Reading Camus in Salford while we’re reading Huxley in Kilbarrack and Raheny… Joy Division, a European Cultural Aesthetic, and how come we got the hippies? December 2, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Books, Culture, Film, Music.trackback
Reading Prospect (sub req’d) last month there was a fascinating short article by Paul Lay on Joy Division. In it he enquired “What became of the young working-class intellectual?”
His question was prompted by:
“Control, Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Ian Curtis, singer of Joy Division, the most celebrated product of a period of extraordinary cultural aspiration among British working-class males. The phenomenon seems all the more astonishing viewed from our age of Nuts and wall-to-wall sport. To get some flavour of the age, look at any copy of the New Musical Express between 1978 and 1982. The NME ran a weekly column, “Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer,” in which musicians would list their favourite books, films and thinkers. References to Bergman, Beckett, Nietzsche, Fellini and Dostoevsky abound. Tarkovsky is a favourite; the austerely Catholic films of Robert Bresson get a namecheck. The Fall, led by that other Mancunian working-class autodidact, Mark E Smith, took their name from Camus’s novel, while the Cure’s first single, “Killing an Arab,” was inspired by L’Etranger.
He also enquires:
Where did this fascination with high culture, especially the European avant garde, come from? Well, Europe, viewed from a northern council estate before mass travel, seemed impossibly exotic.
Before answering that: They followed a trail set by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who, having shown young men the delights of androgyny, led them to a cold, divided Berlin, where they recorded the groundbreaking records Low and Heroes, mixing Manhattan cool with the unbearable heaviness of European history.
And he also suggests that:
Britain in the late 1970s was a remarkably quiet place, nowhere more so than in the pub, usually music-free, where young bands gathered to discuss world domination over pints of mild before going home to listen to John Peel. There were few distractions: television closed down early, video was yet to arrive, computer games were crude, food was functional. LPs and singles were expensive and thus treasured, as were books. Britain had not yet made the shift from a largely literary culture to the overwhelmingly visual one of today.
What I find interesting about all this is not how closely it tallies with the experience of my own friends and myself in Raheny and Kilbarrack, but how little. Now, it has to be said, we were 15 or so in 1980, so we were a good eight or nine years behind Curtis et al in terms of age. But from my recollections it wasn’t so much the Irish Sea that lay between us and Manchester in cultural terms as the Atlantic Ocean.
Sure. There are elements in common. Bowie was venerated. But… moreso for the earlier material than the later, more ‘difficult’ albums. I never recall Neu or Can being mentioned during that time. The most exotic record collections tended to contain King Crimson, the more obscure (for which read ‘early’) Pink Floyd albums. Indeed all things Floyd were considered good… hence a curious subculture which dedicated themselves to swapping poorly taped Syd Barrett cassettes. Indeed, strikingly, the reference points for the more avant-garde amongst us weren’t European experimentation but largely the tail end of the hippy era. Prog-rock bands, some slight element of jazz and there you go. Fripp was perceived in these circles as being a ‘genius’. And perhaps he was, perhaps he was.
The Velvet Underground and the Doors were cool, or so one was told. I’m presuming at this point that a picture is emerging. This was a mid-Atlantic taste.
Donagh on Dublin Opinion mentioned Roger Doyle, whose electronic experimentation in Operating Theater was completely off the radar for almost all (I taped a couple of tracks off the radio – probably Dave Fanning back when he was gud – because I liked the cinematic sweep of the stuff, and as I’ve previously noted was intrigued by all things synth). In fact, precisely because large tranches of New Wave made considerable use of synthesisers they were dismissed, presumably because of some lack of ‘craft’.
Which leads me to film. Probably because of the capability to see BBC and ITV in Dublin there was some cross over on the visual side. I too cherished Tarkovsky’s Stalker from an early age. A close friend of mine conceived a passion for French cinema which has endured to this day and arguably art-house cinema in Ireland (and I’m thinking of Kino as much as the IFI) was given its first push at this point in time. I don’t want to overstate this. Consider that three or four years earlier we’d been enraptured to a greater or lesser degree by a Wookie so our ability to critique European New Wave cinema was questionable at best. In fact a bigger influence again was to be the arrival of Channel Four a year or two later which delivered the real stuff for us. Saturday nights would never be the same again, at least the one’s we stayed in for.
And literature? Books? Well, this too was curiously Atlanticist in content. A close friend read Tolkien in the Summer of 1981 which was actually late in the day all things considered. I was reading the Illuminatus Trilogy that year (which actually reads better the more one realises it’s concealed history of libertarianism), or was it the year previous? And science fiction. Lot’s of it. Which explains why Huxley figured as well, as did some Ballard. Oh yes, and Vonnegut. And “Fear and Loathing”, and any number of tomes devoted to the years of zonk – including Christgau… That this was part and parcel of another subculture is perhaps also evident. If anything this was late hippy, somewhat West Coast, an entire cultural aesthetic transplanted to Dublin. And importantly it’s worth noting that the hair styles tended towards the longer. None of the minimalist spiky barnets that others had.
But in fairness there were other strands. I’d fallen in love with the incomparable James Tiptree Jr’s science fiction (JT Jr. in reality being Alice Bradley Sheldon, one of the leading female and feminist SF writers of the 1970s) a year earlier. In film, as I’ve mentioned before, Michael Caine and the Ipcress File were in there too… And curiously post-punk was a significant influence for many of us, from John Cooper Clarke to Joy Division/New Order and various luminaries of the New Wave scene such as Echo and the Bunnymen, Department S, Siouxsie, The Church (in their earliest NW guise), Robyn Hitchcock (again going through something of a NW phase). But don’t let this deceive you. The still nascent record and tape collections were filled with Kiss, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Motorhead, AC/DC, Rainbow, Saxon, early Venom… and so on. What was popular a year or two before might not have been played much (indeed in a fit of almost Maoist self-abnegation I sold almost all my heavy metal albums in early 1982 or 3 – a fit of willful cultural vandalism that took me years to recover from, and a considerable amount of money to repurchase in various formats across the next decade).
I think there was a reason for the more Americanised tastes. Many many record collections consisted initially of records (and they were almost all records) passed down or stolen from older siblings. Radio stations were slow to pick up on punk and later New Wave and tended once more towards a more American sound (hence the fact that I can still remember far too many Hall and Oates songs – and lyrics). Therefore that which had come before exercised a considerable momentum as regards the development of tastes. So once the immediate had been satisfied and tastes matured, considering too that from the vantage point of 1980 punk looked a little dated, what then? Those records provided a path forward into ‘deeper’ material. And those older tastes were very strongly influenced by US music – perhaps to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the UK.
One major divergence? Or so it seemed? Well, Lay notes that: it is remarkable how much religious imagery is invoked in Joy Division songs, even their very titles. … Joy Division’s songs, especially on the final album Closer, are drenched in this religious language, which has now all but disappeared. For Curtis’s generation was among the last to be brought up in a Britain where religious language was ubiquitous, transmitted through school assemblies, religious studies classes and the shared landmarks of baptisms, weddings and funerals, all of which offered Curtis access to a vocabulary of transcendence.
That certainly wasn’t a part and parcel of our cultural lives – and I remember being enormously puzzled a couple of years later to be told that religion was central to Curtis. Still, I’m not entirely right. Ireland did produce an avowedly religious band which went on to have a certain measure of fame. Never much liked them though, then or now…
Still, if we go back to the original article I have to raise one significant point that makes me cautious about the whole thesis. Frankly music was, whether in Manchester or Dublin, a bit of a minority interest. More were interested in sport. Most were interested in practically anything else. And while the NME might well have ploughed it’s furrow, and granted Sounds and Melody Maker were also extant then, I wonder how broad their appeal truly was.
It’s odd, perhaps we were just too young. Perhaps Dublin was different in terms of class and environment. Perhaps there were clusters of working class intellectuals in Dublin reading Camus and Sartre and Ballard (oddly enough I know for a fact that in Maynooth during the mid-1980s some people influence in part by Morrissey were reading Camus – but they were younger again). Perhaps some of you? And yet, it’s striking how Roddy Doyle when he came to write the Commitments positioned the music in an American context. At the time – influenced by New Wave and after I thought that was almost deceitful. Now I’m not so sure.
As a teenager in Cork, I used to read Camus, Orwell,
J.S. Mill and Yeats. Used to listen to Massive Attack, Pulp,
Suede, New Order.
I hardly every went to the cinema at that time, though, and
had no interest in sport (I was one of the scrawny guys who
nobody would pick for P.E. teams).
Starkadder, that sort of undermines the argument in Prospect about people not engaging with culture in the contemporary or near contemporary period…
I’m so glad I didn’t grow up in Cork!
Nothing wrong with Cork-nice city.
WBS, I think I was in a minority. Most of the other lads were into
rubbish like WWF wrestling and Guns ‘N’ Roses (one of
these guys boasted he never read anything except
schoolbooks and “The Irish Sun”).
Yes, Cork is pretty good. Got to admit that after Barcelona it would be my favourite place…
A place with two TV channels up until recently? No thanks.
In Cork, we had six channels in the early eighties (RTE 1+2, plus
BBC, ITV, and Channel 4) then cable, satellite and digital.
Not my experience of being in Cork well after that, nor of people I know who grew up there. You must have had a booster of some sort. Still, even with all 6 channels, I’d have happily given it a miss.
I cried when Johnny Alpha died.
I thought Halo Jones was hot.
Didn’t everyone?
I used read the “Victor” and “Warlord” instead of “2000AD”.
Both of them were published by that Tory bastion
D.C. Thomson, although I don’t remember any
overt right-wing propaganda in them.
Liked the Judge Dredd film. Great stuff. How come there were never any Irish war comics set during the Tan War?
The only Irish comic I can think of (for kids) is Count
Curly Wee. Look out, Spiderman and Asterix!+
+Sarcasm.
There was an episode of Judge Dredd set in the Green Dolphin in Raheny. I kid you not. The bad guys had spud-guns that had a setting for “chips” when they wanted to spray their enemy.
I loved Starlord, and moved over to 2000AD when they merged. Strontium dog,and Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein (only got the music joke MUCH later on). Thinking back now, those characters had a huge effect on me, especially Johnny Alpha. Outsider, loner, tough fucker. It was brilliant.
I loved Starlord too. Mindwar was it?
Conor,
That episode sounds great. Although, I have to ask, what age were you lot when you were reading this stuff?
I don’t remember mindwar, but looking back now, you can certainly made a case for Johnny Alpha as a kind of existentalist hero, albeit a fucked-up one. The time when he finally tracks his father down, and condemns him to live the final moments of his life forwever – the father is pleading for his life, and Johnny Alpha sets his timebomb to six-second eternal return – was just incredible. Then you had the mutant wars, when they get a reprieve from the genocide unleashed by the norms.
I mean ,these were amazing plotlines for a comic, no? Genocide is not punished, but a compromise worked out. Johnny Alpha kills his father, for all eternity… fantastic stuff. (The eternal death and rebirth is taken from Dante as well
)
I still read 2000AD. I was 8 when I started reading Starlord, in 1978.
I see. I enjoy the very occasional Batman and Sin City comic. But other than that I stopped reading comics about 10 or 11.
I’m glad to see however that we have moved away from Camus and Yeats who deserve to be treated like the Beano.
Comics are a bit like Children’s TV. There’s a lot more going on that is not picked up by the mainstream, mainly because comics/cartoons are not taken seriously as a cultural art form in the west. But, you take stuff like Reg and Stimpy, or Samurai Jack, and you’re dealing with subversive culture.
Put it this way. I used to walk around Edenmore with Cancer Ward in my coat pocket, but Johnny Alpha is what I remember tonight. I mean, i could talk for hours about the depth and complexity of Strontium Dog, but… am I a working class intellectual only if I talk for hours about Camus, or Solzhenitsyn, or Dante? what I’m saying is, is it the work under discussion that makes me an intellectual, or is it my analysis? I’d like to think it’s the analysis.
That’s why I wouldn’t have much time for Paul Lay’s article. It seems to suggest that it’s the work of art/culture/literature that makes you an intellectual, not the actual process of logical and rigorous analysis.
Oh! And this present discussion has sent me off to amazon.co.uk to pick up one of the collections of strontium dog second-hand, as I’m in Spain at the moment and don’t have it with me, and I miss it! There you go, WBS, you’re drumming up business for amazon
Agree on the complexity of many comics and cartoons (though never found Samaurai Jack all that subversive or great) and on the importance of analysis. Having said that, not all subjects are equally worth time and effort. So we should spend more time analysing, say, the housing problem than Heat magazine.
The Judge Dredd set (in part) in the Green Dolphin is available second-hand on Amazon as well. I don’t know if it’s worth buying, but the link give a intro to the storyline.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Judge-Dredd-Emerald-Garth-Ennis/dp/1840233419/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196632762&sr=1-1
also, the storyline was written by an Northern Irishman, Garth Ennis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Ennis
I agree It’s the process that counts. Once you move out of that you’re into, well, pretension. As the Critic on the Simpsons says, “Camus can do, but Satre is smartre”.
and I’d be happy with working class intellectuals analysising Heat AND housing.
Mind you, I’m a big brother fan, so take it from there. 
Been downhill ever since Galloway left it. Cheers for the Dredd info. Looking forward to the new Batman movie. Spiderman films basically sucked.
I only went looking now for info on the Judge Dredd storyline. I never knew that it was written by someone from the island, although my friends and I suspected as much as the Green dolphin was mentioned. We thought it was someone from Dublin, though. Looking up the info brought home to me two things: the storyline was written in 1991, when I was 21, so I was still reading 2000AD (I read still back issues more than the actual comic today); also, Garth Ennis’ first comic was one set in the Troubles, in 1989. Interesting stuff.
A few cartoonish characters from the Troubles alright. One of whom was sentenced yesteday I’m glad to see. Lots of people resent Robert Mac Liam Wilson claiming, falsely I’m sure, that he just wrote down stories he was told in local pubs.
That’s a great question Conor, is it the product or the process? I think there’s a balance, but I’ll be honest, I was asked tonight as I hummed along to the title sequence of Stargate Atlantis (it rots your mind in an enjoyable sort of way, but my excuse is that there’s SFA new SF on TV at the moment) how come if I liked that why I didn’t listen to classical. I don’t have an answer, just that I’d sooner sit down and listen to ‘cheap’ music as sonofstan put it than expensive music.
I’m also very wary of pretension or the canon… Life’s too short anyway and there’s so much stuff out there so one has to develop filters… or one’s own canon.
One other thought. I actually think that the broadness of influences that I reference in the original post were a good thing. Certainly a hell of a lot more optimistic than the dank mittel European that Lay thinks people bought into…
BTW… anybody remember Crisis comic? That was pretty political particularly towards the end. Actually on reflection wasn’t that where the Garth Ennis one was?
The new Battlestar Galactica is great, although not on at the minute. Good music too. Never liked Stargate the TV show all that much, though the film is excellent. Heroes doesn’t float my boat either, while Lost is rubbish. Smallville isn’t really Sci Fi, but is good, and links in with the comic theme. Hurrah!
Crisis, from what I remember, was pretty explicitly political from the outset, with that Third World War story from Pat Mills. I thought it was great at the time, but I have a suspicion that if I looked back over it now, it’d be pretty rubbish.
I think the Garth Ennis NI story was also published in Crisis. I think it was called ‘Troubled Souls’ and wasn’t at all bad. There was another story he did around the time called True Faith which was fun in an ‘I hate God’ kind of way. I can’t remember if that was in Crisis or the sister publication (and short-lived) Revolver. Garth Ennis has really gone to seed in the last few years, though. He’s rubbish. I’m sticking with Alan Moore, and I’m waiting from the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to arrive from Amazon US.
I’m a huge fan of the new battlestar galactica as well, although season three was a bit of a let-down. According to the fan sites, it was because the Sci-Fi channel wanted less story-arcs and a return to the single episode, single story format – the Star Trek format stuff. The good news, however, is that the executives have copped on that it didn’t work and Ronald D. Moore is to get his story arcs back again. I haven’t seen “Razor” yet, but I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a TV movie (or two part special) they did for the opening of season four. It was shown a couple of weeks ago in the States and it tells the story of the second ship before it meets up with Galactica.
I mean, the two-parter in season two: Resurrection Ship, ranks as one of the best pieces of TV I have ever seen. The fact that a full battle – one taking place for the very survival of the human race – forms the BACKDROP to a deadly battle of wits between the last two human battleship commanders – is just one example of the depth of writing on the programme. Any other Sci-Fi show would have had the battle scene as the focus, and would have gotten praised as well. Moore took a risk on characterisation as the focus of the story, and it paid off in buckets. The plot is there to drive the story along – humans trying to get home – but the characterisation is what makes the story work.
and that’s before we get into suicide bombers as heroes, and human rebel leaders looking like Mohommas Omar (eye patch and arm injury and all) and portrayed, equally, as heroes.
Again, the writing is what puts Battlestar Galactica up there with the best – second only to (pre-season six) Sopranoes.
WBS, the funny thing about classical music is that a good portion of it is ripped-off from folk tunes. But… one is seemingly deemed higher than the other.
Can’t wait to see the story of the other ship (the Atlanta perhaps?) The Iraq parallels and other political commentary do set the show apart. Although you have left NYPD Blue out of your list of the top shows. Battlestar Galactical doesn’t come close to it. I thought the last episode of the Sopranos was awesome, even if the last four or five episodes were hyper-active as they tried to close the show out.
Revolver smiffy. That’s bringing back memories.
Garibaldy, yeah, I like BS Galactica in it’s ‘reimagining’. Pretty powerful critique of the Iraq war too in parts. Stargate the TV show was dire, except towards the end when they brought in the Farscape crowd, and even then they didn’t do much to pep it up. I like Lost though.
Conor, I hadn’t heard of Razor. Ressurection Ship was brilliant (although can I just put in a plea for Babylon 5 Seasons 3 and 4 which were equally complex, albeit not as hard edged).
That’s true about classical music. Still, all forms are pretty much equally good or bad and to my mind it’s personal taste that should determine personal taste. The hierarchy is entertaining, sort of semiotics of luxury, etc…
I just checked online and it’s the Pegasus. I’d forgotten its name.
From around 1994 until 2004, for reasons way too complicated to go into now, i didn’t have a TV, so I missed a lot of programmes, including NYPD Blue. The Sopranos I finally got to watch last year, when I got through all five seasons in the course of about four weeks. I just couldn’t help myself. After watching season one I just thought, My god! This is something else.
Pegasus indeed. You need to sort out NYPD Blue on DVD. Even if it won’t seem as daring now as it did then, it’s still the greatest show ever, including the Sopranos. Have you not seen the end of the Sopranos? If so, glad I didn;t reference any specific events.
The last two episodes of the last series of Battlestar Galactica are on sky two tonight at 12. Can I now resist the urge to stay up and watch them?
Can I point out that having read “L’Etranger” does not make one an intellectual? “Killing an Arab” is just one of those songs which tell you what the writer was reading at the time they did their A-Levels (also see Echo and the Bunnymen, “My White Devil”). It might well demonstrate an interest in ideas, but not, in itself, that those ideas have been studied and understood at all, let alone in any depth. More likely it means “a tendency to be over-impressed by anybody who throws around certain names and concepts which give the impression that they are an intellectual and a damned contemporary one at that”.
This realisation helps answer the question “how does Paul Morley get away with it?” which has been troubling me for about a quarter of a century now.
ejh! This is terrible news… Are you saying that a close (if now temporally distant) acquaintance with the works of Robert Crumb and Cheech and Chong does not constitute intellectualism?
I think the answer to the question you started with; what happened to the young working class intellectuals? is unversity; these days they get to go, and by the time they realise they’ve been sold a pup, the fire is gone…
I think that being able to include the word Barthes in a Joy Division review probably fails to constitute intellectualism.
Intellectuals? All spoofers. Why lament their absence among the working class? There’s a difference between intellectualism and knowledge derived from praxis.
Give me the Third Culture folk every time.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/
Surely only intellectuals say “praxis”.
Hi John,
had a quick look at the third culture link. found this at the end:
” America now is the intellectual seedbed for Europe and Asia. This trend started with the prewar emigration of Albert Einstein and other European scientists and was further fueled by the post- Sputnik boom in scientific education in our universities.”
Funny how it doesn’t mention the Nazi scientists who built the American space rockets. It simply writes them out of the history of American scientific intellectualism. you have Einstein, and then you have Post-Sputnik. no Nazis.
Is this the type of rewriting of history that you want as the new third culture? One that ignores inconvenient truths about the past? Seems to me like a type of spoofing, no?
Kilingons also say Praxis. It’s the moon that blows up at the start of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country.
Hi Conor–
Hmm. I don’t think the Third Culture folk are the sort of people to deliberately ignore inconvenient truths at all. You could write them and ask about their omission if you’re convinced it’s deliberate or essential that it be mentioned in what is clearly a brief overview that at least implicitly acknowledges 1) that the U.S. benefits and benefited from immigration and 2) that Nazism drove Jewish scientists out of Europe. My greater concern would be how few women are represented in and by their project.
As for spoofing? Nah. Spoofing to me means feigning greater knowledge than you actually possess and attaching unmertied significance to obtuseness. The Third Culture folk in general seem to believe in recognizing and acknowledging their ignorance and the importance of skepticism to scientific method and the growth of knowledge.
ejh–
I read it in a book.
At first I thought “here’s another right-wing think-tank”, but there you go. Not at all. cheers for the link.
I really enjoyed this piece. I went to Joeys Marino (or more formally St. Joseph’s CBS Fairview !) in the ’70s and 80s.
Although I was reading tons of Sci Fi from Marino public library at the time I never knew anyone else who did. Most were interested in getting locked, English soccer and the distant possibility of sex,
Next there’s a sentence you’d never expect to see in print.
There is an interesting Joeys-David Bowie relationship.
Bowies Musical Director is one Gerry Leonard who was in class 6.1 and was 17 when he did the Leaving in 1979.
Leonard is now an internationally critically acclaimed musician and teacher who is based in New York and goes by the handle Spooky Ghost.
Check him out at:
http://www.spookyghost.com/
Bowie – Joeys!
Joeys – Bowie!
Messes with your head!
Critical Inquirer, I now live close to there, and actually used the library in the 70s.
A Bowie/Joey’s link… Briliant!
And curiously post-punk was a significant influence for many of us, from John Cooper Clarke to Joy Division/New Order…
Just came across a nice example:
http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZwMs2fLoVE