There is a cabaret tonight at Shunt, starting at 6. You are all
invited. Only Shunt is now at Bermondsey Street. All of it. So, if you're
lucky, you might even be able to pick up a cheap chair. They're good,
I've bought two, carried them off like a bailiff following the father's
downfall in a Perrault. In other fairy-tale news: that small door
on Joiner Street leads nowhere now, because of course the Lounge beneath
London Bridge has – as I may have hinted at – after months of happy and
open communication between all parties keen to prove the viable
compatibility of artistic and commercial concerns, been suddenly thrown
out on its arse by a shower of useless pricks.
No
news is good news, and that's the news. I'm not really sure even now,
some three or four weeks after its last night, how much I'm allowed to
say, or what the plan is, which is a bit why this blog – in which the
Lounge featured so centrally – has been so quiet recently... that, and just
the abominable anger and sadness of how's it all transpired. Anyway,
here belatedly are some stills from that last night, the 26th of June:
Of
course, we'd already had a last night back in November, with the place
stripped, and old changing-rooms re-revealed, and the recognition that
this wasn't just the Lounge we were saying goodbye to but the spaces of
"Tropicana" and "Amalto Saltone", and that was a nice night, with seeing
old friends and looking ahead and we knew where we stood. This night was
different, of course.
(I
don't know what's going on here,
but four hours later there was an egg
and spoon race.)
And naturally the Shard asked Shunt to "leave the place
as they found it", but while we're not short of volunteers, none were
found willing to rip out the toilets and the plumbing and the electricity,
replant the sawn-off steel, or smear shit back onto the walls, so sorry
about that.
Two
nights ago someone called Hilary came to see "Money". She had programmed
what turned out to be the Lounge's penultimate week, and had hung from
piercings in her shoulder while singing Verdi, something she can only do
once a month, but that's not the point, the point is on Friday she
lit up as she told me something I had found for myself whenever I came
to put on work at the Lounge, but have probably never acknowledged here:
that there was nowhere as helpful, as generous, as responsible, as
unquestioningly encouraging, or as just plain big and playable-in as
those vaults, let alone for free.
Hillary
told me she had made exactly what she wanted to make there, and
everyone had come, and nobody known what to expect. (And then I walked
home with a chair on my head.) So all I'm saying is, when I would
describe the Lounge in terms of a mini-Edinburgh-Fringe reprogrammed
weekly, impressive as that sounds, I actually did it an enormous
disservice: it was far easier than that. Art got made there, even by
accident. Not good art necessarily, of course not, but how
are you going to know until you put it in front of strangers?
And
there was no flyering, no feedback forms, no mentoring schemes, nothing
except anything you wanted. Half a panzer coming through a wall? George
would build it. A live, seven-foot wide video link to New York above the
bar, or the running of a fake lift for your own promenade? Andrea would
rig it up and get two volunteers to stand either side with a cue sheet
and pneumatic forklift. And on and on. That was the Lounge. Something
like one hundred people on that payroll, three of them paid for by the
Arts Council. No really, just three. And now what? The Foundry gone this
past month too. And East 10. But it's the Eighties Revival, non?
"Always be closing."
"Oh
well, it keeps you honest!" said an old acquaintance. God I hate poets.
Okay then, back to the ghetto. And while fifty per cent of the world's
cranes stand idle in Dubai, the Great Work of transforming London from a
temperamental network of human-scale cultures into a collection of
incredibly large, fucking stupid objects best viewed from twenty storeys
high proudly changes up a gear.
P.S.
With not quite the numb pang that accompanies the deleting of a dead
friend's number from your phone, I have removed the Lounge's video from
my myspace homepage and placed it below. It's more of an advert than a tribute I
know, but what are you going to do? Oh yeah, you're going to come to the
cabaret! Tonight, quick!
Here.
The Shunt Lounge