By Harry Laventure

The Internet. Noun, “a harrowing whirligig of rot”. Defined by example: scroll, Lebron James’ smiling face transposed onto a pumpkin with a spectral version of the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ playing from the digital wings; scroll, the grinch, coloured blue, enormously excited about a certain kind of patella-themed medical procedure on the following day; scroll, a small dog AI rapping in Chinese; scroll, a rotund young man now known to the world as The Rizzler; scroll, Ian Hawke; scroll, Hawk Tuah; scroll, Talk Tuah; scroll, Talking Tuah. Has the great gallery of gibberish ever had so little wall space? Certainly not. 

After the pinted pretension of a Christmas quiz’s revelry, a friend of mine described influencers as our era’s answer to socialites. Having wept for Madame de Pompadour for a little while, I reflected on the sparkling offerings of the zeitgeist. Are we cooked? Perhaps, but it’s not all bad. I present the panacea: LondonDeadPubs. Real name, James McIntosh. Street, Jimmy Mac. 

Sycophant that I am, it is a labour of Herculean proportions to pin down this cultural aficionado in but a few lines. He is at once a musician, an underwriter, and a journalist, alongside more serious endeavours. Published on Spotify, in the FT, and editing for The Fence, there are many strings to the bow of this Zythophilic Robin Hood of content. Above all else, punctuated by various homages and tips of the hat, one theme has been prevalent in his corpus: yes, the nominative determinism speakst true, his muse is the humble boozer. 

LondonDeadPubs offers the premium service of criticism for every kind of public house, from the shop-conversion cavalcades of quaffage on the estate to the anachronistic debauchery dens of the Dorset village. Spliced between shots of sips and sips of shots, soundtracked by vaguely alienating ambience, Jimmy Mac has flown far and wide in search of the perfect place for a perfect pour. Adorned with a sartorial armoury of herringbone jackets and 70s collars, his quizzical insouciance has peppered pub after pub, pint after pint, with a narration that is at once lucid, referential, enjoyable, and directly informative. Structurally, his arenas of merriment are judged on four parameters by number: ambience, interiors, drinks, and the ever-delightful DPF (Dead Pub Factor). According to these barometers, each inebriation station is ranked and depicted in a fashion that is faithful to their identity, for better or worse. 

From Moranos of Canons Park to Albert’s Schloss of Piccadilly, we meet no conceit or alcoholic martyrdom on this tour. Criticism is humorous but candid. The care and attention to detail of each review coagulates with the frothed collar coherence observable atop a well settled stout. The fact is, Jimmy Mac seems to me the perfect influencer. I sincerely know nothing about him beyond his LDP character. His content is consistent but enriching, niche but entertaining, and it stems from something sincere. This is a man who not only loves to drink, but knows and treasures the very English reverie that is a simple pint in a pub, whatever the context. 

At the end of it all, we must concede the comforts in the anchor of a damp coaster. The concentration of a country’s attitudes to the seasons, bleak and golden; the shadows of sodden-boots on old stone floors post-countryside-walk, whisked away by the glowing fuzz of a cast-iron hearth; or the light chime of parasols in the creaky rattle of beer garden benches. That particular hieroglyph of the pump-badge, and the second sunlight of an IPA’s contents refracted and projected on a table of your choice… I digress.

At the risk of sounding like a git, he is one of the few actively positive things that I have encountered spontaneously through the algorithm’s radical wisdom. I implore you to find him on Instagram or TikTok. 

On the mystical metric known as the DPF, it’s a ten from me. 

By Maisie Jennings

David Lynch (1946-2025) was an American filmmaker. 

I discovered David Lynch as a teenager – I was discovering cult classics, “arthouse” films, Murakami novels, and drinking red wine without grimacing. I watched Blue Velvet and was spellbound, nearly hypnotised. Masterfully, Lynch enmeshes American, white-picket-fence suburbia with dangerous and seductive forces – a distinctive thematic quality across his body of work. The terror Lynch constructs is existential; it probes the fragility of the everyday, piercing the mundane with ostensibly unnatural evil. At the same time, he locates this fear within, arguably, some of the most beautiful shots in cinema, and amongst whimsically playful moments of campy humour. This, I think, is why Lynch’s work, transfixes and intoxicates like a lucid dream and, simultaneously, reverberates in our minds like a terrible nightmare. He undercuts horror with glimmers of hope, offering some light in worlds that seem bereft of it. For me, he completely transformed the way I interacted with art, and taught me that strangeness could be a boundless repository of creativity. 

In an interview with the Guardian in 2018, after the release of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, Lynch speaks plainly: “I was never a movie buff. I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.”. Expressed in typically gnomic fashion, Lynch’s blithe response is somewhat unexpected from one of cinema’s greats. In another interview, he lists the films that inspired him: the works of Godard, Kubrick, Fellini, and Bergman. However, Lynch, delighted by the ephemeral slipperiness of ideas, explains that inspiration is often captured in the “24/7 movie” of life, and not conjured or created by the realm of film. “The whole thing”, for Lynch, “is translating that idea to a medium”. His 2006 book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, outlines his creative approach: 

‘Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.’ 

It is a characteristically elusive metaphor. Lynch goes on to elaborate that ‘going deeper’ means to access an expanded state of consciousness via Transcendental Meditation, a practice he began in 1973 during the production of his first feature film, Eraserhead. Though Lynch certainly did lean towards the wacky persona he became associated with, his wisdom is gentle and serious. More than anything, Lynch lived for his work – the deeply introspective process of art-making. 

David Lynch was born in Montana in 1946, and his childhood was spent mostly in transit due to his father’s job as a tree surgeon with the United States Department of Agriculture. It was an all-American upbringing; Lynch was a Boy Scout and his family pinged about happily between towns in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Virginia. He reminisces, however, on a particularly striking image from his childhood: 

‘[My youth] was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it was supposed to be. But then on the cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions and millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and it’s all red ants’. 

This memory constitutes the opening scene of Blue Velvet – a bright blue sky, white picket fence, and pristine red roses subsequently disturbed by the camera’s focus on the squirming insects on the ground below. Lynch’s surrealist Americana had always been implanted from the landscapes of his childhood – doubtlessly his time spent in Spokane, Washington influenced the mystical lumbertown of Twin Peaks – as ever, it is reflective of his ability to catch the big fish of ideas and translate them into works of art. 

In the 1960s, Lynch went to art school in Philidelphia. He found the city to be a sort of industrial hellscape – ‘There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest inspiration in my whole life was that city’. After his daughter was born and Lynch moved his family to Los Angeles in 1971, it took Lynch another five years to complete his first feature-length film Eraserhead; he dubbed it his ‘Philadephia story’. The success of Eraserhead lead Lynch towards a brief, but phenomenally impactful, foray with mainstream, blockbuster cinema. He was approached to direct Jonathan Sanger and Mel Brooks’ The Elephant Man – a biopic starring John Hurt as Joseph Merrick, a severely disfigured man who became a Victorian object of curiosity. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, and Lynch was hired to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune, kickstarting his collaboration and enduring friendship with actor Kyle MacLachlan. Dune was a notorious commercial and critical disaster – Lynch was unhappy with the heavy postproduction cuts of his footage and the experience further alienated him from pursuing a conventional Hollywood career. 

In 1986, Lynch released Blue Velvet – cementing him as cinema’s psychosexual and surrealist auteur. The film also established Lynch’s use of recurring cast members and his small, exclusive pool of creative collaborators. Most notably, perhaps, was his partnership with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who created the dreamlike scores to Lynch’s most iconic projects. After Blue Velvet, Lynch got to work on Twin Peaks, extending Lynch’s visual corpus into prime-time television. Twin Peaks aired in 1990, and since then, I think, it remains the most enchanting, thrilling, and entirely matchless American TV drama. The series follows FBI Agent Dale Cooper (another role played and shaped by MacLachlan) to the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks as he leads the investigation into the murder of high school sweetheart Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Its release and sensational reception marked a decisive turning point in television drama – the deliberate, steady pacing, uncanny tone, and surrealist turns influenced other iconic shows like The X-Files, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, to name a small few. Although it was precipitously cancelled after the second season, Twin Peaks proved that television could be a challenging, provocative medium. 

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature-film prequel to the series, was released in 1992; it cast much darker, devastating shadows than the off-kilter folksiness of Twin Peaks. The film signified Lynch’s refusal to satisfy his audience’s lingering questions, instead, he unearths the true evil within the town – rather than the cosmic, metaphysical forces in the woods, the horror of Fire Walk With Me is found in the home, inside the torment of Laura Palmer. It is a shuddering crescendo of sorrow, and, in my opinion, Lynch’s masterpiece. 

Lynch returned to the psychological thriller in 1997 with the release of Lost Highway, starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette as a couple who receive mysterious videotapes of themselves inside their home. The film is labyrinthine and dense with potential explanations, and potentially Lynch’s coolest, sexiest mindfuck. In 2001, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive further disturbs the conventions of the neo-noir – deconstructing fantasy by layering dreams and illusions. Initially, Lynch has intended for it to be a series and a pilot was shot, immediately cancelled, and then adapted by Lynch into a feature-film. Despite its shaky start, it proved to be another enormous critical success – owing, I think, to its endlessly interpretive nature, and Lynch’s frustration of the audience’s desire for diagetic narration. We become the detective, and Lynch’s neo-noirs do not so much defy interpretation and explanation as they mire us in them. 
In recent years, Lynch had retreated from making feature-films. 2017 saw the release of the third season of Twin Peaks – a powerful 18-hour nosedive into the depths of surrealism, beginning with the endless reverberations of Laura Palmer’s bone-chilling scream. It underscores, for me, how woefully insufficient language is to express the mysterious forces of existence that Twin Peaks reveals and obscures. I was deeply touched by Kyle Maclachlan’s tribute to Lynch in The New York Times; he explains that Lynch was not just a filmmaker, but an artist concerned with languageless mediums, existing within the world of feeling and the unconscious – the deepest depths of a unified, creative ocean. It’s why Lynch’s films are so brilliant. He was a painter, and he was enthralled by the idea that you could add texture, sounds, and smells to an image. Almost, I think, like experiencing the senses in a dream.

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

By Rohan Scott

County Durham’s Bowes Museum is a fabulous French Second Empire edifice nestled in a corner of the charming town of Barnard Castle. It was purposefully built in 1892 to house the collections of Josephine and John Bowes. Given the context of the ‘Kith & Kinship’ exhibition, it is important to acknowledge the source of the Bowes family fortune. The coalfields of County Durham and Northumberland did well to service the wealth and station of the Bowes family, but would not have been possible without the graft and toil of many working people in the region. If this museum may be a sweet fruit from bloodied and ashen soil, then I hope the beauty of its contents and the ‘Kith & Kinship’ exhibition goes some way to serve as a testament to the communities that enriched the very foundations of this museum.

The museum is endowed with an excellent ceramics collection that beautifully illustrates the intersection between art and functional wares. Over the past century it has subsumed other nationally renowned collections, allowing it to enamel a picture of the history of porcelain. Items range from ancient Qing wares to intricate nineteenth-century European open-work pieces. A favourite of mine is a pair of faience felines coloured canary yellow, made by Émile Gallé.

The parquet-floored picture gallery sits on the second floor, occupying a grand space reminiscent of the rooms in the National Gallery. Upon entering the gallery, a conspicuously placed Canaletto might catch one’s eye, unless first drawn to the bizarre novelty that is a silver swan automaton. Works by El Greco, Goya and Fragonard can be found on the walls, interspersed with paintings by none other than the museum’s founder, Josephine Bowes. 

I will briefly pay some attention to a concurrent exhibition called ‘Framing Fashion: Art and Inspiration from a Private Collection of Vivienne Westwood.’ It displays items from collector Peter Smithson alongside pieces from the museum’s collection to explore historical inspiration in the works of Vivienne Westwood. I feel entirely underqualified to make any discerning comments on this exhibition – but I thoroughly enjoyed the pieces from Dressing Up (Autumn/Winter 1991/92) which feature Harris Tweed corsets, velvet jackets, tattersall skirts and stalker hats. It somehow manages to make a country wardrobe fit for the runway.

The ‘Kith & Kinship’ exhibition revolves around the works of Norman Cornish (1919-2014) and L.S Lowry (1887-1976). The exhibition seeks to illustrate the relationships and social webs of Northern England’s working class communities during labour disputes, wars, the Great Depression and industrial decline. Cornish and Lowry captured the lives of working people in moments of joy and moments of hardship to create a colourful testament to the people of Northern England – their history, their kith and their kinship.

The selected works of Cornish and Lowry work beautifully in tandem, complementary in intention, contrasting in approach and outcome. Cornish draws directly from his experience in the pit in Spennymoor, County Durham. The scenes of his artworks reflect an ‘insider’ perspective as a member of the very community he was capturing on canvas. By contrast Lowry conveyed the toil of Northern industrial life – in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester –  as an empathetic outside observer. The exhibition has been curated with sensitivity and purpose – that is – purpose to highlight an aspect of English history and society so often overlooked. The works of Cornish and Lowry are delightfully paired together to create a sort of correspondence between the two artists. 

Some painting that deserve particular attention are as follows:

‘Chip Van at Night’ (Cornish)
Cornish delivers the warm glow of a Spennymoor chip van, conveying a sense of warmth and respite from a long day’s work.

‘Teenagers’ (Lowry)
Lowry’s signature waifish matchstick figures present a still of adolescent life in industrial Britain.

‘The Gantry’ and ‘Pit Gantry Steps’ (Cornish)
Two paintings of miners climbing the pit gantry steps, the overcast skies and ominous steel structures induce a powerful sense of dread.

‘The Big Meeting’ (Cornish)
A sea of flat cap-crested miners against a backdrop of the silhouettes of Durham Cathedral and Castle. An inspiring image of a community celebrating their heritage and demonstrating labour solidarity.

‘Cricket Match’ (Lowry)
A joyous image of play, set against a backdrop of urban decay – representative of declining industry, unemployment and uncertainty during the Great Depression.

Postscript: I thoroughly recommend a visit to the ‘Kith & Kinship’ exhibition and the permanent collection of Bowes Museum. I apologise for the late delivery of this article as the final day of the exhibition is Sunday 19th of January. The ‘Framing Fashion’ exhibition is on until the 2nd of March. I hope this might inspire some last minute weekend plans – or perhaps a cause to see the museum and the other fabulous exhibitions they put on later in the year.

By Matthew Dodd

On the 25^th of November 1974, at his family home in Warwickshire, the singer-songwriter Nick Drake passed away from a believed overdose of antidepressants at age 26. Drake, a Cambridge dropout, left behind him three studio albums: all of which were released to critical and commercial failure. Around fifty mourners attended his funeral and, by 1975, his record label Island had decided not to reissue any of his albums. Fifty years later, a fully orchestrated rendition of Drake’s music was performed to a packed out Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC’s annual programme of Proms. Having died in obscurity, by the 21^st century Drake has far eclipsed more successful contemporaries like Donovan and Fairport Convention to become perhaps Britain’s most popular folk artist. But how did a career that lasted less than seven years and ended in unconscionable tragedy become such a defining chapter in folk history?

In youth as in adulthood, Drake was a guarded and often abrasive figure. His father recalled an old headmaster of Drake writing that ‘none of us seemed to know him very well. All the way through with Nick, people didn’t know him very much’. By the late 60s, Drake had won a scholarship to study English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Once there, he immediately aligned himself with, in the words of fellow student Brian Wells, ‘the cool people smoking dope’. Having found himself drawn to folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, Drake began performing his own music around London in 1967. Apocryphal accounts describe Drake as an imposing performer, his gangly build and harsh features giving him even at the outset the look of a star. Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings talks of how Drake performing at this stage ‘seemed to be seven feet.’ Still, Drake was uncomfortable performing, a fact that would persist throughout his career. For all the extended paraphernalia published on his short life, no actual live recording of Drake exists today. 

Drake skipped lectures to record his first album, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, and by 1969 had left Cambridge nine months before graduating to return to London and focus on his music. He expanded from the raw, Leonard Cohen inspired sound of his first album with his second, the fuller, jazz influenced Bryter Later in 1971. With the release of Bryter Layter, Drake began to withdraw further, refusing to promote the album publicly and delivering reserved performances. Across two nights in late 1971, Drake recorded what would prove to be both his masterpiece and his final album, Pink Moon. Unlike his previous two records, Pink Moon, features no instrumentation beyond Drake’s voice and guitar – save for a brief, revelatory moment of piano intrusion on the titular track. Island, Drake’s record label, had not expected a third album from him and only learnt of its production when Drake delivered it, completed, to producer Chris Brackwell. A popular story goes that Drake left the completed tape unannounced at the reception desk of Island Records, though this was not the case: just another piece of mythologising in Drake’s already developing legend. Despite the strength of Pink Moon, now considered amongst the greatest albums ever recorded, it won Drake no greater acclaim and his work remained on the fringes of the folk scene. By this point, all of Drake’s albums had collectively sold under 4000 copies, leading him to consider joining the army as an alternative career prospect. Nevertheless, despite mental deterioration, Drake returned to the studio in 1974 to work on an ultimately unrealised fourth album. Throughout the year, however, his mental state worsened and a few months after his 26^th birthday, Drake died in his childhood bedroom.

Drake’s posthumous fame came in no single wave but as a slow, rumbling ascension to the heights of folk’s musical hierarchy. Artists such as Robert Smith and Kate Bush cited him as an influence during the 80s and, throughout the decade, his status as a tragic figure began to brew. Documentaries and biographies began to appear in the 1990s and the somewhat un-Drakelike use of Pink Moon in a Volkswagen advertisement brought his music to a wider audience. By the 21^st century, Drake’s status among the emergent ‘indie’ crowd had been firmly established. The use of Fly in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Royal Tenenbaums, on whose soundtrack Drake appears alongside the similarly fated Elliott Smith, represented an early example of his newfound demographic base. 

In the decades following his untimely death, Drake has been transformed into the archetypal martyr of contemporary folk music. His guarded public persona, his staunchly un-traditional attitude to guitar playing, his introspective and often inscrutable lyrics find fresh ears with each generation of wayward rebels and dreamers. The model of his martyrdom and lifelong mental health struggles have drawn him into the massed tradition of ‘tortured artists’ – alongside Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Plath and countless others – whose respective mystiques have only ballooned in the wake of their early deaths. This tendency to cast Drake as a tragically doomed romantic hero does, as it does to those other artists who shared his fate, a disservice to both his artistry and his memory. There is, of course, a degree to which Drake’s reputation has been made by his tragedy, in the same way that Van Gogh’s paintings or Plath’s poetry is made all the more powerful by knowledge of their grim contexts. The brevity of his career, represented in three albums amounting to a little under two hours, certainly affords him a certain unassailability. Compare him, for instance, to his great friend and contemporary John Martyn, another legend of the British folk scene, whose forty year career has earned him enduring acclaim but failed to bring him to the mythic status of Drake. Death froze Drake as the brooding face of eternal tortured youth: clad in corduroy and woolly jumpers, unkempt hair pushed back by the wind as he wanders through England’s green and pleasant lands singing of the days and their endless coloured ways.

It is easy for every brooding adolescent to find some understanding in a figure like Drake – indeed, that’s the very way his music found me – but to define Drake by his death, to narrativize his mental illness as the climax of his hero’s journey, is a gross error. Poorly treated mental illness – whether he suffered from heavy depression or schizophrenia was a fact undiscerned in his lifetime and still not understood fully now – robbed the world of a lifetime of music and, more importantly, took a friend, a son and a brother from those around him. It’s easy to fall for the myth of Nick Drake, but for the sake of all those affected by issues of mental health, we cannot. Nick Drake didn’t die for our sins. As a culture, we are all too keen to fictionalise our heroes and reduce them to stepping stones on the path to our own self-actualisation. On this path, Drake becomes just another victim of a tendency to fetishise mental illness, to turn unbearable pain into an aesthetic choice and by extension alienate the suffering from their pain. Nick Drake’s music is a solace, a heartbreak, a tragedy but Nick Drake was also a man. Now 80 and with a successful career in acting of her own to her name, Drake’s sister Gabrielle has reflected at length on the way her brother’s cult of personality has affected her personally. She remembers candidly hearing of one fan gleefully taking a piece away from Drake’s gravestone. But, she claims, this mythologised Drake – the dreaming boy roaming Hampstead Heath – only bears slight resemblance to her actual brother, a man she found frequently obstinate and difficult. 

The temptation to project one’s own woes onto our idols is a dangerous one. To look into Nick Drake’s steely eyes and recognise, not the seismic melancholy attributed to him, but our own troubles is an understandable salve to the woes of the world. But we must understand our heroes as people as well as legends. Nick Drake’s body of work is unimpeachable, three near-perfect albums of consummate artistry, an unbridled marriage of poetry and music. Yet, his memory’s necessary entwinement with his tragedy bears attention beyond the ephemeral attachment to a romantic hero. Drake is baked into the ecosystem of contemporary music: his influences are felt throughout artists from Belle & Sebastian to R.E.M. But perhaps his most powerful legacy is his enduring ability to connect with and console generations of listeners, to draw out beauty from the heartache of the world. To find serenity in art is natural, and if serenity does have a soundtrack, it surely must be by Nick Drake.

And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be

Image credit: Songs From So Deep

By Holly Simms

Thom Yorke and Hamlet, if you are a self-confessed, somewhat pretentious student of the arts, an admirer of the trope of the tortured artist, or ideally both, has a combination ever made more sense or had a greater natural appeal? April 2025 will allow this question to be realised as Radiohead’s sixth studio album and Shakespeare’s longest and arguably greatest work are reworked to form a coalition and come to the stage in the form of ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief.’ 

‘Are you such a dreamer, to put the world to rights? I’ll stay home forever, where two and two always makes up five.’ These opening lines of Yorke’s album allow anyone familiar with the basic workings of ‘Hamlet’ and its profoundly mentally complex protagonist to see the thematic links between the two creative masterpieces. However, it was theatre director Christine Jones who spoke the connection aloud, allowing for this reworking to be conceived. In an interview regarding the project she discussed the psychological impact of seeing Radiohead live in 2003, the year Hail to the Thief was released, recalling, ‘it changed my DNA.’ She then goes on to ponder on its Shakespearean echoes, stating, ‘Not long after, I was reading Hamlet and listening to the album. […] There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album.’ Additionally, Yorke has said he finds this project an ‘interesting and intimidating challenge’ with the RSC claiming the result of this challenge to be a ‘feverish new live experience, fusing theatre, music and movement.’ 

But what is it that makes this collaboration genuinely exciting? Shakespeare’s folio has been reworked, reworked, and reworked again, often with fairly dismal consequences. As an excited, newly inspired fan of Shakespeare I headed to the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at 16 years old to watch their production of ‘Richard III,’ a favourite play to this day. However, I found myself greeted with Richard and the rest of the cast in sports strips, forcing comedy and delivering Shakespeare’s meter in a manner which made it appear they were about to burst into freestyle rap. When attending a production of Shakespeare I don’t generally wish to feel on edge with concern that Lin Manuel Miranda might jump out of the stalls at any given moment.

This production is just one example of an endless list of Shakespearean reworkings that fall short of their expected critical reception, often deemed to be jarringly stripping the productions of their original integrity. Granted, this ‘integrity’ often includes prominent themes of patriarchal oppression, with Shakespeare’s supposed ‘heroines’ rarely given the opportunity to be even somewhat developed characters. However, as upsetting as these themes can be to explore in theatrical characterisation, if in every modern production of these plays, we must turn their original structures on their heads, are we still performing Shakespeare at all? Or do we just feel so collectively guilty for hyper-canonising the ‘Bard’ and his misogynistic tendencies in the way we have, that we must make the plays an ode to today’s rightful quest for equality as to allow them into our modern creative spaces?

Herein lies the crux of what I find to be appealing about the upcoming ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ I am hopeful that it will be able to find balance. Radiohead’s emotive melodies and lyrics that act as the building blocks for ‘Hail to the Thief’ hit so precisely on the themes of mental turmoil, paranoia, and grief that bleed from ‘Hamlet’s’ every syllable. Hamlet’s impassioned musing of ‘what piece of work is man!’ appears to be a line of thought that has resonated with Yorke across much of his musical career as he explores the psyche and its failings consistently and in great detail from ‘Pablo Honey’ through to ‘A Moon Shaped Pool.’ When this music soundtracks the conflicted, poisoned and often stagnated mind of Hamlet I am hoping that the play’s, still deeply relevant, discussion of the human condition will be what audiences are left most focussed on. Consequently the play should be able to modernise itself; as the reason for its hyper-canonisation becomes clear, it speaks to what is innately human in all of us, time period irrelevant.  

When the original core of the play is left intact having been exposed against the sounding board of Yorke’s art, today’s audiences should then be leaving feeling encouraged to contemplate the problematic elements of the play on their own, without having them thrust upon them. Ophelia’s quiet power in the face of dehumanising oppression, possibly unintentionally present in the text, can float its way to the fore of the mind naturally with the support of Yorke’s soundtrack. Shakespeare’s misogyny and its modern reverberations can therefore be able to co-exist with his genius as each layer of the play can be exposed intentionally and evenly without a clunky imposition of creative guilt heaped atop the play’s 4,167 lines.

Although there is much more to be said on the complexity of modernising Shakespeare and the challenge of locating its resonance within modern media, not much more can be said on this production in hope. Having bought tickets for the show in its first release I hope to be proved right in my high estimation of its quality. However, they do say never meet your heroes and perhaps the seemingly ideal combination of an all-time favourite band and one of the greatest works of literature created may not quite meet the mark. Nevertheless, ideally, I will not be left still roaming the creative ether in hope of one day finding the perfect Shakespearean reworking. 

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“He was reading Ulysses to his baby, just for the craic, know what I mean?” – Fontaines D.C, Crack Magazine, June 2024

Fontaines D.C have changed. I, a fond and faithful listener, now find myself being ‘24 raging with desire’ more than I am drumming the demands of  ‘my childhood was small but I’m going to be big’,  yet the shatteringly poetic lyrics of melancholia and nostalgia of Fontaines’ continue to stick, with Romance providing the space for Fontaines D.C to morph and experiment. They have grown up, grown out, and continue to marvel. Romance, the highly anticipated soundtrack to my summer, whirls us through Fontaines’ dabble into maturity, journeying us on a quest for understanding. The Joycian echoes in their lyricism and dynamism are still heard behind the deafening ridiculousness of their new look; their sound encapsulates a Joycian manifesto of vast, violent living. 

Pressing play on Romance, the title track greets us with an eerie smile. The swirling soundscape, introducing us to this album’s more shoegaze influences, with a dripping bassline provides a perfect preface to the question at the heart of the track and the album; ‘maybe romance is a place?’. Fontaines’ image has been cemented in the Dublin city sky that hangs over so many of their songs, providing the Irish music scene with the recognition it deserves. Fontaines’ brash portrayal of 21st century Irish life is not romantic, but nostalgic, inviting all of us to feel the love, rage, and confusion. The foreign familiarity about the place is striking even to non-Dubliners. Joyce’s Dubliners is just as much much an outcry to the realities of Ireland as it is a voyeuristic love letter to the people that make the city; Fontaines have taken this manifesto to heart, with Romance dissecting the unromantic romance of life as well as celebrating the fleeting tenderness that makes it, whilst also taking us on a Ulysses-esq journey of all encapsulating and awe enrapturing discovery. 

Just as Joyce felt it was easier to write about Ireland whilst in Paris, Fontaines’ love letters home only grew stronger and nuanced from the NW postcodes where Romance was penned. Indeed, the album art itself embodies this confused billet-doux. On the one hand, the familiar typeface of Skinty Fia has remained – the gothic brutality searing the surface identity of the LP, yet the abrasively virulent crying love heart in their album art is striking against the sombre tones of its predecessors; a confused attempt at a salient move to a distinct future. Whilst Ireland becomes the ghost at the feast of Romance, hauntingly visible whilst never fully materialising, you can tell that the new bounds of the band’s relationship to their homeland have influenced the introspection that takes place. It is no wonder then that Joyce appears so lucidly within their lyrics as they have moved from Dublin, in the obvious homages to him in the titles of “Bloomsday” (Skinty Fia) and “Horseness Is The Whatness” – ensuring an oblation is taken to the man who has inspired them so profoundly. If ‘romance is a place’, the band journeys in search of discovering it through the album – defying the anger of exclusion in “Here’s the Thing”, and truly modernist disillusionment of “In the Modern World”. Neither Ireland, Britain, or liminally vast geography of touring are the place, yet through the drawn out quest that Romance is we perhaps come closer to finding this place is not in fact an island unto ourselves, but just ourselves in general. 

The threatening epic of Ulysses gathers its foreboding from its microscopic atomisation of the human experience, which Joyce further complicates by distilling all that makes us tick into the course of a day. As Mr. Bloom relishes in the idea of  “watch[ing]it all the way down, swallow a pin sometime come out of the ribs years after, tour round the body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of intestines like pipes”, fascinating in the idea of  introspection he, and we, find ourselves submitting to, so do these boys in the better land. They crudely dissect all the stages, nuances, and apparitions of romance. The crashing optimism of “Favourite”, with its happy-go-lucky swooning towards a more comfortable future, is complicated by the tragedy of “were”; “you were my favourite, for a while”. The simple sunniness of the track is blasted, forcing us to reconsider how we feel about the way things once “were”, but ultimately providing us with musical satisfaction in spite of the seeming incongruity of sound and song. Fontaines take us into the “coils of intestines” of how we perceive romance, before, during, after, as younger iterations of ourselves or elder, showcasing all of romance’s murky innards. 

The punching tone of “Starburster” has been compared to that of a panic attack. Brutal. Uncompromising. Strange. Divinely crushing and incoherent with the rest of the album. To start an album this way takes guts, which Fontaines proceed to lay on a platter for us. This intangible battlecry is reminiscent of the bizarreness and brazen of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. What being ‘the pig on the Chinese calendar’ and J. D. Salinger has to do with any of this, I am yet to understand, but, what is remarkable, and a testimony to the extent of the Joycien stains on their work, is that it doesn’t have to be understood to make sense. “Bug”’s cinematic manipulation of voices, ramifies this idea further; the layering voices and production of the track excite me with each listen, and yet I am never entirely too sure who is saying what or why. Ulysses and “Starburster” aren’t nonsense, nor do they come to us with exacting meaning.

A friend’s take on Romance, that is echoed by many long-time fans, is that Fontaines’ new look is “vanilla piss” and startlingly obvious that “they haven’t dressed themselves”; the grimey stench and detachment of old has been diluted for market. Whilst the rage of  Fontaines’ juvenilia only appears as subtly secret as a lingering childhood habit in Romance, and the noxious colours of Romance would make Dogrel hurl – the bizarreness of this look, the distorted future it encapsulates echos those Joycian flecks within their being. Appearing to us now as emotionally-complex aliens from some far flung lightyear, adorned in quasi-Harajuku armour, they, like Joyce, appear both overwhelmed and anticipatory of the future – relishing in the fuzzy terms of being Irish and out of Ireland whilst pushing 30, whilst watching their world descend to an unpredictably fast chaos through their patchwork sound and style. The lunacy and journey of Romance is by no means over, and marks a new start for Fontaines, one which, like Joyce, may take retrospection to fully appreciate.  

Maybe Romance Was a Place? Fontaines D.C.’s Fourth Best

By Harry Laventure

Midnight (sg.): the 23rd August opens in E-minor. On my knees by the end of the working week, I have stayed up to catch a glimmer of the sun rising on the Irish five-piece’s latest album. It is now a biennial tradition, after all, and I am yet to be left dissatisfied by this particular love affair. Chatten and co have made belligerent fragments of my everyday’s glittering discoveries since the Mercury awards of 2019, and the raving colossus of Dogrel. The guitar-barking menace of this stout-smudged elocution still stains my approach to contemporary music like a crackhead at the blinds. Had modern wrath ever enjoyed such lyrical swagger? Between the indignant passages of T.S. Eliot and old Irish trad’s intrusions on a distortion pedal, to think otherwise would have been a sinful proposal to my nostalgia-ridden catalogue. 

As the second child, A Hero’s Death (2020) seemed inconsistent in its oscillations, but had the polarities of the dynamic down to a tee. Tracks like “A Lucid Dream” and “Televised Mind” roared symmetric to their ancestors in “Hurricane Laughter” and “Too Real”. The whimsically touching “Oh Such a Spring” and wounded consolation of “No” provided more tender hues to their earthy discography. Skinty Fia (2022) secured the band Best International Group at the Brits. A glorious collection of hits and tremors, the listener could not help but shudder at the undertones of the Irish diaspora both in the searingly vague (“I Love You”) and the hyper-personal (“The Couple Across the Way”). We felt here a movement away from the amelodious dirges of their crucible years, and a new conviction in worldview: the dead-eyed grunts of a group still in disillusionment’s grapnels whilst occupying new landscapes. And how it suited them. To say that I saw them on this tour would be a gross underestimation of the tangible effects that their music can have live. The gravity of it tests the mettle of a man’s range, physical and emotional. By the end, we were all of us bent to the shape of a gaping mouth: their sorrows were ours, our screams were theirs. 

All the while, the band had stayed true to their pretences. Their interviews continued to be laced with a strain of awkwardness preserved for the alienated of an inside joke, only just balanced by a self-effacing aridity of ego. Musically, the instrumentation of the group had never lost an authenticity in its elemental, deceptively simple composites. There were no attempts to disguise the raw with the motley. That is not to say that they were without improvement. Whilst lodestars maintained their shade, the stark gape between the violent texture of a track like “Nabokov” and the thinner thuds of “The Lotts” played exhibition to the innovation that certain artists are capable of in the desperate terror of stagnation. Within, we continued to be granted lyrical sapphires like

See the handsome mourners crying

They hawked a beating heart for a sturdy spine, yeah

What good is happiness to me 

If I’ve to wield it carefully?

That was off the lead single “Jackie Down the Line”, for goodness’ sake. This is a band that met at poetry club, after all. 

Chatten’s solo project Chaos for the Fly (2023) seemed a healthy exercise for him. It felt like a malady 0f the heart that had to be sweated out and wrestled with introspectively. The result was a constellation of ballads with disarmingly touching lyrics, at no detriment to or detraction from the wider band’s identity. And so we waited in the wake thereof with baited breath. 

This all being said, I do not think that I was ever permitted true excitement for Romance from a couple of days after its Kubrickian announcement. I so desired it to be a success, but certain symptoms preyed upon my English scepticism. The much talked about cyber-punk look marked a consolidated effort to change their appearance in line with the new sounds they were generating. Uh oh. “Our personality is bigger than the sound that we make”, Chatten pronounced to NME a few moments after Glastonbury. I then read that they had hired James Ford as producer, the man who took Arctic Monkeys from Humbug to AM with the new sartorial armada of leather jackets, aviators, and quiffs. Alarmed, yes, but not enough to render my impressionability hardened.

Indeed, none of this stopped me from listening to each of the four preceding singles within seconds of release. “Starburster” was a delicious new flavour; a rhythmic version of scattered thoughts; an aggressive insincerity somewhere between early Kasabian and Spear of Destiny – from the kind of ‘enlightened’ madman you wouldn’t want to get onto the train when there is only a spare seat next to you. It was a smug wink into the void – the sort of music Camus may have enjoyed. “Favourite” was peculiarly but deliberately familiar. Not very complicated in sonic or lyrical terms, it felt like an early Cure or Felt track had bonked one of the very first Fontaines singles. There was something logically and cyclically pleasing about this: as the boys remarked themselves, if “Starburster” is where they want to go, “Favourite” is where they have come from. Melancholic but exuberant, it is a good pop song from a band who had never confused the simple with the condescending. We now had the second and the final tracks of the upcoming album. 

I must speak plainly here. “Here’s the Thing” flies entirely in the face of that last compliment I just paid. An utter aberration to the ears, by their standards. This is an important concession – any sense of disappointment in this review comes only as second fiddle to my high expectations and hero worship of the band until now. Described as their soundtrack to an imagined anime car chase, it is ludicrously conceited to claim that it is a song “that twists and turns in what it wants, back and forth between pain and numbness” as Chatten has. Cliché lyrics meet cliché chords, and a decent guitar riff is juiced for a melody that seems calculated in its catchiness. As for the call and response panting which forms the backhand of the verses, I have more disgust than the sum of every other gripe of mine in the discography. The gasp in “Starburster” works like the straggled breath of air from a drowning man. Pardon my ugliness in expression, but given the lazy narcissism of the song’s structure, progressions, and lyrics, I can only conclude that this is the musical version of loving oneself – it sounds like it too. 

Hearing this entirely destabilised my hopes and expectations for the album. I sincerely believe it is their worst song on there by a long way, maybe ever – beyond the pop of it, I cannot fathom why it was picked as a single. “In the Modern World” was a far better fourth, only two days before Romance’s release. I confess, I’d watched live versions of this beforehand. The slightly predictable chords are eclipsed entirely by the profundity of the instrumentation’s atmosphere (not just because there are strings) and Chatten’s confessions. The war-like drums and Spaghetti Western guitar riffs harmonise with the eternal standoff between the delicate rhetoric of a relationship’s intimate rationale and the callousness of our conditions. This is Romance in its essential form. 

Given the length of this proem, it is perhaps time that the ring composition concluded. There I lay, 00:41. The following are my bullet point thoughts on the rest of the album. 

  T1: Romance

The creeping Leviathan. Sinister as an imp’s carousel (conf. ‘Bob’s Casino’, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare). It’s arguable that the harmony and wanderlust of maybe romance is a place is the best bloom on the album. Perfect opener, on recording and live. 

T2: Starburster (above)

T3: Here’s The Thing (not worth another word)

T4: Desire

Sincerely interesting arrangement until ‘Big Shot’ riff was recycled. Breakout has strong flavours of shoegaze, Deftones/NewDad. An invitation for the participation of larger crowds. Large chorus.

T5: In The Modern World (above)

T6: Bug

Cheesy jangle pop that hasn’t much shine. Instrumentation similar to an early Morrissey track (pale imitation of The Smiths’); slightly corny melody meets lyrics like Now I’m higher than anyone here/And that ain’t nothing on me. Maybe I’ve missed the point.

T7: Motorcycle Boy

A song superior to its title. Vocal sample not unlike something from their creative hero’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. An otherwise stripped-down arrangement only enhances strong vocals and lyrics. Relentless strum turns the anxiety into a rhythm that outruns the relationship lamented. 

T8: Sundowner

Recycled ‘Jackie Down The Line’ on bass. Sounds like a drug montage by someone who has never taken drugs. Vaguely apocalyptic lyrics. Tame Impala-esque. Maybe better as a cover. 

T9: Horseness Is The Whatness

Once more, a lullaby introduction almost identical to Lamar’s ‘Father Time’. Proof that quoting a literary great does not instil the same calibre by default, it still comes of age from innocence and plods in a pretty way. 

T10: Death Kink

Absolutely raucous. Back to basics in their ragged brilliance. 6/4, no less. Self-destruction and rage cling to Chatten’s voice, indignant to all. Walls of sound like bruised skies (conf. Bacon’s Pope Innocent X) reliant on no wizardry of production. A solo that struts. I’d kill to hear it live. A whole life meretricious, you shattered. Fitting for a number of listeners sonically and philosophically. 

T11: Favourite (above)

For the first time since its writing, I revisited this piece today. Alas, my thoughts haven’t changed. 

 

By Roemer Lips

Friday afternoon. I was itching to get out of my political science lecture. The subject was Clifford Geertz, a central figure in the understanding of anthropology as an interpretive science, who argued that analysis of culture should be focused on meaning, not law. As thrilling as this may sound – especially when explained in French – I was having difficulty concentrating. Red Star was on my mind. 

When one thinks of football in France, Paris might not be the first city that springs to mind. Marseille has the European pedigree, and the fervent support that strikes fear and wonder in equal measure. Lyon had the seven consecutive titles in the naughties, with a cult classic team of Juninho, Malouda, Ben Arfa and Benzema. Fans of a certain vintage may even remember the flair of Saint-Etienne in the 1970s and 80s, with mavericks such as Platini, Rocheteau and Rep. Of course, the humongous, Qatari-backed elephant in the room is Paris Saint-Germain, undoubtedly France’s most popular club. However, it reeks of inauthenticity, from its spontaneous 1970 birth to its limitless financial power, which actually makes one wonder how they don’t win the league every single year, or how European success still evades them. Supporting a football club is all about a sense of belonging; a fan should feel recognised as a valuable part of the collective, not just as a customer. A club with the riches of PSG can afford to completely disregard its fanbase, and even well-intended efforts to forge a proper culture come across as disingenuous. The opposite can be said of Red Star FC, who’s supporter culture is one of the richest in world football. 

From its foundation in 1897, Red Star was destined to be a left-wing, antifascist club. While its name supposedly derives from a cross-channel ferry service, its connotations with the political leanings of the club’s fanbase are unavoidable. Whether this political stance was somehow inspired by the revolutionary potential of the club’s name is unclear, however the two complement each other perfectly. 

Having fulfilled my academic commitments, I met with a similarly football fascinated friend and we boarded the metro, hurtling towards Saint-Ouen, just north of the city. At the bar L’Olympic just opposite the stadium, supporters spilled onto the street, beer in one hand and cigarette in the other. Go to any pub next to an English football ground before kick-off and the place would be a chaotic mess of half-drunk fans singing. The Red Star supporters hardly made any noise at all, quietly chatting amongst themselves. The majority were only identifiable by the green and white scarves draped elegantly around their necks. It became clear to me that this was the club of choice for the moustachioed, bicycle-riding, painter jacket-wearing Parisian, of which there is no shortage. Reducing the fanbase to this, however, would be a mistake. The importance of Red Star to its local community is immediately clear when you walk around Saint-Ouen. Children wear replica shirts, and the walls of kebab shops are lined with green and white scarves. Not a PSG logo in sight; a proper community club.

Soon, darkness descended and the Stade Bauer’s floodlights began to glow. There was a football match to be played. We finished our beers, filed into the ground, bought another pint (the opportunity to have a beer in the stands was too appealing for two English football fans), and assumed our seats right next to the standing section full of ultras. The stadium is currently under construction, and therefore only consists of two stands, one along a sideline and another behind one of the goals. It creates a feeling of openness, as the ultras’ drumbeats roll over the low-rise industrial buildings and into the night, carrying with them the fans’ fervour for social change. 

The opponent that night was Caen, who brought with them no more than 200 fans, tucked away into the corner of the stand behind the goal. Waving their Normandy flags, they fervently supported their players, likely relishing the opportunity to get one over the Parisians. To put it bluntly, the standard of football, even considering that this was a second division match, was subpar. Simple passes were repeatedly misplaced by both sides and neither team played with any real intensity. Red Star were especially lacklustre and conceded two before half-time. The groans from the main stand at each goal were palpable; one got the sense of a familiar story unfolding before the fans’ eyes. The second half, however, was wildly different. Red Star took to the field with a renewed sense of urgency, and quickly scored two of their own, including an outrageous lob from the centre forward with his back to goal. Both goals were treated with an explosion of joy from the main stand – a level of passion that I had not seen from most Red Star fans up to that point. Considering the club’s countercultural tendencies, one would be forgiven for expecting many fans to be muted in their support, almost too cool to care about the club’s on pitch results. Red Star, though, belongs to the combatant revolutionary foot soldier and not the high-brow political thinker. The fighting spirit of the club lives in every supporter and is unleashed when Red Star scores. While it is true that the club stands for more than just football, this absolutely does not mean that the football doesn’t matter. The football matters as much, if not more, because it represents a set of values that the fans deeply care about.

Alongside its political reputation, Red Star is a cool club. Recent collaborations with VICE and Highsnobiety will tell you that. Their Instagram feed is aesthetically more pleasing than most, while their website is clean and modern. However, the problem with being cool is that the moment too many people start recognising that you are cool you risk losing the very thing that made you cool in the first place. Red Star’s countercultural standing, its simplistic, bold logo, and its location were what made it – for lack of a better word – cool. It is the perfect club for fans blinded by the increasingly bright lights of PSG. I consider myself among this group. Football, though, is business, and Red Star need to be careful to avoid selling out. Replica shirts are currently priced at eighty-five euros, which is a concerning omen. More worrying is the club’s ownership, which since 2022 has been the American investment firm 777 Partners. As you’d expect, Red Star fans were initially sceptical of this, and unfortunately they were right to be, as 777 recently found itself in a major fraud case and is in the process of selling all its football clubs. The future of Red Star therefore hangs in the balance. Of course, the fans still make their views clear with songs and banners; there is however a serious danger of a disconnect emerging between the club and its supporters, as is the general trend across the football world. Red Star’s soul, though, will remain with the fans, and no amount of American money can rob them of that. For now, at least, it still has that old-school community spirit that makes the matchday experience so unique. 

The analysis of culture should be interpretative, focused on meaning. Culture in a footballing context is a product of history and myth, which informs the songs supporters sing, the colours they wear and the heroes they invoke. It hangs in the atmosphere, away from the pitch and the directors’ box and is much easier felt than explained. Red Star then is full of culture, full of meaning to its supporters. By committing yourself to the club, you are partaking in a history of left-wing, anti-establishment struggle going back to 1896. Other clubs try to replicate that level of romanticism, Red Star just has it. Indeed, I felt spellbound when on the metro home, with my newly bought scarf around my neck. Football has the magical ability to capture you, and in the Stade Bauer this magic is ubiquitous. Whatever the future holds, Red Star has a fan for life. 

By Tilly Bridgeman

‘It has been the site of wild parties and scandalous liaisons, of creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, of one-night stands and days-long parties, of famous triumphs and untimely deaths.’ The Castle on Sunset, Shawn Levy.

The year 2020 saw major punctures made to physical spaces of creativity, with communities being fragmented by lockdowns and individuals seen only as a mass of blue masks marching in search of loo roll. Over the past four years, the deflation of creative endroits has persisted, with online artistic engagement superseding escapades to the cinema, art galleries, opera house – the list goes on.

Yet, a Richter scale ticks on the outskirts of Hollywood’s hills, picking up pulses of creativity coming from a neon red sign and a grey slate roof. ‘The grande dame of Sunset Boulevard’, it named itself in a recent Instagram post; over the course of nearly 100 years, Chateau Marmont has become the space for creativity.

If pressure makes diamonds, then it is a similar sense of tension, so evident in Shawn Levy’s lines taken from The Castle on Sunset, that generates the glinting artistic pieces conceived at the Chateau. The debauched and the intimate, the striking and the simple, the chic and the shabby; contrast defines Chateau Marmont, and it is at this strange intersection of opposing forces that a space of innovation emerges. This seedy wonderland was where photographer Helmut Newton captured Michelle Pfeiffer for Vogue, and was himself caught in a tragic car accident twenty years later. It is the castle in which the young and in love Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski moved to, after their wedding in 1968, yet also where Polanski, alone, would spend his last night in the US following his wife’s murder in 1969. It was at once a hideaway for Nicholas Ray, affected by an incident involving his son and second wife, and the fertile ground from which grew his Rebel Without a Cause. 

Contradiction, right down to the Chateau’s architecture – mid century suites set against an imposing turret – paves the way for artistic upheaval. In conjunction with this permeating sense of incongruity is Chateau Marmont’s ability to amass a vast array of individuals, generating a kind of “safe space” for creativity. Congregation seems to be an apt word, a congregation of thoughts, of personalities, of arts. The Chateau lit the flames of Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll’s nearly decade long affair during their filming of Paris Blues. In 1938, Humphrey Bogart welcomed his mother into one of the suites. More recently, Jay Z and Béyonce ordered the conversion of the garage into a one-time casino for their 2019 Oscars after party. Romantic pursuits, family gatherings, friends (and enemies) all exist in this sphere of imaginative conception. 

Would Shakespeare have found himself at the Chateau? I am not too sure, but I will use his lines from Romeo and Juliet to conclude my point. ‘What’s in a name?’, well, in the case of Chateau Marmont, perhaps everything. Architect Arnold A. Weitzman, in the 1920s, was commissioned by owner Fred Horowitz to build something along the lines of the Chateau d’Amboise, a former cache for French royalty. Yet, when it came to christening the castle, “Chateau Hollywood” was rejected, and in its place the smaller Marmont Lane stood. A chateau and a roadside hotel, where the regal collides with the sordid, and the minds of ninety vibrant years have met and continue to meet.

And so, while Gore Vidal drapes Myra Breckinridge over one of the loungers by the pool and John Belushi fiddles with needles in his bungalow, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele takes the mascot of Pan and his pipe on a stroll down the runway, and Sofia Coppola pushes Stephen Dorff out of the door and into Somewhere, the light of creativity on this Sunset Boulevard Chateau never seems to set. 

By Maisie Jennings

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault. 

Laura Palmer’s body is found on the shore: blue-mouthed, blue-eyed, blonde. Her naked corpse is shrouded in plastic, as if gift-wrapped for the male gaze. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult classic television series Twin Peaks (1991) is distinct in its strangeness. What begins as a fairly conventional whodunit is stretched and contorted by dream visions, interdimensional spirits, and the imposition of the supernatural onto seedy, corporeal, small-town America. The charming and unusual narrative structure is characteristic of Lynch, the surrealist auteur. Overlooked, however, is his remarkable use of female victimhood – identifying Twin Peaks and his wider cinematic oeuvre as a lexicon of male violence. 

The elusive nature of Twin Peaks’ plot does not obscure the fact that it hinges entirely upon the debasement and death of a teenage girl. Aligning with classic Lynchian themes, gender-based violence is the evil used to untangle darker threads enmeshed within kitschy Americana. In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is homecoming-queen-turned-perfect-dead-girl, and her murder investigation, led by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman, unveils the town’s criminal underbelly. The post-mortem shattering of her ‘good girl’ image reveals Laura’s secret life as a cocaine addict and teenage sex worker. 

On one hand, I think Lynch and Frost attempt to critique white masculine hegemonic power: the town’s most important male figures are implicated within the sex and drug trafficking ring that underpins Twin Peaks’ business and industry. On the other hand, it can be argued that the discovery of Laura’s secret diary and the scandalous revelations that fester, or flirt with, in some ways, a moral justification of her death. Her tragic abuse, exploitation, criminal connections, and drug use essentially groom her for this inevitable, logical end. Moreover, her death catalyses a grander, metaphysical battle between forces of good and evil; though she haunts the original series’ narrative in all her pain and beauty, the significance of her death becomes markedly less focused on her own suffering. Nevertheless, Laura’s murder is unequivocally propagated by the patriarchal structures and male dominance that constitute Twin Peaks. In Episode Four, Laura’s funeral is interrupted by her ex-boyfriend, Bobby Briggs – “All you ‘good’ people – you wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did…”. 

During the course of the series, it is revealed that Laura was killed by her father, Leland, who had been possessed by an evil spirit named BOB. Leland, while possessed by BOB, had also subjected Laura to years of sexual abuse. BOB, I think, is best understood as a symbolic representation of earthly male violence, rather than a demonic, supernatural entity. In the series, whether BOB is real or not is debated by Cooper and Truman; they decide, however, that he is “the evil that men do”. I believe this statement explicitly refers to how men hurt women, rather than a wider meditation on humanity’s primordial capacity for evil. The terrible violence enacted by BOB belongs far more tangibly in the world of Twin Peaks, than the mythologised Black Lodge: the extra-dimensional stem of all evil and darkness. 

Like Laura, virtually all the other female characters in Twin Peaks are subject to male violence. It occurs so frequently and so intensely, yet it seems to function as little more than a thematic device or motif. In the very first episode, simultaneous with Laura’s murder, the character Ronette Pulaski is beaten and raped with such brutality that it leaves her comatose – after a few episodes, she is omitted from the plot. Although the 1992 feature film and prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me clarifies the violent details of her death, its significance is presented as purely incidental, making the investigation of Laura’s murder a federal case, and prompting the arrival of Cooper. 

The treatment of gender-based violence in Twin Peaks demonstrates a troubling dichotomy. Male violence appears as an integral theme, but the female suffering and trauma that pervades the series is seemingly subsumed by larger points about corruption and morality. It is this latter theme in which Lynch and Frost invest heavily through the antidotes of white masculinity and ‘good’ male characters. When Audrey Horne, the daughter of business magnate and brothel owner Ben Horne, is captured whilst undercover as a teenage prostitute, the series is quick to brush over her drugging and assault: instead, she is used to demonstrate the overwhelming goodness of her male rescuers. Indeed, Audrey’s character is constantly fetishised by a voyeuristic, sexualised gaze. The surveillance of her age, allure, and purity as an 18 year old schoolgirl more or less reduces her to “jailbait” – the forbidden object of Cooper’s desires. 

I’d like to further problematise the depictions of sex work and exploited women in Twin Peaks through the character of Josie Packard, the only woman of colour presented as a main character in the series. As the narrative progresses, it transpires that Josie, the widow of wealthy mill owner Andrew Packard, had been involved in prostitution, gang warfare, and prostitution in Hong Kong (she is also revealed to have orchestrated her husband’s fatal boat accident). Josie embodies the racialised fetishisation of East Asian women, in particular the stereotypical ‘dragon lady’ – an alluring mistress of deceit and deception. Demonstrative of Lynch and Frost’s unforgiving attitude towards sex work, Josie’s death in the second season seems to act as a suitable punishment for her crimes. 
Twin Peaks is indicative of wider examples of how male violence and female subjugation is used across David Lynch’s filmography. Blue Velvet (1986) is focused on a masochistic female sex worker and her various assaults and entrapments, a foil to the innocent high-school love interest of Kyle MacLachlan’s protagonist. Wild at Heart (1990) features the rape of another female character. There is the femme fatale of Lost Highway (1997). Even Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (1984) portrays femininity as a destabilising force. Although, in classic Lynchian fashion, there is thematic significance to his use of gender-based violence, there are enduring problematic aspects found in his ceaselessly brutalised female characters.