Edinburgh - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

A continuous chain of little inventions; art in Edinburgh summer 2018

Probably as much as I love any art movement, I love German Expressionism; most of all the artists of Die Brücke (I wrote at length about them here) and their (initially) optimistic quest to forge a new, forward-looking art which was distinctively German, drawing on native traditions (woodcuts, landscape etc), but also attempted to peel away the layers of staleness built up by decades, or even centuries of academicism, to reveal living art beneath. The art of Paula Modersohn-Becker, too, who was doing something similar in Worpeswede, is important to me too, but I also love the more anguished, personal kind of Expressionism that was reflected in the famous Expressionism of German silent cinema (see also Kirchner’s later works, and – not “German Expressionism” per se, but still German and expressionistic, early Dix and Grosz, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz).

So, even though Emil Nolde (1867-1956) is perhaps my least favourite of the major German Expressionist painters, and even though I had lots of qualms about it (see here), I was excited to see the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition Colour Is Life. And it really is good.

In comparison with the much younger artists of Die Brücke, which he joined for a year in 1906* Nolde’s art is just as vivid, but less vibrant (if that makes sense); his colours tend towards the bilious and acidic and his style, though ‘free’, often seems – even in landscapes – more frenzied and less harmonious than the works of the rest of the group. His deeply felt religious paintings, especially – and there is a really remarkable group of them in the exhibition – have an intense, anguished, alienated quality that is more like Munch atmospherically than it is his German contemporaries. It’s among his figurative (but not religious) works that my favourite painting of the exhibition, an enigmatic and slightly double portrait (that I can’t find online), which is smoother in surface texture than the religious pictures and imbued with an oddly menacing atmosphere.

*at which point Nolde was 39 and the group’s founders were in their early to mid twenties

I’m glad to say that although I felt like the information at the exhibition tended to downplay his vociferous Nazism a little, it at least acknowledged it – and although it is nowhere explicit in his art, there are some uncomfortably anti-Semitic-caricature-like faces in his paintings of people, including in some of the religious works. But whether I would think that if I didn’t know he was (extremely) anti-Semitic, I can’t say. Interestingly, for an exhibition called Colour Is Life, by far the most powerful works to me were Nolde’s woodcuts (including arguably his most famous work, The Prophet of 1912), where his compositions are remarkable for their economy and stark intensity.

Interestingly (perhaps not coincidentally?) the majority of Nolde’s most impressive work seems to have been done by the mid-1920s, but there is also a selection of his ‘unpainted pictures’ in the exhibition. These are little watercolours, incredibly vivid in their colours, which were made in secret during the period when his work was condemned/forbidden by the Nazi government which Nolde had, however, not only welcomed, but effectively campaigned for since the early 30s. Incidentally, around the time that Nolde was signing the Aufrufs der Kulturscha (1934) which supported Hitler as Fuhrer and joining the National Socialist Association of Northern Schleswig, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founders of Die Brücke, was writing “Here we have been hearing terrible rumours about torture of the Jews, but it’s all surely untrue…There is a war in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the last 20 years are being destroyed, and yet the reason why we founded the Brücke was to encourage truly German art, made in Germany. And now it is supposed to be un-German. Dear God. It does upset me.”*

Head of a South Seas Islands woman (1914)

This was more than just the symptom of a generation gap between different artists; it’s at the heart of why Nolde’s art is, despite surface similarities, so different from that of the artists of Die Brücke; Expressionism is (obviously) about expressing; and yes, Kirchner and co expressed their anxieties, but their vision – at least at the time the group was at its most cohesive – was an optimistic one, accepting other influences as much as it rejected the status quo. To the 21st century, the way they were influenced by the art of other cultures, to simplify and brighten their own work can be uncomfortable; it has something of the ‘noble savage’ myth about it and their assumptions about the freedom and ‘naturalness’ of the tribal cultures whose work they studied in ethnographic museums were made from a viewpoint that now seems colonial and ignorant. But – the point of their own work is that it uses these forms and elements to describe something that is whole, natural and above all universal – the ‘otherness’ of the figures Nolde drew and painted on his trip to the South Seas (and even of his incredibly bold landscapes) just before WW1 is inescapable. His drawings of the people he encountered aren’t caricatures; they are brilliantly observed, but they are themselves ‘ethnographic’ in a way that Kirchner and co’s art strove not to be; Nolde is seeing and recording, not absorbing.

* Kirchner, quoted in Kirchner Museum Davos Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by EW Kornfield, & CE Stauffer (1992)

Still; the Nazi government didn’t care about this distinction, and the exhibition text tells us that Nolde had more paintings shown in the condemnatory Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition than any other artist, which would be a cause for some schadenfreude if not for the fact that, after petitioning the government (he was on civil if not familiar terms with charming people like Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach) he was informed in late 1941 that any work he undertook should be presented before government officials before any kind of public showing, which is of course harsh and limiting by any normal standards, but surprisingly mild compared to what they were doing to other artists. But, as Nolde must surely have realised, for all their cultural protectionism and promotion of what they considered to be artistically wholesome and correct ideas, the Nazis really weren’t interested in art as art at all.

Julie Wolfthorn – Witch of the Woods (1899)

For some not very pleasant perspective, since I can; Nolde was prevented from making a living from his art for a few years, and had works confiscated (which he did eventually get back however), meanwhile his contemporary, Julie Wolfthorn (only three years older than he was), whose figurative, traditional, slightly folkloric art has at least an equal right to be seen as definitively German (or, far more right, to the anti-modernist authorities of the time), was, as a Jew, too dangerous to exist, and was murdered in 1942, at the age of 78, by the regime which Nolde did his best to be accepted by.

So yes, a beautifully curated and mounted exhibition; but one which leaves a slightly bitter taste.

So, that’s what I paid to see (and it is absolutely worth the price of admission), but in fact the bitterness faded quickly; aside from owning a Kirchner painting that is for me everything that Nolde’s work isn’t, the National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) hosts a permanent (and free) exhibition Surrealism and the Marvellous, which was already great, but has been enhanced hugely by the acquisition of Toyen’s superbly enigmatic The Message of the Forest (1939) and Leonora Carrington’s diminutive but haunting (and at the same time kind of funny) 1939 portrait of Max Ernst, Bird Superior (1939).

Leonora Carrington – Bird Superior (Portrait of Max Ernst), 1939

I could spend (and I think have spent) hours in this room; even longer now, as the archive adjoining it is hosting Club Dada: Berlin and Beyond, a really exciting collection of books, pamphlets, photos etc (and a small Max Ernst painting) that focuses mainly on Berlin Dada but also has some great items from the original Zurich group. Much as one wants to pore over these artefacts, I don’t even mind too much that the books etc are in glass cases since my German is minimal and I can’t read French at all.

Raqib Shaw – The Adoration (after Jan Gossaert), 2015/6 © the artist

Over in Modern One, I nearly didn’t look at the (also free) exhibition Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters, partly because part of me doesn’t really want them to be reinvented, and because I didn’t know Shaw’s work, and also because it was up the stairs and I’d been walking around for hours. But I’m glad I did; what a fantastic show! I can’t imagine anyone not being impressed by Shaw’s work, even if it’s not their cup of tea. The paintings (too simple a description; his huge panels are painted in shimmering enamels, but embellished with a kind of cloisonné effect, incorporating jewels, glitter, all kinds of things) are brilliantly drawn and dazzling in their richness and detail (and a bit over the top, which is part of the charm). Although the compositions of the pictures in this exhibition are inspired by ‘old master’ paintings (one of which is one of my all-time favourite pictures, Lucas Cranach’s enigmatic Allegory of Melancholy (1528), displayed alongside Shaw’s painting), the familiarity only makes the extravagant fantasy of Shaw’s works all the more dreamlike and affecting.

Jan Gossart – The Adoration of the Kings (1510/15)

I think we (no, I don’t know who I mean by ‘we’) are used to seeing and accepting things like Biblical scenes or Greek myths presented through the filter of the Italian (or Northern) renaissance, and this is similar but different. With the old masters we (them again) see familiar (or what were once familiar) scenes presented in a kind of fancy dress of anachronistic costumes/settings etc which were initially intended to heighten the relatable-to realism of the works, but which now add another layer of meaning and cultural baggage. With Shaw’s work, the ghosts of both the original meaning and the original treatment are seen as if through the eyes of someone from another, much more effervescent dimension. The dislocating, hallucinatory blend of familiar (and it isn’t just the source material that’s familiar; Shaw’s use of dazzling, opulent colours and ornate textures is, despite the fantastical elements, quintessentially Indian, to my western eyes anyway) and strange is exhilarating and strangely poignant.* To take my favourite picture; neither Cranach’s or Shaw’s Allegory of Melancholy is sombre exactly; but despite the centuries and world views that separate them, the same delicately wistful atmosphere pervades both pictures. It’s an impressive exhibition.

So, the moral of this is; go to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh if you get the chance. Oh, and the National Gallery of non-modern art too – aside from having an incredible permanent collection, they currently have a Rembrandt – who doesn’t like Rembrandt? – exhibition and have put a fantastic Jenny Saville painting (Aleppo) among the old masters in a way that works amazingly well and was gathering crowds of (especially young) people when I was there.

*Perhaps an obscure (and certainly a geeky) comparison; looking at Raqib Shaw’s pictures reminded me of reading Brendan McCarthy & Pete Milligan’s similarly post modern/immersive/multicultural/hallucinogenic comic strip Rogan Gosh in the 2000AD spinoff Revolver.

Brendan McCarthy & Peter Milligan, Rogan Gosh (1990)

The Vanishing Everything of Everywhere; Goodbye 2017

“Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…” When The Bangles covered Simon & Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter in 1987, the song was 21 years and one month old, now The Bangles’ version (from the underrated – according to me – movie of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero) is 30 years and one month old; time flies, another year draws to an end etc etc etc. It took until the early 90s for 60s nostalgia to really take hold and, true to form 30 years on from the 1980s, 80s nostalgia is everywhere; in music, in fashion, (especially) in film and television. Even the tired, terrifying old tropes of the cold war are back; excellent stuff.

It’s approximately 90 years since HP Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” (in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926-7)), and it’s got to be something like 25 years or so since I first read those words (in the HP Lovecraft Omnibus Vol 2, Dagon and other Macabre Tales, Grafton Books, 1985, p.423 ). So what about it?

Lovecraft might well be right about fear; but more pertinent to my intro is that perhaps the oldest emotion preserved in literature – at least (major, major caveat, based on my ignorance) in the literature of Europe – is nostalgia, and the feeling that things were better in the past. (see also here for an excellent & thoughtful look at nostalgia) The literature of the ancient Greeks makes clear that the age of heroes already lay in the distant past; the pride and arrogance of Imperial Rome was tempered – formally, at least – by the belief that it was a pale imitation of the Republic which the Empire supplanted. The earliest literature in (old) English makes it clear that the inhabitants of what was one day to become England were a) not entirely sure of what had come before, but b) knew that it was in many ways ‘better’ and certainly more impressive than the present day of the 8th century:

“The work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,/ mouldereth…
And the wielders and wrights?/Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone”

The Ruin, (Translated by Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics (3rd edition, 1991, p. 2)

Even closer to home (for me), the earliest literature of Scotland, the Goddodin of the poet Aneirin, dating from anywhere from the 7th to 10th century and originally, it is presumed, written – or at least passed down – in the ancient British language now called Old Welsh (which it is of course, but it is also, geographically, old English and old Scots, since it seems to have been spoken in a far wider area than modern Wales). The Goddodin is a series of elegies mourning the loss of the warriors of eponymous ancient kingdom (which spread roughly over what are now the modern Scottish regions of Lothian and Borders) in battle, and with them the heroic culture of the era.*
To say that nostalgia as opposed to fear may be mankind’s oldest emotion is problematic, both logically (chicken/egg innit), and because for all of its obviously dominant ingredients – sadness/regret and happiness – a large component of nostalgia can be fear, and, specifically, Lovecraft’s ‘fear of the unknown’ (in this case the always unknowable future). This is problematic for many reasons; in the examples noted above, the glamour (not intended to have its old, magical meaning, but actually that is probably even more appropriate) attached to the past is partly because it can’t come again. If the people of ”now” are as noble, heroic etc as the people of “then”, then somehow the past – and the ancestors, a vital component of the values of most non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures – is not receiving its due reverence.

*this theme even crops up in a very similar form in the Fortinbras subplot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, preserved at one remove from the earliest known version of the story, Saxo Grammaticus’ elemental/mythological 13th century version from his Gesta Danorum. But even this is assumed to be derived from an earlier, lost source, probably Icelandic.

Although it seems almost incomprehensible to someone of my generation, there seems to be a similar, ‘don’t disrespect the ancestors’ unease nowadays in the unwillingness in some circles to condemn wholesale the expansion/existence of the British Empire. And really, it’s not complicated – it is entirely possible to be impressed by and/or grateful for the innovations of the Victorian era – flushing toilets, railways and whatnot – while seeing the culture and times for what they were; repressive, oppressive, misogynistic, racist, ignorant. It shouldn’t be difficult, because it’s happened before, more or less. Christianity made it easy for previous ages to condemn the pagan empires of Rome, Greece, Egypt and co (and indeed the ancient Arabic civilisations) without abandoning the inventions and innovations of those civilisations. Indeed, even at the height of Christian belief in Europe, interest in the cultures of the pagan empires remained high, even if Christian scholars felt the need to inflict a version of their own value system onto their researches. There’s no reason that people now shouldn’t be able to do the same with the ages we have left behind, or are hopefully in the process of leaving behind. Yes, good things come from bad, but not because of the bad, but because (most) human beings are extraordinary.

In 2017 there seemed to be – as I suppose there always must be – an ever-increasing number of warring nostalgias and counter-nostalgias, the latest being for the Russian Revolution in 1917 – a violent event, with vast and oppressive consequences and therefore definitely negative, but like most revolutions, born of aspirations and ideals which are hard to dismiss. In fact, Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale Of Two Cities seems uncannily prophetic, because Dickens – as he explicitly realised – could see that human nature and human actions remain fairly constant:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”

I think it’s probably true that it’s always the best of times, for somebody, in some respect, it’s certainly always the worst of times for others; which sounds complacent or at least fatalistic, but only if one doesn’t try in some way to improve things. This kind of impersonal nostalgia – for ‘better’ times – is, necessarily selective. (in fact, all nostalgia is, because perception is selective – hmm, it seems like this just started copying the thing about realism I wrote recently, but bear with me) and relies to a large degree on ignorance and/or self-deception in order to be nostalgia at all.

History isn’t a subject, history is everything; people, peoples, cultures, societies, but, necessarily “history” as taught, or absorbed through popular culture, filters and simplifies, to the point where some people in Britain still talk nostalgically about ‘Victorian values’ without (usually) intending any reference to the exploitation and subjugation of untold millions of people, child prostitution and child labour, the life expectancy of the average Victorian person etc etc etc. And, as always, history is more complex than its popular image. The era may be symbolised for British people by the building of railways or the expansion of the Empire, or by Jack the Ripper, or Queen Victoria being unamused, or by the establishment’s treatment of Oscar Wilde; but it was also the era that produced and shaped Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria and of course, Wilde himself, as well as the whole decadent movement. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud was only two years younger than Wilde; an apparently value-free but perhaps significant observation…

This kind of complexity is what makes history more interesting than it’s sometimes given credit for; the Scottish Enlightenment was a wonderful, positive, outward-looking movement, but it coexisted in Scotland with a joyless, moralising and oppressive Calvinist culture. Time and nostalgia have a way of homogenising peoples and cultures. The popular idea of ancient Rome is probably one of conquest, grandeur and decadence, but what is the popular idea, if there is one, of ‘an ancient Roman’? Someone, probably a man, probably from Italy, in a toga or armour; quite likely an emperor, a soldier or a gladiator, rather than say, a merchant, clerk or farmer. Even within this fairly narrow image, a complex figure like the emperor Elagabalus (Syrian, teenage, possibly transgender) defeats the obvious school textbook perceptions of ‘Romanness’ (as, perhaps, it did for the Romans themselves). Even in our own time, the fact that older generations from the 60s/70s to the present could lament the passing of times when ‘men were men & women were women’ etc is – to say the least – extremely disingenuous – presumably what they mean is a time when non-‘manly’ men could be openly discriminated against and/or abused and women could be expected to be quiet and submissive.* Similarly, throughout my life I have heard people – and not exclusively right-wing people – talk about the economic success that Hitler brought to Germany; but you don’t have to be the chairperson of a financial think tank to see that a programme of accelerated militarism that requires war in order to function isn’t really a viable economic model for anyone who doesn’t also espouse the ideology of Nazism. But a strange kind of nostalgia dictates that if it wasn’t for all those pesky Nazi faults he could have been a great leader. He couldn’t, though, because he was a real person, he did the things he did and therefore he wasn’t a great leader.

*throughout this article I have been referring to ‘people’ and ‘humankind’ in what is intended to be an inclusive kind of way, referring to people of all races, genders or indeed lack of gender. I admit I have probably referred to gender in a binary sense, partly no doubt through laziness. However, I do have a tendency to not use the term ‘cis’, unless necessary – for me personally, the word ‘women’ includes trans women and the word men includes trans men. I don’t intend any offence by this, but I also don’t really mind if anyone is offended. I think it’s a shame that something as basic (if not simple) as a person’s gender should be a matter of opinion, but so it seems to be. My own view is that the contents of someone’s underwear is none of my business unless they explicitly make it so.

As I’ve said at least one too many times, history is complex, but nostalgia, despite being impossible to sum up in a single word other than itself* has a simplifying quality. Nostalgia is safety – political reactionaries always look to the past for ideas of stability – but that is only because the past itself is stable, in the sense of being unchangeable. As we see daily, though, although (until the invention of the time machine) it is unchangeable, history, through endless re-interpretations and re-evaluations and new points of view, isn’t really ‘stable’ at all – and I think it’s fair to assume that (as Dickens implied) every ‘golden age’ masks a dark age. And although it mainly seems otherwise, people are, by and large, fairly positive, they want to look back with fondness, even if it’s a melancholy fondness. There’s a quote from the great Scottish singer/songwriter Alex Harvey that strips away the soft-focus effect that the distorting lens of nostalgia imposes on history:

“Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” (quoted in Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots From The Hip, Penguin Books, 1991, p.71)

This is, I think, indisputably true; but evidently I am wrong – people are entirely capable of being nostalgic about almost any negative event. ‘The Blitz Spirit’ is remembered fondly in Britain because the blitz ended years ago and all of its bombs already fell and lots of people survived it. It’s hard to make a film about the past without an element of nostalgia, especially when the film is played out as a thriller or adventure of some kind. But even leaving aside war movies and the old fashioned western film, there is and has been in recent(ish) times a whole sub-genre of ‘elegiac’ Western movies which, by and large, focus on the dying days of the ‘old west’ while barely acknowledging the genocide and horror that is the historical backdrop of the period. In a way, that’s fair enough – those stories are not about that subject – but when there are not only no (or very few) films about that subject, and it is barely even acknowledged by ‘official’ narratives of taught history, it’s a stark and telling omission.

*though interestingly, its original Greek meaning ‘homecoming pain’ is more specific than the word itself has come to be in English, and most of the European languages tend to use variations of the word ‘nostalgia’ rather than having their own word with the same meaning)

It’s my personal feeling that nothing good is produced by adversity; which is not to deny that people are amazing, resourceful, resilient and inspiring; they are. When I said before that every golden age masks a dark age, it’s probably true too that every dark age is shot through with some elements of positivity, although I won’t scrutinise that statement too closely. Countries which were colonised by the British Empire (or indeed any empire) manage to grow and assert and define their own cultures; but we can never know what was lost. I love blues music (and indeed the whole phenomenon of western popular music which mostly grew from it), but again; we can never know what would have been, had these energies not been re-directed by a couple of hundred years of slavery and exploitation. Individuals achieve almost superhuman feats of bravery and resourcefulness etc when facing adversity; escaping from abusers, kidnappers etc. But no-one in their right mind would – I hope – recommend that all young people undergo these kinds of ordeals in order to fully achieve their potential. I don’t think it’s particularly useful for individuals (although governments and institutions are a different thing) to feel guilty about the deeds of the people of the past (or proud of the achievements of the past, really), I also see no need to pretend that, because India has a big railway network, the British Empire did something positive by oppressing the country’s people and culture and stealing its resources. Nothing good came of the British in India. India survived anyway, just as people survive catastrophes everywhere and achieve amazing things in doing so.

So much for impersonal nostalgia – the personal kind is in many ways very similar, if less destructive. I’ve always been a nostalgic person; both for things I don’t remember, or that were long before ‘my time’ (you name it; silent movies, the 1960s, the Weimar Republic, Hong Kong cinema of the 70s, the Northern Renaissance, the Scottish Enlightenment, 80s teen movies) and, more naturally perhaps, within own experiences. One of the things that initially made me write this was a reference in Anthony DeCurtis’ biography Lou Reed – A Life (John Murray, 2017)* to Reed’s 70s partner/muse Rachel, a fascinating figure who seems to have vanished into history. In googling her I discovered various sites about vanishing/vanished aspects of New York and, because old photographs are endlessly fascinating, somehow segued from that to the vanished Jewish East End of London and the vanished and vanishing everything of everywhere. But as irretrievable as Jewish East London of the 60s and the underbelly of 70s New York are, one’s own childhood is equally as irretrievable, not that one wants to retrieve it, exactly.

* An excellent book, but one which illustrates some of my points; while Lou Reed spent most of his adult life complaining about his conservative 1950s childhood, DeCurtis himself has a more rose-tinted view of the period, saying “In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day…and none of Reed’s friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias” (p.14) – fair enough, except that he also says, ‘Richard Mishkin was a fraternity brother of Allan Hyman’s in Sigma Alpha Mu, a so-called Jewish fraternity because at the time Jews were not permitted in many other fraternities.” (p.36)

Most of the polaroids etc that make up the ever-browsable Internet K-hole appear to be American, but any child of the 80s will recognise the texture and aura of the era we grew up in. When George Orwell wrote (I think in The Lion and the Unicorn, but I might be wrong; I’ll check) – “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person” he was putting his finger on one of the strange paradoxes of culture, heritage and nostalgia. The memories I have of the 80s are made up of a distorted, child’s-eye view of events and culture which is truly mine, plus things I know now that I didn’t then, other peoples’ memories, TV, films. The most potent sources of nostalgia seem to be – as the makers of shows like Stranger Things and Dark, and films like Super 8 and (too many to list) are very aware – the things you didn’t notice that you had noticed, the most ephemeral details; jingles from adverts, fonts, packaging, slang.

And this is right, I think. The fleetingness of things remembered has nothing to do with their power as memories. I have no idea what the first horror film I saw was, but I do know that a scene on some TV show where skinheads (or possibly a single skinhead) glued a man’s hands to the wall of a lift/elevator scared me as a child and stayed with me for a long time; maybe because I used to see skinheads around on the streets (you had to watch the colour of the laces in their Doc Martens to see if they were ‘bad’ skinheads or not – though they were probably kids too, I now realise). I also know now (but didn’t then) that these were the second wave of skinheads, which is why I also saw Oi! written on various walls around the town; at the time I don’t think I ever made the connection. Again, when one thinks of the impact of very small occurrences it shows how impossible a really objective view of history is. I no longer bear any high school grudges, but without really thinking about it, many small and/or random sneers and insults from my youth have stayed with me in vivid detail, along with the people and places involved. Similarly (but nicer) I will eternally feel grateful to two beautiful black girls in Camden in (I think) 1990 or 91 who made remarks to me which, even at the time were, at best ‘not politically correct’ but which pleased me immensely; it is among the very few teenage memories that boosted rather than eroded my confidence; a tiny thing, barely even an ‘incident’, but a big deal to a painfully shy adolescent. What to make of such a minor, slightly embarrassing (especially at the time; I can still vividly remember – although it was not a rarity – my whole face burning when I blushed. People often remarked on the redness of my blushes. I remember – not even slightly nostalgically – being compared to a tomato, being told I looked like I would ‘burst’ etc) episode? Nothing, except that real nostalgia, unlike the nostalgia industry (“it was the 70s; Buckaroo!”, to quote Alan Partridge) is particular, not general. The Camden episode may include references to youth, gender, race etc, but it has nothing to do with those factors really, and I doubt if the two girls remembered it even days later. These are not the kinds of details which are worthy of a biographer’s attention; but they define my youth every bit as much as the music I listened to, the sweets I remember that no longer exist, or the clothes I wore.

To me, 80s nostalgia has less to do with “the 80s” in the sense it that it appears in TV shows and films as it does a litany of gloomy-sounding things: the urban decay of 60s and 70s council estates, indoor markets, army stores, arcades, brutalist churches that harmonised with the concrete towers that the fire brigade used for practise. This is a kind of eeriness as nostalgia; reflected in my liking for empty streets and art that represents empty streets: Algernon Newton, Maurice Utrillo, Takanori Oguiss , the photography of Masataka Nakano and taken to its extreme, Giorgio de Chirico, where the emptiness isn’t empty so much as it is pregnant , reminding me always of – nostalgia again – the ruined city of Charn in CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew (by far my favourite Narnia book) – which made a huge impression on me as a child – and may be where my liking for such things (including ‘urbex’ photography, like that of Andre Govia, and of course, The Ruin, quoted way back in the first paragraph) comes from.

“The passing of time and all of its crimes, is making me sad again” – sadly, one of those crimes is that when I first heard that line (from Rubber Ring by The Smiths) in 1989 or thereabouts, Morrissey seemed to be on the side of the downtrodden and marginalised, whereas now he seems to be one of that increasing number of people who pretends that the mainstream of British culture is itself somehow being marginalised; which is patently ridiculous. And nostalgic, of course. And there’s a whole culture industry with its own cultural shorthand, to bolster the standardised view of any given period; especially now, when a decade can be summed up by a b-list cultural commentator or celebrity who clearly isn’t old enough to remember some of what they are talking about, saying “‘e were mad, weren’t ‘e?” about some figurehead of the era. Not so great of course, when said figurehead turns out to be Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, at which point even nostalgia, like history, has to be revised. But, as endlessly mentioned above, the beauty of all nostalgia is that it’s selective. The 70s that Morrissey seems to feel nostalgic (in the true, mixed feelings sense) about (witness the whole of Viva Hate, which I love) wasn’t ‘better’ than nowadays, but the writer of its songs was young then. He isn’t now. There are younger people who are also nostalgic about the 70s, or the 80s, because they see the partial versions of the era(s) preserved by those who were there then, or who pretend to have been. The people who mourned the loss of the blitz spirit mourned it because a) they were younger then, and b) they survived it, and told people about its spirit. The people who are nostalgic for the Empire will (hopefully) never have to deal with being in charge of a mass of powerless, subject people whose resources they are stealing (or be the subject of the same), but they can enjoy the things it brought to all of our lives; the wealth of the Empire which, like the mythical ages of Greece and Rome, and the giants that the Anglo-Saxon poet pondered over only exist now as the faded, distorted memory of a faded, distorted memory. Like the 70s, like the 80s, like 2017, like yesterday, they are wonderful and terrible because they can never come again.

Happy New Year!

Review of the Year – the paradox of realism

2017, like most years but somehow more so, was filled with unpleasant things, events and people. For me though, one of the more pleasant features of the year was that I made the effort to visit art galleries more often than previously, in particular to see the superb exhibitions held by the National Galleries of Scotland; after missing Modern Scottish Women in 2016, I was determined to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery and especially True to Life – British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Both of these exhibitions were excellent, but I am writing mainly about the latter. As curator Patrick Elliott was clearly aware (see also the essay What Sort Of Truth? British Painting Between The Wars by Sacha Llewellyn in the excellent exhibition catalogue), ‘realism’ is not a simple thing to define, and indeed it seems strange that (for example) the peculiar and highly artificial painting of Maxwell Armfield and the shockingly immediate work of David Jagger should be considered the same kind of art.

‘Pacific Portrait’ (1929) by Maxwell Armfield (left) and ‘The Conscientious Objector’ (1917) by David Jagger (right)

If ‘Realist’ at first seems a pretty simple and unambiguous description, the fact that many of the artists (Dod Procter, Meredith Frampton, Gluck, Glyn Philpott) and paintings discussed in the exhibition catalogue also appear, equally convincingly, in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Deco Painting (Phaidon, 1990) demonstrates just what a subjective term it really is. What the word seems to denote in the context of this exhibition is something like ‘representational rather than abstract’, which admittedly is an extremely unwieldy and far too wide term.

In the period in which the art of the exhibition was produced (the title says the 1920s and 1930s, but a few earlier and later works were included, so roughly from the years of World War One up to the first half of World War Two), the word realism tended to have mainly negative connotations; for which see Billy Bunter author Frank Richards’ famous 1940 reply to George Orwell’s article Boys’ Weeklies; “They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which nevertheless, are equally real!” This was and still is an aspect of a wider conception of realism that Orwell himself attacked occasionally in its more extreme political forms. Today, ‘realpolitik’ is used as a term of criticism, but in fact almost all political or social ‘realism’, even when respectable, is basically an excuse for people or governments not to act compassionately when it becomes unprofitable to do so. People who term themselves realists rather than optimists or pessimists tend (in my experience) to lean more towards the latter, but with an added smug quality as befits someone who is never surprised when bad things happen. While the artists of True To Life presumably held beliefs and opinions on a wide range of issues, these are by and large absent from their work as collected here. This is not the 1920s of the General Strike or the 30s of the Depression and The Road To Wigan Pier, let alone the 20s and 30s of Lenin, Mussolini and HItler, or perhaps more to the point, of Picasso, Matisse, or Dadaists and Surrealists.

Edward McKnight Kauffer – poster for the London Underground (1930)

Nevertheless, from the delicate figure studies of Dod Procter to James Cowie’s pastoral portraits, it is a window onto certain aspects of British art and life between the wars. Also, the painters’ rejection of the vocabulary of avant garde modernism should be seen in the context of the time; while abstract or semi-abstract art had been at the cutting edge of modernism in the years just prior to and during World War One, not only had the innovators of that era moved on (why not look at my article about Wyndham Lewis in the 20s here?), but the angular, dynamic language of modernism had infiltrated mainstream culture to the point that institutions as staid as the Royal Mail were using designers like John Armstrong and Pat Keely to give the Post Office a modern identity, while Edward McKnight Kauffer and others did similar work for the London Underground and, outside of the UK, fascist Italy, Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union all utilised versions of modernist design to establish new national identities. In that sense, the idiosyncratic, apparently old-fashioned and above all individualistic styles adopted by British artists outside of the more radical movements can be seen as, if not revolutionary, then at least stubbornly dedicated to their own visions.

Although it may seem paradoxical or incompatible, the ‘realism’ of these artists is founded to some extent on escapism and idealism; but maybe that is truer of realism in a wider sense than at first seems to be the case. The definitive artistic form of realism (if we think of everyday life as ‘real’ – but I don’t really want to get into philosophical questions here as I’d like to finish this article at some point) nowadays is probably something like instagram, or on a slightly grander level, the documentary film, but the very nature of documenting reality – whether in film, photographs, painting or in writing – is necessarily selective, and in being so, tends towards some kind of commentary (and/or judgement) on its subject. One of the nice things about the True To Life exhibition was that both the grime-and-hardship/warts-and-all and the grass-and-flowers aspects of realism were represented – albeit mostly in a perhaps fairly superficial way. There was very little evidence of the documentary as protest – perhaps because, by the end of WW1, photography had become the obvious tool for this kind of work. That said, social commentary of a sort was present in Thomas Nash & Stanley Spencer’s idiosyncratic recasting of some of the Renaissance’s favourite religious scenes such as the Crucifixion & the Last Judgement in ‘modern dress’ and modern settings (and slightly generic ‘modernist’ styles). This use of realism was not uninventive, but was in essence just another way of looking back at the ‘old masters’; revisiting the groundbreaking realism pioneered in the 14th century. More interesting, (to me) was John Luke’s strange 1929 modern-dress version of one of the baroque era’s favourite Old Testament scenes, Judith and Holofernes, in which the story of the beheading of an Assyrian general is made even more unsettling by having a strangely surreal Agatha Christie/Enid Blyton aura.

Much as in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Art Deco Painting, the unifying factor in the exhibition’s disparate works was less a matter of style/school or subject than it was atmosphere; the paintings, as different as they are, belong definitively to the period between the wars, in much the same way as the very different works of Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood did (according to me, here).

If the term ‘realist’ in painting suggests the artist as eye (kind of an analog to (again) Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalised realism; “I am a camera”), the eye of the artist/writer is necessarily as individual as the brain it is connected to. For example, one might assume that realism and idealism were opposites, but there is a strong classicising element among some of the artists in the exhibition – but even then, individual artists seem to have reached a kind of classical serenity and monumentality via different routes.

Meredith Frampton – Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941)

One of the stars of the exhibition for me was the portrait painter (George Vernon) Meredith Frampton (1894-1984). Frampton’s art was in some ways the most ‘realistic’ art in the exhibition, in the sense of being (by far) the most illusionistic and quasi-photographic. In a way, portraits like the stunning Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941) are less ‘realist’ than than they are ‘corporealist’ – their accumulation of painstakingly rendered detail being in some ways closer to taxidermy than to the realism of a snapshot. In their almost eerie stillness, his portrayals of professional men surrounded by the accoutrements of their work, (another excellent example is Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938, below) seem – despite the maximalist inclusiveness of the painting – closer to the carefully composed minimalism of a photographer like Lilo Raymond than to a more or less contemporary realist (or ‘objectivist’) painting like Otto Dix’s theoretically similar portrait of urologist Dr Hans Koch (1921). And yet, for all of their modern realism, both artists looked to the past; for Dix – who had experimented with Expressionist styles earlier in his career, the aim of the modern realist painter was to tackle the breadth and the often-unrecorded detail of modern life with the – to him – unimprovable techniques of the old masters. For Frampton, the source of his style is less the realistic tradition of the Northern Renaissance than it is the monumental, but still ‘realistic’ neoclassicism of Ingres.

Meredith Frampton – Sr Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938) and Otto Dix – Dr Hans Koch (1921)

The more usual classical influence on British art of the period was the modernist route via Picasso and cubism; in the case of painters like the ex-Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth (also Edward Burra, whose expressionistic 1930 painting The Snack Bar was included in the exhibition), the angularity of Vorticism became a kind of stylistic shorthand that marked out their otherwise fairly conventional/traditional art as ‘modern’. Several other artists in the exhibition, such as Gladys Hynes and James Walker Tucker seem to have used modernist stylistic traits in the same way; to heighten the clarity and monumental qualities of their work; a kind of ‘realism’ as simplified solidity and a classicism that couldn’t be easily written off as old fashioned.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst – By the Hills (1939)

For society portrait painters like Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Sir Herbert James Gunn, realism – if explicitly not ‘gritty’ realism – was a necessary part of their trade. The glamour and drama of portraits like Brockhurst’s By the Hills (1939) is what made the artist in demand for fashionable sitters, but their effect – despite relying on a similar sense of heightened photo-realism for their success – is almost the opposite of Frampton’s still life approach. This kind of art was, despite its use of traditional techniques (and even, in the case of By The Hills, a Renaissance-influenced landscape in the background) resolutely of its ‘modern’ age, referencing Hollywood and the world of contemporary fashion, but not really any of the ideas that had affected the visual arts since the mid 1800s.

The same is true of the slightly creepy empty street scenes of Algernon Newton; despite their passing resemblance to the post-impressionist work of Maurice Utrillo, these brilliantly realised townscapes are depictions of the modern world, but not interpretations of it. While the artist captures the melancholy charm of the slightly shabby suburbs he painted, their spirit is more like restrained romanticism, rather than being invested with the revolutionary sense of psychogeography that the proto-surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico had pioneered two decades earlier. That said, because of the role of artist – not just as a ‘camera’, but also as processor and interpreter of experience – his paintings are something more than a documentary photograph of an empty street.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Cheltenham (1932)

Pietro Novelli – ‘Cain Killing Abel’ (1625)

In fact, what True To Life highlights, is the extent to which the vast majority of art, until fairly recently, had as its aim something that could be called realism; the National Gallery’s Beyond Caravaggio exhibition likewise showed Caravaggio and the artists of the late 16th/early 17th century trying to make their art – both in religious/mythical and modern genre paintings – more immediate & vivid through a kind of dramatic heightened realism. Impressionism broke away from the staid, schematised world of academic painting to capture something closer to the experience of both the artist and viewer, Expressionists tried to infuse their works with the feeling of events as experienced, Futurists tried to capture the violence of the 20th century where traditional techniques tended to distance it… And in that sense, much of the work labelled ‘realist’ in this exhibition works for us now in a way that it possibly didn’t at the time; to a modern audience the work in True to Life is almost all imbued with a between-the-wars ‘period’ quality that seems to capture the zeitgeist of that troubled era, even while sidestepping most of the troubles themselves.

It is with that last point that the artists – without doubting the depth of feeling they put into their work – mainly succeeded in recording (limited aspects of the) reality of their era in a relatively superficial way. As an example, Clifford Rowe’s The Fried Fish Shop (1936) depicts what the interior and clientele of a fried fish shop of the 30s presumably looked like; as such it has sociological and historical value, as well as being a fine, faintly modernist painting. On the other hand, a slightly earlier and in some ways comparable painting like the Vorticist-inspired Rain On Princes Street (1913) by Stanley Cursiter (it’s quite surprising that none of Cursiter’s fashionable work of the 20s & 30s was included in the exhibition), despite its fractured, faceted and in that sense ‘unrealistic’ modernist appearance, not only captures in its stylised way a glimpse of late Edwardian metropolitan life, but also the feeling – still the same over a hundred years later – of being on Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a busy, rainy day. So in the end I suppose which painting deserves to be called ‘realist’ is as subjective as reality itself.

Clifford Rowe – The Fried Fish Shop (1934)

Stanley Cursiter – Rain on Princes Street (1913)

You Were In My Dreams – Kristin Hersh at Summerhall, November 17, 2016

It was a beautifully clear, cold autumn-heading-into-winter evening in Edinburgh. As the eight o’clock concert approached, the streets of Newington were calm and mostly empty. After a few moments of worry about finding the venue I realised I knew where it was, which was handy.

Although a seated solo show with readings from the author’s works, prefixed ‘An Evening With…’ seems about as grown-up and civilised as a rock concert can be, there’s (for me at least) a slightly surreal edge of teenage flashback about the whole thing, not least because of Summerhall itself. Once a veterinary school, the artwork and noticeboards on the walls, the sets of double doors, the echoing stairways and empty rooms along the weakly lit corridors conjure exactly that atmosphere of being at school after hours, all the more powerful for being unexperienced for 25 years or so.

The sinisterly-named but actually very pleasant ‘Dissection Room’ itself initially strengthens the familiar atmosphere, despite the high, somewhat church-like ceiling. The rows of plastic seats in front of the low stage have, if it wasn’t for the side room with a bar, an irresistible feeling of the end of term school concert. And what better person to see here than Kristin Hersh? Like many people of my generation, my first encounter with the singer/songwriter/guitarist was in 1991 when Throwing Muses’ ‘Counting Backwards’ became an indie hit, followed shortly by the release of their Top 40 hit album The Real Ramona. I loved it; I still love it, and while the music press at the time were pushing the band’s other singer/guitarist, Tanya Donelly, as no. 1 indie pinup (or possibly co-no.1 with Curve’s Toni Halliday) for me, Throwing Muses were all about Kristin Hersh. I liked her voice better, I liked her songs better (I had a bigger crush on her) and while Donelly’s post-Throwing Muses band Belly was definitely to my liking, they didn’t grip me in the same way Throwing Muses, or Kristin Hersh’s solo work did. Never saw her live though.

So, on this very crisp November night, sitting among the politely expectant audience, already loving Kristin’s new album/book (which I pointlessly gripped in my sweaty hand through the show, I was quietly excited. The stage was set with a chair, two guitars, a couple of pedals (which I had a look at later; for fact fans, they were an acoustic simulator and a chromatic tuner) and a small table/case of some kind with a small pile of books on top. Based on the sound of the album I had expected an acoustic guitar, but in fact she plays (what I think is) a Fender Classic Series ’72 Telecaster thinline, with which which she manages to – but wait, here she comes.

Stepping slightly self-consciously onto the stage, Kristin smiles at the crowd, warns us that she can’t see without her glasses, so to scream for attention if required, and takes her seat. A small, neat blonde figure informally dressed in a long skirt and pink t-shirt, Hersh is both pixie-like and indomitable, her piercing eyes noticeable even from my seat in the 6th or 7th row. She is also, as I knew from her records but somehow hadn’t really considered until now, an exceptional guitarist. So, after a brief and funny apology in advance for playing new songs, she launches into Wyatt at the Coyote Palace’s enigmatic opening track, ‘Bright’. The sound is very close to the album, the rich, reverberating tone of the guitar filling the lofty space of the hall and more than making up for the lack of the very detailed layers of the recordings.

The relaxed and good-humoured show was weighted towards solo material, with a few Throwing Muses songs and readings from her books punctuating the set. With the sound pared down to one woman and a guitar, the differences between the more punky band material and her solo work (even the folk songs of Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight) are minimised. This isn’t to say that it’s an evening of hushed softness; in fact the presentation brings out the feral power lurking in songs like Crooked’s melodious ‘Mississippi Kite’ as well as – and I mention it because it was the high point of the show for me personally – starkly bringing out the desolation at the heart of ‘Sno cat’; not that it was very different from the album version particularly, but it was one of those instances where the context of the spoken introduction (an anecdote rather than a reading) filled the gaps in the allusive, oblique lyric and gave it a huge emotional impact.

Probably the most rapturous reaction from the audience came fairly early in the set with the performance of the forlorn 1994 classic ‘Your Ghost’ which was as (sorry) haunting as ever and, gave me one of those indescribable flaneur-ish ‘alone in a crowd’ moments that are extremely powerful while being neither happy or sad exactly. There were many other highlights; the aforementioned ‘Sno cat’ several from Wyatt… the ‘Hooker Gazpacho’ reading, ‘Between Piety and Desire’ and ‘Guadalupe’. A reading from her memoir of the late Vic Chesnutt (Don’t Suck, Don’t Die) was followed by a beautiful version of ‘Bakersfield’ from his classic 1990 debut Little.

In the live setting, the relationship between the readings from her books and the songs they are connected with (I went on about it too much in my album review so won’t go on about why it’s good again here) is even more evident and the pacing of the set is perfectly judged and at about two hours, was over far too soon. There was a three-song encore, including a great version of the brilliant (and in the context of Kristin’s introductory anecdote very funny) Throwing Muses classic ‘Cottonmouth’, which was one of the first songs that introduced me to her music, twenty-five years ago; a strange, sad, happy kind of magical feeling. And shortly thereafter Kristin left the stage.

Apparently I regressed to my teenage state during those two hours; I was too ‘spellbound’ I suppose, to take any pictures while the show was on, and then, despite ten years or so of writing about music and interviewing bands, I lurked around for a bit, chatted to the sound guy, clutched the book I had intended to get signed, faded into the background and eventually wandered out into the wintry (though not quite frosty) city night, feeling a mixture of things that added up to ‘satisfied’ in a way that was absolutely definitive of the adolescent version of me that fell in love with Kristin Hersh and her music in the first place. It was a good show. I wish she’d done ‘American Copper’, but you can’t have everything.

Play For Today – current playlist

It’s been a while, so without further ado or elucidation, here’s some of what’s on the turntable (and equivalents) at present:

Kristin Hersh by Billy O’Connell

1. Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books, 2016)

2. Jingo de Lunch – Perpetuum Mobile (We Bite Records, 1987)

3. Rachel Mason – Das Ram (Cleopatra Records/Practical Records, 2016)

4. Naia Izumi – Natural Disaster EP (self-release, 2016)

5. Hobbs’ Angel of Death – Heaven Bled (Hell’s Headbangers/High Roller Records, 2016)

6. Suzanne Vega – Lover, Beloved; Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers (Amenuensis Productions, 2016)

7. Bessie Smith – The Complete Recordings, Vol 1 (Columbia/Legacy)

8. Ghosts of Sailors At Sea – Red Sky Morning (Faded Maps, 2016

9. Dorje – Centred & One EP (Invisible Hands Music, 2016)

10.Drudkh/Grift – Betrayed By The Sun (Nordvis/Season of Mist, 2016)

11.The Mothers of Invention – Burnt Weenie Sandwich (Reprise Records, 1971)

12. Gentlemans Pistols – Hustler’s Row (Nuclear Blast, 2015)

13. Kaada/Patton – Bacteria Cult (Ipecac, 2016)

14. Maki Asakawa – Masi Asakawa (Honest Jon’s, 2016)

15. Nightsatan – Nightsatan and the Loops of Doom (Svart records, 2014)

16. Pilot – From the Album of the Same Name (EMI, 1974)

17. Haar/Ur Draugr – split (ATMF, 2016)

18. Wardruna – Runaljod – Ragnarok (By Norse Music, 2016)

19. Scott Walker – Scott 3 (Phillips, 1969)

20. The Stupid Daikini – Everything is Fine (self-release, 2015)

Independence as a State of Mind: the Bosque Records story (1988-2001)

Romantic intro…

Records (even really bad ones) are mostly just what the word suggests: a unique record of a specific performance, made on a particular day or days, by people in a particular room or rooms, who were in whatever mood they happened to be in at the time.

Record labels are, at their best, a time capsule of an era (or, if they go on long enough, time capsules of eras; see for example the lavish Rise and Fall of Paramount Records box sets), bringing together and preserving these voices and sounds and making them accessible for as long as the technology exists to play them.

Naturally, the more focussed or niche (or just small) a label is, the stronger the time capsule quality is; which brings us to Bosque Records. Although the big names of the 90s Scottish indie scene (Primal Scream, Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub, Travis, Shamen etc etc etc etc) are well remembered by posterity (or else are actually still around), they were simply the most visible/commercial/successful elements of an extremely vibrant and wide-ranging scene, which had its roots in the punk era and evolved throughout the subsequent decades in a variety of unpredictable and sometimes whimsical ways.

At the less commercial end of the spectrum was Tom Worthington’s Bosque Records, initially based in Edinburgh (rarely noted for its music scene) and then Glasgow (always noted for its music scene). In the period 1988-2001 Bosque released a handful (twenty-something) of distinctive, often powerful releases by artists as diverse and idiosyncratic as Dominic Waxing Lyrical, Gilded Lil, Starstruck and Trout. A small output perhaps; but it fulfils the ideal that (presumably) all labels start out with; you can pick up a Bosque release, be it punky, experimental, bluesy, dancey, with the confidence that you will hear something different, something interesting, something unique. And that is a real achievement.

In some ways, Bosque was documenting the end of an era; changes in the music industry, along with (and partially caused by) the birth/growth of the internet and the (temporary, as it turned out) death of vinyl records meant that the indie scene of the early 21st century would be less local and often less experimental, thanks to the appearance in the mid-90s of ‘indie’ as a term denoting a specific style/genre of (mainly guitar-based) music.

The original meaning of indie was in fact exemplified by small labels like Bosque; truly independent, devoted to whatever music their owners wanted to release, regardless of style and fashion or commercial potential. Indie releases from the 80s and 90s have their own special charm; like the music itself, the hand-drawn logos, the artwork and design have a resolutely non-corporate appeal, an expression of freedom and the non-elitist sense that art isn’t something precious or pompous, and that it has everything to do with your life.

Tom was good enough to share his reminiscences (and pictures; please see his Flickr albums for proper photo credits) with us;

When and why did you decide to start a label?

“I was in a band in Edinburgh, named Hee Haw and we had recordings that we wanted to release. In 1988 we first put out an 8 track cassette ‘Splash your head’ that sold quite a few (200?) so logically we thought that we would next do a vinyl record which was the 5 track 12” ‘WrigglEP’ in 1989 (bosc 006). Of course we should have done a 7” or 2 x 7”s but we had ‘label support’ from Fast Forward who persuaded us that the 7” was wrong for us and the ‘market’. And we were impressionable so that is what we did. It was alright, Peel played it and we sold a few, gigging as much as we could.”

Where did the name Bosque come from?

“Bosque (my spelling) is/was a word in common parlance in Forres, Moray, the town where I grew up. It means, roughly, excellent or sound, as in mighty. There was a Bosque cassette compilation in 1994 that featured The Manxish Boys, Pink Kross, Starstruck, Gila Monster, Policecat etc. This was called ‘Humpy Bosque’ (bosc008c) which suggests that it is an incredibly wonderful thing – which it kind of was. The name was of course awkward and annoying, always requiring to be spelled out to people, B O S Q U E.”

What were your biggest influences when you started the label?

“Punk rock. Vanity self publishing. Desire to document. Validation. Independence.”

What is your favourite record label, if you have such a thing?

“I shall plump for Shimmy Disc. But also early Flying Nun. Ankst Records too – I so admired their thing and was always actively seeking a decent band that communicated in Gaelic. But to my knowledge no such band has ever existed.”

Was there a specific guiding principle/vision behind Bosque records?

“Initially no, not really, it was a collective necessity and a shared responsibility. But after the Hee Haw releases it became me and Mark Gibbons, and that’s where it got freaky, and free. We were so in love with music, our own and that being made all around us. We were passionately involved, music and art and poetry was all that mattered. We knew that we had to take complete control and somehow, that is what we did. After Mark & I moved through to Glasgow in 1995 he started to have more fun. He joined and recorded several other bands and became less and less involved in Bosque. It was mostly me then, in a cheap white suit, a bit stoned.”

You were involved in the Bosque Burlesque events as well as the records, was there a spirit of camaraderie between the label/bands/fans?

“Well yes there was. I mean not always, because we were purposely juxtaposing things and deliberately trying to integrate many strands of the cultures that we were interested in. The Bosque Burlesque shows were a good example of this approach. Bosque was always about widening things out, finding connections and introducing jarring elements that tickled our fancy. We were trying to be free. And straddle the medias. There was such a great scene in Glasgow in the mid 90’s. We hardly cared about the rest of the world, we had all the excitement and all the tunes right here in our city. It was, essentially, a very wonderful time. The grotty basements and the parks and the cheap bars were full of individuals experimenting with their lives, throwing all that they had against the wall to see what would stick (a Will Prentice observation).

< Minx Grill

Seemed like everyone made music, wrote zines, put on gigs, we were just very, very present. Really I was too involved to ever be successful at the label game. I was a little bit older than most of us and I found myself in some kind of welfare/surrogate uncle role for lots of lovely, amazing, needy people. But at the same time I was trying to be a responsible safe bet to London promo/label types, fuck that wasn’t very comfy for me. But someone had to do it…

But aye, looking at the photos I took of the Bosque Burlesque shows, just about everyone in the audience was in bands themselves – and lots of them still are! A lot of fun, so many stories…”

What are your favourite Bosque releases and why?

“I suppose that the Sativa Drummers / Rockaragnarok split 10” (bosc024) summed up the ethos pretty well – and it is a great record. Sativa Drummers were a collective of drilled, politically motivated ravers with drums who would turn up from over the horizon at every demo or radical event in the east of Scotland. Mark Deas recorded this record and marshalled a massing barrage of drums, with minimal tape loops that conjured up an Albini-esque finale. Rockaragnarok on the other side were associated with and even shared members and lives with the Sativa Drummers but played an entirely different, timeless plas-rock psyche that amazes me still. But I am proud of all that we released. I just wish there had been more.”

Are there any Bosque artists you feel deserved wider exposure?

“Pretty much all of them. Seriously. I honestly believe that when they were on form, Gilded Lil were one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all time – and Trout were punk rock incarnate. Starstruck were pretty incredible at times and I am extremely proud of it, even if I say so myself. And what to say of Dominic Waxing Lyrical? I hardly know where to start, but the good thing is that he has not stopped and that is perhaps in some small way, due to our documenting and validating his music and stance on life back then.”

<Gilded Lil live c.1998

Were there any bands around then you wish you had signed but didn’t?

“Lots, I had so many ideas, so much enthusiasm, but so little money. There were so many good ideas for records, it’s a wee bit painful to think about them. I was useless with the business and admin but was convinced all through doing the label that someone, some big label or distro or individual would support and bankroll me through a load of releases. I had the bands ready, and the ideas and energy. It didn’t happen though.

I very nearly got to make a record with Mr. McFall’s Chamber (trumped by Robert Fripp).

I would have loved to have made a record with the Country Teasers.

There was to be a Starstruck picture disc 7” on the subject of red hair that just never happened dammit.”

It felt like the UK indie scene really changed around the time of Oasis, when suddenly commercial appeal/mainstream success started to be a goal, rather than something to be suspicious of, was that how it felt from the inside?

“I don’t think I cared that much. That stuff was all so crass and bland to me. Starstruck actually had a run in with Creation records around this time. Dave from Fire/Paperhouse Recs wanted to re-release the 1991 Starstruck cassette album ‘It’s fun, it’s easy. It’s you’ (bosc005) on CD on his Seminal Twang label – which was a fantastic idea, we were thrilled. And he was keen, he got us to do some recordings for various compilations, flattered us, gave me beer money, put us on the guestlists and generally held out the prospect of looking after the band, he was just really enthusiastic. But then he got head hunted to Creation where it all went wonky. Although we went with him there (without having signed anything, duh) his priorities suddenly seemed to change to immediacy and cashing in on what had become indie as a style not independence as a state of mind. We were palmed off, were bottom of the pile and basically forgotten about, which was deeply frustrating and resulted in Saskia and I going into the Creation offices at Creation and removing the Starstruck artwork and tapes. Disappointing, extremely. But we never were going to fit into that scene. Maybe we never were going to fit into any scene… Thus the subtitle to the Starstruck ‘Moi et Beatrice Dalle’ cassingle (bosc009) in 1993 was ‘No Creation Now!’. It also includes our classy version of the Beach Boys ‘Surfers rule’ which we had recorded for a Seminal Twang compilation with Murdo from The Cateran and Margarita from The Fizzbombs/Rote Kapelle.”

How far (if at all) do you think the label was shaped by being based in Glasgow? It definitely felt like Glasgow had a scene in a way that Edinburgh didn’t…

“Well Bosque moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow in 1995. Couldn’t be bothered with Edinburgh any more. Glasgow was absolutely the place to be. I was coming through twice a week anyway. Mark & I had both split up with girlfriends in the east and besides we had added a rhythm section to the Starstruck sound and they lived in Glasgow. So we loaded a van and hit the M8.

Mid 90’s Glasgow was grotty but kind of perfect. Bands would form, flicker and break-up in a day. 15 people would huddle in a bedsit to watch a VHS of a Cassavetes film. Folks would meet at the photocopy shop, start a new zine. We all forgot to eat. The 13th Note and Sleazy’s could be so perfect of an evening and sincerely we did not give a fig for the rest of the world, we had our own. We made friends for life. Very interesting when Richard Hell or Kim Fowley or The Make Up came to town – Glasgow gave more than it got. Amazing.

Of course I remained closely involved with my pals in bands in Edinburgh and felt obliged to introduce and promote their thing, first to Glasgow and then anywhere else that would have them…. This Edinburgh connection seemed like a trump card for Bosque, it felt important. But when I’m in Edinburgh I always want to get back to Glasgow to see what’s going on.

So yes, Bosque was shaped by Glasgow, but perhaps in hindsight it would have benefitted from a slight remove. But that’s not the story.”

Was running the label a financial struggle? Was it ever a full-time occupation?

“Well yes it was a struggle, eventually a bit of a disaster. It was so hard to even make ends meet and I never made any money to speak of, it all went back into the bands, their records, tours etc. But for a very long time I was so motivated and convinced of a beautiful outcome. The satisfaction was from being with fantastic, hilarious, talented people and making music and records. And between me and all the other labels, we did document an important and exciting time in Scottish culture. We did.

But yes I had to work through it all to pay my own way. And I sold furniture, records, all kinds of stuff, just to complete recordings and make the records that I believed in and was committed too. My enthusiasm knew no bounds.”

Was distribution ever a problem?

“Distribution was always a problem. We existed in a window of time where provincial rock & roll had little currency outside of our scene and the internet was but a baby. Post Fast Forward (1990 or so) there was no Scottish distro network to speak of so we were trying to deal with the London distributors and certainly for Bosque that was generally a highly dysfunctional & unsatisfactory relationship. These firms always seemed to be at it with us, but I freely admit that I was pretty dim about it all and not good at the language of bullshit or of playing hard-ball, both of which seemed to be required skills in manouvering within the London music industry. So probably most of our sales were at gigs, direct to shops and through the mail. But can I say that Paul Kearney is a lovely man!

As far as the web went we were actually really on it and did even attempt to live-stream a gig in 1995 as Mark & I and Saskia & Clare from Sally Skull were involved in Scotland’s first internet café then – but it all went tits up, which was another reason for escaping Edinburgh. We subsequently had a website and tried to work that but in the absence of streaming/downloads/secure server it was never a realistic way of running the label.

Sally Skull live, c.mid 1990s

My complaints about distro should not obscure the wonders of the myriad bedroom distros & the international pop underground which supplied the Bosque P.O. Box with cute letters containing fivers and ten dollar notes and IRCs and cheques in return for our vinyl – which meant that there was always a wee bit of money around for the essentials of life.”

Why/when did Bosque close?

“It all got very messy in late 1998/1999. Drugs and depression, death and despair. I had promised certain things basically the Gilded Lil album (bosc028), and I just had to hold on until that was released, which wasn’t until 2001. But I so very badly wanted/needed to get out, quit, take a back seat and get some rigour and honesty back in my life. It was a sad end to an extraordinary time. So very much energy had been put into the venture and there was not so very much coming back at me.”

What do you think of the Scottish/UK indie scene nowadays, do you still follow it?

“A bit. I go out and see bands in Glasgow sometimes. Lots, maybe even most of my friends make music, some of them have never stopped, I guess that they cannot and indeed why should they. There is still a lot of fantastic music being made in this country, particularly of course here in Glasgow. Great bands, labels, venues – loads of crossover into visual art, film and the written word. Exactly as it should be and, I am glad to say, it just don’t stop.”

Looking back at Bosque, do you have any regrets? Would you do it all again and if so what would you do differently?

“No regrets, fuck that. Never again. Onwards.”

Heartfelt thanks to Tom for taking the time to answer my questions! See many more great photos from his archives here

See the Bosque discography here