A flicker of spirit-forms: Susan Hiller's Channels

written after visiting Everything At Once, November 2017

I am alone in a black-walled room in 180 Strand, a solitary figure before a wall of televisions. The screens aren’t offering much in the way of visual entertainment, though. Some are bright blue or darkly fuzzed, others crackle with white noise. All 104 televisions resemble the kind found throughout my nineties childhood: hulking affairs, clunky with the promise of the future. But these screens, neatly stacked squares of blue like a Roman mosaic or artfully-tiled bathroom, have lost their power to transmit. Analog dinosaurs in a digital age, they are now obsolete.

A foreign voice punctures the static susurration, and then another and another, until the empty room fills with a disembodied global chorus. After a few moments the voices slowly die away to leave a single speaker. He’s describing a near-death experience, an oscilloscope image on one of the screens corresponding to his words. Other narrators tackle the paranormal subject one at a time: a sixth former in a car accident, a man with a sore throat at a football match. Though the experiences differ they share common themes and phrases, from a sense of weightlessness to visions of long-dead uncles and the inevitable tunnel of bright light. After a few narratives, the voices multiply again, building up to teeming chatter before succumbing to the relative silence of white noise.

This circularity of sound, from static to babble to single voice and back again, forms a rhythmic pattern that reminds me of a wavelength, an image which perhaps sums up the themes of the installation. Susan Hiller’s Channels (2013), shown as part of 180 Strand’s late-2017 exhibition Everything At Once, continues to unravel what much of her art is interested in: the distance between the technological and the bodily, the scientific and the spiritual. Through this piece she asks questions about how we absorb information, how we convey experiences - including irrational ones - and how technology mediates this communication.

These questions are partly explored by the relationship between the movements of Channels’ television screens and the way the viewer experiences the piece. The undulation of noise that shapes Hiller’s installation is a communal background movement to the individual movements on each screen, introducing an interplay between the collective and the independent, the common and the anomalous. Together, though at different paces, the screens flick through barren channels, searching fruitlessly for a signal, a constant collective action spiked by isolated voices. Phrases describing the speakers' near-death experiences often match my own physical experience of the installation. One narrator remarks on the shift from ‘stillness’ to noise, while another recounts feeling disembodied, devoid of tactile sense, as if he was ‘a thought-form … a spirit-form even’. In this dark space I too experience fluctuation and disembodiment, relying solely on my ears to figure out what’s happening, my visual capacities reduced to the static fuzz on the screens.

Appearing to produce sound and not image, a confusion of function emphasised by the contrasting clarity of intermittent single voices, Channels’ screens underscore analog’s outmoded status in the digital age. Technological progress has rendered the televisions redundant from their primary purpose. This is made explicit by the arrangement of the televisions, piled like goods in the high street electronics stores of yore - I think of the secondhand washing-machine shop that spills its wares onto a street corner in my gran’s rural village - but piled tidily, revealing a care and nostalgia for a technology which once epitomised the promise and power of the future.

Channels confronts the death of analog with accounts of near-death experiences: both produce the same blank gaze into the future. The piece elevates the supernatural and the technological to the same plane. The televisions and the oral narratives both deal with promises of the future, yet neither are able to fully articulate what might come next. The non-functioning analog television fails in its promise, while the near-death experiences are deemed implausible by modern society. In using analog television sets to broadcast near-death experiences, Hiller highlights the anomalousness of such encounters. They don’t fit into the narrative of the modern world, one that's ordered by science and technology. But she doesn’t condemn psychic accounts to the trash heap, either. By lifting near-death experiences to the same status as technological advancement, Hiller points out that just as technological networks endure and progress, spiritual networks do not fade from society either.

When I enter the installation I straight-away think of Cildo Meireles’ Babel (2001), currently on show in the Tate Modern. Like Babel, a replica of the Tower of Babel built with radio sets that modernise as the tower grows, Channels is immediately contemporary but also a historic artefact, celebrating two strands of time at once. Both works comment on mass production, the collective versus the individual, the hopes and fears produced by technology’s impact on society, and how technology moves through time. Yet while Babel soars into space, a tunnel of voices guided towards the heavens, Channels uses recent nostalgia to plunge into the future. Meireles’ radio sets are tuned into live radio stations: they’re still able to perform their correct function, as if technology has the upper hand and controls the direction and output of individual voices and experiences. Time has been less kind to Hiller’s televisions, however. Defunct, their incongruent ability to channel the voices of those who claim to have seen into the future questions what unites society: technology, or something more spiritual.

Fake plastic shoes: on walking to Westfield

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. That is made clear by the abundance of multi-lane roads and hulking metal, the sweeping layout, the pedestrian-unfriendly scale of the place. I've grown to love these kinds of vistas - blame a summer spent skirting the underbellies of American cities - but they're an acquired taste, not meant for the urban peripatetic viewer. Industrial Stratford on a bleak rain-laden Sunday is tough to romanticise.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. To be honest, I don't think I'm meant to come to Westfield in the first place. I'm not the intended visitor: I buy all my clothes secondhand, pare down my possessions on a monthly basis, hate polyester, don't own a television, read a lot instead. And the (corporate chain) cafes in Westfield harbour no readers. Perhaps because in this vast complex there are hundreds of stores, but only one that sells books.

Westfield is a locum of rampant consumerism, but it's pretty good at self-disguise. Cinematic shopfronts dramatise buying things into a kind of epic glamour. A polished vision of purity temporarily strips visitors of any knots in their lives. All is simple and fixable! Happiness just a purchase away! Not content with merely promoting the mindless consumption of things as a solution to gnarly modernity, the sanitised mall also hides its inevitable detritus: the waste and pollution and underpaid staff and dodgy ethics and systematic unfairness. Everywhere smells of fake plastic shoes.

You aren't meant to walk to Westfield. You're meant to be shipped in unawares, delivered by car or tube straight into the mouth of the mall so that you bypass the urban wilderness outside. That's what's particularly creepy, I think (aside from the irony that the pedestrian-unfriendly 'urban wilderness' was designed as part of the London 2012 Olympics campaign aiming to celebrate physical movement). The mall and its tube-fed transportation erase all sense of time and place. Road and rail encourage smooth transition into a realm that possesses no weather, no seasons, no natural light, no time, no face.

When I enter Westfield that wet Sunday morning most of the shops are still closed. Only a few souls roam the wide bleached walkways. It feels unearthly, futuristic even, so that when the sound system inexplicably emits Bruce Springsteen's I'm On Fire, a song that so personally embodies what it is to be alive, the empty space transforms his lusty wails into a plaintive, ghostly cry of the past.

Springsteen is for lovers: The She Street Band at the Clapham Grand

It’s Friday night at the Clapham Grand, the stage lights are low, the room teeming with beer bottles, Bruce shirts, and bandanas. But the Boss himself is nowhere to be seen. That’s because this high-spirited gathering of fans young and old aren’t here for Bruce Springsteen himself, but for the all-girl covers band breathing new fire into his songs.

The She Street Band formed in 2016, after bassist Jody Orsbon saw Springsteen live for the first time at London’s Wembley Stadium that summer. His performance with the E Street Band blew her away, but it was the infectious energy of the audience that really stayed with her. The She Street Band came into being, she tells the Clapham crowd, ‘to try and keep some of that magic alive’.

Covers bands often bring to mind bad Elvis wigs, uncool dads kindling their teenage band-member dreams, cartoonish adaptations of rock star outfits, and the likely desecration of your favourite songs. This is unfair. Covers bands can also be one of the best reciprocations of love for an artist or band.

But as the type of fan who can date a photo of Springsteen according to the length of his sideburns, I have my reservations as I wait in a crowd masked in anticipatory blue haze. When the seven members of the She Street Band take to the stage with grins to rival Springsteen’s, though, and settle into a confident, poignant rendition of Thunder Road, I am immediately at home.

The She Street Band are in no way amateurish. For most of the band this is one of many musical projects. They know how to inhabit a stage. What’s particularly striking is that they make no attempt to imitate Springsteen. There aren’t, thankfully, seven blue-jeaned, bandana-brandishing figures lined up on stage. The She Street Band is not a tribute to Springsteen the star (and certainly not to Springsteen the eighties sartorial disaster), but to his music. As well as their avoidance of rock star fancy dress, the She Street Band’s thoughtful arrangement of lead vocals allows Springsteen’s songs to travel through time and take on new identities. Playing on the different strengths of the band’s impressive vocal range, the songs are distributed between four lead singers, or they all sing together. No member of the She Street Band has been assigned the role of Bruce Springsteen. His spirit is dispersed equally throughout the band, strengthening their command of his music and making space for updated interpretations.

Some things stay the same, of course. Each sax solo is met with audience ecstasy. The Badlands counter melody, familiar to anyone who’s ever been within earshot of a Springsteen show, runs like a leitmotif through the night. Everybody explodes during Born To Run. There’s a delightful moment during Dancing in the Dark when a man winds up on stage dancing with Orsbon.

But the She Street Band doesn’t rely solely on these moments of guaranteed satisfaction inherited from Springsteen’s masterful song writing. Their rendition of Darkness on the Edge of Town, more tender yet just as vigorous as the original, reminds me that a well-crafted song can offer up new meanings and take on new stories, if it falls into the right hands.

And it goes without saying that Springsteen’s songs take on a whole new resonance when they’re sung by women. Fresh and energetic, this is Springsteen not just for newer generations, but for all the girls absent from his shows before the 1980 chart success of Hungry Heart.

The Grand is full of faded Springsteen tour t-shirts on this February Friday night. Two veteran fans in the front row demonstrate particularly contagious enthusiasm: white-haired, they are the best dancers in the house. I think of all the decades of Springsteen tours they must have followed. I’m moved not just by their dedication and loyalty to his music, but by their open-heartedness towards a new era’s treatment of songs that have belonged to them for so long. That’s what’s remarkable about Springsteen’s work: its spirit endures through generations, never losing its power to forge communities.

I’ve always dreamed of being in the E Street Band, but now I think I want to be in the She Street Band. And with Twitter support from Amy Lofgren, wife of E Street Band guitarist Nils, and Olivia Tallent, daughter of bassist Garry, two sell-out London shows under their belt, and the loyalty of a legion of Springsteen fans, surely it’s only a matter of time before Springsteen himself offers an approving grin.

When I listen to Bruce Springsteen’s songs, I never imagine myself as the female characters. I’m never Mary or Wendy or Janey. I’m always the protagonist, always wanting to know if love is wild and real, wanting the heart, the soul, control, right now. The She Street Band provide the joyful space for me to be that person. And they keep the magic alive.

On not meeting Bruce Springsteen

Earlier this summer I came close to bumping into Bruce Springsteen on a side street in London. Then I ran away, and wrote this instead.

Since then, I've spoken to people who did meet Springsteen on that same street. I've watched others meet him in other places. At meet & greet book signings promoting the release of his autobiography, on the east and west coast, including California. Tickets gone before I could blink. And I've realised what a classic fool I was to walk away from the opportunity to meet him on more spontaneous terms. 

I've stood at a bar with Benedict Cumberbatch, and said nothing. Shared a cafe table with James McAvoy while he ate a slice of cake, and said nothing. Been in a bar with Matt Berninger, said nothing. Yes, I'm a fool. But god, none of that comes close to how much I regret not hanging around to say hi to Bruce Springsteen. 

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June 21, 2016


I’d always assumed Springsteen moved from hotel to hotel while travelling on tour. Then I learned that during Europe tour dates he sometimes settles in a certain London hotel for a bit and ‘commutes’ to shows. So he’s living in the same city as me for weeks at a time. 

Anyway, today is midsummer. I’m running errands in the city centre, except right now I’m sitting outside a cafe to try and calm down. Because I walked past that certain hotel earlier, half unintentionally, and there outside the entrance were a handful of Springsteen anoraks, clutching tatty records and looking poised to jump. Like an appearance of the man himself was imminent. I didn’t know what the hell to do so I just kept on walking. I couldn’t stop and wait with them on the pavement: the idea frightened me, repulsed me… and enticed me. I didn’t want to meet him. I wanted to meet him.

So I carried on walking like I didn’t give a fuck. It wasn't long, however, before my feet seemed to wander back down that street again, the other side of the road this time. 

But the Springsteen anoraks had gone. I’d just missed him, then. I didn’t know how to feel about this.

Meeting Springsteen would be the best thing to happen to me, and the worst thing: a dream and a nightmare. On one hand, the teenage dreamer inside me despairs at the thought of a life without some kind of contact with him. Another part of me also feels like I absolutely have to meet him, connect with him somehow, at some point. It’s almost non-negotiable. A bit like when Dylan would trek out to visit Woody Guthrie in hospital. (Leaving aside the fact that, unlike Dylan, I'm not a folk singer on the cusp of reshaping American culture, but whatever.) It's rare to have the chance to meet your hero and most people would jump at it, so I feel lucky to be able to have that choice. To know that you’re within metres of somebody who’s incredibly meaningful to you is a big comfort. And it’s exciting, of course. But it’s also unreal. Bruce Springsteen - along with all the days and nights spent at his shows - all of that is on another plane of reality, and it jars painfully to consider bringing that plane down to real life.

Yeah, to meet him would be wonderful, but not in that slightly sad, stale context. With a few seconds, a scribble of a pen, and another selfie. It’s not that meeting him this way would destroy my idealistic notions of him, or ‘cheapen’ him, or anything high-minded like that. It’s simply that the idea of meeting Bruce Springsteen is too big a thing for my head to comprehend. It’s too much. It makes my brain cells crumble. To link all the years of listening to and learning from his music, and all the hours watching him play and talk, and all the thoughts and words and lessons he's given me - to link all of that with standing on a street corner interrupting a rock star’s day for a few sweaty seconds, among a cluster of balding males - no. It can’t be like that.


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KATE. YOU IDIOT. 

Bits of the mind's string | 02

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you go for a long walk in the sunshine with headphones and a coffee, the combination of exercise, fresh air, music and caffeine turns the cranks of your brain faster than you can keep up with, and you end up with a phone full of half-written, slightly incoherent notes.

You can read the first lot here.

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Waterloo Station

Sitting wifi-less in Waterloo, next to the strains of a terrible busker (truly terrible), a giant pretzel in my backpack.

Busker now singing ‘Just The Two Of Us’ which he’s dedicated to a passing girl in a summer dress. The busker is wearing red trousers. Of course. 

Walked 15,000 steps today, from Brixton to Waterloo. The streets were bordered with the early green of summer, and schoolgirls clustered in groups outside the fried chicken shops, buses and runners trundling past - 

oh god he’s playing When I’m 64

and grand Georgian houses with cracked grey pillars and broken sweet pea frames and shiny black cars squealing circles outside front doors - 

we shall scrimp and save (our day jobs)

walking on, sore heels and a bit hungry and very tired, approaching the side of the Imperial War Museum, where people are sitting on the grass in 5pm Friday bliss, and this is the -

he’s just referred to Waterloo as Wembley 

this is the -

he’s singing It Must Be Love for the second time

this is the way we came to the Imperial War Museum on that school trip in Year 5, I remember walking across the grass in pairs and the 1940s house, and the fine autumn drizzle, and the rubbery smell of the lunch room, but nearly at Waterloo now -

everybody is refusing to meet his earnest gaze

coming at it from the side, the bit I look down on from the train every morning, and Lower Marsh Street is full of drinkers and bottles clashing in bins (“watch your ears, love”) and I slip under the wide girth of Waterloo’s tracks, the roof of the tunnel like the belly of a beetle, and finally I am passing - 

he’s singing Champagne Supernova

round the side of the station and falling into place with the pilgrimage of commuters, tramp tramp tramp, and tramp on the stairs crying spare ten pence please, and a man drops his cigarettes in the gutter, and another stops to make a phone call, and I am inside the station, and pretzel-bound. 

On the bus home

Saw you yesterday standing outside the bathrooms in the shopping centre, looking down at your phone, waiting for somebody. The last time was over two years ago, on a quiet train back from Waterloo. You were on the phone. I was pretending to be asleep. ‘I got a 2:1,’ you said, on the phone. ‘It - will - do.’ Funny to see you again. Funny to think you’re the same boy I followed up the stairs that rainy summer’s sports day in Year 9, the trees heavy with water, the corridors quiet. Your hood up, and your deep voice.

Still deep. (I’m behind you on the escalators heading down and out, and you’re talking to the person you must’ve been waiting for by the bathrooms: not a girl, as I’d assumed, but a bald middle aged man.) That low, slightly cocksure rumble that was so welcome to my ears among the ratty pre-pubescent chorus at school. You’re broader now and I’m taller than you, more tanned than I was in those pale under-confident years: the boy I wrote about in my diaries is hard to find, as is the girl who held the pen.


Thoughts on gap years

The difference in maturity between an undergraduate straight from school and one who’s taken 1+ years out of education never ceases to surprise me. I used to be against ‘gap yahs’ but now I think everybody should take at least one. You don’t have to do anything amazing like travel to a country nobody’s heard of or do public speaking in the middle east or rescue a Third World community. You can just work in your local shop. But whatever you do, the point is to breathe outside the bubble of education, to experience the reality of the adult world and how you might fit into it, to realise the value of education, and to get a bit closer to knowing what you want to do. So that you’re able to make the most of your undergraduate experience, if and when it comes. 

In a pub in Battersea on a hot wet evening in June

In a pub on the Battersea road. It’s a large open space with high windows, high ceilings and leather sofas, dangling light bulbs and big screens. England are about to play and the pub is noisy with football revellers. A lady breezes out of the door with a fistful of 60th birthday balloons. Hipsters in tortoiseshell glasses and vintage England shirts gaze up at the television. The day’s mugginess has lifted, though it’s still warm. A barmaid plunges her arm through a couple’s loving gaze to retrieve an empty beer mug, a thin swill of amber-ish bubbles blurring past their doe eyes. 

UK v USA

Being British can sometimes feel like a straitjacket: constrained by a certain accent, stepping into a cliched demeanour of being polite, reserved, awkward, self-conscious. 

Self-conscious. That’s the key thing. What I love about American culture is its ability to shed any self-consciousness, to be clear cut and vigorous and full of life. It’s like walking out of a stuffy, old, velvet-lined theatre full of well-spoken, smartly-dressed people, and walking down the city street with the air on your face and people slouching and moving and dancing, and human buzz all around. Lights and life. That’s what the difference between British and American culture feels like to me.

Two hundred hours

In the last ten weeks I’ve spent two hundred hours either creased and crumpled on trains and buses, or blown to bits along Waterloo Bridge, or hunched at draughty bus stops trying to avoid the drunkard’s eye. I watch the city slide past me: late at night, the streets glistening with life; or during the quiet midday, suspended alongside brick and window on high line trains that pull serenely past the scurrying Thames, blocks of sunlight clasped in their empty carriages. I’ve inhaled the morning waft of suited males and the evening tang of crisps and gin. 

I love the regular faces: the bearded hipster on the bus looking out of place in this corner of suburbia, the three schoolgirls who always meet at the bus stop outside Tesco, the girl who clutches a different homemade cake every Thursday, the heavy breather watching Seinfeld on his ipad, the fine-boned Asian boy with a man bun and tortoiseshell glasses who sits, eyes closed, so still on such a busy train. The tanned man in tight jeans with a handbag. I sat next to him once in my tomboy clothes, and there was a strange moment when we simultaneously crossed legs at the knee, his movement far more graceful and feminine than mine'll ever be. 

Then there's the disorientating transition between leaving the house in the early morning black, feeling like you're the only person alive in the world, and thirty minutes later boarding one of the sweaty sardine tins herding hordes of suits into the city. Arriving to class late, damp and frazzled. 

I happened to be reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust on many of these journeys. And what she says about how modern transport messes up our idea of space, time, scale - our idea of what it is to be human - played itself out as a real life example every day I made that seventeen mile journey between home and city. It was hard to connect the suburbs with the city: the suburban girl with the city girl. Living in the middle of London last year, whenever I came home to the suburbs I felt overwhelmingly different, like I was pulling on somebody else's clothes. This year that feeling repeated itself daily. By the time I’d stepped off the train at Waterloo and breathed the grimy, busy air I was somebody else entirely, with different priorities and preoccupations. And in the evenings, with every inch I was tugged back towards home, I could feel myself shedding that identity. To commute for four hours a day is to be in a permanent state of transition, without actually getting anywhere - it is to be two different people at the same time.

I complain a lot about commuting but actually, the secret is I quite like it. Not the dandruffed shoulders of middle aged men in the morning, not the gladiator tactics of traversing Waterloo Station at rush hour, not the lady at the bus stop who went into great detail about her toe operation while I cast my eye desperately down the road, not the buses that smell of hot breath and squashed stale crisps. 

No, I love the travel, and the knowledge that for a certain amount of time I don't have to do anything, make any decisions, be anyone. I am neither here nor there. I love it when two trains converge to run alongside each other and for a few minutes the two bouncing interiors are not-quite reflections of each other, and my reflection is of somebody else.

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'They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be swung in long rattling trains, still dreaming, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.'

- Virginia Woolf