I was sitting in a bar in Euston with a bunch of people who
genuinely believed themselves to be vampires when it occurred to me that I
stuck out like a sore thumb. The goths, as a whole, have always been my allies,
however these guys had taken it too far, and my black suit and shirt along with
my discourse on the brilliance of Sir Christopher Lee was not enough to
convince them of my comradery. It seemed bizarre, I thought. Most of these ‘vampires’
worked for transport for London. So that’s what became of all those make-up
wearing white and black checkered phantoms I knew at school, they had
disappeared into the underworld of the underground. A few weeks later I would
learn from an American writer that the gothic scene in Texas is based around
Morrissey. This defies all reason. I love The
Smiths; I hate Morrissey.
I’d gone to the bar in the hope of acquiring another
person’s soul. In blues folklore, there is a well-known legend that one can
sell their soul to the devil at the crossroads at midnight to master their
chosen instrument, only I’m quite fond of my
soul, so I thought maybe I could sell another. -Deals with the devil always
go down well, right?- Indeed, my solidarity with the goths comes from my love
of the blues which, as is well known, was the first genre to be branded ‘the
devil’s music’. However, there was no solidarity with these goths who convulsed
against the intruder in their midst.
The solution to my exposure was not hard to find as the bar
was a dive, half bottles of wine were going for three pounds each, and I’m a
fast drinker. Three half bottles later and I could have blended in with the Royals
or, at least, that’s how I felt after bringing that third empty bottle back to the
bar and bowing to the bartender. I’d had enough of the staring down from the
phantoms in black with fake plastic teeth; it was time to bust out of there.
But where could I go to next? The British Library was just
round the corner, but it would be closed by now and is not the place for
drunks. Camden was a short walk away, but going to Camden alone, already drunk,
seemed to be asking for trouble. Only the Southbank seemed to enter my mind,
yet that is hardly surprising as I adore the Southbank; nowhere in London is
more beautiful. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I’d reached the
station at embankment. As I staggered across the bridge to the south side of
the river, music from the many buskers covered my shoulders like a warm blanket
shielding me from the cold. First the trio of afrikan drummers that made my
feet bounce, then a punk guitar player thrashing out incoherent power chords. Finally,
I found a north afrikan jazz trio on brass with an accordion accompaniment: now
you’re whistling Dixie. Leaning against the rails of the bridge I soaked in
their improv over expanded dorian and mixolydian scales that had enough blue
notes and chromatic jazz runs to make my back shudder. Music has always had a
profound physical effect on me. When it hits just the right spot, my shoulders
twitch and I become entranced, lost to everything else. After emptying the
change from my pockets into their hat and giving the trumpet player a high five
I staggered on to find my next cultural experience.
This came in the form of the royal festival hall. The RFH’s bench
spotted foyers across its five stories is one of my favourite places to sit and
write during the day, or crash out in full view of the public after a long
night performing. Many a time I have laid on a couch in the twilight between
sleep and wakefulness as businessmen and overly formal types held informal
meetings against the skyline of Parliament, Somerset house, the Eye, and the
other major attractions of London. Tonight I admired a photography exhibition,
currently in vogue, that littered the main foyer and open space cafes and bars
on the ground floor. The subject matter was refugees from environmental
disasters. You gotta know the blues to play the blues and these guys knew the
blues. These guys had the blues, the mean reds, the down and outs, and they had
it up to the nines. Ghosts of greyscale and high-def colour shot frozen still in
angles only an expert could achieve haunted every corner. As I chicken walked across
the foyer through the haze of wine, the faces of the condemned jeered at me
from the facades, while my outstretched arms mimed jazz movements attracting
the attention of several other patrons. Disparate peoples in rags stood in
torrents of rain, tornados, and the wrecks of their former dwellings as
London’s bourgeois debated as to whether they should sympathise with the
subject matter or admire the photographer’s aesthetic; Disaster and destruction
has always been crucial to art.
I had more political objections. Was the whole thing not a
farce? A statement of irony? I declared to an audience amused at my slurred
outburst. The west’s reaction to these disasters was to send in a flash
photographer to chronicle the suffering of others. By the time the shots had
been edited, organized, and displayed, the next catastrophe had occurred
somewhere else. All that was left was a perverse and empty reminder that we
should value what we have and not gamble with it in helping others.
It made me think of the old days of the grand tour when the
nobility used to traipse around Europe fucking whores and drinking in brothels
after going to the opera at night, while pretending to read books and gain an
education at major institutions during the day. Clothed in the rich colored,
gold trimmed, fashions of the late renaissance, to the black and white formal
cut suits of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they graced
the grand decadent cities of Europe with their own brand of decadence which
they would later bring to statecraft. They did not hide their corruption but
rather strove to exceed such decadence with their own exploits, searching for some
perfect excess of passion. At least the old nobles were honest in their
debauchery.
Now, the rich send their young to third world countries to
contribute to community projects during their gap years. This is, arguably, an
ethical improvement to the lavishness of old. The downside is that, like the
nobles before them, many return with a superiority complex unlike any other. No
doubt they found some other vain chauvinist on the tour to fuck while making
anthropological observations on another culture’s way of life. They gained an experience
they would ultimately use to scramble onto the rat race like all the other rats.
Had I met that photographer then in vogue, I would have found a smug
professional courting compliments and sympathizing with patrons that shared his
suffering. He wouldn’t understand that you have to know the blues to play the
blues. The royal festival hall had not provided the soul I was looking for.
The time was approaching nine o’clock when I stumbled out
onto the river bank. I sat on a bench and thought of my current exploits. It was
time to clean out the table or run home empty handed; I needed to ante up. I
thought back to the buskers on the bridge. As amazing as they were, those cats
didn’t have anything that I didn’t. I took a look around and noticed that I was
in a prime location for busking: A location where people can walk past freely
and aren’t trapped by the sound, and with enough people walking past to make
the endeavor worthwhile. I pulled out my trusty 10 hole diatonic and started
reeling off my repertoire and improvising new licks.
It was the devil’s music. Rough blue notes that were once
outlawed by the Catholic Church rode out and haunted those that strolled by in
the evening. The chill of brass reeds grating over a slow bend that makes
expression on the harp possible caught my audience and fascinated them for a
moment or two. A black spectre going ballistic in improv by the slosh of the Thames
is quite a sight after all.
“Hey that guy is shit hot,”
came a woman’s voice. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or my playing.
I looked up and saw two gorgeous couples smiling back at me- she was talking
about my playing. It had been an American voice, from the east coast. I’ve
never met an American I didn’t like and, through habit, have learnt the
location of their accents. Her eyes had lit up in the way that only love and passion
can do. Music can do that to people. Smiling back, I opened up the conversation
and the five of us began to shoot the breeze. I invited them to sit down and
they did. They had been on a double date, though I could tell it had gone so
poorly that they were in as much need of an adventure as I had been. Their love
of blues, their experiences of England, and my interest in America circled
through the conversation. They kept hitting the conversation back, not in that
forced way of feeling one has to reciprocate to the question asked, but in the
natural way of being quite taken by someone. They invited me to flitter with
them further on down the bank.
I wasn’t doing anything
better, so why not? I picked up the silver and copper that had been thrown to
me and we ambled down the bank lost in the underpasses of the great bridges,
shouting aloud to hear our laughter reverberate in the underpasses. I thought
the night air and synchronized breathing needed to play the harmonica would have
sobered me up, but my legs continued to dance a tune that I didn’t recognize.
After walking for a short while, the street lamps flickered on to reveal the
greatest terror of the night: we had, to my repulse, arrived at the Tate Modern
Art Gallery.
The Tate Modern is a vile
place where many a good man has lost his mind. Built out of a million bricks,
it was originally Bankside’s oil-fuelled power station until it was converted
into an art gallery in the year 2000. It feigns a false chic of postmodern irony;
that a powerhouse of electricity is now a powerhouse for art. I went dizzy as I
looked up at its great, sinister chimney which leered over me. The chimney
which once belched black smoke onto the skyline stood against darkness again as
night had now descended. Its façade of a million bricks is as much a prison as
it is a ‘site’ for viewing great art. Since its rejuvenation it has been a
magnet for many terrifying experiences -indeed, I believe the land it is built
on is cursed. Whenever I have visited the gallery the experience has been so
disappointing that I have broken off all contact with those I visited with. As
such, visiting the Tate has been the kiss of death to several former
relationships and I have since done everything within my power to avoid
visiting the building.
The Americans seemed
disturbed by the seething contempt that struck my face, but they did not know
what horrors this building held. The TATE is so packed full with school
children and tourists that it is impossible to find a moment’s peace to enjoy
the works it contains- for it does, occasionally, display some awe inspiring
work. But the greatest horror comes not in the form of loud, sticky, photo
chronicling groups, but in the form of people who pretend to know everything
about the works they stand before, when it is clear they know nothing. The
worst wear blazers and polo shirts and use art in an attempt to tower over
others like the chimney they themselves stand beneath; they use art to be
chauvinists. Alas, the Tate simply is not a space for experts to deliver humble
lectures and insights to curious audiences, both in love with the form(s)
before them. People are sardined into rooms where more time is spent
negotiating a path around the other spectators than it is appreciating the
spectacle one came for.
Thus the horror comes not
from the consumption of art by some god awful building- all art is consumption.
Nor in who consumes it (I am not a
chauvinist who feels art should be denied to sticky school children, herds of
tourists, or pretentious wankers in polo shirts. Indeed I, almost, feel that
those groups need art more than anyone else), but in how it is consumed. In the
galleries, great works are warehoused next to over-flowing bathrooms managed by
immigrant cleaners formerly exploited by middle men companies that paid them
less than a minimum wage. Bins are loaded with sticky sweet wrappers and
bottles from the overpriced cafes that feature on every floor. The whole
enterprise is parody.
It was a tragedy that struck
me to my core; though it seemed as much an opportunity to do something bold and
daring, a beautiful artistic motion that would liberate the art inside and
re-ignite that beauty again, as opposed to letting the institution ruin the
evening. It was an occasion to rise to, to conquer, and overcome. I would find
a room with a Picasso, a Dali, and a Man Ray all within close proximity, and
then I would liberate them from the nightmare. I would take out my harmonica
and play a scathing blues lick, let the sound reverberate through that empty
hall where the machinery, boilers, and burners once stood. I would make the
furnaces ring again; I would play something beautiful that all those artists
would have understood, but that the herds would find a vulgar breach of the
peace. I would perhaps have a minute or two before I would have to escape the
building’s prison officers and flee into the night. It would be pure
improvisation like the surrealists themselves: a postmodern statement decrying
the prison ‘site’. Or I would do what I
saw Godard’s trio do in the Louvre in his band
a’part, and run through the gallery, around every floor, up every
escalator, taking in everything as quickly as possible, with guards in hot
pursuit. I would do something, anything,
that would bring the gallery back into the world of freedom and spontaneity;
back to that moment of someone doing something beautiful without resignation
which sets the landscape into new significance. That landscape of paintings and
sculptures would understand and thank me. I had to do something, any act of defiance that would break the
parody.
“We have to liberate them! We have to save them all!” I
cried. The amerikarnas were further distressed by my outburst and I realized
that my discourse on the Tate’s horrors and lobby for intervention to save art
from the prison had only been rehearsed in my head.
I tried to explain my cause to free the Tate from within,
however all my comrades understood was that I wanted to do something frantic
and off the wall inside the gallery. Negotiations reached that patronizingly
simple stage one has to adopt with drunks: ‘I don’t think that’s a very good
idea’, ‘perhaps you’d better sit down’, ‘no no, it’s best not to do that’.
Before long it was too late. The guards at the entrance were staring at me. I
had been clocked and, if I did make it in, any act of liberation would be
swiftly prevented. I sighed at the Americans, ‘you bastards probably wouldn’t
sell me your souls anyway.’ The women laughed at this, but the men had had
enough. The amerikarnas said their goodbyes, content that I had welched on my
former plans.
I caught a seat on a bench in the shadow of that awful
building that now jeered over me. All there was left to do was to start busking
again and, with its tourist attraction, the Tate’s only redeeming quality is
that it has a number of busking posts outside. I took up position and then a
scene caught my eye. A couple, both parties movie star beautiful, were breaking
up in the loud dramatic attention grabbing way everyone fears when they have to
end it. It looked like the break-up from hell. Both stood crying and screaming
at each other against a chilly waterloo night skyline. Finally, the man
revealed his last resort from his bag, a bouquet of roses to apologize for
whatever he had done. She was stumped for a moment, and then she grabbed the
bouquet and threw it over the bank into the river. My kina gal. The stems
scattered in the air, drifted for a moment, and then gravity tugged them into
the tides.
And that was it. That was all I needed to see for the night
to be worthwhile. I caught the next train back to Richmond, bought some chips from
the best chip shop in the world, and then wrote a song about what happens when
your woman throws the roses you gave her into the Thames.
https://soundcloud.com/samsmusicandmusings/roses-on-the-thames
