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DEREK HATTON DOES FLUXUS22 April 2006 The day is Saturday. The place is the offices of the Hatton Gallery on the campus of the University of Newcastle. We drove up from the workshop in Norwich on Thursday, put the show up in the Hatton Gallery yesterday. Today the show opens. It looks good. The next four weeks are going to be spent here and hereabouts, working in schools in County Durham and Sunderland, working with MA composition (music) students at the University and doing ten ‘Introductions To The17 With Bill Drummond’ events at the Hatton. The ten introductions are open to the paying public. I had arranged to use the office to check my email. Logged on, password keyed in, inbox clicked. Met with the usual assortment of emails: penis enlargements, knock-down price Viagra, degrees for the asking and money-for-nothing scams. Then there are the other ones that I will procrastinate about until it’s too late to do anything with them. And finally there may be one or two that might make me feel that what I’m up to is worth doing, that somebody somewhere is taking notice. There was one – I could tell before I even opened it – that fell into that last category. It was somebody sending in a response to SCORE 17. This is the last score that I have written, and the one that I am still the most pleased with. This SCORE reads: SCORE This was the first response that I had to this invitation, I couldn’t wait to read what this SCORE submitted by a member of the public would be like. I clicked the mouse to open it. It looked short and to the point. I knew immediately it would look good once it was designed and printed up as a SCORE poster, in the style of the 17 I had already done. Then I read it. Subject: The17 Contact Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by I’ve puzzled over your work for years. Various options which I’ve narrowed down to:
But all these are preliminaries, the real descriptor is submit : Send I read it again. Then looked out of the window for some time before I noticed my ageing reflection staring back at me from a window pane. Then I read it for a third and fourth time. This Paul Ilek was sharp, knew how to put words together, knew the references to make, the buttons to push. ‘Derek Hatton does Fluxus’ is my favourite. This person must have known exactly what the public perception of Derek Hatton was when he was the deputy chairperson of Liverpool City Council in the first half of the 1980s. The sharp suits, the smug mug, the media soundbites before the media knew that it could be bitten. The fucking mess he made of it all, the national laughing stock he made of Militant in the eyes of the electorate. ‘Scouse barrow boy does Trotsky’ As for Fluxus, I’m sure that I will be getting that again. It is such an obvious comparison to make. But a fair one. ‘Conceptualism lite’ Guilty. It’s hardly Art and Language at its most hardcore. Those were the days when conceptualism was conceptualism before it went tabloid. ‘Smug bastard with money’ Not as good as ‘suburban radicalism’. But ‘raving narcissism’? Well, I suppose it is all about me. I put Paul Ilek into Google, hoping to get some idea of where this fan-boy was coming from. Nothing came up, so maybe it is not his real name. ‘I’ve puzzled over your work for years.’ You might think ‘why bother if what I do gets to you so much?’ But then I know I could write at least two volumes on why I think U2 are the worst band the world has ever known and why Bono is … There is no point in me even starting because I know it would say far more about my shortcomings than about any that Bono and the boys from County Purgatory might have. And if I was to start, I know where it all began but before I tell you I should say that I have never listened to a U2 album or seen them do any more than a couple of songs live. It started in the Lyceum Ballroom off the Strand in 1979, or was it early 1980? Echo And The Bunnymen, who I used to manage, were the headlining act of the five bands on the poster. The headlining act is the one that is paying for the PA and the lighting rig. This means we were the ones who say what the support bands can use of the mixing desk and the lights. I knew fuck all about this U2 other than what I’d been told and that was all positive but they had turned up with a whole stage set, a huge big U and 2 made out of what looked like flower pots and they wanted us to move our drum riser to fit it in. We weren’t moving our drum riser for any fuckers! Then their sound engineer asked me if they could use some of our channels on the mixing desk, channels that we already had balances on. Balances that we didn’t want any jumped-up Paddy arseholes messing with. The answer was a polite ‘No’. The sound engineer told me that I would regret my decision as the day would come when U2 would be the biggest band in the world and the world wouldn’t have a clue who Echo And The Bunnymen were. A couple of years later U2 and The Bunnymen are on the same bill again, but this time it’s Top Of The Pops, and we are all backstage. Bono was giving it the big friendship thing. Telling us all how it is our time now and if we all work together we can change things in the world, we can make it more than just a better place, we can sort out the wars and the poverty. And I’m thinking, ‘we are doing Top Of The Pops. We have already sold out on principles to get this far. Jesus would never have done Top Of The Pops.’ I am saying this now with the safety of hindsight. If U2 had been dropped after their second album, I would never have developed my ideas for two volumes on why they are shite and why Bono should be shot for the sake of humanity. When I first saw someone wearing one of those ‘Make Bono History’ T-shirts I felt good in an ‘I’m not alone’ sort of way. I take great paternal pride in the fact that my 19-year-old son who has vastly different tastes in music to me, also thinks U2 are the worst band in the world. I could go on. I won’t. It is enough to say that if this Paul Ilek feels about me as I feel about Bono, then I know where he is coming from. And I also know it’s more about our shortcomings than about any failings the target of our projections may have. ‘So what’s all this got to do with The17?’ |