How I Left The National Grid:
A Creative Writing PhD on Self-Design and Post Punk
Guy Mankowski
3rd Year Creative Writing PhD Candidate
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Date of registration: 21/02/12
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Contents
Acknowledgements 3
1. Introduction: Post-punk and Identity 4
2. Post Punk: The Cultural and Political Context 9
3. Self-Design: Contexts and Theory 34
4. Creative and Critical Practice 45
5. The Writing Process 86
6. Bibliography 104
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to firstly express my deep gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Andrew Crumey
and Dr. Adam Hansen. I consider myself very fortunate to have had two supervisors
who offered such consistent input throughout, to such a high standard. My heartfelt
thanks to both of them for being so helpful, insightful and committed throughout. I’d
also like to thank my family, Vivienne, Andrew, and Oliver Mankowski for their
support towards my PhD. I also appreciate the input of Kingsley Hall and Julie
Campbell, who offered compelling insights into their creative practice as post-punk
musicians. Thank you also to Jehnny Beth and Savages for inviting me to interview
them: this allowed me to meet other artists whose insights were most useful. Thank
you also to Hanna Jameson, Lyn Lockwood and the Manic Street Preachers.
Excerpts from chapters 1,2 and 3 have previously been published in the
journal Punk and Post-Punk. A slightly briefer version of the novel has been
published by Zer0 Books / Roundfire.
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1. Introduction- Post-punk and Identity
This PhD investigates, through creative and critical practice, how we might apply
theories of self-design to understandings and creative representations of the post-punk
movement. These theories inform the creative component of this PhD, a novel entitled
How I Left The National Grid (hereafter, HILTNG).
Through critical and creative practice this thesis will address three questions:
1. What is self-design and how can we historicise it?
2. Why is self-design evident in certain subcultures or cultural moments,
particularly post-punk?
3. What can a novel about self-design in post-punk do to address these questions
and tell us about identity?
To answer these questions, this PhD will consider how to represent people responding
artistically to their environment, with a focus upon post-punk urban settings in 1980’s
Britain. Through creative practice these people will be represented by attempting to
recreate that environment in a cultural moment, which, as will become clear, is in
many ways linked to the present day.
These research questions inform the material aggregated here; in turn, this
material seeks to address these questions by considering the perspectives, contexts
and positions necessary for answering them. Before proceeding to outline the
theoretical framework, I will define ‘post-punk’. It is necessary to do this, because
this term has been used both to describe music and a repeated cultural moment. The
use of this term in popular culture will be explored. This will be followed by a brief
exploration of how post-punk music can be distinguished from new wave and
industrial music, in order for us to establish key terms. This cultural moment will then
be explored as an extension of the punk movement, within the context of post-
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modernism. This will allow the practices of punk and post-punk to be later understood
within a sound theoretical context. The methods and tendencies of post-punk artists
will then be investigated, to offer a practical dimension to this theoretical analysis.
Considering the cultural and political context of post-punk is necessary in order to
establish how a fictional post-punk band could be created in novel form. By so doing,
the theoretical materials gathered here can be activated as creative practice.
The first question will be directly addressed by then looking exactly at what
self-design is. The second question will be explored by examining how self-design
has evolved, up to and including the post-punk moment. The third question will then
be addressed, by initially investigating how these understandings have been reflected
in the novel form. Finally, the focus will turn to the ways in which HILTNG
specifically reflected these concerns.
Defining post punk
As the punk movement blazed out, some of its components developed into another
cultural moment, when the raw anger of punk music was replaced with the more
cerebral concerns of post-punk. As punk had rooted itself in the aural and visual
territory of a ‘dystopian’ and ‘post-industrial’ present, so post-punk built upon the
space created.
Post-punk is generally understood as a musical movement. Simon Reynolds
describes the typical ‘angularity’ and ‘brittle spikiness’ of the post-punk guitar sound.
In his words, drums often had a ‘tumbling, tribal propulsion’, and the bass ‘stepped
forward as the lead instrumental voice.’ In post-punk ‘atmospherics and new sonic
possibilities were explored’.1 Kitty Empire describes the mentality of the post-punk
1 See Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (London: Faber, 2006), p.xvii. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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musician, saying ‘Many of them came to pop from art college with austere agendas,
bristling with theories and influences culled from art, literature, performance and
critical theory’. She continues, ‘the post-punks sought to bring to pop the most un-pop
of themes. Boy meets girl gave way to lyrics about industrial decay and the mechanics
of power.’1
Yet there is uncertainty around the term-post-punk, as it seems to overlap with
the term ‘new wave’. Theo Cateforis describes how new wave bands such as Talking
Heads ‘shared punk’s energy but tempered its vitriol…with liberal doses of humour,
irreverence and irony.’2 By contrast, bands that are considered explicitly post-punk,
such as Joy Division, had an over-arching seriousness in their music. The playfulness
Cateforis refers to is perhaps what distinguishes new-wave from post punk, which is
the more prominent and preferred term in the following material.3
Definitions of ‘post-punk’ seem to overlap with what some scholars call
‘industrial’ music. Karen Collins describes industrial music as being ‘created
originally by using mechanical and electrical machinery, and later advance[ing] to
synthesisers, samples and electronic percussion’. She elaborates that industrial music
is ‘commonly built around ‘non-musical’ and often distorted, repetitive sounds of
industrial machinery…reflecting feelings of alienation and dehumanisation as forms
of social critique.’4 This marriage of social critique and synthesised sounds is evident
in bands such as Throbbing Gristle, which Reynolds would define as post-punk.
Therefore at times it is appropriate to refer to bands such as Throbbing Gristle as post-
1 Kitty Empire, ‘Never Mind The Sex Pistols’, 17 April 2005, The Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2005/apr/17/music?INTCMP=SRCH (Accessed 28th December 2012). 2 Theo Cateforis, ‘Are We Not New Wave: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s’, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, (2011), p.4. 3 For more on new wave see Cateforis (2011).4 See Karen Collins, ‘Dead Channel Surfing: the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music’, Popular Music, 24: 3 (2005), 165-178, p. 166.
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punk, whilst remaining mindful of this ambiguity. Reynolds offers an effective
response to these questions of terminology by describing post-punk, perhaps most
usefully, as ‘a discourse about music, rather than a style of music’ (xvii). For the
purposes of this piece post-punk will refer to bands who have created a discourse
about music, most explicitly by using manifestos.
Theodore Gracyk argues that ‘post-punk is sufficiently diverse that its
organizing principle is not to be found in its stylistic unity.’ He observes that ‘as a set
of musical styles its organizing principle is not audible’. In contrast, to Gracyk its
‘core exemplars represent a coherent movement, in the art-historic sense’: ‘post-punk
represent a shift away from punk’s romantic expressionism to a modernist
commitment to use verbal-musical interplay for the expression of ideas.’1 In other
words, he perceived post-punk more as a means of expression than simply a musical
genre.
Post-punk thereby resists a tidy definition, musical, temporal or otherwise.
The riot grrl movement, which occurred in the early nineties as a moment in post-
punk, has been described as ‘a fluid set of contested, sonic, spatial and linguistic
practices with the aim to incite a radical girl gang into being’.2 Comparably, post-
punk could be argued to be a ‘fluid set of sonic, spatial and linguistic practices’,
which were a reaction to punk. Post-punks were engaging in a performance of
politics, bringing to the surface the politicality of their cultural product. But what
conditions were punks responding to? A primary one was the postmodern condition.
1 Theodore Gracyk, ‘Kids’re Forming Bands: Making Meaning in Post-Punk, Punk & Post Punk, 1: 1 (2011), 73-85, p.78.2 Julia Downes, ‘We Are Turning Cursive Letters Into Knives’, in Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds.), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), p.92. All further references to this volume will be made parenthetically in the text.
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Post-modernism represents an ‘exhaustion of totalizing metanarratives’, which
created an incredulity towards grand narratives.1 Punk used the eclectic means at the
disposal of a bricoleur ‘as a means of waging war on society’.2 Punk, in particular,
reacted to how means of profit-making channels in popular culture, ‘the apparatuses
of media, fashion and entertainment’, have been used to ‘circulate instantly disposable
spectacles and services’.3 Ryan Moore argues that the plethora of lifestyles
consequently offered to consumers in popular culture enabled people to ‘fabricate an
identity from the unending flow of celebrities, lifestyles and products.’ This was state
of affairs which punk kicked against, using, ‘with self-reflexive irony…recycled
cultural images and fragments for the purposes of parody and shock’ with, for
instance, punks wearing safety pins and leather jackets to subvert the original
meaning of these items.4
By extension, the post-punk movement used different means. For example,
just as the early-Twentieth-century Dada art movement created manifestos, so
formative post-punk bands such as Pere Ubu used Dada performance techniques, such
as Dadaist sound poetry (37). Likewise manifestos were a technique employed in the
post-punk movement. They were used as part of a process of making manifest the link
between cultural production and consumption, and the contexts of that production and
consumption.
As this discussion of definitions suggests, in order to understand punk, and by
extension post-punk, we need to offer a cultural contextualisation. Therefore, an
1 Ryan Moore was here building upon the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, particularly in his work ‘Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction,’ The Communication Review, 7 (2004): 305-327, pp.305-7.2 Moore, ‘Postmodernism’ p.307.3 Moore, ‘Postmodernism’ p.307.4 Moore, ‘Postmodernism’, p.307.
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understanding of the socio-economic backdrop against and within which post-punk
flourished is necessary.
2. Post Punk: The Cultural and Political Context
The narrative of HILTNG starts in 1980, when England was in the grip of a recession.
At this point, capitalism appeared to be in a state of jeopardy. The country was ‘in the
midst of a severe economic crisis and apparent political paralysis’, a crisis
‘compounded by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the inauguration of
Ronald Reagan in 1981’.1 Matthew Worley notes how both these political leaders
‘showed willingness to pursue far more hard-line ideological and militarist strategies
against the Soviet Union than their immediate predecessors’ (334). This sense of the
‘hardline’ was apparent not only in the policies and strategies of these politicians, but
also in the response of trade-unions, who wielded their own responsive power in the
form of occasionally paralysing strikes as the situation developed.
Thatcher and Reagan were responding, at least in part, to the economic
situations prevalent when they gained power. As Worley observes: ‘Inflationary
pressures inherited from the 1960s had led to a rise in unemployment and industrial
conflict that combined to inaugurate a prolonged period of socio-economic and
political unrest’ (334).
This socio-economic unrest was not just manifested in a pervading
atmosphere, but also in some outbreaks of violence. Worley notes that by the winter
of 1978 a wave of industrial protest served as ‘a prelude to a recession that saw
Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government preside over record levels of
unemployment and a spate of inner-city riots born from socio-economic and racial
1 Matthew Worley, ‘Shot by both sides: Punk, politics and the end of ‘Consensus’’, Contemporary British History, 26: 3 (2009), 315-340, p. 334. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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tensions that had long-simmered across the UK’ (334). These were not the only
domestic tensions. The IRA was in the process of undertaking a campaign of
mainland bombings. The National Front organised riots, in which long-held racial
resentments were violently expressed. Britain, as Richard Clutterbuck put it, appeared
to be ‘in agony: at war on the picket lines, scarred by mainland IRA bombings, and—
on certain inner-city streets— confronted by a buoyant NF keen to ferment racial
violence’1.
The artistic community offered an ambiguous response to these tensions. The
punk movement, during this time, was at its peak. It was seen by Worley to ‘reflect a
breakdown in the post-war ‘consensus’’(334). In fact, it did more than reflect: it
instigated a breakdown to the extent that in concerts people were able to blur the
boundaries between responding to the music, and rioting. Worley suggests that the
various aspects of punk reflected captured different facets of the realities of that age,
and further that ‘in its music, rhetoric, attitude and style’ it ‘embodied Britain’s
deteriorating economic and moral standing’(334). As he acknowledges, this view
builds upon the work of Stuart Hall (and others associated with the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)).
Hall and his colleagues contended that ‘aspects of youth culture can be read as
sites of resistance to prevailing socio-economic structures, class relations and cultural
hegemony’ (334). Within this context these ‘sites of resistance’ were often gigs, as
music became a ‘contested site of political engagement’ (334). Music, however, might
not have been a site of resistance at all. David Muggleton, in his later research into the
Goth movement, moved beyond this view of culture as resistance. He was more
interested in how ‘members of youth subcultures interpret and make sense of the post-
1 Richard Clutterbuck, Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence (London: Penguin, 1978), cited in Worley, p.338.
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modern characteristics imputed to them by social theorists’.1 He interviewed members
of subcultures to uncover explanations regarding their behaviour and dress, rather
than applying theories and frameworks onto data. His conclusion was that in the punk
scene an emphasis on postmodern hyper-individualism and fragmentation runs
alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity.
During the 1980’s the National Front’s noticeable presence on the streets was
often reflected in punk concerts. In particular, the band Sham 69 saw their gigs
becoming meeting points for National Front supporters. Even left-wing bands such as
Crisis and Gang of Four saw their audiences regularly break into violent
confrontations. As the music that was performed fed off anger and tension (as well as
arguably creating more anger and tension) a fluid battleground was therefore being
created in many live venues. These riots fit with Hakim Bey’s definition of
‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’, which are ‘temporary spaces that elude formal
structures of control.’2 At these gigs even a hint of sympathy from the performers, in
support of rising racial and socio-economic anger, seemed enough to spark
confrontation. Indeed, it seemed as if certain factions were looking for an excuse to
riot, with gigs offering a place to do so.
Bands such as Joy Division found themselves implicated in these riots, with
right-wing groups attending their shows.3 The ambiguity in their work was also seized
upon by right-wing groups, with the band having to refute possessing a sympathetic
ideology. Onstage in Birmingham, in 1976, Eric Clapton had made a speech in favour
1 David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning Of Style (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2000), p.5.2 See Hakim Bey on ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ in reference to the city, cited in Fiorella De Cindio and Alessandro Aurigi’s Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 177. 3 Joy Division were not fascist, but their work reflected a preoccupation with fascism.
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of Enoch Powell’s right-wing stance on immigration. During the same period, at the
other end of the political spectrum the Rock Again Racism movement was founded.
Once the explosion of punk music in the mid-seventies died down, the ‘post-punk’
movement began.1 The post-punk movement is acknowledged to have continued into
the late eighties. Its musicians were noted for their tendency to not just use their dress
but also their lyrics, stagecraft, artwork and performance as an overt means of
expression. Post-punk bands such as Joy Division, The Fall and Public Image Limited
were notable for adopting the 1970s ‘Do-It-Yourself’ ethic of punk music, but using it
as a platform to explore new aesthetic and ideological territories.
Post-punk took the anger and amateurism of punk and combined it with more
analytical, considered content, using an autodidactic approach to question, empower
and reconsider what is taken for granted. Magazine’s 1978 single ‘Shot By Both
Sides’ is representative of its interrogative stance.2 The song captures singer Howard
Devoto’s reluctance to conform to either side of a debate, with him thus ending up
‘shot by both sides’. Part of the difficulty about conforming was that there was no
self-defining subcultural movement.
Yet despite the role of gigs, in recession-hit Britain developing subcultures
lacked not only ideological but also physical room in which to develop. As Alan
Sinfield said ‘there is no miraculous free space’ in which subcultures can form.3
Sinfield captured the necessarily disjointed nature of artistic expression within this
1 During the ‘Post Punk, New Wave, and Authenticity’ conference in May 2014 at London School of Economics (at which part of this thesis was presented) participants in the punk movement were asked about this terminology. Former members of The Mo-dettes and The Revillos were bemused at being categorised as punk, saying they were merely ‘themselves.’ The category of post-punk did not seem to connect with them at the time, though they readily accepted it now. 2 Magazine (1978). ‘Shot by Both Sides’, Virgin Records, CD. 3 See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004 Ed.), p.178.
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context, when he wrote that ‘subcultural meaning, like all meaning, works through a
strategic reordering of what is at hand.’1
So when we consider how artists used ‘what was at hand’, we need to account
for these fragmented times. Yet these times also connect to ours. Andy Beckett’s 2010
book When The Lights Went Out captured the political and social climate that
prevailed at the start of the 1980’s, but in the year of its publication many of the issues
that affected Britain (such as high unemployment and recession) were again high in
the public consciousness. The impact of these concerns affected the development of
individual identity in the eighties, as it would in 2010, and the inception of HILTNG.2
Post-punk and subcultures
Bands such as Magazine and Joy Division reflected changes in their urban
surroundings in their work. But how can we theorise these reflections? Giacomo Botta
echoes Sinfield’s assertion that there is ‘no miraculous free space’ for subculture
formation in his consideration of the specific use of urban space in post-punk.3 He
argues that an ‘innovation at the level of cultural sensibility’ led to the
reconceptualization of place, which permitted musicians to claim urban zones for
themselves, as areas in which they could foster an identity and express their inner
world. Botta observes:
1 Sinfield, p.178.2 In his account of the 1980s the journalist Dominic Seabrook described ‘an atomized, depoliticized Britain, where glassy new shopping centres towered over disused mine workings’.3 Giacomo Botta, ‘Dancing To Architecture: Popular Music, Economic Crisis and Urban Change in 1980’s Industrial Europe’, Serbian Architectural Journal, 1 (2012), 113-131, p. 123.
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Punk scenes in industrial cities were able to rearticulate the private vacant
industrial spaces, into public ones, both materially (by gathering in them) and
at the imaginary level (by using them in pictures, lyrics).4
Botta’s conceptualisation of the different ways in which artists express themselves
and form their identity is worth briefly elaborating upon. It uses ideas of ‘articulation’
as posited by Stuart Hall. In the words of Hall, articulation is ‘a linkage between that
articulated discourse and the social forces which it can…but need not necessarily, be
connected.’2 Botta builds upon this idea of ‘articulation’, using it as a term by which
to explore how an artist can express themselves and disseminate their work in three
‘dimensions’. Botta posits that ‘territorialisation through music occurs in…textscapes,
landscapes and soundscapes’:
The lyrics and titles of songs make up a band’s textscapes. The use of local
music tradition, local vernacular, or typical city noises constitutes a bands
soundscape. Finally the landscape covers all the visual elements.3 4
Botta considers the work of post-punk artists in relation to these ‘articulations’ which,
in the words of Hall, do not necessarily connect with the discourse of dominant social
forces. He analyses the work of Joy Division within the context of their particular
creative milieu, taking into account the socio-economic conditions that prevailed in
Manchester during the late-eighties.5 In particular, he writes how ‘in their lyrics the
4 Botta, ‘Dancing’, p.123. 2 Stuart Hall, ‘On postmodernism and articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10: 2 (1986), 45-60, p.45.3 Giacomo Botta, ‘The city that was creative and did not know: Manchester and popular music, 1976-1997’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 12, (2009), 349-65, p. 355.4 In an email correspondence with Professor Botta (between 03/04/14-04/04/14) I queried whether or not these three dimensions do indeed cover all aspects of artistic expression. He said he had been ‘thinking about if visual articulation include performance.’ He added ‘this is also complicated I think because the performance includes bodily elements that cannot be understood as merely visual (and here I am thinking of Ian Curtis’ dancing on stage).’ He acknowledged that he ‘might have to add one more dimension to my analysis.’5 The term ‘creative milieu’ is drawn from Roberto Camagni and the Groupe De Recherche European Sur les Milieux Innovateurs (GREMI), meaning a set of networks ‘of mainly
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built environment is evoked because of its monotony and desolation, structuring a
sinister textscape which only through circulation may be identified as Manchester by
listeners.’1
Botta’s work shares a similarity with Beckett’s, in that he contextualizes these
practices within the socio-cultural backdrop of neo-liberal politics practiced at the
time by Margaret Thatcher. Botta argues that the economic policies of Thatcher (in
which individual entrepreneurialism was strongly favoured over community
investment) gave rise to desolate urban spaces. Botta describes how undeveloped
urban spaces were, ironically enough, fertile ground for post-punk: the ‘lack of
identity and direction during the crisis (of recession era 80’s Britain) reveals the
citizens’ attempts to dramatize their own condition sonically and occupy city spaces
with speed and noise’.2 This is what happened during post-punk.
The architectural theorist Owen Hatherley brings a different perspective to
Botta’s diagnosis. Hatherley argues that there was a ‘delayed cultural reaction’ to
sudden urban developments in cities like Manchester, which were rebuilt in the
1960’s but whose effect ‘only registered ten years later when punk claimed towers
and walkways as home in places like Hulme Crescents’.3 Hatherley describes how
‘post-punk is usually represented in grim towers and blasted wastelands. Places which
survive in fragments outside the ring road’. The link between these alienated urban
spaces (which convey a sense of the fragmentary) and post-punk is illustrated in John
informal social relationships within a limited geographic area, often determining a specific external image and a specific internal representation and sense of belonging, which enhance the local innovative capability through synergic and collective learning processes.’ See Roberto Camagni, Innovation Networks: Spatial Perspectives (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999). p.17. 1 Botta, ‘The City’, 356. 2 Botta, ‘Dancing’ , p.127.3 See Owen Hatherley’s ‘From Rock To Rubble: How Manchester Lost Its Music’, April 9th 2012, The Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc3-1U1ZxHA. Accessed 14th May 2014.
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Foxx’s 1980 video for ‘Underpass’. In this video Foxx appropriated inner city
walkways and underpasses within his identity, placing himself amongst them during
the act of performance.1 But what other means of cultural production, besides pop
videos, were used in the post punk movement?
Post-Punk and its methods
Alan Sinfield argued that you cannot understand contradictions and crisis, such as
those evident in this era, without understanding the relevant modes of cultural
production (and vice versa)2. Therefore the methods employed by post-punk artists in
era will now be focused upon. A familiarisation with these methods also allows for
them to be drawn from in the depiction of a fictional band, in the novel component of
this PhD.
Reynolds’ Rip It Up offers an overview of the means of cultural production
used in this socio-historical moment. In post-punk, these means are varied because in
his words post-punk musicians were ‘more articulate and laden with ideas than their
punk forefathers’ (Reynolds, xvii). The Slits’ Viv Albertine confirms that the
members of her well-known post-punk band were ‘always questioning things’.3
Reynolds suggests that this approach had been shaped by the self-critical sensibility of
1970’s conceptual art, in which the discourse around the work was as important as the
art itself (205). Reynolds, along with Simon Frith and Howard Horne, documented
that post-punk artists often had art-school backgrounds, in which such discourses
1 The single ‘Underpass’ is taken from John Foxx’s album Metamatic. See Foxx, Metamatic (Virgin, CD, 1980).2 See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004 Ed.).3 See Caroline Sullivan, ‘How we made Cut (The Slits)’, 24th June 2013, The Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jun/24/how-we-made-cut-the-slits. (Accessed 15th May 2013).
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were encouraged.1 In the performance arts, for example, Bertholt Brecht’s theory of
alienation effects would have been taught as a means by which the performer could
challenge the audience’s identification with characters in a play, thereby giving
prominence to theories and ideas being expressed which otherwise may have been
submerged beneath the empathic connection a character evokes. Reynolds describes
how Brecht’s ‘alienation effects’ were employed in post-punk. Musicians would, for
instance, use third person narratives in a song to avoid the listeners having an
empathic connection with characters in the music. This would allow the music to
examine more complex themes than the listener might have expected, to ‘offer a
glimpse of the deep structures that organise our lives’(xvii). Reynolds asserted that
this post-punk will to demystify was influenced by Marxist theory. In his words, Marx
had proposed that ‘capitalism fetishized objects, thus alienating the worker’ (205).
The implication made by Reynolds here is that, by making clear the process of
production, alienation is challenged.
Citing another influential theorist, Reynolds claims that Antonio Gramsci’s
Marxist ideas influenced post-punk musicians like Scritti Politti (205). In particular,
Reynolds identifies Gramsci’s belief that ‘ruling classes maintain hegemony by
insisting it is natural’, as influential to them. Reynolds quotes lyrics from Scritti
Politti’s ‘Hegemony’, a song that includes lines such as ‘an honest day’s pay for an
honest day’s work’, as an example of post-punk drawing from such influences.2 Such
stock phrases, Reynolds argues, are ‘the glue which holds the hegemony together’,
and by parodying these idioms Scritti Politti, in his view, offered a challenge to the
orthodoxy (205).
1 See Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art Into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987).2 See Scritti Politti (2004). ‘Early’ , Rough Trade, CD.
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Scritti Politti demonstrated their art-school education, by possessing the guiding
conviction that discourse around art was inseparable from the artwork itself: that
every artwork was a form of ‘active criticism’’.1 The band demystified the process by
which record companies physically create and distribute records. In their artwork,
they itemized every cost that went into getting the record into the shops.2
As Leeds art students, Gang Of Four were also influenced by Gramsci’s
theories. Gramsci believed that critique should unmask everything that appears
obvious as a man-made construct, a ‘truth’ that serves somebody’s interest.3 On the
cover art for their Damaged Goods EP Gang Of Four made explicit the power
imbalance between band and their record company by depicting a matador and a bull
having a conversation (using speech bubbles).4 In this the bull says ‘at some point we
have to take responsibility for our actions’. Here, Gang Of Four were using Gramsci’s
ideas to highlight an inter-play of power that had hitherto been publicly unsaid, or
even perceived as natural.5
Such assertions raise the question of how consciously post-punk musicians
employed theory in their work. Challenged with this question by Reynolds Andy Gill
from Gang Of Four said ‘You’re correct in thinking we were familiar with the terms
but we were really not approaching song-writing from any theoretical point of view’.6
1 See Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.226.2 See Steve Jelbert’s ‘The Lost Art Of The Pop Manifesto’, The Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/apr/29/pop-manifestos-manics-malcolm-mcclaren . (Accessed 5th September 2013).3 Antonio Gramsci, quoted in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.119.4 Gang Of Four, Damaged Goods EP (Fast Product, 1978).5 In the words of Reynolds (2009) ‘the ruling class exert hegemony by making the ways of the world seem like simple ‘common sense’ (p.204). For more on theories of power relating to the use of language, using the example of developing an alternative power over the judicial system, see Michel Foucault’s Power / Knowledge (New York: Random House USA, 1988 ed.), p.33; and also Pierre Bourdieu’s Language And Symbolic Power (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999 ed.), p.43, in which the production and reproduction of ‘legitimate language’ is discussed. 6 See Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p.109.
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The overt links Reynolds makes between theory and practice in post-punk may
therefore be unrepresentative.
However, it is indisputable that another tool of cultural production in post-
punk was the creation of agendas and manifestos. In Reynold’s words, post-punk
‘teemed with meta-music critiques and mini-manifestos’ (109). The band Throbbing
Gristle’s agenda was, in the words of their leader Genesis P-Orridge, to ‘look at this
scabby, filthy, dirty horrible society and transform it into an inhuman emotionless
spectacle’.1
Other post-punk bands wrote and deployed manifestos with explicit items of
concern that described a finite set of aims. These manifestos demonstrated, within
post-punk, a very specific use of text. In this practice, literature and music merged.
Post-punk manifestos present a union of music and literature that is particularly
germane to this PhD project, which examines how music can be described in the
written form (through a novel). The manifestos of bands verbalise their intent in a
most concise medium, and are thereby offer a quick overview of a band’s ambitions.
It was useful to research them, during the process of creating a fictional band, as they
offered an insight into the issues that relevant bands wish to express. Understanding
these issues made it easier to create a band, for the purposes of this novel, which
could be perceived as authentic.
Given this, some brief case studies will now be presented to examine how this
link emerged, and the resultant practices that ensued. In these case studies, in order to
include a range of post-punk bands, the focus is on more contemporary examples,
which often emerged during post-punk revivals. 2
1 See Simon Ford, The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (London: Black Dog, 1999), pp. 7, 15. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.2 The term post-punk is problematic in that it semantically refers to any bands which followed the punk scene, and therefore in that sense it includes many bands. Bands are cited here which are illustrative of post-punks usefulness in this context because they demonstrably manifested
19
Writing and Music: Post-punk Manifestos
Manifestos are a form of address that has been used for a wide variety of reasons.
They have been used by political theorists such as Marx and Engels, by radical
feminists ( Valerie Solanas, for example), and by bands.
In 2010, Steve Jelbert noted the proliferation of manifestos in pop music over
the years.1 He identified one moment when pop groups and political manifestos came
together, citing the ten point programme of the White Panther party, which was co-
founded by MC5 manager John Sinclair. The White Panther party was a far-left
political organisation founded in 1968, and MC5 became The Panthers’ house band –
at which point politics and rock fused. On their manifesto, also released in 1968, The
Panther’s fifth demand was ‘Free access to information media- free the technology
from the greed creeps!’2 It was numbered, from one to ten, printed in black and white,
and employed terse, direct statements, with eight of the bullet points starting with the
word ‘Free’. It was published in a US periodical, entitled Fifth Estate, and was
influential enough to be praised by Abbie Hoffman as a key countercultural document
a few years later in 1971.34
The Panthers’ approach to free information would later become evident in
post-punk manifestos. The way the Panthers approached their manifesto prefigured
the later use of this medium by post-punk artists.
their ideas to try and enable their implementation.1 See Steve Jelbert’s ‘The Lost Art Of The Pop Manifesto’.2 See Steve Jelbert’s ‘The Lost Art Of The Pop Manifesto’.3 See Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (London: Grove Press, 1971), this section is called ‘FIGHT! TELL IT ALL, BROTHERS AND SISTERS’. 4 The White Panther Party was pivotal in reviving The Fifth Estate during the 1960s. The Fifth Estate was a radical counterculture underground newspaper.
20
Reynolds noted the use of manifestos by post-punk bands in the era that
followed.5 At the start of the post-punk movement, in 1977, the band Wire declared
their ‘Seven Rules Of Self-Definition’. This manifesto again used terse language, had
a black and white layout and had each item numbered. This time the manifesto took
the form of a self-address and included the items ‘No solos’ and ‘No Americanisms’.
In post-punk revivals after the 1980’s the address of the manifesto shifted, to be
inward instead of outward. This itself may have been part of a larger tendency to
indulge in the darker insights of pop performers at this point in the nineties, where
papers such as the New Musical Express and Melody Maker offered extensive
coverage of musicians’ on-going personal travails.
In the early nineties the Manic Street Preachers kept their inter-band manifesto
largely private, while frequently alluding to it in interviews. An early flexidisc, UK
Channel Boredom, had printed on it a manifesto titled ‘Behaviour Leading To
Actualisation Or Ways To Dig The World, Part 1’.2 It took the form of a self-address,
its tone more akin to that found in popular therapy books than in post-punk
manifestos. It was also unusual in its use of the present tense, with the first item
recommending ‘a) Experiencing life like a child, with full absorption and
concentration.’ The only item that recalled previous post-punk manifestos was the
third, which ran ‘Listening to your own feelings in evaluating experiences instead of
the voice of tradition or authority or the majority.’ It was given away for free with the
small-circulation fanzine Hopelessly Devoted, its impact being negligible enough to
not provoke any coverage in future Manic Street Preachers’ biographies.3 This could
be because the items were vague enough to not provoke a measurable reaction.
5 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.xxix.2Manic Street Preachers, UK Channel Boredom Flexidisc (Hopelessly Devoted Fanzine, 1990).3 The most authoritative of these is arguably Simon Price’s book Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers (London: Virgin Books, 1999).
21
However, as an inter-band form of communication the Manic Street Preachers
developed a habit of exchanging postcards with one another throughout their career.
On their website their bassist Nicky Wire writes of how ‘the band were prolific
communicators’ and how every time he received post there’d be a ‘bundle’ of
postcards from other members. He thereby offered an insight into how the band
maintained, during periods of separation, a line of communication. But this method,
which could be seen as fostering a shared artistry, also merged into the way the band
communicated with the outside world, with various journalists being bombarded with
private letters by the band that increasingly began to be read as manifestos.1
The Manics’ guitarist and ‘Minister of Propaganda’ Richey Edwards later
publicly issued a series of letters that took the form of state-of-the-nation addresses.
These letters broke from the tradition of pop manifestos in that they adopted a more
passive, defeatist tone – albeit one couched in the capital letters used in a military
address through a telegram. 2
One ‘manifesto’ issued by the band’s lyricist Richey Edwards in December
1992, was, like TG’s manifesto, concerned with conformity:
WE SIT IN STRAIGHT LINES, DO WHAT WE ARE TOLD, LIKE SEATS
ON LOCKERBIE, DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC.3
The punk reaction to what Ryan Moore described as ‘an endless flow of celebrities,
lifestyles and products’ is evident in a line, which again sits in isolation, later in the
same manifesto:
1 From Manic Street Preachers, ‘Journals’ (2014): <http://www.manicstreetpreachers.com/journals/postcards-young-man> [Accessed 5th December 2014].2 Simon Price, Everything, p.17.3 From ‘Rant It Up: Richey’s Manifestos from 1992’: http://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/archive/richey%20manifesto.htm > [accessed 5th September 2013].
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CULTURE IS A CHEQUEBOOK4
Here Edwards was perhaps making the statement that culture is a commodity which
can be bought and sold, and that frequently the emphasis is more on this than on the
content of that culture.
The theme of culture being a commodity is one which Edwards again picked
up on, in a missive from May 1992:
DIETRICH, GARBO, FRITZ LANG COLONISED THE IMAGINATION
OF THE US AND SOLD IT BACK IN TECHNICOLOUR2
Here Edwards adopted a cynical tone with regards to how even ‘imagination’ has
become commoditized in modern culture.
During their career the band have addressed their followers through a variety
of means. These included strategic sampling of films, interviews and songs in their
music, and using relevant quotations from authors in their record sleeves. These are
the same kinds of methods as identified by Julia Downes, when describing riot grrl as
a movement in which ‘a deliberate and conscious pillaging of literature, theory, art,
history and popular culture’ was used to ‘articulate subversive representations that
challenged the status quo’ (153). A definition used in riot grrl is here also a fitting
description of the methods of ‘active criticism’ used by Manic Street Preachers,
particularly during the early nineties. This was a period in which bands like the
Manics reacted to the overblown, apolitical music of hairspray eighties bands such as
Kiss and Meatloaf. And where bands such as Guns ‘N’ Roses had assembled a
bricolage without explicit recourse to a manifesto, the Manic Street Preachers
4 Richey Edwards’ manifestos on behalf of the Manic Street Preachers can be found on the website of Repeat Fanzine, at <http://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/archive/richey%20manifesto.htm > [accessed 5th September 2013]. 2 From ‘Rant It Up Richey’s Manifestos from 1992’ <http://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/archive/richey%20manifesto.htm > [accessed 5th September 2013].
23
combined the vivid colour of glam-rock with an agenda, fusing ‘pop and politics’ in
the way Reynolds later defined as ‘post-punk’.1 This way of linking popular music
and writing did not die with the Manic Street Preachers, and just as they had kept
alive original post-punks’ strident posturing, linking pop and politics in the form of
manifestos, so more recent musicians have sought to do the same.
The Chapman Family were a Stockton based post-punk band active from
2006-2013, who spawned during another revival of this genre of post-punk manifesto.
They wrote an open letter in 2010, which was published in the magazine Artrocker as
a manifesto.2 Artrocker is available in most high streets , but this ‘manifesto’ did not
elicit a clear response, perhaps because it expressed only vague intentions.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Edward’s state-of-the-nation address was rekindled here.
‘The country is in ruins,’ (it ran) ‘and the population is feeding on the glorification of
D-list celebrity morons’. During its conclusion singer Kingsley Chapman wrote ‘We
just want you to rethink your priorities.’ The articulacy of their anger and socio-
political criticism offered an inspiring contrast given their apolitical peers at the time.
However, the methods by which The Chapman Family intended to achieve this shift
in priorities were not detailed. Arguably, in this letter, The Chapman Family were
reasserting the stance taken by previous post-punk bands, to both demystify the
process of making music and to reassert how bands could alter the perceptions of their
audience.
In 2013 the post-punk band Savages issued a series of direct, specific
manifestos, with an even greater focus on shifting audience behaviours. Excitingly
these statements (issued on their website and printed in their record sleeves) are often
1 Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired, p.408.2Open letter by The Chapman Family, from < http://www.artrocker.tv/videos/article/the- chapman-family-adult-an-open-letter-from-kinsgley> (Accessed 5th September 2013).
24
supported by specific strategies.1 This is in marked contrast to other post-punk bands
(including The Chapman Family), whose strenuous language, on closer inspection,
did not contain a method by which they intended to instigate change.
In the song ‘Shut Up’ (from the 2013 album Silence Yourself) the band’s
front-woman Jehnny Beth issued a spoken-word call to arms, which also appeared on
their website. 2 This online manifesto used military style capital letters, as Edwards
did, and took the form of a second-person address. But Savages offered a deeper
insight into the restricting aspects of orthodoxy and hegemony than most post-punk
bands. Their manifestos were less self-referential than those of The Chapman Family,
with the bulk of their content expressing a concern for their audience.
‘We live in a world of many distractions,’ Beth wrote, before warning: ‘if you
are distracted, you are available.’ Reflecting the urgent, direct nature of post-punk
music the manifesto called for clarity of thought, as a way of preventing individuals
from being manipulated by orthodoxy. Here the post-punk manifesto aimed to
enhance self-realization, as riot grrl manifestos had.
Beth writes, ‘perhaps having deconstructed everything we should be thinking
about putting everything back together.’ This deconstruction is arguably comparable
to the ‘exhaustion of meta-narratives’ that Moore described.3 Savages are therefore
placing themselves within the context of other punk and post-punk bands who reacted
to it.
In their 2013 ‘I Am Here’ manifesto Beth recall the concerns of Scritti Politti,
by addressing how hegemony is maintained through enforced conformity.
1 Savages manifestos can be seen online at <http://savagesband.com/words > [accessed 15th November 2013].2 Savages, Silence Yourself, Matador Records, 2013. 3 Moore, ‘Postmodernism and Punk Subculture’ p.307.
25
‘Manipulations and fears…are meted out to young, intelligent and radical people who
yield to the pressure of accepted practices,’ she wrote.
Either consciously or unconsciously Beth reasserts Gramsci’s views on how
power is deployed by ‘making the ways of the world seem like common sense’.1 Beth
also echoed the sentiments of Throbbing Gristle, who had warned against ‘a façade of
experts’ that exercised control over the populace.2 The manifesto urged followers of
the band to resist contributing more vapid content to the ether of social media.
IN OUR MODERN WORLD, MAN ASSIDUOUSLY ABANDONS HIS
LIFE TO PRACTICAL NECESSITIES AND HIS IMAGINATION TO
SLAVERY. MANIPULATIONS AND FEARS – MANIPULATION BY
FEAR – ARE METED OUT TO YOUNG, INTELLIGENT AND RADICAL
PEOPLE WHO YIELD TO THE PRESSURE OF ACCEPTED PRACTICES
AND MANY AGE-OLD SERVITUDES. THE ELDER GENERATION
HASN’T COME TO WARN THEM: EACH OF THEM CAME TO TELL
ABOUT THEMSELVES. EACH ONE TO TELL HOW THEY HAD
EATEN, HOW THEY HAD SLEPT, HOW THEY HAD IMPORTANT
ORGASMS, IMPORTANT CHILDHOODS AND DREAMS. BECAUSE AN
HONEST LIFE IS ADVERTISED AS A LIFE OF SILENCE, NORMALITY
AND DULL CONCEIT. ART IS STULTIFIED. LOVE A PRIVILEGE. AND
IN THE VICINITY OF OUR MOST SPLENDID CREATIVE YOUTH, IT IS
STRONGLY ADVIZED TO KEEP OUR MOUTH SHUT IF WE WANT TO
SUCCEED.3
1 Gramsci, quoted in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.119.2 Ford, Coum Transmissions, p.7.16.3 Savages ‘I Am Here’ band manifesto can be seen online at http://savagesband.com/words [accessed 15th November 2013].
26
In their manifestos Savages are continuing a punk tradition, responding to the
condition of postmodernity by asking their listeners to resist the demands of ‘capital’
(or in other words, the forces of alienation and consumerism), which dictate protocol
surrounding art and lifestyle. The aim seems to be to overcome suppression and
achieve self-realization.
A further Savages manifesto detailed how the ‘solid, indestructible’ sound of
the band was purposefully ‘designed’ to ‘provide a wide range of emotions’. The
music is described as ‘a self-affirming voice’, intended to help listeners experience
everything differently:
SAVAGES’ INTENTION IS TO CREATE A SOUND, INDESTRUCTIBLE,
MUSICALLY SOLID, WRITTEN FOR THE STAGE AND DESIGNED
WITH ENOUGH NUANCES TO PROVIDE A WIDE RANGE OF
EMOTIONS. SAVAGES ARE A SELF-AFFIRMING VOICE TO HELP
EXPERIENCE OUR GIRLFRIENDS DIFFERENTLY, OUR HUSBANDS,
OUR JOBS, OUR EROTIC LIFE, AND THE PLACE MUSIC OCCUPIES
INTO OUR LIVES. SAVAGES’ SONGS AIM TO REMIND US THAT
HUMAN BEINGS HAVEN’T EVOLVED SO MUCH, THAT MUSIC CAN
STILL BE STRAIGHT TO THE POINT, EFFICIENT AND EXCITING.1
In a break from the vagueness of some previous post-punk manifestos, Savages issued
an edict requesting that fans at their concerts do not film them, as it prohibits the band
from ‘IMMERSING OURSELVES’. In this instance an attempt to alter the behaviour
of their followers in a highly mediated era was expressed with a more developed,
actionable agenda than their predecessors created.
1 Savages Manifesto #1 band manifesto can be seen online at http://savagesband.com/words [accessed 15th November 2013].
27
Beth has subsequently confirmed that these requests had facilitated change,
saying: ‘Yes, I think it has kind of made people more relaxed with the idea of
engaging with the music.’ Refraining from using phones has resulted in audiences, in
her words, feeling ‘permitted’ to move their body. ‘Because that is expected from you
you feel more free to do it,’ she said.1 In the case of Savages, therefore, post-punk
manifestos have been effective at permitting self-realization and altering behaviours
regarding cultural experiences.
Post-punk: a negative aesthetic
The above case studies offer specific examples of how the ideas inherent in post-punk
were manifested, in a most explicit form, by bands. However, the practices of such
bands are not the only textural links that connect them. Whilst studying various post-
punk bands it became evident that another manifestation of post-punk was observable.
This was the propensity of the bands to express a state of negation. Post-punk artists
often chose to define themselves visually, musically, and emotionally, through
different forms of negativity. This was a trait integral to the identity of the main
character of HILTNG, Robert Wardner. When Robert’s record company remove the
support required so he can complete an album, he stops communicating with them.
His absence of engagement extends to the narrative when it resumes in the present
day. Wardner flits around the edge of the action, refusing to participate in the band’s
comeback gig, and walking out of a recording session. He is characterised by the
different forms of negativity he exhibits.
Howard Devoto, founding member of punk band The Buzzcocks, was quoted
saying ‘I thrive on what I’d term ‘negative drive’. I get bored very easily and that
boredom can act as a catalyst for me to suddenly conceive and execute a new 1 This response was given in an email with the author on 04/04/14.
28
vocation.’ He went as far as to say ‘in fact ‘negative drive’ is what I believed the punk
ethic should about.’1
Simon Reynolds quotes Devoto discussing how he marshalled a sense of
negativity to create what he called ‘interior soundtracks’ for someone who ‘might sit
in the corner of a cafe going very quietly out of his minds’.2 In Rip It Up, Reynolds
describes how in Devoto’s debut performance on Top Of The Pops, negativity was a
key part in his performance. Devoto stood stock-still on camera, his inactivity a
striking contrast to the other performers who imbued their songs with more physical
energy. Devoto describes how ‘the only way I could bring any significance to (the
show) was by taking away’3. Similarly, Wardner brings significance to the
relationship he has with his record company by ‘taking away’, in the form of his
refusal to engage.
When one reviews the practices of post-punk musicians, it is striking how
negation is both a strategy and an aesthetic. The stripping away, the conscious
provocation to force the listener to sense ‘an absence’ in music, arises again and
again. In The Buzzcocks’ track ‘Boredom’ Pete Shelley instils a guitar solo into the
song, which consciously ‘lacks’ the willingness to do what the listener would expect.
Reynolds describes an ‘deliberately inane two-note guitar solo’, which he calls
‘thrillingly tension-inducing in its fixated refusal to go anywhere’.4
Other post-punk musicians were defined by the absence in their sound. The
Leeds group Gang Of Four characterised their aesthetic, in Reynolds’ Rip It Up, ‘as
much by avoiding things as by doing things’5. Their guitarist Andy Gill said ‘Instead
of guitar solos, we had anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.’ But the 1 See Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.19. 2 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.20.3 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.xxix.4 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.7.5 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.113.
29
tendency to toy with the listener’s expectation about an arrangement, to consciously
create space, was perhaps most deeply explored by Joy Division.
Their music had a built-in sense of negation. Reynolds describes how the
band’s producer Martin Hannett deliberately cultivated ‘a sparse sound’, using a
device called a Marshall Time Modulator. In his words ‘the way empty space is used
by the band… create(s) a musical landscape of ruin, loneliness, and alienation’.1 On
their debut record Unknown Pleasures the sounds of distant, whirring lifts and
shattering glass add to an aural portrait of an urban hinterland.
The band were recorded separately, in isolation from one another. Therefore
the sense of unity suggested by the term ‘band’ did not apply to Joy Division, as
Hannett wanted to separately treat each instrument. The music was therefore denied
of the sense of warmth which comes in a live recording, when a group are performing
together. In the words of Paul Morley, Hannett gave ‘each contributor all the room
they needed’ on the record, evoking the sense that audibly they were ‘in their own
zones, miles away from each other.’2
In Joy Division’s work it was not only the band members who seemed
separated from one another. Peter Saville’s artwork separated the band from their
audience too. The sleeves, unusually, did not feature photographs of the band, or even
the song titles on the outside. The concept behind the artwork seemed to suggest that
the band were a remote entity that you somehow had to prise your way into. As Paul
Morley said, ‘Saville designed an audacious, opulently minimal sleeve that said little
about who, what, where, when, why’.3
1 Reynolds, Rip It Up, p.114.2 Paul Morley, quoted in Paul Crosthwaite’s ‘Trauma and Degeneration: Joy Division and Pop Criticism's Imaginative Historicism', in Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds.), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), p. 130. 3 Morley, quoted in Paul Crosthwaite’s, ‘Trauma’, Litpop, p.130.
30
Joy Division’s negative form of expression may have been a natural response
to an urban climate in which a sense of absence was keenly felt. Many post-punk
artists from Joy Division’s era were residents in Manchester’s Hulme Crescents, a
Brutalist housing complex. A 1975 survey documenting the personal experiences of
urban life in the Crescents found that 96.3 per cent of tenants wanted to leave. It
stated:
Many people suffer from loneliness, depression and anxiety, finding the estate
an intimidating place in which to live. Worry about street crime, drug abuse
and break-ins makes many people, particularly women and elderly people,
shut themselves up in their homes.1
Given the intense urban regeneration during the 1980’s it is unsurprising that many
post-punk musicians expressed a sense of alienation in their work. Indeed, conveying
a sense of ‘alienation’ through the visual landscapes they were pictured amongst
could be considered part of Joy Division’s idiosyncratic ‘landscape’, to use Botta’s
definition. Kevin Cummins took perhaps the most well-known images of Joy
Division, capturing them on Manchester’s snow-covered Princess Parkway. In line
with the negation and fragmentation inherent to their music in these images the band
are remote. They appear alienated and polarised even within what was arguably,
geographically at least, their own milieu.
1 Fraser, quoted in Giacomo Botta, ‘Dancing To Architecture’, p. 12.
31
Figures 1 and 2: From Kevin Cummings’ Exemplar: Joy Division1
Elsewhere Cummins photographed the band against a backdrop of high rise buildings
and tower blocks (Figure 2), amongst architectural sites which were a formed as a
result of the socio-political situation Botta described, as affordable, highly functional
living spaces.2 Andy Beckett summarizes the music of this era, writing ‘if Manchester
music has a legendary sound, it is the empty-factory echo of Joy Division’. Beckett
here deftly links the reverb-laden sound of Joy Division to the empty factories of their
city, echoing with neglect.3 As Dave Haslam wrote, ‘it seemed as if the bleakness of
the failed landscape around them was seeping into their music’.4
Jon Savage eloquently described how Joy Division’s work evoked Manchester
during this era. He wrote that ‘Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin
Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss are one perfect reflection of
Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and hidden semis
1 See Sarah Phillips’s ‘Photographer Kevin Cummins’ Best Shot’, 2 October 2011, The Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/02/photograph-kevin-cummins-best-shot Accessed 14th May 2014. 2 Even if, as the survey above suggests, these complexes did not successfully realize their intentions.3 Beckett, quoted in Paul Crosthwaite’s, ‘Trauma’, Litpop, p.133.4 Haslam, quoted in Paul Crosthwaite’s, ‘Trauma’, Litpop, p.133.
32
seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th
century’.1 Aside from the evocations related to a speeding car, Savage is here
referring to how, during this era, artists were finding an aesthetic home in the ‘dark
spaces and empty places’ despite or perhaps because, as Sinfield observed, there is
‘no miraculous free space’ for subcultural formation.2
This portrayal of alienation band was consistent with Joy Division’s lyrics, for
instance in the song ‘Interzone’.3 In it Curtis sings of how he ‘walked through the city
limits / trying to find a clue / trying to find a way to get out.’ The conclusion seems to
be that to Curtis the city is a site of unbearable negation, which must be escaped, or
within which new space must be found. This new space, Curtis hopes, will ‘yield a
clue’, presumably towards the way out of an urban labyrinth, and to his own survival.
Botta describes the ‘depersonalized space and monotonous urban landscape’ evident
in Joy Division’s work, a condition which presumably Curtis wanted to escape (148).
3. Self-Design: Contexts and Theory
Having established the tools of cultural expression utilised in post-punk it is now
important to investigate the history of self-design, in order to now directly address the
first research question posited. Post-punk artists self-designed, by using various
means of expression to shape their own identity. But they were not the first to do this,
as self-design has a long history, both in culture and theory. One starting point is the
early modern period and its rediscovery of the human capacity for self-fashioning.
‘Self-design’ is a term analogous to Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of ‘self-
fashioning’, which he used in the context of the Renaissance. This term referred to the
capacity individuals have to embody, develop and subvert cultural norms through all 1 Savage, quoted in Paul Crosthwaite’s, ‘Trauma’, Litpop, p.133.2 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, p.178.3 See Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures. Factory Records, CD (1979).
33
expressive media. Greenblatt was interested in all cultural production and
consumption in and between contexts, as encapsulated in his term ‘cultural poetics’. 1
Greenblatt noted that in sixteenth-century Europe there was an ‘increased self-
consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful
process’ (2). Nobles consciously created their image through the symbolic use of
objects. Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 The Book Of The Courtier noted that men of
the noble class were required to ‘create themselves as works of art’.2
The concept of identity in Renaissance literature and culture must be
considered within the relevant contexts, and these include both the early modern and
modern. Greenblatt emphasised the instability and fragility of selves fashioned in the
earlier period. He stated that ‘self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something
perceived as alien, strange or hostile’, adding that ‘This threatening Other…must be
discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed’ (9). Yet we need to
remember that here Greenblatt was writing in a conflicted, post-consensus world. In
1980, what he was observing as having occurred in the Renaissance resonated too in
the moment when he wrote. Greenblatt observed:
We sense…that we are situated at the close of the cultural movement initiated
in the Renaissance and that the places in which our social and psychological
worlds seems to be cracking apart are those structural joints visible when it
was first constructed. In the midst of the anxieties and contradictions attendant
upon the threatened collapse of this phase of civilisation, we respond with
passionate curiosity and poignancy to the anxieties and contradictions
attendant upon its rise (175).
1 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Moore to Shakespeare (Chicago, US: Chicago University Press, 1980), p.5. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.2 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book Of The Courtier (London: Penguin, 1976). p.309.
34
We might reflect that, in 1980, Greenblatt usefully connects an apprehension of older
forms of self-design with later understandings of the consequences of these forms, as
in post-punk. So Greenblatt is useful because he historicizes, and also because he
provides a bridge between the Renaissance and the present day, in which the tendency
to self-design is still evident.
When considering the construction of self-identity in these modern contexts it
is necessary to mention the more contemporary term ‘bricolage’. Claude Lévi-Strauss
defined bricolage as ‘a method of expression through the selection and synthesis of
components culled from surrounding culture.’1 Derrida later expanded this concept
when applying it to literary criticism. He stated that if bricolage is ‘the necessity of
borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or
ruined,’ then ‘all discourse is a form of bricolage’. 2
Later usage of the term focused upon bricolage as a tool of subversion in
popular culture. In cultural theory bricolage mainly refers to the phenomenon by
which objects can be used as symbols of subcultures. This can occur on an individual
or collective basis. For instance, Dick Hebdige noted that in the seventies certain
groups such as mods ‘could be said to be functioning as bricoleurs’ by appropriating
‘a range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which served to
erase or subvert their original straight meanings’.3 For example: ‘the motorcycle,
originally an ultra-respectable means of transport, was turned into a menacing symbol
of group solidarity’ (104). Here, self-design was occurring collectively in a
subculture. Hebdige described how later, in punk culture, ‘humble objects’ (e.g. safety
pins) were ‘magically appropriated’ and made to carry ‘secret’ meanings’ (18). These
1 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 19. 2 See Christopher Norris, Derrida (Harvard, US: Harvard University Press, 1987), p.87.3 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning Of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), p.104. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
35
meanings, in Hebdige’s view, expressed ‘a form of resistance to the order which
guarantees their continued subordination’ (18).
Yet to gain an overview of, and historicize, the emergence of subcultures in
the twentieth century (and post-punk in particular), it is worth looking to the Second
World War as a starting point. As Hebdige argues, ‘The emergence of (subcultures)…
signalled in a spectacular fashion the breakdown of consensus in the post-war period’
(17). Given this lack of consensus ‘a limited and dependable set of coherent
identities…began to fragment into a diverse and unstable series of competing
identities’.1 The many youth subcultures that emerged post-war, particularly in times
of socio-economic stress, have arguably been formed as a consequence of resultant
cultural voids. Indeed, Sinfield argued that subcultures were founded as ‘way of
coping’ with the modern age. He believed subcultures ‘afford to those who live them
stories of their own identities and significance.’ 2
Hebdige viewed subcultures as a form of revolt against orthodoxy, even a
means of escape from it. He used the example of the cult following inspired by David
Bowie in the late seventies: ‘Bowie’s meta-message was escape – from class, from
sex, from personality, from obvious commitment – into a fantasy past… or a science-
fiction future’ (61). Enlarging on this point Sheila Whiteley suggests: ‘Rock, then,
may be viewed as a fin-of -this-siècle bourgeois bohemia, in that it provides
opportunities to figuratively step ‘outside’ bourgeois life.’3
After punk the ways in which a particular phenomenon or experience could be
fashioned were highlighted in various popular cultural movements. In the early
1980’s, the New Romantics, for instance, purposefully toyed with symbols of
1 Nick Lacey, Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Theatre Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.75. 2 Sinfield, Literature p.175.3 Sheila Whiteley, Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 57.
36
masculinity and femininity. Image was again created through ‘the symbolic use of
objects’1. Post-punk musicians were noted for their tendency to use not just their dress
but also their lyrics, stagecraft, artwork and performance as overt means of self-
expression. In the eighties the post-punk band Devo expressed resistance to the
subordinate relationship they had with their record company through their onstage
dress. Reynolds describes how whilst performing they wore janitors’ outfits and
hazardous waste protection suits to expose the insincerity of the modern rock group
and music industry, as well as to ‘mimic the structure of those who get the greatest
rewards out of the (music) business and become a corporation’ (30).
Assimilating these concepts and concerns into a coherent argument it seems
that self-design, through subcultures, can represent the beginning of an exit strategy
from usual life. Though this has been happening for some time, as Greenblatt
acknowledged, Greenblatt’s interest also emphasises that in the early 1980’s when
post-punk subculture was in evidence, this was a particularly salient issue, with the
‘structural joints’ and pressured fault lines of social and psychological worlds visible.
Yet we might go further, to suggest a link between the eighties and the present day
can be made because both are described as eras of socio-economic crisis. In both the
eighties and recently Britain experienced a recession which had severe economic,
social and cultural repercussions. As discussed, Andy Beckett argues that the 1970’s
saw the start of the neo-liberal social economic policies that are currently being
vigorously repositioned in the present day. Writers such as Hatherley and Beckett are
currently drawing from eighties sociocultural phenomena in order to offer a way of
reassessing contemporary Britain.2 In The New Ruins Of Great Britain Hatherley
1 Castiglione, Courtier, p.309.2 See Hatherley (2009, 2011) and Beckett (2012).
37
describes degenerating architecture in regions of Britain, whilst recounting the related
failed social policies that began in the 1970’s.
Since the neo-liberal policies that began in the late seventies are currently
being revived even more aggressively, these issues are powerfully pertinent. HILTNG
is not being written in a vacuum, but was conceived in relation to contemporary
literature and cultural history that looks to the late seventies and early eighties, both to
revitalise and critique aspects of that past, and to offer a context for understanding the
present. HILTNG is therefore situated amongst other revisions of the late seventies,
conceived amidst a zeitgeist currently reconsidering that era. Just as this thesis
attempts to reinvigorate the agendas of post-punk for fictional purposes, in Militant
Modernism Hatherley attempted to resurrect the unrealized utopian impulses behind
1970’s Brutalist architecture, to find a place for them today.1 Hatherley’s book
considers the manifestos that underpinned such housing projects and argues that there
is another ‘Modernism worth rescuing from the dustbin of history and the
blandishments of heritage.’ He thereby seeks to find ways to apply or interrogate
these values today.2 HILTNG tries to do the same, but uses the novel form as a means
by which to do so.
The lack of existing fiction about post-punk was also enticing. As Kitty
Empire noted, it is ‘rather strange’ that post-punk has ‘resisted scholarship’: ‘Seething
with ideas, it’s a music writer’s genre in excelsis’.3 Despite this, only a few novels
concerning post-punk bands exist, and none capture this artistic eclecticism that
1 As mentioned previously, the impetuous to create affordable, comfortable post-war housing drove the creation of Erno Goldinger’s English inner city tower blocks. But these tower blocks instead created environments in which concealed crime could flourish, and the underfloor heating system created ideal living environments for rats. This was satirised in the J.G. Ballard novel High Rise. 2 See Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (London: Zer0 Books, 2012), p. 13. 3 Empire, ‘Never Mind’, April 2005.
38
occurs when a post-punk band constructs their own bricolage, as part of a tendency to
self-design.
In order to make an original contribution to addressing this gap the intention
was, therefore, to create a novel in which a dynamic, artistically eclectic post-punk
band were central to the text. The idea was that the novel would contain a series of
interviews, offering insights into characters from the post-punk scene, but these
interviews would be blended into a plot which had its own momentum. The content of
the novel would allow the various facets of the characters to be fully explored,
particularly with regards to how they self-designed.
As a context, the post-punk moment offers itself to a novel in which articulate
characters with eclectic tastes could be interviewed. During the post-punk moment an
openness to unusual influences made an impact upon culture: ‘there was a whole
subculture…that supported…endeavours to go underground, to step outside’.1 Indeed,
Jon Savage suggests ‘in the seventies pop culture acted as a clearing house for
information that was occult in the widest sense…underneath the literary radar.’2
Likewise Reynolds observes how post-punk lyricists ‘absorbed the radical science
fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Phillip K. Dick’ (xiii).
Cultural history, like any history, by writers such as Reynolds both relies upon
and itself creates narratives, fictions and myths. For instance, Simon Ford’s book
about Throbbing Gristle presents itself as an accurate account, but the nature of some
of the recollections (for example the description of the band’s distribution system on
7.19) could only have been recalled by the band themselves, given their autodidactic
1 See Jon Savage, ‘Controlled Chaos’, 10th May 2008, Guardian Online. Cited in: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/10/popandrock.joydivision . Accessed 14th May 2014. 2 See Savage, ‘Controlled Chaos’, May 2008.
39
approach. The band were therefore adding their mystique by presenting themselves as
a functional unit when, in fact, the nuances of this system are too obscure to be
critically evaluated.
Alienation and post-punk
Post-punk artists, as well as drawing from a wide range of literature, also
demonstrated other tendencies through their work. These are worth examining, to
develop a strong sense of how post-punk manifests itself, for the novel.
As we saw with Greenblatt’s definition of Renaissance self-fashioning, he
emphasised the importance of the ‘other’, thereby making it a central feature within
the idea of self-design. This ‘other’ is also important in post-punk music. Specifically,
the ‘other’ in the context of post-punk seemed to be mainstream society- be it the
forces of commercialism, or the pressure to conform to an orthodox life.
As Hebdige argued, ‘in punk, alienation assumed an almost tangible quality. It
could almost be grasped’ (79). This sense of alienation seemed to ultimately lead to a
greater desire for inclusion, manifested through a more concerted effort to obtain
unusual props for an individual’s bricolage. In punk subculture it seemed that a sense
of alienation from the orthodox world made included members feel more privileged.
Given their willingness to ‘step outside’ the norm, in looking for influences,
post-punks were often drawn to art which was preoccupied with a sense of otherness,
and alienation.1 This is evident in the work of the post-punk band Tubeway Army, for
which singer Gary Numan styled himself in an alien form, in his role as frontman.
The ways in which he did this influenced HILTNG, particularly for the opening scene
of the novel. In it, Robert Wardner makes himself as pale as possible, and along with 1 Savage, ‘Controlled Chaos’, May 2008.
40
his wilfully eccentric onstage movements this allows him to style himself in the image
of an ‘other’. Throughout the creation of HILTNG the idea of the alienated individual
became more and more central, particularly given how Wardner purposefully isolates
himself from society by vanishing. Given the prominence of these themes, the idea of
the ‘alien’, and the ‘other’, were increasingly considered to be part of a ‘post-punk
identity’ during the creation of HILTNG.
The theme of alienation was often evident in the work of writers who
influenced the post-punk movement. Reynolds notes lyricists such as Joy Division’s
Ian Curtis, Magazine’s Howard Devoto and Josef K’s Paul Haig were ‘steeped in the
shadowy unease and crippling anxiety of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Conrad and Beckett’
(xiii). As his wife Deborah testified, Ian Curtis was indeed influenced by Dostoevsky,
and also by J.G. Ballard. One Joy Division song, ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ was named
after a short story collection by Ballard.1 Ballard’s writing contained terrified
reactions to the brutal industry of the modern world, as evidenced in his novels such
as High Rise. In this book Ballard’s suspicion of the way the modern world was
progressing was evident in an unsettling, nauseating air that pervaded the narrative.
High Rise possessed a sense of atavism; of primeval forces dulled by society being
unleashed. There is also in the novel the sense that ultra-civilisation eventually leads
to even more intense degeneration. In the post-punk movement this sense of nausea
and implied suspicion was evident in subtle soundscapes and clipped, barbed music.
This music at times broke into bursts of noise, as if the artists’ anger and suspicion
could no longer be supressed, and it demanded a sudden outlet.
In post-punk, anger seemed to have been displaced into an internalized rage,
disappointment and sense of loss. This is evident in the lyrics to ‘Decades’ in which
1 Simon Dowling, What Pop Music Tells Us About JG Ballard’, 20th April 2009, BBC News Online. Cited in: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8008277.stm. Accessed 14th May 2014.
41
Curtis sang ‘Here are the young men / The weight on their shoulders’. 1 The sense of
young men being burdened by the modern world was often apparent in the music of
this movement. As George Lipsitz asked: ‘Why did young workers from all over the
country participate in the creation of rock and roll? One strong motivation came from
a desire to leave behind the alienations and indignities of work.’2 This has been
reflected in post-punk music made by contemporary bands like The Futureheads. In
their song ‘First Day’ they sarcastically sang, in the role of an imaginary manager,
‘Welcome to your new job / We hope you have a wonderful first day’.3
The sense of alienation was not only apparent in post-punk music, but also in
its artwork. The front cover of Wire’s Chairs Missing displays a sparse scene in a
mortuary, with a single flower placed on top of a grey chrome coffin. The sense of
negative presence apparent in the image was typical for this period, and part of what
might in retrospect be deemed a ‘post-punk aesthetic’. More explicitly, the world of
urban breakdown chronicled in Ballard’s novels was apparent in the vernacular of Joy
Division lyrics.
Furthermore, in these post-punk representations people were seemingly not
only alienated in or by their workplace and culture but also in their physical
environment. The identity of various post-punk artists was apparent not only in their
dress but sometimes most powerfully in the geographical sites they associated
themselves with.4
In his essay Mental Life and The Metropolis Georg Simmel drew parallels
between the exteriority of identity and the city generally. He wrote ‘A person does
not end with the limits of his physical body…rather with the totality of meaningful 1 See Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures. (1979).2 See George Lipstiz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), p.118. 3 See The Futureheads, The Futureheads. 679 Recordings, CD, 2004.4 The depiction of Joy Division, in Kevin Cummings’ photographs, is one example.
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effects which emanates from him. In the same way the city exists only in the totality
of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere.’1 Simmel happened to describe
the sense of removal and alienation associated with the post-punk movement. He
wrote ‘the metropolitan type creates a protective organ for itself against the profound
disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu
threaten it’ (326). Simmel argued that adaptive city living requires from the urban
individual a certain detachment. But he stated that ‘the self-preservation of certain
types of personalities is obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world,
ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own
valuelessness’ (331).
Given this, the psychic effects of the alienating city on post-punk artists
seemed worthy of consideration. Mark Owens suggested that the Brutalist tower
blocks of the Hulme Crescents often shaped the mentality of the artists that lived
within them and the work they subsequently created. In a lecture on Brutalism, he said
‘The architectural form of the tower block and the media screen of the TV are seen to
have shaped the empty emotional landscape of post-punk’s generation’.2 One
contemporary post-punk artist, the Manchester based musician Julie Campbell (who
performs under the telling moniker LoneLady) wrote of how she had felt psychically
moulded by living in a tower block. She went as far as to say that the urban landscape
had made her feel irreversibly changed, ‘brutalized’.3
HILTNG makes a unique contribution to knowledge because this project seeks
to do justice to the ideas expressed in the post-punk cultural moment. It draws from a
1 See Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, US: Chicago University Press, 1972) p. 325. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.2 See Mark Owens, ‘New Brutalists / New Romantics’, Design Lecture at CalArts (March 2014). Cited in: http://archive.org/details/MarkOwens-DesignLectureAtCalarts . Accessed 14th
May 2014. 3 See Julie Campbell, ‘Severe Beauty: Perspective and Soundscapes’, The Modernist, 4, (2012).
43
range of critical and creative materials in order create a novel in which these ideas are
played out to their fullest. For instance, the outfits or behaviour of a musician might
be of interest to the biographer or cultural theorist, but the ramifications of an artist’s
behaviour can arguably only be explored in full using creative work. The novel form
lends itself well to this requirement, as the reader demands from the author drama,
and to some degree trauma, in order to remain interested. This novel allows for the
ideas expressed in post-punk to be explored creatively in a dramatic manner which
tests these ideas as far as it is possible to do so. We will now address more directly
how the critical and theoretical material, regarding the ideas expressed in post-punk,
shaped the novel.
4. Creative and Critical Practice
How has this critical and theoretical material shaped the novel?
The theoretical materials discussed above have explicitly informed the creative work
underscoring the production of HILTNG. In order to explain how, I will begin with
the title of the novel.
How I Left The National Grid, as a title, serves several functions. It offers the
name of a fictional band, and in the term ‘national grid’ additionally gives a metaphor
for the matrix of power that people live within. The title of the novel reflects a
preoccupation in the narrative with the capacity music has to allow an individual to
alienate themselves from and challenge usual, habitual life. It was informed by Sheila
Whiteley’s aforementioned view that ‘rock provides opportunities to figuratively step
‘outside’ bourgeois life’. The title of the novel seeks to capture how an individual’s
capacity for self-design can be a means by which they choose to associate or
disassociate themselves with other individuals (and with orthodox life). This title also
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reflects how the main character, the rock star Robert Wardner, decided to leave the
band and eschew society in general. In so doing, he wilfully becomes alien.
The novel opens with rumours that Wardner is coming out of exile and
engaging as a musician again. At the start of the book Sam, a former Melody Maker
journalist, renowned for his knowledge of the band, is commissioned to write a book
about Wardner. It is envisioned by Sam’s publisher that in the course of interviewing
people related to the band Sam will eventually track down and interview Wardner.
The critical, contextual and theoretical materials gathered affected HILTNG in
several ways. For the novel a post-punk band, The National Grid, was invented who
were ‘active’ during the early eighties. As a band they aimed to subvert culture as
bricoleurs. In the narrative of the novel the band actively encourage their followers to
adopt their bricolage.1
To further express their collective identity, their frontman invented an onstage
persona, that of a factory worker whose shift ‘refuses to end’. When assuming this
identity he wears a blue-collar outfit, has a whitened face, blackened eyes and
performs using jerky, sporadic movements. When performing, The National Grid
divide the stage into two areas, one for ‘The Drones’ (Wardner’s description of the
band’s rhythm section) and one for ‘The Operatives’ (i.e. the other members). The
subordination of non-songwriting musicians by record companies is satirized through
this distinction. Devo’s use of onstage uniform as described by Reynolds was
influential here (31).
1 Given that the term ‘bricolage’ suggests self-expression, there is a paradox to this. The paradox applies to other bands, such as the Manic Street Preachers, whose followers adopt their bricolage. The intention was to achieve a sense of authenticity about this fictional band, by purposefully deploying this paradox in the novel.
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These exterior aspects of self-design were considered when creating the
characters. Given LoneLady’s observation that Manchester had ‘brutalized’ her, other
effects that the urban landscape may have had upon the characters were considered,
through their collective identity. What impact would intense city living have on a
character’s general demeanour? Wardner’s paleness and seemingly distressed
movements onstage are intended to represent an individual who has been permanently
altered by the demands of grinding factory work, until he has become a sleep-
deprived catatonic. Oppression and resistance to the orthodox world of work is
thereby made manifest through his dress and performance. The singer reconstitutes
himself as a ‘work of art’, to quote Greenblatt. He uses his body as a canvas for
expression.
The tendency to negate, as discussed above, became central to the
understanding of post-punk used in HILTNG. This understanding is evident in the
narrative, which is centrally concerned with a ‘missing’ character. Even when Robert
Wardner is present in the text he remains absent in some demonstrative way (either
absent from routine life or estranged from his wife, band mates, and record label). By
creating, in literature, a space in which to then insert absence, the intention was to
imbue the novel with this negative, post-punk characteristic. Even when Wardner is
briefly reconciled with his songwriting partner, the chapter ends with him wilfully
ostracising himself. Wardner removes himself from the narrative arrangement in the
same way Gang Of Four deliberately ‘left a hole’ in their compositions.
However, at many points in the novel the intentions of the characters are more
difficult to discern. In cultural histories by the likes of Reynolds the potentially faulty
memories of interviewees create a range of accounts and the author and reader
attempt to create an objective truth by using them. On reflection it became apparent
46
that this thesis provides a fictional history, the related reverse of this. Other books,
such as Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) have done this too,
by creating musicians who exist alongside pop stars we recognise from the real
world.1 By creating characters that engage with real-life figures a fictional history of
these people is created in such books. This history may exaggerate aspects that existed
in a famous personality, or develop new facets of their persona for the sake of a novel.
Either way, a fictional history is developed. Yet as recent scholarly collections such as
Litpop: Writing and Popular Music indicate, stories are integral to modern music. The
myths that surround bands such as Led Zeppelin, and their decadent behaviour, are all
part of what draws attention to them. By engaging with these projections authors can
build characters that will be perceived as authentic.
The characters in HILTNG create a discourse about each other’s lives, but
even in this fictional work a composite ‘truth’ cannot be assembled from such
accounts. The reader is presented with a range of complementing and competing
histories, which they attempt to make sense of. Their response to it this then creates a
discourse of itself.
How did creative work inform the novel? Literary responses to Popular Music and
post-punk
The materials considered above are cultural, critical and theoretical accounts of post-
punk music. But how has music, and most specifically post-punk music, been
represented in fiction? To answer this question it is necessary to attend to the
burgeoning scholarship regarding works of fiction concerned with popular music.
This will be done in a sequential manner, firstly by considering why novelists write
about pop music generally, then by turning to novels which contain bands that could 1 Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).
47
be defined as post-punk. The commonalities between such books will then be
discussed, where pertinent, in the conclusion of this section.
At least since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet a
genre of literary texts representing fictional popular musicians has developed. The
Ground Beneath Her Feet happens to share with HILTNG a preoccupation with the
mystical qualities of the pop star. Both novels explore the idea that as an ‘other’ they
can report back to us on mundane life with a clarity that non-pop stars lack. Asked
why he had chosen rock ‘n’ roll as the subject of The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
Salman Rushdie asserted ‘rock is the mythology of our time’.1 Just as HILTNG
explores the mythology Wardner leaves in his wake, so this novel is concerned with
similar themes, in particular, how pop stars are perceived as capable of sharply
scrutinizing the orthodox world, given the myths that build around their absences.
Darius Cama seems in many ways a hybrid of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, and in
the novel he wilfully mythologises himself, as Wardner arguably does by vanishing.
Ormus, in the words of Guthier, ‘proposes that understanding any social system
requires not only knowing what exists within, but what exists without’ (157). Ormus
says, in dialogue, ‘But what about outsideness?...What about outcasts, lepers, pariahs,
exiles, enemies, spooks, paradoxes?’ (Rushdie, 42-3 ). In the novel, Ormus attains this
outsider status. Suggesting that he has himself sought this alien quality, he says ‘It
could be I found the outsideness of what we’re inside. The way out from the carnival
style, the secret turnstile. The route through the looking glass’ (Rushdie, 350).2 This is
1 Salman Rushdie, cited in Tim Gauthier, ‘Rock Music as Cosmopolitan Touchstone in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet’, in Erich Hertz & Jeffrey Roessner (eds.), Write In Tune: Contemporary Music In Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.55. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.2 Arguably, the idea of the alien as pop star is a metaphor which consumers of pop cultures explore through certain figures. This might explain the appeal of David Bowie and Gary Numan (though not the apparently lesser appeal of Jobriath). By physically representing aliens, perhaps such pop stars imbue themselves with an otherness which implies that they have an insight that they can potentially offer us through their work.
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an idea explored in the latter stages of HILTNG, when Sam has a conversation with a
prior, in whose monastery Wardner is seeking refuge. Trying to understand why
Wardner so preoccupies Sam, the prior speculates whether consumer culture, in the
present day, has prompted people to look to celebrities and pop stars for answers. The
prior says ‘You hunt these figures down, like they are wise men.’ Having conceded
that this theory might offer an explanation, Sam is still determined to find Wardner
himself. This suggests that he hopes Wardner will offer, given his disappearance, a
theory about modern life that Sam will find satisfying. In The Ground Beneath Her
Feet Ormus, too, seems to understand that the insights an outsider can gain need to be
communicated. He says ‘it is not sufficient that the artist experience the vision – he or
she must communicate that vision to others’ (157). Wardner, having resisted the
imperative to do this, has therefore provoked Sam to seek him out, so he can gain this
understanding.
In the introduction to the 2014 anthology Litpop, Rachel Carroll and Adam
Hansen speculate on why such works of fiction are important to music. They quote
Stephen Benson, who in his book Literary Music in Contemporary Fiction wrote
‘Fiction serves as an earwitness to the role of music in everyday life, a record of why,
where and how music is made, heard and received’1. From this perspective, writers
write about music to unpack and set out how music is disseminated through our lives.
In this volume, Carroll and Hansen curate a series of essays on how music, in
different genres and eras, has been captured in literature. The introduction analyses
how the symbiotic relationship between music and literature generated a need to
create such an anthology in the first place. In their view, ‘The proliferation of worlds
1 Stephen Benson, quoted in Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds.), Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), p. 5. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
49
built by writers discussed in this collection’ themselves offer an insight into the extent
to discuss this interlinking between genres (4). They quote Tia DeNora, who
commented ‘just as music’s meaning may be constructed in relation to things outside
it, so, too, things outside music [like novels] may be constructed in relation to music’
(7). This challenges the normative, reductive view that writing strives to understand
music, a view which perhaps resulted from the high profile of music journalism. This
volume instead posits the view writing can be constructed ‘in relation’ to music, as a
jumping-off point into other investigations (7).
Hanif Kureishi’s reflections on literature about music are also relevant, and
quoted in the introduction to Litpop. Kureishi said ‘pop is a form crying out not to be
written about’ (8). This is a convincing statement: the verse-chorus-solo components
of the pop song afford it tantalisingly little space in which to explore themes and
ideas. This makes the most successful pop songs master classes in concision, and
seduces the reflective writer into further exploring content that the song can only
fleetingly consider, as a result of its format. But Kureishi focuses on the affective
qualities of pop music, saying: ‘It is physical, sensual, of the body rather than the
mind, and in some ways it is anti-intellectual; let yourself go, don’t think – feel’ (10).
Yet, arguably, this is all part of pop’s appeal to the cerebral writer. Pop music, in
novels, allows the writer to vicariously live out their fantasies in a manner that cannot
adversely impact them.
Kureishi’s reflections on the unbridled, emotional quality of music touch upon
another reason that writers create novels about music. Music has an intangible quality
that appeals to the writer’s ego, challenging them to capture that which cannot be
portrayed. The Litpop introduction cites Gerry Smyth, who locates the appeal of
music in its ‘ability to invoke states of consciousness that are beyond the ability of
50
language to render’ (17). It is not just that music evokes the indescribable. It is also
because, as Jon Savage says, ‘in our literary culture, we barely have words for the
physical, emotional and physiological impact of music on our bodies’ (20). Smyth and
Savage are in symphony here, with Smyth arguing that ‘music is the ineffable that
subsists outwith language’ (25). As Carroll and Hansen rather pithily say, ‘Many
critics feel compelled to concede that music possesses a quality which is irreducible to
language, before proceeding to explore the relationship between words and music’
(25).
Litpop, along with Gerry Smyth’s Music in Contemporary British Fiction:
Listening to the Novel, provides a historical survey of the relationships between music
and literature. The anthology focuses variously on music as inspiration, music as
metaphor, the representation of music in the novel and its various genres. Using as
different approach, Smyth’s monograph examines in particular the emergence of the
‘music-novel’ as a significant literary genre. The book is significant because, by its
very existence, it promotes the idea of the ‘music-novel’ as a form worthy of
academic consideration.
Stephen Benson’s Literary Music in Contemporary Fiction offers a more
technical analysis of these interrelations, considering for instance the polyphonic and
musical qualities apparent in the fiction of Milan Kundera. More recently, another
volume in this canon has proved influential: Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner’s Write
in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction. Perhaps most relevantly, Hertz and
Roessner’s book looks at contemporary works of fiction which happened to be
influential to HILTNG, such as Brett Easton Ellis’ (2011) Less Than Zero and Jennifer
Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad (2011). In such books the use of music may
seem incidental, even irrelevant, to the casual reader. But in Write In Tune Matthew
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Luter elucidates how, in Less Than Zero, ‘musical references are intentionally chosen
in order to reveal authorial judgements about characters’1. The point is made that the
use of pop music in a novel is not ‘irrelevant or beneath comment’ and music is not
featured to merely offer background or credibility to a narrative. Instead, ‘taking
seriously the embedded meanings of this deliberately catalogued music leads to a
fuller understanding of just what this novel and its characters are choosing to embrace
and to reject’ (20).
Luter argues that deeper insight in the novel can be gained by reading meaning
into the choice of pop songs used at various points in the text. He makes a distinction
between the seeming depth of the characters, and the corresponding depth of the text.
He writes: ‘We must not assume that a novel lacks ideological depth simply because
most of its characters lack that depth’ (20). Arguably, fiction about pop music has not
been taken seriously in the past because a category error was made. The assumption
was that literature relating to pop must be as ephemeral as pop itself. Luter argues
firstly that pop is not ephemeral, and secondly that messages are often encoded in
literature about pop music, through the use of music in the text. He writes: ‘reading
(Less Than Zero) as profoundly ideologically motivated, then, requires letting go of
some rather stereotypical (and not particularly enlightening) ways of approaching
rock music in literary criticism.’ The use of Led Zeppelin, and the fictional New
Wave band X in the novel is cited by Luter as an example of ‘cultural conflict’ in the
text. He writes: ‘if we approach, say, the two epigraphs of the novel- lyrics from Led
Zeppelin and from X- with knowledge that, while both are rock bands, broadly
speaking, the two artists represent quite different things to Ellis’ characters, then we
1 See Matthew Luter, ‘More Than Zero: Post Punk Ideology (and Its Rejection) in Bret Easton Ellis’, in Eric Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner (eds.), Write In Tune: Contemporary Music In Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.20. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
52
wind up seeing cultural forces in conflict’. (21).This point was not merely of
academic interest. In hindsight it is evident that HILTNG uses pop stars and their
work in the text to signify specific meanings. For instance when, in the second scene,
Robert Wardner tries to perform a citizen’s arrest on the popular Spanish singer Julio
Iglesias, Wardner is in fact making a symbolic point. Wardner is, by doing this,
drawing attention to the fact that his sense of authenticity is threatened by performing
alongside a singer whose music aims to soothe, rather than provoke. By creating
conflict with Iglesias he is portraying himself as an ‘other’.
Coincidentally, in the novel Led Zeppelin are used as a signifier, as they are in
Less Than Zero. As The National Grid arrive to record their album, former members
of Led Zeppelin are leaving the studio. The band’s bassist comments ‘It’s the eighties
now; we’re taking over from them.’ Within the text a cultural conflict takes place,
even though this conflict is not actualised physically within the prose.
Jennifer Egan’s celebrated novel A Visit From The Goon Squad (2011)
exemplifies the ways in which a creative response to popular music can engage with
cultural history and conflict. The story is presented in a manner that reflects the
culture and era portrayed. Each character in this novel relates a section of the
narrative within their ‘own’ chapter. The reader is taken to different, non-sequential
parts of the narrative’s chronology as they read each chapter in sequence. In Write In
Tune, Danica van de Velde draws parallels between the punk, DIY, cut-and-paste
aesthetic, which Hebdige described, and the collage of writing that Egan’s novel
comprises, which is the written equivalent. Velde describes how ‘the shift in temporal
register…embeds the rhythms and chaotic flow of punk into the structure and
language of the text… Egan interweaves the chaos of the (punk) movement within the
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fabric of the text. In this sense, the punk subculture is utilized not for its political
undertones, but for its structural aesthetics.’1
One aspect of this aesthetic of collage is that the smoothness of the composite
whole can be threatened. Egan, however, uses any possible cracks in the
impressionistic veneer of the novel to offer deeper insight into her characters. One
recurring theme in the novel is that of memory and nostalgia. The reader pieces
together the narrative using extracts from each character, and therefore melancholy
regarding the passing of time, and an attendant sense of regret, are conveyed. Velde
comments that the story ‘enacts the characters’ memories: however, it also gestures
towards emotional voids and temporal absences, positioning music as both a source of
positive recollection and deep disappointment’ (124). As with HILTNG, in Goon
Squad music is a vehicle by which the characters can gain a state of self-realization.
They can achieve this either through commercial or artistic success. Just as former
National Grid band members such as Theo want to use the band to regain a sense of
former glories, so too the Goon Squad character of Bennie is haunted by his past and
seeks to do the same.
As Velde writes, ‘By juxtaposing past and present in her layered structure of
time, Egan lays bare the hollow idealism that is particularly at the heart of her male
characters’ lives’. In her words, this exposure ‘positions them to desire to return to a
past that they can never recapture’ (124). As is also apparent in retrospect, both Goon
Squad and HILTNG depict males journeying to regain authenticity. In HILTNG Sam
is journeying to find Wardner, as he believes the quest will ‘put the fire back in his
life’ and make him artistically active again. The band’s guitarist Simon tries to get
Wardner to return to the studio so he can re-engage with himself, and the world, as an
1 Danica van de Velde, “Every song ends’: Musical Pauses, Genderered Nostalgia, and Loss in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad’, in Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner (eds.), Write In Tune: Contemporary Music In Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.124.
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artist. In Goon Squad Bennie longs to recapture a sense of authenticity he had in the
past and yet he is overcome by ‘shame memories’1. Bennie’s need for authenticity is
projected onto a musician, Scotty, who in the words of Velde he ‘praises for being
‘absolutely pure’ and ‘untouched’’ (133).
The idea of Scotty’s purity, as conveyed through Bennie, is not simply the
response of one character to another, with attendant insights on male self-worth. Egan
frames these insights on authenticity, more broadly, around the idea of digital
technology. For instance, Bennie perceives that Scotty lived a ‘subterranean existence
beyond the surveillance of what has become a hyper-digital culture’ (Egan, 321).
Goon Squad explores the idea of an artist retaining a sense of integrity by resisting
this ‘hyper-digital culture’. This culture, with its multiple representations of art, often
reproduces creative work whilst leaving it bereft of some of its authenticating
qualities. In HILTNG this idea happens to be explored too, in the ‘reunion gig’ scene.
Wardner is not present at this gig, and Sam bemoans how in the live setting he is
replaced by a video that ‘rages over their heads’. Like Scotty, Wardner retains his
integrity by not colluding in such contemporary representations. Wardner, however, is
still represented onscreen in a manner which we suspect he would object to (though
he is not present to voice his objection.)
Egan further explores the idea of digitization, when she writes ‘Bennie knew
that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem
was precision, perfection: the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of
everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh’ (24). HILTNG uses similar
language. Wardner’s onscreen representation at the live gig is described as neutered:
‘his anger is now dissolved in pixels’.
1 See Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad (London: Corsair, 2011), p. 130. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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In Bennie’s eyes, Scottie does not just represent purity. In the words of Velde,
Scottie also ‘represents a strangely uncontaminated link to Bennie’s past life’ (130).
Bennie’s veneration of Scotty is, in the words of Velde, ‘a means of trying to
nostalgically mend his own fragmented sense of self’ (130). Similarly, in HILTNG
Sam is trying to nostalgically mend his own fragmented sense of self by undertaking a
quest to find Wardner. Although it is not explicitly stated in the text, Sam hopes this
quest will also serve as a bridge to his glory days, when he was an intrepid young
journalist.
In her consideration of Egan’s novel Velde quoted Egan talking of the book as
a ‘story told in parts that sound completely different…yet also work together’ (125).
Velde quoted Egan saying ‘I wanted a collision of different styles and feelings that all
work together to make one story about people over time’.1 Egan was seemingly
aiming for a ‘collision’, which was also uniform enough to tell ‘one story’. Velde,
seems to sense the hint of contradiction about this, given that as a piece of art the
book is ‘intentionally cacophonous, transgressive, and resistant to conventional linear
structural flow’ (125).
Moving away from Velde’s analysis, and onto an interview Egan gave with Jo
Reed allows us to examine her approach. In this interview, Egan told Reed of her
intention to ‘write a story that happens in parts.’ She elaborated that she ‘wanted the
parts to be as different from each other as possible, kind of in the manner of a concept
album’.2 She spoke of wanting ‘each chapter, and the characters’ perceptions within
it’ to represent ‘a song from her literary concept album’. Later in the interview, her
musical approach to writing the novel is further explained, when she mentioned
1 See Egan, interviewed by Reed, ‘Art Works, for the National Endowment for the Arts’. Cited in: http://arts.gov/file/2435. Accessed 10th November 2014.2 See Jennifer Egan, interviewed by Jo Reed, ‘‘Art Works’, for the National Endowment for the Arts’. Cited in: http://arts.gov/file/2435. Accessed 10th November 2014.
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thinking of the album as ‘polyphonic’. Egan said ‘There is actually an A side and a B
side. Because when people talk of linked stories, they tend to assume there will be a
continuity of tone and voice, and I really wanted the opposite, I wanted that feeling on
an album where you go from a soft song to something really hard, and then back to
something else that’s different’. It seems therefore that any seeming contradiction in
Egan’s approach can be attributed to her viewing the book more as a ‘concept album’
than a normal novel.
HILTNG was developed whilst the author was reading Goon Squad. Both
books tell the story from different viewpoints, and at various points in the narrative of
the story. Though Goon Squad may have influenced HILTNG in the extent to which it
used this approach, the former was clearly written with a different intention. For
HILTNG the intention was not to create a ‘collision’ but to present different
perspectives on the same story to allow the reader to piece it all together.
Having said that, there are seemingly accidental similarities, with HILTNG at
one point creating a deliberate stylistic ‘collision’. Towards the end of the novel,
when Sam meets Wardner, he is characterized in a different way to how Wardner
presented himself in the first person narrative. This is a signpost to the reader that they
should question the authenticity of ‘Wardner’s narrative’. Both novels also present
their overall story in various forms, Egan using prose and Powerpoint presentations,
and HILTNG using prose and press cuttings. The novels further share a likeness
because they concern characters wanting to return to who they once were, through
their engagement with music. These last two similarities seem to be coincidences, and
were not the intention when HILTNG was written.
As well as Less Than Zero, with its proliferation of ‘New Wave’ bands, Goon
Squad is one of the few high-profile novels that could be said to contain post-punk
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bands. In it, the fictional female duo Stop/Go have an amateurism and autodidactic
approach that could be categorised as post-punk.
In Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet the main characters play in a
band whose song titles (‘Hell Is For Buildings’, ‘Temporary Feeling’) suggest a new
wave band comparable to Talking Heads.1
Both Goon Squad and You Don’t Love Me Yet evince certain tendencies in
musicians, associated characters and their actions, which HILTNG both endorses and
queries. In both Lethem’s and Egan’s work the dialogue between musicians and
creative figures has a markedly apathetic tone. For instance, in Lethem’s novel we
encounter lines such as: ‘Falmouth sighed, radiating disappointment that Lucinda
wouldn’t tangle with him’(13). In Egan there are passages like this: ‘Sasha had been
in the grip of a dire evening, her lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs,
sometimes glancing at the flat screen TV,’ (14). The disaffected tone of the narrative
becomes suddenly more abstract, however, when the characters are playing music.
The narrator describes the music, in these instances, in romantic and hyperbolic terms.
Lethem’s description says: ‘their hearts huddled around the fledgling song, as if it
were a tendril of bonfire in wild darkness’ (23), one of Egan’s narrators describes
‘hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky’ (27).
Other books could be considered as containing post-punk bands. In Dana Spiotta’s
Stone Arabia the character Nik Worth fronted a band called The Demonics who are
defined (by him) as a ‘seminal garage rock band,’ and who seemingly fit into the
category of eighties new wave, which, as discussed, shares features with post-punk.2
Nik is a man who has withdrawn into his own fantasy world as a result of failure to
1 See Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet (New York, Vintage, 2008). All further references will be made parenthetically in the text. 2 See Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011), p. 82. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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achieve fame. Similarly, in HILTNG, Wardner has retreated into his own world as a
result of being unable to create the kind of life he imagined through music.
Stone Arabia is notable for containing within it a fictional band biography
offered, in various forms, by a central character. This character creates, through a
composite of media and methods, a series of fictional bands and side-projects. While
the music he generates for this chronology is real, the only reviews and coverage it
provokes are not.
Stone Arabia strongly influenced HILTNG, with its fictional representation of
a band complete with side-projects, artwork and journalism. The band created for
HILTNG only released a couple of EPs, and their record company forced out a debut
album, which the members deemed finished. This conflict ensured the band achieved
some fame, but it also contributed to the narrative, as former members (such as the
guitarist Simon) are, in the plot, driven to finish a record to their satisfaction. This
output is discussed by characters within the novel as if it were real.
The novels considered here all have a common feature, in that they contain
bands which have post-punk features, but who are not explicitly post-punk.
Crossovers between these ‘partially post-punk novels’ will now be considered, before
moving onto novels which fit more neatly into the post-punk category.
As Spiotta does with Stone Arabia, Egan also invents bands and record labels
for the purposes of her narrative in Goon Squad. This book, like Stone Arabia, uses a
range of media to tell the story. Variation in form lends itself to a variation in the
narrative position, which alternates between the first and third person in this book, as
in Lethem’s. These novels all feature the trope of creating bands we’ve never heard.
To quote Roland Barthes, there is something ‘writerly’ about this. Barthes describes a
‘writerly’ text as one in which the reader ‘takes an active role in the construction of
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meaning. There is a multiplicity of cultural and other ideological indicators (codes)
for the reader to uncover’.1 This idea relates to Stone Arabia as in it the author,
through relatively scant description, creates bands about which there are many aspects
open to interpretation by the reader. Band biographies in general are texts in which
the myths about popular music are generated and perpetuated. Therefore, certain
tropes about rock bands exist, even if we are not aware of the specific bands they
relate to.
If the work of Roland Barthes helps us understand some of the functions and
effects of these novels: so too do the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially The
Dialogic Imagination. Egan and Spiotta’s novels are notable for being what Bakhtin
would term ‘heteroglossic’. Mikahil Bakhtin cited texts that offer ‘authorial speech,
the speech of narrators, inserted genres [and] the speech of characters’ as helping
heteroglossia enter the novel by permitting ‘a multiplicity of social voices and a wide
variety of their links and relationships’2. Goon Squad and Stone Arabia novels use
unreliable narrators to present a story in a multivocal, multimedia manner, thus
imbuing each respective work with complexity. This complexity is arguably
perceived by the reader as a result of the author having offered us an alternative
perspective on events. In Goon Squad a thwarted seduction through the eyes of the
manager character Bennie takes on an exploitative tone when told through the more
naïve, adolescent language of his target, Rhea. The effect of this complexity is that the
reader is inclined to believe that the text is more authentic, as we are aware of
multiple perspectives on different scenarios in our own lives.
1 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure Of The Text (London: Hill & Wang, 1980), p.5.2 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.263. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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As in Goon Squad and Stone Arabia, in HILTNG the story is told alternately
from the first and third person, to give both intimate and panoramic accounts,
depending upon the content at that time. This variety of perspective, narrator and form
is intended to in the words of Bakthin ‘combine to form a structured artistic system…
subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole’ (262).
Yet whilst the eclectic narrative positions and use of multi-media in such
novels is of influence, HILTNG purposefully eschews emerging tropes in this genre of
writing, as described above. For example, in this novel managers are not exclusively
male and exploitative. The band’s manager, Bonny, is closer to a thwarted, nourishing
matriarch.
Purposeful choices were also made with regards to the pace of HILTNG, in
contrast to the novels described above. For instance, in You Don’t Love Me Yet a
‘jauntiness’ was noted in the narrative. But for HILTNG a heaviness, more reflective
of the world of the early eighties described by Beckett, is imparted. This tone is
achieved because the interview content that the characters create is concerned with the
alienation and mental breakdown of Wardner. We learn at the conclusion of the novel
that the accounts we have attributed to Wardner may instead have been written by
Sam. Therefore, the sections in which Sam is close to a mental breakdown are
deliberately written to mimic the form of writing we have come to associate with
Wardner (including personal pronouns, and shorter, more clipped sentences). These
sections are also disjointed and abstract, forcing the reader to both be reminded of
‘Wardner’s style’ and to question who wrote which part of the novel.
In summary, authors seemingly write novels about music in order to try and
capture its mythical, transcendent qualities. Novelists such as Hanif Kureishi
acknowledge the challenge of trying to do this, which seems to entice writers. The
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music novel also offers writers the opportunity to create, through a fictional pop star,
an ‘other’. To quote Stephen Benson this allows fiction to be an ‘earwitness to the
role of music in everyday life’ (4). The existence of novels about music challenges the
idea that such works are not worthy of scholarship. Further, the presence of arguably
disposable pop music within a text does not render that text necessarily inferior.
An analysis of novels about popular music, some which contain bands that
might be considered post-punk, were discussed in relation to HILTNG. By including
fictional bands with side-projects and journalism books like Stone Arabia reflect the
cut-and-paste aesthetic of punk, in text form. By using a range of media within the
novel form, and by flitting across timescales between the first and third person, books
like Goon Squad deeply implicate the reader. The work of Roland Barthes and
Mikhail Bakhtin help us to understand some of the other effects of these novels,
including their capacity to offer different perspectives on the plight of a character, and
to imbue a novel with deeper complexity.
The novels considered here, like HILTNG, are frequently concerned with
opposition, memory, nostalgia, authenticity and self-realisation, particularly in a
hyper-digital age. But HILTNG is also distinct from these books, because it avoids the
apathetic and at other times jaunty tone that the music novels mentioned often used.
‘Post-punk’ novels
In addition to these recent novels engaging with popular music, there are also several
novels that specifically depict post-punk bands. Given that, their influence on the
construction of HILTNG will be considered in turn. However, the usefulness of the
‘post-punk’ categorisation where it has been applied by the author will be debated.
This is done to promote the argument that HILTNG makes an original contribution to
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knowledge because it is the first publication to explicitly call itself, and be a ‘post-
punk novel’.1
Cathi Unsworth’s The Singer is concerned with two fictional bands, the punk
rock group Blood Truth and the ethereal, shoegazing band Mood Violet. Unsworth,
however, seems to define Blood Truth as ‘post-punk’, though this categorisation is not
entirely convincing given the band she then portrays. Early in the novel she writes
that, during their heyday, Blood Truth ‘made a post-punk masterpiece, up there with
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures’.2 Additionally, each chapter of the novel is
named after a post-punk album. But this genre does seem to have been deployed
retrospectively to the text, perhaps in production, rather than in the construction of the
novel. Blood Truth are in fact defiantly punk, and describe themselves as ‘walking in
the footsteps of The Clash’ (30). Their singer, Vince Smith, has hair that is ‘a mane of
jagged black points’, a description which suggests that of the punk mohican, and he
wears a dog collar (xii). Live, Smith is described as ‘a hell-bound punk Gene
Vincent,’ (probably referencing Ian Dury And The Blockheads’ ‘Sweet Gene
Vincent’) accompanied with ‘rockabilly riffs’, ‘fast drumming’ and ‘yowling vocals’
(xii).3
The narrative concerns a journalist, Eddie Bracknell, who is hunting down the
missing Smith in order to write a book about him. Bracknell lives in squalor with a
girlfriend, who, as a result of his laziness, is on the verge of leaving him. He has a
drink problem which, it becomes increasingly evident, obscures his judgement.
Bracknell hunts down Smith using the internet, and these searches offer a literary
1 The full title of the published version is How I Left The National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel. 2 Cathi Unsworth, The Singer (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007), p.31. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text. 3 See Ian Dury and The Blockheads, ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCOym2yutD0. Accessed 14th May 2014.
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device which allows the journey to find someone to take place very quickly. The
novel also contains excerpts from reviews, interviews, and encyclopaedia entries
about Blood Truth.
The story is told in alternating chapters, which switch between the present day
and the nineteen-eighties. The surface elements of the novel described so far are also
evident in HILTNG, but arguably the similarities end there, with narrative voice
presenting the biggest difference. In The Singer the past narrative is told in the third
person and the present day narrative is in the first person. Unsworth’s past narrative
concerns the band’s schooldays and swift rise to fame, and the present narrative
follows Bracknell’s quest to find Smith.
This use of the third person in the past account usefully distances the reader
from aspects of the plot which Unsworth does not want the reader to know (even if in
all likelihood the characters would have revealed them in the present narrative). An
example is when Bracknell meets Donna, the head of the band’s former record
company. We later learn that she would have possessed an insight into where Smith
went after vanishing, having received postcards from him. But she inexplicably does
not offer this information to Bracknell.
The use of the first-person in the present day account somewhat implicates us
in the protagonist’s quest. But it also allows the protagonist to be shut out of details,
which prevent him from revealing important plot points. For instance, Bracknell’s
developing relationship with a photographer from the band’s early years, Ray, does
not reveal enough to betray that Ray is planning Bracknell’s murder. Additionally,
texture and context regarding the music scene from which Blood Truth originated are
minimised to allow for a rapid, thriller-style plot. Given that Bracknell’s quest
inevitably generates a lot of dead ends, this use of the first-person creates a lot of
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room for redundancy to creep in. Again and again, characters smoke, drink and eat
chips or fry ups. For HILTNG it was important to avoid such potential redundancies in
the present-day narrative, and to have the richness of each character described not just
through the lens of one person. The intention was to give the characters depth. One
way in which to do this was to show characters designing themselves in the text. This
occurred via the creation of musicians who designed their own identity, using their
bodies as a canvas to articulate the effects of living in an industrial environment.
Wardner, for instance, does this by exaggerating the effects of living in a capitalist
society, through his use of an onstage character, Clive Douglas. Douglas works in a
power plant, on a shift that ‘refuses to end’. As a result he is deprived of sun, and
sleep. The intention was for Wardner to also self-design, by consciously alienating
himself from his usual environment. By separating himself from normative life
Wardner creates a new identity. For the purposes of this novel the best way to depict
selves in formation was to describe their choice of clothing and behaviour in the text.
Their choices, in turn, served as metaphors for their alienated positions within society.
My own view of subjectivity is described by (and perhaps even emanates
from) Michael Billington in his evaluation of Harold Pinter’s work. Billington wrote
‘the language we use is rarely innocent of hidden intention…it is part of an endless
negotiation for advantage or a source of emotional camouflage.’1 To those who might
see language merely as a means to clearly state intent, or capture the world
objectively, Billington replies ‘it is nothing to do with a failure of communication’.
He instead describes it as a ‘form of evasion or self-protection as a means of
achieving tactical language’. This view of language, as a battleground on which
advantage can be gained or lost, is one adopted for HILTNG. My intention was to
demonstrate a lack of conviction regarding the efficacy of interviews as a mean to 1 Michael Billington, Harold Pinter (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 213.
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establish objective facts about a missing person. The aim was to show throughout the
plot that interviewees would allow their judgement to be clouded and their own
interests to be served.
Additionally, by creating perceptions of Wardner through a variety of third
person accounts, a point is eventually made realising Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of how
‘unfinalized and unresolved’ characters are.1 It was important to present characters
who are unresolved, to achieve this quality that Bakhtin described, in order to achieve
psychological veracity. Bakhtin, as a literary theorist, advocated the importance of
distinct dialogue within a novel. He wrote that the ‘internal stratification present in
every language at any given moment...is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel
as a genre’ (262). Bakhtin’s authority and influence as a theorist of dialogue on
language made him especially relevant to a novel using interview material.
Does The Singer thereby achieve what Greenblatt called ‘strategic opacity’? 2
Strategic opacity, like Barthes’ ‘writerly text’ invites us, as a reader to engage with
the text through deliberate gaps in it, perhaps in the plot or characterisation. The
Singer does not seem to achieve strategic opacity, as arguably the plot merely
misleads the reader. The reader is told one character’s theory on the whereabouts of
Smith, and later on we learn that such a hypothesis was completely implausible within
the context of the book. For instance, Bracknell is successful at finding Smith only
because in the latter section of the book there are a series of revelations from a French
detective, which we could not have intuited from previous offered information. This
detective, Joseph, teaches us that Smith left Blood Truth to go to Paris, before
relocating to Portugal. We have no reason to deduce that Smith might want to go to
Portugal until we are told, and the use of the third person allows this new area of the 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems Of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.61. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World (London: Vintage Digital, 2012), p. 324.
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investigation to be suddenly offered at the same time that the question is resolved. For
HILTNG I was keen to retain interest in the band using plot additions which instead
later turn out to fit with the integrity of the story. The rumours that Wardner murdered
are not merely red herrings, but eventually serve to explain Bonny’s motives as a
character.
Unsworth’s rock star, Smith, remains at a distance even when present in the
text. He is by turns apparently charming and then violently aggressive. But without
the reader having the use of the first person to analyse him there is never a means to
psychologically read him until he is met by Bracknell at the end. Within the main
body of the story, there is never a whole chapter on this character which allows us to
understand his nuances. Whatever its benefits, the use of the third person in the past
narrative does not offer us an insight into the interior world of Smith. At the end of
the novel we realize this was for a purpose: to hide Smith’s constant intent to murder
Bracknell. But there is no reason for the other characters to have not offered plausible
theories on Smith’s whereabouts. The fact that they never do perhaps dents Smith’s
mystique, because the reader learns to downplay the observations of various
characters. Throughout the novel characters have a wide range of theories on Smith’s
whereabouts, seemingly apropos of nothing. ‘I change my mind on a daily basis,’ one
says, ‘sometimes I think he might have taken a vow of silence with some dodgy
monks somewhere and they’re keeping him prisoner’ (68). Although HILTNG
arguably also does this, the theories about Wardner in this novel are never at odds
with the portrait that has been painted of Wardner. Wardner is rumoured, for instance,
to have murdered a fan and at this point in the novel we have seen him physically
attack a record company executive. Wardner later speaks of a spiritual epiphany, and
so when he ends up in a monastery it is part of his development. But in Unsworth’s
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novel it is very unlikely that Smith might have taken a vow of silence, as he is only
ever described as a violent man.
Fitting with much of the book, we are told rather than shown why Smith
frequently acts in a manipulative and unpleasant manner, with Unsworth at various
points citing his troubled schooldays. Unsworth has given herself plenty of room for
her characters to make statements without them ever needing to fit into a wider
narrative. In part, we wish to continue reading because we are intrigued by the
characters’ theories, but it becomes gradually evident that the characters are often
simply wrong. The characters who did know the truth about Smith’s disappearance do
not offer insight or explanations, and we are left with no understanding of why they
refrained from doing this.
At the plot’s denouement we learn that Smith plotted to marry Mood Violet’s
rich singer, Sylvana, so he could murder her, inherit her wealth, and then move to
Portugal to live off the money. At no point are we given the information to suspect
that Smith might have been intelligent enough to pull off such an con, and his move to
France is in no way suspected by his band mates, despite him having run off there
before. In such sequences, therefore, perhaps The Singer shows Unsworth to be
employing what Barthes called a ‘readerly style’. In this, the ‘reader is a site merely to
receive information. Readerly texts attempt, through the use of standard
representations and dominant signifying practices, to hide any elements that would
open up the text to multiple meaning.’1 In The Singer any possible multiple meanings
simply turn out to be false, in favour of a singular meaning that Unsworth eventually
clarifies.
1 Barthes, ‘Pleasure’, p.5. 2 Barthes, ‘Pleasure’, p. 5.
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By contrast, in HILTNG the present day narrative is told using the third
person, to allow the characters that are interviewed by the protagonist to create the
distance an investigative journalist would have to overcome. Distinctly, the second
narrative, from the perspective of the missing Wardner, is told in the first-person. This
was chosen to allow Wardner’s emotions and reflections to adhere him to the reader
(at the risk of going against the alienated mood intended) and thereby increase their
emotional involvement in his journey. It allows Wardner’s gradual dislocation to be
experienced in great detail, with the intention of giving the text a more ‘writerly’
quality, inviting the reader to speculate on the emotions Wardner would experience
which he might not have described. This also encourages the reader to associate
Wardner with the minutiae of the urban environment into which he has vanished. For
instance, in the final scene, where Sam hunts Warnder in a remote town in the
Pennines, Sam mentally relates Wardner’s aesthetic to the aesthetic of the 1980’s-
style railway station which the trail leads him to, on his way to the monastery.
HILTNG aspires to a ‘writerly’ quality because information is given to the
reader not as a red herring, but as an incitement to speculate, engage and intuit. For
instance, when Wardner becomes alienated from his songwriting partner Simon he
looks around himself, in inner city Manchester, and notes how he ‘needs to get away
from all this’ and ‘head north’. He alludes to a spiritual malady by way of an
explanation. Wardner sends postcards to a friend, in which he quotes a Christopher
Marlowe poem to state how he would find a home in ‘valleys, groves, hills, and fields
/ Woods or steepy mountain yields.’1 He adds that he could ‘never be far from
Manchester.’ When it transpires that he has sought refuge in a monastery in the
1 Christopher Marlowe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’, in Francis Palgrave, The Golden Treasury (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2002), p.2.
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Pennines this is therefore the final piece of a puzzle which the reader has been
empowered to construct themselves.
Sam’s quest to find Wardner, in the third person, takes a cool and measured
approach with regards to Sam’s successes and failures. Entwined with Wardner’s
account of his exile, Sam’s narrative is intended to implicate the reader in the telling
of the story. It allows the reader the room to assemble, into a coherent narrative, both
Sam and Wardner’s versions of truth. Bakhtin wrote that ‘the stratification of
language…on entering the novel establishes its own special order within it, and
becomes a structured artistic system, which orchestrates the intentional theme of the
author.’1 In Bakhtin’s view, therefore, a novel should contain varying accounts in
order to achieve an ‘artistic system’, rather than present a series of red herrings. For
instance in the novel, what may appear to be red herrings (with one character offering
erroneous information) are in fact consistent with the motivations of that character.
For example, at one point in HILTNG, Sam is told by Wardner’s song-writing
partner Simon that Wardner will not be recording in a studio, so Sam does not need to
look for him there. In the next sequence Wardner recounts meeting Simon in that
studio and watching a man, who fits Sam’s description, walking away. The characters
might not be reliable in their version of events to one another, but their accounts are
consistent with the whole novel. To some degree the novel presents a ‘truth’ which is
consistent with itself, even if large swathes of it turn out to have been written by Sam,
when we assumed them to be the work of Wardner.
Mikhail Bakhtin also speculated on the importance of retaining the
distinctness of various embedded dialogues within a novel. He wrote:
The prose writer does not purge words of intentions and tones that are alien to
him, he does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words, 1 Bakhtin, Dialogic, p.262.
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he does not eliminate those language characterizations and speech
mannerisms… glimmering behind the words and forms, each at a different
distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of his work, that is, the center of
his own personal intentions. 1
For HILTNG this was interpreted to mean that at its best, a novel takes on the
diversity of different voices within its unity and highlights the distinctions therein,
and does not blend them in a way which diminishes these distinctions. It allows the
distinctions to sit within the composite whole of a novel, thus allowing for the
richness of a range of fully-realized voices to all work together under a consistent
premise.
On the subject of consistency, for HILTNG it was important to portray a band
who would have been defined as ‘post-punk’. It was therefore of particular interest to
observe exactly how Unsworth described Blood Truth. In the following section of this
thesis the descriptive room Unsworth offers in the book will be considered.
In the opening sequences of Unsworth’s book there are some slight, yet still
evocative descriptions of the band’s political motivations and their musical
expressions. Smith is described as a musician ‘like (John) Lydon and (Ian) Curtis…
men you could look up to…Forged in the Winter of Discontent from the grimmest
inner cities’ (25). But, after the first third of the novel even these lean descriptions
fall away, and the book takes on the feel of a thriller. Scenes become taut and lack
description. In them we are mainly ‘told’ how a character looks. For instance,
Bracknell’s girlfriend Eddie is described as ‘the most glamorous, mysterious woman
at our school’ (82). However, we are not given means to deduce that she is mysterious
or glamorous. A few lines later she calls Bracknell ‘fucking pathetic’: this harsh
criticism is not balanced by further insights into Eddie from her elsewhere (82). 1 Bakhtin ‘Dialogic’, p. 298-99.
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The Singer eventually reveals itself as a not successful thriller straining to be about
music, in contrast to HILTNG, which was intended to have some of the qualities of
the thriller, whilst being embedded in, and evocative of, the minutiae of the post-punk
scene. Unsworth’s apparent choice of ‘the thriller’ as a genre allows her to give the
narrative pace but does not give her the room to explore the texture of the music, or
the environment from which it sprung. It also prevents us from investigating, through
a character, the environment in which Smith is sought. It instead offers Unsworth the
space to present vibrant scenes in which women compete for Smith’s sexual attention,
incidents which we later realize do not contribute to the plot. The language has a
chatty, clichéd and at times stereotypical feel to it which ‘tells’ more than it ‘shows’,
which perhaps prevents the characters from communicating insight. The following
excerpt, in which a record company executive is questioned about Mood Violet,
illustrates this point:
‘Seriously,’ Stevens looked at both of us with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Get
someone else to dish the dirt on that one. I might have the most successful
band on my roster, but she lost me the best one’ (102).
We are not given the information to deduce that Mood Violet are the best band on his
label, instead this is a fact that we have to accept, given the lack of an alternative
view.
Despite the chapter headings Unsworth’s book also has little concern for
accurate contextualisation within the post-punk scene. True, Blood Truth form at a
Sex Pistols’ concert, and the far-right’s attempted adoption of punk is fleetingly
referred to. As Worley describes, ‘Sham 69 concerts in London became a rallying
point for…National Front supporters in the late 1970s’.1 It is therefore plausible that
Blood Truth would have gained a similar following. 1 Worley, ‘Shot’, p.334.
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Yet elsewhere the contextualisation is inaccurate. The vanished Manic Street
Preachers’ rock star Richey Edwards is repeatedly, incorrectly, referred to as ‘Richie
Manic’ [sic] by both characters and referenced texts, which to many would undermine
the credibility of the text (35).
In the conclusion of the novel Bracknell is murdered by Smith in Lisbon. It
transpires that the photographer also commissioned to help Bracknell make a book
about Smith (Ray) was conspiring with Smith all along. They planned to take
Bracknell to Portugal and kill him, thus keeping Smith’s new life a secret. In contrast,
at the end of HILTNG, the discovery of Robert Wardner represents a turning point in
Sam’s life. For the first time he achieves a noteworthy goal. Finding Wardner also
offers a resolution to Sam. Wardner has become a sage-like figure, having
consciously turned his back on modern life. He offers the reader, through Sam, an
explanation for this behaviour. This, in emotional terms, offers a conclusion to the
book and justifies Sam’s sacrifices to find him. In The Singer Smith’s withdrawal
occurs to protect an inheritance which we did not even know existed until the very
end. We are not informed why Ray aided Smith with his murder, nor given any reason
to suspect these characters as capable of such a deception. Until this point Smith is
portrayed as, in the words of Unsworth, a ‘degenerate’, apparently incapable of any
such complex machinations (36). Additionally, Smith is revealed to have sent
postcards to a former lover, Donna, throughout his disappearance, even though he was
clearly keen to keep the murder of his wife quiet. Donna, who is hungry for fame,
does not pass on these postcards and seemingly forgets about them, which seems
inconsistent given her earlier publicity-seeking strategies.
Within Unsworth’s metanarrative there is therefore no conclusion as to why or
how the story was written. It exists, unashamedly, as a piece of fiction. By contrast, in
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HILTNG, at the end it is revealed that Theo, the band’s bassist, attempted to get Sam’s
book commissioned to drum up publicity about The National Grid, and force Wardner
to reform the band. In this book the reader is given the room to decide if Sam in fact
wrote Wardner’s first-person account during his early years (in which he was
obsessed with the band). It is hinted that Sam’s publisher has pushed for a creative
biography of the band, which might incorporate two narratives in a form similar to
that which the reader has read.
Having considered, in this analysis of The Singer, a ‘post-punk’ novel which
uses a blend of the first and third person, another such novel will be now be
considered. By contrast, this book only uses the ‘first person’.
Rotten In Denmark, by Jim Pollard, follows the life of a band, The Go-Karts,
with the story told exclusively in the first-person from the perspective of their
guitarist Frankie Dane.1 Dane is now in his forties, and the narrative jumps between
the eighties, when the band strode ‘onto the post-punk scene’ and the present day,
where Dane is lamenting the loss of his song writing partner Cal (24). The book itself
is quickly revealed to be Dane’s biography in the making, recently commissioned by a
publisher.
Though the choice of the first-person should, in effect, lead to a greater
intimacy with Dane, and therefore more emotional involvement with the reader, it
does not seem to. At the novel’s denouement we learn that Carter’s overdose was not
accidental: Dane deliberately cut his band-mate’s cocaine with painkillers to murder
him. However, until now the use of the first-person has not betrayed any motivation
or planning to do this, even though within the text it is, at the end, mentioned that this
‘revelation’ will boost the band’s profile. At the novel’s conclusion we learn that
1 Jim Pollard, Rotten In Denmark (London: Smith/Doorstep Books, 1999). All page references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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Dane, following this announcement, has gone into hiding. An inserted news reports
tells us that as a consequence Dane’s recent solo album has ‘eclipsed Elvis, The
Beatles, the Stones, Michael Jackson, Madonna, The Spice Girls and anyone else
you’d care to name’ as a result (265). The novel at times uses magazine articles and
archived interviews to tell its story in a manner similar to Unsworth.
One drawback of portraying a fictional band that are allegedly so famous, is
that the credibility of the text, as well as the reader’s suspension of disbelief, is
arguably undermined as we have inevitably not heard of them. Some authors, such as
Salman Rushdie with The Ground Between Her Feet, overcame this pitfall by creating
a band integrated enough in the contemporary world (or an alternative version of it, at
least) to be credible. In The Ground even minor characters offer contemporary and
cultural references which make them thoroughly credible. In Rotten In Denmark,
however, the reader needs to rely on their impression of the band to justify their fame.
But the style of the writing is such that in much of the novel we are told of the Go-
Karts’ appeal and charisma, rather than shown. This could be because Pollard is
portraying a band so famous that it would be difficult to describe them. For instance,
when Dane consents to be interviewed after a screening of a film about his band, he
writes that audience give him a standing ovation. But, snatched recollections aside,
Pollard does not describe what Dane said that was so compelling, which the reader
could have found tantalising. Pollard writes that Dane ‘finds himself talking about his
father’ but mentions ‘I don’t know what I am saying’ (167). If Pollard had portrayed
this powerful speech it might have convinced the reader of Dane’s gravitas, and by
extension convinced of the bands talent. This would then assist with the reader’s
suspension of disbelief in lieu of other contextual details.
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There are other ways in which the novel arguably could have had a greater
impact. Details could have been withheld in order to render the novel more evocative,
thereby inspiring the reader to create a personal portrait of the band members. This, in
turn, could be part of a greater motive- to create a fictional band that is symbolic. This
symbol could represent a cultural moment in time, or demonstrate an artistic tendency
evident in a certain era. A novel is one art form that does have the capacity to create
an individual, or group of individuals, who we can observe reacting to different
situations. As such, these people have then claimed a life of their own within and
outside of the text. The reader is therefore offered the room to re-appraise their own
life, which is one reason the novel form is thrillingly confrontational.
As a result of these reflections, for HILTNG, care was taken to create a main
character who interrogated his own engagement with the world. The intention was
that, in observing the positive and negative effects of his choices, in turn the reader
can use this band to re-appraise their own lives. Post-punk, and its intellectual rigour,
are adopted as a means to allow this to occur.
To this point, in Pollard’s book there is perhaps a lack of the rigour required
for a band to be defined as post-punk. A sample line of dialogue demonstrates the
chatty and highly colloquial narrative used when, for instance, the band’s former
manager criticizes Dane for vanishing and consequently selling more copies of their
album than Van Morrison managed: ‘You split the bollocking band, do a whatsit,
Lord Lucan, and out[sell] Astral Weeks’ (27).
While perhaps evocative, such dialogue does not offer the scope for an
intellectual interrogation of the main concerns of post-punk. The band are also
politically apathetic (‘we shrugged our shoulders when Thatcher won the 1979
election,’ Pollard writes (44)). This viewpoint might have been more credible if it was
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made within the broader context of how untenable sustained political engagement is
for a band, but it is not.
In contrast, in Rotten In Denmark the sourced interviews and reviews do not
have a distinct writing style. They blend smoothly into the prose of the narrative, as in
Unsworth’s novel. For HILTNG the intention was to be closer to Mark Hodkinson’s
The Last Mad Surge Of Youth, for reasons which will now be elucidated.
The Last Mad Surge Of Youth, like Unsworth’s book, uses two narratives to
tell a story but in distinct ways.1 In the former, a third person narrative recounts the
formation and growing fame of a band, Killing Stars. A second narrative, also in the
third person, describes their singer’s present malaise. This singer, Barrett, is troubled
by the onset of middle-age, and his current lack of inspiration. He is trying to write
material that will return him to the spotlight, whilst tackling an alcohol problem which
he finds increasingly hard to hide. Barrett appears on television to promote a weak
solo album, and during his appearance chastises the presenter for his inauthenticity.
This act signifies the start of his undoing. By the time his former band-mate, Carey, is
commissioned to write Barrett’s life story we are already halfway through the novel.
Carey’s account, which takes over from the account of the band’s early years, tracks
back again to the shared childhood of these two friends and moves slowly towards a
conclusion. Arguably, these layers of narration are useful because they make a point
about subjectivity, namely that the same stories can be told with very different
perspectives and emphases. This dual narrative was employed in HILTNG, a choice
that was also informed by Bakhtin’s description of ‘unresolved’ characters.2 The
motivation was to create characters who remain unknowable, despite Sam’s attempts
to extract an objective account from them.
1 Mark Hodkinson, The Last Mad Surge Of Youth (West Yorkshire: Pomona, 2009).2 Bakhtin, Problems, p.61.
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The choices Hodkinson makes in telling this story shape its impact in
noticeable ways. For one, the sustained use of the third person gives the story an
impersonal feel. The reader gains little sense of intimacy with the characters, and
consequently their triumphs and failures do not emotionally engage. When Barrett has
an angry meltdown on television and is forced to run away, it provokes little
sympathy. Hodkinson’s decision to move rapidly between accounts makes the novel
very readable but it also instils a further sense of detachment. This has positive and
negative implications. The reader does not feel able to fully engage with the
characters. This effect might be due to the fact that the story is not recounted in
enough detail for the reader to become immersed. Another is that the sequences in
which the story is told are too brief to enable an emotional link to be built. A positive
impact of this set-up is that as a whole the novel retains a stylistic unity, despite the
excerpts within it, which are written with enough flair to be believable.
For example, when Carey writes a piece about Barrett’s controversial
appearance on a talk-show, his writing has a lively, journalistic feel which contrasts
against the more measured sentences in the rest of the book:
‘I was a close friend of his and a member of his first bands. I liked him
immensely. Everyone did. He was never still or quiet.’ (184).
This stylistic unity, given the restrained prose, makes the novel distinctive. Hodkinson
is able to imbue his characters with a wisdom not always evident in Unsworth’s and
Pollard’s novels. Despite the use of the third person, this wisdom is achieved by us
spending so much time in Barrett’s company, through both narratives. Hodkinson
thereby shows us the folly of stardom, given his dramatization of the processes which
allow a musician to connect with the public. However, it also makes the ‘star’ in his
book seem rather listless, which perhaps undermines the whole premise of a novel as
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being necessarily an interesting proposition. For that reason, in HILTNG it was
decided that, for an extended period of the book, the reader should be distanced from
Wardner. As a result there is a gap in Wardner’s account. This is built in to try and
engender a sense that the reader, as well as the characters, might ‘miss him’. It also is
intended to tantalise the reader, to stimulate them to learn more about Wardner.
In contrast to Wardner, Barrett is trying to find a way ‘back in’ to the system.
He has not, like Wardner, been exposed to it and found it wanting, and consequently
sought an alternative. Despite all the deficiencies of the system by which fame is
given, Barrett wishes to be fully immersed in it again. In the sequences in which he is
errant, or absent, he is merely distracted. He cannot, as an outsider, offer us any
insight about the systems within which we are all presently immersed, because he
does not in any way cherish his outsider status.
However, with Wardner, the intention was to create a character who gives us
the means to delineate the postmodern landscape through his chosen exile. Sam’s
journey, in which he hunts Wardner in cities, service stations and other non-places, is
intended to imbue HILTNG with a distinct texture. This texture can only be offered
through an account of an alienated person. However, when Barrett is absent in
Hodkinson’s book, this is little more than a source of irritation for the other
characters. Carey uses the time in which he is waiting to interview Barrett to return to
their shared childhood haunts. But this recourse makes the narrative sag a little, as we
have just had the story of Barrett’s childhood recounted to us. In places the book lacks
a sense of momentum. Rumours regarding Wardner’s supposed murder of a young
fan were included in HILTNG to give the plot a momentum, to ensnare the interest of
a reader who might not be particularly intrigued by music. Indeed, when negotiating a
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publishing contract for HILTNG it became apparent that the momentum offered by
such a device was necessary to reach a wide audience.
Arguably the most interesting section of a band’s life is how they become
successful, and the decadent activities that occur when they do. Hodkinson skirts
round this area, taking us to the point where the troubled Barrett is accosted by fans in
pubs, though we do not fully understand the fans’ obsession or the scale of Barrett’s
fame. Hodkinson seems to expect us to understand Barrett’s attractiveness.
Alternatively, he might be inviting us to speculate on what made him a star. In
HILTNG the reader is given less room to speculate on this subject, because the
intention was to show Wardner, through the first-person, struggling to gain the
limelight in his early years. The idea was that this will both attach the reader to him,
and explain the way other characters gravitate towards him. Hodkinson’s book is very
good at portraying what factors music journalists find attractive in a band, and this
goes some way towards offering a helpful explanation of their fame.
One strength of Hodkinson’s book is the restraint with which evocative details
about the band’s work is offered. As a teenager, Barrett is portrayed photocopying the
sleeve to his first demo, which is entitled ‘Factory Workers and Alienation’ (1).
Barrett tries to achieve a ‘scorching effect,’ saying, ‘it overheated once and it looked
brilliant, this sepia colour fading to black’ (1). The novel recounts the band’s
autodidactic approach, in which every aspect of their philosophy and artistic
expression was debated. In capturing a band’s creative fervour at the point of
inception, the reader is offered a ‘writerly’ insight into how they became famous. The
band talk in considered, intelligent language. ‘It was crucial we captured the pre-
tutored, unfettered version of the band for posterity’, Barrett says (38). The
stereotype that Unsworth offered, of the rock star lacking the means to articulate, is
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not apparent. Hodkinson’s band debate if ‘proficiency is a disease,’ and how they can
incorporate Marxist theory into their work (38). They experiment with making sound
using ‘fire extinguishers and beer trays, everything at hand,’ and listen obsessively to
John Peel (46). They consider the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, David
Hockney and Edvard Munch. They are concerned with industrialisation and
alienation. This wilful experimentation, use of eclectic influences and applied political
theory are all described as definitively post-punk by Reynolds (244). Hodkinson has
an attention to detail that brings the band to life, so that when an NME reporter is
keen to interview them very soon after their formation we fully understand why.
Hodkinson does not have to fall into the stereotypical rock clichés that Unsworth
offers.
The Last Mad Surge… successfully depicts the concerns that many post-punk
musicians shared. A young Barrett says he realised that ‘The future was in bleak
soundscapes…reflecting back to them [his peers] the desolation of their lives and
environment’ (68). Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle are mentioned as bands
which the characters feel they should be interested in. Hodkinson thereby gives the
subject matter an authenticity and consistency that Unsworth’s novel lacked. The
fictional band in the novel, Killing Stars, express a concern with subjects that
Throbbing Gristle responded to (such as poor urban planning) and these concerns are
expressed with a sharp ear for genuine dialogue. In this, a fine balance needs to be
struck, in order to achieve both authenticity and insight in dialogue. This excerpt of
speech from a young Barrett illustrates that Hodkinson achieves this:
‘Everything is fucked up,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘They’re flattening everything
and rebuilding it in concrete, all these underpasses and walkways, the precinct
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in town. The world’s going to be completely different a decade from now, if
they’ve not bombed it to fuck’ (68).
In their interviews Killing Stars are portrayed as having a preoccupation with
‘authenticity’. In Rip It Up Reynolds describes Scritti Politti (who Killing Stars
perhaps most resemble) debating their principles and actions so vehemently that they
almost talked themselves to a standstill. In the words of Ian Penman, Scritti’s
frontman Green had a ‘monomaniacal insistence on what was CORRECT,’ and he
‘spent most of his time disapproving of things, like an unwashed Pope’ (224).
Likewise, Killing Stars obsess about their authenticity. Barrett charismatically
reproaches a TV interviewer’s audience, saying ‘Can’t you see he hasn’t got a soul?
It’s fake….they’re scared of real life. Terrified. Don’t encourage them…’ (210).
One way post-punk was distinct from other musical genres is that its
participants, in the words of Reynolds, ‘saw 1977 not as a return to raw rock ‘n’ roll
but the chance to make a break from the tradition’ (xvii). Post-punks therefore
established a reputation for subverting the expectations people had of rock stars. One
way in which this was achieved was in striving for discipline and punctuality, instead
of the usual rock star indulgence. Where Unsworth portrayed her singer Vince Smith
as a destructive hedonist, Hodkinson portrays Killing Stars as ‘ruthlessly polite’,
saying ‘They were punctual. Hotel rooms were left tidy. The van was returned in
spotless condition’ (106).
Killing Stars are also invested in the idea of a band being a self-sufficient
entity that resists orthodoxy and record company control. This aspect is arguably the
most exciting aspect of the post-punk genre. Post-punk music instilled the sense that a
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band could forge an ideological system through which a range of artistic products and
ideas could be disseminated.1As Hodkinson’s main character observes:
The whole system of running the band, to the last detail, defined Killing Stars.
It was something they’d schemed for years in Carey’s bedroom, their
particular take on the dignity of labour, a loyalty to fellow workers. (106)
The post-punk drive to self-release work was also utilised in HILTNG. Wardner
resists having a record company control the release of his music. HILTNG also shares
with Hodkinson’s novel the intention to give the characters an intellectual curiosity.
Reynolds characterised The Fall’s frontman Mark E. Smith as a ‘working class
intellectual making good use of (his) library card, devouring everything from
Burroughs and Dick to Yeats and Camus’ (175). Similarly, Wardner is literate enough
to quote Christopher Marlowe in his postcards, and he references the work of various
playwrights in his dialogue.
Perhaps the most commendable aspect of Hodkinson’s book, however, is
harder to replicate and apply. It is in the wisdom which mature, experienced
characters offer one another on the nature of life, and particularly fame. In order to
achieve this properly, the author needs to have (or be able to conjure up) life
experiences, which can be difficult to fake. This is required for the text to possess
authenticity. This wisdom is evident in Barrett’s reflections on why he did not stay
famous: ‘They were all hustlers, every one, but the test was to remain enigmatic, to
keep hidden all that grotesque pushiness and self-love’ (156).
In his depiction of a band who combine pop star mystique with post-punk
credentials, Hodkinson’s book is perhaps closer to Reynolds’ conception of post-punk
1 Reynolds depicts Scritti Politti’s insular system of creating and releasing work as part of an ‘odd conglomerate’ in fascinating detail (203).
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as ‘a marriage of pop and politics’ (xvii). The enthusiasm of the band described veers
close to parody. In it, Killing Stars:
save their most extravagant show for the capital, Carl throwing offal from the
stage while Jonno, in full, radiation fall-out suit, used a gas primer to set alight
an effigy of Margaret Thatcher (275).
The time lag between accounts in his novel also gives the characters the space to
mock their younger selves, with Carey smiling at the use of the words
‘fundamentally’ and ‘actually’ in the same sentence, in an early interview with the
band (276). Barrett comments ‘It was the sixth-form debating society…with U2
providing the soundtrack’ (276). In HILTNG Sam interviews Simon whilst they walk
by a motorway, in a scene in which Simon similarly recounts the band’s youth. The
intention here was to also show a character’s self-awareness about early pretension,
with him mocking The National Grid’s use of power plant uniforms onstage.
One trait that all three of these ‘post-punk’ novels share is that each has a long
section portraying the childhood of the band members. However, the depiction of a
band’s shared childhood never offers us an insight into the characters behaviour later
in life, nor does it serve to emotionally connect us to them. As a result, for HILTNG,
there is no lengthy recourse to Wardner’s childhood. No strong advantage to doing
this could be detected whilst reviewing previous novels.
The experimentation undertaken by Hodkinson’s fictional band Killing Stars
was an inspiration, however. A band can only be accepted by the reader as
charismatic and talented if we have examples of their artistry. If this portrayed
artistry offers us an insight into how they became famous then it further enriches the
novel’s credibility. Therefore, in the motorway interview with Simon, he relates the
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band’s experimental phase with excitement to Sam. This was deemed necessary, in
order to convince the audience that this band could have had an impact.
Finally, in The Last Mad Surge of Youth the characters (particularly Barrett)
are evidently beholden to narratives that already exist, with regards to how rock stars
behave. For instance, even when Barrett is trying to give up alcohol his management
have no clear understanding of how this can be achieved. They too are attached to a
narrative in which an ageing rock star can only further disintegrate. The characters are
therefore limited by shared expectations that exist in the present day.
Even if the characters think they inhabit a novel in a distinct, original way, in
fact they are often playing a part in a greater, pre-existing narrative. By extension, an
author seemingly makes choices as to the development of a plot, but in fact
predefined structures are usually being adopted. In Unsworth’s novel a former
journalist tracks a missing rock star and in so doing provokes death threats. All of
these seeming choices were also made, completely independently, for HILTNG.
Therefore it seems that the real choices are in how this story is told, the self-
awareness with which it is told, and in what aspects of the story are foregrounded. In
the case of HILTNG, the intention was to ground the story in the modern world, and
thereby interrogate it. Throughout this survey, then, the aim has not been to rubbish
others’ creative efforts, but to critically position HILTNG, and understand my creative
choices better.
5. The Writing Process
Having reviewed the theoretical work and fiction which informed the writing of
HILTNG the final aspect of this critical section is to review the writing process itself.
Given that the novel was being written for publication this analysis does not only
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implicate the development of this novel in conjunction with professional colleagues,
but also its development within the wider context of the contemporary publishing
industry. It also requires me to consider how this writing process reflected my initial
research questions.
The writing process for HILTNG was very distinct from that for my first two
novels. My first novel, The Intimates, was written over an intense eight-week period
and then redrafted over the course of two months. Much of the writing that ended up
in the published novel was from a first draft that had been carefully written. My
second novel, Letters from Yelena, followed a similar pattern, but the redrafting
coincided with a research trip to Russia in which a great deal of background
information was gathered and absorbed. The writing and editing process was
elongated. But for both novels, the voice of a first-person narrator was found early in
the first draft. A firm sense of the narrator’s voice was deemed the ‘starting point’ for
the novel, and the writing only begun when that was established.
By contrast, for HILTNG, the plot was the starting point. There was an original
premise, in which a struggling journalist was commissioned to find a vanished singer
from a post-punk band. Straight away, this premise is problematic with regards to
engaging to the reader. The interesting character is the vanished singer who, by
necessity, is absent from the plot. The journalist is essentially a medium through
which interesting ideas (that tend to have emanated from the singer) can be discussed
and expressed. I had to decide a way to tell the story of one man’s quest to find
another, whilst maintaining the reader’s interest. This was problematic as it was the
quarry who was interesting. It might seem that the story would be naturally intriguing,
as we would learn about the quarry as people talked about him. But in trying to set
down this plot on the page it was apparent that this would not necessarily be gripping,
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as any action or interesting insights into the quarry would be far removed from the
present day. HILTNG was originally written in the first-person, from the perspective
of Sam, to try and make his story personally engaging.
However, this approach too was problematic. The reader was distanced from
the most interesting character (the singer) and also characters could only be perceived
through Sam, which limited their texture. After a few chapters were written in the first
person, through the supervision process it was decided to switch to the third-person.
As an author it would therefore be my voice coming through in Sam’s story. I was not
able to describe the postmodern world without using descriptive language that I
believed offered some insight into it. This language had to be written with a strong
sense of discipline, however, to ensure that the description did not slow the narrative.
It also had to reflect the kind of writing a journalist might create, as the reader would
no doubt intuit that we were seeing, on the page the story Sam had been
commissioned to write.
The problem of Wardner (the quarry) being absent was therefore also solved. I
decided to intersperse ‘Sam’s story’ (told in the third person) with first-person
recollections from Wardner. Having Sam and Wardner sit alongside each other in the
text, seemingly in separate worlds, was a useful way to build tension and intrigue. In
the first narrative, Sam would be desperately trying to find Wardner, and readers
would look to the second narrative, told from the person of Wardner, for clues that
might help Sam. This dramatic irony was useful in arguably keeping the reader
engaged. It also offered the opportunity to be ‘writerly’, allowing the reader the room
to assess what is unfolding in the greater narrative.
This new approach towards the narratives solved a number of problems. It
allowed for the excitement of the post-punk scene to be captured through Wardner’s
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story, as he told it in the present tense. The reader was thereby able to perceive the
emotions felt by the characters more directly. In his account Wardner described the
creative milieu in which his band were formed, and his gradual exile from modern
life. These insights, I believed, were the main draw of the novel, and through
Wardner’s account I was able to tantalise with this. This strategy also allowed me to
interrogate how self-design is historicized, in the post-punk scene, using a work of
fiction in an immediate and interesting manner.
However, I did not find it easy to establish Wardner’s voice, and initially use
this strategy. As with previous novels, I developed a worksheet in which details about
Wardner’s life were recorded. At first his voice was rather rich, descriptive and even
romantic. He described nights spent in seedy underground clubs in Brighton, after he
had stolen away to the south on a train without a ticket. I described how his artistic
approach was shaped by time spent in the company of musicians, performers and drag
acts in these underground clubs. In these pieces the focus was on his intimate life, as
these experiences often concerned intense but brief relationships during this time.
This blend of the sensual and melancholy was a consistent tone. Through writing
these scenes, ideas about Wardner’s gradual exile were created.
These developments were coupled with research. For Letters from Yelena
(LFY) research was coupled with writing early drafts. I listened to many post-punk
records and met musicians from this scene. I watched interviews with musicians and
saw films with archive footage. For LFY I had travelled to Russia, using an Arts
Council grant to visit and even live with ballerinas for a time. For this book the setting
was Manchester, so given the importance of Manchester’s creative milieu to the
music created in the post-punk scene some time was spent there. I undertook inner
city walks and became accustomed to relevant areas of the city. As described
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previously, Manchester has undergone a series of architectural transformations over
the last few decades, and an inner city walk reveals the different architectural layers
of the city. Given that one of the initial aims of this PhD was to historicize self-design
this first-hand experience allowed me to gain knowledge of the relevant creative
milieu, and do this. In one scene Wardner’s writing partner, Simon, walks with Sam
from a sink estate in Hulme, along a motorway and into the city. I conducted the same
walk.
This research allowed me to learn how to create characters who would have
developed in such a setting. It also offered me insights into the environment that
shaped the type of creative work produced in this era. I could then in turn interpret
this process creatively in a novel. Through the process of becoming familiar with
Manchester I gained a sense of the many urban changes that have occurred in this
city, which are evident in its clash of architectural styles. I was able to experience
why self-design was so evident in the eighties post-punk scene. Given the constant
changes to the living environment, it was only natural that people would try to get a
grip on their identity by moulding it themselves.
It became evident that as a creative form the novel is an ideal medium by
which to explore how a historical tendency (for instance the tendency to self-design)
has evolved. A novel allows an author to follow their own brief, to recreate a
historical era in the text. A novel further allows the author to create separate
narratives within a composite whole. By creating one narrative which looks at self-
design in the eighties, and one which looks at self-design in the present day, I was
able to therefore present creatively a portrait of ‘self-design’. Though Wardner’s self-
design is the more immediately apparent, in trying to find him Sam too is self-
designing. He is using parts of Wardner’s identity in order to find his own.
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I developed as a writer, in creating this novel, because for the first time I
researched information to achieve this that I knew I would probably not use. For LFY
almost all the research gathered was used in the novel. For HILTNG I was more
selective. I did not include any research that could slow the story, even if it meant the
story might seem less authentic. As a result I have grown intellectually writing this
novel, retaining a great deal of information which remained unexpressed.
During the course of this research, I watched interviews with musicians such
as Mark E. Smith and Richey Edwards, who I had been conscious of when conceiving
Wardner. I realized that Wardner would have carried a ferocious, if cerebral, anger.
He would not be as melancholy as he had been in early drafts and, like Mark E.
Smith, he would live in the moment. He would be direct in his action, if opaque in his
reasoning. Despite this opacity he would have a clear internal logic he remained
faithful to. Wardner was then re-written to be more uncompromising. His voice began
to emerge strongly: succinct, brittle, passionate.
It was important that the reader could distinguish between the first and third
person account. In terms of format a key text was Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero.
In it, the protagonist Clay experiences the present in one text and recalls the past in
another. His past accounts are presented as italicised excerpts. This format was
employed.
As the drafts developed, Wardner took over more and more space in the novel.
The problem was that, by contrast, Sam’s account became less engaging. One book
which helped me overcome this problem was The Adult, by Joe Stretch. In this novel
characters offer insights into their lives and the contemporary world through fleeting
insights and witticisms. Stretch’s novel strikes a fine balance. It has at once an
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interesting, amusing narrative and also an extended insight into contemporary living. I
did not attempt to have as much humour, but I wanted to achieve a similar balance.
As an example, in The Adult there is one scene in which the narrator, a teenage
boy, describes Leanne, a woman he is attracted to. This scene was influential firstly in
how it portrayed a secondary character engaging with the modern world. In so doing
it offered the reader an insight into that character, and the social context they were a
part of. This scene also showed a character learning about another by searching for
them on the internet, as they do in HILTNG:
She stops using Facebook in late 2008, which is pretty bold. Her early tweets
concern public transport in London and the success or failure of her cookery.
After three month, she focuses more explicitly on the problem of happiness.
Her third attempt to ‘change my approach to the net’ is the most short-lived.
She becomes desperate almost instantly.1
Elsewhere, Stretch defines his characters as existing within a very contemporary state
of exile, whilst also placing them accurately within a modern setting: (140)
We were in small clubs that played new music, normally a form of
provocative electro, and these places were almost always empty, kind of like
deluxe nightmares…with individuals…expressing deep hope through clothes
and semi-robotic, slightly insolent dance moves.
Sam, as a character, was gradually built so that he became more driven, was given
more to run away from, and more to fight for. After a conversation with an agent I
decided that Sam’s narrative could offer some more insight into the modern world if
his job typified many aspects of it which people might find unattractive. Therefore the
1 See Joe Stretch, The Adult (London: Vintage, 2012), p.136. All further references will be made parenthetically in the text.
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story was re-written so Sam was working at a call centre, and the trauma of his
disintegrating relationship was increased.
Just as redrafting was required to find Wardner’s voice in the text, so
redrafting was required to ‘find’ the best way to capture characters. The band’s
manager, Bonny, was conceived after reading a description of The Libertines’ first
manager Banny Pootschi. In High And Low With The Libertines she is described by
singer Peter Doherty as ‘a fur coat with two hockey sticks for legs,’ and as ‘like an
ambassador’s wife.’1 This combination of low-rent glamour and high-class aesthetic
made an appealing combination. Bonny, the character who was developed as a result,
was constructed to have come from a higher class than the band she managed, to
create a peculiar tension- in part gender-related, in part class-related.
At this stage The Adult was again influential, because it captures aspiring
musicians who use pretentious language. The characters seemingly do this to try and
define themselves (within the broader context of a novel about maturation). But
interestingly, their pretentious statements often also offered insight into the modern
world. These failed attempts at self-definition were influential on HILTNG, in how
they struck a balance between humour and depth. In the following quote Harry, the
singer in a band who are growing famous, is talking to a young fan of his, Tooley.
Tooley has won a competition to meet him and Harry is making the most of this
attention. Harry says to Tooely: ‘The afterlife and the after-party are very similar
places. There are virgins in this venue right now, Tooley, waiting for us, leaning
against the barrier’ (160).
My characters’ dialogue was redrafted to imbue it with pretension. Pretension,
it seemed, was a great way to amuse, offer depth, and avoid making characters who
1 See Pete Welsh, Kids In The Riot: High And Low With The Libertines (London: Omnibus, 2011), p.136.
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were overly earnest. In my previous novels, I only considered creating suspense in
later drafts. At this point I would purposefully create intriguing questions for the
reader to ponder, to keep the reader going, in the hope that they would want to see
these points of intrigue resolved.
For HILTNG the process was very different. Having originally pushed to write
the end of the story, the focus was first on losing any material that was unnecessary.
Characters like Simon and Bonny had been written whilst I was still ‘finding’ them
(that is, understanding how they would operate in situations and articulate their
predicament). Therefore, scenes in which they featured were often far too long.
To make the novel more concise, I wrote out a description of the narrative. I then set
myself the challenge of removing any scenes and descriptions that were unnecessary
to the plot. This also allowed the characters to gain more clarity. For instance, in the
final third of the novel, the band’s bassist, Theo, was a difficult character to write. At
first he was written to be camp and spiteful, but after reading The Adult I thought it
would be more interesting to have him as a ‘false prophet’, an ageing bon viveur who
imparts postmodern ‘wisdom’ that is highly spurious. Whilst developing him I
followed the adage that ‘an empty vessel makes the most noise.’
On the next draft the focus was then on putting characters in situations that
allowed them to be portrayed at their most colourful. So Theo was placed in a
nightclub, as I knew that in this environment he would be able to hold court, and thus
express himself more elaborately. Bonny was placed, in perhaps her key scene, in
front of an array of journalists, because then we could see her at her most
Machiavellian. The process of developing characters was therefore more refined than
in previous novels. Previously, I would write a paragraph describing a character on a
worksheet, and not put them into the story until I felt comfortable about how to
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present them. For this novel I ‘threw myself in at the deep end’, portraying the
characters within the story before I had a clear sense of what their identity and role
would be. I wrote draft scenes of each character, problem-solving how they would act
and present themselves in different settings. This was a far more laborious approach
than I had previously employed, as it required much cutting and refinement
afterwards. But it was necessary, as it allowed each character to be enhanced.
It was only after this process that intrigue and was placed in the narrative, at
regular enough intervals to keep the reader engaged. On reflection it seems that
although the writing process for this novel was comparable in some ways to that used
in previous books, it was also far more convoluted. For instance, in the final draft of
The Intimates I asked myself how each scene could be ‘pushed to the limit’ either
dramatically, texturally or in terms of atmosphere. For HILTNG there were around
three drafts (of perhaps thirty) in which component parts of this demand were focused
upon for a whole draft at a time. On reflection, this was a better way to plot a novel,
firstly because it instils the novel with different layers, and secondly because I now
find the plotting of The Intimates to be very heavy-handed.
The main way in which I have developed as writer however, is that I no longer
see the novel as an entity to be edited one draft at a time. For this book I retained a
mental blueprint of what stage of development each chapter was at. I took a new
approach and saw each chapter as a ‘set piece’, which I wanted to have the maximum
impact. The intention was that each set piece would therefore achieve a different facet
of the impact I wanted to have, and not be dissolved into the over-arching intention
for that draft. There seemed to be no way for me to visually map the stage each
chapter was at; I had to learn to remember these differentiations.
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As a result of these advances I have grown creatively. Rather than focusing
on, say, ‘dialogue’ or ‘drama’ in a draft, I believe I have now gained the skills to draft
a chapter to make the most of its overall impact, taking all these facets into account.
Therefore the novel is a series of set pieces, blended into a composite whole, in which
each scene has a distinct requirement that I wished it to fulfil. With this novel being
dialogue-heavy the focus for me, as a writer, shifted. It is now more important to me
for each character to define themselves within their habitat, using their own, distinct
speech. It was essential that I learnt how to do this, in order to create characters whose
personal and artistic identity is shaped by their environment.
On reflection, the novel process lends itself well to creating characters who
‘self-design’ within the text. By redrafting each scene to fit a requirement I was able
to refine the fictional bricolage of each character. A novel, like a self-designed
identity, undergoes a constant evolution in order to achieve an ideal which is probably
not possible. It is then, in retrospect, hopefully considered by others to be somehow
objective, or reflective of a certain era.
In order to express the identity of each character it was important for each
narrative to have the maximum effect. For Wardner’s narrative to have the greatest
impact it needed to be fractious, oblique, and acerbic. Sam’s narrative needed to
capture the texture of the modern world. My prose style has developed to now
incorporate more than one demand within the unity of a novel.
In supervision, it became evident that there have been key themes and
preoccupations in my previous novels. The observation was made that both my
previous books have been about bounded and intense relationships. In HILTNG bands
were a useful mechanism by which I could explore the invisible solvent the holds
people together, even when to all intents and purposes their bonds have been broken.
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Yet the book had within it echoes of themes I had explored in previous novels.
In The Intimates many of the characters have also started to psychologically
disintegrate, becoming less and less functional because of lingering problems. Their
problems were mainly attributable to a lack of artistic success, as well as a strong
need to escape. In Letters from Yelena a ballerina escapes an abusive stepmother
through her dancing, and develops an intense relationship with her art. This theme is
carried into HILTNG. Wardner sees his music as an escape from mundane life, if he
can become successful at it. In his frustration he chooses to escape mundane life in
another way, by ‘opting out’. He too has an intense relationship with his art, as is
evident in his performance on Top Of The Pops, when he attempts to hang himself on
national television. It was important to me that this set-piece was the opening scene of
the novel. When I re-read LFY I was disappointed with the slow pace of the action,
and for my next novel I was keen to amend this approach.
Crucially, the version of the novel that was published differs from the version
submitted for the PhD. Despite the drafting process mentioned above, when I offered
the novel to publishers the feedback stated that there were still some scenes that were
not essential, for a commercial release.
The novel was submitted to a range of agents and publishers. Supervisors,
colleagues and other writers had already appraised the novel. Although the feedback
from agents and publishers suggested that a few aspects needed consideration, certain
themes emerged. I learnt which parts of the book would need to be pared back, and
which would need to be enhanced, for the book to become commercially viable.
In Wardner’s account, the singer uses the present tense to describe activities
that we associate with rock stars. The attention of the reader is arguably maintained
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for these sections, because they have chosen a novel that is ostensibly about rock
music, and so they are likely to be interested in such descriptions.
However, in Sam’s account he has little of that interest to draw from. As a
failed music journalist he is trying to penetrate that world, and so insights about it
come to him (and therefore the reader) more slowly. Feedback from agents focused
upon how I could make Sam’s story more engaging. Until the novel was sent out the
main method for dealing with this issue was to give Sam’s story a texture which
showed the contemporary world for what it really is, behind the commercial façade
that is frequently projected. For instance, when Sam takes train journeys to meet
interviewees the aim was to show how isolated and vulnerable he was, even though he
was relatively ‘on-grid’ in comparison to Wardner, who has disengaged from society.
In supervision we decided on this as a strategy that would give the text a sense of
rigour. The feedback I received from an agent stated that this did not make Sam’s
narrative commercial enough. It was decided that the text should stimulate more
empathy towards him; which is why the issues with his girlfriend were given greater
prominence in further rewrites. One scene was inserted which captured Sam’s
unfulfilling, claustrophobic job in a call-centre. This was intended to portray his
relatively low social status, in comparison to other characters who had experienced
success in the music industry. The reader would, it was decided, be more interested by
the novel if Sam was already a vulnerable man. Therefore a history of obsessive
behaviour, leading at one point to a hospital admission, was presented at the start of
the story. The idea was that when Sam was subjected to stress the reader would be
engaged as they would want to see how he coped.
This technique, evidently intending to emotionally manipulate the reader, did
not arise in supervision. In supervision the focus was upon retaining the internal
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validity of the text, by making sure that character’s actions were consistent, and that
the behaviour and dialogue of characters was realistic.
However, these changes were not sufficient to broker a publishing deal, and in
order to generate a publishable version of the text a more drastic rewrite was required.
The mental memo which I followed when creating the published edit was that I
should ‘lose anything that was not essential to the plot.’ It became apparent, from
agent and publisher feedback, that aspects of the book that I had deemed essential for
inclusion in the story, often concerning character backstory, needed to be lost. The
call centre scene therefore had to be cut, which was rather ironic given that it had
been included following the advice of an agent. Sam’s unfulfilling work life therefore
had to be briefly ‘told’, through dialogue, rather than shown, through description. The
rule of ‘show don’t tell’ was only retained, given this amendment, because characters
were revealing this information in conversation, rather than through a third-person
narrator. In Sam’s narrative, other connecting scenes that were intended to add to the
overall impact of the novel were excised. For instance, in a number of scenes Martin,
Sam’s publisher, phones Sam to tell him of threatening letters that he has received
regarding Sam’s book. These were cut for the published version, with Sam only
mentioning these incidences in dialogue. It had also been conceived that Elsa’s
infidelity towards Sam, as a result of Sam’s obsession to find Wardner, would engage
the reader. Elsa sleeps with her boss, Malcolm, when Sam abandons the party for the
first exhibition she has overseen. To support this intention a scene was written just
before, in which Sam and Malcolm verbally spar over the importance of their
respective artistic endeavours. This debate happens in front of Elsa, with both
characters trying to assert prominence. That sequence was cut, as it delayed plot
momentum. Finally, in Sam’s narrative, the more technical and experimental
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sequences in his narrative were cut. These took place as he became desperate to find
Wardner, after he has learnt of Elsa’s betrayal. Though they would have led to a
greater emotional pay-off for the reader, once Wardner was found, publishers deemed
these sequences too slow.
Such scenes were slow by design rather than oversight. Towards the end of the
novel, when Sam goes to Milfield monastery to find Wardner, the motivation behind
this scene was for there to be a crossover between Sam and Wardner’s characters. In
both versions, Sam catches his reflection in a dirty bus shelter. He notes that he is
wearing the jacket he originally bought to resemble Wardner, during his appearance
on Top Of The Pops. Sam briefly reflects on how similar he looks to Wardner. With
his hair neglected, and thus in a similar style, and with a haunted look in his eyes,
Sam reflects that if he finds Wardner he will be ‘presenting him with his own image.’
This sequence was cut in the published version, only retaining Sam’s reflection.
In the PhD version of the novel, in the next section, Sam experiences a sense
of anomie given the deep frustration he feels at having not found Wardner. As he
summons the will to go to a monastery to pursue his final clue towards Wardner’s
location, he sits in a pub and ends up knocking over a pint. At this point his sense of
helplessness is so great that he cannot recall the social conventions which he is
supposed to follow to amend this small problem. He relays, through the third person
narrative, that he has now received Wardner’s ‘gift’, which is an understanding that
the contemporary world is a ‘stage set’. Yet he feels he has forgotten his lines. Sam’s
inability to cope with the spilling of his drink reflects his view that the world in which
he lives is unable to offer him fulfilment. In order to have this section further evoke
Wardner, and to introduce doubt regarding the integrity of Wardner’s account, the
style of the prose changes so it is similar to that in Wardner’s first-person account.
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The prose becomes terse, direct, and comprised of brief sentences. Mid-
section, the prose becomes a first-person account of Sam’s story, just as Wardner’s
account is told in the first-person. Sam’s thoughts are here perceived directly, rather
than them being prefaced or bookended with, terms such as ‘he thought’. Therefore
visually, stylistically, and also as a result of his alienation, Sam becomes Wardner. He
thereby finally becomes able to find him. These parts of the story, in which technique
and character insight were the focus, were cut for the published version as they were
thought to affect the motion of the plot.
Similarly, sections which fleshed out Wardner’s character also had to be
removed, and these seemed much more costly to the integrity of the novel. Press
reports, which gave a cold perspective on Wardner’s vanishing, were originally
inserted to provoke emotions in the reader. Having understood the deep impact that
Wardner’s disappearance had on his wife, this report was intended to show the gap
again between the official, sanctioned world, (in this case a press report) and the real
world, which we experienced in Wardner’s first-person account. In fairness, such
sections were also written as an exercise. They enforced a sense of discipline in the
on-going development of the novel, by instilling in me a clearer sense of this
character. By describing each character’s personal situation and then how the world
would objectively react to their predicament, I gained a better sense of their character.
An early section of the novel took the idea of a back story to an extreme. It
portrayed the band, in a Parisian apartment, after a show. In this scene Theo
convinces Wardner to undergo Past Regression Therapy. The intention was to show
that despite the brutal, humdrum reality of Wardner’s exile, he arguably did have a
more mythical dimension which could, (depending upon the beliefs of the reader)
lend some weight to the idea of the rock star as ‘seer’. It showed Wardner, under
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hypnosis, recalling himself in a past life, in which he spoke truth to power on behalf
of a local community.
The longest section that was cut for the published version regarded not only
Wardner’s creative process but how Manchester influenced his artistic development.
Though this section offered insights into what made Wardner a successful artist it was
not deemed integral to the plot by the publisher, and so was cut. This was a source of
contention. Throughout the development of the novel, excerpts of this scene in
particular had been sent to post-punk musicians so that feedback could be garnered on
the credibility of the text.
In this scene, Sam interviews National Grid guitarist Simon about Wardner.
The sequence shows how the protagonists’ creativity was shaped by their creative
milieu. The original intention was that the novel would appeal to an audience
interested in creativity and the role of the artist. It was interesting to learn just how
much needed to be sacrificed in order to retain the sense that the plot was prioritized.
The idea of cutting such sections to retain commercial viability seems a flawed one.
For instance, the publisher pushed, in private correspondence, the idea that a novel
about post-punk would only sell if it had advance notices from other artists and
reporters who specialised in this area of music. But in order to garner their approval a
finalised manuscript needed to be sent out, from which many sections relating to this
dimension of the story had been forcibly removed. The current, commercial impetus
to prioritize plot seems, on reflection, short-sighted. On the other hand, journalists
such as Simon Reynolds showed an interest in receiving advance notices of the novel,
when told it was ‘inspired by Richey Edwards and Mark E. Smith.’ So, from another
perspective, it is seemingly the genesis and labour undertaken in writing a novel (and
perhaps too the tacit approval of a publisher) which seems to pique the interest of
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journalists. The status of the novelist is, undoubtedly, also a factor. A novelist with a
lot of cultural (and financial) capital will probably have to cut very little of what they
wish to include.
This novel is an important step in my evolution as a writer. It forced me to
deploy all of my skills and experiences in a more advanced manner. For the novel, I
strived to create a series of set pieces, each of which make various statements. These
set-pieces variously concern the personal usefulness of art, the difficulties in being
artistically accepted, and the fractured nature of the modern world. For the first time I
have created a novel in which I do not try to examine these issues through the overall
effect of a novel. Instead I used various processes to get to the heart of these issues
scene by scene, and character by character. Through this novel I gained an insight into
the mercurial nature of the contemporary world, and the enduring nature of important
relationships (both artistic and otherwise). I learnt that these relationships do not
fluctuate following the measures which the modern world deems appropriate. Instead,
their strength seems contingent upon the emotions and attendant discipline that people
invest in them. Paradoxically (given my implicit critique of the modern world) I argue
that the digital age allows highly personal relationships to be fostered and cherished,
some of which perhaps cannot be expressed in the real world. These relationships are
evident not only in the behaviour of people, but also in less perceptible shifts within
their inner worlds. It was personally fruitful to go through the process of capturing
these ideas in novel form. Finally, I learnt that people do not only shape their art, but
they are shaped by it. Art is important enough to define and design ourselves.
102
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