It’s a
few days before Christmas, 2015. I’m stood at the bar in Independent,
Sunderland, ordering cans of Red Stripe for myself and Matt, one of my best
mates. We’re about to watch The Lake Poets, aka Martin Longstaff,
Sunderland-born singer-songwriter and purveyor of, in my opinion, some of the
best music to come out of the North-East in ages.
Martin is
about our age (late twenties), and many of his songs are, I think it’s fair to
say, bleak. I’ve seen him live a few times, and he doesn’t hide away from the
starkness of his material. Listening to his album – which you should purchase
immediately – is testament to this: it’s full of wistful tales of former
industry, failed romance and even child abuse. The type of stuff my Dad likes
to refer to as ‘hanging music’.
Not all of
it is pessimistic, though, and it is on his song, ‘Shipyards’, that I think
Longstaff is most adept at balancing nostalgia with rationality, showing that a
string of genealogy is necessarily fraught with tensions good and bad.
Before
this post begins to sound like a review of that gig or album, I would like to
introduce another ‘Shipyards’ song. The melodic punk band from Sunderland, Leatherface,
released The Last in 1994. On it, the
song ‘Shipyards’ opens thus:
‘And throw the fishermen lines
Close the shipyards and mines
Leaving the water, we still have the
old wives’ tales
About the old days, deep lonely
water, the old days.’
When, in
that crowded upstairs room in Independent a few days before Christmas last
year, The Lake Poets strummed the opening chords to ‘Shipyards’, I instantly
felt myself welling up. Before he’d even reached the refrain, I was gone,
properly sobbing into a can of mass-produced lager and a Kleenex that some kind
woman had offered me. “’ere you gan, pet. I’m going to sound like your Mam, but
it’s probably best you make that one your last”, she said, gesticulating to the
(aptly-coloured) red and white ‘Jamaican’ beer in my hand.
The Lake
Poets’s ‘Shipyards’ opens like this:
‘On the river where they used to
build the boats
By the harbour wall, the place you
loved the most
I
can see you there alone, but oh, you know, I’ll be there.’
An elegy
for Longstaff’s grandfather, the song reaches its refrain, ‘And if you could
see me now/I hope that I’m making you proud’, linking present back to past. It
is a song rooted on Wearside, a place that once built more ships than anywhere
on earth, and which we still think of as the archetypal Northern ex-industrial
town blighted by Thatcher, ignored by Blair and probably not even identifiable
on a map by most of the current cabinet.
Both
songs’ structures are classical in their efforts to tug at the heartstrings.
Unlike much of the raw, energetic, razor-wire punk that Leatherface are famed
for, their ‘Shipyards’ is a piano ballad whose keys are perfectly poised
against that oft-quoted quality of Frankie Stubbs’s vocals: his rough, barroom
poetry. Longstaff, in contrast, goes for the jugular with an appeal to
sentimentality: all acoustic guitars, falsetto range in the right places, with
that haunting refrain, ‘Proud, pro-ow-oww-d’.
Pride is
a good place to start from when thinking about these songs, and it necessarily
invokes the heavy industry that Sunderland and the wider North-East region used
to be famed for. But it can’t just be these songs’ sentimentality or nostalgia –
their expert evocation of a more golden era and time of plenty – that can make
a grown man break down in tears upon listening to them. In the case of the
Independent gig, the multiple pints consumed before even arriving at the venue,
coupled with the general mushiness of the festive season, was at least part of
the reason why I was so emotional, but The Lake Poets are comprised of a singer
and ensemble of musicians between their mid twenties and mid thirties. None of
them built a ship or worked down a mine, and neither did I. It’s true that
Frankie Stubbs, Dickie Hammond and the other members of Leatherface were
starting out as a band at the height of Thatcherism, and that they likely knew
many people who did work in those industries, but I still find myself puzzled
as to why, listening to them twenty or so years after they were written, in an
era that, in many ways, is vastly different to the one they sing about, I feel
very connected to the period they stem from and the response to it their music
evokes.
***
My PhD
research takes as its starting point a belief that I belong to the abstract
concept of the North-East of England because it is a palimpsest: an
ever-changing manuscript of layers, on to which many things have been written
and re-written. One of the things that I have found incredibly difficult to
explain (possibly because there are singers out there who have already done a
cracking job of it) is how I can
possibly feel connected to the former industrialism of the North-East, and even
why I should.
In
essence, we are speaking of vestigial nostalgia: a kind of hauntology in which,
the more we know about what life was like before, the harder it becomes to
reconcile that with what exists, or doesn’t exist, now. Sunderland was clearly
always a tough place to live, with not only the harshness that comes with
working on a river at the mouth of the North Sea, or deep underground in a pit,
but the disease and filth of the slums in the east-end, where workers were
crammed in to service those industries. No, it should not be glamorised, and it
is risky to romanticise the ‘brighter’ side of working-class life: the camaraderie
and the community, the jobs for life, the sense of work being a thing that
produced things and was servicing a national good. All of those things came at
a price, as history has shown.
***
When I
was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, getting the bus to and from sixth form in
Ashbrooke, Sunderland, I would sit with massive headphones clamped around my
ears listening to mp3 records of American punk bands. There’d be the occasional
British band on there – mainly ska-punk stuff from the excellent Household
Names Records roster: Capdown, Lightyear, Captain Everything etc. – but in the
main it was the big Southern California and East Coast American sounds: NOFX,
Strung Out, Rise Against and a load of other bands on labels like Fat Wreck
Chords and Epitaph.
The
musical zeitgeist of 2004-2006 favoured nu-wave indie, or whatever moniker the
(at the time still just-legitimate, not free, glorified Topshop advert)NME shoehorned it into. Radio One was
full of bands like Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight and Franz Ferdinand, none of whom
appealed to me, and in the North-East, I wasn’t queuing up to watch The
Futureheads or Maxïmo Park in the way that many of the lads at college were,
but instead trying to pass for being of legal drinking age to enter clubs in
Newcastle to go crazy to the likes of Flogging Molly, or watch homespun hardcore
punks The Mercury League do warm-up sets to fifteen people in the shit little
room above Pure bar.
Then I
left the North-East and moved nearly two hundred miles away to Chester, to
study English and Creative Writing. I gradually replaced the punk bands with
new indie bands and other, less intense rock acts, until I was spending less
time at gigs and more time reading poetry anthologies. It was only much later,
applying for my PhD really, that I realised that the North-East, just as it had
produced some fine poets, had also produced some music I could relate to.
Despite
hating them first time around, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get into The
Futureheads later. Seeing them in 2012, when they were touting their a’capella
album, Rant, at their own Split
Festival, I remember a tent of around 2,000 pissed people in Ashbrooke cricket
club singing along to the folk song, ‘The Old Dun Cow’:
‘Somebody shouted MacIntyre! –
MACINTYRE! –
And we all got blue-blind paralytic
drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.’
I also
remember lots of pies, Maxim ale, a Richard Dawson set, a(nother) Lake Poets
set, more Maxim ale, one or two Field Music songs, and leaving for the pub when
it transpired that headliners Public Image Limited were little more than a
front for John Lydon’s ego. It was all very stereotypically Northern, and of
course, I loved it.
***
Leatherface
came recently. Very recently, in fact, after one of those serendipitous Twitter
conversations the medium orchestrates so well, with the writer and publisher of
Influx Press, Gary Budden. I was peripherally aware of the death of guitarist,
Dickie Hammond, last year, and I do remember that Hot Water Music, whose
singer, Chuck Ragan, I have seen live, once did a split with them, but they
were never ‘on my radar’, as it were. Which is a massive shame. Ten-twelve years
ago, as I was sat on the 35 bus to Sunderland, crossing the river Wear, I was
unaware that a band from its shores had written not only incredible, melodic
punk songs with intricate guitar patterns and soaring, throaty, world-wise
vocals, but that many of those melodic punk songs were about this place.
Bands can
pass you by, appearing in your life long after the hype has faded, or even
years after they’ve split. Leatherface are one of those bands. This is not the
punk rock music I spent my late teens and part of my early twenties fawning
over. Sure, many of the signatures are there – the blast beats, the guitars
that sound like, well, you know what punk is, the general sense of it all being
balanced, in the best possible way, on a knife-edge – that was all there, but
the lyrics. Jesus, the lyrics. Take this, from ‘Dead Industrial Atmosphere’:
‘The air ’round here is dead industrial
and so austere
The air ’round here smells of
religion and Vaux’s beer.’
Now, I’m
a massive fan of synaesthesia in poems – that act of mashing the senses – but wow,
that’s pushing it to the outer limit of what’s acceptable. Those familiar with
the geography of Sunderland will know that, to this day, the former Vaux
Brewery site, derelict since 1999 (yes, derelict since the last millennium) is
still, basically, a big ugly field of nothing on the south bank of the Wear.
Apparently work will start this summer (only 17 years late) to transform the
site with a new office block, shops and housing. I don’t want to get into the
complexities of how Tesco bought the site back in 2002, and how it was then
objected by Sunderland Council and brought back into public ownership. The fact
that nothing has happened for such a long time says all it needs to, I think.
You could
make a pretty compelling case for the plight of Sunderland and how little has
changed from that 1999 split Leatherface and Hot Water Music put out to now.
The old brewery is still an overgrown deconstruction site, its gaping mass, or
lack of, symbolising for many the place where once there was a heart, beating
with industry, sustaining generations of families.
Sunderland
is still the only town in Britain where I’ve been threatened with serious
violence. I was 17, waiting outside Ku Club on the High Street (think Slipknot,
Brown Ale and the occasional nod to civility with drug raids) when I was
approached for “a light” (that chestnut) and, not producing the goods,
threatened with the trusty “blade”. There
are so many other anecdotes, digressions and largely accurate socio-economic
statements I could make to summarise the Sunderland I have known and how it can
be a dreary, depressing place, but equally there are so many examples I could
give – most of them involving football or music – to show that it is a lively,
forward-thinking city still brought together by a deeply-seated sense of
community.
Even if
that community either works in call centres five miles south-west of the city,
at Doxford Park, or commutes to Newcastle or Durham, it still feels like a
close-knit place acutely knowledgeable and deeply respectful of its heritage
and natural landscapes. Most visitors to the North-East flock to the beaches at
Tynemouth on a day trip to Newcastle, or further north to the (equally
stunning) beaches of Northumberland for longer stays, but few make it to the
gorgeous foreshores of Seaburn and Roker, which, true, is a shame, but it does
have the effect of keeping them somewhat secret and special.
I love
much of the contemporary music of the city. Obviously, I have fawned over The
Lake Poets somewhat substantially already, and I’ve retrospectively enjoyed
most of the Field Music catalogue (and am looking forward to seeing them at the
Sage in Gateshead in October), and I can’t wait to hear Barry Hyde’s new solo
album, Malody. I’m also looking
forward, as co-editor of the forthcoming seventh issue of Butcher’s Dog, to publishing two poems based on Sunderland, a
region whose literature, like its landscapes, all too often plays second fiddle
to its more glamorous cousin, Newcastle.
At risk
of this post becoming a Sunderland love-in, I should state that I am not a
Mackem. My connection to the city began, and continues, with football, but
apart from two years at St. Aidan’s sixth form, I have little authentic connection
to it, despite being born a few miles away in South Shields. But nor am I a
Geordie, really. If you want to use labels, I’m a Sand-dancer, and South
Tyneside is arguably even more neglected, culturally, economically and
politically, than Sunderland is (it pisses me off that the South Tyneside coast
is easily the most beautiful and diverse in the county, yet it rarely gets a
look in beyond Great North Run day – although then again, maybe I like it being
‘mine’?)
 |
| Derelict Vaux Brewery site, Stadium of Light visible in background |
***
All of
this, of course, connotes ideas of ownership, civic pride and responsibility
and cultural and artistic representation. Why am I simultaneously annoyed that
most of my friends at sixth form didn’t listen to American punk bands, but glad
that I found my own scene? Why do I covet the music of Leatherface, decades
after their first albums were released? Again, I think it’s like stumbling on
something that few people know about, so it must still be genuine and
authentic, not tainted by the charts or commercialised and played at half time
at the Stadium of Light. (See a previous post for more of those qualms from
when I saw Bruce Springsteen play here). And the most pertinent questions of
all, trying to link this back to my own practice as a writer and researcher,
revolve around how I subsume all of these sounds, sights and sentiments and continue
to write my own material with original and valid claims to a regional identity
and representation.
Leatherface
have gone. The shipyards and mines they sing about have gone. So, what would a
punk rock from Sunderland, or the North-East, in 2016 look like? How would it
fuse with – should it fuse with? – poetry? My immediate answer is to direct you
to the pop-punk band, Martha, from Durham. Their political character, which
stems from a working-class solidarity with the Durham coalfields, is tinged
with the ennui of the late-twenties/early-thirties person growing up in the
sensory overload of free market capitalism that we might call the Noughties
(and beyond).
Above
all, for the sake of my research project, yes, but also for the sake of my
sanity, I wonder whether the rootedness that I allude to earlier is as much a
thing now as it was, and if not, why not? Music like that produced by
Leatherface and The Lake Poets is fraught with nostalgia, which can be helpful,
but it also needs to look forward (as Longstaff does). How do I pay fair dues
to the past, realising that it will stay there, and move forward? And if I can’t,
will I be like the Vaux site – a gap still unfilled in a decade?
‘Shipyards’
(Leatherface) contains the following lines:
‘They
own the water, the whole company.
They
own, they own this country, the whole fucking thing.’
I think
this is the point in the song when Stubbs’s frustration really begins to show.
The song, having opened with a wistful look back to riverside scenes, tells us
that we still have ‘the old wives’ tales’, but by the time we reach the denouement,
even they no longer seem secure. There is a sense, I think, that if a private
firm can own and sell back water to the people, that a threshold has been
crossed. Remember, this was written and recorded in the early nineties. Much
privatisation, atomisation and isolation has occurred since then. Yet still, as
a man in his late twenties who has enjoyed many of the privileges of the free
market – who has gone to university on the back of state-loaned money, very
much part of an agreeable agenda for education to be a tool for a person to
realise their potential – I agree with Stubbs: water should not be owned, the
whole country should not be owned by a marginal elite. But one look at the news
(you know which stories I’m referring to: steel and tax havens) tells you that
this is the case, that the people in Sunderland, and Teesside, and Port Talbot,
did lose, and will lose out again.
Quite
outside of poetry and music, where it is arguable, wearing a pessimist’s hat,
that nothing really happens, the world around us continues to feel atomised,
species continue to be eradicated, refugees continue to flee just as terrorists
continue their campaign of destruction, and the North continues to be shafted
by the South, to the point where I seriously worry now, in a way that I don’t
think I did in 2010, what it will be like in places such as Sunderland come the
next general election.
We live
in a society that values ‘official’ accounts of events; that valorises logic,
rationale and accountability; and is anywhere from sceptical to hostile towards
what we might broadly label a ‘folk tradition’. The writer Gary Budden has said
that “at an essential level, punk in its many forms is a form of folk music; a
way of recording a history and aspects of culture that may well be invisible or
otherwise forgotten.” The reason Leatherface and The Lake Poets – bands at
nearly opposing ends of the scale, musically – appeal, I think, is that their
lyrics fall under the broad church of folk-punk: music that isn’t afraid of
where it has come from, who it is for, and what it intends to say about the
status quo.
And so,
as I always do, I turn back to music and literature. Claiming belonging to a
place, a region, feels in a way very knee-jerky, ignorant or self-centred. But
for now it feels like the only good place to start from. I don’t own this
place, but I belong to it, and that still means something. That still means an
awful lot. My folk-punk tradition is alive and well in the singers and poets
who have come from this region, this little part of England, and it is alive in
those that sing and write here now. I’m part of that, and, to paraphrase Marty,
I feel proud.
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