Austin Collings: Sebald in the chippy

Author, filmmaker and lyricist Austin Collings is artistic director of The White Hotel, Salford’s semi-mythical nightclub and arts community. But with life in lockdown, he has been walking the streets of the north of England, ‘Eliot's Waste Land sponsored by Morrisons’, and two films have resulted. By Mark Blacklock

With The White Hotel, the semi-mythic Salford institution – nightclub, events space and community – in lockdown and, like all other venues, functioning only online, its artistic director Austin Collings has been wandering the streets of BOLT-ON – “Eliot's Waste Land sponsored by Morrisons” – with a camera. He’s holed up out there helping his parents but “this place has been practising a version of lockdown since Sam Allardyce and Peter Kay were elevated in 1999 like gods of the north. They do a fine line in shut shops and shit boozers.” The current environment has provided a fresh angle on the backdrop. “The first few weeks of ULTIMATE LOCKDOWN were sensational: like THE BLITZ condensed into a NETFLIX series. All for that. Wandering around like THE ROAD.”

“The first few weeks of ULTIMATE LOCKDOWN were sensational: like THE BLITZ condensed into a Netflix series”

Collings is a jack-of-all-trades. Ghost writer for late Mark E. Smith; author of The Myth of Brilliant Summers, a set of smeared missives of decaying edgeland memoir; lyricist for the collaborative Bomb Sniffing Dogs project; and sometime film-maker.

In two new films his voiceover script is performed by Hamish Rush, a Salford actor. “Cut from old-school cloth. I roped him in because he sounds like somebody interesting on a bus: bit too loud, but warm, funny, fascinating and fearless. I gave him very brief and very strict instructions thinking I was Harold Pinter on a pittance but he just fucked them off and came back with something that sounded like Jonny (David Thewlis) in NAKED reading the Taxi Driver script stood in a taxi rank at 3.14am, with a kebab going cold and leaking into his hand.”

A CINE-POEM DIRECTED BY AUSTIN COLLINGS VOICE: HAMISH RUSH MUSIC: SAM PRICE-SALISBURY SCRIPT : EMPIRE OF THE PLAGUE Words: Austin Collings Have you got a minute? I am quickly ageing. Try and keep track - you are listening to the short tale of a submental in lockdown who loves true-crime but not true-life and has temporarily given up wanking and who seriously misses inhaling the wisdom of a morning pint after a bender. The blurred hours were we drift painlessly between nirvana and near-terminal hangover. Look at the lovely and useless shit I’ve been shooting on my phone. I’ve gone all artistic. Why can’t I just shoot myself? The sound of that acoustic guitar again. The sound of another body sharing their quarantine, uploading their content, saving a scene, winding me the fuck-up - wish they’d shut the fuck up. I’m going to leave my room, sleep on a fly-tipped mattress - just me and a fox on the cobbles. Wake up to another scorcher. The scent of used electricity clinging to the pillow of my wrist. With the sun a white fire, it’s shirt-off, Union Jack shorts on. Round here the bunting has never been down. Permanent decoration. Book us a taxi to the Falklands. I want to go and see a man about a gun. Are we all now day-release degenerates? Remember when ambulances sounded different? They don’t sound so distant now. I am not one of those who wins and wins. I wonder about everything: shattered eggshells strewn across pavements – stuff like that. I fret about everything: kids who look unhappy with their parents - that’s a real fret of mine. Animals that appear confused - that’s another. Before all this, my life looked like an all-day-brekkie compartmentalised into a polystyrene take-away box. Plastic fork. Coke Zero instead of Coke Coke. It wasn’t quite right. Where some see the glass half-full, or half-empty, I see the coffin half-full. I was born paranoid. I thought about dressing up as a nurse - to gain some clout - to get to the front of the queue. A snide move I know. I need to take myself to the cleaners, wash my moral compass. Twenty streets away a new plague is on the make whilst my heart salivates at the prospect of football resuming. Ghost games. The air has turned and everywhere’s an empty lot. Traces of the workaday-world are fading but my eyesight is strengthening. I feel like I’ve taken a big step into the afterlife these past few weeks; such a last light - full of spheres and zones and distance. A life in progress. Whatever is holding me up - thanks. The sun is now high and lonely as I sweat and schlepp my way back. Another day done. The mattress is still there but the fox has gone. I settle down, eat my drone-dropped KFC and watch very special guest-star Gary Barlow joined by Rachel Riley. Barlow plays piano and Riley walks you through the government-sponsored-suicide-instructions before you’ve even got the kennel cough. Good night Britain. Hopefully the darkness can restore what the light can’t repair.

A CINE-POEM DIRECTED BY AUSTIN COLLINGS MUSIC: SAMUEL PRICE-SALISBURY

Collings’ lyrics are mordant, poetic, wringing the optimism of the weepy comedown-recovery pint from the heart of the black dog itself. Narrated from the POV of the terminal wrong’un with a golden heart, they draw the viewer into the dodgy deal: “I want the short films to have the gripping immediacy of conspiratorial YouTube videos.”

There is correlation with the vinyl releases of the Bomb Sniffing Dogs, a group which “works like the Champions League with a US spin. From the North to Berlin and LA via Southend, we are Liam Power, Elena Poulou, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Andrew Royden, Tom Fish, Matt Fishbeck and more. I don't like the word collective. Call us a gang, like the Bash Street Kids, reunited outside of the BEANO, in a boozer somewhere.”

The assorted musicians, visual artists, film-makers and lyricists produce spoken word pieces enmeshed in hazy post-ambient, post-rock soundfields, and the off-kilter alternate reality visions have the recognisable tang of Collings’s imagination. “I wanted to create a new map of language and music with the idea – a kind of astral madness. It's a house inside a head that we used to play a knock-a-door-run on. Before that, we'd peer in it, amazed and aghast at the dark, and the mess: piles of black bin-bags and newspapers. Then we broke into the house one night and we stay in there from time to time when the owner is out shuffling around town, buying old horror paperbacks from the charity shop Scope.”

We exchange emails the week after far-right gangs have counter-protested Black Lives Matters in London. The culture wars in the UK are turning grim. Austin offers a typically lucid response to how this is playing out in the North of England. “Defacing Penny Lane: its dubious origins (Liverpool was Europe's most used slave port by 1740, and many of its streets have names linked to slavery) have clearly been reimagined and elevated by The Beatles and it means a lot to people… I'm from a piss-poor background in Radcliffe, but inanimate statues do not worry me: insidious corrupt systems however – that's where the end-game lies.”

I offer an observation: that much of his work is interested in different forms of memorialisation: or in re-animating different memories. As ever, Austin provides the punchline: “Sebald in the chippy.”

The White Hotel / The Myth of Brilliant Summers

BOMB SNIFFING DOGS | 12" WHITE VINYL (TWH001) is out now