Feeling busy, stressed, overwhelmed? Top tip: when people ask ‘how are you?’ just reply, ‘very productive right now!’
Taganistas, we have been very productive this week. Our new book is almost at the printers and we’re excited for you to get your hands on it – the first opportunity for which will be at the ICA in central London on 11th December!
As well as selling you No Tags Vol 2, this live No Tags show promises to educate, inform and entertain – and we’ll be announcing our special guests very soon. In the meantime tickets are selling at a reasonable speed so grab yours now from the ICA website.
OK, onto this week’s guest: it’s revered member of the UK blognoscenti, Dan Hancox.
For a certain generation of music nerds and culture writers, the late 2000s and early 2010s will be remembered as a golden age for what we now call ‘the discourse’. A time of mega-thread arguments on Dissensus, homebrew theorising on Blogspot, and an explosion of obscure MP3-swapping over Megaupload (thank you for your service, Kim Dotcom).
As baby music journalists at the time, Tom and Chal became aware of a mycelial network of bloggers and para-academic thinkers setting new terms of engagement with dance music and popular culture, which included Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman, Simon Reynolds, Owen Hatherley, Jace Clayton and Dan Hancox (this UK-centric blogosphere was largely, as Chal would put it, a refreshingly woman-free zone – and mostly white, as we recall).
All of which is to say that Dan was and remains a towering figure in both of our lives – literally, too, because at 6’4” he’s often the tallest person on the dancefloor at Corsica Studios/Carpet Shop/insert small south London nightclub here.
Since the 2010s he’s become an occasional colleague (during the FACT years) and a friend, and has written extensively on grime – including his definitive genre history Inner City Pressure – crowds, cities, the politics of public space and his beloved Spain, and interviewed icons ranging from Skepta to Barcelona’s socialist mayor. He broke the story on the Met’s racist ‘Form 696’ policing of London nightlife and went long with Wiley for the Guardian.
These days he’s the co-host of the Cursed Objects podcast, where he and Dr Kasia Tee try to make sense of this mad world through tat such as Airbnb canvas art and Jamie Oliver’s mix CD.
In September, Dan briefly broke the internet by sharing the transcript of his 2007 interview with Burial to his Substack, Honor Oak Riot. With that excitement, plus the imminent paperback publication of his latest book Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World, we realised it was time to get Dan ‘pon pod.
Join us in the smoking area as we discuss: releasing the Burial tapes; Dizzee and Wiley’s on-stage reunion; the power of crowds and why the state is so scared of them; the future of Notting Hill Carnival; what Dan makes of DJ AG’s livestream empire; the adult return of sodcasting; Van Gogh bucket hats and other cursed objects; and his favourite films.
Tom Lea: You recently dropped the full transcript of Burial’s last ever interview. I did find it funny that you phrased it that way, because it sounds like he’s died.
Dan Hancox: I know, I felt really bad. I think I wrote ‘the final interview’ and then I changed it because that definitely sounds like he’s dead. So I just changed it to ‘last interview’ with the caveat that he might do another one, one day. Who knows! At least one person commented on my Instagram saying ‘RIP’.
TL: It’s the black-and-white picture as well. He’s a man whose public image at that point only existed in black-and-white pictures and one slightly morbid illustration.
DH: There isn’t much visual evidence of him. There’s not much textual evidence of Burial’s existence either, but I did indeed drop the Burial transcript, for no particular reason except that I had it and had always meant to do something with it. A friend of your podcast and mine was asking me about it recently, so I looked it up and it was brilliant.
His words are mesmerising and are somehow in keeping with the spirit and aesthetics of his music. I think they make his music richer and affirm some of the things that people project onto his music. He happily talks about night buses and whalesong and McDonald’s and all the things that people take the piss out of him for.
CR: Was there anything in there that you had either forgotten or that seemed more salient now with the passing of time?
DH: His forecasts about dubstep. They were already coming true, in the idea of machismo both in the clubs and sonically. We had so many names for it at the time, didn’t we? Wubstep. Brostep.
TL: Blokestep?
DH: Drillstep? Anything that was quite belligerent, following Coki’s ‘SpongeBob’, I guess. There were decent iterations of this sound, but it very quickly became global and relabelled as EDM. I remember going to a family wedding in upstate New York in about 2010 and we were trying to engage a 10-year-old kid who was seated at our table, because weddings are very boring for children, and we asked him what kind of music he liked. He said, ‘Oh god, all the kids in my school like dubstep, I’m so over it.’ He was 10!
That was the moment that I knew that Burial’s forecast of the corrosion of the original, meditative dubstep sound was right. Remember, DMZ’s slogan in the early days was ‘come meditate on bass weight.’ That is very distinct from the all-encompassing, thwomping sound that would take over, and Burial was very clear in saying that that was not what he was after.
TL: Do you think Burial could be Burial, by which I mean a totally anonymous but incredibly successful artist, today? Was that the last era when you could do that?
DH: I think other people will choose a similar path in the future. It’s quite a rare path, isn’t it? He’s sometimes compared to Banksy, which I don’t like because I don’t like Banksy’s art generally, but I would compare him to the comedian Daniel Kitson, who is similarly regarded by a lot of his peers and his fans as the greatest comedian of his generation. He appeared in one episode of Phoenix Nights very briefly, and since then has had no manager, no agent, no publicist, no tour bookers, no team around him whatsoever. He has continued to sustainably do standup and deliver it straight to his fans in a way that pays his bills, though it probably doesn’t pay him nearly as much as it would if he did a voiceover for British Airways or appeared on Mock The Week.
Both Burial and Daniel Kitson started way before this era, but they are continuing to make it work well into this era. Is the constant exposing light of social media not something that a Gen Alpha or Gen Z musician might equally want to shy away from for the same reasons and get away with it? I think they can. Do you think they could pull it off?
CR: I think there are definitely younger people who are thinking that they just won’t be online in the same way, or they’ll preserve anonymity – it’s just harder to see because you can’t see people not being online. There’s the assumption that people are simply more and more online, but some of them can see their parents addicted to their phones and don’t want that.
With Burial though, it’s particularly weird because he’s also this massive, almost household name while having no public profile really, whereas Daniel Kitson is still a cult hero. You can hear Burial’s music on the telly!
TL: He’s also never performed live.
DH: He didn’t win the Mercury Prize for Untrue largely because he didn’t show up and was never going to. He was the favourite to win, most people thought he would win – certainly I put some money on him winning, which I was annoyed did not come off. But they couldn’t brook the idea of giving an award to somebody who wasn’t standing on the stage, even in a mask, performing his music, because that’s not what he ever wanted to do.
I think my main reflection on publishing this piece now, is, god, people fucking love Burial. It has had more reads than some of my Guardian pieces. People flood in from all over the world. He connects to fans way beyond the UK. There’s something about the emotionality of the music that crosses borders. The other reflection I had was that, all of the drama in 2007 or 2008, when The Sun was trying to unmask him and Kode9 was very defensive of him. It worked! [Burial revealed his face on his MySpace.] It’s been 18 years and nobody’s really bothered him since. He’s just got on with it. That’s really pleasing. He got what he wanted in a media-industrial complex where musicians and artists of all kinds are often hounded in one way or another.
CR: So we’ve been thinking a bit about crowds in response to your book, which is called Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. Maybe you could give us the topline on what Multitudes is about and what prompted you to write it?
DH: I was a music journalist for many years. I still occasionally write about music, but I mostly listen to it now, which is preferable. I also reported on a lot of protests and on the London riots in 2011. I go to a lot of football matches.
At some point during the pandemic I read a story about people in Edinburgh singing the Proclaimers’ ‘Sunshine On Leith’ through their open windows. They were all singing this beautiful homage to the place where they live, Leith, which is on the outskirts of Edinburgh. I thought it was a remarkable thing for people to do, to try and connect to each other through song. Why are they doing this when they’re trapped at home in their houses?
I googled the song and found a video of 25,000 fans of the Scottish team Hibernian, or Hibs, singing it and was pretty much moved to tears. I watched it again, and then again, and then again because watching 25,000 people sing this beautiful song at a moment where we weren’t even allowed to see our friends and neighbours and family members was pretty profound. It made me realise that I was missing crowds of strangers as well as people I actually know and love, and I wanted to know why that was. I realised that, actually, a lot of the things that I’ve been interested in for 20-odd years were to do with the crowd itself.
The crowd at Notting Hill Carnival is as much a part of the thrill as any of the DJs, that’s why you are there. Similarly, for many years I’ve been interested in how the dynamics and the behaviour and the psychology of a crowd changes when the riot police turn up at a protest. Say it’s a very peaceful protest, all of a sudden the riot police are here and things intensify on both sides, and you might start seeing projectiles thrown towards the cops at that point.
I wanted to understand why that was, what changes in a group psychology depending on the context. Why is it that I will scream abuse at a referee at a football match, but I wouldn’t say boo to a goose on the high street when I’m on my own? That’s about disinhibition and where that comes from.
I tried to pull together all the threads of my music journalism and reporting on riots and protests and spoke to loads of crowd psychologists to find out just what it is that’s so great about being in a crowd. You know, the people on the Tommy Robinson far-right march had a lovely day. It’s an unfortunate thought, but they had a really good time and they would’ve emerged from that feeling more emboldened and stronger in their beliefs, as reprehensible as they may be. It behooves us to look at the behaviour and psychology of crowds we don’t like and what they get out of it as much as ones that we enjoy being part of.
CR: One of my current toxic opinions is that we should bring back football hooliganism. I do sort of believe that, as an outlet for a certain type of energy, hooliganism is a space for consensual going-berserk that might be needed. In the words of Mike Skinner, ‘geezers need excitement’.
DH: I mean, that’s actually quite persuasive. Football hooliganism at its peak in the 1980s was extraordinarily corrosive and bad. I didn’t realise until I started reading about it just how common it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s at small clubs. At lower league clubs, where there are just 3,000 people at the ground, you’d still have a hundred hooligans from each side arranging to meet afterwards and beating the crap out of each other. I’m not about to write a book or do any research into masculinity, because there be monsters, but it’s a pretty good argument.
CR: Yeah, I have had no exposure to it and so it’s easy for me to say bring it back. It’s probably a bad idea. You also write about how a crowd might be the only place where a normal, law-abiding citizen would have an encounter with state violence and the police.
It reminded me that the language of the Criminal Justice Act actually specifies how many people constitute an illegal rave: a gathering of more than 20 people listening to a succession of repetitive beats, that’s the illegal part. So what is it that the police are worried about when more than 20 people get together?
DH: It’s the fact that people feel emboldened by joining a group of like-minded fellow citizens. Once they feel emboldened, they might behave in a way that is beyond the control of the state. That could be 200 people, or indeed 2,000 people who’ve taken over a field in the home counties to have a rave in 1987. Or it could be a political demonstration.
It could be a group of football fans on their way to a match, as happened at Hillsborough. At the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 the fans were treated with contempt and 97 people died, either on the day or subsequently. The way that the police force in Sheffield, the football association, the media, and anyone in any position of power thought about football fans at that moment was: they are going to cause trouble. These are mostly working class men from Liverpool, they’ll be drunk and violent from the off, let’s treat them with absolute contempt.
It’s why the language that gets used around crowds, like ‘mob mentality’ and ‘crowd control’, always points to the fact that there is something untameable and primal and dangerous about groups of people who’ve gathered together under their own steam. Any self-organised crowd is inherently concerning because it is other, because it hasn’t got that licence, because they haven’t been summoned to gather there. It’s why there’s great concern, not just about protests, but about any kind of organically self-organising crowd.
For example, on New Year’s Eve in London or in any other major city, people get together in an unofficial capacity. Boris Johnson quite recently introduced ticketing, fencing and security to reduce the number of people that can watch the London fireworks on the Thames to about 100,000, down from about one million or more. This is something that Sadiq Khan has continued as well – you have to have a ticket if you want to see the fireworks, and they’re not that cheap. But it’s more the fact that the crowd is being controlled and is channelled into a particular area where it can be monitored, surveilled and policed. That’s the establishment’s ideal relationship with a crowd, to have some degree of control over it.
CR: Am I right in making a link with the historical events of the 19th century, too? You’re talking about crowds making the modern world, but the type of crowds that actually made the world modern were also revolutionary crowds – the fear was that people were going to gather in the street and set up a barricade and maybe release the prisoners. Is the fear of crowds is actually a historically contingent aspect of modernity, or does it go back further?
DH: That’s absolutely right, but there are examples before the late 19th century and 20th century you can find. The bread riots [throughout Britain over the centuries] were basically the democracy of the age, which was before anyone had a vote. It was the way that communication from ordinary people was made to the state: we’re starving here, we’re going to riot. Usually some change was made to prevent it happening again, like the provision of more bread. That usually worked in the absence of the vote. I’m looking at the very late 19th century onwards because that is where crowd theory comes from and when it was invented.
It’s the point in human history at which suddenly everybody was moving to cities, which were exploding in size and sometimes incredibly densely populated. The numbers were absolutely insane in the 19th century. Most of the major western cities that we’re all familiar with quadrupled in size in the space of 20 to 100 years. Streets that were always quiet were suddenly bustling with people, and those people were increasingly poor, agitated, unwell and angry about it. They were trying to form political parties and trade unions at the end of the 19th century – or, indeed, storm the Bastille and release the prisoners.
One of the books that I cite says that it was the Bastille mob that was haunting Europe throughout the 19th century, because they didn’t quite finish the job. That is literally where crowd theory comes from. They invented crowd theory – they being a couple of establishment, very right-wing, proto-fascist thinkers – because they had to try and find a way to understand these seemingly incoherent and unfathomable demands, like democracy, universal suffrage and clean housing.
These demands had to be tarnished as the frothings of madmen. The origins of crowd theory were basically about stopping Bolshevism, which then informs every bit of thinking about how to police crowds throughout the 20th century, up to and including now.
CR: It’s always about stopping Bolshevism, isn’t it Dan?
DH: Yeah. Pretty much everything.
CR: Earlier this year we were talking about what makes the perfect night out. Obviously one of the factors that contributes to the perfect night out is the crowd, or indeed, our perception of the crowd, but it’s a very nebulous thing and each person’s perception is very personal.
As someone who has been in all sorts of crowds, not only music crowds, what do you think a good crowd is? How would you know if you were in one?
DH: I think everyone’s favorite crowd experiences – and this is what the scientific literature says, as well as my own experience – involve joining a crowd of like-minded souls. If I’d gone to the Oasis gig on Saturday, or the Tommy Robinson march the previous Saturday, I would not have had a good time. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but we get joy and affirmation and a stronger sense of self through joining crowds of like-minded people, whether that’s for politics, culture, football, whatever it might be.
I think my favourite nights out, and maybe this is me showing my age, take place under a low ceiling, in a dark room where people haven’t got their phones out. I don’t want to bang on about that, but it does slightly depress me to go to a gig or a club and a disproportionate number of people [have their phones out]. I allow myself to take one photo or video at a gig, that’s my silly little self-ascribed rationale. Then I have one memento from it, maybe one thing I might share on Instagram when I get home, but that’s plenty. You do want to be looking at it with your eyes, not through a small rectangle.
I think the Carpet Shop in Peckham does the job for me because it is the right building for the crowd I want, which is an intimate one, where you will talk to the person next to you if someone drops a banger, or you’ve identified where the fan is in the corner so you can cool down a little bit. Good crowd experiences are often about good experiences with strangers, because there is a likelihood that you’ll have enough in common that you will get along and that person won’t be a dick to you. I’m likely to find that in a small club that holds 150 to 200 people, more so than if I were to go to Fabric this weekend.
CR: It’s interesting that you say like-minded souls. What are the limits of that? How like-minded does the audience need to be, or indeed, how diverse? There’s a lot of talk about uniting on a dancefloor, a diverse scenario where different people can come together and leave everything else at the door. That’s one way of mythologising the power of the dancefloor, but this is maybe different.
DH: I think one quite sweet thing about the nightclub experience is the conversation you have in the smoking area with someone you have almost nothing in common with. One of my favorite smoking area conversations was with a weird goth woman who was 21 and had flown over from Poland.
CR: Honestly, I think I’ve met her.
DH: She was telling me and my friend about the world of dark ambient and about her New Year’s Eve spent with a bunch of other goths listening to dark ambient in the woods. My friend listened very politely and then said, ‘That sounds awful!’ She took it in the spirit in which it was intended, but we had almost nothing in common with her except that we were in the same club and the convivial environment led us to have a conversation anyway. Maybe it can do that as well, maybe it can actually bridge a divide that otherwise wouldn’t be bridged.
TL: We’ve got a real hot potato to throw at you now. Do you remember – I think this was in 2010 – you and Mark Fisher having a bit of a back-and-forth barney in the pages of FACT Magazine?
DH: Yeah I do, I remember it very well. It was over the hardcore continuum. Do you want me to talk about that?
CR: No, let’s not relitigate that one.
TL: Swiftly swerving any accusations of being stuck in the past, I wanted to read from another 2010 article that you wrote about ‘sodcasting’ in the Guardian.
CR: Dan, did you come up with the term ‘sodcasting’?
DH: No, I didn’t. It was a subeditor at the Guardian who named it for a Pass Notes column, I think? I picked it up from there.
TL: Well, for the uninitiated, what is sodcasting?
DH: I’m bracing myself to be attacked here. Sodcasting is the playing of music, or we could now also say video reels, off your phone in public, out loud, without headphones. That’s what sodcasting is.
TL: I want to read this passage, because it’s very good.
CR: It’s great when you’re a writer and someone says, ‘I’ve got this thing you wrote 15 years ago, let’s read it out now.’
TL: ‘To some, sodcasting might seem like a bloody minded imposition, two fingers from those who don’t care what others think of them. To the teenagers, though they probably wouldn’t put it quite like this, it’s a resocialisation of public life through the collective enjoyment of music. It’s friends doing the most natural thing imaginable – sharing what makes them happy. And if you try to restrict people’s innate instinct to enjoy music together, it just squeezes out from the sides, like an overfilled sandwich.’
Now, 15 years on the context is very different, with TikTok and Instagram sending this phenomenon into overdrive, generating multiple new Guardian op-eds and a TfL campaign. It’s really funny looking back at your article, when there was also a TfL campaign about sodcasting. How do you feel about it all now? Do you condemn sodcasting?
DH: Minister, will you speak out?! It’s got quite bad, hasn’t it?
CR: Is it not the resocialisation of public life, after all?
DH: Not when someone’s playing a Reel out loud.
CR: Now it’s AI voices reading fake news.
TL: If it was some kids playing Soulja Boy off their phone, I would be down for that.
DH: Yes! That’s what I was writing about in 2010. It was a very different media environment in 2010. There was a period when it was younger teens, who are still learning what social norms are, they’re also learning who they are and trying to work that out through the establishment of identity individually or in group dynamics, in a small group, at the back of the bus, playing music off their phones. Maybe slightly annoying, really not the end of the world, and a positive thing in that slightly pretentious language you just quoted back at me. It’s making public space social, it wasn’t really doing any harm.
Now you constantly have loads of beepy things going off everywhere on every bus and train, AI news or TikTok pundits speaking about whatever subject it might be. I think I’m basically going to blame this on old people, as someone who is old myself now.
TL: I think that’s absolutely fair. All 13-year-old kids have AirPods, so it’s not them. When I was writing the notes for this, genuinely as I was typing this, I was on the train back from Manchester and a man in his late 30s, early 40s in front of me started endlessly scrolling TikTok, no headphones, just blasting nonsense into the atmosphere. And I was on the DLR the other day and a man booted up Match Of The Day on his phone and started watching on full volume. That’s psycho shit.
DH: I do think there was a period after 2010 when all the kids got headphones and stopped playing music off their phones on the back of the bus. By about 2013 it didn’t seem to be a problem anymore. One small cycle later, in terms of the evolution of the actual media, primarily through TikToks, Reels and the easy availability of data to play videos, and you have predominantly middle-aged people thinking it’s fine to play anything out loud. It annoys me as well, it’s out of control. Let’s give it back to the 13 year olds who are playing Soulja Boy because they’re the only ones who know how to use this particular technique effectively.
There was a TFL campaign back in 2010, which I really liked, which I think speaks to something about how we negotiate shared space together. It had a little cartoon drawing of an older woman and a young teenager, and the teenager has a thought bubble that says, ‘I’m going to think about other people and whether they want to hear my music when I’m on the bus,’ and then the older person has a thought bubble that says, ‘I’m going to try and remember what it was like to be 13.’
I thought that was actually really touching as an idea. Every older person sometimes needs to be reminded that, when you were 13, you were also probably an annoying little shit in various ways that were ultimately harmless. Maybe we can all remember that we all have different needs when sharing this public space. How we fight back against this wave sodcasting, I’m not quite sure.
CR: When you’re a teenager the way that you act in public is so weird because you’ve still got the child goggles on. When you hang out with your friends and shout and scream and generally cause a bit of havoc, you have this sense of not really being part of the world yet, so it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing and that gives you licence to go a bit mad for a while until you finally feel the eyes of the Big Other boring into you every day. Then you’re an adult.
But weirdly, adults now have this extended personal bubble that they’re living in, because of the screens, because of the feeds. You are outside and in public, but you are not really part of the space because you’re still glued to your personalised feed, and it’s a weirdly similar effect. The only explanation I have for why a 50-year-old man is playing AI news off of his phone to the entire carriage is that he’s almost forgotten, or lost awareness of, being in public space.
DH: I think that’s bang on. I always reject and push back against annoying people who claim Londoners are unfriendly because people on the Tube are not talking to each other, as if talking on the Tube to strangers would be a better state of affairs. Come on. I’m 6’4”, it’s a tiny little Tube that was built 150 years ago for when people were much shorter. We should definitely not be talking to one another on the Tube.
CR: It’s very chic for a full carriage of people on their way to work to just silently be doing their thing. I actually find that really reassuring.
DH: Absolutely! Headphones and media devices that we can listen to music or audio on are a key part of that, in the way that reading used to be in the past. But I think you’re bang on about the way it’s changing behaviour in public space. People think they have a forcefield around them that allows them to listen to this stuff out loud.
CR: Tom has brought to my attention some research into the ways that people’s personalities have changed over the past 10 years. What this research shows is that personalities of people in all age groups are changing in different ways.
They’re looking at particular traits, which include conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extroversion. The research discovered that neuroticism has gone up in almost everyone under 60, but especially the 16-39 age group. Neuroticism is up, agreeableness is down, conscientiousness is very down, and extroversion is also down.
When we have these conversations about young people not going out, or young people being on their screens all the time – with ‘young people’ going up to about 50 in this case – there is something going on there. According to this research, people are becoming less extroverted, more neurotic, and less conscientious. I feel like these are people who perhaps do a bit of sodcasting, but also have less appetite for the unpredictable energy of the crowd.
What do you think about the idea that we’re more introverted and neurotic than we used to be? Do you sense that crowds themselves are less popular, that people don’t want to be in crowds as much as they used to?
DH: I think Covid is a big part of this. We’re still trying to ascertain just what the impacts of lockdown and the general climate of anxiety, fear, illness and death during that period were. We did see this desire to rush back into the public square in the summer of 2021. People went nuts for going back into football matches. People were having block parties. The BLM protests were incredibly intense and the police were very violent that day. People risked their health and the health of those that they loved, up to a point, by returning to the public square, by going back to nightclubs, by going back to football matches pretty much as soon as they could – in fact, before they were even allowed to in a lot of cases. The desire to get back out there was evident, in spite of this general evidence towards introversion.
I think the crowd will remain unavoidable because people are only moving towards cities. They’re not going back to the land and they won’t go back to the land. That’s not something that we’re going to see as a consequence of the various trials and troubles of the 2020s, whether that’s climate change or anything else. People will just keep moving to cities, cities will just keep getting bigger, like how Tokyo and Yokohama are basically now one big megalopolis that actually encompasses at least two massive cities.
Urban growth will continue, so in a sense the crowd will be unavoidable. People will have to make nice with it, whether they feel shy or introverted or scared of it or not. My hope would be that, in joining physical crowds again, that person who is feeling introverted and glued to their phone and like they only really want to speak to people with whom the algorithm has decided they’re going to speak to or hear from, will discover the joys therein and find the affirmation and happiness and, indeed, social experiences that they were denied when they were staying in their bedroom.
There’s a moment in the film Pride where the guy who’s nicknamed Bromley, who’s the sort of wide-eyed young gay man who is not out to anybody, goes to his first Pride demo and he’s absolutely filled with fear and trepidation. His homosexuality is not an identity shared with anybody and he tiptoes tentatively in and is very nervous throughout. Then there’s another demo later in the film where he’s holding the banner and is confidently chatting away with his friends, and I think that is the journey that the crowd can take us all on. That’s what I mean when I say it allows us to be more truly ourselves. Far from losing ourselves, we find ourselves and realise what it is that makes us happy by joining like-minded souls in physical spaces. I just hope that people will keep doing that, however scared they are of the stuff that they’ve read about on the internet or Instagram Reels.
TL: Our last question on No Tags is always the same: recommend us a film!
DH: I was thinking about this in the gym earlier and wondering which direction to go in.
TL: Good, I like it when people think about the film question.
DH: I think some of your listeners will already be familiar with Patrick Keiller’s film London from 1992. It appears as a documentary, it’s not a documentary.
CR: It’s such a Dan Hancox pick.
DH: It’s the most ‘your boyfriend’ suggestion I could have made, but yeah, your boyfriend is recommending London by Patrick Keiller. It’s a series of static shots of London filmed around 1991, as if a camera has been plonked there and the world is passing by as normal, and then there’s this absolutely captivating hour-and-a-half-long story told over the top of it which vaguely aligns with these images. It’s about the shape and future of London as a city in 1992. It’s fascinating to watch now because London looks so different, but it’s also a philosophical meditation on the city and the way that art and culture finds its way through the more sinister forces of capitalism and government and policing and so on. It’s a film I’ve recommended to so many people, so it gives me great pleasure to recommend it to you guys.
CR: Did you have a second one?
DH: Oh, I did have a second one, didn’t I? My second recommendation is El Sur, which is a Spanish film by Victor Erice, more famous for The Spirit of the Beehive. That’s his famous arthouse film which is very, very subtly about Franco. But I’m recommending El Sur, which is a really beautiful film set in the north of Spain, also under Franco.
In it, a man is clearly still traumatised by arguments he had with his father about the fascist period. He fell out with his father and had to leave the south – ‘el sur’ – and move to the north of Spain, a land of dark buildings and dark shadows. And it’s about a little girl and her relationship with her dad, trying to understand what is troubling him. I suppose it’s also a film that speaks to my interest in the fact that, when you have something like fascism, its legacies are strange and continue for a really long time afterwards. That maybe doesn’t sound super enticing, but it’s beautifully shot and beautifully acted, I can’t recommend it enough.
