No. 11: Philip Hoare

A deep dive (lol) with the night swimming punk.

Hi everyone, welcome back - again apologies for the break, but as I said in the previous mail, I’ll pause everyone’s subscriptions for a month, so those paying won’t lose out.

And we’re back with a splash (pun intended). Philip Hoare is best known as an author, his often dreamlike narratives having a particular focus on the sea and on whales, and before that as a journalist. But he has been heavily involved in music scenes too. It was Brian’s idea to include him, as he’d photographed him for work and taken to him immediately, and as soon as I started looking into his background I was all about it too. As you’ll see, Hoare’s subcultural involvement is about as deep as you can get, and his insights into how subcultures function and transmit their essences go right to the very heart of what we’re about with Bass, Mids, Tops: in particular he completely understands the physicality of culture, in a way that I guess is not surprising for someone whose writing is all about the body and its place in space and time.

Going to interview and photograph him was fun. Hoare lives in the hinterland where Southampton stretches out towards Portsmouth, at the opposite end of the Solent from me - and Brian and I both went down to meet him. He took us for a walk through the Royal Victoria Park, telling us local legends of haunting around the now demolished military hospital there – built in the Crimean War and once the longest building in the world, packed with many hundreds or thousands of terribly wounded men – before we sat down for tea in the Cedar Rooms, originally a YMCA ballroom dating back to 1940. It all felt like a perfect setting as he started referencing his roots in the area, the links between punk and odd and archaic bits of discarded early 20th century culture, and his love of night swimming in the Solent which was just across the park from where we sat.

His torrent of thoughts are a fantastic mixture of the salacious and the psychedelic, hypnotic in the way they flow hither and thither. I’ve broken up sentences as best as I can for ease of reading, but on the whole his speech is pretty unpunctuated. The whole of his opening salvo below really came out as a single sentence – and what a sentence! Because Brian has a particular interest in punk, post-punk and Bowie, you’ll see he got quite involved, indeed there are chunks where it is more three old men setting the world to rights than interview. But we’ve always wanted this format to be about the natural patterns of conversation and I hope you’ll agree that this led us to some really interesting places. Once again it helped us with our broader mapping out of contours with some interesting intersections with previous interviews: around dub, around markets and jumble sales, around stencils and collage, and more. It also includes Nick Cave throwing chairs in a “girly” way. Anyway, get yourself a cup of tea or something nice, and settle in, because this one is quite a ride.

So Philip – I stumbled on your quote that “punk is utopian” the other day, which straight away is something I’d love to get into. You were a punk as such, right?

Southampton's first punk... I’m speaking to you in Southampton now where I was born and grew up. So I left school in 1976 and I wanted to go to art college. My parents dissuaded me from doing that. I was brought up as Catholic – still am a Catholic. And I didn't get enough good grades – I got a grade E for my English, which considering I've published nine books now is quite funny, but so my parents said, you know, there's no future in going to an art college, and they were kind of worried I get into sex, drugs and rock and roll. So I went to college in London in 1976 [laughs] and within two weeks, I was in the Roxy club with John Rotten refusing to let me go through the passage – the passage going downstairs in the Roxy club was very narrow and he just stood aside and sneering you know [makes a face] – but I was very impressed. I remember being really impressed, too... because you had to queue up to get in, it didn't matter who you were – and this boy came up in black leather jacket – you know there was difficult to get those things in those days especially if you didn't live in London – and he had the peroxide hair... I'm pretty sure it was Billy Idol in fact in retrospect but at the time I didn't know who Billy Idol was, and going “oh have you got a loiiiiight” in this very affected London way you know, which I did, and the spark of the lighter flared up his face it's like a god to me. Like this peroxide, very beautiful young man going into this club, it was like “this is the place for me!” So I used to go there every week, sometimes twice a week, having people like The Jam, The Adverts, The Vibrators – they were the first band I saw. So backtracking... in May that year I'd I'd come up from here, to London by train to see Bowie in the Station to Station tour in the Empire Pool Wembley. And I was already a big Bowie fan from Ziggy Stardust onwards. I never owned Ziggy Startust, only had a tape recorded from someone else. I found the tape the other day actually, that little tape, I played that so much. And so finally it's 76, it's my birthday, my 18th birthday, got to Wembley to see him and the Empire Pool Wembley then was just like a cavernous black hole, it was, it still felt like the the swimming pool it had once been, and he came out – I don't know if you know know the set for the Isolar tour, that Station to Station tour, it was just a cage of fluorescent lights, like a Bruce Nauman installation or something, it's just a cage and strip lights and him within it in black and white, you know the black waistcoat, the white Paul Smith shirt – as we know now, didn't know at the time – with the Gitanes in one pocket and his hair red at the back and then orange at the front: the Thin White Duke. ...and he just sang to me. I mean, as far as I was concerned, it's just him and me in this huge space. And you know, “The Return of the Thin White Duke throwing darts in lovers' eyes”, that great long soundtrack, the train, and the opening act was Un Chien Andalou¹, Buñuel, his Chien Andalou underlayed with a soundtrack of Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity... You don't recover from that. You can't ever recover from that. I still haven't. I still write about that in every book I do. You just don't come back from that.

Brian: How did Bowie get to Southampton – I mean, how did you come across him?

Just my friends. At school my friend's brother, and his friend, they'd been to see Bowie at Southampton Guild Hall in ‘72. I was too young, but that was how I was inoculated by Bowie – and the cultural references. What was really interesting is that they really picked up on Bowie's references to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. So that was coming to me in '72, ‘73. So a long time before it was really entering into the punk, the youth thing. And my friend's brother, well, his best friend John had a jacket made, from a shop in Chelsea, he had a leather jacket made like Lou Reed with sort of glass studs on it, very thin black leather, and he was he was the first man I saw wearing platform boots, and his nails painted black. This is at a monastery school, we were all at a monastery school. It's amazing what you could get away with at the monastery school. 'Cause you couldn't do it at your local comp, probably! I had I had lunch with him a month ago, actually, he's a Lieutenant Colonel, the Royal Engineers, it was so hilarious, and he's actually his new his new command is Royal Hospital at Chelsea. So he's in control of that...

Brian: At the other end of the World's End Road...

Yes! So that was how I came into Bowie. And I was really into the 20s thing and Man Ray² and all that sort of thing. In fact, my college rooms, when I moved into my college after the Bowie concert, in that Autumn, I assembled a kind of a grid of plastic cups on the wall, sort of Carl Andre³-ish. And had Man Ray's name written above it, so I was already obsessed with Man Ray... and Man Ray died that November too – 1976

Brian: Did you get the programme from the Bowie tour? Because wasn't there was a Japanese photographer did all that...

Sukita? yeah, yeah, beautiful thing. Yeah. I did an installation in in Torbay about two or three years ago – I made a Bowie exhibit in this Victorian museum, the Torquay Museum, and all the tenants had to wear red overcoats. It was just The Man Who Fell to Earth, it's just a riff on Man Who Fell to Earth. And I had my original stills I had the you know the marquee stills which you have on film stills outside, I had original stills and I installed them in a line. And when when Bowie's effects were sold by Sotheby's, my sister's husband, my sister is completely obsessed with Bowie so he bought her Bowie's... God who's the Italian designer, you know, the Italian designer, mid 80s, you know, sort of postmodern designer, the... you know, pepper pots.

Argh, yes OK... Not the Alessi guy with the lemon squeezer⁴?

No. Oh it'll come to me. Anyway him⁵, and my brother in law bought her his lamp. So we had this lamp installed. I refuse to touch the lamp because it belonged to Bowie. In 2013, when I was asked to contribute to the Bowie Is catalogue. And I did a conversation with Mark Kermode and Christopher Frayling. And afterwards – we did this conversation which is in the catalogue, in the book, best selling book the V&A have ever published⁶ – the curator took me aside, he said, “I've got something to show you,” – just me because he knew I was just completely mad. And we went downstairs and there's the conservation department, and there's a big plywood... like a coffin, like a sarcophagus, semi circular plywood dome and you lifted up and there was the costume he wore in “Ashes to Ashes” that is like buckram, Jacobean Pierrot, you know, with pearls and things and it was virtually shaking as I looked at it, and I went to touch and I couldn't touch it. And it was like a chrysalis. It's like he'd gone. This was 2013 Before he died, and no one knew he was ill. But I sort of had this premonition, whatever...

Of course he would do so much with all that idea of prefiguring and secrecy and so on with Blackstar...

God that was amazing, and the artwork, who designed that cover – Jonathan...? Jonathan Barnbook. Yeah. Yeah, that was an amazing sequence. But But yeah, so anyway, so going back to '76...

Well actully before you do, could we go back a bit further still just to get your background... Was there pop culture at home when you were a younger child?

Yes, yes very much. So because I had three brothers, my eldest brother was like a generation before almost, I was the fourth of four brothers, with two sisters after me. My oldest brother was kind of like, sort of semi teddy boy in the 50s. The next one was a mod. And then my brother, my next brother, nearest to me was a hippie and he was going to the Isle of Wight pop festivals, which is just by the ferry over there [gestures towards the sea], he was the real introduction to pop culture, because he'd come back talking about Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Brown and taught me to dance like Arthur Brown dancing, with his flame on his head⁷ [laughs]. My brother really outraged my father, my brother being very straight, he wasn't at all gay, but wearing gold, crushed velvet loons and a frock coat – he looked fantastic! And I idolised my brother really, in that way. And that's what made me attuned to pop music, that kind of the dress, the dressy-up thing, I was as much interested in what they wore as what they sounded like. So in ‘76 which was obviously when punk was really kicking off.... As I came out of the Empire Pool, having seen Bowie, behind me were walking Steve Severin and Siouxie Sioux. And I knew who they were because I was reading the NME, sand seeing them like this, it's really... I thought, wow, that's what the future is. They're his children⁸. And that's what's going to happen you can see it's already happening but of course in Southampton, you wouldn't really have been aware of that apart from what you read in the NME.

Brian: So the NME was the conduit?

NME, yeah, definitely, but also a magazine called Rock Scene, which was... which is really forgotten now in the punk story, but was really important because that was reporting on the New York Dolls and Television and all those bands. Rock Scene was was a magazine with proper photographs. It was just photos like, you know, American published but you can get it here or an import and it was bit like buying Marvel Comics, it had an illicit quality because was like an American thing, which was all banned by my father, you had to read that stuff under the under the bedcovers. And, and already having been into Roxy Music, which is another thing... We were taught by monks at our school and I remember, we had the first Roxy Music album, which my best friend brought in, and we were looking at the gatefold on the Roxy Music and one of the monks came in this is before school started he ripped it out of our hands. He said [furious Irish growl] “I'm a man – I don't look at pictures of girls!” because it's that sort of cheesecake photograph. What he didn't realise we were looking at the men inside. I'm looking at Ferry and Brian Eno, like “Whoa amazing!” So funny. So yeah, so then that autumn of ‘76 was a real introduction to the physicality of punk, going to punk gigs especially the Roxy which became just amazing you know the people you would see there, 'cause the audience were as interesting as the band I saw The Damned a lot, I used to get up and sing with them on stage and brought a water pistol to squirt at them – but people were still gobbing at them, at bands, actually: an absolutely horrible thing really. But amazing place you know because that kind of cryptic undersea undersea world almost, almost like being under the ocean very dark basement you know, Don Letts DJing and all you could drink was Red Stripe...