Rent has achieved sentience and now appears determined to hunt us for sport. Pints cost what small electrical appliances used to cost. Studios, rehearsal rooms, materials, equipment, transport, all of it requires money, and money requires work, and work requires time, which happens to be the precise substance you need if you want to write a play, start a band, organise a night or make some strange beautiful object nobody asked for.
The mathematics are brutal. Work more to afford London. Have less time to create anything in London. Eventually become a highly efficient economic unit who spends £9 on lunch and has forgotten every interesting idea they ever had.
Yet we are still dancing. I saw this twice recently.
Act 1: Final Girl Festival
The first time was in Deptford. Final Girl Fest had taken over Endeavour for a night of goth, punk and alternative music led by women and non-binary artists. It was hot outside and hotter downstairs, where we descended into a sweaty basement like refugees from some particularly tedious version of civilisation.
Then the noise started. The Screaming Violets, Outside Voices, Phoebe Joy and DJ Cryptic Dollface provided our soundtrack for the night, hammering away, surrounded by bodies, cables and sweat. Behind the performers, Jennifer’s Body and Queen of the Damned flickered across the wall, vampires, teenage monstrosity, feminine rage, blood, lust, eyeliner.
The room became a pressure cooker. We thrashed around and jumped and smashed into one another in the heat, sweating through our clothes and collectively exorcising whatever psychic filth had accumulated during another week of British politics.
Something about the whole thing felt wonderfully beyond the radar. There was no corporate activation. Nobody had erected an enormous QR code inviting us to EXPERIENCE THE BRAND. No venture capitalist had identified an exciting opportunity in the emerging goth-basement vertical. It was simply there.
Ella had assembled a temporary kingdom from music, film, darkness and people willing to turn up. This matters, because culture has a nasty habit of being remembered backwards. We remember the bands, movements and scenes that eventually became famous and forget that they began in small rooms where everyone was broke and somebody was desperately trying to work out why the microphone had stopped working.
Independent culture grows like weeds through cracks in the economic pavement. Final Girl Fest felt like one of those weeds. Dark. Sweaty. Slightly dangerous. Alive.
Act 2: Hater fundraiser
A few days later, I found another specimen on the opposite side of London. Stratford. The Orange Room. An anime-themed party.
People arrived in cosplay and danced to Latin house mixes of anime classics, which is the sort of sentence that makes me believe London may yet survive. The dancing was extraordinary. Powerful, balletic movements cutting through the room. Bodies twisting and spinning as the music collided genres and continents with magnificent disregard for cultural border control.
People danced for hours, but beneath the cosplay and bass was another economic reality. The night had been organised by Gawa Leung as a fundraiser for Hater, the play she wrote and is taking to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Hater follows an actor living with complex PTSD who begins stalking another woman, who is the same casting type as her. It is a dark premise about performance, identity and obsession.
Gawa has already fought to get the work onto stages. The play has appeared at London fringe venues including The Space and The Bread & Roses Theatre. Now she is pushing it further, towards Edinburgh. That costs money.
Of course it fucking does. You write the thing. Rehearse the thing. Find people to perform the thing. Find somewhere to perform the thing. Promote the thing. Then discover that taking the thing to one of the world’s largest arts festivals requires another small mountain of cash. So you throw an anime-themed party.
Act 3: Culture from the margins
This is how culture actually gets made. Not through some mystical descent of artistic genius from the heavens, but through favours, friendships, borrowed equipment, cheap spaces, ticket sales, fundraisers, WhatsApp groups, and people deciding that the thing deserves to exist. That was what connected these two nights for me.
Deptford and Stratford. Places beyond the traditional cultural citadels of central London, where creativity keeps erupting anyway.
The economics are hostile. The buildings are expensive. Everyone is tired. The pressure to turn every waking hour into economically productive labour grows more intense. Still somebody books the basement. Somebody writes the play. Somebody plugs in the amp. Somebody puts on the cosplay. Somebody presses play. Then the room fills with people.
London’s underground culture hasn’t disappeared. It has been pushed outward, squeezed into the margins, forced to become ingenious. Perhaps that is exactly where we should be looking for it, because while the centre becomes cleaner, richer and increasingly indistinguishable from an airport departure lounge, strange flowers are pushing through the concrete elsewhere. In Deptford. In Stratford. In sweaty basements and back rooms.
The rent keeps rising. We keep dancing.
Epilogue: Keep seeking out new culture
If any of the above has inspired you then keep seeking our new culture.
If you’re in Edinburgh right now then you can see Hater at The Penny at Gilded Balloon Patter House. I highly recommend this show. You can also watch my video from Hater’s run at The Bread and Roses Theatre in London.
Do follow Ella on Instagram - @crypticdollface - for details on future Final Girl Fests. It was a really fun night.
You can also view my video on my recent trip to the Barbican on my TikTok.
Or listen to the latest episode of the Moderate Fantasy Violence podcast where my co-host and I talk about Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Obsession.
No I don’t know why I put Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières at the top of this either. It just seemed appropriate.
Until next time
Alastair JR Ball