The Future of East London for Dazed & Confused

The latest issue of Dazed & Confused is an east London special. As the Olympic Games looms and Hackney rents rise, I talk to such east London players as The Foundry's Tracey Moberly, Upset The Rhythm's Chris Tipton and Influx Press, who are publishing the anthology that I contributed "Dalston Kittiwakes"(which I can only describe as a "creative essay") to, Acquired for Development By....

For the piece, I took a wander to the Westfield Stratford City mega-mall from Old Street with the artist and post-industrial romantic Laura Oldfield Ford. Below she talks about Westfield, the nature of her art, and angering Hackney "yuppies".

How do you feel about Westfield Stratford City?
Aesthetically it feels like an international airport - but it’s not necessarily the aesthetic of it that I despise but the other side to it. The precarious labour conditions and the fact that all this money has been sucked out of this area and taken offshore into tax havens, with none of it actually coming back into the area. People here are on minimum wage and work without being unionised. It is that sort of thing I object to. I don’t fetishise poverty chic as it were; I object to the nature of working in these places.

Most people we have encountered in here are not shopping. They are like us, just looking at the spectacle, wandering round it and looking at it. I think it is quite interesting as a phenomenon. Hardly anyone’s got shopping bags. Which does beg the question how long this place will actually survive. If it has become such a spectacle, people are not really using it in the way that they want them to. Maybe they are relying on future inhabitants of the area who are gonna buy it up. But where are they gonna come from? I just don’t think they exist.

I heard that people have been starting fights at your talks?
We’ve had a few brawls so far. The people who are eager to ask questions tend to be the people who object to being called "yuppies". They’ll argue with me or ask me "Where is all this poverty you talk of?" And the room will be packed out with a load of people who have been evicted from the area, booted out, living in really precarious conditions – suddenly this huge groundswell of support for me erupts. At Cafe Oto [in Dalston] the yuppies started throwing punches. It all spilled outside, it got really heated. These blokes were absolutely furious. They’d seen it advertised in Time Out or something because it was described as East End psychogeography. They thought, "Oh yes I like Iain Sinclair. I’ll go along to Cafe Oto. I’m liberal and progressive and I bought a home here so this is my little patch of London." They all like living in little villages now. The room was packed out by people who were being evicted by these guys who were denying that there has been a shortage of social housing, but everyone in the room was living proof that that was the case.


Read my piece on the future of east London plus further interviews and photography by Jamie Hawkesworth in the new issue of Dazed & Confused, out now. Top image courtesy of Laura Oldfield Ford

INTERVIEWED: Blixa Bargeld for Dazed

I travelled to Berlin by air in August to eat, drink and talk with Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten. A naturally arrogant, kind, alternately gruff and giving man, Bargeld has presided over Neubauten, this greatest of European pop groups, for thirty years. He translated the menu for me in this Mitte restaurant. Demanded eye contact (you gave it to him); told me of setting fire to his school in protest against the redundant democratic practices of the school council, of his unsurprisingly fraught encounter with Bono and The Edge, and why the forthcoming European tour might be the last time we hear from Neubauten for a while.

You can read the resulting feature in the October issue of Dazed & Confused, on t'shelves now.

Fütter mein Ego!
Fütter mein Ego!
Fütter mein Ego!

INTERVIEWED: These New Puritans in Dazed

Essex quartet These New Puritans made Hidden last year, a brilliant, meticulously crafted record featuring darkness, lightness, magick, the Thames Estuary, hard graft and disparate influences: Britten, Britney, Byrd, Bjork, Burial; The Beyond...
Read my interview with Jack and George - along with interviews with other UK artists pushing matters Factory Floor and Dave. i.d. and featuring amazing photography by Leonie Purchas - in this month's physical, not digital, Dazed & Confused.

TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

AGONY & ECSTASY: TRAILER TRASH TRACYS

Dazed & Confused, October 2009

Ever got the bus through south London’s notorious Elephant and Castle at night? As you swoop past the intermittent lights that shine out of greying estates earmarked for demolition, you cannot help but marvel at the scale of this very public heartbreak. Jimmy Lee, one half of duo Trailer Trash Tracys, resides in the area – in the shittest council flat you are likely to see,” he says. “But it means I get a three-bedroom flat to myself for £200 a month.”

TTT make songs that seem like epic siren calls in this doomed night. At the root of them is the yearning 80s balladry of bands such as Berlin and Cocteau Twins. Swedish émigré Suzanne Aztoria’s vocals float and crackle like static ghosts over gorgeous songs that quiver under the weight of reverb. New Single “Candy Girl” articulates, among other things, the wooziness of coming down; the failure of modernism; the pain of leaving. Yet it is no miserable anthem. Above all, the song is soaked in the possibility of beauty rising out of desolation.

The pair started working together when they were both in a manufactured pop band. “We were in the indie version of Girls Aloud,” says Susanne. “We were in the middle of a contradiction,” adds Jimmy. “Sounding like the Jesus & Mary Chain, but having these pop songs to play. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.”

Something of the JMC stuck though – the nocturnal lushness that ignited the shoegaze scene, as well as Bobby Gillespie’s “boom, boom-boom, bap” drum style, pinched in turn off Phil Spector. “We can see why people would call it shoegaze, as we use a lot of reverb and other effects,” says Susanne. “But I don’t think it is as simple as that. It is really important for us that they are good songs.”

To say that their music is a passion for both might be to underplay it. “We do meet up a lot to write, record and rehearse,” Susanne attests. “We are kind of perfectionists, so a song has to be completely right for us to be happy with it.”

Yet obsession often leads to pain, and going over and over songs in his south London flat might be getting to Jimmy. “Since starting this band, I have been caught talking to myself,” he confesses. “That’s no bullshit, I don’t even realise.”