Steven Ball is one half of Storm Bugs, a South East London duo who played a key role in the late 1970s/early 1980s cassette movement. Bending circuits, scratching vinyl, mutilating melody: they created a strangely liberated form of proto-industrial arte povera that, rediscovered and reissued over the last decade, has held up remarkably well. Loosely affiliated with that period’s DIY groups, Storm Bugs still feel uncaptured. Ball’s subsequent activities, moving across spoken word, video and installation, testify to his restless energy and genre vagrancy.
Collected Local Songs, while quieter in register, is equally intriguing. It's a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centifugal texts: ghost signs, ringtones, viral marketing skywriting, fragments of overheard speech. "Cloud Of Dreams" comes across like an old blues song written by conceptual architects Metahaven: "Woke up one morning/Singing phrases from a dream/Into his mobile phone".
There's drift and ambulation here. Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count. It recalls the cussed melancholy of Jem Cohen’s films, or Stephen Dwoskin's Jesus Blood, the South London film best known for its Gavin Bryars score. Sometimes Ball’s vocals are a touch too measured, making "Deptford Flea Market lnterlude" - comprised of found sounds such as junglist beats and street stall patter - all the more potent. Collected Local Songs may be a discographic side swerve for him, but it's a resonant and very effective one.
The following is my introduction to the film This Surface by David Hall and Tony Sinden from the David Hall: Video Art Pioneer tribute event at Tate Britain on Thursday 5 March 2015.
In 1972 Mouldy Old Dough, was one of the most popular records in the UK. It was number one
in the pop charts for four weeks in October, making it the second biggest
selling UK single of the year, behind only The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon
Guards' bagpipe version of Amazing
Grace.
The song was written by Nigel Fletcher and Rob Woodward, and first
produced by them as the band Stavely Makepeace, subsequently released under the
name Lieutenant Pigeon. The song was recorded in the
front room of Woodward's semi-detached house in Coventry, and features his
mother Hilda on piano. Played in a boogie-woogie, honky-tonk, ragtime style, the
only lyrics growled by Fletcher are the title "Mouldy Old Dough" and
"Dirty Old Man". As well as the boogie-woogie piano the song also
contains a military-style drum and recorder melody, which acts as an intro and
middle eight.
It is one of a number of early seventies novelty
hits, which are mostly characterized as being records by hitherto (and often
subsequently) unknown eccentric artists, unusual enough to capture public
attention, or humourous songs by known artists whose work rarely graces the pop
charts, such as Benny Hill's 1971 chart-topper Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) and Chuck Berry’s 1972 hit My-Ding-a-Ling.
Indeed one of David Hall’s ex-students would later
achieve the heady status of having a novelty hit record with a cover of an old Barrett Strong song.
Mouldy Old
Dough has the whiff of an old-time knees up about it, and as such it’s a
natural accompaniment for the age-old traditional party trick of balancing a
pint of beer on the head while dancing.
The film This
Surface (David Hall & Tony Sinden, 11 minutes, 16mm, 1972-3) thus locates itself firmly in the popular culture of its time, in an
ordinary setting, with an ordinary activity, in a pub around Christmas time
with one of the most popular of current hit records playing in the bar. Perhaps significantly it avoids the then
voguish nascent glam rock genre or teeny-bobber hits (for currency it could
equally have been a record by T. Rex, Slade, Gary Glitter, or the Osmonds, for
example). So the film starts in a setting steeped in everyday working class and
popular culture, as far removed from the usual settings or concerns of avant-garde film as could be imagined in
1973.
This indicates part of the intent of the Five Films
collection, of which this is one. David Hall and Tony Sinden’s intention was to
take the conventions of film as a starting point for a series of exercises in what
would later become known as Deconstruction. Not for them the then avant-garde orthodoxy of establishing
new and alternative aesthetic constructions, or as the term suggests, forming
an advance movement that would invent forms for the future. Nor for them the
context of a small but elite site of reception, populated by an audience of
cognoscenti.
The other films in the Five Films variously
deconstruct the relationship of the actor to the viewer (Actor), or spoof Spaghetti Westerns to playfully undermine the inadequacy
of the frame to encompass pro-filmic scenes (Edge), and like Hall’s other works, particularly those made for TV
such as This is a Television Reciever
and the TV Interruptions, these films
use the juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange to present the
problematic that reveals the construction of the illusion of cinema. But they do this in a way that doesn’t
require any specialist knowledge of film semiotics, they provide the keys for
this as part of their own conditions, assuming a non-specialist audience, one
that might otherwise be alienated by unfamiliar experimental aesthetics.
David Hall’s practice was not avant-garde, this is not film aspiring to high art, it is not bravely
carving out a new visionary utopian space which might not yet exist, if
anything it is anti- or ante- avant-garde
(which is to say both in opposition to and beyond the concerns of), it was
plugged right in to the present situation, and the common, recognizing that
film, and video, and TV, are socially and technologically part of an
entertainment culture and industry.
Perhaps the fact that the Five Films have been
generally overlooked as works of critical experimental cinema, and rarely
screened as individual films let alone in their entirety, can be attributed to
their refusal to conform to the rarefied concerns of the avant-garde, and their suggestion that ‘deconstruction’ can be
performed within the site of popular forms.
Having invited us in to this party, the film
abruptly takes us on a drive around Brighton, starting with a seascape from a
moving car, a seascape and horizon as precisely framed and as measured as might
be a structural landscape film, and in that regard reminiscent of David Hall’s
experiments with landscape production and framing in Vertical. However here the message of the film starts to become
explicit; the words of the title, which form the first two words of a mini-essay,
are hand written in red felt pen, apparently on the car window; the exterior
and the text (which I think of as a kind of diegetic text) pull in and out of
focus. The film essays a play of surfaces, layers and image planes: drawing
attention to both the screen as surface of projection, the film surface (both
as image and subtitle text), the text on the car window, as well as the surfaces
in the technical apparatus of filmmaking.
Brighton, a seaside town, a place with a royal
history and a popular resort for summer holidays, with the End of the Pier and
House of Wax entertainments, which is where the film comes to rest, beside a Sword
of Damocles amusement, and here it is worth watching for another play of
surface self-reflexivity through self-reflection.
I’ll stop there in the hope that I haven’t
over-described the film with too many spoilers.
Each time I see the film I notice something new. The Five Films are
films in which, I believe, every element is meticulously intentional, the play
and balance of humour, self-reflexivity, and nuance are exquisitely crafted.
Before he died I was working with David Hall on
ways of resurrecting the Five Films, the existing available prints had not aged
well and David was reluctant to have them screened, and we were working to
producing new digital masters. With
funding from the Henry Moore Foundation, Lux is in the process of getting the
films digitized, and as such the copy of This
Surface screening tonight is hot off the surface of the scanner…
