Several decades ago there was an ideal of “Great Britain”. The broad, sunlit uplands of Churchill’s phrase evoke farmland dotted with Southdown sheep (the breed which look like woolly teddy bears) and hedges full of songbirds. The horizon is punctuated with spinneys of elm trees and the spires of parish churches. Did it ever exist in reality?
We released a long, pent-up breath and went in search of somewhere else … Unwittingly, just like Jonathan Meades, we found ourselves abroad in Britain.
During the 1940’s, the image of broad, sunlit uplands was a powerful metaphor; it gained currency during six years of total war. Spitfires roared overhead as the smell of roast beef wafted over a honeysuckle hedge. The ideal was something to yearn for while bogged down in the trenches of the Bulge.
During the flooding earlier this year, the uplands metaphor took on another significance, since the uplands aren’t floodplains. The Somerset Levels and Thames Basin were inundated; in previous years, the Humber at South Ferriby suffered, and before that the River Tay overtopped its embankments at Perth.
The higher land acted as a refuge from the flooding, just as it was a bulwark against the loss of British identity during wartime. That cherished landscape, abundant with trees, wildlife and villages has inspired many pieces of pastoral music, and perhaps you can already hear Vaughan Williams’ “Lark Ascending” playing in the distance…
A biographical article which I’m writing at the moment reminded me of the parallels between place, architecture and music. The visual and auditory cortices in the brain are closely allied: they have rhythm, structure and composition in common and sometimes they come together in a synaesthetic way. As I was writing, I thought about this song, which evokes the broad, sunlit uplands.
Talk Talk’s track, “New Grass” is topographical. The sound picture it draws is an open, rolling landscape; the warm-toned electric organ and lilting guitar achieve a feeling of tranquillity and disquiet. The music seems to capture what the uplands, but also hints at fears for their future. New Grass evokes a folk memory of agrarian Britain, particularly the years immediately before the Great War when radical young men in walking boots explored the countryside.
The Great War poets suggested that Britain’s essence lay in the pastoral, with its traditional and modest values: by contrast, the city was brash and inauthentic. That duality carried into the Modern era with poets such as W.B. Yeats who looked back to Thomas Hardy and forwards to Phillip Larkin. Similarly, it had a relationship with pastoral music where Talk Talk found a place of their own, between mystical Romantics like William Blake and composers such as Delius and Vaughan Williams.
“The Lark Ascending” was written at the start of the Great War when there was an underlying fear of the loss of countryside, culture and ways of life. Similarly, Mark Hollis of Talk Talk completed “New Grass” in the last years of the Thatcher government. The track was released in 1991, by which time much of the Green Belt had been lost, agribusiness had destroyed the hedgerows and joined hands with suburbia. The Idea of the South remained, but the reality had shifted.
That’s just my interpretation, of course, because Mark Hollis retreated from the showbusiness machine many years ago, and doesn’t seek out publicity. Apart from "Chaos" on the UNKLE album Psyence Fiction (the one with Futura’s cone-headed aliens on the cover) he has kept a very low profile. Maybe he decided that the yearning and wistfulness of New Grass said everything he needed to say.
Still, for me, New Grass *is* the South Downs, which roll gently towards the Channel. It’s more than an idealised version of wartime Britain: in that track the ideal, the image and the music are now inextricable with the place.
The South is another country. Where does it begin and end? You keep travelling until you run out of land in Sussex. Brighton seems the most English of towns, but it’s almost as close to Dieppe as to London. Nonetheless, the Great Wen has the same push-pull attraction on Brighton as it does on the rest of the country, and going up to London takes just an hour on the electric train. Perhaps it’s too close…
The North is far enough from London to seem exotic. From the wild moors above Haworth to the sooty gritstone of those dark satanic mills, it was captured in John Bulmer’s photojournalism from the 60’s, a Kestrel for a Knave, to the TV drama Our Friends in the North. For the metropolitan media, The North is Lancashire and Yorkshire; it’s Way Up North when you hit Teeside and Tyneside, and the Far North once you cross the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick.
At architecture school, I discovered how this perception differs according to your starting point. For people living near the south coast, The North would be an escape – but Scotland was like internal exile. Jo from Guildford, Nick from the Isle of Wight, Pat from Southampton: among their reasons for choosing Duncan of Jordanstone, so they claimed, was to get as far from home as possible…
At first, the hard-edged Scots tongue must have seemed abrasive. Those stone-built cities which climb up towards the Campsies, the Pentlands and the Sidlaws come from a different tradition. The clear air, harsh winters and heavy industry bred hard men and socialism. So the place was straightforwardly different, even though people are people across the world; all brothers and sisters under the skin.
As the North is to them, so the South to us.
One day, I escaped from London and explored the town at end of the sunlit uplands … Brighton … a magnet for teenage runaways, love-struck couples and musical dreamers. The hazy sunshine and mild winters are agreeable, and soft accents roll from stucco terraces which go down to the sea. Yet beyond the comfortable politics of reaction, there’s a community of bohemians and anarchists here, radicals on their own terms.
So, join the Little Magnets who tumble off the train like freshly-struck coins, then stroll along the Marine Parade and take in the swirl of hot dogs, candy floss, perfume and cigarettes around the Palace Pier. Leave the attics in bedsitter land and walk out along the front on a quiet midweek afternoon; saunter through the antiques markets and vintage clothing stores, hang out in the coffee shops and catch gigs at the Concorde.
The Brighton scene has pedigree: from Graham Greene and Mods & Rockers, to Quadrophenia and the Zap Club. I remember the cool graphics of club fliers which drew me there: punk was followed by indie music, then the crusties and acid house came along. Brighton also has a full-on graf scene: writers have made their mark in sprawling wildstyle. And it has COTS – the Colossus of the South – a series of vast stormwater chambers which tempt the bravest to explore during dry weather.
But most of all Brighton meant Transvision Vamp. I recall a friend at school, Scott Clark, who was a huge fan of Wendy James, but I can appreciate them for the music they wrote, too.
As she said in an interview, “I was a young teenager and the world was opening up for me… My life was beginning, that's how I remember Brighton. The world was full of possibilities, and Nick and I made our own bubble and lived in it, working, working, working towards the day that we would have our music ready for the world.” Freed from other peoples’ expectations, they were able to make themselves up as they went along.
That comes through in the music, along with the trashy aesthetic of Pop Art which chimed with Brighton, the saturated colours of Jamie Read’s posters along the Kings Road, the powerfully-amplified fairground music which encircles the pier and beneath it the onrush of the Channel breaking over the shingle beach.
Transvision Vamp became what Talk Talk began as: a pop band which sprang from punk. For a glorious moment, they achieved what they set out to do. They channelled all the yearning, the pent-up energy, and the self-discovery into three minute pop songs. Who knows what their equivalent is today; it certainly isn’t played on Radio 1.
That’s the first impression, of high-energy kinetic tracks such as “The Only One”. The song reaches its chorus, then… (Clarkson Pause) … the middle eight punches out. On a tinny iPod you pick up how compressed the guitars are, but over a club PA with a decent bass response, it destroys the place. It’s also a good example of eidesis. The lyrics don’t repeat through laziness: they repeat for effect, just like Miesian buildings gain much of their power through the unbroken repetition of the grid. That’s a rhythm thing.
Transvision vamp The Only One from Mark Alchin on Vimeo.
However “Landslide of Love” is the most completely-realised track they recorded. Nick Sayer once said it was the song which he felt at the time was his best example of "pure" song writing. It nails exactly how teenagers can be overwhelmed with emotion, which swings from pure elation to feeling so low that you think you’ll die.
At first listen, you catch the song’s uplifting harmonies, the synthesised strings and the guitar part in the bridge. Afterwards, you begin to hear the lyrics and realise how cleverly they resolve the song into something wistful. The vocals sound like ignited oxygen on The Only One, but world-weary on Landslide: there's something equally melancholic about a seaside town out of season, and Landslide seems to capture Brighton’s faded glamour just as it was around twenty years ago. That’s an atmospheric thing.
Landslide was released in 1989, and a few years later Transvision Vamp followed Talk Talk into silence. Having burned brightly, they faded away. At this point, it all goes back not to Blondie, T-Rex, Marilyn nor James Dean … but to Marcel Proust. Pop music creates the most powerful madeleines of all, the mnemonic triggers for memory which take us back to places and times we knew: it takes us to Brighton, where the modern pastoral ends and the Idea of the South runs out into the sea.
