going back to what I was going through, personally, and all of the stuff that you do go through as a student, I remember – before punk even – pursuing Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; I had pictures of the Baader Meinhof on my wall, and all of that hunger strike stuff was going on. It was that struggle for commitment which you have as a young person. And where did you put all that when you’re a young person like me, who wanted to play a “Yes, but –” game with everything?’
Since 1990, Devoto has given the whole punk reunions circuit an extremely wide berth, as well as being highly reluctant to offer up his recollections to what has become the major academic industry of ‘Punk Studies’. An example of this reticence could be seen in his contribution to the commemorative documentary, which was made in 1996, about the two Sex Pistols concerts held at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. Despite being the man who actually arranged these concerts – with his own first group, the Buzzcocks, supporting at the second – Devoto chose to be represented on the programme by a reel-to-reel tape-recorder, playing a recording of his few comments about the occasion.
Person to person, he can give a meticulous account of his involvement in punk, often using factual information and chronology as a means of avoiding generalized statements about punk’s ‘attitude’.
‘Can I just say,’ he states, ‘that what I don’t buy are things like a piece which I read by Caroline Coon about punk a few years ago, which said how desolate the mid-Seventies were, culturally and politically. And I don’t buy John Lydon’s line, either, in this new film The Filth and the Fury, where he’s going on about “the system being really oppressive in Britain, and that’s why punk rock happened”. I just don’t accept this stuff, really. In myself, I can’t say that I was feeling particularly great at that time – but what’s new?’
Having left the Buzzcocks almost as soon as they released their first record, Devoto formed Magazine as a way of expanding the possibilities that had been opened by punk. In a leaving statement issued on 21 February 1977, he wrote: ‘I don’t like most of this new wave music. I don’t like music. I don’t like movements. Despite all that, things still have to be said. But I am not confident of Buzzcocks’ intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat.’
As ever, Devoto’s stance was one of disaffection and dissatisfaction – rejecting the early complacency into which punk rock so readily dropped, prior to becoming little more than a picture postcard parody of itself. With Magazine, he explored the causes of this stance through lyrics and performance at once disturbing and playful, self-aware and endlessly self-questioning.
Musically, Magazine comprised the formidable teaming up of Dave Formula, John McGeoch and the legendary Barry Adamson, whose own solo work would pursue the idea of attempting to solve the case of oneself. In hindsight, Magazine would have found their place in the history of music on the strength of just one of their early recordings, ‘Shot by Both Sides’.
‘Magazine was its own particular blend of trying to contain a certain sort of intelligence in that sort of music. One of my partners of those years, asking about a Magazine lyric, said, “Is that about you and me?” And I said, “You’ll never know because I swap them around.” But also in Magazine there was the idea of me addressing the audience and making ambiguous pronouncements about our respective roles – your idea of me, and my idea of you. And I was really playing with that during the period of the first two Magazine LPs – when I was in the prime of my ambition. I’m still proud of Magazine. Half a lifetime of feeling went into it.
‘And I’m sure that I tried to rant on about the importance, to me, of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things. I’m trying to explain the Magazine song, “Shot by Both Sides”, I suppose, and this is the area which I’ve explored in everything I’ve done since the Buzzcocks.’
In many ways, Devoto’s life since adolescence, when he first started to write, has been an epic of self-portraiture. Even now, he is writing his autobiography and recording it as a spoken word document, to be left to the National Sound Archive after his death. He has barely reached the middle Seventies and the work is already twenty chapters – ten hours – long, including one hundred and fifty samples of music. Not surprisingly, one of his favourite authors is Marcel Proust. His own writing, as a lyricist, has articulated his personal position with an eloquence and originality that rivals much of the best contemporary fiction and drama.
But at the heart of his constant enquiry – as revealed with brooding poignancy on his final LP with Luxuria, Beast Box – seems to lie a fear of what he might discover if he could actually answer his own questions about himself. ‘They’ve opened the Beast Box haven’t they?’ he concludes the title track of that LP, and even on the haunting crescendo of ‘Railings’, which he recorded in 1998, for the rock group Mansun, his distinctive voice appeared to croon from its own grave, ‘Don’t burn your hand on the window, if you just want to take in the view …’
‘Life is hell,’ says Devoto during this interview, neither joking nor seeking to shock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about twenty. Now, in the last ten years, since I’ve essentially quit music, I’ve come to some kind of accommodation with that. But at a blood and brain level, that’s really how I feel, and it’s one big reason why so far I don’t have kids.
‘From where I was, in 1990, I suppose that most people in my position would try to find another niche for themselves in the music business. But I have too much damaging, damaging pride. And if you take my lack of confidence, and you take my pride – well, there you really are shot by both sides.’
Contemporary Interventionism
In the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey of British experimental art from 1965 to 1975, ‘Live in Your Head’, there was a work by Keith Arnatt from 1972 in which the artist had been photographed standing on a busy street, wearing a placard which proclaimed, ‘I’m a Real Artist’.
Dour and faintly absurd, yet with a confrontational edge that flits between threat and polemic, Arnatt’s street sloganeering seems particularly relevant to a new sensibility that has emerged in contemporary British art, and that seeks to rearrange or dismantle the purpose and cultural status of current artistic activity.
In ‘Live in Your Head’ the foregrounding of documentation over aesthetics, for example, and of politics over individualism, could be seen as a direct rehearsal of the ICA’s ‘Crash!’ exhibition, or the ‘democracy!’ show curated by students on the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art. Taken as a gear-change in the zeitgeist, these shows and a host of lesser-known pamphleteers, activists, interventionists and ideologues, comprise a distinct reaction – or response – to the agenda set within the visual arts throughout the 1990s.
On the one hand, there is a sense in which dissident, confrontational or otherwise socially engaged artistic practice would seem to become disqualified the moment that it has any relation with the ‘elite’ white cube of the gallery, or the social systems of the art world. On the other, within the gradations of artistic dissent – from artists engaged in direct street action, through to those who are actively reinventing the notion of art in the community – there still seems to be room for such work to be curated without losing its integrity.
‘Many of the major new galleries have engaged artists to work with communities in imaginative education and outreach programmes,’ says Teresa Gleadowe, the Course Director of the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art; ‘Such activities have little relation with traditional studio-based practice – they involve
