I Wanna Cleave a Capitalist!

Bruce the Barbarian was a cartoon by New Zealand-born cartoonist Murray Ball, apparently well known for a series called Footrot Flats, about a farm. It ran in Labour Weekly, an official Labour Party publication that was closed down in 1988 - and given the year, and the tone of this cartoon, it's not hard to imagine that the weekly was being run by a cabal of those who, as official Labour Party history has it, ran the Party into the ground - macho, workerist, class warring, hairy. A book was published in 1973 collecting the strips, all of them dating from the Heath era, and it's as vivid and expression of polarised, oppositional politics in the British '70s you could possibly want. It's also quite funny.

The premise is a little peculiar, but once you've accepted it, the cartoon is not exactly complicated. Bruce, a Barbarian from the East - specifically, New Zealand - comes to invade the (falling) British Empire to 'RAPE and LOOT and PLUNDER', but, says the blurb, 'he found the Tories had got there first!' So he sets out to 'save the British from Ted the Tory and grab a fair share of the looting, plundering and raping'. This should give you some sense of the somewhat complex allegiances of the strip, particularly with respect to sexual politics. Various forms of disbelief have to be suspended - most of all the portrayal of Edward Heath, or rather, 'Emperor Tedius Heath', as a proto-Thatcherite Roman Emperor bent on class war - but the lack of pissing about occasionally makes for extremely sharp political satire, which the hint of wrongness only helps. It's Up Pompeii-goes Class War, with Frankie Howerd replaced with an Antipodean barbarian armed with a 'pig-sticker', which gets regularly plunged into sundry toga-ed plutocrats.

It's just a little a bit startling to find an official Labour Party publication advocating, via Roman/British Empire alternative reality or otherwise, that shoving daggers into the bellies of the ruling class is the means of changing society.

Reading it, it becomes obvious that this is the very thing itself that the Blairites wanted to change about their Party, not just in terms of politics but also of machismo. Bruce, barbarian and defender of the British proletariat, is as you see above a bit workerist. The workers themselves are usually a bit shorter than him, but usually in flatcaps and somewhat more downmarket togas.

The more things change, etc.

What is especially fun about it is how much it advocates things which would surely not have been official Party policy even at the time. Private Healthcare, which Bruce encounters after being impaled in a Gladatorial bout, is fit not just for nationalisation but also for avenging via pig-sticker.

Private education, similarly. Here you get the impression that for a lot of people in the Labour Movement, Thatcherism - in the sense of a concerted attack on unions, the Welfare State, etc - was seen coming a long time before it actually arrived, which leaves some of the attacks seeming a little odd. Thatcher as Education Secretary basically continued Labour policies (save for that heavily symbolic milk-snatching), much as Heath failed to make any real break with the social democratic consensus. That's what it seems like at this distance, anyway - but reading Bruce the Barbarian, the war is already here.

Yet lots of the things he opposes are Labour Party policies anyway. Only four actual politicians are encountered by Bruce in his travels through Britannia - Heath, Enoch Powell, Thatcher and Harold Wilson, who Bruce casually encounters in the street. In the strip above, Bruce stands against the construction of motorways, something the Wilson government did a lot of. They didn't exactly curb Private Health or Private Schools, either.

Being a barbarian, Bruce takes a dim view of Empire, and of its leading apologist in the ruling party.

That said, the strip is relentlessly unreconstructed. In terms of anti-racism, it's all fairly impeccable, if very un-PC in its use of inflammatory language. What is less so, is the sexism that runs through the book. He is a barbarian after all, and the scheduled raping, looting and pillaging doesn't leave much room for reading Spare Rib.

Hence the Up Pompeii! comparison. Bruce the Barbarian, despite being quite magnificently left-wing by today's standards, is still identifiably in the same world as the sex comedy, as George & Lynne, even, with a fair bit of bouncing bosoms and titillation. Bruce, maybe like the Labour movement itself on its Hard Left, Class War side, is not quite sure what he thinks of the women's movement.

So large breasted ladies are a sign of plutocracy as much as anything else.

The strips above and below encapsulate quite well the fact that Ball evidently wants to support feminism and take the piss out of it at the same time, to be a male chauvinist and supporter of equality at once. Ken Livingstone claims here, 'Old Labour culture was quite sexist and racist'. It probably was. But it was also perhaps vaguely, dimly aware that it shouldn't be, before the 80s New Left rammed the point home.

In its premise it's weird, as politics it's almost equally strange (Wilson as friend of the Marxist barbarian), and sometimes (well, rarely) it isn't funny - but isn't it great to see all the anger and violence and unadulterated class rage in this strip all there, all out in the open, and not just that, but celebrated? And more to the point, can you imagine the editors of any Labour publication looking at it now with anything other than aghast horror?

(click on pics to make larger)

The Man Machine

A relatively obscure figure today, Jeff Beck was one of the great sonic pioneers of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. Whereas for most musicians the possibilities of the electric guitar lay in its ability to conjure rebellion and carnal heat, Beck’s approach was coolly technical - he played the guitar like a precision machinist, as though it were a milling machine or a lathe. A notorious perfectionist, he once asked his record company to withdraw a released album from the shops so that he could add some more overdubs to the mix.

Beck first came to prominence as Eric Clapton’s replacement in The Yardbirds, and who, during his tenure, became the most aurally adventurous group of the pre-Hendrix era. Their masterpiece, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" was a modernist vortex that seemed to suggest almost endless possibilities, though it marked Beck’s departure before Mickie Most destroyed the band and Jimmy Page rebuilt it in his own image.

During 1967/68 Beck recruited his own group from the roster of established and up-and-coming musicians that constituted the British R'n'B scene, including Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Nicky Hopkins, and even on occasions John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Keith Moon. The two albums he recorded with this first incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group, "Truth" and "Beck-Ola" were awesome explorations of the possibilities of stereophonic sound - the lost midpoint between early pioneers such as Joe Meek and Phil Spector and later dub magicians such as Lee Perry and King Tubby. His version of The Yardbirds’ "Shapes Of Things" is a veritable Spaghetti Junction of a recording, with great arches of phased guitar whizzing over the listener's head from every possible angle. "Beck’s Bolero" is similarly mindbending, alternating as it does between fuzzbox-distorted riffing and a clear, echoing slide guitar that recalls the vintage modernism of The Shadows or the soundtracks to Gerry Anderson shows.



"Beck-Ola" was heavier than "Truth", and is often cited as a precursor to heavy metal, but even amongst all the thunder, there’s a precision to the playing and the recording that is so characteristic of Beck’s work. Perhaps that is what is so anomalous about his music to post-punk attuned ears - the sounds that he created weren’t accidental to what he was intending - Beck left nothing to chance, and recorded exactly what he wanted to record, no matter how abstruse the original sounds in his head. Indeed, this is what separates us from all the early sound pioneers and renders them marginal and slightly kitsch: they had full authority over what they recorded, and so what they have bequeathed to us is rarely fortuitous, and can rarely be explained by the picaresque rock anecdote.



With the break-up of the original band, Beck formed a new group with a collection of virtuoso unknowns, and moved in the direction of jazz-rock. Although his music of this period is often criticised as being self-indulgent, my personal objection to it is the opposite - that it’s far too restrained and tasteful. That said, when they did rock out, the results could still be jaw-droppingly impressive. In truth, we are less likely to see another Beck than we are to see another Hendrix; the values of dedication, temperance and modesty being generally scorned. Nevertheless, if there are few post-war British musicians who really merit the attribution of the accolade of "genius", then Beck should really be considered amongst the foremost candidates.

Breaking Glass (1980)



Released in 1980 but written and made in 1978, Breaking Glass is a not-major but under-rated and now almost completely forgotten youthsploitation movie. Like Rude Boy (similarly under-rated and much more interesting to watch than many better put-together, "fully realised" films) it captures--just through involving cameras and locations--the crapness of late 70s U.K.

Breaking Glass, it's always seemed to me, is obviously based on the Poly Styrene story (songs about anticonsumerism and anti-youthsploitation, turn their singer into popstar product, who then has a crack-up on account of the contradictions). (The honking New Wave sax is the give-away, there weren't that many bands who had that specific sound and instrumental line-up). (And 1978, when the film was written, was the year of Germfree Adolescents). By the end of the movie, though, the band's sound is edging towards Tubeway Army and Hazel O'Connor does also have a whiff of Toyah about her.

Always wondered who the reclusive prog-rock star producer is meant to be (Peter Gabriel? Roger Waters?). C.f. The Wall/"Welcome to the Machine"/"Have A Cigar", and in different way "Hotel California", why is that the rock market is so powerfully attracted to musical/filmic representations of the inevitable recuperation of rock's rebellion? How does the triumph of the spectacle/alienation become entertainment?

Ever Pick Your Feet In Poughkeepsie?

Ned Kelly (1970)

"What would England do if America declared war and hoisted a green flag, as it is all Irishmen that has got command of her armies, forts and batteries? Even her very life guards and beef tasters are Irish. Would they not slew round and fight her with their own arms for the sake of the colour they dare not wear for years, and to reinstate it and raise old Erin’s isle once more from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yoke, which has kept it in poverty and starvation and caused them to wear the enemy's coat? What else can England expect?"

Edward "Ned" Kelly, The Jerilderie Letter, 1879

Undoubtedly one of the most derided films of the 1970’s was Tony Richardson’s biography of the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Dismissed by both its director and its leading star, it functions nowadays as a kind of mysterious void in the story of The Rolling Stones, as though all the dark forces that Jagger played with in his debut feature film Performance came back to torment him in his second outing. Almost from the start the production was dogged by problems, including a protest by Australian Equity at the importation of Jagger, numerous injuries to cast and crew, on-set fires, and the attempted suicide of Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, who was originally intended to play Kelly’s sister.

Ned Kelly himself is Australia’s greatest folk hero, and a figure who still today invites no small measure of controversy. The Outbreak of his gang in the Victoria of the 1870’s remains fascinating because it was as much fuelled by an anti-authoritarian nihilism as it was by criminal opportunism. The episode has all the qualities of a small war, something emphasised by the iconic suits of armour the gang fashioned for themselves in their final shootout at Glenrowan.

Mick Jagger was always a curious choice to play Kelly, being neither Irish nor Australian nor even an actor, and his performance invited scorn in any number of ways. Australians were outraged at his adoption of an Irish accent for a man they considered to be a true-blooded Australian. The Irish scoffed at his curious brogue that seemed to wander all over the Bush in search of an authentic tone, while the critics derided his attempt to adopt an accent at all, and noted that it frequently fluctuated between Irish, Cockney and modern Australian within the space of a single sentence. What nobody noted though is that we simply have no idea how a second-generation Irish-Australian spoke in the mid 19th Century, and so Jagger’s accent in Ned Kelly didn’t invite the same authenticity issues as, say, James Coburn’s in A Fistful Of Dynamite.

Jagger’s slight build was considered to be inappropriate for the role of a burly bushwhacker, and this is reflected in his interpretation of Kelly’s character, which is shifty and distracted rather than blunt and forceful. It is in this respect that we can start to understand why Richardson cast him in the role. Nowadays it is difficult for us to recall that Jagger was once considered to be a very dangerous individual indeed, but a great deal of that antinomian charisma is preserved in Ned Kelly in a way that it isn’t in archive footage of The Rolling Stones or even in Performance. There is something in his gimlet eyes and distracted smirking that suggests that Jagger, as Kelly, really is capable of stirring up a hornets’ nest of trouble for those in authority. Perhaps Richardson saw this in Jagger’s portrayal of another Irish reprobate, Oscar Wilde, in the promotional film for the Stones’ We Love You. There’s a sense in Jagger’s performance as Kelly that he is always thinking, always looking for a means to finesse his ever-deteriorating circumstances.



In many ways the opportunities that the critics had to poke fun at Jagger were advantageous in that it meant they didn’t have to engage in the film’s uncompromising politics. Ned Kelly contains some of the most open Irish Republican proselytising in 1970’s cinema. Beyond the Jerilderie Letter, there is continuing debate about the extent to which the real-life Kelly’s actions were politicised, with persistent rumours that his bank-robbing activities were ultimately intended to establish a Republic Of Victoria. The film reifies these rumours and depicts Kelly as a solid class-conscious Republican with the rhetoric to match, turning him from an outlaw to a revolutionary, and makes no attempt at "balance" in portraying his struggle within the colonial authorities. It was plainly a film as much about contemporary Northern Ireland as about Victorian Australia, and like Paul McCartney’s Give Ireland Back To The Irish, was an example of popular Republican sympathising that was quickly and conveniently consigned to the memory hole. Despite the exaggerations of the film, underlying the real case of the Kelly Gang were, however, genuine issues of land ownership and distribution in the Victoria of the mid-19th century, and it’s interesting to note that one of the indirect results of the irruption of the Kelly Gang was reform of the State’s Land Selection Acts and police force.

There are few countries whose landscape is more sympathetic to cinematic photography than Australia, and Ned Kelly is up there with the best in terms of its rapturous cinematography. Richardson was an excellent director, and keeps the story moving along efficiently, effectively, and often with considerable flair. More than any Rolling Stones record, however, Ned Kelly marks the end of Mick Jagger’s days as a bohemian nonconformist. Undoubtedly stung by the hostile reception that greeted the film, he would return to acting only gingerly in the ensuing decades. The Stones themselves, who had become predictably dissipated in his absence, would be whipped back into shape and turned into a lucrative touring business. The film had been a disaster in both his personal and professional lives, and he would no longer be taking any risks with his career. Ironically, Ned Kelly, an excellent film, was to turn Jagger from an outlaw into an entertainer.