The Other Side of Midnight – King remembers the summer of 1990 and the ‘epiphany’ he had while watching a Happy Mondays’ video
This was commissioned by Arena Homme+ magazine in 2013. It’s a piece of work that is really only about one second, and I split that second into three parts. The images are taken from a clip of Happy Mondays playing Performance on the Granada TV show, The Other Side of Midnight.
I first saw this clip on a VHS video in the summer of 1990. I played it over and over again, and became obsessed with it. More specifically, I became obsessed with the very end of the clip, where Shaun Ryder walks across the screen and smiles at the camera… that smile really affected me, it was just so triumphant.
It seemed to say a million things: ‘we’ve done it’ – ‘you can’t stop us’ – ‘we’re getting away with it’. So, to me, as a 20-year-old, it said something about him, his background, his nonchalance. It was his confidence, really. Somehow that smile translated in my mind as ‘you can do it’, ‘you can do whatever you want… if I can, you can’. To me, it was a call to arms.
The first panel, the image before Shaun smiles to camera, is all about my life as I remember it, before the summer of 1990. I just wrote it, without editing. I’ve long had this idea called ‘Britain Before Central Heating’. I’ve never figured out what form ‘BBCH’ should take, which is why I’ve never pursued it properly. This panel is mainly about life before central heating… my life from as far back as I could remember, maybe from about the mid-1970s, up to the point where I see this video… that smile.
Britain was a very different place then – expectations were different. I always associate the end of the 1970s – with us getting a telephone, colour TV, central heating – as being connected to Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. Thatcherism gearing us up for the consumer 1980s. Perhaps that is too neat a fit: these minor luxuries being handed down to (some) working class families by Thatcher… but it’s true in my case.
The second panel is where Shaun looks to camera. This was my epiphany moment – somehow Shaun has freed me. I was not a ‘raver’. That idea of communal joy still doesn’t sit well with me… but Shaun’s smile made me ‘get’ something. That summer of 1990 was a fantastic time to be young… certainly in the North of England. It was one of the hottest on record and England reached the World Cup semi-finals… all played out to World in Motion by New Order, who, incredibly, had recorded the England team’s official song.
That summer to me was a haze of beer and magic mushrooms, wide white jeans and trying to grow my annoyingly thick, wavy hair into the sort of Baldrick haircut Shaun had. I look back at that summer as a time of incredible freedom. I had just finished my first year at college, and my dad had got me a well-paid summer job at Hygena, the factory that made MFI furniture. On weekends I was free to do as I liked, which, for once, I could afford to do. It was wonderful.
The third panel is the ‘moment’ after Shaun’s smile – or really, all the years after the summer of 1990. It deals with 1990-2013. As with the previous two panels I just wrote it off the top of my head, automatic writing. It’s telling now, looking back at this seven years later, how ‘class-based’ this text is. Of course I no longer live in Goole - I’ve lived in London for 28 years. I live in a house in Highbury – so I wonder if I’m really qualified to rant against the Mumfordisation of popular culture… but that’s what I do.
I think the third panel makes clear, and only now, just how much the Mondays and Shaun’s smile really meant to me. It was, in my eyes at least, some kind of empowerment – Shaun was communicating with me, via a borrowed VHS video tape – ‘you can do it’. That’s how I choose to see it anyway. So, the third panel really laments the rise of Jamie Oliver, cheese experts, real ale masters, leaf tea aficionados… artisan fetishists – it laments the gentrification of popular culture.
I was right to spot Shaun’s smile to camera… it was a last blast. He was the last real rogue allowed to become a pop star in Britain – pop music, certainly mainstream pop music, seems to have been sanitised. Shaun was truly bad – he was the real thing, certainly in those days – Scott King
