Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers - Tom Wolfe

 RADICAL CHIC & MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS - TOM WOLFE

It's January 1970 and world-famous composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife are hosting a party in their Manhattan penthouse duplex, and it's the kind of party you'd be silly to decline an invitation to. Not everyone is there, of course. There's no Mia Farrow, Jack Nicholson or even Salvador Dali but that's only because they're not in Leonard Bernstein's immediate circle of friends and neighbours. Those who are there, however, are extremely rich and in their own ways significant movers and shakers. They are people of influence. People who form a strata that could be called 'jet set'.

Hosting such parties is a 'thing'. It's a form of socialising and networking that is as far from jelly, cup cakes and sausages on sticks as you could get. Abigail's Party and playing Demis Roussos on the record player these parties are not. Rather, there are maids and butlers to wait upon the guests, serving them exquisite and expensive snacks and tasty morsels with the most delectable wines. These are elite parties for elite people where part of the entertainment comes with gathering around the piano to soak up some classical sonata performed by whatever world-class composer might be in the room. Which all begs the question in regard to Leonard Bernstein's particular party: What is Tom Wolfe doing there? Whether he's been invited or has gatecrashed isn't really clear and whether Leonard Bernstein is aware of it or not, Wolfe is taking notes and recording the evening's events.

Some who have genuinely been invited and are, in fact, guests of honour are a contingent of Black Panthers including Don Cox, the Panthers' very own Field Marshal General. He's there to talk about and to raise funds for the defense of the Panther 21 who have been in jail for the past year awaiting trial for supposedly conspiring to blow up the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Just why anyone would want to blow up these Gardens is anyone's guess but that's the charge.

Everything and everyone is very sincere, very serious, very purposeful and very 'right on'. The only person there who seems to be taking a somewhat dim, critical and sarcastic view of it is Tom Wolfe who from this party and other similar ones has coined a phrase that encapsulates and sums up the whole scenario, the whole trend and the whole scene where white guilt meets the rage of the oppressed. That phrase being 'Radical Chic'.

Nowadays, the kind of people attending such a party might be called 'Champagne socialists' but Tom Wolfe got there first by identifying the phenomena and labelling it, rather than labelling the participants. Times have now changed, of course, and lessons have been learned particularly by the rich and by those possessed of political nous. In fact, it could be said that the world has now been turned upside down though not in the way Gerrard Winstanley might have imagined but more in the way that Martin Luther King Jr once called it out as being 'socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor'. The rich nowadays - and very blatantly so - rather than being at each others throats are all nods and winks and I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine, whilst the poor have been given a world of dog eat dog and then thrown to the dogs. The world as it is today is a special brew. An alphabet soup where the scum still rises to the top whilst the main body boils and ferments into weird new flavours that seem to have an addictive quality about them. And it's maggot infested.

Tom Wolfe was a perceptive writer whose particular skill was in being able to read between the lines and in doing so enable him to see what was going on and to see what was coming. He got there first in regard to the emerging hippy movement by latching on to Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he identified the 'Me Decade' in an essay of the same name, and defined a form of writing called 'New Journalism'.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers is actually the titles of two separate essays published in one book, with both essay titles coming to form the title of the book. If that makes sense? The Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers essay is almost frivolously racist, concerning itself with the hustling of anti-poverty programs in San Francisco. The Radical Chic essay is the one in which the Black Panthers are the evening's entertainment at Leonard Bernstein's duplex and to be fair, the Panthers don't come out of it too badly. It's obvious they're only there to secure some money from the hosts and their guests, and who can blame them? How else are they meant to raise funds for the Panther 21 trial where even the bail for each person has been set at a ludicrous $100,000?

Don Cox is given free rein to explain the Panthers' cause with Tom Wolfe quoting him liberally, and he makes a good case. It's the hosts and their other white guests who are tied up in knots and it's this that Tom Wolfe observes. There have been other similar parties hosted by other rich socialites before this one, raising funds for such people as the grape workers of California, the Chicago Eight, Friends of the Earth, Ramparts magazine, even Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin. The Black Panthers, however, are somewhat different. They are, essentially, Maoist revolutionaries and are considered to be 'the real deal'. Also different is that this time Tom Wolfe is present with his eye on the pulse and his finger on his pen to record the whole spectacle - and spectacle it is.

The term 'hoisted by their own petard' comes to mind though it's not one that Wolfe uses himself. Instead, Wolfe simply records everything and allows Leonard Bernstein's saying of 'Right on', for example, in response to Don Cox to hang there and subsequently speak volumes about the ridiculousness of it all. He records vividly and in detail the surroundings of Bernstein's home and all the accoutrements and luxuries that come as a direct result of the same system that oppresses the black community and other members of the working class. The dichotomy is glaring.

Much less kind about the Black Panthers than Wolfe is the New York Times that in an editorial piece two days after the party rubbishes the notion that the Panthers are in any way representative of the black community, and accuses Bernstein and his fellow 'Beautiful People' of 'elegant slumming'. Bernstein obviously is insulted. It wasn't a party, he insists, it was a meeting - and he's never been a member of 'the jet set' in his life. The mud, however, sticks. None of which, moreover, is helpful to the Black Panthers at all as it almost immediately puts paid to anyone else wanting to host any such similar party for fear of ridicule and the wrath of the New York Times, subsequently shutting down an avenue of fund-raising and starving the Panthers of money.

The American Establishment, clearly, were out to put a halt to the Black Panthers activities by any method at their disposal. Or as Malcolm X would put it: By any means necessary. Proving at the same time that unfortunately, though a very good writer, Tom Wolfe for the FBI and their Counterintelligence Program was nothing more than a useful idiot.

John Serpico

Anarchism In Bristol And The West Country To 1950 - Steve Hunt

 ANARCHISM IN BRISTOL AND

THE WEST COUNTRY TO 1950 -

STEVE HUNT

Another radical pamphlet/booklet from the Bristol Radical History Group and if I had my way I'd happily read the lot of them but unfortunately the world we live is not yet a perfect one so I read them instead in dribs and drabs on the basis of when one happens to fall into my hands. This particular one by Steve Hunt entitled Anarchism In Bristol And The West Country To 1950 piqued my interest because Bristol - much to my delight but much to the chagrin of such people as Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees - has a reputation for being a radical city. A reputation for some for even being a city of rioting anarchist mobs storming police stations and pulling down statues of benefactors in a bid to wreck havoc upon its cultural heritage. It's true, these things have happened though not nearly as often enough as I personally would like to see. There's also another slant, of course, on Bristol's radical reputation as being a city of 'woke' nightmares where same sex toilets without doors are the norm and where if you don't identify as being gay then you're just plain weird. Or something like that.

How to write seriously about something that's beyond parody? Like the anti-vaxxers during the Covid lockdown who would protest, saying they wanted their freedom back. Freedom for what, exactly? To go shopping? To go back to how it was before lockdown when everyone and everything was so very free? Like the Brexiteers saying they want their country back. Back to those happier times when England ruled the waves? When there were just three black-and-white television channels, pubs closed at 10.30 and jolly policemen would give scallywags a clip 'round the ear for stealing apples?

It's all to do with perception, really. Perception and hegemony and how that bleeds into everyday life. If you believe for example that England is ruled by a Left-wing Deep State cabal and that the BBC is its main arm of propaganda then apart from Liz Truss you're on your own, as others edge slowly away from you in the same way they'd edge away from a knife-wielding lunatic. If you think freedom is defined by how good your shopping experience is then you're the perfect consumer - and that's your lot in life. If you think there's no longer such a thing as free speech isn't what you mean that you can't say things anymore without being potentially challenged? Or as comedian Stewart Lee put it: 'You can't even be a Nazi nowadays without being accused of being a Nazi. It's woke gone mad.'

So, to Bristol and its reputation for being a radical city. There was a time not so very long ago when Bristol's public profile was managed by Bristol City Council and the city's local newspaper, the Bristol Evening Post, working always in conjunction with each other within pretty strict and somewhat conservative parameters. For the Evening Post, news was just stuff to fill the spaces between the advertisements because ultimately it was all to do with revenue. That news was supplied by the City Council's press office and by the police via their press office, supplemented by the Evening Post's own roving reporters reporting on cats stuck up trees and other such items of interest.

Of course, anything coming from any press office is going to be slanted, biased and one-sided, and if printed verbatim or rinsed through a conservative editorial policy then essentially it's all the equivalent of propaganda for the authorities and the status quo, presented as 'news' in 'The paper all Bristol asked for and helped to create'.

The only answer to this monopolization of how the public and private spheres are depicted is to somehow present and offer an alternative view but by default because that view is going to fall outside of the consensus it's going to be classed as 'radical' even if it's nothing of the sort. And as we know, from 'radical' to 'extreme' is just a very short jump.

When trying to present an alternative you use whatever tools and means available be that public meetings, pamphleteering, the publishing of newspapers and books, etc, etc. Anything to challenge the 'common sense' values and politics of the dominant culture. It's a contest that has been raging since time immemorial and in hindsight its quite inexplicable how the power to define the world and dictate its values has been controlled for so long by the conservative Right. 

In Bristol, that power has always been concentrated in just a few albeit very strong institutions all channeled through its local media. There's been many challenges to that power over the years but all deftly dealt with by cutting them off at the head though in the last few decades - whether by accident or design it matters not - there's been a change of tactic with more of a 'many-headed Hydra' approach coming into play. It's still an on-going process with no end in sight as of yet but this new approach involving music, film, physical media, the Internet and social media has without question upset the apple cart leading to Bristol's current 'radical city' reputation.

It goes without saying there's going to be distortions, exaggerations, plain untruths and counter attacks where any alternative is going to be misrepresented and cast as the proverbial 'woke nightmare' but the important thing with all this is that it's in motion. The hand is off the brake. The genie is out the bottle. The cat is out the bag. The train has now left the station and as an old friend of mine would often put it, it's now full steam ahead through the shit.

Which brings us to the Bristol Radical History Group and the part they have played - and are still playing - with their slew of publications. Anarchism In Bristol And The West Country To 1950 admittedly starts on rather shaky ground by suggesting modern anarchism was started by Edmund Burke whose statue can be found on Broad Quay, in Bristol. It's stretching it a bit and the author probably knows this but it makes at least for an interesting claim, particularly as by doing so it puts Bristol at the centre of all things anarchist. Burke was a Bristol MP in the 1770s but it wasn't until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proclaimed himself an anarchist in the 1840s that the actual history of anarchism is said to have begun. Up until Proudhon's declaration, the term 'anarchist' was an insult, used to disparage. Proudhon, however, tied his name to the mast proudly.

It wasn't until the 1880s that an explicitly anarchist movement started to appear in England so that's quite a leap between Burke, Proudhon and such people as William Morris visiting Bristol in 1885 to give a talk at the City Museum that the Evening Post amusingly dismissed as 'pernicious nonsense'. No change there then from the Post. A meeting was also attended in 1889 at St James' Hall in Cumberland Street in Bristol by none other than Peter Kropotkin. This is really all the evidence needed to show that for anarchist ideas during this period it was the lift-off point.

Steve Hunt traces a line from Bristolians such as Edward Carpenter, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, Gertrude Dix and George Barrett all the way to the one-time 'most dangerous woman in America' Emma Goldman visiting Bristol in 1925 to give talks at Bristol's YMCA and the Folk House, on Park Street, staying at a house in Redland. This lineage that Steve Hunt traces is an important one as it's people who over the course of Bristol's history have in their own way all added to how Bristol is today. 

Of course, these people have by and large been ignored by those who have always plotted and recorded the history of Bristol, or when not ignored have been cast by the powers that be and the powers that have been as 'pernicious' or 'extremist'. Rather than having them remain as denigrated figures Steve Hunt raises them instead to their rightful positions, that being as heroes one and all, and in the process providing a valuable and important service to the city.

Anarchism In Bristol And The West Country To 1950 isn't a definitive book on the subject but it's a good stepping stone for the curious of mind to investigate further. And stepping stones are what it's always been about, be it the potential stepping stone of a guest speaker at a public meeting, the potential stepping stones of writing a pamphlet, a book or an article, the potential stepping stone of singing a song, or even the definite stepping stone of a full blown riot. All stepping stones to somewhere over the rainbow.

John Serpico

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - ANTHONY BURGESS

There are some who cite A Clockwork Orange as being their most favourite of books and there are others who have written whole academic texts about it, analysing its meaning and its relevance to the modern world. Myself, I concur it's a special book for a lot of reasons not least due to its enduring appeal to academia since being first published in 1962. A Clockwork Orange sits alongside other great dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984 so is therefore very much a classic but unlike these others that it shares the same shelf space with it sits there almost reluctantly like a truculent child forced against its will to share its toys. Arguably, unlike Brave New World and 1984, A Clockwork Orange still seems to have the power to provoke and incite reaction which is why it's worth revisiting and potentially revising.

One of the interesting things about Alex - 'your humble narrator' of the book - is that he's only 15 years-old and that after a night of drug-laced milk drinking and mindless sex and violence he has to be up the next morning to go to school. And then the two girls that Alex picks up in the record shop are aged just 10. With this in mind, the dynamic of the book changes somewhat and rather than imagining the characters as depicted by Kubrick, it reminds us that these are children that Burgess is writing about.

The violence that Burgess describes as enacted by Alex and his droogs is nasty and near-touching evil but it's also very theatrical and almost comically slapstick. It's like the violence of a cartoon - like Tom and Jerry - brought to life but with a sense of unreality about it, the only real thing being the victims of it. The whole sense of theatricality is elevated to an almost majestic level, of course, by the language. If the world is a stage then Alex is one of its greatest thespians, treading the boards like a master, his every utterance orated in a very wonderful Shakespearian manner saturated in Russian-based slang. Alex's speech is an art-form in itself. In fact, the language and the style in which Burgess has written A Clockwork Orange is the key to it being such a great book. If Burgess had written it in normal English language all we would have would be the bare bones. Burgess's linguistic inventiveness gives it flesh.

The question of violence is obviously central and very early on in the book Alex shines a light upon it: 'But what I do I do because I like to do' he tells himself during the visit to his home by his social worker (or Post-Corrective Adviser, as Burgess calls him) following the previous night's ultra-violent escapades. And right there is the nub of it. Alex is intelligent, curious of mind and cultured as evidenced by his love of Beethoven. He has awareness, insight and can when required be quite philosophical. On the question of modern youth (Alex being a representative of that) the problem is not his but of society's and its twisting of morality alongside a profound misunderstanding and denial of self. According to Alex, that is.

According to the government, society needs protecting from the likes of Alex and his droogs but rather than just continuously filling the already overcrowded jails a new solution called the Ludovico Technique is put forward, it being basically a chemically-advanced form of aversion therapy. Another solution though made less light of in both book and film is to recruit the likes of Alex as police officers.

The new method of drug treatment to cure the will to violence sits unhappily with some, however, who view it as a step towards totalitarianism. 'A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man' as one of the critics put it. That same critic being the same writer whose home Alex and his droogs had invaded two years earlier and attacked him and raped his wife.

But everyone knows all this already, or at least they should if they've read the book or watched the film. The question is: Has anything changed in our understanding and perception of A Clockwork Orange over the years? Did Burgess's vision of the future come true or has it already happened and we're way beyond it?

The book and the film have slightly different endings and the film has to some extent muddied the meaning of what Burgess was originally saying. That is, that there will always be violence in the young and that the night will always belong to them. Night time as a playground for youth will always be the case but the violence within youth is but a phase that will be grown out of. The violence of the State, on the other hand, is a whole other matter. 

State violence is violence in perpetuity and much greater and far more dangerous than the oftentimes mindless violence of youth because State violence is calculated and used in a very matter-of-fact way. State violence comes in many forms and is ultimately a means to have the individual and society as a whole to bend, submit and succumb to the State's will. And what is the State? Well, the State is a collection of institutions whose power is near-unassailable, where only the representative's faces change whilst the actual power remains steadfast, unshakeable and unmovable through any democratic means.

State power cannot be voted away, only the people (and then only up to a point) who represent and wield that power at any given time. What Burgess is questioning then in A Clockwork Orange is the morality of power, the morality of violence, and ultimately the morality of State power, State violence and consequently State control. A subject that nowadays is hardly ever questioned, hardly ever challenged and hardly ever even thought about let alone discussed.

So is A Clockwork Orange of any relevance nowadays? Interestingly and arguably it's probably not but only because I would hazard a guess that nowadays the book is read (and the film watched) for entertainment only, with the most entertaining part being the first chapter where we follow the exploits of Alex and his droogs as they terrorize, fight and rape their way through the city after dark before sloping off home for a good night's sleep to be up for school in the morning. What follows for the other two thirds of the book though still entertaining is decidedly less so even though it's the most important.

A Clockwork Orange is social commentary through science fiction and to its credit has not actually dated much at all. The real world has changed, of course, and is probably harder to comprehend nowadays than it was when Burgess wrote his book in 1962. Whether youth violence has increased, decreased or remained the same since then is hard to tell. Personally, I'd say it's decreased due mainly to there being a lot more distractions available. State violence on the other hand I would say has increased but only through the shifting of the terrain upon where it's conducted. It's a lot more subtle nowadays, a lot more nuanced but still with the same purpose, that being to bend the individual to the State's will. To forge a compliant, unquestioning and obedient society of happy consumers. A society of clockwork oranges.

John Serpico

In The All-Night Cafe - Stuart David

IN THE ALL-NIGHT CAFE - A MEMOIR OF BELLE AND SEBASTIAN'S FORMATIVE YEAR - STUART DAVID

There's an argument to be had to say that all the best bands from the United Kingdom come from Scotland. Think about it. Just make a list of all the Scottish bands you can remember off the top of your head from any era and the evidence will be right there. It certainly puts paid to any foisted-upon-the-world notions of Scottish culture as being all kilts, caber tossing and those tins of biscuits tied with tartan ribbon. Adding to this illustrious off-the-top-of-your-head list is Belle And Sebastian, from Glasgow. The uncrowned doyens of Indie, and according to the blurb on the back of Stuart David's book 'one of the most influential and beloved bands of all time'.

Stuart David is the co-founder of Belle And Sebastian and In The All-Night Cafe is exactly what it says in the strapline: 'A memoir of Belle And Sebastian's formative year'. That's 'year' as in the singular and it's an important point.

Obviously, it needs to be asked: Why would anyone want to write specifically about a band's formative year? Why would you not rather just go straight for the jugular and write about the sex, the drugs and the rock'n'roll? The reason, of course, is because this is Belle And Sebastian we're talking about and it's one of the reasons why they're so likeable.

Belle And Sebastian are a nice band of nice people playing nice music, and rather than mocking this in an Alexi Sayle 'Nice! Nice is a biscuit!'-type way, it should be welcomed and applauded. Just as there is room in the world for a band such as Insane Clown Posse for example, so is there room in the world for Belle And Sebastian. Who's to say that one is better, more worthwhile or even more rock'n'roll than the other? Alice Cooper would famously cavort onstage with a python whilst chopping up baby dolls but then after the show he'd go home to play a nice round of golf. Who's to say that after playing what might be called by some as the musical equivalent of a round of golf, that Belle And Sebastian don't go home and cavort with pythons and chop up real babies? Who knows?

Stuart David, it should be noted, played bass in Belle And Sebastian but left the band in 2000 to concentrate more on his writing and his own band, Looper. Stuart Murdoch is the lead vocalist and still sings with Belle And Sebastian to this day.

Anyone who has ever been in a band will recognise and no doubt identify with what Stuart David is writing about as he lays bare all the frustration, the doubt, the hardship and ultimately the satisfaction that comes with forming a band. In Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film, Performance, the character played by Mick Jagger at one point says 'The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness'. It's a very good quote and if true might this idea also apply to Belle And Sebastian, that most gentlest of bands?

The answer on reading David's book is an unequivocal 'Yes' due mostly, it must be said, to the singularity of vision of their lead singer. Were it not for him, Belle And Sebastian would never have existed or at least not in the form that caused Seymour Stein, the head honcho of Sire Records, to fly over from America to Scotland to personally meet them, wooing them with a display of wealth and decadence reminiscent of a Roman emperor. 

Belle And Sebastian with the backing of Seymour Stein (who had previously signed Madonna and given The Smiths their American deal) could have ruled the world but because the band didn't wish to tour America at that point, the deal fell through and instead (like the title of one of their songs) they ended up ruling their school. Following on from this, however, Belle And Sebastian have gone on to release twelve studio albums, to play a sell out concert at the Hollywood Bowl and even more importantly to become immortalised with an appearance in The Simpsons where they were depicted as the band playing at Groundskeeper Willie's wedding.

In regard to Stuart David, his moment of madness came one afternoon in 1994 when he decided to learn how to play bass guitar as a way of starting afresh in forming a band. The idea came to him from nowhere but was one that was to change his life forever. Previously to this he had been claiming benefits for eight years and trying to form a band but with him on lead guitar, foiled constantly by the failure to acquire a bassist. Almost as soon as he began learning to play bass himself, along came guitarist, vocalist and song-writer Stuart Murdoch. The rest, as they say, is history and the first year of their playing together leading up to the recording of their debut album is the whole story of In The All-Night Cafe.

It's a very heartwarming story that ends happily, and it shows that the success of Belle And Sebastian as a band is well deserved. Nowadays they're obviously not quite the same band as when they began as penniless, geeky outsiders but the fact that they're still going whilst so many other bands from that period have long since died is testament to their belief in the gift to life that is music. 

John Serpico

Tarantula - Bob Dylan

 TARANTULA - BOB DYLAN

First published in 1966, Tarantula is Bob Dylan's only ever work of fiction published in book-form unless, of course, you're someone who subscribes to the notion that everything Dylan has ever done is fiction and therefore Tarantula is simply business as usual? It's a moot point.

It's a book I first read as a teenager and at that time, a book I failed to understand. I had been baptised in the unholy waters of hardcore punk rock and what that had given me was a near-cleansing of the doors of perception. Never mind what Mott The Hoople had once said about 'who needs TV when we've got T-Rex?' How about who needs lysergic acid diethylamide when we've got punk rock?

The Year Zero concept promoted in some quarters of the punk fraternity where the past is erased as in 'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones' was always mere posturing, I always thought, and was never really something I went along with. Patently, punk rock didn't just come out of nowhere. It might well have been 'here today gone tomorrow' for some but it was never 'here today not there yesterday'. In fact, punk rock actually presented the keys to the past where a whole treasure trove of culture and experience lay waiting to be ransacked. And so ransack it I did. Pillaged it, even.

During the years of the Punk Wars, Dylan had been cast as anathema and his songs almost as crimes against humanity but for me this actually made him a person of interest. It was Caroline Coon who hit the nail on the head with all this when she rebuked Johnny Rotten for him denigrating hippies. "The newspapers are going to come after you in the same way they came after the hippies", she told him. And she was right. So, Dylan being such a cultural icon and an ever-looming presence over the 1960s was obviously someone who demanded investigation and so investigate him I did. Which is how I first ended up reading Tarantula.

Not that they're fully-honed now at all but back then my critical faculties weren't even in their infancy. I'd had no education to speak of but school had at least taught me to read and like so many other others before me, I found that reading was the route to the root of the world. 'A house without books is like a body without a soul' as Roman philosopher Cicero said, so to the public library it was along with visits to the second-hand bookshops of Bristol. 'Libraries gave us power', as the Manic Street Preachers once sang, and it's true. This being one of the very few things of note they've ever come out with, I might add.

On first encountering and reading Tarantula I didn't understand it at all. It was stream of consciousness stuff without punctuation or form. It was gobbledygook. It was gibberish. It made no sense in the slightest and even searching out the odd, single slither of a line containing a hint of meaningfulness was a task too far. There was nothing in there of any note. Nothing to latch onto apart from a sense of cleverness for the sake of being clever but even this was quashed by the much larger sense of it not being half as clever as it presented itself to be.

There was a smugness about it, as if it was talking its own language and if you didn't understand that language it was because you were 'square'. You just wasn't hip to the beat, daddio. You were nowheresville. It was all just Greek to me, however. Double Dutch. Couldn't make head nor tail of it. I was failing to catch the wind. Falling at the first hurdle of the acid test.

So, years later and on reading Tarantula again does it now make any sense? The answer, not surprisingly, is 'No'. It's still very much gobbledygook, still very much gibberish. I have, however, now become wise to it. Tarantula is a vanity project that if written by anyone else other than Dylan would have been binned immediately. It's a disservice to book publishing. It's a fraud. An insult to intelligence. A waste of time and a waste of paper. It should never have seen the light of day let alone be presented as 'essential reading' and 'verbal playfulness and spontaneity'. 

It serves no use. It serves no purpose. It's the literately equivalent of erectile disfunction except it's not even literature. Rather than the works of Shakespeare, it's what a thousand monkeys clattering away on typewriters for a thousand years would come up with. It's rubbish. Utterly. Never in a million years would Dylan himself consider giving it a second glance let alone reading it, so why should anyone else? Why not instead consider destroying it, that's if anyone could even be bothered spending any energy on doing so? That's right, wipe it from the face of the earth metaphorically at least. Slap a sticker on every copy in the world like those 3 for 2 Waterstones ones as a public health warning stating something like 'Pretentious drivel. This book can seriously waste your time'.

John Serpico

Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? - Nige Tassell

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE C86 KIDS? - AN INDIE ODYSSEY -

NIGE TASSELL

C30 C60 C90 - go! C86 on the radio - or on the Janice Long or John Peel show at least and, of course, in the NME who in 1986 produced a cassette tape collating into one place a selection of happening bands of that year, awarding it the title of 'C86'. Whether or not it was the intention of the NME to try and create and label a scene (as was always the wont of the music press) is beside the point as these things like a Frankenstein's monster often tend to take on a life of their own, becoming something other than what was originally envisaged or intended. 

Was C86 meant to be a celebration of independence from 'the music biz'? It certainly gave that impression even if it was all being done by smoke and mirrors. For sure, all the featured bands had only ever released anything on an independent label as opposed to a major one but for a fair few this wasn't out of any ideological stance, it was just that no major record label had ever approached them. For a fair few, having a record released on an independent label served a dual purpose: Firstly, it being the only way they were ever going to get a record released at all but secondly, serving as a potential stepping stone to a major record deal that they'd have no qualms about jumping at.

The meaning of 'independence' at this point began to get distorted, particularly when the word was shortened to simply 'indie' and began to be used as a description of a type of band - a style, an aesthetic - rather than a state of being and an attitude in the way that Crass, for example, had been doing. John Peel preferred to call them 'shambling bands', particularly in regard to Bogshed but with the weight of the music press behind it, the term 'indie' stuck.

The C86 cassette tape proved to be for the A&R departments of major record companies a godsend. Here for the princely sum of £2.95 were twenty-two newly endorsed-by-the-NME bands, already brought to the attention of the music-buying public through simply being included on the cassette tape in the first place. The featured bands were all pretty much easy pickings, a vast number of them still only teenagers with no business acumen in the slightest. 

So what could possibly go wrong?

Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? - An Indie Odyssey by Nige Tassell is the story of those bands and of what became of them after being thrown so suddenly into the spotlight. Or rather, what became of them after being thrown to the wolves.

1986 was an interesting year when it came to music and the pop cultural wasteland it inhabited. The punk rock free-for-all was practically over and its various threads unravelling though not without leaving tidemarks, sediment and noxious smells of the kind to sniff in the vain hope of getting high on. It was also on the cusp of the Dance, House and Rave tsunami that was about to swamp everything. It was the year of the non-sexist haircut and the casually shabby. It was the year that Primal Scream - the band that most successfully straddled all these things - first came to much wider attention, essentially by their inclusion on the C86 tape with Velocity Girl, their song and ode to Edie Sedgwick.

If the shambling bands, as Peel called them, were an unspoken riposte to 'rockism' and the testosterone-fueled, boorish attitudes that came with it then Velocity Girl was the antithesis of everything rockism stood for. It also happened to be the opening track of the C86 tape, acting therefore as a kind of masthead. Ironically, however, Primal Scream were probably the worst band of all on the tape to represent any anti-rockist sentiment as they quickly morphed into would-be rock stars themselves, espousing and trying to conduct their affairs in a similar fashion to any Led Zeppelin-style rock band from the Seventies. Unfortunately for Primal Scream, their lead singer Bobby Gillespie with his lank hair, awkward dancing and rubbish hand-clapping wasn't really suited for it, looking more instead like a bus conductor from the 1970s ala the guy from On The Buses. Tickets please! Moreover, according to Tassell's book, Bobby Gillespie's middle name is Bernard, one of the most un-rock'n'roll names imaginable.

In his book, Tassell talks to Gillespie but he also talks to Primal Scream's tambourine player from their earliest incarnation who jumped ship (before being pushed) around the time of the recording of their debut album, Sonic Flower Groove. Between the two, the tambourine player sounds like he would have made for a much better rock star.

For all that, Velocity Girl was and still is a classic song as were others on the tape such as Therese, by The Bodines. So whatever happened to The Bodines? "We signed to Magnet Records - home of Roland Rat and Alvin Stardust. It was tragic." comes the reply from the guitarist.

And Stump? "We signed to Chrysalis and despite all their press officers, we got no coverage. And when the press stops, everything stops." Prior to their signing, Stump were constantly in the music press due to them knowing a lot of journalists and phoning them up all the time hassling them for interviews, a tactic for some reason Chrysalis told them to stop doing. 'Leave it to the professionals', was what Chrysalis were essentially saying but it obviously didn't work out very well.

And Age Of Chance on signing to Virgin? According to their lead vocalist "The thing with being on a major record label is that you're getting money thrown at you. It's just that it's your own money. You realise that way too late."

And so on and so forth.

It's understandable why a band would want to sign to a major record label - the main reason always seeming to be the need for support in the form of distribution and funding - and only purists and idealists would condemn a band for doing so. And besides, it seems like most independent labels operate in the same way and have exactly the same ethics as a major but just on a much smaller budget. So, there isn't actually a lot of difference between them.

The problem with many of the C86 bands signing to major labels was that 'roughness' and 'independence' was part of the bands' initial appeal. It was part of their brand, their shtick, and part of the reason why they were liked to begin with. On signing to a major they immediately lost their 'independent' guise and their music smoothed out by better production in a bid to appeal to a wider audience but in doing so the baby was being thrown out with the bathwater. Hence why so few of the bands who appeared on the C86 tape failed to cross-over into the mainstream.

There's a lesson in this, of course, and it's something to do with mountains and Mohammed, borne out by the success of Half Man Half Biscuit and We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Going To Use It who through not compromising anything both ended up having the mainstream come to them rather than them chasing the mainstream.

There were twenty-two bands that appeared on the C86 tape and there are twenty-two stories and then some within the pages of Nige Tassell's book, among them being a lot of personal stories of what became of various members of those bands. Ultimately, it's the personal aspects of these stories that makes the book so engaging. These are stories of what Warhol called '15 minutes of fame' but followed then by a lifetime of obscurity. These are stories of those who went on to success in other fields of work and activity, stories of those who returned to their bedrooms to continue making music and who have been there ever since, and there are stories of those who have now passed away.

And then, woven in between all of these stories is the story of the author himself tracking down the bands and their individual members, how he goes about it and where he ends up. All in all it's a veritable odyssey but an odyssey of an unexpected kind. The author himself calls it an 'indie odyssey' but actually it's slightly more than just that. It's a looking back at a time in his life that obviously meant something not only to himself but to all the other participants be they individuals within the bands or within the audience. It's a coming to terms with that period and a coming to an understanding of what it was all about. It is an indie odyssey but it's also very much an unpretentious, heartwarming spiritual one.

John Serpico

Black & Free - Tom Skinner

BLACK & FREE - TOM SKINNER

Well, to say I'm disappointed is an understatement. I'm underwhelmed, and it all started off so promisingly. From the title 'Black & Free' and the front cover picture in almost dayglo pink and blue of black men facing off gun-toting National Guardsmen. From the introductory first few pages describing a rumble in Harlem between rival gangs wielding bicycle chains, bottles, knuckledusters, and lead balls in socks. All good stuff but by page 26, however, the author is talking about Jesus and Christianity and it's suddenly one of those Talking Heads moments where you might ask yourself 'How did I get here?'

It turns out that author Tom Skinner is a Baptist minister and Black & Free is his memoir. Doh! as Homer Simpson would say. I've nothing against the author personally, of course - how could I, he's probably been dead for years - but the story of how he came to accept Jesus Christ into his life is not what I'm after. In fact, I couldn't give a flying fucking fuck, to be frank.

Written in 1968 at a time when the barricades were going up in Paris, when Vietnam was a slaughterhouse, and revolution and emancipation was on the agenda along had come Tom Skinner - self-proclaimed peoples' prophet - declaring that all the problems of the world, all the social injustice, prejudice and oppression was all down to the sin in the hearts of men. Live and let live and each to one's own but as Patti Smith once advised, Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine so you can stuff such ideas as 'original sin' where they belong in the dustbin of history or better still up your arse.

'Forgive them, for they know not what they do' is the reply. So the crusaders, the ministers and all the soldiers of Christ are right and I'm wrong. Which is a bit presumptuous, is it not? A bit arrogant? A bit overbold? To believe and then exclaim that you're right and everyone else is wrong isn't 'faith'. It's self-idolatry and it's the seed of prejudice that when pronounced as a sin in others goes unrecognized in the self because it also serves as a blacked-out mirror. 

'Love does not come naturally. Love is not part of human nature. It is not in the nature and desire of man to love instead of to hate. That type of life can only be produced by the person of Jesus Christ,' the author says. But I beg to differ. And actually, this is a fundamental building block of a person's worldview that dictates their course through life. Personally, I'm with Kropotkin and the idea that man is a naturally social creature and the key to his welfare and survival is through co-operation, mutual aid and altruism. It's obvious. If it wasn't then we'd all be out in the streets killing each other, or at least absolutely despising each other. 

What a horrible life it must be to believe that man is naturally hateful? No wonder anyone thinking this might turn to Jesus for salvation. For sanctuary. For a crutch.

I bought Black & Free on the strength of its cover and the series of photos enclosed within its pages showing the ghettoes of America in flames during the race riots of the Sixties but on reading it found myself caught-up in the tortured fantasies of a Baptist minister. I wanted revolution and the Black Panthers but found myself being told it's better to suck it up and to turn the other cheek. 

Well, thank you for the advice. But no thanks.

John Serpico