post-punkpunksubculturesmanifestosbricolageidentityperformativity

‘Post-punk’ has been defined in a variety of ways. Some commentators view it primarily as a reaction to punk, with distinct musical features. Others debate whether its organizing principle can even be found in a stylistic unity. Ryan Moore has described how punk responded to a ‘condition of postmodernity’. In his view, postmodernism represented an ‘exhaustion of totalizing metanarratives’. Within this context punk used bricolage to ‘turn signs and spectacles against themselves, as a means of waging war on society’. For the purposes of this piece post-punk is broadly considered a response to punk’s response to postmodernism. This article addresses how manifestos came to be used in various examples of post-punk music. It uses, as a starting point, Julia Downes’ description of musical manifestos in riot grrrl as a ‘key way to define … ideological, aesthetic and political goals’. A series of chronological case studies investigate the key components and aesthetics of the post-punk mani-festo, which include the use of lists, itemization and direct second-person address. Given Simon Reynolds’ view that post-punk ‘tried to make politics and pop work together, but failed’, this article examines whether the goals of post-punk manifestos were at all achieved. Were manifestos in the main, promotional or self-motivating exercises? Do recent ‘post-punk’ manifestos, such as those by the band Savages, both

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acknowledge and move beyond the limitations of earlier models, to increasingly alter how people consume music?

Post-punk can be defined as a musical genre that both paralleled and emerged from the punk rock explosion of the late 1970s (Erlewine 2012). Simon Reynolds described ‘a vanguard that came to be known as ‘post-punk’, who ‘saw 1977 not as a return to raw rock and roll but the chance to break with tradition’. He defined post-punk in musical terms, as a series of bands who ‘dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk’s uncompleted musical revolutions’, and who ‘explored new possibilities through their embrace of electronics, noise, reggae’s dub techniques and disco production’ (Reynolds 2005: xvii).1 Theodore Gracyk argued, however, that ‘post-punk is sufficiently diverse that its organizing principle is not to be found in its stylistic unity’. He wrote ‘as a set of musical styles its organizing principle is not audible’. He proposed that its ‘core exemplars represent(ed) a coherent movement, in the art-historic sense’, and that ‘post-punk represent(ed) a shift away from punk’s romantic expressionism to a modernist commitment to use verbal-musical interplay for the expression of ideas’ (Gracyk 2012: 78). In other words, Gracyk perceived post-punk more as a means of expression than simply a musical genre.2 For the purposes of this article, the component of Gracyk’s definition that relates to ‘verbal-musical interplay’ and ‘the expression of ideas’ within music we recognize as following punk is utilized. In the following case studies post-punk bands are chosen that wilfully expressed such ideas, both to themselves in the form of self-address, and outwardly to the world at large. Reynold’s narrower musical definition of post-punk, mainly relating to bands between 1978 and 1984, is thereby challenged.3

As Reynold’s work acknowledges, post-punk is generally seen as a movement that came into reckoning soon after punk in the late 1970s. However, in order to encompass post-punk bands that consciously mani-fested their ideas in written form, this piece looks to more recent post-punk bands that fit Gracyk’s description, and the author acknowledges the neces-sary chronological gap created in this piece as a result. This does not mean that the prominence and relevance of 1970s’ bands such as Wire (who are also mentioned) is refuted or overlooked. Only that more recent bands offer illus-trative examples of the usefulness of post-punk as a movement that explicitly manifested their ideas in discourses extra to their music, despite these bands not being at the forefront when the term ‘post-punk’ is used. Bands such as Crass, which arguably come to mind more readily than some cited here as post-punk, are only not used as case studies here for this reason.

Post-punk clearly resists a tidy musical definition. The riot grrrl move-ment (which occurred in the early 1990s as a moment in post-punk) has been described as ‘a fluid set of contested, sonic, spatial and linguistic prac-tices with the aim to incite a radical girl gang into being’ (Downes 2014: 147). Comparably, post-punk could be argued to be a ‘fluid set of sonic, spatial and linguistic practices’, which were a reaction to punk. By appropriating a range of practices, post-punks where thereby acting as bricoleurs, to use Dick Hebdige’s appropriation of the word. Hebdige adopted Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term ‘bricolage’ from being ‘a method of expression through the selection and synthesis of components culled from surrounding culture’ (Lévi-Strauss

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1966: 78). He applied it to the punk movement, arguing that in punk culture ‘humble objects’ (e.g. safety pins) were ‘magically appropriated’ and made to carry ìsecretî meanings’ to present a challenge to orthodoxy (Hebdige1979: 21). Both Downes and Hebdige thereby argue that within their specific contexts groups acted to make latent meanings in their work explicit through the creation of their cultural products (music, manifestos, etc.). By so doing they were engaging in a performance of politics, bringing to the surface the politicality of their cultural product. But what conditions were punks respond-ing to? A primary one was the postmodern condition.

If postmodernism represented an ‘exhaustion of totalizing metanarratives’, which created an incredulity towards grand narratives, punk used the eclectic means at the disposal of a bricoleur ‘as a means of waging war on society’ (Moore 2004: 305–07). Punk, in particular, reacted to how means of profit-making channels in popular culture, or in his words ‘the apparatuses of media, fashion and entertainment’, have been used to ‘circulate instantly disposa-ble spectacles and services’ (Moore 2004: 307). Ryan Moore argues that the plethora of lifestyles consequently offered to consumers in popular culture left consumer people to ‘fabricate an identity from the unending flow of celebrities, lifestyles and products’. This was the state of affairs, which Hebdige argued, punk kicked against, using, ‘with self-reflexive irony … recycled cultural images and fragments for the purposes of parody and shock’. In Hebdige’s view this took the form of individuals wearing safety pins and leather jack-ets to subvert the original meaning of these items (Moore 2004: 307). David Muggleton, however, was more interested in how ‘members of youth subcul-tures interpret and make sense of the postmodern characteristics imputed to them by social theorists’ (2000: 5). He interviewed members of subcultures to uncover explanations regarding their behaviour and dress, rather than apply-ing theories and frameworks onto data. His conclusion was that in the punk scene an emphasis on postmodern hyperindividualism and fragmentation runs alongside a modernist emphasis on authenticity (Muggleton 2000: 6).

By extension, the post-punk movement used different means of expression. The Dada art movement created a manifesto, which was a source of inspiration in the post-punk movement. Simon Reynolds notes how formative post-punk bands such as Talking Heads and Pere Ubu used Dada performance tech-niques, such Dadaist sound poetry (2005: 37). In particular, manifestos were a technique employed in the post-punk movement. They were used as part of a process of making manifest the link between cultural production and consumption, and the contexts of that production and consumption.

Many pop artists overlook these links, but in the post-punk moment there was a tendency to make this latent process explicit. Regardless of the content of an artist’s manifesto, the manifesto itself is a performative act that is both political and cultural. By creating a manifesto the artist is acknowledging that the cultural product itself does not contain a code for its consumption – it requires rhetorical performance and political articulation as well as actual performance. In short, the cultural is political.

Julia Downes’ discussion of the manifesto in riot grrrl is partly applicable to post-punk. She described manifestos in riot grrrl as ‘a special rhetorical device: a key way in which individuals define(d) and redefine(d) … ideologi-cal, aesthetic and political goals’ (Downes 2014: 156). This article will employ this definition of a manifesto, because it is applicable to post-punk bands who both did and did not have a published manifesto, but who used every means at their disposal to express their intent.4

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A short history of pop manifestos will now be offered and, after this, case studies specific to post-punk will be chronologically presented.

Manifestos are a form of address that has been used for a wide variety of reasons. They have been used by political theorists such as Marx and Engels, by radical feminists (e.g. Valerie Solanas), and by bands.

In 2010, Steve Jelbert noted the proliferation of manifestos in pop music over the years (2010). He identifies one moment when pop groups and politi-cal manifestos came together, citing the ten-point programme of the White Panther party, which was co-founded by MC5 manager John Sinclair. The White Panther party was a far-left political organization founded in 1968, and MC5 became The Panthers’ house band – at which point politics and rock fused. On their manifesto, also released in 1968, The Panther’s fifth demand was ‘Free access to information media-free the technology from the greed creeps!’. It was numbered from one to ten, printed in black and white, and employed terse, direct pleas, with eight of the bullet points starting with the word ‘Free’. It was published in a US periodical, entitled Fifth Estate, and was influential enough to be praised by Abbie Hoffman as a key countercultural document a few years later in 1971.5

This plea to free information would later become a theme in post-punk manifestos. The way the Panthers approached their manifesto prefigured the later use of this medium by post-punk artists.

Reynolds noted the use of manifestos by post-punk bands in the era that followed (2005: xxix). At the start of the post-punk movement, in 1977, the band Wire declared their ‘Seven Rules Of Self-Definition’. This mani-festo again used terse language, had a black and white layout, and had each item numbered. This time the manifesto took the form of a self-address and included the items ‘No solos’ and ‘No Americanisms’.

Other post-punk bands such as Scritti Politti, Gang of Four and Throbbing Gristle (TG) also created manifestos as a means of expression, although theirs were not expressed in the succinct form of Wires’. In the twenty-first-cen-tury post-punk revivals would see the manifesto take on different forms when used by recent post-punk bands such as The Chapman Family and Savages.6

So, how did post-punk bands use manifestos?

In the late 1970s TG devised a manifesto, which they expressed in an interview with Melody Maker. They declared their intention to ‘look at this scabby, dirty, horribly society and transform it (in music) into an inhuman emotion-less spectacle’ (Ford 1999: 7.15).

For the 1979 Hayward Annual, a book of British art, their frontman Genesis P-Orridge expressed concern at how information is controlled, thereby mystifying the system by which music is commoditized. He wrote

in keeping a monotonous culture and a society under a control process one creates a façade of experts guarding knowledge/information. The public at large feel, I am sure, that art is not for them. Artists have delib-erately made them feel inferior, excluded through not being trained in understanding of art. Demystification is our duty.

(Ford 1999: 7.16)

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TG usually released information relating to their ideology to accompany records they released through their own company Industrial Records. But on occasions such as these they were using distribution networks set up for other causes by which to publish their manifesto. It is unclear whether TG’s mani-festos had any palpable effects, though as we will later see, they influenced contemporary bands.

Scritti Politti, who formed in the late 1970s, also aimed to demystify. Steve Jelbert described Scritti Politti as ‘Gramscian’, given the influence of neo-Marxist theorist Gramsci on their work (2010). Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks (1998), defined the concept of ‘hegemony’, which Reynolds described as ‘a catch-all term that covers the official ideology of state, Church and other insti-tutions, along with more diffuse and subliminal ‘common sense’ assumptions that hold together a social system’.7 In Scritti Politti’s 2005 album track of the same name hegemony is described as ‘the foulest creature that set upon a race’ (Reynolds 2005: 203).

Scritti Politti demonstrated their art-school education, by possessing the guiding conviction that discourses around art was inseparable from the artwork itself: that every artwork was a form of ‘active criticism’ (Reynolds 2005: 226).8 The band demystified the process by which record companies physically create and distribute records. In their artwork, they itemized every cost that went into getting the record into the shops (Jelbert 2010). Their lyrics and artwork were thereby part of what Downes would later call a ‘fluid set of linguistic practises’ (2014: 147).

As Leeds art students Gang Of Four were also influenced by Gramsci’s theories. Gramsci believed that critique should unmask everything that appears obvious as a man-made construct, a ‘truth’ that serves somebody’s interest (Gramsci quoted in Reynolds 2005: 119). On the cover art for their Damaged Goods EP Gang Of Four made explicit the power imbalance between the band and their record company by depicting a matador and a bull having a conversation (using speech bubbles) (Gang Of Four 1978). In this the bull says ‘at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions’. Here, Gang Of Four were using Gramsci’s ideas to highlight an inter-play of power that had hitherto been publically unsaid; even perceived as natural.9

In post-punk revivals after the 1980s the address of the manifesto shifted, to be inward instead of outward. This itself may have been part of a larger tendency to indulge in the darker insights of pop performers at this point in the 1990s, where papers such as the NME and Melody Maker offered exten-sive coverage of musicians’ ongoing personal travails.

This may be also because, along with other 1990s bands such as Placebo and My Vitriol, the Manic Street Preachers ‘shared a preoccupation with the aesthetics of suicide’ (Mankowski 2014: 35–58).

In the early 1990s the Manic Street Preachers kept their inter-band manifesto largely private, while frequently alluding to it in interviews. An early flexidisc, UK Channel Boredom, had printed on it a manifesto titled ‘Behaviour Leading To Actualisation Or Ways To Dig The World, Part 1’ (Manic Street Preachers 1990). It took the form of a self-address, its tone more akin to that found in popular therapy books than in post-punk manifestos. It was also unusual in its use of the present tense, with the first item ‘a) Experiencing life like a child, with full absorption and concentration’. The only item that recalled

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previous post-punk manifestos was the third, which ran ‘Listening to your own feelings in evaluating experiences instead of the voice of tradition or authority or the majority’. It was given away for free with the small-circulation fanzine Hopelessly Devoted, its impact being small enough to not provoke any cover-age in future Manic Street Preachers biographies (Price 2002). This might be because the items were vague enough to not provoke a measurable reaction.

The Manic Street Preachers developed, as an inter-band form of commu-nication, a habit of exchanging postcards with one another throughout their career. On their website their bassist Nicky Wire writes of how ‘the band were prolific communicators’ and how every time he received post there would be a ‘bundle’ of postcards from other members. He thereby offered an insight into how the band maintained, during periods of separation, a line of commu-nication using this rather unusual form of communication. But this method, which could be seen as fostering a shared artistry, also merged into the way the band communicated with the outside world, with various journalists being bombarded with private letters by the band that increasingly began to read as manifestos (Maconie 2013).

Their guitarist and ‘Minister of Propaganda’ Richey Edwards later publi-cally issued a series of letters that took the form of state-of-the-nation addresses. These letters broke from the tradition of pop manifestos in that they adopted a more passive, defeatist tone, albeit one couched in the capital letters used in a military address through a telegram (Price 2002: 17).

One ‘manifesto’, from December 1992, was issued by the band’s lyricist Richey Edwards. Like TG’s manifesto, it was concerned with conformity:

We sit in straight lines, do what we are told, like seats on Lockerbie, deck chairs on the Titanic.

(Edwards 1992)

The punk reaction to what Moore described as ‘an endless flow of celebrities, lifestyles and products’ is evident in a line, which again sits in isolation, later in the same manifesto:

Culture is a chequebook.10

Here Edwards was perhaps making the statement that culture is a commod-ity that can be bought and sold, as part of the condition that results from the ‘exhaustion of totalizing metanarratives’ (Moore 2004: 307).

The theme of culture being a commodity is one which Edwards again picked up on, in a missive from May 1992:

Dietrich, Garbo, Fritz Lang colonised the imagination of the us and sold it back in technicolour.

(Edwards 1992)

Here Edwards adopted a cynical tone with regard to how even ‘imagination’ has become commoditized in modern culture.

During their career the band have addressed their followers through a variety of means. These included strategic sampling of films, interviews and songs in their music, and using relevant quotations from authors in their record sleeves. These are the same kinds of methods as identified by Downes, when describing riot grrrl as a movement in which ‘a deliberate and conscious

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pillaging of literature, theory, art, history and popular culture’ were used to ‘articulate subversive representations that challenged the status quo’ (2014: 153). A definition used in riot grrrl is here also a fitting description of the methods of ‘active criticism’ used by Manic Street Preachers, particularly during the early 1990s. This was a period in which bands like the Manics reacted to the overblown, apolitical music of hairspray 1980s bands such as Kiss and Meatloaf. Where bands such as Guns ‘N’ Roses had assembled a bricolage without explicit recourse to a manifesto, the Manic Street Preachers combined the vivid colour of glam-rock with an agenda, fusing ‘pop and poli-tics’ in the way Reynolds later defined as ‘post-punk’ (Reynolds 2009: 408).

The Chapman Family were a Stockton-based post-punk band active from 2006 to 2013, who spawned during another revival of this genre of post-punk mani-festo. They wrote an open letter in 2010, which was published in the magazine Artrocker as a manifesto.11 Although Artrocker is available in most high streets, this ‘manifesto’ did not elicit a clear response, perhaps because it expressed only vague intentions. Edwards’ state-of-the-nation address is rekindled. ‘The country is in ruins’, (it ran) ‘and the population is feeding on the glorification of D-list celebrity morons’. During its conclusion singer Kingsley Chapman wrote ‘We just want you to rethink your priorities’. The articulacy of their anger and socio-political criticism offered an inspiring contrast, given their apolitical peers at the time. However, the methods by which The Chapman Family intended to achieve this shift in priorities were not detailed. Arguably, in this letter, The Chapman Family were reasserting the stance taken by previous post-punk bands, to both demystify the process of making music and reassert how bands could alter the perceptions of their audience.

In 2013 the post-punk band Savages issued direct, specific manifestos. Excitingly these statements (issued on their website and printed in their record sleeves) are often supported by specific strategies.12 This is in marked contrast to other post-punk bands such as The Chapman Family, whose strenuous language, on closer inspection, did not contain a method by which they intended to instigate change.

In the song ‘Shut Up’ (from the album Silence Yourself) the band’s front-woman Jehnny Beth issued a spoken-word call to arms, which also appeared on their website (Savages 2013). This online manifesto used military-style capital letters, as Edwards did, and took the form of a second-person address. But Savages offered a deeper insight into the restricting aspects of orthodoxy and hegemony than most post-punk bands. Their manifestos were less self-referential than those of The Chapman Family, with the bulk of their content expressing a concern for their audience.

‘We live in a world of many distractions’, Beth wrote, before warning: ‘if you are distracted, you are available’. Reflecting the urgent, direct nature of post-punk music the manifesto called for clarity of thought, as a way of preventing individuals from being manipulated by orthodoxy. Here the post-punk manifesto aimed to enhance self-realization, as riot grrrl manifestos did.

Beth writes, ‘perhaps having deconstructed everything we should be think-ing about putting everything back together’. This deconstruction is arguably comparable to the ‘exhaustion of meta-narratives’ that Moore described

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(2004: 307). Savages are therefore placing themselves within the context of other punk and post-punk bands that reacted to it.

In their 2013 ‘I Am Here’ manifesto Beth recalls the concerns of Scritti Politti, by addressing how hegemony is maintained through enforced conform-ity. ‘Manipulations and fears … are meted out to young, intelligent and radical people who yield to the pressure of accepted practices’, she wrote.

Either consciously or unconsciously Beth reasserts Gramsci’s views on how power, particularly how it is deployed by ‘making the ways of the world seem like common sense’ (Gramsci quoted in Reynolds 2004: 119). Beth also echoed the sentiments of TG, who warned against ‘a façade of experts’ that exercised control over the populace (Ford 1999: 7.16). The manifesto urged followers of the band to ‘keep our mouth shut’, from an edict which a few lines later pleaded for people to resist contributing more vapid content to the ether of social media.

In our modern world, man assiduously abandons his life to practical necessities and his imagination to slavery. Manipulations and fears – manipulation by fear – are meted out to young, intelligent and radical people who yield to the pressure of accepted practices and many age-old servitudes. The elder generation hasn’t come to warn them: each of them came to tell about themselves. Each one to tell how they had eaten, how they had slept, how they had important orgasms, important childhoods and dreams. Because an honest life is advertised as a life of silence, normality and dull conceit. Art is stultified. Love a privilege. And in the vicinity of our most splendid creative youth, it is strongly advized to keep our mouth shut if we want to succeed.

(Savages ‘I Am Here’ band manifesto)13

In their manifestos Savages are continuing a punk tradition, responding to the condition of postmodernity by asking their listeners to resist the demands of ‘capital’ (or in other words, the forces of consumerism) that dictate protocol surrounding art and lifestyle. The aim seems to be to overcome suppression and achieve self-realization, ‘if we want to succeed’.

A further Savages manifesto detailed how the ‘solid, indestructible’ sound of the band was purposefully ‘designed’ to ‘provide a wide range of emotions’. The music is described as ‘a self-affirming voice’ intended to help listeners experience everything from their ‘erotic life and jobs’ differently:

Savages’ intention is to create a sound, indestructible, musically solid, written for the stage and designed with enough nuances to provide a wide range of emotions. Savages are a self-affirming voice to help expe-rience our girlfriends differently, our husbands, our jobs, our erotic life, and the place music occupies into our lives. Savages’ songs aim to remind us that human beings haven’t evolved so much, that music can still be straight to the point, efficient and exciting.

(Savages Manifesto #114)

In a break from the vagaries of some previous post-punk manifestos, Savages issued an edict requesting that fans at their concerts do not film them, as it prohibits the band from ‘Immersing ourselves’. In this instance an attempt to alter the behaviour of their followers in a highly mediated era was expressed with a more developed, actionable agenda than their predecessors created.

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To honour the post-punk tradition, conclusions will be presented in the form of a manifesto.

Post-punk bands, in summary, proposed that:

1. You must question the role of the music industry in the production of music.

2. You must question the power relations that impact upon your consump-tion of music.

3. You must resist what ‘the unthinking progression towards uniformity’ (Ford 1999: 7.16).

4. You must attempt to unseat conformity, and disclose ‘The Façade of Experts’ that guard knowledge (Ford 1999: 7.16).

5. You must react to the blandness of aspects of pop culture and strive to use every mode of expression at your disposal.

6. You must resist orthodoxies relating to how music is used in people’s lives and how life and music relate.

These case studies beg the question of whether post-punk manifestos were successful in achieving their ends. Are they merely a high-risk publicity strategy or a serious statement of intent? The KLF’s Bill Drummond acknowl-edged that, compared to politicians, artists are less at risk than others when creating manifestos:15

Politicians can never be seen to be playing with the idea. They’ve got to be seen taking it entirely seriously, at every level. A whole campaign costing millions is riding on the back of it. An art manifesto would be recognized as an artwork in itself anyway, critiqued by art critics not political journalists.

(Jelbert 2010)

Drummond seemingly concludes that manifestos are low-risk publicity stunts. But manifestos are a potentially more tasteful and impartial form of marketing than Drummond’s quote implies. They allow an artist to show the world that they are thinking critically and politically, and that they are consciously ensur-ing these aspects become part of their image. What they manifest may well be challenging and subversive but as popular musicians they are operating (to a greater or lesser degree) in a commodity system in which they can choose to be explicit regarding their role.

The people best equipped to ask what manifestos are for are probably musicians. James Dean Bradfield is the singer of the Manic Street Preachers, a band who prior to releasing their debut record Generation Terrorists proclaimed an intention to sell sixteen million copies of it. They also declared huge soci-ocultural ambitions, not least the destruction of capitalism (though their intended role in this dismantling remained vague) (Price 2002: 11). Bradfield has subsequently reflected that the band were ‘mental for releasing those mission statements’. He believes that manifestos motivated the band through ‘fear of failure’.16

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In contrast, when asked why Savages were motivated to write manifestos, Jehnny Beth’s comparable view was that ‘It was an exercise. It’s more interest-ing to set yourself a set of goals before you enter the rehearsal room. Whether you achieve it or not doesn’t matter. What matters is putting direction into your work’.17 Beth’s manifestos are a performance of politics, another way in which individuals can ‘define ideological goals’ (Downes 2014: 156).

Reynolds argued that post-punk ‘tried to make pop and politics work together but failed’, thereby implicating the failure of manifestos as a strat-egy in post-punk (2009: 408). But the post-punk manifesto has seen a recent revival by bands such as Savages, who have acknowledged the influence of earlier models. During our interview Jehnny Beth cited Genesis P-Orridge’s Thee Psychic Bible (1994) as an influence.18, 19 Therefore, even if post-punk manifestos have been an unsuccessful strategy historically, if post-punk revivalist bands use them to successfully facilitate change they have arguably been an effective method. Beth acknowledged a diverse range of influences in the construction of her manifestos. In her words ‘Adam Curtis biogra-phies, Surrealist manifestos’ (and) ‘Alan Moore’s theories about magic were all inspiring’.20

Both Savages and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have requested for audiences to not use mobiles and cameras at their concerts using manifestos and live notices to issue this plea (2014).21

These notices fall within Downes’ description of a manifesto as ‘a rhetori-cal device … in which individuals define ideological goals’ (2014: 156).

When I asked Beth if her requests had facilitated change she said ‘Yes, I think it has kind of made people more relax with the idea of engaging with the music’. Refraining from using phones has resulted in audiences, in her words, feeling ‘permitted’ to move their body. ‘Because that is expected from you, you feel more free to do it’, she said. In the case of Savages, therefore, post-punk manifestos have been effective at permitting self-realization and altering behaviours regarding the consumption of music.

There are wider implications regarding this breakthrough. If performers are able to alter the behaviour of people at their gigs, then could there be other ways in which performers can affect the consumption of music?

In recent years festivals have relied more and more upon corporate sponsors, who not only push their products onto audiences for the dura-tion, but who are thereby able to influence the behaviours of the band and the audience. But does the Internet, through manifestos, offer performers a way in which they can counteract this corporate control? The impact of Beth’s manifestos suggests that there may be further ways that artists can influence the production and consumption of their work.

The author would like to thank Dr Adam Hansen for his extensive editing advice and Jehnny Beth for her input.

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Guy Mankowski has lectured at Edinburgh, Northumbria and Sunderland Universities. He is the author of the novel Letters from Yelena (2012), which won an Arts Council Literature Award, leading to him to being the first English person to be allowed access to The Vaganova Academy of Ballet, in St Petersburg, for research purposes. The novel was used in GCSE training material by Osiris Educational. He was awarded an AHRC studentship to write his third novel, How I Left The National Grid (2015). His research is now focused on post-punk.

Contact: Guy Mankowski, Lipman Building, Northumbria University, Ellison Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE1 8ST.

Guy Mankowski has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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