It’s taken me a week to write this post, on and off, and I’m still not sure I’ve completely cracked it. I keep tying myself in knots about whether I’m stating the obvious, making assumptions, or just speaking from a position of ultra-cringe privilege. I could carry on writing it for another 6 months and still not get anywhere productive, so fuck it, I give up. This is where I got by lunchtime on Sunday 17th April.
A couple of weeks ago, Paul Mason wrote a piece for The Guardian which connected the Thatcherite economics of the 1980s – suppression of unions, celebration of entrepreneurialism, the slow murder of British manufacturing – to the way white kids are underachieving at school compared to those from other ethnic backgrounds. It’s not that these kids are being ‘overtaken’, he says, more that the aggressive promotion of neoliberalism over two decades has interrupted the cultural narrative of the white working class, and disadvantaged their children at school.
“Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story.”
In Govan, the area of Glasgow that hosts Buzzcut, there are visible reminders of the shipbuilding industry that once dominated the area. Walking there from the West End of the city, there is a marked change in architecture when you cross the Clyde. Leaving crescents of grand sandstone townhouses behind, you pass brownfield sites peppered with shiny new office buildings, the empty, weed-covered dry docks, visible only through metal fences, and then clusters of new-build social housing. The homes on this estate, Govan Riverside, have pictures of ships rendered into the gable-ends. The story of Govan is marked in 6 foot high pebble-dash iconography.
The Pearce Institute, home to Buzzcut, was built for the shipbuilders and their families, and bequeathed to the people of Govan following the death of Lady Dinah Pearce, whose late husband, Sir William Pearce, had been a talented naval architect and then a local MP. In its foyer hangs an embroidered union banner, and while I was there for Buzzcut, other parts of the building were home to local advisory services and a volunteer-run café. In the Institute’s Billiards Room, a large wood-panelled hall in which I would later be fed dry bread by a man in a rubber fetish mask, there are black marks on the floor where the old tables used to be.
I am reminded of the Latin motto of Battersea that was inscribed in the ceiling at BAC, an old town hall:
non mihi, non tibi, sed nobis
not for me, not for you, but for us
In Brechin’s Bar across the road, the landlady tells us that many people from more affluent parts of Glasgow won’t go to Govan. When the National Theatre of Scotland were based there for Allotment back in 2009-2010, she ran the bar in their space, and had artsy types acting like they were out on safari, asking if it was ‘alright’ - meaning safe – to go over to her pub for last orders. The upstairs function room at Brechin’s Bar has original wood panelling and decorative ironwork, not dissimilar to the Pearce Institute’s Billiard’s Room. It’s rarely opened to the public these days, but it is in demand as a filming location. Govan’s architectural history is lending authenticity to other people’s stories.
The problem with stories, of course, is that we romanticise them. The act of telling necessarily formulates a narrative, even if that narrative is false. I am romanticising Govan right now, I know it. I went to a festival for a couple of days – spent time with a bunch of other artsy London tourists – and now I’m getting all misty eyed about the history of Govan, of which I know fuck all. I have always been emotionally affected by the UK’s manufacturing heritage, partly because my politics have been formed in response to its shafting, but perhaps partly because I feel so divorced from it. I’m not from Govan. I don’t come from a family of shipbuilders, nor miners. My Dad worked in a steelworks in Cardiff for a while in his early 20s, but he was just passing through. As, it seems, was the steel industry.
I know more about Port Talbot from the Wildworks telling of The Passion in 2011, than anything else. When the Tata story broke a few weeks ago – the potential loss of 40,000 jobs in Port Talbot – the first images in my head were not of blast furnaces and run-offs and coke ovens; they were of Michael Sheen walking out of the sea, the Manics playing at the Last Supper. What I know of those worlds has come to me via the stories of others.
When Nick and Rosana moved Buzzcut to the Pearce Institute, it was not with an outreach objective. Buzzcut is an experimental performance festival. The work they programme is often politically radical or concerned with ideas of gender and identity. They don’t choose the artists they present because they are especially focused on the history of Govan or its people; they were just looking for somewhere appropriate for a festival. That said, their mission states that they believe in “strengthening and broadening communities”. What interests me about this, and about the way Nick and Rosana talk about community in relation to their festival and its location, is how much I’ve come to associate the idea of community with the location of that community.
Maybe I’m putting words in their mouths when I type this, but my interpretation of Buzzcut’s community focus spans the live art community and those at its edges too. That live art community are largely based in London and other metropolitan centres (although they are highly web-literate, connected through online networks as much as through face-to-face contact) but they are a nucleus around which there are many other people. With it’s pay-what-you-can pricing model, enviable access policy, and free crèche, Buzzcut attempts to blur the edges of that live art nucleus by extending an invitation. People who find themselves at the doorway will see that the doorway is open.
There’s an issue here that can’t be ignored of course. How do you situate something unusual in a location that you don’t ordinarily inhabit, and not be a cunt about it? At the Pearce Institute, who is extending an invitation to who exactly? Often, I think it’s attitudinal. The same event might happen on two consecutive weekends; on the first weekend the organisers ensure activities are free and well signposted, and on the second they blanket flyer the neighbourhood with claims that the work has been specially programmed for the ‘benefit’ of locals, then charge everyone a tenner. Shall we vote on which of those is the most cuntish?
Where do stories fit into that though? Who is telling the story of the community/ies at play at live art festivals? When the work on offer is at the more avant garde end of the performance spectrum, there can be a sense that narrative is a dirty word. Where the story of Govan is physically held within its architecture and post-industrial landscape, it might be that the story of last week’s Buzzcut is only held as memory.
That’s the glass-half-empty view, anyhow.
The glass-half-full view might be that it is remembered through documentation and meandering recollections like this one.
The glass-pretty-much-brimming view is that it has made a contribution to other, more meaningful stories: of individual artists and works; of audience members and their evolving tastes; of the Pearce Institute; of the local economy; of the arts scene in Glasgow, and Govan more specifically. It’s worth mentioning that this is the first Buzzcut since the closure of The Arches last summer. The festival’s role as a place of congregation for the artists living and working in the city is more significant than ever.
In his article about a widening gap in educational attainment between white and non-white schoolkids, Paul Mason blamed Thatcher’s Tories and their suppression of “paternalism and solidarity”. With attacks on the lazy, workshy poor replacing mutual aid, collaboration and cohesive social institutions, he said, “you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it”. In 2016, we are living under austerity, manufacturing and heavy industry are gone, the unions all but finished. Rebuilding dismantled cultural narratives for the white working class will take much, much more than the integration of a few genderqueer performers with local visitors to the Pearce Institute, but there are key principles at work in the structure of Buzzcut that might give hope: mutual aid, collaboration, social cohesion; the “strengthening and broadening communities” of that mission statement.
While writing this, I’ve checked my own privilege on a few occasions. I shouldn’t speak for the working class in the same way I wouldn’t speak for a person of colour, or someone who defines themselves as LGBTQ, or even just a man. I have, however, been reminded of a piece of research I heard about a couple of years ago: Abigail Gilmore’s paper ‘From crap towns to creative places’. In it, she looks at the human geography, economies and cultural policies of three ‘crap towns’ in the north – St Helens, Huddersfield and Macclesfield – and learns a little about how different factors have affected the cultural engagement of their residents.
I grew up in Macclesfield. Reading the section that talks about its history and populace is both familiar and fascinating. It feels a bit like an evocative smell; like passing someone in the street who wears the same aftershave as an ex-boyfriend. Macclesfield is an interesting cultural case study because it somehow manages to maintain decent levels of engagement while having literally zero amenities. Seriously, there’s fuck all. There wasn’t even a cinema for most of my teenage years, let alone a professional theatre. It’s relatively affluent, but the class divide is considerable. The town’s drug problems have been so significant that its nickname ‘Smacklesfield’ is quoted in Gilmore’s paper.
There are a couple of important things working in its favour. The first is the easily commutable distance to Manchester, making it a relatively attractive place for creative businesses (McCann Erickson are based in Prestbury), and making the cultural amenities of that city easily accessible for Macclesfield residents. People who work in creative contexts so often play in creative contexts too.
The second is the pharmaceutical industry. The town’s largest employer is AstraZeneca. It’s like the nuclear power plant in Springfield; basically everyone works there. Or did, before round after round of redundancies and departmental downsizing took effect. My Mum works there still, but she’s seen big changes. Her team shrunk, and shrunk again, and now the site they were based on has closed down altogether – they’ve moved to desk space in the offices of the R&D facility instead.
Gilmore’s paper on ‘crap towns’ explains that AstraZeneca’s presence in Macclesfield has led to a highly educated workforce either commuting into the borough, or relocating there completely. Over several generations, the make-up of the town changed. Whether medical researchers or middle management, the influence of AZ staff brought cultural capital to the town. It’s true that Macclesfield has fuck all in the way of amenities, but a consistently decent number of its residents have been engaged in the arts – 53% according to Gilmore’s figures – whether that’s via self-driven hobbies and volunteer groups or through trips into Manchester.
I wouldn’t be gauche enough to suggest that the gradual withdrawal of AstraZeneca from Macclesfield is in any way like the death of shipbuilding in Govan or the closure of the steel industry in Port Talbot. AZ is the town’s main employer but it does not dominate like ships and steel once did in those areas. Much of the existing middle-class will have both the economic and social capital to facilitate new careers, but for many, that will mean moving away altogether. Macclesfield is going to change. Unemployment will rise and the area will become poorer. The wealthy in the villages will remain so, but in the town, the drug problems may grow.
The arrival of a live art festival into my home town will not fix this decline, like situating Buzzcut in Govan doesn’t wave a magic wand over that area. I’m not advocating for some kind of mural or monument to medical research in the middle of Mill Street (especially when there are so many ethical problems around drug manufacture, even when those drugs treat cancer and depression), but I am worried about my home town, and I’m worried about the arts crowd become either a clique or a ghetto. Access and community is built into the very structure of Buzzcut, but it’s notable because it finds such an important cultural resource in the Pearce Institute. In many ways that building, and the people it services, is world’s apart from the live art world, and yet the way the two organisations operate is so similar. While much of the publicly-funded art in the UK professes a people-focussed outlook, an awful lot of them are kidding themselves. Where work is made free, booking systems remain, and while the work created in isolated outreach programmes is supposedly chosen for its ‘accessibility’, that just translates as unsophisticated and unchallenging.
I wonder if what we all need is the bricks and mortar of buildings like the Pearce Institute. There’s nothing like that place in Macclesfield though, and it’d never earn the rent/upkeep in London.
