Innovating tradition and doing so in a sustainable way is one of the key themes tackled by many professionals in different disciplines. Portuguese architect and product designer Pedro Campos Costa has tried through some of his projects based on interdisciplinary researches to explore this topic: his "Casa Não Casa" (House-non-House) is an experimental structure with mirror-like surfaces covered in photovoltaic cells that make it invisible within the landscape in which it is situated; his LOW Bar features a large multi-purpose cardboard wall-piece assembled without any gluing.
Tonight Campos Costa will be taking part in a lecture entitled "(R)innovate Tradition" at Macau-based architecture and design studio Lines Lab (some readers may remember previous posts about the studio).
The lecture is also a product launch to celebrate Campos Costa's new piece, a lamp made with cork, a material often employed in the construction industry especially for its insulation properties, that the architect and designer already used in different projects, including the "13 longue chair" installation during Milan's Salone del Mobile.
What does it mean to you "(R)innovate Tradition"? Pedro Campos Costa: To be true to tradition, intending this word in some cases as the material or the technique or technology employed to make something, and creating through it a building chacterised by contemporary and modern design or a product for modern needs. I think there is an interest for this kind of projects and concepts and that renovating traditions through new and modern ideas is something that works well not only for a smaller product, but also for our cities. As an architect I do apply these concepts to city scales, master planning and objects of design, looking at the past and reinterpreting it.
What fascinates you about cork? Pedro Campos Costa: It's a very Portuguese material, since we have a lot of it in Portugal, but what truly fascinates me about it is the fact that cork is a truly amazing material with a lot of properties: it is waterproof, and recyclable so you can destroy it and endlessly rebuild with it a new product; it's light, flexible, and doesn't burn; it's very good for acoustics and insulating and it is allergy-proof. This is why I find it extremely exciting working with it.
Some of the shapes you create through your projects are very fluid, do you employ any kind of computer software to design them? Pedro Campos Costa: Cardboard projects such as the LOW Bar or the stand for the environmental agency were laser cut using a CAD CAM system, but usually I already know what I want to do and where I want to get before sitting in front of a computer. My process is not completely computer-based as I'm more interested in designing and using the computer as a tool. So I usually design a project and then I move onto the computer, using it as a pencil.
Do you consider your architectural practice as something separate from your interior design projects? Pedro Campos Costa: All the projects I do are related one to the other. For example, while doing the cardboard project for the Low Bar I developed specific skills that I then decided to apply to other projects linked to product design. In my case usually the product directly derives from my architectural practice, nothing happens casually, but every piece of work is a continuation of my research.
What plans do you have for the future? Pedro Campos Costa: I have an exhibition in Hong Kong closing today, but in the next few months I will keep on promoting the work I've done so far in different places. In September I will be in Milan to present my products in a shop and we're also planning some small exhibitions in Paris and Berlin.
"(R)innovate Tradition", a design talk by Pedro Campos Costa, Manuel Correia Da Silva and Nicola Borge-Pisani, is at Lines Lab, Calçada da Igreja de São Lázaro No.8-A3, Macau, China, 10th May 2013, 6.30 p.m
Architect Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) is celebrated today in the town where he studied and worked, Philadelphia, with the Louis I. Kahn Memorial Lecture featuring Ted Flato of Lake|Flato Architects (6:30 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).
Kahn first studied architecture at Philadelphia's Central High School and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger formed the Architectural Research Group, an association of progressive-minded young architects.
The association dissolved in 1933, but Kahn continued to support its ideas and its social preoccupations about "group housing", becoming actively involved in the housing reform movement and supporting communitarian ideas, sharing the belief with many thinkers and writers that there was a need for a civic architecture that could instil in people a sense of common purpose and democratic participation. During the '30s he worked as a consultant to the Philadelphia Housing Authority and, in the '40s, he focused on the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.
Kahn founded his own studio in 1935, and also worked as design critic and professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and later on at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
He developed his style in his fifties, also influenced by his residence at the American Academy in Rome that allowed him to travel throughout Europe and study monumentality, light, and form from ancient buildings and sites.
Inspired by ancient ruins and by Piranesi, the architect created heavy buildings characterised by a monumentally monolothic style. Up to then architecture had been about shifting aesthetics and choices, but with Kahn it turned once again into a discipline based on masses, elemental geometric solids and the weight of bricks.
Piranesi inspired him the Roman crypto-portici and the underground passages of the fortress-like National Assembly Building in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, characterised by what Kahn defined as "servant spaces", that is stairwells, corridors, restrooms, storage spaces or mechanical rooms and made with bricks, bare concrete and travertine marble, materials that could protect from the sun and the rain (while circulation of air was provided by huge geometric openings).
One of the most striking features remains the fact that the National Assembly was conceived as a majestic concrete mass and does not include any single columns, but hollow columns, parts of space enclosures, were adapted as structural supports.
Kahn influenced many architects from Tadao Ando to Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, leaving behind seminal works such as the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1951-1953), with its concrete tetrahedral ceiling that allowed him to eliminate ductwork and reduced the floor-to-floor height by channeling air through the structure itself; the Richards Medical Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1957-1965), with their trademark severe towers that hosted stairwells and airducts and that embodied the "served Vs servant spaces" dichotomy; the laboratories of the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, and the National Assembly in Dhaka, that he described "ruins in reverse" and that, according to the legend, were spared bombing during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, since they were taken as an ancient historic site.
Fashion-wise Kahn's monolithic masonry is evoked in the solid silhouettes created by Damir Doma in his Pre-Fall 2013 collection that features designs - including oversized coats and jackets with cocooning shapes, sleeveless dresses and sweaters with geometrical embossed motifs - characterised by the same sinister aura that at times surrounds Kahn's buildings.
Kahn is worth being rediscovered for many reasons, in particular for his obsession with solid geometric forms that is at the base of fascinating modern production processes such as 3D printing.
His teachings could also be applied to other disciplines, fashion included: if stuck for inspiration, he once told his students, ask the material you want to use for advice (see video emedded at the end of this post), a principle that should prompt us all to familiarise with and get to know our materials before deciding what to do with them.
If you're gonna miss the Philadelphia lecture, don't despair: the retrospective "Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture" is at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until 11th August and next year it will move to London to mark Louis Kahn's 40th death anniversary. Until then listen and enjoy the chamber opera "Architect" inspired by Louis Kahn and written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan in collaboration with Jenny Kallick and John Downey.
Throughout the decades artists and landscape architects produced a rich body of work that directly moved from the many personal and collective meanings the landscape inspires us. It is indeed not surprising for specific landscapes to often hold a strong grip on the artistic consciousness and some artists - including George Inness, Childe Hassam, Christo and Richard Estes - often employed the landscape as their muse. Land Art is the starting point behind the womenwear's collection of Finnish designer Satu Maaranen.
Entitled "Garment in Landscape", the collection is a mix of art, camouflage and abstract Finnish prints and Haute Couture. The designs included in the collection invite the wearer to enter in communion with the landscape and become part of it through bright colours, surface elaborations, thick paint brush strokes and oversized wide-brim yet linear hats calling to mind the horizon. Some garments are characterised by atmospheric effects that the designer charged with a panoply of visual, physical and emotional experiences. Maaranen won with this collection the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision at the 28th International Hyères Festival that took place last month.
Can you please introduce yourself? Satu Maaranen: I grew up in Järvenpää, a city nearby Helsinki. I'm a graduate of Aalto University. I've studied art since I was 6 years old and later on studied art pedagogy. During my studies in fashion I did internships for a 200-year-old textile house, Erica, in Italy, and with designer Christian Wijnants in Belgium as well as a textile trainee program in Netherlands. I now work as a freelance designer based in Helsinki.
Is there a designer you particularly like? Satu Maaranen: I really like Celine, Hermes and Kenzo, to name a few.
How was taking part in the Hyères Festival and winning the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision? Satu Maaranen: It was amazing. Just being one of the finalists was already an honor and gave me good connections to established people in our business. Winning a competition like this means getting appreciation and being acknowledged. Naturally, I feel happy about getting the prize.
Were you excited about presenting the collection to the jury? Satu Maaranen: I was excited and also a bit nervous. After the presentation the jury members visited our showrooms and I got to chat with all of them a little. The female members of the jury also tried on some of my garments and that felt special. It was great getting feedback from them and I'm glad they liked what they saw.
Will you integrate some of the motifs/ideas from your collection in more commercial outfits for Petit Bateau since the award gives you the chance to collaborate with this brand? Satu Maaranen: I might. The idea of bows and ruffles could be really cute in this context as well.
Can you tell us more about the inspirations behind this collection? Satu Maaranen: I wanted to create a collection that took into account the surrounding landscape, where the garments could be in total harmony with the environment or in total discordance with it. I did research about land art, the camouflage phenomenon and the revolutionary print design in Finland during the '60s. When everybody else was making petite floral prints, Vuokko Nurmesniemi and Fujiwo Ishimoto, who designed for the Finnish textile and fashion house Marimekko, did something abstract and raw, almost primitive. The inspiration for the silhouettes and cuts came from traditional Haute Couture, but I wanted to create an experimental and young atmosphere. In this particular collection the "architectural" shapes are influenced by traditional Haute Couture, like Givenchy and Balenciaga. I guess sometimes architecture itself inspires me as well. I do work a lot with very three-dimensional shapes.
In which ways is the collection informed by art? Satu Maaranen: I was inspired by both camouflage artists as well as land artist. The camouflage artists photograph themselves wearing clothes that perfectly reproduce a wall behind them, or a bench on which they are sitting. I was also intrigued by the astonishing works of many land artists in which the environment has an important role. Therefore I coated some of my fabrics with grass, sawdust or sand. And I also created digital prints of these surfaces. The spontaneous open silkscreen prints resemble different elements and moments in nature, everything from the movement of the sea to the northern lights and summer sunsets.
What kind of materials did you use for your collection? Satu Maaranen: I used textiles such as cotton, silk and viscose. I coated some of them with sand, sawdust or grass; I handprinted or digital printed others. The collection withholds both stiff and thick fabrics and some very delicate and light silk organza. Some of the fabrics are very wearable and washable while others call to mind art pieces.
Will you be taking part in any fashion events soon? Satu Maaranen: Due to winning of the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision, I will be taking part in Berlin Fashion Week this summer with an extended version of my winning collection. Later on I will show my collection in both New York and Paris.
What are your future plans? Satu Maaranen: I would like to work for a big fashion house somewhere in Europe to learn more and become an even better designer, and then someday maybe launch my own brand.
All images courtesy of Satu Maaranen
With thanks to freelance fashion designer Sofia Järnefelt for facilitating this interview.
Even as a young child, Ludovic Houplain's life was ruled by logos: his father worked as a racing driver and his uniform and car were covered in logos of various sponsors; his grandfather owned a factory in which everything, from the letterhead to the door, was emblazoned with the company logo and he had a puzzling fascination with the Carrefour sign that he encountered every day on his way to school.
As he grew up, Houplain found himself surrounded in a world made with logos while working on different projects. Logobook (ed. by Julius Wiedemann, Taschen) is the story of his passion for logos, but also of the making of the Oscar-winning short movie Logorama by H5 (2009).
In 1999 Houplain made a film for Alex Gopher entitled The Child that was set in a typographical environment in which words represented the urban environment. After developing projects based on logos for music videos that were never released for legal reasons, Houplain realised that logos had become for him "Lego bricks", as he states in the volume, and that time had come to work on a bigger project.
Together with H5's François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy, Houplain started developing the background research for a film entirely based on logos. The team went through a painstakingly long process, doing a sort of "casting" of logos, listing which ones would have been better for characters, objects, animals or vehicles and which ones could have been used as props.
The result was Logorama, a 16-minute thriller full of car chases, shootings, kidnappings and apocalyptic adventures in an imaginary world created employing around 2,500 logos. The film treated logos in an ironic way, using them for their merely aesthetic function rather than as cult objects.
While working on the film, Houplain realised that brands have overshadowed products in our world, and that logos are designed to follow fashion and trends. This is the main reason why artists were often enlisted by specific companies to design logos, adapting them to the aesthetics of the decades through which they operated.
Philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky states in one of the essays included in the volume that we are literally bombarded with logos through different media: according to surveys, each of us is indeed exposed to 1,200 logos a day. In a nutshell, we live in the society of hyper consumption in which products are less important than the brand that offers not just goods, but the possibility of buying into a dream, a myth and an image, and this is valid in all industries, from food to fashion, from transport to computers.
Yet, Lipovetsky argues, while young people can name more labels than saints, poets and philosophers, living in a society of brands has made our buying trends unpredictable and impulsive, and, though, certain brands are exerting a greater control on consumers, the latter are actually searching for more individualistic experiences.
It's unlikely that brands will die, though, as foreseen also in the apocalyptic Logorama, and, to prove the point, this weighty tome (it's over 700 pages long), feaures an extensive survey of all the most popular logos around, arranged in alphabetical order and taken from different industries including airlines, apparel, computer software, electronics, food, music and retail, just to mention a few ones. Highly recommended if you're a graphic designer, but also if you're just an obsessed and impenitent fan of logos.
Artist and activist Ai Weiwei first met independent curator and art critic Feng Boyi after returning from New York to Beijing in the early '90s. The duo soon started working together, releasing a series of underground publications known as the Red Flag books that tried to conceptualise the practice of Chinese artists while presenting international contemporary art to China. The series proved extremely influential with Chinese artists, turning for some critics into a manifesto for China's emerging avant-garde.
As the year passed, Ai and Feng continued their research and eventually managed to shook the system with a seminal exhibition that entered history. In 2000, while the Shanghai Biennale was taking place, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi organised a peripheral event entitled "Fuck Off" (Subtitled in Chinese: "Ways to Not Cooperate") that featured forty avant-garde artists. The exhibition was closed by the authorities for its radical content, but, by then, many curators from other countries had already seen it, and the event had acquired cult status. A new exhibition at the Groninger Museum, entitled "Fuck Off 2" and inspired by that first milestone for Chinese contemporary art, will soon be celebrating Chinese avant-garde artists while tackling the issues of free speech, artistic freedom, censorship and democracy.
Curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and chief curator of the Groninger Museum, Mark Wilson, the exhibition includes this time 37 contemporary Chinese artists and artist groups, and analyses the current sociological, environmental, legal, and political climate in China today.
The Groninger Museum has a special connection with Ai Weiwei since it hosted the second solo museum exhibition by the Chinese artist in 2008 and also acquired the works "Water Melons" (2007) and "Grapes" (2009) directly from Ai Weiwei for the Museum Collection. Critique against censorship is expressed by the selected artists in radically different ways: printmaker and illustrator Wu Junyong comments on politics in a style that may be reminiscent of Chinese art, while conceptual artist Zhang Dali juxtaposes enhanced and retouched photographs employed for political propaganda to the original images to spot alterations and comment about the veracity of contemporary mass media and about the "real Vs manipulated" dichotomy.
Photography is represented by quite a few young artists including photographer and freelance writer Lin Zhipeng, who created the blog North Latitude 23 and produced shoots also for creative and fashion magazines, and Ren Hang, known for carefully staged and at times ambiguous images with an exploitative and fetishistic twist about them.
In the tradition of the first "Fuck Off" event, this exhibition also features controversial works such as He Yunchang's gruesome performance "One Meter Democracy" (2010) in which he cut a one-meter long wound on the right side of his body using it as a metaphor for the control exerted by governments over people's bodies.
Some of the performances included attracted the attention of the authorities: Cheng Li's controversial "Art Whore" aimed at comparing the act of commercialising modern art with trading sex, and consisting in the artist engaging with a female partner in unsimulated sex acts before a selected group of invited artists at the Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall in Beijing, landed him a sentence to a year of re-education through labour in March 2011; "Free Sex" (2011) by sex-worker advocate Ye Haiyan, known for her campaigns to improve the conditions of China's sex workers and AIDS victims that led her to work as a prostitute in a low-cost brothel, resulted in constant pressures by the authorities, the media and even Internet hackers.
Freedom of expression remains one of the core themes of this exhibition, even though in quite a few cases the most interesting point about these artists is not just their allegiance to their practices, but also the fact that their works often have universal meanings and strong connections with global social issues, including the pursuit of identity, doubt on the truth and legality of old authoritative value systems, government control and punishment.
While introducing visitors to contemporary art from China, "Fuck Off 2" also promtps them to ponder about the real meaning of taking one's own decision, exterting one's free will and achieving freedom individually, nationally and internationally.
"Fuck Off 2", curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and Mark Wilson, The Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, from 26 May to 17 November 2013.
Image credits:
All images courtesy of The Groninger Museum
1. Wu Junyong, Don't be Silent, 2011, Illustration
If you're a professional costume designer at the moment you're definitely not harbouring good thoughts about the fashion industry. It wasn't rare in the past for a fashion designer to provide the wardrobe for a specific actress, but nowadays cinema, theatre, opera and ballet have been consistently infiltrated by fashion houses and designers claiming of having just created the costumes for this or that production.
Since Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby premiered a few days ago in New York and while movie fans await its arrival in Cannes, features about Miucca Prada's costumes for the film multiplied.
The latest news about costumes mainly focused on Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci working on the new production of Maurice Ravel's "Boléro" at the Opéra de Paris with choreographies by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, and Marina Abramovic as set designer.
In the meantime, Joseph Altuzarra's costumes for the New York City Ballet’s spring gala (with choreographies by Christopher Wheeldon) will debut next week.
All these costume news proved a good excuse to recap further collaborations that happened in more recent years including Rodarte's tutus for Black Swan; Stella McCartney's costumes for her father's first ballet, "Ocean's Kingdom" (2011), and Jean Paul Gaultier's for "Le Nozze di Figaro" at the Opéra National de Montpellier last year; Valentino's gowns for the New York City Ballet, and, more recently, Vivienne Westwood loaning some of her Spring/Summer 2013 looks to the English National Ballet for the company's new campaign.
Lacroix's costumes for Bizet’s "The Pearl Fishers" for the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg wil debut this May, while he's still working on the ballet costumes for Balanchine’s "The Crystal Pavilion" for the Paris Opera Ballet (to be staged next May).
In some cases such as Vivienne Westwood for the English National Ballet, famous fashion designers were enlisted to attract a younger audience or renew the image of a company; in others, directors and producers set on specific designers who have some connections with dance or theatre or a long-standing tradition of working for the stage. For example, Thierry Mugler was a dancer, Altuzarra studied ballet, while Christian Lacroix started working for the theatre in 1986 and designed costumes for productions both in France and abroad, winning twice the Molière Award, France’s national theatre prize for Best Costume Designer.
Yet there is one basic problems with all these contemporary designers and fashion houses suddenly turning costume designers: in most cases the designers do not have any passion for what they are doing or any basic knowledge of the disciplines practiced on that stage or behind that camera. An admirer of Maurice Béjart, the late Gianni Versace was one of the most prolific designers and creator of costumes, but we all know that his sister Donatella doesn't have the same passion or skills.
Designing a costume as we learnt from previous posts on this site is a radically different art from creating a fashion collection. A costume is an exercise in theatricality that must also take into account the movement, gestures and comfort of the wearer; a fashion collection is mainly a commercial exercise, the result of a series of factors, from trends to desirability.
While some designers lack the skills and humbleness to work for the stage, the main problem at the moment is that, rather than designing from scratch, most of these designers are mainly adapting costumes borrowing from their previous work.
Miuccia Prada's Great Gatsby costumes reference recent collections: the infamously famous chandelier dress seen in the film's trailer is for example taken from Prada's Spring/Summer 2010 collection.
Tisci adapted his Autumn/Winter 2010 collection for Givenchy with its memento mori themes in the costumes for Ravel's "Bolero", coming up with a flowing nude silk tulle skirt with underneath skin-tone tulle bodysuits covered in embroideries that imitate bones and reproduce the outline of a skeleton.
Apparently the main aim of the choreographers was pushing the eleven dancers - all wearing the same costume - to abandon themselves to the rhythm of the music, symbolically shedding their skins and turning into moving skeletons. This is why during the piece, from twirling dervishes in tulle skirts they become theatrical incarnations of Kriminal (ah, if only we could ask certain dancers or actors what they think about their costumes...).
One of the critiques moved to such famous collaborations focuses on the fact that a ballet, an opera or a theatrical piece shouldn't be about the costumes, since, unfortunately, in some cases the coverage given to costumes unfairly overshadowed the performance. Yet there is also another problem with these recent examples.
Recycling such themes and inspirations denotes a lack of imagination and of artistic vocabulary, something that became quite clear in 2011 when, interviewed by Newsweek about designing the costumes for her father's first ballet, Stella McCartney stated "I do performance wear and these dancers are athletes, so I have an understanding of that. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you have to use stretch materials if you're working with ballerinas."
In a nutshell, clad them in Lycra and you're done, this is probably why you expected some of the dancers in "Ocean's Kingdom" to start singing "Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats" any minute, their tight suits confusing the boundaries between ballet and musical (yes, there is a difference there).
Talk to different costume designers and they will tell you amazing stories about finding a solution for a specific material, playing with metres and metres of plastic, spending entire weeks trying to turn pasta shapes and pan sponges into glamorously grand jewels.
Costumes create a theatrical illusion for the audience, help giving life and a personality to a character but also free the costume designer's imagination. Think about Bernard Daydé's PVC and lurex costumes for "Bacchus and Ariadne" (1967): they did echo in some ways the space age fashion trends so popular at the time, but they weren't borrowed from a specific fashion collection (and look at the details included in the sketch and at the notes of the designers).
According to reports, Tisci said he had made one of his dreams come true, "It is one of the dreams of a designer to design costumes for a ballet." You wonder why if it's your dream to become a costume designer you don't study for such a career. But then we all know that nowadays many careers aren't built on talents, skills or studies, but on connections and on the celebrities you know.
If you're a costume designer, don't despair, you will have your consolation one day: costumes made decades ago are still touring museums and being showcased at special events all over the world. After generating buzz, attention and advertising opportunity, contemporary costumes tour the windows of flagship stores, but, in thirty years' time, they will doubtfully be exhibited in contemporary art museums. After all Prada is not Umberto Brunelleschi.
Dutch Sabine Staartjes likes to define herself as an "eclectic fashion designer". A graduate of the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, Staartjes often focuses her work on reinventing patterns and fabrics through elaborate processes.
For her graduate collection, entitled "Unexpected Expectations", she employed a Jacquard loom at the passementerie department of the Tilburg-based TextielLab to make thin strips of fabrics that she then wove to make a pixel-like houndstooth fabric.
Staartjes employed this fabric to make her designs that she conceived as a commentary about modern society and social interactions between people.
The designer recently explored once again the social interaction theme through a new project showcased at the Breda-based Moti Museum during the "Te[ch]x(t)iles" event.
The museum, in collaboration with Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie (Stimulation Fund for the Creative Industry), invited ten designers to present their visions about the future of fashion investigating new technological and communicative developments and showing how new techniques can have an impact on the functions of fashion.
Staartjes's project, entitled "SmartPhocus", was inspired by modern communication, by our constant need to check ou our smart phones even in the most unlikely places and by the "distant Vs close-by" dichotomy.
The designer created two booths where two people meet and carry out a conversation seeing only each other's head and hands. In this way the people involved focus on the conversation without being distracted by modern technology.
The booths, made with a digital printed fabric with images of eyes and ears on brightly coloured psychedelic backgrounds, also feature an application developed by Kristi Kuusk, a designer set on bridging the gap between textiles and interactive product design (her work was recently featured in the Pretty Smart Textiles exhibition).
The images printed on the fabric are indeed recognised by the camera embedded in a tablet that displays on the screen augmented layers of noises and information. The application shows the technical noise around us, stresses the importance of focusing on each other, but also hints at a future in which our clothes may be made with a textile capable of constantly changing in the digital world while remaining the same in the real world (see the following video to get an idea).
Can you tell us more about your background? Sabine Staartjes: I'm living in Almere, Holland. I was born in Amsterdam and in about two months I'll be going back there. I studied Fashion Design at the School of the Arts (HKU) in Utrecht, graduating last summer.
What's the main inspiration behind the SmartPhocus project? Sabine Staartjes: SmartPhocus is about having a good conversation without being distracted by your smartphone. With SmartPhocus I wanted to bring back the focus on the exchange between two real people.
There is a lot of talk at the moment about smart textiles – do you feel that new technologies will help us developing genuinely innovative and functional garments in future? Sabine Staartjes: Yes, I think there are a lot of things happening around smart textiles. For example nano-technology offers so many opportunities to make new fabrics and this is really amazing.
So far which is the most challenging technique you used to make your designs? Sabine Staartjes: Two years ago I made a collection called "Knitted Silk". The name of the collection hints at the technique behind it. I cut silk into strings and knitted it into a top and a jumpsuit. I worked on one top for a whole week; it was really a challenging technique because I came up with it myself. For the collection "Unexpected Expectations" I also used a technique I developed by myself to make my own yarn and weave it.
You worked for your graduate collection with the TextielLab, which were the main challenges for that collection yarn-wise/weaving-wise? Sabine Staartjes: I worked in the passementerie department at the TextielLab. We needed three weeks of non-stop weaving on a very old weaving machine to make the ribbon and that was challenging because when you're working on a collection you usually want to have all the materials you need as quickly as possible. But there are processes at the TextielLab that bring you backwards in time, so you need to be patient. The most challenging experience for me was to cut and weave 500 metres of fabric into a pied-de-poule-inspired fabric.
The collection seems to be characterised by a sort of interplay of colours and patterns - did you take inspiration from art to create it? Sabine Staartjes: The inspiration for the collection "Unexpected Expectations" actually comes from cognitive dissonance, a term indicating the feeling of discomfort arising when one is confronted with facts or opinions that contradict one's beliefs. A good example is the hardening of the society: the different layers of society do not mix well, social contact is minimal and too little effort is made to get to know each other. I do think that society must become more intertwined and people should have more respect for each other. This is why the basic element of this collection is weaving, a technique that hints at the interaction between people. I have used known elements and techniques from the Western culture, but with a new approach such as the pied-de-poule pattern, the T-shirt and the traditional Dutch costume, they were all employed as starting points to create a sort of new costume for a modern society. Zooming in and out of certain parts is also an important aspect of this collection: the designs appear different from a distance than from close-up and encourage the observer to come up close to the person wearing the piece to explore it better.
What kind of materials did you use to make it? Sabine Staartjes: I used all different kinds of materials. For the ribbons I made in the TextielLab I used wool and metallic thread. The fabrics that I used for the weaving were cotton and velvet. I also employed 200 metres of knitted yarn to make a woven jumpsuit.
Is there a technique you'd like to experiment with in future? Sabine Staartjes: In every collection I challenge myself to learn something completely new. In future I would like to learn how to make lace.
What are you woking on at the moment? Sabine Staartjes: I'm focusing on my webshop and a new collection. I would like to have my own shop with wearable clothes one day and and also be able to work on collections for exhibitions.
Credits:
All images courtesy of Sabine Staartjes
Photographer: Richard Terborg Model: Judith Siemons Make-up And Hair: Nina Plešnik
Installation credits for SmartPhocus:
Concept & Installation: Sabine Staartjes App: Kristi Kuusk (TU / e) Frank van Duin Unit040 Johan van den Acker Studio Tour The first video embedded in this post is directed, shot and edited by Marijke de Bie for the Te[ch]x(t)iles event.
I'm continuing the punk thread for another day republishing another interview with Vic Godard I did for the publication Erasing Clouds in 2003. Vic and The Subway Sect will be playing at The Continental, Preston on 17th May 2013, check out the live gig details here.
Prologue
"Could you please check if you have any albums by Vic Godard and Subway Sect?" "Well…let me see…" the kind shop assistant at Rough Trade Shop in Talbot Road, London, patiently scans the what's-in-stock pages on the computer in front of him, "…no, I'm afraid, not, we've sold out what we had," he sadly announces, "but right now we have…" he pauses, building some expectations "…we have TICKETS! Yes, TICKETS for his gig!" "Is he doing a gig?" "Yeah! He's playing on 29th November at a place near here!" "Is he still playing?" an innocent looking guy who was rummaging in the punk section of the shop chirps in, turning towards us. "YES! And it's going to be fantastic! Amazing!" the shop assistant goes, beatifically rolling his eyes to the heavens, resembling for an instant one of those statues of saints you can still see in old churches in the South of Italy, with waxen complexion, cheeks inflamed by their love for God, eyes forever looking at their Creator in visionary ecstasy. The shop assistant keeps on praising the event for a while. He's definitely reached a new state of bliss, perhaps nirvana, and that only by announcing that, yes, Vic Godard is still doing his thing.
A beginning
"RRRRRRRRrrrasta Girl!" a fake punk with a broad smile, but not too many teeth shouts at me outside Notting Hill subway station. "Hey, Queen," he goes, pointing at my Jamaican hat, "would you like to have any?" he offers me some of his spaghetti steaming from a take away Styrofoam container. "No, thanks," I politely answer, smiling, perhaps he's spotted my hunger. "Then, do you want a smoke?" he goes, raising two fingers holding an invisible joint to his lips and pretending to be smoking. "Er…" I pause, "Not now, really, I'm waiting for somebody, you see…" I show him a rucksack near my feet, "OK, then…" he shrugs his shoulders and remains silent for a second. Then, still smiling, he tells me his name, where to find him in case of desperate "need" and finally rushes to mingle with the rest of the Saturday crowd flowing from the underground steps and going towards Portobello, where Italian and Spanish tourists are clogging up the stall galleries looking for bargains they'll never find. It's true, I'm waiting for somebody, somebody who's late, but who finally arrives in his car, stops outside the tube station and picks me up. "Nice to meet you, Vic," I shake his hand once I'm in his car and, while I'm beaming because I'm finally meeting one of my heroes in flesh and bones, ex-Subway Sect's singer Vic Godard, he drives me far away from the madding crowd.
"I was thinking, have you seen that Julien Temple movie?" he breaks the ice. This is crazy: I just wanted to ask him about The Filth and The Fury, Temple's movie about The Sex Pistols. "That's an amazing movie!" I enthuse while images of the movie quickly flash through my mind, "but I think the director should have mentioned Subway Sect as well," I add. "But he mentions us!" Vic reminds me, "In a way he mentions us. Remember that he underlines the fact that there was so much talent in the audience. That was us, he didn't have to actually name the band, because everybody already knows what he's talking about. Besides, the movie is about The Sex Pistols, so they couldn't show footage of other bands." "Oh well, I suppose I don't care about whom the film is, I wanted to see some footage of the Subway Sect as well!" I cry like a little petulant brat. "But as Subway Sect we were never really filmed," Vic explains, "I think we were only filmed three times in the punk era. There's a German documentary about us, then Don Letts did films of us on tour and there is another video about Subway Sect as well, but there aren't others. That's it."
I'm still skeptical; I just wanted to see Subway Sect included in Temple's film, so I change the topic and tell Vic I recently saw ex-Aztec Camera Roddy Frame playing in Glasgow to an audience of Postcard Records veterans totally in love with him. "I met Roddy Frame through Edwyn Collins because he was a good friend of him and when we were doing the album 'Long Term Side Effect' (Tugboat, 1998), Edwyn suggested to get him playing on one of the tracks, 'Cold London Blues'," Vic reveals, then continues.
"And I met Edwyn in the early '90s. After starting working at the post office, I recorded some songs with Paul 'The Wizard' Baker. He had a four track in his bedroom, that was where we first did demos for 'Johnny Thunders'. I sent the demo to Geoff Travis and he suggested to get Edwyn to produce it, so he sent me around to Edwyn's house. I think it was 1991. That's when I met him. When he covered Subway Sect's 'Holiday Hymn' with Orange Juice in the early '80s I thought it was awful, now I quite like it. I never liked it when I heard it originally. Maybe it was a really bad tape. I remember hearing it in a hotel room, on a cassette. Somebody played it to me on one of those tiny cassettes player, so maybe it was just bad quality tape! But I like the version of the song that is on Orange Juice's Postcard CD." Vic pauses, before remarking "I really like it NOW."
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
"I'm used to carrying weights," Vic smiles, taking my rucksack with all my stuff and carrying it for me, while I get a hold of my microphone and mini disc to record him as we walk along a London park near the zoo. Vic's so skinny that I'm concerned about him being able to carry my big bag, but he reassures me, indicating the sack hanging from his shoulder, "I'm a postman! I'm used to this." Vic has indeed been working as a postman for the last 16 years. "Are postmen into music in Italy?" he asks. "They don't have a lot of time to do that, I guess they work too much." I reply. "I work from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m., so that's not that bad," Vic explains. "Actually things aren't really that good in Italian post offices: a lot of people work on short term contracts and are fired after only a few months…" I add. "We have a lot of short term people at the post office here as well, at the end of three months they have to go. And Securicor is taking over the post office as well…" he adds, shaking his head.
Vic is actually in good company working at the post office, since other musicians also work there. "The Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers works with me. Of the band who's going to back me up in my next gig, three of us are postmen," Vic confirms, "but Paul 'The Wizard', the keyboardist, finishes working at 7 p.m. and we start at 5 in the morning, so by the time he's finished his working day it's nearly our bed time…" Vic smiles. It is with these postmen and musicians that Vic has recorded his latest album. Entitled "Sansend" (Motion Records, 2002), the new album is actually penned by Subway Sect featuring Vic Godard since it's a collaborative project with several other musicians.
Recorded with Vic's friend Nick Brown, Sansend also includes, apart from The Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers and Paul 'The Wizard', vocalist Chantelle Lamond and special guest Larry Marshall, who does the vocals on the track "Heavy Heavy Heavy Load". "The new album took a long time to be recorded," Vic explains, "but that's because we only really worked on it on Sunday afternoons. If you were only working about five hours on Sunday afternoons on something, it would take you at least a couple of years to do it. We found a fantastic violin player who lives near me, Phil Martin, who's in the band now. The Bitter Springs didn't play on the album, but their singer, Simon Rivers, did the lead vocals on one of the songs and he wrote it as well. He actually wrote the bits that he sings and I wrote the bits that I do. Though we had different singers and two different violinists, I mainly did the whole record myself, just by playing the tracks into a computer."
Throughout his career, Vic often played with different musicians while recording albums or playing gigs. I wonder if he ever had problems organising the sessions. "Oh, no," he shrugs, "I never have any difficulty in anything that has got to do with music. When there's music involved, I'm always in a good mood. If I'm in a room where music is produced and I'm involved in the process, that will be really fine by me." Though, as stated, Sansend is released under Subway Sect's name, "It doesn't sound anything like Subway Sect," Vic points out, "…hopefully not!" he exclaims and continues. "The old stuff is different from what we're playing now. The lyrics aren't that similar and the music is quite a bit different. Having said that, a lot of the guitar playing is exactly the same as it was. I haven't changed my style at all, but now everything on Sansend is controlled by the beats, whereas in the punk era we never had this consistently as we had different drummers and it was only when we got Bob Ward in as a drummer, that we became listenable. I used to write songs on the guitar during the punk era, now I'm writing them on a piano, that's the big difference from the punk period."
In a way Vic has also changed the way he records his songs: "I've got a four track, a mini disc four track, so that I can record demos in my front room. I never use Edwyn Collins' studio because it's too far away. I live in Kew and he lives in West Hampstead. It takes me an hour and a half to get there, so about the time I get there, I'm sort of exhausted from the driving! Driving in London has become terrible. In the mid-90s, I could drive to his studio in less than an hour, but now you'd think yourself lucky if you got there in an hour and a half because there are so many more roads and schemes. Where I live there is no underground on Saturdays and Sundays to Kew Gardens and you have to get a bus. And this has been going on for a year by now. Besides, the studio where I was working with Nick Brown has been taken over by other people, but, luckily, he's now got his own studio in his house, near where I live, so that's where we're going to work from now on."
As announced by the devoted shop assistant at the Rough Trade shop, Vic played a gig on 29th November in London at The Tabernacle. "The Bitter Springs backed me up and Scottish poet Jock Scot did a couple of tracks with us as well," Vic lists the line-up, "The band who played with me isn't really on "Sansend", except for two of them, and the violinist Phil Martin and Nick Brown the producer were added to The Bitter Springs for the gig. Actually, there was also another band on, The Trojans featuring Gaz Mayall, they had a reggae night in the '80s, but they did their set after us, because there was a party after midnight."
Though Vic is planning new gigs, he doesn't seem to be too worried about rehearsing: "We don't need a lot of time to rehearse. We have quite a rough and ready sort of approach. We could go along and do a gig even as we are, but it would be sloppy. What we're doing now is trying to learn more songs, we want to do as many songs as we can, that's why we're rehearsing, we don't want to just do the old numbers because we already know them. What we're doing now is working on learning the tracks from the new album, though during the gigs we'll also play a few of the old tracks. But we're not really learning anything that we don't know unless it's on "Sansend". We're not going to play anything by The Bitter Springs because there's not enough time as there's another band that has got to play. When we are going to do other gigs, we'll have time and The Bitter Springs will be able to play their set with me. They have a new album out, so I'm looking forward to playing their new record with them."
Apparently, there will be quite a few chances for The Bitter Springs to play also their tracks because more gigs with Vic are being scheduled. "We're carrying on playing gigs also in January because the album is coming out again in January," Vic reveals, "We're doing this because we hope that the shops that haven't taken the album when it came out will take it after Christmas. So we're going to keep on trying to do gigs. Actually, we aren't really going to re-release the album, but we're going to try and get the shops who didn't take it to buy it," Vic corrects himself.
"The whole story about the album being rejected by the record shops puzzles me a bit, so I ask Vic to explain me what's going on with music distribution in London: "When the album was released, none of the shops had seen good reviews of it. They simply said 'No, we can't take this'. We actually got good reviews of live stuff and we got great reviews of Sansend in Uncut, Mojo, Q. All three of them did good reviews, but when they did it, no one could get the album in the shops because the shops hadn't taken it! We got a few orders on the Internet and that did help. So now we're hoping that once the shops see the reviews and how good they are, then, some of them will hopefully take a couple of copies. Things are getting better all the time for me, but I'm not the only one who has got a distribution problem. It's not just me, it's any band which is not on a major label. There's not many independent record shops left, everything is owned by the same people, they own TV stations, shops, radio stations, so if you're not actually on their books, they'll say they'll start losing money if they play or buy your record."
Getting airplay also seems to be difficult for Vic. "XFM said Sansend was too avant-garde," Vic sniggers, "But I have one supporter on another radio station: Robert Elms, who works on London Live, which once was called GRM. Robert plays my records regularly, but they're not allowed to play more than three records an hour, so they don't play that much music, the radio programmes are mainly talk. There was a music session on that station until about five years ago. But when they changed their name to London Live, they became more talk-based. The only time I ever got an interview on radio was on that station because Robert's a big fan of mine. So as long as he's got a job there, I can get some airplay! He's always played my records ever since he was on that station. I bet his boss doesn't like him!" Vic concludes, laughing, before asking me, "Is it easy to have an independent record label in Italy?" "No, actually the situation is quite dramatic, because once you release the records you never manage to find anybody keen on distributing you, so you end up selling your MP3s on the Internet, and getting depressed because you never seem to manage to sell the actual product." I quickly explain. "Hmm, it sounds even worse than here…" Vic somberly comments.
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
Alain-Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes is a story of lost innocence and missed opportunity. The main character, Augustin Meaulnes, spends his whole life trying to recapture the magic moments grasped while visiting a mysterious domain. Enchantment, frustration and discomfiture characterise the novel, which is a hymn for the departed days of youth. Rumours say that Subway Sect took their inspiration from French novels, but Vic only used to mention in interviews Le Grand Meaulnes as his favourite book of all time, and, in a way, Subway Sect's story can somehow be compared to Fournier's novel. The story of the band is a story of loss, a story of what could have been achieved and was never grasped.
Formed in 1976, Subway Sect managed to enter the Olympus of punk rock thanks to that long gone Monday in September of the same year, when they played the first night of that two days stint passed to the history of music as the Punk Festival at The 100 Club in London. Their line up included Vic on vocals, Paul Myers on bass and Rob Symmons on guitar. That Monday, right after Subway Sect, there were two other bands, The Sex Pistols and The Clash. Mark Perry's fanzine Sniffin' Glue hailed Subway Sect as "real punks," writing in a review of their first gig, "The Subway Sect hit the stage first and had all the intellectual wimpeys cringing in horror and yapping about how the band couldn't play etc. … They chew gum on stage and look vacant. The four songs they did were great."
Subway Sect's first single, "Nobody's Scared", came out in March 1978, followed by a second one, "Ambition", in December of the same year. Unfortunately, by that time Bernie Rhodes, Subway Sect's manager and also manager of The Clash, had already sacked the whole band, apart from Vic. At that time Vic was living on the dole with the rest of the group. When Rhodes sacked the band he increased Vic's wage to fifty pounds a week, which, in those years, was quite a sum of money.
Many years have passed from that day which destroyed Subway Sect; would Vic make the same choice and leave the band behind if he could go back in time? "Oh no, definitely not!" he raises his bushy eyebrows and vigorously shakes his head, "If I could go back in time, I would get rid of Bernie Rhodes first thing!" He laughs, "We should have stayed well clear of Bernie and tried to manage ourselves as Subway Sect. Bernie's problem was that he sacked the band!"
"Were they pissed off?" I ask. "Yeah, they were really pissed off. I coped with this by just avoiding seeing them for a couple of years. I think that if we had had a manager that was only the manager of our band and not the manager of another band, things would have been different. At that time we were at a tax loss situation, like when you get too many expenses against what you're earning. When Bernie had to pay taxes and didn't have any money, he just paid us with whatever The Clash earned, it was really a small wage, and put it against the expenses. I don't think we had some good tracks at the time but I think that if Bernie hadn't been involved we would have probably had an incentive to actually improve. We weren't really going anywhere, but with Bernie it was really obvious that we weren't."
Some of the punk-era friends Vic had are invariably lost now in the folds of time. "I did a gig with Siouxie and the Banshees in 1979, that was the last time I saw them. Some members of Subway Sect now come to the gigs, but I've never seen the drummer again, Bob Ward. He used to live in Beckenham in the East End and we used to meet in a rehearsal place in Camden. We got him by putting an ad in the Melody Maker. We auditioned a lot of drummers and he was the one we thought was best, but he wasn't really a friend of us. It would be great to get together again, I don't even know if he's alive or in jail or what he is. But it would be good to see him because he's the only one that I haven't seen from those times."
"I still see The Sex Pistols' drummer Paul Cook, and, before he died, I was also in touch with Nils Stevenson. About the members of Subway Sect, well, I delivered a letter to one of them, Paul, the bass player, this morning, he was on his way to work when I was on deliver on Downing Street. I also see Rob Symmons, the guitarist, he used to work around the corner from the studio where we were recording, that's why he does backing vocals on the new record and he's going to come to the gig as well. But the rest of the band never learnt how to play the guitar, as they never touched it since 1977, though Paul Myers did a year in The Professionals in 1978. But he never took up the bass after that neither did Rob get into music again."
At the beginning of the '80s, Subway Sect's sound changed and became more jazz and swing oriented, tuxedo and bow tie replaced the grey suits of the punk era. Were the fans pissed off by this change? "Oh well, I didn't really have any fans," Vic candidly admits. It's a statement I refuse to believe, but he insists, "I didn't really when I did that. The people we were playing to at the gigs really loved that stuff. We did one tour when we supported Bauhaus in Liverpool and we really had problems since the audience hated it. But in all the other gigs on that tour people loved it. There were skinheads that used to dance about to our stuff in the early '80s, we never really went down bad when we were doing that stuff. It wasn't as if we were doing punk stuff and then we started doing jazzy things. The thing was that when we were doing punk stuff, they were throwing things at us, bottles and everything and when we were doing the jazz stuff, they really loved it, so I thought 'Wow! They like this!' It didn't seem to me as if they hated it at all, actually they seemed to like it more than anything else we had ever done. One of the tracks, 'Hey Now I'm In Love,' was even chosen by Capital Radio as record of the week at that time. It was the first time our stuff was getting played constantly on the radio in London and I had never had it before, so it was a big success for me!"
At present, most of Vic Godard & Subway Sect's releases are out on James Dutton's Motion Records. Vic's first release on Motion Records was the glorious compilation "20 Odd Years: The Story Of Vic Godard and The Subway Sect" (1999) that contained all the classics. The collection is divided in two CDs, the first one more grim and punky, the second more gentle and swingy, incarnating the next impersonation of Subway Sect, when they returned at the beginning of the'80s in their new swingy and jazzy attire. Carefully compiled, the double album unfolds the story of the band and of Godard throughout the songs, 'Nobody's Scared', 'Ambition', 'Enclave', 'Split Up The Money', 'Vertical Integration' 'Johnny Thunders', 'Stop That Girl' and 'T.R.O.U.B.L.E.', just to mention a few of them. "James did a really good job with the re-releases of Subway Sect's records," Vic states, "The sound was so bad in the original records. All that stuff didn't sound like the way we sounded as a band, nowadays with a computer you can actually recreate roughly what it sounded like then. So you can really hear it for the first time as it was."
Through the record label site, Motion Records often asked Vic's fans to provide lost recordings or pics of Subway Sect to include in the re-releases. "It took a long time to put all the material together," Vic remembers, "We had to get different tapes from different places and we were always hoping to get better tapes of the older stuff. We never got a hold of the master copies of a lot of the old tracks," he pauses "To tell you the truth, I don't think they exist at all!"
Motion Records has also been releasing reggae records which are real masterpieces of the genre, from King Tubby to The Skatalites, from Augustus 'Gussie' Clarke to Lee 'Scratch' Perry and to the latest compilation "Never Forget Jah (The Early Years '76-'86)" by Peter Broggs, "Motion did a good job also for what regards the reggae stuff, the records released by Motion were not available on CDs, they were only available on singles," Vic reminds me, "but if you only have a pile of scratched reggae singles, it might be worthwhile to get a better quality product, such as any of these compilations." Reggae DJ Don Letts, more famous for his films on the punk era, recently released a compilation, "Dread Meets Punk Rockers Uptown" (Heavenly, 2002), that anthologises the records he used to play at the Roxy Club between 1976 and 1977. "I don't keep in touch with Don Letts, I haven't actually seen him for years," Vic reveals, "The album he released was quite good. But I haven't been listening to a lot of reggae stuff recently. I've only got that record by Sean Paul, 'Gimme The Light', which I love and think is the best reggae record for ages. Actually, it's not even reggae, it's a sort of New York style of reggae, it's more a hip hop record. Have you heard that Busta Rhymes remix of that?" Vic asks me, "That's good as well."
Vic also released records with Scottish record label Creeping Bent. Creeping Bent's band The Secret Goldfish co-wrote with Vic their single "Somewhere In The World" and released a split single with him. Later on, The Leopards and The Nectarine No.9 worked with him together with former Creeping Bent fellows Adventures in Stereo, who actually recorded another version of Vic's "Nobody's Scared", released on the Bentboutique compilation, which also contains two tracks sang by Vic, "Make Me Sad" and the Lou Reed cover "She's My Best Friend". The latest Creeping Bent compilation on which a track by Vic appeared ("Nothing Is Easy") is "Nouvelle Vague" (Creeping Bent, 2002). "Creeping Bent's Douglas McIntyre had a singles club and rang me up to ask me if I could do a track for the club and I did two of them," Vic tells me how he got in touch with Creeping Bent's managing director. "If I do gigs in Scotland, unless we're doing gigs as part of a tour, it's quite difficult to get a whole band up to Scotland, since it costs a lot and you have to be paid a lot to do that, that's why I use to work with Scottish bands in Scotland, because they're already there and the only person that has got to move is me…it's similar to what Bernie used to do with me…" he mumbles. "But they like working with you!" I exclaim. "Oh yeah, we both like working with each other, I love working with The Leopards!" he admits, "And I did gigs with The Nectarine No.9. I did a great gig with them at the LSE a couple of years ago. It was really good. I've played with them more than once. I first met Jock Scot when he was playing with them. I would definitely love to do a gig in Scotland."
Vic has also got another connection with Scotland: he's collaborated with writer Irvine Welsh on a major project, a musical play. "It is entitled Blackpool and was staged in Edinburgh in February and March 2002 at the Queen Margaret University College, directed by Harry Gibson and in collaboration with the third year company of the college," Vic explains. "Working with Irvine was fantastic. I'd do it again anytime, though Irvine's always so busy, so I don't know when it will be possible. It was really good. He emailed me the transcript and I tried to transcribe his words into songs. We're going to do at least one of the Blackpool songs during the forthcoming London gig and an LP will be done out of the musical."
And talking about LPs and CDs, I wonder what's in Vic's record bag today: "I've bought two records tonight, Christina Aguilera's and Naughty By Nature featuring 3LW's 'Feels Good ('Don't Worry Bout A Thing)'. But what I wanted wasn't in the shop: I was looking for the new Jennifer Lopez record, have you heard it? It's fantastic!" "Do you like her stuff?" I ask, totally amazed. "No, not normally," he replies, "but I like the new one, because it's based on old beats. Otherwise I like R&B, hip hop and compilations. I have millions of comps. I have a lot of CDs with different tracks by different people. In the end it's a marketing ploy, but I like albums with different singers, I don't think there are a lot of artists I could listen whole albums of. But I've been listening to Bob Dylan's last few albums, he sounds like a skiffle band, he's simply fantastic!"
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
"This is Camden Town," Vic announces while driving. "You see, those are the first shops of Camden, that's the Jazz Café," he adds, pointing at the buildings we see along the way. "At the time of Subway Sect, we used to rehearse in Camden Town and we used to crash in a rich suite further down the road." Listening to Vic talking right now is a bit like going around with Guy Debord on one of his missions around London to draw the umpteenth psychogeographical map. London can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but right now London is a city of possibilities in which Camden Town suddenly assumes another value, a value given to it by memories.
"You know that design tycoon Sir Terence Conran?" Vic asks, "He used to live downhere, his son was one of The Clash's roadies, so we used to crash out in his house. It was one of these huge houses down here and it was at a walking distance from where we rehearsed in Camden. We used to walk down there and try to get money out of Bernie Rhodes! Unsuccessfully…" "Subway Sect's aim seems to have always been trying to get money out of Bernie Rhodes…" I interrupt. "Oh yes!" Vic confirms, "And Bernie made crash any band that he got over up to London in Terence Conran's flat. At one point he was managing an all female French band call The Lous, who took their name after Lou Reed. We went on tour with them in 1978, I don't know how Bernie got involved with this French girl band, but we did a tour called 'The Great Unknown Tour' with them all around Britain, after The Clash started getting quite big. Well, Bernie made them all sleep in there, they were all crashing on the floor. Also half of The Clash was sleeping there. Terence didn't live there because he was divorced, his wife Shirley Conran, author of the book Superwoman, lived there most of the time. One day Terence Conran came back. We were meant to be using only one part of the house and there were all these people using his favourite room so he slammed the whole lot out and we could never use that again. The Clash even had their office in his house at one point!" Vic keeps on driving and recounting his story, then at one point he stops and indicates a row of beautiful white houses on the right side of the road. "There!" he exclaims, "It was one of these houses, see these white places with the balconies, it was one of them!" "It looks so posh!" I remark. "I know, it's a lovely place," he says. "John Nash designed these houses. As I told you, we didn't really live there, we only used to crash there, if you went to a gig and you missed the last bus, rather than walking all the way to were we lived, we could just go in there till the morning."
Since Vic has mentioned The Clash, it doesn't seem inappropriate to ask him about them. How were they perceived by Subway Sect? "We actually used to share the rehearsing room with them, so you couldn't really see them as icons, because we spent with them a lot of time. We saw The Sex Pistols as icons originally, but then when we met them they were just ordinary blokes…" he pauses, then continues, "I mean, to tell you the truth, they didn't behave in an iconic way, so that's what stopped you a bit from thinking about them as icons. But the only reason we started making music was seeing The Sex Pistols, that was the only reason why we started learning how to play instruments."
In Julien Temple's movie, Johnny Rotten speaks in a very human way of Sid Vicious, as he actually remembers how he tried to save him from heroin. In the same way, when The Voidoids' Richard Hell wrote a review of Alex Cox's movie Sid and Nancy, he pointed out, "One could wish that the social structure and its values … could have been implicated some for the depressing fate suffered by Sid and his girl. Because it was fate. Sid's whole identity was self-destructive." "Sid was a really sensitive person trying to play the part of a real thug," Vic remembers. "He taught me the first three chords on the guitar, he taught me how to play 'Chinese Rocks' on the guitar, that was the first time that I could actually strum those chords on the guitar in the rehearsal place one day. I think you might say old Sid started me off as a guitarist!" Vic exclaims. "He once said on Radio One that his favourite bands were Abba, Subway Sect and The Ramones! That was the best thing that had ever happened to us! You didn't have any respect for all the other people who said they liked you, but if Sid said that, then you'd really thought you'd made it!"
"Vic smiles, recollecting. Sid Vicious OD'd in 1979. What happened when Vic heard about his death? "I was into heroin myself at the time," he admits, "so I was a bit insulated from it all. You are when you're on heroin, because all you're thinking is how to get the gear for that day." "How long were you addicted?," I ask. "Too long!", he exclaims and stops talking to think, then continues, "From when I was about 19 to maybe when I was 30 or roughly around that age, maybe 32, I'm not really sure. The best thing about heroin is that it is really good to give you a grasp of how much money is worth. That is the best thing that it did for me, it taught me how to live on nothing at all. When you're on heroin, all your money must go into heroin. If you spend one penny on something other than tin foil or heroin, it seems sacrilegious. So everywhere you go, you have to bunk fares, because you think 'I'm not going to pay a 1.60 pounds fare to do this, I could use the money to buy the gear.' Now, I know how to live: as a postman I'm very poorly paid, so I know now how to live onto next to nothing quite well!" "How did you get clean?" "I got on methadone. That is illegal in Italy, isn't it?" "At present heroin users can get methadone in Italy, but it's not enough." "What do you mean, they also use?" "Yes they do." "So, you don't have heroin on prescription in Italy? "No, we don't." "You see, I got clean in a clinic in London, and actually there were more Italians than English in the clinic. There weren't many other people from other countries, so I've always thought that other countries had better laws and maybe in Italy they had more draconian laws."
Vic pulls his car in King's Cross railway station parking lot. "A while back I had to catch this train to Glasgow and I was really stressed out because I couldn't manage to park the car," Vic tells me, "In the end I got the train by the skin of my teeth. You know, it's very expensive to leave your car here. I spent a fortune when I left my car here for 24 hours when I went to play to Scotland." We keep on chatting about this and that, about drug laws and politics in Italy before a car park assistant in a fluorescent jacket taps on the windscreen. "Are you dropping somebody at the station, Sir?" the guy asks Vic. "Yes, she's got to get a train," Vic politely answers. And that means that I have to stop recording our conversations.
Beginnings.
Beginnings are tricky things. For the Gospel of John in the beginning there was the Word, for The Slits, in the beginning there was rhythm and for Greil Marcus, author of the seminal book on the alternative history of the 20th century, Lipstick Traces, in the beginning there was "Anarchy In The UK". But beginnings are exciting. The writer Alexander Trocchi never seemed to be happy with one beginning, he would find thousands of new beginnings to tell his stories, he never seemed to be content enough with one beginning. The real problems sometimes are conclusions, because that's the point in which you have to come to an end. That's why music is great, because in songs there is never a conclusion, songs have an outro.
Outro
Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark…Flashes of sudden light alternate to segments of dark in the tunnels pierced by the train. What if the train or the London underground were time machines, what if their movement through space would set off a displaced movement through time and they would turn into means of transport through a dream like the motorcycle in André Pieyre de Mandiargues's erotic novel The Girl on the Motorcycle? Then the train or the underground could freely run through time and might go back to an era of safety pins, rebellion and transgression. They would go back to that night at The 100 Club. The Sex Pistols. The Clash. Anarchy and "Anarchy In The UK". The Slits and Siouxie and The Banshees. DIY and fanzines. Sniffin' Glue and heroin. Majors and independent record labels. The dole. Bernie Rhodes. "Nobody's Scared" and "Ambition". Camden Town. The Subway Sect and Vic Godard.
Sometimes a melancholic sense that particular moments of epiphany that we experienced can never be retrieved overwhelms us and makes us think that the best parts of our lives lie behind us, not ahead. But new beginnings are the secret. Right now Subway Sect and Vic Godard's new beginning is "Sansend". Tomorrow his new beginning will be a new gig. Then another beginning will follow. Then another and another. And Subway Sect will keep on living and playing.
Punk is currently trendy again (well, did it ever go out of fashion?) also thanks to the soon-to-be-opened Met exhibition "Punk: Chaos to Couture". In a previous post I hoped that such events may bring back a healthy dose of rebellion, subversion, individual expression and resourcefulness not only in the fashion industry in general, but also among consumers, yet recent features and articles on many fashion publications and sites prove that, even in 2013, the mainstream is more interested in appropriating the look rather than the principles of punk. Sanitised by the fashion industry that has removed the rebellious and violently expressive music and slogans, punk is now acceptable and desirable, just like Margaret Thatcher. After her death many fashion magazines turned the "Iron Lady" from a detested politician into a desirable icon of style, rewriting her political career and erasing protest from history. To ponder a bit about genuine punk values I'm republishing today an interview with The Subway Sect's Vic Godard that I originally did in 2001 for Spanish publication Go Mag (yes, some parts are dated by now and some of the people mentioned are not with us anymore, but the feature includes bits and pieces of punk history). Vic will be playing live at various venues this year (some unmissable gigs will feature The Sexual Objects - see the final image in this post), check out all the dates here.
"Don't forget to check 'em out 'cause they're a fuckin' amazing band..."- Steve Mick on Subway Sect, Sniffin' Glue, November 1976
I'm wearing my favourite clothes, black trousers and an old black baggy jumper with a few holes here and there and I'm sitting on the floor, leafing through a few old magazines and sparse articles from the punk era. I pass pages and pages of images of the angry Sex Pistols, the powerful and riotous Clash, the long-haired Ramones, the enthralling Buzzcocks and the raw Damned, just to mention a few of the most famous bands of those times. And I start thinking of all the kids who went to their gigs, wearing weird hairstyles, fashionable badges and the all-encompassing safety pins stuck everywhere. I think about all those kids who bought their records and identified with those furious songs that the press and the media considered just as an avalanche of noise. While leafing through these pages, dreaming of being a magician able to summon up from the pages of a spell book a little genie capable of bringing me back to those times, I stumble on a pic of a guy. He's wearing a white shirt, gently clinging to his microphone and pensively averting his gaze from the audience, looking down, perhaps trying to look cool, perhaps trying to remember the lyrics of the song he is performing. Well, I must admit that he doesn't look like a real punk, but more like a suffering poet. Near the pic, taken by Caroline Coon and published by Mark Perry's punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue on its 10th issue in June 1977, there's simply written, in felt pen, "Vic Godard - Subway Sect". Many years have passed since that picture was taken and since Vic Godard and The Subway Sect, clad in their dyed grey clothes sang and played their imperfectly perfect tracks. I wonder how Vic's doing now. "Very good!", his voice, satisfied and relaxed, beams out of the receiver I'm holding and, since he's kindly keen on having a wee chat with me, we take a step back in time and take a little trip to the late '70s. See, I'm not a magician, but I managed all the same to call the proverbial genie.
It is November 1976, when, in an interview on Sniffin' Glue, Paul Myers, the Subway Sect's bass player says that the band took their name from the fact that they went "busking down Hammersmith subway". I wonder if that's true, "Well, not really", Vic reveals, explaining "I mean, we were on our way to our first gig. We just stopped there so we could start off in the underpass, 'cause we carried all the equipment on the bus, drumkit, amplifiers and all that. So, on the way from getting off the bus and getting onto the underground we set up in the underpass." For many, 1976 was the year zero, the year in which punk changed people's attitudes and musical tastes, and it was a time for a change also for what regards inspirations; is it true that Subway Sect took their inspiration from French novels? "Yes, probably in some way, as Françoise Hardy was quite important in that era.", Vic claims, though, musically speaking, he admits another source of inspiration, "The Velvet Underground", he states without any doubt at all. Formed in 1976, Subway Sect, before disgracefully ending their career, managed to enter the Olympus of punk rock icons thanks to that long gone Monday in September of the same year, when they played the first night of that two days stint passed to the history of music as the Punk Festival at the 100 Club in London. That Monday, right after Subway Sect, there were two other bands, The Sex Pistols and The Clash.
"The Subway Sect hit the stage first and had all the intellectual wimpeys cringing in horror and yapping about how the band couldn't play etc. The line up of the Sect is: Vic Godard - vocals, Paul Smith - drums, Paul Myers - bass and Robert Miller - guitar, it was their first gig and I loved 'em. They chew gum on stage and look vacant. The four songs they did were great." Sniffin' Glue, September 1976
It was Malcom McLaren who helped The Subway Sect, "We met him before the 100 Club Punk Festival, when he was working in his shop, 'cause he used to sell different trousers to what was around in those days, non-shared trousers. He was thorough about us 'cause he was paying for the rehearsals as well. So he really made sure that we got good enough to do a gig." Of the Punk Festival, Vic has got a particular memory of something that stuck to his mind, "The sound check: Steve Jones from The Sex Pistols tried to rearrange our songs because he didn't think the music we were doing was correct." And there's also a memory of who eventually became an icon for the punk kids, Sid Vicious: "He liked us a lot. We just thought he was a nice bloke, he was a quite shy sort of bloke, a very nice young man." It's weird to imagine Sid Vicious as a shy man, but, as Vic explains, his image was created by people "because of what he was."
"SUBWAY SECT: This band are real punks ... Their music is very simple, usually using 2 or 3 chords but the strength of the band's personalities as a whole makes up for lack expertise. They deserve more gigs, more chances to show how much they're worth ... A band like this needs to be heard. They're an example to every kid who wants to do something positive." Sniffin' Glue - December 1976
Undoubtedly it must have been rather cool to be able to meet such bands and play with them, still, there was a moment, in February 1977, in which the good star of Subway Sect seemed to fade away for a moment at least. Sniffin' Glue, leaves the positive and kind comments aside to complain "Whatever happened to the Subway Sect. They used to get up on stage and be themselves, now they're rehearsing like an established band", but Vic states, "There were a lot of rehearsals then because we needed them really badly." On the contrary, Vic doesn't rehearse a lot now, "No, never because I haven't got a group, when I play in Scotland I get there the day before, when I'm in England I'm lucky if I have a group I have to rehearse with."
"Subway Sect's set at Harlesden showed that a lot of rehearsing hasn't changed them. They'll still one of the most important bands around." Sniffin' Glue, March 1977
Though they were considered one of the most important bands around in 1977, the Subway Sect would have lived their annus mirabilis, and at the same time their most disruptive year, in 1978, when apart from touring with Patti Smith ("She was a bit of a cow really", Vic remembers), among the others, they also played in Paris at Yves Saint Laurent party: a nebulous, but still vivid memory. "I think I remember Elton John dressed up as a gorilla", says Vic, then he stops to reflect "Oh, that wasn't that weird ... and the ice cream was nice." The first single, "Nobody's Scared" came out in March 1978, followed by a second one, "Ambition", in December of the same year. Unfortunately, by that time Bernie Rhodes, Subway Sect's manager, had already sacked all the band, apart from Vic. At that time Vic was living on the dole with the rest of the group, when Rhodes sacked the band he increased Vic's wage to fifty pounds a week.
But The Subway Sect had already gained quite a few fans: among them there was also Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins who came down to London from Glasgow to look for Vic. Rumours have Vic hiding whenever Edwyn was around on his path "No, I wasn't hiding, we were on tour. He came down when we were doing a tour, 'cause when 'Ambition' came out we were doing nothing, we were supporting the Buzzcocks on tour. And they came down to a place in Camden where we used to rehearse and I just remember Bernard Rhodes making them mop the studio which is what he did to everyone when they came down there: he had them to clean the place, things weren't really florid there then." As time passed, Edwyn Collins remained a constant in Vic Godard's life: Orange Juice covered Subway Sect's "Holiday Hymn"; the refrain "No more rock'n'roll for you" from the Sect's "We Oppose All Rock'n'Roll", can be heard on Orange Juice's "Poor Old Soul - Part 2"; Vic did the back vocals for Edwyn's "A Girl Like You" whereas Edwyn played on Vic's "Long Term Side Effect".
Together with Spearmint's Shirley Lee, Edwyn, who, as Vic tells me, "has just finished recording his new album (Paul Cook who does the drums for him told me)", also wrote the notes for the booklet which accompanied the re-releasing of "What's The Matter Boy?" (2000, Universal Music Operations Ltd.). Finally re-released in its 1979 original mix and gloriously packaged, the collection features, among the other tracks, the legendary "Stop That Girl," the great riffs of "Watching the Devil," the glorious "Enclave," the melancholic "Empty Shell," the sweet "Make Me Sad," plus four tracks recorded in 1978 for the BBC Peel session, which features also the Lou Reed number "Head Held High." "I Am the Emperor of My Cupboard," Vic sang in "Double Negative" and Subway Sect were emperors in their own style as they prove in songs such as "Exit, No Return," "Stool Pigeon" or "Split up the Money." This seminal album is the sensation of punk, of swing, of freedom and of good songwriting made real in a band which, if they had wanted, might have turned a matchbox into a grenade, to paraphrase one of their tracks.
In the sleevenotes, Edwyn writes: "On its initial release, in 1980, staff at MCA were so bamboozled by this LP that they took the unusual step of handing over marketing and promotion to Rough Trade, from whose warehouse I picked up several copies. One for myself and the rest of Orange Juice and four Postcard cronies. Everyone was excited - myself, Alan Horne, Aztec Camera, The Fire Engines. Vic was an inspiration! The music was, in places, primitive but the ideas were always sophisticated. The underground had moved on." On the back cover of the reissued album there is also a comment from ex-Fire Engines, now Nectarine No.9's, Davy Henderson: "23 years ago the other week I saw the Subway Sect for the first time ... Sat 7/5/77. Things changed forever baby. Things changed forever". When I ask Vic which of the quotes he likes best he says "Davy Henderson's: I like that guy". Vic has often played with the Nectarine No.9 as backing band, in the same way as he's often been playing with bands signed to the Scottish independent label Creeping Bent, from The Secret Goldfish, who co-wrote with him their single "Somewhere in the World" and released a split single with Vic, to The Leopards, to the Nectarine No.9, to former Creeping Bent fellows Adventures in Stereo which recorded another version of Vic's "Nobody's Scared" released on the "Bentboutique" compilation, that also contains two tracks sang by Vic, "Make Me Sad" and the Lou Reed penned "She's My Best Friend". "I thought Adventures in Stereo are a really good live band, but I didn't really like the recordings much, I found them a bit too weedy, not really tough enough for me. But then, when they played live they really worked quite a tough sound. And I really liked The Leopards' new album, I played with Mick Slaven, the singer, Skip Reid the drummer and Campbell Owens, the bass player, quite a lot."
"Sniffin' Glue: Are you political through your music? Vic: None of the rest of the group are political, but my songs ... some of 'em have got political ideas in them." Sniffin' Glue, November 1976
Vic has often been considered one of the best songwriters of his generation. In his career, Vic also played with The Black Arabs and he hasn't got any doubt when he is asked what's the best thing he did with them "The song 'Devil's in League With You', which actually was recorded onto acetate and I only heard it a few times, but it was never released properly." The track now features on "Twenty Odd Years - The Story Of Vic Godard & Subway Sect" (1999, Motion Records). The collection is divided in two CDs, the first one more grim and punky, the second more gentle and swingy, incarnating the next impersonation of the Subway Sect, when they returned at the beginning of the'80s in a new attire, more swingy and jazzy. Carefully compiled (it contains also tracks from the unreleased Gooseberry Studio session, recorded in 1977, plus live tracks) and with a little help from Edwyn Collins, The Leopards, The Black Arabs and Adventures in Stereo, this compilation embodies a time and manages to evoke it for the listeners. The compilation unfolds the story of the band and of Godard throughout the songs, 'Nobody' Scared', 'Ambition', 'Enclave', 'Split Up The Money', 'Vertical Integration' 'Johnny Thunders', 'Stop That Girl' and 'T.R.O.U.B.L.E.', just to mention a few of them.
The Subway Sect truly had an ambition, that of making music, being more interested in it than in making money, that was their strength, and they fulfilled it. Though they never turned into pied pipers of a particular music movement and never managed to create a massive horde of delirious fans behind them, nonetheless they created a niche for themselves, making affectionate music for affectionate fans. Ataractic towards the world and the hall of fame, The Subway Sect and Vic Godard definitely found a place in the heart of the cognoscenti and of those with a good ear for great music. "Twenty Odd Years" is a golden straw in the haystack of the music releases.
"I stumbled round as seeded/ And found the magic lot/I knew that time remembered what the rest/of us forgot/ I threw the secret formula upon/the table plain/And sat there waitin' for the strings to/begin again." - Vic Godard, "Vertical Integration"
Vic Godard seems to have found a new integration and a new place nowadays: going back to his connections with Scotland, there's another interesting piece of news about a collaboration between Vic and the writer Irvine Welsh, author of the acclaimed Trainspotting. The greatest surprise is that no, Vic is not going to feature on the soundtrack of the umpteenth movie taken from Welsh's novels, the two are putting together a musical. Hmm, sounds spooky if you think that on Vic' 1986 "T.R.O.U.B.L.E." album there is a song entitled "I'm Coming To Write A Musical", weird coincidence or forecasting? Who knows ... But how is it working with Irvine "Really really good: it's the best thing I've ever done. I've never worked with a lyricist before, so it has been a totally new thing to me to put in the music to someone else's words. Yeah, totally unique." And if you are wondering who will star in the musical, for instance, ubiquitous Scottish actor Tam Dean Burn, well, you still have to wait, since as Vic states, "The casting hasn't been done yet. The music has been sort of written, but it's not been recorded yet and I know the script is written, but the actors haven't been interviewed yet. I'm finishing my own album hopefully by February and that's when we probably start recording all the music for the musical, which is called 'Blackpool' and will start in summer 2001."
In an interview appeared on Sniffin' Glue in November 1976, Vic describes a gig Subway Sect played: "We did Sex Pistols' numbers, a couple of ... not the ones they've written, we did 'Steppin' Stone' and a couple of ones I've written then which we don't do now. We did a complete 'noise' first, at that party - that's what made everyone walk out - where everyone smashed their guitars around. I just chanted some poetry over it all." I wonder if he would have liked to write a book, just like The Voidoid's Richard Hell did, or some poems "Yes, I'd love to. I was supposed to. Sometimes I'll do." Meanwhile he is collaborating with Edinburgh's poet and writer Paul Rekkie, "Yes, I've been recording with Paul as I'm getting different lyrics and different voices on this album, so it's just not me doing all the singing, so really, that's why he came about. There's probably going to be one track with him on it I think, but I wanna get a few different guests on there."
At present, apart from working as a postman, Vic is engaged in a different project: his 1982 album "Songs For Sale" is soon going to be reissued, though he advises "Not probably yet for a while, not until probably later on in the year 'cause I still want to get these two albums out of the way first, the musical one and the album I'm working on now, so I'll be onto that after those two."
Vic has got a favourite song from Subway Sect, "Oh well, there's a really good one, the one that we're going to add to Songs For Sale that I found 'cause a fan sent me a live tape, a song called 'Falling In Love Takes Time' that we did in 1982 and that was never on Songs For Sale at that time and we are going to put it on this one. It was taped at Ronnie Scott's but the quality is quite good." Vic admits that if there is a track he would like to see re-released is "Definitely 'Falling In Love Takes Time', but I've got others other than that one. I've got loads of unreleased tapes of songs I've done in the period between 1990 and now. "
At present most of Vic Godard & Subway Sect's stuff is coming out on James Dutton's Motion Records, "James Dutton used to work for Bernie Rhodes in the early '80s", Vic remembers, "Then when Dexy's Midnight Runners became big he started working for ITN as a camera man and then I didn't see him for roughly ten years at least and it was through the boyfriend of the bass player who worked with me on the End of The Surrey People album, Clare Kenny, that I met him again. Her boyfriend actually knew Jim and he was in hospital at the time 'cause he had been injured and she told me about him and that's how we got together again. He had an idea of starting off a record label and that's how it turned out, mainly it has to do with reissuing reggae." Motion Records often asked Vic's fans to provide lost recordings or pics of Subway Sect, apparently everyone was ready to help "Yes, I've got loads of live tapes sent to me from different areas. And some of them have actually been used."
King Tubby and Larry Marshall's works released by Motion show that the label is also a safe harbour for fans of quality reggae and there are a few releases from Motion Vic particularly likes "The Lee 'Scratch' Perry ones, they are absolutely brilliant. The new one is coming out in February I think and the tracks on it have never been heard in this world."
"The first group I saw was the Subway Sect. There's no good or bad states with this mob. They are just an experience, although the audience were pretty subdued during the band's set. The applause was sparse but the music was excellent. 'Eastern European' was the best song: 'I take no acceptance of those hoardings I see/As I run along a street I prefer not to take it/I prefer quotes directed at me/Cigarettes they look at me/And tell me I'm an American/But my recent dreams advise me/They'd be extra life/If I were Eastern European/Then I can concede.' Yes, the Subway Sect are a wonderful band."- Sniffin' Glue, June 1977
Fans would probably love to see old videos of the band, but do they actually exist? "I really made one, no, two videos. One that I've got a copy of which was done when the "End Of The Surrey People" album came out. We did a video with Douglas Hart from the Jesus & Mary Chain who did it for us for really nothing apart from the cost of the film, that's the only video I've ever done really. I did a thing for the French TV before, but there was never actually a video of it, that was singing, 'Now I'm In Love' for the Songs For Sale album, so it was in the early '80s, and that was filmed as a video." Probably fans would love to see these videos, in the same way they love the live gigs. Vic announces that the audience's response during his last gigs was "Fantastic! Enthusiastic! But I suppose that's because the singing is in tune now whereas usually in the past it would be sort of way off. There was a Velvet Underground tribute up in Edinburgh last August that was with The Leopards, it was good. Normally in London we don't get any money, but I like playing gigs anywhere. The audience is really appreciative now. In the past the audience was confrontational, in the punk era, but while I was doing all the jazz stuff in the early '80s, the audiences were really good." Unfortunately radios don't play Vic's stuff: "There used to be a station that used to play my stuff, GLR, but it doesn't exist anymore and it's also a sort of a talk radio now. The only person who would have played my stuff would be the old John Peel thing and even that is not really often. I really don't get any airplay now." Neither does he seem to be very interested in music journalism "Music, white music journalism, well, I don't really read any of it. The stuff I read is all the adverts in American hip hop magazines. 95% of the magazines is just adverts with clothes, jewellery and lycra, it's not anymore about records." Is there a particular band you'd like to recommend us? "There's a record label called Loud and all the groups on that label are really fantastic! When I'm at home I listen to hip hop and R&B from America from the last 10 years." Given the hard times Vic had during his life what kind of advice would he give to young people who have a band and who want to release some stuff on their own "It should be very easy now because a CD burner is really cheap, so you just need some friend who has got a computer equipment and the rest would be down to the person who writes. I mean writing would still got to be done, but, from there on, once the music has been done, it should be easy to sell small amounts, if you pay for small adverts in a publication. Don't expect to make many money out of it...", he concludes, laughing.
"If life was less complicated and everything had gone according to plan, Subway Sect's 'Ambition' would now be regarded as one of rock music's greatest number ones, and group influenced by Subway Sect, like The Fire Engines, would now be more successful than Duran Duran". NME, 1984
Vic tells me that there aren't great chances for a reunion with the original line-up of the band, "Rob Symmons comes down to the studio where I'm working every Sunday. I saw him last Sunday. He's very interested in the music I'm doing now, but the others, we're not in contact with them. Paul Myers, the bass player, actually joined the Post Office about six months ago, but he didn't like it. Actually he's still off sick, he was there for about two months and then he has been off sick ever since."
Among Vic's future projects there is that of playing with Pete Saunders, who was in the original Dexy's Midnight Runners "I want to because I want him to do the piano for some of the songs for the musical but I keep on leaving messages on his answer phone and he never rings me back, so I don't know if he's annoyed with me for saying. Perhaps he's not very interested, I want to play with him, but he doesn't want to play with me. I did a gig last year at the Scala in London where we were singing Cole Porter sings with him at the piano. That was one of the most enjoyable things I've done recently." Recently Vic has also been playing with The Bitter Springs, with whom he his working with for the Irvine Welsh musical as well "The NME likes their stuff. I've been working with their singer for two lead vocals for my next album.", he underlines.
Given all his new projects, Vic should have been partying hard on the last day of the year 2000, but he confesses "Ah, I was in bed by about 8.30 p.m.!" But probably he was resting because the new year will be rather busy for him. His resolution is indeed interesting: "Well, I want to go slightly slower, that's my resolution! I'm probably going to release three albums in the year: the new one first, then the musical one and then Songs For Sale. The producer I'm working with is Nick Brown, who's actually my best man, and he wants to do another album as well because I still have got more songs that we can't fit into this album and we found it quite easy to work together, so I'll probably be doing another one after that. You know, he does all the computer stuff and I do all the other stuff, so it seems to be working really well."
In an interview published in November 1976 on Sniffin' Glue a young Vic Godard stated "I'd sort of like to describe myself as a kid really, I don't wanna grow old. I hate the thought of being old. I always wanna be a teenager and when I'm old I'm not gonna act as an adult. I mean it when people say 'you're childish' at the age of 25..." When I mention it to him he simply laughs "...Ah, wishful thinking..."
After wishing Vic 'Happy New Year', I leave him to his work. The genie that accompanied me through this trip along the years and the music, goes back, not in the magical lamp, but in the recesses of the phone, back where it came from, leaving behind him a trail of memories and in front of him so many albums to release. Lazily, I go back to leaf through the articles I was surveying: the bands are stuck there forever in those pictures, their music preserved on beloved vinyl and re-mastered CDs. I try to build pictures inside my head of the gigs I've missed. I turn on my stereo to play "What's The Matter Boy?" and for a moment I see my trousers and jumper turning into a fazed grey colour: power of the imagination? More like power of the music, of the lyrics and of a talented band.
Researching and experimenting are neglected areas in quite a few industries, fashion included. Yet there are institutions working hard to radically change things. The Tilburg-based TextielLab highly specialised in techniques such as embroidery, knitting, lasering, printing, and weaving, is one of them.
Launched in 2004 as part of the local TextielMuseum, the Lab has expanded throughout the years, turning into a buzzing creative and working space where artists, architects, fashion and interior designers and students work and develop their projects co-ordinated by highly skilled technicians and creatives.
Thanks to its equipment including knitting and weaving machines, computer-controlled Jacquard three-dimensional knitting machines and tools like the Easy Leno, specially developed for the TextielMuseum and ideal for high-tech and interior textiles, the Lab has proved inspirational for many different professionals and has so far offered endless possibilities to its clients in the field of materials and computer-driven, decorative and manual techniques.
Last year this unconventional atelier produced large interior design projects, textile sculptures and installations, while developing computer-controlled processing techniques for the graduation collections of many Dutch and European art students.
The TextielLab also includes study and work stations, a well-stocked library and archive, and a Yarn Bank that features traditional wool and cotton but also alternative materials such as banana fibre, horse hair, and rubber. These spaces offer visitors and designers the chance to discover more about the composition, durability and external and technical properties of specific materials.
Hebe Verstappen, the Head of TextielLab, considers it as a creative space where knowledge and technical expertise come together letting innovation take centre stage. Since 2012 the specialist centre has indeed put particular emphasis on innovation relating to techniques and materials, becoming even more selective with requests about weaving and knitting projects.
While the Lab is open to all the TextielMuseum visitors and tourists, a trip there would be highly recommended to all those students interested in learning more about alternative careers in the design industries.
How did the TextielLab Yearbook 2012 launch go during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan? Hebe Verstappen: We go to Milan Design Week every year because there are a lot of people working in architecture, design and fashion who meet during it and this is the perfect situation to show what we have done in the last year and also do a bit of networking with other professionals. At the latest edition of the Salone, we had a book launch at the Dutch consulate and displayed highlights from the exhibition "Turkish red & more". We met a lot of representatives of academies and institutions, knowledge centres and the creative industries, making quite a few contacts. We are actually already working with a new client we met there.
Can you briefly introduce to our readers the TextielLab? Hebe Verstappen: We are part of the TextielMuseum, but the Lab is a big space, a bit like a factory, but a very special one where different textile techniques, knowledge and yarns come together and combine. We have a workforce that includes technicians and creatives divided in different teams, and we also work with volunteers. All these people focus on one project and they are coordinated by a manager who does the planning. As you may guess, the museum is very quiet, while the Lab is always buzzing with machines, discussions and debates! There are always sketches and drawings all over the place and it can be quite messy at times, though it's a creative mess, like an artist's studio or a designer's atelier. Museum visitors are welcome to look over the shoulder of the designers and technicians, but they can't actively join in. We get roughly 8 new projects a day and we work every day with different techniques and clients. We call all the artists and designers working with us on a project "clients".
Your machines have been used to make the collections of designers such as Walter Van Beirendonck and Marga Weimans, but also for graduate collections. How do you pick the projects you want to work on? Hebe Verstappen: It's a long process because it's vitally important to recognise the potential of a project before approving it. We usually have an intake meeting and the best thing for someone who wants to work with us is coming here and see how we work to understand what you can expect. The intake usually takes place 3 months before the project starts. Sometimes this may not be possible as the people involved may live far away, so we exchange sketches and discussions through the Internet. Every week we discuss new projects here and usually the criteria of choice is based on innovation.
What happens when you pick a project, do you have to match the designer with your technicians? Hebe Verstappen: We try to match a product developer and a technician with a client, and pick them according to the type of client and type of assignment. We usually know from the start who's better at working with a specific client.
Does it ever happen that a project developed for one field is then applied to another? Hebe Verstappen: Yes it does. Quite often a project developed for the fashion industry is then adopted in the interior design field. This is how innovative processes start. We don't have clothes or wardrobes, but we have samples and swatches and an architect may come here and see a fabric created for fashion and then translate it as interior design or upholstery projects. This is a sort of unique exchange between different disciplines.
The TextielLab has worked with professionals from different fields, from architects to sculptors and fashion designers, how easy it is for such professionals to enter the world of weaving and knitting once they step into the TextielLab? Hebe Verstappen: The clients who come here immediately trust us, because we have the skills, the archive, a great portfolio and a lot of samples to work on. We invest a lot in education, we go to fairs, from the Pitti Filati to Filo, Expofil and Première Vision, these are all important appointments for us. You can't be here and not feel the expertise. For example, we did a big project, the wallcoverings by OMA for the Rothschild Bank in the centre of London and we worked with people who had no experience in the textile industry; it was an exciting project and the client was very satisfied.
Was it a difficult process to let design studios into the archive so that they could be inspired for their new pieces for the "Turkish red & more" exhibition? Hebe Verstappen: Opening the archive is the most difficult part of the job since some textiles can't be exposed to light, while others can't be touched. Usually we open the archive to groups of students since it would be too difficult to do so for one person as you need to carefully arrange things with the curator.
At the TextielLab you have a variety of machineries to work with: in your opinion, are traditional looms better than computerised systems and what's the best solution between the two different mediums? Hebe Verstappen: The best solution is actually a combination of both. The weaving department is the biggest, we have three professional weaving machines, and we have three knitting machines. We also have machines for decorative techniques like embroidery and laser cutting that we use a lot for educational projects. Weaving and knitting are very complicated processes and quite often not even students at high degree levels are able to master such techniques.
There is a lot of talk at the moment about smart textiles, but do you feel that new technologies will help us developing innovative garments in future? Hebe Verstappen: We get a lot of enquiries about smart textiles and smart materials, but the funny thing is that we can't use these yarns on the computerised machines. So we employ manual techniques such as passementeries or handweaving looms, but employ with them smart materials. We are currently working with machine producers to find a solution for this sort of gap. We are also working on a European project financed by the government and there are a few people from smart textiles in that circle. We hope to reach some interesting and innovative developments by 2015. We would like to develop for this project a curtain with integrated sound.
What kind of new machine would you like to acquire for the TextielLab and what plans do you have for the future? Hebe Verstappen: A 3D printer that employs fibres. I'm currently looking for a good 3D printer that can print in big scale and may be able to produce 10 metre long curtains. For what regards plans for the future, we organised educational programmes for young talents in Europe such as the European Textile Trainee (ETT) project to show the industry what we are doing and highlight that this is not a dusty museum, but a very stimulating environment. So it would be nice in future to maybe have a symposium, a sort of big international meeting and workshop. In the TextielLab Yearbook we featured all the people who worked with us last year but also listed all the spinners to show that our work is carried out together with other entities. This is also what we'd like to remind people in future, the networking aspect between our institution, product developers, machine builders and yarn manufacturers, this aspect is actually quite often neglected by industries such as fashion that too often tend to see these worlds as far away one from the other.
Image credits:
All images courtesy of the TextielMuseum
1. TextielMuseum, Tilburg
2.- 7. The TextielLab
8 -9 Library at the TextielLab
10. Illustrator and designer Merel Boers in the TextielLab