Note a quality that several works of ‘innovative’ British writing and filmmaking of the 1970s seems to share: a kind of directionlessness, which does not allow itself to end coherently. The later (and not only later) novels of B.S. Johnson, Chris Petit’s Radio On, and the Clash documentary by Hazan and Mingay all exhibit this, and it is of course difficult now not to interpret it in the context of the wider directionlessness, and the impending political dead end, experienced by the left in the later seventies. In each case there is the sense of something being initiated that is not sustained, like the weak attempts at narrative development that intersperse the documentary. As Petit said of making Radio On, “when there’s few other people around doing what you’re doing, it makes it difficult to get better”. And none of them in fact did get better; Petit’s subsequent career, and Johnson’s death – perhaps – show this (though with Johnson there were obviously other reasons for his suicide). Indeed Johnson’s suicide could be interpreted as an index of his commitment, and ambition.
But what all these works manage to convey despite, or perhaps because of, their deficiencies is a remarkably strong sense of the time in which they were made – the Clash documentary in particular. The variety of nostalgia this carries with it is interesting in itself: the dilapidation and crass ugliness of the urban environment it depicts, together with the physical (and linguistic) unruliness of those that appear in it, both today carry the memory of a social space less tightly controlled and administered than it is today. Next to contemporary urban ‘regeneration’ projects, with their ‘landscaped’ public areas and bristling with CCTV cameras, their installment of retail units in almost every available space, the neglected, decaying urban landscapes of the nineteen seventies speak of lost freedoms – if also, perhaps, of greater physical dangers. The verbal violence in the form of swearing, which is indiscriminate and thereby almost, at times, good natured, is another instance of this; today it, together with obscene gestures like the fuck off sign (so ubiquitous in the seventies), has almost completely disappeared, and obscenities have acquired a violent charge they probably never had in the past (perhaps, too, they are more likely to provoke violence if used – or rather, state violence, the intervention of the police). What all this amounts to is that the working class, carnivalesque atmosphere that one sees present at the gigs – which is wild, spontaneous, uncontrolled and open to all, and which inherently involves risk – has become ever more difficult to create, if it is possible now at all. Tillmans has spoken of this process in one of his exhibition catalogues, and no doubt it has been widely commented on by others. Your own ‘conservatism’, and ‘dislike’ of popular music has meant that you have only become fully aware of it recently – and in large part by virtue of your experience in the former Soviet Union, where one quickly becomes aware of the absence of physical controls on movement through the urban environment which are so ubiquitous in the west that one no longer notices them. This process of suppression, or absorption, of spontaneous social activity and its replacement, ‘from above’, with its controlled simulacrum has been one of the most striking developments of the last thirty years. It goes hand in hand with processes of ‘professionalisation’ (also notably absent in the Clash documentary), and the creation and saturation of information technology and media markets, whose simulacra come to substitute themselves for the things they represent. What seems in the documentary to express all that is anachronistic and naïve in the rather befuddled political stance it tries to assume, is the basic, and unquestioned, assumption that the band’s politics and its professional ambitions within the music world were somehow compatible, and would not inevitably come into contradiction with each other. This assumption has not survived. Perhaps the Clash only seem so good now in the light of what happened next in popular music. Who, if anyone, might properly be considered their heir today?
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