I've had an unbelievable amount going on in my life, including a major life transition. So, the pace of life right now is quite frenetic and I have been spinning quite a few plates in the air. In the middle of all this I experienced two events which have set other, related events in motion. The first event involved an old work colleague getting in touch to say he had found my 'Touching From a Distance' book that I loaned him over 15 years ago. 'Touching From a Distance' is the biography of Ian Curtis from Joy Division and the last section of the book contains all the lyrics he wrote for the band before his death. It arrived at my workplace and I have been marvelling, once again, at just how good a lyricist Curtis actually was. The second event was going to a Killing Joke gig at the Glasgow Barrowlands (still one of the best music venues ever). Throughout that gig I had nothing but respect for Killing Joke who began their existence as a band a few years before I was born. I didn't find that gig a nostalgia trip but instead an in-your-face political commentary of the times we are living in.
For a bit of context, both Joy Division and Killing Joke formed in the late 1970s and were predominantly inspired by punk music, but also grounded in other music genres. They felt they had something to say in the dark times they perceived they were living in (the Winter of Discontent was building up and they were on the precipice of a huge political and economic change which was Thatcherism and neoliberalism). They even toured together and are still regarded as two of the first post punk bands in Britain, getting their ideas from art, politics, cinema and literature. Both bands loved the energy from punk music, but found it was too manufactured and was failing to live up to its aims of subverting expectations, challenging listeners and, crucially, being authentic.
Both bands shaped my teens. I never got into Britpop, although I admit now with hindsight it produced a few classic albums. I grew up political, born into a traditional working class family (both sides of my family were all miners, lorry drivers, steel workers and manual labourers; not to mention the women being domestic labourers and low-level labourers such as cleaners) with a twist (my parents separated when I was very young, and I was one of the first children in my town to grow up in a single-parent household headed by a woman). My family were die-hard Labour supporters and as anti-Thatcher as you could get. Britpop never encompassed for me what it was like to grow up feeling like you are on the absolute fringes of society, receiving horizontal violence on a daily basis because of the double-whammy that you were poor and from a broken home. I wasn't an angry, young white man so even punk, although I loved its energy, never fully connected with me. It was bands like The Cure, Joy Division, Killing Joke and Siouxsie and the Banshees that drew me in and were able to encapsulate a darkness and emptiness that I felt inside, whilst still connecting to a larger narrative of being a puppet of cruel, political regimes. These bands were also teachers and mentors, connecting me to literature, film and philosophy that would exponentially shape my education choices and (zig-zagging) career path.
The dominant demographic at the Killing Joke gig this month was definitely older than me (or at least looked a lot older than me), but there were also smatterings of young people; some of whom seemed to know / recall the lyrics better than I can. What struck me throughout that gig was just how political it all was. Killing Joke are one of those bands that go on a hiatus when there is not much controversy happening in Politics, and then come back with a vengeance when things get really murky. Their leader and lyricist, Jaz Coleman, may have ingested one too many conspiracy theories along the way, but right now he sounds more contemporary than many artists out there. His scathing political commentaries are on point and he expectorates an unfliching counter-narrative that has remained remarkably consistent throughout the (many) years. This makes him a surprising anchor in a world that has been increasingly devoid of a coherent left critique of the state of Politics and the economy.
For my birthday last year, my partner bought me both the tickets to the Killing Joke gig and Chris Bryans' 'A Prophecy Fulfilled' which is a compendium of the impact Killing Joke have had on music, art and culture from the perspective of the band, those who know them well and have been influenced by them, and their fans. After the gig (he is now a fan), we have also watched documentaries and interviews with Killing Joke, including gaining news that I'd missed that members of Killing Joke and Joy Division had collaborated in the early 90s and had recently released this collaboration (K÷93). What I found interesting is their insistence that we are on the precipice of another zeitgeist, which is in tune with my previous post about a paradigm shift, interregnum and/or a populist moment being our current reality. They are adamant that this current state of affairs cannot continue and it's up to the arts to bring about a political, economic, philosophical and cultural shift to lead us to a better tomorrow as the world presently implodes within itself.
This got me thinking about music and youth, and what is emerging from this scene. It made me wonder if we are about to witness another, early, Manic Street Preachers that will come along and pave the way of counter-culture but spit it out in their own, unique and insightful way. This ruminating led me to watch an ok 'No Manifesto: A Film About Manic Street Preachers' which was released in 2015 but I'd somehow missed it until now. A truly political band that were once on the pulse of the impact of politics, economics and culture on the psyche of the young (re-visit 'The Holy Bible' - by God they don't make them like that anymore). Like Killing Joke and Joy Division, they saw music as an avenue to expose this impact and as a way to unite against it.
I do hope another Manics are finding their sound right now. We need them. I don't pretend to know how young people are feeling right now more than the young people themselves. I see the world filtered through the lenses that have shaped me throughout the years, and these are not necessarily the same lenses (nor experiences) that young people are using right now. I look forward to hearing what is going to emerge and I will be looking out for it (interestingly, I just discovered a band called Enter Shikari but I think they, as polemic as they are, might be a generation away from contemporary youth in their own lenses and experiences). It really is time and the conditions are made for it.
