anti-theatricality in rock (Coleman's Disgustard)

"The Clash were, I am fairly sure, playing the Apollo — so if it was the Apollo... you were only too aware of the way this small but potent punkish enterprise was scaling itself up rapidly and quite aggressively. The group were evidently no longer an organic continuation of their scrotty urban environment, existing somehow independently of the cogs and flywheels of an egregious industrial machine — and if you are younger than sixty you will have to take it on trust that there once was a time when rock groups really did appear to operate independently of good industrial practice, represented, regulated and approved by that chafing machine.

"You yourself rocked up in all your teased out tousle to the chipped-Deco embrace of the Apollo’s mighty frontage, highly conscious that this was rather more than a halfway house to the big time, and once inside and facing the framing device of a hefty proscenium arch, you were instantly visited by the sense that the Clash, this small aggregation of individuals in military trousers was no longer a socio-political pustule exploding with electric guitars; this was a show. Something that had been put on for an audience by professionals who know how things work. Showbusiness. A put-on, not a turn-on.

"I have no other way of addressing this strange perceptual contortion except to say, in a self-reproaching tone, that I loved the Clash at the time. I did not regard them as fakes or put-ons. They obviously were not fakes or put-ons. And yet I remember finding myself unable to swallow the Kool-Aid that night.

"I fear I may have made too much afterwards of Mick Jones in his white jumpsuit (white!) and the way he appeared to turn a bright eye on himself, as all rock guitarists have done since a shapely Fender was first slung over a young person’s shoulder, observing themselves almost as the Method actor does, from the inside, looking out from within, and then back at his or her outer form with a critical edge on their gaze — as if their inner selves must seal the deal formally with the outer cladding in getting the look, the moves, the face, the grace, la figura, the right stuff right. The ideal projection of self. Mick Jones was getting very good at this kind of eyeless self-scrutiny and projection and I thought it was very bad form. I may have even used the word “narcissistic” when among friends. And I’d have then probably punched you if you’d said to me that I was carrying my responsibilities as a paying member of the audience a smidge too far. No, of course I wouldn’t. But I would have probably fantasised about punching you."

Nick Coleman, at his Substack, which is full of interesting musings about music and the roles it's played in his life. The post is titled "the death of rock: and it was on my watch!"

I think what I would say about the Clash is that if you were to look, today, at footage of them from even their very earliest days, the elements of theatre would scream out to your eyes - there's a rhetoric of bodily movements, from the way Simonon held his bass and pumped his leg, to the quasi-military formation of the players on stage, to how Strummer is projecting towards the mic and the audience. 

Well, looky here, footage of The Clash at the Manchester Apollo, two years before Coleman saw them at the same venue. 

Yet it must have seemed at the time to have a quality of unvarnished urgency that felt like Reality arriving on the stage, instantly outmoding the Old Wave ways of going about rock performance. 

But I mean, quite quite early on they started having backdrops of photos taken on the war torn streets of Belfast, right? So that's already in the realm of theatre, even as it projects towards the Real and tries to bring it onstage with them.  

Jump to 4.46 for a satirical scene from Rock Follies in which Old Waver Stevie Streeter tries to go New Wave with staged urban decay. Tim Curry in top form!