Interview: Jeremy Deller

The Turner Prize-winning artist on politics, music and his film Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992, now showing at The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition.

Jeremy Deller has interrogated and framed art, music and politics through his work as a producer, publisher, filmmaker, collaborator and archivist for the last three decades. The London-born Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist has explored everything from brass bands (Acid Brass) and Depeche Mode (Our Hobby is Depeche Mode) to the Miners’ strike (The Battle of Orgreave) and the Iraq War (It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq).

The Vinyl Factory has a long history of collaboration with Deller to create a multitude of music and art projects, from his 2013 Venice Biennale soundtrack which VF produced and recorded at Abbey Road to the co-commissioning of his film Bom Bom’s Dream which was shown at The Infinite Mix, co-presented by VF at 180 Studios in 2016. Over the years, Deller has released numerous records with VF including English Magic, his cover of ‘Voodoo Ray‘, and collaborations with Adrian Sherwood and Cecelia Bengolea.

The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition showcases VF’s many artistic collaborations with artists we’ve regularly worked with including Deller. In his installation for the exhibition, Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992, Deller once again dives into the world of music; this time examining the socio-political history of the ‘Second Summer of Love’. A film of a lecture Deller delivered to a class of A-level Politics students, the piece combines rare archive footage with an oral history tracing house music from its Chicago and Detroit origins to its political presence in post-Miners’ strike Britain.

We speak with Deller about the importance of rave history, the students’ response and the relationship between art and popular music.

This interview was originally published on The Vinyl Factory

How did the lecture come about?

I’d given a talk in a school in a North London state school–just a regular artist talk and I was slightly wary. I’d never given a talk to a group of teenagers, but I got such a great feeling from it. It’s funny when you do talks, you know if your audience is with you or against you or they’re engaged. These young people were engaged and asked funny questions. It was a laugh. 

When I was asked to make a documentary about ‘80s music, I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go back to that school because I liked being with those young people. I’m going to do a film giving a lecture about my view of music and society in the 1980s, and how dance music pushed society forward and changed society.” 

How did the students respond? 

A lot of them were politics students but that doesn’t mean they study contemporary history. Also, I think for most of the students in the film, their parents were not born in the UK, so their parents had no experience of growing up in Britain in the ‘80s and ‘90s and there was no folk or familial memory of Britain at that time. Those students were looking at this footage and some of these ideas for the first time.

Their reactions are very visceral and immediate to things like the miners’ strike, the Traveller movement, or even just footage of raves. They were intrigued and puzzled by things and, in a sense, I was trying to show them a version of Britain they might not be aware of just because they weren’t aware of the history, but also the complexity and the surprising nature of certain aspects of British society and youth movements.

What was your approach to research for the lecture?

When you are researching something like this, you do some from memory and read books. I went online and found a clip which is in the film that I didn’t own before I thought about making the film. It was a group of dancers in Detroit dancing to Kraftwerk which, for me, is one of the most joyful incredible pieces of footage you could ever see. 

It’s such a revealing piece of footage. People dressed up all looking like they were going to a wedding or something, dancing their hearts out to Kraftwerk. It’s the most incredible thing. I knew I wanted to use that–whatever happened, I would use that clip. Then, of course, you look at other clips and you go online and look at things and one thing leads to another.

When you saw the students working and experimenting with the music gear you brought in, did it remind you of the experimental roots of the music you were talking about?

It felt like it was a reflection of a new generation. There is a moment when the young people get to play on equipment that was used on some seminal house music records. I wanted a bit of fun, like a breakout session, because however much you play with something on a screen or a computer, there’s nothing quite like getting your hands on a physical object and making sounds from it. 

I thought that was an endearing and important part of the film. In most secondary schools now, there is so little provision for music making that, it felt like the right thing to do to give the young people an opportunity to play on these things and make sound.

You can make something that sounds pretty good quite quickly and easily, and they get a beat going and start playing over it. It’s fantastic. 

There is a major political thread throughout the lecture. Do you think contemporary dance music is as connected with politics as it was in the past?

I don’t know much about what’s going on now. I know a little bit, but, I think the big difference between music then and now is that now a lot of dance music has very strong lyrical content while most of the big songs from the ‘80s and ‘90s were instrumentals with maybe repetitive lyrics.

What was political was that you were actually in a field or somewhere you weren’t meant to be. The context was very politicised, even if the lyrics weren’t. The fact that you would be doing something in a place where you shouldn’t have been or were gathering en masse was itself a political act, even though it might not seem like that, it might just seem like a big party.

What was happening was a disruption of order and of what was expected of you. Any mass movement after the miner’s strike, which ended in 1985, was seen through the lens of being a problem. Just gathering bodies together was seen as an issue by the government.

Maybe it reminded them of striking miners trying to get to a picket or trying to get to a pit or something like that. There was this strange echo of what had happened before and that gave it a political edge. Of course, because the parties weren’t regulated, they were initially illegal, which meant the law had to change.

How important do you think it is that young ravers now know about the history that’s come before them?

It’s always interesting to know the history, not just for dance music. It gives you context and also perspective. This film is really about perspective. It was never meant to be a series of interviews with middle-aged men sitting in a recording studio or in front of their record collection, talking about how amazing it was when they went to parties and the drugs they took and reminiscing. It’s not meant to be a sentimental film in that respect or one that’s nostalgic.

It’s a film that takes a few steps back and looks at the bigger picture about Britain at the time and how dance music changed the country and pushed history forward, might, you know, push it. 

There’s a quote by a French philosopher–”music is prophecy”– and, in a way, house music and acid house were a prophecy of what the future could be in technology and how people related to each other. It showed us the future and we’ve taken some aspects of it, good and bad, I think.

It’s really a film about how music changes society and can intervene in history and push history forward.

Tell me about the diagram and imagery of Stonehenge that are also in your installation. 

The diagram I made when I was 19. I drew it originally in 1996 when I was making a project where a brass band played acid house music called Acid Brass. It sounds like a joke, in a way, and it’s meant to be an absurd diagram that charts the relationship between these two musical movements. In a sense, the diagram tells a story about Britain in the 20th century, going from industrial to post-industrial culture. If you look at the diagram, you can see the connections–they both meet media hysteria and civil unrest through the miner’s strike and trade unions and brass bands.

It’s called the history of the world because, for some people, this is their world. Weirdly, it serves as the script for the film, which I made over 20 years later. As soon as house music happened in Britain and I was looking at it from a distance I knew something important was happening in the country.

The other image in the room is a negative image of Stonehenge, which was taken on a fashion shoot I did there. And, today’s solstice day or some of this evening will be solstice. Stonehenge appears in the film and every other documentary about Britain. Stonehenge is always present in a sense. It’s always present in our lives. there’s always something happening there that we think about. It represents us. I thought it was appropriate that Stonehenge should be in the room watching over us.

Do you think it’s important that popular and dance music are exhibited in art-focused spaces?

Well, of course, I’m an artist, but this work is probably the least artful-looking work in the exhibition. I would argue that it’s a very traditional documentary but you can still see it as an artwork.

For me, what’s important about shows like this–and it’s something I believe in my work–is that music is an art form. Popular music and dance music should be taken seriously. It wasn’t for a long time and was denigrated. House music, especially, was denigrated in the media as just being meaningless.

Obviously, it’s full of meaning, especially for the people that loved it. It was their lives, it is our lives. Pop music and pop culture is something that should be examined and looked at by artists. That doesn’t have to make it serious because it’s a very playful exhibition but it’s an important subject matter because it’s so special to people and it’s full of meaning as well.

Music documents change in society, and it changes societies. It’s the art form that does that more than anything else. It changes attitudes, but it can change histories and social histories especially. 

Buy tickets to The Vinyl Factory: Reverb at 180 Studios now.

180 Studios
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
22 May – 28 September 2024

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday

Watch next: Patch Notes: Atomised Listening

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