11.For all that it's a book that's so obviously in love with pop culture, and so obviously entranced by the sturm und drang of trying and inevitably failing to make sense of it, there's a very real sense of sadness at the heart of "Phonogram: Rue Britannia". It's a comic about inadequate men and women who've done their best to fulfil their wills and ended up neither kinder nor truly wiser than they were when they began the process. Oh, they may know something more about magic, but the hidden world of Phonomancers and Retromancers produces not a single individual who we'd consider both responsible and compassionate, for all of their grand dreams and their sorcerous capacities. They're all relics of their own ossified ambitions, all morally desiccated almost-human beings who at best might make entertaining if contemptible dinner companions. At their worst, they're quite cancerous, as individuals and as a breed, either bent on enslaving the tastes of their fellow human beings as a mass or quite happy to turn their backs on such exploitation in the name of a quiet life. And even Dave Kohl, who alone of them all actually takes a few baby steps in the direction of doing the right thing, has to be shamed, cursed, threatened and effectively tortured by a goddess while having his very identity threatened by his opposite numbers before he'll even begin to behave in a semi-decent fashion.
If it's remarkable that "Rue Britannia" is, for most of its pages, a book without a heroic, or even a conventionally moral, figure anywhere in its text, it's also amazing that it's a comic that's nominally about music starring characters who rarely seem to be enjoying music at all. Phonomancers and Retromancers alike use music as a source of their power, debate its meaning and sneer at the tastes of anyone who doesn't grasp the ultimate value of their superior aesthetics, but they're never shown simply enjoying it. Music to them has become a commodity, a means to an ends, but in their stunted and cruel lives, it never seems to be very much fun, never moves them or changes them in unexpected ways.
It's this separation of music from the enjoyment of it that fuels every evil, great or passing, in "Rue Britannia". Every page of the comic seems informed by an equal measure of despair and distaste, a sadness on the part of Mr Gillen and Mr McKelvie that folks can turn even music - especially music - into a weapon of snobbery and power. There's a weary-minded amazement here that human beings can take even the most precious and rarefied of resources and twist it until it's a mark of them and us, superiority and inadequacy, power and subjugation.
And that's surely a great deal of why the book's final page has music relegated to the background of matters at hand, informing but not controlling Beth's pre-existing feelings of great fondness for her boyfriend. Their sharing of a gentle, unforced, undramatic morning embrace is worlds away from the heightened states of existence, or at the very least the knowing rapture, that so much of musical myth expects its listeners to adopt. The inane breakfast DJ prattling over "Motorcyle Emptiness" is something which the purist/elitist would surely be appalled by, music separated from its supposed artistic context and pumped out as a background for the nation's yawns and teeth-brushing. Yet in "Rue Britannia", we're being shown that, for all its transcendental qualities, music is ultimately far less important than the lives it can be used to enhance, and that music is there to inform the everyday rather than to transform the everyday into a heaven on earth.
12.
In this way, "Phonogram: Rue Britannia" serves as a determined satire on the elitism that constantly, and no doubt inevitably, characterises pop culture. It presents us with sharply and deliberately dressed, stiflingly-mannered individuals who consistently screw up their own lives even as they ruin those of their numberless and largely faceless victims. These are very but self-satisfied and yet so often joyless obsessives and elitists, characterised by their contempt for the masses, by their belief that anyone who doesn't dress and dream and live as their principles demand is a lesser form of life, to be at best exploited as individuals and at worst en masse. There's Emily, who's decided that "all revolutions are revolutions of one", and then managed to make the philosophical leap from that egoistic principle to the Randian-esque conclusion that she's responsible for no-one but herself. Emily, who's capable of sharing a drink with Dave Kohl as he rather pathetically begs, while trying not to seem to, for her help, and responding with;
" ... a little etiquette pointer. If a boy is impolite to invite a girl to a suicidal endeavour, the girl is justified in an equally impolite refusal."
And there's the Coven leader himself, the Myth, shown pointedly striding across an empty Brighton Beach, as if it were a private estate carved out by the Bank Holiday riots in the Sixties, denuded of the qualities of flux and conflict and uncertainty that gave those punch-ups their cultural frisson in the first place. A man so self-contained and selfish that you'd suspect he resents breathing for fear the great unwashed might benefit from his exhalations, a man with "sad eyes" and a love for passing on grand statements about "dignity and integrity" while quite missing out on the fact that's he's content for others to have their freedom curtailed as long as he's OK. The world, according to his argument, is divided up between them and us, and "anything" the Retromancers might "influence doesn't matter".
But Dave's personality matters to him, although The Myth so arrogantly and yet so passionately tells him it shouldn't, and, we can't help but suspect, so do the personalities and experiences of those the Retromancers will affect.
"Recentre" yourself, advises Emily, "Move it and move on.", pronounces The Myth, with an old Mod's inability to avoid paraphrasing the great Curtis. To the leaders of the Coven, to the elite of this society that's no society at all, even our personality, let alone the music we love, is a commodity to be traded for self-interest. Even the concept of a individual personality has been counter-intuitively redrafted by them until it means "whatever it is that I have to be in order to be what I want".
But if a central tenet of Rue Britannia is that music isn't more important than people or the lives they choose to lead, another is that music is still an incredibly life-enchancing good. The great and sweatless of the coven have chosen to see music as a means to a end, and even view their own personalities not as works in progress so much as works of art to be defined, purchased and sealed off from change, but that's because they've turned a precious common resource into a private commodity. In doing so, they've squeezed the magic out of music by using it to work their wills, and they've purposefully drained the humanity out of themselves because they see no advantage to it. In truth, they're horrible creatures, rooted in their own abstractions of the past which they believe will allow them to live without compromise, change or suffering. And for all that we might enjoy their company on occasion, for all that we can recognise value in some aspects of their personalities, they're horrible creatures and vile bodies, and they do nobody any fundamental good at all, including themselves.
13.
"Phonogram: Rue Britannia" is a text without role models, and that may well be a large part of why it's been received in some quarters with such a qualified and often quite unfairly dismissive response. Indeed, it's clear that Mr Gillen and Mr McKelvie expect the reader to be the moral arbiter of the tale, rather than the audience having their hand held as they're walked through thesis, antithesis and onwards through the dialectic. The world we see is filtered largely, though in no way entirely, through Dave Kohl's perceptions, his point of view, and nothing that he sees and thinks can be taken for granted; he's in no way any measure of an objective observer, and we're not supposed to regard him as being so. Just because he retains a fondness for Emily, and her surface similarities to Britannia herself, doesn't mean that we're compelled to take his tolerance for her as our response. She's willing to abandon him to the prospect of either dying or having his personality entirely rewritten in a fashion beyond his control without caring to lift a finger to help. Whether being considered as an individual or a symbol, she's surely beyond the pale, regardless of what Dave himself might sentimentally feel.
"Rue Britannia" is a book which trusts us to keep our wits about us, and which encourages us not to sleepwalk into accepting without thinking what we're being shown, no matter how good-humoured and entertaining the scenes are that we're being presented with. It's a text that trusts us not to be elitist, not to revel in sexism or to bend the knee to the pop-Stalinism practised by so much of the old British music press. The reader is constantly being asked to empathise with the characters in this first book of "Phonogram", but we're also being asked to decide whether these people really are what they want us to think of them or not. Dave Kohl is, as the goddess herself says, a man carrying "buried guilt", and so he's obviously deserving of some measure of sympathy, but she's also quite right in the definitive judgement that he's a "complete bastard". Emily may wistfully regret Dave's decision to make a stand on Primrose Hill, but she lets him go alone. And The Myth talks of "a few sacrifices I don't like to think about", but he's quite unwilling to consider helping Dave deal with the folks who want to raise a zombie Britannia. "Screw them", says The Myth about the Retromancer's project, "Anything it'll influence doesn't matter." Yet of course, that word "it" refers in this case not to things, but to people, including Dave Kohl himself, and The Myth is willing to let them all suffer since he has, as he declares, "the future".
This willingness to trust the reader not to believe that the cast of "Rue Britannia" are adorable hipsters, and to consider the fact that they might mostly be elitist monsters, can best be seen in the text's portrayal of "Kid-With-Knife", who is, according to Dave Kohl's own narration, "a lovely guy" and "a friend". Yet if we go by the evidence of "Rue Britannia", the Kid, for all his affable loyalty to Kohl, is anything but an endearing mirror serving as a friendly little track-suited scamp for the tale of Dave Kohl, comic book protagonist. Time and time again, this comic book places its characters in narrative roles which we associate with certain virtues and certain outcomes, and this skillfully results in there being a clear distance between what we think we see at first and what's actually there on the page. Despite what often seems to be occurring in "Rue Britannia", a touch of reflection consistently reveals heroes who aren't often behaving so heroically, friends who are fundamentally unfriendly, leaders lacking leadership, and antagonists who aren't so very different from their nominal opponents at all. And where the Kid is concerned, this tension between how he appears and how he acts is especially difficult to resolve. For it really is especially difficult not to adore him, not to cast him in the role of selfless sidekick. He's unquestioningly loyal, helpful, trusting and supportive. He doesn't pry, he rarely tries to, or cares to, understand. He's everyone's ideal second for that moment when everything hits the fan, and, of course, he looks adorable.
But it does need to be asked why Dave Kohl's only "friend" just happens to be a charmer, a not-too-self-aware younger man who defers to the Phonomancer in everything, who never challenges Kohl, or demands anything of him, and who does everything that's asked of him. Dig under the surface of "Rue Britannia" and David Kohl's attitude to the Kid is not unlike that of an owner to a pet crossed with that an employer to a handyman. Kohl tells us that The Kid "lacks irony", and he certainly does. But he lacks irony because, for all that he's fiercely smart in certain situations, he's not particularly morally informed or engaged. The Kid is, as so many lovers of Phonogram have either missed or didn't care to recognise, and I include myself in their number, a man who doesn't understand that " ... not every problem can be solved by breaking off a lager bottle in someone's face". We may love him because he isn't burdened by angst even as he's devoted, because he wouldn't make demands upon us even as we can make the same of him, and because he offers what we might call a highly effective range of social and physical skill sets for situations that lie outside of the conventionally challenging, but he's something of a social monster as well as a great deal of a best mate too.
Kid-With-Knife certainly cares not a whit for the law, which all seems rather romantically endearing and liberating and all very Dean Moriarity, until the reader considers what the world would be like if it were even more full of Kids-With-Knives, or, indeed, if we were living next door to just a few of them. And even if we put the matter of violence to one side and push the issue of purely recreational drug-taking away, there's a great deal of the anti-social individual about The Kid. Parking where he likes and then sawing off the wheel clamp that results from it really does seem like a case of sticking it to the man, man, and no doubt having the Kid around with the tools and the will to help you break into any locked property you want to access is a convenient business. Or, at least it is until you imagine what happens to society if everyone does what they want to, at which point The Kid merges into the cohort made up of all the other primary characters in "Rue Britannia", the folks who do as they will and feel on one level or the other that they're doing it because love is the law and they know exactly what the broader points of that are. Indeed, the Kid is surely the flip side of Dave Kohl's art-Mod take on Brit-pop, representing the myth of the lawless but lovable tyke, the Oasis tendency who somehow manage to stand for liberation through not caring for anyone else outside the gang. Yin and Yang, the parka and the not-so-casual casual wear, a strange marriage of convenience with a measure of affection between apparently disparate types both set on personal success without the inconvenience of compromise.
And yet, in terms of the harm that the Kid and Dave Kohl might each cause as a result of their own personal selfishnesses, it's not hard to see who's the more anti-social of the two. The Kid's utterly disconnected from any of the covens, which means that the worst that he can do is limited to the purely individual level, though that'd be of no comfort to any individuals that he might in one fashion or another harm. That very lack of an ability to handle "irony" safely innoculates him against the will to power and the utter lack of responsibility which the ideology of the Phonomancers brings them. There's certainly not the slightest evidence that the Kid has been systematically abusing women as Dave Kohl has been. But just because he doesn't belong to the ranks of what might elsewhere be identified as the "super-villains", those parasites who use their extraordinary powers to prey on others, doesn't mean that he's a good bloke to anyone beyond his own. For the characters in "Rue Britannia" are a litmus test for our own prejudices. And regardless of the fact that he's been slotted into the role of "mirror", of everyone's cutest best friend, Kid-With-Knife is nothing close to an unqualified success as a human being, as anyone who's been introduced to a broken lager bottle by him would surely testify. Should the reader really be so beguiled by what appears to be innocence when the evidence is that it's something that at least in part is far less appealing? After all, isn't "Rue Britannia" concerned with the difference between the appearance of things and their true nature, between claims made and goods received?
I've known and loved several blokes like the Kid, though I'd never have told them that, and loved them as much for their success in being true to themselves, no matter how despicable that could be, as for the fun they threw in my direction. And I'll happily, if somewhat shamefacedly, own up to the fact that it's taken me weeks to grasp that The Kid isn't objectively the nicest bloke in comic pop fiction, and that he is, in fact, something of an anti-social liability. I saw the smiles and the support and thought what a good thing it would be to have a friend like that, and how lucky it is for Dave Kohl that he's still a good enough person that he can attract and retain such friendship. Yet, that's nothing but sentimentality, and its the same rush of sentimentality that pop music at its best and simultaneous worst can so enchantingly deliver, convincing us that we're, for example, listening to the voice of a generation rather than a Slade for the Nineties singing about "cannonballs" and "halls". But put aside the sentiment, and ignoring where their relationship will later be shown to have taken the two of them, and it's obvious that it may well not be any essential goodness in Kohl that draws the Kid to him, and vice-versa. These are two immature men who are largely different enough from each other to not tread on each other's toes, while both being largely concerned only with their own somewhat dubious interests. From that point of view, their friendship isn't exclusively a wholesome and entirely heartwarming business, just as it's undoubtedly characterised by affection and trust too.
I'm glad that the characters in "Rue Britannia" aren't moral paragons, because I've met damn few of those in almost half a century - half a century! - lurching from one disaster to another. I'm glad that there's ethical ambiguity deliberately placed in the text, and that as a reader I'm forced to admit as I re-read that I've quite missed the point of things, because that means I'm being both respected and challenged by the work. (Indeed, I've no doubt that I'll take "Rue Britannia" out in a year's time and realise that what I'm writing here is piffle, and be pleased for it too.) And I very much want to read more about Kid-With-Knife and that Dave Kohl as I push onwards into "The Singles Club", and I'll not be doing it with any lack of affection for their characters or lack of concern for their fates. I'm not in any way complaining that the text is unethical or the creators are wrong-headed. I'm just pointing out to myself, so that I might not forget, that charm isn't the same as virtue.
There are folks who've managed to read, or perhaps just hear of, "Phonogram; Rue Britannia", and taken it for a text in favour of elitism. I was feeling both irritated and somewhat uncharitably contemptuous of that. But then I realised how I'd missed a very great deal of the whole point about Kid-With-Knife, and so I really don't feel in any way so clever or judgemental anymore.
To be concluded, and in the remarkably near future too;
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