Insidious Lassitude

Sheffield is more visible from the M1 than Newcastle. Well, Newcastle isn’t visible at all from the M1 because the M1 ceases to be a motorway somewhere not far north of Sheffield, but some of Newcastle can be seen from the A1. The road sweeps past the Angel of the North and steeply down the Bowes Incline, and at night time there is such an expansive blanket of lights that it appears all of Newcastle and the north east of England must be visible. Go there in daylight though, and it turns out that many of the lights are the Metrocentre shopping centre. Those lights aren’t really Newcastle; they’re just an appliqued pattern on the surface. Newcastle for the most part is only unfurled from a vantage point away from the A1. But from a similarly elevated perspective, the main north-south road passes closer to the centre of Sheffield, and as it crosses high above the River Don, it affords a more revealing glimpse of the city. Along the riverbanks are the vicissitudes of industry; the river a transect of industrial development, reflecting the economic growth of the city right through to the Meadowhall shopping centre. Up on the knolled raises and rolling suburban hillsides there are the houses of a leafy commuter belt. As an outsider - someone like me, native to Newcastle - it could almost seem as though the whole of Sheffield is uncloaked and sprawled over the river for every passer by to see; its history and its secrets and its tramlines all on show. Perhaps too, people who are unfamiliar with Newcastle think everything is visible from the Angel of the North.

The Angel is ten years old this year. Ten years have seen two more ‘icons’ of Newcastle join the Angel in the brochure, with the Baltic and the Millennium Bridge now forming a ‘triumvirate of cultural icons’. This ‘trilogy’ (not my words; the words of local government), is central to the NewcastleGateshead Initiative’s rebranding of the city of Newcastle as a ‘World Class’ (yes, capital letters; no, I don’t know what it means either) ’cultural destination’. This ‘culture led’ economic regeneration means that as you crest the Bowes Incline and pass underneath the Angel you won’t see any poverty as you cast your eyes over Newcastle. Oh no. Though you will see hundreds of anthropologists scurring excitedly to the Quayside. It’s they, not shoppers, who cause all the traffic jams on the A1 by the Metrocentre.

Of course, once these ethnologists get to the Quayside they’ll find the artefacts of Newcastle to be surprisingly similar to those of other cities of 21st-century England; of, say, Birmingham, or Leeds, or maybe even Sheffield. There’s a Hilton, a Malmaison, a Pitcher and Piano, some patioed recreation areas agreeable to promenading by tourists, some ‘alfresco, European piazza-living, cafe culture-styled’ bars. And the ethnologists will also find that a cultural icon of the north east need not be created by locals (like the Angel - made by Hampstead born, Anthony Gormley - isn’t), or thought up by natives (like the Millennium Bridge - conceived and designed by architects and engineers in London - wasn’t), or represent them in any way (like the Baltic - run by Americans or Norwegians, full of art from places that are not north east England - doesn’t). In fact, it’s likely far more proftiable if they aren’t so terribly parochial. The tenets of cultural iconography, it turns out, are a lot like those of economic expedience. Someone should get English Heritage on the phone, because it can only be a matter of time before the Metrocentre is proclaimed a cultural icon. Indeed, in Gateshead council’s promotional descriptions, it already has the same cultural classification as the Baltic, the bridge, the Angel, and The Sage. Like the conflation of Newcastle and Gateshead, these icons of that new place are not social, historical, or geographically specific. They aren’t signifiers for that. They are monuments to events which have never happened; icons that represent the flattening of social diversities in order to be receptacles more easily filled by commercial interest. These are monuments/places/images built with the errected as flat-pack easy-assemble icons. That is precisely their failing; iconic status cannot be inferred on something by will, or by throwing money at it. These are not familiar objects, they’re alien; they have nothing to do with the people or the local society. But the norh east was festooned with these objects as an attempt to engender regional and cultural identity; as if these things could be plucked from the air.

Sheffield too has its own regeneration and development agency. ‘Creative Sheffield’ has much the same agenda and methodology as NewcastleGateshead Intiative; it seeks to addess the issue of loss of industry and the associated problems of poverty, dysfunctional infrastructure and loss of local identity by fostering economic growth through ‘cultural’ things like Starbucks, and by erecting vapid monuments to modernity. To this end, the Tinsley cooling towers next to the shopping centre at the side of M1 have recently been the subject of discussion. Apparently they were set to be demolished, until strong objection from locals who see the towers as a link to their industrial heritage and thus a symbol of their identity. The authorities (it’s unclear exactly which body, or bodies, has responsibilty for the decision) then decided they could utilise the towers’ familiarity and make the towers ‘Sheffield’s own Angel of the North’. The idea was a novel one, entirely without precedent, eureka-ed out of thin air, apropos nothing at all: fill a disused industrial building with modern art and put tourist signs on it. Ok, so it’s apropos NewcastleGateshead. In this way the towers could be a sort of Angel and Baltic on a single site! They would have the visiblity of the roadside Angel and, like the Baltic, be full of lucrative art and big empty space that connotes modern profundity. And there’d be a cafe and a shop selling sundry associated art tat and mush stamped with the silhouette of the towers. Brilliant!

The plan according to Sheffield-native organsier and campaigner Tom Keeley, was that the space would be ’our very own [Tate Modern] Turbine Hall’. Hey, look, that’s another big industrial building filled with (much better) modern art and (equally profound) space! But, it gets cleverer yet: they were intending to fill the space with an installation by (Mumbai-born, London-based) Anish Kapoor! Lord alone knows what dimension of genius they plucked that idea out of. It would ‘really make people think about Sheffield differently’ says Keeley. Differently to how they think of it now perhaps, but the same as they already think of Newcastle or many other cities in England. The shape of the icons is different, but inside the buildings it’s all the same; behind the facade are the same connotations and the same ecomomic agenda.

But the plan has been changed again, and now the buildings are again set for demolition. On part of the site though, there is to be a £500,000 piece of public art. It will be ‘based around the theme of energy’, according to the Guardian. This way the council can have its new power station and a spurious lump of glass, lest anyone think Sheffield is not modern and hip and a ‘cultural destination’. Art and commerce: see how they sit cheek by jowl; see what agreeable bedfellows they make! 

*****

The Long Blondes frontwoman Kate Jackson is one of those involved in the lobbying for the use of the Tinsley towers as an art venue of some sort. A bit like Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys before them, the Long Blondes name is unusually-often preceded by ‘Sheffield’s’. The single most important fact in understanding them seems to be that they are ‘Sheffield’s’. Their entire identity and validity as a band seems to be founded on Sheffield. From this everything follows. In reviews of the records or the gigs it’s ’Sheffield’s Long Blondes . . .’, or ‘Sheffield band the Long Blondes . . . ‘, as if any appreciation of their work or assessment of their art must be premised on comprehending their Sheffield-ness and taking that into account. Type ‘Long Blondes Sheffield’ into Google and it spits 182,000 matches. Incredible for a band who are really a bit of an oddball niche interest. Both the Arctic Monkeys and Pulp have sold many, many more records - even from un-Blondes places like Asda and Tesco - and both have a far, far larger profile - even amongst people with jobs and mortgages - yet even though they are routinely described as ‘Sheffield’s’, they each only yield around 100,000 Google results. The Long Blondes and Sheffield are inextricably linked. It is thus of some surprise that - as I remember - of the five members of the band only one comes from or even lives in Sheffield. And it wasn’t even playing in Sheffield which got them recognition or a record deal - indeed they were seen as a bit too leftfield for the city.  

That their identity - and by proxy, their artistic identity and voice - should be so closely entwined with Sheffield is odd. That the one member of the band who does live in Sheffield (though she’s from Bury St. Edmunds) is frontwoman, mouthpiece, photographic focal point, and fashion ‘icon’ Kate Jackson, is perhaps a reason. It might be fanciful and pretentious to draw parallels between her band, Jackson herself, and Sheffield, but she did lobby to have the Tinsley towers turned into an art venue, and the comparisons are there to be made if you stick your neck out far enough. And fanciful and pretentious neck-sticking-out is, after all, the Insidious Lassitude dogma.

Released last week, it has been said that the Blondes new record is typical of ’second album’ syndrome, where - as the cliche goes - a band spend their lives writing their first record, secure a record deal, and then have to make a follow-up record with the mirror the first one held up to them; they have an audience, and a perception of themselves which is totallly different to the one which they previously had. This is maybe a bit like a city which has grown into the place it is because of an industry - like steel in Sheffield - and then has to subsequetly find a way to redefine itself and its identity. The Long Blondes sound like they didn’t want it suggested that they’d made the same record twice. Very anxious in interviews to define themselves as an art-rock band, ‘”Couples”‘ sounds self-consciously arch, arty, and deliberately brittle. Which is not to say that it’s at all bad. On the contrary, they’ve made another great record. A record that is tight, intelligent, sophisticated, stylish, witty, emotionally and musically coherent, authentic, and delivered with charm, flair and panache. They’re still as good a band as there is in Britain.

That said, although the new record is successful in all the criteria it defines for itself - those of an art-rock record, basically - it could be argued that whilst also ticking all those boxes their first record also ticked several more too. By imposing on themselves such strict art-rock doctrine, they seem to have deliberately eshewed some of what made their first record, ‘Someone to Drive you Home’, so successful - a kind of wry literacy, a warmth, perhaps a touch of lyrical melodrama - and replaced it with detached or aloof arty stylings and cleverness. The art-rock aesthetic is - perhaps ironically - one of limitation, and restriction. The things that make a band sound ‘arty’ are almost antithetical to qualities like warmth and melodrama. The art-rock doctrine is one of standoffishness; it opposes familiarity. Working in these narrow confines - almost an asceticism - the Blondes of ‘”Couples”‘ necessarily can’t pull off the remarkable magic trick they did on ’Someone . . .’ where they combined apparently competing forces (like familiarity and invention, for instance), because that would militate against - or indeed contravene - the tenets of art rock. And, frankly, it just wouldn’t be half as arty. This sounds vaguely paradoxical - denial in creation - but that’s the syntax of art-rock for you. That’s what makes it so darned clever. Ultimately, ‘”Couples”‘ sounds like the Long Blondes attempting to distance themselves a little from their former selves. (In addition to it just sounding like a damn fine record.) They sound like they’re trying to sound like something; or trying to not sound like something.

On the first record they were a particularly English sort of band. One of the reasons it was such a strong record was that, though they referenced pop culture that was sometimes American, they did so through a prism of Englishness. Even the album cover was a Jackson painting that showed Faye Dunaway of ’Bonnie and Clyde’ stood by a Ford Cortina. With a preoccupation with the 50s, or a sort of ’time of greater certainty’, there was an apparent interest in how the globalisation (or Americanisation) of the world changed human relationships and shifted identity. The new record still has these concerns, but whereas ‘Someone’ accentuated them by walking a magic tightrope between classicism and postmodern artyness - an aesthetic which was, briiliantly, entirely in keeping with the ’old in new’ agenda - ’”Couples”‘ perhaps sees this agenda muddied and obscured a little, submerged beneath the deliberate stylings and subjugated by the perceived importance that they are seen to be arty. An analogy could be made with a city like Sheffield recontextualising itself - the loss of the real things which gave it culture and meaning, to be replaced by the appearance of cultural significance by means not of local culture, but of imported art. The idiom of rock music is American, and what the Blondes first record did so successfully was translate that into an English vernacular. The new album flirts a little too crudely with art-rock, and what are now fashionable to call ‘disco’ backbeats - a sound which is very current and trendy amongst English indie bands. (Though much has been made of this ‘going disco’ in the press, it isn’t that much of shift; the Blondes were always grooved and disco-ed.) Again, this could be compared to the way in which cities appropriate from other cities, all the time reducing the particularities of identity - simplistically, for instance: Sheffield - steel; Newcastle - coal) and invoking a facade of interchangable modernity.

These analogies - albeit they’re interesting and possibly have some validity - are unfair on the Long Blondes. They may seem to imply that the Blondes have cynically manipulated themselves in much the way a city brands itself. On the contrary, I think that their motivation for an identity shift - or a development, because it they haven’t completely cast off their former skin like Newcastle has - comes not from a rebranding, but from a genuine attempt to distance themselves from that modern world of false icons, lost mythology and shallow expedience, and to very deliberately make their opposition to it even more overt by being arty and clever and very explicitly concerned with the loss of the things society has lost. It’s only that somehow, by doing this, they’ve maybe compromised their own identity.

Art-school educated Jackson talks a lot about the importance of the visual context the band are received in - how the artwork, the videos, the website, the image, are all constituents of the Long Blondes. She has attracted particular attention because of her interest in fashion and her penchant for vintage clothes; a clear visual representation of the themes of the music. Arguably her fashion ‘icon’ status is indicative of the foregrounding of image (by others particularly), in the same way that a city needs some recognisable image - some signifier - on which its meaning or cultural significance can be hung. Even music is now represented with a visual code. Rock music is given some of its meaning and cultural significance by its visual signifiers. But one of the similarities between identity in music and in place (or at least cities), is in the same way that these signifiers can now be hijacked by commerce. In the same way that the way music looks is important because the signifiers create a shorthand for its sale, art has been co-opted by cities as a shortcut to meaning or to engender modernity and cultivate a image which is marketable through today’s visual-led media. The western world is a marketplace now, images are everywhere, and as Jean Baudrillard once noted during a trip around America, we live in a world of images such that now the image is the thing.

Interestingly for the new Blondes album Jackson has made artwork that is eniterly monochrome, with a slight sepia tinge. This is again reflects the Blondes preoccupation with the past. It is suggestive once more of a yearning backwards look, to a time of greater certainty when things were black and white - there’s even a zebra on the cover. A consolidation of the Long Blondes Englishness preservation ethic, the artwork looks like it was made by photo-collage, bits of paper photocopied into place; the kind of rudimentary style that people used in the past. It is an aesthetic which is perhaps telling. On the first record there was painted representation of a cinematic icon of escape; now there is the use of photocopied images. It could be argued - although it’d again be very harsh on what is really a rather brilliant record - that such a difference is indicative of a shift in the Long Blondes music from authentic art to appropriated style.

These are interesting observations to make and there are certainly some things that can be read into the new Blondes record. But none of this is to say that they have in any way lost their way, or their singularity, and become caught up in the slough of disco indie doggerel that other English bands wallow in; they haven’t and they remain the only one with anything to say. English bands seem to struggle to make something authentic from the American idiom of rock, and despite the slight dissolution of their voice, the Long Blondes remain almost the only rock or indie band in this country who have a distinct artistic voice and who have something to say. The others - whoever they are - perhaps really are analgous to the city model of appropriation and branding; there is a template which they all use, a template which is quite possibly every bit as duplicitous, fatuous and facile as the one used by NewcastleGateshead Initiative. But it is maybe telling that even the Long Blondes, who stood apart - perhaps partly too because they weren’t seen as London-based, and were geographically distant as well as artistically - have been affected and blunted a little by the homogenisation of society and culture - albeit blunted only slightly, and precisely because of their endeavors to oppose it.

This homogenisation of society is perhaps in part a consequence of Americanisation and the attendant threat to English culture, and also of the need to sell - be that records or cities. Appropriating what has worked elsewhere is a technique used by city planners and record companies alike. Unlike other English bands who - generally speaking - are caricatures of Englishness - mockney accents, slightly whimsical and twee songs - the Long Blondes have genuine English substance, and a voice that isn’t appropriated from other English contemporaries. But - almost as a direct result of their self-conscious search for an identity which is distinct and arty - that brilliant and knowing Englishness, that surefooted identity, has been diminished ever so slightly. Perhaps, like the debate about the use of the Tinsley towers, in a quest for authentic artyness they’re in danger of turning their backs on the things which gave them that it in the first place - their unique melding of the old and the new, the English and the American, the esoteric and the classic, the specific and the universal. It is maybe ultimately a question of artistic identity in a time when everyone wants to use art to signify something saleable - be they records or ‘cultural destinations’. 

*****

Jackson has said her favourite film is ‘Paris, Texas’. In it a mute man is picked up in the desert by his brother who hasn’t seen him in years and taken to the city. The man sees himself in a mirror and flees. The film is about his struggle to not only find his self, but to reconcile this with the image of himself. He carries out of the desert with him a photograph of the place where he was conceived, a plot of land he intended to one day build a home on. The place was Paris, in Texas, and once the mute begins to talk again he recounts how his father would tell people that the man was conceived in Paris and withheld saying Texas so that they’d at first believe it to be Paris in France. His father told this joke so many times that the man came to ‘believe’ it; he began to become ‘lost in an image’. To reiterate this metaphor the narrative has the man’s brother employed as a billboard maker. The conflation of the image-place and the psychological/emotional-place is one of the key motifs of the film.