In The R.Elms of the Senseless (slight return)

Interesting reflections on the Robert Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s over at Michaelangelo Matos's substack Beat Connection

 

Although he takes a poke or several at the Elmscentricity of the Bob universe ("has no problem tooting his horn") and he firmly sides with the ravers against the nightclubbers ("I....  have no patience for anybody’s door policy"), Matos is more generous to this kind of "I'm-in-with-the-In-crowd-ism" than I am. 

Perhaps geographical distance, and not having to live through it in real-time, accounts for it! 

He satisfyingly skewers the Elms assertion that Rusty Egan invented modern deejaying (drily pointing out that Egan used just one turntable). 

Also satisfyingly skewered is the strained Elms argument that New Romanticism was not in ideological lockstep with Thatcherism. Regardless of who they actually individually voted for in 1979 or 1983, the whole slant was escapism combined with make-it-at-all-costs (with a strong vein of fake-it-till-you-make-it in there too). 

Matos mentions and highly recommends a doc I have never heard of: Soul Boys of the Western World:

"It it goes over the sun with the Blitz footage. This club took place in a Soho dive bar, and when the camera sails through it in this film, the walls pulse. It’s the most alluring thing I’ve ever seen in above-board filmmaking. I wanted to enter it and not leave. Within seconds, everything I’d ever read, or written, about the place came suddenly to life." 

While I shudder at the idea that this is an entire documentary devoted to Spandau Ballet, I might have to steel myself and watch it. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Earlier bloggige o' mine about Blitz and about Bob. 

"dance music is not showbiz"

A bit from an interview with a Uruguay magazine about Energy Flash coming out in a Spanish translation and at the end was I asked about my work-in-progress Shock and Awe:  

Is there any link between glam rock and electronic music?

 Not really, although the great German techno producer Wolfgang Voigt is a huge fan of T. Rex. And there was a fad in electronic dance music the mid-2000s for schaffel, which is a rhythm that is related to the boogie feel of T. Rex and things like “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum. That sort of shuffling, bluesy groove. A lot of mostly German producers were putting out tracks with that feel.

I think the connection between glam and rave is simply this idea of kids going crazy and dancing. A lot of glam was all about rhythm – the desire for a stomping beat after a period in which rock had got very laidback and album-oriented and pensive.  The kids want to boogie. Slade, talking about their rise to popularity, say that everyone was bored with album-rock that you had to sit around listening to.  They say, “the kids just want to rave’ – i.e. have a band like Slade that was high-energy stomping music.

So as much as it was about costumes and make-up and camp, there was also a primal aspect to glam that harked back to rock’n’roll but also looked forward to  rave. It’s a continuum of music to go crazy to.

The DJ is a god?

 Not for me, strangely. I never got into the veneration of deejays. Some of the best deejays I’ve danced to are relatively unknown.  When I think of the best, most incredible dance nights I’ve had, often I don’t remember, or never knew, who the DJ was. It was the resident DJ at some club.

I have seen some amazingly skilled DJs who really add something through their techniques, but generally speaking, deejaying is  about playing good records in a sequence that works, that has highs and lows.  And at the end of the day, the DJ would be nothing without the producers of the music. Who sometimes are DJs, but not always. So if anything, I would say the producer is the god. 

But more than that, the crowd is the star.  I don’t like the thing of everyone dancing but staring in one direction at the stage. I prefer clubs where the DJ is to one side, tucked out of sight, in a little booth. There’s nothing to look at with DJs. It is much better to look at the other dancers, make eye  contact with strangers, or look at the gang of friends you came with. Or just close your eyes and get lost in music. Dance music is not showbiz.

[of course what I am forgetting here, historically, is disco, where there very much is an overlap between glam and dance music, at least in terms of fabulousness and dressing up. Also an overlap between showbiz / show tunes and disco.  Also EDM at that very moment was becoming all about spectacle and hi-tech display, even costumes with Deadmaus etc. Still in terms of my preferences it's a valid statement]