Loft Living – Bombay Calling
Culture, Work and Everyday Life on Post-Industrial Tyneside
The Observer (7th of December 2003) carried two stories which had resonance for Tynesiders. One, illustrated by a photo of three attractive but for night life Newcastle surprisingly fully dressed – only décolletage on show – young women, asserted that Newcastle’s loft dwellers – residents of a place transformed from coal city to cultural capital – lived in the new cool capital, a boom city with a glittering night life and affordable luxury living. The other described how UK based global capital in its continuing search for maximum possible exploitation of the workforce was exporting call centre jobs to the massive reserve army of graduate English speaking labour in India with consequent returns to its profits. I don’t know if the three graces of the first article were call centre agents, but on post-industrial Tyneside there is a pretty good chance that they were. Party on girls but it may be the last chance saloon.
There is just so much to rant about here. Contemporary Newcastle as a ‘City of Culture’ – not really I would say. Sure we have some new provision – notably the Baltic which was essentially a product of Gateshead’s desire to do something with a well liked industrial landmark and that borough’s long term old fashioned social democratic commitment to art for the people. Alongside that – even behind it in the case of the Baltic and ruining the impact of that building against the definition of the Tyne gorge – we have exceptionally banal property speculators’ over-priced flats for people perhaps with more expectations than sense. Never forget that the Newcastle-Gateshead City of Culture bid was fronted by Sir Ian Wrigglesworth – SDP turncoat turned property magnate. The bid got kicked into touch exactly because the judging panel saw just how over the top it had gone in kowtowing to the property money and ignoring the people. However, this is not a city which is producing culture – if that word means something which relates the experience of life to the production of artistic representation both ‘popula’ and ‘high’. Rather it is a ‘fantasy city’ – useful expression of the American urban commentator Hannigan to describe the urban core as a corporate dominated bland consumption experience.
There was a time not so long ago when Tyneside was a place with a culture producing culture – the city of Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues – the title of Pearson’s lovely book about the ‘the world that made the Animals’ – an industrial city full of life, character, music made by local bands who could rehearse in wresting halls, drunken mad poets, an ability to relate people’s own experience to the global music of resistance and just plain hell raising. Burdon is still keeping it up. At his last gig on Tyneside he looked like a middle aged betting shop manager, sang like a boozy angel, and called George Bush worse than muck – that’s the way to do it bonny lad.
What do we have really? A city of booze and boozers – not the old industrial boozers with than term covering both the people and the pubs but of new, spangly, bland drinking dens which serve much the same purpose as the beer halls of black Jo’burg under apartheid – or as Joe Wilson recognized in his later life as the gin palaces of mid-Victorian industrial Tyneside – places to keep the proles happy and disorganized whilst capital and capitalists make hay – rooking the workers both at work and at play. I truly hate working men’s clubs but this kind of thing makes me think that they have a point. And alongside this, young people with aspirations to quayside lofts – don’t mention global warming by the way and the River Tyne in the living room in twenty years time – aspirations based on insecure jobs in a deferential and disorganized (dis- not un- : this is an active process) workforce. The new networked society of global helots is here and now and partying fit to drop.
Of course there are exceptions – real cultural makers who can put experience and art together – but how much they depend on a sense and sensibility drawn from what has gone before. David Almond is a prime example – a brilliant writer in that most alive genre of fiction – books for children – with a skill and style to knock the typical Booker winner into a cocked hat – whose work is permeated with the very essence of the Felling. AMBER keeps plugging along with the most honourable record of documenting people’s lives and how they change. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s wonderful photos of the post-coal Durham coastline have been one of the best things in the Baltic – delete qualification, one of the two best, because I was very taken with COBRA as well but that is what Fred Johnson – Gateshead’s original Chair of Libraries and Arts – wanted when he started the council’s commitment to art – the best from here and from the world. This is well outside global corporate entertainment and 55° North in a converted office block!!
I am running out of rant and steam but have one last toot left in me. The Tyneside of my adolescence and young adulthood – the city of 60s – was a much livelier and more vivid place than our contemporary facsimile of a ‘city of culture’. There was just as much booze, plenty of drugs, frankly I think rather more sex, and a real world whose people still thought that organized workers had the power and right to change the future. Tyneside could speak out – in massively popular TV. When the Boat Comes in was middle-brow and radical – a truly dangerous combination; in a poetic sensibility which as not the bloodlessness of Bloodaxe – milky spoon more like – but something which could bring together the heritage of Pound and Pickard’s howling at the moon; and in which the main Theatre season could be non-stop Brecht – for the liberal bourgeoisie OK but Brecht all the same. However, nostalgia is not the point. What of now? There are surely stirrings. It may be that it is from exactly the domain of culture and lived experience – the territory where people make sense of what they are outwith the world of work – that the next rising up will come. Certainly we do well to take note of what Jack Grasby – a dramaturge of insurrectionary resistance in the everyday if ever we have had one – notes at the end of his The Unfinished Revolution – South Tyneside 1969-76 when he quotes from Neal Ascherson writing about the 60s in the Guardian thirty years on. To paraphrase: could it happen again, this defiance out of nowhere, probably yes. Here’s hoping. Because we certainly need it.
1: The delightful George Monbiot, part of the new ‘anti’ coalition being put together by Galloway, the SWP and assorted other Stalinist and related fragments overdue for a date with the dustbin of history, thinks this is a good thing by the way. New Labour and new whatever seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet here. Trade unionists take note.
Dave Byrne
