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Member Since: 6/5/2006
Band Members: ALBUMS:Ecstasy Under Duress - 1982 Beating The Retreat - 1984 The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom - 1986 A Good Night Out -1987 Terra Firma -1988 Materia Prima - 1989 Gododdin - 1989 Pax Britannica - 1990 Totality - 1995 Tactics For Evolution - 1997
Influences: Nostalgia From the programme to The Second Coming, by Neal AschersonThe Scottish born writer Muriel Spark said once that the novelist was the worst of all sinners before God. For the novelist creates human beings who are denied all hope of salvation.Much the same is true of the Heritage industry. All over Britain, museum factories and industrial theme parks are springing up, in which men and women - often people who once worked in those factories and industries before they closed down - return to simulate the labour of the past. And they become prisoners of that past. For the girls in Victorian smocks in the cotton mills, there will never come factory acts to give them better conditions - more air, more space, less deafening machinery. For the coal miners who act out the hewing of coal by lamplight, there will be no Vesting Day when coalmasters are overthrown and the National Coal Board inaugurates its own welfare state. Those worker-actors are condemned forever to perform the ceremony of toil and exploitation, without the hope of rescue, reform or even liberating technical changes at the end of the show.They are stuck in history. And the heritage museum suggests that the history of work is static. It doesn't have the nerve to prettify old work out of recognition: black greasepaint is smeared on the mechanic's face and hands, and the woman playing a medieval peasant gleaning rye gets plenty of care-lines drawn across her forehead. But the heritage museum does say "Life and labour were like this: full stop." It doesn't usually say "Life and labour were a process of change, sometimes upwards, sometimes downwards, in which those who laboured always had an idea or even a memory of how things could be different."As Britain declines in the World, and as the traditional industries run down, the search begins for new resources. And the most tempting of these resources turns out to be the past. Unlike coal, North Sea oil, ironstone or oak forests, the past is an inexhaustible raw material which will never run out and never go out of fashion. In Britain, after all, the deposits of recorded history are more than 2,000 years thick. No wonder that there is now such a rush to mine it. This country, which once manufactured real goods for sale, now returns to its deserted mills and plants to manufacture heritage for the tourist industry. Britain now offers itself as a place of pilgrimage, a mall for shoppers of the imagination, a long green theme park.But, secondly - and this is the warning of the 'Second Coming' - the heritage industry carries a powerful poison in its nostalgia. It doesn't just look back on the 'bad old days' to pay respect to those who endured such conditions. It doesn't just weep for the passing of the British Empire, political and commercial, when this country was the much quoted 'workshop of the world'. Industrial museums and historical theme parks look even further back - they can't help themselves - to mythic times geared to the English imagination (I deliberately say English here, not British). In those golden days, people knew their proper place and station in life. The leaders led, the rest obeyed, and everyone - great or small - pulled together as a team for the sake of the nation. No such Golden Age ever existed, of course, not even in the misty, Druidic times before the Romans came. But if you shut the past off from the fresh air of the future, that is what the past begins to smell like.In 'The Second Coming' you are taken on this journey from living work to dead work. In the beginning, a symbolic workforce enters with all its hopeful, confident panoply of organised labour: its union banners and socialist visions of Utopia. Introduced to the idea that they will be operating a world of pantomime, museum production, the workers at first retain their rituals of industrial unity. But then the tone of the narrators begins to change. The command to work becomes an oath to a very English version of patriotic loyalty and unity, obedience to 'the heritage'. The workers are bombarded with steadily more sinister ideas: Enoch Powell's sentimental visions of a neo-medieval society prostrating itself before the sacred mystery of the nation, and then - with growing force - the call for dictatorial authority to enforce this ancestor-worship ends. Faced with this, the unity of the workforce falls apart into alienation and confusion, culminating in gigantic imagery of breakdown and chaos, until a new landscape is finally revealed.
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