That’s why Gordon Chapman-Fox’s one-man “band” grabs our attention, inspiring us to seek out his surprisingly brisk musical output.
For older residents of the United Kingdom who remember when Cold War projects to move city dwellers to exurban communities were new, the name is likely to inspire nostalgia for a period when planning for the future didn’t just mean preparing for the end of the world.
For younger Britons, the remaining New Town infrastructure may well function like Victorian Gothic architecture did in horror narratives from the mid-twentieth century, serving as the legacy of an era that seems extraordinarily distant from our own, yet grips us like an icy-fingered revenant.
And for Americans like myself, accustomed to being plotted against, typically by a combination of corruptible government officials and corporations eager to exploit them, the mere idea of a “development plan” sparks trepidation.
Maybe the biggest surprise is that Chapman-Fox manages to split the difference between these different expectations.
The artist’s latest release, Public Works and Utilities, treads the same path as its predecessors over the past four years, starting with the thrillingly titled Interim Report, March 1979.
On the opening number “Swift Safe and Comfortable,” trebly electronic notes wind their way through a pulsing bed of synthetic bass and tinny drumbeats, like wind snaking through the trees. The music does not tell a story so much as conjure a space.
“Renewal and Regeneration” begins with melancholy chords reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS, then introduces faster keyboard arpeggios which hover above them, creating a compelling tension.
Over and over, the album’s music gives us the impression of heading towards a goal without ever making it all the way. But there is plenty of beauty in the striving.
The album’s final track “The People Matter” recalls Vangelis’s famous score for the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which supposedly takes place in 2019, when Chapman-Fox was first developing the concept for Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan.
That’s the best clue that his music means to conjure a future past, the rainy multicultural dystopia feared in an age when “nuclear winter” was being discussed, when Los Angeles would have the feel of smoggy postwar London, rather than the sun-baked, white supremacist one we find ourselves rushing towards today.
The idea of creating new towns emerged in the wake of World War II, when British voters sent their wartime prime minister packing and a robust Labour Party tried to compensate for centuries of class division through bureaucratic fiat.
The National Health Service remains the most famous and popular result of that luxury-challenged but hopeful period, while the fleshing out of a post-World War I plan to replace the densely packed squalor of urban slums with council estates is perhaps its most troubling legacy.
The many new towns created between the onset of the Cold War and Margaret Thatcher’s arrival at Number 10 fall somewhere in between, representing an attempt to distribute the nation’s population more evenly and give residents easier access to the amenities of suburbia.
The Warrington–Runcorn implementation of this plan began to take shape in the late 1960s, in a stretch of Lancashire greenbelt almost equidistant from the soot-covered red brick of Liverpool and Manchester.
The symbolic value of this location, coming at a time when The Beatles and other working-class artists had given the North a much-needed boost of confidence, was clear.
For better or worse, the people responsible for designing and building Warrington-Runcorn aspired to carve out a socialist ethos within a part of the UK identified with the worst effects of the industrial revolution. It’s no accident that IKEA chose this area as the location for its first British location, since the impulse to Scandinavianise society informed everything from the brutalist architecture of the area to the conviction that residents should own a motorcar they used primarily for weekend excursions and holidays.
More than anything, the music on Public Works and Utilities and its predecessors captures the paradoxes inherent to this vision. This isn’t a soundscape strewn with rubble and despair, of the sort that Burial and other Hyperdub artists are celebrated for conjuring, but one in which doubt still mingles with hope for a better life.
Music lovers who grew up during the Cold War will remember the significance of concept albums. Starting with The Beatles’ landmark 1967 record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, popular artists who wanted to be taken seriously broke with the practice of treating LPs as mere containers for songs with no intrinsic relationship to each other.
The fact that concept albums are now an extremely endangered species testifies to the fact that we have largely lost sight of the horizon, our view occluded by a political and social mess that grows more daunting by the day.
Gordon Chapman-Fox’s music doesn’t conjure the grim reality of late Eastern Bloc urban planning but rather the yassified version that graced travel advertisements from the period.
Even if we recognise that living in this world was bound to fall short of our expectations, the fact that it didn’t pulverise them into hopelessness gives them a retroactive allure.
Public Works and Utilities, and the records that preceded it, remind us that it was once possible, within the lifetimes of people still living today, to imagine a life beyond capitalism.
Photograph courtesy of The JR James Archive. Published under a Creative Commons license.
