❚ A CRACKLING EXCHANGE OF OPINIONS has given Facebook some edge this week. Legendary Wag club host, the deejay Chris Sullivan poured scorn on the term “jazz-funk” and its followers, igniting a barrage of responses from 70s fans of the Gold Mine, Caister and the Lacy Lady, sampled below.
➢ Chris Sullivan at Facebook, Nov 15:“ A friend of mine asked me what I played at Novikov every Sunday. I replied “jazz and funk” and he said “jazz-funk” and so horrified was I that anyone would think I play that rubbish, I recorded the start of my set for him and here it is… ”
Paul Carter: Nuthin wrong with jazz-funk at all – was the soundtrack to many young Londoners’ lives… The Gold Mine was one of the best clubs ever… When everyone was obsessed with punk and post punk, the really cool kids (black and white) were groovin to jazz-funk and soul. Just sayin.
Chris Sullivan: When I went to the Gold Mine it was funk but later came jazz-funk like Brazilian Love by George Duke and jazz-funkers started getting their hair permed and wearing dungarees and going to Purley All-Dayers… bloody horrible… Most true funk I love and jazz, especially Blue Note, is impeccable but jazz-funk is shite… and its emergence ruined a good little scene – remember the Cortinas with the car stickers “Wayne and Shirley” for example, and the furry dice.
Paul Carter: Bit of snobbery there I think… and it is an opinion Chris, no more… I remember some incredible nights down the Gold Mine with Chris Hill, Pete Tong, and the rest of them – a lot of wedges but not a perm in sight – just great music – I think it’s a real shame that it’s been written out of club culture in favour of Northern soul (dull dull dull) and the West End scene in which you played such a large part. I was in both scenes and I always loved that the suburban scene was just about the music, not about the width of your turn-ups (much as I loved Le Beat Route and the rest). Oh and it was far more racially mixed too… / Continued at Facebook
Cultural clairvoyant Douglas Coupland: photographed in Shanghai for Time Out by Yang Xiaozhe
❚ DOUGLAS COUPLAND CAPTURED THE ZEITGEIST of a generation with his 1991 debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, and he kept his finger on the pulse of our times with such books as Microserfs, jPod and Generation A. However, Coupland’s first great artistic passion was not writing, but visual art. The Canadian cultural clairvoyant is in Shanghai this week for a group show at Art Labor. He talked to Sam Gaskin for Time Out Shanghai about the rise of smartphones for decoding and recoding the post-everything milieu…
“ If a UFO landed on Earth,” Coupland said, “and it had one of these on its roof you wouldn’t know what it meant, but you’d know it meant something. We could even go into some sort of Mad Max future where all the scanners are dead but you’d still wonder what it said. That’s what I like about them. There’s wonder in these things.”
These things are the Quick Response codes (a 2-D version of barcodes), upon which Coupland has mapped his Memento Mori series of paintings. On one level, the works are colourful abstracts reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and TV test screen patterns. Using a smartphone app, the paintings can also be scanned to reveal encoded messages. This fusion of image and text brings together two Couplands: the conceptual artist who got his start at a Tokyo art school and the novelist and aphorist who wrote Generation X and jPod… ” / Continued online
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❏ Scan this Coupland painting with your smartphone to reveal its hidden message about the future … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at onlinebarcode reader.com
“ Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. ” — Kurt Vonnegut, 1994
ANOTHER SHOW OPENED IN CANADA LAST WEEK
❏ Coupland graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1984 with a focus on sculpture. The 49-year-old artist was in Calgary this month for the opening of his newest exhibition, Douglas Coupland: Twenty-first Century at TrepanierBaer Gallery, which features thought-provoking sculpture, paintings and a collection of Marshall McLuhanesque “slogans for the 21st century” formatted into his paintings as QR codes.
“ Q: Regarding your Memento Mori QR paintings — which can be scanned with a cellphone QR app to reveal the title of the paintings — what inspired this approach and what do you hope it awakens in people?
❏ Scan the above installation, photographed by The Calgary Herald, to reveal the message about truth in the Memento Mori painting … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at Inlite Research
HOW TO READ QR CODES
❏ QR codes are similar to the barcodes used in supermarkets, but store much more complex data arranged in a square pattern on a white background. They are familiar in Japan and Europe on home-printed tickets for flights, trains and entertainment events, and on the walls of art galleries for providing detailed information about the exhibits. The QR code in the right-hand column of Shapersothe80s will take you to a different random page within this website each time you scan it.
QR codes are usually scanned with a smartphone after you have downloaded the relevant app — or by taking a photo of the code on your phonecam. The alternative is to visit the website of a QR reader and upload the QR image for it to be decoded. You can do this with each of the Coupland paintings here, though many online readers do seem to have difficulty scanning his multicoloured images and only two readers succeeded.
❏ Scan another Coupland canvas showing at the TrépanierBaer Gallery to reveal its hidden message about the dead … or right-click to download the image, then upload it into the online QR reader at Inlite Research
NEW THIS WEEK: FIRST INTERACTIVE MUSIC VIDEO TO INCLUDE SCANNABLE QR CODES
+++ ❚ ON NOV 28 SPANDAU BALLET’S 1983 chart hit Gold is re-released as an iTunes download newly remixed by superstar trance deejay Paul Oakenfold. But there’s a twist involving 20 fans who stepped up to the mike to record the chorus of the song that has echoed throughout sporting arenas the world over.
In 1981, Cadbury launched its Wispa chocolate bar with bubbles as a competitor to Rowntree’s Aero. Now that Cadbury is the Official Treat Provider of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the bar is relaunched as Wispa Gold with caramel, retailing at 56 pence. The London 2012 Games offer a billion-pound retail opportunity that is unlike anything Britain has experienced before and a quarter of these sales are likely to be made in the final months of this year. When 25m Brits watched the recent Royal Wedding, total revenue hit £50m, so retailers are keen to capitalise on London 2012.
Cadbury is investing £8m in an advertising and sponsorship campaign plus another £1.5m on marketing, all aiming to support Team GB ahead of the 2012 Olympics with the slogan Keep Them Pumped.
Fan, commuter bike, shoelaces: all gilded ready for the video of the remixed Gold
Six of pop’s greatest power training anthems have been re-recorded as campaign soundtracks to encourage athletes preparing for the July Games. New music videos have been shot for The Final Countdown, Simply the Best, Danger Zone while an epic video for We Will Rock You [below] has enlisted more than 200 inhabitants of Merthyr Tydfil to cheer on their Olympic hockey player Sarah Thomas.
Spandau’s sleek and glitteringly golden video for the Oakenfold remix features Team GB athlete and BMX champion Shanaze Reade, plus the 120 fans selected in online auditions who then came into the studio to give full voice to the chorus. Below, we see one of them definitely getting into the Olympic spirit. “The song will be equally at home in the charts as it will in the clubs,” reckons the optimistic sax player Steve Norman. Oakenfold has one word for it: “floor-filler”.
❚ THE MOST EXCITING GENERAL ELECTION FOR 31 YEARS takes place in the UK this week. Since the Conservative landslide that put Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street on this day, May 3, 1979, British voters have seen only one change of political ideology, from right to left (to use the word generously), with the Labour party landslide of 1997. The Conservative government won four consecutive general elections, and Labour governments subsequently won three.
Boy wonder: “Vote for one party…” Old lags: “… and get one free!”
This points up unique new aspects of generation gaps. Half the adult population who are entitled to vote – and this embraces the UK’s delayed Generation X – have known only one political sea-change, while everybody younger than 31 – the 11m that include Generation Y who reached voting age since Labour came to power – have experienced only one flavour of government. Consider the tensions that should be reverberating within this nation’s breasts.
During the 1980s the Thatcher administration shifted for ever the tectonic plates underpinning society (though the concept of “society” was one she as prime minister famously denied). Parallels with today are spookily similar: an unprecedented recession has toppled many supporting pillars of the economy, while unemployment is passing 2.5m just as it did in 1979. Currently one-fifth of all people of working age are “economically inactive”. Among today’s 18-24-year-olds the unemployment rate is 17%, even for graduates. And a decade of austerity is set to declare itself just after the election.
UK population by age: 18-49 year-old clout (ONS)
By the dawn of the Swinging 80s, the young had grown very angry indeed with the grown-ups’ way of running things. Yet in the 20-tens, we find ourselves still unsure whether Generation Y are activists or slacktivists. Meanwhile those researchers at Pew already have a shrewd idea about the politics of online social networkers and whether they can be bovvered enough to stray offline and put an X on a ballot paper. Don’t hold your breath.
Would these songs change your vote? Newsnight invites rappers Nu Brand to create an anthem for the Conservative Party (BBC)
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
An “invaluable website” — historian Dominic Sandbrook, 2012
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU AT TOP to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH, see the sidebar below
SEARCH our 600 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
◆ “Headphones on! David has left us with an amazing legacy. The greatest influence on my life and the one who opened the doors to so much quality by his associations”
WAG CLUB’S CHRIS SULLIVAN:
◆ “I tell a few tales about my time with Bowie as do a few others. But it is 100% his music while looking at the absurdly powerful impact he had on me and I am sure most of you”
NEWS — OLD FACES, NEW MIXES FOR THE 20-TEENS
✱ The autumn issue of V Magazine recasts the New Romantics for American readers, and puts millennial pioneers on its covers: Mormon supermodel and social media wunderkind Lucky BS on one and Troye Sivan on another as the gay YouTuber carving out a new path through music. Eyebrows are already raised
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✱ 29th Sept – Deejay set from legendary Blitz club host Rusty Egan at Under the Bridge, London SW6 1HS with Michael Rother playing Neu! – two singers over backing tracks, plus six songs from Rusty’s new album, Welcome to the Dancefloor
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✱ Tony Hadley is back “doing what he loves best – being a solo artist” . . . Moving on from Spandau Ballet, their singer is playing live at three UK dates in October with the South Bank Sinfonia, plus six in Europe
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✱ Powering on through the autumn Peter Hook & The Light perform New Order and Joy Division live in North America
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✱ Dazed magazine for autumn 2016 is fronted by two leading French femmes Léa Seydoux and SoKo and “celebrates the visionary talents who capture the creative spark of the moment”
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✱ The best new tracks on the latest Dazed Playlist include Mykki Blanco, Erykah Badu, Nas and Scottish trio Naked
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✱ i-D's Futurewise summer issue No 343 believes that we're more politically fired up than ever before, and urges us to grab control of our lives! However, its promo blurb doesn’t explain who this cover face Selena Forrest is or why being fully clad in Balenciaga expresses the change it claims is “in air”. I-D really seems to be losing the plot✱ i-D’s mix for August features Malmo’s young house producer Armand Jakobsson, aka Rimbaudian. Tracks include his own I Would Do Everything I Did Again, and Wanna Be Bae; plus DJ Seinfeld’s Flyin' Thru Sunrise
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✱ “The Greatest” issue 65 of Soul Survivors magazine pays tribute to Muhammed Ali and features Angie Stone, Alton McClain, Peven Everett & Billie Jewell, Guile Sharp . . . Under Fitzroy Facey’s sole ownership, the mag celebrates its tenth anniversary with a new compilation on Expansion Records, out in September
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✱ Tue–Sat: Trumphouse Tuesdays, Grenade, FCK, #FRI251, SatFac251 at Factory251 – clubnights, cocktail masterclasses and live bands – EDM, house, garage, hiphop, nu disco, funk, soul and indie over three floors designed by Ben Kelly at Princess St, Manchester M1 7EN
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✱ Remake Remodel claims to be “The Nation’s Saving Grace of Alternative, Rock’n’Roll” — Ruby Lounge M4 1QB first Saturday of the month, plus Rip It Up Mondays at Soup Kitchen M1 1DF
◆ On Mi-soul radio on 13 Feb 2015, the day after Steve Strange died, deejay Rusty Egan paid musical tribute to his sidekick in founding their legendary Blitz club-night back in 1979: “Music says everything I could ever want to say” ... Catch up at Mixcloud
◆ Support Rusty for free music downloads through the Artist Union
◆ Shapersofthe80s is declared an “invaluable website” by historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of the rich cultural analysis, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979. We report how Sandbrook gives generous credit to key influencers on youth culture who are the stars of this website. His unstuffy appreciation of high and low life energised the BBC2 series The Seventies aired in 2012
◆ Elsewhere at Shapers of the 80s, telly don Simon Schama succinctly expresses why we should document the “irreverent freedom” that is a special aspect of life in Britain
Archive — Many publication dates are arbitrary, so click and take pot luck!
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