Garth Cartwright

Gypsy Kings
Garth Cartwright and His Journeys with Gypsy Musicians.

"Our empire is surrounded by enemies. Our history is written in blood, not wine. Wine is what we drink to toast our victories." (Anthony Quinn in Attila the Hun)

The above quote is not wholly relevant to the Roma people of the Balkans. But I use it as Hunter S Thompson used it in his new journalism landmark Hells Angels - to describe an endemic outlaw mentality. But also because expat Aucklander Garth Cartwright, who spent many months with the Roma, compares his book Princes Amongst Men: Journeys With Gypsy Musicians to Thompson's first book.

"I chose that because if you don't know anything about gypsies, you're going to think they're wild outsiders who make music and dance and fight and pull knives all the time. And Hell's Angels, if you don't read his book, the only idea you have is of these wild outsiders who ride motorbikes and pull knives. That book of his is a great piece of journalism, and it shows them not as angels in any sense, but it shows them as real human beings, and that's what I want to show, that the Roma are real human beings. They have an incredible culture, and communities, and language that essentially is overlooked."

Cartwright, who grew up in the cultural vacuum of Mount Roskill, wandered through Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia over many months during 2003, tracking down and hanging out with the gypsy musicians. In the marginalised Roma communities, musicians are more than just entertainers; they reflect a culture that is many centuries old. Moreover, they are a celebration of it. It is often the downtrodden that have the best tunes - just look at how jazz and blues, and more recently hip-hop, grew out of African American oppression. Some of the Roma musicians are stars, some are legends, while the majority make their living playing at weddings and festivals.

The Balkans - a war plagued, almost forgotten corner of Europe - is a strange place for a kiwi boy to end up, covering something as seemingly arcane as gypsy music. "When I got to Europe in the early ‘90s I started hearing European gypsy music," explains the London dwelling Cartwright. "It just knocked me over straight away. It's a music that knows no rules, and is sung by people who are really possessed, they don't want to do it politely, or just for the top 40, but just communicating really deeply, there's something beyond just music or entertainment or the trivial background soundtrack that so much music is today. So for someone that just loves music it just grabbed me man, and took over straight away."

It was a convoluted path that led Cartwright to the Balkans. He says he was always interested in reading news about such exotic places as a kid in suburban Auckland. The stifling boredom and lack of cultural stimulation in Mount Roskill - "It was what you'd call a dead zone" - triggered some kind of wanderlust, and he hasn't stopped yet. After immersing himself in music, literature, skateboarding, even boxing to stave off the ennui, Cartwright took to Kerouac-style aimless hitching as soon as he was old enough. He dabbled in punk, and started writing.

Soon enough he was writing controversially about New Zealand art. Hell raiser artists such as Philip Clairmont, Tony Fomison, and Allen Maddox were around, and no one was writing anything engaging about their work. Cartwright lived with Fomison for a spell, before winning some journalism awards that afforded him the opportunity to travel overseas.

"I jumped on a plane and went straight to America, 'cos I wanted to go and hear as much blues and soul and honky-tonk country music as I could. I really wanted to do an On The Road trip. I met an old friend in LA, and we bought a $600 Buick, a rusty old car, and jumped in it and drove down to New Orleans. And continued driving for the next 6 months. Then I went to Mexico and Guatemala and Belize and Cuba, and I did my Latin American wanderings. Then I came back and lived in San Francisco, and essentially I had a real romantic engagement with American and Latin American culture. But to get into the States I had to have a ticket out, so I had a ticket to London. And living in there when Bush Senior was in power and the first Gulf War was on made me think, well, America's not quite as romantic as I thought it was."

On the other side of the Atlantic Cartwright did what he needed to pay the rent, including a stint in market research - "it's a nightmare job you know". It was at this job that he found out he had won a Guardian music writing competition, that he had entered and then promptly forgotten about. "I got a phone call one day, it was this really posh English guy who goes 'I'm ringing up to tell you you've won the competition’. And I'd just had a smoke at lunch time and was like 'Yeah? What's this man?' I didn't really know what was going on, and it took some time to sink in."

Making the most of this opportunity gave Cartwright a rare entry into the closed world of British print. Since then he's written for many daily newspapers and music magazines. And it was through the freelancing that he found the seed of Princes Amongst Men, writing an article on Romanian Taraf de Haïdouks for the Telegraph. But it's not easy making a living out of freelancing, particularly when your preference is to cover a music that loses its cultural context away from its own shores.

"All the media is very parasitic, it feeds on its own media. I think the band of the moment is Interpol, so they all do features on Interpol. They're very much lemmings in that sense. So if you come in and go, 'Look, I've got this story about a woman gypsy queen in the Balkans, and she's been twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and she's a great humanitarian, and she was friends with Tito, and Indira Ghandi", you'll generally get a blank look. Because even though it's a great story, they want what they've been told is fashionable. I have little respect for parts of the British press. The arts coverage is generally pretty poor. It's an extension of the fashion pages."

Having said that, it seems Princes Amongst Men has been generally well received. The book is part hung-over travelogue, part musicological adventure, and part amateur sociology in the classic New Journalism vein. It tells the hidden story of the Roma, how they live their lives on the fringes as they have done for eons, damaged but not destroyed by the horrors that have gone on around them. But as you would hope, it is the music that shines through like a triumphant beacon. This is equally to do with Cartwright's outsider passion for it, and the fact that it is in the Roma blood, a connection to their past, and a promise for their future.

"They've always been a marginalised community, so music would have always been seen as a way of getting some respect and making some money for your family. It's a community conveying through music and dance their absolute belief in themselves. It's really a deeper, older, more ancient thing. And that's something you realise about the Balkans, it's where Asia and Europe are blending. In Western society we've cut off our roots and built these big urban societies where there's just manufactured entertainment for us."

It wasn't an easy thing to do either, traveling through these shattered remains of Communism's lost ideals. Public transport is average, hotels don't exist, the food is different, and breakfast is generally alcohol and cigarettes. It takes its toll.

"It absolutely destroyed me. The Balkans is the extreme opposite of New Zealand, not in landscape or climate, but in lifestyle. People smoke really heavily, drink hugely - often first thing in the morning someone will pass you a glass of rakia (brandy), it's just their way of starting the day. And fried meats and stuff, there's none of this idea of being health conscious. And when you're living amongst gypsies, you do as them, it's no use standing off and trying to live this healthy lifestyle. If you're along for the ride, you have to go for the ride. That was really hard, and it gets really hot in the Balkans, it's incredibly hot and humid and dusty. Then in the winter it's freezing. It beat me up essentially. By the time I got back to London at the end of September 2003 I was physically shattered. I was lucky I had everything by then to start writing the book, because I couldn't have kept traveling any longer."

Since the completion of the book, Cartwright has been researching his next project about his first love, American blues and soul. If it's anything like as good as Princes Amongst Men it'll be a coruscating read.

Garth Cartwright
Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians
(Serpent's Tail)


Gavin Bertram.

Simon Reynolds on Postpunk

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

"Our own correspondent is sorry to tell, of an uneasy time that all is not well" ('Reuters', Wire 1977)

While punk's initial amphetamine flash was a beguiling antidote to what had come before, it dissipated as rapidly as it arrived. But the ground illuminated by its fleeting glow yielded enough energy to create a greater fireball, one that has flamed since, spitting out sparks to reignite the spirit. What came in punk’s wake fed on its fundamental promise, but took its revolutionary stance far further.

Postpunk didn't so much describe the stylistic signature of the music, as situate it in a particular time and place, bestowing it with the political weight of the era. Punk rallied against the cultural climate of the time, but its direct progeny found a far greater rallying call responding to the political climate. It was a bleak time, the late 1970s and early 80s, and postpunk was a rare pocket of dissent to the new right doctrine sweeping the West.

While its musical traits have been mined over the last few years by acts such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Maximo Park and Art Brut, there's something missing. The body moves but it has no soul. For those familiar with the initial postpunk vanguard - Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, PiL et al - this Noughties wave feels like a shallow facsimile, an exercise in exploitation. Nothing personal, they just don't have the oppressive weight of a troubled epoch on their collective shoulders.

"In some senses I think postpunk was one of the last places left to go," muses British music journalist Simon Reynolds. Author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Reynolds has constructed a compelling journey through postpunk and its many aspects - including industrial, New Pop, and Goth. At last a definitive telling of what's described on the cover as 'the most exhilarating moment in Britain's pop/rock history'. Reynolds, who previously penned the history of the nineties rave phenomenon Energy Flash, has covered postpunk in exhaustive and fascinating detail.

"I don't know if people are inspired by the politics and cultural context," he continues. "I get the impression that people don't know that much about it, and there's a certain aspect that is unrecoverable. Someone that grew up after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and communism can't imagine what it was like when it really did seem like the world could get blown up. I think some of the fear of that time is something you can't communicate to people who are young now."

It’s also impossible to ignore the artistic advances made in this six-year period. Reynolds asserts in Rip It Up and Start Again that after punk's digressions into back to basics rock'n'roll, the postpunk pioneers were intent on creating a sound that had no historical precedent. This they largely achieved, bringing adjectives like angular, desolate and abrasive to the forefront of the rock lexicon. Although he's in two minds about the real gains made by the bands covered in the book, Reynolds upholds Leeds legends Gang of Four as an example.

"In some ways Gang of Four were like a pub rock band. They liked to drink a lot and they were playing this white, aggressive, amped up kind of black music. But at the same time they were able to create something that did seem precedentless at the time. By the way they used technology and by exaggerating the spikiness of Wilco Johnson's playing in Dr Feelgood and bringing in dub, and by the way they approached things in this incredible premeditated cold-blooded way. The only things it reminded me of at the time were certain disco records, and it was such an abstraction of those disco records, so stripped of what disco was about, it just seemed so new."

Gang of Four were a highly politicised band, coming from the radical student left. The aggressiveness of their manifesto was an integral part of their music and lyrics. Amongst their postpunk contemporaries there were more strident units (Scritti Politti), and those whose message was delivered in a subtler, and perhaps more subversive package. John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols organisation PiL, and Manchester's revered Joy Division are two that come to mind. By issuing challenging, compelling albums that entered the broader public consciousness, they left glowing embers that would ignite again and again throughout the preceding years.

"Obviously Joy Division weren't as big a band as the Doors, say, or Jimi Hendrix," says Reynolds. "But I think in terms of pushing the boundaries of rock music it is equivalent work. And they created waves within an audience that existed then that was looking for figures to show the way forward - in the same way that in the Sixties people were looking to musicians to lead the way forward."

Joy Division's Ian Curtis was certainly one his generation's answers to the pop culture prophets of the 1960s. His tragic death by his own hand in May 1980 guaranteed his place in the pantheon of rock's departed deities. Late Joy Division producer Martin Hannett told Jon Savage (author of punk history England’s Dreaming) that Curtis "was one of those channels for the Gestalt: the only one I bumped into in that period. A lightning conductor."

While Curtis and Hannett are two who were obviously unavailable to recall their memories of the period, Reynolds has interviewed an outrageous amount of participants - over 120. Certain individuals - John Lydon for instance - didn't respond, but of those who did there was a lot of enthusiasm for the project - although some needed the theme explained.

"A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, they didn't quite understand what I meant," recounts Reynolds, still mystified. "Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. It's always been known as the postpunk era, it's not something I've invented! So they didn't necessarily have a grip on it, but when I started explaining what I wanted to do about halfway through the interview they'd suddenly get very animated. Like they'd forgotten what a great time it was, and what a great time they'd had. Even though there was a lot of fear at the time, and political fear and anxiety and stuff going on, they would get really animated as they remembered it. Nearly all the people I spoke to were very accommodating."

Just as British punk was inspired by Stateside frontiersmen such as the Ramones, MC5 and Stooges, its own sparks leapt across the Atlantic, in some kind of cultural handshake. Post Modernist-savvy acts like Talking Heads, Devo, Pere Ubu and the Residents all contributed to a movement that was at odds to the prevailing cultural paradigm of North America. All around the world enclaves inspired by punk, and motivated by its offspring, began to emerge. In New Zealand Children's Hour, Danse Macabre, The Gordons, and some of the early 1980s Dunedin music can be attributed to this. Postpunk must have tapped into some preternatural instinct in this country, as both Joy Division and The Fall found early chart success here.

Reynolds says that of all those he interviewed, there was no one overriding common experience. There are mixed feelings, but the majority are immensely proud to have been a part of something so potent.

"Nobody I spoke to disowned what they'd done, or thought it was ridiculous. There was this sense that it was an urgent thing that they were doing. And that's one of the things that is hardest to recreate. Sometimes when I've done interviews, especially with younger people, they get a certain look in their eye, like 'Oh really? Did you really think this was subversive or was going to change the world?' They can't even imagine that it would be possible to believe that. And that's what I was trying to get across, that rightly or wrongly, whether it was a delusion or not, people really thought that what they were doing mattered. It all came from punk I suppose - the punk part of postpunk is very important. There's this tremendous reinvigorated and revived sense of the power of music."

As the more aggressive edges of postpunk were blunted by time, and critical acclaim, a new movement grew out of it. A music concerned with hijacking the charts, using the machinery of the music industry to achieve its subversive ends. New Pop included such chart luminaries as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, Human League and Heaven 17. The post bit remained intact, but the punk bit was perhaps no longer so relevant. At least on the surface…

"Martin Fry from ABC said 'I am a punk, I always have been and always will be,'" says Reynolds. "They saw themselves as living out punk, just by trying to excel and make the most spectacular record they could. To make a record that sounded like a classic disco record but with these sort of biting lyrics, they felt that was part of punk. As much as they rejected the standard rock'n'roll format that punk rock was rooted in on the whole, the punk part of it, that sort of missionary zeal was something they tried to live out."

Simon Reynolds
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984
(Faber and Faber)

See the full transcript of the interview with Simon Reynolds on the Author's website: www.simonreynolds.net

10 Essential Postpunk Albums:
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Wire - Chairs Missing
Gang of Four - Entertainment!
Devo - Freedom of Choice
Killing Joke - Killing Joke
Cabaret Voltaire - The Voice of America
Talking Heads - Fear of Music
PiL - Second Edition
The Fall - Grotesque (After the Gramme)
The Human League - Dare