This terrific short film called The Girl Chewing Gum was made in 1976 by the artist John Smith (surely not his real name). It takes a minute for the “joke” to sink in but once it does it’s wonderful to watch, well worth sticking with to the end.
(Discovered at It’s Nice That)
Being a responsible and mature adult I suppose I have to tut-tut the violence but I must admit that seeing those students rioting at Tory party headquarters in London during the protest against tuition fee increases last week did warm the cockles of my heart quite a bit. I didn’t think students had that kind of fight in them anymore, having long ago swapped the dangerous passion of political activism for dull, conformist careerism and it brought back fond memories of my own time at college — except without all the fire-starting and window-breaking stuff.
I was at Maidstone College of Art in the early 80s (the same year as Tracey Emin — oh, the stories I could tell you) when we had clear “enemies” in the form of Thatcher and Reagan and while there I went on (non-violent!) marches in support of the GLC, CND and the striking miners. More locally we were involved with fighting a plan to merge Maidstone with the nearby Canterbury and Rochester art colleges that was being forced through by the Thatcherite National Advisory Board for Education against the wishes of not only the staff and students but even the local Tory council. Being a soulless technocrat Thatcher obviously didn’t see the point of any higher education that wasn’t “practical” like the arts so we had to be made more “efficient” and the art school system turned into a vocational sausage factory. We had a big protest march through Canterbury but the main event was an all-night sit-in at the college which turned out to be more of a party than anything with live bands and dancing but who said political activism had to be boring? It certainly felt great to be involved in something like that and what’s the point of being young if you can’t make futile, idealistic gestures?
As usual it was all for nothing, Maidstone was merged with Canterbury and Rochester in 1987 after I left (though they were stopped from closing one of the colleges down completely) and now those have been folded into one multi-campus monster called the University for The Creative Arts. It turned out that our new Principal — the very man who attended all our Student Union meetings and assured us he was on our side in opposing the merger — was actually appointed by the Advisory Board tasked with the job of helping the merger happen so basically the bastard was a mole who stabbed us all in the back.
With the draconian budget cuts his government is passing David Cameron could become a hated bogeyman on a par with Thatcher and we could be in for a replay of the 1980s — futile or not. Let’s hope the music will be as good too, we may have been on the losing side in most of the battles but we had a bloody good soundtrack.
Download: Set The House Ablaze (live) – The Jam (mp3)
I’ve had mates who were Punks, Mods, Soul Boys, Skinheads and Rude Boys but I’ve never known anyone who called themselves a New Romantic, and not because I have anything against blokes in frilly shirts and eyeliner either. I used to work with a girl who was a regular at Blitz and knew Boy George before he was famous but she’d laugh if you applied that label to her, the scene was far too individualistic to be pigeonholed in that way which is why for a while they were called The Cult With No Name.
Yes, New Romantics looked a bit ridiculous at times (Exhibit A above) and were often better at dressing up than they were at making records, but given the choice between their flamboyant silliness and the plodding denim rockism of an Oasis I think I know who I prefer, especially when they made such cracking 12″ mixes as these.
Download: Night Train (Dance Mix) – Visage (mp3)
Download: Planet Earth (Night Mix) – Duran Duran (mp3)
Download: The Art of Parties (12″ version) – Japan (mp3)
Read: Spandau Ballet, the Blitz kids and the birth of the New Romantics (excellent article)
The 1980s were sometimes known as “The Designer Decade” when the “D” word was often used as a rather snide label for anything that was trendy, superficial, made-over, expensive, exclusive (I was a designer in the late 1980s and got bloody annoyed that my job title was used as an insult.) People drank designer beer and designer water, men sported designer stubble on their faces and we even had designer banks and designer socialism. So it’s no wonder the decade also brought us designer political protest.
One of the iconic fashion items of the era was the baggy white t-shirt with a big slogan on it, though popularized and ripped-off by Wham! and Frankie Goes To Hollywood the original slogan shirts were created with a serious political purpose by British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett in 1983 and had messages like WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW, STOP KILLING WHALES, and EDUCATION NOT MISSILES. A portion of the profits from them went to charity and their simple bold type was designed to be easily copied by others so that the messages on them would become more widespread. While all the FRANKIE SAY RELAX t-shirts may have diluted her original intent somewhat it’s easy to snigger at the idealistic notion of a mere t-shirt having any political effect whatsoever, and that fact that some were made out of expensive silk makes them look like just another silly example of Radical Chic. I went on quite a few demos back then and don’t remember too many people wearing them, the fashion there being mostly Oxfam and Dr. Marten.
Naive fashionista she might have been but I’ll give Hamnett this, she did have the balls to wear this t-shirt when she met Maggie Thatcher at a Downing Street reception in 1984.
(Pershing is the American nuclear missile system that was being deployed in Germany at the time)
I started writing about all this because I actually had a hand in producing Hamnett’s original t-shirts. Between leaving school and going to art college I worked for a couple of years at a silkscreen printers in Fulham who mostly did the sort of rock and pop t-shirts you saw on sale down the King’s Road and in Kensington Market. Then one day in walks this woman Katherine Hamnett with some typeset artwork of slogans in heavy black letters she wanted us to print on some baggy t-shirts she had designed herself, some were cotton and some silk (which were a real bugger to print and dry). I can’t remember how many different slogans there were but she came back several times with new ones. My job was on the pre-press side, photographing the artwork onto film (the original type for those shirts was tiny, only about 2″ high) and making the screens for printing, so I helped produce the very t-shirt she is wearing above. It’s not much I know but it’s the closest I ever got to Maggie Thatcher, pity Hamnett didn’t have a design that said FUCK OFF AND DIE, YOU BITCH.
Download: Two Tribes (Annihilation Mix) – Frankie Goes To Hollywood (mp3)
On a whim the other day I dug out my copy of David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” album to play for the first time in donkey’s years and looking at the sleeve reminded me just how freaky Bowie used to look and how I was a little creeped out by him when I was a kid. With his bony frame, dodgy eyes, wonky teeth, milk-bottle pallor and outlandish costumes he looked like a zombie in a gay horror film. I still remember back in 1973 going round a friend’s house after school and his older sister had just bought a copy of “Aladdin Sane” which he got out to show me and we both stared at the sleeve photos — especially the one on the inside gatefold — as if we were sneaking a peek at his Dad’s porn magazines, something about it looked a bit pervy and illicit. Sounds silly I know but I was only 10, and I loved science fiction too but Bowie seemed to be coming from a far weirder place than Star Trek.
Of all the iconic images on his 1970s sleeves the one on the front of “Diamond Dogs” is probably the freakiest, showing Bowie as some mutant half human-half dog stretching out across the gatefold like a depraved Ray Harryhausen creation. The original version of the painting was even more perverted with the dog half of Bowie proudly displaying his meat and two veg like a centerfold in Dog Fancy magazine, but when record label execs saw early proofs they worried that some shops wouldn’t carry it so the poor old dog was neutered by having his todger airbrushed out.
The cover was painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert who had just published a book of paintings called “Rock Dreams” which depicted various rock legends (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Hank Williams, Bowie himself) in fantasy settings. Bowie saw an exhibition of the paintings at Biba and commissioned Peellaert to do the cover which apparently ticked off Mick Jagger as he was after him to do The Stones next album too. In the end Peellaert did both “Diamond Dogs” and “It’s Only Rock and Roll” that year, though Bowie beat them to the shops by several months and his cover is far more striking. Take that, Mick.
“Diamond Dogs” was Bowie’s last Glam Rock album and his last proper rock album of any kind for the rest of the decade and I think it’s fallen through the cracks in his catalogue between his Ziggy pomp and the Thin White Duke/Berlin era and doesn’t get the attention they do which is a shame as I think it’s a better album than “Aladdin Sane” — though I’ll resist the temptation to call it the dog’s bollocks.
Download: Big Brother/Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family – David Bowie (mp3)
Buy: “Diamond Dogs” (album)
Another legend of British children’s television has passed away: the great Tony Hart. He was the type you don’t seem to get on kid’s telly anymore, an older man who wasn’t in the slightest bit trendy but was passionate and enthusiastic about his craft. Less your best mate than a favourite teacher or uncle.
His death is particularly sad for me as an art school boy who grew up loving his shows and was inspired by his creativity. I even used to get his books out of the library and try to copy the projects in them. How many other kids are there like me out there who really got into drawing and making art because of him? How many of those eventually went to art college and had a career in the creative fields? I’m guessing a lot. It could be that humble Tony Hart was the biggest influence on British art and design in the past 40 years.
What a bummer.
Download: Art for Arts Sake – 10cc (mp3)
