ELEKTRODISCO CHEEKBONE TRIANGLES
Souvenir by Michael Bracewell
White RabbitSeptember 2021Selected by Lucy Kumara Moore and Lilly Markati
I adore Bracewell’s writing for its elegance and evocative power. Described as a “eulogy for a London of the late 1970s and early 1980s”, Souvenir is a cultural history that might also be an elliptical memoir. It informs, but also offers a series of impressionistic, sensorially alert vignettes on the music, mood, built environment and creative landmarks of a time that was “pre-body-consciousness, pre-digital and pre-ironic”. It presents an opportunity to feel another time, to let oneself be taken on a journey into the past, guided by Bracewell’s observational intensity and unapologetically abundant use of simile. Souvenir also works on the level of the sentence. One that I love especially talks of spring as a time of “anticipation and nostalgia”. There are also passages on Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon and Stephen Willats. I have long loved the investigations into subculture conducted by these artists, and was happy to find them mentioned here. – Lucy Kumara Moore
After the freezing winter of 1981, with its hard frosts and clear icy twilights of intense stillness, and quiet skinny boys hunched in old raincoats, always having to walk, listening to New Order, reading John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard, and pale art-school girls in the thrall of Schiele, Erté and David Sylvian, there occurred in the pop-style zeitgeist a role-playing fantasy. This took the following form and proved a sharp contrast: a received idea of London’s West End during the mid-20th century, mixing a concentrate of Bebop to Beat Boom modes from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and making a dressing-up box of their glamour – zoot suits, pinstripes and keychains, Alma Cogan, spivs, Julie London, Old Compton Street, Expresso Bongo and The Talk of the Town; a streetwise fast-talking cool proletarian notion of Jewish tailors, Bakelite, Beat Girl, pomade, strippers, Demob and Demop, coffee bars, beehives, impresarios, modern jazz, taffeta, nightclubs, Stephen Ward, rockabilly, stout, diamanté and upright bass… This fantasy building in exuberance, over two or three years, to embrace samba, salsa, disco, tinsel, cocktail bar palm trees – tans and tennis shorts, good times party carnival showbiz: the sound of a bright new Britain.
Occurring alongside this period costume drama of pre-Swinging London, pre-Beatles pop, meanwhile, to pursue an independent but occasionally overlapping course, was a cult of the abject, industrial, occult, transgressive, clever, days in a tower block east of Old Street, nights in Heaven or the Final Academy counter-fantasy – which seemed the Shadow-side, confrontational, smug, oppressive, malefic, highly wrought of all that jazz-samba good-times showbiz shit…
The Shadow-side knelt at the altar of Burroughs, Debord, Pasolini and Bataille; the Samba-side rather to Bernard Delfont.
In Kensington High Street, Soho, Covent Garden: dressing up in wilder and ever-more extreme costumes, racing to outrun imitation. “As my appearance progressed from the effeminate to the bizarre…” – so Quentin Crisp had recounted, of his own youthful progress through London in the 1930s; and now, in dark rooms and basements – as shabby and basic as any rural church-hall disco – here are young people dressed in knee breeches, white stockings and black pumps; collarless shirts of storm-cloud grey, cheekbone triangles of cerise blusher, belted radiation suits, ruffs, robes and flounces and weird smocks and space quiffs, turbans, sashes, vertical hair, greased hair, sharp-creased US Air Force trousers; faces powdered white, plum-black lipstick, batwing swoops of silver-mauve eyeshadow, fading towards the temples…
Lord Byron merged with Kraftwerk merged with Momma Don’t Allow; Cabaret, Roxy, Siouxsie, Bowie; dressing up for the elektrodisco modern(e); honing a fantasy of style exclusivity and high individualism in tatty West End clubs and cellars full of noise.
A few years earlier – 1976 and all that – punk (harsher, sparser, thinner, poorer, brittle in its newness) had proposed to a small group of sympathetic souls the notion of modernity itself reaching critical mass: imagine the pavement cracking, the mean corrugated iron fence falling back over the damp-blackened concrete, the white goods and deodorants and fluorescent lighting tubes and flyovers and subways and supermarkets and frozen food becoming the ancient history of a science-fiction present, occupied by orphan adolescents, warming their hands by the flames of a burning television… And, of course, that was a fantasy, too. Or mostly.
But somewhere in all of these fantasies, fast and hard on one another’s heels, becoming a blur – punk and post-punk, industrialism, electro-futurism and new-wave postmodern pop – lived and felt for real, nonetheless, by types of a certain disposition, between the late 1970s and the middle years of the 1980s, there seemed to be a configuration of existential truths, from which some members of a generation were taking their bearings. ◉