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This country's art schools and colleges have famously produced our most inventive pop stars. But does the same still hold true today? Will Hodgkinson reports from the UK's campuses.
On a bright spring afternoon in the student union of Goldsmiths College in New Cross, south-east London, a young woman called Vicky Gould is talking in earnest, slightly nervy tones about being a pop star, studying fine art, and falling in love with one of her lecturers. What makes the situation slightly surreal is that Gould is wearing an afro wig and bright pink taffeta flares.
There is some kind of singing and shouting going on behind us. Just as Gould is explaining how she used to like dressing up as Prince but has now taken to impersonating the late Eazy E of pioneering rappers NWA, a paper cup bounces off her afro. She turns to its source and hisses: "Fuck off!"
Three men shuffle uncertainly toward us. One is dressed as a priest. Another is wearing a pink wig and a tutu, underneath which a pair of hairy legs with knobbly knees poke out. The third has fake breasts and is wearing two wigs at once. "We're butting in because all four of us are a little group," says the man in the pink wig, a gruff-voiced northerner called Lewis Mason. "And we're in bands because we're interested in the egotistical element of art."
Mason and the priest, a fresh-faced youth called Jack Barraclough, have two bands, Holly & Jessika and wikipedia.org. Alex Fear - the man in the double wig - sings with Gould and Mason in Freakasaurus, which has its own junior offshoot called Kidasaurus that they are hoping will play nursery schools in New Cross. Kidasaurus's chances of success in this endeavour may be low. Fine art students all, they claim to love pure pop and to have bonded over a shared passion for Michael Jackson, but the mainstream won't be embracing them just yet.
"Our first single will be called Poo in my Mouth," says Mason, before adding, hopefully, "you can hum along to that." A quick listen to the song and a look at its unhygienic video suggest it won't be bothering the Top 40 any time soon.
Britain's art schools have been integral in shaping the pop landscape. And in stark opposition to manufactured pop and classical music, which are all about professionalism, art schools are all about ideas.
"The art schools from my time specialised in old-school teaching methods of brutalising your students with some wild thinking that was off the map," remembers Pete Townshend, whose lecturers at Ealing College of Art included Gustav Metzger - his concept of auto-destructive art inspired Townshend to smash up his guitar - and Roy Ascott, whose theories on cybernetics predicted the internet. "I remember Roy looking at me in a lecture and saying: 'It's a pity that the only person in this room who has the slightest inkling of what I'm talking about is such an idiot.' Fucking genius, Roy Ascott."
Does that approach still exist in an age of crippling student loans, much-reduced arts budgets and results-based education? I'm visiting three art schools to find out - Goldsmiths (a university with a world-renowned fine art course), Cardiff School of Art and Design and Glasgow School of Art. At first glance, Goldsmiths does indeed appear to be subscribing to the wild-thinking model. The Freakasaurus/Kidasaurus gang met in their first year and became friends through what Fear calls "a shared offensive sense of humour". For his degree show, Alex Fear is planning on installing a working brothel at Goldsmiths. Don't the lecturers mind? "Funnily enough, they don't," he claims, "although they are concerned about the illegality of it."
Fear grew up infatuated with pop culture. He has had haircuts modelled on all four members of McFly and says of that boy band: "I really love them, and still can't tell if I'm being ironic or not." He claims that coming to Goldsmiths was the only option for him.
"I thought Goldsmiths was going to be like a grown-up version of Hogwarts, when in fact it's quite an average art school where you are allowed to do what you want. A large number of people on the course see themselves as superstars in their own world. Pretentiousness is certainly encouraged. But being a pop star and being an artist are just different avenues of creativity, and they're both about the ego."
"I see a gap between music and art," counters Jack Barraclough. "If you look at bands made of art students and bands made of music students there will be a massive difference."
What's that?
"The music students practise."
One of the most famous sons of the London art school world is Jarvis Cocker, who enrolled at Central St Martins in 1988 to take a hiatus from Pulp and study fine art and film. Paradoxically, it was the move that cemented Pulp's success.
"The experience of just being at art school gave me a lot to draw on - Pulp's most famous song [Common People] is about something that happened there - but on a deeper level I was taught to think about things in a non-lateral way. We might be losing that as everything becomes results-based. It's terrible to imagine, but I fear that the years of the alcoholic lecturer who spouts out a few ideas before falling asleep are gone."
In contrast to the excesses at Goldsmiths, a scene has emerged from Cardiff School of Art that is rooted in strange and interesting music rather than on-stage theatrics. Laurence Bell, founder of the pioneering indie label Domino, was in a rugby club in the Welsh mining town of Ferndale in October 2007, scouting for fresh talent, when three bearded scruffs took to the stage. The band, named Threatmantics, instantly captured Bell's imagination: with a viola taking the place of a lead guitar the trio had a sound rooted in early 1970s underground rock and lyrics about the casual violence and boredom of life in small-town Wales.
Threatmantics is an extension of an end-of-year project by lead singer and viola player Heddwyn Davies who, like all of the Cardiff graduates I meet, is unpretentious, quietly spoken and unassuming. Davies went to the art school, which is sandwiched between a bowling green and a hotel, because "I had no idea what I was going to do". His end-of-year project was a viola ensemble that he conducted while suspended from the ceiling wearing a dinner jacket. "At the time I was in a straightforward rock band and I realised that this was so much better," says the lanky 23-year-old, who with his sensible jumper and beard looks more like a chemistry graduate. "So Threatmantics is entirely a product of art school."
The band's musicality is also a product of a prevailing attitude at Cardiff. "A tutor, Paul Granjon, taught us that it isn't enough to just have an idea," says Davies. "Execution is key. You need to see things through."
Davies shared tutorials with the founders of two other bands that favour execution over concept: Louise Mason of the Victorian English Gentlemens Club, and Franic Rozycki of the Wave Pictures, who was also in the viola ensemble. "I went to art school because it looked like fun," says Rozycki, now working on songs in the quirky, observational vein of Jonathan Richman. Like Davies, he looks as if his approach to getting dressed involves grabbing whatever happens to be lying on the bedroom floor at the time. "I couldn't get into being an artist - all that talking about stuff. My teacher was a hardcore performance artist and I didn't really understand any of it."
The Victorian English Gentlemens Club formed at Cardiff School of Art and were organising tours long before completing their degree shows. "It was the first time I met people that were doing professional bands and writing songs well," remembers Threatmantics guitarist Ceri Mitchell, who recalls this as "a great spur in itself: here was a bunch of fellow students getting on with it and doing well, and we felt that we had to fight to be better than them. So art school gave us that drive to make things happen, even though part of the appeal of going there is being able to slack off."
The main building for Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1896, embodies the spirit of the city: romantic but functional. The oak-panelled library, which still has the tables and chairs Rennie Mackintosh designed for it, looks out onto a landscape of gothic spires and brutalist tower blocks. For Sarah Lowndes, the author of Social Sculpture: Art, Performance and Music in Glasgow and a visiting lecturer at GSA, you can only understand the artistic landscape of Glasgow by taking in the geographical one.
"Glasgow has the architecture of boom and bust," says Lowndes. "After the industrial decline of the 70s there were attempts to reinvent it as a shopping town. The DIY ethos that typifies the city's music and art scene developed from there."
In 1983 Glasgow had reached crisis point. Unemployment was at an all-time high, razor gangs were creating a moral panic, and the city became known as the sick man of Europe. The council's attempt to reverse this trend through branding - "Glasgow's Miles Better" - coincided with the birth of a DIY culture where musicians and artists developed the idea of being creative without relying on outside help: Postcard Records, the pioneering label that was home to influential bands like Orange Juice and Josef K, emerged from this time. The Pastels, a band that captured the essence of "indie" and have remained at the heart of the city's music scene ever since, came soon after. Glasgow School of Art became a place not only to study, but also to meet like-minded people and form bands with them.
"A strong sense of community developed, and now the artists and musicians that are not nakedly ambitious get on better," says Lowndes. "Franz Ferdinand are a case in point. They've been successful but they're still very approachable and they contribute to the local scene. And in Glasgow, throwing a party or going down the pub is accepted as a key component of art."
Three members of Franz Ferdinand, the slick art-pop band led by Alex Kapranos, did not go to Glasgow School of Art, but such was their fascination with the culture emerging from it that they asked a fine art undergraduate, Bob Hardy, to join the group.
"I had never wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be a painter. But I was a music fan and that's why I came to Glasgow in the first place," remembers Hardy. "Then there was a party where Alex and I met in a kitchen and got talking about music. He suggested I play bass in his band. I told him I had never played one in my life. He told me it wasn't very hard. So it happened."
Hardy offered an artistic viewpoint, borne of what he had learned at GSA, which was valuable to Franz Ferdinand. "A great lecturer, Brian Kelly, talked about the idea of giving things space, of having boring bits in art in order to make the good bits stand out," says Hardy. "In applying this to Franz Ferdinand I thought about Erik Satie's Gymnopédies, which doesn't follow music's usual structures but is a series of ups and downs."
Hardy also brought to Franz Ferdinand the art school idea that sitting in a pub all afternoon can be just as important as working in the studio. "As an artist or musician, you learn to potter about and come up with things that way. All four members of Franz Ferdinand do a lot of pottering about."
Glasgow appears to celebrate those bands and artists that embrace the local scene. Currently enjoying a lot of attention are Divorce, a mostly female five-piece whose lead singer Sinead Youth and guitarist Vicky Strap On - possibly not their real names - are studying fine art at GSA. "Glasgow has a strong working-class culture," says Youth, who is from the city. "Anything too conceptual wouldn't go very far and people see through you if you are being pretentious. Nobody gave a shit about Glasgow for decades so people had to do it themselves - starting up galleries and record labels. That's why it's so good here."
Being an art school graduate has never been easy but, according to Graham Crowley, it's even worse being an art school lecturer. In October 2008 Crowley, a landscape painter and former lecturer, wrote in a letter to the journal Art Monthly that admin culture is turning art schools into "the educational equivalent of British Leyland", with a lack of resources, staff shortages, and an adoption of the corporate model, in which accountability and success are clearly measured. At the same time, there has been a 23.6% increase in the number of art students at undergraduate level between 1999 and 2007. The art school is still seen as an attractive place to spend your young adulthood.
Also at GSA is a lecturer who became a pop star (sort of) before devoting himself to art. Ross Sinclair was drummer for the 80s indie band the Soup Dragons. Now he's a working artist who also teaches environmental art, which means "kicking students out into the world and teaching them self-determination". Sinclair is concerned that art should have a purpose; something he learned from his time in a band and finding out what made audiences have a good time.
"We try and teach a responsibility in dealing with the audience, which is critical," explains Sinclair from his office in the Rennie Mackintosh building. "What's happening now in Glasgow is a move away from the flash, YBA approach towards something more homespun; a gritty determination to have a conversation with people while still keeping a bit of glitter. The point of art school is that they are catholic institutions where students can learn to think for themselves, learn to be creative, and ultimately give something to the world. The key is that it comes from them; that nobody else can say the thing they can say."
Without wishing to make a value judgment on these young art students' attempts at musical self-expression, one question remains: are they any good? To which the answer is: does it really matter? Any band at art school will be in its nascent stages. If its members can take the self-determination and desire to see beyond the mundane that art school has encouraged and shape that into forms accessible to the wider world - as Townshend, Cocker and so many others before and after them have done - then magic can happen. Take away the art school magic, and you're left with McFly.
