Battersea visions: digging deep into BAC's amazing past

Just £1.10 to see the late, legendary beat poet Allen
Ginsberg and friends at the Battersea Arts Centre
 in 1981. It was a great night - so why has
it taken me 33 years to go back?

It took a visit to the Battersea Arts Centre on Lavender Hill to really nail the fact that Battersea is a more fascinating, historically rich and surprising place than any of the surrounding boroughs, and that the BAC itself is the pearl in this particularly gnarled oyster of a south London suburb.

Not that that would be too difficult - the surroundings comprise the high-yup suburbia of Clapham, Wandsworth and Putney. Battersea was always more extreme than these places, even though it has had more than its share of gentrification since the early 1980s.

Was at BAC for - of all things - a pilates class, arrived too early, checked out a tiny exhibition on 120 years of the Battersea Town Hall building which it now occupies. Displays of old leaflets and programmes in the glass-fronted frames around the room, covering the anti-closure campaigns of the 70s, through beat and punk poetry of the 70s-80s and the radical fringe theatre of the 80s and 90s.

But the real shocker for me was to discover that the Allen Ginsberg event I went to happened in 1981. That was four years before I moved to this area, I was living either in Dalston or in Croydon - both quite a hike from Lavender Hill.

The bigger, more shaming shock here was the realisation that I have only been back for one performance since - and that was a children's film club in 1992, when my son was 3, a Saturday morning screening of  old Disney cartoons.

Why was I not at BAC for all those groundbreaking performances and plays? From John Cooper Clark in 1978 to the amazing theatricals of the 1990s, I missed them all, even though - once I'd moved to Clapham - they were only a 10-minute walk away.

IDIOT!

Still, I did enjoy the bar occasionally. Memo to self - make up for this by going to BAC regularly.

Penguin pulls off classic wind-up with Morrissey autobiography

This Thursday, Penguin is to publish Morrissey's autobiography in the black covers of the revered imprint, Penguin Classics.

And so, another notch is cut into the stock of the big fat gun used by cultural relativists to blast elitist traditionalists out of their rank and stinking waters. Or is it the other way around?

Penguin justified their decision by suggesting the Morrissey tome could indeed one day be regarded as a classic. A very large question is begged here, blatantly - but there you go.

Penguin founder Allen Lane might well be thumping his coffin lid - but there again, if so, he would have been splintering the boards with much violence already, many times over.

The thing is, all of the people most likely to kick up a stink - people, let's face it, who most probably left school in the 1950s or 1960s and spent most of their 5/- pocket money on a 3/6d Penguin Classic such as Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album or The Bhagavad Gita - are now, in terms of cultural clout, totally impotent.

And most of that lot - the Penguin fetishists, and there are plenty of them, believe me - for I am one - would tell you that the Classics really lost their way back in the 1980s, when Penguin started messing around with formats and colour bands and so on.

Or maybe the rot set in even earlier, in 1961, when the original "roundel" design covers were replaced by Germano Facetti's first Black Classics.  Or a few years later, when the original Penguin Classics editor E. V. Rieu - translator of  the first Penguin Classic in 1946, The Odyssey – was replaced by Betty Radice and Robert Baldick.

(I am still searching for a copy of a strange Penguin classic, Betty Radice: The Translator's Art. Her reign at Penguin, in my view, was the golden age).

There are still some much younger types ready to put up a fight. For example, Brendan O'Neill, a writer for Spike,  but here blogging for  the Daily Telegraph, maintains that Penguin has at a stroke destroyed its own reputation for upholding the highest literary standards - at least in this area of its catalogue.

But his argument is cliché-laden: "Plato, Julian of Norwich, Darwin – they must all be spinning in their graves right now. In essence, Penguin is sneering at the public."

But is it sneering? The public gets what the public wants, as one of Morrissey's rivals once offered.

The public loves Morrissey, or loves to loathe him or find him loveably odd and irritating and puzzling. He's another of the many national treasures that the post-punk generation was so good at producing. All that Manchester lot, or at least the ones who survived. Mark E Smith. John Cooper Clark. The one who was not Ian Curtis. Shaun Ryder. Etc. Still a bit unpredictable, you know, and therefore - classics.

And then the lads from Sheffield. Jarvis, they are all called Jarvis. .

Look at them - they now run BBC Radio 4. Or so it seems sometimes. Anyway, why should they not be Penguin Classics, all of them?

Wasn't one of Brixton's favourite sons also a Penguin Classic? Didn't Linton Kwesi Johnson get his poetry into one of those slim volumes, a few years back? He did. It was called, Mi Revalueshanary Fren.  Yeah, but he was only a "Modern Classic". In the same league as Kafka, F Scott Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Lorca,  Camus, etc.

A nice distinction that Penguin used to make - a soft grey spine for the writers whose impact in the 20th century was such the they would almost certainly become fully-fledged classics in time - but not yet so long dead and so much studied as to get the full black of Balzac, Gogol, Dostoyevsky or Dante.

Morrissey, on the other hand - well, how could anyone deny him his place at this table?