While Street Culture, my book on the history of subculture sits patiently in the wings awaiting publication, I was recently approached by the editors of Kulturaustausch who were interested in me penning a piece on a similar subject. The magazine is a quarterly publication, dealing with politics, culture and society, published by Germany’s Institute of Foreign Affairs. http://www.ifa.de/pub/kulturaustausch/ They have an issue focusing on death coming up, and asked me to write a short piece discussing death and counterculture. It’s a wide subject, so I inevitably had to cut the original feature down to fit the limited space available. However, they were kind enough to give me permission to publish the longer version of the essay here, for the benefit of anyone interested in the unedited original, particularly for those of us whose German is too rusty to be able to appreicate the printed version in Kulturaustausch.

I hope some of you find this little survey of death and subculture diverting… 

DEAD COOL – MORBIDITY & MORTALITY IN MODERN SUBCULTURE

 (c) Gavin Baddeley

Counterculture tribes or street subcultures employ a bewildering array of symbols – from Egyptian ankhs to the (A) anarchy sign – as tattoos, T-shirts, jewellery, album art and graffiti. None is more ubiquitous – or open to misinterpretation – than the skull. The ancient, universal icon of death, it is just one example of the morbid themes and iconography common in modern subculture. But what does this relationship with death imply? Is it, as some religious reactionaries and rightwingers insist, suggestive of a tendency to suicide or homicide? Or, as counterculture’s liberal critics are apt to sneer, simply adolescent attention seeking? Might there be, however, something older and more interesting behind countercultural morbidity?…

The counterculture sprang into life in the years following the Second World War, when economic affluence created a new demographic – the teenager – ripe for exploitation by entrepreneurs and to serve as a scapegoat by social conservatives. Hollywood was quick off the mark with films hoping to please both perspectives, focusing on the new buzzwords of ‘juvenile delinquency’. Among the first such films was the 1949 thriller Knock on Any Door, whose adolescent hoodlum antihero – defended by Humphrey Bogart as a hard-bitten attorney – coined the immortal lines ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse’, which one critic later described as a ‘clarion call for a generation of disenfranchised youth’. The film’s director, Nicholas Ray, went on to direct the classic of the juvenile delinquency subgenre six years later, starring an actor who became indelibly associated with the sentiment, even if he never spoke the lines in his brief career.

The film was Rebel Without a Cause, the actor of course James Dean, whose portrayal of the tormented teen Jim Stark immortalised him as the archetypal cool young outcast. Throughout the film Jim courts death, only narrowly escaping being shot by the police in the downbeat finale. The idea of suicide as a consequence of adolescent angst is an enduring riff. And an old one. One of the archetypal images of Romanticism is the 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton, depicting the brilliant poet Thomas Chatterton, who took his own life at just 17 years-of-age in 1770. It is the main subject of perhaps the greatest play ever written, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1600) whose titular antihero is the original brooding blackclad youth, itself based upon a 13^th century Danish history book. While Jim Stark survived Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean died in a car accident a month before its release, freezing him forever as an eternal adolescent.

While Dean died behind the wheel of his sportscar, he was also a keen motorcyclist, and the motorbike quickly became an icon of youth rebellion as potent as the quiff or electric guitar. Dedicated young daredevil bikers quickly adopted death symbolism, most notably the skull and crossbones, on their funereal black leathers. It’s a statement of cavalier courage – that the rider was comfortable with death – tempered perhaps by a superstitious hope that Death might look kindly upon those bearing his colours. The skull and crossbones motif has been adopted for similar reasons by numerous military regiments, often accompanied by the motto ‘death or glory’. Significantly, most were cavalry units – hussars and lancers – arrogant young horsemen who cultivated the same dashing image and craved the same thrills of speed and danger that captivated the Rockers. Generations of generals have relied upon the same youthful illusion of immortality that drives today’s reckless Bikers to fill the ranks of their regiments.

The famous association between the skull and crossbones and pirates is also relevant here. Long before anarchy was formulated as a political philosophy, buccaneers and privateers were living the life afloat and in pirate strongholds like Port Royal. In addition to the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger standard also sometimes incorporated devils, bleeding hearts and hourglasses. According to the historian Marcus Rediker pirates used taboo imagery to affirm ‘their unity symbolically’, and that such macabre ‘interlocking symbols – death, violence, limited time – simultaneously pointed to meaningful parts of the seaman’s experience, and eloquently bespoke the pirates’ own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn.’ Many modern subcultures – Punks, Bikers, Metalheads, Psychobillies and such – adopt similar imagery for analagous reasons. Sporting taboo motifs strengthens the bonds among a group of outcasts, while having a defensive effect by suggesting fearlessness and menace to outsiders.

The most famous rivals of the UK’s motorcycling Rockers in the early-Sixties were the scooter-mounted Mods, who prefer their speed in pill form. While they eschew death imagery, even the style-obsessed Mods have some connections. The subculture’s unofficial anthem is ‘My Generation’ (1965), featuring the immortal line ‘Hope I die before I get old’ – a typical Mod expression of extreme vanity, seeing middle age as literally a fate-worse-than-death. The line’s inevitably returned to haunt the band. When they played the number as the finale to the recent Olympic Closing Ceremony, only their drummer, Keith Moon had lived up to the song’s rash aspiration, dead of a drugs overdose in 1978. An archetypal hellraiser, ‘Moon the Loon’ is just one of a gallery of subculture icons who have made the ultimate sacrifice, dying rather than abandon the subculture’s reckless lifestyle. His last words were reputed to have been ‘If you don’t like it, you can just fuck off!’

On the surface, the Hippies, with their peace and love credo, are even more improbable aficionados of morbidity, preferring such exotic notions as reincarnation. Yet they gave us bands with names like the Grateful Dead (who took their name from a macabre European folk tale), and gloomy songs like ‘The End’ and the ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag’. The former song – a morbid, somewhat surreal, meditation on loss from 1967 – was by the Doors who explored the darkest fringes of the psychedelic spectrum, proving that all was not sweetness and light among the Flower Children. The ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag’ (1965) by Country Joe and the Fish, became one of the leading anti-Vietnam War songs of the era, a sardonic, satirical number they famously played at the Woodstock Festival in August of 1969. For the Hippies, death was metaphorical, metaphysical, and political.

By 1969 Hippie optimism had largely expired, and leading the funeral dirge from England’s gloomy industrial Midlands was Black Sabbath, now recognised as the first Heavy Metal band. Death loomed large on Sabbath’s bleak horizon. Songs like ‘Electric Funeral’ are threnodies to a world destined to perish under a nuclear holocaust, while tracks like ‘Hand of Doom’ focussed on the awful fate that awaited an individual who had tried to escape the horrors of the outside world with drugs. Historical or fanastic escapism, frequently with morbid or violent overtones, is a recurring Metal riff. The definitive example is perhaps ‘The Trooper’ (1983) by Iron Maiden. It’s inspired by the famous Charge of the Light Brigade of 1854, when a British cavalry force made a heroic but suicidal attack in the Crimean War, led by the 17^th Lancers, a regiment with the ‘death or glory’ motto. Battle is a dominant theme in Heavy Metal, but the prevailing story is one of doomed heroism, the Romantic vision of the warrior falling before overwhelming odds.

A popular fantasy figure in Metal and kindred subcultures is the Grim Reaper, the personifaction of death drawn from medieval folkore. The scythe-wielding Reaper was particularly popular among the medieval common populace in his role as the Great Leveller – personification of the idea that nobody can escape death – that death makes no distinction between peasant and prince, or pauper and pope. The idea that privilege and status dissolve before the Reaper remain’s a source of grim satisfaction – even black humour – for those who feel excluded by society. Another afiliated death tradition with modern subcultural resonance is that of memento mori. If one of our medieval ancestors saw a skull, scythe or suchlike in art or masonry, they wouldn’t interpret it as a celebration of death, but an admonition to live your life to the full because none of us are immortal. Many insiders would defend the morbid themes and imagery in subculture in similar terms – that an awareness of death is a powerful incentive to appreciate life.

No subcultures is as heavily associated with death as the theatrical offshoot of Punk, initially known as Deathrock in the US and Goth in Europe. There are essentially two attitudes to death in Goth, exemplified in Britain by Bauhaus and Joy Division, and 45 Grave and Christian Death in America. Bauhaus are widely credited with releasing the first Goth recording, the 1979 EP ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’. Bela Lugosi is the film actor who became famous for playing Dracula in 1931, and the song is essentially a spooky mood piece, calculated to appeal to fans of vintage horror. 45 Grave are also purveyors of somewhat camp, ghoulish fun, the tenor of the band’s gleefully sick humour evident in their lead singer’s stagename Dinah Cancer. By way of contrast, there is no gallows humour in the dark, bleak, experimental rock of either Joy Division or Christian Death. Indeed the authenticity of the suicidal despair that defined the music was underlined when both band’s lead singers hung themselves – Ian Curtis of Joy Division in 1980, Christian Death’s Rozz Williams 18 years later.

Such tragedies give weight to those who accuse subcultures of feeding unhealthy morbidity, even branding them teen suicide cults. Yet these are extreme, and happily rare examples, and both men had serious issues – Curtis’s depression fed by chronic ill health, Williams plagued by a heroin habit – problems they naturally addressed in their art. If we are to censure sad music, then we must strike everything from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by the Beatles to Tchaikovsky’s ‘Symphony Number 6’ from our collective playlists. Sometimes, for those plagued by depression, the melancholy sound of a kindred soul can be the only meaningful therapy. Sincere, sad music can provide powerful catharsis. In recent years Emo has threatened to eclipse Goth as the favourite target for subcultural critics. In 2008, the suicide of a thirteen-year-old English girl triggered a crusade in the UK press, the rightwing paper the Dail Mail running headlines like ‘Why No Child is Safe From the Sinister Cult of Emo’, focusing on the teen’s love of bands like My Chemical Romance as the cause of the tragedy.

Some leapt to the defence of My Chemical Romance and the Emo subculture. ‘For the majority of fans, emo music acts like a release valve, driving away all the negative energy and emotion inside them,’ observed the media and popular culture lecturer Dr Dan Laughey. Vikki Bourne attended a protest against the anti-Emo stories in the press with her daughter Kayleigh, 15, saying they were both huge fans of My Chemical Romance and enjoyed a closer relationship as a result. ‘Emos are being portrayed as self-harming and suicidal and miserable and they’re not,’ said Vikki. ‘Since my daughter met the friends she’s got, she’s happy, she’s got a social life, she’s not suicidal, she’s got confidence.’ A Scottish study on attempted suicide and self-harm among teens conducted the following year, did find a higher incidence among Goths. Robert Young, one of the researchers involved, observed that ‘since our study found that more reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a Goth, this suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the Goth subculture. Rather than posing a risk, it’s also possible that by belonging to this subculture young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers.’

Perhaps the most exuberantly macabre subculture, and hence most difficult for outsiders to comprehend, is Death Metal. Its imagery and lyrics are dominated by violent death and post mortem putrefaction – ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ by Cannibal Corpse and ‘Regurgitated Guts’ by Death are typical song titles. In many respects the attraction is the same as that of gory horror films, though that begs the question of why those appeal to a similar audience. The desire to almost literally wallow in the grisly viscera of human mortality is partly simply the pleasure of shocking outsiders, while showing that you can take – even enjoy – such imaginary butchery. There’s also a lot more humour involved than often appreciated – of a sick joke taking something so far beyond the realms of good taste as to be absurd. Gallows humour is also an age-old way of coping with the fear of injury and death – of using familiarity to pull the sharp teeth from the Reaper’s rictus grin.

This use of humour to diminish worries is, of course, an almost universal human characteristic. It’s just that Death Metal takes it further. Most of the attitudes to death discussed in this article can be found in less extreme forms in mainstream culture. Death is endemic in the mainstream media – from TV cop shows and war films to news reports on disasters – though the emphasis is usually on dying or killing as opposed to on death itself. While our ancestors were familiar with death courtesy of high mortality rates from infancy onwards, slaughtering their own livestock, open-casket funerals, and so forth, today we have largely isolated ourselves from the realities of death. It has become something of a dirty secret, and outsiders – not least members of subcultures – have a tendency to relish airing dirty secrets. A comfortable relationship with taboos like death helps distinguish outlaws and outcasts from conventional culture, while helping to maintain a healthy society by acting as a constant reminder that we can’t simply brush things that make us uncomfortable under the carpet.

It isn’t always easy being an author. I mean it’s not tough in the same way as, say, saving old ladies from a burning building or working the late shift at A&E on a Saturday night for a living. But we do all have our crosses to bear (even if some us prefer to carry them inverted). On this particular occasion, I thought I’d have an unattractively self-indulgent whine about the problems with getting anything vaguely original published. It’s a particular issue at the moment, as the reflex response to the harsh economic climate from many publishers and editors is to pull their heads in and only print the most conservative material they can find. For somebody who likes to write (and read) something a little different, this can be problematic.

I thought I’d offer a concrete example in the shape of a profile rejected from my recent book Vampire Lovers.  Most books – indeed most creative endeavours – are conceived with compromise. This is usually healthy. The confident hand of a skilled, sympathetic editor almost invariably improves a book or article. (I talked about this in my previous rumination ‘Does Size Matter?‘ http://www.gavinbaddeley.com/archives/380) However, there is a balance to be struck, and it is frustrating when the direction of a magazine article or book is unduly compromised by the demands of a – frequently illusory – lucrative target audience. Vampire Lovers was overtly born from a compromise. My publisher thought Twilight  made vampires a commercial proposition, while I’m interested in the undead, and thought I could do something worthwhile with the subject matter, including profiles of TV and cinema’s leading bloodsucking sex symbols, leavened with ruminations on what made them appealing.

I confess that I’m not a fan of Twilight, but I do think it’s interesting as phenomenon, and could certainly get my teeth into that. The idea was to balance the profiles between male and female, and cult and popular subjects, to create a book I felt was well-rounded and potentially entertaining to a wide audience. However, I reached a deadlock with the publisher. They insisted I include someone from The Vampire Diaries TV show, and drop one of the cultier old entries to accomodate it. I could find nothing interesting – or indeed nice – to say about the series which simply seemed a cynical crossbreed of the crassest components of Twilight and True Blood. Moreover, I didn’t want to lose any of my original cast of oddball bloodsuckers which I felt helped give the book character and depth. As anyone who owns a copy of the book can attest, I lost this particular struggle.

It was particularly depressing that the entry that hit the cutting room floor was the gorgeous Soledad Miranda in her mesmeric performance in Vampyros Lesbos, perhaps the definitive cult vamp flick. I like to think the reviews bore me out. Most were very positive but a couple expressed a desire to see more female entries and a greater emphasis on cult classics than recent Twilight cash-ins. I reread parts of the book recently, and I’m broadly pleased with it – unlike the vast majority of recent bandwagon-jumping, undead pulp, Vampire Lovers  was written by a true lifelong fan, and I think it shows. I still, however, wish Soledad had stayed and that I’d never heard of the Vampire Diaries, and because it seems a shame to waste the essay on Vampyros Lesbos I’m posting it here. (If you own a copy of Vampire Lovers, please feel free to tear out the section on The Vampire Diaries, print this out, and crudely glue it in its place.)

“A Psycho-Sexadelic Horror Freakout!”

Soledad Miranda

as

Countess Nadine Carody

in

 Vampyros Lesbos

Just what qualifies as a true cult movie? How about a sexually-charged, subtitled Spanish-German vampire movie, set in Istanbul, about a foxy Hispanic, man-hating vampire lesbian? Our gorgeous Sapphic bloodsucker, one Countess Carody, moonlights as a surreal stripper in a seedy Turkish cabaret club. By day, she doesn’t sleep in a coffin, but likes to sunbathe nude in front of her beachside apartment, itself a testament to the most lurid interior design chic of its day, a pad so tacky it travels round the clock to become cool. The same 70s hipster style is evident among the cast – chicks in peekaboo negligees and thick false eyelashes, guys in big tinted specs and heavy sideburns. Add an appropriate soundtrack – all swirling Hammond organ, funked up sitar and a breathy voice whispering “Ecstasy” – and, if anything, the 1970 movie Vampyros Lesbos seems almost over-qualified in the cult department.

One prerequisite of cult status in cinematic terms is the ability to divide critics and audiences, and Vampyros Lesbos certainly does that. While most cineastes turn their noses up at a film widely dismissed as a crass monument to technical ineptitude and lurid bad taste, to fans it is a bizarre tour de force, perhaps the masterpiece of the man responsible, Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco. It’s undeniably Franco’s vision at work here. He not only directed and wrote, but also takes a supporting role in Vampyros Lesbos, as the sleazy hotel clerk Memmet, a psychosexual sadist, sent over the edge when his wife falls victim to the charms of Countess Carody. If not one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Jess is surely one of the busiest. Franco has over 150 directing credits to his name, though an exact total is difficult to come by, as his films frequently appear with varying titles, in numerous versions (Vampyros Lesbos has been released under at least a dozen different names, from The Heritage of Dracula to The Vampire Women).

Devotees can immediately identify Vampyros Lesbos film as their idol’s work under any title, as it contains so many of the inimitable characteristics of a Franco film, though whether this reflects a unique vision, or is simply the inevitable consequence of making so many films so quickly is open to debate. There is plenty of handheld camerawork, leading to both interesting angles and unsteady frames, while zoom shots – so frequent in some Franco films as to seem close to a nervous compulsion – are in evidence. The small crew is multi-national, as is the cast, adding to a strange aura of exoticism and chaos that characterises classic Franco, the multi-lingual Spaniard habitually filming under conditions most directors would consider creative suicide. Film shares a place in the director’s affections with a lifelong passion for jazz, and fans have compared his unruly style of filmmaking with the unpredictable, improvisational qualities of freeform jazz. Jazz scores are also a Franco trademark – frequently composed by Jess himself – and the soundtrack to Vampyros Lesbos, released under the subtitle ‘Sexadelic Dance Party’, enjoys a cult following in its own right.  

“Men still disgust me. Many were captivated by me. Many women. I bewitched them. They lost their identity, I became them. But then I met Linda. Now I’m under her spell.”

Sex is also key to his celluloid recipe, and no Franco film is complete without a lengthy scene lingering on (or zooming into) a nubile nymphet, writhing in an orgasmic reverie on the floor. On writhing duties in Vampyros Lesbos is the Spanish actress Soledad Miranda as Countess Nadine Carody. The Countess had an encounter with Count Dracula himself, who she explains rescued her from a rapist. She walked away from the experience as a vampire with a disdainful contempt for men, while the Count fell under Nadine’s erotic spell. “He was addicted to my body”, she explains. In Vampyros Lesbos we follow the progress of a blonde estate agent named Linda, who has been having erotic nightmares about Nadine, and is assigned to settle Dracula’s inheritance. It turns out, of course, that the chief beneficiary of the Count’s estate is the haunting brunette of her torrid dreams, and Linda’s supernatural seduction begins in earnest. In many respects, this makes Vampyros Lesbos an erotic adaptation of the original Dracula, though one of the most unorthodox ever filmed, replacing most of the Victorian novel’s principle male characters with sexually liberated ladies.

This wasn’t Franco’s first take on Bram Stoker’s famous book. As already noted in our piece on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Spaniard had previously made a version which, like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 epic, was sold as a faithful adaptation of Stoker’s original novel. It was a dubious claim, but sufficient to convince a reluctant Christopher Lee – the saturnine English actor who had become an international star playing the Count for Hammer studios, but had sworn to renounce the part – to don the midnight cape once more. Franco’s Count Dracula also featured Soledad Miranda in her first major role for the director, as the Count’s victim, Lucy Westenra. “The normally reticent Lee waxed poetic about the sheer chemistry of this naturally poised beauty”, according to authors Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs in Immoral Tales, their classic study of cult European horror cinema. “During filming they had to retake the neck-biting scene over two dozen times, and even after twenty or thirty takes he still felt goosebumps and shivered with the natural electricity during every take. She had the X ingredient, that indefinable quality that could have made her a star.”

It’s a story that has all the hallmarks of a horror movie myth. Not least, some cynics might contend, because the idea of a famously fast operator like Franco allowing dozens of takes of any scene seems singularly improbable. But the brief partnership between Jess Franco and Soledad Miranda invites cinematic myth. As the past tense employed in the above quote implies, Soledad never enjoyed stardom – even the cult stardom conferred by films like Vampyros Lesbos – as she tragically died in a car accident, just weeks after Vampyros Lesbos premiered. The Spanish actress died on her way to sign an important new contract that may have paved the way for the international recognition that had thus far eluded her. Soledad Miranda was already something of a celebrity in her homeland, courtesy of a string of film and TV credits. But Spain was still under the dictatorship of Jess’s namesake General Francisco Franco, who imposed stringent media censorship, and Spanish celebrity seldom meant much abroad.

Soledad made several films with Jess Franco, though she mostly used the name Susann Korda or Susan Korday in the credits, as such sexually provocative roles invited condemnation in the socially conservative Spain of the day. Ironically, many of Jess Franco’s films were banned in Francoist Spain. The director told Amy Brown, curator of Sublime Soledad, an on-line shrine to the actress, “the films she made with me from Dracula on, were the films that the Spanish audience didn’t know! They haven’t seen it. Because the film was forbidden by the Spanish censorship…” Franco (from hereon in, Jess, not General) has always been fulsome in his praise for his most famous leading lady. “I thought she was fantastic and everybody in the crew said, ‘Oh, my God, she’s wonderful, she’s perfect’”, he told leading cult film expert Tim Lucas. “I think Soledad was fantastic in my Dracula. Even Christopher was very impressed.”

In common with all great cult stars, Soledad Miranda’s screen presence encapsulated something – in her case something powerfully erotic – that is devilishly difficult to capture with words. Jess Franco suggested to Tim Lucas that she “seemed to come fully to life only on camera.” Franco elaborates that she “had a personality which translated to the screen a lot of the things that she felt deep inside. But it translated in an unconscious way. She was a funnel. It was very simple for me to explain things to her. She got it immediately because she was like a funnel. I think she had this special thing that the stars have. It’s not that you have to be a great actor but when this actor enters the scene you don’t look at anybody else – you only look at this girl or this guy. And she had this. She was a very sweet and very nice person… It happened very often with the Spanish gypsy people… Those gypsies had a kind of majesty and personal class. Who knows why? Because there’s no reason for it. They work very well and they pose in a fantastic way – a lot of them. Soledad was a maximum of this kind of person.”

Soledad Miranda was born of Portuguese parents in the Spanish city of Seville, with gypsy ancestry, began her career as a flamenco dancer, and made her media debut in the gossip columns as the rumoured girlfriend of Spain’s leading bullfighter. All of which contribute to the image of the ultimate sultry senorita, a Hispanic femme fatale, a modern version of the operatic anti-heroine Carmen. Yet there was something more to Soledad, something fans suggest was brought out by Jess Franco in his oddball, poetic, sleazy horror films. “Once a young, dimpled, bubbly starlet, she became the pale, haunted, mysterious icon of Franco’s movies”, according to Amy Brown. “She was not beautiful”, insists the director himself. “I saw her through my lens many times and she was not beautiful. But she had a mystery.” He’s wrong by most estimation – Soledad was uncommonly beautiful – but there was something more to the actress, the enigmatic sense of dangerous sensual energy contained within her delicate physique. “She was very sentimental and very carnal at the same time”, says Jess.

“You are one of us now. The Queen of the Night will bear you up on her black wings.”

While Franco was distraught by the death of his first major muse, it did nothing to slow his cinematic output, and he would find a new muse. Lina Romay began her acting career playing the gypsy girl Esmeralda in Franco’s 1972 film The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, a typically torrid and kinky version of the Frankenstein story, where surreal plotting and low-budget invention soon overwhelm the narrative. Franco has described Lina as “a little bit of a re-incarnation of Soledad Miranda”, though as their relationship developed – both professionally and off camera – Romay’s own distinctive qualities soon shone through. The adjective often applied to the actress is ‘uninhibited’. While Franco says Soledad Miranda had no qualms about her nude scenes, his new star appeared to positively thrive in the sweaty realms of sexual excess he created on screen. Unabashedly sexy rather than beautiful in a Hollywood sense, Lina staked her own claim to undead immortality in Female Vampire (1972), in which she plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, a mute succubus who drains her victims during oral sex, frequently wearing little more than boots, a belt and a cloak. “It’s said than I am an exhibitionist”, observes the actress. “Every actor is one – I gladly accept that. I’m not a hypocrite.”

As mainstream cinema became more sexually explicit, independent filmmakers needed to stay one step ahead, and Jess Franco’s work increasingly crossed the line between erotica and pornography. It’s a distinction the director doesn’t recognise. “What is hardcore?” he says. “What is the difference between an erotic film and a porno film? It is the point of view of the camera. So you know it’s a stupid classification. If you shoot a scene with the camera above it is erotic, but you do the same thing with close-ups… it’s porno. The intention is the same. It’s the point of view of the camera.” On a more practical level, if he wished to keep making films, Franco needed to take his funding where he could find it, and this increasingly meant making pictures that would appeal to the burgeoning ‘adult’ movie market. For Franco filmmaking is clearly a passion that borders upon compulsion. While critics might castigate his slipshod production values and gleeful disdain for good taste, nobody can seriously doubt his dedication to the medium, making movies in less time than it takes most of his Hollywood contemporaries to agree on a schedule.

The startling success of the 50 Days of Grey trilogy of female-friendly smut has inspired a great deal of comment. Personally, I don’t see it as a literary phenomenon, so much as yet another example of the hive mind hysteria that drives modern culture. Folk are so desperate for the comfort of knowing that they’re immersed in the self-same bullshit as countless other drones, that the actual content and character of said shit is of secondary importance at best in my opinion. Which is depressing. Uniquely depressing is the theme of 50 Shades of Grey, which involves some imbecile frantic to be fucked over by some rich charmless shit in a suit and tie. For the rest of us non-masochists, thoroughly sick of being fucked over by charmless shits in suits, this is in very poor taste.

But there again, I’m no expert on sadomasochism. Somebody who is, is Mark Ramsden, a musician, author and seasoned veteran of the fetish scene. Radical Desire, Mark’s justly acclaimed guide to all things kinky, has recently been republished in a substantially expanded edition, with illustrations by his wife Ruth. You’ll learn more in an afternoon browsing the down-to-earth, witty essays in its pages, than a lifetime subscription to certain slick fetish journals, or countless interminable evenings being sneered at by scene snobs in overpriced rubber pants to the strains of deafening dance music in a sweaty West London cellar. So I thought I’d have a brief chat with Mark about the current state-of-play in BDSM, and how fetish fiction transformed from the transgressive rantings of a disgraced French aristo and feral philosopher, to indigestibly cheesy chick-lit penned by a London housewife who got her hormones in a tangle over the terminally turgid Twilight saga. Are these the End Times?…

So, Mark, how did we get from 120 Days in Sodom to 50 Shades of Grey?

Maybe it would have been better if more people had remembered Sacher-Masoch’s woman-worshiping consensual vision rather than the transgressive cruelty of de Sade, but Krafft-Ebing put them together and unfortunately it stuck. At least the recent mainstream acceptability has finally wrenched public perception away from horrific tortures. All you need now is a skyscraper, a fortune and a helicopter…

Have you read 50 Shades of Grey? Do you think it represents a new level of tolerance for fetishism or a new nadir in S&M’s descent into mainstream banality?

I can’t read a book with 86 repetitions of ‘Holy crap!’ – some of which are the more elegant ‘crap!’ – London expressions such as ‘Laters’ transposed to Seattle, plus numerous other false notes, even before we get to the very weak mash up of Kink and Mills and Boon. It may be true that there’s no such thing as bad chilli but it seems you can actually make smacking someone’s bare bottom boring. But then I can’t get turned on by improbable ‘Masters of the Universe’ or shy virgins. It’s amusing that a fan fic based on Twilight has succeeded, when that book was written by a woman hoping to promote chastity among teenagers. 

The secret may well be a lot of unresolved sexual tension then gradually escalating intimacy towards eventual marriage – oh dear have I defused the explosive surprise? – which has been a popular template for centuries. Like The Da Vinci Code it doesn’t say much for a lot of our fellow humans but then the film – also like The Da Vinci Code – will be much better.  The upside is that a lot of toys that were once unthinkable are now mainstream plus a lot of people are having a lot more sex, indeed much more varied sex. Plus the man as hero has been restored. (Are you listening misandrist television advertisers?) 

As a Satanist, but not a fetishist, I attended the memorial held by the Torture Garden club for Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan several years back. I remember being struck by the countless ‘official’ film crews and photographers. It all seemed rather crass and commercial somehow… Though there was at least one room where they weren’t playing terrible techno… In general has the increasing slickness and fashion chic involved in the fetish scene been a boon or a disaster?

It remains a struggle if we’re talking about clubs. Plus there was this insane court case recently where a barrister nearly lost his career over some fisting videos. Venues and organisers have more and more legal problems, the recession has been hard. The struggle is by now means over even if you can watch what you like in your own home. Twenty years of heavy public involvement was enough for me but there will always be another generation. I was in any case always more interested in real people not conforming to stereotypical roles of Sub or Dom, and I was never really part of the rubber haute couture scene, although I wrote for the upmarket scene magazine Skin Two.

 Is a hint of the forbidden a crucial element in fetishism’s appeal?

Yes. Naughty but nice, if we may reference the old cream-cake advert...

I get the impression that you’ve become more acquainted with the darker side of
the occult-fetish axis over the years. Is this true and how common is an interest in Satanism and such among fetish folk?

If you’ve already broken the taboo that sex can only happen in the context of a loving heterosexual relationship and indeed expanded what constitutes sex then it’s not much of a step to embrace Left Hand path spirituality, confronting the darkness within us all. Scourging and bondage crossed over from fetishism into magic, as defined by Gerald Gardener mid-20th Century, but as practised by folk since time immemorial.

I’ve always thought that there’s a lot more black humour in Sade than generally
recognised, and your book Radical Desire is frequently very funny. Yet fetishism overall appears kind of humourless. How do you see the relationship between comedy and kinky sex?

Fetishism is full of crashing bores arguing like trainspotters or DIY enthusiasts as to correct practice, indeed arguing extremely abusively as many of these people have personality disorders and some are playing their role as ultimate Dom or Domme too faithfully. Many are seeking revenge for old wounds by attacking other people using the privilege of a Top. It’s best just to meet like-minded individuals online or at a munch then abandon the herd as quickly as possible.

Could you say a little about the illustrations in Radical Desire? I gather they’re taken from a tarot deck…

Some are from our Dark Tantra Tarot pack, the only fetish pack as far as I know, Ruth Ramsden has more of her fetish illustrations in her new Cutting Edge Press novel Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot and a wider selection of work on her website. 

Do they still play terrible dance music at fetish clubs?

Well, it would be a shame to waste all that MDMA… If you don’t fancy the usual ‘50 shades of dance’ – generally Hard House rather than Techno these days – then the Rock/Industrial/Gothic music at Club Antichrist is a splendid alternative, plenty of depravity, fashion and startling performance art. Well established and very popular. http://clubantichrist.com They also have a good comprehensive forum the Alterium http://thealterium.com/ where you will find lots of interest to yourself. Books, movies, Dark Culture however it is manifest can be accessed there. Also highly recommended is the Gate http://www.thegateclub.co.uk/ a much smaller club run by scene legends Master Keith and Mistress Demonic where one can actually hear any indecent proposals. They’re hosting a Vampire Fascination night on October 22nd at the Resistance Gallery in London for everyone from beginners to serious players.

 
Radical Desire is available from all the regular book outlets. For more on Mark’s other books, plus his music and other endeavours, check out his site http://markramsden.moonfruit.com/

I had mixed feelings when it was announced that my home city of York was planning to stage the Mystery Plays this summer. (For the benefit of those unfamiliar with Mystery Plays, they are traditional performances, depicting epic biblical dramas for the benefit of the masses in the Middle Ages.) On the one hand I was very enthusiastic. I’m an ardent medievalist, fan of the theatre, and particularly intrigued by the Mystery Plays, as they often give fascinating hints as to attitudes to Satan and general devilment in the Middle Ages, beyond the obvious orthodox views presented by the Church. However, it quickly became apparent that the 2012 York production was heavily adapted to suit contemporary tastes. One look at the trailer (posted for your viewing pleasure below) convinced me to forgo a ticket and save my shekels for other artistic endeavours…

You see, as this was designed to coincide with celebrations to mark the 800th anniversary of York receiving its Royal Charter from King John in 1212, and was to be performed against the magnificent backdrop of the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey in the Museum Gardens, it didn’t seem too much to ask for the production to have an authentic medieval theme and feel. We want old school angels with pearly white wings and fire-breathing demons emerging from the hellmouth. But, as anybody whose watched the above trailer will know, instead they decided to fuck with it. So, it’s sort of set in 1951 (though where the rainbow collective of multi-coloured dervishes come in is anybody’s guess). According to Damian Cruden, the artistic director, ‘in order for the Plays to remain alive and have a future, there has to be recognition that they are stories of our time, and we can look back at the whole of the 20th century as being of our time.’

It’s the same old excuse wheeled out by people who fuck with time-honoured classics. The script is so classic its timeless, but nobody will want to see it unless we change it. Bullshit. If its timeless, perform it as it was intended. If you want something contemporary – or from 1951 for no particular fucking reason – find something set in 1951 or whenever. Don’t put half your cast in housecoats and hairnets and expect nobody to notice that the language is all centuries old. If the story’s universal, don’t fuck with it. If it’s not, and that really bothers you, find another. I’m probably jaded by studying English at school, where we were frequently taken to see Shakespeare productions by third rate theatre companies, who tried to obscure their incompetence by relocating their plays into a space ship or gangland Chicago in the 1920s.

The trouble is, of course, that if Shakespeare had intended the battle scenes in Macbeth to be fought with rayguns, or Richard III to be running a bootlegging business, he’d have put it in the script. But he didn’t, so your production is going to be suffused with a sort of threadbare surrealism that doesn’t enhance anybody’s understanding or enjoyment of the play. Of course, it isn’t just shitty repertory Shakespeare that falls victim to this compulsion to fuck with the settings of established classics. Many Hollywood Shakespeare adaptations play fast and loose with the Bard’s plays in order to make no obvious point, apart from showing an arrogant disrespect for the playwright they purport to revere. Recently, for example, a film version of The Tempest gave the central character of the wizard Prospero a sex change, naming her Prospera, and casting Helen Mirren in the role. “She had her whole life taken away from her because she was a woman” explained the director Julie Taymor. (Which is all well and good, but has fuck all to do with what Bill Shakespeare wrote.)

While, to be fair, this Tempest is far from disastrous, I’d maintain that with her sex change antics, Taymor hasn’t adapted the play – she’s just fucked with it for the sake of it. A good adaptation in my books is one where elements of the inspiration are woven into a new production, leading to something which can enhance the viewer’s appreciation of both the original and the adaptation. So, you can set The Tempest in space, so long as you do something creative, clever or – most importantly original – with it. Such as with the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet, which borrows much from The Tempest, but builds from it rather than simply fucking with it. Or the 1943 horror flick I Walked with a Zombie, which resulted from a deliberate collision between Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Gothic romance novel Jane Eyre and Haitan voodoo. It shouldn’t work, but it does…

More dubious, perhaps is the recent ‘mash-up’ novel Jane Slayre which crossbreeds the Bronte original with additional vampire-slaying text. This is, of course, just one of the tsunami of classic literature/horror parody mash-up novels that have emerged in the wake of the succcess of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was, at the very least, original and a strong gimmick. It’s also difficult to imagine what you could do to a Jane Austen novel that wouldn’t improve it. These more recent entries into the mash-up genre however, are starting to smell of laziness and desperation. Worth picking up to smile wryly at the cover, but probably not worth treating with the respect due an actual book. Or indeed adaptation. After the original cute idea, now lazy writers and editors are just flailing around looking for other incongruous classics to fuck with, and I for one don’t feel like encouraging them.

One of the most intriguing examples of the thin line between adapting and fucking with your inspiration takes us into the realms of the vampire. While little read today, Dr John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre, inspired by his association with the scandalous playboy poet Lord Byron, can still lay claim to being among the most influential vampire tales ever written. Certainly our modern concept of the vampire as a seductive ladykiller has more to do with Polidori’s story than Dracula as conceived by Bram Stoker. Polidori’s Vampyre was widely adapted for the stage in the early 1800s, particularly in Paris, in what amounted to the first popular vampire craze. In 1820, the British dramatist James Planche decided to adapt it for the London stage in perhaps the first major vampire production staged in English. Ironically, Planche later became known for contributing to authenticity in costumes for drama, particularly Shakespeare.

According to Planche in 1823, ‘while a thousand pounds were frequently lavished upon a Christmas pantomime or an Easter spectacle, the plays of Shakespeare were put upon the stage with makeshift scenery, and, at the best, a new dress or two for the principal characters.’ He decided this would not do – playwrights should stop fucking with Shakespeare and present it in the costumes the Bard originally intended – a decision that helped make Planche into one of London’s leading dramatists. Three years before, however, he hadn’t felt the same about his production of the Vampyre. As the theatre had a large collection of Scottish costumes left over from a previous production, Planche opted to relocate the action to the highlands, dressing his lead vampire in appropriate tartan attire. The Vampyre was only a minor success, which may be just as well. Otherwise subsequent vampires might well have followed suit, trading in cloaks for kilts, and when the Count referred to the ‘sweet music’ made by the ‘children of the night’, it may well have been the mournful wail of the bagpipes…

I’m certainly not totally against noise. I’ve seen the loudest band in the world several times, probably have minor hearing damage to show for it, and don’t regret it. The main reason I don’t regret it is that anything that turns down the volume dial on the rest of existence can’t be all bad. For there is a time and place for everything and, increasingly, it’s proving impossible to identify the location where tranquillity can be found. Perhaps it’s just me being my familiar intolerant self. For example, I’ve found myself shushing people at heavy metal concerts. That can’t be right surely? Allow me to elaborate… 

If I go to a metal gig I tend to avoid the front. If someone elbows me in the face while flailing around to the sounds, my reflex reaction is to express my displeasure physically. So it’s better for all concerned if I plant myself around halfway back. Trouble is, I then find myself among the gobshites. The idiots who, having shelled out on a ticket, then proceed to spend the entire performance talking mindless shit to their companions. But, because some inconsiderate characters on the stage are playing loud music, they need to shout. Loudly and incessantly throughout the performance. Try as I might, I find it really difficult to lose myself in the music with some fucktard just behind my right ear, bellowing at his pointless friend about what he had for breakfast, how many pineapples he can fit up his butt, or whatever. So I find myself in the surreal situation of asking people to pipe down. At a heavy metal concert…

At least, at a heavy metal concert you still have the option of moving toward the speakers and braving the moshers (and resultant potential ABH convictions). Other entertainment media are inevitably even more vulnerable to the endless babble of the drones. If I even have to begin explaining what is wrong with talking in a cinema, then please stop reading this now, go find a spoon, and scoop out your own sorry eyeballs. The only question, really, is why people do it. The generous interpretation is ignorance, though the very term has now come to encompass bad manners in some colloquial usage. While there is certainly some attention-seeking involved in some cases, for many offenders, it just doesn’t occur to them to shut the fuck up. Ever…

There are no environments where silence is golden anymore. The concept of quiet contemplation has been lost to us as a species. Libraries, once temples to hush and knowledge, have become glorified crèches with free internet café facilities. It may well be nice for young mothers to have somewhere to let their shrieking offspring run riot, and popular to have a convenient place for bored teenagers to check their Facebook for free. But libraries once provided an oasis of calm for those who couldn’t otherwise escape from noise – vital for some poor souls who had nowhere else to study in peace (or perhaps escape a home filled with screaming infants and callow adolescents bullying each other on social network sites). Yet these final bastions of serenity have also inevitably fallen to the gobshite hordes.

Where does it all begin? Part of the blame must rest with the mobile phone, a device apparently designed to assault tranquillity on every front. From its ability to play tinny dance music on public transport, to its constant, insistent demands that its owner engage in brain-suckingly pointless conversation, call it what you will – mobile, cellphone, iphone – it is not your friend, and you are not its master. Surely, it cannot be a coincidence that, as the forms of media for communication have multiplied, meaningful conversation has withered on the vine. I’ve often thought that the sign of a true friendship is the ability to sit at a table in a pleasant bar together, and not feel the need to utter a word if there was nothing to say. Yet most social environments abhor silence more vehemently than nature abhors a vacuum – the prospect of calm in a conversation instilling a sense of raw panic in most people in mere seconds, allayed only by producing your communication device and filling the ether with yet more cerebral flatulence.

It is my belief that this goes back further than infants receiving their first mobile phone, to the very earliest months of existence. It occurs to me that, in the days of our distant ancestors, any baby making the amount of racket now accepted as normal would be abandoned to die. It would attract predators, and better one exasperating mouth silenced than the entire clan put at risk. Now, the situation is reversed. Even the dullest infant rapidly learns that shrieking attracts attention and reward. Perhaps this begins the building sense of entitlement that seems to be becoming increasingly prominent in our culture. At the very least, surely it inculcates the value of making a constant, infuriating, pointless din in every breathing moment. So, for the few among you who still value moments of pleasing, simple silence, I tip my hat to you. The rest of you, please, just once SHUT THE FUCK UP!

I’ve finally completed the last of my three part series of essays on Satanic cinema for the fine folk at Brutal as Hell – find it here – http://www.brutalashell.com/2012/07/how-to-win-friends-and-sacrifice-people-part-3-of-3/ – the piece concludes with a potentially exciting teaser…

Congratulations are due to the rock scribe Neil Daniels on completing his lavishly illustrated 200-page celebration of the career of Iron Maiden. Entitled The Ultimate Unauthorised History of the Beast, this handsome volume is replete with passion for Britain’s best loved metal band. Further details from the publisher here –  http://www.qbookshop.com/products/194571/9780760342213/Iron-Maiden.html  The book features guest reviews of Maiden’s back catalogue from fellow metal authors, including a couple penned by yours truly.

(Neil’s also collated interviews with leading rock journalists over the years, including one featuring dubious words of wisdom from my good self…  http://neildaniels.com/Interviews/2008/Music/Baddeley.html )

This Sunday (June 24th), as part of York’s Festival of Ideas, I’ll be one of three speakers for an afternoon of talks on Monsters and Supernatural Metamorphoses. Bob Savage will be talking on the unnatural history of horses, Jonathan Ferguson addresses the evolution of the zombie myth, while I’ll be holding forth on werewolves.

For further information, visit the web-site below… http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/talks/2012/monsters-supernatural/

On Wednesday the 27th of this month (June) I’ll be one of four speakers at the latest Strange Sermons event. Strange Sermons is a project designed to air views and experiences outside the orthodox popular or academic arena, and this event focuses on viewing the forbidden. I’ll be talking about Satanism – a subject I haven’t addressed in public for a decade now – alongside three other diverse and interesting voices. It’s at the Horse Hospital in central London, and promises to be a stimulating evening…

For further information, click here http://strangesermons.com/events/

There’s an essay by yours truly on a trio of immortal Satanists of the British Empire in the summer edition of the definitively devilish men’s magazine Old Nick…

Check here for a preview… http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/401696