Long a chronicler of London life, Iain Sinclair considers his new film 'Swandown' as the polar opposite to Danny Boyle's Olympic vision of England, writes DONALD CLARKE
THIS FEELS like a good day to interview Iain Sinclair. Large sections of the western world still seem stupefied by the mammoth school pageant with which Danny Boyle launched the London Olympics. No fool, the Lancastrian film-maker managed to placate the right by offering Queen Elizabeth a cameo and soothe the left by including tributes to the National Health Service.
The inestimable Mr Sinclair – a writer committed to deconstructing every paving stone in London – has just completed a very different treatment of the English experience. Part situationist prank, part mock-Homeric Odyssey, Andrew Kötting’s film Swandown follows the director and Sinclair as they paddle a swan-shaped pedalo from Hastings to the Olympic site in Hackney, East London. Boyle’s extravaganza blares triumphantly. Swandown is propelled by recreational anarchy and quiet anger.
“They are polar opposites,” Sinclair says. “In a very leisurely, abstract way, we progress across the English countryside. It contradicts all Danny Boyle’s stuff about laughing milkmaids and cricket on the green – that parody of Larkin and Betjeman. Our film is fat men in military fatigues sitting by the river fishing for nothing because there are no fish left.”
Sinclair, a resident of Hackney for more than 40 years, is far from convinced by the Olympic project. Ever since it was announced that the games were about to descend on east London, he has been using every available outlet to detail his disgust and dismay. He knows whereof he speaks. Over the past few decades, in closely packed, dizzyingly allusive books such as Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital, he has creatively anatomised the cultural and social superstructure of the English capital. His most recent tome, the characteristically knotty Ghost Milk, has much to say about the way the Olympics has quietly dismembered large parts of Hackney and Newham.
The ceremony did not win him over. “I thought it was profoundly and deeply shallow,” he says. (A man who uses words carefully, he surely intends the oxymoron in that last phrase.) “There were a few impressive effects that would have worked in a more totalitarian production and the rest verged on bathos. It was very bizarre to see a tribute to the National Health Service when it is crying out for money.”
It was also deeply peculiar the way sometime icons of the counter-culture – Dizzy Rascal, the Sex Pistols – found themselves sharing airtime with the Queen.
Who was the more compromised? “The audience for going along with it,” he says. “I take it to be a great hallucination. It’s a great corporate bonanza. The whole imperial history of Britain was erased to make way for this slightly woolly New Labour vision of history.”
Let us ponder how a Welshman, largely schooled in Cheltenham, ended up becoming (with apologies to Peter Ackroyd) the era’s most distinguished chronicler of London life.
Sinclair’s first stop after school was, it transpires, Dublin. During the mid-1960s he studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin. Experimental films were shot. Odd poetry was declaimed. “That was partly a result of my large enthusiasm for Irish writing – particularly modernist Irish writing,” he says.
Did the city not seem somewhat parochial in the period? Books were still being banned. “No, not at all. We would put on plays in garage theatres in Sandymount. We would rent European art films through the Trinity Film Society. Dublin had all these great cinemas where you could catch up with Hollywood stuff. I remember feeling embarrassed by the behaviour of some English people who still treated the city like an outpost and just ignored what was going on around them.”
Sinclair could never be accused of ignoring his surroundings. After college, he made his way to London, acquired a cheap house in Hackney and began the process of turning street history into art: poetry, experimental films, novels, unclassifiable non-fiction. The word that has so often stuck to his work is “psychogeography”.
Sinclair’s colourful CV tells us that he taught art, worked on building sites and toiled as a second-hand bookseller. Meanwhile, he began making connections with the post-beat writers who were gathering in London’s scruffier quarters.
“I was doing bits of filming and it had become very bureaucratic,” he says. “I decided it was easier not to search for approved commission, but to do things on my own terms and pay for them by taking these labouring jobs. That also gave me access. I was involved in meeting people. I did that for 10 years as a way of absorbing information from the trenches. Running my own small printing press meant I could publish my own small books.”
Downriver, a whacky, dense novel, attracted attention in 1991. But he really began to surge above ground with the wonderful, distracting, absurd Lights out for the Territory in 1997. Subtitled 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London, the book found his psychogeographic musings clanking furiously into top gear.
Swandown offers (some pun intended) the perfect vehicle for Sinclair’s erudite, subversive aesthetic. It is suffused with references to Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and Werner Herzog. But it is also happy to poke fun at itself.
At one stage, when pondering Sinclair’s attitude to the Olympics, Stewart Lee, the off-beam comic, comments: “He just thinks nothing should be allowed to happen in Hackney without his permission.” Sinclair is amused, but unrepentant.
Lee’s joke does get at something obsessive in Sinclair’s work. But the case made against the Olympic development in Ghost Milk is rigorously researched and passionately argued (if prone to endless diversions). He believes that the Olympic project was a “smoke screen” for forwarding a long-planned epic development hatched between government and commerce. Only a supposedly cuddly enterprise such as the Olympics would, he argues, permit this coalition to destroy large tracts of London collectively dismissed as “wasteland”. A large swathe of the working-class East End has ceased to exist.
“Now, we are left with this corporate entity which looks exactly like an invaded city. There is no other way of looking at it. You’ve got helicopter gunships, surface-to-air missiles, more troops employed than in Afghanistan. And this monolithic combination of government and media just hyperventilates about it. The BBC has literally become ‘the Olympics channel’. It actually calls itself that. There is no way this could happen in any other part of London.”
He reminds us of the rings being forged in Boyle’s opening ceremony and – after noting that Josef Goebbels devised many of the Olympics’ continuing traditions – alludes to a “Wagnerian super-opera that could only happen in a totalitarian state”.
This is heady stuff and, as is sometimes the case in Sinclair’s prose, the rhetoric occasionally becomes so overpowering you feel yourself gasping for air. But pause for a moment and consider how few dissenting voices have been permitted on the airwaves over the last week. Sinclair is worth listening to. He demands to be read. And he offers decent company for anybody prepared to straddle a swan in stagnant water.
Swandown plays at QFT Belfast until Thursday and screens at the IFI Dublin on August 22nd.
