27.01.2022

Walking into the near empty Pavilion at Butlin’s, Bognor Regis, in January 2022 has the feel of entering a horror film. I say this with affection; the neon banners and polyester uniforms of staff, the sense of timelessness in which you can allow yourself the pleasure of drinking a Butlins on the Beach at two p.m., they hold the promise of a suspension of reality. Watching the tiny palm trees being ravaged by the wind outside makes me feel like I’ve stepped into Florida inside a snow globe, being shaken by the hand of a toddler on a sugar rush. Butlin’s used to be a working-class holiday resort, a week’s wages, a price guaranteed, my roommate educates me. It seems fitting that it should now host this swarm of white, middle-class rock consumers, who’ve gathered together to feed on the new generation of indie rock. Trailing behind the boomers through the grey grounds of Butlins to the check-in area for Rockaway, into a large hall which reminds me of the Christian conferences I once attended, has a surreal quality to it. 

I feel a sense of eradication of history, as I look at the Burger King that sits tucked away in the corner of the Pavilion, and the place feels an unlikely contender to be standing on the continuum of the working-class culture of the United Kingdom, unless it represents being underpaid sold back to people as an identity to consume. The all-encompassing Butlins-ness of every surface has an element of claustrophobia to it, but like a co-dependent relationship, you quickly find it inconceivable to leave, as if the rest of the world has melted away and all that remains is the scarcely populated tent that hosts the arcades, the bowling alleys, restaurants and bars, with its twilight-like around-the-clock light. On the third day, when we attempt to go for a walk on the beach, we walk along a fence that stubbornly separates Butlin’s from the outside world and I think this is how the horror film ends; you think you’ve made the choice to be somewhere, but when you try and leave, you can’t. 

The hyper-artificial, branded surroundings of Butlin’s, in its chain-like plastic sheen neatly borrows itself as a backdrop to the energy on stage, and I can’t tell if perhaps it makes the music look better, because the music is the only bastion of self-expression in this otherwise eery wasteland, gutted from all its commercial pep by the pandemic. There is of course a charm that animates the polyarene of the carnival joyrides that stand blacked out in the January rain; there is James who waits the tables at Papa John, and Cheryl who check us out at the shop and there is the security guard who recommends we try the Whopper. When we ask James what his plans are for after his shift, he tells us he’ll probably go home, play video games, cry, sleep and then wake up to come back to work again. He won’t see any of the acts; he will walk from one plastic partition enclosed booth to another until close, and again in the morning. 

There is a reason why the immediacy of live performance cannot be replaced with anything other; its pixelated counterpart, the metaversistic contortion of the energy that can be felt on the skin may have its own, possessable appeal but it does not measure up to the abandon of standing in the midst of the constant vibration of sound pulsating from the speakers and resounding through the bodies around you. It is this experience that erupts onto this container of human fates. The contrast between the maintenance of the illusion of continuity and sameness and the immediacy of the music may be why the angrier performances at Rockaway seem to sweep over me like a cleansing wave. 

Now, I am no music critic, but perhaps it is the bald white men clad in zip-up hoodies and long thin scarves that causes in me the need to analyse why is it that some bands seem to possess an electric charge, like something is tearing its way through and out of them, like the alien that rips through the crew member’s chest in the sci-fi film. Others seem to simply enjoy playing; some not even that. When I watch Wu-Lu step on stage in front an ocean of gleaming white pins, I can feel the repellent energy that vibrates between the stage and the audience. It’s the energy of an audience that is ready to consume meeting the energy of something that is gearing up to impose themselves on the audience, forcefully and unapologetically.

Consider this a sweeping statement, but I find that a general rule applies in music as it does in other forms of seduction; things that are desperate to be loved are rarely appealing. This is simply because something that is desperate to be loved is looking to be defined from the outside. I find that desperation to be loved often comes with the pretence of not caring about being loved and this anaemic quality of indifference does not lend itself to processes of creation. It may very well be the antithesis of it, because it hides that which ought to be seen behind a rejection of the very gaze it yearns. Therefore, let us consider the subtle difference between the following things: desiring the gaze with the hope that the gaze will tell you what it sees and form you into existence versus knowing that to exist fully in the world is to withstand the gaze, to invite it and force it to see through your own. The latter is why the performances of Wu-Lu, Wunderhorse, and Nuha Ruby Ra, to mention a few, will withstand scrutiny. There is an element of defiance in their performance, that I find is integral to what we consider ‘rock’, as soiled as the word may be with the smears of cocaine, cum and froth of Stellar. Whatever core or nucleus exists inside these artists, from which the energy of the performance emanates, is undeniably dense and steadfast. 

Another observation I wanted to make from my seat amongst all the other plastic-beer-pint-critics, is that the performances that were tinged with nostalgia were the least noteworthy. An imitation of another era, especially of the more pop-like commercial indie that saw the groomed musicians holding their instruments passively with matching aloofness, doesn’t do it for me. Those acts at Rockaway that carry the air of art university students could not escape their own propriety, which nostalgia more often than not lapses into. The idealised past is plasticised and sanitised, somewhat akin to the two-dimensional surface of the ‘Are You Ready To Butlin’s?’ that greets one at entry to the resort. The acts that appeared to exist on the stage as mere references to a time that was manufactured in the executive suites of record companies fail to transform the stage, and rather than turn Butlin’s into their absurd playground, they meekly blended into its artifice in their eagerness to please. 

The immediacy and urgency of those who performed as if this is their final performance, leaving something vital on the stage in their wake, seemed to be more aware of the fragility of the present tense. Take Tricky’s haunting vocals and his wandering on and off-stage: I found myself nearly holding my breath, because it felt like the source from which he was pouring out his performance was finite, and part of the thrill was that it could run out at any moment. The intimacy between the performance and the audience came from this realisation, from balancing on the thin blade of there-or-not-there together. This was made all the more evident in retrospect. As the gig ended, what was left was the emptying, plastic filled floor of the mainstage and shuffling, denim-clad calves. I was returned to the surrounding world of illusions; infinite time and pitchers of cocktails, suspended between the unchanging walls of Butlin’s, Bognor Regis. Meanwhile and perhaps even right now, at the Papa John’s, James clears another table, only to set down a set of fresh napkins and cutlery.