The Measures Taken

Central Europe is the grey expanse at the heart of the best British pop. One of the most interesting moments in 'Rip It Up and Start Again' was Vic Godard's infatuation with the Eastern Bloc- not necessarily for its politics, but for what Herbert Marcuse described as an 'anti-sensual...grey on grey' culture. This can be seen in the litany of place names in the lyrics of David Sylvian, in delirious eurologues like Simple Minds 'I Travel' (a song which if written now would surely include a line about going to indiah on your gap yah)- and John Foxx's Ultravox, Visage, even Scritti Politti- representing a kind of Eastern Europe of the mind, to blast oneself out of gaudy, lumpen blighty. And also as a metaphor for England's collapsed consensus- Germany and the Warsaw Pact as areas that had already had their fascist groove thang.


Architects, usually trained in pre-1933 Berlin, left little grey pawprints all over Britain, providing the physical co-ordinates for this imaginary Bloc- think of Denys Lasdun's still remarkable Cold War bunker of a National Theatre (finshed, I think, in 1977...), or Erno Goldfinger, or most remarkably Mendelsohn's De La Warr pavilion. Britain was the first stop for the Bauhaus as they escaped from the Nazis, though they were usually so disgusted by what they saw that they moved to New York as soon as they learned the language. These imprints can be seen as what the later post-punks were picking up on, though here reversing the pattern- re-creating it for themselves rather than having it imposed upon them by town planners.


Another remarkable instance of this process is Chris Petit's Radio On, essentially Wim Wenders' Im Lauf der Zeit relocated to the Westway and Bristol, with Liza Kreuzer and Robby Mueller in tow- driving through grey on grey in grey, a lustrous lichtspiel in grau rejecting both the greenawayite and leighist versions of England, by shooting it as if it were Dusseldorf. Of course Wenders' film is itself a reimagining of location, a bleeding grey of the classic Road Movie, with the freeway replaced by the constantly present border with the DDR- an absent stopping point that also marks 'Trans-Europe Express', the point where the train stops.


This border has of course long since been crossed. What K-Punk calls the 'restoration' of the mid-80s removed Europe from the heart of British pop, as well as being the time when the Eastern Bloc bureaucracies became property owners. The US effortlessly took total aesthetic supremacy. The only real British cultural form since- the Pirate Radio Continnum- for all its musical independence is visually and ideologically totally in thrall. This continuum has a few, rarely reported on downsides- essentially for anyone not fond of machismo and sportswear, it offers little aesthetically other than a lower-budget, scruffier version of the class warfare of MTV Cribs. A British Fennesz, or a British Superpitcher, are all but unimaginable, the last few years' efflorescence of microhouse, electro-house, the geometries and lustrous surfaces of Perlon, Kompakt stopping at the channel. For the most part though, the Europe that provided the earlier Bloc of the Mind is also now all but non-existent- this, if anything is the subject of Fennesz and Sylvian's monumental 'Transit'- a crumbling, impotent collection of cities, fit only to be retrospectively eulogised.

all the buildings i have loved are barely standing

A book published in the early 80s about the 1956 anti-Stalinist uprising in Hungary provides, amongst other things, a seeming manual of post-punk fashion- the protagonists in an abstracted version of 1950s fashion, all long grey coats and disconsolate quiffs, the insurgents looking like members of Josef K.

Budapest now is an uncomfortable conglomeration of 21st century hyperconsumerism and belle epoque remnants- grimy, looming, still bullet speckled thoroughfares like Andrassy Ut are suddenly interrupted by barrages of advertising. You see a row of old cars and a film crew, then notice that the street signs are being replaced by french ones- it's being used as a cut-price Paris. Curiously, considering the city is covered with triumphalist statues to various warlords and aristocrats, all the communist-era monuments are exiled to a kind of edifice graveyard on the edge of the city, advertised all over the city's tube stations. The era is written out of history, in a fittingly Stalinist fashion.

This is 'New Europe', in Donald Rumsfeld's terms- like the old one, except more pliant. Its strange, unpronounceable tongues can be tolerated, as there's less dark skinned people to scare the American tourists than say, London, Paris or Berlin. No Muslims to worry Mark Steyn. Sure, you have to step over the homeless, but it's worth it for these prices. Its a vision of Europe without pop- or without a resistant pop- instead bars are full of the europop militarism of turbofolk, the kind of music Arkan's wife makes. We have to hold on to the grey areas, aesthetically if not politically- resist the call to colour...