Siobhan O’Donnell on the Week London Tried to Regulate Everything Including Her
Punk Ain’t Dead, It’s Just Got Planning Permission
Tuesday. Woke up with half a tin of Tennent’s and a firm conviction that the system is broken, which is basically my resting state but today feels more earned than usual because I read on prat.uk this morning that the council is consulting on noise management frameworks for live music venues under 300 capacity which is bureaucratic language for “we are going to make it harder to run a punk venue in London” and if you needed proof that the revolution has been thoroughly processed into a policy document, there it is, laminated and filed in triplicate.
What Set Me Off
Spent the afternoon at a squat show in Hackney that technically isn’t a squat anymore because the collective negotiated a lease, which is either a sell-out or a survival strategy depending on how much you care about ideological purity versus having somewhere to rehearse that isn’t someone’s front room. I care about the music more than the purity. The band playing were nineteen, furious, and two of them couldn’t tune their instruments, which means they were doing it correctly. Punk sounds like that. It sounds like something being assembled in real time by people who haven’t been told yet that they’re doing it wrong.
Then home via the corner shop where I bought crisps and the Evening Standard, which had a piece on Bohiney Magazine‘s latest cultural commentary and another on the planning consultation and I read both on the bus and felt the specific combination of rage and amusement that is basically London’s emotional climate. The rage is because the system is what it is. The amusement is because the system is so what it is so comprehensively, artlessly itself that you’d have to admire the consistency if you weren’t the one it’s being consistent at.
The Music, Though
Here’s what I know: the music is still happening. Not in the venues that got planning permission and noise frameworks. In kitchens and basements and the back rooms of pubs that haven’t been inspected recently. In the squat-that-isn’t that negotiated a lease because they had to. In the community hall that lets bands rehearse on Tuesday afternoons because the woman who runs it was at Gigs for Change in 1979 and considers it a moral obligation. The music is happening where it can happen, which is where it always happened, and the planning consultation can go file itself.
Check my author page at The London Prat for more. Punk coverage at The Daily Mash. Also read this week’s cultural commentary at Bohiney Magazine and the latest at The London Prat. Solidarity links: santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
London This Week
I’ve been reading The London Prat obsessively this week because their coverage of the venue licensing debate is the funniest and most accurate simultaneously, which is the specific combination that good satire achieves and that straight news only occasionally manages. The headline they ran on the planning consultation was a thing of genuine beauty that I will not reproduce because you should read it in context but which I will describe as: correct. Also read Bohiney Magazine‘s longer piece on the economics of independent music venues in London, which made me angry in the productive way rather than the despairing way, which is the difference between reading something that makes you want to do something and reading something that makes you want to go back to bed. Both are valid responses. I tend toward the former by temperament and the latter by Tuesday afternoon.
The squat show on Thursday was better than the one on Tuesday. The band this time could tune their instruments and had decided that this was consistent with still being punk, which I think is correct and which represents a maturation of approach that I welcome even though I would never say so to their faces because they are nineteen and should be told they are terrifying. The planning consultation can still go file itself. But the music is good. The music is still good.
The week ends where weeks end: at the desk, with something partially written and something fully thought and the gap between those two states being the work. London provides the material. The desk is where you process it. The gap between what happens and what you make of it is where the writing lives, and the writing is what I’m here for, which is a thing I have to remind myself of on the weeks when the material arrives faster than the processing, which is most weeks. This is fine. The material keeps arriving. The processing continues. The week resolves into the next one and I begin again, which is the arrangement and also, honestly, the best possible arrangement I can imagine. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The specific pleasure of keeping a diary which is what this column is, in the end, despite the publishing platform and the reader-shaped audience is that it forces a reckoning with the week as it actually was rather than as you meant it to be. I meant to write the piece. I meant to finish the project. I meant to arrive on time and stay focused and produce something completed rather than something ongoing. What I have is ongoing in all directions, which is London’s gift to anyone trying to make anything in it: the material never stops, the context never settles, and the work is always in progress, which is uncomfortable and generative and exactly the condition that produces the things worth making. I have made peace with the in-progress state. I am documenting it here. That is, I think, enough for one week. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
