It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

Some time ago, I wrote this after hearing the person who made the documentary Crazy About One Direction speak (in an academic context). I've had it set to private for ages but in the context of my continuing participation in Manics fandom, and all that it has given me, I wanted to post it now. 

I watched Crazy About One Direction when it aired last year.  I also watched the enormous twitter fall out where the girls who were interviewed were attacked by other fans and expressed their regret.  I watched the film maker apparently bait fans on twitter to greater response and outcry.  I talked to two of the girls who appeared in the documentary on twitter about their responses to seeing the finished film and the twitter response they endured.

My conclusion was that the documentary was about exotisizing and laughing at the 'obsessive' fan performances of devotion. I felt the girls who contributed were hung out to dry.

I asked her today about a comment she made in her presentation that all the girls were happy with the film and pleased to be in it given my interaction with one contributor which was to the contrary - I suggested that perhaps we could understand it within a framework where outrage was a performative act of belonging to the fandom.  She suggested the girls who said they were angry about their portrayal were not being entirely honest because of the pressure they felt to hate the film.  I think that's a neat and plausible explanation but I don't feel it completely deals with the ethical issues raised by the film's airing and the backlash online.

She spoke about how she felt she had made an affectionate portrait of the fans and admired and enjoyed the culture they created and their experience of being in a fandom. She felt she could never win at making a film about the fans that they would enjoy.

Here's the issue, as it stands for me: if you haven't lived a fandom from the inside you can't talk about it.  If you 'admire' the cultural practices and creation of a fandom then you already miss the point.  If you think being inside a fandom would be wonderful and wish you could be - but aren't - then you are never going to represent that experience correctly because you cannot understand it.  There were a lot of shitty documentaries made about Manics fans, a lot of shit articles written about how we were obsessive and insane and impenetrable.  None of them understood why we were those things, none of them acknowledged how and why we came together and why we protected our borders so vigorously.

Manics fans got to understand the media, we got to understand you have to check credentials if someone wants to interview you.  We got to understand we needed to laugh at ourselves and doing so would help us, as well as take the venom out of the bite of the media when they tried to make those same jokes.  Most music press articles on Manics fans these days have a begrudging respect -  we stayed the course, we learnt to be media savvy, we made the jokes first, but we never sacrificed our passion for the band and our protection of one another. 

I tried telling the One Direction film maker I believed that a lot of the anger the One Direction fans felt was experienced by Manics fans in the past and that we had learnt to negotiate the stereotypes about what a Manics fan is - and that One Direction fans were too young a fandom to have got there yet.  She seemed to understand - but then she made comments that suggested she didn't understand at all.  She linked the threats of suicide and murder One Direction fans levelled at themselves and her respectively after the documentary aired to Manics fans cutting themselves as a performance of belonging.  I explained to her that she was confusing cause and effect - that, yes, perhaps belonging was coded in the Manics fandom by performance of self hatred, but perhaps - more likely -  it was that the Manics provided a space to talk, an outlet, and a siren call to those who were already hating themselves.  Perhaps, I told her, One Direction fans were not expressing self hate and feelings of ugliness because One Direction had a song on that topic (as she suggested), but rather because they felt that way and suddenly, finally, had a channel to express that.

She nodded with interest - this seemed to be the first time an alternative reading of that action was offered to her.  'But!' she countered, 'Manics fans are a very different demographic to One Direction fans.' I nodded in agreement.  'One Direction fans are working class' she said.  I hesitated - Manics fans are almost universally from working class families in my experience -  as conversation around us interrupted I lost the opportunity to correct her on the ways in which I felt they were different demographics.  'There's more than shared music for Manics fans though,' I said 'we have a shared political position'.  She nodded; 'yeah, suicide'.  I boggled.  'Suicide is not a political position', I said.  Conversation of people around us overtook us again and I never got a response from her beyond a laugh.  I was talking about socialism and political leftism.  She was talking about performance of emotional trauma.  She doesn't understand my fandom - she sees only the sensational in a fandom which has negotiated a new media relationship away from sensational representations of our fandom.  For that reason it's perhaps inevitable it was only the sensational, the disembodied, the abstract that was represented in what she believed was an 'affectionate' portrait of One Direction fans

I got talking, later on this evening, to a friend about my experience of being in the Manics fandom.  We talked about what it meant to me and what I understood the fandom as.  Family.  Family is what it is.  Manics fans understand me deep down and I understand them, we share a common cultural knowledge, a social and political position, and, perhaps sadly, a shared trauma in relation to family or mental health or society, or all three.  We skip the basics, the introductions, and we go straight to acceptance and understanding and compassion.  And we sustain one another, look after one another, forgive one another.  We offer each other all the things my friend gets from her family or origin.

I wouldn't dream of making a documentary about what it means to be in my friend's family.  But the cultural availability of fandom, the public construction of it, the apparent accessibility of it, means people feel able to talk, with authority, about what it is we are doing and why.  The jokes we make about what being a manics fan means - about self harm and self loathing and suicide and disappearance - they are funny because we live them.  They aren't funny because they are abstract or because they are excessive.  But those are the reasons people outside the fandom, including this filmmaker, laugh.  We laugh together, they laugh at us.  We laugh or we'd cry, they laugh because it seems strange and incomprehensible, because it is Other.

Ethically though? Nightmare.  I maintain her documentary was fundamentally unethical because of how it offered up her representation of those girls to a hostile and paranoid fandom.  And after speaking to her I strongly believe it fell down ethically because she was sure she understood their fannish experience and refused to listen to them telling her what it felt like from the inside.  She fetishised the experience of being inside fandom and that creates an insurmountable distance in story telling. My family is the Manics fandom, I find it hard to articulate what that feels like - but I don't want someone else to tell my story for me, to judge me by their standards, to point and say "isn't this weird, how they communicate and organise and live?! Isn't it novel and different?! Let's all look and stare!"

And that, I think, remains the fundamental misunderstanding of the filmmaker which means she can't quite see how inevitable the response to that documentary was.  And it made me feel misunderstood, as I tried to illustrate my point with my own experience of fandom because she got side tracked with what she thought she knew about Manics fans and stopped listening to me.

If you're not interested in gig reports and/or the Manics then scroll on by...

Last night I went to my 14th Manics gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire which is one of the few 'classic' London venues I haven't been to before.  I arrived about 5pm and got lost trying to get from the tube station to the venue which was quite serendipitous as a woman approached me and asked if I was trying to find the Empire, I said I was and then a passer by who overheard us pointed us in the right direction.  We chatted on the way and it turned out she was on holiday in London for a week and quite by chance had googled the Manics earlier that day and discovered they were playing and decided to come down and see if she could get a ticket.  Once we got to the venue I joined the (fairly small) queue and she went to talk to the touts.   

She got a ticket for £70 (face value; £32.50, ouch!) and we stood listening to the soundcheck through the fire escape.  We got talking and it turns out she's from Thailand and had been trying to see the Manics for years - back in 2008 they were due to play a couple of days after all the protests and the airport being closed/occupied so they cancelled, rescheduled twice and then cancelled entirely so she was beside herself with excitement.  Then a chap came over and started to talking to us, he was 52, from Italy and had decided to buy a ticket from an online tout (£85) and fly in from Italy that morning and was going straight to Stansted after the gig to catch a flight back again!  Manics fans are nothing if not dedicated!

After that I began talking to the guy ahead of me in the queue who was wearing a pair of leopard print converse that I had been eyeing up for some time.  He had been to every date on the tour so far (see: dedicated!) and at the Bristol gig the night before, had got back to his hotel to discover his ears were bleeding! We chatted and joined forces in our plan to get a good spot on Nicky's side of the stage.

Much laughter and chatter later we were in the venue.

I have a few negatives about the actual gig and I'm going to get them out all at once so I can move on and talk about the good things.

Bad things

There was a hugely aggressive atmosphere. Some lager totting-Ben Sherman shirt wearing knob pushed in front of me as soon as the support act finished and proceeding to completely obscure my view and slam into me as he danced. When he left after a few songs, there was space for three people to move forward, two women from my right moved into the space and aggressively prevented me from moving forward for no reason I could comprehend.

Later, two women who looked rough as all hell (i.e. people I would not mess with) started having a go at the nice guy standing next to me because he was pushed up against them; newsflash ladies, if you are in the 4th row at a standing gig and there have been multiple crowd surges people will be pushed up against you.  I intervened after I heard him repeat for the 3rd time that he couldn't move backwards because he was squashed/there was no space.  I told them there was nowhere for him to move and that we were all squashed, they were basically suggesting he was a pervert because he was pushed up against her back - poor guy was nothing of the sort.

Another woman who I had seen hanging around outside the venue (but not queuing) forced her way to the front, screamed in my ear repeatedly and completely obscured my view of Nicky by holding her massive Galaxy Note phone up to photograph him for the full length of 3 three songs - a lot of people were shouting at her, and she kept leaning on the shoulders and heads of the people in front of her which I'm sure was even more annoying than what I suffered - but she ignored everyone and just kept forcing her way forward.

Towards the final third of the gig the mosh pit which usually happens in the centre and off to the left moved right and into the area in front of Nicky where I was standing - I got smacked in the back repeatedly and about 4 blokey laddy types forced their way in front of me.  I have been knocked over, shoved, kicked, fallen on by crowd surfers, squashed, lifted off the floor by the force of the crowd, and generally abused in gigs - and at Manics gigs - but I have never been so persistently and deliberately attacked and punched as I was last night.  The type of men who were smashing their way to the front exclusively danced and sang to the hits and simply were not the sort of people who have been at gigs in the last few years.  By the penultimate song I had been shoved halfway to the back (from my original position 2 people from the barrier this is a considerable distance) and into an area of calm.  I decided to move out of the centre entirely for the final song and found myself in a group of people dancing, singing, smiling and shouting which made me really regret not moving there sooner.


So, that's out.

Good things

Despite the aggression, there was a lot of positive energy.  The crowd singing on the very first track - Motorcycle Emptiness - was HUGE.  One of the loudest responses I've ever heard and from a relatively small crowd/venue.  Nicky and James seemed to really thrive on the volume and energy of the crowd, there was a lot of interaction (although relatively little talking from them between songs)

The acoustic set in the middle - just James - was spectacular.  One of the best I've seen him do.  He completely fucked up both the lyrics and chords for The Everlasting but we sang him through.  All the new tracks - of which they did many more than usual in an album tour - sounded fantastic.  Richard Hawley came on to do his guest spot on Rewind the Film but it's still just not a winner for me.  That was really the only song I didn't enjoy.

Nicky also did an acoustic bit - he sang the first verse of Marlon JD (much to my unconfined joy, delight and surprise) and then went into [new track] As Holy as the Soil (which made me tear up) but he was tremendous.  His voice was an open joke amongst fans when he started singing but it has definitely improved over the past few years.  That was a really special moment for me.

Motorcycle Emptiness and Design for Life were the first and last song respectively and were the purest moments for me with regard to immersive, unifying energy from crowd and band.  I feel I missed the enjoyment of a number of songs as I was forced to concentrate on avoiding fists in the latter section of the set but overall it was really solid.

Home

I said goodbye to my new Thai friend (who, by the way, spotted my Thai language tattoo and translated it - I did get it right! - and then gave me a lesson on correct pronunciation!) and sent twitter messages to the guy to say goodbye.  We both waved off a smiling Italian man too.  I headed for the tube and got talking to a guy from Yorkshire who told me the last time he'd been to see the Manics was the final night at the Astoria back in 1994.  Manics fans saying they were at the last night at the Astoria (Richey's last gig) is a bit like people saying they were at Woodstock - the number who claim it and the number who were documented to be there simply don't tally - but I am inclined to believe he was telling the truth.

Made the final-ish train to Brighton at midnight and walked home in the deserted streets of 1:30am.  I bade good morning to a fox taking an amble down the road (he paused at the zebra crossing, apparently contemplated where he wanted to go and then resolved to carry on down the pavement on the side of the road he was on) and fell into bed - aching but basically content.

"You can't expect to be happy all the time. A few minutes everyday is all I expect" - Nicky Wire

 I'm currently going through a Bowie phase so intense it is only rivalled by a three month period in 2005 in which I ate only beans on toast and ryvita and listened only to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

I've been scavenging the net, and newly bought 'Starman: David Bowie - The Definitive Biography' for all the ins and outs I need.  I am a big believer in finding the music of an artist before you read up on the mythology and political wrangling that brought them to the fore because it can have such a dramatic impact on your relationship with the music.  This impact isn't always negative (just last year Nailed to History: The Story of the Manic Street Preachers prompted in me a new openness to the Manics commercially disastrous Know Your Enemy) but it can be and I think the immediacy of music in coming through your stereo in a closed room is something that should not be compromised by critical analysis in the first case.

I am struck by the similarity in the story of Bowie's rise to fame with the Manics upward trajectory; from letter writing campaigns, to form coming before substance as they both proclaimed themselves to be - not the next big thing - but the big thing.  I find it fascinating that whilst it takes time - both Bowie and the Manics taking several years from inception to record deal to mainstream recognition - pure, unwavering self belief, self aggrandizement and ruthless ambition is truly the best policy.

As far as my own relationship with Bowie and the Manics goes I think the similarities in their stories are striking; from modest backgrounds, determined to not just transcend those roots but to realise their individual love affairs with rock n roll in it's most idealised form.  Glam rock - 'high glam' as Bowie apparently termed it once, given it was primarily a conceptual statement - of this ilk is borne out of frustration and ambition, and as such is much more seductive than any other music genre I have encountered; perhaps the reason I am only obsessive over these two acts has more than a little to do with that.  Yes, in my youth I donned the uniform of baggy jeans and jumpers for Sterophonics, Coldplay, Travis, Mull Historical Society, Embrace, and Easyworld gigs, but the defining and enduring relationship has and always will be with the glam of the Manics and David Bowie.

Such preening, extroversion, and posturing are at odds with my own natural state.  At my core I am an introvert - and I'm ok with that - but somehow Bowie and, to a greater degree given their continued live presence, the Manics, provide a safe framework within which something in me cuts loose and I am free - eyes blackened with eyeliner, hair glossed and often dyed, short skirts, 'DIY aesthetic', pressed to the front of the stage calling out lyrics with all the simultaneous seriousness and irony required of a good Manics fan.  

Bowie's honest/dishonest declarations on his sexuality and wilful visual confrontation provided me with a much needed touchstone for queer identity when I was a teenager living in a world stripped of any alternative influences or role models.  That his purported bisexuality may have been nothing more than a calculated technique to court publicity is, to me, irrelevant - it provided me an image and a route into a world I inhabit now.

It struck me as ironic when I was watching a late night repeat of Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997 and the crowd sang to 'Creep', that a song about isolation and alienation could unite so many people without any apparent hypocrisy for them.  That is the remarkable thing about music - it starts off purporting to be about alienation, outsiders and otherness and creates, as it gains momentum, an entire sub culture -membership of which depends on correctly enacting that same 'otherness'.  I do wonder at what point it stops being true - how many of those people repeating the lyrics of Creep like a mantra have any connection to the content? When does belonging obscure identification?

I think that, almost uniquely, glam does have an honesty in its performance because it is founded on artifice.  The whole intention is to create a new reality which stands both in parallel to, and above, the norm.  Followers of glam, recreating themselves to attend gigs, are aping their idols in every respect - stripping it off to go back to work on Monday is in keeping with the artifice.  Many people speak of coming to glam through one defining realisation after a single spectacle - for many with David Bowie I understand it was his 1972 performance of Starman on Top of the Pops that changed their relationship with fashion, sub culture and music.  When that is the case, when one moment draws you in, and you can dress yourself in that moment, I propose that you are recreating the moment of epiphany.  A genre which makes you see the world differently in one move can, therefore, offer you revelation every time you dress.  And you can dress a hundred times, a hundred different ways.

Bowie recognised that - that's why he was able to reinvent himself so many times and why the Manics duplicated so many of his statements (from replicating a certain image in You Love Us (Heavenly Version) from Bowie's Boys Keep Swinging amongst many, many other visual statements).  It's a vocabulary of outrage, confrontation, statement and, above all, freedom.

I went to see the Manics last night with Becky and Harley.

It was SPECTACULAR.

One of the best performances I've seen them give.  James was in spectacular voice and hitting notes hitherto unheard by human ears.

Drank vodka in the queue - as is the Manics fans way - and talked to some people who had flown from continental Europe for the gig.  

In an unexpected turn of events, Tolerate made me cry.  The first bar was played and I knew with the absolute physical certainty you have the moment before you throw up that I was going to burst into tears - completely involuntary, somehow more than mere emotions - and pow! I was sobbing my heart out, alternately sobbing and smiling so broadly I thought my ears would crack.   Tolerate has never made me cry before, I wonder if it is an expression of my sublimated fears regarding the political instability and social reorganisation this country is currently experiencing.  Whatever it was, that song is epic and it absolutely overcame me last night.

Currently nursing a back and legs covered in bruises from various crowd surges but overall the Nicky pit was as stable as it ever is.

I just can't put into words how seeing them live - when they are on form as they were last night - is a transformative experience.  Body and soul altered and shaken.  I came away alternately smiling and feeling as though I was going to cry again.  Harley and I were both on that adrenaline high that only the Manics provide and both of us only managed 6 hours sleep last night - finally coming down around 1pm today while we were having lunch.    I woke up with a great big smile on my face and laid back just letting it all come back to me.

Becky has never really been into the Manics but I asked her to come with me in the hopes of converting her.  I don't know that she was converted, or that she enjoyed it - although she tells me she enjoyed some parts of the set.  She asked me why people were so obsessed with them and expressed shock at the fact that at one point during the set she looked around her and found that everyone was crying.  I'm not sure I have a sufficiently large vocabulary to put into words why that happens - but I know with absolute certainty what those other fans were feeling who surrounded Becky. 

The Manics are, and were last night, greater than the sum of their parts - quite literally when they play live given Richey's absence - and that really is as much explanation as I can give as to why I, and many many others like me, find ourselves in tears in front of the stage, mid gig, singing every line as though it is our last.


I'll leave you with a couple of links to blazzingly short video clips....
Nicky's unfeasibly long legs from 00:21
May your gods be with you

And the set list;




ETA: Review from the Independent.