Transmetropolitan Symphony
Londoners grow up to the music of the city. The ever-present discordant hum and roar of the metropolis is at its most striking when we congregate passively on tube carriages to shuttle through the city as we have done for generations. Wincing at the screech of an approaching train and conscious of the eager push of the crowd, a weary commuter might cast their gaze downwards to the potential doom of the grime-grey-coated track. Seeking transcendence, our traveller might avoid eye contact by fixing attention on the ghostly graffitied silhouette of a missing poster, or an unfathomable jumble of cables. Underground (and Surface), a new immersive exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery, brilliantly combines the visual and aural disorientation of the underground by pairing Jock McFadyen’s paintings with Jem Finer’s musical underground soundscapes, writes Ed Gray.
Jem Finer’s musical achievements as a member of London Irish band The Pogues are well known. The band’s ability to conjure the spirit of 1980s London from the view of the outsider, the immigrant, in songs of defiance and rebellion has entered the collective consciousness of the city. Perhaps less well known is his musical composition Longplayer, designed to play for 1000 years without looping from its home in Trinity Buoy Wharf. Finer’s search for the epic within the ordinary continues at the Guildhall, where he describes his soundscape treatment of the Underground ‘as a vast modular instrument’. The resulting ambient layered recordings, built upon by the addition of a hurdy-gurdy, are both calming and unnerving. Time seems to stand still as we view the perpetual purgatory on McFadyen’s empty tube stations.
Few bands evoked the spirit of Thatcher’s London like The Pogues, and there were few figurative painters brave enough to commit it to canvas like McFadyen. The London Underground is one of the themes he continues to return to throughout his work – a link to his own boyhood experiences on the Glasgow underground – the smell of cordite and the wonder and fear of a novice urbanite disappearing into a warren to resurface in an unknown corner of the city as if by magic.
Aldgate East, Kennington, and Bank appear and reappear, painted over decades in layered scenes akin to Finer’s soundscapes. Paint is scratched in, scraped, smeared, dabbed, and dribbled with rivulets of turps, subtle sable brush detailing alongside broad sweeping brush marks, in a process that McFadyen has described as being like an orchestra making music.
In the second gallery, we leave this claustrophobic subterranean underworld to come up for air in familiar-seeming edgelands that become epic and otherworldly urban landscapes in Jock’s hands. Alongside these vast paintings are smaller figurative works, peopled with raggle-taggle hipsters, weary workers on a zero-hour fag break amidst broken street people. Some painters might be afraid to indulge in such potentially voyeuristic representation, but McFadyen revels in the defiant strength of his outsider subjects, and their collective struggle to survive against the odds, in paintings full of wit and wonder, curiosity, and the possibilities of paint.
The buried underground remnants of a Roman amphitheatre in the Guildhall basement provide a moment to pause and reflect on the transience of our own brief time in the city we share with the ghosts of the past. Accompanied by Jock and Jem’s aural and pictorial exploration of the layers of our urban existence, this seems an even more mystical space than ever.
Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard, EC2V 5AE. Free/Pay what you can afford. Ends 20th Sept.
In Conversation: Jock McFadyen & Jem Finer with Will Gompertz 20 April, 6:30 – 8pm
Ticket options: £15 Standard / £10 Concessions