“K-Shop” from The Light Side

This morning came news that the world appears to have just changed.

 

But even though this news is so big and so unfathomable that world leaders are stupified in responding, as I type, the presidential victory of Donald Trump in the US feels like an echo chamber of the B-word in the summer, here in the UK. All the polls said not to worry in the final hours, before a ‘shock’ result woke us up in the morning. This time, I am not weeping. I’m just a bit numb. Like lots of people around the world, I imagine.

It is, you might say, a symptom. The rise of a right-wing sounding reaction to the establishment. So is the numbness. Something is wrong, and a lot of people found a moment to finally express it. And express it mighty ugly. Perhaps mirroring how a lot of people really feel.

Much the same is said of drink culture. When under the influence, we let out who we really are. This should probably make me nervous about ever touching a drop – but on the rare occasions I slip from the lofty peaks of complete sobriety, I understand it looks generally ‘affectionate’. Thank goodness. But for thousands of us every single weekend across my home country it looks as ugly as a hellmouth, that desperate numbness.

And this is the lens through which The Light Side’s current feature sees the world – life in the nighttime economy on an average British Saturday night. And it’s hard to unsee. Especially when it’s actually filmed in the place where you live, the place you’ve always oddly felt safe from the madness of the rest of the world.

 

SALAD.

The same day I saw K-Shop for the first time, I recieved a Huffington Post article link from a writer espousing the joys of Bournemouth. Katherine Baldwin moved from Islington to the south coast last year worried, she says, that “it would feel like I’d retired before my time.” Those of us who live here forget that the rest of the country STILL hears the words ‘blue rinse’ when it hears the town name. You do forget. Not least of which because, as I’ve said before, who but young funksters have blue hair these days anyway?

I mention my little corner of the world often, because I feel strangely committed to the place where I grew up. Not because I completely never left, but because I’ve always oddly seen it through grateful goggles – goggles that see lifestyle, basically. Beach. And fresh air. And posibilities. And Katherine seems to be discovering what many say they’ve been finding and helping in fact to build over the last decade – a town slowly pulling together its potential. Potential to be a creative space to live and share ideas and make good things happen in. Slowly. Perhaps truthfully, rather than by exciting but unsustainable flash in the pan. Bomo will never be truly hip, but much feels like is happening here in some ways. And how jolly nice it feels for those involved.

A start-up like Yobu might illustrate this. A neat likeable brand and independent food offer on the high street that is aimed at younger people with a fresh, playful Jap-pop kind of futury vibe. Friendly. Happy. Tasty. A little different. And the place where bloodbath social commentary K-Shop was filmed.

 

CHILE SAUCE.

Screening the feature in the very basement in which its most grisly scenes took place was a bit odd, to say the least. And not least of which for writer/director Dan Pringle and Producer Adam Merrifield, the real duo behind the production.

“We spent six weeks in here” said Dan, “and I’ve not really been back. It’s… changed” he added, looking a little spaced-out as he took in the bubble tea graphics and beanbags.

K-Shop‘s tagline is the tidiest thing about it: ‘You are what you eat’. And if I describe the film as a dissection of the drinking culture that feeds the fast food industry at the weekend, I fear you may not at first take me literally. But you must. Cleavers are cleft. And doners are dealt. Messily. And you are left with the distinct impression that those meat grinders could essentially have ANYthing pushed through them and no customers would be any the wiser.

Billed as a clever horror flick, I’d say it isn’t that. It’s possibly just clever.

“The French thought it was a fantasy” says Dan. “We said ‘no, no – this is how it is over here’. And they were incredulous. The American’s just don’t get it. Everyone the length and breadth of Britain simply says ‘that’s our town’.”

Selling this film into foreign markets is an interesting multi-lensed mirror back to those of us watching it as Brits, who get the ubiquity of beer in our culture. Even more so, those of us watching it as Bournemouthers – who recognise every location outside the shop, staring quietly at street footage we understand is made up with some 70% of guerilla reportage. IE: Real.

“Those coming down for a night out see the town as disposable” says Dan. “They just use it once and throw it away. They don’t see the relentlessness of it.”

It may be a horror show to watch. But once you’ve had the odd grisly splatter that might make you smirk with nerves, just as you’re meant to with Horror, the film’s real tone grows over you like a realisation, or a film of grease, it is indeed more of a dystopian fantasy – a dreadful vision, which langurously paints a world at its own pace, in its own language. So criticisms of its lengthy running time and slightly ambling narrative, and of one or two plot points that might have seemed a bit unclear, these criticism feel – or felt to me at least – a little beside the point. This isn’t a type of film made by enthusiasts. This is its own thing – faced with grim determination by people who want to say something. Hold a mirror. One few of us would really want to look into.

But into which, perhaps now more than ever, we surely must look. Because if thousands of voters in many western countries this year rather dream of being able to describe their home towns as ‘discovering their potential’ and ‘jolly nice places to live’, then what do we do when even the jolly nice places have very ugly realities on display?

 

MEAT.

We all know it. You know it. I know it. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. At half five on a Saturday teatime in town. Nightime in Bomo at the weekend is a freakshow. But it’s not a Bomo problem per se, it’s a Britain problem at least. And on the face of it the rest of the world finds it hard to understand why we live like this.

It’s a good question. The scenes of folk utterly degrading themselves, and of how those who run the kebab houses and takeaways deal with it every night like a moaning, drooling, splattering, face-eating front line in the zombie apocalypse. But as the film alludes, for a lot of those who find themselves running these little businesses, who have grown up in the UK but with recent family roots in countries all around the middle east, this ain’t trouble, mate. If you’d seen what we’d seen as kids…

Which begs the question. What is this decrading of ourselves a symptom of? From what are we trying to escape in the treadmill scamper towards endless Fridays – if escape for so many others was emigration and fast food businesses in other people’s countries. Making an okay living. If you factor in the monthly replacement cost of your shop window.

What are we so keen to blind ourselves numb from? Or even more chillingly, perhaps the question is: Just how have we set up the endless loop of living for the large weekend as a more distracting goal than something more… creative?

Is it a matter of economics? And if we put it this way, then how does such a dessicating view of human life really pump so much blood, and other fluids, into bar business? And onto the streets. What is it about weekly wage packet thinking that means our social starting point, our instinctive assumption, is that we must constantly look for little reasons to ‘celebrate’ – and this ‘celebration’ must always involve getting slaughtered? It’s the question at the heart of K-Shop.

Is it something so large, we mostly can’t see it? A cultural maw of mythical scale we can’t spot brooding under the high street. It feels oddly like there is something big breathing very slowly under this film. A thing we fear falling into so much we don’t even know it. Something that might even make us vote for desperate, pantomime characters, dressed up in comedy garb so incongruous they are grotesque. Monsters who will eat us, who in our delerium we desperately hope are our way out of the hellmouth we see ourselves in with clearer eyes. A culture so twisted, it in fact turns us into the very monsters we fear.

If trying to hold an academic human light up to the chaos of binge culture in the UK seems even more absurd than the inebriated playground antics of the Saturday night streets of Bournemouth themselves, then K-Shop is a bit absurd. It’s meant to be just a dark joke about a lot of joking around, isn’t it? But the film felt like rather more than that to sit through to me. It holds the attention because of some good film making – a richly grimy visual pace, an otherworldly aural/musical tone, a nice line in dark comic touches and a strength of presence in lead Ziad Abaza, playing the social science thesis-writing, kebab shop running, meatcleaving vigilante Salah with a disbelief-defying likeability worthy of a Marvel Netflix performance. But the integrity I felt running through the movie’s veins flows precisely because it wants to hold a lens up to something so deeply ridiculous and so profoundly serious. A culture based on getting blind.

What K-Shop does is focus the attention on it. And as we walked out of Yobu that night, into the very set of the freakshow we’d just seen – the walk back to our car through the town – it was impossible to disconnect from the film’s tone. A science fiction dystopia set right where we live, in a parallel universe we already live in.

Which does leave you feeling – as does so much of what we are seeing on our screens today – it’s impossible to know where terrible fantasy ends and terrible reality begins.

Perhaps it is a matter of where you look.

 

Yello, live in Berlin – a divine Dada fraternity

If one of the secrets of good theatre – like good press spin – is generating anticipation, then keeping your fans waiting almost four decades to see you play live has to rank as one of the biggest stage build-ups in pop history. But if there’s one word that flamboyant duo Yello have left me with after such a long-awaited curtain-up, it isn’t drama. It’s humility.

 

The lovely first lady of Momo and I had said one word immediately, as soon as I’d somehow secured us the golden fleece of music show tickets from stabbing wildly at my keyboard on a ticket site earlier in the year – bonkers. Whatever Yello were going to do in that old power station in Berlin in October, we just wanted it to be bonkers.

“I want giant floating heads and fish on bicycles and a parading Holi colour explosion carnival of Dada looniness, please” I believe I said. Or similar.

What we got wasn’t that. For fanboys and girls at least, it was something more disarmingly affecting.

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MOVE, DANCE, BE BORN.

Something odd occurred to me while away this weekend. An awful lot of the music I spend most comforting time in is not trying to get me to deal with anything. There are no issues being wrangled with by the great synth heroes that first inspired me to attempt to make music myself. Most of them didn’t use words, for one thing, preferring a more universal language, you might say. Of atmos. Or maybe groove. And goodness knows, most club music is not euphoric because of it’s erudite social commentary. It is escape that is the issue – and of the first artists to inspire me, who have since found a more life-long relevance to my brain, none used words more evocatively and escapistly than Yello.

Dieter Meier’s unique vocals behave more like another silky human texture to Borris Blank’s divine rhythmns. Yet they are full of perfect little turns of phrase in English that augment each tone story the music already suggests. I found myself turning to spoken word in the make-up of Momo:tempo, from long before the project name existed, on an instinct unconciously encouraged by the sound of Yello. But Yello was never telling me how to change the world. It simply coaxed me out of the ordinary humdrum and into a more exotic aural landscape, far from politics and social breakdown.

The landscape of play.

It’s the homeland of therapy, perhaps. But I don’t think the boys of Yello set out with this in mind. Theirs is an instinctive demonstration of art – a life painting pictures, because it is what they were born to do. A subtle subversion, drawing on the heroes of daftness in counter culture, Dada.

For two artists whose work sidesteps deep heartache and politics, I can’t think of many people I’d be more interested to take to dinner than Borris and Dieter. Because, of course, Dada’s radical, juvenile theatrics were a direct reaction to what might have felt to its instigators as the beginning of the collapse of the world.

 

I LOVE YOU, I KNOW.

It’s one hundred years this year. Since the birth of a movement who’s remarkably short-lived inception is known perhaps less for its artists’ own names than it’s founding location – the demur Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Home city to Dieter and Borris. But the thrust of Hugo Ball’s pals’ anti-art, anti-establishment pantomime spread to Berlin, from its birth in the middle of a continent at war, and ultimately around the globe in a key part of the development of modern art’s new ways of seeing.

Mrs Peach and I dropped into the Berlinische Galerie earlier in the day before the show and found ourselves at Dada Africa – a look at how the anthropological and ethnic influences of the continent shaped some of the language (and non-language) of Dada, as a cultural lever to starchy imperial Europe, perhaps. The perfect set-up to an evening just up the road in a post-industrial space being filled with stories, sounds and colours, collaging and juxtaposing influences and cultural post-its from around the world. The promo film of the exhibition even looks and sounds a little like part of the show.

Yello have always delighted in drawing on a sense of such oddness. Yet, with no loud agenda. All are welcome to drop into their pocket universe. To take a step to one side of ordinary life, music, work. And after all these years of buying their LPs, I think I appreciate them now more than ever – because they demonstrate something important to me.

Without noticing at the time, I learned from Yello that the coolest thing anyone can do is utterly ignore any attempts to be cool. As an artist, this is especially crucial to one’s work – for fashion and audience figures are significant factors in making a living. Getting to do what you want to do. But Yello have only ever made music on their own terms – pursued the creation of an instinctively true world unmapped by any other artist. No one sounds like Yello to this day. In tone, in craft, in approach. In sheer untainted joy of sound. They make music that sounds like the art of a chef – exquisitely designing each detail of a fine meal. Like a way of living. Like they’re inviting everyone to a feast. And I love them for all this.

A critic from the Berlin Times was at the first ever show from Yello, on the Wednesday before we saw them. And this particular writer fairly savaged it. Saw it as boring and un-innovative. And when I read this after (thankfully) we’d seen them for ourselves, I felt a heavy heart. Because we’d bounced out of the angular old Kraftwerk Berlin with sheer joy. And the entire upstairs gallery, filled with lord knows how many hundred for a fifth night, seemed to feel the same. Like most people there had brought the right eyes with them, through which to see Yello. But this writer hadn’t.

Yes, beauty and joy are in the eye of the beholder. But Yello helped to give me these eyes.

I think so many of us were predominantly just made happy to see our friends. There they were, these indefatiguable heroes of joy-art. Right there with us at last.

 

THE SUN… EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL.

Yes, I was surprised at the lack of Dada. I did think the show would be madder and a little edgier. Though I was also oddly heartened privately that the Yello live set up is strikingly like the, ah… well, the Momo live set-up – computer mix, synths, front person doing daft voices, brass section, drums, percussion, additional guitar and the odd guest vocal. Minus the budget for thousands of space-filling fans and a ten-meter screen of graphics, obviously. It was… familiar to me, let us say with an emoticon smile. But the show had a strangely calm lack of theatrical madness. No swooping entrances, no cloak-swirls and tap-dancing, no bicycling fish. And somehow, this didn’t disappoint. It actually impressed me in a different way.

What Borris and Dieter brought to the show was a touching humility.

They could have bombasted through their set and gurned grotesquely like a true Berlin cabaret. But instead, Dieter’s charisma played second fiddle to his upholding of his stage members – deferring to the guests, the partners, the other talent and most of all to his friend Borris. And it filled me with warmth.

The sound of the show was clear and clean and what you’d hope from Yello’s immensely crafted mixes. Nothing distracted. All the musos on stage delivered all they needed to with aplomb and skill and a sense of fun. Yes, this isn’t music about the bass end – but they aren’t quite another 80s band suffering from the Great Low Frequency Drought of that decade. When they use tropes and ideas from anywhere, including the dancefloor, it is always to make something that keeps the interest moving. Carries you through a sense of story. “Something more than music going on” as Carl Cox supposedly put it. Undoubtedly why I’ve never gotten bored with listening to them.

But the thing to really sing out of the show was how much these two older chaps still appear to love working together. How relaxed they were with one another. It was fraternity in art. Just loving what they do, no matter what the cool kids see or hear.

There is a picture of the two of them on the inside sleeve of Borris’ recent Electrified collection of extra-Yello pieces, where Borris kind of winks to camera in that forties screen idol way of his while Dieter simply tips his head forward against his friend’s ear with eyes closed in the deepest look of comfort and affection. And when I think of that picture now, I kind of well up. I’m sure they can go into any routine at the drop of a hat for the cameras, but that’s still partnership – to make something so committedlly idiosyncratic and beautiful together, and still look like you’re finding joy in it. And finding boundaries to push. That… is inspiring.

If the world needs anything right now, it is play. A little joyous intervention. Some disruptive silliness.

We walked home feeling strangely loved up. Not just at seeing musical heroes, and in the inspiring streets of Berlin of all places. But at seeing artists loving something of life after so long. Putting propellered colanders on their heads for publicity photos in what should be more dignified years, some might say. Maybe it helps that I am reminded of another favourite Swiss person when I think of them – my uncle Peter. As human and warm hearted a person as you might ever meet. Or maybe the fact that putting a propellered colander on his head is exactly the kind of thing my dad would do. I was given a good example from the crib.

And then Caroline said something simply: “Y’know, after forty years, these two are still pushing themselves from their comfort zones. That’s a testimony.”

Maybe that’s the spark of excitement I took from this. Because if you haven’t wanted to face the stage before, why choose to take the leap into the spotlight in your sixties and seventies?

Love of art. That’s why.

Sure, record sales too. Fine. But for Yello, even as two canny businessmen whose biggest hits score the yuppied 80s, I’ll bet that stuff comes second to play. And possibly third to a really great dinner.

That’s one table I want to sit at. x