Music, memory and modern life: Saint Etienne's London

摘要

Blending city symphony and essay film, the cinematic collaborations of Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans and the pop group Saint Etienne constitute a lament for the disappearance of mid-century modern London. All deeply elegiac in tone, Finisterre (2003), What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2006) and This is Tomorrow (2007) form a loose trilogy about the ways in which Thatcherite and Blairite efforts to modernize London, to secure its central place in the global circulation of capital, have led to the loss of the idiosyncrasies, even ideals, that characterized the modernizing metropolis of the postwar period. These films seek out the residual traces of older forms of modern life (caffs, council towers, community centres), celebrating and cataloguing them in the face of their disappearance or dilapidation. They operate at the conjuncture of memory, melancholia, modernity and metropolitan life, and as such form part of a larger effort – cinematic (Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit), literary (Iain Sinclair, Shena Mackay), and artistic (Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller) – to excavate a secret history of the city and assert the value of neglected spaces and disappearing forms of modern life. This essay uses the Kelly, Evans and Saint Etienne collaborations to assess the formal limits of such works of cultural memory, which often threaten to lapse into melancholic despair, and to explore the role music might play in such efforts to remember, record, and preserve the recent past.