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A New Bohemia


From the East Anglian Daily Times, Sat 21st Sept 2024

WANTED: A NEW BOHEMIA

“I need to find a new Bohemia” sang Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys on this year’s summer single. I think there are probably quite a few of us by now, yearning for something new in pop culture. The only people still left flying the flag for something less ‘safe’ are hipsters, art-students, and those boys and girls wearing each other’s clothes. Do you know any? Possibly not. They tend not to go into pubs. They don’t drink much. They don’t go out clubbing and you won’t see them on You Tube videos being dragged screaming drunk off holiday flights.

To the more dyspeptic newspapers these youngsters, so often dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘snowflakes’ are the new baddies. Yet, a few of their elders will afford them some tolerance. After all, some will remember their own wayward youth. Weren’t we punks, new romantics, goths or whatever? Besides, experience tells us that the new intake will probably grow out of it. In time. Not all of them, we hope. Because it’s usually the weird ones who end up restoring this country’s reputation as innovators of popular culture.

After WW2, in the gentlemen’s clubs and posh provincial hotels, watery-eyed old buffers in blazers mourned our lost empire and ever-diminishing status as a military power. Yet, at the same time, a generation of youngsters who’d grown up on food rationing, playing on bombsites in smoke-blackened cities, now arose to build Britain another type of empire. This one didn’t involve slavery, land-theft or the purloining of other people’s minerals and natural resources.

Our new empire was made of pop music, fashion, films, dance and drama. Much of the outside world simply couldn’t get enough of these charming, inventive British kids. The USA, for instance, wanted the Beatles so badly, that they ended up forging their own Happy Shopper version. Called the Monkees, the newly fabricated foursome arrived with a ready-made TV series, based entirely on a couple of sped-up scenes from the film A Hard Day’s Night.

Meanwhile, a bevvy of our best models were dispatched to storm 1960s New York’s fashion scene. These were not red-top tabloid bimbos but bright, well-educated and beautifully-spoken young women from Swinging London. They had the time of their lives, then, when they became bored with modelling – which a few of them quickly did, some became writers, designers, photographers, or else they blossomed into respected actresses.

Back in the UK, by the mid-1960s, the fashions, hairstyles and stylings of this, our Soft Empire, had filtered down to the high streets. Despite our well-entrenched reputation for British fustiness, the youthful pathfinders won Britain an image as the coolest place on the planet.

Did the old guard get it? Nope. They reared up at the hairstyles, the clothes, the music and the art. They even briefly jailed two of the Rolling Stones, until shamed into releasing them again. This only acted as an accelerant on a generational war, which time dictated the oldies would lose. “These days you can’t tell the girls from the boys.” they’d parrot to each other. But no one was listening anymore.

Back in the present, with various newspapers flying the flag for common sense and normality, here we go again. So I was delighted, while touring, this spring, to find that many younger audience members had bothered to dress up in the sort of style which would have had my late dad growling, “Look at that bloody creature!” I’d always rather admired that creature.

The point is, that when I was young, there still existed a Bohemia of sorts. We had rudimentary housing back then: a warren of bedsits and run-down old houses, their rooms rented out as affordable, if often poorly-maintained accommodation. We managed the rent with our part-time jobs, lived out of each other’s pockets, dressed in jumble-sale chic, formed bands, wrote and painted. You know the drill: shilling for the meter, candles in wine bottles, paraffin heating and stand-up washes in a bedroom basin. Yet, we sometimes made the best of such places in interesting ways. I’m genuinely not romanticising it. It could be squalid at times. But it was… okay, you know?

What do would-be bohemian home-hunters have today? The estate agents control the rental sector, hiking the prices up to mirror the mortgage sector. Now comes some attitude-in-a-suit, standing over you with his contract and a demand for a big deposit.

How will a New Bohemia accommodate and feed itself ready for the next cultural renaissance, when faced with such obstacles? It will, that’s all. The youngsters I met at my gigs in various British cities this spring, seemed determinedly different. Young women in interesting hats. The young men in floral shirts and strange-looking trousers, some of them sporting amateur moustaches on baby faces. There was a fragile defiance about them all. These kids weren’t interested in mainstream fashion, binge-watching boxed-sets, or ‘Avin’ it in Ibiza. Something’s stirring out there, I reckon. Finally.

PICS: Main pic: Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger in 'Performance'

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