Fairytale of New Cross

If you already feel as though Christmas has been going on for quite a while now, that is because it has: the reason for this is because no one can agree when Christmas begins, anymore. Is it when the first mince pies appear in the supermarkets? Is it when the John Lewis television advert is first broadcast? Is it when you put your tree up? And when is that supposed to be? Is it as soon as December arrives? Or is it twelve days before Christmas? There is certainly a class dimension to Christmas, these days: lower down the social scale the plastic tree will have been up since mid-November and the kids will be opening their presents in the dark at 5am on the big day; at the top of the class ladder, the Norwegian spruce will go up on Christmas Eve and the poor little blighters will have to wait until after Christmas luncheon for their gifts.

I, of course, know exactly when Christmas begins: it is the precise moment at which you hear, for the first time that winter, James Fearnley’s piano introduction to The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. This song is the greatest Christmas single never to have topped the hit parade: it chimes with the reflective and bittersweet mood of the season and has never turned stale. What its ubiquity has done, though, is render almost all Pogues' songs as Christmas songs: Misty Morning Albert Bridge, Rainy Night in Soho, London Girls – even A Pair of Brown Eyes – all sound festive to me at this time of year. So when the Christmas music comes out in our house, alongside the Sinatra and Elvis festive albums and assorted seasonal compilations, there is always a Pogues’ Best of. This year, there was a bonus: when I saw James Yorkston play in Bexhill earlier this month, he performed two songs that The Pogues have also covered, I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Everyday and The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. The Pogues are one of those bands I have never stopped listening to; they are a perennial soundtrack to the past thirty-odd years and I associate them with nothing but good times.

The association probably began in February 1980 in The Wellington pub, just around the corner from the Lyceum Ballroom in London. A mob of us were carousing before a Joy Division gig and a big-eared, broken-toothed bloke came over to us and snarled, “You lot seem to be the only people in ‘ere having a fuckin’ good time; do you mind if I ‘ave a drink with yer?” We were a raggle-taggle bunch of punks, proto-Goths, football hooligans and longhaired hippies but we all recognised Shane MacGowan, either from his status as a face on the fledgling punk scene or his band, The Nips. He never mentioned who he was and neither did we - back in those egalitarian times, bands and fans were all the same – but we had a good time getting drunker together.

A couple of years later, I was squashed in the basement bar of the Hope and Anchor on Islington’s Upper Street, waiting for a new band called Pogue Mahone to come on stage. I had been told they combined punk and Irish folk music and were worth seeing - I didn’t think it sounded too promising; but they were incredible and there, on stage, was Shane again, standing next to a bloke repeatedly hitting himself on the head with a tin tray as the musicians behind them played with phenomenal speed and energy. I had never seen the like.

Further down the line, in the late 80s and early 90s, there were all those gigs at Brixton Academy which became annual fixtures at either Christmastime or on St. Patrick’s Day. The evening would always begin in the Canterbury Arms behind the police station, and each would end up as raucous as the last. I am quite sure I can recall one performance when Shane wasn’t even there: Joe Strummer was on lead vocals, instead, and there were several Clash songs in the set. I might have dreamt that, or just fabricated it, but I think it’s true.

More recently, as the fin de siècle became the new millennium, The Pogues were a consistent feature of the football routine. The Amersham Arms in New Cross, south-east London, an Irish-run pub and music venue, always had plenty of Pogues on the front bar jukebox and, as the pre-match drinking session was winding up, their version of Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town was a regular rallying cry before the game. And I think that is why I most associate The Pogues with good times. Those were the last days free of the weight of responsibilities: before kids, before teaching, before genteel poverty; when all I had to worry about was getting out of bed early enough on a Saturday morning to get to the pub on time – what seems now, like a fairytale existence.

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.

Les Enfants Sauvages

When the debut single by Savages was released in 2012, one review said that it “makes us dream of what it must have been like to have been around to hear, in real time, the debut releases by Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, to feel, as those incredible records hit the shops, that unearthly power and sense of a transmission from a satellite reality." As someone old enough to have been around to hear and buy all of those records in real time, I sometimes feel that music is no longer tangible and rooted in experience, but is rather some sort of virtual heritage concept that can be plundered from any age; and it makes me feel old.

Savages, a London band who played Brighton’s Concorde 2 last night, are not old - they are very young; but their sound could have come straight from those defining years of post-punk at the end of the 70s. And it is a fantastic sound: thundering percussion from stand up drummer, Fay Milton; a rumbling bass that hits you straight in the sternum, from Ayse Hassan; powerful and strident - but highly emotive - vocals from Jehnny Beth; and stylish, coruscating guitar work from Gemma Thompson. It is Thompson’s playing that stood out for me: the searing and soaring trebly urgency of the Banshees and PIL, combined with a startling array of effects and noises straight from Martin Hannett’s box of production tricks; there was never a moment’s silence in the set as her guitar fed back and warped, even in between songs.

Most of the tracks from their debut album, Silence Yourself, were played last night and, with the addition of two new songs - the pleading and desperate I Need Something New and, closing track, the radio-unfriendly Fuckers - the pace was frantic from the start. The only change of speed came in the middle of the set: the mellow and atmospheric, Waiting for a Sign, was followed by a surprising cover of highly influential electronic duo Suicide’s single, Dream Baby Dream, from 1979. It was a vibrant and exciting performance and, watching the band last night - black-clad, gender-neutral, wreathed in dry ice, indifferent or diffident in front of the audience – I could have easily been in a reality from the satellite of 34 years ago.

Licht und Blindheit

Peter Hook’s decision to trawl through his back catalogue and tour whole albums has seen him fall out with his New Order colleagues. Next month, with his band, the Light, he will perform New Order’s Movement and Power, Corruption and Lies on stage. But for the moment he is still mining the rich seam of Joy Division material. Billed as an Unknown Pleasures gig, his turn at Concorde 2 on Brighton’s chilly Madeira Drive on Wednesday night turned out to contain a lot more.

The one vinyl album I own that has been most worn through continually playing is Joy Division’s debut. I was 17 years old when it was released and it sounded like nothing ever made before. And I’ve never really stopped playing it – these songs are hard-wired into my consciousness – and it still sounds unique despite the scores of bands who have subsequently been inspired by its sound. At the gig, there are countless men of a certain age and Peter Saville’s sleeve design – a diagrammatic representation of the radio waves emitted from a collapsed star - is everywhere: it forms the stage backdrop, it’s on posters and it's on T-shirts, including one worn by one of the support band, Manchester’s Tiny Phillips. But there are a lot of younger people in the audience, testament to Joy Division’s continuing influence.

Expecting the bass line from Disorder when the band take the stage, it’s a surprise when they begin with the patient, swirling build-up of Dead Souls, the B-side of the 1980 Licht und Blindheit single for the French label Sordide Sentimental. After the subtleties of the opener, there are a couple of early songs - No Love Lost and Leaders of Men – from the cusp of Warsaw/Joy Division, and Digital from 1978’s A Factory Sample EP. The sense that Hook was always the most boisterous member of Joy Division/New Order seems to be borne out as he crunches through these early songs. He handles the vocals well, despite the occasional lapse into bellowing; he is sure of the lyrics and delivers them with passion. Perhaps this should not be a shock: it was a toss-up who should take the vocal duties after Curtis’s death and Hook lost out to Bernard Sumner. I love the fragility of Barney’s voice but listen to Hook’s lead vocals on Dreams Never End and Doubts Even Here from New Order’s debut album and consider whether the right decision was made.

The well-replicated rawness of those old Warsaw songs makes me fear for the tender songs on Unknown Pleasures; but his handling of the delicacy of Candidate and Insight allays my fears. The band includes another bassist, enabling Hook to selectively concentrate on the intricate bass melodies that are perhaps the most important element in producer Martin Hannett’s creation of the Joy Divison sound. And with samples of the album’s original production augmenting the songs, the spliced tape intro to New Dawn Fades gives me an emotional catch in the throat.

Once they have finished Unknown Pleasures in its entirety, that’s not it: Atrocity Exhibition, A Means to an End, Isolation, 24 Hours and The Eternal all signal that perhaps Hook’s next project will be playing all of Joy Division’s second album, Closer, live. Finishing with two singles, Transmission and the obligatory Love Will Tear Us Apart, Hook has played for nearly two hours. There has been criticism of his motivation for touring this material but Hook clearly loves these songs and seems lost in the moment on stage. And who could deny someone who was instrumental in creating such iconic music the chance to let it see the light again after so long?

My Funny Valentine

Padding around the orchards of Greenways Fruit Farm yesterday, with Smithy the dog, I fell in love with a thing of rare beauty: it caught me completely by surprise and still seems inexplicable because I had passed the obscure object of my desire many times before without a flicker of emotion.

Perhaps because I had changed the direction of my usual walk from clockwise to counter, and came upon it from the opposite direction, sight of it from a different perspective made me truly see it for the first time.

Perhaps it was the power of the music I was listening to on my headphones - my soul already stirred - that accounted for the feeling that overwhelmed me. As I came up the hill I was listening to Tiger Man from British Sea Power’s atmospheric instrumental album, Man of Aran; at the very moment I turned the corner at the top and caught sight of it through the gap in the beech windbreaks, the track shuffled to the extraordinary Decades by Joy Division.

Joy Division’s music is the perfect snow music: this was cemented in my psyche early on by Kevin Cummins’ beautiful photograph from January 1979 of the band on a snow-covered footbridge. At the highest point of the bridge’s curve, the four are isolated in the bleached landscape, trapped by the symmetry of the railings and streetlights. This connection between Joy Division and snow was probably further compounded by the fact that it seemed to snow a lot in those winters at the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties when I was listening to their music; mind you, I have never really stopped listening to their music and there has been a lot of snow since, too.

So, perhaps the ethereal atmosphere of the snow and freezing fog had made me insubstantial and vulnerable and, when I suddenly found myself in its presence, its towering imposition overwhelmed me.

Whatever prompted it, there is no denying that I fell in love with an electricity pylon; pylon number 4VM 029 to be exact. I had never before considered the beauty of one of these structures but with its graceful, curving sweep from broad base to narrow pinnacle, its delicate latticed framework and its deific trio of pairs of crossarms, it struck me as both magnificent and tender. And its position on the fruit farm, near the top of the hill, shows it in all its glory.

All transmission towers, as pylons are called in the trade, are variations of an original design by Milliken Brothers, commissioned in 1928 by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Central Electricity Board. The design has since been used all over the world. My pylon looks like an L6 D model but I stand to be corrected.

The American poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer wrote in 1913, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree”. Spike Milligan reimagined these lines from the view of a cocked-legged dog; the people at the Pylon Appreciation Society would probably reimagine the tree as a pylon. For them, the poetry of a pylon is plain to see and they dedicate their efforts to helping the rest of us see their worth. For most however, I am sure the pylon is an eyesore, the forerunner of the dreaded wind turbine. Those who would have the countryside preserved in aspic can only see beauty in a sentimental construct of thatched roofs and tea rooms. The giants of the national grid, roped together as they march cross-country, are a stunning sight on the horizon or at close quarters; and you only have to drive across Romney Marsh and see the towers of Little Cheyne Court in the distance to be filled with awe by wind turbines, too.

Kilmer, incidentally, died in battle in northern France in 1918, by which time every tree had probably been blown to kingdom come. He never got to see the likes of 4VM 029; he would have loved them.