John Beagles
Make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands

Neil Mulholland
Guaranteed disappointment

William Clark
Megalomedia

Kumal Sangha
Ethnic cleansing

Michelle McGuire
Forced Entertainmen

Ian Brotherhood
Tales of the Great Unwashed

Leigh French
Babes in toyland

Peter Suchin
BLOCK Capitalism

R E Sammi
Red Rebel Song, Nikki the Warrior, 5662

David Burrows
Career Opportunities

Marshall Anderson
Working with children and the snake

Mick Wilson
Articulate

Stewart Home
Marlborough maze

Dan Stephen
Talking to Tom Leonard

Ewan Morrison
Cynicism and postmodernity

Ed Baxter
Homage to J G Ballard

Adele Patrick
These boots aren't made for walking

Robert H King
Soundscape
 

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letters
Axis bold as brass

Dear Editor
The Board of Directors and Trustees of Axis have noted your article "Limited Axis" in your Autumn edition, which will usefully contribute to our monitoring and review of our service. We would point out however, that Axis remains committed to providing an accessible and democratic service, delivered through a number of complementing processes and mechanisms to provide information which is useful and beneficial to both enquirer and artists. However, the growth of our outlets, and progress towards our five year target of ten thousand artists cannot be achieved overnight, and require considerable resources.
Our service is free, except where printouts and contact sheets are required, which are charged at their minimum production costs. It is wholly erroneous to suggest that that (sic) the data supplied by artists 'is sold to drive' our business, which mainly depends on core funding from grants, supplemented by sponsorship and project income. The registration fee for artists is hardly excessive and, like the criteria for defining professional practice, is founded on extensive consultation with artists themselves. Our criteria is not elitist, but practical, and we make no exclusive aesthetic of evaluative judgements, believing that the information we provide should be rich enough to enable users to make their own judgements by whatever criteria is applicable to their individual needs.
We are also committed to developing full interactive web access to the register, but there are issues of copyright and protection of artists image which need addressing, and require more careful consideration. However, it is naive to suggest that the web itself is the democratic solution, and it is precisely because of the current very class, race and gender exclusiveness of the web that we are committed to a range of access platforms and mechanisms that together will ensure a broader constituency of users.
The feedback we obtain from both artists and users, along with our very thorough monitoring, provide a considerably more positive picture than your reviewer suggests. Neither does your reviewer's negative prediction for Axis match the rapidly increasing use of our service, the regular success stories we receive from artists who have benefited from being on the register, nor the enthusiasm and support we received at the launch in December of our first London Axis point.
Yours sincerely
Doug Sandle
Chair of the Axis Board of Directors and Trustees

Variant Replies
Originally we had no intention of printing the above 'response', but on Marshall Anderson's request we undertook to publish it. Readers familiar with Anderson's article in Variant, issue 4 will have noticed that Sandle provides nothing to address or refute any of its carefully argued points. Instead he just blabs away with all this blatant hyperbole on his own organisation. The huge amounts of money seemingly wasted on Axis have in our opinion still to be accounted for, this was their chance to reply and they can't, or won't address any of the real issues. Also, who is on the board of Axis and how did they get there?

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Make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands
John Beagles

I wanted to enjoy Tracy Emin's performance on the Tate gallery after dinner 'round table chat', but I couldn't. Despite my satisfaction at Roger Scruton's inability to disguise his misogynist contempt for the worthless piece of seaside flotsam he took Tracy Emin to be, it was impossible to suppress the thought that she had been set up. Sure it was enjoyable to see the tedium of television's professionalism ripped apart, to marvel at the drunken pomposity of David Sylvester, but once Tracy Emin had staggered off, I couldn't help feeling her irritation, frustration and anger had been expected and engineered.
The ensuring media/art world frenzy over Emin's 'outrageous remarks and behavior' seemed indicative of an increasingly dominant attitude towards her. Rapidly she is being maneuvered into the role of official young British Art's bad girl. In much of the patronising discussion surrounding her personae (rarely her work), there is more than a whiff of her being labeled as representative of a new breed of noble savage/idiot savant. While a lot of what Tracy Emin said on the Tate gallery discussion and Will Self's Saturday night chit chat was drunken rubbish, some of her objections to the misrepresentations of British Art rang true. However as they were articulated illegitimately (i.e. they didn't observe the dominant protocols of art discussion) they were either passed over or blatantly ignored1. 
Instead of considering why her remarks aren't deemed worthy of 'serious discussion' what becomes valuable and prized about Emin is her commitment to "getting everything out in the open" in her "naive, intense, raw, honest, direct, powerful, true stories"2. As the noble savage from the exotic hinterland of Margate, Emin is attractive to those who find themselves simultaneously emotionally neutered, consumed with a voyeuristic appetite for a bit of 'rough' and harboring a romantic belief in the naturalness and truth of the "ordinary people". That her experiences as one of "the ordinary people"3, a not too atypically screwed up South coast misfit, who spent her formative years butting her head against the oppressive conservatism and misogyny of a seaside town the Germans forgot to bomb, is all well and good for a London art world plagued by guilt about its privileges and accusations of elitism4. 
The roots of the privileging of Emin the artist, as solely a survivor, are multidimensional. As the embodiment of one kind of nineties female artist, her qualities of resilience and strength are highly valuable and important. By not giving a fuck about the petty, polite protocols of small minded Britain, the insipid machismo of the art world and particularly in setting up her own 'museum' she has, to use the talk show jargon, set a positive role model. Similarly her "rude aesthetic"5 detailing her experiences of abortion, sexual violence and her various relationships may have undoubtedly gone some way towards legitimising (again) areas of female experience previously stigmatised and marginalised. 
However it's also possible to see the marketing and discussion of her as indicative of the return of an old spectre, albeit in new clothes. 
The art world was very fond of its tortured, heroic male geniuses. Modernism's church was after all built with the supernova life-force of its worshipped deities. Struggling away in the garret, tortured by the likelihood of misunderstanding, such biographical details of male artists' victories provided the grist to the mill of the mythology of modernism. Artists had to be out of control, possibly slightly insane; insanity was a trademark, a byword for authenticity, originality and quality. A juicy life sold the monographs. 
Then wave after wave of criticism landed on modernism; feminism exposed the phallocentrism (exposure is always the best method of ensuring deflation), post structuralism peeled back the myth of originality and the conceptualists blew apart the lazy easy going role of language in relation to art. Even the attempt in the 1980s to claw back some of modernism's lost power, under the guise of the neo-expressionists' oh so ironic and clever strategy of --'we make big paintings, with big brushes, but we don't really mean it. Please make the cheque payable to...'--failed. Even Saatchi had trouble selling their stuff! 
Much of the discussion about Tracy Emin highlights that for many she represents the return of the kind of classic modernist artist neo-expressionism had tried to resurrect. It is perverse that this incarnation of the artist as an "uncreated creator"6, a primitive expressionist bestowed with a unique, special gift operating in a sacred, separate space is exactly the kind the conceptualists and feminists thought they had seen off. Except of course, this is the twist, the point. This time the artist in question comes with the added bonus of being a guilt free incarnation everyone can enjoy. After all she's a woman. How could any of those old critiques of originality, authenticity etc. apply to her?
However a quick glance at some of her most prominent coverage highlights that for many she represents exactly this kind of artist. Ranging from David Barrett's universalising: "We are swept into acceptance by the sheer force of the personality", to his revealing remark "it's not always what she says, but how she says it that is so powerful"7 and onwards to Stuart Morgan's impersonation of Claire Rayner "the first time you had sex, was it against your will [luvvie]"8 it's impossible to escape the feeling that we are again in the presence of the "charismatic power of the creator"9. 
Such a collapsing of the distinction between the artist and the work has powerful and worrying precedents. The monolithic power Picasso wielded via the fusion of his personality and art was so potent it was frequently impossible to get any critical perspective on his work. Likewise I can't help but remember the tyranny of much 'critical postmodernist' work. Frequently the work was so private in its mapping of the symbolic and real violence handed out to those perceived as existing on the margins, that any attempt to critique it was seen as a personal attack. The free fall into all out subjectivity that resulted nullified discussion, created a climate of intimidation and ultimately lead to the stagnation of the work. 
Now Tracy may not give a fuck, and she may genuinely be telling the truth (whatever that means) but investing in her personal biography as the best route to understanding is and always has been only a partial truth in the casual construction of a piece of work (it doesn't matter if she doesn't think of it as art, it's still exposed to the same myriad of influences). For example whether she's conscious of it or not, the role of the art world is impossible to shake. It doesn't really matter if no one tells her not to make a text piece detailing an abusive encounter with Jay Jopling, the inference will hover in the air, subtle intonations towards making the drawings will float her way. 
The truth of Emin's narratives, their authenticity does not just explode supernova like from within; such a perception of the sovereign autonomy of the self smothers any of the conflicts, paradoxes and pressures that she finds herself in, making the kind of work she does, in a particular artistic, cultural and social space. 
Such an obsession with the utterances of the artist is also deeply problematic. Are only those artists who give good copy, worthy of attention?
While not wishing to position artists as mute bystanders, inarticulate grunts who simply produce, there does seem to be a need for mediation between their ideas about their work and writers, curators and the public's responses. Reading a book about Martin Scorsese recently I couldn't get past the point that my perception of Taxi Driver and his, are completely at loggerheads with each other. I don't see the film he thinks he made. But that doesn't invalidate the work or our mutually incommensurable opinions. 
While the "in yer face" persona of Tracy Emin represents for many the good old fashioned, straight up and down, uncomplicated pleasures of expressionist fervor, she also has become the embodiment of a new culture of meritocracy, increasingly obsessed with the cult of survivors. 

Natural fact is I can't pay my taxes
Tracy is a top class survivor, who as David Barrett says is "a great story" because while "Andy [Warhol] never recovered from his wounds, Tracy just gets stronger". The popular hook of her work is that by sharing in her experiences via her cathartic outpourings of pain and suffering, we too become spiritually, socially and emotionally liberated. Emancipation through empathy. Tracy becomes a kind of Ricki Lake guest for those who would never admit to watching TV. 
Now pulling yer socks up, getting on yer bike, doing it your way etc. have always been popular old chestnuts in Britain. Rallying together woz wot saw us threw the war, weren't it? Mmm. For the salt of the earth, the tarts with hearts and the all singing all dancing miner's daughter, pulling yourself together and taking whatever life threw at yer, was the best way of up and out. However in them days the possibility of embarking on this route was at least mediated somewhat by the simultaneous belief in a welfare state and some level of support for those deemed at the bottom of the pile.
Then came Thatcher, who in the space of a couple of years instigated the germs of a new meritocracy, which in its brutal push to absolute self reliance did away with such "nursing". Mortally wounding the traditional aristocracy, its previously unchallenged power of natural and hereditary rights, Thatcher spawned a generation stamped with the ethos of competitive go getting (at any costs) who were free to plunder a massively deregulated and inflated private sector. Later Nick Leeson revealed himself as her devil child; "the gentleman banker destroyed by the crudest of yuppies, subverting old class with new money"10. Leeson learnt fast and didn't stop in his hunger to make "shagloads of cash"11.
If Leeson is one side of the legacy of Thatcherism then the concentration and obsession with only those who display the credentials of being survivors, of battlers, is the other. In making a fetish of Tracy Emin as an ex-victim, there is the real danger of forgetting and punishing the failure of those unable to pull themselves together, for whom "the natural fact is they can't pay their taxes"12. To paraphrase Spock: the success of the one outweighs the misery of the many. Models of hope and resilience are one thing, but a hierarchy of suffering, with only those who have really been through it being valued, is something else entirely. That this attitude is not unique to life under Thatcher is glaringly obvious, when Blair's bubble bath version of self reliance and moral responsibility is looked at. Under New Labour there persists the notion that the marker of a healthy society is one which provides ladders of opportunity for minorities to climb. But as Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard remark "the capability of individuals to climb the ladder at all depends on them not being more than a ladder length from their destination"13.
I really feel I'm in mortal danger of coming over all Elton John and Candle in the Wind about Tracy Emin. Seeing her pissed on TV, being patronised and condescended to, I found it hard to shake the memory of so many wild childs who've been before. Only allowed to be one thing, defined by a caricature of themselves set up by others to satisfy their own needs, there are a limited number of moves they are permitted to make. 
Lets face it once she's exhausted her biography of all its really succulent cuts, once she finds that the next batch of biography to be ploughed involves her relationship with Maureen Paley, getting pissed on TV etc. then just how wonderful will her anecdotes, her painful narratives, appear. What will she have survived then? What will she be emancipating herself from then? 
Critics, curators and many artists like to perpetuate the notion that the art world is a special space freed from the vicissitudes of the everyday, that it's a clean place, empty of the abuses of power that ravage life outside. Enlightened, leading a moral vanguard, artists, critics and curators are above racial and sexual discrimination, sexual violence, class snobbery etc. Unfortunately the way Tracy Emin finds herself being represented highlight that such behaviour is not the preserve of others. 
"The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its pose and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinary, coarse, pushing, name ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class feeling, class envy, class resentment. That I showed class feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people. All I did not know then was how cold that class is. That came with experience. "14

notes
1 I know it could be argued her drunkenness insured she wasn't taken seriously, but I think it's worth asking what was it about both situations which prompted her to getting pissed. As Pierre Bourdieu remarks in his essay "The Linguistic Market" (Sociology in Question pub. Sage), the truth of plain talking is that , "when it is confronted with an official market, it breaks down". 
2 All adjectives come from David Barrets review of Tracy Emin's one person show at the South London Art gallery in May 1997, in the May edition of Art Monthly. 
3 The lumpen catchphrase, much used by the BBC's Jenny Bond and ITV's John Suchet in the aftermath of Diana Spencer's death, which has propelled them to the top of the hit list. 
4 Gillian Wearing got rewarded for providing some defence against such accusations of elitism with her pseudo documentaries. However Gillian Wearing has always been smart enough to jump camps when it suits. In one interview she's speaking the language of an old fashioned documentary filmmaker, one who believes the camera is a benign presence which objectively records the thoughts emotions of its subjects, the next, well it's all just a big con, they're actors playing a part and I wrote the text on the signs.
5 Paula Smithard "There's a tenuous line between sincerity and sensationalism" Make June/ July 1997. 
6 This is Pierre Bourdieu's phrase from the essay "But Who Created the 'Creators'?" in Sociology in Question pub. Sage. 
7 David Barret review of Tracy Emin's one person show South London Art Gallery in the June edition of Art Monthly.
8 Stuart Morgan's interview with Tracy Emin in Frieze makes entertaining reading. It's hard to imagine anyone else being asked the question "in your work you talk about anal sex a lot, does it have to be pictured so violently?". Perhaps of course that is the point; Tracy is unique and therefore deserves such treatment. 
9 Pierre Bourdieu "Who created the creators?" in Sociology in Question published Sage. 
10 A Class Act--The Myth of Britain's Classless Society Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard
11 Ibid. Pag 45
12 Marvin Gaye Inner City Blues from the album Whats Going On. In many ways the fetish made of Tracy Emin's suffering, and the incumbent problems, isn't a million miles away from that afforded to many singers/ songwriters, artists such as Marvin Gaye and Bob Dylan. 
13 Ibid. page 15.
14 A Class Act--The Myth of Britain's Classless Society Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard

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Guaranteed disappointment:
Punk graphic design at the Festival Hall
Neil Mulholland

The rip-off riff's authentic ring
A singer who can't really sing
Can only mean one fucking thing
Punk rock revival
Affect the look of a man obsessed
Predisposed to the predistressed
Now you know you're properly dressed
Punk rock revival1

Following a stint of trouble-making at Croydon Art School, Jamie Reid began production of the Suburban Press, a publication which resulted from his disillusionment 'at how jargonistic and non-committal left-wing policies had become'2 during the early '70s. It was while working on the Suburban Press that Reid made his most significant attempts to break out of the mould of Situationist artiness and the Left's agit-prop in-fighting. Four years later, his 'rip off' graphics and Helen Wellington-Lloyd's 'ransom note' lettering were the benchmarks of 'punk design'. Reid's graphic experiments did not occur in isolation. In general, the 1970s saw a steady growth in 'radical amateurism' as montage techniques were adopted by photoconceptualists, community photographers, feminists, and anti-fascists alike. MINDA's photomontage designs for the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism3 confronted the rise of Fascism by drawing allusions between the images of the Conservative Party, the National Front and the Nazis. Reid, meanwhile, was carrying out an assault on the iconography of fascism. It would seem that for him, MINDA's strategies were examples of the simplistic propaganda they opposed. From placing a swastika in place of the Queen's eyes (God Save The Queen) to forming a swastika from marijuana leaves (Never Trust a Hippy), Reid ridiculed fascist iconography by striking at its very heart, de-centring its power by problematising the meaning of its imagery.
The curators of Destroy: Punk Graphic Design in Britain--an exhibition of 400 record sleeves, posters and fanzines at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank--have made little concerted effort to locate punk's contributions within a heterodox range of visual practices. However, this exhibition isn't about punk. It's about 'punk graphic design' and their histories are not necessarily identical. Writing in 1980, Peter York noted that the 'main thing that punk introduced was the idea of cut-ups, montage--a bit of Modern Artiness--to an audience who'd never heard of eclecticism. Punk was about changing the meanings of things'4 a view which has been dusted down to champion the exhibits in Destroy. A problem here might be that such blow-dried approval was clearly intended to celebrate punk's recuperation into the spectacle against which--disciples of its mythical origins cherish to enlighten us--it ought to have rebelled against. Of course, as everyone is also advised, McLaren and Reid recognised from the beginning that delinquent subcultures, since created through the channels of the mass-media, could only simulate revolution. 
Perhaps, then, it is reasonable to claim that punk's anti-design stance had always made the whole enterprise peculiarly arty. Not according to another popular myth currently being rehashed, this being that punk designers were untrained, anonymous figures, their designs raw and uncouth, using anything that came to hand--their aim being to deface the designs of happy hippies trained at art school. It is true to say that many designers remain anonymous while designated designers such as Sabastian Conran, who produced promotional material for The Clash, were self-taught. Yet many celebrated punk designers were trained at art school, and for them plagiarism was more of a carnivalesque prank than political art terrorism directed against Western property values. Malcolm Garrett began designing sleeves for the Buzzcocks while still a student at Manchester Polytechnic, where he had developed a taste for International Constructivism: 'I began merging a number of things I liked, the pioneering type of graphic experiments like Futurism and Bauhaus from earlier in the century with stuff from pop art and Andy Warhol.'5 In the summer of 1977, Garrett's fellow student (and future Assorted Images co-designer) Linder Sterling was finishing her dissertation on the sanitisation of punk. Her photomontage for the Buzzcocks Orgasm Addict (1977), while having obvious precedents in dada and surrealism, most closely mirrored the kinds of anti-consumerist montage produced by mail artists and feminist community photographers in the '70s, satirising imagery from magazines such as Woman's Own. Certainly such punk 'designs' were formally chaotic, irregular and harsh, while as 'cultural productions' they appeared subversive in intent. All laudable credentials for any aspiring subculture, but wasn't a very similar 'anti-aesthetic' to be found in the converse Hegelian logic of grunge-formalism which had demarcated 'fine art' from 'design' in most art schools since the late 1960s? Destroy is testament to such a view, given that it was not organised by anarcho-syndicalist employees of the Royal Festival Hall, but by Maria Beddoes and Paul Khera, a duet of sentimental graphic designers who, as students, had been inspired by punk to cast aside their airbrushes and set squares in revolutionary ferment: 'This is The Evening Standard. This is Fiesta. This is a pair of scissors. Now form an advertising Consultancy.'
'The idea that you can still go out and do what you want is coming back at last', says Ben Kelly sleeve designer for Godley & Creme, A Certain Ratio, and The Cure among others. 'I still count myself as one of the lucky generation', fortuitously suggesting that some 'punk' designers were luckier than others.6 If anything, the cult of the individual designer was reinforced by punk's 'version of the credo quia absurdum est: you don't like it but you do it anyway; you get used to it and you even like it in the end.'7 Copyright, an issue previously of little interest to graphic designers, became the hot topic, (battles continue to take place over the attribution of many Pistols graphics.) Who was the best designer outlaw; who was the least individual? Generating such contradictions, of course, was the whole point. However, given its pedigree, is it still possible to relish the 'irony' of such ambivalence? Adopting a visual vocabulary and style which was entertaining, yet acidly absurd, Reid famously recorded attempts to erase the Pistols from cultural history (Never Mind the Bans, 1977), before interminably representing their demise in posters and merchandising, much of which is represented in Destroy. Yet Reid's fear that 'the posters would end up as decor for trendy lefties' bedroom walls'8, was misplaced, for this is one of many times in which they have found their legitimate home in a vinyl sleeved cube, the art-gallery-as-record-fair; legitimate since, according to Reid's version of punk, assaulting the pop scene head on, simply gave the Pistols a lot of publicity, enabling them to make 'Cash out of Chaos'. Khera has an analogous incongruous fable: 'The Pistols were playing on a boat across the river and were banned from coming ashore by the police. We knew that the show would get more of a reaction here and it seems an ironic venue because of punk hating royalty.'9 One end product of this version of events is Saatchi art. Literally. New Labour, New Danger (1996) saw Reid's Readers'-Wives style letterbox eyes and rip-off-style-ripped-off by the Right. To complicate matters, New Labour themselves appear to have heeded McLaren's 10 lessons in how to mask reaction in the cloak of youth and revolt.
Like New Labour, Destroy is also about what it excludes, reminding us that cultural history results from a suppression of possibilities. It would have been interesting to have seen Genesis P-Orridge's Paranoia Club business cards here ('E know you don't write back because you hate us'), or perhaps a few posters such as Gainsbourgh's Blue Movie Boy, and Gary Gilmore Memorial Society. It seems unfortunate to have missed such an opportunity to have presented Throbbing Gristle's proto-punk work as COUM Transmissions, much of which has far greater appeal than Reid's numerous homages to the Motherfuckers. Unlike many punks who were relatively new to such matters, TG/COUM had been practicing for seven years as performance artists. They had also spent a great deal of time developing punk's deliberately offensive fascination with murderers and criminals, although in this, they were far from alone.10 TG were particularly adept at arousing an extreme response, leaving people in a dialectical position where they could not switch the situation off as a joke. Many of their record sleeves which are on display, on first inspection seem bland, a banal photograph of an everyday location, but to the initiated the spot is the scene of a crime, usually a rape or grisly murder. Re-presenting the shock effects of sex crime, thought designer Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, would provide an effective route to challenge the hegemony of the mass-media's manipulative sensationalism. With a heady mix of urban decay and accounts of the last murder and subsequent apprehension of the Moors Murders,11 TG pushed sado-masochistic performance to its limits: "Is it only legality that prevents the artist from slaughter of human beings as performance? ... Ian Brady and Myra Hindley photographed landscapes on the Moors in England where they had buried children after sexually assaulting and killing them. Landscapes that only have meaning when perceived through their eyes. Art is perception of the moment. Action. Conscious. Brady as a conceptual performer? ...What separates crime from art action? Is crime just unsophisticated or 'naive' performance art? Structurally Brady's photos, Hindley's tapes, documentation."12 This 'investigation' into the links between art, sex, prostitution and crime, provoked press malpractice and misinterpretation at a time when most of their short attention span was focused on the Pistols.13 As a result, P-Orridge received a number of death threats. Satirically exposing the hypocrisy of this situation, Death Threats appeared as a track on Dead on Arrival: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (1978). The record sleeve dryly alludes to child pornography, involvement with which P-Orridge was also being wrongly accused of at the time.
COUM's feud with the 'straight' artworld was clear, as P-Orridge encouraged the use of text as purely graphic, verbal abstraction, stating that: "In much contemporary art words are juxtaposed with images and photographs. I do the same in a small exchangeable format. (It amuses me to parody real world / art world).'14 As for many punk designers, radical amateurism demanded a humorous assault on categorisation and intellectualisation. In many ways this served to challenge the pretensions of semiotic art and rectify the solicitous nature of educational photography by transforming them into humorous forms of insubordination. Early punk graphics derided the vogue for appending abstruse theoretical texts with fetishistic imagery: 'COUM have nothing to say and they're saying it. Make your own theory. COUM have no game to play and they're playing it.'15
However, by maintaining a contradictory and absurd stance, much punk design refused to establish the wider contexts in which it might retain a critical stance or challenge viewers to shift the goalposts for themselves. The punk fascination with highly conventional textual and visual cues of crime stories and pornography tended to disallow the ability to manipulate words and images to suggest new meanings: 'To suggest that the prerogative of art is simply to touch on possibilities without comment surely shows an insufficient grasp of visual rhetoric. ...Surely he must see that no amount of manipulation of context can redeem the use of the [Auschwitz] gas-chamber logo; in purely artistic terms, which he cannot escape, there are such things as a sense of diminished responsibility and a law of diminishing returns.'16 While the arbitrariness of verbal and visual language allowed for graphic artist's manipulation, their control over what was ultimately signified was tenuous at best. For better or worse, punk designers were unwilling to fully manipulate their audience's conclusions, that is, the artist's authority, once the work was in production, was ignored. Yet, even this much was never quite certain with TG. As a riposte to their tarnished image, TG appeared in Arran knit sweaters with Land Rover on an English coastal hillside for 20 Jazz-Funk Greats, one of the highlights of Destroy.
Given that playing games is the major design concern here, the emphasis in design of the later '70s and early '80s shifts away from 'punk' bands, towards New Wave and New Romantic bands. From the point of view of designers in 1976, such designs would not be 'punk'. This, however, presupposes that punk graphic design was primarily a question of form. It may seem absurd today to think that punk imagery could still be valued for its 'subcultural' status, but it remains clear that it contributed more than a little to changing the social, economic and political topography of Britain. Nonetheless, for many in the late 1970s, regarding record sleeve designs as possible solutions to the problem of the artist's contribution to the perpetuation of an oppressive system, would have made them guilty of the egotism and elitism they deplored: 'If they did anything, they made a lot of people content with being nothing. They certainly didn't inspire the working classes.'17 Such New Wave sensibilities therefore tend to dominate a great deal of the designs exhibited in Destroy. 
In all, this seems to have been particularly pressing given that Destroy is the third in an annual series of exhibitions at the South Bank Centre entitled Towards the Millennium, each of which aim to capture the 'zeitgeist' of a decade through its art or design. Hence, we are are given the impression that, from 1978, a greater number of sleeve designs became more absolute, while others look like baroque creations fit to challenge the collection of souvenirs of art history that inspired them. In most cases, however, the carnivalesque and agitational side of punk seems to convert to an emphasis upon record-design-as-commodity. Given that many sleeve designers had quickly abandoned the anti-aesthetic, the emphasis on commodity fetishism was an ingenious means of ensuring that records did not loose their newly acquired art status.
The sleeves selected for the later section of the exhibition explore the ways in which designers sought to correlate style and function when both were in an indeterminate context, producing designs without being preoccupied with the appearance of making or effacing art. The ironic 'Industrial' style which had been initiated by TG in the lead up to the 'Winter of Discontent', was reformulated and taken literally by technological determinists such as Cabaret Voltaire, Brian Eno, and Ben Kelly. Ultra-elegant Industrial sleeves inspired a plethora of designers to lovingly refine the utopian aspirations of ubiquitous modernist schools of design. Drawing on Garrett's successful appropriation of International Constructivist styles, Peter Saville turned his back on felt-tip and photomontage, and injected a melodramatic sentiment of romantic disintegration into the late 1970s by highjacking modernist design for a new generation of 'pale boys' raised on Kraftwerk and Berlin Bowie. Saville elicited a busy abstract sublime, activated by an engaging tension between a mass-produced look and a painstakingly handworked feel to the finished products for Joy Division, New Order and The Durutti Column. The operative tone of Factory designs remained hopeful and visionary, but exuded a powerful lack of meaning and place, creating an look which was neither critical nor nostalgic, but evolutionary.
Prophetically, Peter York once regarded punk designers as a important guides to this new Leisure Class, a new moneyed class which rejected the academic values of the middle-classes, replacing the pedantic rationality of 'good taste' with 'a pluralism of pleasure.'18 Certainly, Thatcher's emphasis on self-fulfillment, authenticity, and freedom of choice had an obvious appeal to participants in the sixties cultural revolution, many of whom were impresarios. Hence, in liberal post punk design, the consumer was king, driven by the desire to maximise pleasure. New Romantic design was a part of the raw, uncouth, socially, psychologically and sexually insecure new elite who were either unable or unwilling to attain the 'academic values' associated with Old Labour, values which had secured some members of the excluded a safe path to success since W.W.II. Such designers were set to take the lead in the corporate image-centred world of the 1980s. New Romantic sleeves openly celebrated the erasure of historical claims to knowledge made by the academic estate, while maligning of the nihilism and amateurism of Punk by re-establishing a perfectionist emphasis on image and 'product'. BOW WOW WOW's sources are absurdly eclectic. See Jungle.... (1981, RCA), Nick Egan's translation of Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, made the pointed suggestion that style and content were both subservient to the vagaries of fashion, stirring up a superficiality that would often border on neurosis. Following a similar line of reasoning Steve Strange, ex-frontman of punk outfit The Moors Murderers, formed the 'collective studio project' Visage in 1979 with Blitz DJ Rusty Egan, Midge Ure and Billy Currie of Ultravox, and John McGeoch, Dave Formula and Barry Adamson from Magazine. Announcing it 'leisure time for the pleasure boys', they quickly found themselves invited to all the right cosmopolitan parties with rich high profile social termites so despised by punk, and henceforth became the music press' whipping boy. Robotic beats, banks of varied synthesisers, flattened vocals, and the message of terminally repeated choruses concealed the void between dead-end daily jobs and night time fantasies of The New Darlings of Decadence, who, deriding the conventionality of fashionable outrage, heralded the new order of posing: "New styles, New shapes / New modes, they're to roll my fashion tapes / Oh my visage / Visuals, magazines, reflex styles / Past, future, in extreme / Oh my visage."19 Strange's desire to substantiate and enrich his own image by depicting his own body as the source of his style was quintessentially New Romantic. The 1982 retrospective album The Anvil (Polydor), named after New York's infamous leather 'n' bondage dive, was launched at Strange's very own Paris fashion show. The album cover saw Strange in a Luchino Visconti movie-still photographed by the master of soft porn and presentation incarnate, Helmut Newton. Inevitably, Saville was responsible for the ceremonial graphics. 
Despite being responsible for the slick consumer packaging of Public Image LTD's Public Image (1978), the typewritten amateurism of punk fanzines such as South London Stinks (Anon. 1977) remained in the early issues of Terry Jones' iD. This magazine was quickly transformed into a market leader, as the editorial emphasis switched entirely to fashion, its punky credentials distancing it from advocates of the heinous 'graphix' style found in late '70s fashion journals such as VIZ: Art, Photography, Fashion. With Garrett occasionally helping out with design, iD succeeded to switch the British Fashion Press' emphasis away from prosaic interviews with 'Them' designers such Zandra Rhodes and the Logan Brothers. Instead was lucid reportage of the outrageous fashions being worn 'on the streets' and at venues such as Blitz, St. Moritz, Hell, Le Kilt and Le Beetroot where nightclubbers had been turning up as living works of art. Here was a sharp, timely contrast to the grubbiness of punk. Theatrical get ups; swashbuckling pirate clothing, Kabuki masks, make-up, and transvestites were all welcomed. There were sad Pierrot clowns, majorettes, toy soldiers, puritans and Carmen Mirandas. VIZ went into receivership, while Strange's Eighties Set took off. Following two entire editions of The Face (English for Visage) devoted to them,20 The Now Crowd suddenly became an international movement, 'The Cult with No Name', with an article in Time, and lavish spreads in Continental magazines from Stern to Vogue.
Not all New Wave design was as slick and polished as the airbrushed glam that punk rebelled against; nor was it all obsessed with mannerism and the sound of commodities fucking. One direction was the theatrical engagement with 'class' taken in designs such as Barney Bubbles' numerous editions of Ian Dury and the Blockheads' Do-It-Yourself (1979, Stiff). Far from being alienated youths, Dury and the Blockheads were ex-art school students (Dury even taught at Canterbury and the RCA) and greatly accomplished musicians. Consequently, Bubbles, another punk designer who had been to art school, took this opportunity to make a humorous jibe at the affected amateurism of de rigeur DIY punk graphics, designing a number of sleeves which resembled school books covered in scraps of flock wallpaper from the early '70s. Similarly, John Cooper Clarke, once heralded as the New Wave George Formby, is a poet who, like Ian Dury, had been around for some time but only started to come into his own with the advent of the New Wave: 'You can look at things like Dada and Surrealism and reject it for being a middle-class phenomenon. I think people in the New Wave have done the smart thing and walked into those areas. Now you've got a kind of working class vision of things. I don't think I've ever seen a punk rock group that didn't have something very imaginative about it. It's not being a traitor to your class to go into those areas. It only widens your perspective.'21 Saville's sleeve for Snap, Crackle & Bop (Epic, 1980) represents Clarke's trademark three-piece suit complete with tab collar, shades and JCC punky lapel badges. The 'pocket' comes with book of poetry styled like a Telephone Directory, the lyrics overlaid on pages listing the names Cooper or Clarke. With music handled by The Invisible Girls (experienced Mancunian hands Martin 'Zero' Hannett, Pete Shelley, Bill Nelson, and Vinni Reilly) the New Romantic stance as a parody of design, utilising theatrical breaks with 'straight' culture, was both pointedly mocked and cherished: "Don't doubt your own identity / Dress down to cool anonymity / The Pierre Cardin line to infinity / Clothes to climb in the meritocracy / The new age of benevolent bureaucracy."22 The intellectualisation of youth subculture was one of many targets of Clarke's drollery: "Twin wheeled existentialists steeped in the sterile excrement of a doomed democracy 'oose post-Nietszchian sensibilities reject the bovine gregariousness of a senile oligarchy."23
While Destroy is warts and all--including ABC and Duran Duran--it would be unfair to say that the 'punk artifice' parable has been allowed to run unhindered. The curators, perhaps daunted at the number of previous attempts to analyse punk, have settled with displaying everything taxonometrically and in approximate chronological order. This modernist hang was not entirely a contemptible suppression of contingency, given that it gave scope for critical acknowledgment that cultural artifacts are the products of competing value-systems. Hovering in their transparent sleeves, 'punk' graphic designs are bracketed as open verdicts, allowing full criticism to run as the final, unwritten chapter. Visitors can examine stylistic shifts and provide monolithic theoretical justification for them, or openly consider the indeterminate relationships between the different factions involved without adopting the pretense that anything is capable of resolution. When beginning to consider if Reid's work has been juxtaposed with the first twelve felt-tip pen and typewriter script issues of Glasgow's version of Sniffin' Glue to emphasise or undermine Punk professionalism, tacit acknowledgment that the hang functions as a reminder that the culture of our age is one that is never finished. Since rules change in accordance with the needs of time and situational modalities, it would seem fair to say that exhibitions such as Destroy are one of a series of games played according to undetermined rules. The speculation never ends.

notes
1 John Cooper Clarke, 'Punk Rock Revival', Specially commissioned for The List in 1997. 
2 Jamie Reid in Jon Savage, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, Faber & Faber, London, 1987, p55.
3 Minda, "Minda", in T. Dennett, D. Evans, S. Gohl, AND J. Spence, (eds.), Photography / Politics: One, Photography Workshop, London, September 1979, p125.
4 Peter York, "The Clone Zone (Night of the Living Dead)", Style Wars, Sidgewick & Jackson, London, 1980, p47.
5 Malcolm Garrett, quoted in 'Graphics', Creative Review, February 1998, p37.
6 Ben Kelly quoted in Domenic Cavendish, 'The Great Rock & Roll Exhibition', The Independent (Style), 31st January--6th February, p5.
7 See footnote 10.
8 Jamie Reid in Jon Savage, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid, Faber & Faber, London, 1987, p43.
9 Ben Khera quoted in Attitude, February 1998.
10 'The passive nihilist compromises with his own lucidity about the collapse of all values. Bandwagon after bandwagon works out its own version of the credo quia absurdum est: you don't like it but you do it anyway; you get used to it and you even like it in the end. Passive nihilism is an overture to conformism. ...Between the two poles stretches a no-mans-land, the waste land of the solitary killer, of the criminal described so aptly by Bettina as the crime of the state. Jack the Ripper is essentially inaccessible. The mechanisms of hierarchical power cannot touch him; he cannot be touched by the revolutionary will.' RAOUL VANEIGEM, 'Desolation Row' (1967), translated in King Mob Echo, No. 1, April 1968, Pygmalion Press, London, p7.
11 Throbbing Gristle, 'Introduction' (1.01), 'Very Friendly' (15.54), Throbbing Gristle Live Volume One 1976-1978, Mute.
12 Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson, 'Annihilating Reality', Studio International, July/August 1976, p44.
13 Tony Roinson, 'Moors Murder 'Art' Storm', Sunday Mirror, 15th August, 1976, p9.
14 Genesis P-Orridge, 'Statement by Genesis P-Orridge to his Solicitor April 5th 1976', G.P.O. versus G.P-O: A Chronicle of Mail Art on Trial Coumpiled by Genesis P-Orridge, Ecart, Switzerland, 1976. 
15 COUM Transmissions, 'What Has COUM to Mean? : Thee Theory Behind COUM', Typewritten Statement, Undated, COUM Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle Archive, National Art Library, V&A, London, 1990.
16 Stuart Morgan, 'What the Papers Say', Artscribe 18, July 1979, p18-19.
17 Ian Birch, 'In The Beginning', The Book With No Name, Omnibus, London, 1981, p11.
18 Ian Chambers, 'Urban Soundscapes 1976-: The Paradoxes of Crisis', Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture, Macmillan, Hampshire, 1985, p199.
19 Visage, 'Visage'.
20 The Face, Nos. 7-8.
21 John Cooper Clarke, New Musical Express, January 28th, 1978.
22 John Cooper Clarke, 'Euro Communist / Gucci Socialist', Ten Years in an Open Neck Shirt, Arrow/Arena Books, 1983, p10.
23 John Cooper Clarke, Psycle Sluts, Part 1', Disguise in Love, Epic, 1978.

 back to top

Megalomedia
William Clark

"We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than ever the case under the old system, now feel free."
B F Skinner

Gus MacDonald is announced as Corporate Leader of the Year, Companion of the British Empire, Chairman of the Year. The list seems endless as he rolls onto a game show type set. He is slapped on the back by his old mate Billy Connolly who whispers sweet nothings into his ear and they embrace in a manly fashion. Gus is given a "Lifetime Achievement Award" live on the TV station he runs, by one of his employees, while the rest of them form the audience. With tears of emotion welling up in his eyes Gus approaches the microphone ...at that point the national grid flinches like a wounded animal. The nation has put on the kettle. Some of us are wondering while it boils: Was it Idi Amin who awarded himself the Victoria Cross?
Personalising the issues is going to be difficult to avoid, but he started it. Yes there is very little criticism of Gus in the media these days, only words of sanctimonious sycophantic praise. This is not entirely surprising because Scottish Television is now the Scottish Media Group or SMG for short. It now (em...) kind of owns the "independent" media in Scotland as the new name suggests. It owns Grampian TV, the Herald and the Evening Times, its shareholders, The Daily Record/Sunday Mail and Flextech run most of what's left. According to the Scotsman--one of the few publishing houses not controlled by Gus--STV and Grampian alone will reach 4.7 million out of a possible 5.1 million viewers in Scotland. Somehow or other that does not constitute a monopoly or any breach of regulations in the eyes of the regulators, the ITC. This is because they were set up to de-regulate the market and have stood by while the whole independent network has become monopolised. If you remember the Monopoly board game, you don't have to literally own all the properties to control the game, just some of them. Also, surely any decent monopoly would "influence" its regulators, assuming that is, that they need influencing.
Last June the 3rd the Scotsman said that the purchase of Grampian by SMG: "should be subject to the utmost scrutiny," adding that: "this newspaper must comment, for who otherwise can?" Left all out on their own they were getting a bit panicky, and their analysis of the situation suffered, well, proved to be wishful thinking to be precise. They stated that "the ITC said yesterday it would bow to pressure and mount a public enquiry into the deal." Somebody was lying there, because the ITC did no such thing. Let's have a look at what happened.
The boards of Grampian TV and SMG only confirmed they had been talking together on the 6th of June. They did this because someone leaked information to a Sunday paper not owned by them and the stockmarket got wind of it. Four days later both parties had agreed terms and SMG bought about 20% of Grampian on the open market.1 By July the 11th the ITC had "concluded that there will be no requirement to conduct public interest test with regard to proposed merger with Grampian." Let me run that past you one more time. While the deal was being done before their eyes, the ITC decided that they would not even begin to look into the matter, and it took them a mere couple of weeks to arrive at this conclusion. They did not even detect a whiff of monopoly about it, despite the fact that they had earlier said they would "bow to pressure" after the Scotsman phoned them with what could easily have been a rumour of a takeover. SMG went ahead buying bits of Grampian until by September the 3rd it was "entitled now to acquire compulsorarly (sic) all [Grampian] Shares held by shareholders who had not yet accepted the offer." A week earlier they had started another deal, this time purchasing 18.2% of Ulster TV with a view to a takeover. The ITC just ignored it.
The ITC's decision was also taken in the light of the fact that they had not so long ago already deemed it appropriate to investigate STV when it bought Caledonian Publishing, the owners of the Herald and Evening Times. They found then that:
"the overlap between Caledonian's circulation and Scottish Television's broadcasting area did not constitute a threat to the public interest."2
If the Herald's own reporting is to be believed on the matter, and it might be here, the reason the ITC let the Grampian deal go through was because: 
"The Herald and the Evening Times were not deemed to be 'relevant local newspapers' in Grampian's broadcasting area." 
That must have been a bit galling for the Herald to print. A few years ago they had dropped the "Glasgow" from their masthead in an attempt to convince advertisers that their circulation was UK-wide and massive. Now it seems we have irrefutable evidence that they are simply not read--are irrelevant in fact--in huge areas of the country. So let's look at the ITC's logic. With the Herald/Evening Times all we had was an 'overlap', nothing to worry about there, Gus may have Mayfair but Park Lane is just "overlapping". With their second decision on Grampian they simply did not even consider the position of STV, never mind the Daily Record, and put the accent on "local" papers. So the SMG empire is thus insignificant in Scotland because of the existence of the Aberdeen Evening Express. And what if the ITC conceded that they were significant? Wouldn't it just be another "overlap?" Some people will be wondering how exactly the ITC found out what everyone in Scotland watches and reads in the space of a few weeks. Others will be wondering what are they waiting for? Gus MacDonald to proclaim himself Lord of Hell and stamp 666(TM) on everyone's forehead? Then the ITC will perhaps 'consider an enquiry'.
It was left to the Office of Fair Trading to "scrutinise" the deal in terms of "competition." That too was passed, although few people could come up with a single name as a competitor of SMG, maybe someone is secretly running an independent TV station from their bedroom, who knows? The deal was also completed before the Devolution referendum. Thus Gus can argue, with a fairly straight face, that SMG is not a monopoly in the context of the UK; when it comes to an "independent Scotland", well what are people going to do--write to the papers?
Nearly everyone in Scotland watches the TV or reads a paper and yet we are all in almost complete ignorance of who owns and runs what we're watching and for what reasons. Meanwhile, our nicely anaesthetized minds are being delivered to SMG's advertisers. Although Gus MacDonald is fairly well-known, a huge part of the public façade of SMG is this constant portrayal of him is as some kind of "nice-guy socialist, people's champion." But it is hard to see what they were all celebrating in that awards ceremony; other than the creation of another mini-media mogul, say in the mould of Axel Caesar Springer who controlled 40% of all West German newspapers, 80% of regional newspapers, 90% of Sunday newspapers, 50% of weekly periodicals and two thirds of the papers bought in most big German cities. He was considered something of a despot by the German left in the '60s, but these figures are not far off MacDonald's. Springer was hated because he created an unrivaled nation-wide political platform which he obviously used. The Labour party are very popular in Scotland although most people believe them to be corrupt and of having betrayed them systematically3. It is a self-evident truth that the promotion of the Labour party in the Scottish media has had a lot to do with their "popularity". The Daily Record for instance openly aligns itself as a party paper and donates thousands to the party.4
Editors may well assert their autonomy in these situations, but they huddle together like sheep on the big issues. Their collective viewpoint is increasingly based on a belief that vast daily sales (largely to individuals whom they consider stupid) means mass approval of what they offer. They see this as according them a political mandate. While party politics are only one perhaps vague (in that the press is biddable) influence on those who run the media: advertisers and shareholders are another; and here we're talking the language of real politics: hard cash. And the real language of newspapers is marketing: i.e. hard cash.
One of Gus MacDonald's letters (to shareholders only) of the 9th of April stated that: 
"Your Directors consider that employees at all levels should be encouraged to identify their interests with those of the Company's shareholders and that this objective can be furthered by providing means for employees to become shareholders themselves."5
Is it not idiocy and bad business practice that the editor of the Herald/Evening Times should identify his interests with those of the Daily Record/Sunday Mail? "Yes", if they are competing and "no", if they are working for the same ends. The "competition" between them seems to be over: for is this not an instruction to ramify the whole network?
Another point of this "objective" is that SMG get back some of their employee's wages by acting like a bank. Their employee's money is 'tied up' for three years and when optioned will only pay out a limited dividend. But I am being all old socialist here. Isn't Gus--our former shipyard fitter--not just being realistic in the Thatcher, sorry Blair '90s? In fact isn't he just advocating a bit of profit sharing? Sure, but he isn't sharing it with everyone. The next line in the letter is straight out of Orwell: 
"The proposed schemes are a sharesave scheme and a profit sharing scheme (which will operate on an "all-employee" basis) and two discretionary share option schemes for those key executives who are most in a position to affect the fortunes of the Company." 
For shit like this Gus MacDonald gets an award?. The "Company scheme" has been "designed to be approved by the Inland Revenue." The "Executive scheme" is completely "unapproved". With this scheme the 'company' itself will decide "which individuals should participate and the extent of their participation."
As ever the whole project must "satisfy the guidelines of the institutional investors," the banks and other media combines who own SMG6. Graciously (only) the chairman will not participate. The scheme is patently open to abuses of the worst kind, I would go as far to say it is abuse. It seems designed as some form of carrot on a stick to socially engineer SMG's employees towards cartoon levels of compliance and self censorship--one day, Smithers you will get the key to the executive washroom. For the wealthy it will create more wealth (an executive can invest four times their salary in it). For others it must have seemed that SMG wanted their savings for some kind of hidden agenda--and left them wondering what happens to my savings if SMG's empire over-extends itself? It is too late for worries of that kind.
And it is astonishing what is legal these days. On January the 27th, a couple of months before Gus sent out that letter, word got out that SMG planned to launch an issue of 200 million fixed value bonds. Backed by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation and UBS7. The net proceeds of this issue would be used towards payment of a massive bank debt related to SMG's acquisition of Southern Water and Manweb, two privatised utilities supplying water and gas to the north of England, now only part owned by Scottish Power. Could this be the same "advantageous share scheme" that is being forced (the scheme if you remember operates on a "all-employee" basis) upon SMG employees, who are already working harder for less money?
The average wage per year (as a unit cost) has fallen like a stone: from £33,711 in '94 to £16,306 in '96. In the same period the profit per employee has gone up from £2,000 to £41,000. The return on the shareholders' funds has similarly jumped from 4.37% to 67.11%. These figures relate to staff who have the impertinence to request payment for their skills. Were it possible to take into account those hopefuls who work for nothing, or on an expenses only basis, the actual remuneration would plummet further.
But SMG workers have nothing to fear, the people's champion is at hand. No, not Gus, but another old socialist: Sir Gavin Henry Laird, board member of SMG and member of the Employment Appeal Tribunal. Gavin has been looking after the worker's interests for as long as anyone can remember, particularly in the big right-wing Union, the AEU. Everyone must have wanted rid of him though, because he was kicked upstairs till his fat arse landed on a seat on the board of the Bank of England. The same year he joined STV, which seems to be acting like a bank itself these days. Gavin also "works" for Britannia Life, an insurance company, so it is unlikely that he is a big fan of the welfare state. He also "works" for the Armed Forces Pay Review Body (who recently opted out of the National Minimum Wage scheme) and GEC Scotland. So he decides what soldiers get paid when they're getting killed by weapons sold to the enemy by GEC. He also finds time to slave his guts out on the Edinburgh Investment Trust where the top directors from The Securities Trust of Scotland, Flemings Bank, Scottish Widows, Clydesdale Bank, Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, all pool their knowledge to make a killing on the Stock Market8. So old Gavin can be forgiven for not noticing what is happening to SMG employees. It could also be that he knows fine well.
Aggrieved employees who for some reason do not trust Gavin could try the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). They are a little busy right now, or at least they must be given that they have been "working" on (some would say suppressing) the as yet unpublished report on the £100m of profit that went missing when that other old socialist, Robert Maxwell, did a bit of profit sharing himself. The Mirror Group, who own the Daily Record/Sunday Mail who own 20% of SMG, are technically still under investigation. Board members, such as Sir Robert Clark, still sit on the same seats they used to when Maxwell was there. As we all know nobody noticed a thing at the time, anyway nobody has been found guilty of anything and that's the important thing. The hundred million simply vanished. Nobody is overly worried about that DTI9 report because another old socialist, Helen Liddell, went from working on the Daily Record to running the country in a few short months. She was put into the Monklands constituency after the death of John Smith. Monklands had more or less been designated a Labour Corruption Zone and some facts were leaking out. As can be imagined the investigative journalism which brought a lot of open secrets to light was done by one or two people on a small local paper. The Daily Record did nothing. Liddell claims to have been only remotely connected to Maxwell, but according to Private Eye 942:
"...she was renowned and feared for her ruthless devotion to Cap'n Bob. Escorting him to a function in Edinburgh City Chambers in 1988...she clung to him so closely that at one point she even followed him into the gent's lavatory--a historic moment that was recorded by a BBC TV documentary crew filming the event. In the following two years she often accompanied Maxwell in his private plane on trips abroad, including a sortie to Bulgaria to advise the new government on how to run its elections. And in 1991 she was involved in the notorious Mirror Group floatation, which was the subject of a DTI inquiry."

Oil, Polly Peck, Digital TV and Flextech 
And what of Flextech, SMG's other 20% owner are they any more trustworthy? Although little known by the general public they have grown to become the second largest provider of satellite programmes in the UK: they are responsible for Playboy TV, UK Gold, Bravo, Challenge TV (a game show channel) and a few other even worse channels. Back in the early '90s they were an industrial holding company mostly engaged in oil and gas services. Its companies mostly operated in the waters around Cyprus, Norway and Malaysia, all sensitive military areas. Its deputy chairman was Lawrence Tindale, chairman of countless off-shore Guernsey companies and at the time also a director of Polly Peck International, the company which crashed in 1990 at much the same time Maxwell went overboard. The company was "supposedly making profits of £200m per year but collapsed within weeks leaving shareholders with nothing and creditors who were owed more than £1 billion with little more."10
Flextech moved into media in a big way when they were taken over by the European business arm of TCI, the biggest US cable TV operator, ultimately owned (35%) by United Artists, the American multinational. The driving force behind the company is said to be its chairman, Roger Luard, who is also on the board of SMG11. One peculiar thing about Flextech is that although its shareprice has soared since its early days, it has not made a profit in years. On the contrary its accounts show it has made huge losses. It would seem that investors are backing it on the strength of the United Artists connection and on a promising deal with the BBC, which if you have ever paid your license fee you have unknowingly contributed to yourself. Back in October '96 the BBC chose Flextech as its 50/50 partner in the launch of an eight channel subscription package using old BBC programmes. At one point the Mirror Group's David Montgomery and Flextech's Adam Singer were in talks about a joint venture with the big cable companies exploiting the BBC deal. Both Singer and Montgomery are on the board of SMG, which is probably where the planning began.
Flextech are also involved in the chicanery that accompanied the licensing of terrestrial digital broadcasting. It is predicted that digital will see pay-TV phase out the old analog transmissions. The decisions were made last year but programmes will not start up till later this year. At present preparation is in a "complete shambles". Two competing consortia wanted the license from the ITC: British Digital Broadcasting (BDB) who won, and Digital Terrestrial Network (DTN) who lost. A legal challenge (by the losing consortium) ensued and the Office of Telecommunication (Oftel) intervened, at first to advise that DTN was the better deal and then to request the removal of BSkyB from the winning consortium. There was nothing new in the winning bid, most of which is available on Sky. What is on offer is primarily the Flextech/BBC package, indeed Roger Luard of Flextech has been rumoured as a potential boss of BDB. Flextech's parent TCI has also been involved with Microsoft to develop technology to enable digital TV to link with the internet.
Although the ITC have on the surface asked BSkyB to drop out of the BDB consortium (which is a 50/50 deal between Granada and Carlton) Rupert Murdoch will not be shedding many tears. For a start BSkyB are launching their own digital satellite system (threatening some 200 channels) and they have been given the job of running the subscriber management system for BDB, thus having contact with BDB customers. The BSkyB company, News Datacom will still provide the encryption access and it will not have to bear any of the start up costs. Most press reports (in non-Murdoch newspapers) gave the impression that BSkyB had been written out of the terrestrial deal thanks to the intervention of Oftel. On the surface this is true, but Oftel have done nothing to 'regulate' on these 'hidden' involvements. But let us focus on the ITC

"Without detriment to programme standards"
The ITC was formed to take over from the IBA as a result of the White Paper Broadcasting in the '90s, written in '89 by Douglas Hurd. This proposed a "radical reform of the TV framework for broadcasting in the UK" for two principle identified reasons: "technological and international developments"; and that the government wished "a much wider range of programmes and types of broadcasting to be offered to viewers and listeners." It was the usual Thatcher government lies about the free market masking political patronage: "choice should be widened, competition increased without detriment to programme standards and quality." Back in 1989 everyone was getting excited about Satellite TV. As Rupert Murdoch himself said/lied: "Sky Television will bring competition, choice and quality to British Television. The monopoly is broken ...television will begin to develop the diversity it has lacked." Murdoch the "monopoly breaker". Sky began with four channels: the flagship Sky Channel featured game shows, including revivals of ITV shows such as the Sale of the Century and The Price is Right, a magazine programme with Tony Blackburn and Jenny Handley, an evening chat show hosted by Derek Jameson and American imports such as the Lucy Show. Rupert has been a little bit slack in delivering the "quality."
The ITC have "requirements" from ITV not regulations. These are that each franchise: 
1 Show regional programmes (including programmes produced in the region).
2 Show high quality news and current affairs dealing with national and international news, in the main viewing period.
3 Provide a diverse programme schedule calculated to appeal to a variety of tastes and interests.
4 Ensure that a minimum of 25% of original programming comes from independent producers.
5 Ensure that a proper proportion of programme material is of EC origin.
Obviously it is all a bit of a joke. They don't deal with monopolies, that is the province of the Monopolies and Mergers commission which was set up rather late in 1973. The ITC just hands out licenses, it's the government's bagman. The ITC also has "responsibilities" concerning Satellite TV whereby "steps will be taken to ensure that the programme content of all such satellite services is supervised." Presumably Bravo's "Stripping Italian Housewives" is there to fulfill category five. Bravo (which is run by Flextech) has as its motto "Swearing, Sex and Violence," perhaps category three comes into play there. Although the ITC has some vague code on advertising and sponsorship the government made it plain that they favoured "liberalising the present restrictions" and then chucked in the usual nod and a wink pretend proviso: "provided the editorial independence and transparency for the viewer are adequately protected." This probably means that we have a right to know the identity of the "News Bunny." (which is someone in a bunny suit who "reacts" to the "news" on L!ve TV).
The government was also pretending that it was determined to "impose limits on concentration of ownership and on excessive cross-media ownership, in order to keep the market open for newcomers and to prevent any tendency towards uniformity or domination by a few groups." That statement typifies what the media has become. The original fifteen franchises have been absorbed into only four groups. Most of the power has been concentrated into the hands of three men, Lord Hollick at United News and Media, Micheal Green at Carlton and Gerry Robinson at Granada, all of which are rampantly involved in cross-media ownership. So who are the ITC, why are they constantly described as "watchdogs" and whose interests are they protecting?

Lord Snooty and his pals
Sadly it is all a bit predictable, but frightfully British! Sir Robin Biggam is the ringleader and gets £65,580 for failing us miserably. He makes more money in the (guess what) arms trade, working as the director of British Aerospace. He is also a money seller with Foreign and Colonial Investments12. Next up is the Earl of Dalkeith (real name Richard Scott), who is the heir to the title of the Duke of Buccleuch (there are only 24 Dukes and it rates just under Royal Dukes, such as the Duke of Edinburgh). Mr Scott seems to do nothing. He was on the board of Border TV for a year in '89, he was on the old IBA and seems to have been accidentally left behind. He is also on the Millennium Fund Commission. He gets £12,630.
As does the aptly named Micheal Checkland. He used to be the Director General of the BBC and before that also worked on (guess what) an arms company, Thorn Electronics. It was Checkland who complied wholesale with the lunacies of Thatcher and supervised the censorship of the eleven Republican and Loyalist groups. During his tenure we also saw the censorship of Duncan Cambell's programme on Zircon, where the Police actually raided the BBC, poisoning the air for future investigative journalism. So much for category two of the ITC's "regulations". It was Checkland who made the assertion back in 1990 that he "was keen to work alongside the new TV channels as a programme provider," which was put into practice in deals with British Satellite Broadcasting, paving the way for the Flextech deal and the rampant commercialisation of the BBC.
But by far and away the most interesting character on the ITC is Dr Micheal Shea who works for Caledonian Newspaper Publishing, a subsidiary of Gus MacDonald's SMG. Shea has a long history of duplicitous activity i.e. telling lies for a living. It is also transparently obvious that he has intimate connections with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He joined the Foreign Office (which claims to oversee MI6) in 1963, serving first in Ghana and then in Bonn in '66 where he was also seconded to the Cabinet office, then Bucharest in '73, then New York in '76 where he headed an outfit called "British Information Services"13. He then became the Press Secretary of the Queen for ten years.
On the filthy lucre side of things he sits on Scotland's premier Unit Trust, Murray International. Fellow board members here include George Younger and Angus Grossart, the latter being a recent ex-STV board member. The Grampian buy-out was put together by Noble Grossart Merchant Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland , both run by Grossart. Shea is an independent advisor to Grossart's wing of Arthur Anderson, the second largest Insurance Broker in the World. Shea is also the head of "political and government affairs" at Hanson plc. In between finding time to eat, sleep and go to the lavatory he is on the boards of Strathclyde University, the National Gallery, Edinburgh University and Gordonstouns. He joined Caledonia in '93. Shea should not be on the board of an "Independent" Commission; there should be an independent commission watching Shea. The notion of characters like this being paid to lord it over us, deciding what we see or do not see is repulsive and as stupid as the belief that they are in any way "watchdogs" for the public good. Even a scant look at their activities offers convincing evidence that they do not give a toss for the public and consider themselves above and aristocratically superior. But it is these people who control who gets the license to broadcast. Despite all the smirking lies masquerading as legality of the White Paper, the ITC are actively encouraging monopoly.
In 1990 when the ITC were set up, 15,000 people were employed in ITV. As the companies in the network rushed to 'rationalise' in the run up to the franchise auction two years later, the number fell to about 10,500. In 1996 according to the ITC's own figures, the number fell to just over 8,200. The familiar pattern of mergers being justified on the basis of cost-saving and resource-pooling will be of little consolation to those skilled workers who were faced with the choice of either becoming "freelance" (a euphemism for unemployed-but-waiting-in-the-wings) or giving up altogether. The casualisation of the work-force has seen an explosion in the activities of "independent" production companies--the "stars" of the media all have their own and corner the market. With over 1,000 "indies" competing for work largely based in London, those freelancing are forced to follow in the hope of picking up some scraps. An "anonymous senior industry source", quoted by Jamie Doward in his Observer article of September 28th '97 said: "One strength of the old system was its commitment to regional programming. But the industry is in danger of moving away from that." This observation contrasts with Gus MacDonald's patriotic optimism of '93 when, in the STV annual report for '92, he made much of STV's "Scottishness" claiming it as a major asset which would help ensure future success. His robust confidence in Scotland's indigenous talent seems curious given that in the following years he and the rest of the board have reduced the number and wages of employees. In the accounts they seem to have doubled their employees but this is only because of all the mergers.
In 1996 the ITV network had an income of £2.2 billion, none of which came from license fees. It was generated by advertising. Where do the advertisers get the money? From us, via the products we buy. Hence, the actual cost per person for the right to have advertisers in the livingroom becomes a matter of guesswork. An average family shopping trolley will be full of products, all of which carry a built-in cost to recover the promotion of the product. Banks Building Societies and the big companies who simply have to tell us how nice they are, all pass those advertising costs on to us. In effect we are all paying the network to sell us what we have already bought. The more we buy it, the more successful it becomes, the greater the need (and cost) for us to confirm that we do indeed buy it. In other words, pay over the odds for it now, pay again later.

The (digital) Revolution will not be televised
In a country which has rejected right-wing parliamentary politics so completely, it is essential to remember that the non-parliamentary right are entrenched to such an extent that they will always elude democratic attempts at change. They are simultaneously a coherent and incoherent force in that they are both destructive or allied to one another at any given time. The alliances in the media, even on this scant evidence, reveal a complicity with big business with SMG branching out to own privatised utilities. We must always remember that our local independent Television Station provides us with an education, an outlook. Consider the words of another Scotsman who worked his way up to the top to become an award winning mogul:
"...Andrew Carnegie wrote eleven essays called The Gospel of Wealth. In it he said that capitalism--free enterprise--was stone cold dead in the United States. It had been killed off by its own success. That men like himself, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Rockefeller now owned everything, they owned the government. Competition was impossible unless they allowed it... Carnegie said that this was a very dangerous situation, because eventually young people will become aware of this and form clandestine organisations to work against it...Carnegie proposed that men of wealth re-establish a synthetic free enterprise system (since the real one was no longer possible) based on cradle to grave schooling. The people who advanced most successfully in the schooling that was available to everyone would be given licenses to lead profitable lives, they would be given jobs and promotions and that a large part of the economy had to be tied directly to schooling..."14
While this applies (indeed is an antecedent) to compulsory education it also echos the illusion provided by the media, particularly television which is akin to the notions behind B. F. Skinner's "learning machines". As the creepy Skinner quote at the beginning of the article suggests there are people out there who, through rampant megalomania or some darkness of the mind, seek complete control. MacDonald and Laird represent an extremely generous and tolerant form of socialism, so much so that they can encompass its polar opposite. As for their motives, well they have both gained vast amounts of money and power. But they're trying too hard, they're trying now, to fool all of the people all of the time.
Future developments in digital TV should bring with them a feeling of optimism, access to TV. We must remember that not every one has the ability or resources to even contemplate this and that the power of TV is such that the Advertisers/distribution companies and providers will move further toward a cartel. We will wait a long time for the software which will provide everyone with TV station-like access via the internet.
Scottish culture has been represented on STV in perhaps the most insipid and erroneous ways imaginable. The arts (whether literature, drama, music or art) have provided some differing forms of "education" which has tried to counterbalance this situation. We can wave goodbye to all that in a few years. TV culture ( the voice, the agenda, the outlook, the people) has always been at a remove from the reality and evidence of our senses. To understand why requires investigation not just of the talent for impoverishment broadcast on the programmes, but investigation of who is running the thing and why. It is seldom attempted.
Scottish Television has reduced itself to news and sport: the news will have all the formality of the classroom, sport, all the "freedom" of playtime. We will never be informed that the news is manufactured or its agenda limited (for instance that by some co-incidence the exact stories will appear on the other side), or the limitations of that agenda. STV and now SMG has preached the big lie. And the big lie is that there is a criminal underworld and an honest overworld and that they do not interpenetrate. SMG's agenda is fast becoming one which serves as a cover for the legalised crime which big business engages in every day.
MacDonald used to be an "investigative reporter." What was it he found out back in the '70s that made him pretend to promote free speech in Scotland while working for those who seek to deny it to us? Perhaps he now feels free. as Skinner would put it; and glad that he has been given such a "profitable license" as Carnegie would say.

notes
1 Somewhere along the line the Chase Manhattan Bank started acquiring more SMG shares, at the same time the BBC Pension Trust sold theirs.
2 Glasgow Herald July 12
3 And they would be right.
4 This has been complicated slightly by the attempts to weed out embarrassments among "old Labour" in Scotland, whether through their corruption or left-wing views, and replace them with Blairites (i.e. opportunists). This has been portrayed (read 'news managed') particularly in the Herald, with allusions to a secret group called the "Network" thus propelling it into the ambit of conspiracy theory. The purge is real enough, but somewhat ineffectual.
5 SMG's main shareholders are Flextech (19.95%), Daily Record/Sunday Mail (19.93%), FMR Corporation(7.38%), Chase Nominees (5.31%), Mercury Asset Management (3.43%). Someone could fairly easily buy up 40% of SMG which would be a controlling shareholding.
6 They of the Blue Arrow affair.
7 Directors of most Investment trusts interpenetrate like this.
8 A kind of political ornament
9 Private Eye 808. It collapsed when money was pumped in by bankers and shareholders, Private Eye 832 states that a dealer who boosted Polly Peck ended up working for Mercury Asset Management, who also own about 4% of SMG. Polly Pecks more famous director, Asil Nadir ran off around May 93 in the wake of court charges, a secret Scotland Yard investigation, all the Micheal Mates lunacy, connections to Micheal Hesletine and with £440,000 of Polly Peck money ending up in the Tory party coffers. A bit of a mess.
10 See Investors Chronicle May 30/97 for background on Luard and Flextech. The Observer of 15/3/98 sttes that the Mirror Group and the Chase Manhattan Bank have been in close discussion with Flextech's owners TCI, the Mirror group wants to join with them in a Cable TV deal.
11 Probably the premium British investment outfit.
12 This more than likely had connections to the IRD (the Foreign Office's black propaganda outfit) but I have no direct evidence.
13 An Interview with John Taylor Gatto (Flatland No. 11)

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Ethnic Cleansing
Kamal Sangha

Amar and his friends spent most of the summer hassled by police. A few minutes after the shopkeepers' shutters were down a patrol car invariably pulled up on the corner where they swapped stories to keep themselves going. Two officers told them it was an offence to be brown and think you owned the streets.
PC McKenna loved these moments. He got a real buzz out of it. He would brag to his wife after they made love, smoothing his hand across her throat, and then snap his fingers--Like that!--after he spun the air with a restraint technique tacit in standard police training manuals.
Each night Amar came home his parents turned to him from two, low, wooden stools in the kitchen; they cut loose threads and made final adjustments to garments for a local manufacturer. Cloth dust filled the air and weakened the light. Amar thought they looked like the two people in a painting in the local museum: solemn and sullen and still working after a poor dinner. He couldn't handle it and went straight back out after he finished eating.
His mates practiced dance steps to the music coming out of the late night record shop, totally skint bar a few cans of lager placed in one of the open doorways. If the owner was out they would go in and request a medley of made-to-measure grooves. Then they would dance as pair, trio, quartet, full tilt, right up on the beat.
McKenna watched them on a monitor at the station. He would study their mouths for a pulsing tirade or a self-incriminating rhyming couplet about cops. Often he got confused as they mixed Punjabi and English. It was enough to make him snatch his fags off the desk and take out his truncheon and thwack it against his palm before he slid it back into the holster.
The boys were really going for it. The late sun was still strong and happy sweat poured out of their faces. One of them suggested they regularly practice, he reckoned they could make it as an outfit dancing at birthdays and weddings. Suddenly everyone agreed and started talking quickly about what they could achieve. It was great to be alive.
McKenna brushed his trousers as he stepped out of the car. He was six four and proud of his body. He used to have a partner but now did the rounds alone--back up was only a gesture away. In meetings with local community leaders and liaison officers he would stiffen to the word multicultural, thinking, how did it get this far: these black cunts with their halting English and local clout; their grandfathers, who used to polish his one's boots, obedient to all non-verbal commands under the Indian sun. In spite of the changes this was his patch and his people before him: the clubs, the pubs, the market, the boys brigade. Now there was a temple, restaurants, women in orange silk. When was the last time he'd seen hopscotch.
McKenna approached the dancers. A few people stopped and watched from the other side of the street. He put his foot on the kerb and tapped almost to the music, just stopping himself in time. He balled his fists and kneaded them into his sides, smiled and shook his head. 
Amar stood in the dark of a doorway blowing smoke out into the street. He watched McKenna pick up the glow of the cigarette. One of his mates carried on dancing. The others clapped in unison and nodded to the beat. The lone dancer stopped mid move, arms extended up past his head, fingers splayed, swivelled and turned to his friends. Ar-ee-pa! The boys threw back their heads and laughed, lapping it up for all it was worth. McKenna was old hat, a knackered emissary from some totalising, racially fucked up confederacy.
Another song, another remix. A different dancer veered towards McKenna and came to a halt a foot or so, frozen in dance. He looked at the boy's face: pouted lips and dilated eyes. A knowing smile slithered into his head and he began to work out which bones he could cleanly break.
Amar stepped out of the doorway with a can in his hand and took a long swig. The lone dancer collapsed his arms and asked for a drink. He took it out of the back of Amar's hand while Amar simultaneously took a can out of the hand of another, a swift, cool, balletic move dazzling audiences around the world. McKenna licked the inside of his mouth. He hoped to sit in front of a cool pint as soon as all this was in the shade. He looked straight ahead and pointed at Amar's chest.
You: put that in the bin.
An old Punjabi folk song played in the record shop. Amar's father hummed it as a dirge about farm hands pushed off the land where they ate and sang at the end of the working day, lightened by some home-made brew.
Amar lobbed the can at a bin attached to a lampost. It bounced off the edge and a gush of lager splashed McKenna's upper body. One of the boys was about to rejoice but another pulled him down and told him to cool it.
McKenna didn't even flinch. He stood still with his hands on his hips, legs at ease. He ignored the lager on his arm and shirt and rolled the can with the sole of his foot towards Amar.
Pick it up--now!
Amar clicked his tongue in his mouth. For months McKenna had pushed him around, stopped and searched his dad's car umpteen times--makin him go down to the station to show his documents, waitin at the front desk and slappin him down and showin him the front door and tellin him to sort out his boy in front of other officers.
McKenna dabbed himself with a hanky and wiped his sunglasses. He might just let it go this time until he got him on his own: a couple of strategic blows between chest and navel--where there would be no marking. Nothing that would show up in court. C'mon junior, let's do it, right now. Jesus! I don't know what's worse: you, or a bad meal in a restaurant. 
The can stopped two thirds of the way to Amar. It was cheap shit and he didn't like the taste. McKenna was ready--the colour of a dark bruise. He wanted a knock out in the fifth and a briefcase of broken bones.
Amar eyed the can and stepped towards it. He swung back his right foot, making sure he got his toes right underneath, and smacked it as hard as he could. It sped through the air and hit McKenna full in the face.
Later that night a doctor announced the death of Amar Singh Dhillon. His parents shared a mug of hot milk to help them sleep. They were not waiting for the telephone to ring.

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Forced Entertainment on Politics and Pleasure
Michelle McGuire

Regarded by many as one of Britain's leading experimental theatre companies, Forced Entertainment devise theatre that questions issues concerning contemporary life. Based in Sheffield, the company has toured nationally and abroad with diverse shows for small scale theatres, installation works for galleries, site-specific performances, digital media pieces and most recently films. Formed in 1984 by a group of six graduates from the University of Exeter, the ensemble are a rare breed for having stayed intact through Arts Council cuts and a volatile arts environment. Perhaps the secret of their success is an ability to operate within the media culture of the late 20th century - firmly placing themselves in a society of changing cultural forms, TV politics and consumerism. I met with Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall and Cathy Naden to discuss the processes of their understated work.

Michelle McGuire: Is Forced Entertainment a reflection of the times and therefore a product of Postmodernism?
Robin Arthur: I think the short answer to that is yes, probably. As people, as artists, we've always been consciously trying to make work that is contemporary. There are quite a lot of artists that are trying to make work that isalmost like classical work. And I don't just mean people who, in theatre for example, go back and approach the classics. But, there are a lot of writers who think about their work being in the high modernist classic tradition ­ almost outside of the time ­ who would almost regard the notion that their work emerged out of the time that they write it in, as being a kind of insult, a kind of cheapening of what they do. But I don't think that is true for us at all. I think we've always tried to make work that is contemporary and arises out of the moment.
Claire Marshall: So it's always been influenced by music, by film, by videos, by other aspects of culture.
RA: When we first started making work, I didn't know what Postmodernism was. But when I found out what it meant, it did seem like quite a good way of describing some of things that we were doing. I think that our relationship with that term or that set of conceptions has gone rather more cynical of late. But, I think it would be stupid to deny that it is something that describes quite well a lot of what we do.
Cathy Naden: Tim [Etchells - Artistic Director] always used to put this quote on publicity that was around, might have been as early as 200% & Bloody Thirsty, which was a show that we did in 1989. He used to say that the work was always understandable by anybody, "who was brought up in a house where the TV was always on". And I think that in a way, we are kind of filters for everyday experience and that can be things we've seen on television, or things we've seen on the news. And it is not a conscious process of looking out for those things. I think it is like an expression of what it's like to be alive now. Because things kind of filter through accidentally, like the Gulf War happening around the time we were making Marina & Lee. And it crept into the text and little parts of the show. But that was never an overtly political statement we were making. It was just one part of an experience that was creeping into the work. And also, I think that the way you can use the high culture and low culture that you get in Postmodernism, is something that we use a lot. The sort of putting together things that shouldn't go together, trash things and crap things and making something new out of it.
CM: I think Postmodernism has become a bit of a dirty word sometimes, that suggests that everything is very ironic, very cynical and very removed. Although it's a word that describes some of what we do, it is just a describing word. You don't set out to make a Postmodernist piece of work. Sometimes it feels like it's not a good description because a lot of what we do contains a lot of cynicism, a lot of anger and there is also a lot of naivete and hope and innocence in the things that we want to make happen on stage.
RA: I think that is a really good point. Critical terms like Postmodernism are interesting at the point where they arise from an observation of work that is taking place. So, when the term was created, I think it was an observational term, it was a term that detected something that was present in work. One of the problems is that as soon as the word became in vogue, people tried to make Postmodern work. Those critical terms, it seems to me, should always be subsidiary to the creative process rather than in control of it or dictating it. I wouldn't like to think that we attempted to make Postmodernist work or that that was in the back of our minds. Or that we were trying to conform to some critical formula, it's a word that has, at various times in the work that we have been making, been a relatively useful description. But it is not a formula that we attempt to fulfil when we make work.
MM: Much of Live Art has a political social awareness. How does Forced Entertainment fit into that sphere?
RA: Again, the fundamental part of what we do that makes it political or socially involved is to do with the form. It's to do with things that we've discovered about what we do in live performance over the last ten years or so. Working out about five years ago that we didn't want to go and play in huge theatres in front of 600 people. Being involved in a form that's about small scale and about a kind of intimacy with people, is for me, one of the biggest political parts of what we do because it's a rejection of all those notions about 'up-scaling' and 'size is important' and mass communication being incredibly important. I mean, I'm not saying that we are totally opposed to those things and I don't even think we've worked out for ourselves how or why that it is important to us. But it always comes back down to the fact that when we make performances, it's for small auditoria, it's for small numbers of people. At the top range of our touring circuit where you are dealing with venues that will hold two hundred people, you get in there and it's horrible, you don't like playing those places. You don't like the lack of communication or the lack of contact. So, that kind of smallness, not conceptually, but just the very gut-level instinctive rejection of the notion of commercial success or commercial concerns is very political. It is that kind of decision which is perhaps less overt than you might be talking about with regard to the whole live art thing. But I think it's there in that whole live art agenda, almost at root, because of the medium that people are dealing with.
CN: I think we tried to find our own way through the funding maze. We haven't followed the normal career path for a small scale company because we haven't moved from project funding to revenue funding. But three or four years ago, we made this decision to diversify. So, we tried to keep the creative process by making pieces that weren't with theatre and diversifying into other things like digital media. So in that sense, those sorts of projects that have been happening within live arts have really been tapped into. And that is also about getting to different audiences and reaching the fine art world or digital media world.
MM: So is that how you see Forced Entertainment progressing in the next few years? This kind of diversification?
CN: Yeah, I think we will still continue to make the live work. Certainly economically, it makes sense to diversify. I think it's really good when you can have work out there that's doing the job for you without having to involve other people. The thing about touring shows is that you always have to go to where they are going. A project like Frozen Palaces (CD ROM) could be out there in the world doing the work for you.
MM: And you do all your work in one day.
CM: Yeah, but there is something about that which in a way is at odds with what Robin was talking about because for all of us, it is a political act to commit so much time and so much hands-on work to make these shows. Everything is still to do with us all cleaning the buildings, us all being responsible for doing the little jobs that happen. I don't think it will ever come to the stage where Richard [Lowdon - company member] sits down, designs a set and hands it over to someone and they build it. I just can't see, not completely, him not wanting to see what materials are being used on the set and having to work with the performance as it grows. So, keeping the hands-on approach is really quite important. And then, sit that beside the idea that you can write Frozen Palaces and send it out in the world.
MM: And that is going back to that kind of multiplicity that we were talking about before. Where you then reflect back into that mass multi-media.
CM: And I think both of those things have to exist for us to exist. Sometimes, I think that in ten years time, Forced Entertainment will just be this name under which different projects exist.
RA: I think that what Claire was saying there comes back down to the other aspect of it that is - God, I don't really know if we really constitute as a co-operative anymore, but effectively that has always been the way that the company has worked. It is a strange kind of pragmatic socialism that takes place for us in our work environment a lot of the time. It is changing a little bit but at root, I think it is still there and I've not liked to think about us getting down to the point where the division of labour was so specialised that I only ever just turned up and did a show. At root level there is, in terms of the choice of media, in terms of the way that we work, a collaborative way that we work which, as I go on, think it is an increasingly rare to encounter. It does happen, it rarely happens for a very long time.
CM: I think it is almost unique given the longevity. Other companies that have been going a long time generally have about two original members. People like Natural Theatre Company, I think, are two creative directors with different performers each show sometimes. Having your little space in the middle of the city and all being centred around that and essentially nobody having major commitments outside of that is very unusual.
RA: Having established those two crux points to go back to, the political or social agendas that are more normal in live art. I think that, in a way, when we then embark on making work we don't carry that mental baggage with us. I'm sure that actually, because of the nature of the process and because of the nature of the business, that the work that we make is actually political, but for me it's political in a naturally evolved way rather than a formulistic way. I think the work has political and social concerns that emerge from the process and from the way that we work rather than political and social concerns that are bolted on. If you look at a lot of theatre as opposed to live art, because live art is a very different category, but if you look at the most overtly social or politically social theatre work that has come out of this country in the last twenty or thirty years, most of it has been made in the context of an incredibly, perniciously, nasty, not just capitalist system but a kind of really strange world. Where notions of democracy or commitment are utterly out of the window. If you think about the great political playwrights, their relationship with the means of production of their work is well, dictatorial. It has no democratic credentials at all. They write the damn thing, hand it over to a director who directs the damn thing. And I don't understand how you can think about making political or social work if you haven't sorted out your own means of production to start with. It's utterly ludicrous for someone to claim that they are writing left-wing, social critiques when the mechanism that they use for bringing that stuff out into the world is highly suspect, by anybody's standards.
CM: I can remember thinking when that play, Blasted was on at the Royal Court which was all horrible ultra violence, buggery and terrible swearing on stage. I remember reading about it and thinking, well we've done all that, we just didn't make a fuss about it and we didn't pretend that our blood was real. We said it was fake and you could see the squirter but we covered ourselves in it and we died. The way that Tim and Cathy write, is a language full of obscenity that is just kind of casual. We use violence all the time by talking about it or not doing it or sort of pretending to do it. There are tons of angry political statements in a lot of our work, it's just that instead of making a play about 'the poor homeless people', or the problem of homelessness, you get a card board sign that refers to that or you get a little bit of text that talks about the people all around being 'just a bunch of fucking cunts'. I think it is very angry, especially with all the Thatcher years and the Major years. It doesn't start off that we are going to make a show about this, it's just if you're angry and political with a small 'p', that's going to be in the work.
RA: I think that is very true. There is always a belief that the world is more complicated than Disney or the Communist Manifesto. The world is a more complicated place than either of those things would like you to believe it is. And our politics are rather more amorphous, even romanticised. That results usually in a kind of general pissed-offness! It's more to do with punk than it is to do with structuralism. It is not about having an intellectual overview about what is wrong with society, it's about saying, 'I saw this thing and that made me fucking puke and then I saw this thing and that was rather sweet'. And how those things actually work for you now in the world. And that is where our politics and our social agenda comes from and where it makes itself apparent. The work always dictates its own politics rather than politics dictating the work. It is less common now, but in the early eighties, there was this Marxist critique that said that politics and political and economic underpinning of society dictates everything, which means that when you're an artist, you should be concerned with those things primarily and your art should in some way reflect that. And we've always had the attitude at root, that that is a very skewed way of looking at the world. And that the artistic way of looking at the world is a valid one. If it occasionally takes swipes at various economic or social political things on route, then for sure it's going to do that because it lives in the same world as those things.
MM: Is Pleasure [touring show 97/98] representing the mood of the company?
CM: Pleasure must have come out of the mood of the company. I mean, I think we were exhausted making it, we got really stuck making it. It was an incredibly difficult show to make and we went down a lot of blind alleys to make it. And when we were touring it before Christmas we were still changing it. I don't think we are going to change it anymore now, as you have to put a stop to it at some point. But it does reflect something. The last show, [Showtime] was such a show about making work, it was such a show about being a performer, it was a show about being away so much and being dislocated. Making Pleasure is kind of a reaction against that. It's like, what have I got? What do you want to see? What can I do for you? And I think a lot of the mood of Pleasure is about that. I think it is a very strong reaction to a very mixed and difficult and busy year.
RA: I think another thing to say about Pleasure is, when we started work on Pleasure, I think we all thought it was going to be a very different show from all of the other shows that we have made. And, one of the interesting things is that it turned out to be not such a very different show. I think it exposed a difficulty, within the company which is that the work is always a compromise, a complicated and difficult compromise between lots of people whose quite idiosyncratic desires and wants form a piece of theatre. I think it has been a good learning process for us to know that you can't just suddenly launch off into something entirely different and just expect it to just to be this radically different thing. We are always going to advance in tiny little grandmother-like footsteps, I think. Rather than in big jumps. It is not in our nature as a group of people to do that.
CM: Because you are some kind of democracy. You can only do those big leaps if you brought in a new director and you did what they said. And we wouldn't!
RA: And I do think it is how we make things as well, and you can't get away from it. It sure is a hell of a lot different than Showtime.

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Tales of The Great Unwashed
Ian Brotherhood 

The Great Unwashed depends on daytime custom to survive. Big-spending youths on stag or hen nights are few and far between, and the clientele holds no benevolent lottery-winners or locals-made-good. The folk who pay the bills are the old ones who use the pub as a second home. 
For the most part the regulars are men, and for the most part they are poor. But they move in numbers, and between them are capable of consuming impressive amounts of drink. 
There is a myth which holds that the aged are privy to some little-known wisdom. The nostalgic and naive can sometimes be seen plying the old-timers with drink in the hope that this may part them from some pearly advice. It is never forthcoming, or else takes the form of such banalities as could be read in any daily paper's horoscope. We once had a student from one of the city's leafier suburbs who came in with a tape-recorder and a note-pad. He claimed to be a social anthropology student, and was collecting oral history for his project. He pestered one and all for a full afternoon, bought drink for anyone who could tell him a story, but made the mistake of asking Sippy Pat for her recollections of the war. Pat wasn't born until the mid-fifties, so was none too pleased. She quietly hailed her cousin who, with a couple of friends, escorted the tiddly historian to the lane by the car-park where any remaining curiosity was kicked out of him. 
Of course the old ones do have their stories, but they keep them close and quiet. What stories they have that would interest others don't always involve the teller as hero, and so many of the best come from others, second and third hand. 
I can tell you about Sammy the Biter, who was well into his sixties when he decided that he wanted to be taller than the five foot two nature had allowed him. He purchased, by mail-order, a special pair of shoes which would make him three inches taller. I recall the dreich Autumn day when he came in, soaked and shifty, and much taller than he should be.
­What's happened to you Sammy? I asked, and he put a forefinger to lip and leaned closer. 
­It's the special shoes. It's a miracle. Just like it said in the ad so it is, three inches on you and no-one will notice anything untowards at all.
The astonishment on the faces of those seated proved that the improvement had been noted, and had inspired a stunned silence. 
­How can they not notice Sammy? I whispered, you're too tall now. 
Sammy made for the toilet in slow, careful steps. The shoes, for everyone was now looking at them, seemed unusually short, almost square, and the movement of Sammy's legs suggested he was walking on tippy-toes, causing terrible distortion of his upper legs and hips. It occurred to me that perhaps he had become a devil, and the black shinies contained not feet, but cloven horntrotters. Sammy emerged from the toilet, went sadly home, and the shoes have never been seen since. 
John the Midden has a good stock of fighting tales, but in all he is cast as the victor. They are mostly true it seems, but he omits his few losses which are of far more interest to those of us who are less than enamored with the big fellow. His ignominious hammering at the hands of tiny Finny MacAteer and Pakky, at the end of which he was taken under police escort to the hospital with a big aubergine stuck in his throat, is the stuff of local legend. But that's another one altogether. 
Personally, I don't care to listen to too much talk from the old ones. I find that few can be honest about their own failings and mistakes, are too ready to blame spouses or offspring for their own weaknesses, and there is a sizable minority who have no stories at all, but are simply reaching the end of their span as they lived it, in total boredom, only slower than before. 
But there was one whose story stuck with me, and has for thirty years or more. 
Guilt keeps the memory of Poppy Laggan alive. My guilt. He had been a regular as long as Da could remember at the time I met him. I was still young then, and with my own team of children just a couple of decades behind me, I was full of life and wanted more. I absorbed stories and characters, sure that the remainder of my span would be taken up with visiting fantastic places when I'd made my fortune, telling my sons and daughters about all the world-wide wonders awaiting them, becoming then a grandfather, a contented slipper-bound sage smoking exotic tobaccos and surrounded by enigmatic souvenirs.
Poppy Laggan was not remarkable to look at. Fifty-something, prematurely gray like all his four older brothers, much smaller than the others. The runt I suppose. He would come in on the way back from his job at the printing works, have two pints of stout and a glass of red-eye, then head home for his dinner. Very occasionally he would come in of a Saturday evening with his brother Sean, but even then he would hold his silence, content to let the older man speak. Poppy was seldom obvious in his drunkenness, could hold his own with the others. He never gambled, and had an almost phobic aversion to horses and any talk of them. But he was well-liked by all.
It was a Thursday night when he came in at his appointed time, and he gave no indication that anything was amiss. I hadn't noticed he was wearing a collared white shirt, and it was only when he removed the black tie from beneath the scarf that I realised he must have been to a funeral. I didn't dare to enquire, and left him in peace. The radio was on that night, and the place was busy, listening to some European game whose participants and outcome have escaped me. 
When we closed, Da moved to the end of the bar and sat with Poppy. They didn't say much, but I could tell something was up. I cleared out the cellar and settled the cash, settled the optics and poured them another. They had moved to the snug below the gas mantle. Da beckoned me over. 
Poppy was worse than I'd ever seen him, but for all he poured in the drink it seemed not to worsen his state. His eyes, red and tired, would close for several seconds, then he would shake himself awake, drink more, and mumble something to Da. I could see Da was more than worried - he was frightened. I got more drinks. And more. And Poppy's story slowly came out. 
Sean had died. Heart attack. The first one, and a big one, it had finished him at fifty-eight. Poppy had been the closest to him. 
­See, thing is, I know what's happening now, said Poppy, and Da nodded and I watched. 
­It's alright, said Da. 
­Ma told me from early I had a gift, that I had the sight and all that. It's like being locked in the picture-house, not knowing what's coming on. I can't stop it. Closing my eyes makes it clearer, opening them just makes it fade. 
I thought I caught a movement, Da making a tiny sign of the cross with his forefinger. 
­How's the difference 'tween a curse and a gift, carried on Poppy, when you get to see them things no-one should see? Sean's back again now. I don't know if it's behind or ahead, and that's no matter. I don't even know where. But he's back in it again when he thought he must've been out. He was happy being out, I know that much.
Poppy drank deep and long again, eyes closed. Da lit their cigarettes.
­There's a to-do before he's born, a ceremony on the shoreline. It's a clear sky and cold as hell, and the stars have something to do with it. It's the women in charge, the men are settled about the fire and they bring him in with the music and animals on leads, kids dancing about. What a terrible smell of fish all about there is. It's happy, and he's lifted up and there's a cheering, then silence. They look like us these folk, just the same. But it's not his Ma that's holding him. She's dead. A figure comes out from the dunes, all covered with hairy things and not a face on it you can see, and it's chanting over and over and the cheering gets back up and there's an almighty party. He soon knows he's special. Other weans get taken out on the boats to fish, or else help their mammies about the house. There's always work to be done. But not for Sean. Not that that's his name now you understand. I can't say his name. I can hear it, but it makes no sense. But it means The Deer or The Stag or something like that. It's a special name. He does as he pleases. If he wants to eat when the others are working, he eats. If he chooses to sleep all day, so be it. There is never an angry word against him, no child dares near him. Angry dogs get their tails between their legs when they smell him coming. He has a fight with a simple lad from a nearby village. Maybe they're about ten or eleven. The bigger lad gives him a fair old thumping and Sean goes back to his village with bruises and burst lips. There's a real to-do over it. The women all get together and stroke his hair and make him lie down and give him special mixtures and foul drinks, even though he's fine and just wants to get back out and about. The men come in that evening and there are angry shouts. Next day, before the sun, the men leave with weapons clanging, and return before mid-day with the head of the boy impaled on a lance. It is taken to the shore. There is another ritual, quiet and serious. The head is left atop the lance, and even when the birds have stripped it clean it stays. Sean has his own house, deep-set in the low flat stone, and everything he needs. Every woman in the village is his mother and sister, every man his father and brother. But he has no family. Everyone is his friend but he never has a visitor at his comfortable home. He takes to wandering further and further from the village, climbing the cliffs, hunting alone for the men will not allow him to join them on land or sea, and he meets travellers who are happy to talk until they find out who he is. He has no sense of being famous or fearsome, but it seems that he is. He grows tall and broad. The girls start to gather within view of his home. He is in the angry years, and takes it out on his own. He fights with anyone, daring them to fight properly, though he knows they will always go down eventually. He takes a girl back one night, and the following day there is a lot of talk but nothing done. Her parents smile and allow her to bring him some food. He takes another girl, and another. No harm comes to him. The men let him come out on the boats, the great low long boats, and he retches and heaves for days on end. He feels like life has started for him with this voyaging, albeit little more than bartering trips across the bay. And then it all comes so fast. I don't know how old he is, but not much over twenty. A rider comes and talks to the village men and right away you can see there's something up. The women start crying, the children start running about, fighting each other. They're going to war it seems. Sean's watching from his house. He feels fear now. First time. Real fear. A great ship arrives the next day, and together with their own smaller ship they prepare. Food salted, kegs of beer, weapons greased and wrapped against the brine, furs piled high in the wide base of the ship. They leave at daybreak. The women and children watch from the shore as the ships move away and head South. Some of the older children run alongside the clifftops and wave and watch and wave until they cannot be seen. The voyage is unlike anything Sean could have imagined. He had heard the men talk of high seas and monsters, but nothing had prepared him for such terror. He cannot eat, cannot sleep. He alone takes no shift at the oars. After weeks, they beach at midnight on moonlit sand. The land they have found is low and quiet, and not a tree to be seen. The sea washes calm, carries a warm wind from the West. Sean in half-sleep, the men discuss the attack. The chiefs debate long into the night, consulting hide-etched maps. Tonight is their last before the assault. The last of the beer is consumed, the beef soaked and eaten. The priests of all the villages represented come together and invoke whoever's favour. The music is muted and serious, but grows stronger and faster as the night goes on. With the light at its weakest, for it never really gets dark now in the Summer, the priests become frenzied. Sean joins the others in the dance about the fire but he is roughly subdued, made to spectate from the centre. Then the dance stops. The prayers continue as the men fall upon him, and they pull at his hair and face, two men to each limb, they rip him apart. His being alive seems to be important. He screams. But with no mouth and no tongue there is no sound. He can see tears in the eyes of some, but others are laughing and frothing. Leathered fingers pop his eyeballs, and he hears the excitement mount as one of the priests takes a small knife to Sean's belly and slices space enough to get a hand in. Out with his guts and heart, but it's something else they want. Maybe his liver. Whatever, the warm meat is pulled from him, hacked off and raised. Sean listens, dying. The meat is squeezed, its juice added to the bucket which the men will drain as their last and most important protection. Sean dies again, and the last faces in his mind's eye are those of the only folk he'd ever known and loved, berserk with fear and rage. 
It's not for me to say if Poppy was simply drunk and gibbering. It doesn't matter if his story was true or not, and no-one can ever say it was or wasn't, except maybe Sean. What matters is that I, in my excitement and stupidity, repeated the story to the others the next day. Poppy is a seer, I told them. He has the gift, I said. Da cracked up when he heard I'd been talking, but it was too late. 
Poppy was forced to wander even further afield in search of a pub where he would not be pestered for r