'TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON'S DOCTOR WHO)

(aka 'They Just Won't Let It Lie') 
First transmitted: September 1967
Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis
Plot spoilers happen!

“We know the Cybermen died out many centuries ago.” 
- Viner
“No they didn't, you daft twit!” 
–Every child in the land

Going Gothic

'Tomb of the Cybermen' is one of those iconic 'Who' stories. Iconic enough in fact for the review site 'Tomb of the Anorak' to be named in its honour. (After the immortal line “will you please see about the anoraks?”) As with its predecessor Cyberman story, 'The Moonbase’, it pushes the action forwards by setting things further in the future – in a time where the silver darlings are believed to be extinct. But it's unlike its predecessor story... well, in about every other way.

We've already seen how the show was already casting its net wider – borrowing from movies as much as other TV shows. The Cybermen's original appearance, for example, fed from both Brit TV's 'Quatermass' and Hollywood's 'The Thing From Another World'. Yet 'Tomb of the Cybermen' ups the ante and plunders a whole genre for source material.

As John McElroy wrote in his intro to the published script (Titan Books, 1989), this story “had no basis in factual science and took the team into a new genre”. Which one? That was helpfully telegraphed in the title. There's a reason why this one isn't called 'The Cryogenic Chambers of the Cybermen' or 'The Freezer Units of the Cybermen' - beyond those not being terribly snappy titles.

While 'The Moonbase' part-paved the way, this is the point where the Cybermen nudged out some mummies to fully embrace the Gothic. They don't so much borrow as strip-mine. Extensive research reveals Gothic fiction took the term from a previously existing architectural style, and titles often came from settings - as in perhaps the first Gothic novel, Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1763). And even with Walpole his first excursion into the gothic had been architectural, building Strawberry Hill. 

None of which is surprising. For, in a genre which prized mood above plot, setting was often integral. A frequent Gothic trope was to have architecture stand for psychological states; ruins for insanity, secret passages duplicity and so on. Consequently settings are commonly given as much significance as characters or plot.

And notably here the sets for the Tomb, where the story almost exclusively takes place, take on almost exactly this function. Viner, the inevitable 'canary' character whose function is to fall prey to superstition first, cries “It's this damned building! It's alive, it's watching us, it'll get us!” The surprisingly good design provides much of the story's effectiveness, giving him and the others something they can react against.

The Gothic might initially seem a strange step to take for Pedlar and Davis, whose first act had been to take the show in a more Science Fiction direction. At times described as Dark Romanticism, it originally set out to repudiate the Enlightenment, scorning the supposed advances brought by reason and scientific enquiry to revel in the supernatural. Even when Gothic tales weren't set in the past, before the over-bright illuminating light of the Enlightenment had been switched on, they demonstrated how the past never really was past. Just like the dark, it never actually went away.

Of course Gothic monsters continually erupt in SF, but normally in a more managed way. Traditionally, Science Fiction doesn't incorporate the Gothic so much as pick up the gauntlet thrown down to the Enlightenment, then counter-attack with a laser gun. The Gothic's disruption to consensus reality rises only to get slapped down by reasonable scientific explanation and techno-fixes, to become dissipated by the tale's end like shadows before the dawn. To misquote Goya, the slaughter of monsters produces reason. 

(And this was more true of the SF of this era, before 'Alien' made popular SF almost a sub-genre of horror. We've already seen how 'Quatermass and the Pit' tried to “swallow horror into SF”.)

And yet it proves itself quite a potent ingredient, for a show which was never 'proper' Science Fiction. And just as the Cyberman are part (but only part) machine, the Doctor (in his Victorian attire) is part (but only part) Gothic. When, for example, he cracks the code to open the Tombs there's little pretence that he isn't actually reciting a magic spell. (Troughton doesn't even fluff the term “integer”, it was mis-written in the script.) The electric cable he lays to keep the Cybermats at bay is also a magic circle. The Doctor is a wild card, an alien set against the aliens, the weird against weirdness.

Overall, the Gothic works in 'Who', and in SF in general, precisely because it isn't a neat fit with a clearly defined function. It works because it jars, because it disrupts. It’s like an awkward plug fitting, providing spurts of sparks rather than a smooth flow of power. In fact it works so well that it's surprising it took this long to be embraced. (Unless you count the Haunted House section of 'The Chase’. Which we don't. That was more flirtation than embrace.)

The Ungrateful Dead

Despite their protestations, locking themselves in a vault without an escape hatch might not make the Cybermen sound like the most logical of races. But it's a fitting objective correlative for their role in the story. As was first brought up in 'The Moonbase' but now comes into its own, they are the dead. The dead who will not stay dead. The length of time elapsed since the previous story allows them to pass into folklore for the human protagonists, the same role Pharaohs played in the classic Gothic. On one level, ‘Tomb’ is a successor to those folk tales about the fool who thought he could make a deal with death – and the fairly inevitable consequences which ensue.

The two conversations the Doctor has with Victoria about his age might seem like general characterisation, incidentally placed inside convenient gaps in proceedings. In fact they fully reflect this story's themes. Firstly, look at their context. As we never see inside the archaeologists' rocket ship, the Tardis becomes the only interior other than the Tomb. And, just as she does with the Tomb, Victoria sees inside the Tardis for the first time. There's even a similar emphasis on the two sets of swing-doors opening, and on her as she steps through them. The two become opposite poles.

The Doctor tells her first his age, then that he can remember his long-gone relatives “when I want to. And that's the point really: I have to really want to... the rest of the time they... they sleep in my mind and I forget.” Of course this is the dead as they are supposed to be, living on as our memories. It contrasts with the Cyber Controllers anti-nature assertion “to die is unnecessary”.

Logic plays a large part here, a surprisingly large part when you consider it’s entombed in a narrative which makes no sense whatsoever. The bad guys, who've secretly come to awake the Cybermen, are members of the Brotherhood of Logicians. Their credo is “everything yields to logic”. And of course the Gothic surroundings make this into a curse. For in Gothic tradition rational thinking is always a curse, and curiosity kills archeologists as easily as cats. When the Doctor claims “some things are better left undone”, he's virtually reciting the Gothic credo that counters the Brotherhood.

In a neat twist, the code-barriers and traps that keep the explorers out of the Tomb turn out to be filters – like aptitude tests in job interviews. The Cybermen only want the brightest and best to gain access, the choicest goods for conversion. The hypnotic target wall found by Jamie symbolises the whole Tomb. It's the place that pulls at your attention like a magnet, until you've lost control of your own will. The Cybermen are ostensibly short on power. (Though they seem to have a rejuvenator ray in that very tomb. Perhaps it’s their best one so they don't like to use it much.) But there's an equivalence between power and curiosity, as if it's human curiosity which gets them up and running around again, as vampires gain sustenance from our blood.

However, this leads on to a point where the Gothic tradition and science fiction do not spark creatively so much as bumper crash. The Doctor cries to the Logician as he opens the vault “You fool! Why couldn't you leave it alone?” Perhaps an odd thing to say, seeing as he's just helped him do that very thing. He clearly suspects the man's motives, and has surmised the Cybermen still live, yet goes along with the whole thing anyway.

There is something half full/half empty about this. Of course it has to be the Doctor who performs such a vital story function; in a genre show he has to look like the protagonist. But let's generously go with the half full side. Moments before, the same man has shown the Doctor his notepad, and the Time Lord's curiosity cannot help but be aroused. The Doctor is as caught in the honey pot as everyone else, unable to heed his own warnings. (Though we lack a scene where he expresses regret over any of this.)

As logic and science are, in the Gothic tradition, the problem it stands to reason they cannot be part of the solution. The transitional 'Moonbase' Cybermen were offed by the appliance of science. Yet this time Polly's patented anti-Cyberman recipe is quite forgotten. This time the only thing that stops them is sheer brute force. (Luckily they have a forceful brute to hand. More of that anon.) There were even complaints on broadcast at the level of violence.

Though the Gothic exists to be a disruptive force its at root a conservative genre – quite literally, it wants to make things how they were. Inject it here and you turn everything almost completely upside down. In 'The Moonbase' its unquestioned that humans should have built the base and controlled the world's weather. It's just unlucky the Cybermen show up to misuse them. While in 'Tomb' the archeological expedition, before even asking whether it should have accepted funding from such shady sources, should never have set out. The rocket should not have landed, or even taken off from wherever it came from. Everyone should have stayed home and closed the curtains. The dead should have been left to lie, all doors left unopened. Just accept things as they are.

But of course, the Gothic appropriations tell only part of the story. The Gothic intrudes, but doesn't entirely over-write. The 'Tenth Planet' Cybermen, the Cybermen created to exemplify the growing influence of the machine, do not entirely go away or yield to their successors. While in 'meaning' terms the new Gothic might dilute the clarity of their earlier appearance, in story terms combining the two ingredients makes for a more-potent cocktail. The Cybermen become both undeath and unlife, the dead who won't stay down and the revolt of the machines.

And where the two unite is in the Cyberman motifs that fill the tomb walls (example above). For almost half the running time that's all we see of the buggers, but the story is made more effective for that. As described in the script, “the unchanging faces of the Cyberman motifs stare down at them from the walls” - and it serves to steep the atmosphere. It's the King's seal, the sign that proves we are in his domain, but at the same time the corporate brand. And both draw their power from the force of repetition, seen until they become both ubiquitous and near-subliminal. And have not corporate brands replaced Kings' seals, occupying our lives so prevalently that we stop noticing they are there?

This uniting is also exemplified by the much-celebrated bravura sequence of the Cybermen's emergence, their hatching mixing the organic with the metallic. They are literally switched on, by the pulling of a lever. But the dialogue also likens them to drone bees in a honeycomb, clustering round the Cyber Controller as their Queen.

The Return of the Living Racists

If there is less taken from 'Quatermass' than previous Cyber-instalments, there's something else borrowed from Nigel Kneale – the 1957 Hammer film 'The Abominable Snowman'. Kneale's interest lies less in the elusive Yeti themselves than in the varying motivations of the expedition members. Essentially, the British scientists are contrasted against the American financiers, one group wanting to study the creatures, the other to capture one and put it on show for bucks. It's a morality play, almost a kind of Tibetan pilgrimage, in which these different motivations lead to very different outcomes.

Pedler and Davis take this scenario, but split the American party into two. One group essentially become the military, the rocket ship crew who remain off-stage for much of the running time. (They mostly work like the cavalry in reverse, buggering off at the first sign of trouble.) But there's a third group, who (following Kneale) have financed the expedition for their own ends. Except what had been petty-minded greed here becomes lust for power. And, most infamously, instead of Americans - they’re now all non-white.

Hence the ongoing debate over whether this story is racist. Though quite why there has to be one is a bit of a mystery. Let's spell out what should be obvious. I do not imagine... I shouldn't think anybody is imagining that Pedler and Davis were secret white hood wearers determined to port their supremacist agenda onto teatime TV. The racism is almost certainly unthinking. Some have tried to use this as some sort of defence, as if unthinkingness exonerates the unthinking. It doesn't. It's not the intent that makes racism racist. It's the racism that makes racism racist.

What's more its sweepingly racist. Klieg and Kaftan (yes, really, Kaftan, see above) are some unspecified form of Arabic or Asian. (Kaftan, see above, is introduced in the script as “a dark-haired Middle-Eastern woman”.) As if that were not enough, they're then given a giant, monosyllabic black “manservant” - Toberman. Whose main duty seems to be to impose. (Though he branches out into a bit of lurking every now and then.) Why offend someone when you can just offend everybody?

And as for the widespread fannish defence that 'Tomb' was merely “of it's time”... This airy excuse ignores that these episodes were broadcast in 1967, where (just one example) the Black Panthers had formed the previous year. Who were both aware of racism and opposed to it, as I recall. But not only do these blithe references to “the past” blindly disregard any actual consideration of those times, not only do they ignore previous developments in 'Doctor Who', they even ignore previous developments in 'Doctor Who' made by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis!

Of course, we've already seen how both their previous Cyberman stories indulging in ludicrously stereotyped Frenchies and Italians. Of course, they took the 'Star Trek' supposition about pluralism – that in the future we're all be past racism, but someone British or American will naturally remain in charge.

Perhaps you could even argue that this was a reconsolidation of power, a tactical retreat in the face of Civil Rights demands. (“Okay, you can have one black woman aboard. But she just does the phones, okay?”) But this is where the phrase “of it's time” can be used genuinely - in those times such baby steps arguably were advances. And when even so limited advances are followed by a 'don't trust the darkies' plotline, we've gone from “I have a dream” to “still stuck in the same nightmare” in one easy trip.

Comments on the storyline's racism normally focus on Toberman, a stereotype almost the gargantuan size of the actor playing him. And this may initially seem the most egregious example. But the depiction of Klieg and Kaftan, if less in your face, is actually worse. For they mark the point where the storyline breaks most from its Gothic inheritance. And its at that point the story loses even its threadbare semi-defence of merely regurgitating racist cliches, of reflecting outdated notions past their sell-by.

In Gothic fiction, Arabs would have been custodians of the Tomb. They might have died loyal deaths, fled in superstitious fear or treacherously set the party up for undead ambush. But in all those roles they would have seen those reawakened tomb dwellers as their natural masters. The old Gothic narrative of great immortal kings served by successive eras of retainers, like an earthbased equivalent to a generation starship, at least paid ancient civilisations some kind of compliment. The most backhanded of compliments, true, but a compliment nonetheless. To misquote the Wu-Tang Clan, that Ancient Egypt ain't nuthin' ta fuck with.

But 'Tomb' arose in a post-imperial era, so they get their roles reassigned. The Suez crisis had been a generation before, but the show was still broadcast to the country it had changed. In which the new African and Asian nations were endlessly presented as the upstarts of the world stage, destabilising influences, dissatisfied with the constraints of merely formal independence and now ungratefully after some actual agency. This is the moment of truth in the “of its time” defence. Yes, the racism is of its time and not some completely different time. They’re right. But they’re describing a racism they imagine they’re exonerating.

And how do Klieg and Kaftan try to establish this agency? With money. Their role in funding the expedition, and their belief this puts them in charge, is established almost straight away. Kaftan's offer of a cash bonus leads someone to rush into becoming the first fatality. It gets almost endlessly reiterated after that, in ructions with reassuringly well-spoken and white-skinned expedition leader Parry. (A direct successor to Doctor Barclay in 'The Tenth Planet'.) The script also states that Kaftan “speaks with an almost aristocratic air,” and you've probably already guessed which word I'm focusing on there.

True, this in some ways does go back to Victorian fiction, where heroes were decent sorts from noble birth, adventurers unshackled to day jobs. The aristocratic Doctor himself is an inheritor of this tradition, an inheritance which allows him to continue his personal adventures without Parry's need for backers.

Whereas, what was the Asian stereotype of the day? Of course it was the shopkeeper, the pennywise small businessman, the avaricious bean-counter. Money was at this time often seen like some equivalent of the psychic paper in later 'Who', getting people in positions where they had no natural right to be. Here, some quite contemporary ingredients are being used to thicken that old recipe for Gothic racist stew. And they sour an already unpalatable taste.

In short, Klieg and Kaftan's lust for power is predicated upon their being people in whom power would not naturally reside. So they attempt the unnatural, they try to usurp power. And after they've given up flashing money, they appropriate a Cyber-gun. Indeed, there's almost an equivalence found between the two. (“I am invulnerable with this. I shall be the master!”)

This isn't the earlier poster image of all countries pulling together, to staff scientific bases on the moon. This is the impoverished nations of Africa and Asia trying to escape Western domination by running to the only other show in town, the Soviets, and realising too late they've stepped into a still-deeper tar pit. (“You belong to us,” the Cybermen flatly tell them. “You will be like us.”) In this analogy the Cyber-gun would of course be the Bomb, the short-cut to getting noticed on the world stage. (“Now they will have to listen,” exults Klieg.)

It’s important not to take these two readings of the story – a metaphysical tale of how we face death and a geopolitical analogy – as rival or even separate explanations. Instead, each is effectively catalysed by the other. Many of the story elements resemble the vastly inferior ‘Daleks’ Master Plan’. The alliance hopelessly reliant on honour among thieves, the MacGuffin as bomb analogy. But the Daleks of ‘Master Plan’ are merely the baddest of a bad lot. The Cybermen of ‘Tomb' are a whole other thing, clearly beyond their ostensible allies.

Similarly, parables about death are so universal they can feel removed. You can’t bargain with death to just strike down your enemies, of course you can’t, it would be like trying to reason with a storm. Compounding them with a political analogy, giving characters the drive and fanaticism to pursue such a thing, it gives the theme a purchase in our lives.

And yet other elements undermine that reading. For one thing, as we've seen, the closer you get to them the less the Cybermen look like stand-in Reds. Moreover, for it to work Klieg and Kaftan would have to be the poor relations of the expedition, Cinderellas awaiting their chance to shine. But it's almost the opposite. The script gives them power solely to suggest they shouldn't really be holding it. Instead of being the servants they, and they alone, have a servant. (See how they’re willing to exploit the labour-power of black people. Why, they aren't like us at all...)

If they're like anything from the Third World they're like the elites of those countries, demonised for doing what the First and Second Worlds do routinely, just on a smaller and more immediate scale. Their problem is that the Cybermen are more like them than they are, more ruthlessly driven by the pursuit of logic and power.

Which leads to an interesting element to this story, which further derails the notion that its racism is in any way incidental. While the Cybermen hog the title, and clearly are more monstrous, its Klieg and Kaftan who are the actual villains. Kaftan suggests early they split up to shadow the Doctor and his companions, and in many ways they become those shadows. The megalomaniac Klieg is the opposite of the wise but softly spoken Doctor, whose MO is “keeping my eyes open and my mouth shut”. Notably, that staple 'Who' scene, the clash-of-values conversation the Doctor has with evil, is held with Klieg rather than the Cyber Controller.

Kaftan, meanwhile, is cunning and alluringly duplicitous against Victoria's wide-eyed innocence and trust. While for their part the Cybermen become almost like the shadows to Klieg and Kaftan. When they are inevitably killed by the Cybermen, it’s almost literally their own greed and arrogance killing them – merely given humanoid form.

While Toberman (above) is strong like Jamie only more so. But then Toberman is different all round...

Toberman's status as a servant, the fact that formally speaking he has no agency, ironically gives him a unique significance in the story. While Klieg and Kaftan's role has been to get everyone deeper in trouble, he revolts against his Cyber-conditioning to get them out of it. Most commenters see this as stemming from their killing Kaftan, his “mistress”, rather than over the conversion thing they've done to him.

More worryingly still, it also seems to stem from the Doctor's urging. He's told “they've tried to make you their slave”, as if something different was happening before. He even repeats the Doctor's words as if in some hypnotic trance (“Evil!... Destroyed!”), as if he's less being de-conditioned than re-conditioned. Which of course leaves us with that hoary old cliché of a black man sacrificing himself for some nice white folks, because he's been told to. How noble, how heroic. How fortunate it didn't have to be to one of us.

Nevertheless, there is one aspect to all this which, while continuing to foreground Toberman as someone black, is perhaps less problematic. As mentioned earlier, even in their new Gothic incarnation the Cybermen still represent the power of the machine. And Toberman is the only character in the story to suffer conversion. As Tomb of the Anorak points out, he has a name only two letters away from 'Cyberman'.

His climactic fight with the Cyber Controller, his wrecking of the control panels, in some ways recalls Frankenstein's rebellious Creature. This comparison of course underpins the racist notion – perhaps the ultimate racist notion – that he's somehow less human. Yet it also recalls John Henry, the strong black labourer who raced against a steel drill, a machine built to do a man's job, and died in victory. Here the steel drill is merely given humanoid form.

Notably, virtually the final shot is of Toberman lying dead on the ground, while the Cyberman icon remains on the upright tomb doors. (The only place where the icon is a full figure.) It's the brand, the exemplifier of the machine, which remains. The Cybermen aren't dead, because they can’t be, the Doctor's merely switched them back into stand-by mode.

Admittedly, when considering the racism, it should be conceded no-one here gets what you'd call a developed part. If the Gothic showed an interest in human psychology it zeroed in on flaws and rarely attempted anything approaching characterisation. Mostly what we get served here are stereotypes, you know pretty much everything about everyone from their first scene. There's no development, rites of passage, character 'journeys' or anything remotely similar. The situation at the end is almost the very same as at the beginning, except that more people are dead.

This doesn't matter so much for the story-specific guest cast. But Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling struggle with badly underwritten parts for both Jamie and Victoria. In one particularly absurd scene, Victoria obligingly steps into a death trap of her own accord. (Will there be a future episode where she offers to tie herself to a railway line? “Which knots would you like me to use, Doctor?”)

As alluded to earlier, even the introductory scenes for Victoria tend to really be about the Doctor. And by this point, conversely to all else, Troughton is taking to his role as the Doctor with relish, dominating every scene without ever seeming to. And he has one line which seems his disruptive credo - “the best thing about a machine that makes sense is you can very easily make it turn out nonsense”. It's almost an exact inversion of Klieg's “everything yields to logic”. Perhaps ultimately that's what the Doctor managed to do to science fiction, take one of the most post-Enlightenment of genres and switch its lights off.

When Good Art Turns Bad

Truth to tell, when something is this racist it grates more than a little to simultaneously be saying how nice the set design is. Yet when good art has bad content we do need some variant on the old saying “hate the sin, love the sinner”. The racism cannot be overlooked, explained away or excused, and those that try are part of the problem. But at the same time the racism is not the sum total of the episodes. How can it coexist with the things we may want to engage with?

There is a an argument most often made in bad faith, but is at root genuine. If we airbrush away all from the past that now seems unsightly to us, we will be sanitising the past. We’ll be lying to ourselves, and worse - we will leave ourselves unable to see how far we have come, which only increases the risk of our falling back. There’s a balance to be struck. We don’t want ’Birth of a Nation’ broadcast to tots at teatime. But neither can we pretend that such a thing was never made.

In short, how do we react when good art turns bad? Perhaps George Orwell has some answers. Let's turn to his 1944 essay 'Benefit of Clergy' on the then-shocking art of Salvador Dali...

“It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people… So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.”

...which is hopefully a point of general agreement. But Orwell continues...

“Not, of course, that Dali… ought to be suppressed… it is doubtful policy to suppress anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation… He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.” 

The comparison is of course inexact. Despite the widespread wailing about ‘cancel culture’ no-one to my knowledge has suggested DVDs of ‘Tomb’ should be burnt. And unlike Dali’s carefully calculated outrage, the truly shocking thing about ‘Tomb’ is that it seems to regard its racism as perfectly unremarkable. But the comparison is there.

The route out of this impasse lies in that phrase “a symptom of the world’s illness”. ’Tomb of the Cybermen’ is a symptom of the world’s illness. And symptoms are useful to Doctors. We should worry less about what it tells us about Pedler and Davis and more about what it tells us of late Sixties British society. In short we should be taking the “of-it’s-time” defence and reversing it, turning it from a supposed shut-down into the starting point of our enquiry. How could such a thing be made at this time? Did no-one see the problems? Did audiences not object?

One possible weakness of this approach is that it is self-selecting. We are scarcely likely to start spending our spare time watching old episodes of ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’, just to assess their role as cultural barometers. But what might be a weakness might also be an advantage.

The really remarkable thing about ‘Tomb’ is how much it jars against the Whoniverse’s self-image, which extends into the self-image of it’s fans. (Hence of course the widespread disavowals.) It’s precisely because Pedler and Davis elsewhere exhibited relatively progressive views that they exacerbate the ire in some and the excuse reflex in others. But more pertinently it tells us something about the extent of casual racism in late Sixties Britain, that it had not retreated to retrograde elements – it could still hide in plain sight.

And, rather than be a problem to overcome, in many ways this lays out what is interesting about 'Doctor Who'. Of course huge swathes of what is nominally SF merely transpose the tropes of colonial fiction into a new setting – troublesome dark tribesmen becoming equally troublesome green skins. It's just to be expected. You could point it out with your eyes closed.

But 'Who', a product of the 'enlightened' BBC, was always implicitly promising to do better than that. So it follows that its limits and inconsistencies will form a rough and ready map of the limits and inconsistencies of the contemporary liberal mind. Not to crow at their imperfections. Still less to try and outdo one another in after-the-fact indignation. But to navigate the past by that map.

So the racism is a fairly hefty hurdle to get over. Mileage may vary on it. If you do manage to get past that, then this story does genuinely become something of a classic. Pedler and Davis's stories can often feel the epitome of early 'Who', simultaneously iconic and absurd, inventive and cliched. Looked at functionally, the plot is really a whole lot of running around, in which rather predictable people do rather predictable things in order to push everything along. (The Doctor manages to be both predictable and inconsistent, surely some triumph.) But that might well be the frame rather than the picture.

What you remember is the set-pieces and images, which gain a resonance that rises above all of that. Perhaps what most epitomises this story is that no new music was recorded for it. Yet the 'Space Adventure' Cyber-theme is so best matched to the awakening Cybermen, that it always feels as if it must have been purposely written for it. It's the sequence of the Troughton Cybermen. Overall, by Gothing up the Cybermen, Pedler and Davis gave them an endurance and longevity they would never otherwise have possessed. While the show itself would return to the Gothic again and again.

ON DIGITAL EXILE (A RESPONSE TO LAURA PENNY)

Laurie Penny is, to my mind, a good writer. And their recent article, ‘There Are Lots Of Ways To Tell A Story’, is worth looking at. You can read it now, if you want. I’ll wait here…

…okay, done? Penny may well be smarter than me. (Not flattery, just a low bar.) But I’ve a perspective they don’t. I am part of “the last generation of that demographic to reach adulthood before social media”, the age where I’ve experienced the world without and then with the net. And from that perspective this is my way of telling the story…

First, we should always make clear that if more people are getting to say stuff, the problem for the Right isn’t what they say but that they get to say it. The only things they should be permitted to say are applications to join the in-group, professions of loyalty to our great nation, to the Royal family and so on. (Well, you know, the white Royals.) With the caveat that acceptance of such professions can only be provisional, the test reapplicable at any time. Difference alone is not seen as an inherent problem, provided there is social hierarchy to manage it. It’s threats to their hierarchy which antagonises them.

By comparison, in the segregated Southern states, no-on ever questioned black people’s right to vote. That was constitutionally guaranteed. It was just a matter of denying black people’s ability to vote, that was all. And the appearance of fairness without the messy real-world ramifications, surely that was best. But then some bolshy troublemakers tried to give those theoretical rights real-world consequences, boorish oafs with the effrontery to make us say the quiet part out loud.

Hence the common conceit that “freedom of speech” is when they speak, and “cancel culture” is when we imagine we then get a turn. It’s no good pointing this out to them and expecting them to change. It’s not a twist of logic they’ve concocted to serve their ends. It’s what they honestly think, and they genuinely don’t see why it should be a problem. This is what makes them our enemies.

Circling closer to the point, people can over-estimate the importance of the net. (It’s slightly unclear how much Penny’s piece is personal recollections, and how much intended as analysis of general trends.) Everything new and unfamiliar can get loaded onto it, the way my parents’ generation fretted over that funny pop music. The rise of social media came about with as many push factors (the decline of the high street, of the local pub etc.) as there were pull.

But the elephant in the room is neoliberalism. With organised labour defeated, society was reduced to an agglomeration of individuals, where everyone’s just in it for themselves. The atomised world of social media, with it’s endless formalised and fruitless debates, came to provide a handy form to match this content. But it’s not causal, things would have gone this way without it.

The drift from Right to Far Right is of course largely down to the paranoid feeling among the privileged that their privilege may be under threat. Privilege so hard-wired into their world-view they perceive any questioning of it as oppression. 

But it’s also due to a fantasy of belonging. In a way, they have won too much, even for them. They sense at some level that their victory has come at a cost, so in a world they own almost outright they become nostalgic for before. We can all be alike again, just like it all used to be, once we get the unlike back in their place, just like it all used to be. So, not for the first time, they blame the consequences of their actions on us.

There’s an argument which, these days, seems to constantly need making. If anti-fascists fight back against fascists, yes both may well be fighting, but that doesn’t make them equivalent. The anti-fascists are still anti-fascists, that’s why they’re opposing the fascists, and that does make a bit of a difference really. To understand something, you need to recognise it has a content as well as a form.

Yet it’s equally true, and at times just as necessary, to say things have a form as well as a content. And products of technology are a classic example. There’s the absurd, reactionary and widespread notion that technology is politically neutral, that it comes off some conveyor belt called ‘progress’ in a linear fashion. So responses to it can only be binary, an all-embracing yes to product upgrades one and all, or a desire to go off and live in a teepee.

To take an obvious example, a society powered by renewable energy could work from a decentralised network. It doesn’t absolutely have to, of course, but it could do. Whereas a nuclear-powered society definitely could not. And strangely enough, nuclear power is given far greater funding, is subject to far less regulatory control, than renewable energy. If I say I prefer the path of renewable energy, I am not being ‘anti-technology’, I’m favouring one type of technology above another.

But the notion that technology is politically neutral at the point of innovation, that it starts to have political effects only when its put in place, is scarcely any less reactionary. Technology is always scoped out, invested in. There’s no automatic correlation between investment and result, but only investment can lead to result.

And there’s a history in radical thought of assuming one mode of production will simply supplant another, reshape the society it comes into contact with and capitalism will go the way of Windows 95. In 1935 the great radical thinker Walter Benjamin wrote the classic ‘The Work Of Art In the Era Of Mechanical Reproduction’, in which he argued…

“The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.”

In short, the argument is that the mass medium of film leads inherently to more contemplative, and hence more critical audiences. And this will be true across the arts. And I’m going to suggest it didn’t work out that way.

The angle’s seductive partly because it offers victory. Though it isn’t and can never be part of our thinking that some kind of cavalry will ride in to our rescue, we either liberate ourselves or we are not liberated. But also, and more saliently for here, because at first sight it seems materialist. We don’t need to wait for people to just change their minds one day, according to arbitrary and subjective processes. Our minds are after all shaped by real-world encounters, so different encounters will re-shape them. 

But this is at best a vulgar materialism, as mechanistic as the film projector. Marx criticised it from the start…

“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.”

Or, at another point, “If man is formed by circumstances, then we must humanise the circumstances.”

And the net gives us a particular twist on this. It sprang, more or less, from academia and initially followed those principles. It wasn’t set up with the idea that we’d learn what it felt like to be autistic or gender-fluid or convey any other subjective form of experience. But it was set up to spread the free flow of information, so we could learn when the fall of Rome had been, and at the press of a button. At the time academia was generally thought of as something higher-minded than the tawdry world of commerce, something to benefit society not just stimulate the economy.

I can remember that era, where people would exult over the ‘digital Wild West’. And me pointing out that it was the Wild West which became modern corporate America. And them telling me I didn’t understand how the next worked. Which perhaps I didn’t. But I did, on the other hand, understand how capitalism worked.

The net was set up to be decentralised, so information could be spread rather than corralled. But in it’s early days capitalism enclosed the commons, evicting those who lived on them, sometimes burning out those who didn’t leave quickly enough. It changed the principles the commons were run by, by a combination of money and force. (Inasmuch as they’re different things.)

Similarly, the digital commons of the internet have now been divided up into a series of enclosures, with Musk, Zuckerberg et al as the landlords. They may be willing to de-padlock and grant you admittance but on their terms, and demanding registration if not remuneration. Banning, or digital exile, has become by fiat of digital landlords. In some ways it’s a benefit that Musk is such a gormless blowhard, because he fails so badly at disguising this. And this was precisely the case with enclosed land back then, it was only ever the undesirables they wanted to keep out.

There was no perfect past, of course. Back in 2005 Brighton’s (since defunct) radical info news-sheet ’Rough Music’ had their website under threat. Some antagonist was persistently going to their ISP to claim they broke it’s terms of service. Which, rather than spend time and money investigating, would normally just close them down. But they could, and did, respond by going to a new ISP, in a continuing game of cat and mouth.

Whereas more recently, the radical news site It’s Going Down was banned from Twitter by Musk. (At the same time he brought back Trump, and other far right nuts. This is of course what “free speech absolutism” normally means.) They had already been banned from Facebook, in 2020. True, they still have their own website. But with the way the modern internet works, that’s like being allowed to open a shop provided its not on the high street.

And significantly this enclosing of the digital commons has come hand-in-hand with a new enclosing of the physical commons. Here in Brighton the main shopping centre, Churchill Square, is officially private property. You can be ordered out of it at any time, with no reason given, and no right of redress.

Meanwhile… I have no direct contact with academia, but I’m told from those that do that it has also become run by the principles of neoliberalism, with tenure a bygone word, where journals are profit-gouging, where targets for publishing research are set, where it’s understood research should be benefiting “the market” in some way.

We have freedom of speech, officially sanctified. But the ground we stand on, as soon as they stop liking what we say, they’ll try to take from under us.

THE PHYSICS HOUSE BAND (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope and Ruin, Brighton
Fri 9th Dec

’Star Trek’, it seems, was wrong. You can change the laws of physics. It just takes you five years. At least that’s the length of time it’s been since I last saw the Physics House Band, and they do now sound quite different. In the intervening time, they’ve lost a bass player. There’s literallya space mid-stage where he stood. Which has changed their chemistry…. No, wait, that ruins the metaphor.

The guitarist now goes in for more power riffs. Which is actually a pretty smart solution to losing a bass player. The traditional rock-sound distinction is that the bass will play the beat and the guitar the melody, while a riff just lumbers in and does away with all that.

They’ve also replaced the bass with more saxophone. I’m not sure how that works, but it has. As the guitar rips into riffs the sax plays squalls above it. Which sounds counter-intuitive but works well. Think of a ballerina pirouetting around atop a Howitzer tank. Or something like that, anyway. When they do this it works very, very well. However… 

They have often tended to peaks-and-valleys dynamics, something they npw do much more. And it was these sections which didn’t work for me. As the record shows I’ve been uneven in my response to this band. Which I suspect is more down to my subjective responses than their ability to do things right. And I found my response had become more uneven than it had been before.

A lot of music I like has no forward momentum, such as the minimalism of Reich or Glass. It can be fun to screw with time that way, to write numbers which effectively stop clocks. But if the music’s not moving, in any conventional sense, you have to like it where you are. And the view from these valleys simply didn’t do it for me.

Bands need to move on, and they’re not under any obligation to take you with them when they do. But I guess myself and the Physics House Band have now parted ways.

SVANKMAJER’S ‘ALICE’

The Real Surreal

If you wanted a central image to separate this ’Alice’, by Surrealist Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, from more standard adaptations, take a central one – the White Rabbit himself. Rabbits can lend themselves to cuteness, they’re sometimes given to children as pets. But this is quite pointedly a stuffed rabbit, a taxidermy exhibit, with frequent references to its spilling sawdust innards and regular close-ups of its sharp chomping teeth.

It’s too easy to contrast him against the fluffy Disney version, so let’s instead use the gentleman in fur of Tenniel’s original illustration. This version isn’t something I’d be following down any holes, looking more like something more from an anxiety dream than Wonderland. (A word notably missing from Svankmajer’s title.) We might want to ask, where would such a critter come from?

If Svankmajer was a Surrealist, Lewis Carroll was often cited by that movement as a precursor. He was name-checked by Breton, the movement’s self-appointed Pope; made the subject of a 1931 essay by Louis Aragon; his Alice was twice painted by Max Ernst (if not terribly recognisably), and Carroll’s own drawings were even included in their 1936 New York exhibition. 

But were they finding a fellow traveller or press-ganging him into their service? To me the best take on ’Alice’ remains Mark Fisher’s. Beneath all the clean pinafores and innocence of youth lies an absurdist work, “the precursor of Kafka”. Which is precisely why it appeals to children...

“There is the feeling that Wonderland is Alice's world alone, yet she has no place in it. She is always late, in the way, misunderstanding what ought to be obvious… The adult world as seen by children is, precisely, a Nonsense world, incomprehensibly inconsistent, arbitrary and authoritarian, full of bizarre rituals.”

It’s vital, I think, to understand that at least the majority of the characters she encounters are stand-in adults. While the ever-analysed White Rabbit doesn’t really stand for any thing, not even Alice’s curiosity. The whole point of him is that he can’t be caught up with. Forever just out of reach, the elusive nature of answers.

And Absurdist isn’t the same thing as Surreal. A Surrealist Wonderland would be thrilling and transformative but also dangerous and destructive. While Carroll’s is ultimately confounding, sinister and incomprehensible. And this brings risk of appropriation. The same way the later hippie generation appropriated Alice into a reductive metaphor for drugs.

Wells famously stripped his film version of Kafka’s ’The Trial’ (1962) of any of the standard period detail. Similarly Svankmajer doesn’t de-Victorianise ’Alice’ so much as domesticate it down, strip it of any Technicolour Oz-like grandeur. For example, turning the famous fall down the rabbit hole into a descending lift. The majority of the film was shot in his own house.

Though there’s a bigger difference. The now-famous book Alice’s sister reads, as we all know, has no pictures or conversation in it. While the book Alice appears in is full to bursting with both. It’s stuffed with wordplay, while the film is (typically for Svankmajer) largely silent. But those visual symbols, occupy much the same place as words did for Carroll.

And much of Carroll’s approach is to treat nonsense consistently. If there is such a thing as Mock Turtle soup, it follows there must be a Mock Turtle to make it from. And the film follows similar lines. The White Rabbit is stuffed with sawdust, so when he eats he swallows more of the stuff.

A World Of Symbols

The film opens pretty much like the book - the summer’s day, the riverbank, the accompanying adult/older sister (it scarcely matters which), the book without pictures or illustration. The only addition is to show Alice diffidently tossing stones in the river, as if to alleviate her boredom. But then, when so many scenes from the book don’t make the screen, we get a Svankmajer invention - Alice effectively duplicating all this in her room. The toys and other items around her then become the cast list for the film. As Caryn James of the New York Times has said, it’s “a world of symbols come alive.”

Combined with which, throughout the film only Alice is played by an actor. Everyone and everything else is portrayed by puppetry or stop-motion. Plus, while the book is written in the third person, she narrates the film. As she also provides the dialogue, she’s both omnipotent narrator and lost intruder. And she makes little attempt to provide voices for others, they simply speak with her voice.

All of which is like child’s play, an attempt to make sense of the wilder world using toys as diminutive props. Alice spies on the bizarre happenings, but her face is stoic. Which upholds the central irony, that this world is made by Alice’s imagination yet she remains uncomprehending of it. Basic functions, such as opening drawers, work for other characters but not her. That deadpan scrutinising look, the “what can this be about”, is familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with children.

That emphasis on drawers, often using them as portals, may be because adults often try to keep children out of them, storing not-for-play objects in them. (One is shown containing scissors).

We’ve seen before two Surrealist devices as least as common as dreams, both of which come up here. One’s the single often-youthful explorer of a huge, multi-roomed house, as in the painting of Dorothea Tanning. The other’s the charged object. Which simply animates well.

Child animism is, at root, the presumption that all objects have their own life. And behind much of Svankmajer is an audaciously simple idea, that stop-motion animation is a perfect means to convey this. You can even take the object the child sees and bring it to life, or at least a kind of life. How easily an old sock and some false teeth can turn into a Caterpillar! What often seem the medium’s limitations, its jerky quality, its sense of animate unreality, suddenly transform into advantages.

‘Uncanny valley’ is used to describe the awkward interchange between cartoony symbols and realism, between a smiley face and a photo-realist portrait. And there’s something equally neither/nor at work here. It all seems to slip and slide, elude any categories we try to give it.

Much has been written about how CGI ‘smoothness’ is the special effect of neoliberalism, a spectacle which creates a disjunction between ‘realism’ and the real. In such an era, to see extemporising being foregrounded, pointedly showing false teeth attaching to a sock to make up a Caterpillar like giving away a magic trick, feels like being a thirsty person who’s fallen on water.

One of the more ambiguous cases for the child, and interestingly one we tend to push on them, is automata. Things that move, surely they must live. And both the Mad Hatter and March Hare are portrayed by automata. One has a wind-up key in his back, the other very visible strings. Their repetitive chatter and behaviour becomes like the stock dialogue of wind-up toys.

But unlike most adaptations this isn’t aimed at children. (Alice even makes a gag of this in her introduction.) Which raises the question, if this is all about child perspective, why tell us? When we mostly gave up on socks being sentient a while ago. The answer’s in something else Alice tells us in her introduction - “Close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see anything”.

Like many Surrealist phrases, this might seem an invitation to dream, dream dream your days away. But these dreams are not sweet. It’s more an injunction to close our eyes against the things we have decided we know, to shut out the consensus reality we have built. Svankmajer has said his practice was to keep hold of the way he saw the world when he was seven. (We already looked at his earlier short ‘The Flat’, which has a similar character-vs-objects duality yet with an adult protagonist.)

The Three Alices 

But at the same time as a look back to child psychology this a film about the changes brought by adolescence. Alice doesn’t just change size, she’s always awkwardly the wrong size for her world, too big or too small. (Though some of this occurs in the book I don’t think it was Carroll’s original intention.)

If we say many images are sexually suggestive, we don’t need to find too precise analogies. The soon-pierced clingfilm lid of the jam jar could represent a hymen, for example. But the drawing pin then found in the jam just conveys the general sense that sex is ‘dangerous’. After all, you suggest to get away from saying. (Needless to say, when the actor is a child this skirts dodgy territory. But overall it stays the right side of the line.)

Perhaps as one way of reconciling these themes, the size-shifting makes Alice seem almost three different characters – Regular Alice, Big Alice and Little Alice. This last one is (in another Svankmajer invention) represented by a doll and is most integrated into Wonderland, obeying the White Rabbit which Regular Alice chases. Unlike Little Alice, the existence of Regular Alice is forever contingent, yet in this strange world has nothing to pin that contingency on.

Big Alice is stuck in a room (see up top), but in a narrative flip then defends it against a siege by the White Rabbit and assorted creatures of Wonderland. It’s as if it’s become her body, which she safeguards against violation. When she’s attacked the imagery strongly suggests sexual assault, skull teeth tugging at her skirt.

”Say What You’re Supposed To Say” 

Carroll refers to his lead’s “good-natured anxiety”. And accounts of the film often refer to Alice’s passivity, how she wanders a world she finds no way to engage with. Yet this disregards Big Alice, and the final trial scene where Regular Alice effectively transforms into Big Alice. While other scenes see bigger changes, the changes made here seem most significant.

In the book it’s the Knave who’s placed on trial. But the focus is more on the absurd and chaotic nature of the proceedings. It’s a trial run by those with no notion of how a trial runs, and no intention of admitting it, so such details become ambiguous. Alice starts growing inadvertently, which gives her the gumption to challenge proceedings.

In the film it’s her who’s the accused, with the whole trial based around nailing her, the jury essentially a jeering mob. Literally given a script to read (an admission and plea for mercy) and told “say what you’re supposed to say” she refuses, and mocks the court by eating one of the tarts, the very thing she’s accused of. She adopts a cheeky grim, as familiar on a child’s face as the deadpan curiosity, yet the first time we see it. She shakes her head and in that motion briefly becomes the creatures of Wonderland, as if she’s come to realise where they’re from.

In this scene everything is brought to a head, which turns out to be her head. She overcomes Wonderland by realising, at the very same time it’s been a strange and foreign world, it has been part of her all along. Her very last line, about cutting the White Rabbit’s head off next time, suggests the old Alice who hopelessly followed him is gone, that her adventures have crowned her the Queen of her own imagination. That’s Surreal, that is.

Much of Svankmajer’s appeal is that he isn’t a modern film-maker who’s been influenced by Surrealism, he’s simply a Surrealist artist. And if he could make a film as fully Surrealist as this in the Eighties, surely someone could make one now. (Okay the accursed marketisation of film funding works against this. But that’s an external constraint, not a creative one. It’s not impossible for an artist today to think as a Surrealist, the way it would be with say a Constructivist.)

And Surrealist versions of Alice always work best when transforming the original explicitly. There’s a reason, after all, adaptations are called adaptations, not transpositions. If we wanted to get back to the book we could just read the book. The original Czech title was ’Something From Alice’, stating quite explicitly it was never intended as a straightforward adaptation from page to screen. 

But the last thing it does is take an innocent Victorian children's tale and messes with its skirts. It would be truer to say it takes a dark Absurdist drama and finds it a happy ending.

NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S ‘HIEROGLYPHS - UNLOCKING ANCIENT EGYPT’ EXHIBITION

...in fact it teatures precisely one exhibit, a relief from the Karnak Temple, which depicts the defeat of the Libyans, photographed by my good self which characteristic ineptitude. 

The two figures are the sort of thing we expect to see in Ancient Egyptian art, standard hieratic profile view. Yet that rearing horse deominates the image. And more importantly both sets of its legs are doubled. The motion effect which adds to the sense of it rearing up mid battle.

It’s an effect mostly associated with Futurist art of the early twentieth century, for example Boccioni’s ’The Charge of the Lancers’ (1915, above). This image looks more eye-popping because the effect is used more extensively. In fact everything seems to lead out from the body of that horse, enhanced by the dark-to-pale colour gradation.

While at Karnak Temple the effect is never used anywhere else. It’s perhaps not clearly visible in my hurried photo, but it’s not used on those falling and feeling figures, which are all kept integral. Yet they’re such a jumble, you have to scrutinise the work quite hard to realise they’re not. (An effect possibly heightened by the contrast between them and the neat columns of hieroglyphs.) The whirlygig blur of battle looks very much the intended effect.

Art from this era is usually almost anti-dynamic, it’s impassive, ritualistic. To quote Wikipedia: “Artworks served an essentially functional purpose that was bound with religion and ideology. To render a subject in art was to give it permanence. Therefore, ancient Egyptian art portrayed an idealized, unrealistic view of the world. There was no significant tradition of individual artistic expression since art served a wider and cosmic purpose of maintaining order… It is also very conservative: the art style changed very little over time.” In short, it exists to say ”this is so”.

Here, not so much. A more dynamic art suggests a more volatile world. So how to explain this multi-legged horse? Options include

i) “A useful reminder not to over-generalise over the culture of an ancient civilisation, especially one which went on for so many centuries.”

ii) “It’s interesting, but you can’t extrapolate that much from a single example. For all we know popular reaction could have been befuddlement, and the artist firmly told to count the number of horse’s legs the next time.”

iii) “The answer’s obvious. A Futurist artist had a time machine, duh.”

iv) “Shut up Gavin, no-one cares about this sort of thing apart from you.”

‘OBJECTS OF DESIRE: SURREALISM + DESIGN 1924 - TODAY’

Design Museum, London

“There already are enough useful objects designed to perfectly fulfil their function, what I am looking for is to communicate and interact with the object.”
- Cinzia Rugger

Lobster Telephones That Ring

“Although Surrealism is often seen as escapist”, this show points out, “its founders were more interested in changing perceptions of reality.” Well of course! It’s a shame it still needs to be said, but as it does it’s better to say it. And there seems little doubt that the movement’s popular association with painting and drawing is because they’re associated with escaping into another world.

Design, though? It also says “Surrealism liberates design from the rational and utilitarian.” I hate to be a killjoy. But don’t we want design to be a bit utilitarian, or at least useable?

Dali’s famous Lobster Telephone isn’t just here but adorning the poster. We’re told that Edward James commissioned eleven of them for his various residences, which do seem to have been working models. But even if we still had cradle phones, let’s face it you wouldn’t want one of the cumbersome things yourself, wrapping it round your head only to hear from some dodgy call centre calling themselves “your bank”.

The show quotes Isamu Noguchi, “everything is sculpture”. Which sounds more a Bauhaus statement than Surrealist. The Bauhaus credo was of course ‘form follows function’, which the show counters with ‘form follows fantasy’. But this ignores the degree to which Surrealism was intended as sabotage.

Take Many Ray’s famous ’Gift’ (1921, above). It clearly wasn’t designed to ever be used as an iron, but to be disruptive. Just like an actual iron like that would tear through shirts, Surrealism intends to tear through art and society. Strictly its Dada rather than Surreal, but the slippage between one and the other is considerable. And as Dada was anti-art, wouldn’t Surrealist design need to be anti-design?

Similarly, some of Duchamp’s readymades show up. But the whole point was to tear them from their function, sometimes quite literally, and put them somewhere where they didn’t fit. People have used his urinal for its original purpose, but only as a prank. It’s similar to the way that words, when taken in isolation, seem to descend into prattle. Duchamp wasn’t interested in them as works of design, nor of designing with them.

Furthermore, we use design as a synonym for plan, in phrases such as “by design”. Whereas Surrealist artists frequently worked by automatist (chance and/or unconscious) processes. You could claim that to come from the authentic Surreal region of art it needs to involve, as said of the recent ‘British Surrealism’ show, “artists surprised by what springs from their own hands.”

And further furthermore, early on the show gives us Dali’s ’Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ (1937, above). Even if we were to somehow miss it in the work, the focus on transformation’s there in the title. Things are not still or separate, but ever-changing, to the point where things aren’t really even things any more. The show refers to these as “ungoverned shapes”. How can you convey this with real world objects? 

As it turns out, you can. Dali’s ’Cats Cradle Hands’ chair (c. 1936) transforms its back into arms and hands. Or Meret Oppenheim’s ’Traccia’ (1939, both above) gives a table bird’s feet.

Ray and Charles Eames’ ’Moulded Plywood Sculpture’ (1943) has the sinuous curves often found in Surrealism, but almost works better for being ‘real’. They seem to flow so, the eye can’t really get a purchase on them and hopeless follows them round and round. It’s not a ceaseless Moebius strip, ever-twisty and ever-turny, but it still looks like one. Sculpture is surely, by definition, about solid and fixed objects. Well, not here.

In fact Surrealist artists had pretty much a penchant for realising in real life things they’d originally painted. Dali’s sofa of Mae West’s lips is on show here, but us Brighton folk are familiar with another version in our local Museum. So more interesting to me was Victor Brauner’s ’Psychological Space’ (1939, above). The show displays the original painting, from which he made that wolf table for a 1947 exhibition. Why do such a thing? A quote from Shiro Kuramata might come closer: “Enchantment should also be considered a function.”

As seen before, over the Tate’s recent ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ show, a large part of Surrealism was about having an almost animist relationship with charged objects. “Its perspective comes from recognising objects as entities; to be recognised, to enter into accordances with, the most humble modern objects seen as possessing spirits.”

It’s true that, to intensify this feeling, they tended to prefer objects whose origin was somehow mysterious, stumbled upon in flea markets and the like. But there’s nothing essential about this. It’s similar to the way couples can relish the tale of the unusual way they met, but that’s not essential to being in a couple.

However, you don’t have to think about this for very long before you realise you’re being asked to treat functional things as though they were some combination of art object and magical force. The problem then becomes that the designer can’t pre-determine this relationship, which is all between the object and the user.

And speaking of exhibitions, they seem important here in themselves. Or at least the ones the movement itself staged. As the show points out “Surrealists approached [them] as collective artworks”. Just as with Dada, they were part of Surrealist practice, not just a means by which to display already finished works. In fact the works just became materials for the overall show, with obligations such as displaying them clearly being discarded. There’s photos of various exhibitions here which are effectively installations, the opposite of neatly ordered and carefully labelled rooms like the one we’re in. A particular favourite of mine is is Duchamp’s ’Sixteen Miles Of String’ for a New York show in 1942. (Photo below by John D Schiff.)

And there seems a similarity with Dali’s home designs for Edward James’ Monkton House, where everything seems incorporated, integral to the Surrealist concept, nothing left to be ‘normal’. Or his film or theatre sets, or window displays for Bonwitt Teller, (1939, above). And these do look different, and more effective, than when individual elements are ripped from the room and shown as isolated artworks. It’s a kind of fishbowl design, where part of the point is we know we’re looking at real objects. But they’re there for us to look at rather than engage with. As much as it is design its design as display, not use.

Design Into Dollars?

The skeptical reader may note how much Dali has dominated things so far. And its unsurprising that the man soon anigrammatically nicknamed Avida Dollars led the way in this direction. (It’s a bit of a tangent but the show includes 'Destino’, the animation he made for Disney. In 1945/6, but not realised until 2003. And it’s notable how easily his slick later style blends with the smooth Disney look.)

After all… shop windows, objects made to be talking pieces for toffs, don’t these consumer items seem a world away from an art movement that declared itself revolutionary? How does this fit with the Tate show which largely focused on colonial subjects? And couldn’t that be said to be inherent in this direction? Enchantment, like most desirable things, turns out to be a luxury product. The rich, after all, live their lives on show, consume conspicuously, while the rest of us make do with frill-less functionality.

Or take ’Horse Lamp’ by Front Design (2006, above). It looks a surreal triumph, a full-size model of a horse made to do no more than hold up a lamp. Most of us would literally not have room for such a thing. Except you can buy it, given the will and a spare five grand. Which kind of transforms it from absurd object to click and collect. (Well, okay, you’d probably ask for it to be delivered.) 

Or, perhaps more strongly still, Carlo Mollino’s 1938 designs for Casa Miller, which included a torso-shaped hole in a wall. Is there a left-field charm to this? Yes. But that charm all belongs to Magritte, a Surrealist artist I’m not even especially keen on. In such moments it’s hard not to think of those who crowbar Banksys off public walls for private clients. One leaves a hole behind, the other makes off with it, but same difference.

There doesn’t seem much point debating whether Dali was a dollar-clutching scumbag. But life isn’t obliged to hand us easy answers, and he was also (at times) a superlative artist. While James was a longstanding supporter of Surrealism and an interesting figure in his own right, not just a standard toff looking for the latest thing. And Meret Oppenheim, Surrealist par excellence, made limited-edition luxury gloves. (If not until 1985.) Besides, in those days most painters got by either via patrons or by being wealthy themselves. We don’t live in this world and get to be untainted.

Besides, what’s often appealing about these themed shows isn’t the through line but the by-ways. Things which don’t necessarily belong here but, now they are in front of you, you’re glad of it. And the chance encounter seems the more Surreal way of going about things, better than rigidly inspecting the guest list. The show quotes Ingo Maurer: “Chance rules our lives, much more than intention.”

Case in point… When the architect Le Corbusier was claimed as Surrealist-influenced, first I felt they were clutching at straws early. But they went on to convince me. The painting by him, while good, was more post-Picasso than Surreal. (Albeit from the era where Picasso was saying he was Surreal.) But the sculpture ’Ozon III’ (1962, above) could have had Andre Breton pinning a medal to it for services to strangeness. It seems to simultaneously reduce the human body to a mechanism and turn it into a charming cartoon, with parity found between an arm and an ear. With its bizarre anthropomorphism there’s a strong sense of humour to it, and I didn’t know Le Corbusier even had one of those.

Should We Still Be Surreal?

“Surrealism”, the show says, “is still evolving. The torch has now been passed to contemporary artists and designers who dare to shake up the creative process.”

Well, we could argue about whether art is still evolving. But Surrealism didn’t re-use century-old devices, it sought out new methods to deal with the world they found themselves in, revelling in any upset this caused. Current-day artists shouldn’t be in thrall to it, they should be using it in the way it used primitive art, ruthlessly plundering it of anything that looked useful, discarding the rest.

As said over the ‘Dreamers Awake’ show at the White Cube, “contemporary artists are forever claiming they’re its inheritors, often on the basis of a hazy notion that once it was ‘edgy’ and now so are they. Does for example Sarah Lucas belong here? (Inasmuch as her tedious efforts belong anywhere.)” And you’d have to say much the same here, to the extent that Sarah Lucas does indeed show up again. But let’s do what we did then, and talk about the stuff that’s worth talking about.

Gae Aulenti’s ’Tour’ (1993, above) is a coffee table on wheels. It may initially seem akin to ’Horse Lamp.’ Except it’s anti-functionality doesn’t come about through lack of space, it’s inherent to the thing. You could take it home if you wanted, but it couldn’t do other than create chance processes in your lounge.

From 1950 on, Piero Fornasetti was taking one face (the opera singer Line Cavalieri) and placing it on an endless succession of plates, each with some Surreal twist to the image. Though the twists are often ingenious, it’s the combination of form and content which makes it. We associate plates with mass production, with repetition, with conformity.

Anyway, the twin highlights of this more modern section of the show are chairs. Make of that what you will…

Danny Lane’s ’Etruscan Chair’ (1984, above) is made from the most industrial of materials, glass and steel tubing. Yet just by making them geometrically irregular he anthropomorphises it. Those are definitely eyes in its back, and I stood there waiting for it to scuttle off.

Alberto de Braud’s ’An Uncomfortable Place’ (1992, above) features what would be a regular chair frame, except that it’s erupting strange tendrils and knotty protuberances. Chairs we assume to be made from dead wood, but this seems to somehow have not just retained life but still be growing. (It’s actually bronze, it just looks like wood.)

And, in a sense, carpenters do to wood what society does to people, drain its essence, chop it into regulation size, make it into a usable commodity. Except the title leads us not to side with this rebellious chair but take on the perspective of the sitter. If you thought someone was about to sit on you, you’d automatically assume a more awkward shape, and this is the chair’s way of doing that. It’s reminiscent of the rebellious furniture of Svankmajer’s short film ‘The Apartment’.

That which you thought tamed and made orthodox may still surprise you, it may be a good point to end on. Except of course precisely what makes this a great art objects makes it literally impossible to use as a chair. It’s merely disguised as a functional work of design to make its point. This show’s full of things which are functionally useless. Some of which are just useless. While others enchant.

OZRIC TENTACLES/ GONG (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO ALL COSMIC)

Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 18th Nov

Shortly after the sad death of Nik Turner seemed just the right time to attend an Old Hippies Reunited party, and as luck would have it a double-barrelled one came along…

I’m not sure how many time I’ve seen Ozric Tentacles now. There was a fifteen to twenty year period where it seemed almost impossible not to see them. Attend anything remotely resembling a festival or gathering and there they’d be. And I’m equally unsure when I last saw them, except it was some while ago. They would play regular venues too, but it what when that festival environment was clamped down on that they went out of my sight, like an animal losing its habitat.

Looking back, their sound was based on a kind of false memory. There wasn’t really a time when Psychedelic music overlapped with Prog, it was more than one waned as the other waxed. The bands who performed that transition, like Pink Floyd, tended to have a ‘mellow’ phase in-between. But that sound was why their best-known number came to be ’Kick Muck’, the guitar sounding less like a guitar and more like someone cranking furiously at a funnel which emits a ceaseless torrent of notes, so many and so fast they go by in a blur.

Guitarist Ed Wynne is the only survivor from back then. And the band’s become something of a family affair, featuring his ex-wife Brandi on bass, his son Silas Neptune on keyboards and a flautist and drummer whose names I failed to catch.

The standard thing to say about a longstanding band is what they’ve gained in ability they’ve lost in edge. Which sounds remarkably close to what music did when it morphed from Psychedelia to Prog. The greatest thing about Psychedelia being its abandon and derangement, and the worst thing about Prog being that it abandoned that abandon.

And for a band whose first-ever gig was a six-hour spontaneous jam at Stonehenge Free Festival in ’83, who often seemed to be jamming on stage, there seems little jam tonight. Wynne even introduced the tracks, something never done back in the day. The absence of ‘Jumping’ John Egan, who combined flute-plyaing with on-stage antics like a cosmic Bez, also changes the dynamic.

Nevertheless, if there’s now more smooth than rough, there was always some smooth. Unlike most festival circuit bands, they had (and have) the musical chops to work for those who stood to listen as well as those who waved their arms. There were points this set seemed to meander and my attention drifted, but overall it kept enough punch and was musically adventurous enough to take you with it.

The highlight, version of ’Kick Muck’ notwithstanding was the finale, also their most Dance-influenced number, where the abandanometer most definitely went into the red.

This was very much a double-headliner, with the auditorium packed and ready for Gong even at the un-rock & roll time of 8pm. In case there’s anyone left who doesn’t know who Gong are these days… Daevid Allen assembled a younger band around him (this time with no relatives) back in 2014, who released one album. After getting his no-hope diagnosis (the album was called ’Rejoice I’m Dead’), he suggested they carry on after he was gone, which they have.

But any debate about whether that makes them Proper Gong or a tribute band with validation is sidelined, when they play precisely one classic Gong track the whole set, even then segueing into it from somewhere else. Which was ’Master Builder’, my absolute favourite Gong track ever, so they made one Old Hippy happy.

How much the set drew on the one album made with Allen I don’t know, I’ve not heard it. Though at one point new new songs are announced. Pretty soon it became obvious that this was really only Gong in the sense of inheriting the family name, and you should look on them as a new band.

To which the verdict would be mixed. Some tracks did sound close to hippy music as described by its detractors, meanderingly pleasant music with ‘positive energy’-type lyrics. But, not just on ’Master Builder’, also elsewhere in their set, they proved that when they want to wig out they absolutely can.

Not from our fine shores, but more or less the right Ozrics line-up…

"SOMEBODY CALLIN'" HOWLIN’ WOLF’S ‘MOANIN’ IN THE MOONLIGHT’

(Top 50 Albums)

When I was first getting into music, what histories there were faithfully followed a script. Rhythm & Blues’ role had been important but brief, to be the midwife of Rock & Roll. (And it normally was R&B, more than Gospel or Country.) It was portrayed as original but basic. It had taken black people to come up with it, all simple-minded yet pure of heart like they were. But it had taken white people to pick up on that and turn it into something.

Even R&B artists would at times go along with this, perhaps figuring it not best to bite the hand attached to the deepest pockets. None less than Muddy Waters sang ’The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock and Roll’ (1977), which at least moved midwife along to mother.

But if anything, it was the other way up. Rock & Roll finally formally broke something which had in actuality been undermined in American music decades back, the colour bar. And that was a significant cultural event. But to do it, it had to dilute the material down for a mass audience, make it more palatable. (And the right term is mass, not white, audience. You could tell a similar story with Country.)

Big Joe Turner’s version of ’Shake, Rattle and Roll’ is not just better than Bill Haley’s, it’s better at all the things Rock & Roll is supposed to be good for. The same is true for Big Mama Thornton’s ’Hound Dog’ over Elvis’, and you could keep going.

But it’s more than that. The problem with constantly searching for the roots of Rock & Roll is that everything else just gets thrown away as a weed. When, if you just look at what’s in your hand, it can be the finest flower. We should stop seeing Blues as a staging-post to somewhere else, and start seeing it as a place in itself.

The two big stars of the classic post-war era of R&B were Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Their creative rivalry was only accentuated by their being on the same label (Chess) and using the same main songwriter. (Willie Dixon, who would deliberately tell Wolf a song was already promised to Waters, knowing he’d then insist it had to be his.)

And they sound very little like someone trying to come up with Rock & Roll. True, there’s times they rock it, and as well as anyone. Wolf’s ’Rock It Boogie’ comes self-described. But, as a general rule, in straightening itself out in order to be made into Rock & Roll, Blues became a more rigid, more regularised form of music. In picking up the fixed-voltage power of electricity, it lost the free-form force of unpredictability.

Not so with our guys! Giles Oakley wrote “they can continue the use of country-style unpredictability in bar lengths, giving free range to the blues feeling surging through the whole band as if it were one man.” (‘The Devil’s Music’, 1976). He was talking of Waters’ band, but it applies to both. Rather than upbeat and animated, their music was measured and spacious, even laconic. (Perhaps best summed up by the Wolf lyric “Oh the church bell tollin’/ Oh the hearse come driving slow”. Not something you could sing over a Gene Vincent beat.) Harmonica was often then used to thread, bend and stretch between the placed-out guitar notes, like barbed wire curling round fenceposts.

And Waters was great. Truly great. But ultimately, Wolf was even better.

I’d first heard Blues early, as a child, as my Dad had some old records. And my young ears could barely take in music that sounded so unearthly, so totally removed from the Pop music and advertising jingles which I’d taken to be music.

He had no Howling Wolf. (Due, I’d suspect, to the lack of any ‘authentic’ acoustic era.) In fact I wasn’t to hear him until an adult. Whereupon, despite having had years to acclimate myself to music, when I finally got there he still sounded as unearthly as the Blues I’d first heard.

It is true that lyrically, particularly by the time of R&B, Blues did tend to prefigure Rock & Roll. And Wolf sang as much about the familiar themes as anyone else, women not being able to resist him, and his baby doing him wrong. (However those two were supposed to fit together.)

But his lyrics could also hinted at something sinister going on, at lurking, indeterminate menace. (Something people associate with Robert Johnston, but don’t imagine in electric Blues.) In the later track ’Ain’t Superstitious’ from 1961, the title phrase is continually countered by lots of good reasons to be superstitious. Yet, importantly, Wolf knew to never make it any more explicit than that. It was like that anxiety dream where you’re not sure quite what’s causing the anxiety, making you all the more anxious.

(And Blues was ever thus. All the things that books earnestly list as creating the genre, which basically come down to racism, are almost never referred to explictly in the music.)

And this perfectly matched his voice, gravelly but also given to unearthly, name-defining howls, wails and moans. (He liked to say he’d originally tried to yodel like Country star Jimmie Rodgers, but howls were simply what had come out of his throat and so he’d gone with them.) Suffice to say, if you take to Wolf’s voice, you’ll most likely take to everything else about him.

And voice and lyrics were then married to the spectral music, sounding like it could pass through walls. The opening track ’Moanin’ At Midnight’ (1951) sums this up well. It starts with Wolf literally setting the tone with a low moan, as if retuning you into his frequency. Surely one of the greatest track openings of all. It’s the equivalent of saying “who-hoo” in a ghost story, except in a way that actually works.
It’s a classic example of the combination effect in music, the whole being more than its parts. Lyrics like “Somebody calling me/ Calling on my telephone” scarcely sound like Pulitzer prize stuff. But add it to the voice and the music and the result is spine-tingling.

But going back to that idea R&B was a basic genre, does any of it get repetitive? The short answer is yes. Even that low moan intro gets straight-out duplicated on another track on the same album, ’Moanin’ For My Baby.’ But there’s two things to consider here…

First, this was never planned as an album. The currency of R&B was the single, at most the EP. The Billboard R&B chart, which began in ’49, even included jukebox plays alongside record sales. This album, though put together back in the day, was complied from already released singles. (In ’59, from material dating back to ’51.) And that was what albums were to Chess, at least back them. (Fun fact! ‘Album’ originally referred to a clutch of 78s packaged together. It meant ‘separate things collected together’, like a stamp or photo album.)

And more broadly… the notion that Blues was, formally speaking, an authentic Folk art is nothing but a hopeless romanticism. It was a commercial genre, with labels as much hit factories as Motown would later be, which gave many a living and got some rich (Wolf included). However, it still retained many elements from folk culture. Including a lack of interest in originality. If someone had a new idea, whether a lyric or rhythm, that was simply taken as added to the buffet table. Everyone else just helped themselves, and were unabashed about doing it.

And if that person who had the new idea was you, then what else would you do but copy yourself? Stars would commonly cover their own songs under different aliases. Sometimes this was to slip through contractual obligation. But it was more than that, songs didn’t have some definitive ‘finished’ version, like novels or paintings. They were fluid things, changing with each iteration.

So the line between one song and another naturally became thin and porous. Recording essentially the same track with a few elements shifted around was par for the course. R&B was only interested in what worked. And Wolf himself did all three of these - borrowed from others, got borrowed from by others, and recycled his own best ideas.

So if the measure of R&B is its effect on R&R, Howlin’ Wolf’s was probably nil. But that’s because it took rock music over a decade to catch up with him. Sam Phillips claimed he was the greatest artist he ever worked with, despite going on to record the Sun Records roster. Dylan named him as the best live act he’d seen. The Stones, though named after a Waters song, called him “one of our greatest idols” and covered ’Little Red Rooster’. The Doors did ’Back Door Man’, while Marc Bolan stole ’You’ll Be Mine’ and Led Zeppelin ’Killing Floor’… the list goes on. And you hear his howl all the way through Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. Hail the wolf!

MICHAEL ROTHER/ TEST DEPT (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MICHAEL ROTHER + FRIENDS CELEBRATE 50 YEARS OF NEU!
Clapham Grand, London, Thurs 3rd Nov

As I may have given away by now I’m something of a Krautrock obsessive - particularly over what we might call the Holy Trinity of Can, Faust and… well, expect you’ve guessed the third one. And, after the unfortunate demise of Klaus Dinger back in 2008, seeing the remaining half of the duo is the closest we can ever to come to Neu! Rother’s joined by drummer Hans Lampe, who played on their third and final album, and guitarist Franz Bargman from Camera. 

Having seen anniversary sets of, in order, Can, Faust and now Neu!, I’d concede this was the most straightforward of the three - playing the classic tracks more or less as they were recorded back then. (Sometimes dipping into his other band of the era, Harmonia.)

But then again, these are classic tracks. It’s no exaggeration to call it some of the greatest music ever made. And it feels awesome to be in a room of fellow aficionados, enthusiastically clapping a few beats into each new number. Which is why I preferred this to the other time I saw Rother, where he concentrated more only his later solo output. Maybe Rother without Dinger is a little like a sweet ’n’ sour with just the sweet. But seriously, if you can’t celebrate fifty years of Neu!, I really don’t know what you can.

And also, as a duo, Neu! back then were really confined to be a studio project, only playing live with their expanded line-up of the final album. Leading to the sense that all this isn’t retrospective so much as overdue. And it’s not just great music, it’s great music to hear live, serene and ecstatic at the same time. So irresistibly dancey were they, codgers even older than myself were to be witnessed abandoning themselves to the moment. (There may have been a few aching joints the next day.)

And also also, people picture Krautrock as science fictiony. Which may be partly true of Kraftwerk, but doesn’t apply to the Holy Trinity. Neu! may lend themseles to machine metaphors, but there’s nothing to suggest anything futuristic. And nature analogies apply equally well. So if, in the well-know adage, nothing dates faster than science fiction, there’s nothing here to date. In fact you could easily believe it sounds as fresh today as it did fifty years ago. In Neu!s case the absence of lyrics also helps, nothing which might pin it to an era. (Fans of ’Hero’ look away, but they skip the few numbers Dinger sang on. Only one track had vocals all night.)

Speaking of machines, I’ve waxed lyrical before how their sound ”glides as if … so pure a thing as to be untroubled by the lumpen world of gravity. Its pulsing drive, repetitive yet so propulsive, always seems to be stretching ahead of you. It's like the car that always seems to stay in front of you on the motorway, seemingly sailing ahead without burning up any energy.”

And indeed part of the backdrop film show was of the camera drifting freely down the motorway. A coincidence? Probably. But I’m going with it anyway.

Neu! may have exceeded even Faust and Can in the disparity of lack of immediate units shipped and long-term influence felt. Post-Punk, Dance and Electronica all owe them an unpayable debt. And as a sign of that esteem those promised “friends” turned out to be Stephen Morris of New Order and Paul Weller, joining them for the encore. I’m not sure that musically they contributed all that much, but perhaps being there’s the thing.

Actually a Harmonia number, but it’s all good…

TEST DEPT/ BLURT
The Albany, London, Sat 29th Oct

“Test Dept's formation in 1981” it says here “in the decaying docklands of South London, was an urgent reaction to the materialistic drift and reactionary conservatism of the prevailing musical and political culture. TD rejected the conventional and developed a style that reflected the decay of their surroundings scavenging the unregenerated wastelands for raw materials, and transforming found industrial items into designed, sculptural instruments…. It was the antithesis of commercial record industry values.”

I have to admit I never quite caught up with them back in the day, even missing the famous Brighton show where they used police riot shields for percussion. But I liked the sound of them when I heard them. And, well, I liked the sound of them. Industrial outfits, to varying degrees, tended towards dodgy ‘provocations’ which seem even worse looking back from our era of hipster racism. While Test Dept were unapologetically Leftist, all Constructivist typefaces and collaborations with a striking Miner’s choir. More in the spirit of Mayakovsky than Charlie Sodding Manson. And more Mayakovsky means more me.

When this gig was announced, they commented they’d be glad to be back in New Cross, the place it had all started out for them. And, walking round the area beforehand, I discovered how Old London New Cross still is - graffiti, political flyposting and (perhaps most remarkably of all) cafes that give change from a tenner. Made all the more bizarre by the way you can constantly see Canary Wharf on the skyline.

While Blurt went through their set (more of which anon), visible behind them was a metal scaffold sporting sheets of metal, dangling chains and various extemporised devices which might have been musical or torturous in intent. If there was such a thing as Chekov’s Percussive Supply, that would have been it. It was then placed literally centre stage. And yes, they did all go off.

The set started with high-register electronics, pounding drums and everyone else pitching in on percussion. And bar occasional outbreaks of wind, usually on strange and ethnic-looking devices with names unknown to me, that was the musical set-up. One member showed a remarkable ability not just attach a bass drum to him but to march around with it.

Beats are martial, unrelenting, providing no release. And that era had a penchant for musing the master’s tools against him, calls-to-arms enlisted against the arms trade.

The drummer… you know the actual drummer looked young enough to be a recent recruit. And I wasn’t quite sure how the splendid drumming was down to him or the drum sound. But it was surely something of both. They rattled and resounded like an Ironmonger’s shelves all being upended at once.

Not knowing their output well, I couldn’t tell you from when the set was pulled. Some lyrics sounded quite contemporary, so I deduced not an entirely historic set. I further guessed several tracks were from the Nineties, when they took on more of a Dance influence. (Before they came on the canned music notably switched from the Stooges to House.) Though it seems it was dominated by the new album, ’Disturbance’, and sounding pretty good for it.

The Dance direction is now often ridiculed, like it was all old Punks desperately reaching for relevance. But in fact they’d spotted something in the music which they could work with, its insistency, its powerful production-line beats. And jettisoned the parts which didn’t work for them, such as the blissed-out hedonism. Besides, it all sounds pretty dancey, whenever from.

The only weakness… okay, you can’t bash and shout the whole gig long. And some of the more ambient passages were actually pretty good. But they got a little too ambient at points for a gig setting, and you felt the audience’s attention starting to wonder.

But overall, you know the way T-shirt manufacturers kept busting the ceiling of their scales. (L, XL, XXL and so on.) You may need something similar to convey the intensity of this performance.

Blurt are a Post-Punk band dating back even further, to 1979. They once played Brighton semi-regularly, but it must have been over fifteen years ago, as I don’t seem to have blogged about them before.

They’ve the peculiarity of being a beat-driven band not incorporating a bass player. Which they often manage via the guitar and drums trading places. Guitar lines can me the most metronomically simple, or even tones, while the drums power the number.

Frontman Ted Minton’s sense-defying lyrics, sometimes declaimed poetry and occasional sax blasts don’t just make the connections between Post-Punk, Dada and Beat recitals, they more defy any distinction between them. It’s all sound and fury signifying nothing, and that’s the very point of the thing. (The titles given to their discography gives some of this away.)

If memory serves, they were better fifteen years back, to be truthful. But they’re still worth catching, and provided the vital role of a support band to provide something unlike yet complementary to the main act.