Revenge of The Sloane Ranger

1. Theory:

London in 2005 is a profoundly contradictory place. As its centre ossifies in concrete and tarmac, its inhabitants are developing a romantic affection for a rural life that exists far beyond the M25 perimeter. Muted tones of green and brown are emerging in the unlikeliest of places.
In the bars of Shoreditch, dot.commers and off-duty City drones lounge in heavy tan Derby brogues by Tricker’s of Jermyn Street - stout shoes suited to serious work and country pursuits. Outside, a black Audi TT zips towards an R&B Saturday-nighter called Smoove. The driver wears a navy quilted ‘Husky’ jacket by Barbour, Burlington socks and an Aquascutum scarf. A scooterist pulls up wearing one of Barbour’s black ‘International’ jackets, developed in the war years for submariners. He also carries a green netted game bag by Deben. Meanwhile on the other side of town, OutKast’s André 3000 jets in for GQ’s Man Of The Year Awards and alights first at Cordings of Piccadilly, the huntingwear supplier now part-owned by Eric Clapton. The natty Atlantan swiftly blows £9,000 on acquiring the look of a country gent.
The most urban, sophisticated and stylistically complex folk in the western world are re-imagining themselves as huntsmen, farmers and landowners, reviving an aesthetic that runs far deeper than any fashion whimsy and reveals a great deal bout the way the collective British psyche works in 2005.
In 1982, the original trendspotter Peter York codified the first flourish of the ‘Rus In Urbe’ – ‘the country in the town’ – look in his Official Sloane ranger Handbook. Its cover urged readers to ‘Live in the Country (or failing that, Kensington Square)’. Inside shows a rough line drawing of chap in a Barbour jacket (‘crumpled, oily and sweaty’), Beale & Inman cords, Viyella shirt with tattersall checks and a beetroot complexion. Dressed for a weekend on the estate, Henry forgot to change when he arrived back in town. Twenty three years since its publication, this vignette seems utterly contemporary.
The Sloanes may have retreated from the public consciousness, but they left a look that’s widely echoed in London’s offices, clubs and bars. Its roots run deep and wide. The sequel to York’s original Rus In Urbe deconstructs his codification brand by brand and reassembles a stylish and useful look in the light of sportswear’s dominance of the past 15 years and the flashbulb blindness of celebrity culture.
Peter York today see a variety of reasons for the re-trending of countrywear. ‘One is to do with the rule of passed time and recurrence,’ he says. ‘We’ve had a big dose of Seventies, which means we’re in for a big does of Eighties. The people who do wear that style have reappeared too. The fact is, and this sounds awful, but we’ve had a double dose of below-stairs celebrities and mockneyism. There’s only so much the world can take. People all know that Mockneyism is fake. So this amplifies the Whatever-Happened-To? People have thought: What happened to the Toffs? Were they all taken always and killed?
‘Also, never underestimate the power of reaction. The world has seen too much sports-related clothing and footwear. It’s very hard to keep ahead of the mass in that way.’
In many respects, the style never really disappeared. Stroll through Paris or Rome, and the well-to-do curate with their everyday sartorial choices: crisp Barbours paired with brogues imported from John Lobb, green or red cords, cashmere and flat caps. ‘It’s a very good look, if a little conformist,’ Peter York says. ‘The French have always done it and Italians do it wonderfully - much better than we do. They do it clean, suave and creamy.’
Not so much a cut-out-and-keep look as a way of thinking, Rus In Urbe also reveals a great deal about our relationship with the city, and about the London’s relationship with Britain. For years no metropolitan trendy would seen dead in a Sloane’s Barbour, the unmistakable signifier of entitlement, arrogance and the wrong kind of exclusivity in the fiercely socially divisive Eighties. In more inclusive times, those associations are fading, and they fade to reveals what more find to their liking: authenticity and durability in a world of fashion faddishness; usefulness and protection in an urban world that’s increasingly harsh and erosive.
Barbour have noticed a spike in sales in urban zones - in particular their quilted ‘Husky’ jackets are a staple among black Londoners who aspire higher than the somewhat infantile Ecko/Akademiks romper-suit look.
‘We’ve notice a lot of things coming through,’ says Claire Saunders of Barbour. ‘There always ebb and flow in fashion, but underneath there is the search for a lifestyle that’s less ephemeral, more authentic and practically useful. Barbour has always been exceptionally functional.
‘Barbour is also about escape to the country,’ she adds. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re in London, Milan or Hong Kong – it’s a human desire to escape from the stresses and strains of the city.’
There’s a similar undercurrent in the acreage of tweed seen in last year’s womenswear collections, when the romance of ‘deep country’ swept over the catwalks. Tweed – the ultimate in countrywear - was also active in another revolution. When Brian Ferry’s son stormed the Commons in protest at the foxhunting ban last year, hundreds of countrysiders clash with the police in Parliament Square. To a man they wear green tweed caps. Perverse as it may seem, a totem of old money, entitlement and rural conservatism suddenly became the symbol of revolution.
For Peter York, the ‘tweed revolution’ signals a country attempting to reconcile the yawning gap between urban and rural, between town and country. ‘London is a floating battleship that has nothing to do with England,’ he says. ‘You forget that there are people out there who are still doing what they did last year, or 20 years ago. We’ve been reminded of that rather forcibly. The whole notional [sic] battle of old money against new money is really rather acute and deeply felt. In London the top class isn’t English at all – it’s international bankers. There’s a lot of people going, Excuse me, isn’t this our place?’
Perhaps the British wear Barbours, Trickers and tweed caps to remind them, in a confusingly globalised world, who they are. Either way, they’ll keep you dry when it rains, which it will forever in the UK. That’s a trend not even Tom Ford could hope to alter.
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2. Practice

Meanwhile, you can get a sharp price on good shoes where I grew up, and good shoes are important where I live, near Clapham Common in London. In Oswestry, a market town deep in the Shrophire Marches near the foothills of Wales, Harry Hughes sell stout oxblood country brogues with quarter irons by Loake. In Guns & Ammo on Beatrice Street they sell green Shakespeare course bags with game nets, and the sadler’s near The Cross offers strong leather belts, green flat caps and tins of wax for oil coats. On sodden London Sundays I pull on my Loakes, grab my £90 Top Man Harris Tweed jacket and squire myself across Clapham Common to a gastropub near the Old Town, meeting for some lunch that we choose to imagine comes out of a piping Aga.
For many in Oswestry these are enduring, purposeful clothes suited to work and leisure under siege from nature’s attrition. But for the rest of the town’s population, they seem irrelevancies, the opposite of style. ‘Sheepshagger clothes,’ as Darrel, a 19-year-old Oswestry IT student puts it. The old GPO’s conversion two years ago into a Wetherspoons– the first recognisably ‘designer’ amenity Oswestry has known, with booths and everything – was an instant hit. Minibus crowds from Llanfyllin and Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant pack the bar in obvious Armani and deafening Versace shirts, drinking discounted shots and lagers before chips or a ruck at closing time. In the Somerfield carpark opposite Guns & Ammo, modified Novas pull up on Saturday nights and pump 50 Cent or happy hardcore into the damp air.
I’m no more alone in my ersazt (i)rus in urbe(i) fantasising than Somerfield’s 50 Cent massive are alone in their (i)urbe in rus(i) imaginings - if you live in the city Loake shoes no more substantiate a claim to countrysider status than a Vespa scooter makes you a habituée of the Roman . But they’re emblematic. Amid increasing affluence, where how society take its leisure is a luminous indicator of how it views and really feels about itself, and the answer looks muddled. Britain under Blair is experiencing a renewal in its romantic attachment to the countryside that’s less visible than its last – the Sloane Rangers Peter York identified in 1982 – but far broader in membership and influence.
At its frothiest, the leisure class’s Romanticism is expressed in the ‘brown-for-town’ affectation, a kind of sartorial available off the peg at Duffer, which hints at a search for the ‘noble stoicism’ Wordsworth described in the original flourish of Nineteenth-century Romantic thought. Meanwhile Britain’s adventure economy is booming. From mountaineering, rock-climbing, Ironman, triathlon, long-distance cycling and offroading at its hairiest extremes all the way to ‘glamping’ at lifestyle raves like the Big Chill and Fawsley Fayre at its softest, all suggest a flight from the service economy and industrial media production of the city that have replaced Blake’s dark, satanic mills. Patterns in second-home ownership in Cornwall, Western Scotland, North Wales and the Yorkshire ridings increasingly indicate a desire for distance from, rather than for convenience for the metro cities. In the light of which, the city trader’s vogue for hunting in Scotland appears the most extreme example of the urban invading the rural.
Little of this looks entirely new. But what is changing is the volume, stemming from the dizzying compression of modern life after the property boom, atomised social relations in a relentlessly competitive economy and the accelerated transcience of the digital age. In the Lakes second-homing has inflated property prices to ten times local wages, and in north Wales queues on the tracks to Snowdon’s summit are commonplace today.
And while those who live there will tell you that the rural life rarely lives up to the dreamy ideals of the urban masses, what all this really signals is a schizophrenia of mutual incomprehension between rural and urban that is growing, rather than shrinking. When Otis Ferry’s tweedy rebellion was as much a critique on the controlling Blairite model of urban have-it-all affluence as it was stance for conservative ruralism.
In his memoir ‘The Farm’, GQ contributing editor Richard Benson reaches a similarly uncomfortable conclusion: ‘It wasn’t the changing Wolds I was grieving for at all: it was myself, and the things I had lost. In the end, I was just another city person imposing a set of ideas on the countryside that the countryside had never claimed for itself.’
Urban life may difficult and ugly, but the countryside face new pressure too: the death of mixed farming, rural poverty, land pressures, erosion, disappearing ecology and encroaching commericalism. Although we need the countryside as never before, the also countryside needs more than just our weekend affection. A good pair of shoes are a good starting point in the long road to understanding, but in the city that’s all they’ll ever be – a pair of shoes.
© Kevin Braddock 2006

Cornish Pastie Millionaires

Published in the Independent On Sunday, Jun 20, 2004
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Half of London's smart set may have decamped to Cornwall to surf, breed and renovate property, but the West Country county is doing its own bit of colonising. You notice it first by the aroma: a robust scent of baking pastry, spuds, meat and turnip that comes only from a freshly baked Cornish pasty. It's the smell of the West Cornwall Pasty Company, and it now makes taste buds tingle in high streets, arcades and station concourses dotted around the country.
In just six years, Gavin and Arron Cocking's West Cornwall Pasty Company has developed from a single shop opened in Reading with a pounds 2,000 overdraft, a spark of can-do entrepreneurialism and a lot of elbow grease, to an operation that shifts 5 million pasties a year across 30 sites and generates an annual turnover of pounds 14m. Remarketing a dormant curio of British cuisine, the company has successfully tapped into our appetite for authentic gastronomic experiences in a lunchtime takeaway market that had barely progressed since Pret A Manger re-imagined the sandwich back in 1986.
Unlike the grey, unidentifiable packages of formless pastry served in chip shops, or the pre-cooked, microwavable Ginsters sold in service stations, West Cornwall's fare is painstakingly true to the original Cornish blueprint - a simple, filling and nutritionally complete meal, baked in a shape to fit Cornish tin-miners' pockets. Made in a bakery in Falmouth, the fresh pasties are cooked on site. And it's not only the traditional Cornish recipe - diced steak, potato, onion and turnip wrapped in a rough pastry parcel - that punters are feasting on. There are now 15 varieties including such previously unheard of combinations as chicken and balti, turkey and cranberry, and cheese and cauliflower.
While the pasties are taking on different forms, each of the chain's premises still warmly evokes the ruddy seaside charm of the Cocking brother's home county. Menus are painted on surfboards hung from the ceiling; walls are decorated with vistas of sandcastles and fishing boats and tables are covered with gingham cloths - emotional signifiers that find resonance with so many of us. Sat amid the tables of their King's Road branch in London's Chelsea, 38-year-old Arron explains the draw. "Pasties look appealing, they give off a great smell and even if people have no association with Cornwall, they see it as something with some history to it."
The Cockings' own story is a satisfying as their pasties. Natives of Helston on the Lizard Peninsula, Arron and Gavin, 37, returned in their mid-twenties from travelling and rekindled an old idea of bringing the authentic pasty, which they'd grown up on, to the high street. Their first outlet was an instant success. "We'd never done anything like it," Gavin recalls. "We had no DIY or shopfitting experience - I'd never picked up a hammer in my life. We taught ourselves." Within a year they'd opened five more shops, each time moving from site to site, living in the basement of each, subsisting on pasties while their girlfriends, sisters Victoria and Sarah Barber, ran the ovens and designed the shops. An old schoolfriend, Mark Christophers, quit his City job to manage the company's financial expansion.
"We've grown up on pasties, so we came up with a product like the one you'd get in Cornwall - we're convinced you'd be hard-pushed to get a better pasty in Cornwall than you can in our shops. We wanted to do a pasty we could be proud of because we have a lot of friends who come up from Cornwall and want to try it."
"But it's only a good product if it's done well," adds Mark. "It's a shame that so many places make pasties so poorly, that's done an awful lot to undermine their reputation."
It only adds to the authenticity of the experience that the company's directors are peroxide-haired, thoroughbred Cornishmen whose knockabout cheer reflects the wholesome unfussiness of their product. The Cocking brothers have managed to bake a part of their own heritage into the core of their business. It's a similar strategy to brands such as Ben & Jerry's ice-cream or Innocent Smoothies. Both have enjoyed rampant success by building local history, authenticity and fun into original food products, all of which suggests West Cornwall Company's plans to open even more stores around the country will be hungrily received.
"When we first opened, people found it quirky," Gavin says. "We all had really long hair and, at lunchtimes, the shop would be full of people in suits. It was fun, people liked coming in for the atmosphere." Consumers as far away as Glasgow are now enjoying their pasties and there's talk of opening a further eight takeaways this year and then possibly hitting New York.
Not that they're in any hurry. "I remember when we first sold a million pasties a year," says Arron, "it was unbelievable. Only a couple of years ago we were still shopfitting. We feel we're ticking along quite nicely."
www.westcornwallpasty.co.uk

We'll eat again: Five foods ripe for reappraisal
1. Faggots in bread: A delicacy of West Midlands cuisine, clearly overdue for a relaunch. A filling of "lights" - chopped liver and kidneys - is accompanied by boiled peas and served between slices of white bread.
2. Barm cakes: Underappreciated Lancastrian speciality (outside Lancashire that is), these "advanced bread rolls" are baked with heavier dough than standard rolls and boast a tougher top crust. The traditional accompaniment is chips.
3. Jamaican beef patty: Usually sat forlornly sweating inside the chippie's display cabinet, the Jamaican patty is a small pastry stuffed with a spicy ground-beef mix. Scotch bonnet mushroom give the patty is piquancy, while paprika accounts for its sunny colouring.
4. Sweet Yorkshire pudding: The true Yorkshireman scorns the assumption that Yorkshire pudding is solely the accompaniment to roasts, and liberally slathers jam all over a slice or three for his dessert. With clever marketing the sweet Yorkshire pudding has the potential to be the new banoffee pie.
5. Welsh cakes: Heavy, scone-like pastries cooked on a griddle and pebbledashed with currants and other dried fruit, this Welsh treat could render the Danish pastry era over for good.
© Kevin Braddock 2004

Clubbing In London is Sexy Again

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Published in electronic Beats Magzine, March 2006
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Something strange is happening in London nightlife. People are dancing with each other again.
Once a month a crew of promoters stage an event called Jerry’s Joint in a tired, red-walled old pub called The Boogaloo. It is a dim dive off an arterial route out of the city that looks and smells as it is hasn’t seen a vacuum cleaner in years. The club isn’t the only regular Fifties evening in the capital. It probably isn’t the only nitespot with a music policy timelocked the other side of 1962. It definitely isn’t the only London club where they play Little Richard, Eddie Cochrane, pre-psychedelia Beatles, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent, Elvis, Big Joe Turner and hundreds or other rock & soul singers your parents probably hadn't even heard of, back to back on 45”s. But it’s probably the only jive joint run by ‘cats’ whose average age is 23 - people who've seen everything the world’s clubbiest city has to offer and decided the only beat that bites wears a leather jacket, a pair of faded 501s and quiff that defies gravity through Black & White’s pomade.
Jerry’s is drinking club. Beer and shots are the intoxicant of choice. Other stimulants are not necessary. People go there to sink ale, pop their collars and curl their lips over a cigarette, or flop round on couches, talk the weekend out and shares discoveries of new old music.
Because Jerry’s joint is a dancing night, people also go their to shake a leg for the opposite sex. Cute girls dress in primary-colour A-line dresses, prom shoes and bobby socks, and twirl round a tiny dancefloor in the space vacated by some table and chairs. People feel like they’re starring in ‘Happy Days’ or ‘Grease’. Boys empty their jars of beer, step out of the shadows and throw poses on the edge of floor before taking the first slender hand that whirls their way. Elvis’s ‘O Sole Mio’ cha-cha-chas on decrepit speakers. Couples twist, jive, mashed-potato and hitchhike with each other like 50 years of house, techno, hip hop, electronica, drum & bass, synthesisers, club culture, raves, Ibiza and Ecstasy never happened.
Saturday night time winds on into early morning. Elsewhere in London’s club dungeons, clubbers perform a metronomic step-left, step-right, or grind their way further into the tiles of dancefloor. They dance in the anonymous blur of everyone else, or they dance together but alone, sealed into private euphoric hypnosis under the strobes, staring blankly up at the DJ, or down at floor beneath their feet, or not knowing quite where to look.
But at Jerry’s Joint, people are looking each other in the eyes. They're holding hands, throwing ambitious twirls, twists, pirouettes, spins and jives that look more sincere than professional. People spill out drunk at 2am, laughing and kissing. Resolutions are made to sign up for twist classes on a weekday night to make it more fun. Everyone who goes there remembers Jerry’s Joint, not necessarily the next morning.
What goes on at Jerry’s joint is no more explicitly about sex than any other club anywhere in Europe. But it shows up just how unsexy the mainstream club experience has got, just how far away dance music - music meant for dancing to - has left behind what caused it to exist in the first place. No-one disputes that dancing’s true evolutionary function is attraction and selection. At Jerry’s Joint the dancing is more like the bit before the sex: the coy, romantic holding-hands bit. It’s like intensely, wide-eyed excitement of initial bodily contact and promise, just like Elvis Presley’s insurrectionary hipshaking prefigured the global teenage sex-quake of the liberated Sixties.
It's been a long time since dance music could realistically claim to be the unifying social glue of a generation. It’s ages since clubs were still just clubs – places made up of members known to one another – rather than venues for exploring the limits of your consciousness or flaunting your untouchably cool taste through a forced smile. Plenty of former ravers explain how dance music and stimulants brought them closer to people, but eventually prevented them from connecting with others, because emotions too often proved artificial and shrivelled up in the 6am red-eye daylight through the exit door.
Meanwhile, the clubland vogue for spontaneous, narcotic sex in the toilet cubicle may well be a fantastic memory to save for your retirement, but is there a more brutally lonely, dismal experience than fucking over a broken cistern? In many London clubs at least, today’s experience is defined by fear instead of interest, by a cold, commercial loneliness. Forget about meeting new people. Clubbing today often reminds you how difficult it is to connect with others in a moment when you can have 30,000 friends in MySpace and a million imaginary porno-partner online, but still can't find anyone to feel close to on a Sunday night. Isn't this what it was all means to be about?
If rock & roll was the first moment when explicitly dancing was about attracting, then maybe disco was the last. Disco never had any illusions about itself: it was uninhibited, shamelessly flamboyant, relentlessly good-time music designed to throw shapes to in front of someone who caught your eye. Crucially, disco forced men – nature’s ultimate wallflowers – to dance for women in a way that hip hop (too macho), drum & bass (too fast to dance too and still look good), trance and techno (too hypnotic) could never hope to do. In disco, as with the peak periods in house music, you sang the words and filled in the spaces between with your own imagination, with one eye on your moves and the other on that girl/guy over there. Tracks by savvy house producers Joey Negro’s ‘Make A Move On Me’- keep returning to disco for a very good reason, even though the Paradise Garage and Studio 54 closed down more than two decades ago.
Some of dance music’s recent identity crisis is down its disappearance into druggy introspection. The rest is due to its inability to deliver the soundtrack to the get-together, the build-and-release dynamic that tracks human sexual drive. What is less sexy than an undeviating seven minutes of 303 and 808? Doing 69 in a toilet, perhaps? Nowhere this is more absent than in the current fad for minimalism and glass-dick techno which, in the quest to discover the perfect, primary pulse of the libido, completely misses the point that lust music is about the grind, not the solitary bump: just ask Prince, the Rolling Stones, Chic, The Kinks and Michael Jackson. It also forgets that dancers need a beat, but they also like a voiceover such as Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ that narrates how they’re feeling at that moment in time.
Madonna, among others, never forgot this. She began as a dancer and will remains a dancer until she hangs up her leotard once last time. Songs like ‘Hung Up’, along with Goldfrapp’s ‘Strict Machine’, Tiga’s ‘You Gonna Want Me’, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and even Benni Benassi’s brainlessly erect ‘Satisfaction’ and Hound Dogs’s daft but irresistible ‘I Like Girls’ (could it get any more blatant?) are doing more for the sexual happiness of the collective international clubland than the invention of Viagra, vibrators and Vin Deisel in a leather kilt.
Jerry’s Joint switches the scene right back to the pre-foreplay of original hand-holding rock & roll of the Fifties, playlisting music that emerged as a reaction to the extreme social conservatism of an era when science hadn't even acknowledge the female orgasm. The night is just a strand in a wider romance with the Fifties that goes deeper than just a recycled ironic fad – fun-fun-fun bowling alleys are opening all over London, Robbie Williams mimics The King in his latest video and bequiffed four-piece London bands are coming on all Gene Vincent across the city. The club also hints that many are tired with the dismal unsexiness of ‘sexy clubbing’ places where doors prices are dear, people are cold, fake feelings come in wraps or pills and where all you can think about is that you should be having sex, but aren’t.
The music you hear at Jerry’s Joint describes quaint ideas of love that probably got your parents together. Revolutionary in its day, the rock & roll sounds polite compared to the naked predatory aggression of dance music as we understand it. Maybe that’s why people who never met till five minutes ago can dance with each other at Jerry’s Joint
Less about quick fuck in the toilet than teasing, an eye-to-eye, hand-to-hand courtship, the ritual at Jerry’s leaves far more to the imagination, which is where the best sex always comes from.
Try Jerry’ s Joint if you're looking for fun, friendship or anything more. The future of the human race may depend on it.
© Kevin Braddock 2006

Vincent Vincent & The Villains pioneer London's rock & roll revival

‘We need rock & roll. Rock & roll is fresh.’
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Vincent Vincent & The Villains

What came first? Did the emerging Fifties revival drag cult four-piece pinups Vincent Vincent & The Villains out of East London and into the limelight? Or will The Villains tip a latent affection for bowling, Jerry Lee Lewis, varsity jackets, A-Line dresses and jump-jive sounds into pop culture’s Next Big Thing?
Scan the crowd at a typical VV & Tvs gig and once thing is clear: an ocean of 20-year-olds can’t get enough of raw, shaky-hipped melodious jive sounds that nod to rockabilly, skiffle, boogaloo and British rock & roll. It’s like hippy, punk, acid house and Britpop never happened. Scan the crowd a second time and you notice there isn’t a former Ted in the house.
Recent press notices for The Villains have been glowing. With good reason. This year’s Brits and NME awards may have signalled the high-water mark for British pop, but where next? Since the Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys and Coldplay reinvented Blur, The Buzzcocks and U2 respectively, the invisible hand of music is already on the move, disembarking from punk and back to the ultimate cradle of excitement and teenage kicks. To the rock & roll of the Fifties, to be precise. Vincent Vincent (not his real name, but when it's that good, who cares?) got there first.
The band were invented two years ago from the place all the best bands comes from – one guy’s imagination. Vincent Vincent says he never felt part of pop culture’s turnover of media-fabricated scenes, and that’s only one reason the band sound like the freshest outfit to stumble over a pile of Bo Diddley 45s since George Michael did the ‘Faith’ thing.
‘I’d much rather we were sore thumbs than people thinking we’re part of a rockabilly revival,’ Vincent says. ‘I’m not trying to revive anything. I’m just playing the music I love. I don't believe in scenes - I just believe in pop music.’
On a stage supporting The Cribs and The Zutons as on their sporadic seven-inch releases – like last year’s ‘Blue Boy’ and today’s ‘I’m Alive’ b/w ‘There Is A Cloud’ on the wonderful Young & Lost label – VV & TVs capture the immediate excitement of initial sexual contact – the same frisson the world felt when Elvis’s hips invented the female orgasm under McCarthyite Fifties repression.
‘There are a lot of homogenous, repetitive styles on the radio, and I wanted to do a rock & roll band,’ Vincent says. ‘I love it and understand it. When everyone was into Britpop, I was buying rock & roll seven inches from record fairs. I wanted to be in a band that created the same kind of buzz with infectious hooks, great harmonies, and a contemporary edge that can be loud and aggressive and mean.’
Not that Vincent is stuck in a nostalgia timewarp. Quite the opposite: he uses the doo-wop template to talk about live as it's lived today. Boy still meets girl, but a trip to Sainsbury’s is as good a reason to harmonise. But what really counts with VV & TVS is that amid the accelerating turnover or postmodern reference, the band know that everyone, everywhere can still shake it on a Friday night and find timeless music to fall in love to. Everyone is a teenager once, and the cleverest people stay teenagers forever. ‘Early rock & roll was about the attitude and excitement and the sexual explosion. Kids were aware of sex whereas previous generations had been repressed. Here comes rock & roll and suddenly everything is in your face.’
Are we on the cusp of a Fifties revival? Time will tell. But Vincent Vincent & The Villains are sure of one thing:
‘We need rock & roll. Rock & roll is fresh.’
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Renounce pop culture forever with an off-the-peg Fifties lifestyle

DJs to namedrop
G The P
Reverend Milo Speedwagon
Gaz ‘Rockin’ Blues’ Mayall
Leo The Amateur
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Bands to namecheck
Vincent Vincent & The Villains
Rumble Strips
Richard Hawley
The Primitives
The Cramps
Johnny Thunders
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The Look:
Him: winklepickers or suede brothel creepers, All Stars, Black & White Hair wax, Lewis Leather’s motorcycle jackets, Ray-Ban Wayfarers, Levis 501s (with turn-ups)
Her: A-Line dresses in circus colours, gingham, prom shoes, white Copacobana sunglasses, fake Prada bowling bag, secretary specs, big white Cadillac.
Accessories
Curled lip
Vintage varsity jacket
Marty McFly
Matches for chewing
Shaky hips, assorted jive moves and a Chuck Berry duckwalk
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Pick a pin-up:
1. Elvis in ‘Blue Hawaii’
2. Brando in ‘The Wild One’
3. George Michael in the ‘Faith’ video
4. The Fonz in ‘Happy Days’
5. Ringo Starr in Hamburg
6. Robbie Williams as The King in the ‘Advertisement Space’ video
7. Lonnie Donegan doing ‘Rock Island Line’
8. Chris Isaak in the ‘Blue Hotel’ video
9. Nick Kamen in the Eighties Levi’s ads
10. Vince Vaughan & Jon Favreau in ‘Swingers’
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See you at The Hop
All Star Lanes, Bloomsbury, London, weeknites
Gerry’s Joint, monthly Saturdays at the Boogaloo, Archway Road, London
Gaz’s Rockin Blues, St Moritz Club, Soho, London
South Pacific, Fridays, Kennington Road, London.
Any Tiki bar

France's Banlieue Riots

Published in British GQ, March 2006:
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The Quartier Nord of Asnières', Seine-Saint-Denis, France. Photo by Andy Sewell
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When France erupted in a two-week flambée of rioting, pyromania and police confrontations last autumn, the places that went up weren’t the manicured boulevards known to tourists. Instead it flared in places like Clichy-Sous-Bois - suburban ‘banlieue’ zones home to sink estates so profoundly delapidated and ugly that they could be a corner of some post-Soviet hinterland, or Bosnia, or a Judge Dredd strip or any other forgotten concrete jungle if it wasn’t for the French graffiti everywhere, the reminder that you’re in the guts of affluent G8 country in middle of 2005.
‘Everyone said the kids were breaking their own things here,’ Abdel, a shaven-headed 23-year-old postal worker, tells me as he surveys the aftermath in the ragged roads of his Clichy-Sous-Bois home, 15 miles from the Eiffel tower. ‘But look. They haven’t got anything to break. They’ve got nothing.’
It’s impossible to disagree with him. A fortnight ago the first Molotov cocktails exploded here in the cités - estates - of Clichy. Abdel looks at cadaverous tower blocks and scorched streets around him and sees shocking nelect. People from smarter neighbourhoods fly-tip rubbish in front of homes and torched cars await removal. Retired immigrant men fog the street-corner air with conversation and the few women in the streets wear Muslim headscarves. Everyone under 25 has their hoods up, and even though at nighfall police vans pull up and patrol the streets at a menacingly slow pace, in the daytime helmetless kids scream past on mopeds. ‘The kids aren’t scared of anything here.’ Abdel says. ‘Nothing. The problem is, if you put people in cages, they become animals.’
Abdel watched the rioting from high in his block, La Lorette, a disfigured oblong tower in the middle of the estate. He is married with a daughter and has a job paying the the minium wage of €1000 month. ‘I’m a slave,’ he says. He wears a smart leather coat, white Nikes and has kind but wearied eyes. ‘I should keep my mouth shut’, he says, ‘but they didn’t send in police to calm thing down but to provoke us. It’s war – the police make the war. There is pressure here. They drive round, two or three in cars, slow down and look at you like that.’ Adbel squints his eyes meanly and hardens his lips. ‘We don’t need police here.’
Abdel shrugs when he remembers the civic SNAFU in Clichy-Sous-bois a fortnight ago, because what happened wasn’t surprising and the reasons it happened won’t change.
The nationwide rioting and arson ignited here, a borough 30 minutes north-east into the inkblot of greater Paris, along the A3 arterial route on October 28. Events at Clichy were exceptional but also emblematic, because the fractures that exist there are being repeated across France.
The town of 25,000 assumes little, since like every suburb its function is to breed moderation. Clichy rolls down the side of shallow, wooded hill 15 miles from Paris. Parts of the town are trimmed, ordered, petit-bourgeois and perhaps screamingly dull to the highly aspirational. Houses are detached and neat, and many of the blocks in private ownership look well-maintained. Clichy has busy boulangeries, hair salons and cafes on its shopping parades. Some architecturally ambitious lycées and ranging green spaces border the leafy boulevards that wind up to the Forest of Bondy. Typically for a suburb, has no obvious centre and no obvious boundary with neighbouring towns.
One district seems unrelated to another, and the town’s atmosphere can change dramatically from one side of road to the other. Cross Clichy’s backbone, the long Allée Maurice Audin, from the pretty Mairie [Town hall] to the cité of Le Chêne Pointu and the transition is jarring: from pleasantville to claustrophobic concrete necropolis over a pelican crossing. This is equally typical of the France no-one visits. Climb the Allée, left at the squat McDonald’s and up the Allée Romain Roland to High-Clichy, and you reach yet uglier canyons of social housing where state-subsidised rent is 600 euros a month for five rooms and unemployment hits 40 per cent, four times the national average. From pavement to block and back again life in this part of Clichy is lived stoically, through a concrete pall of dejeaction and dispossession. After a while, it cracks.
Since the Eighties many suspected that the dystopian banlieues or 'quartiers chauds' (hot neighbourhoods) were a powderkeg. Autumn 2005 set an entire matchbox to the powder. On October 28 2005 two teenagers died in Clichy-Sous-Bois after being chased by police, a CS grenade bounced into the local mosque and disruption flamed from Paris’s outskirts to the six points of France.
By November 16 2005 the riots were quelled, the TV crews had gone some kind of normality returned to France. But out in the slum estates in the cold November aftermath, life goes on, segregation remains real, the people are poor and everyday, it begins to cook again.
So much for ‘l’égalité.’
***
A certain Scorsesean affectation emerged in French public life last Autumn. In a speech that was as much Robert De Niro as Charles De Gaulle, France’s pugnacious right-wing Home Office minister Nicolas Sarkozy used the word 'racaille' to describe a delinquent juvenile underclass on a visit to the Parisian banlieue on October 25. At its worst, 'racaille' means ‘scum’. Suburbs across of France took Sarkozy at his word and responded in the traditional French way. The banlieues exploded in a series of events that that traumatised lives, caught global media attention and left schools, gyms, police stations, shops, a theatre, a depot with 24 buses, a huge carpet warehouse, a McDonalds and almost 9,000 vehicles smouldering.
Several days into the anarchy Sarkozy went further, pledging ‘zero tolerance’ on lawlessness and expressing his Taxi Driver intention to ‘power-hose’ the rioting delinquents of La Courneuve, a notoriously difficult neighbourhood in the ‘93’ Seine-Saint-Denis suburb north-east of Paris. France’s atmosphere on the cusp of October and November was inflammatory, and so was its language. The politicised French – namely, every citizen - have publicised their contempt for politicians since the invention of walls and spraycans, and graffiti appeared in the banlieues beyond the 'péripherique'. It said ‘Fuck Sarkozy’; ‘Sarkozy you are dead’ and ‘Sarko Fuck Your Mother’. Kids blogged and graffed that they had ‘la haine’ (hatred) and ‘la rage’ (fury) for and against ‘Sarko’, his CRS riot police and any other public institution within pelting distance.
Malek Boukerchi, 33, is an intense, rangy former estate kid who works as an educator in some of France’s toughest zones. His understanding of banlieue situation is hard-lived. ‘Who is the scum?,’ he says when we meet in central Paris. ‘I am scum, 'racaille', but one has to had to evolve.’ Travel into the ‘93’ Département and it’s abundantly clear why he and other now talk of the ‘France downstairs’, ‘La Sous-France’, which is also the French word for ‘suffering’. A separate state that bears no resemblance to the France of tourist brocghures or “Amelie”.
‘Pressure grew since 9/11,’ Boukerchi says. ‘People began to look at banlieue people more like terrorists. There was an identity crisis. There are plenty of kids who return to Algeria but they’re not Algerian. You are considered a dirty Frenchman, and France you’re considered a dirty arab. People talk of liberté, egalité, fraternité. But it’s an ideal. The real shared value is discrimination.’
A knot of unemployed men with the dusky complexions of North Africa collect every day by the Salon de Thé opposite another of La Forestiere’s gruesome blocks built and apparently unmaintained since 1962. ‘Who is the ? It’s you, its me, it’s the police, it’s the state,’ says Khaled, 19, who is angry. ‘A government minister has no right to use words like that.’
‘We were against the riots,’ says Mohammed, 22. ‘But it’s the fault of the police. They are the 'racaille'. ‘It’s not pretty here, but we’re nice people.’
‘Who built France?,’ says Kamel, 26. ‘We did. But we’re always at the bottom. We’re French. But not like the others.’
They list the gravest problems of life here in the following order. 1: ‘Racism.’ 2: ‘Unemployment.’ 3: ‘Racism.’
Zyed Banna, 17 and Bouna Traore, 15, lived in the lower parts of Clichy-Sous-Bois in La Sous-France: Bouna in a shoebox halfway up a rust-coloured tower in Le Chêne Pointu, Zyed in one of the 150m-long, five-storey blocks of the Vallée des Anges that face each other across the Allée Maurice Audin’s western end.
They died gruesomely in the other Clichy, the France upstairs: in the Rue Des Bois, a smart cul-de-sac in the town’s northernmost pocket. The street ends at a fortresslike orange Electricité De France substation beyond a three-metre wall. Pylons stride off into the distance carrying thousand of volts. Warning banners painted in hip hop-style read, ‘Stop - don’t risk your life!’.
Neither teenager heeded the sign. They were stopped with a third teenager playing football at around 6pm on Thursday October 27 by police demanding ID papers. Something caused them to run. It is unclear whether the police chased them, but they ran up the adjacent Rue Des Pres, bolted left through thicket and jumped into the pit of high-voltage cabling in the back of the substation grounds. Zyed and Bouna were burnt alive but the third teenager survived with massive injuries. The deaths tripped the local grid and caused a powercut across Clichy. In the darkness rumours grew fast.
‘Electrique – extremely tense’ is how Ahmed Bouhout, a youth worker attached to the town hall, describes the 24 hours that followed when he shows us round Clichy. ‘Spontaneously the kids started smashing things, burning cars.’ A minibus was first of 15 vehicles to go up in flames, and attempts were made to torch the town hall and a school. Clichy’s young, many of whom are expelled from education, heard the Chinese whispers and reached a tragic conclusion. ‘They thought the police killed Zyed and Bouna,’ Bouhout says.
Sarkozy later stated that they were not pursued. Clichy’s Mayor, Claude Dilain, countered that Sarkozy’s version had ‘nothing to do with’ the account given by the surviving teenager’s father. Contrary to procedural code, emergency services were not immediately alerted, Bouhout says. ‘If they were pursued, and if they were seen enter the substation, the police should have alerted the emergency services. It is very likely that the place saw the kids enter but didn’t call. And Sarkozy, instead of demanding an enquiry, launched a campaign of zero tolerance. That’s what shocked people.’
Clichy awoke after a night of torching to grave problems. CRS lines massed to on bottom end of the Allée Maurice Audin. Enclosed on both sides by the long blocks where Zyed live, the street is perfectly sealed for a pitched urban battle. Bouhout watched the riot explode from within.
‘During the day, the kids talked about it, saying “it shouldn’t be like that”,’ he says. ‘When the CRS took up position the kids grouped against them - right in front of them. As night fell it started stirring. Lots of kids, maximum age 20.’ There were hundreds by the time the flashpoint arrived.
‘It was spectacular. I took photos,’ Bouhout says. ‘It made me scared. But look, it was Maurice Audin, not the whole town. It was very calm elsewhere. If you’d gone out in different part of the town, you’d have thought nothing was happening.’
By the Saturday 29 a semblance or order was established, but too late for owners of 23 torched cars. The more determined cat-and-moused with police and fire services, and ‘ambient violence’ continued to spark through Clichy.
On Sunday evening, a CS grenade exploded into the packed local mosque behind the desolate Anatole France shopping precinct in Haut-Clichy. The timing could not have been worse: it was prayer time in the middle of Ramadan. No one is certain how this happened. But the notion of religious persecution was added to what was already perceived locally as police aggression against a poor immigrant minority.
‘That’s what really kicked the riots off,’ Abdel tell me outside the mosque. ‘Now you’ve got a whole other community who are angry. It’s pressured here.’ He lists the pressures: unemployment, poor wages, terrible housing. Clichy’s unusually high youth demographic means an abnormally high number of ‘de-schooled’ kids who get up at 2pm and kick about till 3am.
Rioting erupted afresh after the grenade. Someone drove a burning car into the nearby Armand Desmet gymnasium, and its roof caved into the inferno. The sentiment was unified - Clichy teenagers began wearing white T-shirts with the slogan ‘Mort Pour Rien’ (dead for nothing) – and the violence was disorganized, but by now it was clear that symbols of a nebulous, aggressive ‘authority’ were targets.
It was also spreading fast, breaking out of the 93 into neighbouring departments around Paris and across the country. Intensive TV coverage produced two effects: it syndicated images of teenage revolt nationwide; then it engendered competitive pyromania between rival cités judged by numbers of vehicles torched. Within a week, confrontations, arson, arrests and CS gassing ripped through the banlieues of Lille, Strasbourg, Lyon, Rennes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Caen, Nice, Nantes and St Etienne and hundreds of other towns.
Violence peaked on the night of November 7, when 1,406 cars burnt, 395 arrests were made and 8,000 police were active in 274 French towns and cities. A state of emergency was declared on November 8 and curfew laws dating were invoked for the first time since the Algerian war of Independence in 1955 as Sarkozy sacrificed ‘Liberté’ to another national concern, the politically expedient vote-winner of ‘sécurité’. On November 12 he pledged to deport foreign rioters. The next day offsales of petrol and the carrying of jerrycans were banned.
Damage estimated to €480m was done in the wave of devastation. Over a hundred police were injured by Molotov cocktails, stones, bricks and in one case steel pétanque balls. In the French Republic, where unemployment is high and economic growth slow, events began to make Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité increasingly look like relative values rather than articles of civic faith.
***
Ten days into the uproar, a drawn-looking Jacques Chirac appeared on TV to appeal for calm, suggesting La France was suffering from an ‘identity crisis.’ ‘What is at stake,’ the President lamented, ‘is the success of our policy of integration.’
Ten ago years Matthieu Kassovitz’s film ‘La Haine’ detected exactly the same crisis but predicted a bleaker conclusion – that the success was no success because the state ensures there is no ethnic integration. Kassovitz’s drama begins in a concrete Parisian banlieue and ends in the self-destruction of two its its leads – angry, directionless estate kids of various ethnic backgrounds into hip hop and weed. Gun law triumphs.
The banlieues surround every sizeable French town and city, and 750 are classed as ‘sensitive’: vast zones of densely-packed, brutalist tower blocks built in the Sixties and Seventies, where high unemployment, poor schooling, poverty and youth lawlessness have marinated for decades in dilapidating architectural idealism, civil dispossession and national and ethnic complexities. Many of the banlieues are visibly rotting. The immense, cadaverous rectangle bristle with satellite dishes and despair, and contain up to 300 large families. At nightfall, fleets of police wagons pull up and patrol many estates. They survey a population who have less and less to do with France’s ‘fromages’, the substantially white, catholic, petit-bourgeois majority. The banlieues are not a police state, says Samuel Thomas, vice-president of antiracist organisation SOS Racisme, but ‘a state of segregation. The police know theirr job is to keep kids in the banlieue. Prevention didn’t bring results. Now it’s the politics of repression.’
Figures on ethnicity are not kept in France; if you are born under the Tricolore, you are French regardless of colour, creed or extraction. Yet around six million people are thought to be immigrant or the sons and grandsons of workers brought from former colonies to rebuild the WWII destruction. Overwhelmingly those who inhabit the worst of the estates are muslim Maghrebin (Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian extraction) and subsaharan African (Senegalese and Malian). The everyday standard of life in some banlieues is a million miles away from the dream civilisation surrounding the Eiffel tower, 15 miles away.
An impoverished underclass prone to popular insurrection is hardly new to France. The 1789 Révolution, the 1871 Paris Commune, May 1968’s student riots and the Nineties banlieue tremors round Lyon and Paris prefigured 2005’s explosion. But in 2005? What really shocked observers this time was the extreme youth of the rioters. Police hauled in 'casseurs as young as 10. The manner of rioting was best expressed, Pete Doherty-style, as 'nique-tout' – ‘fuck-everything’. Perhaps more telling is why the riots stopped, and what happens next
It’s clear in the numbers going to trial - 7,000 to 16,000 in a decade– that relations between delinquents and the police have soured, despite intensive community relations (some kids refuse to be arrested by cops they don’t personally know). Who is at fault? ‘It’s a tiny truant minority,’ an anonymous ‘robocop’ (CRS), told ‘Le Point’ Magazine. ‘What’s saddening is the impunity. We catch arsonists and take them back home.’ More and more kids understand the game and are lodging complaints now. In the Evry banlieue police found teenagers with 100 Molotov cocktails.
‘It’s like a massive 3D video game for the kids - they don’t understand what’s going on,’ reflects Erwan Ruty, who has mediated in the banlieues for over 10 years. ‘They get bored of it, and it’s Game Over.’ Ruty remarks on the relative restraint shown by both sides. ‘Everyone has been very self-controlled – police, the kids. There were no baton charges. We know there are guns in the banlieues, but no one used them. No one did a Charles Bronson.’
Yet for all the riots’ intensity and duration, no-one died. ‘It’s nothing like Watts or Brixton,’ Ruty says. ‘These riots were very targeted against schools, piolice, buses –institutions. This is collateral damage. The targets were precise even if the acts were unconscious. That’s very French. It’s saying, “We’ve had enough of the authority.”’
Order was also restored because operators in a parallel banlieue economy know that peace makes money. ‘The dealers have no interest in police, guns and riots,’ says Ruty.
The spikes in an upward trajectory of violence have been worsening for some time, however. ‘It’s more and more difficult to live there, especially for the kids,’ Ruty says. Entrenchment is deepening on all sides and the banlieues today host an uncomfortable menage à trois: the state’s increasingly repressive forces of order face a second- or third-generation immigrant demographic failed by education, housing and a closed labour market. In the crossfire sit communities of mediators, social organisations, welfare initiatives and quartier-based ‘big brother figures’ who work at setting positive examples.
For the ‘petit Mohammeds’, a French birthright does not guaranteed the opportunities afforded to the ‘petit Pierres’ – the life-chances vouchsafed by ‘égalité’. But the Republican model demands that a generation renounce their ethnic identities. Violence can result from the schizophrenia. ‘If you’re from the 93, you’re basically fucked,’ 17-year-old accountancy student Ladji, from the Saint Denis banlieue, tells me. ‘For some kids smashing up cars is their only means of expression.’
Aften ten days or so, the nightly violence began to diminish, but paranoia crept into the smart boulevards of central Paris. Parisians in shops and cafes cast over with a look of disquiet when you ask them about what’s happening a few miles away.
On Armistice day, Sunday 13th November, police intercepted blog postings and texts intending troubles around the Champs Elysees, Les Halles and the Arc De Triomphe. Bourgeois Paris, with several hundred CRS wagons in prominent locations, braced itself for a tsunami of banlieue hoodies – the new social demon who’s uniform is identifiable to anyone familiar with British suburbs: Adidas tracksuit, pneumatic Nikes, some fake Burberry or Louis Vuitton scarves, NY baseball caps.
There are 160,000 ‘deschooled’ kids in France and they are a tribe whose lives revolves around McDonalds for lunch and couscous for dinner. The thrills of delinquency - TWOCing cars, petty theft and dealing – are the teenage distraction they always were. Kids will tell you how ‘school isn’t worth it because teacher humiliate you there,’ and their indolence turns to boredom to anger and back to being bored with being angry. Hence the riots stopped.
But the real reason they hang around estate stairwells is because France’s metaphorical ‘social escalator’ is terminally bust. They feel the antipathy when they visit Paris, knowing there will be police ID checks on the way. The antipathy reflects back to French society in a morose, furtive hostility. Given the complexity of their upbringing, it’s easy to see why many idolise the thuggish banlieue rap crew 113 and much as Charles Aznavour. Sociologists have yet to explain the penchant for fake Burberry.
But not every French chav is a 'casseur', and Samuel Thomas of SOS Racisme, recognises institutional prejudice for what it is. ‘Sarkozy stigmatised a whole group of kids who have the look of those who act violently,’ he tells me. ‘Because they wear a caps, tracksuit, a scooter, shaved head, because he’s of African descent. His attitude put a match to the gunpowder.’
As attitudes ossify, it falls to the mediators to translate the mess. ‘We’re in a very difficult situation,’ says Rachid Nekkaz in the central Paris office of Banlieue Respect, a organization representing 170 'cités'. ‘France is scared. As soon as there is trouble the state braces itself and resorts violence. But there is no exclusive right to the use of violence. We have to mediate between the kids’ violence and institutional violence’.
Will the violence start again? ‘But it never stopped,’ Nekkaz says. ‘This problem has been here for 40 years. France lost the Algerian war – it’s an immense frustration and the Maghrebins are a symbol of failure.’ He is equally blunt on a long-term solution. ‘We’ve got to destroy the banlieue,’ he say. ‘All of them, and disperse people everywhere in France. There’s no other solution.’
***
Back in the vast banlieue of Asnières north of the Seine where 20,000 live compacted into the projects, life continues.
Sensationalist coverage doesn’t help. Some US channels – CNN, Fox and ABC – sent in celebrity war reporters and, quite inaccurately, pinned an Islamist character to the riots in revenge, it’s suspected, over France’s position on Iraq. One channel headlined reports ‘Muslim Riots’, and others invoked France’s ‘Intifada’ (Russian reporting was also partisan, suggesting this was ‘France’s Chechnya’). Those who live in the canyons of Asnières – a smarter banlieue than Clichy, though no less prone to overheating – respond to all this in various ways.
Some are inured to the burning cars. Unemployed Johnny, 17, and Andy, 23, show us some scorched carpark plots and the cinders of a Renault 205. ‘They bunrt cars here, there, over there…’ Andy says. ‘Sometime it lasts all night, sometimes five minutes. Some people have “la haine” here, yeah. Who? We don’t know all of them…’
Others are resigned. ‘We had a lovely illusion of France being multicultural after the ’98 World Cup,’ says Farid, a 25-year-old transport worker, standing outside a café at dusk. He was disappointed that of the squad’s multimillionaire royalty, only Juventus’s Lilian Thuram stood up as self-avowed racaille-done-good.
But others refuse to be resigned. Zo, a strapping 32-year-old council technician in a baseball cap, is civically-minded and proud of his cité. He is banlieue born and bred. He marches the streets pressing flesh, bonjouring old ladies and disciplining the urchins, a one-man war on social disintegration. Some of the carbuncle blocks may look like the worst Marballa developments replanted in the wrong place, but they are still people’s homes. ‘It pisses me off that people think Asnières is Brooklyn,’ he tells us on a tour of the streets and blocks. ‘We’re not in Iraq here.’
Zo is sick to death of camera crews.
TV coverage on November 7 seemed briefly to take the side of the rioting kids when The TF2 channel transmitted footage of CRS beating up a 19-year-old at La Cournueve, a tougher, uglier banlieue east of Asnières. Eight 'flics' were suspended on the 10th as Sarkozy launched an enquiry. But Rodney King-style notoriety is the last thing the embattled suburb needed.
La Courneuve has suffered in the past. During the Nineties the slum saw intense rioting, arson and gang violence around the five titanic rectangular blocks of ‘Les 4000’, the worst symbols of of France’s widening social fracture. Three have since been dynamited. The remaining two – Balzac and Fontenay – are eyesores with all the scale and ambition of French civil engineering but none of its debonnaire self-confidence. Two burnt-out trucks moulder at the grimy foot of the 15-storey Balzac. The block was designed with gaps half-way up that look as if apartments have been pulled out like drawers. Even the sky through the other side looks dirty. Rents are €400 a month. Public investment is slowly improving conditions in La Courneuve, but in the suburb’s plaza near the shopping centre, all there seems to be is absence, a sense of life on hold.
At the foot of the vast Fontenay, kids boot footballs, pull wheelies and hang about in clear autumn sun. Amar, a slight and very gentle man who runs the ASAD (Action, Solidarity, Assistance et Dialogue) organization, fights hard to keep their spirits up. ‘They can’t see beyond the perimeter of the estate,’ Amar says. He gave the youngest ones cameras when the adjacent block, Ravelle, was demolished in 2004. Everyone cheered. He knows there is a richness in the banlieue, even if obvious role models in the media and public life are few. Dynamic people have grown up here – footballers, doctors, lawyers – but sadly, few return.
‘I give kids a hand, cultivate their dreams,’ he smiles. ‘La vie en rose isn’t for everyone’. He introduces us to a Djibril, a shy 17-year-old with a diamond earstud and an Avirex jacket. Amar pushed him to file a complaint against the police after the kid was turned over. ‘He was CS-gassed, thrown in a truck, not allowed a doctor for three days with bruises and cracked bones. He’s 17. He’s a minor.’ Even through Amar can’t say for certain the kid wasn’t a throwing Molotovs, he knows injustice when he sees it. Life lived under brutalist architecture accustoms the eye.
***
As other banlieues raged, calm paradoxically returned to Clichy-sous-Bois very quickly. The father of the dead Bouna Traore played a part, walking the streets and challenging delinquants during the riots. Ahmed Bouhout recalls, ‘He would say, “You must not burn cars in my son’s name. My son is dead, that’s it. He’s dead.” He showed dignity.’ Tellingly, both families chose to interr their children not in France but in Tunisia and Mauritania, their countries 'd’origine'.
On the cold evening of Wednesday November 16, Mayor Claude Dilain addressed a public meeting in the hall adjacent to the Mairie. His attitude was serious but not grave. He plainly recounted the facts and told 150 people of complexions that represent the true face of France: ‘you have all lived the silent rage. There is anger and sadness, not just for the deceased. What happens now? France cannot ignore this - it is a powderkeg. This is a population in great difficulty – unemployment, bad housing and schooling is a vicious circle we know off by heart. France is territorialising into rich, poor, middle class… this is a bad road. If discrimination continues, the Republic is damned.’
The mayor responded to questions from the floor and listened to witnesses: a man whose blonde, blue-eyed daughter was racially abused by arab kids; an Algerian whose extensive postgrad education cannot win him a job; an elderly man who lambasts flammable TV reporting. ‘We have gardens here in Clichy,’ the old man says. ‘We have trees.’
The mayor leaves the meeting that night with the respect of the audience and a very serious job to do.
On Friday November 18 2005, France awoke to reports that the CRS had repressed a 1,000-strong civil rumpus in the centre of Grenoble. Shop windows were smashed, doors forced, vehicles set alight and CS gas was to quell the violence. The event aroused fears of a new wave of arson, arrests, tear-gassing and schismatic political handwringing. But the riot was an anomaly: the revolutionaries were locals students celebrating the annual Beaujolais Nouveau arrival, and their hurrah had gone violently askew. Concluding transmissions, newscasters heralded a 'retour à la normale'. Nationwide an average of only 100 cars were being torched every night. The rioting was over until the next time.
What happened in France is unlikely to happen in the UK. The riots had an ethnic character and a religious undertone, but they weren’t really about colour and had as much to do with radical Islam as they did with Le Beaujolais Nouveau. They were really about an outdated republican ideal of equality that many feel has turned out to be a massive lie. In 2004 France banned muslim headscarves in school to preserve the country’s secular identity. But the banlieue generation’s fondness for Burberry scarves can’t mask the reality that there is less, not more, social mobility now than in their parents’ generation.
Discrimination and poverty cook into the odd outbreak of ambient pyromania, which is not just how Clichy-Sous-Bois but all of France returns à la normale. Strangely, the ugliest, poorest parts of Clichy have recently become aware of their symbolic potency. Huge blow-up photos shot on the estate by JR, an affiliate of the Kourtrajme.com film collective which counts Vincent Kassel as a member, have been flyposted onto the side of tower blocks. They show bunches of estate kids posing, kissing babies, having a laugh and ‘representing’, hip hop-style, for their banlieue. They show that liberty and fraternity truly mean as much here as anywhere in France.
But in the end they also show that ‘égalité’ is a different matter altogether.
© Kevin Braddock 2006