Tyne life: is the culture revolution fabulous or phoney?

Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday June 26, 2005
The Observer

Do more people now come to Tyneside to celebrate a hen night or to see an avant-garde art show? This week one of the north east’s more notorious sons is to argue that, despite all the expensive innovations along the banks of the river, visitors are still much more likely to come for a drinking session than for a dose of Brit Art.
Chris Donald, co-creator of the influential Viz comic, is accusing the cultural revolution in his home town of being phoney. It is, he suggests, hypocrisy to tell tourists that ‘NewcastleGateshead-upon-Tyne’, as it is now known, is suddenly Britain’s answer to Bilbao or Barcelona. It remains closer to Blackpool, he believes. ‘The majority of money still comes in through beer tourism,’ he says, ‘and, if you ask people who live here, lots of them haven’t been to any of the new arts centres.’

As the man who first gave the nation the popular Geordie stereotypes Sid the Sexist and the Fat Slags, Donald welcomes the jobs that have come with the new investment, but disputes the idea that Tyneside has become a haven for culture-lovers overnight. He has made his point visually, too, by inventing fresh comic-strip characters to illustrate the ‘fault line’ he sees between the old and the new.
Updating his iconic Fat Slags, who inhabited the pubs in Bigg Market, Donald has come up with the ultra-slim Classy Slappers, who dress up and go out looking for footballers in wine bars. But the new creation that really epitomises the culture clash Donald detects is deluded aesthete Art Carbuncle, who sees artistic statements in the everyday trappings of working-class life. Although Donald left Viz five years ago, the cartoonist has submitted his first Carbuncle strip to see if the editors want to make the character a regular feature of the comic.

Donald’s provocative views – to be broadcast in a BBC documentary tomorrow – have already prompted a defensive reaction from those who support the publicly funded attempt to bring elite art to Tynesiders.

Television presenter and art historian Dan Cruickshank says that using art and architecture to regenerate an area is an old and noble tradition. ‘The idea of bringing working men the best of art was around in the 19th century too. And while it is easy to be cynical about it, it is surely an entirely admirable aim,’ he argued this weekend. ‘It is better to raise people’s expectations than to just pander to what they already like, which really would be patronising. Change may not happen immediately in Newcastle, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.’

The playwright Alan Plater, who grew up in Gateshead and whose father worked in a shipyard, is also in favour of the changes. ‘In the past I would have used the idea of a Gateshead Hilton to get a cheap laugh. Today there is one,’ he says, although he agrees with Donald’s claim that Newcastle’s makeover has diminished its essential ‘Geordieness’.

‘If you cover your waterfront with wine bars, you will make it look pretty much the same as anywhere else,’ says Plater. ‘There are now more art galleries than shipyards. But this is not necessarily a bad thing – after all, the industrial revolution is over and the beauty of shipbuilding has gone almost entirely. I think Tyneside needs Chris Donald as much as it needs [new arts centre] Baltic, and there should be room for both.’

Over the last decade, the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its neighbour, Gateshead, have all been joint lottery winners. Derelict wastelands, formerly national emblems of post-industrial decline, have been transformed by a succession of high-profile, and largely highbrow, new landmarks since the sculptor Antony Gormley first placed his rusty Angel of the North on the hills above Gateshead in 1998.

‘The ultimate and beautiful irony is that it is Gateshead that has taken the initiative in all this by commissioning the Angel of the North,’ says Plater.

Southerner Gormley’s creative vote of confidence in the north east was followed by the arrival of the award-winning Millennium Bridge, then the redevelopment of the old Baltic Flour Mills into a vast contemporary art gallery. Most recently, Tynesiders have been asked to applaud the opening of The Sage – a huge glass concert centre described by Donald in his BBC3 film as taking the ‘familiar shape of a bloated condom floating down the river’.

As if to underline the argument Donald is making, this month sees the preparations for Baltic’s most daring project yet. Spencer Tunick, the installation artist renowned for persuading large groups of strangers to take all their clothes off in public, is organising his biggest UK installation so far on 17 July at the art gallery. Geordie men, famous for wearing nothing but T-shirts in all weathers, should be hardy enough to rise to the challenge.

www.balticprojects.org/tunick

· Picture of Tyneside, BBC3 11.25pm, Monday, 27 June

Not long left for cassette tapes  

Some 40 years after global cassette production began in earnest, sales are in terminal decline.
From its creation in the 1960s through to its peak of popularity in the 1980s, the cassette has been a part of music culture for 40 years.

But industry experts believe it does not have long left, at least in the West.

The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often ended its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades before MP3s and downloads.

However, the cassette’s reign now seems to be over.

“Cassette albums have declined quite significantly since their peak in 1989 when they were selling 83 million units in the UK,” Matt Phillips of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) told BBC World Service’s The Music Biz programme.

“Last year we saw that there were about 900,000 units sold. It’s clear to see that cassette sales are dwindling fast.”

Mix tape

Dutch electronics giant Philips perfected the design of the cassette in the 1960s.

It was designed to be a new form of portable entertainment, launched into a market dominated by vinyl LPs and reel-to-reel tape recorders.

Oddly, Philips did not charge royalties on their cassette patent, allowing numerous other companies to use their design for free. This ensured the quick acceptance of it as a new form of media.

It went on to accrue enormous worldwide sales. At its mid-80s peak, it sold 900 million units a year, 54% of total global music sales.

The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in particular the ability of people to record music on them.

They feared piracy, arguing that home taping was “killing music”, a similar argument to the one occurring today over downloading.

One thing home taping allowed was the creation of the mix tape – a compilation of songs often put together as a present for a loved one. The process of creating the mix tape was immortalised by Nick Hornby in his novel High Fidelity.

New York music writer Joel Keller laments that personal computers have killed the mix tape star, and that the “drag and burn” method of creating compilation CDs is simply “less fun.”

“I liked it when I sat in front of my stereo, my tape deck, with a big pile of CDs, deciding on the fly which songs to put in what order,” he said.

“My play and record fingers got a little sore because I had to time it right. Listening to the song as it played, finding the levels – it seemed like more of a labour of love than it is it do CDs now.”

Legacy

However, while cassettes are disappearing quickly from the music stores, they are clinging on in the UK in bookshops.

Having begun as a way of providing titles to the blind, a third of all audio books are still sold on cassette. An audio recording of a bestseller such as The Da Vinci code can sell between 60-70,000 copies in the UK alone.

“Audio tapes are like an old friend that doesn’t go away,” Pandora White of Orion audio books told The Music Biz.

“I think it’s the accessibility of it. Where you stop and start is immediately where you left off, whereas CD can be a bit more tricky.”

And outside of the music stores of the West, cassettes do continue to survive as a music format, in countries such as Afghanistan and India.

In some markets, performers record directly onto cassette.

Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.

However, he added that this is because the penetration of CD players “is not 100% in those markets.”

With the US’s largest magnetic tape factory ceasing production earlier this year, there are fears that even if cassettes are wanted in future, there will no longer be anything to wrap around the spools.

However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive.

Listen – it’s the sound of a new art
(Filed: 15/06/2005)

It used to be visual art’s poor cousin, but now sonic sculpture is creating a buzz, says Serena Davies

American sound artist Bill Fontana has been recording the Millennium Bridge across the Thames outside Tate Modern. “Shall I show it to you?” he says. He means the recording, not the bridge. “The structure’s really musical. You can’t hear it with your ears but if you use accelerometers, which are what structural engineers use to measure vibration, there’s a very interesting sound developing.”

Enter the weird world of sound art. As in King Lear when the blinded Gloucester learns to “see feelingly”, so sound artists, with the help of a little technological wizardry, teach us to see aurally. It’s a melding of the senses, an opening of Blake’s doors of perception.

For decades, only the perceptions of an esoteric group of innovators and their friends have been getting any wider. “For a long time, sound was the poorer cousin of the other mediums. It’s taken a long time for the art establishment to accept it,” says Lina Dzuverovic-Russell, UK-based sound-art curator and writer. Fontana calls his craft “the ugly duckling” of the art world.

Yet all this is changing fast. Sound art is moving into the mainstream. In Britain, it can be heard in our most celebrated buildings and, as most sound artists started off as musicians, it is making a noise in the music arena, too.

Five years ago, when the Hayward Gallery held the UK’s first major group show on sound art, Sonic Boom, “it was really a very big step”, according to its curator, musician and critic David Toop. “There was still some anxiety about whether it would mean anything to people – but they really enjoyed it. Now, you read about these pieces one after another.”

These pieces include, most famously, Bruce Nauman’s recent installation of eerie, cacophonous voices in Britain’s biggest art space, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. There is also sound-art collective Greyworld’s touch-activated whispers and bird song at the Hampton Court Maze (recently opened) and an enormous project by the NVA group to create “soundscapes” on the Isle of Skye, launching in August. There have been further big exhibitions, at the V & A (last year’s sound installation, Shhh) and the Barbican (Christian Marclay, one of the genre’s most respected practitioners, featured recently).

And, long before he started thinking about the Millennium Bridge, San-Francisco based Fontana, a leading sound artist for 30 years, was disorienting MPs by playing the amplified ticks and chimes of Big Ben directly into the Palace of Westminster.

Recently, the musical end of this art form has been whipping up controversy. The New Music Award is a new high-profile prize, organised by the Performing Right Society’s charity, the PRS Foundation. At £50,000 it is the musical equivalent of the Turner or the Booker, with one difference: the winner is given the prize on merit of the idea alone – the money is to see it through.

The shortlisted suggestions are all, essentially, sound art. Some say they’re not music at all. There’s ex-Pogue Jem Finer’s project for a system of Japanese water bowls built into a vast hole in the countryside, where the pings and plunks of dripping water will boom out through a giant brass horn above ground. There’s Terry Mann’s plan to combine the sounds of all the cathedral bells in England into a single surround-sound installation. And there’s Craig Vear’s idea for an installation piece created out of the noises made round a buoy at sea – to be experienced from a point where you can see the buoy, too.

Each proposal is as concerned with its sound’s location as it is with composition; two are site-specific. Such emphasis on context brings to mind 1970s sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus’s talk of how he aimed to use sound to “transform the ‘space’ into a ‘place’ “. The suggestions also eschew conventional musical instruments, preferring “found” sounds and environmental noise. They will be musical in so far as the sounds are then arranged, but PRS director David Francis admits it’s a “very, very broad definition”.

He says the shortlist’s sound-art theme is incidental: these were simply ideas that demonstrated the most creative thinking. Vear’s explanation is more prosaic: “Fifty thousand pounds doesn’t pay for an orchestra, but it will allow you to develop a piece of software.”

Whatever the reason, it demonstrates that these ideas are now common currency. Toop describes the suggestions as typical of a lot of contemporary work today. Dzuverovic-Russell – who is in the process of preparing a sound-art exhibition at the South London Gallery featuring Kim Gordon, bassist of cult rock band Sonic Youth – says that mixing art and music is now normal: “The boundaries between media are breaking down.”

Also breaking down are the boundaries between audiences. Mann wants his piece heard in shopping malls and railway stations. Toop is organising work by four sound artists to be played outdoors in the city of Cork, this year’s European Capital of Culture. And Fontana launches an installation in Leeds next week, where the gurgles of rushing water from the city’s atmospheric Dark Arches, built over the river, will combine with the noise of trains from the station above to turn historic Dark Neville Street into a real-time sonic experience.

Whether our perceptions will really be altered remains to be seen. But it’s a noble aim. And, in the meantime, the buzz around sound art is growing, going from a whisper to something to shout about – and, finally, the rest of the art world is listening.

Bill Fontana’s ‘Sound Lines’ will be in Dark Neville Street, Leeds, from June 21. ‘Sound Out’ in Cork, Ireland, is from Sept 1 (www.cork2005.ie). ‘The Storr’ on the Isle of Skye begins on Aug 1 (www.nva.org.uk). The New Music Award will be announced on July 12.