H.R. Giger changed my life

I was sad to read of the death, aged 74, of the Swiss surrealist artist Hans Rudolf “H.R.” Giger. Through his groundbreaking, influential designs for the alien and its environments in Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking, influential murder mystery in space Alien – a style that was known as “biomechanical”, a precisely airbrushed cross between the visceral and the metallic – he had more than crossed my radar. Although I was under the age of consent to see Alien on release in 1979, as an avid teen film fan I bridged the gap by requesting The Book Of Alien – a lavishly illustrated making-of by Paul Scanlon and Michael Gross – for my birthday in March 1980. Via the portal of this otherwise conventional softback souvenir, I entered the rarefied, graphic world of Giger (the book was full of initial sketches and designs by various artists, but his dominated).

This book, though cherished, did not change my life. But Giger did, in 1987, although I didn’t even know it at the time. I was a student at Chelsea School of Art in 1987, on the cusp of graduation and what I hoped would be some approximation of a “career” as an illustrator or more specifically a cartoonist (my chosen area of expertise in the sense that it chose me: I wasn’t much good at proper drawing). I had been an avid reader of the NME since the year Alien was released, and had keenly rolled with its evolutionary punches as it morphed from the inky rag of the post-punk era to a post-modern media studies pamphlet designed with acres of white space in the early-to-mid 80s. What I didn’t know, as a reader, in 1987, is that the paper was on its knees, commercially speaking. This would have been no concern of mine; as long as my weekly fix of music news, culture and dangerous Marxist politics arrived on a Tuesday, all was well.

I was the sort of nerdy NME reader who pored obsessively over what I didn’t know at the time was called “the masthead” (ie. the list of staff and freelance writers), and noted any personnel changes with interest. As a student of art and design, I also mapped the visual changes in the NME in relation to whoever was  designing it, and knew that the reigning art editor in 1987, Joe Ewart, had ushered in a starkly dynamic page layout, of which I approved. It was very much in keeping with advances in style magazine design over at The Face and i-D, except printed on shitty newspaper.

In 1988, I was living in a studio flat in South West London and attempting to keep the wolf from the door by taking on soulless freelance illustration work for a modest design agency. It was not “art”, but if I drew enough cartoon cats, cyclists and reindeers in a month for corporate handouts, I could pay the rent. (If you bought the puzzle magazine Puzzled around this time, you will have seen my cartoon owls, polar bears, penguins and other assorted fauna – this was the vertiginous level at which I toiled.) In order to satisfy my creative juices, I decided to produce my own fanzine and write about things that interested me and perhaps sell a few copies, like two new NME writers on the masthead whom I had quickly grown to idolise, Steven Wells (who produced Molotov Comics) and James Brown (Attack On Bzag).

I did not make my own fanzine, This Is This, in their image; instead, I went for neatly typed columns of copy with – yes – plenty of white space around them. I wrote about Tony Hancock, Stephen King, Gerry Sadowitz and the water metaphors in Lloyd Cole’s lyrics, and drew my own cartoon strips satirising TV-AM, Time Out and Apocalypse Now. I borrowed the photocopier at the design company that employed me and used it to “size up” my illustrations and create a clean page design. Then I paid Kall-Kwik to print me up and staple 100 copies. My aim was to carry them around in an Our Price plastic bag and sell them at gigs. I think I sold around a dozen.

However – and here’s where my life intersects with H.R. Giger’s, without his or my knowledge – I sent a copy of This Is This to James Brown, recently installed Features Editor at the NME, and, I hoped, a kindred spirit. The height of my ambition at this stage was to have my fanzine mentioned in the bitty news section Thrills, which James edited. Maybe I would flog a few copies by mail order. What I wasn’t doing at this point was looking for a job at the NME. The prospect was a fictional one.

I’m glad that I didn’t know then what I know now about how the office of a weekly music paper works. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have wasted a stamp. The probability that the brown envelope containing This Is This would have been opened, never mind the contents being read, was close to zero. I could never have imagined how high the teetering pile of envelopes on James Brown’s in-tray was. However, the stars were aligned for me, and he did open my envelope, and he did flick through my fanzine, and he did phone me up.

In the message he left on my answer machine he said he liked the fanzine and wanted to have a chat with me about it. I was cock a hoop, and yet still only dreaming of seeing my fanzine mentioned in the pages of the NME. He invited me up to the offices of the paper in London’s New Oxford Street – which was, for me, like visiting Mecca – and casually mentioned that he might be able to put a bit of writing work my way.

Now, the history books tell us that back the white heat of July 1976, the NME ran a small ad asking for “hip young gunslingers” to write “lively and incisive prose” in an effort to refresh the lifeblood of the paper in the wake of punk rock with a new staff writer. (Actually, the history book – Pat Long’s closest-to-definitive The History Of The NME.) It ended up with two from the 1,200 applications: Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, with Ian Cranna, Paul Morley and Paul DuNoyer taken on as freelancers. No such formal clarion call went out in 1988, but Brown and his successor on the live desk, Helen Mead, were unofficially tasked with trying out some new writers. It was in this spirit of provincial empowerment that I found myself sucked into the wonderful and frightening world of the NME. (Barbara Ellen, Stuart Maconie and Steve Lamacq were among those who also had their professional lives changed in the same period of conscription.)

Though lured into the office with the promise of writing work, a part-time vacancy was going in the NME art room and, technically if not practically qualified, I was introduced by James to editor Alan Lewis and new art editor (previously Joe Ewart’s assistant) Justin Langlands, who seemed to like me – or perhaps just my dungarees and Age Of Chance baseball cap – and took me on. All of sudden, from a standing start, I had landed a two-days-a-week post at my bible, which quickly expanded to three days. When Justin took his first holiday in the August of ’88, I actually became Art Editor for a fortnight; that’s two issues of the paper I’d read and re-read for almost a decade under my aesthetic control (yes, I redesigned all the logos while Justin was away, and Justin reinstated the old ones when he got back).

From my new vantage point, I set about bothering all the section editors for writing work, and one by one, they caved. My “journey” from layout boy to actual bylined NME writer had begun. The rest is autobiography. But without H.R. Giger, the man whose art had so captivated me in The Book Of Alien, my life might never have wound its rudderless way in this direction, and the NME might have remained a weekly newspaper I pored over and not one I actually tinkered with from the inside. The “media”, as I did not yet refer to it in 1988 – and an industry of which I did not count myself as a member – might have remained over there. I have no idea if I would still be a freelance illustrator, providing print-ready artwork for puzzle books, but it’s conceivable. If not for nine erect penises …

In 1987, when my wildest dreams still revolved around perhaps drawing my own comic strip for a newspaper, the NME I loved was undergoing one of its habitual regime changes. I couldn’t have known how seismic. According to Pat Long’s account, sales had fallen below 100,000 copies for the first time in 31 years. It is sad to say, but choosing Neil Kinnock as its cover star in the week of the General Election – a decision that thrilled me to marrow of my bones as a reader, and cemented all my political ideals – was symbolic of the NME‘s propensity to back a loser. The paper’s owners, IPC, saw that famous cover (“Lovely, lovely, lovely!”) as the shortest suicide note in history. Editor Ian Pye was sacked, and “safe pair of hands” Alan Lewis was parachuted in.

His commercial instinct and desire to drag the NME back to being about – hey – music were seen as anathema to remaining stalwarts like media editor Stuart Cosgrove PhD – a mid-80s appointee of editor Neil Spencer, under whose leadership the paper entered what was, for me, a purple patch of polemic and pretense. It was future Channel 4 Controller of Arts and Entertainment Cosgrove who produced an issue devoted to censorship while Lewis was on holiday in September ’87, which involved the reproduction of a sexually explicit painting by H.R. Giger known as Penis Landscape. It had been given away as a poster by Californian punk activists the Dead Kennedys in 1985 with their Frankenchrist album and landed the band and their lable in legal hot water. It depicted nine erect penises entering nine orifices that could be vaginas or anuses. What could possibly go wrong?

The NME folklore passed down to us was that the printers had refused to  print it and downed tools. According to Long, it was more a case of the colour repro lab complaining about having to print it, but the industrial kerfuffle gave IPC management the excuse to get rid of the staffers it considered “troublemakers”, notably Cosgrove – who I presume considered it a cause worth dying for – and Joe Ewart. “Media” returned to being a token section of the paper with film and book reviews in it, and Ewart’s assistant, Justin, took the art reins. (Having worked under him, I know that Justin was surprised and delighted to get the gig, although the trade-off was allowing Alan into the design room, whose lack of design finesse did not stop him wielding a scalpel and demanding bigger, clearer, more literal layout.)

Without understanding its significance, with a few months of my arrival in Justin’s art room, the NME moved offices back to IPC’s skyscraping HQ King’s Reach Tower in Waterloo. We were the unruly child, taken in hand and put under the same roof as Mum and Dad. I had no real idea that I was part of a new era, but events have proven that to be the case. Under Alan’s earnestly commercial helm, we started to produce a tighter, brighter, more focused, less discursive and more humorous paper. The circulation went back up. We even managed to cover Acid House within the newly revived, conventional rock format, made easier when, during the Madchester boom, guitar bands took E and picked up samplers, while Lamacq and new lieutenant Simon Williams plugged directly into an energised, corporate-sponsored indie scene. (As Lamacq told Long, “Everyone at that time wanted Danny Kelly’s approval,” and this genuflection to the larger-than-life successor to Alan Lewis generated real heat in the office, regardless of musical affiliation.)

If you’d asked me my preference as a media outsider in 1987, I would have wished for a Labour government and the continuation of the Ewart/Pye/Cosgrove regime. I would have cheered a pullout H.R. Giger anal fantasia every week and stuff those evangelistic reactionaries in the print trade. But it was not to be. There’s only so much sticking it to The Man you can get away with when you’re part of the machine, which the NME always was. (Believe it or not, we never referred to it as a “brand” in the late 80s – that was all to come.)

So rest in peace, H.R. Giger. You changed my landscape, and very possibly paved the way for Hull indie rockers Kingmaker to breach the Top 20 in 1992.

 

 

Insect flak

You’ll have heard that the sequel to gross-out horror movie The Human Centipede – Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) – has been refused certification by the British Board of Film Classification. Where does this leave a prudish liberal like me, eh? I am, in the marrow of my bones, against artistic censorship. I believe in free expression, and for free expression to be placed in the public arena where it may be judged, or ignored, by the public, in context, as long as no animal or human being was harmed in its making. At the same time, I find the subject matter of The Human Centipede and its sequel – and the gleeful exploitation of that subject matter – revolting and obscene, and I believe that its squalid place in the “torture porn” pantheon represents an irreversible coarsening of our culture, and I’m glad the BBFC isn’t letting them get away with it. Confused? I certainly am.

I had an angry letter published in the Radio Times in 1988 when BBC2 aired one of cinema’s greatest works Apocalypse Now and presented a butchered version, in which the word “fuck” was painstakingly removed or dubbed over – such that anyone who, like me, had pretty much memorised the whole film (we all did that, right?) would feel each snip like a knife to the ribs. This, I pointed out in my letter, was a film about the horror of war, and one of the “fucks” they excised was the one in Colonel Kurtz’s speech where he bemoans the fact that the US military won’t allow its pilots to write “fuck” on the side of their aeroplanes and yet they train them to drop fire on people. This irony was, I suggested, lost on the BBC’s moral guardians. (Needless to say, another reader wrote in to complain about my letter and accused me of getting off on hearing curse words. Cunt.)

I watched the first part of BBC3’s surprisingly good reality show about the war in Afghanistan, Our War (no, Your War), based on actual helmet-camera footage from on the ground with the 1 Royal Anglian regiment, and it effectively showed the death, in April 2007, of 19-year-old Private Chris Gray. Now, clearly his family had given consent, and appeared on camera, and it was sensitively framed and contextualised, and indeed acted as a moving memorial to another young life snatched by war, but some would argue that the BBC should not broadcast a soldier’s death (it occurred in the dusty confusion of an ambush but you saw his dead body being carried away), and that the Ministry of Defence should not have released the footage. I disagree in this case. This is not presented as snuff; it’s a human story with a human message. A similar argument – political, ideological and moral – can be had about whether we have a “right” to see footage, or photographs, of Osama bin Laden’s corpse. At present, those images are censored. But they are not artistic.

In 1988, a young man in the first real heat of ideological indignance, I likened cutting the “fucks” from Apocalypse Now, which was shown long after the watershed, to cutting pieces out of the canvas of the Mona Lisa. I still believe that. And the nasty makers of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) – in which a pervert masturbates with sandpaper over a DVD of the first Human Centipede film in a metatextual masterstroke – plan to appeal the BBFC’s verdict. They may yet cut a few seconds here and there in order to win a certificate. This happens all the time. It happened to the apparently rather unpleasant A Serbian Movie last year, which won its release.

The BBFC were very clear about why they have effectively banned The Human Centipede 2: their report heavily criticised the film as making “little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience” and that the film was potentially in breach of the Obscene Publications Act, meaning its distribution in the UK would be illegal. The BBFC actually said that “no amount of cuts would allow them to give it a certificate”. So, we may never legally see this film. (I managed to get my hands on a pirate video copy of A Clockwork Orange and saw that while it was still banned. And this was before the Internet.)

However – and I’m as guilty as anybody for adding to the chatter – The Human Centipede 2 is now the most famous film in the world. Even people who hadn’t noticed the first one have heard of it now. The BBFC have, with the best intentions, made it a cause celebre. Imagine how alluring it will be, especially among teenage boys, now that it’s forbidden fruit!

I suspect I will never see it, either way. I don’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see The Human Centipede, and easily avoided doing do. I watched the trailer and it made me feel ill. So should they actually ban the sequel? The idealist within me says no. If it causes a sick person to do something sick, why should art be censored for everybody else on account of that one sick person? This is a murky area, I know, as I hated the bit in episode two of BBC2’s incredible drama The Shadow Line where Rafe Spall appears to drown a cat. He didn’t really. I don’t imagine a cat was harmed – although a real one walked away looking pretty wet, and they hate being wet – but I really worry that some idiot somewhere will copy what they saw on TV. People can be incredibly stupid, and I genuinely believe that people have never been as stupid as they are now. But can we censor everything because of stupid people? (I’m hoping that The Shadow Line is so intelligent, very few stupid people will have still been watching by episode two.)

If you think I’m going to provide an answer to this dilemma, I’m not. But I’d like to talk about it.