Saturday, May 07, 2016

"Austerity Nostalgia"

"As a skinny white boy from the south of England, all of the things in these songs have immediate resonances. Every single time I hear something from the first two Smiths records, I immediately see a particular scene in my head from Southampton in the 80s or 90s. I can see a particular garden, street, corner shop. And the ability to evoke that is extraordinary. What the Smiths did is enormously powerful, but it's clear why they did it. Morrissey's version of pop culture and his version of England stopped at some point in the 1970s from corresponding with his obsessions and how he wanted the world to be. So he just wills this old world back into being. And because of the fact that he wasn't a dilettante, that he was obsessive about these things, it's incredibly powerful in a way that Public Service Broadcasting are not. He cares deeply about this world, despite the fact that he makes it sound horrible. He cares and wants to evoke it. As a protest against the 1980s, he wants to live in A Taste Of Honey. And that's a horrible world, and it's good that that world is dead."

Karen Shook at The Quietus interviews Owen Hatherley.

And The Guardian prints an excerpt of Hatherley's latest book, The Ministry of Nostalgia.

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