Tomorrow's People - Jeremy Sandford & Ron Reid

 TOMORROW'S PEOPLE -

JEREMY SANDFORD & RON REID

I was reading the autobiography of Chris Difford from Squeeze and he mentioned a hard-to-find book called Tomorrow's People that contained some pictures of him and Glenn Tilbrook in full hippy regalia taken at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974. Two weeks later and I'm in Oxfam and on the shelf there's a near-pristine copy of that very same book along with with some old copies of Oz magazine. I ignore the Oz magazines (as they're £35 an issue) but go for the book. And yep, there they are: two pictures in fact of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook; all long hair, painted faces, bare feet and technicolour dreamcoats not yet Up The Junction but happy as Larry at the Windsor Free. Like punk might never happen.

The title of the book, Tomorrow's People, refers to the suggestion by the authors Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid that festival-goers can be called this due to them being in rehearsal for a future society where basic amenities as we know them have broken down. It's the hippy dream, essentially, where everything is free, everything is groovy, and where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts - and of course, there's nothing wrong with  that.

Anyone who has ever been to a real festival as opposed to a corporate shindig passing itself off as a festival, cannot but help to have come away from it reeling, with a distinct feeling of it being how society should really be. The crossover between a festival situation and the 'normal' world is so distinct that it can be felt physically, as if it's an actual wall you have to walk through between the two.

What constitutes 'normality' is oppression, adherence to rules, conformity, wage slavery and false idolatry to vacuity. What constitutes a festival is a tangible sense of freedom, a genuine sense of community and 'togetherness', smiles, eccentricity as a norm, and good vibes. You should never say never but hardly ever does the twain meet. You go back to the 'real' world after having been to a festival and you can experience a kind of culture shock where for what feels like the very first time you see things a little too clearly and the way that things really are. It's not exactly a pretty sight. Society has a way, however, of sucking you in and it doesn't take long for you to be back in the fold and the festival experience to be suddenly the unreal one.

Tomorrow's People is a reflection on a pipe dream that at the time - we're talking early to mid-Seventies here - seemed very achievable, however naive it might in hindsight all look now. Have you ever been to a festival with just £5 in your pocket, just the clothes on your back, no tent and no sleeping bag, and stayed for a week having the best time? I have. It takes a certain amount of good faith, optimism and youthful enthusiasm but it's possible to do.

This is one of the striking things about the photographs of all the festival-goers in the book, how they're all very unprepared dress-wise for any change in the weather. No campervan, backpack, kagool or pair of wellingtons in sight; just the clothes they're standing up in and maybe a blanket to sit upon or to wrap themselves in. There's one picture of a girl even, where she's wearing a hat with a fork protruding from it and that seems to be the extent of her luggage, and even this seems a bit excessive and extravagant because what's wrong with eating with your fingers?

Tomorrow's People was published in 1974 so therefore there's no mention of the Stonehenge Free Festival that started the following year and what can be argued as being the full, florid flowering of the free festival experience. That's not to say Stonehenge was without its problems because there were some though in comparison to the 'normal' world that at the time was advocating mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons, they were as nothing.

Attention is paid instead to other festivals such as Phun City (organised by the International Times collective and offering among its many delights 20 acres of woodland available for copulation), the Isle of Wight festivals and its Desolation Hill aspect, the first Glastonbury Fayre, and of course the Windsor Free.  The writing, it must be said, is kind of all over the place, almost as if the author wrote it whilst on his sixth chillum but the photographs are exemplary - even the possibly embarrassing ones of future pop groups such as Squeeze.

John Serpico

The Ice Saints - Frank Tuohy

 THE ICE SAINTS - FRANK TUOHY

In an age where practically any book imaginable if you know where to look and you're willing to pay is available somewhere on the Internet, what dictates that you choose to read one book above another? There's a number of reasons, isn't there? Hype, word of mouth, availability, synchronicity, visuality. If you have a decent-sized library of books, when it comes to choosing which one to read next can often be an instinctive decision, a kind of gut feeling. Almost as if the book chooses you rather than you choosing the book.

And so to The Ice Saints by Frank Tuohy, a book found one day in a second-hand bookshop and purchased on the strength of the pictures on the front and back covers depicting a pretty miserable looking woman wrapped in a shawl. And that's it but that was enough because to go into a book 'blind', without knowing exactly what it's about can also be of appeal and a deciding factor in choosing what to read.

Set in Poland in 1960, The Ice Saints is about life in Poland at that time, caught behind the Iron Curtain and caught in the cross-fire of Russia and the West. Using the character of a British woman visiting her sister in Poland where she now lives with her Polish husband, writer Frank Tuohy describes and somewhat explains the social landscape where poverty reigns supreme, upheld by the pillars of politics, ideology, paranoia, acceptance of fate, and loyalty to the one-party state following the scourge of the Second World War.

The British woman brings news that her sister's son has been left a substantial sum of money in the will of their departed auntie but it's news that once understood what it will entail brings calamity and disruption, adding additional unhappiness to the unhappiness already there.

Frank Tuohy was a lecturer for a time at Krakow University and it's this experience that informs and drives his book. There's very much a 'stranger in a strange land' feel about it and throughout conveys the feeling of being in the company of people talking a foreign language that you only have very little understanding of, leaving you therefore misinterpreting what is being said and misunderstanding what is going on. On top of this is also the ever-present awareness of constantly being monitored, spied upon and reported to the authorities. It's the perfect scenario for catastrophe to occur and occur it does, though leaving everyone in the end just as isolated from one and other as at the start and with no lessons learned.

Tuohy raises a very pessimistic question mark over Polish society and indeed paints a pretty bleak picture of it though thankfully it's a picture that can be said to no longer apply as Poland has now changed beyond all recognition, particularly following the democratic upheavals of 1989. As a testament to Communist era Poland it still stands, however, as a very human picture due to filtering the outcomes of war and politics through the lives of individuals and successfully depicting the very real but profoundly sad results.

John Serpico 

Therese Raquin - Zola

 THERESE RAQUIN - ZOLA

Does anybody nowadays read books by 18th Century writers of ill repute? No, thought not. Written in 1867, could a book from that long ago have any relevance to today's world? Could such a book have stood the test of time? The answer to both is, of course, yes. In fact, Emile Zola's book, Therese Raquin, is surprisingly still relevant if not so much to the modern world but to the human condition.

Though habits may change, human nature isn't a moveable feast but remains pretty well fixed. Whether or not this is actually a good thing is open to debate though the smart money says it's a double-edged sword. Human nature is obviously what has got us this far but at the same time it's going to be our undoing unless we take stock of ourselves and turn both inwards to become more self-aware and outwards to become more aware of others.

So, Zola's book is a story of human nature taking its natural course when presented with a particular situation, that situation being adultery. What to do when a husband is in the way of lust and a better life? One option though certainly not the only one is to remove the husband from the equation and this is exactly what Therese and her lover Laurent do by pushing Therese's husband into the Seine whereupon he is drowned.

To avoid the guillotine they bide their time and through the manipulation of others around them wait for the right moment to come together without any suspicion being roused. During that period of laying low, however, with Therese playing the part of the grieving widow and Laurent playing the loyal friend of the husband, guilt gestates until finally it is all that is left. Raw, horrific, relentless and unassailable guilt manifested as visions of the rotting cadaver of the husband forever in their minds and at their sides.

Zola's book turns from morality play, to murder plot to full-blown horror story without missing a trick or skipping a beat. It's reminiscent at times, even, of the kind of story Stanley Kubrick would make into a film, a la The Shining. There is an atmosphere of desperate dread throughout and a constant attempt at trying to escape that dread by any and all means. There's a claustrophobia about it - the kind that might be felt if buried alive and trapped in a coffin. If hell is other people, as Sartre stated, then Therese Raquin epitomizes this and shows us that through our helplessness we are the architects of our own doom. Blown on the winds by forces that Zola calls Naturalism or in other words an absence of free will. Controlled entirely by our nervous systems and cast adrift in - what that other great philosopher, Woody Allen, once put it as - a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

All good, fun stuff, of course.

John Serpico

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 23)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 23)

You find them in almost any tourist/arty souvenir shop: bits of wood, roughed up to make them look like bits of driftwood picked up from the beach, usually painted blue with a stencil slogan on them saying things like 'This way to the beach'. They're ten a penny and probably made in Hong Kong. There's one that caught my eye though simply because it's open to interpretation. It says 'Exmouth is not a destination it's a way of life.' 

Glam! - Barney Hoskyns

 GLAM! - BARNEY HOSKYNS

The problem nowadays with glam rock is that its reputation goes before it and its reputation isn't a good one, not helped by Gary Glitter driving a stake through its heart with the exposure of all his crimes. At the time, however, glam rock was the sight and sound of a wedge being driven between generations. Decades don't normally cut off neatly from each other but tend instead to bleed into one and other. Subsequently, the Sixties didn't end in December of 1969 and nor did they end at Altamont. Likewise, the Seventies didn't begin in January 1970 nor did they begin with Bowie announcing he was 'gay and always had been'. Culture is never cut and dried and neither is history

According to Barney Hoskyns in his book Glam!, it was Marc Bolan who began the glam rock 'revolution', driven by his desire for pop success, by changing his musical style from hippy whimsy to cosmic electric, and by applying glitter make-up to his face for his appearance on Top of the Pops. According to music producer Tony Visconti, however, it was Bowie and Bolan simultaneously who invented glam, with Bowie pushed in that direction by his then wife Angie. According to Lou Reed on the other hand, glam came from Andy Warhol and in particular his Factory Superstars Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn who for some time had been making costumes out of things they found in the street, and wearing make-up, nail polish and glitter.

Who we should thank for glam is academic, of course. More importantly and as conveyed by Hoskyns, what glam's great gift to legions of disaffected teenagers was the implicit invitation for them to reinvent themselves. To strike a pose, to revolt into style. This is precisely what Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Wayne County, Cherry Vanilla, Candy Darling and indeed all of Andy Warhol's coterie did, transforming themselves from freaks and outcasts to instant superstars. Bolan and Bowie did the same, all of them in the process helping to build and add different elements to the torch that could be passed along and held aloft by future torch-bearers from the Sex Pistols to Marc Almond to Lady Gaga.

The phenomenal thing about glam was how very quickly it became the vehicle to take such things as androgyny and bisexuality into the mainstream, making it suddenly acceptable for blokes to put on a bit of make-up and to sport multi-colored tank-tops, platform shoes and feathered haircuts. Groups such as Slade, Sweet and The Glitter Band whose members wouldn't look out of place on a building site or behind the wheel of a lorry became the main representatives, pulling a host of other groups such as Roxy Music in their wake. With their retro-futurism Roxy Music in turn created another wake that broke down the barriers between high and low art, an attribute that Bowie ascribed the New York Dolls as also having.

Saying it before anyone else had the chance to, come 1973 Bolan was declaring that glam rock was dead though in response Angie Bowie replied that 'It may have been Nero fiddling, but he was playing a hell of a tune.' And she was right.

All in all, Barney Hoskyns' book is an adequate overview of glam, the only problem with it being he over-stretches himself and casts his net a little too far, in the process applying the glam label to Kiss and even Bette Midler. Kiss may indeed have been an attempt at appropriating glam but to the glam purist they never cut the mustard, at best being a kind of third-rate glam metal. The devil is always in the detail. To the glam purist there's a distinction between Mud, for example, and Showaddywaddy. That distinction might only be the cluster of baubles pinned to the ears of Mud's guitarist but it's an important one.

Hoskyns' book ends in 1997 with Gary Glitter having been arrested on suspicion of harbouring child pornography. There is then a footnote adding that he had been charged and was due to appear before magistrates. The rest is history. The Leader of The Gang was dead and so too 24 years after Bolan's original announcement was glam, Glitter's downfall being the final nail in the coffin, leaving many a good memory and many more good tunes but a very desecrated though still very glitter-encrusted corpse.

John Serpico