DISAPPEARING WOR(L)DS

When websites go down, who loses?

There’s no guaranteed longevity for online content. Websites collapse, are abandoned, and are never to be seen again. Words and worlds are disappearing.

Photo by Dave Swindells

A couple of articles of mine have disappeared. Sometimes dead sites are archived somewhere, but often - especially the smallscale ones - they’re irretrievable. Losing some of my words is not particularly traumatic for me, let alone for the rest of the world, but, nevertheless, leads to some anxiety about what record of our current life, news, music, photographs, ideas, will be available in thirty, forty years.

A decade ago I read an academic paper about the Smiths; specifically the academic was concerned with how the band had been perceived in their early years. The general thesis was that weekly music papers like NME had found the band intriguing and had given space to Morrissey interviews, but in the wider media, newspapers and magazines in general had mostly ignored the band, or been perplexed by them, or even hostile. The writer was much exercised by the lack of coverage for the Smiths in the Manchester Evening News at the time, apart from occasional paragraphs on the local music page.

My response to this was to highlight a small but very potent area of the print media totally ignored by the academic - fanzines. The reality of 1977-1986 (and beyond) is that there were dozens of emerging, leftfield bands championed in the fanzines of the era. The fanzine network was small scale but made a big contribution to peoples’ taste; to understanding marginal music scenes; and to bringing certain bands to prominence. In the words of Ian Curtis in one interview; “Fanzines are the future”.

The Smiths were much loved in Jamming, for example. Morrissey was more than happy to give interviews to fanzines as he appreciated their importance (having been on occasional contributor to Manchester’s City Fun fanzine).

In the era 1983/4, you’d have been very naive to expect coverage of the Smiths anywhere other than specialist media outlets; that’s just the way it was. It was probably the same for Echo & the Bunnymen in their first year or two, or the Nightingales throughout their first incarnation in the 80s. And it still is the same - coverage of grassroots, way out, or emerging bands is pretty much the preserve of specialist websites.

It seemed to me the although the academic may just not have grasped the role of fanzines, or maybe had but then discovered that gaining access to the back catalogue of mid-1980s fanzines is very difficult. But I did wonder whether he’d set off with the thesis shared by a good number of Smiths messageboard types, that the Smiths were uniquely maligned by the world, and Morrissey not given the worshipful status he deserves. And delving into fanzines of the time would have shown this just not to be true.

Jump forward to the present. Imagine trying to pull together the history of so many bands, or genres, DJ culture, and, in fact, music in all its various shapes and sizes, without having access to the billions of words published in blog and social media posts, on music websites and message boards. It would be like publishing a thesis on perceptions of the Smiths in their early days without looking at any fanzines.

By extension - and this is the point - when websites on any and all subjects disappear, we’ll be left with a skewed, half-baked history of our times. And - given that many blogs, posts, and sites vulnerable to erasure express the most marginal ideas - what content that remains will be dominated by powerful voices that have the support and financial clout to survive. Distorting forever our search for who we are, and where we’ve come from.

The status of the billions of digital images online is also precarious, of course. Including those we might have collected on social media platforms.

Disappearing words = disappearing worlds.

Rumours that the Vice website was possibly closing sent me scurrying to search their archive. I found an interview with me by Josh Baines just after my book Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues was published. I’ve lost touch with Josh, but I remember we had a most excellent time together when he interviewed me for Vice. I’m re-posting it here, firstly, because - who knows? - it may one day be replaced with a 404 message and my words and Josh’s hard work will have vanished. Like our encounter never happened.

Secondly, we’re talking clubs and venues which I think could be of some interest, especially in that it gives an insight into the positivity and joy of communal experience we both express just before the Covid pandemic hit and communal experiences became problematic, and/or impossible.

During the lockdowns we had no access to our favourite social spaces, and, as we know, in the years following, nightlife and hospitality have found the going very difficult. There are a few factors, mostly I think to do with the cost of living proving a deterrent to customers and the cost of energy hitting venues and restaurants etc. But is there evidence also to do with what might be called the “psychic rupture” resulting from the lockdowns - that the experience has changed behaviours? There’s a residual anxiety? That the habit of going out, put on hold during lockdowns, has never returned particularly strongly?. That the insecurities of life have motivated us the hunker down at home? I don’t know the answers, but if someone at some point now and in the future, wanted to investigate all this, personal posts on social media, blogs, and interviews would be all be useful research material.

Thirdly, I’m posting this here because Josh writes with a lot of verve. I particularly like the way he explains the passion some of us have for nights out in great venues; “We seek out these dens of inequity because without them we'd be nothing more than 64 million bitter, resentful, sacks of blood and congealed fat with nothing to look forward to other than a new series of the Bake Off and the possibility that a woman might put a cat in a bin again”.

Vice.com

20th January 2016

The words and questions by Josh Baines are in bold…

A few months back now, I met Dave Haslam in a coffee shop in Berlin. We were both there to attend the Pop Kultur festival, which was being held at Berghain. I was there to drink beer and watch DJs, and Dave was in town to interview Bernard Sumner of New Order before DJing at the Panorama Bar. He'd asked if we could meet at Cafe Sibylle, on Karl-Marx-Allee. Cafe Sibylle is famous for housing Stalin's ear.

Haslam is a DJ, broadcaster, and author of several books that concern themselves with the relationship between music and British society, including Manchester, England and Not Abba; the Real Story of the 1970s. 

Recently, he published Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues, a monumental work of socio-cultural history that charts the course of what we, as a nation, have got up to after the sun's gone down from the Victorian age to today.

In a way, the book is a complete antithesis to the cupcakes and cricket ideals espoused by Conservatives young and old, the people who'd prefer not to think as Britain as a nation that fundamentally needs the escapism that pubs and clubs and concert halls offer.

We seek out these dens of inequity because without them we'd be nothing more than 64 million bitter, resentful, sacks of blood and congealed fat with nothing to look forward to other than a new series of the Bake Off and the possibility that a woman might put a cat in a bin again.

Nightlife is a form of transcendence, in a very real sense, from the humdrum of the everyday, and, as Haslam discovers in the book, this idea of the excitement of the night—in both literal and more metaphysical terms—as a fundamental necessity, isn't something that just arrived on our shores in the Northern Soul days.

Given that Haslam was a resident DJ at the Hacienda and still plays out around the world today, he's in an incredibly good position to ascertain the continued importance of nightlife on British society. As part of our Britain at Night series, we interviewed Haslam about the book and the past, present, and future of clubbing in the United Kingdom. Sadly, or luckily, our conversation took place away from Stalin's prying ears.

Obviously you've a long and storied history when it comes to nightlife, and clubbing in particular, but what was it exactly that made you want to document a few hundred years worth of British cultural history in your most recent book?

I discovered some stuff about Victorian music halls 200 years ago in Britain, big places where two or three thousand people would gather, get drunk, watch entertainments of all kinds —from pianists to performing dogs— and there were prostitutes there and off-duty policemen and all kinds of shenanigans. I wanted to link all that to what happens now, and to tell the story of everything in between - mods, disco etc. Plus from personal experience I know how important live venues and nightclubs are to people; the best times of your life. I wanted to celebrate that.

During the course of your research, what, if anything, shocked you most about our ancestors approach to nightlife?

I was struck how uncontrolled things were; no health and safety! But really what was great to bring out in the book was how each generation makes its own spaces, has its own music, its own drug, its own fashion. Did you know you could buy cocaine from a sandwich shop in Soho in the 1920s? I didn't!

Related to that, have things really changed that much, or have technologies just advanced?

Human nature doesn't change. People love to socialise, they like music, dancing, unpredictablity, places where they can escape to, where they might find a lover. People like to dress up. The music changes, and the technology. We're also more international in our outlook now. Even up to thirty years ago people would only have experienced their local disco, now people travel to Ibiza, to festivals, to Berlin or whetever. I remember at the Hacienda we'd get cars full of people who'd travelled from Wolverhampton or St Helens or Leeds. One nation under a groove.

Is nightlife blighted by the nostalgia industry? Are we all so concerned by what happened in the past that we forget to concentrate on the present?

Life After Dark is a work of history not nostalgia. It doesn't portray a "golden age" in 1963 or 1988 or anything. I think if you read the book it makes the present feel more exciting; it's like we're the heirs to all this amazing activity, there's momentum there. Producers like Bicep and Jamie xx—they see dance music's past as a resource and inspiration and that's how it should be.

In the book you make a very, very convincing argument for the idea that the best club in the world is the one that changes your life. What club, Dave Haslam, changed yours?

I'd have to say the Haçienda of course. There are countless other candidates, but from being in there and seeing New Order play, and Mantronix, and the Smiths, to DJing there nearly five hundred times, watching from the DJ box as the whole rave/techno thing exploded, it was an honour and it was unforgettable.

Lastly, and it's the big one: is there an actual, positive future for British clubbing?

Absolutely. Through the 200-year history I researched there were a few blips and changes people had to adapt to, but people did adapt. And move forward. One of the great things now is the richness of music making; the internet gives you a library of great music from the past and music being made from round the world. There's got to be stuff that turns you on. Thirty years ago it was only really dedicated DJs like me who'd be in import record shops four or five times a week hoovering up all the hard-to-get stuff. Now it's all out there, and ready to be discovered. As for venues? If you can't find a night you like, start one.