A Garland of May:An Evening of May Folklore with Lisa Knapp.

"Unite and unite and let us all unite for summer is a-comin' today and whither we are going we all will unite in the merry morning of May" - Padstow May Song.

I didn't expect, when I left the house on Thursday afternoon, to end up sat in a room above a pub (while rowdy football fans downstairs cheered on Chelsea against Eintracht Frankfurt and Arsenal versus Valencia) singing (badly) along to a folk song from Cornwall that both welcomes in the month of May and, very pertinently for me at the moment, makes comment on our corporeal impermanence.

Man, they say, blooms like a flower and fades just as quickly too. I'd long known that but me and my friends had it brought home to us with a particularly cruel sucker punch to the guts very recently. It had made me ponder not just the mortality of myself,my friends, and my family but the mortality of everybody and everything. It had driven home to me how short our time here is and how we have to, somehow, eke out the very most of it - and, if we can, find like minded souls to share it with.

Some of the places I find like minded souls are at the meetings of the London Skeptics, the Greenwich Skeptics, the London Fortean Society, and, most recently of all, SELFS (the South East London Folklore Society) and last night's talk at The Old King's Head on Borough High Street, A Garland of May with Lisa Knapp, proved to be no exception.

The March SELFS event had seen me toasting the Thames with its own water and if that seemed a bizarre, but lovely, way to end an evening then Lisa Knapp's singalong version of the Padstow May Song was even more lovely, if a little less bizarre. It was a busy evening, folk were sat on the floor, and (and this surprised me) there were no shortage of takers for the sing-song. At one point even drowning out some of those noisier footy fans beneath us.

I'd seen Lisa once before (February 2017, the Barbican, Shirley Collin's Lodestar concert) and, perhaps due to being in such close proximity to the likes of Shirley and Alasdair Roberts she'd failed to make much of a lasting impression on me. That certainly changed on Thursday evening.

The roughly ninety minute talk was almost as much a gig as it was a lecture, six rather wonderful songs both punctuated and illuminated Lisa's talk. Showing a valiant spirit in not allowing some early technical gremlins to put her off her stride, Lisa started off by telling us about the research she'd done, much of it in Cecil Sharp House, for her recent Til April is Dead album. One that celebrates the tradition of welcoming in May. Or a May. Or the May. Any kind of May really, except Theresa!

She spoke about the May traditions of Jack in the Green in Hastings, the Rochester Sweeps Festival, maypoles, May Day, St George and the dragon, May Queens, the Padstow Hobby Horse (or Obby Oss), and the folkloric songs that emanate from England. She informed us that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually set on May eve and she punctuated this with brief excerpts of May songs by Martin Carthy and, I can't get too much of her, Shirley Collins.

On an unseasonably wet day, she'd festooned the upper bar of The Old King's Head with greenery and as I sipped modestly on a brace of Doom Bars, Lisa told us about the tradition of 'garlanding'. Garlanding seems to consist of laying greenery on rich people's door steps and then singing outside their houses in the hope of obtaining money, beer, or food.

In New Romney and Lydd in the 1420s, and then again in Launceston in the 1430s, there are records of people paying to have 'the May' brought in. It's even said that Henry VII paid ten shillings to some maidens in Lambeth for this service. Well, that's what he said.

But the tradition dates back further than the fifteenth century. Using Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun and Steve Round's The English Year as her primary sources, Lisa told us that the first recorded reference to Beltane, the precursor of May Day, comes from approx. 900AD. Folk would force themselves to pass through fires in the hope of warding off illnesses and bad spirits, if not third degree burns!

The Beltane traditions belonged, and still belong, more to Wales and Scotland than they do to England where the more innocent maypole seems to be the centre point for May festivities. It is innocent too. There's no evidence to be found whatsoever, sadly, that the Maypole was some kind of phallic symbol associated with fertility rituals. Although we all know what a young man's mind turns to once spring has sprung. Something it's not been far off all winter, truth be told.

Neither are maypoles believed to be representative of some kind of ancient Germanic tree god. Which is nearly as disappointing. The first literary reference to a maypole appears in 1240 when a bishop in Lincoln mentions the use of one. At first the clergy had no strong feelings about maypoles but with the rise of puritanical thought around the Elizabethan era this all changed and maypoles fell out of favour for a few decades. The shaft in the church of St Andrew Undershaft, near the Gherkin, was once a maypole but was destroyed by puritans as far back as the 1500s.

Following the Restoration, maypoles were back and back to stay. Victorians later prettified both maypoles, and all May traditions - which by now included dancing milkmaids (from the 1600s onwards) and, a century after the milkmaids, gyrating chimney sweeps who found themselves both short of work and monies come May and were prepared to dance for their dinner.

It's a noticeably working class tradition and a big part of the reason for that is because these were the times before the opening of great people's parks and, especially, large indoor spaces where the commoners could gather. So May became fixed in the calendar as a time when people could go outside, dance, mix, and celebrate. The first big annual get together.

Unlike other holidays like Easter, Christmas, and Whitsun, the May celebrations are not of a religious nature and seem to put the focus more on nature and friendship. With that in mind it was a rather lovely touch that Lisa's first song of the evening, The Night Before May Day, should involve samples of local people, wildlife, and even livestock.

Later songs like Jack in the Green made use of testimonies from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Cornish song Hal-an-Tow contained references to washing one's face in the May dew and sounded to me a bit like the folktronica band Tunng, and Don't You Go-A-Rushing, Maids in May saw Lisa finally get to have a go on the viola that'd been sitting lonesome by her side all evening.

Elsewhere, there was a song that was left unnamed but contained recordings of birdsong and was truly beautiful. Parish notices touched on next month's talk about John Michell (a big man on the megalith scene - and also a man who weighed the Earth), this Sunday's Pagan pride festival in Russell Square (the world's oldest I learnt), and a free folk festival in Bermondsey in September featuring the brilliant Stick in the Wheel (think The Streets gone folk) but it was Lisa's talk, and her music, that really made the evening.

Towards the end of the week in which I'd witnessed great sadness and seen a great friend's life taken away by cancer it was humbling to be back in the company of good people, sharing stories and songs, and celebrating the beauty of nature and the beauty of this world. It's not something we should take for granted. We won't have it forever.

 

Foreign Postmark:The Recent Art of David Salle

"I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination" - David Salle.

Equivalence (2018)

In my last blog I complained about the bullshit that artists and galleries say and write to justify their art so it's something of a downright liberty to kick off this one with a quote like that from Oklahoma's David Salle above  - but, hey, that's the sort of person I am. A person capable of holding two, or more, contradictory ideas at the same time.

That's the sort of person we all are. Judging by his recent series of paintings, Musicality and Humour is the collective name they're going under, David Salle certainly is. It's not the first time I'd seen Salle's work at the Skarstedt in St James's. In November 2016 that gallery's opening show hosted an exhibition shared between Salle and the photographer Cindy Sherman. I visited and, of course, I wrote about it at the time. 

I liked the Salle paintings in that show (the Sherman works too) but I think I like these recent works even more. They're bolder, brighter, more full of life. In places they're cartoonish and elsewhere Salle adopts a faux-naive approach. There's a lot in them.

Equivalence features a hospital bed in what looks like the fifties, a deep sea diver's helmet, and an attractive dark haired lady in a purple bikini top that contains within it images of typical American houses. The hospital scene has been enlarged and repeated like an extended jazz riff. It all makes for something lovely to look at and something that seems pointless to try and understand. Just enjoy it.

The repetition in Hearts and Gloves comes from a cup of coffee and a saucer and there's a different lady looking out at us as we gawp in at her. There's also a seemingly random rubber glove to the fore of the painting. A nod, perhaps, to one of Giorgio de Chirico's favourite motifs?

Hearts and Gloves (2018)

Inverted Heart (2019)

Grey Honeymoon (2018-19)

On we go. It's a small show, just eleven paintings, but each one of them contains enough to keep you guessing and, best of all, has been put together in a way that pleases the eye. Tiger skins, pirouetting ballet dancers, the language of advertising, donkeys, conical bras, and, all over the place, brooms. There's even a broom with a face in Autumn Rhythm. A painting whose very title suggests music and one whose construction looks to me like a Jackson Pollock where the drips of paint have been replaced by humdrum items like irons, sides of meat, and is that a cheese grater?

Foreign Postmark (2018)

Autumn Rhythm (2018)

Latin Rhythms (2018)

Why choose these elements? Why not? Latin Rhythms features a dangerously stereotypical Mexican in a big hat riding a donkey with a flower in its hair. In another show I may have been triggered but so silly is Salle's art that it seems to me it's much more likely he's been inspired by an episode of a Looney Tunes cartoon than a Trump rant about immigration.

You only have to look at the greyed out figures of S.P. Divide. Against a backdrop that looks more like an upturned deck chair than a Sean Scully, stock characters parade around in bow ties and cocktail dresses, carrying briefcases, looking for all the world like the makers of the Paddington animated series from my youth have turned their hands to remaking Mad Men.

S.P. Divide (2018-19)

The New Globe (2018)

Leader of Steals (2018-19)

It's daft, that's what it is, and for that I admire it. There's too much po-facedness in art. What's wrong with a little fun? There's nothing wrong with being all serious if you're going to make important points but if you've got fuck all to say for yourself then maybe ease up on the big pronouncements.

The naked guy with the droopy moustache in Leader of Steals made me smile, not least because he's hiding his equipment behind a giant box of Kleenex and the intrusive shoes, gloves, and household appliances were all fun too. I could play little games to myself seeing what I could spot.

I'm not sure if it was David Salle's intention to put a tiny little smile on my face during a sad time - but that doesn't matter, he did. I'm not sure he's necessarily going that far against the tidal wave of literalism but he's certainly living the life of the imagination. Good on him.

The Rain Fell Everywhere (2018-19)

Prude Looks Like a Lady:An Installation by Anthea Hamilton.

A few weeks ago I found myself wandering around the Thomas Dane Gallery in St James's in London surrounded by walls that resembled Battenburg cakes, wooden mock ups of slightly fetishistic looking boots, statues of butterflies, paintings of flowers, and oh so tasteful photographs of naked men with their 'manhoods' obscured by their own legs, their own hands, or a carefully placed candelabra.

You'll not be surprised to know I was bewildered. Although some of the art (the flowers, the butterflies mainly) looked impressive I had no idea what it was all supposed to mean. Anthea Hamilton's The Prude (for that is the artist and the exhibition in question) takes places over two small galleries on Duke St and when I read in the bumf you can pick up on the way in that she "frequently mines heterogeneous image sources" my heart sank a little.

Whose wouldn't? They've been mining heterogeneous image sources round here for generations. My dad was a heterogeneous image source miner, my grandad was a heterogeneous image source miner, and we've even been able to trace heterogeneous image source mining back eight generations. It's the family trade.

What I'm saying, in a style that my English teacher at school would have dsimissed as flippancy, is that the idea of heterogeneous image sources is something of a cliche. It's just more alphabet fucking soup and when you've been to as many galleries as I have, read as many press releases as I have, it all starts to taste the bloody same.

But I soldiered on. I'm a committed blogger and someone has to write these things so they can sit on the internet and be ignored. They don't just write, and ignore, themselves. The show, in theory, is about the 'prude'. The prude is someone for whom modesty becomes extreme. The prude, we are told, is someone who will not permit either themselves or others any sensuous enjoyment in this life. The prude, we read on, could be somebody like Cecil Vyse in E. M. Forster's Room With a View, someone who affects to be a sensitive individual, an aesthete, but, in fact, remains detached from lived experience.

It's an interesting enough idea to base an exhibition around but it's really hard to see what this show says about the state of prudishness. I've not titled the works because it's not clear from the literature which works are which but the titles may give you some idea of Hamilton's mindset (also bear in mind that Hamilton was responsible for the giant golden bum entered for the Turner Prize 2016 - if you'll pardon the expression):-

Walnut Way Wizened Boot
Slanted Tartan Scramble Chair #01
Wavy Socks and Sandals Boot
Wrestler Sedan Chair
Folded Wing Moth

There's also a lot of works called RPD (followed by some sort of catalogue number) so make of that what you will. I just scratched my head, took some photos, and continued round. If art requires an accompanying leaflet to explain it then that leaflet better be interesting but this one, which rambled on endlessly about Ed Ruscha gradients, fundamental economies, processes of realisation, and tactile surfaces conceived through digital production, was so dull it made the already (mostly) unimpressive art even less interesting than it already was.

Dry exercises like this are exactly the kind of thing that puts more people off engaging with art and galleries. I was well into my thirties before I even worked out that people like me, not in the industry, were even allowed to enter these precious commercial gallery spaces. I do it now with glee and often and sometimes I get a wonderful surprise. Often, it's rather dull. This fell, most definitely, into the latter camp.

Most of the works on show just made me think the whole art world is one giant con where the ability to back up your creations with a load of bullshit words is far more important than the actual work itself. These works, for the most part, were neither aesthetically pleasing, they weren't (in any way) challenging, they had nothing to say about the times we lived in, and they elicited no emotion from me whatsoever.

So, thank Anthea Hamilton for her butterflies at least. They look pretty. But that's because butterflies do look pretty. Same for the big orange flowers. Same for the tiling.

I can't say that Anthea Hamilton hadn't put any effort in to her art. She clearly had. But her efforts seemed pretty directionless. Unless the direction intended was straight to the bank because with this display I really can't see what else was intended other than to trick the rich guardians at the doors of the art world to part with some of their not so hard earned cash.

Disappointing - and not one giant golden bum in sight. Just the shit that came out of it.

Chimerica:A Pacific State?

"Journalists seek truth and right now we need them more than ever".

It's true. At least for some journalists. Others less so. What happens when a journalist, photojournalist Lee Berger (Alessandro Nivola), bends the truth (or tells an outright lie) in search of what he believes to be a bigger truth? What happens if he's caught? Will the machine crush him (while allowing much bigger (and more dangerous) liars) an easier ride? If so, how will he find redemption?

All these questions and more are asked (and some are answered) in Lucy Kirkwood's often compelling recent Channel 4 four part series Chimerica, a series I was turned on to by a five star review in The Guardian by Lucy Mangan and one that, if it didn't quite live up to that perfect assessment, certainly rewarded the viewer's patience.

It's billed as "a fictional story about real events" and those events are set both in the present and in the past, both in the USA and China. The basic premise is that Berger is a celebrated photographer who gained notoriety when he took the iconic photo of the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square during the June 1989 pro-democracy movements in Beijing.

Against the backdrop of the 2016 US election, Berger is working in the middle of bomb scarred Syria and making presentations to students, one of whom asks what became of Tank Man. It transpires that both his identity, his current whereabouts, and even if he's still alive is a complete mystery.

All the talk in America is of how Hillary will make Trump eat his "fucking toupee" but as the series develops, and we see images of Trump rallies and learn that journalists (entire newspapers even) have been blacklisted by the Trump machine, the blinkers start to fall from the eyes of our chief protagonists and they reach the point we're at now. A world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news', victim blaming, locking children in cages, and celebrating racism and sexism.

When Berger manipulates an image he's taken in Syria he's accused of playing straight into Trump's "tiny hands" and soon he's lost his job and he's on a plane to Beijing to try and find Tank Man, to save his career, and seek that redemption.

He inducts hard drinking Tessa Kendrick (Sophie Okonedo, excellent as ever), a consultant for a US credit card firm, into the mile high club in the toilets of a Cathay Pacific flight while female flight attendants snigger, covering their mouths, outside and soon she becomes his partner, of sorts, both romantically and in the search for Tank Man.

More important assistance in Lee's mission comes from Zhang Lin (played by Terry Chen as something of a nervous wreck for reasons that will eventually become apparent). Lin's operating in a China where lawyers, journalists, and even bloggers can be arrested and tortured. He drinks so much Tsingtao beer you wonder if the makers of Chimerica have gone in for some product placement but you also think about what's left Lin so boozy, and so jittery.

In trying to tell stories about present day China and present day America while also dipping back to '89 in China (and occasionally to Watergate era-America) while at the same time attempting to show the tale of Lee's personal atonement AND his romance with Kendrick, Chimerica occasionally bites off more than it can chew.

It's not always as gripping as it could be (compared to something like, for instance, Killing Eve) but perhaps that's part of the nature of the political thriller. Chimerica is more of a slow burner and there are some twists and turns towards the end, as well as several beatings for Berger, I absolutely did not see coming.

When it dips back to the eighties it's all news footage of Trevor McDonald, a young Donald Trump on CNN, and yuppies in braces barking into landlines (not brick mobiles?). Lots of the action is set in the liminal spaces of hotel rooms and airports, possibly a cliche now but they do seem like the sort of places investigative photojournalists probably spend most of their time in. It also does that thing that happens in films about the American press where conversations pivotal to the plot are carried out while harassed superiors march through office corridors fending off various queries.

That's how a lot of the exposition is delivered in the first episode. But there's just as much barbed political satire. It's often blunter than you imagine it was intended to be. While it's true part of the reason for Trump's success was the complacency of the Democrats, this point gets bludgeoned home a little too often. There's a suggestion that Bill Clinton initiated the establishment carve up that made it possible for Trump's political rise and one character asserts "I like (Hillary) Clinton. Women hold up half the sky".

Lee's former boss Frank (F. Murray Abraham, who was in All The President's Men so has good form on the ol' international espionage front) complains, as if to exhort us to punch a Nazi, that the problem with liberals is "too much spilt coffee, not enough split lips" and tells a Bernie supporter who's planning to abstain rather than vote for Hillary that the election "isn't a fucking salad bar. You don't get a bespoke artisanal candidate. You choose the thing that's not a giant shit".

It's a nice dig at those whose convictions prevent them from voting against fascism. Elsewhere we hear a Chinese observer to the US election proclaim "an election every four years! No wonder you never get anything done", hear the 'have your say' section that online papers feel obliged to carry described as "a national circle jerk for imbeciles", and see Lee scrolling through badly spelt abusive comments underneath a YouTube apology his bosses have insisted he edit before releasing.

Race (always bubbling under the surface in the world of American politics) is touched on when Berger asks a security guard "do I look like a terrorist?" only to be met with the killer riposte that yes, he does. One of those white power Timothy McVeigh type terrorists.

There's stuff about Vice, Buzzfeed, the dead wood press, the likelihood (or not) of Chinese democracy, corruption in both power houses, and how Chinese investment in US business can help censor stories about Chinese state corruption. These are important, and timely, ethical debates but it feels, at times, as if this washing machine is too packed to spin.

The, often bilingual, action pings back and forwards from China (cue pictures of Wham! playing live in the country, Halina cameras (I had one!), and references to eating tree bark in the Mao era) to a strip club in the Garment District of Manhattan and this sets into stark relief the very real grey and polluted streets of large Chinese cities and the huge imposing and impersonal steel and glass skyscrapers that tower over them.

Elsewhere, it's a tale of hard livin', whisky swiggin' journos that seems to belong more in the world of anecdotes about Henry Kissinger ruining your bosses desk with the unsolicited gift of an oily fish but may, for all I know, still ring true. That said it worked more often than it didn't and I enjoyed it. There were a couple of moments, one bizarrely involving Van Gogh's Sunflowers, that sent a chill up my back and I was genuinely wrongfooted on at least two occasions.

Lee's colleague Mel Kincaid (Cherry Jones) tells him "it's not a crusade, it's desperate masturbation" and, despite having the occasional shuffle around down the front of its slacks, that's not an accusation you could make of Chimerica because, even though it tries to balance various different oddly shaped objects on its head at the same time, it just about retains the clarity of vision to make this both a piercing indictment of the corruption of high level international affairs (now and in the past) while remembering to tell a rollicking story that intrigued on both the personal and the political level.

A qualified thumbs up for Lucy Kirkwood and her wonderful cast with special props going out to Nivola, Okonedo, Jones, Murray Abraham, and, most of all, Naomi Yang as Joy and Terry Chen as Zhang Lin. Pour us another Tsingtao.  干杯.

¡La Caixa!:- The Breathing Lesson and Other Stories.

Hola.

A couple of weeks ago I was down at the Whitechapel Gallery to see their small, two room, exhibition of works drawn from the renowned collection of "la Caixa" Foundation in Spain. I took a few photos, had a nose around, went home, uploaded them to my computer, and considered maybe writing a short blog about them. Then some pretty big stuff happened (which you can read about by clicking on here) and I pretty much forgot all about Whitechapel Gallery, art, and writing blogs in general.

Quite rightly so. Anything else would have been stupid. Psychopathic even. But life goes on and I find putting some music on, often classical, and knocking out these blogs to be quite therapeutic. Even when they're hard work or take ages or even both. In fact those are the ones that can often feel the most rewarding afterwards - especially if they get 'likes', shares, or views. I'm needy. I know that.

Don't expect anything too grand from this one. It's me dipping my toes back into the water, trying to get back into some kind of routine, and, if it's a little self-indulgent, then please forgive me. I am trying to make these interesting for other people and not just an exercise in navel gazing. Honestly!

Gerhard Richter - I.G. (1993)

This one will, at least, be short. "la Caixa" was founded in 1904 in Spain and is pledged to a mission of social engagement and outreach - part of which, since the eighties especially, has involved the collection, and promotion, of twentieth century art. Particularly by Spanish artists but also including works from Italy, Germany, Britain, the USA, and Latin America.

From January 2019 through to April 2020 the Whitechapel Gallery is presenting a series of exhibitions of works from "la Caixa", each curated by a writer and featuring an example of their writing. The one I went to was put together by one Enrique Vila-Matas. A new name to me but a novelist, apparently, "known for his metafictions" and one who has put together a small collection of portraits (and two landscapes) and named it 'Cabinet d'amateur, an oblique novel' in homage to a story by French writer Georges Perec in which a painting that contains other paintings is able to generate 'further fictions'.

So far, so highbrow. But what's the art like? Some's good. Some not so good. Gerhard Richter is, quite rightly, a giant of the contemporary art scene and his I.G. (that's the artist's second wife, Isa Genzken), from 1993, not only subverts the traditional portrait by showing the subject from behind but, in looking so akin to a slightly out of focus photograph, attempts to blur the line between painting and photography. I'm not quite sure it does that but its gauzy surface with almost an entire half given over to a lump of pure blackness does aid reflection rather well.

Carlos Pazos, despite adding a fluorescent light across the top of his painting (a nod to the Rauschenberg aesthetic?), has gone for a more typical pose. It's a self-portrait and the artist, pondering his own mortality after turning thirty (he's got some bad news coming) in the Barcelona dancehall Cebeles, could be any one of us caught in a moment. Milonga, the title, refers to a form of Argentinian tango but why this is remains unclear to me!

Carlos Pazos - Milonga (1980)

Miquel Barcelo - Une poignee de terre (A Fistful of Earth) (1989)

In, what seems to be the real theme of this exhibition, Miquel Barcelo's A Fistful of Earth things become further unclear. The obfuscation continues. We learn that Barcelo has included some actual earth in his work, that he came of age towards the end of the Franco dictatorship, and that he visited Mali in 1988. None of which really explains anything about the work. It's nice to look at though. It could be the surface of a far away planet, an overhead view of the desert complete with animal tracks, or perhaps a close up of a fried egg. If you know the answer to this riddle send me a postcard!

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has got a whole room for her installation, Petite. The French artist has made a piece that plays on our old friends "spatial ambiguities" and "in-between spaces" and it's decent. Spectral shapes of children appear and fade away. Trees, buildings, and other people emerge and disappear behind them. It looked good for a while but I didn't stick around long.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Petite (2001)

Dora Garcia - La leccion respiratoria (The Breathing Lesson)

That's the problem with installations. I never know how long I'm supposed to engage with them for. I'm even getting like that with paintings now. At least video art usually tells you how long it lasts - normally way too long! The Spanish artist Dora Garcia's video of a girl being instructed on how to breathe (and also how not to breathe) lasts sixteen fucking minutes. 

I can't hang around that long. I've got blogs to write, pints to drink, sudokus to do. Much longer and it would have tested my increasingly weak bladder. There's lots of waving hands around and clapping and it's all, supposedly, "informed by literature and psychoanalysis" whilst being "interested in the relationship between art and society and the individual" (all that alphabet soup starts to really fill you up, you can get bloated). It fits the remit of the show, alright, but that doesn't mean it's either good, or interesting, art. I genuinely think my still photo, above, is as good (perhaps better) than the actual video!

So we're left with Andreas Gursky (who is, of course, a respected, famous, and rich artist and one I've written about in length at the past) and his, fairly modestly sized for him, photo of an archaeological site in Egypt. The vast sand desert slowly blurs into the verdant Nile valley and, that alone, makes it interesting to look at but further inspection reveals two more details that felt pertinent to both this exhibition and to life itself.

Firstly, look at all those tiny people, tiny excavating machines. No matter how hard man tries to tame nature he will fail. We can even destroy the planet and yet nature will remain elsewhere. Long after we're gone. In this respect it's a memento mori and that's pretty relevant to me both now and, in fact, at all times.

Finally, it turns out Gursky has manipulated the image anyway. So, despite giving the illusion of truth it is in fact a lie. Like all art and like very much in life. All those things we hold dearest to us will one day either crumble into the sand of the desert or, worse, turn out to not be what we thought they were in the first place. Art tells us a lie so it can live forever. In death there is an a honesty that can never be undone.

Andreas Gursky - Theben, West (1993)

Sleaford Mods:Streets Ain't The Same When You Get Older.

"Who knew they got the experts in" - Kebab Spider, Sleaford Mods.

Yesterday morning one of my best mates Bugsy died (just 51) and it feels almost inappropriate to be writing about anything else except him at the moment. More likely than not I'll write something in depth about him and what he meant to me eventually, but emotions are still too raw at the moment and the funeral hasn't even been announced, let alone taken place, yet. So for now, before starting my review, I'd just like to dedicate it to a brilliant mate who'd almost definitely been with me at this gig if he'd been able to be. Certainly, I could never ever hope to list the huge amount of gigs we've attended together in the past.

Sleaford Mods are just his sort of band. Angry, impassioned, humorous, surreal, punk/grime spirited, and featuring some pretty basic, but powerful, synth noises. Within the last lustrum or so they've risen, quite remarkably, to the status of elder statesmen of sorts. Probably not the sort of thing they aspire to but each new album, hell - each new gig, seems to serve as a state of the nation address.

Reading's Sub 89 is considerably smaller than Brixton Academy (where I saw them, and wrote about them, back in 2017) but venue size, surprisingly - as I've previously remarked, doesn't seem to matter with ver Mods. Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have proved themselves more than capable of working any size room and on a boozy Friday night playing to a crowd of their peers (agewise at least for the most part) they absolutely fucking rocked.

The opening trio of tracks from Eton Alive (Into the Payzone, Flipside, Subtraction) acted as a gentle livener (relative, this IS Sleaford Mods) before that album's Stick In A Five And Go and Kebab Spider really got the party started.

Stick In A Five And Go is a bass heavy tale of revenge fantasies, buying a Royal Mail uniform, and having a good mate at the DVLA and it showcases all that is great about Sleaford Mods. The imagined exchange between Williamson and his foe ("I've got a big package for ya, you need to sign for it, Mr. Trees. It's massive, so can you come outside? You need to sign for it, mate") uses our hero's East Midlands accent to perfectly capture the band's eloquent handling of toxic masculinity, righteous anger, and surreal humour.

Kebab Spider is a woozy, abstracted funk detour into the dark workings of Williamson's mind. It's all "bingo punks", "shoeshine boys for fakers", and "flag tits" and has pretty much everyone in Sub 89 joining in with "you're just saying it all to look good". As ever, Williamson and Fearn are as adept at skewering heritage rock acts as they are corrupt politicians and the general uneasy sense of anger and ennui that seems to permeate the very soul of Britain these days.

TCR, BHS, Jobseeker, Mr Jolly Fucker, and Tied Up In Nottz (with a z you cunt) are, of course, as excellent as ever. These songs are now firm live favourites and despite the fact we've heard them many times before we still hang on to Williamson's every word and every minor key change that Fearn 'inflicts' upon us. By mid-set, we are their eager quarry.

 

But credit too for lesser known tracks like Bang Someone Out which sees Jason Williamson making weird raspberry noises and singing (yes, singing) about Donkey Kong, dirty tea bags, and the amorality of fitness for work assessments ("it's fit for work if it can shit and stare"). Or OBCT, whose initials come from the line "passed Oliver Bonas in the Chelsea tractor" and, in that, we know exactly what sort of person Williamson's got in his sights this time around.

It also features some kind of kazoo sound and the line "you're getting dragged round by your sleeves" repeated as the song comes to a close. Which is ideal and not just because the bass sound on the song could be described as 'dragging' but because most of us are now being dragged round by our sleeves. Dragged round by a failing political system, dragged round by the unchecked power of social media, dragged round by YouTubers, dragged round by demagogues, dragged round by stump orators, and dragged round by myths of British (always meaning English) excellence and invincibility.

Sleaford Mods puncture the tyres of the bikes these pompous pricks ride round and throw a strawberry milkshake in the face of Britain's homegrown fascism but, at the same time, they look out at the idle rich, the conceited, and the political class that allowed us to get into this sorry state and find them to be equally culpable and equally worthy of bile.

Best of all they do it with humour, grace, and kicking tunes. As ever, Sleaford Mods proved to be one of the, possibly the, most important British band of our age. Working class anger refracted through the broken lens of the experience of living in the UK in 2019 to reflect a country where the people who sleep in piss stained alley ways are far more worthy of our love and protection than those that hold high office. The nation may be fucked but, so far, they can't take our music from us.

Thanks to my fellow gig attendees:- Vicki, Nick, Shep, Darren, Tracy, and Ben (especially Ben as he got the tickets in and put me up in a caravan in his drive after the gig (and got me trolleyed)), thanks to Sleaford Mods for restoring/keeping my faith in music, and thanks to Bugsy for being one of the main people that helped me and joined me and inspired me on the marvellous musical journey that eventually brought me to this gig - and for everything else. Gonna miss going to gigs with my friend!