Separated at birth

This is too good a game not to play along with. A contribution to Mockitecture's Song/Building pairings.

Here's Zaha Hadid performing her sublimely empty and windswept Oxygene 2:



and here is Jean Michel Jarre's Dubai Opera House.

Grim Prospect

This post is perhaps more in the line of English Buildings, but there are some odd coincidences that make me want to write briefly about this building. It's by Oliver Hill, architect of the recently refurbished Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and it is, or was, called the Prospect Inn. It is on the Isle of Thanet which is the bit of Kent that sticks out into the Straits of Dover starting at Whitstable and ending at Ramsgate and with mostly potatoe fields in between. The Prospect Inn sits next to a roundabout overlooking Manston Airport in a particularly bleak bit of landscape.

A few years ago I wrote a review of a book on pub design in which Hill's inn featured. Built in 1938 it is one of the very few pubs ever to be designed in a modernist style. I became vaguely obsessed with its plan, which is eccentric to say the least, especially the biomorphic toilets which stick out from the sides of the building like slightly floppy ears. They are also on opposite sides of the bar area and you need to go outside to get to them, suggesting a playful spatial joke on the courtship rituals of friday night drinking. It also featured some rather lovely floor graphics - long since gone - and a stripped back arts and crafts style fireplace which is still there.

After lying derelict for some years (you can see some pictures of it in this state on mark.ed's flickr site here) the Prospect Inn has been refurbished, mostly pretty horrendously and with a new Holiday Inn tacked onto the back. This has been designed in a sort of pre-fab industrial style with bull-nosed escape stair protrusions that it's just possible to imagine are intended to be sympathetic to Hill's design.



Early modernism in the UK was often associated with leisure uses but these were mostly of the slightly hairshirt, self-improving kind such as lidos and health centres, so the Prospect Inn was also rare for having a populist and hedonistic function. Not that you can imagine much in the way of hedonism happening on this bit of the Isle of Thanet, which is presumably why it closed down. Now the new hotel serves the expanding Kent International Airport.

Oddly Hill also designed an estate of modernist houses (see this fabulous flickr site) in Frinton-On-Sea, a slightly sinister village on the Essex coast that until five years ago didn't have a single pub, and which has a number of bizarre local bye-laws including one forbidding ice cream vans. I know this because as a child Frinton was the nearest bit of seaside to where I grew up so I spent a lot of childhood summer days there. Years later as an architecture tutor I set a spectacularly unsuccesful design project there based on the town's endless battle to keep out the modern world*. Somewhat shamefully, I was completely unaware of Hill's work there at the time.



Anyway, I realised the other day reading this book that I had passed the Prospect Inn a number of times and not realised. So, today I took some terrible photographs of it in the rain while my wife stared out at me from the car in disbelief and my ten day old son slept on in blissful ignorance of his father's nerdish behaviour.

Finally, here is a period picture (via) of the serpentine wall that is still there along the roadside, along with a beautiful pub sign which is a miniature version of the building, which sadly isn't.

* Frinton-On-Sea was recently the subject of a BBC documentary about the resident's extraordinary conservatism. Unless I dreamt it, which is possible, it is also the temporary home to a number of ex-Radio 1 DJ's. who are starting a digital radio station there in tribute to Radio Caroline, the 1960's pirate radio station which for a while broadcast from a marine fort just off the Isle of Thanet. The original Radio Caroline pirate ship was anchored off the Essex coast in the early '70's and, somewhat bizarelly, washed up on Frinton's beach. Perhaps the residents feared a counter cultural invasion and have stepped up their vigilence ever since.

You Can't Hide Your Love Forever

Aloof From Inspiration's post on the formation of sexual desire/identity through pop, made me think about the role of clothing in focusing that desire. The look and feel of a band becomes a kind of cultural landscape that fans inhabit which has its own rules and behavoural codes, not least sexually. Not only that but in the narcissistic mirroring of star and fan lies a form of proto-relationship, the first serious one for many, where dressing identically suggests a virtual form of co-habitation, as if you are borrowing each others clothes.

If the subtext of mainstream pop has always been sex and sexual desire, then its margins have often been a reaction to that. Alternative music provides an outlet for feelings of sexual unnatractiveness, physical awkwardness and personal misanthropy. Sometimes, as in the case of The Smiths, this is expressed as a haughty disregard for sex altogether. In this case the role of clothes becomes less about making oneself appear conventionally sexually attractive than of confirming a kind of higher allegiance to something else.



Most of the bands I listened to as a teenager were deliberately sexless. The Smiths, obviously, but also Orange Juice, The Cure and countless other now forgotten C86 bands. Well, perhaps not sexless exactly, but awkward, gawky, troubled. This was in marked contrast to the priapically obsessed heavy rock/metal that my older brother listened to: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Whitesnake - christ, even the band names were filthy - music which was continuously, comically, horny (Train Kept A Rollin' All Night Long). The clothing worn by these bands was equally comical, obsessively drawing attention to lavish chest hair and bulging groins.

Against this there was also the landscape of suburban Essex in the 1980's, the well dressed lads with their peg trousers, wedge haircuts and Maze albums, the Essex Barn nightclub with Shakatak and Shalamar on the dancefloor and the endless rituals of going out on the pull.

To be an indie music fan - a puritanical, not to say snobbish genre - was to reject such overt displays of sexuality and the heavily coded us and them courtships of the dancefloor. To like indie was to align oneself with gawky romantic failure, particularly as so much of its aesthetic derived from a celebration of un-worldly, deliberately childish imagery. Not just the names (Orange Juice, The Pooh Sticks, The Soup Dragons etc.), but the clothes too. These were defiantly un-sexy, mixing an old-man/lady charity shop aesthetic (long coats, tweed and suede jackets, paisley skirts) with pre-adolescence (floppy fringes, shorts, pig tails), possibly the two periods in life when a lack of sex goes with the territory.

Orange Juice were not sexless. They were giddy romantics but in an aspiring, bookish sort of way, more in love with the idea of being in love itself. They sounded as if their idea of romantic love was a kind of tremulous chasteness, a never-quite-there moment full of witty conversation and charmingly drunken bicycle rides. Orange Juice were forever on the cusp of adulthood, or even late adolescence, balanced on an intense over excitable knife edge of anticipation without consumation. The clothes reflected this: shorts, buttoned up shirts, fur hats (for some reason), a boy scout aesthetic with a deliberate camp edge.



Although in many ways Britpop destroyed this version of indie, together with its angular awkwardness, Jarvis Cocker manged to give it a new twist. Jarvis took Indie's perennial teenager and mixed him with a sex obsessed dirty old man. He still wore the charity shop clothes but this time they were those of the 1970's would be lothario mixed with a libertarian but slyly dirty comprehensive school teacher thrown in. Acrylic shirts undone to the navel, flared suits, oversized sunglasses. Melody Maker once described him perfectly as having the look of "someone who has just emerged blinking into the daylight from a soho peepshow, escorted by two policemen".



Vampire Weekend's look brings this all somewhat up to date. They are less eccentric dandies than polite mannerists, thoroughly aware of the rules and mischeviously playing with the pedantry. There are echoes of Bret Easton Ellis and his early New England campus novels examining the microscopic hierarchies of social one-upmanship in such places. And the tedious empty perfectionism of the business card envy of American Psycho. They are perhaps the indie band gone to college, realising after years of sand being kicked in their faces that bookishness can be sexy, preppyness cool. Some mention should be made of Kanye West too, with hislatest buttoned up (and down) look, the preppy scarves and college mascots although now twinned with a more worldly post grad come down: heartbreak.