Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures Part 2

(There must be some technical reason maybe it's the film stock they use that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video. That remains my problem with the new Dr Who as it happens: the contemporary British scenes look like a theme park, a very stagey stage-set, too well lit.) 'Look Out There's a Thief About' public information films on black and white TV, Open University lecturers with preposterous moustaches and voluminous collars, the test card...Everything is so iconic, and the thing with icons, after all, is that they evoke nothing. The icon is the very opposite of the Madeleine, Chris Marker's name rhyming Hitchc.o.c.k and Proust for those totemic triggers that suddenly abduct you into the past. The point being that the Madeleine can only manage this time-s.n.a.t.c.hing function because it has avoided museumification and memorialisation, stayed out of the photographs, been forgotten in a corner. Hearing T-Rex now doesn't remind you of 73, it reminds you of nostalgia programmes about 1973.

And isn't part of our problem that every cultural object from 1963 on has been so thoroughly, forensically, mulled over that nothing can any longer transport us back? (A problem of digital memory: Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don't really remember because they lack the ability to forget.) k-punk post, April 13, 2007 In the end, the science fiction elements of Life On Mars consisted solely in an ontological hesitation: is this real or not? As such, Life On Mars fell squarely into Todorov's definition of the Fantastic as that which hesitates between the Uncanny (that which can ultimately be explained naturalistically) and the Marvellous (that which can only be accounted for in supernatural terms). The predicament that Life On Mars explored was: is Sam Tyler in a coma, and the whole 1970s world in which he is lost some kind of unconscious confabulation? Or has he, by some means not yet understood, been transported back into the real 1973? The show maintained the equivocation until the end (the final episode was ambivalent to the point of being cryptic).

Simm has wryly observed that the show's central conceit lets the production off the hook. If Tyler was in a coma, then any of Life On Mars's historical inaccuracies could be explained away as gaps in the character's recollections of the period. No doubt the enjoyment of Life On Mars derived from its imperfect recollection, not of 1973 itself, but of the television of the 1970s. The programme was mitigated nostalgia, I Love 1973 as a cop show. I say cop show, because it is clear that the SF elements of Life On Mars were little more than pretexts; the show was a meta-cop show rather than meta-SF. The time travel conceit permitted the showing of representations which would otherwise be unacceptable, and beneath the framing ontological question (is this real or not?), there was a question about desire and politics: do we want this to be real?

As the avatar of the present, Sam Tyler became the bad conscience of the 70s cop show, whose discontent with the past permitted us to enjoy it again. Simm, as the modern, enlightened 'good cop', was less the anti-type of antediluvian 'bad cop' Gene Hunt than the postmodern disavowal which made possible our enjoyment of Hunt's invective and violence. Hunt, played by Philip Glenister, became the show's real star, beloved of the tabloids who adored quoting his streams of abuse, carefully constructed by the writers so that they could come across as comic rather than inflammatory. Hunt's 'no-nonsense policing' was presented with enough 'grit' to make us wince, but never so much violence that it would invoke disgust. (In this respect, the programme was the cultural equivalent of a blow to a suspect that would not show up under later medical examination.) Undoubtedly, although perhaps unintentionally, the show's ultimate message was reactionary; in the end, rather than Tyler educating Hunt, it was he would come to an accommodation with Hunt's methods. When, in the final episode, Tyler is faced with a choice between betraying Hunt or staying loyal (at this point in the narrative, it appears that Tyler's betrayal of Hunt is the requisite price Tyler must pay in order to return to 2007), this also became a choice between 1973 and the present day that amounted to a decision, not about collar lengths or other cultural preferences, but about policing styles. Audience sympathy is managed such that, however much we disapprove of Hunt, we are never supposed to lose faith in him, so that Tyler's betrayal seemed far worse than any of Hunt's many misdemeanours. Tyler's (apparent) return to 2007 underscores this by presenting the modern environment as sterile, drearily worthy, ultimately far less real than the rough justice of Hunt's era. Modern wisdom ('how can you maintain the law by breaking the law?') is set against Hunt's renegade-heroic identification of himself with the law ('I am the law, so how can I break it?') The deep libidinal appeal of Hunt derives from his impossible duality as upholder of the Law and he who enjoys unlimited jouissance. The two faces of the Father, the stern lawgiver and Pere Jouissance, resolved: the perfect figure of reactionary longing, a charismatic embodiment of everything allegedly forbidden to us by 'political correctness'.

'Can The World Be as Sad as It Seems?':.

David Peace and his Adapters.

David Peace's four Red Riding novels were acts of exorcism and excavation of the near-past, a b.l.o.o.d.y riposte to I Love The 1970s clipshow nostalgia. They stalk the West Yorks.h.i.+re that Peace grew up in, transforming real events the framing and intimidation of Stefan Kisco; the incompetent police operation to catch the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper into background for brutal and unrelenting fictions that possess an apocalyptic lyricism.

Peace has always been dogged by comparisons with James Ellroy. There's no doubt that encountering Ellroy liberated something in Peace, but in the end Peace is the better writer. Peace has called the experience of reading Ellroy's White Jazz his 's.e.x Pistols moment'. But Peace builds upon what Ellroy achieved much in the way that the postpunk groups leapt into the s.p.a.ce that the Pistols had blown open. Peace extrapolates a pulp modernist poetics from Ellroy's experiments in telegraphic compression, and while Ellroy's pugilistic prose has a pump-action amphetamine drive, Peace's writing is hypnotic and oneiric; its incantatory repet.i.tions delaying and veiling plot revelations rather than rus.h.i.+ng headlong towards resolution. Despite presenting seemingly similar worlds in which the police are routinely corrupt, journalists are venal and co-optable, and the wealthy are vampiric exploiters their political orientations are very different. Ellroy is a Hobbesian conservative, who evinces a macho pragmatism that accepts violence, exploitation and betrayal as inevitable. The same phenomena are oppressively omnipresent in Peace's world, but there is no sense of acceptance: instead, his novels read like howls of agony and calls for retribution, divine or otherwise.

Peace, who has said that he aimed to produce a Crime fiction which is no longer entertainment, has written Crime works that are hauntological in a triple sense. The Crime genre is of course well suited to explore the (moral, existential, theological) problems posed by what Quentin Meilla.s.soux called 'odious deaths': the deaths 'of those who have met their end prematurely, whose death is not the proper conclusion of a life but its violent curtailment'; and as they moved away from the uneasy combination of fanciful genre trappings, period signifiers, Angry Young Man homage and brutality that characterised 1974, the novels of the Red Riding Quartet were simultaneously drawn towards actuality and theology, as if the proximity of the one entailed the other. Readers are put into the position of spectral mourners by the voices of those who have died odiously, the Ripper's victims, heard in the visionary 'Transmissions' which preface each of the chapters in 1980, sections which combine the actual (gleaned from reportage and biography) with the spectral.

The novels are hauntological in another sense, a sense that is closer to the way in which we have used it in relation to music, but not quite the same. Peace is not at all interested in the problems of degraded memory which preoccupy The Caretaker, Burial or Basinski. His is a past without crackle, rendered in the first person and in a tense that is very nearly present. The occlusions in the narrative are due, not to faulty recording devices or memory disorders (cultural or personal) but to the self-blindings of his characters, who see themselves (and the events of which they are a part) only through a gla.s.s darkly. In the end, everything narrative, intelligibility succ.u.mbs to total murk; as the characters begin to disa.s.sociate, it becomes difficult to know what is happening, or what has happened; at a certain point, it is unclear as to whether we have crossed over into the land of the dead.

Hunter, the senior Manchester detective a.s.signed to investigate the West Yorks.h.i.+re police force in 1980, finds himself caught in a world in which things don't add up; they don't fit together. It's a Gnostic terrain. The Gnostics thought that the world was made of a corrupt matter characterised by heavy weight and impenetrable opacity: a murky, muddy mire in which fallen angels one of the persistent images in the Red Riding books are trapped. There is no question of Hunter, or solicitor John Piggott in 1983 or even Peace being able to completely illuminate what has happened. This is a world in which, as Tony Grisoni, the screenwriter who adapted the novels for Channel 4, puts it, 'narratives disappear into the dark'.

The libidinal orientation towards the past is also markedly different in the case of Peace and sonic hauntology: whereas hauntological music has emphasised the unexplored potentials prematurely curtailed in the periods it invokes, Peace's novels are driven by the unexpiated suffering of Yorks.h.i.+re at the end of the 70s. And Peace's writing is also hauntological in its intuition that particular places are stained by particular occurrences (and vice versa). As he has insisted in many interviews, it is no accident that Sutcliffe was the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper. Peace's books are avowedly anti-nostalgic, the anti-Life On Mars, with its ambivalence towards police brutality (and its media representation). There is no such vindication in Peace's novels, no suppressed yearning for a time in which coppers could beat suspects with impunity. After all, it is corruption, rather than criminality per se, that is the focus of the Red Riding Quartet.

Music in Peace's books functions as a hauntological trigger. He's remarked that he uses music, including music he doesn't like, to take him back to the feel, the grain, of a period. Musical references are embedded in the text either diegetically, as background sound, or more esoterically, as cryptic-epigraphic ciphers and repeated incantations: a portal effect that gratifyingly echoes (in reverse) the way in which music of the 1970s, especially postpunk, would direct listeners to fiction. 1980 is haunted in particular by Throbbing Gristle, especially the phrase that they took from another killer, Charles Manson: 'can the world be as sad as it seems?' In Peace's hands, this question becomes an urgent theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he recounts calling forth an absent G.o.d, a G.o.d who is experienced as absence, the great light eclipsed by the world's unending tears. The world, the sad, desolated world, is full of angels whose wings have either been shorn off, reduced to stubble, or which have grown into gigantic, dirty monstrosities...addict angels hooked on alcohol, casual but incessant l.u.s.ts, and the trash of the consumer society that is struggling to be born out of the wreckage of the social democratic consensus...angels whose ultimate response to the world is puking (everyone pukes in Peace's books), throwing up the whiskies and the undercooked crispy pancakes, but never being able to purge any of it, never being able to take flight.

The religious elements in the books become increasingly foregrounded as the Quartet develops, until the deeply ambiguous, hallucinatory ending of 1983 becomes a quasi-Gnostic treatise on evil and suffering. The final section of the novel, 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' (that transfiguration of pop cultural reference into epigraph being one of Peace's signature techniques), explicitly posits the idea that, far from undermining the existence of G.o.d, evil and suffering entail that G.o.d must exist. Eclipse implies something that is eclipsed, a hidden source of light that produces all this shadow. In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil maintains that suffering, particularly suffering visited upon the innocent, means that the theistic G.o.d could not exist, since a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient being would not countenance undeserved suffering. With his inventory of wretched child abuse cases, Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov makes the most famous, and most pa.s.sionate, statement of this position. Yet if there is no G.o.d, the suffering remains, only now there is no possibility of its expiation; if there can be no justice to come, the universe is permanently blighted, irrevocably scarred by atrocity, abuse and torture.

The Red Riding novels inspired Channel 4 into making the kind of television dramas that some of us had long since ceased hoping could ever be made in Britain again. The three films, broadcast in 2009, were the most striking British dramas of the first decade of the 21st century, towering above all the facile costume epics, routine police procedurals and emotional p.o.r.nography which clogged the schedules. Moreover, in their use of setting and landscape, in the epiphanic power of their images, the Red Riding films attained a visual poetry and an expressionist naturalism that exceeded practically anything British cinema has achieved in the past 30 years.

As Nick James observed in his preview of the Red Riding films for Sight & Sound, nothing in the previous career of the Red Riding's three directors Julian Jarrold for 1974, James Marsh for 1980, and Anand Tucker for 1983 gave any hints that they could produce work of this quality. In many ways, it is as if the auteur of these films was Peace himself, and the three directors succeed so consummately because they allowed themselves to be channels of his infernal vision. It was inevitable that some compression occurred in the transition from page to screen; indeed, one whole novel from Peace's Red Riding sequence 1977 was never filmed, but Tony Grisoni deserves immense credit for the way that he weaved the three films into a symphonic coherence that nevertheless refused easy closure and intelligibility.

Peace's equivalent of Ellroy's anti-hero Dudley Smith, the corrupt detective who justifies his own running of drugs and vice operations as 'containment', is Maurice Jobson, the whey-faced policeman who features in all three of the films. Where Smith (as masterfully played by James Cromwell in the best Ellroy adaptation to date, LA Confidential [1997]) is charming, charismatic and flamboyantly loquacious, Jobson (as played by David Morrissey in the C4 adaptations) is taciturn, abstracted, immobile, blank, in a semi-fugue state of disa.s.sociation from the atrocities he partic.i.p.ates in. Morrissey's is one of many excellent performances in the trilogy: all of them masterpieces of measure and controlled power, proper television/ film acting, far from the braying thespery that the British theatrical tradition often turns out. Rebecca Hall is damaged and dangerous as Paula Garland, Maxine Peake, angular yet vulnerable as Helen Marshall. Sean Harris manages to make Robert Craven plausibly loathsome without tripping over into grand guignol grotesquerie; while Paddy Considine brings a flinty resolution to the role of Peter Hunter, one of the few lightbringers in the Red Riding's North, an inverted world in which evil enjoys carnivalesque licence and the police and the powerful are free to 'do what they want'.

The film adaptation of Peace's extraordinary novel The d.a.m.ned Utd lived down to expectations to just about the same extent that the Channel 4 films exceeded them. The team tasked with adapting the novel looked unpromising. Before The d.a.m.ned Utd, Director Tom Hooper (drafted in after Stephen Frears left the project) had a background in fairly unremarkable television (he would later go on to make The King's Speech), while the shtick of screenwriter Peter Morgan and lead actor Michael Sheen as established in The Queen and Frost/ Nixon didn't have any obvious fit with Peace's fractured and abrasive modernism. In the end, Hooper and Morgan didn't adapt Peace; they eliminated him. Hooper's film returns us to the found object-narrative Brian Clough's bitter 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974 that Peace used as the raw material for his 'fiction based on a fact'. What's missing is everything that Peace brought to the facts: the bite of a Real that will always elude (bourgeois) realism; and the shaping power of a Gnostic mythography, in which the most malign ent.i.ty is the cursed land of Yorks.h.i.+re itself.

It can be tiresome to criticise a film adaptation simply for the ways it differs from its source novel. In this case, however, a close comparison of the two versions of The d.a.m.ned Utd is instructive, for two reasons. First, because, in erasing Peace's signature, the film in effect competes with his rendition of the Clough/ Leeds story; and second, because Peace's pulp modernism precisely offers British culture an escape from the kind of good humoured, well balanced, middle of the road, middlebrow realism that Hooper and Morgan trade in.

At the press screening, Morgan said that when he read The d.a.m.ned Utd, it brought a nostalgia rush 'like eating Farley's rusks'. Yet surely even the most guileless of the readers of Peace's novel could see that it tastes not of the warm mush of baby food but of bile, scotch and refluxed stomach acid. In Hooper and Morgan's hands, Clough's story is reduced to all of the givens, all the off-the-shelf narrative and thematic pegs: he was a 'misunder-stood genius', struggling against an establishment represented by puffed-up provincial patriarchs like the Derby County chairman, Sam Longson (well played by Jim Broadbent); he was self-destructive, and he needed his partner Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) to curb his excesses; he was locked into an oedipal struggle with the man he replaced at Leeds, Don Revie. Even this is told more than it is shown, and throughout, the audience treated as if it is witless: dialogue is too often used for clumsy plot exposition or to crudely telegraph Themes. Not only do Hooper and Morgan fail to evoke Peace's existential terrain, his blighted vision of Yorks.h.i.+re, they also convey little of his intense sense of territoriality. In the novel, Leeds's Elland Road ground is the site of a struggle over s.p.a.ce in which Clough is up against both the spectre of Don Revie and the animal aggression of the players he has left behind. (A striking image from the novel of Clough chopping up and burning Revie's desk in an attempt to exorcise the absent father's ghost inexplicably never made it to screen.) The film also misses the purgatorial rhythm of sport which Peace caught so acutely. As every sports fan never mind about coach knows, the jouissance of sport is essentially m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic. 'The d.a.m.ned Utd shows what Clough's tragedy was,' Chris Pet.i.t put in his review of the novel, 'deep down, he knew that winning was only loss deferred.' The intense fear that colours everything in Peace's novel is dissolved in a tone that is frequently jaunty.

Then there is Michael Sheen. The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost. (And there are bizarre bleed-throughs between the characters at one point, it felt as if Sheen's campy Clough had morphed into Kenneth Williams.) Certainly, Peace has an advantage over the film-makers here: written fiction can move beyond received television images of figures from recent history far more quickly than film can but an actor with more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth of Clough not accessible via the TV footage. Instead, Sheen offers his usual tracing of mannerisms and verbal tics, competent enough as far as it goes, but devoid of any of the tortured inner life that Peace gave to his Clough. Even if the acting were uniformly superb, it would have needed far more than Hooper provides in order to summon the dread and misery of Peace's world; but the indifferent photography and the often appalling soundtrack make Hooper's The d.a.m.ned Utd feel more like a dramatisation of actual events than a film of Peace's novel.

Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and 'the 70s On Trial'.

July 2013.

The turn that events took had all the look of some kind of ritual a.s.sa.s.sination. The killing not of a body the body was already dead but of a name. It was as if some kind of deal had been struck you'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact (or as intact as it could be), but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil.

September 2012, and it all starts to come up. Like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained, first seeping, then surging out. Jimmy Savile, the nation's favourite grotesque, the former DJ and children's entertainer, is exposed as a serial s.e.x abuser and paedophile. You can't say it comes as a surprise, and that's one of the most unsettling aspects of the whole affair. How out in the open it all was...We all read the text purporting to be the transcript of an unbroadcast scene from the BBC's satirical programme, Have I Got News For You, in which Savile is openly accused of being a child s.e.x abuser, and took it at face value (it seems now that the transcript was a fake, but it was an astonis.h.i.+ngly convincing simulation...The rhythm of the interaction between the panellists...The way the verbal sparring escalates into aggression...The name of the supposed victim, Sarah Cornley...it all had a ring of authenticity the signature of a Real, perhaps, that could not at then be recognised except in fiction...) Yes, in a certain way, it was all out in the open we all knew, or felt that we knew but it mattered that the abuse was never acknowledged in his lifetime. For while the story remained unofficial Savile would not only go unpunished, he could continue to comport himself as a celebrated entertainer, a knight of the realm, stalwart charity fundraiser. No doubt Savile took a sociopathic delight in being able to get away with it in plain sight. In his 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, Savile had boasted about having s.e.x with an underage runaway. The police wouldn't dare touch him, he taunted. Neither, it seemed, would the media. Occasionally, a journalist would attempt to breach his defences. Louis Theroux did his trademark gentle probing of Savile about the paedophilia allegations in 2000 BBC doc.u.mentary, but of course there was no question of the old man cracking.

By the end of 2012, the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as a trauma. The phrase it's like something out of David Peace has become something of a commonplace in the past few years. Strangely for fiction that is about the past, Peace's work has actually gained in prophetic power since its publication. Peace wasn't predicting the future how could he be, when he was writing about the 70s and the 80s? so much as he had fixated on those parts of the past which were about to resurface. The Fritzl case had echoes of the underground lair in which children are kept prisoner in the Red Riding novels. And everything that came to light about conspiracies amongst the English power elite all the murk and tangle of Murdoch and Hillsborough seemed to throw us back into Peace's labyrinths of corruption and cover-up. Murdoch, Hillsborough, Savile...Pull on one thread and it all started to connect, and, wherever you looked, there was the same grim troika police, politicians, media...Watching each other's backs (partly for fear that they will be stabbed in their own back)...Having the goods on each other, the best kind of insurance policy, the ruling cla.s.s model of solidarity...

After his death, Savile increasingly started to look like something Peace had dreamt up. We were drawn to a certain kind of fiction because consensual reality, the commonsense world that we like to think we live in, wasn't adequate to a figure like Savile. At the same time, it became clear that the elements in Peace's writing that previously seemed most melodramatically excessive were those which ended up rhyming with the new revelations. It's as if melodramatic excess is built into the Real itself, and the sheer implausibility of corruption and abuse itself forms a kind of cloak for the abuser: surely this can't be happening?

Savile's stomping ground was right in the heart of Peace's territory...in Leeds...where the entrepreneur-DJ started to build his empire, and where, knowing that abuse is easier to get away with when it comes disguised as care, he volunteered as a hospital porter... A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down...Incredibly, Savile was for a time a suspect in the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper investigation members of the public had named Savile, and the body of one of the Ripper's victims, Irene Richardson, had been found very near to his flat. Then there was the infamous photograph of Savile, Peter Sutcliffe and Frank Bruno at Broadmoor in 1991 Savile, toting his signature cigar, brokering a meeting between a serial killer and a troubled former celebrity boxer. The grinning Sutcliffe looks like he's wearing one of Savile's sh.e.l.l-suits. The insanity of a society and of an era all their occult complicities between celebrity, psychosis and criminality is screamingly exposed here. Ritual inversion: light (entertainment) transforming into the darkest horror. By the end of 2012, Savile's name was so irretrievably sullied that his old friend Peter Sutcliffe felt the need to speak up for him.

Savile was the kind of figure who came to dominate popular culture without inspiring much affection. You couldn't say he was ever loved. Someone writing in to the London Review of Books dug up the BBC's audience research reports on Savile's first appearances on Top of the Pops. '10 December 1964. Jimmy Savile, who introduced the programme on this occasion, was obviously disliked by a large number of the sample audience. Many indicated their aversion to this artist by remarking that anything they had to say about him would be "quite unprintable", whilst comment by those who freely expressed their feelings was liberally larded with such terms as "this nutcase"; "this obnoxious 'thing'"; and "this revolting spectacle".' You don't have to be loved, or even liked, to be a popular figure. Savile didn't even have the love-to-hate appeal of a national pantomime villain such as Simon Cowell. His ticket to fame was his grotesquerie itself (and this grotesquerie meant that one of the most initially unnerving things about the revelations was being forced to think of Savile as any kind of s.e.xual being). As Andrew O'Hagan argued in his piece on Savile for the London Review of Books, what mattered in the new world of television light entertainment was not likeability, or talent, but a certain larger-than-life aura call it eccentricity, or call it derangement which Savile easily possessed as his birthright. Even those who found Savile creepy could accept that he 'belonged' on television. After all, where else could he possibly belong? The problem was that, after the 60s, if you belonged on television, there was nowhere that wasn't open to you. We now know that Savile was given keys to the Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane, so that he could wander around the inst.i.tution just one example of the freedoms that Savile's celebrity and power would acquire for him. We hear that Savile molested paraplegic patients in their hospital beds, and I'm reminded of Dennis Potter's 1976 television play, Brimstone and Treacle, in which the lead character, the unctuous Martin, rapes a severely brain-damaged young woman while pretending to care for her. The BBC withdrew the play just before it was due to be broadcast presumably at around the same time that Savile was appearing on Sat.u.r.day night kids' TV while raping helpless patients in private.

As Savile's reputation descended into the mire, it pulled others' with it. The police investigation prompted by the scandal, Operation Yewtree, went after a whole slew of former household names with (surely) more to come. Someone, I don't remember who, says it's like the 70s have gone on trial. Yes, but it's a very particular strand of the 70s that is under investigation not the officially debauched rock 'n' roll 70s, not Zeppelin or Sabbath, but the family entertainment 70s.

As the stories mounted up, Savile came to seem more and more unbelievable. Taken together, even facts that were already known about Savile before his death came to look as if they couldn't possibly be true. Could it really be the case, for instance, that Savile had taken part in negotiations between the Israeli and the Egyptian governments in the 70s? That he had mediated between Prince Charles and Princess Diana as their marriage started to fail? (And how mad, how desperate, would you have to be to take Jimmy Savile's advice on your marriage?) That he had spent Christmas after Christmas with Margaret Thatcher? (Thatcher had tried four times to enn.o.ble Savile, but was repeatedly rebuffed by her advisers, and only succeeded in knighting him at the f.a.g-end of her period as Prime Minister.) Murdoch and the Daily Mail wasted no time in pus.h.i.+ng the idea that the abuse was an inst.i.tutional pathology it was the BBC, and, more broadly, the paternalistic media culture of the 60s and 70s, which had incubated Savile's corruption. The BBC, now in a permanent state of confusion about its role in a neoliberal world, duly went into a neurotic, narcissistic collapse. Its judgement was shot; it had failed to broadcast a report about Savile's abuse, and the crisis over Savile would push it into moving too hastily when, a few months later, a Tory peer was wrongly named in another abuse scandal. Murdoch and the Mail crowed on about how the Savile revelations demonstrated the importance of press freedom but the question that they neatly evaded was, where were their brave hacks? Why didn't they expose Savile when it mattered, when he was alive?

When the question started to be asked about how he'd got away with it, we already knew the answer. He had connections at the very top. The very top. And he took care to make friends with those in power and authority at lower levels, too. Police officers regularly attended Savile's now notorious Friday Morning Club meetings at his home in Leeds.

Savile's ascent to his unlikely position of power and influence required immense amounts of hard work. One thing you could never accuse him of was slacking. A forensically researched post on the Sump Plug blog details how infernally busy Savile was in the early days of his career: The Plaza [Ballroom in Manchester] was just one of many dance halls and clubs that Savile oversaw, managed, diskjockeyed at, wielded shadowy control over or had some kind of undeclared stake in, not only in Manchester but also on the other side of the Pennines -in Bradford, in Wakefield, in Halifax, over on the coast in Scarborough and Whitby, and especially in Leeds. In his hometown the joints he presided over included the Cat's Whiskers and the Locarno Ballroom in the County Arcade, known by locals simply as 'the Mecca' (later rebranded as the Spinning Disc). That's where, in 1958, his predilection for underage girls first came to the attention of the police. The matter was swiftly resolved by peeling a few hundred quid off the big roll of twenties that he always carried, right up until he died.

Meanwhile, in Manchester on any given night in the late 50s and early 60s, if you couldn't find Savile at the Plaza at lunchtime, he'd surely be at the Ritz later on. Or, if not, try the Three Coins in Fountain Street. He didn't even rest on Sundays; that was when he span the platters for upwards of two thousand jivers and twisters at his Top Ten Club at Belle Vue.

The man was everywhere -at practically every major dance hall and nightclub in the North's heaving conurbations, as much of a fixture as the rotating mirror ball.

Savile's empire quickly spread down south too, down to the Ilford Palais, and to Decca Records, who would pay him to play their latest releases. Up North, Savile's rackets were protected by a gang of bodybuilders, boxers, and wrestlers, including improbably for those of us who came to know him as the comically fat wrestler Big Daddy, cuddly mainstay of Sat.u.r.day afternoon television s.h.i.+rley Crabtree. The roots of 70s television were here, in these ballrooms and dancehalls, their seediness waiting to be transubstantiated into light entertainment.

But, a year after Savile's death, the transubstantiation would go into extreme reverse. Now then, now then one of Savile's catchphrases started to a.s.sume an ominous significance. Only a few months previously, the BBC had broadcast a number of programmes celebrating his life and work. Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed. Not only is the headstone taken away, but we hear can this possibly be true? It's impossible to tell in the fevered atmosphere that the family of a child buried near to Savile had requested that Savile's remains be disinterred as if he were some medieval devil, a noxious cloud of malignancy that can corrupt even the dead. More farcically, CBeebies, one of the BBC's children's channels, was censured because it broadcasted a repeat of an episode of the programme the Tweenies, in which one of the characters impersonated Savile.

Now then, now then...

At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile OBE Sir Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. Who's going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer, someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable this can't possibly be happening. What has happened can be pieced together only in retrospect. The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and coverup can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now...

02: HAUNTOLOGY.

London After the Rave: Burial.

k-punk post April 14, 2006.

Burial is the kind of alb.u.m I've dreamt of for years; literally. It is oneiric dance music, a collection of the 'dreamed songs' Ian Penman imagined in his epochal piece on Tricky's Maxinquaye. Maxinquaye would be a reference point here, as would Pole like both these artists, Burial conjures audio-spectres out of crackle, foregrounding rather than repressing sound's accidental materialities. Tricky and Pole's 'cracklology' was a further development of dub's materialist sorcery in which 'the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in' (Penman). But rather than the hydroponic heat of Tricky's Bristol or the dank caverns of Pole's Berlin, Burial's sound evokes what the press release calls a 'near future South London underwater. You can never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio, or the tropical downpour of the submerged city out of the window.'

Near future, maybe...But listening to Burial as I walk through damp and drizzly South London streets in this abortive Spring, it strikes me that the LP is very London Now which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach. Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and most keeningly what could still happen. The alb.u.m is like the faded ten year-old tag of a kid whose Rave dreams have been crushed by a series of dead end jobs.

Burial is an elegy for the hardcore continuum, a Memories From the Haunted Ballroom for the Rave generation. It is like walking into the abandoned s.p.a.ces once carnivalised by Raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of Raves past. Broken gla.s.s cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the subways in Jacob's Ladder's New York. Audio hallucinations transform the city's rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was m.u.f.fled ba.s.s turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains.

Burial's mourning and melancholia sets it apart from dubstep's emotional autism and austerity. My problem with dubstep has been that in const.i.tuting dub as a positive ent.i.ty, with no relation to the Song or to pop, it has too often missed the spectrality wrought by dub's subtraction-in-process. The emptying out has tended to produce not s.p.a.ce but an oppressive, claustrophobic flatness. If, by contrast, Burial's schizophonic hauntology has a 3D depth of field it is in part because of the way it grants a privileged role to voices under erasure, returning to dub's phono-decentrism. s.n.a.t.c.hes of plaintive vocal skitter through the tracks like fragments of abandoned love letters blowing through streets blighted by an unnamed catastrophe. The effect is as heartbreakingly poignant as the long tracking shot in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) that lingers over sublime objects-become trash.

Burial's London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses, parents who can't quite bring themselves to sell their Rave 12 inches at a carboot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also haunting their interpas-sively nihilist kids with the thought that things weren't always like this. The sadness in the Dem 2 meets Vini Reilly-era Durutti Column 'You Hurt Me' and 'Gutted' is almost overwhelming. 'Southern Comfort' only deadens the pain. Ravers have become deadbeats, and Burial's beats are accordingly undead like the tik-tok of an off-kilter metronome in an abandoned Silent Hill school, the klak-klak of graffiti-splashed ghost trains idling in sidings. 10 years ago, Kodwo Eshun compared the 'harsh, roaring noise' of No U-Turn's 'hoover ba.s.s' with 'the sound of a thousand car alarms going off simultaneously'. The subdued ba.s.s on Burial is the spectral echo of a roar, burned-out cars remembering the noise they once made.

Burial reminds me, actually, of paintings by Nigel Cooke. The morose figures Cooke graffitis onto his own paintings are perfect visual a.n.a.logues for Burial's sound. A decade ago, jungle and hip hop invoked devils, demons and angels. Burial's sound, however, summons the 'chain-smoking plants and sobbing vegetables' that sigh longingly in Cooke's painting. Speaking at the Tate, Cooke observed that much of the violence of graffiti comes from its velocity. There's something of an affinity between the way that Cooke re-creates graffiti in the 'slow' medium of oil paints and the way in which Burial submerges (dubmerges?) Rave's hyperkinesis in a stately melancholia. Burial's dilapidated Afro NoFuturism does for London in the 00s what Wu Tang did for New York in the 90s. It delivers what Ma.s.sive Attack promised but never really achieved. It's everything that Goldie's Timeless ought to have been. It's the Dub City counterpart to Luomo's Vocalcity. Burial is one of the alb.u.ms of the decade. Trust me.

Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial.

The Wire 286, December 2007.

With his self-t.i.tled debut LP last year, Burial established himself as an extraordinary sonic mythographer, a sound poet capable of articulating the existential malaise of an era and a place using only sampled voices, broken breakbeats and musique concrete sound effects. Burial was a vivid audio portrait of a wounded South London, a semi-abstract sound painting of a city's disappointment and anguish. Burial's was a sound saturated in dance music, but his unsequenced beats were too eccentric to dance to. His sound was too out of step to fit into dubstep, the genre his records were most likely to be filed under because they were released on Kode9's Hyperdub label. Burial's sound might have fallen between the cracks, but it wasn't some eclectic melange of existing forms. What was most impressive about it and no doubt one of the reasons that it was The Wire's Record Of The Year for 2006 was the consistency of its sonic concept. There was an impersonal quality to Burial's desolate elegies, a quality reinforced by his doing only a few interviews and refusing to allow a photograph of his face to be used in any promotion. Swarming rumours filled the hype-vacuum. Many didn't believe he actually existed, attributing the record's production to Basic Channel, The Bug, Kode9 himself a ma.s.sive backhanded compliment to how fully realised Burial's (syn)aesthetic was. In fact, his sound has been gestating slowly, semi-secretly, for at least half a decade. The tracks on the first alb.u.m had been selected from recordings Burial had made since 2001. His first appearance on vinyl was the track 'Broken Home' on Wasteland's Vulture Culture Mix 2 in 2004. And the 12' EP South London Boroughs, which trailed some of the most potent tracks from the first LP, followed a year later.

Burial's refusal to 'be a face', to const.i.tute himself as a subject of the media's promotional machine, is in part a temperamental preference, and in part a resistance to the conditions of ubiquitous visibility and hyper-clarity imposed by digital culture 'It's like a ouija board, it's like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in,' he says of the internet.

'I'm just a well low key person,' he admits. 'I want to be unknown, because I'd rather be around my mates and family, but there's no need to focus on it. Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who made them looked like, anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it more.' Burial doesn't DJ or play live, so photographs of him can't even be surrept.i.tiously taken and circulated. 'I just want to be in a symbol, a tune, the name of a tune,' he explains. 'It's not like it's a new thing. It's one of the old underground ways and it's easier.' Burial is more sensitive than most to the way in which people are shaped by impersonal forces. 'When you are young you are pushed around by forces that are nothing to do with you,' he says. 'You're lost; most of the time you don't understand what's going on with yourself, with anything.' He knows that his sound does not come from anything with a face.

Without being chauvinistic, Burial is fiercely loyal to the British Hardcore continuum from which his sound has emerged. 'If you're well into tunes, your life starts to weave around them,' he says. 'I'd rather hear a tune about real life, about the UK, than some US hip-hop 'I'm in the club with your girl'-type thing. I love R&B tunes and vocals but I like hearing things that are true to the UK, like drum 'n' ba.s.s and dubstep. Once you've heard that underground music in your life, other stuff just sounds like a f.u.c.king advert, imported.' Indeed, one track on his new alb.u.m Untrue is called 'UK'; another, one of the most sorrowful, is called 'Raver'. Burial's London seems to be a city populated by dejected Ravers, returning to the sites of former revels and finding them derelict, forced to contrast the quotidian compromises of their post-Rave life with the collective ecstasy they once lived out. Burial's is a re-dreaming of the past, a condensation of relics of abandoned genres into an oneiric montage. His sound is a work of mourning rather than of melancholia, because he still longs for the lost object, still refuses to abandon the hope that it will return. 'A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and I hear something in the tune that makes me feel sad,' he says. 'A few of my favourite producers and DJs are dead now too and I hear this hope in all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK. But they couldn't, because the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn't as artificial, self-aware or created by the Internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those Ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren't running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like superclubs, magazines, Trance, commercialised. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone. Now there's less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can't hide, the media clocks everything.' He checks his pessimism: 'But [dubstep nights] DMZ and FWD have that deep atmosphere and real feeling. The true underground is still strong, I hear good new tunes all the time.'

After a statement as definitive as his first LP, it was difficult to imagine where Burial would go next. But Untrue substantially modifies the sound auditioned on Burial. The most obvious difference from the first record is the amount and type of vocal on the new LP. His mentor Kode9 describes it as 'weird soul' and, if the reference points for the debut were early to mid-90s Rave and Jungle, the touchstones on Untrue are late 90s Garage and 2-step. The cut-up and pitchs.h.i.+fted voices looped fragments of longing make Untrue even more addictive and even more keeningly moving than Burial. Burial had in fact produced a whole alb.u.m's worth of material in another style 'more technical, all the tunes sounded like some kind of weapon that was being taken apart and put back together again' but he sc.r.a.pped it. 'I was worrying,' he recalls, 'I'd made all these dark tunes and I played them to my mum, and she didn't like them. I was going to give up, but she was sweet, telling me, 'Just do a tune, f.u.c.k everyone off, don't worry about it.' My dog died and I was totally gutted about that. She was just like, 'Make a tune, cheer up, stay up late, make a cup of tea.' And I rang her mobile 20 minutes later and I'd made that 'Archangel' tune [on Untrue], and I was like, 'I've made the tune, the tune you told me to make."

Burial's treatment of voice has always been crucial to his sound. Too much dub-influenced music is content to simply erase the voice and turn up the echo, but Burial instinctively knew that dubbing is about veiling the song, about reducing it to a tantalising tissue of traces, a virtual object all the more beguiling because of its partial desubstantialisation. The drizzly crackle that has become one of his sonic signatures is part of the veiling process. Self-deprecatingly, he claims that he initially used the crackle to conceal 'the fact that I wasn't very good at making tunes'. But he is not so much influenced by dub as by the 'vocal science' developed by Jungle, Garage and 2-step producers. When he and his brothers would listen to darkside Jungle, Burial found himself increasingly drawn to the vocal tracks. 'I'd love these vocals that would come in, not proper singing but cut-up and repeating, and executed coldly. It was like a forbidden siren. I was into the cut-up singing as much as the dark ba.s.slines. Something happens when I hear the subs, the rolling drums and vocals together. So when I started doing tunes, I didn't have the kit and I didn't understand how to do it properly, so I couldn't make the drums and ba.s.s sound ma.s.sive, so as long as it had a bit of singing in it, it forgave the rest of the tune. Then I couldn't believe that I'd done a tune that gave me that feeling that proper records used to, and the vocal was the one thing that seemed to take the tune to that place. My favourite tunes were underground and moody but with killer vocals: 'Let Go' by Teebee, 'Being With You Remix' by Foul Play, Intense, Alex Reece, Digital, Goldie, Dillinja, EL-B, D-Bridge, Steve Gurley. I miss being on the bus to school listening to DJ Hype mixes.'

New Labour Britain is intoxicated by consensual sentimentality, hooked on disposable simulated emotion. With the ubiquity of TV talent shows, religiose emoting has become a fast track to media recognition, secular UK's equivalent of sanctification and salvation. In this process, singing has become almost incidental it's lachrymose back stories that the media really hungers for. Burial's strategy with singing is exactly contrary to this: he removes voices from biography and narrative, transforming them into fluttering, flickering abstractions, angels liberated from the heavy weight of personal history. 'I was listening to these Guy Called Gerald tunes,' he says. 'I wanted to do vocals but I can't get a proper singer like him. So I cut up a cappellas and made different sentences, even if they didn't make sense, but they summed up what I was feeling.' In the process of changing the pitch of the vocals, buried signals come to light. 'I heard this vocal and it doesn't say it but it sounds like 'archangel',' says Burial. 'I like pitching down female vocals so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing.' This is apt, as angels are supposed to be without gender. 'Well that works nice with my tunes, kind of half boy half girl,' he enthuses. 'I understand that moody thing, but some dance music is too male. Some Jungle tunes had a balance, the glow, the moodiness that comes from the presence of both girls and boys in the same tune. There's tension because it's close, but sometimes perfect together. I look like her. I am her.'

Kode9 describes the alb.u.m as 'downcast euphoria', and that seems to fit. 'I wanted to make a half euphoric record,' Burial agrees. 'That was an older thing that UK underground music used to have. Old Rave tunes used to be the masters of that, for a reason, to do with the Rave, half human endorphins and half something hypnotised by drugs. It was stolen from us and it never really came back. Mates laugh at me because I like whale songs. But I love them, I like vocals to be like that, like a night cry, an angel animal.'

Angels, again. On Untrue, Burial's Ravers appear as downcast angels, beings of light exiled into the dull weight of the worldly. Untrue is like German director Wim Wenders's Wings Of Desire (1987) relocated to the UK: an audio vision of London as a city of betrayed and mutilated angels, their wings clipped. But angels also hover above the hopeless and the abandoned here. 'My new tunes are about that,' Burial agrees, 'wanting an angel to be watching over you, when there's nowhere to go and all you can do is sit in McDonalds late at night, not answering your phone.'

As you might expect, Burial's attunement to angels, demons and ghosts goes back to childhood. 'My dad when I was really little,' he says, 'sometimes he used to read me MR James stories. On the South Bank last year, I bunked off from my day job and I found a book of MR James ghost stories. The one that f.u.c.ked me up when I was little was "Oh, Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad". Something can betray how sinister it is even at a distance. Something weird happens with MR James, because even though it's in writing, there'll be a moment when the person meets the ghost, where you can't quite believe what you've read. You go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It's like you're not reading any more. In that moment it burns a memory into you that isn't yours. He says something like, "There's nothing worse for a human being than to see a face where it doesn't belong." But if you're little, and you've got an imagination which is always messing you up and darking you out, things like that are almost comforting to read.

'Also,' he continues, 'there is nothing worse than not recognising someone you know, someone close, family, seeing a look in them that just isn't them. I was once in a lock-in in a pub and the regulars there and some mates started telling these f.u.c.ked-up ghost stories from real life, maybe that had happened to them, and I swear if you heard them...One girl told me the scariest thing I ever heard. Some of these stories would stop a few words earlier than seemed right. They don't play out like a film, they're too simple, too everyday, slight. Those stories ring true and I never forgot them. Sometimes maybe you see ghosts. On the underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go, they are smaller, about 70 per cent smaller than a normal person, smaller than they were in life.'

Burial makes the most convincing case that our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida's concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectral. Burial craves something he never actually experienced firsthand. 'I've never been to a festival, a Rave in a field, a big warehouse, or an illegal party,' he says, 'just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it. My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn't believe I had them. It was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you're only little. I'd get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world, and my brother would drop by late and I'd fall asleep listening to tunes he put on.' It was his older brother who made Rave a kind of 'present absence' in Burial's life, a s.p.a.ce to be filled with yarns and yearnings. 'He loved tunes, Rave tunes, Jungle,' Burial tells me. 'He lived all that stuff, and he was gone, he was on the other side of the night. We were brought up on stories about it: leaving the city in a car and finding somewhere and hearing these tunes. He would sit us down and play these old tunes, and later on he'd play us 'Metropolis', Reinforced, Paradox, DJ Hype, Foul Play, DJ Crystl, Source Direct and Techno tunes.'

The Rave relics feed a hunger for escape. 'I respect working hard but I dread a day job,' a.s.serts Burial. 'Or a job interview. I've got a truant heart, I just want to be gone. I'd be in the kitchens, the corridors at work, and I'd be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she'd put me out in the bins. So I'm in a black plastic bag outside a building and hearing the rain against it, but feeling all right, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away.' A too quick psychoa.n.a.lytic reading would hear this as a thinly coded wish to return to the womb and Burial's warm ba.s.s certainly feels enwombing but that would be to ignore the desire to flee that is also driving this fantasy. Burial wants out, but he cannot positively characterise what lies beyond. 'We all dream about it,' he says. 'I wish something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see anything. You don't have a choice. You'd be on the way to a job, but you're longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk past it. No force on Earth could make you go down there, because you've got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are on your case, you can't go down old Thames side and throw your mobile in.'

But there are always flickers and flashes of the other side. After-images. 'I used to get taken away to the middle of nowhere, by the sea,' concludes Burial. 'I love it out there, because when it's dark, it's totally dark, there's none of this ambient light London thing. We used to have to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where you were and then you'd walk on, and the image of where you've just been would still be on your retina.

Sleevenotes for The Caretaker's.

Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia.

May 2006.

Could it be said that we all now suffer from a form of theoretically pure anterograde amnesia?

Oliver Sacks' The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) have made the features of the condition referred to, misleadingly, as short-term memory loss well-known. In fact, sufferers do produce new memories, but they are not retained. There is no long-term encoding. This type of amnesia is anterograde rather than retrograde because it does not affect any memories formed before the onset of condition. Theoretically: in practice, it is likely that even the old memories will undergo some degradation.

On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia the alb.u.m, a tendency in the Caretaker's music has reached a kind of culmination. The theme was once homesickness for the past. Now, it is the impossibility of the present.

Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom was a kind of replicant mnemonic implant, a false memory of the tearoom pop of the twenties and thirties. For those of us haunted by the lambent ache of Al Bowlly's croon in The s.h.i.+ning and Pennies From Heaven, that kind of Total Recall trip was irresistible. The ghosts were so glamorous, their bob haircuts and pearls glistening in the candlelight, their dance moves oh so elegant.

An occulted reference might have been The Invention of Morel (an influence upon Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and therefore also upon The s.h.i.+ning (1980)), Adolfo Bioy Casares' science fictional lovesong to Louise Brooks. Casares imagined a world we live in it where the spectres of the beautiful and the d.a.m.ned are preserved forever, their little gestures and ba.n.a.l conversations transformed, by repet.i.tion, into holy artefacts. The simulation machine on Morel's island is film, of course, and who has not at some time wanted to do as Casares' hero does and pa.s.s beyond the screen, so as to finally be able to talk with the ghosts you have for so long mooned over? It is the same temptation that Jack yields to in The s.h.i.+ning when he enters into the consensual hallucination of The Overlook. The Gold Room, in which the Scott Fitzgerald-era elite forever cavort in a ceaseless whirl of wit, cocaine and wealth, is perfectly heavenly. But you know what the price of the ticket to heaven is, don't you Jack?

Don't you?

It is that grave-damp, mildewed odour which the perfume and the preservative never quite covered up which has always made The Caretaker's music uneasy, rather than easy, listening. Queasy listening, actually. It has never been possible to ignore the shadows lurking at the periphery of our audio-vision; the trip down memory lane was deliciously intoxicating but there was a bitter undertaste. A faint horror, something like the dim but insistent awareness of plague and mortality that must have nagged at the entranced-dancers in Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death'.

That's not all.

Something else was wrong.

The sepia and the soft focus were photoshopped in, we knew that. These thick carpets and china tea-sets weren't really there. And they never were, not for us. We were in a simulation of another's mind's eye. The mottled, honeyed, slurred and reverbed quality of the sound alerted us to the fact that this was not the object itself but the object as it is for someone else's memory.

On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, things have worsened immeasurably. It is as if the Overlook simulation has run out of steam. The lights have gone out. The hotel is rotten, a burned out wreck long since gutted, the band is pale and very nearly translucent.

The threat is no longer the deadly sweet seduction of nostalgia. The problem is not, any more, the longing to get to the past, but the inability to get out of it. You find yourself in a grey black drizzle of static, a haze of crackle. Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?

Where were we?

You suppose that you could be in familiar territory. It's difficult to know if you've heard this before or not. There's not much to go on. Few landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them in any order. The point is to get lost. That's easy in this ill-seen, late Beckett landscape. You extemporise stories they call it confabulation to make sense of the abstract shapes looming in the smoke and fog.

Who is editing the film, and why all the jumpcuts?