LONDON LETTER
387
say cool, chic kids versus the leather jacketed, rugged, one-time ton-up
motor-bike boys. The Mods ride the more delicate, whimsical scooters
which are rather jokily caparisoned in glittering accessories. Style is the
thing here, insolent style, and the cheeky fart of the Vespa's exhaust is a
calculated challenge to the Calibans on their BMW's. In the Mod world
fashions come and go like the rainbow. "Faces" make the pace here, the
chic contagion spreading through the community overnight from these
unknown Typhoid Mary's of male fashion. In the old days, say five
years ago, fashions changed at an understandable rate and propagated
outwards from London in the expected way. There would even be lost
valleys, often not very far from London where the trends had passed by
leaving odd little shoals of coelocanth Teds still got up in Edwardian
gear, snapping their fingers to Bill Haley and the Comets. Things have
changed since then however. The social conductivity has shot up and
trends flash about the place like St. Elmo's Fire. Also London has lost
its exclusive lead and since the Mersey thing happened there have been
signs of polycentrism-towns like Nottingham and Covenetry 'go' with
an unexpected sting. Even Newcastle has its own nightclub, the Dolce
Vita, and Liverpool has a low gear Second City called the Scaffold
who do sketches and turns in the youth caves and have a horde of
white stockinged fans who follow them like a horde of mini-bacchantes.
Many of the recording groups seem to have a few art students on the
team. I am sure this is not entirely fortuitous.
If
crime was once the queer
ladder for the recent American immigrant then the art school-pop group
combination has become an upward escape route for our own internal
immigrants-the disgrunted youngsters from the new frontiers of tech–
nical meritocracy in search of a Shangri-La where different rules apply.
These are the bright young teen-agers who have flunked the usual
courses of advance and promotion and backed tenderly away from
Oxbridge, Redbrick and all the other certain certainties of the New
Britain. Without wishing to give up on the whole thing, go 'beat' and
so on, such kids find a good institutional compromise in the fertile,
permissive uproar of a provincial art school. Here, more often than
not, they'll take a course in commercial graphics and before very long
start coming on with the styles and idioms which simultaneously nourish
and feed
off
the world of advertising. The result is of course, that
informal and easy going as these establishments may
be,
they actually
do
impose a strange sort of spiritual penalty-something like the curse of
Midas. And a lot of art in the "pop" genre derives from the need to
ironize this awkward symbiosis between art and commerce.
The enemy of course is taste, just philistinism in reverse which
