by Gordon Burn
Most of what we talked about went the way of the champagne and the oysters. The only thing that is fixed in my memory is our shared enthusiasm for fairs and in particular the way a field looks after a fair has moved on, with its circles and scars and mysterious relief patterns of raised and flattened grass.
He gave me a Betjeman quote, to the effect that there is nothing more empty than a deserted fairground, which encouraged me to try and put into words something which had been only the shadow of a notion until then.
‘I love the way the wagons you see bowling along under their own steam on the road disappear inside the rides when they’re set up,’ I told him (as nearly as I can remember). ‘The way the wheels are locked and jacked up on wooden blocks; how the overhead spokes and duckboards of the carousel are added; then the painted and mirrored panels, then the chairs or horses … Something in it seems to correspond to my own situation on the road, disappearing every night into the apparatus of sequins and wigs and spreading ostrich feathers …’
I saw him filing this away as a mental reference – the rims of his ears glowed momentarily – to use in whatever he might paint.
Some time later I received a souvenir – a small framed collaged piece, built up from that 1960 menu at Cunningham’s, which would itself I suppose now be worth several thousand pounds in the salerooms. But it is gone, as far as I know, along with everything else.
‘Miss Cogan?’
‘Conservation’ had suggested chemicals and white lab coats of the kind worn by the technicians in the EMI studios at Abbey Road as late as the mid-sixties. Facing me, though, and giving me a discreet once-over to see what twenty-five years had done to ‘the subject of the work’, was a person dressed in unremarkable civilian smart-casualwear – Kickers, newish jeans, cheesecloth-type shirt.
‘If you’d like to come with me.’
I followed him past a piece of art splashed with whitewash on the ground like some primitive trail, and then round a tree decorated with small paintings of Christmas bells and decorations instead of the real thing, down some stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs I saw that the love notes and teenage obscenities had been removed from the donation box set into the wall and foreign notes in the higher denominations (the trick of lavatory attendants and cloakroom personnel) fluffed up on the surface like thinning hair.
We proceeded past a barrier spooled out of a plastic post and then, courtesy of a combination-lock, through a door marked ‘SECURE AREA – Passes must be worn’. On the other side it was like a public swimming bath – fresh after the recycled air of the gallery, with that kind of echoey no-noise and vaulted unsourced light.
A concrete ramp led down to the long sub-basement corridor, at the end of which Steenhuis, Peter flashed his identity tag at a man sitting in an oak box of the kind cashiers sit in at the few remaining old-style butchers. ‘SECURITY STATE OF VIGILANCE – BLACK SPECIAL’ it said on a print-out strip inside the box where you weren’t supposed to see.
Another combination-lock. Another door with another message – ‘Under no circumstances must this door be left open’. Another mini-climate of crackling air filtered through Mylex and Ticene gills, but with that metallic edge or imbalance that can strip the sinuses if breathed in too long.
‘You can’t get in here hardly in the summer,’ Peter Steenhuis said in his Dutch-inflected American-English accent, ‘especially in the lunch break, everybody trying to chill out.’
I went on being popular in the Netherlands and Scandinavia – also Iceland and Japan – long after my star had waned at home. I spent years singing phonetically in languages of which I barely understood a word. Being no older than thirty, though, Peter Steenhuis was too young to remember.
‘You can get all the English TV programmes in Holland now. Satellite, cable. My parents are big fans of the two Ronnies,’ he said, consulting a piece of paper with the painting’s acquisition number on it, as if he hadn’t already sneaked a look before coming upstairs to collect me.
The pictures were hung on steel-mesh partitions which rolled soundlessly out into the sieved and bounced light like mortuary drawers. They radiated a second field of cold into the already part-refrigerated room.
When we got to the appropriate stack, he kicked a chuck which released the wheels and hauled out the frame containing a number of paintings by the British Pop artists of the early sixties.
Among them were four by Peter Blake: The Masked Zebra Kid of 1965; Tuesday (a portrait of Tuesday Weld), 1961, which prompted Peter Steenhuis to remark that he thought she was Melanie Griffith’s mother (‘Isn’t Melanie Griffith married to that Miami Vice guy for the second time?’); The Meeting, or Have A Nice Day, Mr Hockney, 1981–5 – and T. 02285, Alma Cogan.
I don’t know what I had been expecting. Of course I know what I had been expecting: to look down the dark tunnel of time and see myself preserved as I would choose to be in my best memory – unflawed, retouched; all minuses turned to plus, all sins forgiven, ‘the fundamental lightness of the nature in question laid uppermost’ (an inspiriting phrase plucked from one of the gallery walls during my morning’s wandering).
But my first impression was that, unlike the elaborate gilt-wood frame, which seemed as timeless and solid as the Edwardian theatre interiors it echoed, the picture seemed to have aged with me, as if we had kept a parallel course.
It was as if the reverses of the intervening years, as well as the uncertainty of my present situation, had been able to paint themselves in; as if the pigment had been invaded by air sadness.
Its guardian and protector stepped forward and released the painting and carried it to a velvet-curtained area where he set it down carefully on a table packed and triple-packed with bubble paper whose bubbles you could burst if you pressed very hard, in the way that always drives Psyche up the wall.
‘Nice painting,’ Peter Steenhuis said, removing an invisible film of dust from the surface with delicate puffs of air from a rubber bulb. ‘I like the restraint. None of that see-me-dance-the-polka brushwork.’
Then he withdrew to a diplomatic distance, thoughtfully removing a large-scale nude of a bodybuilder with a semi-erect penis out of my sight-line on the way.
The Tate Gallery Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, 1974–76, pp. 54–6:
T.02285 Alma Cogan 1961–63
Not inscribed
Oil on panel, 17½×14½×1½ (44.5×36.8×3.8cm)
Presented by E. J. Power through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1974
Coll: Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd.; bt E. J. Power 1962
Lit: Robert Melville, ‘The Durable Expendables of Peter Blake’, Motif, x, Winter 1962–3, pp. 20–22, repr.p. 20
Known as ‘the girl with a chuckle in her voice’ and for her large wardrobe of extravagant, self-designed dresses, the subject of T.02285 was one of Britain’s most popular recording stars in the fifties.
Her string of twenty hits, more than any female vocalist of the era, included ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ (a cover of Teresa Brewer’s 1953 American hit); ‘I Can’t Tell A Waltz From A Tango’ (a cover of Patti Page’s hit) in 1954; ‘Dreamboat’, the only No. 1 by a British female singer in the fifties; ‘Twenty Tiny Fingers’ (1955); a cover of Vaughn Monroe’s ‘In The Middle Of The House’ (1956); and a cover of The Maguire Sisters’ ‘Sugartime’ (1958). Her last hit was ‘Cowboy Jimmy Joe’ (1961).
Alma Cogan was one of the large generation of immediately pre-beat boom stars whose style went out of public fashion after the emergence of the Beatles and other ‘Merseysound’ groups in the 1960s.
The sixties saw her moving into cabaret, overseas touring, and even a brief stint in TV commercial work – a detergent ad – while continuing to record without success for HMV, then Columbia. Her active career as a performer ceased c. 1970.
Peter Blake saw Alma Cogan on various variety bills in London in the mid-to-late fifties. He considered her to be one of the last remaining links with a music hall tradition that was on the point of
disappearing (letter from the artist to the compiler, dated 11.10.74; Tate Gallery Archive TAV 503A) and that, in British art, had direct links with, inter alia, Sickert, Gore, Ginner and the painters of the Camden Town Group (see Gore T.02260; Sickert T.02039).
Peter Blake shares with Sickert an extended and profound understanding of the world of show business and a fascination with its glamour and lively vulgarity.
‘Marriage did not interfere with his … habit of attending the halls, and he would even absent himself from a dinner party in his own home in order to go to a performance’ (D. Sutton, Sickert, London, 1974, p. 235). ‘His eagerness to capture the correct rendering of the tights worn by Emily Lyndale led him to follow her from hall to hall’.
Blake’s interest in painting T.02285, however, was not primarily reminiscential or nostalgic, but the combination in one work of the nostalgic impulse with extreme mass-circulation-linked contemporaneity. In its transposition of pre-existing ready-made source material, the painting shares and, to some extent, pre-dates, the concerns of Lichtenstein, Warhol and other American Pop artists.
Blake started work on the painting in 1961. The source of the image was probably, though not certainly, a photograph of Alma Cogan in performance reproduced in Fans’ Library, a monthly periodical of the fifties which featured a single entertainer in each issue and constituted a kind of early part-work.
Peter Blake purchased copies of the magazine as they were published, partly for pleasure, in his capacity as a ‘fan’, and partly because of his life-long interest in the images, significance and meaning of mass culture.
In his work of this period, Blake was drawn towards significant personalities as often as to the quality of the performance. Of Elvis Presley, for example, who figures in a large variety of Blakeian imagery, the artist said that he himself did not particularly respond to Presley’s music: ‘I have always been a fan of the legend rather than the person,’ he told the compiler in a taped conversation, 3.10.74 (Archive TAV 499A).
‘I wasn’t ever particularly a fan of Alma Cogan, but I was very aware of her.’ (Alma Cogan was the first female singer to have her own major TV series in the UK, 1959–61, ITV. Though her chart hits ceased, her chirpy personality guaranteed her regular British tours and TV appearances throughout the early sixties.) ‘She was very much a presence on a national scale, and seemed to represent something – the innocence of the decade immediately following the war, old-fashioned glamour.’
Peter Blake chose the photograph of Alma Cogan on which T.02285 is based for a number of reasons. Although it was supposedly taken during a theatre performance, it looked posed. It was also printed on the same paper, in the same pocket-size format (and almost certainly by the same publisher) as Spic, Span, Jem, Monsieur and other ‘girlie’ magazines of the period which were later to form the basis of his Pin-Ups and Strippers series of works.
The disposition of the arms and hands seemed to echo for Blake the arms and hands in Francis Bacon’s Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953); while the open mouth also recalled the human scream that has been a preoccupation of Bacon’s throughout his career.
Blake also believed that Alma Cogan had lost the use of her voice for a period in the early part of her career and was attracted to this particular shot of the singer because of ‘the soundless “O” of the mouth’. (She suffered hysterical aphonia, an affliction that strangles the vocal cords, in c. 1953, and was ordered not to sing for six months. It was subsequent to this illness that she developed her famous laugh-in-the-voice style.)
The curtains against which the figure is painted also invoke a device often used by Bacon in the years 1949–55. (‘I’ve always wanted to paint curtains. I love rooms that are hung all around with just curtains hung in even folds’ – David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Bacon, London 1975, p. 112.)
Peter Blake’s description of the colour of the curtains in T.02285 – ‘spinach green’ – derives from a postcard in his possession, sent to him from America by a friend and captioned, ‘Alma, Alabama, Spinach capital of the world’. (He considered calling the painting Alma Alabama at one point.)
T.02285 evidences Blake’s interest, stronger in 1961 than it has since become, in animation of surface texture. The retention of originally unintentional rough paint passages was deliberate. The most open assertion of the value of spontaneous gesture and of inflected handling is to be found, characteristically of Blake at this time, in the rendering of the diaphanous fabric of the dress, and in the areas around the eyes and mouth.
The scumbling, glazing and scraffito techniques suggest signs of age, wear and damage and are evidence of the preoccupation running through all Blake’s work with the obsolescence inherent in the popular images thrown up by a culture one of whose chief activities is producing and consuming images.
Peter Blake was completing work on Alma Cogan when he began his portrait The Beatles in 1963. One painting shows a performer approaching the end of her period of celebrity; the other shows four musicians on the threshold of overwhelming global fame.
But the emotional climate is not noticeably different: both works are equally wistful and equally solemn. He seems to see both past and present at the same nostalgic distance, so that the young Beatles seem to have as much period charm as a fading variety performer, a publicity still as an engraving. No image is so brashly contemporary that he cannot see it in this way.
*
This entry has been corrected and approved by the artist.
(The compiler is indebted to Miss Christine Bowles, Curator, the Pop Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and to F.McL.)
*
Chilblains. Impetigo. It seems a world ago that people used to get chilblains, scaly red ripple marks on their legs, from sitting too close to the fire. Or went round with purple ink painted on the sores on their faces. Poverty-related ailments that you don’t see now.
But chilblains and impetigo are what the fleshy parts of my body reminded me of when I studied them through a magnifying glass (actually a flexible strip of magnifying plastic, grooved like a thumb-print, made in Japan) in the meat-safe sub-basement at the Tate.
Areas of colour which in reproduction or viewed from a distance looked flat and uncorrupted, close-to turned out to be shot and broken and exquisitely damaged with legions of tiny nicks and lacerations. The flesh tones broke down into chance blots and controlled mergings which ranged in colour from oyster grey to angry red.
Passages of greasy lustre, reminiscent of real skin, were blotted up by matt or coarse passages where the trails of thin paint lost their legibility. The texture of chest and shoulder was particularly enlivened with trace lines, tones, shadows and local colour, swirling together like smoke in a bottle.
The whiteness of the scalp was visible in patches through the mass of dense dark hair, and through that, other marks – corrections, counter-images, outlines painted over, chappings and abrasions soothed with transparent glazes – could also be clearly detected.
Under magnification, the face looked like a valuable urn which had been painstakingly reconstructed. The surface had been painted in a way that seemed to contain evidence of its bloatings and shrinkages and rebloatings over the years, as well as ghostly intimations of how it was going to change with age.
Looking into the painting was like looking at a lifetime’s reflections fixed in a mirror – at bits of yourself that had found a place to go when they died.
The longer I looked, the more I saw several kinds of history smudgily superimposed; former selves which floated to the surface like memories, only to become submerged again.
The curtain behind the figure is stained with tide-lines, rejected versions, spectres of myself which are not visible on the postcard reproduction, out of print for some time, which Peter Steenhuis gave me as I was preparing to leave.
IT’S BETTER TO BE LONELY THAN TO THAN TO BE WITH INFERIOR PEOPLE … IT’S BETTER TO BE NAIVE THAN JADED … MEDIA IMAGES ONLY SHOW US WH
AT WE ALREADY KNOW the sign was saying as I stepped into the damp, fungus-forming air and quickly headed off in the direction of London’s rich shabbiness.
*
When I got back I started going through drawers and cupboards trying to find a photographic reminder of the life locked into the underlayers of the painting, but soon gave up. Everything I opened had the death smell of camphor and old clothes that have never been worn and ashy drifts of insect corpses.
Interleaved among my mother’s personal belongings, her underwear and stockings and nightclothes, hidden as if in a game and never detected, was a collection of items which, as Bob Brotherhood would say, were not very eyeful.
Blown lightbulbs, nibbled squares of chocolate, razor blades, a packet of CrackerBarrel, stale biscuits, a dog chew, greying dentures, sardine-tin keys, an obsessive number of Vick inhalers, and a years-old piece of meat in a tissue were among the things I’d unearthed when I decided to stop before I came across something I would really regret finding.
The whole flat smells of neglect, decay, staleness. Dirt is ingrained in the windows, the curtains are heavy with dust, the plastic covers on the sofa where I’m sitting are scored and urine-coloured. Even after so many years, the cushions still hold the shape of my mother’s broad back and tired old buttocks.
The Moors is again at the top of the news. Tuesday, December 16. Hindley has been back on the Moors, trying to help police pinpoint the graves where Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett lie buried.
The first part of the report is to camera, against an establishing backdrop of snowy moorland dotted with operations vehicles, transit vans and police Range Rovers.
‘A massive security operation involving armed policemen was mounted and the area sealed off by a cordon of roadblocks as Hindley arrived on Saddleworth Moor by helicopter shortly after dawn this morning. She spent over seven hours with senior detectives’ – cut to overhead shots of vehicles speeding in convoy along the glassy ribbon of road across the Moor – ‘retracing places she had visited with her former lover Ian Brady. While Hindley walked the Moor, head bowed against driving rain and heavy winds, she was watched by police marksmen.’