Souvenir

by Michael Bracewell

Genres: City Life

Synopsis

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant

'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside

'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare

'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe

A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Release date: September 2, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 128

Sample

After the freezing winter of 1981, with its hard frosts and clear icy twilights of intense stillness, and quiet skinny boys hunched in old raincoats, always having to walk, listening to New Order, reading John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard, and pale art school girls in the thrall of Schiele, Erté and David Sylvian, there occurred in the pop-style zeitgeist a role-playing fantasy. This took the following form and proved a sharp contrast:

A received idea of London’s West End during the mid-twentieth century, mixing a concentrate of Bebop to Beat Boom modes from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and making a dressing-up box of their glamour: zoot suits, pinstripes and keychains, Alma Cogan, spivs, Julie London, Old Compton Street, Expresso Bongo and The Talk of the Town; a streetwise fast-talking cool proletarian notion of Jewish tailors, Bakelite, Beat Girl, pomade, strippers, Demob and Demop, coffee bars, beehives, impresarios, modern jazz, taffeta, nightclubs, Stephen Ward, rockabilly, stout, diamanté and upright bass … this fantasy building in exuberance, over two or three years, to embrace samba, salsa, disco, tinsel, cocktail bar palm trees – tans and tennis shorts, good times party carnival showbiz: the sound of a bright new Britain.

Occurring alongside this period costume drama of pre-Swinging London, pre-Beatle pop, meanwhile, to pursue an independent but occasionally overlapping course, was a cult of the abject, industrial, occult, transgressive, clever, days in a tower block east of Old Street, nights in Heaven or The Final Academy counter-fantasy – which seemed the Shadow-side, confrontational, smug, oppressive, malefic, highly wrought of all that jazz samba good-times showbiz shit …

The Shadow-side knelt at the altar of Burroughs, Debord, Pasolini and Bataille; the Samba-side rather to Bernard Delfont.

In Kensington High Street, Soho, Covent Garden: dressing up in wilder and evermore extreme costumes, racing to outrun imitation. ‘As my appearance progressed from the effeminate to the bizarre …’ – so Quentin Crisp had recounted, of his own youthful progress through London in the 1930s; and now, in dark rooms and basements, as shabby and basic as any rural church hall disco – here are young people dressed in knee breeches, white stockings and black pumps; collarless shirts of storm cloud grey, cheekbone triangles of cerise blusher, belted radiation suits, ruffs, robes and flounces and weird smocks and space quiffs, turbans, sashes, vertical hair, greased hair, sharp-creased US Air Force trousers; faces powdered white, plum-black lipstick, batwing swoops of silver-mauve eyeshadow, fading towards the temples …

Lord Byron merged with Kraftwerk merged with Momma Don’t Allow; Cabaret, Roxy, Siouxsie, Bowie; dressing up for the elektro­disco modern(e); honing a fantasy of style exclusivity and high individualism in tatty West End clubs and cellars full of noise.

A few years earlier – 1976 and all that – punk (harsher, sparser, thinner, poorer, brittle in its newness) had proposed to a small group of sympathetic souls the notion of modernity itself reaching critical mass: imagine the pavement cracking, the mean corrugated iron fence falling back over the damp-blackened concrete, the white goods and deodorants and fluorescent lighting tubes and flyovers and subways and supermarkets and frozen food becoming the ancient history of a science fiction present, occupied by orphan adolescents, warming their hands by the flames of a burning television … And, of course, that was a fantasy too. Or mostly.

But somewhere in all of these fantasies, fast and hard on one another’s heels, becoming a blur – punk and post-punk, industrialism, electro-futurism and new wave postmodern pop – lived and felt for real, nonetheless, by types of a certain disposition, between the late 1970s and the middle years of the 1980s, there seemed to be a configuration of existential truths, from which some members of a generation were taking their bearings.

Above the teeming crossroads in the shadow of Centre Point, the lowering sky presses down on the vast and chaotic pattern of streets below, squeezing the last of the daylight away, summoning night.

It is now late November 1982 – a Saturday afternoon, dark and raw. But at this end of Oxford Street – the shabby end – the busy shops are ablaze with light: window displays, interiors and entrances, each asserting a world – all new and white, yet already worn-down thoroughfares, makeshift, scuffed and flimsy. Gloss-black mannequins, gunmetal cassette players, dancewear and album sleeves, cosmetics and electronics, books and shoes; then the blank façade of a bank and the dank yeasty smell of a pub … And the steady crowds and the ceaseless shuddering lines of traffic: headlights and brake lights, the beginnings of a fine sleet blowing across the beam.

Once beyond the traffic lights beside the old Dominion Theatre and heading east, the squares and mansion blocks and offices and ageing shop fronts of Holborn and Bloomsbury, Gray’s Inn Road, Theobalds Road, Lamb’s Conduit Street – of legal, theosophical and libertarian London, of cranks and barristers – and on, down towards Clerkenwell and Farringdon, are quiet and deep in shadow; withdrawn somehow, as though into their own strange slumber, life stilled behind empty windows. The sodium orange of the streetlights seems to make their darkness darker, their obscurity more profound.

Here there are fewer people around – hardly any people at all. A neighbourhood restaurant on a corn. . .