Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
My recent Italo Disco recommendation went down well with at least a handful of readers, so here’s another one: “A Tour in Italy” (1984) by the Italian outfit Bandaid (nothing to do with Bob Geldof). This one’s a rampaging funk odyssey replete with Nile Rogers-esque rhythm guitar, guileless glockenspiel, jubilant horns, an outrageously rubbery bassline, and—best of all—very funny samples of pre-recorded English lessons voiced by actors in plummy RP, plus a bonus nonsense rap in French.
Because I believe in giving credit where it’s due, I have to tip the hat to Alan Palomo aka Neon Indian for turning me onto this one—it was part of his pre-show mix when I saw him play at Elsewhere, Brooklyn, way back in the pre-plague days of November 2019.
The main bit of this week’s letter is a) inspired by my recent Broadway trip to see Macbeth starring Daniel Craig (short review: I wasn’t 100% sure about it, to be honest!), and b) adapted from an old Instagram post of mine, just in case it seems a little familiar to one or two eagle-eyed readers.
I want to heartily endorse the BBC Two series Our Friends in the North, which aired over nine episodes in 1996, and featured Craig in a breakthrough starring role. I only watched Our Friends in the North for the first time back in 2020, and experienced that rare pleasure of catching up with a much-vaunted TV series and finding it to be every bit as good as it’d been cracked up to be.
I remember the hullabaloo around the show when it first aired, but I was too young, and definitely more in the Grange Hill/Gamesmaster stage of my TV consumption (I miss those days.) It really is astounding—an absurdly ambitious, longitudinal study of personal and political failure in Britain across a 30-ish year span (1964-1995), filtered through the prism of the volatile, intimate relationships between four friends, Geordie (Craig), Tosker (Mark Strong), Mary (Gina McKee), and Nicky (Christopher Eccleston). Has there ever been anything else like it on British television, and will there ever be again?
Written by Peter Flannery, the show has a genuine cumulative force, and left me in tears on multiple occasions, especially in the closing chapters. It's harrowing, but never depressing thanks to the sheer quality of the writing and characterization, not to mention the empathetic and layered performances from the leads, and all manner of terrific character actors in supporting roles (in particular Peter Vaughan as an emotionally static, and ultimately Alzheimer's-stricken patriarch; and a scenery-chewing Malcolm McDowell as a Soho porn king.)
Perhaps most bracing of all is the show’s clear-eyed and complicated portrait of a country in the throes of spiritual death. This might sound overly dramatic, but as the credits roll—it ends just before the dawn of New Labour, the early stages of which it views with suspicion—you can feel the seeds being planted for ashen, desperate Boris-Brexitland, a sad, scared nation turning in on itself, and definitively away from a progressive, inclusive politics.
Viewed from one perspective, Our Friends in the North doesn't really engage with issues of race, but from another, it is absolutely a portrait of White British Meltdown. I'm so glad to have seen it, and it’s helped to deepen my understanding of the country I grew up in and could never really wrap my head around—in that respect I file it alongside more avant-garde work by film and moving image groups like Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa.
Our Friends in the North is available to stream on Britbox.
Before I go, a quick addendum to last week’s letter. A day after I sent it out, I did a massive double-take when I spotted one of the images I’d used in the piece (Kevin Godley transmogrifying into a little Black girl in the “Cry” video) on my Twitter feed. It turns out that someone had the same idea as me—to draw a connection between “Cry” and Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5”—and actually beat me to the punch by a couple of days! Here’s the piece, a fascinating interview with Kevin Godley, in Variety. Also after the fact, I read an interesting, detailed oral history of the making of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video over at Cartoon Brew.
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Tangential, but: did you get to see anything of last year's "Gamesmaster" revival? Surprisingly satisfying - and now with a wry Trevor McDonald on GM duties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQEDt5Goe_8&ab_channel=E4