Skipping to Armageddon

photographs of Current 93 and Friends

Ruth Bayer Strange Attractor Press 2016 £25, ISBN 9781907222450 BIB DEETS

Mystic, visionary and sonic pioneer David Tibet has been charting a distinctive path through British music for the past three decades with his band Current 93 and its offshoots; a body of work recently given critical evaluation in David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground, also published by Strange Attractor. For nearly all of that time, Austrian-born photographer Ruth Bayer has been carefully watching him through her lens.

They first met in 1987, when David took over Ruth’s old room in a house in Tufnell Park, north London. She had just begun to study photography and “the young man in leather trousers and sunglasses” she met as the new tenant became an enduring subject. This beautifully produced volume is a tender testament to their friendship that chronicles the relationships forged between Tibet and his kindred spirits ever since.

Subjects include Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, depicted lying companionably with Tibet on the floor of Ruth’s bedroom. She was in the midst of some interior decorating, so it seemed the easiest place to shoot them: “Then it just became something else, them upside down, lying next to each other and then holding hands,” she recalls. As author Michel ( Under the Skin) Faber notes in his introduction, these two pioneers of experimental industrial music here resemble tired children resting after an afternoon in the playground.

There are further, arresting shots of the remaining axis of Keenan’s Esoteric Undergound: Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and John Balance of Coil, emerging from their dressing room to take to the Royal Festival Hall stage looking, as Ruth puts it: “like some extraordinary Apollo astronauts on their way to the moon!” Now that both have departed this mortal plane, the humour and affection of these candid shots feel particularly moving.

There is a timeless quality to the collection that reflects its subjects’ interest in mystical matters and Ruth’s understanding of that.

The largest group shots, taken on Hampstead Heath for the cover of Current 93’s Earth Covers Earth on a long summer’s day in 1988, depict a renegade bunch, perhaps a band of travelling minstrels or a circus troupe who could have wandered in through a portal in time. Similarly, the intimate shots of Coil/Cyclobe’s Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown, taken in their seaside cottage in Sussex, could represent a scene that awaited Ralph Vaughan Williams when he went in search of sea shanties in East Anglia, a century before. Although none of this appears at all stage-managed.

“None of them were taken in a studio environment,” Ruth says. “They all were either in my space or in theirs inside, in my garden or theirs or in parks; and I think the people themselves are sort of timeless. They dress in their own alternative way and have their own style, I think that’s why I’m so fascinated by them.”

You can see her point: idiosyncrasies vary from Rose MacDowell’s red rubber and black beehive combo to a tweedy Tiny Tim wielding a ukulele, but her subjects can never be mundane. Ruth cites one of her inspirations as Billy Name, the photographer and lighting designer who captured and catalogued Andy Warhol’s inner sanctum. Her shots of Annie Anxiety, a fellow aficionado, were deliberate nods to his work.

“The one of her wearing a silver outfit is a reference to when Billy Name wallpapered the Factory in silver foil; and the one taken of Annie on the bed was in homage to Edie Sedgwick, with the hairstyle and really big eyes made up with eyeliner. I have actually photographed Billy Name. They always say never meet your heroes, but I got on very well with him.”

Perhaps the most iconic is the shot which graces the front cover of Skipping To Armageddon, in which Tibet sits surrounded by his enormous Noddy collection. Infamously the result of an acid trip in which he saw Enid Blyton’s cheery wooden tot crucified in the sky surrounded by mocking elves, this obsession was something that initially left Ruth nonplussed.

“Since I come from Austria, I had no idea what Noddy is, what he represented, or that he was from a children’s TV programme. Because Tibet is quite an eccentric character anyway, I just thought it was him collecting strange figures with blue hats on!” Endearing, unsettling, and enigmatic, it captures the essence of their collaboration. “He is very trusting in letting me photograph him the way I do,” Ruth surmises. “There don’t tend to be any boundaries between us.”

Continued from page 59

our conceptions of autonomy and freedom? Should we intervene in evolution or leave it to nature?

Moreover, some scientists believe that mental states will eventually be explained by lower level neurophysiological processes. Strong advocates of this perspective believe that concepts such as “‘intend’, ‘love’ and ‘consciousness’ do not refer to anything real and will eventually be replaced as neuroscience progresses”. I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s reaction to Bishop Berkeley’s “ingenious sophistry” (matter doesn’t exist and everything is an idea). James Boswell observed that the idea was “impossible to refute”. “I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered,” Boswell wrote, “striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – “I refute it thus.” I feel the same about the idea that lower level neurophysiological processes will explain certain mental states – the people I love and those I loathe, my passion for music as diverse as Cat Stevens and Darkthrone, or interest in robust science as well as the outer reaches of forteana. And I am not sure I want them to. But those who adhere to the strong view would condemn my response as hopelessly emotional, sentimental and unscientific.

Such discussions could have been heavy-going, but Watson makes obtuse science accessible. He does a remarkable job of explaining relativity. His eye for telling detail brings the story to life and often reminded me (and I mean this as high praise) of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Convergence is up there with the classics of popular science. A brief review can scarcely do justice to this essential book.