Fred
Vermorel first met Malcolm McLaren in 1963 when they were students at Harrow
Art School. The two shared an interest in chaos, scandal and, later,
Situationism: ideas which steered the development of the Sex Pistols and punk.
FANS
In the ‘Fantastic Voyeur’ piece,
you describe yourself as playing the part of the ‘mad professor.’ I think you
have played up a ‘dirty old man’ reading.
Yeah – definitely.
In what sense has that personalisation of subversive strategies ever
been a blessing or a curse?
It hasn’t been a problem except for people who lack a sense of irony, like Kate Bush fans who seemed to think that I really was a voyeur. Maybe I was, but I don’t think I was. They were affronted by it, and just didn’t understand what I was doing. If anything, it was a kind of performance voyeurism, performance stalking, like Sophie Calle’s early work. Like her, I defined a project and then just let things happen – and kept copious notes. When the Secret History book came out there were furious denunciations. They called me ‘Fraud Immoral’ – instead of Fred Vermorel, which I thought was hilarious – and various other things like that. I thought, at the time, “I wonder why they’re so angry,” and I was also really puzzled by the fact that the book was so successful. It’s even now, still the best-selling book on her.
It hasn’t been a problem except for people who lack a sense of irony, like Kate Bush fans who seemed to think that I really was a voyeur. Maybe I was, but I don’t think I was. They were affronted by it, and just didn’t understand what I was doing. If anything, it was a kind of performance voyeurism, performance stalking, like Sophie Calle’s early work. Like her, I defined a project and then just let things happen – and kept copious notes. When the Secret History book came out there were furious denunciations. They called me ‘Fraud Immoral’ – instead of Fred Vermorel, which I thought was hilarious – and various other things like that. I thought, at the time, “I wonder why they’re so angry,” and I was also really puzzled by the fact that the book was so successful. It’s even now, still the best-selling book on her.
There’s a number of things that
come from that. What you turned those fans into was anti-fans, because they
morally disapprove of what you’ve done, but also, in doing that, you prompted
their creativity!
Yeah – that’s true.
There’s multiple ironies there. The
absurdity about caring for something that isn’t there is an interesting point,
because now, in a sense, media industries have taken that further, perhaps.
Yeah.
At The Country Music Hall of
Fame, you don’t only look at original cowboy boots, or something like that, but
actually someone archiving a record, so it’s like, how far can you get from the
original subject.
I totally agree with you. It’s gone a lot further than I
anticipated. Originally, when I gave that book in to Music Sales, there was no
chapter about her. I was very proud of that. I thought, “I’ve written a whole
book about her and there’s no mention of her in it!” Chris, the editor there,
he was an old hippy and he smelt a rat. He said, “No – you can’t do this. You’ve
got to have something about her in there.” So I grudgingly wrote the final
chapter about when she’s born, and then her life, and some sentimental stuff
about her songs. I did quite like her music, really, but I wouldn’t have raved
about it.
No, but you’re right about it. It’s got more extreme. I was recently
looking at a film called Anti-Viral (Cronenberg, 2012).
Have you seen that?
Have you seen that?
Yes – I have.
I’m going to show that to my students.
It’s about celebrity and how far
it’s going.
Yeah – I also show it in the context of a clinic in LA, that offers
a sperm donation from, not your star, but a lookalike. So if you want your baby
to look a bit like Brad Pitt, you choose a lookalike who looks like Brad Pitt,
and he will be your donor.
And that’s now seriously
running, without any joke?
When I first saw it, I thought, “This must be a joke.” But when I
checked it out, it seemed to be a legitimate concern. In retrospect, it doesn’t
really surprise me, but you’re right: it’s gone beyond the bounds of
surrealism.
Without any Situationist
assistance.
Exactly. We live in a Situationist nightmare. There’s an article I read recently suggesting
that Donald Trump is a Sex Pistol, because a lot of his rhetoric and the way he
acts is very much like that. Deliberately chaotic and incoherent. Loud mouthed and foul mouthed. Because it’s like, what’s the next thing
that’s going to happen: “What am I going to tweet next” or “Am I going to start
a war, or not. Can I be bothered?” He’s Pere Ubu come to life with nuclear
weapons.
I can see the thinking behind
that. I saw him described recently as a ‘reckless narcissist,’ which kind of
pins it. And the idea that all of US foreign policy would hang on what his
family think and what he’s going to tweet today.
Yeah – and the fate of the world, in fact.
I think there’s a sense in which
different music genres position fans differently.
Yes.
What views, from the Pistols end
of it, did punk take of music fandom? What place did punk offer to its own
fans? Often fandom was associated with following, but with punk, was it like
‘killing your heroes’ and all that?
I’m not sure about that. I don’t have a neat answer to that. I’ve
tried to make sense of it when I’ve lectured about it, by suggesting there’s a
kind of cultural history in fandom, which you can trace from ‘Baseball Annies’ to
Beatlemania, or from the advent of screaming as an accepted mode of behavior in
concerts: a kind of acceleration or intensification. There are also plateaus, benchmarks. A line from the Johnnie Ray concerts in the mid 1950s to
the David Bowie final Ziggy concert where people couldn’t believe what the fans
were doing. Which was hushed up at the time. I spoke to one music critic who was there and
really shocked. To
quote Starlust, a fan we called Julie
told us:
“I
was at the Hammersmith Odeon when Bowie killed off Ziggy in '73. I got trampled
to death! A lot of men were throwing off their underwear and showing their
c**ks all over the place. A lot of fluid was flying about. One girl was
actually sucking someone off at the same time as trying to listen to what was
going on. I thought it was so extraordinary because nobody had any inhibitions.
I remember that around me nobody gave a shit really about doing these things
because it was rumoured that maybe this was the last time Bowie would perform.
Maybe this was the last time Ziggy would be here. And everyone's got to get in
on this because otherwise you're just a square. So everyone just took their
clothes off. And w**king was nothing. There was a guy next to me who was
w**king in time to one track and I thought: My God! What does he do when he's
alone? Then I suddenly realized that all the things I'd been doing were
perfectly OK. Because here were people doing it with each other and sharing it.
How wonderful, you know. So get off on that. And I thought I'd never seen so
many c**ks in my life.”
When Pennebaker was filming Bowie, the far more interesting thing would have been to turn the camera around on to the fans. After that, there was a kind of cult -
When Pennebaker was filming Bowie, the far more interesting thing would have been to turn the camera around on to the fans. After that, there was a kind of cult -
Yeah.
Before I move on to that though, have you heard of Johnnie Ray?
Yes.
Because, as far as I can make out, Johnnie Ray was the first
performer whose audience did what I call the ‘Beatlemania package,’ which was
pissing, and screaming, and masturbation in public. When I found that out, I
tried to trace back to the people who’d been at the Johnnie Ray concerts, and I
was able to do some interviews. It does seem there was a qualitative difference
from Sinatra concerts, for example, where they did scream and go crazy, but not
to that extent. One ex-caretaker who was at a Johnnie Ray concert at a London
venue told me, “It was the first time we found knickers under the seats.” That
sums up quite a lot, I think.
Taking up the plateaus theme, maybe what happened was that fandom – having
gone through a process – having gone as far as it could do with Bowie – what could
it do except negate itself a bit like a Hegelian dialectic?, where a phenomenon
turns into its opposite. So post-Bowie punk fans negated – refused – their
fandom: by ritualized gobbing and throwing things at the stars, by insulting
the stars, by becoming the stars, and by abolishing the distance, the
difference. But I think, now, looking back on it, that’s a bit contrived. But
there may be something in it. Do you see what I mean?
Ironically, I need to go to the toilet now!
That’s not ironic at all!
… This is where things become
interesting, I think, not that they weren’t before. That whole history of
emotional excess; what interests me is that by the 1960s, managers were talking
about fans and engendering that excitement. In the 1950s, Elvis’s manager was
putting people in the front rows during his TV appearances, and things. So there
was always an element of encouragement, or manipulation, or participation, or
involvement with getting that reaction. What’s interesting about that is that
it isn’t the case that the performance, the elitist critique of it, and the
audience are separate things. It seems to me that they’re all bound up
together, and that mutual binding creates that trajectory of excess in some
ways, doesn’t it?
It gets into a dynamic, which is an acceleration and something
coming to a point where it can no longer go any further, so it turns into
something else, into its antithesis.
Even before punk, glam rock is
very aware of the place of fandom and rock stardom. Recently I saw the film Privilege (Watkins, 1967) with Jon Paul
Jones – interesting in terms of its portrayal of Beatlemania. Also, I’ve read
in the Jon Savage archive, of fans writing to the Pistols and saying, “We’re
individualists, but we still love you, Johnny.” So they had to negotiate the
contradiction, like everybody else.We were talking about Malcolm pushing the
Pistols into more anarchic situations, but how do we square the fact that a lot
of people in punk didn’t know those ideas?
You mean the Situationist ideas? I think a lot of them are common
sense, well not common sense, but they can be easily picked up on. One of the
things the situationists wanted to do was to get away from big books and
libraries, and try and create comic strips which encapsulated their ideas and
gestures. Like the thing that happened in Strasbourg when the students took
over the university, and spent all the union money on propaganda posters, and obscene
comics, which they plastered Strasbourg with. Anyone can understand what that
means without understanding the deeper theory behind it: you understand it’s
fun, it’s provocative, and it spreads the word.
And it also reflects a
generation gap.
Yes. Exactly, yeah.
The thing I find interesting
looking back on the 1960s is that the attitude to World War II seems different,
in that now – there was that famous moment when, was it Prince Harry or someone
dressed as a Nazi and it seemed quite shocking – whereas it seems to me that in
the 1960s there was a kind of generational thing: lambasting the previous
generation by alluding to the war in different ways?
I wasn’t aware of that.
Stuff like Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels (Corman, 1966) wearing a swastika?
Oh yeah, from the American point of view, maybe.
Coming back to collage – ‘treatise
by example’ seems central to your concern for presenting material over the
years.
What I’ve done? Yeah – I think so.
What would you say are its
assumptions and limitations?
One of the assumptions is that you should intervene. You can’t not
intervene, so you may as well do it consciously. One of the pitfalls of that is
that is when you do intervene there’s a contradiction which you can’t get out
of.
Also, isn’t there a sense in
which, if people don’t know you’re doing that, they might take it the wrong
way. If they don’t know that it’s an artistic strategy, they might get
confused?
Well, they would get confused if they don’t know it’s an artistic
strategy, but it’s also a research strategy. It’s just a question of ethics, I
suppose. I remember once me and Judy set out to find the human realities behind
certain tabloid stories – extreme situations,
as we saw them. One was a story about a 3 or 4 year-old girl who was sighted. Her
name was Dawn, and both her parents were blind. The story was a very spoony,
tabloid tale about how Dawn would lead her parents through supermarkets when
they were shopping. Dawn was “the eyes of her parents.” I wondered about the existential
situation of that child. That’s very dramatic. Her parents can’t see. She can.
How does she make sense of that? So we approached the family. We did it very
carefully, and the parents were fine. Their social worker was also fine, that
we could talk to the family and, eventually, to the kid. You can’t interview a
kid. What you do is just play with her in the garden, and you just wait for her
to say something. She started to tell us stuff, and soon we realized that the
kid couldn’t make any sense of this. In fact, she thought that her parents
could really see, and they were pretending that couldn’t. Or lying. So, to find out, she did a little scientific
experiment, several of them. She used to put things in the hallway to trip them
up. If they tripped over them, she’d think, “Oh – maybe they can’t see.” When
we realized that, we were in a real dilemma. What do you do? Do you warn the
parents? Because that’s betraying the kid’s confidence. What would you have
done?
Hmmm… I would not have told the
parents, and I would have taken it that it was their responsibility to check
where they were going.
We didn’t think that far. We didn’t tell the parents, and we removed
ourselves from that situation without showing them we were worried, because we
felt, obviously, we might actually push something in that situation and disturb
a very fragile relationship they had there. We didn’t want to be involved with
someone breaking their neck, either. Do you see what I mean? That’s a very
extreme example.
You’ve got a double bind of
confidences there.
Anything you get into, you’re going to affect those people. Even
interviewing relatives or ex-friends of Kate Bush’s family, suddenly they were
different people, because we’d knocked on their door, interviewed them, and
showed them they were important in some respects.
Did that create secondary or
reflected celebrity? Was that the concern.
No, not really. It wasn’t that. It’s just that when you go into any
situation, where you need to interview non-professionals as it were, you’re
liable to intervene, so you may as well be bold and intervene properly. So if
you think it’s unethical or dangerous, then you need to just dissolve it in
some way, by walking away or doing something.
Which is interesting, because that highly ethical approach is almost
the opposite to the Situationist method!
Yeah, but we were trained by Charles Parker, and he drummed it into
us that you shouldn’t go hurting people.
I guess at the end of the day, scholars usually begin from an impulse of caring about people.
Yes.
And it’s ironic if the results
are far from that.
Sometimes, though, the process can be dangerous to the
interviewer. For my BA, my final audio project
was an interview documentary in Northern Ireland. I wanted to talk to children about their
perspective on the troubles. It was 1971,
a volatile time. Judy came with me and
we drove in our Morris Minor to Londonderry and camped just outside. Wandering around the Bogside with a camera
and a Uher and approaching rioting kids seemed very grown up. It was also pretty reckless. We were at
different times caught in a multiple car bomb attack while in a Chinese
restaurant, and also after a shoot-out between a sniper and an armoured car
advised by a kindly woman to get the hell out as we’d attracted the interest of
the IRA. You see, all revolutionaries in
those days, including provos, had a uniform of long hair and casual clothes,
but being a Mod Situationist mine was cropped, plus I dressed formally – I've
never worn jeans! This adventure ended
when one day we were picked up by two stern men in the Bogside and instructed
to follow them. We were escorted into a
tower block flat. Here we were
interrogated by a woman clearly suspicious about our motives. Luckily, I could cite good Roman Catholic
affiliations like my parish priest back in South Ruislip – that seemed to swing it. But she told us to leave Derry immediately and not come back. Which we did. I had crassly supposed that the Northern Irish situation was akin to
Paris ’68, but it was a lot more murderous and menacing.
In Fashion and Perversity
you wrote, “Malcolm thought the rock industry was really about kids having sex
and wanted to rub its nose in the fact.” To what extent would it be fair to say
your own work re-articulates a Freudian view, in a sense: seeing consumer
culture as evoking instinctual responses from the audience that civilization
then represses?
That’s a bit of a loaded question!
It is.
Can you break it down a bit?
Yes. I guess I was putting a
Freudian frame on the idea that the media industries invites people into situations
of excessive desire or dark fantasies. In your work, it seems you blame the
industry for that.
Well, it’s not the industry. It's wider. Definitely, consumer capitalism does
exploit a Freudian agenda or a model of subjectivity which is fraught with forbidden
desires, with impulses that escalate and can explode. That model of
subjectivity permeates everything, including how fans see themselves and how
stars see themselves, as repositories of limitless desire and spiraling
appetite.
In a lot of fan studies that
seems to be bracketed off, and people want to talk about fan creativity or fan
community.
I think because a lot of the people doing that are fans and they
want to justify what they do in terms of how they feel. My starting point was
that I didn’t understand how fans feel, because it seemed to me to be a form of
self-abasement. The only person I was possibly a fan of was Sartre.
When I was in Paris, there was a café I would go to for my breakfast, and there was an American there, who I got talking to. I think he was from Yale French Studies and he was interviewing Sartre. As we got talking – I’d read loads of Sartre and was dead into him – he realized I was a big fan. So he said, “Would you like to meet him?” He saw him every afternoon in his apartment, where they were doing these interviews. I thought about it, and my instinctive feeling was no, and I said no. Then I wondered why not. I rationalized it to myself by saying, “I would have had nothing to say to him, except the fact that I just wanted to be in his presence.” I felt that would be abasing me and wasting his time. What I later realized was how complex fanhood was, because it wasn’t about self-abasement. That was a kind of trivial and dismissive approach. Though there was also a kernel of abjection in fanhood which some fan studies scholars find embarrassing. But it wasn’t simple, it wasn’t one dimensional. It was nuanced. It was complicated. There was also a sense of ambivalence within it, which interested me too.
When I was in Paris, there was a café I would go to for my breakfast, and there was an American there, who I got talking to. I think he was from Yale French Studies and he was interviewing Sartre. As we got talking – I’d read loads of Sartre and was dead into him – he realized I was a big fan. So he said, “Would you like to meet him?” He saw him every afternoon in his apartment, where they were doing these interviews. I thought about it, and my instinctive feeling was no, and I said no. Then I wondered why not. I rationalized it to myself by saying, “I would have had nothing to say to him, except the fact that I just wanted to be in his presence.” I felt that would be abasing me and wasting his time. What I later realized was how complex fanhood was, because it wasn’t about self-abasement. That was a kind of trivial and dismissive approach. Though there was also a kernel of abjection in fanhood which some fan studies scholars find embarrassing. But it wasn’t simple, it wasn’t one dimensional. It was nuanced. It was complicated. There was also a sense of ambivalence within it, which interested me too.
There is so much going on there:
admiration, inspiration, following, perhaps not following. Those ‘meet and
greet’ situations – I was a fan of Howard Devoto; I was quite a big fan of Magazine
for quite a while. They took a lot of ideas from punk and kept an artistic
interest. I met Howard Devoto at one of those ‘meet and greet’ after parties,
and I thought, “What can you say in two seconds to a person, anyway?”I just
said, “Thanks for showing us what’s possible in music.” He chuckled. There’s
nothing to say, in that sense.
Did you see the BBC programme that was made from Starlust? It was called ‘Fans,’ and made
by a guy called Andy Batten-Foster.
Not the recent BBC4 one? Years
ago. I’ve seen clips on YouTube.
You know Patricia, the Bowie fan, who fantasizes about murdering him,
is in there saying the same thing, which got raised eyebrows. It’s got some
good stuff. One of the things we did there with Batten-Foster, I was interested
in what happens when fans meet stars – what
actually does happen. We engineered some meetings, including one with a fan of
Shaking Stevens. Exactly the same thing seems to happen. Either people feel
tongue tied, or they don’t want to say anything, or they say they feel faint,
or they do faint. If you think about it, all of those behaviours are about
absenting yourself. You don’t want to be there any more. You spend all those
endless efforts trying to meet the person, and when you’re in front of them,
you have nothing to say. That really interested me: you evacuate yourself.
Why do you think that is?
I think it’s because there is nothing to say. You’re confronted with
Shaking Stevens, who is this guy in a wooly jumper with a Welsh accent. A very
homely guy. He’s no longer this series of images, layers of images that you’ve
built up. He’s no longer the fantasy that you’ve projected on to your interior screen.
What I was interested in was the instant reaction. The other way you
can see this was if you go onto a photo archive, you can find many photos of
fans meeting stars like Prince or whoever. Often they’re crying. This is one
thing fans do: they cry. They “burst” into tears. That weepiness goes back to the first fan
mail, letters sent to Rousseau, which are full of weepiness and lamentation and
intensely personal while being oddly detached. The only sense that I can make of that is: you don’t want this
situation, this contact, after the dream, it’s painful.
It always reminds me of Artaud,
the bodily fluids part of it.
Yes, that’s a good point.
In a book I’ve written called Understanding Fandom (2013), I talk
about that: a fan meets Gregory Peck. He is shaking her hand, going, “How are
you? Let me hear about you.” She just says, “I’m your biggest fan.” There seems
to be a will to retain the relationship as a fannish relationship.
Yeah, that’s true.
Interviewing Elvis fans, one of
the things that surprised me, a bit, was that often their fantasies were about
things like being on the front row at concerts. It wasn’t about being Elvis, or
married to him, or whatever it was. It was actually about being the best fan.
I’ve often felt that as well. Also, some of the most lurid,
pornographic fan fantasies are actually about wanting to be someone’s friend. They
don’t really want to screw these people, but they would like to get a phone
call from them in the middle of the night – asking for advice or solace as a
friend would. Reciprocity. Just a kind of easy friendship – a yearning
for recognition or innocent love – in the way that the psychologist Alfred Binet called
fetishism a form of love: ‘amorous fixation,’ he called it.
Affiliation.
Yeah, affiliation. It’s love not sex that motivates them. It’s often
couched as sex because in our culture sex is a reasonable – an available or
plausible discourse for ‘amorous fixation,’ this obsessive intensity. It’s not considered reasonable or even sane to
obsess over a star – to build a shrine to them, just because you just want to
be their best friend.
That’s interesting. To what
extent was The Secret History of KateBush an extension of the ideas that informed punk and your previous work?
It came out of – a prequel to it.
The Princess of Suburbia?
Yeah, The Princess of Suburbia.
I basically wanted to write something about music, and just wanted to do something different from punk. I looked around. She seemed to be very different from punk when I saw her. The first idea I had was to lampoon the form, and try and create a very lurid account of her that was designed to look like a concert programme. One that had gone horribly wrong, like EMI had had a paroxysm. It was printed on heavy glossy paper. That sold quite well, but we got legal problems.
I basically wanted to write something about music, and just wanted to do something different from punk. I looked around. She seemed to be very different from punk when I saw her. The first idea I had was to lampoon the form, and try and create a very lurid account of her that was designed to look like a concert programme. One that had gone horribly wrong, like EMI had had a paroxysm. It was printed on heavy glossy paper. That sold quite well, but we got legal problems.
Then I went on and did The Secret History with Music Sales, because she’d got quite established by
then.
The ideas around it weren’t so much about punk, but I was
still playing with the biography/hagiography form, playing with the logic of
the form, and so forth. In the same way that the Pistols’ biog was about trying
to deconstruct the form.
One reason behind Pistols’ book was, when punk started off, my most
earnest desire was to finish my MA and I was spending a lot of time reading in
the British Museum. I was doing something on Victorian photography and getting
involved – sidetracked really, by reading newspaper stories. When I was reading
some of these fascinating stories, I thought, “It’s a shame you can’t go behind
them, and find out what’s behind these stories, because no one’s ever going to
know.” So when the Pistols started to happen, I thought this is my opportunity
to do something which will enable future generations to get behind this and see
what was behind those headlines, and those shocking stories. This was one
motivation I had.
Is that a possible project, insofar
that the headlines then shape the myths that shape the story?
Of course – I was being a bit naïve there. They inform the behavior,
and the outcome, and the trajectory of it as well.
Also your form there was kind of
epistolary, wasn’t it? Almost, like, diarized?
Episodic. I was very much into docudrama and documentary movies. You
got back then a lot of politicized documentaries, Brechtian type cut-ups and
that sort of stuff.
Going on from that, do you now
think that subjectless biography is possible?
Subjectless? No. It’s more and more impossible, and there’s more and
more elaboration of alternatives. Have you read that book about, what’s it
called? About Dick Hebdige. It’s a kind of love story; there’s a woman and
she’s in love with somebody called Dick. It’s I Love Dick (1997) by Chris Kraus, and it’s got a lot of double
entendres, and it’s become quite successful. I was introduced to that book by
someone at Kingston who told me about this book saying, “You know it’s about
Dick Hebdige?” I didn’t know about that at all. Then I realized it’s an
unusually candid book from an "academic." Fanhood isn’t something academics readily admit to, but it’s rife,
as pointed out in a sharp essay by Alan McKee, "The Fans of Cultural Theory."
Another book I discuss in class is Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers (2007), in
which the film critic Antonia Quirke confesses her vocation was chosen so she
can sit in dark rooms ogling and fantasizing about stars she fancies – which
has messed up her real love life no end. So there are some really interesting reflexive
stances available, more and more so.
Do you know Caroline Sullivan’s
book on the Bay City Rollers, Bye Bye Baby (1999)?
Yeah, I do.
That’s quite an interesting
book.
It’s a very good book.
The way that the power
differences change towards the end of the book is fascinating.
And the way that it had an impact on her life, through the
foundation of her career.
Yes, interesting. Can you tell
us about the separation of the facts from the myths in terms of the story of
the Kate Bush biography, because there’s lots of different things going round
online that I’ve seen.
I’ve played around with that myself, because, for example, you know I wrote a book called Fandemonium.
I’ve played around with that myself, because, for example, you know I wrote a book called Fandemonium.
I put a lot of true factoids in there, and, out of
mischievousness, I put in a made-up factoid about a Kate Bush fan who was so
obsessed that he collected her bath water. Then I read a straight-laced, American academic's
account, where he po-facedly recited this as a fact. He even added to
it that this fan had rented an apartment in the same block as Kate Bush – whereas she lived in a house with her brothers – and that the fan then bottled this water for sale. I
thought: Well, why don't you check it? How can you just say that without double
checking it? I got some kind of mischievous glee out of it, but do you see what
I mean: it gets kind of entangled.
Yeah.
Do you know the Tom Kummer story?
No.
Tom Kummer was a journalist who worked for a number of mainstream
Swiss and German magazines and newspapers. All his colleagues were deeply
jealous. He was a showbiz columnist and he got all these interviews with people
like Sharon Stone, and all these top ranking stars: Brad Pitt. And he got all these
secrets. Like Brad Pitt saying he had
things hanging out of his nose, “sometimes for days,” and his then-wife saying
that she wore transparent underwear to please him. Or Sharon Stone who said she
was a virtual nymphomaniac who desired to "irritate men from wholly different
classes of society," and had homosexual fantasies: "men will always
remain pigs." Or Mike Tyson who confessed
to Kummer that he enjoyed eating cockroaches, and quoted Hemingway and Einstein
and Nietzsche… So colleagues were deeply jealous of Kummer, and this went on
for years. He was so feted that a book had been published of his interviews
with a glowing tribute by his editor. His Sharon Stone interview was turned
into another book that is still available on Amazon. Eventually he was rumbled
by one colleague after he interviewed that pop star who was married to the guy
who killed himself, shot himself in the 1980s?
Not Courtney Love?
He interviewed Courtney Love, who gave the most amazing interview,
and even though she’s pretty whacky, you’d think she wouldn’t have said stuff
like, "Minotauruses are eating the genitals of the moon," "All
my poems are on fire!" and, "There are seagulls on the Riviera,
slurping ice-cooled gin and tonics." One colleague got suspicious and she went back over Kummer’s interviews.
She realized that what he’d been doing was pillaging other people’s interviews,
cobbling them together, which is normal journalistic practice, and then
completely inventing stuff. Also, inventing the fact that he’d been there on
his own with these celebs, which he wasn’t.
He was rumbled and disgraced. Everyone had really red faces. He’s
since gone to LA, where he’s a tennis coach. A film was made about him, called Bad Boy Kummer (Gimes, 2010).
It’s in German, but you can find it with British subtitles. I thought, that’s a great example of the fact that stardom is an artefact. In one interview, after he was found out, he said, “So what? I’m a gonzo journalist. This is postmodernism. It’s a different – new, territory.”
It’s in German, but you can find it with British subtitles. I thought, that’s a great example of the fact that stardom is an artefact. In one interview, after he was found out, he said, “So what? I’m a gonzo journalist. This is postmodernism. It’s a different – new, territory.”
In a sense, he was pursuing your
project further than you.
Yeah – because who cares what these people really said? What also
fascinated me was that the people behind these business enterprises like Brad
Pitt had never objected. They never said, “No, he didn’t meet them. He didn’t
go down to so-and-so’s house in LA and hang out for two days with them.” It’s as if there’s a level of celebrity
discourse where just as what’s public fuses with what’s private, what is true
or plausible is irrelevant, has no purchase. A realm of fantasy and “fake news.” Kim Kardashian is the final destination maybe of Karl Kraus’
observations about the corrupting seductions of newspaper-speak.
Returning to that kind of
extension of stereotyping of fandom into the public sphere, did you ever have an
ethical sense of, maybe this is damaging to fans?
To fans? How do you mean? I don’t have an obligation to fans, I
don’t think.
What’s interesting to me is that
when people reviewed your books, they talked about the Barry Manilow fan.
Which one?
The one who said that she
wouldn’t sleep with her own husband.
Yeah – the thing is about those fans is that you have to read it
with a pinch of salt, and realize they are acting out fanhood, aren’t they?
That’s one thing I try to stress, that people aren’t gripped by fanhood. They
decide to be fans. There is agency there.
There must be a sense in which
people are using fandom as a social alibi for eccentric behaviour.
Yeah.
Going back to the stories and
things, there was one I read about you by Stephen Wells. Did you see that one?
Swells?
Yes, something like: Fred worked
for EMI, and then Kate Bushed ended up having an affair with him?
Ah, yeah – me and Swells had a kind of duel! He was a friend of mine
before he went to America. We would wind one another up with emails and
preposterous stories and so on. I think that was possibly debris of that. There
were loads of them, but they didn’t all find their way online.
But they were very entertaining.
He would make up things about me, and I would make up things about
him.
I thought I was going to meet Aleister
Crowley. I’m kind of disappointed! I think I’m going to have to write a book
called, Stalking Fred Vermorel.
Oh, you are talking about the Satanic thing? When Kate Bush
supposedly had my baby and it turned out to be Satan? Swells was kind of stalking me, and I was
stalking him back. In revenge for that Satan story I claimed he’d been b***ered
by the NME editor over a photocopy machine. He was delighted! You know he was
an NME writer?
He’s dead now, isn’t he?
Yes, he died about ten years ago in America.
You enrolled at the Polytechnic of Central London when it ran
the only course on mass media in the country. What did you learn, in those
early days of media studies?
That was a great course, because they didn’t know what they were
doing. So they were sort of making it up as they went along. It was just up the
road from the BBC, Broadcasting House, so we had a lot of input from Charles
Parker, who was great influence. There were some good people on there: Paddy
Scannell, Roger McNally. They were kind of inventing the curriculum – it was
the only course of its kind at the time, so it was kind of disparate. A third
of it was practice in studios. A third of it was theory, supposedly, of media,
which didn’t exist at that time, except for some banal empiricist stuff from
America, and a third of it was another academic subject. So you could do
English or history. I chose to do history with McNally. So it was an
interesting course.
With the theory thing, I had a number of disputes with them, because
I went as someone supposedly sophisticated, with a Situationist background. I
objected very strongly to the American communication theory thing. They did try
and address that by bringing in a bit of semiology, and so on, but it was in
its infancy. David Cardiff, mostly, was doing that. Do you know David Cardiff?
I think I’ve heard his name.
He didn’t write that much. He abandoned teaching to become a painter.
He was the husband of Lynn Barber. A very nice guy. I think the thing that
struck me about that course was that all the tutors were young, so we had a lot
of contact with them. We would go drinking with them every night. Visit their
homes. The classes were small. It was a really good course, despite itself, it didn’t
have any reason to be good, but it just turned out to be really good.
And were there ideas from that
time that stayed with you and informed your work?
Well, yeah. David Cardiff came from a psychology background, and he
talked about psychoanalysis quite a lot. Although, I have to say, much of my formation was done before that.
It was erratic and piecemeal. I was early addicted to public libraries and read The GoodSoldier Schweik alongside Just William and Biggles books. That was the great thing about libraries in those days, before they got weeded and rationalized – and underfunded. The surreal juxtapositions browsing could bring up. There was no scrutiny or control. All you needed was a library ticket and you got the real deal: the actual words of Carl Gustav Jung on proper paper and thumbed and sometimes annotated by unknown strangers. My father, who’d attended a science university in Paris was an amateur philosopher keen on Henri Bergson. When he found me reading Freud he advised me to “start at the beginning” – with Plato. So I borrowed Timaeus, which I enjoyed, but got bogged down in The Republic.
It was erratic and piecemeal. I was early addicted to public libraries and read The GoodSoldier Schweik alongside Just William and Biggles books. That was the great thing about libraries in those days, before they got weeded and rationalized – and underfunded. The surreal juxtapositions browsing could bring up. There was no scrutiny or control. All you needed was a library ticket and you got the real deal: the actual words of Carl Gustav Jung on proper paper and thumbed and sometimes annotated by unknown strangers. My father, who’d attended a science university in Paris was an amateur philosopher keen on Henri Bergson. When he found me reading Freud he advised me to “start at the beginning” – with Plato. So I borrowed Timaeus, which I enjoyed, but got bogged down in The Republic.
Being maths-phobic I failed my 11 plus and went to an RC secondary modern which was a cut above other secondary moderns. In particular the English teacher there, Donald Young, took me under his wing and coached me through early “A” levels. He also encouraged me to read Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The Screwtape Letters and Raymond Williams. The plan was to transfer to Harrow Grammar school and then aim for Cambridge. Fortunately – or not? – my bus to school each day passed Harrow Art School where I got an eyeful of the dudes and belles lounging outside in the street, and then ten minutes later took me past the playground of Harrow Grammar, full of schoolboys in cadet uniforms marching up and down. The idea of putting on uniform terrified me even more than the idea of homework, so I chose art school.
That was where my higher education started because at 16 and 17 you
really take things in. The people at Harrow talked about Surrealism and Dadaism,
Freud and Miró and sexual deviance. One gay third year
student tried to groom me by giving me a biography of Rimbaud. I never succumbed but got in with a crowd who
introduced me to London gay clubs like the Huntsman in Berwick Street. It was the vibe and the gorgeous lesbians with
their dance moves and put downs that drew me there – I introduced Malcolm to
the Huntsman. I did my first life
drawing classes at Harrow – the nude female models were a culture shock – it
was a rite of passage. Another big influence on me (as well as
Malcolm) was the portrait painter, Theo Ramos, who tutored and befriended us. Theo had a Jackson Pollock in his Chelsea
flat and was a mine of theory and anecdotes. He was disappointed when I gave up painting for writing. After finishing my foundation year at Harrow I
bummed about and haunted public libraries for about two years until I
eventually went to Paris. So I was kind
of self-taught to an extent, before I went back into education.
The problem with being an autodidact is that you get opinionated and lack context. So I was lucky in my undergrad years to have tutors clued up enough to knock that out of me. With my MA at Sussex the thing felt like a finishing school for beautiful people, and after being based at 309 Regent Street the Sussex campus was parish pump. Later, I did a spell at the RCA – enrolled for a PhD which I never completed at the time, as the RCA is a wonderful employment exchange and I got too busy teaching. The Humanities seminars there, run by Lawrence Gane, were genial and controversial, plus I learnt how to teach by copying Chris Frayling’s lecturing style – a master class.
The problem with being an autodidact is that you get opinionated and lack context. So I was lucky in my undergrad years to have tutors clued up enough to knock that out of me. With my MA at Sussex the thing felt like a finishing school for beautiful people, and after being based at 309 Regent Street the Sussex campus was parish pump. Later, I did a spell at the RCA – enrolled for a PhD which I never completed at the time, as the RCA is a wonderful employment exchange and I got too busy teaching. The Humanities seminars there, run by Lawrence Gane, were genial and controversial, plus I learnt how to teach by copying Chris Frayling’s lecturing style – a master class.
In your PhD commentary you
talked about academic authors and trends that have attracted and repelled you.
Can you summarize some of your thinking on different areas?
That’s such a big question. What was the context I said that in?
Just talking about people like
Bourdieu and cultural studies.
Well, the cultural studies thing which at first excited me started
to perplex me in the way that it got ossified at a certain point and people
started to teach it by rote. Like chalking up on a board: What’s the difference
between a signifier and signified? If you think about it, there’s no f***ing
difference at all. They try and make out it’s something you can learn. When it
got codified like that it became boring. Because originally it was a game; a
bit like the Oulipo writers.
Also I noticed it became circulated. It became rife in the NME. Then
marketing people picked it up and so it became meaningless, to an extent. The
idea of subcultures, for example, became diffused and diluted, and turned into
a marketing scam, which it already was with punk, really, by that time. It
didn’t appall me. It just didn’t interest me particularly.
I also noticed that cultural studies people weren’t out in the field;
they spent most of their time theorizing on pretty tenuous material. Like Hebdige on punk: heavy on theory but
based on what? A comparison I use in lectures is between Hebdige’s Subculture and Bourdieu’s Distinction. They were both
published the same year. Bourdieu’s book
is densely argued, but it’s based on a mass of empirical evidence. But where is the basis for Subculture – other than some subcultural
tourism?
At that time, I was also very interested in cultural history, and I
found most of the best cultural historians were Americans for one reason or
another. So I was spending a lot of time reading them: the history of the
cigarette, the cultural history of boredom, or whatever.
Right, sort of like material
culture, and stuff?
Right, and sort of anthropology and ethnography based. I liked their
approach because it was at least substantial and well researched. The French have a genius for being mysterious
and abstract, but they can do it. When
British academics take it on, it often falls flat. They’re just obtuse.
Too conservative?
They just don’t have that playfulness. They don’t understand that
semiotics should be a playful thing. It’s like surrealism, more than a system.
Well, I could be wrong about that; maybe it is a system.
Was ethnography part of the mix
for you? Like the Chicago School?
Yeah, definitely – I came to the Chicago School quite late. I was
interested in Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Everybody was in those days.
It makes a lot of sense.
Sartre was an influence as well in the type of thing I took on. My
original intention was to write fiction. I was very involved with reading
fiction as an apprenticeship. Then I read Sartre sneeringly saying: Who wants
to write fiction these days when you’ve got psychoanalysis? When you’ve got
ethnography? When you’ve got all these marvellous ways of approaching reality,
which is always stranger than anything anyone can make up. That’s always stuck
with me. I always think, what people say and do, you can never beat it, so why
make stuff up?
Tell me about existentialism.
How did that inform what you were interested in?
It was just something that was around at the time – which shows my
age, really – at the time everybody was thinking about Sartre and reading
Sartre, and I read as much as I could. I also read Simone de Beauvoir, who I
found a real education. Have you read her autobiographies? She wrote a series
of biographies of her and Sartre, where she scrupulously detailed everything
that they read, so I would use those as a reading list. I heard about Cesare Pavese from her, so I’d go off to the library and get a
load of Pavese. Or Nelson Algren and Kafka or Merleau-Ponty, whatever. That was
my education in a sense. But existentialism – it’s a very big subject, isn’t
it?
It is. The more I read, the more
I understand how pervasive existentialism was, particularly in the 1950s, the
late 1950s.
Yeah – absolutely: 1950s to early 1960s. Then it started to fade
when Foucault came on the scene.
There always seems to be
something existentially doomed about rock stars and pop stars.
Yeah.
Which, kind of culminates in
punk, in some ways, but then, as you’ve said yourself – Pete Doherty, or
whoever – those roles are still being replayed.
Yes.
From what I know, would it be
fair to say that you were forwarding a kind of perverse potential in pop
fandom, in a sense ‘punking’ fans, or had previous music already done that?
Well, I think previous music had already done it. I was trying to ascertain, to express, their thoughts and feelings. One thing that drove me with the Starlust project was that nobody had considered celebrity from the viewpoint of the consumers, the audience.
Well, I think previous music had already done it. I was trying to ascertain, to express, their thoughts and feelings. One thing that drove me with the Starlust project was that nobody had considered celebrity from the viewpoint of the consumers, the audience.
There was good material about how and why celebrity works from Orrin Klapp or Edgar Morin’s The Stars, and Boorstin’s The Image was a major contribution to that – The Image was plundered by Debord for The Society of the Spectacle, and eventually led to Baudrillard’s insights. But Klapp and Boorstin were sometimes blinkered by a high-minded liberalism, and generally too, all these early studies were predicated on the charisma or the industry viewpoint – that there is something special, “star quality,” some magic, that is possessed by the star and beams out and penetrates the fan who is a more or less passive, and a simplistically grateful recipient. Plus at that time, everything that had been written about fans was, I felt, deeply trivial and patronizing. Nobody had really let them speak in their own voices. That’s one thing that I got from Parker: give them their voice. The only thing that troubled me was that sometimes, some of these people were pretty inarticulate. So I did sometimes have trouble in disassembling and reassembling what they said, so it made a kind of consecutive narrative. I always tried my best to be true to what the spirit of what they were saying was. It did worry me sometimes that maybe I was making it a little bit too pat. But mostly you didn’t have to do that. Patricia, who’d done that long interview about her Bowie fetish, it was almost like catharsis with her. It was like 'abreaction' – to use the analytical term. She just started, and she went on for about an hour and a half – I’ve still got the tapes – and she doesn’t stop. And she doesn’t stop, she doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t deviate, and she says all that stuff. It’s verbatim, what she said. We didn’t have any problem with that. We just transcribed it and put it out. Other people were the same.
I don’t know if you remember: we didn’t use much of it, but there’s a fan there who was lucid dreaming. Marnie, we called her, after the Hitchcock character, because she didn’t want her name to be used. She was dreaming about Bowie. What happened was that we interviewed her, and she told us that she was dreaming about him. Because the dreams were so precise and vivid, we asked her then to start a dream journal, which she did do. It proved to be so good that we reproduced parts of it verbatim. I’ve still got that at home. There was tons more that we didn’t use, but those excerpts were brilliant. When I read that, I thought, well, Bowie couldn’t write anything like this, could he?
That registering of the fans
creativity also connects to a kind of elitist conceit, in a sense, that the
fans are more creative than the stars.
Yeah, I did have this motif that I used when people asked, when
people were incredulous. Like Malcolm asked, “Why are you writing about fans?”
I said, because fans are more interesting than stars. I could see his eyes
going, “Oh – that’s a new one!” That was my mantra at the time: Forget the
star, it’s the fan. It kept me going when people were saying, well, “What are
you doing here?” You know.
You’re also a creative part of
that, drawing on Hitchcock, and
Of course – we are putting it together. We’re giving it a form,
we’re giving it substance, and – as I said, sometimes what they were saying was
so disconnected, because some of them were quite troubled. They would talk in
bursts and then wander off. Then you would have to decide, do you want the
wandering off stuff in there? Maybe we should keep some of it, to show that
they’ve wandered off, but maybe we should trim it. So it’s an artistic
decision, and that’s a bit worrying, but what can you do?
Also there’s a project of
showing commonalities there, between what people say. One of the things that
struck me is that people have different contents to their fantasies, and
things, but there seems to be a similarity in their behavior.
Yeah – there was. That’s why I tried to break the fans down into three
marketing categories: the Manilow type of category, the rock category – the
Bowie category – and teen pop, which was Nick Heyward. We were lucky to get a
lot of stuff on Heyward. We got masses of stuff from management offices and
from fan clubs, and from advertising in the music press. At one time I
advertised a telephone number in the NME where fans could leave messages.
My partner claims she’s in Starlust, as a Nick Heyward fan.
Could be. We got loads of stuff that we didn’t reproduce – stuff
that was still rolling in after we published. From America, as well; we started
to extend our tentacles to America and started to get stuff from there.
Did you know it was turned down to start with, Starlust? We were contracted to Constable. There was a woman there:
a very nice woman, very helpful at the time, who gave us free rein. She was
expecting a book that was packaged and narrated from a voice on high. One of
the decisions I made early on was that this stuff was so interesting on its own
terms, I’m not going to have my own voice, apart from this afterword that I put
in there. I just wanted their voice.
We gave it to her in that form and she was a bit shocked, she didn’t
know what to do, I think. So she left it on her desk and then she went on
holiday. During her holiday, the managing director read it and blew his top. He
said, “This is pornographic filth. There’s no way Constable is ever going to
touch this stuff. We want our money back.” So we said, “Sod you. You’re not
having your money back, but fine if you don’t want to publish it.” Then we went
to Faber and Faber, and Pete Townsend, who was an editor at Faber tried to get
them to publish it, because Townsend really liked it. They said, “No, it’s too
filthy.” One of the things they always wanted was this voice above, saying,
“It’s okay. There’s someone in control here. These fans aren’t really as
dangerous or as worrisome as they might seem.” Do you know what I mean: the
voice of sanity that guides you through? And I always resisted that. It was
only then that we went to this rather trashy publisher –
WH Allen?
They said, “Whatever – we’ll do it.” Even then they tried to censor
certain parts of it. There was a set-to in an editorial meeting when the sales
director objected: "Look, I’ve got teenage daughters!"
The reason I’m smiling is that
its sounds like a replay of the Pistols and the record companies.
I guess it was, yeah – I didn’t think of that.
In a way, I think a lot of your
work is about exploitation. So what’s the place of agency in your understanding
of music fandom?
Agency? You mean agency like self-will?
Yeah – the ability of
individuals to make a difference.
I profoundly think, coming from an existentialist point of view,
people are in control. They’re in charge, sometimes even when they act out
madness or so-called addiction. In a kind of Laingian sense, they know they’re
doing it. I do think it’s about agency. That’s one reason I wanted to give them
their voice, and their way of saying things, and not corrupt it or dumb it
down.
So for you the writing is part
of the process of restoring agency?
Representing it, not restoring it.
Yeah – representing it. One of
the things I took away from Starlust
was that commonality of fan experience. Even though the fans were all
different, they all had similar experiences.
They weren’t all fantasies. Don’t forget the groupie, and there were
a few others we didn’t put in there, because it would have been a huge book
otherwise. It was already about 100,000 words.
Have you ever thought of doing
like an England’s Dreaming Tapes,
like The Starlust Tapes?
I would have to get all my boxes out of storage, so I don’t know
about that. What were you saying?
About agency.
Yes – I think that would be a bit of a pompous thing for me to claim – that I was ‘restoring.’ It was there to be found.
What I took away from Starlust was it was about the power of
stardom. It one point elsewhere you described it as a ‘duet between the
possessed and the non-possessed.’
That’s from a quote from the medievalist Peter Brown.
Yes – what interested me about
that is that it’s also about power. People are mutually positioned. In my own
work, I’ve explored that through totemism: that if lots of people pay attention
to one person, they become a socially powerful person, particularly for the
people who believe in their performance.
Yeah – I would agree with you. I had an argument with David Morley.
David Morley wanted me to do a Starlust Mark 2, but about television viewers.
That’s how I met him. He then became a tutor for the PhD I was doing at RCA at
the time. Our argument was summed up when he declared to me, “Theory isn’t
available to fans.” Because he wanted me to, again, insert that [narrator’s]
voice in there. I really recoiled from that, because I thought, well, it’s
their own theory. They are theorizing themselves through their expressions and
behaviours.
To me, for example, Marnie is precisely what you’re saying about
power. She talks about how Bowie takes her over, gets into her stomach, pulls
out her entrails, paralyzes her, and she gets penetrated by the beams of his gaze – well, that’s a
kind of theory about power. That’s a game she’s playing, a performance, and
she’s articulated that in a vivid way. She doesn’t need to talk about Adorno
and Marcuse. I don’t think it would bring anything to the conversation even if
she did, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
Another example would be Julie, witnessing fans acting out the final
Ziggy concert at Hammersmith. She’s
clear about how the experience transformed and certified her own private
fanhood into a public arena. But she hardly needs me to say that for you to get
it.
There’s a ritual that scholars (and students) should tick a box
called “analysis” or “critical analysis” when they write up research. Commentary
is expected. But commentary – analysis, can be embedded, implicit, in an encounter or an interview. Also relevant
to that are the lessons of phenomenology – such as, for example, the argument about whether there can be anything “behind”
or “inside” a description – qualities that can be hived off or recapitulated or
rescued from description. At least, from
“thick description.” Also, the critique
of “depth” and supposedly hidden or masked meanings: whether there are levels
of cultural phenomena or whether what you see is what you get; that’s all there
is. I’m also struck by how when Barthes
describes something – Einstein’s brain or Japanese cuisine, the “theory” is luminous,
but when he tries to account for himself, to do theory itself, when he becomes
Dr Semiotics, he falters and can get tiresome, even silly. In the same way that
psychoanalytical case studies can die a death when the patient stops talking
and the analyst starts pontificating.
There’s a lot of complexity
here, insofar that you’re choosing that, and you’re choosing to give her a
name, and you know some of those theories yourself.
Yes.
Equally, the culture she’s in;
at one point you almost say, “Well, actually, Freud’s in the air.”
Yes. There’s a theorization going on there. There are vacancies,
aren’t there? There are niches in our culture which you can fill, performative
spaces, like creating a shrine, experiencing a kind of mystical appropriation,
a magical encounter, a fantastical intimacy, and so on. All of these vestiges and ghosts of archaic belief
systems then become part of the pilgrimage of fanhood. In the same way,
popularized psychoanalysis has disseminated plausible roles and motives, a
model of desire, a symbolism appropriated and customized by fans. Do you see what I mean?
Kind of.
They’re theoretical spaces, is what I mean – opportunities to choose
and assign certain behaviours. Precedents or roles.
You mean that the power dynamics
of stardom and fandom set them up as possibilities and that people can then
occupy them?
Exactly. They become
hijacked or customized from redundant belief systems like the rituals and
beliefs of pop mysticism like Lourdes, or the “symptoms” of classic hysteria.
I was intrigued when you put
elsewhere that in a sense boy band members or pop stars are new faces on the
roles.
Yeah.
I think there is a certain
amount of truth to that, but times changes as well, don’t they?
Yeah – I wonder what the internet is doing as well and social media.
It hasn’t changed things, I don’t think, but it’s made them more interesting.
One of the things I talk about in lectures is Taylor Swift and her strategy of appropriating
fan behavior. Have you seen that video she’s done when she packs up Christmas
presents for fans?
She’s supposedly filming herself doing it, wearing a Santa Claus hat, and it cuts to the fans receiving the presents, unpacking them and reading personal messages from Taylor Swift. They’re of course all in floods of tears, weeping and gasping and shrieking and so on. It’s all filmed cod-amateur, low tech and wobbly, as if from a fan’s perspective, like a fan art video. I thought, how exploitative can you get? But she’s playing that game. Co-opting a stereotype of fanhood into marketing and promo as an extension of her act, an imprint of her persona. I don’t think you could have played that before fan studies / fan culture – in its form now – had existed.
She’s supposedly filming herself doing it, wearing a Santa Claus hat, and it cuts to the fans receiving the presents, unpacking them and reading personal messages from Taylor Swift. They’re of course all in floods of tears, weeping and gasping and shrieking and so on. It’s all filmed cod-amateur, low tech and wobbly, as if from a fan’s perspective, like a fan art video. I thought, how exploitative can you get? But she’s playing that game. Co-opting a stereotype of fanhood into marketing and promo as an extension of her act, an imprint of her persona. I don’t think you could have played that before fan studies / fan culture – in its form now – had existed.
Well, certainly, if you go back
to Elvis, the fans were always involved in the representation somehow. The use
of social media perhaps adds a new kind of realism.
Yes – instant gratification and fantasy.
One of the things that troubles
me about some of the writing on social media is some people are quite close to
saying that the relationship between fans and stars, just because fans can have
a more ‘equal’ relationship on social media with stars. I think that’s nonsense,
personally.
Yeah, I think it is: follow the money, and the power and the
opportunity. It’s not the same, is it?
Do you know what Miley Cyrus has
done? I’ve heard that at some of her lives shows she actually takes a camera
and puts it in the audience, and gets female fans to kiss each other, and
things like that.
Does she? That’s interesting. I could use that in a lecture. I use other
examples of star strategies and accounts – like Eminem’s video for 'Stan,' which at
least tries to confront the fan’s predicament rather than obfuscating or
appropriating it. Though the ending is a cop-out!
But not many artists would talk about this. Peter Gabriel was an exception. He’s an interesting guy because he’s one of the few rock stars who reads and archives their fan mail. He gave us access to it. Also, have you ever seen that thing where he throws himself backwards into the audience and they carry him round, and put him back? ‘Lay your hands on me,’ he’s singing while that’s going on. I thought that was fascinating. I interviewed a fan who was in the crowd, who then wrote in graphic detail what it felt like to be touching the man himself – the electricity, the feel, the sensualism…
But not many artists would talk about this. Peter Gabriel was an exception. He’s an interesting guy because he’s one of the few rock stars who reads and archives their fan mail. He gave us access to it. Also, have you ever seen that thing where he throws himself backwards into the audience and they carry him round, and put him back? ‘Lay your hands on me,’ he’s singing while that’s going on. I thought that was fascinating. I interviewed a fan who was in the crowd, who then wrote in graphic detail what it felt like to be touching the man himself – the electricity, the feel, the sensualism…
It’s complete totemism.
Yeah, at the end of the day, he’s deposited back on stage and he’s
the one who’s coining the money and having a life, the celebrity lifestyle.
This is the interesting thing:
what the fans are getting out of it and what he’s getting out of it are two
completely different things. One of the things that I think is interesting in
recent times is how fan dedication, in a sense, is being monetized, so that you’ve
got almost like ‘club class fandom’ where middle aged, rich people can buy into
fan dedication, in different ways.
Yeah, that’s true.
Do you hold much truck with
explanations of fandom as a ‘pseudo-religious’ activity? I know you’ve talked
about ‘consumer mysticism’ before, but what do you feel are the limits of the
comparison?
Well, that analogy often comes up. You can see that in La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960), can’t you? Fellini is playing with that idea right at the very
end. The vision of the Virgin and the chanting, hypnotized pilgrims are
analogous to the American star and her enthralled public and paparazzi. The way
I would see it is that - again, there are certain spaces – images and narratives – abandoned by mystical cults and mystical behavior that you can choose to occupy.
It can then seem appropriate – even scripted or inevitable – to make a shrine,
to collect things, to make pilgrimages to sites. To pray, to invoke. To obsess
and fret, and finally to pursue and to stalk. Remember Morin: “Every god is created to be eaten.” Do you see what I mean? It’s not so much that
they’re being mystics. It’s that they’re re-cycling mystical modes of behavior.
And discourses.
And discourses, exactly, to express and enact their fanhood.
I can see that to a certain
extent, certainly with discourses. Sometimes I feel that it is for want of a
better mode of explanation. People just don’t have another frame; they want to
get across how exciting and how magical things are.
Exactly. Another discourse they use is pornography – sex – because to
be rabidly interested in someone may seem a bit weird. So you dress it up as a
sexual frenzy, like, “I want to screw Barry Manilow.” Well, they don’t really,
and they know he’s gay anyway. It is a discourse, as you are saying.
It becomes a way to talk to each
other.
And to interact with one another, and they can do it in a ribald way.
Like a kind of hen party?
Yeah, exactly. Do you remember in Starlust there’s a Mani-gasm tape?
Yes.
Which is a transcript of the real thing. When they play those at
parties, they just roll around on the floor laughing, because they think it’s
so funny.
Ironically, this is what people
like Henry Jenkins would call ‘fan productivity,’ that they’re creating
something there, but we need to put that in the context of power to see how it
works.
Yes, because again it’s subversive. One thing we found with Manilow
was that the Manilow fan club and the management wouldn’t have anything to do
with us. They didn’t want us to speak to fans, in fact they tried to stop us, because
they knew that they would be ribald and subversive, which is what they were. In
the BBC movie they made on Starlust – there’s quite a lot of subversive Manilow fans in there, references to Barry’s
willy and dancing with his effigy.
What do you mean by subversive
in that context?
They subvert the seriousness of the enterprise. They subvert the
idea that they’re in it for the music, because they’re definitely not. They’re
in it for other things, otherwise unnamable things, and numinous experiences.
Well, I often find that idea – that,
“Well, this is about the music and anybody else who is into this for a
different reason is doing it wrong” – that seems to be a limiting discourse which
people put out there, sometimes, to police things. So if we prize resistance in
the audience, and don’t find subversive fantasies, should we be disappointed?
No. I think you just take things as they come. You’re not out there
to pursue, I think, an agenda, are you?
Well you are, but the agenda is to find out what
people say and how they behave and feel. That’s always surprising to me, and refreshing. What I was interesting to me, when doing this true crime project, was finding people from the
1950s to talk about that decade - which I can only dimly remember, and from a
child’s perspective. They said some astonishing stuff to me, stuff that I could never
have made up. That was really enlightening. So that’s the reason to do it.
In Starlust you drew on a range
of academic and popular sources to create a hidden theory of fandom that
skewered the culture industries, in some ways: putting fans first, contesting
some stereotypes, but arguably, I think, perpetuating some ideas from mass
culture criticism. Would you do anything differently in light of lessons
learned and theoretical developments since Starlust?
Since Starlust was
released? Well, I’ve read more Bourdieu
now and would incorporate his notions about social and cultural capital, and
“habitus,” as a dimension of how I approached the fans and did the research. I’d incorporate the lessons of Michael Billig’s Talking of the Royal Family (1991) – interviews as staged bouts of
rhetoric which are multi-faceted and oblique.
Starlust was a
product of a particular moment of fan culture. It was pre-Diana’s death and the Diana funeral, and all that marked a transition
where the practices and appetites of fanhood became generalized. In some ways too, the book seems awfully
dated now, the way that the fans write: all the handwriting, and the curly
handwriting, and all that, which interested me at the time – the modes of
communication. It was also pre-internet, before email and Twitter and
Instagram. That’s a development I explore
when lecturing – the first pop fan base I reckon was made by the Internet was Hanson – because Hanson’s emergence accidentally coincided with the ability of
fans to create their own sites, which they did with profusion – most have long
since gone – though I screen-grabbed some. The promotion of Hanson online was done by the fans, the management had
no clue. It was also unrestrained and, by
modern standards, dodgy: rife with erotic musings and imagery, some of it
bordering on paedophilia.
So I’d have to radically rethink. I’d also have to be aware of
online etiquette and sensibilities. Some
time ago, I got into hot water because I sent out online questionnaires, which
don’t work. That also angered people, when they got unsolicited emails, which I
can understand. It’s a different thing when you get a letter through the post
or a phone call. It’s somehow less intrusive, so all of those things have to be
taken into account. I don’t know how I’d go about it now, but I’d have to
devise different strategies, because the institutional structures are different
now. The management companies are also more wary, because they understand what
you could draw out of it now.
And then the online forums would
probably claim ownership of the words.
Exactly. People know about copyright and – yes – all of that stuff.
It would be quite problematic. It’s a bit like, I always think, have you ever
seen those Fred Wiseman documentaries? He was the first ‘fly on the wall’
documentarist. When you look back on those you realize they’re incredibly raw. It’s
because people didn’t realize what they were going to look like. Now everybody
knows, exactly. They manufacture and massage their appearance. They produce
themselves. You’d have to take all that into account.
Some people are calling that
‘deep mediation’ now: everybody’s got their camera phones.
Yeah – selfies.
Yes. In 2008, you mentioned that
you had material for a sequel to Starlust.
Is that still on the agenda?
That was partly triggered by Morley’s interest, but then I didn’t
pursue that. I’ve still got a load of material. The sequel was the other side
of the coin, because we interviewed a lot of managers and psychiatrists, and
people – fan club managers and journalists and so on – who weren’t particularly
fans. I was going to construct more of a narrative from that, but I probably
will use that material at some point.
Good – it will be interesting to
see when it sees the light.
Click here for part three.
