Watercolor

The Spectre of Authenticity in (Bradford’s) Underground Music For those of us with a passion for the ‘real deal’, Bradford delivers in abundance. Home haircuts outnumber salon-styled angular fringes; layers and practical footwear appear more crucial than up- to-the-minute fashion statements; local brews are sunk in public at medieval hours of the day without shame. The city’s industrial history is embedded in the landscape; falling-to-bits mills, empty units, time warp shopping centres and nostalgic markets. The streets are paved not with gold but grit. The characters that populate them are diamonds in the rough. Mostly. Bradford attracts a different type of thrill-seeker. Not necessarily your aspiring career-ladder climber or city-living lover looking for slick standardisation and professional sheen, but rather a connoisseur of the idiosyncratic, the context-specific and the original; someone willing to - and likely to have an unhealthy habit for - looking beyond appearances, digging beneath the surface and not afraid of (getting) dirty fingernails. No surprise, then, that the underground music scene in the city has long been an integral piece in the Bradford puzzle. There are plenty of the void spaces, the cracks and the dark nooks and crannies in which such activity breeds and thrives. One need only look to the history of the illustrious 1 in 12 Club to see how, given the time, space and energy, normally discounted ‘fringe’ activity can materialise into a world-renowned (counter) institution. People from all over the world have flocked to Albion St over the last three decades to experience ‘real’ musical expression of a mostly crusty type. Naturally it’s not the sole example of thriving community-led or grassroots culture in the city; we can identify the same in the South Asian arts scene; the Topic Folk Club, running for fifty years; and in the grimey urban music emerging from outer ring road council estates, to name a few. Bradford is the home of punk in its many cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary guises. What is the attraction though? How and why does, for some, grit charm like glitter? What type of value does it embody? For me the answer lies in that elusive and not unproblematic promise of ‘authenticity’. It is fair to say that when things are done regardless of commercial concern, that is, for Love Not Money - LNM fast becoming my preferred term to DIY in the shadow of the Big Society – the parameters for evaluation and production shift and change. No longer is making something ‘accessible’ or audience-targeted a priority. In music it isn’t important whether the song is the sort of thing you’d buy, or whether it’s catchy or sticks in your head, or even that it has a discernible tune or beat. This often leads to accusations of indulgence and elitism: ‘How can you enjoy listening to this?’, ‘It does nothing for me’, and so on. It would be facetious – and factually incorrect - to suggest that freedom from market constraints inevitably leads to ‘good’ or enjoyable music. What is on offer instead is a concentrated hit of the authentic: an enactment of the thing-in-itself rather than as a means-to-an-end,

uncompromised and unabashed. Previously I’ve compared watching weird noise-rock bands to surveying child’s play or experiencing amateur sports events. At its best non-commercially oriented music is an embodiment or materialisation of that passion for (collective) activity and creative expression that animates us, undiluted by the self-interest and conservatism of profiteering. Perversely such authentic and unprecedented expression can come across as the exact opposite – ‘This is so odd and pretentious’ - so rare does it occur in our culture. Equally the rough edges and unrefined, abrasive quality of DIY/LNM activity make it less immediately palatable. It is often lo-fi (done on the cheap), strange and scary and as such intimidating, except perhaps to those grit-prospectors amongst whose numbers I include myself. Nevertheless grit becomes addictive; you may find yourself a filth-junkie. Once the taste has been acquired everything else can seem sterile and artificial. Importantly, the hunt for the authentic is a never-ending trail. Once you appreciate the rough-edged in art, music and culture it can lead to the embrace of an entire ‘dirty old town’. Still, for all its attributes we should be wary of making a fetish out of filth. A critical distance is required. A love of grit is a broadening of experience and we need to be wary of simply substituting the capitalist (false) desire for the clean, shiny and professional with a blanket disregard for anything with a whiff of luxury or craftmanship. Why constrain creativity with new limits? In the punk and DIY music scene such rules - sometimes explicit, sometimes implied - have included ‘no high production values, guitar solos, or other indulgences’. Just as all that glitters is not gold, it is not bullshit either. Sometimes fun and excess are authentic too. Likewise roughness does not always equate with the real. Lo-fi aesthetics and crust-chic are easily copied and sold back to us. Remember Levis-fabricated grunge band Stiltskin? Indeed, the more of an aesthetic we attach to authenticity the easier it can be synthesized and profited from. Keeping underground expression and LNM/DIY activity fluid, contingent and slippery is one way of preventing it from being identified, captured and recuperated by the foot soldiers of commerce who wish to drain it of its radical potency. Moreover, the very concept of authentic expression needs to be critically appraised. There is more than a hint of exoticism and middle-class voyeurism in the embrace of grit by those for whom it is a chosen reality that they can exit at will - a dirty weekend away. Also, underlying the appreciation of grit is an essentialist logic that assumes that there is something universal and ‘real’ beneath capitalist sheen; a mistaken and dangerously naïve belief that deep down we’re all the same. I would suggest that even when we’re all covered in dirt it is important to appreciate difference, just the same as recognising that whilst we may all be in the same boat we have different horizons. There may be grit in our teeth, but that doesn’t eradicate the need to talk or sing about why it’s there.

Andy Abbott www.andyabbott.co.uk

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