Disclosure

If anyone can claim to be the house photographer for the Manchester music scene since the 1970s, it is Kevin Cummins. Born in the shadow of Maine Road, Manchester City’s old ground, he began photographing Buzzcocks, The Fall and other bands of the city’s fledgling punk scene following the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. And the next year, Cummins was on hand to document the Pistols’ final British gig, a benefit for striking firefighters and their children on Christmas Day in Huddersfield. But it was to be the music that emerged from Manchester in the wake of punk that brought his photographs to the wider audiences of the NME and The Face.

His images of Joy Division, New Order and The Smiths are some of the most well-known in rock photography and all of those artists feature in an exhibition of Cummins’ work currently running in St. Leonards-on-Sea. Disclosure is a retrospective, at the Lucy Bell Gallery in Norman Road, spanning his forty-year career. As well as images of later musicians from his home town, such as The Stone Roses and Oasis, there are portraits of David Bowie and Sinead O’Connor on show, and some of the last photographs of Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers.

The writer Paul Morley once said that he seemed to have been writing about Joy Division for most of his life; and it must be similar for Cummins as it his work with that band, and Ian Curtis in particular, that endures the most and will always ensure their names are inextricably linked: Curtis, cigarette in hand against the black walls of the bands’ rehearsal room; Curtis on stage, shirt untucking, arms raised in mid-dervish dance; Curtis, in the freezing cold, wearing the mac that launched a thousand rain-coated gloomsters (myself included) in tribute. But it is a photograph of the whole band that rivals Peter Saville’s artwork for their debut album as the most enduring Joy Division image.

The group had shown Saville an illustration, from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, of the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919. The graphic, depicting the radio waves emitting from the collapsed star, was used in negative by Saville and centred in splendid isolation against an ocean of black, with no text. The sense of space on the cover was an uncanny reflection of the space within the music and it is immediately recognisable, without words, as a motif for the group. And Cummins’ photograph of the four band-members on a snow-covered footbridge in early 1979, achieves something similar. The dominance of the white space of sky and snow, the hidden blocks of Hulme and the symmetry of the railings pointing to the band – unposed, adrift and barely identifiable - all contribute to a beautiful image that captures perfectly the essence of their sound.

Disclosure is at Lucy Bell Fine Art, 46 Norman Road, St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN38 0EJ until 10th April 2015. Entrance free.

Gallery open Tuesday – Saturday 11am-4pm, Sunday 1-4pm.

Kevin Cummins is giving a talk at the gallery on Thursday 2nd April 7-9pm. Entrance £5, booking essential.

Can You Dig It?

Turning over the earth on the allotment in yesterday afternoon’s intermittent sunshine, preparing the soil for potatoes, it occurred to me that there was a time when digging and planting on communal land such as this was a truly dissenting act – one that could lead to persecution and prosecution.

Over three hundred and fifty years ago, a group of radicals began planting vegetables and building homes on common land that had been seized and enclosed by local landowners at St. George’s Hill in Surrey. Food prices were high in the wake of the English Civil War, and the protestors called for others to join them in their project of communal farming and living. Alarmed by such militant action, the landowners called in the troops and the threat of trouble quickly drove some away; but many stuck it out. Throughout the spring and summer of 1649, the “Diggers” as they became known, were led by Gerrard Winstanley as they withstood a campaign of violence and intimidation. It was only after being taken to court that the Diggers were evicted from St. George’s Hill and, when they had left, they immediately established another community at nearby Little Heath. Convinced of their design for life, Winstanley and his followers sent out envoys to spread the word and Digger communities were founded in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire as a result.

Gerrard Winstanley, a herdsman and Protestant reformer, had come to prominence earlier in 1649 with the publication of a pamphlet in which he, and others, called for equality for the common people of England; he felt that the people had been deprived of their birthright since the Norman conquest. Unlike the Levellers, who had begun campaigning during the Civil War for equality in relation to law, Winstanley and his followers argued that freedom could only be obtained by restoring and strengthening the people’s relationship with the land. They called themselves The True Levellers but, because of the nature of their direct action, the term Diggers was quickly attached to them. And it was the putting into practice what they preached that made the Diggers so dangerous to the authorities. This led to their movement being quickly quashed but their example informed much subsequent anarchist and agrarian socialist thought, and led to some of their ideas being put into practice with startlingly contrasting results: think the Quakers and the Khmer Rouge.

Perhaps the real legacy is a little more prosaic. In his 1973 book Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward defined the allotment as land where ordinary people are the catalysts and designers of their own space and community. The true heirs, you might say, of the Digger spirit.

Restoration Time

If Dry the River are mostly described as a folk rock band, they are being done an injustice. The haunting tenor of lead singer Peter Liddle sets them apart from the many bands inhabiting that ground between the tender and the rousing; his plaintive voice manages to lend their songs a quality which is, at once, both hymnal and anthemic.

The East London band established themselves with their debut album, Shallow Bed, in 2012. With its trademark contrast of melancholia and euphoria, it viewed life and love through the prism of religious imagery. Typified by songs that begin softly and build to a crescendo of guitars, this was demonstrated at the Concorde 2 in Brighton last night by New Ceremony - ‘the angel of doubt laid down sand beneath our house’ - and centrepiece song, Bible Belt.

This style has continued on the 2014 follow up album, Alarms in the Heart. The rising title track opened last night’s set and was followed by the sacred scenes of the more even Hidden Hand (‘had a vision in the chapel/the flames flickered on your forehead’) and the delicate and moving Gethsemane (leave that painful memory/in the Garden of Gethsemane).

Introducing early single and set-closing favourite No Rest, with its mitigating refrain of ‘I loved you in the best way possible’, bassist Scott Miller commented that the band had been playing the song live for five years. If that seemed a little tired, it was dispelled at the end by his observation that, despite having had a bad day, gigs like this always raised his spirits. And there’s the rub: nobody can fail to be lifted by the restorative music of Dry the River

Four Seasons in One Day

Saturday morning, out early with the dogs: there was a February crispness in the air but there was no frost; the birds were in full voice and their song resonated through the calm of the morning; the buds on the apple trees were visibly becoming more swollen. This all lent the day a spring-like quality, the first this year that showed signs that winter will soon surrender its lease.

But as I reached my turning point at Cattle Wood, the greying sky began a sleety rain that quickly transformed into giant flakes of snow that slapped into my face as I headed home. The wintery snow did not settle on Windmill Hill but, once indoors, I could see the fields up on the higher ground of the distant ridge at Dallington standing out, bright white, under the leaden sky.

Within an hour the snow had stopped and, by late morning, the clouds had disappeared and a warming sun had started to beam down. The tarmacked surfaces of the wet lanes dazzled in the sunlight and steam began to rise from the fields as the rays penetrated the sodden soil. By lunchtime, splitting logs and making kindling, I was down to summer shirtsleeves in the balmy outdoors.

Yet, as the afternoon wore on, the shadows lengthened and the lack of cloud cover caused the temperature to tumble. As the light faded, spirals of grey trailed up from chimney pots and the air was filled with the smell of wood smoke from lighting fires as people started to settle down indoors at the autumn of the day. By nine o’clock at night, bringing in more firewood, I could feel the crunch of the frost forming underfoot.

Dark Times

There was a glorious moment at Concorde 2 in Brighton last night when a grinning Kate Tempest had just taken to the stage. As the beats boomed across the sold-out venue, and Tempest spat out the opening lines of Marshall Law - “Everywhere is monsters/tits out, wet-mouthed, heads back/shouting and screaming just to prove they exist” – we grinned back and a palpable wave of anticipation ran through the crowd: we felt we were in for something special. And that is exactly what we got.

Like the first part of her Shakespearean namesake, South London poet and rapper Kate Tempest is certainly sharp-tongued. However, she is no foul-tempered shrew, just angry at the way we are living now; but with her skill in creating stories that reflect the struggle of life, there is undoubtedly something of the Prospero about her contained in that chosen surname.

At 29, Tempest is already a veteran of hip-hop open mic nights, a published poet with her collection Everything Speaks in Its Own Way and a performed playwright with Wasted. In 2013, she combined the latter two disciplines in Brand New Ancients, a theatrical spoken word piece that won the Ted Hughes Award. And then last year she followed this all up with Everybody Down – a statement not a command – a concept album with Tempest’s Becky and Harry at the centre of a cast of characters all trying as best they can to avoid snagging on the tapestry of life.

These are dark times, Tempest tells us between songs, we are living in a state of emergency and it feels like the end of the world; but hardly anyone is talking about it and those that are, we are not able to understand – is she referring here to a certain verbose Lothario turned revolutionary? She bemoans the fact that we no longer seem able to rely on artists to reflect the times, to contextualise events; but in that same opening song she observes: “CEOs and these modern day Scrooges/…meant to be hard times, right, a recession?/but these guys are buying more than ever.” She seems to be doing a good job, from the platform of popular music, of articulating against the neo-liberal philosophy that the world is yours - unless you are ugly, poor or sick. And in Lonely Daze, a catalogue of how hard it is to get a job, to fall in love, to stay honest, there is resonance in the refrain of “will it be this way forever?/these are stressful times.”

Despite the serious message, it is also a party. There is a band of three on percussion, samples and beats, and a soulful backing singer who perfectly counters Tempest’s rapid-fire delivery. At one point, we all sing Happy Birthday while the percussionist films the audience from the stage so he can send it to his mum. And there are some nice Darth Vader vocal treatments on Chicken for the character of David – “even David’s enthusiasm is boring” - the personification of low expectations and conformity who is told “as long as you live for other people’s opinions/you’ll never be more than afraid.”

Fear is something Tempest identifies as one of capitalism’s desires. That and turning against, and blaming, each other. One of her poems is an appropriation of the opening of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by smartphones.” She is also well aware of the roles of greed and technology in keeping people in their place. The chorus on the infectious Circles illustrates that entrapment and the lack of a way out: “I go round in circles/not graceful, not like dancers/not neatly, not like compass and pencil/more like a dog on a lead, going mental.” And the potential for that rage to turn to violence is neatly summed up in A Hammer – “When all you’ve got is a hammer/everything looks like nails.” Tempest says she does not have the answers but she is able to brilliantly elucidate the frustrations of this life; this is my job, she says.

Be Still My Beating Heart

When I received notice of Ladybird by Design, an exhibition at the Bexhill De La Warr Pavilion of illustrations from Ladybird books from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, I suffered a Proustian rush. Brought on by my ability to immediately conjure up in my head the covers of The Night Sky, Tricks and Magic and The Story of Cricket, I could almost feel the neatness of those compact, slender hardbacks and the soft sheen of their matt covers. Ladybird books loomed large in my early years, and not just because of my childhood hobbies: with the clear font and white space of the left-hand pages and the full-colour illustrations on the right, I learnt to read whilst immersing myself in the simple life of Peter and Jane, and their mum and dad, in the Key Words Reading Scheme series of books at school.

If I was suffering from nostalgia just thinking about Ladybird books, when I walked into the exhibition space at the De La Warr I thought I might either pass out or burst into tears from the sudden resurrection of long-buried memories. With over 200 original illustrations exhibited from the imprint’s heyday, and several walls full of original Ladybird books on display, I was staggered by how many images were familiar to me and how many of the books I must have read at home or at school.

I had two of my kids with me and they were slightly bemused by Harry Wingfield’s series of illustrations for Shopping With Mother, that depicted Peter and Jane in a succession of High Street shops with their mum. “Why didn’t they just go to the supermarket to get all that stuff?” the ten-year-old asked. But they were hugely impressed with the skill of John Berry’s hyper-realistic images for the People at Work books. With their photographic quality, they were convinced that some were not illustrations at all. And they enjoyed Ladybird’s embracing of technology, in the white heat of the 60s, with the technical imagery of the How it Works series.

Although the first Ladybird books were published in 1914, it was in the 1960s that a clear mission to educate and inform children about the world around them emerged. Where else would you find a series of books on the public services of gas, electricity and water? And the domestic world they depicted would have been familiar to most children. The illustrations on display from one of the readers, Things We Do, were reassuringly recognisable and would have been so forty-five years ago: paying the bus conductor, making a go-kart, going to bed.

This is a superb exhibition, not just for the nostalgia trip (I overheard more than one visitor exclaim, “I had that one!”), but for the high quality design, printing and illustrations. Charles Tunnicliffe’s seasonal What to Look For images are things of beauty and I think, looking back, the reason the Ladybird series made such an impression on children of the 60s and 70s was their remarkable vibrancy. At home, television, books and newspapers were monochrome; and outside in the streets things were no different. Watching the 1967 documentary film The London Nobody Knows recently, I realised that when I was a child – despite the Swinging Sixties - the buildings and people around me must have still been very much immersed in colourless post-war drabness.

At the end, the kids had scooted ahead of me and I found them in the foyer seated at a long table reading actual, physical Ladybird books. As I scoured the table for familiar titles, I spotted – be still my beating heart! – two of my three favourites: Tricks and Magic and The Story of Cricket. As I held the books in my hands, and the kids hopelessly bombarded me with requests for sweets and drinks, I found that to open them, and turn back the pages of time, would have been too overwhelmingly embarrassing in a public place.

Ladybird by Design is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill until 10th May 2015.

Wild in the Country

The Beatles were a big part of my childhood. Not my youth – that was Bowie, Lou Reed and punk – but my childhood. Being born in the same year as their debut hit single, and having sisters much older than me, the sound of the Fab Four inevitably drifted through our small council house day and night in my early years. My two oldest sisters even saw The Beatles live at Lewisham Odeon in 1963; they said they could not hear a note for all the screaming going on around them – not them, of course: too cool. I also recall collecting bubble gum cards with stills from the 1968 animated film, Yellow Submarine, and sneaking in to my sisters’ room to gaze at the Magical Mystery Tour double EP, which I was not supposed to touch under any circumstances. I never played I Am the Walrus or The Fool on the Hill but I was fascinated by the artwork of the gatefold sleeve and the colour booklet that came with it. When the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie says that anyone who professes to not like The Beatles is lying and affecting a pose, he is probably right. I do not dislike The Beatles but it was never my music – it belonged to my big sisters and it still does.

As a consequence, I have never thought too much about the mop-tops down the years until I was recently alerted to a local connection at my end by Sussex Sedition’s Somerset correspondent, Andrew Brooke. Reading the Hunter Davies biography of the band, he discovered that their manager, Brian Epstein, had owned a house - Kingsley Hill - in Warbleton, just near Heathfield in East Sussex. Epstein had bought his country retreat in February 1967 and, in May of that year, hosted a lavish party at the house to celebrate the imminent release of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Heart Club Band album. John Lennon’s then wife, Cynthia, recalled: “John and I travelled down in the Rolls with a group of friends. On the journey everyone took LSD and I, against my better judgment but carried away by the jolly atmosphere in the car, decided to join in.” At the party, Cynthia had a bad trip – “upstairs I found an open bedroom window and contemplated jumping out” - but John, George and press officer Derek Taylor spent most of the time in Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls Royce listening to Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale over and over again. Paul McCartney was the only Beatle not to attend the party.

There were other similarly drug-fuelled parties at Kingsley Hill in the following months that year, but the summer of love came to an abrupt end in the dog days of August. Epstein had invited friends down to Kingsley Hill for the Bank Holiday weekend but returned to London early when some guests, specifically invited for recreational purposes, failed to turn up. But he phoned Kingsley Hill the next day to say he would be travelling back down by train and needed to be picked up from Uckfield Station. He never arrived, however, and was found dead in his London home a few days later from an overdose of barbiturates. He was 32.

There is not much to see at Kingsley Hill today. The trim hedges and white five-bar gate bearing the house name give no clue to its place in the Beatles legend; but it is a joy to know that at one time, as the good folk of Warbleton went about their honest business, the loveable Beatles were holding court in a den of hedonism behind such a respectable frontage.