribute song by Momus to be ‘The Most Important Man Alive’. Morrissey stated that it was Devoto whom he had in mind when he wrote ‘The Last Of the Famous International Playboys’, while Paul Morley claimed that Devoto introduced a ‘new literacy not just into punk, but into rock as a whole’. He has also been cited as an influence by novelists as different in style as D. J. Taylor and Jeff Noon.

And yet Devoto himself remains mysterious. His guru-like status has been all the more respected for the dignified manner in which he has allowed his body of recorded work and published lyrics to represent him. Having co-founded and founded, respectively, two of the most influential groups of the punk period, the Buzzcocks and Magazine, he then went on to record a solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream, before forming his third and final group, Luxuria, in 1986.

He ceased recording professionally in 1990, preferring the anonymity of a day job to some kind of honorary position in the music business as an elder statesman of cultural revolution. He could therefore also claim to be ‘the T. E. Lawrence of punk’. With regard to his current employment, Devoto has little to say. ‘I am the manager of the archive at a leading photographic agency in central London. I also receive royalties from my recordings.’ He is neither open nor defensive about his working life beyond music, except to say that his work with Luxuria did not deliver the support he required to proceed.

‘There was something very limiting about punk,’ he states, in a tone that is both assertive and measured – Alan Bennett without the soft edges – ‘and in the early days that was punk’s strength. You knew your themes, you knew how to look and you knew your musical style. And there you were, for a while. But I’d loved all kinds of other music up to that point. There was some big elemental thing that happened with the Sex Pistols, but in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff which I had liked, and which, in the realm of ideas, were not totally different tins of biscuits – Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in, really.’

In the spring of 1976, in Manchester, Devoto co-founded Buzzcocks with guitarist Pete Shelley. They recorded the massively influential Spiral Scratch EP, and a highly collectable official bootleg, Time’s Up. Heard now, these recordings have lost none of their fizzed-up, self-aware energy, driven by Shelley’s sublime reinvention of jagged, high-speed pop guitar playing. On machine-gun-tempo songs such as ‘Friends of Mine’, ‘Boredom’ and ‘Orgasm Addict’, Devoto delivers his smarter-than-smart lyrics with an edgy petulance that disguises their wit and biting acuity as a kind of pantomime of dumbness. ‘You’re making out with schoolkids, winos and heads of state,’ he lashes out on ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘You’re making out with the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cake.’

Artistically, the young Devoto was responding to influences from Alice Cooper to Camus. Having studied philosophy as a student, and having been interested in meditation, his lyrics on Spiral Scratch and Time’s Up were fully intended to be carefully posed, self-questioning philosophical statements about the problems of existence. Interviewing himself, when Spiral Scratch was originally released in 1977, Devoto wrote of the song ‘Breakdown’, ‘“Breakdown”’s hero is in the position of Camus’ Sisyphus – “To will is to stir up paradoxes.”’ Punk rock had thus been a personal and creative catalyst for Devoto, offering him a means to conduct nothing less than a biopsy on his own soul.

‘I think that punk rock was a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness,’ he says, ‘and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with that process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands – in a world, most probably, after religion. My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols, and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something which really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical Sixties.

But going back to what I was going through, personally, and all of the stuff that you do go through as a student, I remember – before punk even – pursuing Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; I had pictures of the Baader Meinhof on my wall, and all of that hunger strike stuff was going on. It was that struggle for commitment which you have as a young person. And where did you put all that when you’re a young person like me, who wanted to play a “Yes, but –” game with everything?’

Since 1990, Devoto has given the whole punk reunions circuit an extremely wide berth, as well as being highly reluctant to offer up his recollections to what has become the major academic industry of ‘Punk Studies’. An example of this reticence could be seen in his contribution to the commemorative documentary, which was made in 1996, about the two Sex Pistols concerts held at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. Despite being the man who actually arranged these concerts – with his own first group, the Buzzcocks, supporting at the second – Devoto chose to be represented on the programme by a reel-to-reel tape-recorder, playing a recording of his few comments about the occasion.

Person to person, he can give a meticulous account of his involvement in punk, often using factual information and chronology as a means of avoiding generalized statements about punk’s ‘attitude’.

‘Can I just say,’ he states, ‘that what I don’t buy are things like a piece which I read by Caroline Coon about punk a few years ago, which said how desolate the mid-Seventies were, culturally and politically. And I don’t buy John Lydon’s line, either, in this new film The Filth and the Fury, where he’s going on about “the system being really oppressive in Britain, and that’s why punk rock happened”. I just don’t accept this stuff, really. In myself, I can’t say that I was feeling particularly great at that time – but what’s new?’

Having left the Buzzcocks almost as soon as they released their first record, Devoto formed Magazine as a way of expanding the possibilities that had been opened by punk. In a leaving statement issued on 21 February 1977, he wrote: ‘I don’t like most of this new wave music. I don’t like music. I don’t like movements. Despite all that, things still have to be said. But I am not confident of Buzzcocks’ intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat.’

As ever, Devoto’s stance was one of disaffection and dissatisfaction – rejecting the early complacency into which punk rock so readily dropped, prior to becoming little more than a picture postcard parody of itself. With Magazine, he explored the causes of this stance through lyrics and performance at once disturbing and playful, self-aware and endlessly self-questioning.

Musically, Magazine comprised the formidable teaming up of Dave Formula, John McGeoch and the legendary Barry Adamson, whose own solo work would pursue the idea of attempting to solve the case of oneself. In hindsight, Magazine would have found their place in the history of music on the strength of just one of their early recordings, ‘Shot by Both Sides’.

‘Magazine was its own particular blend of trying to contain a certain sort of intelligence in that sort of music. One of my partners of those years, asking about a Magazine lyric, said, “Is that about you and me?” And I said, “You’ll never know because I swap them around.” But also in Magazine there was the idea of me addressing the audience and making ambiguous pronouncements about our respective roles – your idea of me, and my idea of you. And I was really playing with that during the period of the first two Magazine LPs – when I was in the prime of my ambition. I’m still proud of Magazine. Half a lifetime of feeling went into it.

‘And I’m sure that I tried to rant on about the importance, to me, of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things. I’m trying to explain the Magazine song, “Shot by Both Sides”, I suppose, and this is the area which I’ve explored in everything I’ve done since the Buzzcocks.’

In many ways, Devoto’s life since adolescence, when he first started to write, has been an epic of self-portraiture. Even now, he is writing his autobiography and recording it as a spoken word document, to be left to the National Sound Archive after his death. He has barely reached the middle Seventies and the work is already twenty chapters – ten hours – long, including one hundred and fifty samples of music. Not surprisingly, one of his favourite authors is Marcel Proust. His own writing, as a lyricist, has articulated his personal position with an eloquence and originality that rivals much of the best contemporary fiction and drama.

But at the heart of his constant enquiry – as revealed with brooding poignancy on his final LP with Luxuria, Beast Box – seems to lie a fear of what he might discover if he could actually answer his own questions about himself. ‘They’ve opened the Beast Box haven’t they?’ he concludes the title track of that LP, and even on the haunting crescendo of ‘Railings’, which he recorded in 1998, for the rock group Mansun, his distinctive voice appeared to croon from its own grave, ‘Don’t burn your hand on the window, if you just want to take in the view …’

‘Life is hell,’ says Devoto during this interview, neither joking nor seeking to shock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about twenty. Now, in the last ten years, since I’ve essentially quit music, I’ve come to some kind of accommodation with that. But at a blood and brain level, that’s really how I feel, and it’s one big reason why so far I don’t have kids.

‘From where I was, in 1990, I suppose that most people in my position would try to find another niche for themselves in the music business. But I have too much damaging, damaging pride. And if you take my lack of confidence, and you take my pride – well, there you really are shot by both sides.’

Contemporary Interventionism

In the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey of British experimental art from 1965 to 1975, ‘Live in Your Head’, there was a work by Keith Arnatt from 1972 in which the artist had been photographed standing on a busy street, wearing a placard which proclaimed, ‘I’m a Real Artist’.

Dour and faintly absurd, yet with a confrontational edge that flits between threat and polemic, Arnatt’s street sloganeering seems particularly relevant to a new sensibility that has emerged in contemporary British art, and that seeks to rearrange or dismantle the purpose and cultural status of current artistic activity.

In ‘Live in Your Head’ the foregrounding of documentation over aesthetics, for example, and of politics over individualism, could be seen as a direct rehearsal of the ICA’s ‘Crash!’ exhibition, or the ‘democracy!’ show curated by students on the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art. Taken as a gear-change in the zeitgeist, these shows and a host of lesser-known pamphleteers, activists, interventionists and ideologues, comprise a distinct reaction – or response – to the agenda set within the visual arts throughout the 1990s.

On the one hand, there is a sense in which dissident, confrontational or otherwise socially engaged artistic practice would seem to become disqualified the moment that it has any relation with the ‘elite’ white cube of the gallery, or the social systems of the art world. On the other, within the gradations of artistic dissent – from artists engaged in direct street action, through to those who are actively reinventing the notion of art in the community – there still seems to be room for such work to be curated without losing its integrity.

‘Many of the major new galleries have engaged artists to work with communities in imaginative education and outreach programmes,’ says Teresa Gleadowe, the Course Director of the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art; ‘Such activities have little relation with traditional studio-based practice – they involve public participation, research, conversation, exploration, shared interests and causes. Social engagement is a common concern. Most of these projects do not result in the production of art objects, and some may not easily be recognized as art at all.

‘The “democracy!” exhibition took on the job of representing some aspects of this activity and of finding ways of presenting it in a gallery situation. This is a difficult and even paradoxical endeavour, which demands from the visitor a level of deep engagement – reading, listening, forensic investigation. As an exhibition subject it is a risky enterprise, and one which might not easily be undertaken by an established institution. It seems appropriate that young curators, working within the research environment of a curatorial course, should give themselves the task of making manifest practices of this kind.’

Evidence that such socially engaged art practice is swiftly gaining in significance, raising a host of issues related to venue, craft, distribution and commodity, can be seen at a glance from some of the artists involved in ‘democracy!’. Sarah Tripp’s documentary project, for example, interviewed a network of people about their faith and belief; Group Material – best known for their ‘AIDS Timeline’ – were an artists’ collective based in New York’s Lower East Side, ‘committed to art’s potential to effect social political change’. Also for ‘democracy!’ Jeremy Deller worked with elderly people, ‘opening the doors of the Royal College’s Senior Common Room to the members of a local drop-in centre’.

Taken point for point, a freshly politicized approach to making art can be seen to exchange the sexual, nihilistic, aesthetically exquisite and pop culturally individualist agenda of last decade’s ‘Sensation’ generation, and replace it with a virtually existentialist reassessment of art’s capacity and function. Where the lucrative visceral shock tactics of Emin, Hirst or the Chapman brothers could be seen as the convulsions of outraged romanticism, so the various practitioners and collectives of the latest sensibility appear to be based in a kind of philosophical ethnography, questioning social and cultural power structures from the outside, and developing an art that is largely impossible to own, display or accord a financial value.

For the novelist, pamphleteer and founder of the Neoist Alliance, Stewart Home – who famously went on ‘Culture Strike’ between 1990 and 1993, refusing to make any new work at all – this relationship between culture, commodity and distribution is central to both his writing and its publication. He regards both Tracey Emin, with whom he once exhibited, and Damien Hirst as artists who have ‘recouped’ on his ideas (his ‘Culture Strike’ bed, and his ‘Necrocard’, respectively) by turning them into commodified objects.

‘I guess that in some ways I’ve worked with self-publishing and small presses in order to enable different discussions to go on outside of the commodified business exchange. The Tate have been collecting my pamphlets and leaflets since the 1980s, so you can criticize these institutions, but their archivists and librarians are really on the ball. Basically, if you get an A3 sheet of paper, and fill it with whatever polemic you want, then those ideas are going to get around and get a response.’

A further collective devoted to such practice is Inventory, formed in 1995 as a group committed to exploring the possibilities of anthropological research as text-based art. Through their Inventory journal – with the slogan, ‘Losing, Finding and Collecting’ – and a succession of activities based on street interventions, Inventory could be seen to represent a determinedly outsider stance, while seeking new, cheap ways to disseminate their thinking.

‘We all abandoned individual practice at the start of the 1990s,’ says an Inventory spokesperson, ‘primarily because we found the whole new British art scene, which had originated around Hirst’s “Freeze” exhibition, to be utterly alienating. We saw ourselves as more connected to surrealism, Dada, Walter Benjamin or Bataille, and we wanted to talk about ideas through a journal which could be slightly academic, mad, and shocking.

‘But that wasn’t enough; we wanted to explore the various economies of social life through social situations, and so our work is political inasmuch as it’s occurring at a time when even the word “socialism” appears to be taboo. We regard nihilism in a pro-active, Nietzschean sense, as something to be worked through, and empowered by. By investigating the nature of field work, we turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves. This could be translated into politics – through the surrealist notion of a permanent state of revolution.

‘I don’t think that anyone in the London contemporary art scene trusts us enough to represent us; they like us to be a bit of a cult. But we’ve survived for five years without them, and so we can easily do another five. We’re quite happy representing ourselves.’

One of Inventory’s better-known ‘interventions’ was a fly-posting project in Hanway Street, in London’s West End, called ‘Smash This Puny Existence’. Braving foul weather, local hostility and the approaches of bored prostitutes, the group fly-posted this dark cut-through between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road with a series of newsprint posters proclaiming such announcements as ‘The Puerilification of Culture’ and surrealist texts on the experience of walking through a city. The group also discovered that a loophole in public by-laws made it possible for a person to stand on Oxford Street holding a large placard (of the sort usually seen advertising closing-down sales) which blared ‘Smash This Puny Existence’.

This project was also disseminated by Matthew Higgs (the curator of this year’s British Art Show) through the long-established art books publishers, Book Works, as part of their Open House series of guest-curated projects. Book Works was founded in the mid-1980s as ‘an attempt to reposition the book in the context of visual arts’, and in recent years their role as enablers of documentative, interventionist and pamphleteering artworks has become increasingly significant. Above all, many of their publications create affordable artworks, which can have whatever collectable status the buyer decides.

‘Over the years, this has produced an eclectic range of works,’ says one of Book Works’ founders and directors, Jane Rolo, ‘from early collaborations with activist groups like the Guerilla Girls, or Adrian Piper’s book Colored People – a visual commentary on preconceived ideas about race. More recently, Czech artist Pavel Buchler’s project involved projecting a red light from Chetham’s Library in Manchester – where Marx and Engels studied – on to the Saint George’s flag of Manchester cathedral. With the Open House project, we’ve been able to work with talented young curators like Matthew Higgs and Stefan Kalmar, and to commission books by artists like Janice Kerbel and Nils Norman: to invest in ideas, rather than the cult of artist as celebrity’

Stefan Kalmar has introduced his commissions for the Book Works Open House project – under the umbrella title ‘access/excess’ – with a quotation from the Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’

As though to illustrate this supposed disruption of systems and orders, Kalmar has commissioned four artists to create what are in essence handbooks for social or anti-social activity. Janice Kerbel’s ‘15 Lombard Street’ gives precise instructions on how to rob the branch of Coutts & Co. bank at that address, for example, while Nils Norman’s ‘The Contemporary Picturesque’ considers protest culture tactics in relation to ‘the development of a repressive form of urban architecture and design – such as surface studs, trash cages and anti-poster surfaces’.

Ultimately, events such as the recent ‘Reclaim the Streets’ demonstrations in London can be seen as a potentially volatile summation of the burgeoning relationship between marginalized artistic activity and direct political action. For Stewart Home, however, as a veteran of many interventionist, hoaxing and direct action campaigns, the political significance of anarchic demonstrations should not become too intimate with art. ‘The danger is that you begin to brand such street actions as “art”, and thereby dampen their political directives. It’s always easy for them to try and control us by treating us as a cult.’

Freezing cold in Cavendish Square, shadows in the doorways of John Lewis – the clear night sky, promising frost, above the ornate red brick of Marylebone’s rooftops … In a nasty little pub, a knot of cumbersome figures accumulate: unironic anorak wearers, plump young men with pudding-basin fringes and bottle-end glasses, dandyfied smoothies reeking of scent, Dadaist-looking spiv types with loudly checked tweed lop-sided motoring caps such as Mr Toad might have worn, a few greying punks wearing old men’s suits … These people may look like potatoes, but they’re the forces of Opposition; like Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy, clan-gathering round the back of Oxford Street, W1.

Shortly before half-past eleven the whole rag-bag assortment creeps and shuffles, grey and hunched against the frost-whitened streets, where sounds are growing softer, along the shadow of the buildings, to a back mews, and a big black garage door, behind the uppermost panes of which a feeble yellow light is dimly gleaming. The little crowd – fifteen or so, maybe twenty – huddle forward in the silence, as the big black door opens just a few inches and a hand so white and frail as to seem luminescent slides out to greet them with a single beckoning finger. Heads lowered, they all shuffle in …

The vast auditorium, smelling of brass polish and dust, is barely lit. But you can just make out a couple of … grand pianos … on the stage. To a murmur of exceedingly well-mannered applause, two casually dressed young men seem pretty much to sprint from the darkness of the wings, hurl themselves down on the pair of adjusted piano stools, fling their hands to the keyboard and … play a Morton Feldman minimalist piano duet for the best part of the forty minutes. Welcome to the ‘Wigmore Alternative’, the Anti-Rave! – where the music doesn’t pound in beats per minute, it echoes in beats per hour …

The enigmatic composer Lawrence Crane (England’s unacknowledged Satie, a joker in the pack) and founder of the Wigmore Alternative – part pastoralist, part humorist, part über-archivist, part punk rocker – would demonstrate, in the twilight of the 1980s, the importance of Organization … The artistic application of the aesthetics of librarianship or proofreading. Cranesque order and neatness was a rout to the sublime.

Pet Shop Boys

For a pop duo who had their first Number One hit – ‘West End Girls’ – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern. Like the artists Gilbert & George, they have developed a creative partnership that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit when they performed on ‘Saturday Night at the London Palladium’ – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts and Jimmy Tarbuck – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the zeitgeist while retaining their cultural independence.

To some extent, the enduring relevance of the Pet Shop Boys could be due to the fact that they seemed to find their perfect musical identity right at the very beginning of their career. By mixing the sensory rush of luxuriously orchestrated dance music with an image and lyrical style that was almost its direct opposite, foregrounding isolation and social commentary, they achieved an originality and acquired a stance that has simply intensified over the years. With the Pet Shop Boys, there is nearly always a hidden, sharp edge of critique – critique of society, of pop, and of themselves – just beneath the lustrous sheen on the surface of their image. After all, they even managed to cover Village People’s ‘Go West’ with a Russian constructivist spin.

The Pet Shop Boys are holding a series of interviews in a semi-derelict suite of rooms just beneath the highly ornate, neo-Gothic eaves of the old Saint Pancras Station Hotel. The hotel has been empty for nearly a decade – although the Spice Girls filmed their video for ‘Wannabe’ here – and this interview has been presented as a kind of eerie performance piece with touches of science-fiction. Summoned up the five dusty flights of the abandoned ceremonial staircase, a tape-recording of barking dogs breaks out high above you. So far, so New Romantic.

Greeted at the top by Dainton, the Pet Shop Boys’ friend and bodyguard, you are then led through a further suite of darkened rooms, at the end of which, booming away, there is a projection of the Pet Shop Boys’ latest video. When you finally get to Tennant and Lowe, they are sitting on an illuminated glass floor inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 – a Space Odyssey, and wearing matching Versace bomber jackets made out of a gold metallic fabric designed to retain every crease and wrinkle. They look like off-duty astronauts.

‘If you had this floor in your house,’ announces Tennant, suddenly domestic in the midst of Goth-Futurist ambience, ‘and it was taken away, you’d really miss it. Everything would look really drab, because it gives off a lovely light. It’s actually quite warm and contemplative.’ He looks around the floor again, for all the world like a customer in Habitat on the Conran Shop, choosing interior lighting.

Tennant and Lowe are there to promote their new single, with its classically Pet Shop Boys title, ‘I Don’t Know What You Want but I Can’t Give It Anymore’. This single is a mesmerically spooky disco stomper, which has a lyric about paranoia, surveillance and infidelity, but a snare-drum and hi-hat back-beat that sounds as though it was lifted off a track by Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. In fact, it is one of those potent configurations of opposites that the Pet Shop Boys have made their speciality. In addition to this, they have developed a new image for the video you could call ‘Boot Boy Samurai Chic’.

As a look, this new image just manages to ride that perilously tight back-curve of style that Eddie Izzard identified as connecting ‘fantastically hip’ with ‘totally naff’. What makes it succeed, ultimately, is the fact that the Pet Shop Boys have pushed it to the very limit: scary gold-haired wigs that show the dark roots of dyed hair, heavy black eyebrows of the kind last seen on Siousxie Sioux in about 1981, spider-thin dark glasses that lend an air of complete blankness to the features, and striped culottes that hang like ankle-length skirts. Gothic interiors, men in skirts and synthesizers – it has to be New Romantic.

‘I do think that the video’s quite New Romantic,’ says Neil, ‘but New Romanticism worked for such a short period of time, didn’t it? And needless to say David Bowie had the best moment in it by leaping in about two hours after it all started with the video for “Ashes to Ashes”. That really is the ultimate New Romantic video, although there’s probably some good ones by Steve Strange and Visage – “Fade to Grey” perhaps?

‘I remember when I used to live in a flat in the Kings Road, just above a Chinese restaurant, and I happened to open the door one day just as Steve Strange walked past. He was wearing “Look Number Three”, which was when he had a beard and sat on cushions. It was his “Cushions Period”, but I always remember it as quite exciting.’

‘There’s not enough of all that, these days, is there?’ adds Chris Lowe, as though remarking on the demise of corner shops. ‘The Kings Road used to be fantastic.’

‘If I had the nerve,’ Neil confides, ‘I’d walk up and down the Kings Road dressed like we are in our video. Secretly, I’d quite like to do that. But it takes too long to put the wig on …’

‘But that was the whole point!’ exclaims Chris. ‘The whole point of New Romanticism was that it took such a long time to get ready. That was what you did – get ready.’

‘I have to say that I like the bit in the video with the whole ritual of putting on the costumes. The costumes are a distancing technique – a way of saying that we’re nothing to do with anything else that’s happening in pop,’ says Neil. ‘Pop music, these days, is either cheesily sincere – as in your boy bands – or it’s effectively natural-looking, and we wanted to do something with a level of artifice in it. I always liked pop that has a sense of wonder about it. I mean, would you rather see David Bowie on roller skates – like he was in his “Day In, Day Out” video – or would you rather see David Bowie dressed as a clown, walking along the beach at Hastings with a bunch of New Romantics? I imagine you’d rather see him dressed as a clown in Hastings – I know I would.

Also, the Pet Shop Boys have always been obsessed with not being real, because we think that’s more interesting. I have always thought that the idea, for a pop star, is to not be able to believe that they’re real. Which is why I think it was brilliant that Elvis never performed in Britain. Actually, to their credit, the pop gossip columnist of The Sun suggested that all the interviewers should be dressed like we are in the video.’

‘But it can also look grotesque,’ Chris points out.

‘No. It really wasn’t designed for daily wear,’ agrees Neil. ‘It was designed like our “Pointy Hats” look a few years ago, to be seen through an electronic medium. That way you can smooth things out. We did the “Pointy Hats” in real life, just once, when we launched MTV in Russia. When we came out to do the press conference we discovered that the ceiling of the room was too low for the hats, and then when I sat down the collar of my jacket rode up, so I had to kind of bend forward. An English audience would have found this hilarious, and we’d all have had a good laugh. But the Russians just sat there and stared at us, and then asked all the usual questions as though nothing was odd. You’ve got to have a nerve to do this kind of thing, you know. But when you look at our “Pointy Hats” video, it’s a classic video. It’s an attempt to move away from all the supposed naturalism in pop …’

With their new image, record and forthcoming tour, the Pet Shop Boys are presenting, as usual, an entire theatrical package. This time, they have pulled off the considerable coup of collaborating with the visionary architect, Zaha Hadid, some of whose buildings have been considered too radical to be constructed. In the light of this latest collaboration, one can see how the Pet Shop Boys – Lowe is a trained architect himself – are continuing their fascination with presenting artificial environments in which to perform their songs.

‘Actually, the idea came about because Janet Street Porter had been walking with Zaha Hadid for her television programme,’ says Neil. ‘And she said, “Why don’t you get Zaha Hadid to design your new musical?” and we said, “Because she’s an architect and it’s a completely different discipline to designing for the theatre.” But then we were in New York and I was flicking through a book of Zaha’s designs in the Rizzoli bookshop, and I suddenly saw all of her architectural models as stage sets – wonderful shapes to walk across while holding a microphone, wearing a ludicrous costume and having a wind-machine on you maybe.

‘So we approached her, and I have to say that she and her operation have been inspiring to work with. They take all the practicalities of a rock show on board, and they are the only people we have ever worked with who take the budget seriously. They are working on a modular set which can evolve during the show and be adapted to different sizes of venue. Which means that the backing singers are going to be doing some heavy lifting, only they don’t know that yet …’

So what does all this new look mean? Or does it mean anything? To judge from the exterior shots of the video, and the extreme styling of their new image, they are positioning themselves in a vision of the future in which the architectural brutalism of the Seventies has become as weathered as the Victorian neo-Gothicism of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Saint Pancras Hotel. It is, perhaps, the idea of the future itself appearing antique and old-fashioned, with every adult and child dressed, as revealed at the end of the video, in the extraordinary Samurai chic which we had assumed was a sub-cult gang costume – like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange – rather than the mark of complete social conformity.

‘There is a comment about conformity,’ says Neil. ‘But I think that if our previous shows were paintings, then they would have been figurative. Whereas this one is definitely abstract. Unlike our other shows, this doesn’t have a narrative, however loose. I think that it is possible for pop music to get over-intellectualized, but on the other hand it probably isn’t intellectualized enough. In the late Seventies and early Eighties pop was definitely intellectualized, and interestingly enough there was a lot of good music around at the same time. These days, you’d get embarrassed to start talking about art or writing in pop because people might think you’re being pretentious, which is a really sad pay-off of the whole laddish thing in the Nineties.’

‘Like Bowie gets ridiculed for wanting to be interested in new things,’ says Chris. ‘But we’re always looking for a new underground …’

But the problem of how to be confrontational would still obsess a new generation of cultural practitioners during the 1990s. How the hell did you catch anyone’s attention, what with the whole more-in-your-face-than-you thing going on? To some pundits, the age would seem obsessed by sex and death, centring on what Professor Eric Northey would define as ‘the nectothon’ of the mass mediation of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death and funeral. Culturally, in many ways, this was a post-modern re-run of the aestheticism and morbidity of the nineteenth-century ‘fin-de-siècle’ – the cartoon decadence of a neo-grunge demi-monde, with yobs and snobs united in the flashlight of high fashion.

And how did you deal with the phenomenon-seeking inverted commas of free-floating irony? That would become another problem.

Irony (as understatement, overstatement, the conflation of opposites and a general fiddling about, in the name of critique, with context and intentionality), within the cultural practice of the early 1990s, would turn out to be the growing pains of the New Authenticity – the phase before the social realism kicked in. But back in the winter of 1988, there was a feeling abroad about irony that was touchingly innocent; it could remind you, in hindsight, of Truman Capote’s wistful recollections, as an alcoholic, of how he used to get drunk: ‘In Harry’s Bar it just seemed such fun,’ he said.

Likewise Irony. Looking back on it now, and seeing the two culture-vulturing city slickers, thinking out ways to sidestep the obvious, outwit the trend-waves, and play a tune on the bleeps and squeaks of the zeitgeist, there is the realization that the fluffy end of the arts and cultural media during the late 1980s and early 1990s (the swift dissolve between Cult Studies and Lifestyle journalism) had become set to being hyper-cynically arch, or ‘arch’.

On the one hand, Irony could be regarded as a means of responding to, and co-existing with, the conversion of all things socio-cultural into a post-modern bombardment of culturally destabilized, aesthetically blurred, ultimately unauthored and free-floating signifiers – the Phenomena of things. Irony, in this respect, was a kind of ‘two can play at that game’, or ‘I’ll be your mirror’ means of critique.

But the Ironists of the early 1990s had also honed the pursuit of Style Watching (the refraction of the post-punk style press through aspirational high bourgeois print media) to such a degree, that their commentaries became increasingly reliant on the instant translation of trends and phenomena into a code of social satire. This was a mixture of wit and anthropology that could end up dissolving in the acid bath of its own chemistry. For there was a faintly psychopathic edge to all of this, in the sense of cold-blooded style watching, however astute, needing to lack almost any kind of empathy – or even emotional awareness – with its subjects, but simply looking for the most precise emblem of their Type. In many ways, this was the point where Naturalism met Marketing – on an island off the coast of Camp.

At the time this seemed like the weaponry of applied dandyism, and wide open to the perils of terminal ennui: where dandies articulate their philosophy of life through Mock Heroic fashion (the world expressed in a tie-pin, for instance), so the culmination of Irony would be a search for the tiniest detail in other people’s dress and behaviour, which would say the most about them. A noble enough enterprise, in keeping with the naturalism of nineteenth-century fiction (cf. Tom Wolfe’s literary and journalistic homage to Balzac and Dickens), but also open to abuse as the reduction of all things to nothing more than a periodic table of status.

Needless to say, by the middle 1990s, the sheer surfeit of Irony in the zeitgeist was like some kind of cultural vitamin imbalance. We were gorged on Irony, sickened and bloated and cramped with snooty cleverness. Irony was our trapped wind. The critic Robert Hughes – somewhat brutally – even described the art of Jeff Koons as ‘the last of the methane in the cow of post-modernism’.

But then a miracle occurred, and Irony turned into the Pursuit of Authenticity. This was partly a cyclical reaction to the trend, but also because a new generation of Ironists had realized that the only way of becoming Irony-proof themselves was to proclaim yourself one hundred per cent Authentic: a no-nonsense, bit-of-a-laugh, see-you-down-the-pub kind of person. Enter the massed armies of Mockney, the Lads, Ladettes and Babes – the football’s coming home, none-of-that-low-fat-malarkey, ‘trainspotting’, fever-pitching, text-messaging, wap-phoning, Girlie Show and two smoking barrels. Enter, Attitude! A breath of fresh air, perhaps, or the fashionable face of anti-intellectualism.

Robert Hughes, needless to say, would now become Newly Marginalized and wheeled out as a Reactionary for his trouble – partly because of his book, The Culture of Complaint – which was held up as a proto-typical, disgusted-of-Manhattan, ‘everything’s dumbing down’, anti-political-correctness kind of book (the same thing would happen to Harold Bloom, with his ‘School of Resentment’ comments about the dangers of politicized – isms to literary criticism, in his massive book, The Western Canon), but also because the top froth of the culture – television, advertising, various chunks of the visual arts, pop and literary worlds – had been hanging on to irony for dear life, even as they were beginning to feel the pull of New Authenticity.

Robert and Harold, therefore, were shut up faster than a pair of dotty old men who had wandered into a rave – they just didn’t get it, did they, and in the neo-Swinging Nineties, if you weren’t hip to the Attitude!, you were … almost definitely … hopelessly … middle-class and toxic.

And this was strange: in a broad-band of culture which was being maintained, administrated, mediated and consumed almost entirely by the middle classes, for an actual cultural practitioner to be regarded in any way as ‘middle-class’ was pretty much the end of the line. It usually implied that you were anti-modern, and, worse, anti-multicultural. Cultural-type people, therefore, were falling over one another to become bourgeois-proof. Regional culture (for example), and dialect in particular, was seized upon to provide the new morality comedies of Authenticity – from Trainspotting to The Full Monty; but at the same time there had seldom been such a pan-media boom in essentially bourgeois lifestyle subjects, from funky cooking to interior design and urban gardening.

‘So why,’ – as Quentin Crisp once remarked – ‘was there such a racket?’

‘The ‘dumbing down’ ticket was a waste of time: a debased and pointless phrase which, along with the equally pointless ‘politically correct’ and ‘Middle England’, simply denoted some vague idea of an armed confrontation between, on the one hand, tweedy intellectuals from the Home Counties with maths-teacher haircuts and a passion for opera, and on the other wantonly extravagant, taxpayer-paid-for, brand-new Faculties of Hip-Hop Studies. It was simply the old High and Low culture debate, but now with added Bitterness.

Rather, the 1990s, perhaps, were acting out their version of the cultural identity crisis that occurred towards the end of most eras, and which the critics of the time can never quite agree upon. And as a fin-de-millennium, as well as fin-de-siècle, the Nineties got a triple whammy of crisis.

With regard to the trend for such crises, writing in 1939 about the 1930s, for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge had stated: ‘The present is always chaos, its prophets always charlatans, its values always false. When it has become the past, and may be looked back on, only then is it possible to detect order underlying the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying the false values.’

And here was Blake Morrison, in 1999, beginning a polemical essay for the Independent on Sunday newspaper – headlined: ‘All Plugs and No Shocks: PR Driven, ‘accessible’, bland, ‘self-congratulatory’. That’s today’s art scene’ – with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘“We can assert with some confidence,” Eliot wrote in 1948, “that our own period is one of decline [and] that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago … I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even have to anticipate a period [of] no culture.”’ Morrison adds: ‘It’s not that we’ve got no culture, but something almost as bad is infecting the patient: Blandness, capital B. Not just the quiet, inoffensive kind. No, something more shrill and happy-clappy. A relentlessly cheerful, end-of-millennium, let’s-make-everyone-feel-comfortable blanket of good taste.’

Such doubt and pessimism about the state of culture, therefore, why It’s All Over or has never been worse, would appear to be a traditional sub-strand of culture itself – a homoeopathic dose of fatalism, to keep the arteries of progress clean. It had occurred in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, back in 1728, and Theophile de Gautier’s Preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, at the start of the nineteenth century, through nearly every cultural configuration by way of Wilde, Pound, Auden, Shaw and Orwell, to the disillusionment with the idealism of the 1960s shown by Sixties people like Christopher Booker (The Neophiliacs) and even Jonathan Green (All Dressed Up). And so when the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is announced, one can only really think, ‘Well, no change there, then.’

But as the shutters came down (the moss-green submarine light in the grey penthouse apartment, the pedal-dampened difficult chords, the snapped violin string) and the culture-vulturing city slickers experienced the gathering loss of sympathy between a particular generation and the times they are living in (pondering Muggeridge and Morrison perhaps), there was suddenly the nagging doubt, ‘What if they’re right?’ … That what was now required, maybe, was the exchange (to judge from the shorter history of disillusionment) of a secular for a spiritual path.

For the 1990s seemed to be a decade of dichotomous thinking, which pointed out more sharply than usual the limits of generational sympathy. Within the culture, there were few gradations of points of view – little anxiety of oscillation between Either and Or. Beyond the increasingly important world of visual art – because visual art, in the 1990s, would become a multi-purpose emblem of modernity and regeneration, rather like London’s Docklands had been in the Eighties – the rest of us would simply become aware of subtle, or not so subtle, massaging shifts in the presentation of things … You just got the feeling that you were usually being sold something, and that, as cultural commodification appeared to be approaching critical mass, most of it simply wasn’t worth the price. ‘So much of everything!’, as Peter York has refined the moment into a four-word statement.

Britain, TV and Art

It was Mike Myers, the American star and creator of the spoof nerd cable TV show, Wayne’s World, who really addressed the recent British obsession with searching for expressions of its national identity in the ironic remodelling of its popular culture. For it was Myers, in an unexpected piece of comic shape-shifting, who discarded the definitively American character of Wayne – all gleaming white teeth and cap-sleeve t-shirt – for the amplified Britishness of Austin Powers: psychedelic secret agent and International Man of Mystery.

The cinema release of Austin Powers coincided with the attempt to revive ‘Swinging London’, as an emblem of Britishness for the late 1990s, heralding the official rise of Cool Britannia. So when the fashionable alliance of New British restaurants, BritCulture and a myriad PR companies was suggesting that a return to the colourful optimism of the mid-1960s was just around the corner, Austin Powers marched round the other corner on our cinema screens, leading a parade of sequence-dancing Beefeaters and hand-springing policemen to a waiting E-type Jaguar painted in the colours of the Union Jack. ‘Hello Mrs Kensington …’ he drooled to the leather-clad agent sitting at the wheel, and the mirror held up to Britain’s latest image of itself as neo-Swinging retro-kitsch was showing a perfect reflection – New Irony and all.

As Britain is described by cult American television, so the affectionate satire of Austin Powers can be seen to have sharpened into downright derision on some of the latest imports to British small screens. In a recent re-run of an episode of Mike Judge’s cult cartoon of teenage nihilism, Beavis and Butthead, the sniggering duo were sitting on their ripped sofa as usual, watching a video by the British band the Verve. ‘Aren’t these dudes from that country where everything sucks?’ remarked Beavis, eventually. Similarly, in the adult cartoon South Park, with its accounts of the goings-on in a small boring town in Colorado, the foul-mouthed children of South Park Elementary would sooner sit next to the red-eyed son of Satan in class, than the British kid Pip – ‘because you’re British, ass-wipe’. Pip, dressed in the cap and jacket of the boy hero of Great Expectations, accepts all abuse with a generous good humour that somehow makes him even more pathetic.

What seems to give these American comments on Britishness their comic edge is the manner in which they identify that strand of cultural self-consciousness that has provided Britain with some of the best, as well as the worst, of its national self-expression. Since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer wed Pop to absurdism in their ground-breaking television show, ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’, in the early 1990s, the cultural fetishizing of Britishness by way of ironic nostalgia and post-modern caricature has been approaching critical mass. The inevitable response to the burn-out of irony would be the rise of the post-Prozac public confessional – the New Sincerity, aided by its sidekick of New Sincerity with street-credibility – the New Authenticity.

An attempt at self-defence at a time of cultural insecurity, the cry of ‘Any old irony’ had been echoing around the studios of British television for some years, and would seem to have authorized a situation in which – as W. H. Auden once suggested in his poem about the perils of trying to reach Atlantis – it had become impossible to tell the true from the false in terms of articulate statements about Britishness. What had come into relief was a raised tracery of distinguishing national characteristics, from the archaic comedies of British manners acted out by Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse, to the baggy British groups with their trademark nasal whine of post-Oasis BritRock. And these are the enduring traits of Britishness that the cutting edge of American comedy has found so easy to lampoon. In addition to the targeted sarcasm of South Park and Beavis and Butthead, who could forget Frasier’s temporary obsession with a horrible English pub? Or the time that a thinly disguised Mary Poppins came to help out The Simpsons, and wound up on the sofa with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and a fag in her mouth?

As the advertising industry has the most calculated interest in reflecting versions of Britain back to itself on television, so it has taken the trend for ironic retro-kitsch – itself an infantilist reflex of nostalgia for our pop-cultural youth – and applied it to articulations of national identity. The TV advert for Mercury ‘One 2 One’ cellular phones, is a computer-generated montage of Vic Reeves interacting with the great British comedian Terry-Thomas, in scenes from the 1960 classic, School for Scoundrels. Beyond the product message, what emerges from this advertisement is a working definition of the way in which ‘Englishness’, as a contemporary concept, is terminally stylized in order to be culturally rehabilitated from any reputation for nationalism or anti-multiculturalism.

This notion is compounded by the latest television advertisement for Rover cars, in which suppositions of Britishness are visually punned into a new, fashionably acceptable vision of Britishness. To an immaculate early-Seventies soundtrack, sourced from vintage Roxy Music and Sparks, the Rover commercial ‘remakes and re-models’ (to borrow from the title of another early Roxy Music number) a British landscape in which the Edinburgh Tattoo becomes the tattooed arm of a young woman at a rave, and a kid munching fast food on a skateboard becomes an arch reference to Meals on Wheels. With a knowing catchphrase, ‘It’s nice to know that things haven’t changed a bit’, Rover’s heavily pushed advertisement is selling New Britain as a state of mind by effectively suggesting that Old Britain is dead and buried.

This trend for montaging laundered notions of British popular culture into a commodified vision of New Britain has been matched – in this age of fetishized Newness – by the search for the New Authenticity. Rather like a short story by Chekhov dramatized by old clips from police surveillance videos, perhaps the function of the New Authenticity is to suggest a social conscience in the lingering dusk if post-modern chaos, and to provide a new cast of everyday heroes to people moral fables. As the national media report the case of a twelve-year-old mother who had sex with her thirteen-year-old boyfriend because they were bored with watching the coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral, there is a sense that the layers of irony attendant on mediating definitions of contemporary Britain have gone beyond critical mass, and finally imploded.

In a blistering editorial in the May 1998 issue of Living Marxism, Mick Hume described the conversion of ‘Cool Britannia’ into what he terms ‘Ghoul Britannia’. Having identified a parading of dysfunctionality, death and despair in many aspects of British culture, from the lyrics of Radiohead and the pathological end of BritArt, to films such as Nil by Mouth and Gummo, he suggested that the dangerously self-defeating miserabilism of ‘Ghoul Britannia’ is ‘symptomatic of a society which has lost faith in itself, one which sees humanity drowning in a bloody gut-bucket of its own making’.

Such a conclusion, in many ways, could be the ultimate destination of the British search for cultural authenticity: the belief, mistaken or otherwise, that the only aspects of ordinary life worth recording are those which reflect dysfunctional behaviour. And this could be seen as a repetition of the trend for problem films, in the early 1960s, that exhausted the true artistic potential of British ‘kitchen sink’ cinema by merely cloning the various ‘problems’ into a threadbare formula. Writing in the Spectator, in 1962, one exasperated critic remarked: ‘We’ve seen the brooding terrace, we’ve heard the moaning factory whistle and frankly we don’t care any more.’ This was not, one feels, indifference to social issues; rather it was impatience with the idea that the whole of British realism could be seen through one, increasingly self-parodic, point of focus.

As though to address this aspect of New Authenticity, there is now a new middle ground to Britain’s pop cultural reflection of itself. The success of Men Behaving Badly, as the grand manifesto of Laddism Nouveau, has been succeeded by the televisual equivalent of a ‘call to all cars’ to find something – anything, pretty much – that will bring the success of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary to the television screen. And this New Comedy of Recognition has a twin in what could be called the New Tragedy of Recognition: more than a decade after thirtysomething turned middle-class American domestic trivia into the stuff of epic theatre, the patrician classes of the British media have hatched a robust cult for public confession, which is now demanding a home on television. And, doubtless, will get one.

Between the vogue for ironic retro-kitsch and the drift towards New Authenticity, a situation has arisen in the articulation of Britishness that could be said to demand the exchange of cleverly honed trends for a return to old-fashioned – some might say reactionary – statements of intent. There is a feeling of slight relief when one comes across one of those brightly coloured adverts that announce, with no further ado, ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin!’ After the succession of dizzyingly jump-cut, defiantly conceptual and ultra-fashionable blipverts, there is something faintly endearing about the straightforward hard sell. And the same, perhaps, can be said of those works of art or cultural interventions that make no attempt to lubricate the wheels of their conceptual thinking with self-advertisement, irony, pastiche or high-minded punning.

As part of the ‘artranspennine 98’ exhibition, which used the whole of the trans-Pennine region from Liverpool to Hull as a venue for showing contemporary art, there was a work by Joseph Beuys, situated in the Victoria Gardens beside the Henry Moore Institute, in Leeds. As an artist, icon and shaman, Beuys can be ranked with Warhol and Duchamp as a figure who managed to harness the energy of his century, and translate his personal experience of that energy into monolithic statements about humanity.

The piece by Beuys in Victoria Gardens is part of a work called ‘7,000 Oaks’, which the artist initiated in 1982 for the international exhibition Documenta 8, and which has subsequently spread around the world. It comprises a young tree, planted beside a basalt marker. The basalt was mined from volcanic vents near Kassel. The catalogue note for the piece explains the epic intentions of the seemingly simple work: ‘The combination of a living, growing tree with the immutable presence of stone is one individual’s response to the vulnerability of nature in the face of destructive progress.’

‘7,000 Oaks’ does exactly what it says on the tin, and is all the better for it.

Every view upon an age is bound to be a portrait of the viewer – a vista seen through the eyes of generational prejudice. Looking down from the apartment in Warrington Crescent, there was a feeling of being momentarily absent from one’s body, neither lost in thought nor quietly meditational, but drawn, somehow, down into the gusting rain and the darkness – a kind of emotional hypothermia, with memories taking the place of sleep.

Ian Devine, the former guitarist with punk progressives Ludus, hit mid-middle age towards the end of the Nineties, extolling both the Saga senior citizens’ magazine and the writings of the Australian historian, Greg Dening. It was Dening who wrote, ‘We make sense of the present in our consciousness of the past,’ and who advocated the writing of history in the present tense. Divine’s ultimate aim was ‘cultural disengagement’ – ‘I want to not know,’ he says, ‘who Hugh Grant is …’