Be Here Now: Outro
Outro: From Heritage To The Creative Industries
Post-Britpop, I have suggested that the UK pop scene is dominated by a new sensibility: "What it marks is the growth of national self-confidence, and hence a diminishment in the need for self-assertion (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13).
The critic George Walden is here referring not to pop music but to Tony Blair's more relaxed attitude towards Europe in comparison with his Tory predecessors (as evinced by his decision to holiday in France and Italy and the unselfconsciousness with which he converses in French) (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13). The applicability of Walden's comments to either circumstance is a coincidence which nevertheless reveals a truth: that there is, as Pat Kane avers, a connection between the project to revitalise British pop and (new) Labour's plans for a New Britain:
The popularity of Britpop could be linked to the coming politics. It's Blairism in action. He's looking for a positive British nationalism that isn't right wing and, in the classic prophetic tradition of pop, Blur and Oasis anticipate that (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20.1
Speaking in the summer of 1997, Damon Albarn, the Blur singer, goes along with this argument, suggesting that:
Clinton got it on the back of a wave of new consciousness in America with grunge. There was a feeling that things were changing. And I think the same happened in Britain. It is extraordinary how music does precede political change (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 5).
In Chapter Three, I outlined the Britpop sensibility and the extent of its restorative powers in some detail, concluding that it was optimistically post-modern with a nostalgia for a national tradition that it used as a springboard to change and renewal. A similar sensibility is evident in some of the projects embarked upon by the newly incumbent administration, notably their plans to mark the arrival of the year 2000 with both a series of Millennium Greens and the Millennium Dome Experience.
The village green is (along with the country house) one of the most familiar symbols of the traditional English countryside. However, in practice village greens have largely disappeared under pressure from the demand for new housing and commercial developments away from the cities where people still work but increasingly choose not to live (see Hewison, 1987; Coupland, 1991). The new government, echoing Britpop's nostalgia for a lost sense of community (itself an echo of the Kinks' nostalgia for the same, as expressed on 'Village Green Preservation Society' - The Kinks, 'Village Green Preservation Society')2, have earmarked national lottery cash for a scheme to reverse this trend: (t)he Countryside Commission has been given £10 million to create at least 250 Millennium greens around the country" (Nottingham Evening Post, 8 October 1997, page 5). What this project reveals is not that that nostalgia has gone out of fashion as Hewison predicted (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996 - see Chapter Three), but that nostalgia is now being applied to revolutionary (restorative) ends - it is a future-oriented nostalgia (implying both a continuation of and break with the socialist tradition since "(a)lways and everywhere the left has defined itself as being progressive and future-oriented - Mellor, 1989, np).
The Millennium Dome project is predicated upon a similar post-modern optimism, in this case expressed as a nostalgia for modernism analogous to that found in Britpop (see Chapter Three). The building itself suggests a return to 'high modernist' architecture's "prevailing passion for massive spaces and perspectives" (even if it rejects Le Corbusier's belief in the straight line's superiority over the curve - Harvey, 1990, page 36). Similarly, its rationale (to embody "at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future of the world" - Tony Blair in Lister, The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 1) is redolent of the grand ambitions of such modernist events as the Brussels world fair of 1958 and (especially) 1951's Festival of Britain (see Toop, 1995, page 82/The Independent, 25 February 1998, pages 1/8/9/18). Yet, for its critics, this project is flawed because it is trying to recover a modernist sensibility in a post-modern age" (The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 18). The projected contents of the dome seem to bear out the futility of its ambition, its thirteen themed zones suggesting a post-modern pick 'n' mix sensibility rather than a unified vision (The Independent, 25 February 1998/The Times, 25 February 1998). This does not deter the administration from (like their Britpop counterparts - see Chapter Three) flying in the face of the 'facts' to defend the validity of their project, in the hope that, as Peter Mandelson asserts, "if the Millennium Dome is a success, as I am confident it will be, it will never be forgotten" (Whitworth, The Times, 25 February 1998, page 6).
To take a wider view, what this new sensibility implies is not the demise of the heritage industry, but its continuation and transformation. Transformation was necessary because, on its own terms, the heritage industry has failed, as Tim Shadler-Hall observes:
I don't know a single successful museum that was opened for economic development purposes that's lasted more than ten years really and has done the job that it was supposed to do according to people who are into economic development (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996).
The continuing problem of unemployment in Liverpool ("a city where 35,000 men (17 percent of the potential workforce) (were then) jobless") in spite of the application of the heritage solution (see Chapter One) testifies to the accuracy of this observation (Hetherington, The Guardian, 25 April 1996, np) (I shall come back to the reasons for this failure shortly). Rather than abandoning its exploitation of culture's economic potential as Hewison suggests (Hewison, 1987, page 9/page 145), Liverpool is actually increasing its investment in cultural activity as a means of renewing the city. Only now this investment is primarily in new forms of culture.
Recent years have therefore witnessed the introduction of schemes such as the Merseyside Arts, Culture and Media Enterprise, "a £2.97 million development programme for Merseyside … with the aim of creating more than 100 jobs in the creative industries by 2000" (Museums Journal, January 1998, page 13). In 1995, at the site of his former college, Paul McCartney opened LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), an institution conceived as "a late twentieth-century version of the Bauhaus, where skills are transferable across disciplines" (Colin Fallows in Savage, 1996, page 301). Liverpool City Council also got in on the act, becoming "the first local council to establish a dedicated Film Liaison Office", a move which has had the effect of "(increasing) production activity in Liverpool by 600%. To this day Liverpool remains the most filmed city in Britain outside London "(Cavern City Tours, 1997, np).
Sheffield has adopted a similar strategy and is in the process of building new museums, art galleries and a Winter Garden (Hugill, The Observer, 21 September 1997, page 15). As part of this project of redevelopment a National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) is under construction. Due to open late 1998/early 1999, the NCPM's development director claims that it will be "a museum for the future, an educational centre that celebrates the success of popular music as a cultural form" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8). In terms of content what this will mean is that the centre "will contain little that is tangible but will place music in a wider social context through high-tech sound and vision exhibits" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).
These projections are rather reminiscent of those already existing pop tourist attractions Rock Circus and The Beatles Story, a resemblance reinforced by the fact that corporate sponsors, Philips, are meeting part of the start-up costs for the venture (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).
This illustrates my assertion that investment in the creative industries is a continuation of the logic of the heritage industry. Instead of going "to the knacker's yard" (Hewison, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996), heritage culture has been incorporated into an expanded 'culture industry' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Hence, Wigan Pier is still showing visitors 'The Way We Were' (Hewison, 1987,
page 24), John Lennon continues to sing Imagine over and over at The Beatles Story (John Lennon, Imagine - see Chapter One) and tribute bands are still treading the boards. However, as John Tyrrell points out, "by '93 you could safely say that (tribute shows) were dying out and only the good ones remain" (Appendix One). The decline of the tribute phenomenon coincided with the emergence of the (as yet unnamed) 'Britpop' sensibility which incorporated its communal spirit and nostalgic evocation, whilst adding a progressive intention (see Chapters Two and Three). The transition from tribute shows to Britpop (and then from Britpop to post-Britpop) strikes me as prescient of a wider cultural trend well-illustrated by patterns of new investment in Liverpool.
More money is being ploughed into exploiting the heritage of The Beatles (the opening to the public of the National Trust owned former home of Sir Paul McCartney at 20 Forthlin Road/a New Cavern City Tours' hotel in the 'Cavern Quarter' - MTCB, 1997, np). This however pales into insignificance next to the investment in contemporary and future culture, illustrated not only by the developments I have previously mentioned, but especially evident from the proposal to:
Transform the Bold Street/Slater Street/Duke Street area into a centre for tourism and creative industries similar to the Temple Bar area in Dublin. Wolstenholme Square which is home to the Nation night-club and Cream would be the centre of the plans which would upgrade the streets and squares. English Partnerships have pledged £30 million for the plan, while with grants and private money, the scheme could finally be worth £100 million (MTCB, 1997, np).
Indicative of the shift from heritage to the creative industries (a process of transformation and continuation) is the decision of the Labour government to subsume the old administration's Department of National Heritage within a new, expanded Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Indeed the present government seems particularly keen to recognise and encourage the development of the creative industries, which are deemed to be of value for two reasons.
The first of these is, as Labour peer and Millennium Dome architect Richard Rogers asserts, the belief that "investment in creativity is fundamental to economic competitiveness" (Rogers, The Guardian, 25 January 1997). This notion is born of the realisation that "overseas earnings from rock music are now bigger than from the steel industry" (Tony Blair - Music Week, 20 September 1997, page 3). Culture Secretary Chris Smith takes up this theme, stating that, "(l)ike America, we are finding that the value added from these (creative) industries is outdistancing traditional manufacturing industries. The creative industries are where much of our future lies" (Music Week, 1 November 1997, page 7).
Earlier I quoted Tim Shadler-Hall saying that museums for economic development (aka heritage centres) have conspicuously failed in that task. Given the connection I have made between the heritage industry and the creative industries is there any reason to believe that the latter are any more capable of replacing manufacturing concerns than the former? An analysis of the failure of the heritage industry may give us a clue.
This failure should be attributed not to the fact that such attractions exist (after all, as Hewison admits):
The statistic that the number of museums in Britain has doubled since 1960 is not in itself a symptom of decline, for a similar explosion has taken place elsewhere. Japan has opened 500 museums in 15 years (Hewison, 1987, page 84).
The problem has been a failure to integrate the demands of develops with the needs of the local community, as Dr Fred Robinson indicates:
It's easy to spend huge amounts of money developing waterfronts, but on the other hand I think the real needs of local people are elsewhere. They're not in these decayed waterfront areas, but rather in the existing town centres and the rest of the conurbation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).
The high level of unemployment in Liverpool (see earlier) is a testament to this since, as Savage notes with regard to the city's leading heritage attraction, "there is a strong sense of the theme park about Albert Dock: a good place to visit, but curiously divorced from the city" (Savage, 1996, page 299).
A similar leisure-industry based development on Teesside has had a similarly limited impact in terms of providing permanent jobs for the local populace. By contrast, a very successful urban regeneration programme in Tyne and Wear has created over 30,000 jobs in a range of industries (creative, tourist, manufacturing, ancillary services) through a policy of partnership between local government, the local community, business, academia and the Urban Development Corporation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).
Beyond the leisure principle
Just as the success of urban renewal schemes depends on going 'beyond the leisure principle', so too the vitality of pop is predicated upon it meaning more than another source of income (see Intro; Chapters One, Two and Three). As Creation Records' boss Alan McGee avers, "(w)ith no ideological point of view, ultimately music has no soul" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). These comments by a member of the government's Creative Industries Task Force imply a cooling of the relationship between the (Brit)pop scene and the Labour administration (an orgy of mutual congratulation which reached its apogee with Noel Gallagher's visit to 10 Downing Street - The Brit Awards 1998, ITV, February 1998). This impression is borne out by the Pulp song, Cocaine Socialism, a vicious diatribe against the new order (Pulp, Cocaine Socialism). Damon Albarn meanwhile has said that he "found it a bit disappointing when Tony Blair started talking about making Britain great again" (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3). This is somewhat ironic given that those were precisely the aims of Blur (and cohorts) Britpop project (see Chapter Three).
This new antipathy between the doyens of Britpop and New Labour would seem to stem from two sources: the first is the characteristic aversion of pop music to the establishment (see Simon Bates quote in Chapter Two); the second is the fact that the idea of Britpop is passé - post-Britpop the shared sensibility I have outlined has largely disintegrated. Hence, Alan McGee lays into the Prime Minister, moaning that "(i)t's all surface with Blair" (Yates, The Review, The Observer, 1 February 1998, page 1). This criticism largely stems from the second reason for the government's promotion of the creative industries:
… to help shape a new, younger image of Britain abroad. Rather than John Major's vision of warm beer and cricket, (Arts Minister, Mark) Fisher says the Prime Minister wants the focus to be on successful industries such as the music business as Britain moves into the 21st Century" (Williams, Music Week, 11 October 1997, page 4).
To this end, the British Tourist Authority has begun promoting the attractions of contemporary pop culture, producing a UK Guide aimed at 18-30 year olds which was all about "Leeds club culture and the rock band Oasis", and including sites associated with the likes of Oasis and the Spice Girls in a new map of Britain's pop heritage (Collin, 1997, page 268)/The Review, The Observer, 15 February 1998, page 4).
Yet within pop music (and elsewhere in the creative industries) this idea of 'rebranding' Great Britain as 'Cool Britannia' has been greeted with derision (see Elton, Radio Times, 18/24 April 1998/The Party's Over, Channel 4, 21 May 1998)3. This is because such a notion taken together with the praise for the economic importance of the creative industries indicates a failure on the government's behalf to grasp that the primary value of culture is (as Hewison rightly proclaims - Hewison, 1987/1991) its value, that indeed without a meaning value it has precious little economic value (hence pop's sales slump of the late 80s/early 90s - see Intro/Chapter Three).
The assimilation of Britpop (and rave culture - see Collin 1997) into the mainstream of a global leisure industry nevertheless does not mean that O'Hagan was right to view the genre as pop's "last flickering twilight" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20). For instance, even though songwriter (and successful litigant in a
plagiarism case against Oasis) Roger Greenaway believes that "we have saturated the possibilities in the pop music area … we are genuinely running out of tunes" (Wroe, The Observer, 11 December 1994, page 9 - see 'All Saints Ponder Cost of Album Samples', Music Week, 7 February 1998, page 1 for further evidence), hope springs eternal that a raft of new technological developments in the areas of instrumentation, production and distribution will lead to as yet unheard of ways of writing and listening to music (see Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23/http://www.xs4all.nl/~steim).
Of course, technology itself is empty of meaning (see, for instance, Collin, 1997, and for Alan McGee the music industry's problem is that "(r)ock music no longer stands for anything, people are losing interest in it" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). Even if this (unsubstantiated) claim has any validity it is already the case that signs of decline are being met by signs of resistance: Pulp have been calling for A Little Soul (Pulp, A Little Soul), Damon Albarn has begun 'talking about heavy issues' (cf also Radiohead); in rave culture there are attempts to revive the adventurous, collective, spirit on 1988's 'summer of love' - revolutionary nostalgia in the area! (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3/Osbourne, Friday Review, The Guardian, 25 July 1997, page 15).
These acts of resistance indicate that pop music is still (as ever) characterised by a dialectic of liberation and control. Pop music will not die so long as its 'emotional truths' continue to resonate with the day-to-day realities of our lives, our dreams and desires. Even if it is not the case that 'everybody hates a tourist', pop music nevertheless must continue to go beyond the leisure principles to become the music of the common people (Pulp, Common People).
Notes
1. As Attali has observed "Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society … Listening to music is listening to all noise, realising that it's appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political" (Attali, 1985, page 113).
2. Illustrating that nostalgia was a feature of pop music even when it was a feature of pop music even when it was dominated by a modernist future-orientation.
3. The government has responded to this opprobrium by ditching the 'Cool Britannia' concept and scrapping a number of museum charges (Marr, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 24/Woodward, The Mirror, 25 July 1998, page 2). Whether developments are simply more examples of image manipulation or a sign that Labour do value culture in and of itself remains to be seen. For the moment I am not prepared to say that they have definitely moved beyond the leisure principle.
Post-Britpop, I have suggested that the UK pop scene is dominated by a new sensibility: "What it marks is the growth of national self-confidence, and hence a diminishment in the need for self-assertion (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13).
The critic George Walden is here referring not to pop music but to Tony Blair's more relaxed attitude towards Europe in comparison with his Tory predecessors (as evinced by his decision to holiday in France and Italy and the unselfconsciousness with which he converses in French) (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13). The applicability of Walden's comments to either circumstance is a coincidence which nevertheless reveals a truth: that there is, as Pat Kane avers, a connection between the project to revitalise British pop and (new) Labour's plans for a New Britain:
The popularity of Britpop could be linked to the coming politics. It's Blairism in action. He's looking for a positive British nationalism that isn't right wing and, in the classic prophetic tradition of pop, Blur and Oasis anticipate that (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20.1
Speaking in the summer of 1997, Damon Albarn, the Blur singer, goes along with this argument, suggesting that:
Clinton got it on the back of a wave of new consciousness in America with grunge. There was a feeling that things were changing. And I think the same happened in Britain. It is extraordinary how music does precede political change (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 5).
In Chapter Three, I outlined the Britpop sensibility and the extent of its restorative powers in some detail, concluding that it was optimistically post-modern with a nostalgia for a national tradition that it used as a springboard to change and renewal. A similar sensibility is evident in some of the projects embarked upon by the newly incumbent administration, notably their plans to mark the arrival of the year 2000 with both a series of Millennium Greens and the Millennium Dome Experience.
The village green is (along with the country house) one of the most familiar symbols of the traditional English countryside. However, in practice village greens have largely disappeared under pressure from the demand for new housing and commercial developments away from the cities where people still work but increasingly choose not to live (see Hewison, 1987; Coupland, 1991). The new government, echoing Britpop's nostalgia for a lost sense of community (itself an echo of the Kinks' nostalgia for the same, as expressed on 'Village Green Preservation Society' - The Kinks, 'Village Green Preservation Society')2, have earmarked national lottery cash for a scheme to reverse this trend: (t)he Countryside Commission has been given £10 million to create at least 250 Millennium greens around the country" (Nottingham Evening Post, 8 October 1997, page 5). What this project reveals is not that that nostalgia has gone out of fashion as Hewison predicted (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996 - see Chapter Three), but that nostalgia is now being applied to revolutionary (restorative) ends - it is a future-oriented nostalgia (implying both a continuation of and break with the socialist tradition since "(a)lways and everywhere the left has defined itself as being progressive and future-oriented - Mellor, 1989, np).
The Millennium Dome project is predicated upon a similar post-modern optimism, in this case expressed as a nostalgia for modernism analogous to that found in Britpop (see Chapter Three). The building itself suggests a return to 'high modernist' architecture's "prevailing passion for massive spaces and perspectives" (even if it rejects Le Corbusier's belief in the straight line's superiority over the curve - Harvey, 1990, page 36). Similarly, its rationale (to embody "at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future of the world" - Tony Blair in Lister, The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 1) is redolent of the grand ambitions of such modernist events as the Brussels world fair of 1958 and (especially) 1951's Festival of Britain (see Toop, 1995, page 82/The Independent, 25 February 1998, pages 1/8/9/18). Yet, for its critics, this project is flawed because it is trying to recover a modernist sensibility in a post-modern age" (The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 18). The projected contents of the dome seem to bear out the futility of its ambition, its thirteen themed zones suggesting a post-modern pick 'n' mix sensibility rather than a unified vision (The Independent, 25 February 1998/The Times, 25 February 1998). This does not deter the administration from (like their Britpop counterparts - see Chapter Three) flying in the face of the 'facts' to defend the validity of their project, in the hope that, as Peter Mandelson asserts, "if the Millennium Dome is a success, as I am confident it will be, it will never be forgotten" (Whitworth, The Times, 25 February 1998, page 6).
To take a wider view, what this new sensibility implies is not the demise of the heritage industry, but its continuation and transformation. Transformation was necessary because, on its own terms, the heritage industry has failed, as Tim Shadler-Hall observes:
I don't know a single successful museum that was opened for economic development purposes that's lasted more than ten years really and has done the job that it was supposed to do according to people who are into economic development (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996).
The continuing problem of unemployment in Liverpool ("a city where 35,000 men (17 percent of the potential workforce) (were then) jobless") in spite of the application of the heritage solution (see Chapter One) testifies to the accuracy of this observation (Hetherington, The Guardian, 25 April 1996, np) (I shall come back to the reasons for this failure shortly). Rather than abandoning its exploitation of culture's economic potential as Hewison suggests (Hewison, 1987, page 9/page 145), Liverpool is actually increasing its investment in cultural activity as a means of renewing the city. Only now this investment is primarily in new forms of culture.
Recent years have therefore witnessed the introduction of schemes such as the Merseyside Arts, Culture and Media Enterprise, "a £2.97 million development programme for Merseyside … with the aim of creating more than 100 jobs in the creative industries by 2000" (Museums Journal, January 1998, page 13). In 1995, at the site of his former college, Paul McCartney opened LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), an institution conceived as "a late twentieth-century version of the Bauhaus, where skills are transferable across disciplines" (Colin Fallows in Savage, 1996, page 301). Liverpool City Council also got in on the act, becoming "the first local council to establish a dedicated Film Liaison Office", a move which has had the effect of "(increasing) production activity in Liverpool by 600%. To this day Liverpool remains the most filmed city in Britain outside London "(Cavern City Tours, 1997, np).
Sheffield has adopted a similar strategy and is in the process of building new museums, art galleries and a Winter Garden (Hugill, The Observer, 21 September 1997, page 15). As part of this project of redevelopment a National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) is under construction. Due to open late 1998/early 1999, the NCPM's development director claims that it will be "a museum for the future, an educational centre that celebrates the success of popular music as a cultural form" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8). In terms of content what this will mean is that the centre "will contain little that is tangible but will place music in a wider social context through high-tech sound and vision exhibits" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).
These projections are rather reminiscent of those already existing pop tourist attractions Rock Circus and The Beatles Story, a resemblance reinforced by the fact that corporate sponsors, Philips, are meeting part of the start-up costs for the venture (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).
This illustrates my assertion that investment in the creative industries is a continuation of the logic of the heritage industry. Instead of going "to the knacker's yard" (Hewison, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996), heritage culture has been incorporated into an expanded 'culture industry' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Hence, Wigan Pier is still showing visitors 'The Way We Were' (Hewison, 1987,
page 24), John Lennon continues to sing Imagine over and over at The Beatles Story (John Lennon, Imagine - see Chapter One) and tribute bands are still treading the boards. However, as John Tyrrell points out, "by '93 you could safely say that (tribute shows) were dying out and only the good ones remain" (Appendix One). The decline of the tribute phenomenon coincided with the emergence of the (as yet unnamed) 'Britpop' sensibility which incorporated its communal spirit and nostalgic evocation, whilst adding a progressive intention (see Chapters Two and Three). The transition from tribute shows to Britpop (and then from Britpop to post-Britpop) strikes me as prescient of a wider cultural trend well-illustrated by patterns of new investment in Liverpool.
More money is being ploughed into exploiting the heritage of The Beatles (the opening to the public of the National Trust owned former home of Sir Paul McCartney at 20 Forthlin Road/a New Cavern City Tours' hotel in the 'Cavern Quarter' - MTCB, 1997, np). This however pales into insignificance next to the investment in contemporary and future culture, illustrated not only by the developments I have previously mentioned, but especially evident from the proposal to:
Transform the Bold Street/Slater Street/Duke Street area into a centre for tourism and creative industries similar to the Temple Bar area in Dublin. Wolstenholme Square which is home to the Nation night-club and Cream would be the centre of the plans which would upgrade the streets and squares. English Partnerships have pledged £30 million for the plan, while with grants and private money, the scheme could finally be worth £100 million (MTCB, 1997, np).
Indicative of the shift from heritage to the creative industries (a process of transformation and continuation) is the decision of the Labour government to subsume the old administration's Department of National Heritage within a new, expanded Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Indeed the present government seems particularly keen to recognise and encourage the development of the creative industries, which are deemed to be of value for two reasons.
The first of these is, as Labour peer and Millennium Dome architect Richard Rogers asserts, the belief that "investment in creativity is fundamental to economic competitiveness" (Rogers, The Guardian, 25 January 1997). This notion is born of the realisation that "overseas earnings from rock music are now bigger than from the steel industry" (Tony Blair - Music Week, 20 September 1997, page 3). Culture Secretary Chris Smith takes up this theme, stating that, "(l)ike America, we are finding that the value added from these (creative) industries is outdistancing traditional manufacturing industries. The creative industries are where much of our future lies" (Music Week, 1 November 1997, page 7).
Earlier I quoted Tim Shadler-Hall saying that museums for economic development (aka heritage centres) have conspicuously failed in that task. Given the connection I have made between the heritage industry and the creative industries is there any reason to believe that the latter are any more capable of replacing manufacturing concerns than the former? An analysis of the failure of the heritage industry may give us a clue.
This failure should be attributed not to the fact that such attractions exist (after all, as Hewison admits):
The statistic that the number of museums in Britain has doubled since 1960 is not in itself a symptom of decline, for a similar explosion has taken place elsewhere. Japan has opened 500 museums in 15 years (Hewison, 1987, page 84).
The problem has been a failure to integrate the demands of develops with the needs of the local community, as Dr Fred Robinson indicates:
It's easy to spend huge amounts of money developing waterfronts, but on the other hand I think the real needs of local people are elsewhere. They're not in these decayed waterfront areas, but rather in the existing town centres and the rest of the conurbation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).
The high level of unemployment in Liverpool (see earlier) is a testament to this since, as Savage notes with regard to the city's leading heritage attraction, "there is a strong sense of the theme park about Albert Dock: a good place to visit, but curiously divorced from the city" (Savage, 1996, page 299).
A similar leisure-industry based development on Teesside has had a similarly limited impact in terms of providing permanent jobs for the local populace. By contrast, a very successful urban regeneration programme in Tyne and Wear has created over 30,000 jobs in a range of industries (creative, tourist, manufacturing, ancillary services) through a policy of partnership between local government, the local community, business, academia and the Urban Development Corporation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).
Beyond the leisure principle
Just as the success of urban renewal schemes depends on going 'beyond the leisure principle', so too the vitality of pop is predicated upon it meaning more than another source of income (see Intro; Chapters One, Two and Three). As Creation Records' boss Alan McGee avers, "(w)ith no ideological point of view, ultimately music has no soul" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). These comments by a member of the government's Creative Industries Task Force imply a cooling of the relationship between the (Brit)pop scene and the Labour administration (an orgy of mutual congratulation which reached its apogee with Noel Gallagher's visit to 10 Downing Street - The Brit Awards 1998, ITV, February 1998). This impression is borne out by the Pulp song, Cocaine Socialism, a vicious diatribe against the new order (Pulp, Cocaine Socialism). Damon Albarn meanwhile has said that he "found it a bit disappointing when Tony Blair started talking about making Britain great again" (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3). This is somewhat ironic given that those were precisely the aims of Blur (and cohorts) Britpop project (see Chapter Three).
This new antipathy between the doyens of Britpop and New Labour would seem to stem from two sources: the first is the characteristic aversion of pop music to the establishment (see Simon Bates quote in Chapter Two); the second is the fact that the idea of Britpop is passé - post-Britpop the shared sensibility I have outlined has largely disintegrated. Hence, Alan McGee lays into the Prime Minister, moaning that "(i)t's all surface with Blair" (Yates, The Review, The Observer, 1 February 1998, page 1). This criticism largely stems from the second reason for the government's promotion of the creative industries:
… to help shape a new, younger image of Britain abroad. Rather than John Major's vision of warm beer and cricket, (Arts Minister, Mark) Fisher says the Prime Minister wants the focus to be on successful industries such as the music business as Britain moves into the 21st Century" (Williams, Music Week, 11 October 1997, page 4).
To this end, the British Tourist Authority has begun promoting the attractions of contemporary pop culture, producing a UK Guide aimed at 18-30 year olds which was all about "Leeds club culture and the rock band Oasis", and including sites associated with the likes of Oasis and the Spice Girls in a new map of Britain's pop heritage (Collin, 1997, page 268)/The Review, The Observer, 15 February 1998, page 4).
Yet within pop music (and elsewhere in the creative industries) this idea of 'rebranding' Great Britain as 'Cool Britannia' has been greeted with derision (see Elton, Radio Times, 18/24 April 1998/The Party's Over, Channel 4, 21 May 1998)3. This is because such a notion taken together with the praise for the economic importance of the creative industries indicates a failure on the government's behalf to grasp that the primary value of culture is (as Hewison rightly proclaims - Hewison, 1987/1991) its value, that indeed without a meaning value it has precious little economic value (hence pop's sales slump of the late 80s/early 90s - see Intro/Chapter Three).
The assimilation of Britpop (and rave culture - see Collin 1997) into the mainstream of a global leisure industry nevertheless does not mean that O'Hagan was right to view the genre as pop's "last flickering twilight" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20). For instance, even though songwriter (and successful litigant in a
plagiarism case against Oasis) Roger Greenaway believes that "we have saturated the possibilities in the pop music area … we are genuinely running out of tunes" (Wroe, The Observer, 11 December 1994, page 9 - see 'All Saints Ponder Cost of Album Samples', Music Week, 7 February 1998, page 1 for further evidence), hope springs eternal that a raft of new technological developments in the areas of instrumentation, production and distribution will lead to as yet unheard of ways of writing and listening to music (see Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23/http://www.xs4all.nl/~steim).
Of course, technology itself is empty of meaning (see, for instance, Collin, 1997, and for Alan McGee the music industry's problem is that "(r)ock music no longer stands for anything, people are losing interest in it" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). Even if this (unsubstantiated) claim has any validity it is already the case that signs of decline are being met by signs of resistance: Pulp have been calling for A Little Soul (Pulp, A Little Soul), Damon Albarn has begun 'talking about heavy issues' (cf also Radiohead); in rave culture there are attempts to revive the adventurous, collective, spirit on 1988's 'summer of love' - revolutionary nostalgia in the area! (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3/Osbourne, Friday Review, The Guardian, 25 July 1997, page 15).
These acts of resistance indicate that pop music is still (as ever) characterised by a dialectic of liberation and control. Pop music will not die so long as its 'emotional truths' continue to resonate with the day-to-day realities of our lives, our dreams and desires. Even if it is not the case that 'everybody hates a tourist', pop music nevertheless must continue to go beyond the leisure principles to become the music of the common people (Pulp, Common People).
Notes
1. As Attali has observed "Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society … Listening to music is listening to all noise, realising that it's appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political" (Attali, 1985, page 113).
2. Illustrating that nostalgia was a feature of pop music even when it was a feature of pop music even when it was dominated by a modernist future-orientation.
3. The government has responded to this opprobrium by ditching the 'Cool Britannia' concept and scrapping a number of museum charges (Marr, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 24/Woodward, The Mirror, 25 July 1998, page 2). Whether developments are simply more examples of image manipulation or a sign that Labour do value culture in and of itself remains to be seen. For the moment I am not prepared to say that they have definitely moved beyond the leisure principle.
posted by Justin Toland at 2:52 am
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