peripheries

(First published on Kiltr 22 days ago)

Being a little late to the party for ‘Big Gold Dream; Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream’, with it initially gaining plaudits on first showings last year and further praised as it toured festivals this year, had more than a touch of ironic synchronicity for me. Removed a year or two by virtue of my relative youth and by a distance of some miles, which seemed even further at the time due to the strange machinations of Scotland’s rural public transport system, from the firework rise and burst of musical creativity which has come to be known as ‘Scotland’s post punk scene’, I still came a knocking, full of vim and vigour, at its door.

There were others like me, waifs and strays blown in from the provinces, having missed the starting gun realising just how significant the main affair was, hoping to extend the celebrations just a little longer as the party wound down. Bob Last may have been fast wrapping up the last of Fast, Scars may have departed for the not so gold lined streets of the Big Smoke but there was still some old school Art School dancing to be done; big brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles had their record collections raided over time and a slightly younger generation gathered the brass necks to enter Edinburgh and Glasgow’s pubs and venues, and in my mid teens I found myself among them.

So having the opportunity to view ‘Big Gold Dream’ a little beyond its initial dissemination was apt and fitting for me. My thoughts on viewing were no less synchronous for running parallel to those forming around a piece I was trying to write on monoculture, with the film’s thematic concerns and subject matter, the comments of the interviewees, virtually every frame relevant to how I saw the process of the death and resurrection of it applying in a Scottish cultural context, I just had to tease out the relevant strands whilst doing the film no disservice because it is a vital and vibrant submission to Scotland’s collective cultural archives.

Getting the (minor) grumbles off my chest first is probably a good idea because it's all gravy from there. Stylistically, ‘Big Gold Dream’ links its archive footage and interviews well with suitably aged segues, which work for the most part. Possibly my only, small, lasting dissatisfaction with it came from this source though, which on occasion foregrounds traffic shots clearly not contemporary with the era under discussion, the most jarring being when an advertisement on a bus side is doubled and foregrounded showing an advert for the risable Johnny Depp vehicle ‘Mortdecai’. It’s a small observation, and a stylistic point, which could easily have been edited out for greater authenticity/cohesion of narrative thread, but ultimately didn’t deter from my overall enjoyment of the film, which is so strong in other areas.

The story of how ‘post-punk’ exploded in Scotland’s two major cities and could realistically lay claim, as one interviewee in ‘Big Gold Dream’ does, to giving birth to ‘indie’ music as we would come to know it, has been tragically airbrushed out, glossed over in far too many ‘post’ cultural reviews. Where its influence has been acknowledged at all in general, it has largely been given footnote or lip service status, despite the wider cultural and musical resonance of the bands, the ‘scene’ and the labels which built it. Director Grant McPhee sets out to give an alternative, visceral retelling of the narrative, adjusting the timeline to accommodate, acknowledging both the importance of this space and time creatively, musically, in a wider sense, for what was to follow, for every band or musician who was to claim one of these artists as an influence in years to come, and for those who lived through it. In cultural terms, this was most definitely a case of where the periphery came to influence the centre ground, how monoculture shifted to accommodate.

To explain a little further and before a continuing review, a few words on monoculture are probably relevant, since it explains the other strand to that synchronicity I was feeling on viewing ‘Big Gold Dream’ and saves me boring you with another post on that too, call this a ‘two-fer’! It’ll take flashing forward a little, whilst noting the slightly obvious point that I’m not referring to either the scientific or agricultural definition of the term but its growing use as a cultural reference…

…some twenty five years ago now, as the ubiquitous wonders of the world wide web geared themselves up into existence, cyber utopians began looking askance at the oft vaunted and celebrated ‘cultural unity’ of what has come to be referred to as monoculture and offered up something else instead. Cultural commentator and music journalist Touré now laments the death of what he calls ‘Massive Musical Moments’, alongside the attempted assassination of monoculture, moments which would perish alongside it.  He describes his lament this way:

‘In these moments, an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it is impossible to ignore it, because the songs are holding up a mirror and telling you who we are at that moment in history.

These sorts of moments can’t be denied. They leave an indelible imprint on the collective memory; when we look back at the year or decade or the generation, there’s no arguing that the album had a huge impact on us. It’s pop music not just as a private joy but as a unifier, giving us something to share and bond over.’

For the newly emergent cyber utopians though, in the vanguard of what they saw as an ultimately democratising force, monoculture and ‘Massive Musical Moments’ were the hegemon to be opposed and dismantled by the new nascent medium. No more would popular taste be dictated by three or four television channels, a handful of radio stations and a restricted number of news sources. The internet would offer a wild and unfettered range of options, ushering in an eclectic digital paradise. Every aspect of niche culture would have an audience and the very notion of a mainstream, an almost obligatory monoculture which everyone was expected to like and engage with, had been eclipsed, rendered defunct and meaningless.

This of course, in popular culture terms, fits the narrative trajectory of much post modernist thought, which saw the influence of meta narratives, the grand over arching theories, history, science, culture etc, as being no longer able to adequately describe the nature of human social or cultural existence and so were proclaimed ‘dead’. For popular cultural tastes, restricted and defined by a delimited mainstream market for most things, those unifying moments were illusory, a matter of market perception and perception was about to change irredeemably. 

Skipping even further forward, beyond that wide eyed optimism, yes, the internet has indeed brought greater availability in diversity and made it slightly more possible and acceptable to survive culturally only on the most niche of tastes, but the overwhelming centre of cultural gravity still sits preponderantly, smack, bang, in the very market determined, middle of the mainstream. There may indeed be a wider access to a more varied cultural output, and lots of it, but general media and concomitant social media coverage, how most people hear about what music, what movies etc are being released and ultimately what matters for narrative/market dominance, is increasingly controlled and restricted.

As with all else dictated by manipulated markets, cultural capitalism has tended towards a monopoly and has had very little by way of a cohesive counter to it. Musicians, actors, directors (or of course their staff acting as avatars on their behalf) fill Twitter feeds and other social media streams, draw in supine media outlets, manufacture narrative dominance until their ‘brands’ are ubiquitous. For most people, amidst the onslaught, it seems, if everything is available all the time, being overwhelmed by it becomes as much the norm as falling back on the easy choices, what seems safe, best known or most aggressively marketed.

New York magazine traced the changing proportions between the popular and the fringe in music. In 1986 in the US, 31 songs hit no.1 in the charts and came from 29 differing artists. By 2012 half of the no.1’s came from just six artists, shifting to a ‘monopoly at the top’.

In a similar study examining web trends, Wired magazine found that, in 2001, the top ten websites accounted for 31% of pageviews, by 2010 it was 75%. With Facebook and advertising driven social media increasingly being the way most people get their news, and with ‘news’ also being far more inclined to include aspects of popular culture as inherently newsworthy, too, the faux consensus around popular culture generally looks set to grow even tighter still.

Peripheries have become sandboxes, market testing grounds for niche appeal, accepted into the mainstream, the hegemon, the monoculture, when its market is proven. And the internet, our interactions with it, has become wholly complicit, compromised into consent for it. In the first stage of the long battle between hegemonising cultural forces and the cyber utopians, the former appears to have prevailed; monoculture is dead, long live monoculture, right?

 It isn’t difficult to see how the usual suspects benefit from the monopoly at the top of cultural capitalism. Guy Debord and his situationist acolytes could see it coming but their powers of foresight failed to predict how their resistance would ultimately be subsumed by it. However Malcolm McLaren may have intended his willing construction of The Sex Pistols as a punk boy band, a curated, collated, living, breathing, music playing, posturing, sloganeering advertisement for the latest iteration of selling rebellion in popular culture, a process easily traced back to the ‘birth of the teenager’ with Rock n Roll, as situationist concept or cynical marketing ploy, it made damn well sure these rebels became the establishment with rapid success:

Punk, conceived as the ultimate outsider, oppositional genre, had quickly swept from the periphery to the centre; the situationist inspired posturing of the artwork on record covers, in fanzines, in Malcolm McLaren's head, became part of the spectacle it was expected to oppose. Its anger dissipating, punk had become part of the monoculture it had set out to oppose; punk made money.

And this is where we slipped sideways, not quite where we came in but where a wee tangent proved necessary, or just before here, when punk still proved inspirational, still seemed genuinely rebellious. As Hilary Morrison, as instrumental in the formation of Fast Product, Scotland’s proto indie label and inspiration behind a lot of what Factory would go on to do later, as her more well known partner, Bob Last, charts in anecdotal evidence in ‘Big Gold Dream’, something shifted in young Edinburgh’s cultural consciousness when the ‘White Riot Tour’ came to town.

Morrison, who alongside Last would become responsible for birthing and nurturing a wider post-punk as well as Edinburgh’s ‘scene’, recounts how most of the scenesters, in the face of the unrelenting faded, austere monotony of mid to late 1970s Scotland, simply couldn’t afford the clothes marketed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm MacLaren as punk ‘uniform’ and made themselves just ‘look as cool as possible’. From their flat at 2 Keir St, Edinburgh, behind the Art College, as they began to collect people and ideas, the DIY ethic which would come to inform the ‘scene’, much of ‘indie’ to come, as well as the self marketing and releasing revolution of much later Internet fuelled generations, was born. This was as much necessity becoming the mother of invention as it was any opposition to McLaren's cynical marketing or the tendency of cultural capitalism towards monopoly.

Whilst this emergent scene was not above fanboy/fangirl naivete, as perhaps best evidenced by Morrison’s anecdotal gleeful curation of John Lydon’s autograph accompanied by his studied, oppositional nihilism (lets not forget Johnny Rotten was a fabrication, a constructed character, who even in Lydon’s own recollections owed as much to Shakespeare’s Richard III as it did to punk rebellion), as he obliged with a signature and a snarling ‘I despise you!’. What becomes clear throughout the film is that among those inspired to create Edinburgh’s nascent scene in the aftermath of the ‘White Riot’ tour, there was an awareness of this artifice, of the fabled authenticity of punk rebellion, all too quickly co-opted by record companies and tour managers to sell records, tickets and merchandise, inscribed through ‘punk’ like a lie through a stick of rock, diffusing its anger and reactionary force. Punk’s inherent capitulation, virtually engineered in by McLaren, allowed the quick and seamless transition into post and new wave, here and everywhere else too.

What became lamentable in this was the apparently, ultimately, built in lack of confidence in the small independent music labels it created to genuinely take on the big record companies on their own terms. Bob Last eventually, after disbanding Fast Product, moved into lucrative, Svengali like management roles for those self same companies. Alan Horne, having run the original Postcard Records, an almost quintessentially Scottish ‘indie’ template, infamously run from a wardrobe for two years, was to later found Swamplands in London as a continuation of his vision. The motown parody pussy cat from the Postcard logos would become a prowling tiger on those of Swamplands, an insecurity complex written in design code.

The irony of ‘Big Gold Dream’, which was also the name of the follow up to Fire Engines’, a seminal mainstay of the Scottish scene, most successful single ‘Candy Skin’ failing can’t have been lost on songwriter Davy Henderson, nor on director Grant McPhee or his screenplay/production cohorts like Erik Sandberg in choosing it for the title of the film, some ten years in the making. Ultimately the ‘Big Gold Dream’ was a shimmering mirage. At every turn, where those interviewed and documented in the film who chased it hardest and failed to find it, cautionary tales flashed neon and went unheeded. If there is one, this is the film’s moral.

As A&R men from London based record companies began hoovering up Scottish bands as a result, the successes of Edinburgh and Glasgow based post punk bands and labels provided a new direction beyond the now bloated behemoth of punk, its anger and momentum dissipated in a slew of cynical, co-opted situationist art inspired marketing, the temptations of the almighty market ultimately puncturing this creative bubble too. One of the most poignant moments in ‘Big Gold Dream’ was watching maverick genius Davy Henderson, formerly of Fire Engines and lured away by Alan Horne to form Win on his new Swamplands label, grow visibly tearful, even behind shades, lamenting his shunning of his ex-bandmates and friends in pursuit of ‘pop’ stardom.

Scars-Horrorshow b/w Adultery

There are of course nuances to these stories, some subtleties to the shifting of narratives ‘Big Gold Dream’ pursues. Where Scotland’s post punk scene has been mapped out at all before it has generally been cited as having an inception point with Orange Juice’s ‘Blue Boy’ on Postcard. The film, rightly, takes this back to the release of Scars ‘Adultery'/ 'Horror Show' on Fast. Postcard has been given some due credit for its influence before but ‘Big Gold Dream’ re-contextualises the impact and import of Fast Product, as well as the rivalry between the two, as perhaps being of more significance, particularly as the template for a later Factory, which Bob Last, unbeknownst to them gave a Fast Product code. All of these details are lovingly teased out in ‘Big Gold Dream’s two hours or so and are vital contributions to a restructuring of Scotland’s popular cultural narrative.

This is not just the narrative of a Scotland in seclusion. As the film's subtitle suggests, these bands and labels were influencing the mainstream from the outside in. In this position they maintained a strength, coherence and artistic integrity, which caught a mainstream, still struggling to catch up with punk, wholly by surprise. As the maelstrom of the market drew them in though, and almost inevitably brought to bear its all too brutal truths, from the inside out, their direct influence waned.

It is the early incarnations, the Fast Product playing with pop art merchandising and situationism, the Scars seminal sound borne partly of a hand-made guitar and an obsession with the use and structures of language, visceral Fire Engines live shows lasting around twenty minutes with no cymbals, hihats or chords, the sophisti-pop of the early Orange Juice/Postcard releases which set the tone for change to come, which continued to influence bands for decades.

Directly though, the smackback to these young Scottish upstarts came from the loaded market they had come to challenge and which it seemed would always find a way to reassert its dominance. ‘Big Gold Dream’s reveal, its punchline comes (spoiler alert!) as it describes the situation with Win’s (third wave Scottish post punk) single ‘You’ve Got the Power’ failing to achieve the no.1 its sales should have determined. The dream, big, gold or otherwise was over for Henderson and his Win cohorts and Horne’s Swamplands imprint as they realised Scottish based sales could be discounted from the charts by vested interests. The cynicism of the market had reasserted itself towards the monopolies of cultural capitalism it could understand, but the band's it couldn't had changed it irrevocably.

The impetus, drive and energy of the ‘scene’, its DIY ethic and arthouse/literary influences, would re-emerge as a key influence in both the C81 and C86 movements as well as on much later bands like The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand. Chasing the Big Gold Dream may have been an aspect of the narrative to being in a band bought by many who made up what would become known as Scottish post punk, but the lie was given to this in it already being within their grasp, a shimmering idea to inspire generations to come, bloated markets, A&R men and monoculture be damned.

Charting the course of all this, with footage and interviews never seen before, intimate and unflinching was the joy of 'Big Gold Dream', giving due nods to bands who may have languished as sad pub 'also ran' anecdotes, growing ever more bitter, giving essential context to what may have disappeared, tragically dismissed as random cultural effluvia rather than the vital, exuberant components of a story they belong to.  It's a story, if your interested at all in Scottish contemporary culture you should absolutely hear, if you haven't managed along to a showing, when 'Big Gold Dream' hits your terrestrial television screens sometime soon or your coffers are suitably swollen enough to extend to investment in independent film making in Scotland with a DVD purchase. You won't be disappointed.

This is story which needed, demanded telling. It's a story beyond the unifying power of 'pop' as shared experience in some of Scotland's own massive musical moments, beyond a telling of where young Scotland was at in time, both of which it absolutely is too. Above all, it's a story, in its constituent parts and for those narrating their context, conceived as a challenge to accepted creative norms, their markets and routes to them, and a relentlessly hegemonic establishment; that's well worth celebrating, ye dancin?

Watch 'Big Gold Dream' here!