Author: Matthew Dodd

By Matthew Dodd

I’d love to speak with Leonard.
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd.
He’s a lazy bastard, living in a suit.
– Leonard Cohen, ‘Going Home’

In 1994, the Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen escaped to the mountains outside Los Angeles to study Zen Buddhism with the monks at Mount Baldy Zen Center. He lived there five years, becoming himself an ordained Buddhist monk, drinking whisky and writing poetry, before returning to civilisation. “I wasn’t looking for a religion,” claimed Cohen, “I already had a perfectly good one of those.” The abscondment to the mountains was, to Cohen, the only logical way to escape the hard-drinking, depressive malaise into which he’d fallen during the early 90s. Failing to find answers in psychoanalysis, Cohen “bumped into someone who seemed to be at ease with himself and at ease with others” and headed for the hills. Many of the poems Cohen wrote during his time at Mount Baldy would appear in Book of Longing, his first book of poems since the 80s. The five years at Mount Baldy did not grant Cohen inner peace but nevertheless exerted a manifold influence on his post-millennium work. In 2023, eight years after Cohen’s death, his song Anthem was invoked on boygenius’ track Leonard Cohen, in which Lucy Dacus quotes his observation that “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” before adding her own, that “I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry, but I agree.”

In the years since his death, Leonard Cohen has only continued his elevation to the saintlike status that had begun being afforded him in life. The prototypical poet-singer, the image of his steeled jowls half-covered by the brim of his fedora, grimly crooning his way through one of a lifetime’s worth of sung reflections stands firm in the popular consciousness. He is, alongside friend and contemporary Bob Dylan, one of the true folk heroes of modern culture. He is synonymous with a style of confessional, dreary talk-singing; the standard bearer of a genre which would be picked up by everyone from Nick Cave to Fiona Apple to Cameron Winter. This mystique, however, has always been steeped in his reputation as one of music’s pre-eminent womanisers. Joni Mitchell, his one-time lover, recalled him as a ‘‘boudoir poet’’; his numerous attachments to various artists, musicians, and actresses remain the stuff of musical legend. It was an infamy Cohen himself disavowed: ‘‘my reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone’’, he would later reflect. And yet, it is Cohen’s steadfast commitment to cataloguing life’s sordid physicality which sets him apart from the bulk of his peers and embeds his influence into the firmament of popular music.

When Taylor Swift released her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, much criticism was levied against the song Wood and its metaphorical allusions to the penis of Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce. The song, which compares said appendage to everything from a ‘redwood tree’ to a ‘hard rock’, was described by Guardian critic Alex Petridis as one which ‘‘clambers on a table in a Wetherspoons pub with a skew-whiff bridal veil on its head and an L-plate around its neck and favours everyone in earshot with a loud paean to the size of her fiancé’s penis.’’ As Swift learnt, to write well about the realities of sexual life is no mean feat. In this arena, Leonard Cohen is an unparalleled talent. A poet before a musician,  Cohen revels in marrying off the sacred and the profane with wry aplomb. On Chelsea Hotel #2, a beautiful ode to fleeting love that recounts the author’s short-lived affair with Janis Joplin, Cohen offers music’s prettiest account of oral sex: ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / you were talking so brave and so sweet / giving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street.’  Cohen finds no shame in confessing his sexual exploits. Heroic couplets and the lilting internal rhyme of ‘bed’ and ‘head’ sublimate the awkward physicality of fellatio into a scene of both aesthetic and emotional gentility. It is as proper to describe one’s lover as ‘so brave and so sweet’ as it is to describe them ‘giving me head’: for Cohen they are two clauses in the same sentence. Cohen does not parse out the beauty from romance, deeming the physical unworthy of poetic attention, but instead accepts the whole. 

The body is the central vessel of human expression, in Cohen’s world. Poetry is not the dominion of ideals, but should derive from the hands, mouths, legs and shoulders of the poet. ‘I locked you in this body / I meant it as a kind of trial / you can use it for a weapon / or to make some woman smile’ , a father – whether the connection is one of patrilineage or divine creation is unclear – tells his son on Lover, Lover, Lover. This liturgical notion of life as a ‘trial’ on how to use one’s body is essential and the album at large, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, finds Cohen at the crossroads of this crisis. Written and recorded at the onset of the Yom Kippur War, Cohen is wracked by the spectre of violence. The first verse of Lover, Lover, Lover sees Cohen implore the Father, ‘change my name / the one I’m using now it’s covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame.’ – his nomic allegiance to Kohenism becoming itself a summons to arms. Performing on the battlefield in Sinai, Cohen told audience members “I don’t care if their war is just or not. I know only that war is cruel, that it leaves bones, blood and ugly stains on the holy soil.” The question, then, of using one’s body as ‘a weapon’ is not mere poetic speculation. Physical love is the Other to physical violence and, by extension, the imperative. In no uncertain terms, Leonard Cohen is a lover, not a fighter. 

Deleuze wrote that “to desire is to become delirious in some way.” Few artists have been as delirious as Leonard Cohen. For him, desire is debasement, the utter annihilation of the self. Voyeurism and the painful art of yearning are as much a part of Cohen’s system of desire as sex itself. With I’m Your Man, Cohen brings to the fore the inherently animal nature of passion – ‘I’ll crawl to you baby and I’d fall at your feet / and I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat.’  On Paper-Thin Hotel, a jilted lover listens through the wall as the subject of his affection makes love to another – ‘the struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb / the grunt of unity as he came in.’ This non-adultery is, to the speaker’s surprise, a relief: ‘A heavy burden lifted from my soul / I heard that love was out of my control.’ Without the bodily specificity, such a song fails in its object. It is the realities of physical love, the grunting, struggling messiness, which knock the speaker out of his poetic revery. Life moves on whilst we wax lyrical. Indeed, Cohen’s most enduringly popular love song centres on a woman with whom he never actually had a relationship. Suzanne Verdal, with whom Cohen walked Old Montreal and drank Constant Common tea, was a woman Cohen only “imagined” having sex with. The lack of physical intimacy is no hindrance, it would seem, as the bodily connection extends to a mental-spiritual one: ‘you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.’ 

boygenius’ ironic half-dismissal of Cohen the horny poet speaks to the gross missteps of our modern musical luminaries. It seeks, with superior morality, to extract the poetry (‘there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in’) whilst distancing itself from the old man who wrote it. The truth is, of course, that we can’t have one without the other. The same Cohen who wrote Bird on a Wire also wrote Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On. More urgently than that, though, is the latent desire on the part of many artists to painfully over-correct from the hyper-sexualised misogyny of the pre-MeToo cultural sphere by sanitising life to the point of sterility. For many contemporary artists, the reality of bodily existence is a messy inconvenience, best kept at an arm’s length.  Artists like boygenius’ component parts are at their best when they front the truth of human connection in all its seediness – ‘you are sick and you’re married and you might be dying / but you’re holding me like water in your hands’ – but too often resist the grotesqueness that it is to live and love in a human body. Self-described Cohen acolyte Cameron Winter seems to understand this, mentioning feet in no less than six of the songs he’s released in the last eighteen months. Humanity is inescapably bodily, in its beauty, frailty and vulgarity. Any artist with a claim to understanding life must see the beauty in this as Leonard Cohen so effortlessly did. Bring on the perverts.

It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing, if you really wanna go that far
– Leonard Cohen, ‘Death of a Ladies Man’

Featured Image: Jim Wigler

By Matthew Dodd

Consider the train. There is, perhaps, no greater symbol of the industrial age, of mankind’s advancement from agrarian primitivists to mechanised modernists than the hulking mammoth of steam and steel, rattling through sceptred fields and countryside. It permeates the psyche of modern society; the great communitarian dream that we might, united by rail, draw nations and continents together as one. Even as its atomistic rival, the dreaded motorcar, threatens its position, it remains a potent image of our contemporary world, and the hope of what it might be. No wonder, then, that it has seeped so heavily into the language of visual storytelling. The train is, like the telephone booth or the six-shooter, one of those enduringly anomalous staples of the moving image. How else to tear lovers apart or prompt random meetings across a train carriage? For over a century, since cinema’s very conception, the train has been an indispensable tool of symbolic relevance, a tool too often overlooked as merely perfunctory. In considering and unwinding the manifold resonances of the train on film, we might come to a better understanding of just how spiritually relevant this marvel of invention truly is.

Britain’s cultural consciousness, to its great disadvantage, lacks the figure of the cowboy. Where American national storytelling may always fall back on the image of the brooding sheriff traipsing endless flatlands on horseback, Britain is forced to recede deep into its medieval past to find any similarly entrancing historical archetypes. Perhaps, then, we supplant the train as our own kind of cowboy. A post-industrial mammoth, stoic and unfeeling, rounding the hills and valleys with unitary purpose. 1936’s Night Mail, a documentary – perhaps the first in Britain’s cinematic history – charting the progress of the overnight postal train, accompanied by a specially commissioned W.H. Auden poem and Benjamin Britten score, certainly makes this argument. The train hurtles from London to Scotland, an egalitarian troubadour at the nation’s service: ‘letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner, the girl next door’. Workers tirelessly sort through envelopes, placing each on specially chalked town-specific shelves. Mailbags are yanked from hooks by purpose-built nets at passing stations with a mechanical, stolid brutality. Auden’s poem is set to the metre of the train’s passage, a relentless onslaught of brusque couplets, dispassionately toasting the broad cross-section of British life past which the engine runs – ‘letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, letters to Scotland from the South of France’. That the film, produced by the Post Office so as to increase public perception of the service and to dissuade the challenge of privatisation, should choose to tie the figure of the postal engine into this poetic system is something of a small wonder. This is no mere advertisement, but an argument for the incontrovertible necessity of the railway to British life. Across Night Mail, the railways become veins through which the blood of the nation runs. The train is positioned as a uniquely British kind of hero: deferential, resolute. The documentary serves as a hymn to this unsung champion of modernity. There is a note of George Eliot about the whole thing, an industrial echo of Middlemarch’s closing paragraphs: that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number of locomotives which have run a hidden service from Euston to Aberdeen and rest in unvisited depots. 

The conclusion of Night Mail, the poem and the film, is a revelation about the fundamental importance of the postal network, its manifold powers of connection, and thus the train’s ultimate duty in serving the people of Britain their correspondence, ‘for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’. Films such as Night Mail, state-funded promotions for a nationalised train network, speak to a dream of post-war British connectivity: a nation at one with itself, bridged by a selfless and noble fleet of knightly engines running, unthanked, across the country. The final such film, a sequel to Night Mail, was produced in 1988, directed by Chariots of Fire’s Hugh Hudson and scored by Vangelis, with additional stanzas added to Auden’s poem. This modern version placed emphasis on the scope of British Rail’s commuter classes, drawing together, once more, the mess of British life intertwined by the railway: ‘the teacher, the doctor, the actor in farce, the typist, the banker, the judge in first class. Reading The Times with the crossword to do, returning at night on the six forty-two’. The film, the last to be made pre-privatisation, ends on the still image of an elderly couple reuniting with their children and grandchildren at the platform’s edge, overlaid with the slogan ‘Britain’s Railway’. 

The train’s stoical connotations give rise, by turn, to a rich romantic resonance. In 1899, two silent films entitled The Kiss in the Tunnel were produced, the first by George Albert Smith and the second by Bamforth and Company. Neither are especially complex works of cinema, featuring nothing more than establishing shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel, as well as an interposed scene of a couple stealing a kiss in the darkness of the carriage. Between the two films, the only major difference is that Bamforth’s – known for their salacious seaside postcards – significantly increased the passion of the couple’s kiss. By combining the couple’s scene with those of the train entering and leaving the tunnel, Smith’s film represented the arrival of narrative editing in filmmaking. In its way, this minor locomotive love affair invented the very notion of narrative cinema. For over a century, then, the intrigue of the engine – the jeopardy of the darkened train tunnel, the intimacy of the compartment – has brought forth its romantic quality to the moving image. 

In his seminal new wave classic Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy mounts his camera to the moving train which tears young lovers Guy and Genevieve apart. Genevieve recedes into the horizon as the train/camera removes Guy inexorably from her. The train, for the lovers, represents the inevitable: a separation as unfeeling and unshakeable as a railway timetable. Thus, the train becomes a method of industrial timekeeping, hours measured out by the comings and goings of engines and carriages. Meetings and affairs are cut short by the necessity of catching a train, a train representative of the outside world – a marriage avoided or a life escaped. Such is the case in Brief Encounter, David Lean and Noel Coward’s masterpiece of post-war British filmmaking. When Laura, the despondent housewife, and Alec, the kind-hearted dentist, meet by chance in a picturehouse, it is the waiting room of Milford Railway Station which becomes their sanctuary: an Edenic place of stillness, free from the rigidity of that real life represented in the arrival of the train. Whilst there, in that liminal space between destinations, they have a kind of freedom, yet a freedom which is ever worn down by the movement of their respective trains towards their station. It is, once more, the train that separates them from one another, and the fear of missing a connection which robs the pair of a real goodbye. The engines represent the reality to these romantic fantasies, tying us invariably to a world which works strictly to timetables and appointments which must be met. As in Night Mail, there is something decidedly British in the character of these trains, apathetic in the annihilation of high-flown romance. The lovers, whose respective worlds are obliterated by their separation, must move on dispassionately, catch the next train, and continue their lives.

The logical counterpoint to the heartbreak of the railway connection is found in Richard Linklater’s sprawling epic of love and transport, the Before trilogy, a cycle that dwells resolutely in the space between trains, and probes the danger of disrupting the regular flow of the timetable. In Before Sunrise, the young ramblers Jesse and Celine – a wandering American 20-something and a French university student – catch eyes across a train carriage bound for Vienna. They exchange reading materials, get to talking, and decide to delay their respective commitments by a day, hop off in Vienna and spend a night together. They amble through the city, falling in a kind of condensed love – the kind of love that perhaps works best with an established time limit – before being borne away by their respective trains. They promise at the platform to meet again in the same spot, in one year’s time. Eight years later, Before Sunset picks up their narrative with the two meeting again for the first time since their lone night together. Erring slightly away from the world of the train, their reunion is marked by a real-time countdown to Jesse’s return flight to America. Surely, were a direct rail route between Paris and Los Angeles established, Linklater would’ve used it here. Nevertheless, the film goes to great lengths to accentuate that kind of rigid timekeeping interposed by a train (plane, in this case) timetable, counting out minutes under the stress of a connection to be caught. The revelatory, subversive decision made at the end of the film, when Jesse elects to lounge in Celine’s apartment at the expense of his flight becomes a transcendentally romantic disruption of the mode of industrial timekeeping. Rather than play his role as modern man, zipping to an airport gate and dashing through security, Jesse does the radical opposite: he wastes time. ‘Baby,’ Celine tells him, ‘you are gonna miss that plane.’ When Jesse, with a coy smile, looks up and says ‘I know’, it is as a man broken free from the oppression of the timetable and, by extension, the outside world. 

Consider, then, when next you race for the TransPennine express or collapse into a seat on the LNER service from Newcastle to Edinburgh, that you are engaged in a sacred communion with an industrial object riven with soaring notes of romance and melancholy. You are the mechanical cowboy, the lovesick housewife; the railways the canvas of your own story. Consider the train. 

Featured Image: O. Winston Link Museum Archives Collection

By Matthew Dodd

As I cowered outside Wembley Park tube station, sheepishly shielding four cans of Carling from the view of patrolling police officers, and watched in semi-intoxicated wonder as a parade of bucket hats flowed towards the stadium, it seemed self-evident that I was observing a national cultural reckoning. Oasis were back. The great bastion of 90s Britishness had returned home to their natural place, extracting millions of pounds from millions of adoring fans. All over the nation, the tidal wave of Adidas Spezials and misjudged haircuts heralded the return of a cultural phenomenon. Across their two hour set, they more than clarified their enduring excellence, the anthemic barrage of power chords and vaguely aspirational lyrics turning thousands of fans – myself, of course, included – into a drunken congregation, joined together in the great fraternity of Gallagher-ism. And yet, this tour didn’t seem to reconsecrate Oasis as the biggest band in Britain. Rather, it seemed to be a reaction to the fact that Oasis still are the biggest band in Britain. Their physical reunion is almost perfunctory; they still occupy the same place at the centre of Britain’s musical ecosystem. Their return three decades on doesn’t toss them into a foreign cultural environment, an antique guitar cable awkwardly plugged into a state-of-the-art amplifier, rather it seems like they never really left.

It’s thirty years exactly since their seminal second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? established Oasis firmly as the pre-eminent British band of the 90s. In the same year, The Beatles Anthology 1 was released, a sprawling multi-media project reflecting on the band’s body of work and legacy, thirty years on from their heyday. Such a project was and remains so interesting because it reacts to how The Beatles shaped the course of popular music, placing them into a totally foreign musical environment – the 1990s – and arguing for their enduring relevance. This year, The Beatles Anthology 2025 is set to be released, a further argument for their continuing influence in an even further removed world. It’s interesting, then, that when Oasis, like their Liverpudlian icons, made their own return after thirty years, it was not to a totally foreign cultural zeitgeist against which theirs was an anomalous presence, but rather to a British musical sphere more amenable to them than ever. Just a year before the reunion, Liam Gallagher had sold out a tour performing Definitely Maybe in full. This isn’t a time-won reflection on an era’s defining music, it is a direct replay of that era. In the three decades between 65 and 95, British rock and roll went from A Hard Day’s Night to Wonderwall; in the three decades since, it’s gone from Wonderwall to Wonderwall again. Bloke-core, a wave of 90s nostalgia, nichetok edits, aAdidas brand deals and the spectre of Radio X continues to propel Oasis into the cultural mainstream, decades after their time. Of course, it isn’t just Oasis at fault. Blur sold out Wembley in 2023; Pulp made headlines at Glastonbury just a few months ago; Radiohead are set to embark on their own blockbuster reunion tour this autumn. These groups persist in shaping our national music conversation. In the 90s, kids queued up for hours to see these godlike bands. In the 2020s, it is the same bands who occupy this space, the same bands kids are queuing up to see. Oasis and their contemporaries continue to dominate Britain’s musical culture in a way that veers beyond reverence and towards stagnation.

Since the end of britpop – somewhere between the release of Oasis’ Be Here Now and Pulp’s This is Hardcore – few British acts have managed to break the mainstream and capture the cultural zeitgest in the same way. The Libertines seemed primed for a time to inherit Oasis’ spot as the tabloid-courting rock n’ roll ascendants before their abrupt implosion after only two albums. Taking a purely commercial view of things, one British band stands out as undoubtedly the most successful since Oasis. That said, as much as we all might like a late-night singalong of Yellow, we can hardly point to Coldplay as the paragons of modern rock. As Super Hans famously noted, ‘people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.’ What, then, has happened to the Great British band?

The post-britpop indie movements of the 2000s, what we might broadly call the landfill indie era, was a far less sure thing than its 90s predecessor. Fuelled by the panoptical tabloid furore of NME and its peers, bands were thrown in and out of the spotlight at a breakneck pace. A few names survive – The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, Courteneers – but a whole wave of lesser bands stand, deservedly or undeservedly, forgotten – The Hoosiers, The Paddingtons, Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong, etc. etc. Where the britpop era saw a centralisation of culture, a nation crowded around Oasis and Blur, the landfill period was marked the vast proliferation of upstart outfits. The band who emerged unscathed from the skip, surely the only band to get close to filling Oasis’ vacant seat, is Arctic Monkeys. From grassroots beginnings – both in Sheffield and on the nascent world wide web – and headline-grabbing romances to, most crucially, massively successful and zeitgeist-capturing music, the Monkeys fit the bill more than any band this side of the century. Like Oasis, they remain lodged in the firmament of the contemporary indie scene: you’d be hard pressed to find a teenager with Doc Martens and a superiority complex who doesn’t know A Certain Romance by heart. Unlike Oasis, however, Arctic Monkeys had the boldness to allow their music to grow up with them, to not continue singing about nights out and Smirnoff ices into their fourties. It’s that artistic bravery that has held them back from becoming the nostalgia-fuelled ouroboros Oasis risks turning into. Nevertheless, their mainstream success is indisputable, especially in comparison to their contemporaries. Over their career, every one of Oasis’ eight albums reached number one on the UK charts. Six of Arctic Monkeys’ seven – blame Taylor Swift – achieved the same feat. By contrast, The Kooks and The Wombats have two number one albums between them.

Since the Monkeys swapped guitars for keyboards in the mid 2010s, what has become now the ‘indie’ scene has failed to produce an act to the same level of popular success. In the years since, UK indie has been collapsing into itself and into a nostalgia for the scenes that once were. For many British bands post-landfill and post-britpop, the object has been less to push the genre forward and more to recreate the feeling brought about by those earlier bands. Consequently, we end up with acts like Catfish and the Bottlemen, whose songs seem custom-built to be chanted drunkenly in a field on the shoulders of your best mate from school. There is nobody in the crowd of a Catfish or Inhaler or Reytons gig who wouldn’t rather be watching Oasis in 1994 or Arctic Monkeys in 2007. For at least a decade, the British indie scene has been running on the fumes of those bands, hoping that this year’s Latitude festival might be at least something like Spike Island.

Naturally, this isn’t all the fault of the bands. There are those acts which overtly chase the high of a bygone era of UK indie – The Reytons’ refrain that ‘everybody round here’s got a cousin or a mate who’s best friends with Alex Turner’ is certainly guilty – but there are of course a whole host of those from across the British Isles which are making genuinely new and genuinely brilliant music. Wolf Alice, Black Country New Road, Sportsteam, Black Midi (R.I.P), Fontaines D.C., Stereo Tuesday, English Teacher, Wet Leg, Mary in the Junkyard, Wunderhorse – the list goes on. But in today’s post-Spotify society, music isn’t the centralised thing it once was. Gone are the days when a nation would sit around the television set and let Top of the Pops reveal who the next big thing are. Similarly, the media landscape of the 90s and 2000s does not exist anymore: no NME reporters are on the ground looking for the gossip about Grian Chatten or Ellie Rowsell. Now is the age of the algorithm, the indie zine, the subgenre, the niche. Bands like Black Country, New Road play deliberately to a niche crowd, revelling in the kind of experimentation only possible outside the mainstream. Today’s answer to Oasis or Arctic Monkeys, the kind of bands that headline festivals and sell out small arenas, are still playing to an audience a fraction of the size of their predecessors. Perhaps the biggest band coming out of the British Isles currently, Fontaines D.C. played their largest gig to date in Finsbury Park over the summer. 45,000 turned out, this punter included, to see a mesmeric line-up of new-age superstars. Between Fontaines, Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers, the gig felt like a festival in its own right: a statement of intent from a new generation of rock n’ rollers. And yet, whilst Fontaines reaches five million monthly listeners on Spotify, Oasis reach thirty-one million. Therein lies the central paradox: the market for British/Irish indie is apparently a shadow of what it once was, but the market that once was is still listening to Oasis. The days are past when a band of loud-mouthed Mancunians could, with nothing more than some power chords and a tambourine, sell out the largest stadiums in the country for weeks on end. And yet, that’s just what happened this summer.  

The quality of music is there, as is the appetite, yet for the most part the UK music industry is submerged under the corporate hegemony of American pop. When homegrown artists like Olivia Dean or Sam Fender do break through, it feels like an exception rather than a rule. National musical character is, now more than ever, defined by our Atlantic neighbours: what was once a back-and-forth trade – The Rolling Stones for The Beach Boys – is now decidedly one-sided. The internet has, for the most part, homogenised much of our popular music culture. As such, the once dominant British music scene – the scene that produced The Beatles, Bowie and Fleetwood Mac – has faded away, its vestigial remains reforming into the indie scene. It’s that scene which now remains paralysed between 1994 and 2007, forever replaying Live Forever and 505. The money is in surefire hits from Disney channel stars, not local bands playing back-end pubs. This summer hasn’t been a Britpop revival, it’s been a rerun of the last time British music felt truly relevant. In other words, it’s been a Britpop summer for thirty years. Until the indie scene can get out of its britpop stupor, until the music industry pays attention to the upstarts and, most decidedly, until audiences listen, our national music scene, once our great pride, risks remaining forever stuck in the past and the great British band, one of our finest national exports, risks becoming history. All is not lost, however. Just last year, Charli XCX’s Brat made pretending to be British cool again (see: The Dare) and the continued success of artists like Raye and Olivia Dean point to a revival in the UK’s pop-soul scene. Whether a phallocentric music establishment would accept the new faces of British music as female is another matter entirely. Nevertheless, we can but wait for the next great British band to arrive and tear Radio X asunder. Oasis spoke to a dispossessed post-Thatcher Britain about living forever, chasing the sun, feeling supersonic; about years falling by like rain and dreams being real. If ever there was a time for a band like Oasis, it’s now.

Featured Image: Jill Furmanovsky

By Matthew Dodd

‘I didn’t consciously pursue the Bob Dylan myth, it was given to me–by God’, Bob Dylan told People Magazine in 1975. And yet, despite his best efforts, he remains the centre of a vast cultural legendarium encompassing university modules, murals in North London suburbs, street names in rural Minnesota and almost everything in between. He is, perhaps, the most documented, revered, critiqued, impersonated and mythologised musical figure of the last century. It’s no surprise then that he should also receive the 21^st century’s favourite tribute to the giants of recent history: an Oscar-tipped Hollywood biopic. James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet in the lead role, depicts the life of the young Dylan arriving in New York and builds towards his infamous decision to ‘go electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Yet, despite being the first major biopic of Dylan, A Complete Unknown is far from the Nobel laureate’s first foray into the world of cinema. The Coen Brothers’ Greenwich Village fable Inside Llewyn Davis only features Dylan – or a version of Dylan – for a few seconds near the end but is nevertheless a beautiful evocation of the time and place which gave rise to his legend and an ode to the music that made him. More obviously, Todd Haynes’ 2007 film I’m Not There sees six actors – including Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin – playing different sides of Dylan’s persona, offering a kaleidoscopic view of this most multifaceted of figures. Still, however, no effort to capture Bob Dylan on film has been so singularly powerful, so essential to understanding the artist, as the very earliest: D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back. Recorded over the course of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain, Don’t Look Back offers an unceremonious and impromptu insight into a man who, before our very eyes, is being transformed into a myth.

As the film opens, we find our hero flanked by his team, shuffling through an airport interchange, ruminating on whether he’s allowed to smoke indoors and singing a nursery rhyme to himself. The genius of Pennebaker’s film is that he doesn’t approach his subject as though he were the most significant artist of his generation, but rather as though he were a 24-year-old college dropout with a talent for being supremely obnoxious. Coincidentally, this is exactly who Dylan was. Over the course of the film, we are presented with the dichotomous visions of Bob Dylan, a pop culture sensation who is shaking the very foundations of contemporary music, and Bob Dylan, a man. Between these warring images we almost find some granule of sincere truth about both figures. Through the window of a London phone box we watch as a middle-aged critic sends back a review of Dylan’s concert line by line, fearing that the audience ‘applaud the songs and miss, perhaps, the sermon.’ This insistence from the press that there must be something more to Dylan’s music, a serious literary value that couldn’t possibly be understood by lank haired teenagers, dogs the film. In response to every suggestion of genius, or even intent, Dylan obfuscates – ‘I don’t write for any reason’, he tells a Time magazine reporter before sounding off a polemical diatribe about the inherent phoniness of the mainstream press. The film looks on from afar at the active mythmaking put upon this young songwriter by the world around him. It argues, instead, that genius is happening largely by accident in little, unmajestical ways. While sitting improvising over an unfinished song, Dylan casually throws in a lyric, ‘I’m a rolling stone’. This line of improvisation does not lead him anywhere before the film’s end.

Other moments speak more overtly to the developing sense that this young star might just be something special. In the back of a car, Dylan hears about a British folk artist, a young man named Donovan, and insists on meeting him. This meeting, documented in full, sees the pair perform songs to one another. Donovan plays a sweet but unremarkable rendition of ‘To Sing for You’, to which Bob jovially responds ‘Hey, that’s a good song, man!’ before bringing the room to an awed silence with ‘It’s All Over Now Bay Blue’. The gap between these two artists, even at this stage, appears cavernous. For all his cocksure posturing, there is an acceptance that Bob Dylan is, by the age of 24, already an important artist. With the benefit of 50 years’ retrospect, the film now seems morosely vindicated. The artists who surround him, such as Donovan and the Animals’ Alan Price, have not quite faded into obscurity, but have certainly become footnotes in the grand narrative of Bob Dylan.

One major character whose legend has survived the Dylan monolith is his friend, on-and-off lover and creative partner Joan Baez – another of the folk movement’s most iconic figures. She first appears here making faces at the camera and doing mock accents before explaining to a reporter – who takes her as simply another element of Dylan’s cavalcade – how to spell her name. By the ‘Z’ of ‘Baez’, the reporter realises his mistake, jolting back with a peculiarly British ‘Oh strewth! I’ve been looking for you all day.’ The relationship between Dylan and Baez is perhaps one of greatest mysteries in the history of folk music, and one of the most beloved points of discussion amongst self-proclaimed Dylanologists, but it comes out here as nothing so nebulous, more so a casual intercourse between two young people drawn together into a massive and unknowable world of cameras, reporters and sold-out music halls. In the back of a car, she sings a deformed version of ‘Baby Blue’, ‘crying like a banana in the sun’. She uniquely refers to Dylan as ‘Bobby’, sticking out as quite possibly the only person in the film who doesn’t view him as a prophet, financial prospect or spoiled brat. Through this narrow window into the lives of two musical titans, we see them quite simply as tender friends.

Walking hand in hand with the development of Dylan the myth is the administration of Dylan the business. Long scenes are dedicated to Dylan’s manager attempting to squeeze as much money out of record executives as possible, the name ‘Bob Dylan’ becoming a byword for riches. Later, Bob and co. quibble over the position of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ in the charts – a meagre number 16 at first. These scenes are a bold reminder that the pursuit of art is not always one run on good will alone. The cultivation of this ‘voice of a generation’ was an opportunity to make a great deal of money, a fact that Don’t Look Back finds no shame in acknowledging. It is the banal, ugly and crass moments that Pennebaker chooses to spend his time on which makes Don’t Look Back such a singularly powerful accomplishment. It is a rare documentary which seems genuinely interested in revealing something about who its subject is, rather than trying to place them into an imposed narrative of success. We watch Dylan perform to sold out venues, but we also watch him, perhaps even more closely, as he awkwardly re-tunes his guitar after ‘The Times They Are A-Changing.’ This is a portrait of the artist unscripted, unceremonious and unpolished. 

The central limitation of the biopic in its current form is its futile desire to aggrandise its subject to legendary status, mapping a hero’s journey onto the life of a real human being. Perhaps the most egregious example of this in recent memory is Bryan Singer’s 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody. Instead of painting an intimate picture of one of the most iconic rock bands of all time, Singer’s film insists on transforming Queen’s career into a three-act tragedy and Freddie Mercury into its tragic hero. His homosexuality is treated as hamartia, his exploration of his sexuality as the pit of his moral degradation. It cannot go unnoticed that this film was made with the express supervision of the band’s surviving members – no wonder, perhaps, that one of the film’s climactic scenes see Freddie apologise at length to the rest of the band for his errant behaviour. This style of biopic turns people into caricatures and, as in Bohemian Rhapsody’s case, risks imposing prejudicial readings onto real lives. All too frequently, these films turn some of the most exciting figures of our time into obnoxious burlesques of their public persona, with every moment of their lives steeped in some sort of divine knowledge of their own greatness. How many times must we watch a biopic tell us just how important every aspect of an artist’s life is in leading them to write one of a dozen or so popular hits? Perhaps the sorry state of the music biopic was best diagnosed by the 2007 satire Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story, in which the fictional folk/rock/pop star’s drummer tells crowds ‘Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays!’

This is not to say that the biopic is a doomed genre altogether, recent offerings such as last year’s Oppenheimer and Priscilla are proof of that, but there is a sense in which the best examples are those which do not propose to be an authoritative biographical extravaganza but rather a reading of a life. Often, these films work best as a synthesis of artist and subject: Oppenheimer may be read as a film as much about Christopher Nolan’s own guilt of creation as his protagonist’s, Priscillia as a story not unlike Sofia Coppola’s own as a young girl forced to meet all too early the scrutiny of the public eye. But fundamentally, they are all simply versions of the story: recollections, urban legends, re-translations of ancient manuscripts.

A Complete Unknown may be a wonderful film about a young songwriter who changed the world, but he will be Bob Dylan the myth rather than Robert Zimmerman the man. It will tell us how this boy became the voice of his generation; how he, with little more than a guitar, a funny haircut and a polyamorous spirit, revolutionised popular music. But it will not give us, across two hours, any of the same insight into who this most elusive of artists actually was as D.A. Pennebaker does when he captures Dylan laughing at the British pronunciation of ‘bloke’, throwing a tantrum at his harmonica being out of tune or, most crucially, instructing his rowdy posse to ‘be groovy or leave, man.’ Bob Dylan has always been a figure who revels in indefinability. Throughout his life he has rejected classification as a folk singer, protest singer, poet, anarchist, and most every other moniker thrown at him. A Complete Unknown will try its best to define him again as one thing or another – voice of a generation, genius, asshole etc. – but, in Don’t Look Back, Dylan himself put all such definitions to rest in perpetuity, telling student journalist Terry Ellis, quite simply, that ‘I’m just a guitar player. That’s all.’

Image credit: The Criterion Collection