Folk Opposition →
Even when capitalism is at its most confident and virile it also contains some buried potential. I think this is the case with football: it’s populist and I think there is potential in any kind of populism. Obviously it’s always poised on a knife edge, because there is always a dark potential there. But you might as well think about how it can be channelled to humane and socialistic ends as opposed to just thinking it will end badly. With football the sense of history and the importance of collective experience are still strong. The difference between football culture and music culture is interesting here; music has also taken a neo-liberal turn. The recent history of alternative culture, with its regional scenes and sub-culture tribalism, is now being marketised and commodified and diluted. I think music has really suffered because it doesn’t have as strong roots as football. Even though you had strong regional scenes, as in Manchester, they were certainly not as grounded. But a football ground is a difficult thing to move! They are in cities and act as a conduit for heritage and identity, no matter how moneyed elites try to move stadiums or, as in Newcastle’s case, rename it. There is something immovable about football which you don’t get with say, indie music, which has been completely co-opted and transformed into its opposite.
I was in a band [Everything Everything] for a few years. The experience of going to a gig is vastly awful: there is almost another book in that. Having said there is potential in almost any collective experience, I’m not sure what potential there is now in a gig-going crowd. You’re not allowed to interact with other people between sets because the music is stupefyingly loud, it’s quite expensive, these venues are owned by Carling or O2, and you are sold this awful watered down beer. Also the bands don’t tend to be very good and the live performances are so formulaic and rigidly hackneyed. Every band will play a certain amount of tunes, they will go off, come on for an encore, they will spend thousands and have a big crew trying to replicate the record’s sound. With all that in place it’s very difficult to get anything interesting happening
The folk revival that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s suffered from a lot of the accusations that you could throw at nu-folk: it was middle-class or it was just a leisure activity. I don’t think that’s true. It was much more positive, based around a network of folk clubs and was geographically diverse, whereas nu-folk is very London-based. And of course it wasn’t just folk music: all countercultural music – punk, reggae, rave – once relied on these widespread networks and embedded contexts. The problem now is one of cultural space: where do you perform? The high streets, pubs and clubs have been colonised by the global market. It’s difficult now because there aren’t the spaces there were in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. We need a music supporters’ trust perhaps.
