Strangeland - Tracey Emin

 STRANGELAND - TRACEY EMIN

I like Tracey Emin. There, I've said it. There is a proviso, however, in that I'm not a big fan of her art, particularly her installations. It's a delicate balance - a juggling act - but I manage it in the same way that I like Francis Bacon whilst not being a big fan of his art - or his studio. Especially his studio. I remember there being an exhibition of Tracey Emin's artwork in Amsterdam once, and on the outside of the Van Gogh Museum a gigantic banner advertising the show had been hung and I remember stopping to look at it and thinking that's an impressive achievement for an artist to have their name outside the Van Gogh Museum like that. Up there if not better than being nominated for the Turner Prize? The thing was, I didn't feel compelled to go in there and to actually view the show. I did at a later date but for the meantime the kudos and the sheer achievement was enough, which all served to enforce the idea that Tracey Emin's greatest work of art is not her tent with the names sown onto it or her unmade bed or her drawings. No, Tracey Emin's greatest work of art is herself.

Strangeland is a collection of Emin's memoirs and recollections written in a painfully forthright, often shockingly confessional but more than likely exaggerated manner, reminiscent of the confessional writings of Billy Childish. And that didn't take very long did it - to bring Billy Childish's name into the proceedings? But then it's almost unavoidable, really. Billy Childish is like the conscience that haunts Emin's art. The pure and unsullied Ying to her 'sold to the highest bidder' Yang. The question of whose art is the better doesn't come into it, however, and neither does commerciality or even originality. If anything, it's more to do with marketing because without any doubt more people know who Tracey Emin is and know some of her art than those who know of Billy Childish. It's just how the world works. The art world especially.

There's some pretty shocking stuff in Strangeland. Things that a reviewer once said that he wished someone who loved Emin had advised her not to publish. But publish she did and now here it all is in book form for the whole world to see. And for whose benefit? Well, for Emin's I presume because whilst it's good to have such candid and at times such brutal honesty displayed there's very little for the reader to actually gain from it, particularly when it comes to her anecdotes in regard to underage sex and abuse.

Strangeland is another addition to Tracey Emin's canon. Another string to her bow. Another medium to channel her art through - that art being herself, of course. Tracey Emin is her own muse, her own subject, and her own creation. Her grand finale, even. The point being that whether it's good or bad art is neither here nor there. That's not the question. That isn't what Emin's art is about.

Likewise, the question as to whether Strangeland is a good book or not is also neither here nor there. It can be read in the same way you would any other book, of course, but it shouldn't really be critiqued in the same way. That's not to say it's beyond criticism, it's just that the ingenuity of Tracey Emin is in the way she's smashed through a kind of fourth art wall in the same way, dare I say, as Picasso did with his Cubism. Purists might scoff but it's true and it doesn't mean you necessarily need to like Emin's art to recognise this.

John Serpico

Harmony In My Head - Steve Diggle

 HARMONY IN MY HEAD - STEVE DIGGLE

The last time I saw Steve Diggle he was as happy as Larry. This wasn't round his house for tea and biscuits I should point out but onstage with the Buzzcocks at the Paradiso, Amsterdam in 2009. He was playing his heart out on his guitar, swigging from a bottle of Champagne and smiling ear to ear looking for all the world as if he was in his natural element which, of course, he was. Whether or not any chemical stimulant was adding to his happiness is between him and his lawyer but as this was Amsterdam there was a slim chance it might have been. And why not? When in Rome and all that...

Harmony In My Head is Steve Diggle's autobiography, ghost written by Terry Rawlings, and it's a rollicking read full of of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. All the things, in fact, that you could want from an autobiography. There's also plenty of insights as you might expect in regard to the early Punk days, the Buzzcocks, and life in England during that whole Punk era with Diggle coming across as a genuinely affable, working class bloke possessed of a wit and intelligence that has seen him weather and survive decades of both personal and music business highs and lows. Moreover, he comes across as the kind of bloke you'd want want as a friend that you would very much treasure as such.

'People have forgotten just how desperate it was living in England during the early Seventies,' Diggle says, and it's true. History has a way of being written by either those with a vested interest or by those with a hankering for nostalgia, hence why as promoted by the tory press that decade is always depicted by images of piles of uncollected rubbish, striking workers, and the three-day week. The entertainment industry in the meantime depicts it as a golden age of glam rock, Hollywood blockbusters, and 'traditional' comedians telling 'traditional' jokes.

Being born into this world meant being born as mere cannon fodder fit only to be a spectator to the spectacle. Active participation in the world and the shaping of it was denied, leaving the likes of Steve Diggle with his nose pressed against the window watching life go by outside and an often ludicrous life at that. He sums it up by describing a night at the Manchester Free Trade Hall watching Patrick Moraz from prog rock group Yes, onstage with 'a fucking shop's worth of keyboards, banks and banks of them, with all those jackplug socket boards that looked like a telephone exchange. It was ridiculous but that wasn't all. Half way through a number he jumped up and blew into a 15-foot Alpine horn. That's when I knew I'd been had.'

From seemingly out of nowhere, however, the Sex Pistols suddenly appeared and from experiencing them came the notion that you don't need money or permission or even talent - you just need ideas even if those ideas are above your station.

'The message was 'Do it yourself',' Diggle tells us. 'I can't emphasize how important this was at that time, how important it was for music in this country. There were a million people on the dole and here was a band saying 'Get up off your arse. Express yourself. You can do it'. The barrier had gone between the ordinary kid on the street and the musician on the stage.'

Hence the Buzzcocks and punk's first double entendre - suggesting a vibrator - and a name as good as a Sex Pistol. Hence Spiral Scratch, the Buzzcocks debut EP on their New Hormones label that according to Geoff Travis of Rough Trade was the first independent record people really wanted. Hence a slew of classic, near-perfect singles that when compiled onto a single album - Singles Going Steady - made for a classic, near-perfect album. Hence for Steve Diggle a life of creativity, travel, art, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

Diggle's a candid raconteur and reveals things of interest in a very matter of fact manner, much of which I'd not even considered. I didn't know, for example, that the song 'Harmony In My Head' was inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the best though most difficult books in the world. I didn't know 'Love You More' was at the time the shortest ever A-side single released  in the UK, clocking in at just one minute and forty-five seconds. I didn't know that on signing to United Artists that the label at first refused to press 'Orgasm Addict' as they thought the word 'orgasm' was disgusting. And then likewise with 'Oh Shit', the B-side of the second single, 'What Do I Get?', where the pressing plant staff actually walked out.

And then in regard to original Buzzcocks bassist, Garth, whom little is really known about to the point of him being somewhat of a punk rock enigma, Diggle informs us he was a 'massive truck driver-type of a guy, a huge build of a man, a proper bruiser' who happened to have a certain propensity for fighting. Garth would fight with bouncers (six at a time on one occasion), band members themselves (Pete Shelley once, for buying the wrong size batteries for his ghetto-blaster), and even whole audiences, one time in Leeds wading into the front row after someone spat at him only to result in the entire stage being pelted with bottles and glasses and the band having to flee the venue for their lives.

Being a self-confessed, life-long conscientious objector to the 9-5 work ethic, Steve Diggle has successfully navigated and dodged every imaginable sling and arrow that a life of being a rock'n'roller (and a punk one at that) could possibly throw at him - and he's still standing. Harmony In My Head is a testament to that mighty endeavour and that most noble of achievements. 

John Serpico