My videos Down Time and Kent Beeson… are in the group show On Joy, Sadness and Desire at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam (Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, NL-1054 PD Amsterdam) along with work by Sebastian Diaz Morales, Mathilde ter Heijne, Mark Titchner, Iona Nemes, Freee and Pia Lindman. It runs until 28 June 2009. Installation shot above by Niels Vis 2009, all rights reserved.

Richard Gregory at Quarantine mailed re the stuff I posted a couple of days ago on The Fall/Ajanta Cinema. (Oh, turns out my Fall thing was as I feared a re-post from earlier, where I posted it alongside some notes about Joy Division, so apologies for the repetition. It’s hard to keep track of time around here.)

Richard wrote:

Just read your blog posting about the Ajanta. I saw the UK Subs there in ’79 – the gig Aaron refers to. I think they were supported by Anti Pasti too (every gig in Derby at that time seemed to have Anti Pasti on the bill).  I know I went to the Ajanta but I remember so little about it. Stirred up lots of memories for me – Buzzcocks supported by Joy Division at the Assembly Rooms in ’79 (“Love and peace Derby” : Pete Shelley with long white scarf around his head) and having to leave to catch the last bus back to Belper just as the Clash were playing White Riot – I think that was at the Kings Hall…. Ah, the olden days.

Didn’t see The Fall until years later, at an Easter Monday gig in Manchester, supported by the then little-known Happy Mondays. This connects to a strange event for me. I went to that gig with my mate Mike (now a lecturer in philosophy, and working with me on my next piece, Make-believe).

About a year or two later I dj-ed regularly at a club in Leeds (the Phono, downstairs in the Merrion centre).  Got invited by a girl I didn’t really know, Rebecca, who was a regular at the Phono, to dj at her birthday party in Liverpool.  Mike and I went over.  He was a student in Liverpool.  After the party (in some club that I don’t remember) we went back to Rebecca’s shared house.

Mike and I sat on the floor in her housemate’s room, chatting in a roomful of people – all of them strangers to us.  I looked up and there on the wall was a photo of Rebecca and her housemate, grinning for the camera, at that Fall gig in Manchester.  Just over her shoulder, intently watching the band, was me and Mike.

In a later mail Richard added these fragments, too good not to share:

All that spitting…  Shame the spitting never crossed over into theatre.  I’ve seen a fair few shows I’d like to have spat at.

And this:

Great thing about the Phono was that it was run by two guys – identical bearded twins.  One worked the door, the other ran the bar.  I worked there for 3 months before i realised there were 2 of them.  I only knew because he offered me a lift home and – fuck – there was another one in the passenger seat.  I thought he was just very nippy between door and bar.

Aaron meanwhile sent the pic below of the band he was in back then (he’s playing bass), here supporting TG, which means I must’ve seen The Corridor twice at least. Strange fucking country the past.

The big question of  the day seemed to be if it was better to be living but dead, or dead but somehow alive.

*

Stepping into some kind of nightmare circle. "It's the typical scene in American novels – the two guys talking in the changing room in the gym" says one deaf old bloke to another in the changing room at the gym.

In the pool itself the guy ahead of you in the lanes stops for a moment to chat to the lifeguard. "Hows it going?" the latter asks. "Not bad" the swimmer replies, "still getting used to life without Heidi and Claire". "That's been a while now hasn't it?" says the lifeguard. "Yeah" says the guy, in a way that quietly implies it really hasn't been that long, or at least not long enough.

Mark E. Smith. Ajanta Cinema Derby, sometime in 1977 or 1978, back at the time when he was talking at least as much as singing, punctuating the songs with extended delirious rants about the proliferation of psychics and Cash & Carry stores or the possibility of time travel or how much he did not like Doncaster, or the audience or Stalin you could never be sure which. Huge fucking row of music, small audience. A venue that used to be, by some incomprehensible irony, The Derby Playhouse (I mean before they built that new one with hexagonal barstools and purple orange cross-hatch carpets) and was by then (the old playhouse, re-named as Ajanta Cinema), a semi-derelict music venue run by some Asian guys maybe as a front for a drugs ring at least if you believed what was gonna be in the paper ten months later, who knows.

Just in front of the stage there is a space that used to be seats, but which has been for some months now an extended no-mans land, a zone of smashed floorboards and seat-remains – a cleared space created when the first gig took place here and at which the room allowed for the crowd was patently not big enough and so by Mutual Agreement the seats were kicked to pieces by those present, the debris for the most part lifted high and Hurled Asunder, causing minor injuries. It is this space – directly to the front of the stage that Smith has his eyes on, when he turns around, neglecting the routine that he himself has characterised as ‘backs to the audience and pass the hair-dye mate’ though he of course has no hair dye. This space, right there in front of the stage, this no mans land, is clearly bothering him, big time. Maybe cos there’s no one in it – I mean there’s only fifty people in the venue max and most of them are leant against the walls holding lager cans. And maybe its bugging him – this space – cos he’s not sure who’s it is. I mean – he’s on the stage and he’s wandering all around it like he owns the fucking place, which for all extents and purposes he does – but somehow he doesn’t seem so happy there on the stage – like he’d really like to be somewhere else, in some other place, a bigger one perhaps. Like somehow the stage is too small because it isn’t a whole world.   What does the character Price say about the nightclub in Trevor Griffith’s play Comedians? Something like: When I stand up there on the stage  – I still hit my head on the ceiling. It might be literally true – but mainly of course he means it more like a metaphor – a way to say, that the world which Capitalism has on offer isn’t big enough yet to accommodate his dreams or imaginings.

Anyhow back in Derby in either ’77 or ’78, Smith won’t take it for long. He’s at the very edge of the stage by this point, walking back and forth, pacing on the exact border, looking down off the low rise and into that other space – that other world, no-one in it and everyone eyeing it, a space in this case between him and the rest of us, a space not quite his and not quite claimed by the rest of us. Time passes. And then there’s a moment like there always is, a moment so good I won’t ever remember it, and could not in any case describe it, a moment in which he makes the jump and steps off the stage. He’s off, he’s over, gone into the emptiness down there, the band oblivious or inured to his probably amphetamine whimsy, and the music’s all thump and screech and grind and he’s wandering, caterwauling, out into the no-man’s land/wasteground that he’s somehow made his own now, barely tethered by the microphone lead and in some ways never to return.

That, was an inspiration. And no mistake of all.

More than a year ago I wrote a text for the inaugural symposium at Spill Festival in London. I started with the passage above (which I don’t think I’ve posted here before – apologies if I did). The whole text – about stages, performance, and all sorts – got published a while back. Anyways. I’ve since had a small correction from my friend the artist Aaron Williamson along with the image above.

Aaron wrote:
I was interested in your invocation of the Fall at the Ajanta Cinema in Derby. My band, the Corridor, were the support at that gig and there were no more than 30 people in the audience (including the support bands)! It was in June 1979 and not 77/78 as you wrote: it’s possible the Fall played in Derby at an earlier date but not at the Ajanta as the first gig put on there by the I.D. gang (Dave Bonsall, Pre-De) was UK Subs in January 79.

I’ve known Aaron since sometime in the early ’90s I think – but had no idea that I’d seen him perform back in the ’70s! We must’ve been at a lot of the same gigs together. Aaron also flagged that “a Derby lad Johnny Vincent, has recently published a book that focuses on the Ajanta Cinema as a punk venue“. I’m intrigued – my memories of all that are a bit blurred.

*
Still on the late ’70s and hoping not to get too nostalgic for the misery. Hard not to notice the resurgence of interest in the wreckers of civillisation Throbbing Gristle who are touring again. A bunch of links and a new interview at Boing Boing. I’m seriously wondering about going to Glasgow to see them – it’s about 30 years since I first saw them last (again at the Ajanta in Derby) at a gig that’s still pretty much burned into me.

It seemed like Dad was developing super powers only these were not the kind of powers the Warriors had in the new cartoons, not like the Talents of Galactia Nine or even like the combat skills of Zebra Head. Dad could not bend metal. He could not see through walls. His powers were smaller, less useful, less theatrical. Maybe powers was not even the right word. Since the changes Dad could generate a feeling of unease and he could make tears without seeming to cry – what good was that? – the water streaming down his face with no warning. He could also make a route through the garden so crazy that no sniper could predict it – wandering, stumbling, sometimes falling, sometimes stopping suddenly, completely without warning. Best of all he could see and hear things that were not there. Late at night James found him staring into the garden where Dad said men were standing but when J. tried to work out if it was near the bushes or right by the barbeque Dad would not Specify.  When things got worse Dad was sometimes exploiting an even more powerful super power (?) that involved him talking to the dead. Long arguments he had – with Stella, and Quentin, and with his own Dad. Mum yelled down from the bedroom asked him to keep the noise down, keep it down she said but he said the volume was not his fault. The ghosts had been drinking.

The Geordie blokes, zombies with voices so slurred and/or accented that you think for a moment they might be German, and in any case still pissed from last night, are cast asunder in the lobby in a state of mesmerised pseudo-alertness, eyes wide and staring the room down, looking the bastard of florescent nothingness directly in the face, as if to pick a fight with architecture or air. From their slumped vantage point beneath the flat screen suspended tv – from which at high volume pumps the aural Guantanamo of Formula One Racing – they keep track on the room, the sound clattering around them and ricocheting from the glass and white tiles of this 'reception area', check-in 3pm, early check-in from mid-day at a £10 surplus/extra charge.

The whole hotel is fucked up anyway. Not for the location (stupid), not for the design (awful) and not even for the inedible breakfast but because of the fact that late last night someone hexed the place to a border zone psychic ruin, a site of coming urban doom. Take a look for yourself. Out there past reception a heavy curse has been laid in the elevator, the chewed and blunt bones of Kentucky Fried chicken (or lesser known, less hygenic competitors) arranged one-in-each-corner of the lifts' gray carpet, the bones still lain there this breakfast-time, cold, darkening and probably bacterial, one at each compass point on the dirt toughened floor, the dead bones working together to spin a web of dark influence not just on those who use this elevator – the hangovered wedding guests, the business travelers rushing to bleary checkout, lovers on the run – but also spreading their curse and power outwards, broadcasting deep unease to the building and the neighborhood entire as the elevator ascends. Going up. Yes, and going down, right down, going all the way down.