The Echoing Corridor Musicin the Postmodern East End Andrew Blake
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174 soundings issue 1 Autumn 1995 The echoing corridor Musicin the postmodern East End Andrew Blake Andrew Blake argues that one can 'read' a geographical region through its popular music. Theplace in question is East End London, and its music reveals a vibrant and creative intermixture of ethnic subcultures. usic surrounds us so thoroughly that we hardly ever ask what it means. Part of the answer is that it helps to give a sense of place. It is time to M explore this geography of sound, the relationship between sound and space. Listen to your environment. You'll hear some or all of: birdsong, wind, traffic, office or domestic equipment such as fans or kettles, and music. Music from cars, out of doors and windows, from your own radio, television, walkman or hi-fi. Most people choose to structure their places of work and relaxation with particular musical sounds. We associate music with places, often enough we quite deliberately make music to fit them. So we can hear places (rooms, buildings, areas) as well as see them. Listening to East London through the music which is made there, we can see as well as hear more clearly. We can hear what is happening, how people have moved through the area and 175 Soundings changed its culture. In his recent book Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, George Lipsitz has argued that 'while the nation state recedes as a source of identity and identification, popular culture becomes an ever more important public sphere.'1 Lipsitz claims that transnational capital has worked both with and against patterns of migration; thanks to the development and use of new technologies of communication, and the creation of new multilingual spaces and continuities, not only the nation state but the 'country' may be obsolete as a way of forming identity. Instead of conceptualising countries, Lipsitz remarks (with acknowledgement to the work of Arjun Appadurai), we should think about 'ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes: through which we can all inhabit many different "places" at once'. Music is a constantly present aspect of this multiscape. This is, in other words, one way of addressing the vexed question of the global and the local, of seeing them, or rather of hearing them simultaneously. The global availability of musics such as rai and reggae have meant not the presence of a series of universal signs or the creation of universal cultures, but their incorporation into syncretised local cultures. This article celebrates these cultures, and asks how public policy can and does encourage their creation and growth. Looking at the influences of American and more recently Asian music, and at the traces of English musical history (e.g., music hall) present in late twentieth-century music made in East London and its extended 'suburbs', I will comment in particular on the location and development of musical forms, and examine the nature and extent of music provision by the music business, by educational institutions and local government. By approaching music this way we can see the lines of cultural gravity holding the East together. One of London's many contemporary troubles is a crisis of spatial/geographical identity. The shambolic, unplanned development of the metropolis has often caused problems (for example, of access) for people living to the east of the City; to the aggregate shambles of the centuries has been added the twentieth-century gifts of the bomb and the overflow town, to produce an 'East London' whose boundaries are limited neither by the conventional postcodes nor by the more recent physical limit of the M25 motorway. Parts of 1. G. Lipsic, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, Verso, London 1994, p.5. 176 The echoing corridor Essex are, no doubt, rural, agricultural and as traditional as any country farmed by the descendants of recent Scottish immigrants may be. Many urban areas of Essex, on the other hand, are parts of London; and this does not just apply to places which are contiguous with or actually part of London boroughs such as Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge. Basildon, Southend and so on are not only parts of the East Thames Corridor; they are parts of London. For all its insights, the recent work on the city in postmodernity has not paid much attention to this "'EastLondon"isan phenomenon of displaced urbanity, of commuter- urban entity which distance areas which are themselves parts of the urbs, extends certainly as far rather than the suburbs, of the city. Whatever their as Southend' differences, common constructions of the postmodern city (the work of Harvey and Jameson among others on the spatialisation of postmodernity, and Davis more specifically on the most thoroughly imagined postmodern city, Los Angeles,2 substantiate the fluidity of the city , its continuing developmental crisis. Work on London has noted the consistent underdevelopment of the East, its lack of infrastructure, and the comparative isolation, therefore, of many of its communities. By contrast, through the technologies of postmodernity, cultures may be drawn together, held together, created and recreated through music. East London has been spatially extended beyond geographical integrity, but continually recreated through music. the growth of holiday resorts in the late nineteenth-century, the ribbon-development expansion until the 1930s, the development of the new towns from the 1950s, the continuing suburbanisation of Essex, and the developing commuter culture of the M25 hinterland, have all impacted on the idea of East London and the affiliations and identities of people who live outside the greater London postal area. London as an idea, an imagined space, and a source of identity, has grown and continues to grow. Musicians originating in various parts of Essex such as Southend and Canvey Island (pub rockers Dr Feelgood), Chelmsford (witty songsmiths Blur), as well as Grays (classical composer Mark-Anthony Turnage), Romford (live-techno band Underworld) and Dagenham (the Dagenham Girl Pipers), use the relatively 2. D. Harvey, the Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford 1989; F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London 1991; M. Davis, City of Quartz, Verso, London 1990. 177 Soundings undifferentiated mode of pronunciation known as Estuarial English, and claim or have claimed London as their focus of identity. 'East London', therefore, should be read as an urban entity which, through cultural, transport and communication links, extends east certainly as far as Southend. This should not be taken to indicate the imposition of a grid of cultural coherence. It is not easy to align age, gender, ethnicity and cultural allegiance. A paradox typical of postmodern cultural politics underlines the point. As the above identification of the extended East End indicates, 'Essex Man', and 'Essex Girl', (both of whom were the butt of much anxious, reactionary humour in the late 1980s) are a particular form of East London identity - but such an identity is not simple or uniform. This overwhelmingly white grouping is partly responsible for the introduction of a great deal of black-influenced dance music to the ears of the nation. At the high moment of late 1980s 'enterprise culture', under the very brief apparent hegemony of Thatcherism, the sound systems of Ford XR3 i's being driven around Essex London were annoying older residents with the soul/dance music mix which was then being provided by illegal, 'pirate' radio stations, but not by the official national broadcasting networks of BBC radio. As the government began to offer new licenses for local and national radio services, one station seeking legitimacy, the former London pirate Kiss FM, actually boasted that it would have access principally to the young C2s of the area. Kiss FM's PR exercise argued to potential advertisers that this group - usually mortgage-free pre-mid-20s marriage - had as much disposable income as people higher up the social-scale alphabet, and a greater willingness to spend it. Advertisers were impressed; Kiss FM was duly licensed; and the pattern of officially sanctioned broadcast music changed, with mainstream BBC Radio 1 reacting to the presence of Kiss by increasing its output of dance and black- influenced music. (In January 1995, for example, Radio 1 appointed black MTV VJ Lisa L'Anson to a daytime slot aimed at precisely the young, fun-seeking C2 Kiss audience.) The general point is that the musics of this wide area (what might be called the greater East Thames corridor) must be analysed as evidence of East London's cultural diversity - both of the affinity of certain musics with certain specific ethnic groups and cultures, and but equally of the ways in which barriers cannot hold and musics have influences well beyond their points of origin. 178 The echoing corridor The location and development of musical forms Any survey, however brief, must start with music hall. the re are certain continuities and developments in staged variety entertainment by and for East Londoners, from the beginnings in the 1840s, through the mid-twentieth- century heyday of Flanagan and Allen, to the 291 Club, an all-black variety show which was held at the Hackney Empire (and televised) in 1991. This theatre was built specifically for music hall in 1901, and still hosts regular Old Time Music Hall shows aimed at older residents.3 Music Hall also remains in a more portable form. the borough of Redbridge and the London Boroughs Grants Committee support the work of Gilt and Gaslight, a small company which provides music hall style entertainment for people in residential homes and day centres for the elderly, working all over East London.4 usic hall began in pubs; the connection between drinking and leisure in the East End was continued in the development of Southend as a M bank holiday resort for the East London working class.