East End Review

Tag: Peter Yeung

  • Viv Albertine: ‘If I’m not passionate I won’t do it’

    Viv Albertine (right) hanging out with Sid Vicious
    The Slits’ Viv Albertine lights a cigarette next to Sid Vicious

    “You, you’re a careerist generation basically. Always want an answer and a goal,” insists Viv Albertine, the punk musician turned writer. “I grew up without any goals, which may be terrifying or unusual for people today. That film came along, that book I had to write, that album I had to make: if I’m going to go through another fallow period, so be it. I’m not just going to churn out creative work to keep myself in the public eye, or to earn a few hundred quid, or for ego reasons. If I’m not passionate, then I won’t do it. I don’t give a fuck what does or doesn’t come next.”

    Despite the message, it doesn’t come across at all anachronistic, heavy-handed, or preachy. In fact, as far as accusations go, I can’t help but feel swayed. Now 59, Albertine has carved out her entire life from a fierce, yet wholehearted independence: from her days as a teenager, haphazardly venturing off to Amsterdam with a mere five pounds, her significant role in the formation of punk with her band The Slits, to vetoing the suggestion of having her recently-released autobiography ghostwritten. Even today, she refused to give up on our interview. “I shifted and became the rock,” she tells me serenely. “My husband was my rock until then, but when I had a daughter, I became the strong one.”

    The day before we were originally scheduled to speak – and the evening of her book launch –  Albertine’s mother passed away. A flurry of overwhelming admin meant a second date was cancelled, while on the day itself even her venue of choice was closed. Undeterred, we amble across to Hackney Picturehouse and take up residence in the cafe.

    Albertine was actually born in Sydney. Her parents had moved to Australia because “in the 50s there was this thing where people could move there for 10 shillings”. When she was four, the family took a boat back to England, and set anchor at a North London council estate. “Muswell Hill wasn’t as cool as it is now,” she explains. “But at the time, young Communist families lived there – there were a lot of very forward thinking people and their children in the area.” Albertine was fortunate enough to attend one of the first comprehensive schools in Britain, with other sonic luminaries such as Rod Stewart and the Kinks her fellow alumni.

    It was while studying fashion and textile design at the Chelsea School of Art that she met Mick Jones, who went on to form The Clash. As punk began, the art connection proved fertile: “Art schools back then used to put on brilliant bands – Bowie was first put on by art schools, Roxy music and Pink Floyd too,” says Albertine, between sips of steaming green tea. “Don’t forget that punk didn’t exist. I was the scene, I was part of making it. Through Mick I met John Rotten, he was just a kid in a band, and Mick knew Malcolm [McLaren]. It was just people who knew each other around the same time. By the time it was called punk, it was already dead – it only lasted 18 months.”

    In her autobiography, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, Albertine writes candidly, almost brazenly, about the scene at the time. Johnny Rotten supposedly complained that she was “trying too hard” when attempting to fellate him, while Sid Vicious apparently was still a bedwetter despite his hardman persona. As a devotee of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s fetish-influenced clothing, she claims many guys at the time “didn’t know whether they wanted to kill us or fuck us”. Her bandmate Ari Up, the 15-year-old singer of The Slits, was stabbed twice by strangers on the street within a single year.

    In 1978, Albertine became pregnant by Mick Jones, and decided to have an abortion to continue with the band. It’s a decision that haunts her to this day. “I didn’t regret it for 20 years,” she writes. “But eventually I did. It’s hard to live with.” She explains on the day: “Up till I was in my mid-30s, I couldn’t bear the thought of being a mother. It absolutely revolted me. It made me feel nauseous to see someone pushing a pram, because to me it represented the end of all opportunities. Then, when I fell in love, whether it was biology or age catching up to me, I had to have a daughter.”

    What followed was “seven years of absolute madness”: attempts to get pregnant via IVF, diagnosis with cervical cancer six weeks after the birth of her daughter and an ill-fated attempt to become an obliging housewife. Albertine became so ashamed that her daughter initially grew up unaware that her mum had been in a band, but she eventually resolved to be honest. “I decided to let her know who I am, and trust that she will love me anyway,” Albertine enunciates in her lingering North London drawl. “I was a very natural mother. It surprised me. I knew what to do. That may be a legacy from my own mum, who was a very strong woman.”

    Since The Slits disbanded in 1981, Albertine has variously been an aerobics instructor, a filmmaker, a ceramicist, a solo artist and the co-star of Joanna Hogg’s art-house movie, Exhibition. Now, she lives in an artist community in Hackney, and in a way, there’s a sense of completion. “I’ve lived in North, South, and West London, but never ever East. But a year ago, I had to move, with my divorce and all that, and I just got absolutely drawn here. It’s so funny, but now I actually feel like I’ve come home.”

    Albertine is one of several music icons now residing in the borough, alongside the likes of Thurston Moore, whose label released her EP Flesh. “I absolutely adore it. I love getting the bus home, and I start hitting East London. I love the old warehouses, and the higgledy piggledy.”

    The title of the autobiography actually comes from her mother, who once said that clothes, music and boys was all her daughter was interested in. What advice would she give herself as a young girl, I ask. “You’ve got to live your life as if you’re not going to have a tomorrow. Of course I’m still scared and feel like a twit, and know I can’t play very well, but I’m going to live my life how I want live it, because when I go, no one’s going to give a shit that I’ve made a fool of myself here, there or anywhere.”

    Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys is published by Faber & Faber. RRP: £14.99 ISBN: 9780571297757

  • William Burroughs in Hackney: photographs of Beat writer go on display at Red Gallery

    William Burroughs. Photograph:
    William Burroughs. Photograph: James Hamilton

    In his 1964 novel Nova Express, a pitch-black social commentary about a dystopian future, William S. Burroughs writes: “I am primarily concerned with the question of survival – with Nova conspiracies, Nova criminals, and Nova police. A new mythology is possible in the Space Age, where we will again have heroes and villains, as regards intentions towards this Planet. I feel that the time of writing is in Space, not Time.”

    It was another five years until Apollo 11 first touched down on a lunar surface, and another decade after that until the Nova Convention was held, a multimedia retrospective of his work in New York City. By this point, the diabolical American genius Burroughs, variously a Harvard University alumnus, drug savant, pioneer of the gay liberation movement, gun enthusiast and creator of the “cut-up technique”, had garnered widespread praise. In attendance were cultural giants from Patti Smith, to Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg.

    An exhibition organised by Ecstatic Peace Library at Shoreditch’s Red Gallery entitled William Burroughs: Nova Convention, will mark the artist’s centennial with photographs of the event taken by James Hamilton of the Village Voice, who captured this celebratory and historic meeting of minds at The Entermedia Theater.

    One of those in attendance that day was a 19-year-old Thurston Moore, scraggly and raw, who is now a co-curator of the Red Gallery show alongside Eva Prinz. He recalls in a “teenage potted reverie … a palpable excitement of the importance of Burroughs’ return to NYC”. These days, Moore travels each year from his home in Stoke Newington to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, just as Burroughs taught there many years ago.

    There, too, was a London connection. “At the Nova Convention he read this poem that he introduced by saying it had been inspired by a trip to London,” Moore recounts. “He had this whole connection to the London underground of radical poetry, people like Jeff Nuttall. He was living on Drury Lane and being part of the scene around the Indica Bookstore that Barry Miles had. He was a big part of the London scene, hanging out with Ian Sommerville, Iain Sinclair and all those guys. For me now living in London it’s something I really relate to, Burroughs’ time here, as an American in London.”

    On the day of the convention itself, the poet Eileen Myles supposedly performed the so-called William Tell act where in 1951 Burroughs tragically sent a bullet through his wife Joan Vollmer’s skull, killing her instantly. But Moore explains there was plenty to revel in. “Glass’s idiosyncratic high-speed minimalist pianistics was natural, gorgeous and sublime. Zappa came out and read a Burroughs excerpt ‘The Talking Asshole’ which seemed appropriate and was mildly entertaining. Patti hit the stage in a glamorous black fur trench, purportedly on loan from some high-end clothier.

    “There was always some magic in the air in NYC and it seemed like there could be no other world in 1978. Burroughs coming back to the city where he predicted the urban energy and flash lightning of punk rock was matter of pride and integrity. We owned the future.”

    William Burroughs: Nova Convention is at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Street, EC2A 3DT until 13 July.

  • How a video camera became a weapon for feminists

    Jane Fonda in a still taken from Cherchez la femme exhibition at Space Studios
    Jane Fonda in a still from the Cherchez La Femme exhibition at Space Studios

    In late November 1967, the newly-named Sony Corporation –  a young, but blossoming Japanese electronics company –  released the Portapak CV-2400, the world’s first consumer videotape recorder. Battery-powered, portable, and inexpensive: no longer was video the preserve of elite television companies and their hegemonic value systems.

    As the Portapak’s poetic manual put it: “The portable video system represents the essence of decentralised media. One person now becomes an entire TV studio, capable of producing a powerful statement.”

    Though Sony’s advertising campaigns for the Portapak depicted the video camera being used by all echelons of society, according to Alaina Claire Feldman, head of exhibitions for Independent Curators International, it became a potent weapon for French feminist collectives during the 1970s. Activist groups like Vidéa and Insoumuses documented wild demonstrations along the boulevards of Paris and radical manifestos against male power.

    Feldman, the organiser of a new exhibition at Hackney’s SPACE studios, which is screening a number of these engrossing, politicised videos, explains: “The Portapak offered an opportunity for documentation of what was happening in the streets, in the factories, in private libraries and conversations, but also for creative critique of the moving image itself.”

    “The portable video came exactly at the right moment: the start of the women’s liberation movement in France, hot on the heels of May ‘68,” she continued. “It was also totally unexpected that women would embrace technology at the time, and because video was so new, it had no history or canon to struggle with; it was entirely open.”

    The name of the exhibition, ‘Cherchez La Femme’, is a reappropriated French colloquialism that traditionally suggests the root of all problems is women. It is this sort of institutional misogyny that these recently-translated feminist films were, and still are, railing against.

    Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976), for example, is a scathing meditation on the rigid roles that women are permitted in public life. After recording footage of a French television talk show, Delphine Seyrig, along with three other women, eviscerate the shocking statements made by Françoise Giroud, supposedly the country’s Minister for Women’s well being. They edit, freeze-frame, superimpose, and add hand-written titles to Giroud’s various patronising claims: that surgery is too difficult for women, or how women’s ambitions should never go beyond pleasing their man.

    The videos show both the dynamic potential in, and the collective creation of the films, mirroring how the feminist movement actually functioned. In Kate Millet Speaks about Prostitution with Feminists (1975), we see this reality: sat crosslegged on the floor, in a room with bookshelves filled to the brim, French and American feminists passionately debate the plight of the prostitutes, while ceaselessly puffing away on their Gauloises. Innovations in technology can often lead to societal change, and the Sony Portapak was no exception. The dissemination of low-budget and lo-fi work like this forged networks of exchange, catalysed strains of guerilla television, and allowed self-representation for many women. Whether these feminist collective’s goals have been achieved is still far from certain, but Feldman has “hope there’s some consequences that eventually come out of it” for the residents of Hackney that get to see them.

    Cherchez La Femme is at SPACE Studios, 129—131 Mare Street, E8 3RH until 13 July.

  • David Bailey: For Real review – ‘A palimpsest of post-war London life’

    David Bailey 620
    Photograph by David Bailey courtesy of Daniel Blau Munich/London

    You can take David Bailey out of the East End, but you can’t take the East End out of David Bailey: in this new exhibition, even his portraits of elder Delhi men evoke the moustachioed hipsters of Kingsland Road.

    Bailey: For Real at Daniel Blau London, one of three Bailey shows held internationally by the gallery in 2014, focuses on the more gritty, yet intimate aspects of his oeuvre: more like a carpenter’s sawdust than his recent glamorous National Portrait Gallery retrospective Stardust. “The East End personifies London for me –  or, it did –  because it was where I was brought up,” he once told the BBC. “I like change; I like the way it morphs into something else.”

    Best known for his 1960s fashion photography, Bailey was born in Leytonstone in January 1938, into a rag-tag trade: the son of a tailor. His mother was born in Bow, his father in Hackney, his grandfather in Bethnal Green, and his genealogy from there –  as far as records go –  traces to Whitechapel. So, although his blossoming career took him around the globe, Bailey made frequent trips back to the East End.

    The prints on show are certainly not an exclusive coup: Mick Jagger and his chiselled cheekbones make an appearance, alongside several portraits of Bailey’s famous friends, but we’ve seen it all before, and quite recently. What the exhibition does offer is a morphed, oblique perspective both on individual images, and the photographer’s work as a whole. Everything on show is presented on torn, imperfect pieces of glossy fibre photographic paper: each is uniquely frayed and shredded by Bailey’s own hands. It renders not only the tactile process of image-making more personal, but also cuts much of the familiar images we know: zooming in closely, it increases the proximity to and intensity of the subjects.

    Bethnal Green (1961) depicts a young boy almost buckling under the weight of a crate of Charrington beer from the local brewery. East End (1961) is a complex shot of a pub window; an attractive barmaid pulls a pint, while lines of acid-etched words in the window contrast with an advertising hoarding message in the reflection. One image portrays a tattoo of the Kray twins – the notorious East London gangsters that befriended Bailey –  itself based on an iconic portrait he once took of them. The exhibition also shows a bleak side of the capital’s east here. Children explore amongst masses of sacks strewn chaotically in one photograph, while another shows a dilapidated, ramshackle building on Viaduct Street, just a stone’s throw away from where Bethnal Green tube now is. Bailey himself was blown out of his home by the Luftwaffe.

    These grainy rolls of aged black-and-white celluloid are reminiscent of George Brassai’s candid street photography in Paris. They are very much like relics, shown here in mounted boxes rather than frames, and are a palimpsest of post-war London life, as well as a few ventures abroad. However, while they do provide an interesting angle on Bailey’s work, the exhibition –  in a year that has comprehensively surveyed the photographer –  is relatively lightweight.

    Bailey: For Real is at Daniel Blau Gallery, 51 Hoxton Square, N1 6PB until 28 June.