The Nineties: When Surface was Depth. Michael Bracewell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the Pet Shop Boys have always been obsessed with not being real, because we think that’s more interesting. I have always thought that the idea, for a pop star, is to not be able to believe that they’re real. Which is why I think it was brilliant that Elvis never performed in Britain. Actually, to their credit, the pop gossip columnist of The Sun suggested that all the interviewers should be dressed like we are in the video.’

      ‘But it can also look grotesque,’ Chris points out.

      ‘No. It really wasn’t designed for daily wear,’ agrees Neil. ‘It was designed like our “Pointy Hats” look a few years ago, to be seen through an electronic medium. That way you can smooth things out. We did the “Pointy Hats” in real life, just once, when we launched MTV in Russia. When we came out to do the press conference we discovered that the ceiling of the room was too low for the hats, and then when I sat down the collar of my jacket rode up, so I had to kind of bend forward. An English audience would have found this hilarious, and we’d all have had a good laugh. But the Russians just sat there and stared at us, and then asked all the usual questions as though nothing was odd. You’ve got to have a nerve to do this kind of thing, you know. But when you look at our “Pointy Hats” video, it’s a classic video. It’s an attempt to move away from all the supposed naturalism in pop …’

      With their new image, record and forthcoming tour, the Pet Shop Boys are presenting, as usual, an entire theatrical package. This time, they have pulled off the considerable coup of collaborating with the visionary architect, Zaha Hadid, some of whose buildings have been considered too radical to be constructed. In the light of this latest collaboration, one can see how the Pet Shop Boys – Lowe is a trained architect himself – are continuing their fascination with presenting artificial environments in which to perform their songs.

      ‘Actually, the idea came about because Janet Street Porter had been walking with Zaha Hadid for her television programme,’ says Neil. ‘And she said, “Why don’t you get Zaha Hadid to design your new musical?” and we said, “Because she’s an architect and it’s a completely different discipline to designing for the theatre.” But then we were in New York and I was flicking through a book of Zaha’s designs in the Rizzoli bookshop, and I suddenly saw all of her architectural models as stage sets – wonderful shapes to walk across while holding a microphone, wearing a ludicrous costume and having a wind-machine on you maybe.

      ‘So we approached her, and I have to say that she and her operation have been inspiring to work with. They take all the practicalities of a rock show on board, and they are the only people we have ever worked with who take the budget seriously. They are working on a modular set which can evolve during the show and be adapted to different sizes of venue. Which means that the backing singers are going to be doing some heavy lifting, only they don’t know that yet …’

      So what does all this new look mean? Or does it mean anything? To judge from the exterior shots of the video, and the extreme styling of their new image, they are positioning themselves in a vision of the future in which the architectural brutalism of the Seventies has become as weathered as the Victorian neo-Gothicism of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Saint Pancras Hotel. It is, perhaps, the idea of the future itself appearing antique and old-fashioned, with every adult and child dressed, as revealed at the end of the video, in the extraordinary Samurai chic which we had assumed was a sub-cult gang costume – like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange – rather than the mark of complete social conformity.

      ‘There is a comment about conformity,’ says Neil. ‘But I think that if our previous shows were paintings, then they would have been figurative. Whereas this one is definitely abstract. Unlike our other shows, this doesn’t have a narrative, however loose. I think that it is possible for pop music to get over-intellectualized, but on the other hand it probably isn’t intellectualized enough. In the late Seventies and early Eighties pop was definitely intellectualized, and interestingly enough there was a lot of good music around at the same time. These days, you’d get embarrassed to start talking about art or writing in pop because people might think you’re being pretentious, which is a really sad pay-off of the whole laddish thing in the Nineties.’

      ‘Like Bowie gets ridiculed for wanting to be interested in new things,’ says Chris. ‘But we’re always looking for a new underground …’

      But the problem of how to be confrontational would still obsess a new generation of cultural practitioners during the 1990s. How the hell did you catch anyone’s attention, what with the whole more-in-your-face-than-you thing going on? To some pundits, the age would seem obsessed by sex and death, centring on what Professor Eric Northey would define as ‘the nectothon’ of the mass mediation of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death and funeral. Culturally, in many ways, this was a post-modern re-run of the aestheticism and morbidity of the nineteenth-century ‘fin-de-siècle’ – the cartoon decadence of a neo-grunge demi-monde, with yobs and snobs united in the flashlight of high fashion.

      And how did you deal with the phenomenon-seeking inverted commas of free-floating irony? That would become another problem.

      Irony (as understatement, overstatement, the conflation of opposites and a general fiddling about, in the name of critique, with context and intentionality), within the cultural practice of the early 1990s, would turn out to be the growing pains of the New Authenticity – the phase before the social realism kicked in. But back in the winter of 1988, there was a feeling abroad about irony that was touchingly innocent; it could remind you, in hindsight, of Truman Capote’s wistful recollections, as an alcoholic, of how he used to get drunk: ‘In Harry’s Bar it just seemed such fun,’ he said.

      Likewise Irony. Looking back on it now, and seeing the two culture-vulturing city slickers, thinking out ways to sidestep the obvious, outwit the trend-waves, and play a tune on the bleeps and squeaks of the zeitgeist, there is the realization that the fluffy end of the arts and cultural media during the late 1980s and early 1990s (the swift dissolve between Cult Studies and Lifestyle journalism) had become set to being hyper-cynically arch, or ‘arch’.

      On the one hand, Irony could be regarded as a means of responding to, and co-existing with, the conversion of all things socio-cultural into a post-modern bombardment of culturally destabilized, aesthetically blurred, ultimately unauthored and free-floating signifiers – the Phenomena of things. Irony, in this respect, was a kind of ‘two can play at that game’, or ‘I’ll be your mirror’ means of critique.

      But the Ironists of the early 1990s had also honed the pursuit of Style Watching (the refraction of the post-punk style press through aspirational high bourgeois print media) to such a degree, that their commentaries became increasingly reliant on the instant translation of trends and phenomena into a code of social satire. This was a mixture of wit and anthropology that could end up dissolving in the acid bath of its own chemistry. For there was a faintly psychopathic edge to all of this, in the sense of cold-blooded style watching, however astute, needing to lack almost any kind of empathy – or even emotional awareness – with its subjects, but simply looking for the most precise emblem of their Type. In many ways, this was the point where Naturalism met Marketing – on an island off the coast of Camp.

      At the time this seemed like the weaponry of applied dandyism, and wide open to the perils of terminal ennui: where dandies articulate their philosophy of life through Mock Heroic fashion (the world expressed in a tie-pin, for instance), so the culmination of Irony would be a search for the tiniest detail in other people’s dress and behaviour, which would say the most about them. A noble enough enterprise, in keeping with the naturalism of nineteenth-century fiction (cf. Tom Wolfe’s literary and journalistic homage to Balzac and Dickens), but also open to abuse as the reduction of all things to nothing more than a periodic table of status.

      Needless to say, by the middle 1990s, the sheer surfeit of Irony in the zeitgeist was like some kind of cultural vitamin imbalance. We СКАЧАТЬ