The Napalm Death and Ceramics Show That Never Was
I was trying to do some sort of thing that was not my real job job like everyone else in London at the time. Today it would be called a hustle, a calling, a passion, a life’s whatever. A thing you do when you don’t want to be doing what you’re probably supposed to be doing. At the time it was reinventing the wheel for no-one in particular, in the form of a new way of experiencing the novel which no on asked for.
There is likely a Tumblr somewhere of quaint, cute and curious combinations of shop. By combination I mean they sell two totally different things or provide two totally seemingly incongruous services, all under one roof. In my hometown of Cleveland, there was one such place that sold meat and comics. This makes perfect sense in a place like Cleveland.
There was one attempt, like a half lunge or your mom trying to shoot a basket sort of whiff of that polar duality in my old neighbourhood of Debeauvoir in London. It was called Eggs, Milk and Butter and sold none of them. This would be a good trade, staples, things every household needs at all times one would imagine. But the pattern of that flat white era was that the club/cafe/bookshop/sex-shop/whatever just kept the sign from what was there before and then basked in the irony. This was a cafe that sold comics. The accompanying flat white era was just that, as flat and white as yours truly, a time of lukewarm promise and a beige haze covering the promise of energy and meaning. I was a victim of that time and a progenitor in equal measure.
They also had tables for the middle class rabble who have just dumped their kids off and the odd laptop explorer doing things that were important enough to sit there and type at in public. It was a convenient escape down the road for myself and had large plate glass windows to watch the near north London traffic of tradesmen and the monetarily successful in the disguise of counterculture as the rambled south through the endless brown brick and chicken boxes that managed to seep from the city.
It was one fine day, the light, a clear, crisp light, devoid of any colour, which filled the front window. I want to say her name was Milo, who once asked, shocked and excited as if she’s found a tenner on the street, “Oh my god, is that a Minor Threat tattoo?” which I answered with a nod and my family answered with a weird look like we’re trying to forget about all that so cheers for reminding us. The signal was well received and then we were then musical compatriots.
One time afterwards, again the pale light and again being sat in front of the large window looking at how to avoid things and then a question one would never imagine possible, “Hey, are you going to see Napalm Death at the V & A (Victoria & Albert Museum)?”
The look I answered with was not that of a squinting half dismay and full dismissal, but instead utter shock. Two items, incongruous, discordant and inconsistent to an extent that if you followed one to the other around the horseshoe, they almost met. Two things and betwixt them, the entire span of the universe, yet so close on the other end it sort of made sense.
Napalm Death spawned out of the blight and blister of 1981 Birmingham, pushing their head out of the womb of anarchist punk, thrash and hardcore. They’re universally credited with likewise birthing the genre known as grindcore. Grindcore itself took the 2 minute punk song, added 300x the amount of dissonance and reduced the song length to a minute or less. They initiated a campaign of musical destruction which looked really cool on shirts and remained political, humanist, introspective and as smooth as broken glass. Employing the trademark blast beat, “described by PopMatters contributor Whitney Strub as, “maniacal percussive explosions, less about rhythm per se than sheer sonic violence”
Next on the other end is The Victoria and Albert Museum. I spent two solid years scraping through a masters up the stretch of museums, embassies, august institutions and stately manors from the V&A at the Royal College of Art. I remember the V&A in particular from the scars of WWII which they proudly left on their bomb chipped front gate walls providing an quick and cute barrier to the throngs of visitors barging into the “world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects.” (Wikipedia). There was this 1851 Great Exhibition thing which was to celebrate the industrial revolution and display all manners of British awesomeness in the form of steam powered everything and all manner of Frankenstein looking instruments.
The pairing in many ways works. The output of Britain at its apex, ruling the waves and subjugating the very elements of coal and fire as much as the peoples of various continents. Contrast that with a band coming out of the mildew and woe of the West Midlands, the once heart of the industrial might reduced to ruin but who’s coal powered all that steam. Imagine if you will a gaggle of dandies with their top hats and monocles, expressing themselves through pensive glances over bone china tea cups and 140 years later when disaffected youth were trying to destroy any notion of gentility with a lawnmower of sound and fury.
The premise of ceramist Keith Harrison’s collaboration with Napalm Death, “Bustleholme” (2013) seemed as self-evident as it was an exercise in straining the limits of what you could get away with in a museum. Keith Harrison received his MA from the Royal College of Art four years before me, and somehow in that time span, sure, did art and stuff, but more importantly managed to meet Napalm Death and get them to do art and stuff with him.
"The raw, uncompromising energy of Napalm Death will be used to activate a set of three specially created ceramic sound systems based on the group of vivid blue and yellow tiled tower blocks on the Bustleholm Mill estate, West Bromwich where I was born. I wanted to invite the band to collaborate with me for this live performance at the Museum for the last of a series of disruptions I have worked on throughout my residency.” (The Quietus)
Of course the cowards at the V&A cancelled the gig. I had a ticket, and actually paper ticket for this I think. I can’t find it, which means that it’s probably in the Smithsonian I suppose. The museum released a statement saying a safety inspection showed that the volume could damage the “historic fabric” of the building. The museum survived the Luftwaffe’s Blitz with grace and bragged with its scars but couldn’t handle this. None of it happened because of course it didn’t happen. But it did at the modernist De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill where the bleak, tower block reminiscent forms, clad in ceramic tiles were actually attacked by not just the music pounding out from inside them, but by a couple of guys who physically went at them.
The Cleveland Institute of Art was a damn great place to study. Perhaps more than the hallowed British institution name dropped on this page. For damn sure it was more rock and roll. I fell into ceramics reluctantly. I couldn’t get some sort of “practical” or “good for my portfolio/career/etc.” sort of elective. I experienced nothing like it and haven’t since. Just being able to spend 6 hours of a day just trying to make things whose survival when they’re finished are at the mercy of the universe. You spend ages on a thing made of clay and have no complete idea of what it will really look like if it doesn’t explode or break apart in the kiln. This was about the time I really got into Napalm Death.
Harrison claims he had no idea if they would be able to break the precarious structures, homages to the housing estates he grew up in around his and Napalm Death’s common hometown outside of Birmingham. They battered at it. You could tell they were into it. They tried, hammering away at the structures, but it held, bouncing and shaking like a car trunk in summer of 1993. The edifice started showing cracks. Some tiles started falling, but it stood.
The V&A gig never happened. How I imagine it is that the band would have jumped right into the classic “Dementia Access” off of “Utopia Banished.” There they were, getting on in years but still able to create a maelstrom of energy and what could only be described as an assault on the crowd. They would have played roughly 10 songs in 20 minutes and spent more time talking in between, thanking the crowd, the artist, and then with a vim and vigour blasted straight into another sonic pummelling. And there would be pints, loads of pints and I would have been the only person there not wearing mainly black. Then I would go home, ears ringing as they still do to this day, and email my friend I grew up with who got me into the band on the other side of the world who would ask why the fuck they were wasting their time on art and how many times Barney yelled “heyyyy.”