Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Inside the house, that evil smell persisted. The electrical system went on the blink. One bulb popped and we were left in darkness, the computer was down.

  Had Marina Warner experienced Hackney, I wondered? I was going over to Kentish Town to talk to Marina about her involvement with Jean‐Luc Godard, at the period when he was shooting Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) in London. 1968. Geography led me back to my old obsession, the manifestation of the New Wave director in Montague Road: the serial Boyard smoker, short raincoat and tinted glasses, darting out of his cab, on the gentle slope between multicultural Ridley Road and the haunted catalepsy of Shacklewell Lane.

  Thinking about it, stuck on a choked platform at Dalston‐Kingsland, I realized that Marina must have made the journey east. Her son, Conrad Shawcross, the coming sculptor, had a workshop in Clapton. Where, it was rumoured, he constructed fantastic craft to launch on the Lea. I met a man alongside Old Ford Lock – now the launching point for Tony Blair’s voyage around the backwaters of the Olympic Park – who had witnessed Conrad’s spinning vessel, with its panoramic camera system. He was offered an original Shawcross print for a couple of hundred pounds. He declined. I suggested that he might have made a mistake he’d live to regret. Conrad’s mistake was to behave as if he was still bunking down in Kentish Town. In his drowsy pitch with only subsidence to worry about.

  The Gazette splashed a banner headline: ARTIST APPEALS FOR THE RETURN OF HIS SOULCATCHER (FEARS THAT CAR ARTWORK MAY HAVE BEEN SOLD FOR SCRAP). Conrad’s missing vehicle was described as: ‘a large, black Ford Capri with the letters IBLS (Investigative Bureau for the Location of the Soul) emblazoned on the sides in yellow’. It was nicked from outside the studio in Millfields Road, Lower Clapton. To make a brief excursion, in all probability, across the Lea. Hackney Wick. The nation’s scrap‐yard.

  ‘“It would be devastating personally and culturally for this to disappear,” said the sculptor, 29.’

  Conrad has appeared on the Richard & Judy show. His work is collected by Charles Saatchi. The Soulcatcher was equipped with fishing rods and dream traps.

  I was determined to close on Godard. I sat down with the DVD of Sympathy for the Devil and went straight to the extra features, which included a documentary, Voices, shot by Richard Mordaunt. The name rang a bell. Was he the one who rented out the house in De Beauvoir Road to Renchi – at the time this film was being shot? Probably not, but every clue had to be chased.

  Sympathy for the Devil was a 16mm polemic shot on 35mm. The contradictions begin there. At £150,000, it was Godard’s most expensive feature, made in a city he disliked and a language he pretended, when it suited him, not to speak. The sight of his new young wife, Anne Wiazemsky (fresh from her radiant debut, co‐starring with a donkey, in Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar), wandering about South and West London, spraying slogans on corrugated fences, was profoundly depressing. The film became an inadvertent documentary about futility, ugliness, poor light; the insolent rhetoric of scrapyards, gun‐waving black freedom fighters (or jobbing actors). One of whom, Frankie Dymon, Jnr., went on, with Death May be Your Santa Claus, to contrive his own post‐Godardian drama. He called himself, with humour, ‘Frankie Y, the Afro‐Saxon’.

  Swinging London: the psychedelic gibbet. A colour‐supplement commission dressed up as a movie. Photographers shooting photographers. Antonioni’s BlowUp, made two years before Godard hit town, predicts riverine expansionism and the future location of the Thames Barrier: Charlton to South Ken. A city of moneyed immigrants. Russians with English tailoring eating Italian food.

  Godard’s more troubled raid tracks around a notable English monument, the Rolling Stones. More stone than roll: even then. Smoking defiantly, prematurely jaded musicians fiddle with a demon‐summoning song, while the camera loops lethargically around them. A more unreal and therefore truer account of the psychosis of celebrity, of (simulated) Dionysiac madness, than Antonioni’s guitar‐wrecking performance by the Yardbirds.

  The major flaw in Godard’s first essay on London is that he didn’t shoot it in Hackney. If ever there was a Shacklewell project, this was it: sloganeering graffiti, half‐digested political theory. Black activists with designer weaponry. Porn shops. Strolls in the park. Band members, who hate each other, rehearsing in the wrong room. Making the windows rattle. Waiting for the Man.

  I viewed Mordaunt’s documentary, hearing about how Godard stormed out of the original screening at the National Film Theatre on 29 November 1968, waving a cheque and shouting, ‘You’re all fascists.’ I hadn’t expected, as we visit the riverside scrapyard, to encounter Marina Warner: down from Oxford, impossibly glamorous among the grunge, the car wrecks. With big brown hair, mascara, white mac and twirly scarf, she was an émigré from Antonioni. Monica Vitti in search of Alain Delon in the Milan stock exchange. Not a new magazine profiler trying, rather nervously, to catch a word with the glowering Godard in his Calvinist shades.

  The interviewer in Voices (young, male) interrogating a fellow journalist, while she waits for her slot with the great man, is clearly smitten. Marina, without spectacles, not focusing too sharply, gives a charming toss of the hair and a little distracted attention.

  ‘Have you spoken to Godard yet?’

  ‘No.’ She laughs. ‘I thought I might try to approach him via his wife. I speak French.’

  ‘You’re doing an article for the Observer?’

  ‘Mmmm . . .’

  ‘Are you going to speak to Jean‐Luc at all?’

  ‘The first question is very important with someone like him. You have to get him, you know, in between times. I’ve got to think of a good first question that will make him think, “That’s interesting.” I respect him. I don’t want to say anything that he would find stupid.’

  I was now the one in search of the right question. I was no closer to finding a print of British Sounds: or of interviewing anyone connected with Godard’s visit to the communal house in Montague Road. But Marina, symbolically, offered me what might be called the Anne Wiazemsky strategy: talk to the wife, the more civilized, approachable part of the equation.

  Everything, travelling west out of Hackney, was out of alignment. The afternoon was hot. I had to stand in a crowded compartment, which hummed with a proper Godardian dissonance of sound: phones, iPods, screeching brakes. The underlying nuisance electronic hum that is London. The one that keeps us flickering on the cusp of violence. I travelled one stop beyond Kentish Town and had to walk back. Marina sent me an email, responding to my questions about her day in the scrapyard.

  I think that yellow scarf was Foale & Tuffin who opened a ‘boutique’ in one of the alleys off Carnaby Street – a tiny booth, in an area which was practically unknown, a muddle of bombsites and derelict sidestreets just tuning in to 1960s fashion.

  The fabric may have been Celia Birtwell. Certainly, Ozzie Clark’s shop, also not much bigger than a wardrobe, off the King’s Road, was a Mecca. Biba was crucial in terms of the look – the cut was very narrow, with tight sleeves and armholes and tying the scarf around my neck like that was no doubt an attempt to outline this Twiggy silhouette that was much desired. Kohl was beginning to be imported from Marrakech – even blue, which Chrissie Gibbs wore. Germaine Greer, when I interviewed her, smelled amazing – patchouli, which I had never come across before. She gave me a little vial of it. The smell of the times.

  One of the obstacles to my becoming a real part of the movement of movements was that I was brought up loving clothes by a mother who made all her own dresses and read Vogue, turning down the corners of the pages for models to copy.

  Marina’s house, in its leafy cul‐de‐sac, was easy to locate in former times: by the lurking presence of Conrad’s soulcatching car. But he had decamped to Clapton. And the car was scrap. Fortunately, Conrad’s name tag was still on the door.

  Upstairs there was a vast plasma‐screen TV. Marina was hoping to start a movie club, showing neglected classics. The DVD of Paul Tickell’s Christy Malry’s Own Double
‐Entry was in evidence. After serving a cool drink, Marina put herself to recalling the events of 1968; the patronage of Kenneth Tynan, and Conrad’s father, William Shawcross, then a left‐wing journalist, flying back with eyewitness stories from Vietnam.

  I had just come to London and was starting to do journalism. For the Observer, the Observer Magazine. It was the early years of the colour supplements. It was the early years of many different things, all of which have changed. Many themes from Sympathy for the Devil – such as the relation between rock music and politics – were so much a part of that period.

  I suspect that I might have suggested the subject of Godard. They heard that the film was being made and wanted someone to write about it. It was done like that then. It was incredibly informal, one didn’t write a synopsis and go to a committee. It was very, very casual. Even approaching film companies was casual. It was not hard to get access to a set or to see someone like Godard.

  We were all involved with the world of fashion. Bruce Chatwin worked there. Francis Wyndham worked at the Sunday Times. I was on the fringes of that world.

  Godard was very, very central to my generation. We completely idolized Breathless. A Bout de Souffle seemed to express, to us, the meaning of life – with what now appears to be rather chic nihilism. The lives and conflicts in Breathless were very simply dramatized. The world divides: pigs or us. That appealed. The same themes come across through Sympathy for the Devil. A sense that we can be ourselves, across difficult class lines, gender lines, race lines. And just by dint of our beliefs and our ideas and our longing to cool down the old order. That optimism.

  The Sympathy for the Devil set was by the river. A genuine disused car lot. I think the bridge you can see in the background is quite near where the South Bank later went up. It might even have been the same area, before those concrete buildings appeared. Is that possible? It might have been the other side, of course. It was a vast wreckers’ yard, a breakers’ yard. When I went down there – which you don’t see in the documentary – there were lots of naked girls, very thin, leggy, Twiggy types, draped over the cars. It wasn’t terribly warm, the weather.

  I remember being quite alarmed by the cruelty and violent sadism of these juxtapositions. It had a wasteland revolutionary look about it, all these black actors toting guns. I was just hanging around. There was this scene when one of the black actors . . . I don’t know if he’d heard me talking, if that’s what incensed him, or if it was just my presence there . . . but he, as it were, broke out of his role, or, in some sense, remained within it, and came striding towards me. He bawled me out for being a white motherfucker.

  I conceded that it probably was the case. I was completely in love with Eldridge Cleaver and Soul on Ice. One of the main dramas of the book was that he had this antagonistic relation with his white woman lawyer. Then he started his wonderful correspondence with her and they become very close. There was a tremendous love interest between them. A lot of poetry written by people mentioned in the book, like Leroi Jones, was constructed from sexual antagonism, pounding rhythms.

  Before visiting the wreckers’ yard I went to South London. I think it was somewhere around Lavender Hill. I had absolutely no idea where that address was. I remember searching for it and feeling completely at sea. I went to the bookshop, it was very squalid. The window was covered in yellow plastic to keep the sunlight off the covers of the books. The ones on display had the kind of graphics that we now rather admire and covet, strange lurid artwork. Thrillers. Deeper inside was a lot of what you now see on the top shelf at the newsagent, but which was then not nearly so evident.

  It was very small, that shop, as a set. The filming was complicated. And she, Anne Wiazemsky – Godard’s wife and leading lady – was sitting on a table with a lot of books. She was reading from a pornographic book in that favoured Godard monotone. She read from Mao.

  I loved the romance of the unknown actress. I loved the Jean Seberg story, this exquisite beautiful boyish girl in Breathless. And then Anne was extraordinarily young when she was found by Bresson, whose method was always to cast amateurs. There was a famous still of Anne with a donkey. She had this quiet, rather affectless, reserved personality. That photograph from the Bresson film is absolutely burned into my mind.

  Of course I was quite young myself, but I looked older. I was rather made up, whereas Anne had a much more simple style. Which is what Godard goes for. He went for Anna Karina too, a very simple style. I was rather bedizened, actually. I was that type. I used to wear those huge plastic earrings and boots.

  I was, although I thought of myself as very grown up and sophisticated, quite . . . uncomfortable . . . about the pornography shop. And the owner, I remember how seedy he was. I was talking to him on the pavement outside. He was thin and leathery from smoking. I sensed in him an astonishment about what had just descended out of nowhere, this European film crew. He couldn’t understand what was happening.

  I absolutely don’t remember what Anne told me. She gave monosyllabic answers in a very quiet voice.

  Godard I met in a kind of keeper’s hut, rather like the ones they have in car pounds now, those horrible cabins. At the end of the day’s filming. I remember that I was extremely inhibited and, though I do speak French, I wasn’t speaking it very regularly. And he was a difficult man to talk to. He rather turned away from other people. Not somebody who showed any real responsiveness to one’s presence. His dark glasses made him inscrutable.

  I don’t remember this episode as well as I remember interviewing some of the other people of the time. I interviewed Truffaut. He came later, Deux Anglaises et le Continent. Which he wanted me to read for actually! But I never wanted to act. I didn’t do it. He cast Kika Markham, she was very good.

  I tell you who I also interviewed, because of my interest in Godard – Belmondo. Jean‐Paul Belmondo. That was fantastic. He’d already been in Pierrot le fou, so this was some sort of action movie. It was in the middle of the night. I had to stay up. A location set, on a road. There were great lamps everywhere. Somewhere in the north of France, Normandy. He played the big star. Eventually I found him alone. He was extremely like himself. He was an actor of whom you didn’t say, ‘Gosh, he’s small. Gosh, he’s so ugly.’ He was identical. He had exactly the charm that one anticipated. And when he smoked, he did his normal movie thing. Like Breathless. I asked him about Godard, that relationship. It’s too awful, I can’t remember what he said. I liked him. He was so vivid and full of fun. He was probably revving a bit. He’d been up for hours, his adrenalin was fizzing away. He was much more accessible than Godard.

  I think I was actually quite disappointed in Godard. What I seem to recall is that I was disappointed, not only with my own article, but with what he said. I couldn’t really find out what the film was about. And also, I think, that already, although we were completely mesmerized by Godard, there was this use of women in the films – which was an area one wanted to know more about. It was terribly fascinating, Vivre sa Vie. I was totally absorbed in it. At the same time, his obsession with prostitution, his fascination with the sexualization of women . . . Ah! And in Sympathy for the Devil there was a lot of violence towards women. I wanted to understand it a bit more.

  And there’s another aspect of the dreamed freedom of those days, in that pornography, in some people’s minds, was an engine of liberation. It was an era of hypocrisy. Certainly that was one of the themes I responded to. I agreed that we were living in this stultified way. A world in which repression was the rule. But, at the same time, it was actually uncomfortable when you saw that porn shop in South London. And the guy who ran it. Somehow this didn’t seem to be the way forward, the political way forward.

  I never knew about Godard’s subsequent London film, British Sounds, or about Sheila Rowbotham’s part in it. Of course, I’d heard about her. Her world was very attractive. I had a longing to be a more serious political person. I began reading Orwell at the time. My political views did get clearer, but I was still char
med by the more glamorous worlds of film and fashion. When Spare Rib was founded, I knew a lot of the people. I didn’t join them. Not because I refused to join, but somehow my life had taken a different path. I wasn’t a natural. People like Michelle Roberts and several of my friends, people who later became friends, belonged. They were a little bit younger, maybe that made a difference. I wasn’t a student during the Vietnam War. I caught the tail end of it at university. I went on demonstrations, after university. But it was my sister’s generation who really caught the big agitations.

  There is something we can take, even from Sympathy for the Devil. Godard was very keen to use film to construct reality – as opposed to reading it or recording it. The part that is about the Rolling Stones is a documentary. The other part shows Godard forming film into life. There is a sort of push. That of course is something people don’t admit now.

  When Sheila Rowbotham’s book, Promise of a Dream, with her memories of Hackney and communal life, came out, the London Review of Books gave it a stinking review. A close friend of mine was incensed and wrote an angry letter. I think the review was by Jenny Diski – who rather specializes in vitriol.

  I like Sheila Rowbotham as a person, her feelings. I’m heartbroken that we’ve been defeated, politically, culturally. I’m also sad for the next generation. The kind of hopefulness, the energy that buoyed one up in those days, is something nobody with any claim to sophistication can really entertain now. You can’t believe there is something to be done that can be done by you.

  Montague Road

  Things started to move. Or I became aware of that movement. Slow molecules, sluggish blood. Until a random DVD pitched me forward into a documented fiction of the past. Gareth Evans, in a blur of motion, arriving before his fourth email, found me a copy of Godard’s British Sounds. A contact in edge‐land academia, one of those motorway‐hugging institutions, burnt a disk from archive. And supplied me with a generous envelope of contemporary cuttings. Cultural memory, if it exists, belongs in those bunkers. All‐purpose (shopping mall, eavesdropping facility) architecture, a water‐feature pond, with mildly offensive statuary, contrived from a subterranean stream: conferences arranged to quantify loss. Budget dependent on high‐profile absentee lecturers, air‐miles professors too jet‐lagged to access their standard computer presentations. Voices husky with recycled air. Engine running on hire car waiting to rush them to Heathrow.