The Story of Pop Art, part 3: Walruses and Urinals
In 1963, four lower-middle class young men from Liverpool retooled the slightly traditionalist, tired-looking British pop music, adding jazz chord progressions to the then still-new, US import rock n’ roll, and became the biggest youth phenomenon the world had (or still has) yet seen. The Beatles had spent a couple of years in Hamburg dockers’ nightclub venues, perfecting their live game and subsisting on amphetamines in order to keep up with the three shows a night regime.
What was palpably clear (to future manager Brian Epstein, at least) was that between John Lennon and Paul McCartney as songwriters — and all four as people — there was a genuine, fluid, airy creative chemistry: worlds of possibility emanated from their union. Between 1963 and 1967, their catchily monochromatic songs of love and aspiration dominated the charts next in America and then all over the world. But once you’d had sixteen number ones, have made your fortune several times over but the rush of initial hormonal success was gone, what’s to be done? For the Beatles, only (unbeknownst to everyone else) halfway through their creative collaboration, they essentially invented an early form of art rock. While they had essentially invented modern pop with Please Please Me et al by welding unforgettable earworms to rock n’ roll energy, songs such as I Am The Walrus from the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack album displayed an equally musical but utterly different band. The world created was a Technicolor one, referencing acid, the hippy dream and psychedelia in all its forms, all with a menacing edge of cynicism that showed the Beatles growing up very much in public. If their contemporaries in 1963 were Freddie and the Pacemakers, in 1967–8 they were Pink Floyd: it was like moving from the countryside to the city, but the boys’ gift to the world was being able to set the whole thing to arguably the most compelling back catalogue in music.
The Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, White and Abbey Road albums were all exercises in perfectly produced, tuneful experimentation, leading the listener carefully through an Alice in Wonderland-style maze of blue gloved, tangerine tree-d surprises, waiting to jump out jester-like behind every perfectly trimmed hedge corner. The hair was flowing, the moustaches were proud, the flares were wide and the vibe was independently unconstrained by the end, The Beatles having shoehorned more perfectly realised ideas into eight years and a dozen albums of music than other less fortunate units would evermore be able to. The bar had been set seemingly insurmountably high, by dint of the Beatles having been the first to write, explore and design all these possibilities — and with such pizzazz. They also worked with the freshest and best, having inspired so many of them to pick up a camera, photograph or pen in the first place.
Polish émigré New Yorker Andy Warhol of course knew of the Beatles but either he or they kept the other very much ‘over there’, never so blatantly working with another such conspicuous cultural force. The brilliantly bearded British pop artist Peter Blake was asked to design the Sgt Pepper’s LP cover in his ‘trademark’ celebrity collage style, which he did with Mohammed Ali, Gandhi and Aleister Crowley-depicting aplomb. Soho/Austin Powers photographers such as David Bailey and Terry O’Neill were waiting around every minimalist white wall, ready to noisily snap, fag in hand.
On the fly, naturalistic and making-it-up-as-we-go-along it was, but this edge of pop art also had the whiff of the cynical/idealist, cultural entrepreneur about it. If the 1950s invented the western teenager, the 60s and 70s exploited him or her, seeing them as essentially little more than a new resource in market capitalism. Though the major music labels were not slow in pouncing upon the possibilities of art rock, it wasn’t so mass-marketable when presented like that. When presented as Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music or King Crimson, the new genre’s colour, depth of culture and pioneering, potential fearlessness predated the more prosaic indie/alternative rock by some flashy way. Punk would come to pretend to wipe away their predecessors six or seven years later (with the curious exceptions of The Beatles and David Bowie, clearly Malcolm McLaren’s favourites) before the public there were only about four memorable songs within the genre, and quickly abandoned it to passing fashion. While the acerbic, intellectual Lennon was often considered ‘the arty one’, there is no one Beatle who did more in sophisticating the deepening the band’s reach than another, they seemed to all be growing at the same time; but like all brothers, not always in exactly the same direction. If some of the key figures in the genesis and development of art rock are widely acknowledged as Brian Eno, David Bowie, David Byrne, Kate Bush, Jimi Hendrix and Bjork and their collective imagination/experimentation, then as a group effort — and despite their mass commercial appeal — The Beatles were no less influential.
Entitlement is very overrated. This is not of course the kind of epigram you are likely to see on a scarlet backdrop at a Labour Party conference any time soon. Entitlement (or white male privilege, to give it its full title) is usually seen as the enemy of the Labour left, as much as it was to the Bolsheviks in Moscow during the Russian communist revolution, a hundred years before the look of Jeremy Corbyn’s capped’n bearded socialism. Nowadays while the Hong Kong youth protests the slippage of whatever liberal democracy they might once have had, Peking is celebrating seventy years of communist rule.
When gay activists were (quietly) celebrating the end of the act of sodomy being illegal in 1967’s Summer of Love, some of them may have remembered history’s most famous bisexual Oscar Wilde, and the very public sacrifice he made at the end of his pomp in the 1890s. The Anglo-Irish Wilde foreshadowed the chaotic, libertarian twentieth century. While living through the end of the puritanical, straightened Victorian era, (Libran) Wilde celebrated academic Aesthetics (or the philosophy of beauty), wrote romantic poetry and a series of increasingly perfect plays. His epic Ballad of Reading Gaol mirrored his humanism and social empathy while serving his own time, lamenting over numerous six-line stanzas the execution of one of Oscar’s rock-breaking, existentially circumscribed cohort. Released after two years of hard labour, he moved to France in apparently lingering ignominy and died of ill health a couple of years later. His tomb in Paris, near that of Voltaire and Jim Morrison, remains festooned, along with his statue, by the love messages of admirers from all over the world.
The immaculate, tidy angles of his play The Importance of Being Earnest (the second most popular comedy play in the English language) and his only novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray belie an imaginative weaver of stories whose talent for the silken manipulation of words far outreaches his own legend. At his death on the turning of the centuries, the baton of energised, socially adroit artistic production was passed directly if subtly to his Parisian co-inhabitant Marcel Duchamp. The conceptualist, cubist painter, chess player and Godfather of Pop Art received Wilde’s witty epigrams and repackaged them back to the French artistic establishment Salon. The artist’s presenting of a common porcelain urinal as a work of art was easily as outrageous as Oscar’s lover’s father the Marquess of Queensbury writing ‘sodomite’ about Wilde on a gentlemen’s club business card.
In 1972, after eight years of Beatles antics charming the world and just Five Years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, David Bowie in his then guise of Ziggy Stardust declared to the Melody Maker that he was ‘bisexual, and always have been’. This public declaration could be seen as the fiery circle of libertarianism finally turning full circle, as Wilde’s Victorian contrarianism met Duchamp’s artistic rebelliousness, ending in Bowie’s sexual and gender identity-blurring. It would take another half a century of mediated sexual progress for sexual rights to come to an accommodation in the mainstream and in law, and while it remains a subject that divides people due to its seemingly existential nature, the love, expressed as individuality, tends to win eventually.
David Heywood Duncan Jones was born in Brixton, south London on the 8th January, 1947. Thus a baby-boomer born from the ashes of the blitzkrieg and on the same day as Elvis Presley had arrived, the youngest child of cinema usherette Peggy and Dr Barnado’s fundraising manager Heywood Jones.
Various biographers and at times Bowie himself would later make much of the seam of schizophrenia running through his family, particularly the female side, leading to sundry sectionings and suicides. More illuminating was to read his concerns in his lyrics, from his All the Madmen from The Man Who Sold The World to Jump They Say from Black Tie White Noise. Non-judgemental, exploratory looks at mental illness and psychic trauma, all. Young David’s older half-brother Terry would eventually throw himself in front of a train in west London in the mid-eighties while Bowie was at his commercial Let’s Dance peak — but throughout the late 50s and early 60s he had been showing his younger brother the jazz and rock n’ roll of the Soho clubs. Heywood — or John, as he was better known — had bought his son a fibreglass/plastic saxophone to encourage his interest in the arts, and the young writer thus found his first musical expression on the instrument. He bounded through five or six London mod/blues/cover bands throughout the early to mid 1960s, including recording early singles and oddities such as Liza Jane, I Dig Everything and Can’t Help Thinking About Me.
On the bridge between band member and solo artist, Davey Jones was trying to sculpt himself a niche between Mick Jagger and the mainstream primetime of Anthony Newley — with a growing interest in mime thrown in. Named after the western war hero and knife, the newly christened David Bowie released his self-titled debut on The Rolling Stones’ early label Decca Records in 1967. Its psychedelic, big-band, nursery rhyme, camp-retro style alienated as many avant garde listeners as it won, placing him early on in the ‘weird cult hero’ box as Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, The Walker Brothers’ Scott Walker and a then unknown Jimi Hendrix. The twee sound of The Laughing Gnome, Uncle Arthur and The London Boys was arguably stranger than that of any of his co-travellers however, and Bowie remained a thinly marginal taste. Falling in and disastrously (for him) out of love with ‘English rose’ Hermione Farthingale, he also formed the hippy folk trio Feathers with her; and set up the Beckenham Arts Lab, eventually spawning the anthemic Memory of a Free Festival, the sun machine closer from his next album.
1969 was the year of the moon landings, and the western media was in a whirl about it. As lead single from his second album, Space Oddity became what many consider to still be Bowie’s signature song. An expansive, trippy, extended psychedelic metaphor for heroin and alienation, the lushly produced classic propelled Bowie to number five, Major Tom’s singular idiosyncrasy endangering the artist with potential one hit wonder status. Such a tag was a major danger to artistic integrity back then, but his new label RCA weren’t too bothered. They were just relieved that their minor league, unmarketable ‘cult artiste’ had at last bought in some coin. The song’s parent album, sometimes confusingly called David Bowie, sometimes Space Oddity, was in fact an often overlooked late 60s classic, arguably the first of Bowie’s glittering 70s grand tour. Laid-back and bucolic, with an edge of apocalyptic psychosis, it set the stall for what would follow with one bare foot still in the fading hippy dream.
States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond, here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B45DXC98/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tu00_p1_i0
