John Harris

From Pussy Riot, a lesson in the power of punk | John Harris

Monday, August 20th, 2012

Putin may have more serious critics, but Pussy Riot have shown the west how artistic dissent can still make a difference

The heritage of protest and provocation on which Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was drawing was confirmed as soon as I saw her picture. The hair cut into a functional bob, the “No Pasaran” T‑shirt with the clenched-fist logo, her leading place in a band-cum-collective called Pussy Riot – it was as if she had been plucked from the Anglo-American subculture known as riot grrrl circa 1992, and dropped into modern Russia.

This time, though, the surrounding contexts had been changed beyond recognition. As with their antecedents, Pussy Riot are young feminists with a scattershot critique of their society, but their chosen target and awful predicament place them almost in a different universe – as proved when Tolokonnikova and her two co-defendants laughed as they were given their two-year sentences. You could call such behaviour “cool”, but in this instance, another word is surely required: one that mixes jaw-dropping bravery with impossible insouciance, and has – as far as I know – yet to be invented.

In the west, we seem to have forgotten that popular culture once produced people who thought it was their duty to decry some of the most ingrained aspects of their societies, and thereby become lightning-rods for dissent. But the rise to prominence of Tolokonnikova et al proves that outside the UK and US, old ideas can assume new shapes and actually take on even greater power (and survive even an endorsement from that cause-squashing menace Madonna, which takes some doing).

To be a mohican-wearing punk in London is to be a kitsch throwback – but in Indonesia or Burma, it can put you on the receiving end of heinous treatment from the authorities. Similarly, in London or Los Angeles, the legacy represented by Pussy Riot can perhaps only be glimpsed in an abiding strain of female fashion you can buy on any high street, whereas in Russia it will soon be on display in a penal colony.

So, some history. Riot grrrl was the work of a handful of people in Olympia, Washington, and Washington DC, who sought to update punk rock – and, with the US religious right in full cry and women’s rights under attack, apply its noise and fury to the politics of gender. Initially, Riot Grrrl was the title of a fanzine put together by four women who would soon form two bands, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. The former remain a byword for what followed: the aggression and power of what its makers called “boy rock” being rechannelled by proud feminists, and unapologetic celebrations of the worldview of the female adolescent (hence “grrrl”).

In the UK, the torch was carried by a mixed-gender band called Huggy Bear, who made one unimpeachably brilliant record – Her Jazz, released in 1993 – and gained brief renown for protesting on-screen against the moronic sexism of the woeful Channel 4 show The Word, before they quickly disappeared. For a brief moment, they had the music industry terrified that they knew the shape of the future but had no intention of giving it away.

Obviously, compared with Pussy Riot, these people’s targets were almost comically modest and their supposed subversion often reducible to radical chic, but the lines that link the two upsurges are obvious. Pyotr Versilov – Tolokonnikova’s husband, and thanks to his fluency in English, one of Pussy Riot’s key spokespeople – acknowledges that the collective’s name “is a reference to the riot grrrl movement that arose in the United States in the early 1990s, based on a concept of feminine strength, not weakness”.

In an interview published by Vice magazine five months ago, a Pussy Riot member who identified herself as Garadzha said that “a lot of credit certainly goes to Bikini Kill and the bands in the riot grrrl act [sic] – we somehow developed what they did in the 1990s, although in an absolutely different context and with an exaggerated political stance”. Listen to the new Pussy Riot song they have titled Putin Lights Up the Fires – premiered by the Guardian last Friday. All screeched vocals and granite-hard guitar, it’s a product of exactly the same aesthetic.

Such comparisons, however, shrink next to a much more powerful point. Like the original proponents of riot grrrl, only a thousand times more so, Pussy Riot are an object lesson in what cultural provocation can do, while orthodox politics and protest too often remain impotent – a point always lost on those who would restrict dissent to the usual staid norms. On last Friday’s Radio 4 Today programme, the historian Robert Service played his part to perfection, pompously advising the BBC to “get some sense of proportion”. On he grumped: “There are really serious critics of Vladimir Putin in Russia who deserve our attention much more than these three misguided young feminist rock musicians who have desecrated a cathedral.”

That may be so, but history suggests that it’s the allegedly “misguided” who often make the biggest waves. There were critics of De Gaulle’s France who may have had a greater claim to serious attention than the enrages of May 1968, and republicans who had a more coherent take on the toxicity of 1977’s jubilee celebrations than the Sex Pistols, who so gloriously spoiled the celebrations with a single titled God Save the Queen. But in both cases, it took the daring and creativity of cultural outsiders to crystallise the sense that their societies were not just hopelessly conflicted, but in no shape to go on as they were.

Politics is about increment and compromise; in the cultural sphere, you are free to be as exacting and impossiblist as you please, and thereby say and do things that the moment actually demands. And look what can happen: as the aftershocks of the Pussy Riot case ripple on, even some of Putin’s allies do not know where to look. “Our image in the eyes of the world is getting closer to a medieval dictatorship, though we are not that,” says one of the president’s loudest media cheerleaders: the mask that covers power at its most cynical looks to have slipped, at least.

What does all this tell us? That the Anglo-American world still sleeps, having sent forth cultural archetypes that have exploded all over the world. That in some places, culture actually still matters. And that in the macho dystopia of Putin’s Russia, where everything cultural is political and vice versa, three remarkable women have gone to prison to prove it.

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Totnes: the town that declared war on global capitalism

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

The locals of the Devon resort have gone to war – with Costa Coffee. But why are they desperate to stop a branch of the giant chain opening up in town? And can they win?

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in Totnes, the small Devon town that sits just below the south-western tip of the M5. Outside the Methodist church hall, a hand-drawn notice simply says “Adios Costa”. Inside, around 45 people are having an animated discussion about the imminent arrival of the ever-expanding coffee chain. There is a lot of talk about a failure of democracy, and the emptiness of what politicians call “Localism” – but, more interestingly, an emphasis on what might happen when the town’s newest arrival actually opens its doors.

“The idea is to be prepared,” says one of the people behind tonight’s gathering, with some excitement. “So that when they get here, things are organised.”

One man suggests regularly visiting Costa, ordering tap water, and then drinking it very slowly. A woman offers to paste up anti-Costa posters on the chain’s windows, doggedly replacing them whenever they’re removed. A couple of people who live across the street from Costa’s proposed new outlet say they’ll hang protest banners and there is a warmly received proposal of an official day of mourning, “because we’ve lost our democracy”. And on it goes: how about a debate in parliament? Or a vote of no confidence in the local council? Or a simple boycott?

Welcome, then, to another chapter in the ongoing battle between places that pride themselves on their local character, and the great stomping boot of multinational capitalism. That it is happening in Totnes (population: 7,500) is hardly surprising: long renowned as a byword for sustainable living and imaginative local politics, it also the home of the Transition Towns movement, focused not just on the way that people and places use fossil fuels, but how to make local economies more resilient by encouraging independent business, and fighting the kind of big interests that tend to take out more than they put in. Their most famous innovation is the Totnes Pound, a home-grown currency that is accepted by more than 70 local businesses.

Totnes’s local economy looks to be in reasonable health, which is surely down to the fact that it is about as far from being what we now call a “clone town” as could be imagined. The local record shop, Drift, is mind-bogglingly great: the kind of place that you’d think was amazing if you found it in New York. The quality and diversity of restaurants is amazing. Most pertinently, the town has 42 independently run outlets that serve coffee, and – so far – not a single branch of any of the big caffeine-selling multiples.

Now, though, Costa – whose most visible slogan remains “Saving the world from mediocre coffee” – is on its way, as part of programme of expansion that will look either worryingly aggressive or admirably ambitious, depending on your point of view. Certainly, it seems to be bucking the prevailing trend of our flatlining economy, opening scores of new outlets while independent coffee shops are truly feeling the pinch.

A fully owned subsidiary of the food and hospitality conglomerate Whitbread, it currently operates 1,400 British outlets, and recently announced plans for 350 more. Thanks also to a snowballing presence in petrol stations, pubs and motorway services, its logo is becoming inescapable, which is exactly the point: the chief executive, Andy Harrison, has talked about increasing the number of branches to 2,000, and thus making them ubiquitous. “People really don’t want to walk very far for a coffee,” he has said. “We can have them a couple of hundred yards apart on a really busy high street, then another at a retail park and another at the station.”

The fact that Starbucks remains synonymous with the more rapacious aspects of modern business seems to have blinded people to what Costa is doing. But as proved by similar battles in the West Country seaside town of Burnham-on-Sea, Bishops Waltham in Hampshire and the Suffolk resort of Southwold, it is Costa that may soon turn into the biggest signifier – in the UK, at least – for the tensions between local communities and big chains.

In Southwold, in fact, Tuesday night saw a successful appeal by Costa against a previous planning decision that had stopped them opening there, greeted with such fury that 100 people were ordered to leave that night’s planning hearing. Such, say anti-Costa campaigners, are the same basic outlines as you see in battles against the big supermarkets: passionate locals who fear the places where they live being laid waste, a massive corporation that wants to expand – and local politicians who tend to run scared, because of the prohibitive costs of locking horns with such huge companies.

The Totnes story goes something like this. In February 2010, a local wholefood business called Greenlife moved out of the High Street, to new premises on the town’s market square. There were initial rumblings about the site being taken by Oxfam, before a new landlord called London and Western Holdings bought the shop, and it was eventually announced that Costa would be moving in, and opening a 70-seat cafe, in a part of town that regularly swarms with visitors.

This, presumably is why they want a piece of the action. “The bottom of the hill is where most of the tourists arrive,” says Frances Northrop, the manager of Transition Town Totnes (or TTT), and one of the prime movers in the anti-Costa campaign. “They come in on the river, or by train, or into the car park there. So they’ll come straight in, and they’ll see a Costa Coffee. And if people are in a new place, a lot of people think: ‘I’m not going to try the unknown – I’m going to go somewhere that I recognise.’”

In response to unconfirmed rumours that Costa would be moving in, Northrop and scores of people with similar convictions got to work, bigging up Totnes’s cafe society. In May, there was a coffee festival, which offered prizes for baristas, the places where they work, and the slippery discipline of “coffee art” (putting images in the froth). Those opposed to the arrival of a chain pasted up posters modelled on the publicity material for the movie of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, recast as “Clonespotting”. Meanwhile, a petition against the arrival of any big coffee business was in circulation, and quickly amassed 5,749 signatures – 75% of which, say the anti-Costa camp, came from people from Totnes, or its surrounding areas.

In time, the town council voted in support of the campaign, along with all of Totnes’s district councillors. The local MP is Sarah Wollaston, the non-conformist Tory most renowned for her opposition to Andrew Lansley’s changes to the NHS – and she is in full accord. “The strength of feeling on this issue has been evident and it is not too late for Costa to look at local opinion and decide to take their business elsewhere,” she recently said. Plenty of locals say the Costa controversy is proof of one of the serial disappointments associated with the coalition government: there has been no end of Westminster noise about “localism” – but on the ground, the blanding-out of our towns, villages and cities seems to be accelerating, against local opposition.

What was soon named the No To Costa campaign zeroed in on the legal obligation to consider planning applications on the basis of what they will do to a town’s “vibrancy and vitality”, and claimed that if Costa got what they wanted, Totnes would suffer. But on 1 August, the planning committee of South Hams district council approved Costa’s plans by 17 votes to six. As Costa’s local opponents endlessly point out, only four of the councillors who voted actually represent the town.

“It wasn’t just about the fact that we didn’t want a large chain, or not damaging our pretty market town – it’s actually that they’re like Tesco,” says Northrop. “They’re an aggressive, extractive industry. We’ve got 42 coffee outlets, all independently owned, a lot of which are struggling, like anywhere else – and if you bring in a retail unit with the buying power and familiarity of Costa, which is the size of three coffee shops, you’re damaging not only those independent businesses, who might go out of business, but their supply chains: growers, producers, drinks suppliers.”

When I contact it for its take on the Totnes story, a Costa spokeswoman tells me: “Totnes is a thriving tourist town and we appreciate that it has a strong reputation for supporting independent retailers.” She says the company “would like to reassure the people of Totnes that Costa won’t be a threat to the dozens of coffee shops that are already there, but will aim to complement the local offering and support the local community.”

She concedes that “it’s disappointing that there is so much objection”, but says that “we simply want to add to the vibrancy of the town and support the local community.” Costa, she claims, will boost the town’s character “by adding vibrancy, complementing what Totnes currently offers.”

When I ask her for a response on the question of local supply chains, her reply runs thus: “Costa coffee prides itself in using numerous suppliers, large and small, across the UK to produce the products it sells within its stores. For example, we work with a family run bakery to produce our cakes, with dedicated dairy farmers for our milk and use British meat in our savoury lines. At a time when many businesses are closing, we are one of the success stories of British business, creating jobs right across the UK.”

I spend nine hours in Totnes, sped on my way by the borderline anxious buzz that comes from endless cups of coffee, served by people who are, not entirely surprisingly, worried by the prospect of Costa’s arrival. Their stories tend to have a great deal in common: a good deal of the town’s cafe-owners are people new to the trade, who have said goodbye to regular jobs, or time spent abroad, and staked their livelihoods on Totnes’s unique culture.

At the freshly opened Curator cafe, I meet 38-year-old Matteo Lamaro, a native of Ancona in eastern Italy, who moved here after a long spell as youth worker in central London. Lamaro’s cafe looks posh, but is way cheaper than the multiples: a regular cappuccino is £2, and a slice of his delicious marble cake comes in at £1.50: at Costa, the equivalent prices are £2.45 each.

“Costa will affect the ambience Totnes has,” he says. “This is an independent kind of place, offering something different from … normality.”

And will its arrival affect his trade? “It depends on the tourists. Costa is a known place, isn’t it, isn’t it? So if they want a coffee somewhere they know, rather than a place that actually offers good coffee … that’s the main risk.”

At the top of the town, the bustling Green cafe takes its name from 46-year-old Ivan Green, who moved here with his family after living in southern Brittany. They live above the business, and he rises at 5am each day to bake 90% of the bread, cakes and pies that are on sale. He is already preparing for the malign effects of Costa’s opening, having done up the flat that sits behind the cafe, and rented it out. “The problem I have with the multinationals,” he says, “is that it’s just not fair competition.” The more he talks, the more outraged he sounds: like a lot of locals, he says that one of his big fears is Costa serving notice that Totnes is ready to be colonised, and sparking the arrival of Caffe Nero, Subway and all the rest.

Over the road, Martin Turner, 42, runs the Tangerine Tree café. He’s been in Totnes for four and a half years, having run the catering department at the HQ of the Met Office, in Exeter. “It’ll have an effect on footfall coming up through the town,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of loyal customers, but it could stop people coming up here: 70 is a lot of seats. The other thing is, it could put rents up. So we’ll definitely notice it.”

I hear the same sentiments at the Fat Lemons cafe – which is Totnes incarnate, purveying vegetarian and gluten-free food, with artwork from the Who’s Quadrophenia hanging on the wall in the gents – and Olsen, a Scandinavian-themed place run by a half-Danish local called Karl Rasmussen, who offers such treats as home-cured gravlax (”with pickled beetroot, salad, Swedish crispbread and dill and mustard dressing”), and octopus, potato and watercress salad.

Two of his regulars are sitting just in front of the counter. “We’ve got 42 coffee places,” says Ann Rutherford, 71. “Why do we need a 43rd?”

“A coffee shop is where people meet,” says 64-year-old Diana Cusack. “We don’t need Costa to give us a place to meet. We’ve got a surfeit of places in Totnes where people meet to talk. We’re a talking town.”

They both say they’ll go nowhere near Costa, but say they worry about its appeal to the town’s youth, who might be drawn in by the prospect of “two milkshakes and free Wi-Fi”.

By way of walking off the effects of so much coffee, I decide to do a few unscientific vox pops – which is when I meet some of the people I’ve just been talking about. They’re killing time in the market square and their lives, they tell me, are split between education, gap years and low-end jobs. On the face of it, they are the kind of people that Costa and their ilk specialise in attracting.

Round here, though, it doesn’t seem to be working. “I think it’s pretty bad,” says Jesse Tighe, 18. “We don’t really need these chains.”

“If you want to come to Totnes,” reckons 18-year-old Finnegan Travers, “you come to the independent places, don’t you?”

What words, I wonder, do they associate with Costa Coffee?

“Shit,” says one voice. “Corporate,” offers another. “McDonald’s,” reckons a third.

“We’re speaking for every young person here, I promise you. And older people,” says Tighe. He glances up the street, towards a pub-cum-music-venue-cum-cafe called the Barrel House, and down towards the premises where Costa will soon pitch up. “No one in Totnes wants this, do they?”

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Totnes: the town that declared war on global capitalism

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

The locals of the Devon resort have gone to war – with Costa Coffee. But why are they desperate to stop a branch of the giant chain opening up in town? And can they win?

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in Totnes, the small Devon town that sits just below the south-western tip of the M5. Outside the Methodist church hall, a hand-drawn notice simply says “Adios Costa”. Inside, around 45 people are having an animated discussion about the imminent arrival of the ever-expanding coffee chain. There is a lot of talk about a failure of democracy, and the emptiness of what politicians call “Localism” – but, more interestingly, an emphasis on what might happen when the town’s newest arrival actually opens its doors.

“The idea is to be prepared,” says one of the people behind tonight’s gathering, with some excitement. “So that when they get here, things are organised.”

One man suggests regularly visiting Costa, ordering tap water, and then drinking it very slowly. A woman offers to paste up anti-Costa posters on the chain’s windows, doggedly replacing them whenever they’re removed. A couple of people who live across the street from Costa’s proposed new outlet say they’ll hang protest banners and there is a warmly received proposal of an official day of mourning, “because we’ve lost our democracy”. And on it goes: how about a debate in parliament? Or a vote of no confidence in the local council? Or a simple boycott?

Welcome, then, to another chapter in the ongoing battle between places that pride themselves on their local character, and the great stomping boot of multinational capitalism. That it is happening in Totnes (population: 7,500) is hardly surprising: long renowned as a byword for sustainable living and imaginative local politics, it also the home of the Transition Towns movement, focused not just on the way that people and places use fossil fuels, but how to make local economies more resilient by encouraging independent business, and fighting the kind of big interests that tend to take out more than they put in. Their most famous innovation is the Totnes Pound, a home-grown currency that is accepted by more than 70 local businesses.

Totnes’s local economy looks to be in reasonable health, which is surely down to the fact that it is about as far from being what we now call a “clone town” as could be imagined. The local record shop, Drift, is mind-bogglingly great: the kind of place that you’d think was amazing if you found it in New York. The quality and diversity of restaurants is amazing. Most pertinently, the town has 42 independently run outlets that serve coffee, and – so far – not a single branch of any of the big caffeine-selling multiples.

Now, though, Costa – whose most visible slogan remains “Saving the world from mediocre coffee” – is on its way, as part of programme of expansion that will look either worryingly aggressive or admirably ambitious, depending on your point of view. Certainly, it seems to be bucking the prevailing trend of our flatlining economy, opening scores of new outlets while independent coffee shops are truly feeling the pinch.

A fully owned subsidiary of the food and hospitality conglomerate Whitbread, it currently operates 1,400 British outlets, and recently announced plans for 350 more. Thanks also to a snowballing presence in petrol stations, pubs and motorway services, its logo is becoming inescapable, which is exactly the point: the chief executive, Andy Harrison, has talked about increasing the number of branches to 2,000, and thus making them ubiquitous. “People really don’t want to walk very far for a coffee,” he has said. “We can have them a couple of hundred yards apart on a really busy high street, then another at a retail park and another at the station.”

The fact that Starbucks remains synonymous with the more rapacious aspects of modern business seems to have blinded people to what Costa is doing. But as proved by similar battles in the West Country seaside town of Burnham-on-Sea, Bishops Waltham in Hampshire and the Suffolk resort of Southwold, it is Costa that may soon turn into the biggest signifier – in the UK, at least – for the tensions between local communities and big chains.

In Southwold, in fact, Tuesday night saw a successful appeal by Costa against a previous planning decision that had stopped them opening there, greeted with such fury that 100 people were ordered to leave that night’s planning hearing. Such, say anti-Costa campaigners, are the same basic outlines as you see in battles against the big supermarkets: passionate locals who fear the places where they live being laid waste, a massive corporation that wants to expand – and local politicians who tend to run scared, because of the prohibitive costs of locking horns with such huge companies.

The Totnes story goes something like this. In February 2010, a local wholefood business called Greenlife moved out of the High Street, to new premises on the town’s market square. There were initial rumblings about the site being taken by Oxfam, before a new landlord called London and Western Holdings bought the shop, and it was eventually announced that Costa would be moving in, and opening a 70-seat cafe, in a part of town that regularly swarms with visitors.

This, presumably is why they want a piece of the action. “The bottom of the hill is where most of the tourists arrive,” says Frances Northrop, the manager of Transition Town Totnes (or TTT), and one of the prime movers in the anti-Costa campaign. “They come in on the river, or by train, or into the car park there. So they’ll come straight in, and they’ll see a Costa Coffee. And if people are in a new place, a lot of people think: ‘I’m not going to try the unknown – I’m going to go somewhere that I recognise.’”

In response to unconfirmed rumours that Costa would be moving in, Northrop and scores of people with similar convictions got to work, bigging up Totnes’s cafe society. In May, there was a coffee festival, which offered prizes for baristas, the places where they work, and the slippery discipline of “coffee art” (putting images in the froth). Those opposed to the arrival of a chain pasted up posters modelled on the publicity material for the movie of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, recast as “Clonespotting”. Meanwhile, a petition against the arrival of any big coffee business was in circulation, and quickly amassed 5,749 signatures – 75% of which, say the anti-Costa camp, came from people from Totnes, or its surrounding areas.

In time, the town council voted in support of the campaign, along with all of Totnes’s district councillors. The local MP is Sarah Wollaston, the non-conformist Tory most renowned for her opposition to Andrew Lansley’s changes to the NHS – and she is in full accord. “The strength of feeling on this issue has been evident and it is not too late for Costa to look at local opinion and decide to take their business elsewhere,” she recently said. Plenty of locals say the Costa controversy is proof of one of the serial disappointments associated with the coalition government: there has been no end of Westminster noise about “localism” – but on the ground, the blanding-out of our towns, villages and cities seems to be accelerating, against local opposition.

What was soon named the No To Costa campaign zeroed in on the legal obligation to consider planning applications on the basis of what they will do to a town’s “vibrancy and vitality”, and claimed that if Costa got what they wanted, Totnes would suffer. But on 1 August, the planning committee of South Hams district council approved Costa’s plans by 17 votes to six. As Costa’s local opponents endlessly point out, only four of the councillors who voted actually represent the town.

“It wasn’t just about the fact that we didn’t want a large chain, or not damaging our pretty market town – it’s actually that they’re like Tesco,” says Northrop. “They’re an aggressive, extractive industry. We’ve got 42 coffee outlets, all independently owned, a lot of which are struggling, like anywhere else – and if you bring in a retail unit with the buying power and familiarity of Costa, which is the size of three coffee shops, you’re damaging not only those independent businesses, who might go out of business, but their supply chains: growers, producers, drinks suppliers.”

When I contact it for its take on the Totnes story, a Costa spokeswoman tells me: “Totnes is a thriving tourist town and we appreciate that it has a strong reputation for supporting independent retailers.” She says the company “would like to reassure the people of Totnes that Costa won’t be a threat to the dozens of coffee shops that are already there, but will aim to complement the local offering and support the local community.”

She concedes that “it’s disappointing that there is so much objection”, but says that “we simply want to add to the vibrancy of the town and support the local community.” Costa, she claims, will boost the town’s character “by adding vibrancy, complementing what Totnes currently offers.”

When I ask her for a response on the question of local supply chains, her reply runs thus: “Costa coffee prides itself in using numerous suppliers, large and small, across the UK to produce the products it sells within its stores. For example, we work with a family run bakery to produce our cakes, with dedicated dairy farmers for our milk and use British meat in our savoury lines. At a time when many businesses are closing, we are one of the success stories of British business, creating jobs right across the UK.”

I spend nine hours in Totnes, sped on my way by the borderline anxious buzz that comes from endless cups of coffee, served by people who are, not entirely surprisingly, worried by the prospect of Costa’s arrival. Their stories tend to have a great deal in common: a good deal of the town’s cafe-owners are people new to the trade, who have said goodbye to regular jobs, or time spent abroad, and staked their livelihoods on Totnes’s unique culture.

At the freshly opened Curator cafe, I meet 38-year-old Matteo Lamaro, a native of Ancona in eastern Italy, who moved here after a long spell as youth worker in central London. Lamaro’s cafe looks posh, but is way cheaper than the multiples: a regular cappuccino is £2, and a slice of his delicious marble cake comes in at £1.50: at Costa, the equivalent prices are £2.45 each.

“Costa will affect the ambience Totnes has,” he says. “This is an independent kind of place, offering something different from … normality.”

And will its arrival affect his trade? “It depends on the tourists. Costa is a known place, isn’t it, isn’t it? So if they want a coffee somewhere they know, rather than a place that actually offers good coffee … that’s the main risk.”

At the top of the town, the bustling Green cafe takes its name from 46-year-old Ivan Green, who moved here with his family after living in southern Brittany. They live above the business, and he rises at 5am each day to bake 90% of the bread, cakes and pies that are on sale. He is already preparing for the malign effects of Costa’s opening, having done up the flat that sits behind the cafe, and rented it out. “The problem I have with the multinationals,” he says, “is that it’s just not fair competition.” The more he talks, the more outraged he sounds: like a lot of locals, he says that one of his big fears is Costa serving notice that Totnes is ready to be colonised, and sparking the arrival of Caffe Nero, Subway and all the rest.

Over the road, Martin Turner, 42, runs the Tangerine Tree café. He’s been in Totnes for four and a half years, having run the catering department at the HQ of the Met Office, in Exeter. “It’ll have an effect on footfall coming up through the town,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of loyal customers, but it could stop people coming up here: 70 is a lot of seats. The other thing is, it could put rents up. So we’ll definitely notice it.”

I hear the same sentiments at the Fat Lemons cafe – which is Totnes incarnate, purveying vegetarian and gluten-free food, with artwork from the Who’s Quadrophenia hanging on the wall in the gents – and Olsen, a Scandinavian-themed place run by a half-Danish local called Karl Rasmussen, who offers such treats as home-cured gravlax (”with pickled beetroot, salad, Swedish crispbread and dill and mustard dressing”), and octopus, potato and watercress salad.

Two of his regulars are sitting just in front of the counter. “We’ve got 42 coffee places,” says Ann Rutherford, 71. “Why do we need a 43rd?”

“A coffee shop is where people meet,” says 64-year-old Diana Cusack. “We don’t need Costa to give us a place to meet. We’ve got a surfeit of places in Totnes where people meet to talk. We’re a talking town.”

They both say they’ll go nowhere near Costa, but say they worry about its appeal to the town’s youth, who might be drawn in by the prospect of “two milkshakes and free Wi-Fi”.

By way of walking off the effects of so much coffee, I decide to do a few unscientific vox pops – which is when I meet some of the people I’ve just been talking about. They’re killing time in the market square and their lives, they tell me, are split between education, gap years and low-end jobs. On the face of it, they are the kind of people that Costa and their ilk specialise in attracting.

Round here, though, it doesn’t seem to be working. “I think it’s pretty bad,” says Jesse Tighe, 18. “We don’t really need these chains.”

“If you want to come to Totnes,” reckons 18-year-old Finnegan Travers, “you come to the independent places, don’t you?”

What words, I wonder, do they associate with Costa Coffee?

“Shit,” says one voice. “Corporate,” offers another. “McDonald’s,” reckons a third.

“We’re speaking for every young person here, I promise you. And older people,” says Tighe. He glances up the street, towards a pub-cum-music-venue-cum-cafe called the Barrel House, and down towards the premises where Costa will soon pitch up. “No one in Totnes wants this, do they?”

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Totnes: the town that declared war on global capitalism

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

The locals of the Devon resort have gone to war – with Costa Coffee. But why are they desperate to stop a branch of the giant chain opening up in town? And can they win?

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in Totnes, the small Devon town that sits just below the south-western tip of the M5. Outside the Methodist church hall, a hand-drawn notice simply says “Adios Costa”. Inside, around 45 people are having an animated discussion about the imminent arrival of the ever-expanding coffee chain. There is a lot of talk about a failure of democracy, and the emptiness of what politicians call “Localism” – but, more interestingly, an emphasis on what might happen when the town’s newest arrival actually opens its doors.

“The idea is to be prepared,” says one of the people behind tonight’s gathering, with some excitement. “So that when they get here, things are organised.”

One man suggests regularly visiting Costa, ordering tap water, and then drinking it very slowly. A woman offers to paste up anti-Costa posters on the chain’s windows, doggedly replacing them whenever they’re removed. A couple of people who live across the street from Costa’s proposed new outlet say they’ll hang protest banners and there is a warmly received proposal of an official day of mourning, “because we’ve lost our democracy”. And on it goes: how about a debate in parliament? Or a vote of no confidence in the local council? Or a simple boycott?

Welcome, then, to another chapter in the ongoing battle between places that pride themselves on their local character, and the great stomping boot of multinational capitalism. That it is happening in Totnes (population: 7,500) is hardly surprising: long renowned as a byword for sustainable living and imaginative local politics, it also the home of the Transition Towns movement, focused not just on the way that people and places use fossil fuels, but how to make local economies more resilient by encouraging independent business, and fighting the kind of big interests that tend to take out more than they put in. Their most famous innovation is the Totnes Pound, a home-grown currency that is accepted by more than 70 local businesses.

Totnes’s local economy looks to be in reasonable health, which is surely down to the fact that it is about as far from being what we now call a “clone town” as could be imagined. The local record shop, Drift, is mind-bogglingly great: the kind of place that you’d think was amazing if you found it in New York. The quality and diversity of restaurants is amazing. Most pertinently, the town has 42 independently run outlets that serve coffee, and – so far – not a single branch of any of the big caffeine-selling multiples.

Now, though, Costa – whose most visible slogan remains “Saving the world from mediocre coffee” – is on its way, as part of programme of expansion that will look either worryingly aggressive or admirably ambitious, depending on your point of view. Certainly, it seems to be bucking the prevailing trend of our flatlining economy, opening scores of new outlets while independent coffee shops are truly feeling the pinch.

A fully owned subsidiary of the food and hospitality conglomerate Whitbread, it currently operates 1,400 British outlets, and recently announced plans for 350 more. Thanks also to a snowballing presence in petrol stations, pubs and motorway services, its logo is becoming inescapable, which is exactly the point: the chief executive, Andy Harrison, has talked about increasing the number of branches to 2,000, and thus making them ubiquitous. “People really don’t want to walk very far for a coffee,” he has said. “We can have them a couple of hundred yards apart on a really busy high street, then another at a retail park and another at the station.”

The fact that Starbucks remains synonymous with the more rapacious aspects of modern business seems to have blinded people to what Costa is doing. But as proved by similar battles in the West Country seaside town of Burnham-on-Sea, Bishops Waltham in Hampshire and the Suffolk resort of Southwold, it is Costa that may soon turn into the biggest signifier – in the UK, at least – for the tensions between local communities and big chains.

In Southwold, in fact, Tuesday night saw a successful appeal by Costa against a previous planning decision that had stopped them opening there, greeted with such fury that 100 people were ordered to leave that night’s planning hearing. Such, say anti-Costa campaigners, are the same basic outlines as you see in battles against the big supermarkets: passionate locals who fear the places where they live being laid waste, a massive corporation that wants to expand – and local politicians who tend to run scared, because of the prohibitive costs of locking horns with such huge companies.

The Totnes story goes something like this. In February 2010, a local wholefood business called Greenlife moved out of the High Street, to new premises on the town’s market square. There were initial rumblings about the site being taken by Oxfam, before a new landlord called London and Western Holdings bought the shop, and it was eventually announced that Costa would be moving in, and opening a 70-seat cafe, in a part of town that regularly swarms with visitors.

This, presumably is why they want a piece of the action. “The bottom of the hill is where most of the tourists arrive,” says Frances Northrop, the manager of Transition Town Totnes (or TTT), and one of the prime movers in the anti-Costa campaign. “They come in on the river, or by train, or into the car park there. So they’ll come straight in, and they’ll see a Costa Coffee. And if people are in a new place, a lot of people think: ‘I’m not going to try the unknown – I’m going to go somewhere that I recognise.’”

In response to unconfirmed rumours that Costa would be moving in, Northrop and scores of people with similar convictions got to work, bigging up Totnes’s cafe society. In May, there was a coffee festival, which offered prizes for baristas, the places where they work, and the slippery discipline of “coffee art” (putting images in the froth). Those opposed to the arrival of a chain pasted up posters modelled on the publicity material for the movie of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, recast as “Clonespotting”. Meanwhile, a petition against the arrival of any big coffee business was in circulation, and quickly amassed 5,749 signatures – 75% of which, say the anti-Costa camp, came from people from Totnes, or its surrounding areas.

In time, the town council voted in support of the campaign, along with all of Totnes’s district councillors. The local MP is Sarah Wollaston, the non-conformist Tory most renowned for her opposition to Andrew Lansley’s changes to the NHS – and she is in full accord. “The strength of feeling on this issue has been evident and it is not too late for Costa to look at local opinion and decide to take their business elsewhere,” she recently said. Plenty of locals say the Costa controversy is proof of one of the serial disappointments associated with the coalition government: there has been no end of Westminster noise about “localism” – but on the ground, the blanding-out of our towns, villages and cities seems to be accelerating, against local opposition.

What was soon named the No To Costa campaign zeroed in on the legal obligation to consider planning applications on the basis of what they will do to a town’s “vibrancy and vitality”, and claimed that if Costa got what they wanted, Totnes would suffer. But on 1 August, the planning committee of South Hams district council approved Costa’s plans by 17 votes to six. As Costa’s local opponents endlessly point out, only four of the councillors who voted actually represent the town.

“It wasn’t just about the fact that we didn’t want a large chain, or not damaging our pretty market town – it’s actually that they’re like Tesco,” says Northrop. “They’re an aggressive, extractive industry. We’ve got 42 coffee outlets, all independently owned, a lot of which are struggling, like anywhere else – and if you bring in a retail unit with the buying power and familiarity of Costa, which is the size of three coffee shops, you’re damaging not only those independent businesses, who might go out of business, but their supply chains: growers, producers, drinks suppliers.”

When I contact it for its take on the Totnes story, a Costa spokeswoman tells me: “Totnes is a thriving tourist town and we appreciate that it has a strong reputation for supporting independent retailers.” She says the company “would like to reassure the people of Totnes that Costa won’t be a threat to the dozens of coffee shops that are already there, but will aim to complement the local offering and support the local community.”

She concedes that “it’s disappointing that there is so much objection”, but says that “we simply want to add to the vibrancy of the town and support the local community.” Costa, she claims, will boost the town’s character “by adding vibrancy, complementing what Totnes currently offers.”

When I ask her for a response on the question of local supply chains, her reply runs thus: “Costa coffee prides itself in using numerous suppliers, large and small, across the UK to produce the products it sells within its stores. For example, we work with a family run bakery to produce our cakes, with dedicated dairy farmers for our milk and use British meat in our savoury lines. At a time when many businesses are closing, we are one of the success stories of British business, creating jobs right across the UK.”

I spend nine hours in Totnes, sped on my way by the borderline anxious buzz that comes from endless cups of coffee, served by people who are, not entirely surprisingly, worried by the prospect of Costa’s arrival. Their stories tend to have a great deal in common: a good deal of the town’s cafe-owners are people new to the trade, who have said goodbye to regular jobs, or time spent abroad, and staked their livelihoods on Totnes’s unique culture.

At the freshly opened Curator cafe, I meet 38-year-old Matteo Lamaro, a native of Ancona in eastern Italy, who moved here after a long spell as youth worker in central London. Lamaro’s cafe looks posh, but is way cheaper than the multiples: a regular cappuccino is £2, and a slice of his delicious marble cake comes in at £1.50: at Costa, the equivalent prices are £2.45 each.

“Costa will affect the ambience Totnes has,” he says. “This is an independent kind of place, offering something different from … normality.”

And will its arrival affect his trade? “It depends on the tourists. Costa is a known place, isn’t it, isn’t it? So if they want a coffee somewhere they know, rather than a place that actually offers good coffee … that’s the main risk.”

At the top of the town, the bustling Green cafe takes its name from 46-year-old Ivan Green, who moved here with his family after living in southern Brittany. They live above the business, and he rises at 5am each day to bake 90% of the bread, cakes and pies that are on sale. He is already preparing for the malign effects of Costa’s opening, having done up the flat that sits behind the cafe, and rented it out. “The problem I have with the multinationals,” he says, “is that it’s just not fair competition.” The more he talks, the more outraged he sounds: like a lot of locals, he says that one of his big fears is Costa serving notice that Totnes is ready to be colonised, and sparking the arrival of Caffe Nero, Subway and all the rest.

Over the road, Martin Turner, 42, runs the Tangerine Tree café. He’s been in Totnes for four and a half years, having run the catering department at the HQ of the Met Office, in Exeter. “It’ll have an effect on footfall coming up through the town,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of loyal customers, but it could stop people coming up here: 70 is a lot of seats. The other thing is, it could put rents up. So we’ll definitely notice it.”

I hear the same sentiments at the Fat Lemons cafe – which is Totnes incarnate, purveying vegetarian and gluten-free food, with artwork from the Who’s Quadrophenia hanging on the wall in the gents – and Olsen, a Scandinavian-themed place run by a half-Danish local called Karl Rasmussen, who offers such treats as home-cured gravlax (”with pickled beetroot, salad, Swedish crispbread and dill and mustard dressing”), and octopus, potato and watercress salad.

Two of his regulars are sitting just in front of the counter. “We’ve got 42 coffee places,” says Ann Rutherford, 71. “Why do we need a 43rd?”

“A coffee shop is where people meet,” says 64-year-old Diana Cusack. “We don’t need Costa to give us a place to meet. We’ve got a surfeit of places in Totnes where people meet to talk. We’re a talking town.”

They both say they’ll go nowhere near Costa, but say they worry about its appeal to the town’s youth, who might be drawn in by the prospect of “two milkshakes and free Wi-Fi”.

By way of walking off the effects of so much coffee, I decide to do a few unscientific vox pops – which is when I meet some of the people I’ve just been talking about. They’re killing time in the market square and their lives, they tell me, are split between education, gap years and low-end jobs. On the face of it, they are the kind of people that Costa and their ilk specialise in attracting.

Round here, though, it doesn’t seem to be working. “I think it’s pretty bad,” says Jesse Tighe, 18. “We don’t really need these chains.”

“If you want to come to Totnes,” reckons 18-year-old Finnegan Travers, “you come to the independent places, don’t you?”

What words, I wonder, do they associate with Costa Coffee?

“Shit,” says one voice. “Corporate,” offers another. “McDonald’s,” reckons a third.

“We’re speaking for every young person here, I promise you. And older people,” says Tighe. He glances up the street, towards a pub-cum-music-venue-cum-cafe called the Barrel House, and down towards the premises where Costa will soon pitch up. “No one in Totnes wants this, do they?”

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The Beastie Boy who really is a role model – to rock stars | John Harris

Monday, August 13th, 2012

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch’s will refuses permission for his music to feature in ads. Even the Clash couldn’t manage that

In June British Airways premiered a TV advert intended to ram home its status as the “official airline partner” of the Olympics and Paralympics: 61 slightly alarming seconds, in which airliners taxied around the streets of London, and we were treated to the consummately postmodern trick of advertising masquerading as non-advertising: “Stay at home, support Team GB,” ran the tagline.

The soundtrack, strangely enough, was the Clash’s London Calling. There it was, heavily edited, blasting out in the midst of union flags and a vision of the capital restored to its swinging London-ish pomp, despite the fact that its lyrics suggested the exact reverse: “phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust … we ain’t got no swing … London is drowning, and I live by the river.”

What to do? Wring your hands? Or acknowledge that this particular die was cast when the same band’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go was used by Levi’s jeans in 1991, and accept that popular music has long been an absurd carry-on in which hardened meanings are as transient as success, and it’s axiomatic that nothing is sacred? Any lingering view to the contrary surely died in 2000, when Nick Drake’s impossibly sad Pink Moon was captured by Volkswagen and used to advertise its Cabrio range, soundtracking a gang of hipsters marvelling at the night sky, motoring to a party and then putting the car in reverse and deciding to marvel at the night sky again – as usual, bohemia as reimagined by unutterable squares.

Last week, however, there came news of one person who wanted nothing to do with any of this. The Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch died of cancer in May, having played his part in the creation of 25 years of music that any ad exec would pay millions to get hold of. We now know that his will contained one very interesting clause: “Notwithstanding anything to the contrary, in no event may my image or name or any music or any artistic property created by me be used for advertising purposes.”

Now, it would be easy to view this as one more act of self-righteousness from a group who often seemed to specialise in them. [With an estate valued at around $6m, and guaranteed royalties from his group's biggest-selling records that will swell his posthumous earnings, Yauch could afford such a stance – unlike the thousands of musicians who, with their industry nosediving, sometimes seem to sell their souls in order to eat. In Britain, moreover, any sniff of moralism from The Beastie Boys has long been met with the retelling of a tale from 1998, when the same people who had created Licensed To Ill — a brilliant album, but also home to some of the most sexist lyrics ever written — placed themselves on moral high ground to which they had no right, contacting the Prodigy and requesting them to desist from playing a largely instrumental track titled Smack My Bitch Up ("what a pious bunch of cunts," said The Manic Street Preachers' Nicky Wire, and he had a point)]

.But this move really counts for something. It chimes with much the same stance taken by Radiohead, Beck and REM. There are echoes of the statement issued by the surviving Beatles when Nike used the original recording of Revolution to sell trainers, and the argument that they “wrote and recorded these songs as artists and not as pitch- men for any product”. Even if you’re a musician stuck a few hundred rungs down the ladder, knowing that the music industry is on its uppers and the use of your music in an ad might get you through another year, it’s not a bad ideal to bear in mind. If you’re lucky enough to break big, it should be imprinted on your brain.

The trouble is that holding the line against the blurring of creativity and advertising can now look almost impossible. Sponsorship is ubiquitous, as proved by this coming weekend’s annual V festivals – two days of promotion for the Virgin group, who push their trains, mobile phones and the rest – and Scotland’s T in the Park, which pushes the great contributions to that country’s culture and public health of Tennent’s Lager. Jack Daniel’s whiskey now pays for bands to do intimate gigs in the their hometowns (because, notwithstanding its parent company’s annual revenues of $3bn, its brand is all about “roots”). By way of an illustration, consider the case of the White Stripes’ Jack White, who pledged to restore music’s soul and wound up writing a song for Coca-Cola entitled Love Is the Truth, which was nice.

And once a musician is dead, God help them – not least because, while US law gives the estates of dead stars control over the use of their image, in the UK no approval is required. With Yoko Ono’s say-so, John Lennon’s image has been used to sell Citroen cars. Most mind-boggling of all, in 2008, a portrait of Ian Curtis of Joy Division apparently wearing a pair of Converse trainers (a brand owned by Nike) was hurled around the globe. Did a man whose songs include Atrocity Exhibition and Dead Souls actually wear Converse? Even if he did, would he have been comfortable being reduced to selling them? There again, who cares?

Actually, I do. As I’ve acknowledged before, moaning about the state of pop music at the age of 42 is probably a futile and undignified thing. But if my ongoing sadness about the plight of such a beautiful, democratic form comes down to one thing, it is this: the washing away of all meaning, so that most contemporary musicians apparently have no language with which to convincingly sing about the world, and their forebears end up as nothing more than poster boys (and girls) for other people’s very marketable notions of cool. To argue against all this may sound hopelessly naive; in such a dire financial climate for musicians, it also implies any future Beatles or Beastie Boys probably having to endure long years of penury, which is easy for me to advocate. But I stand by the basic point: to even start to avenge music’s bland-out requires one thing – musicians distancing themselves from the machine, and returning to the noble ideal of art for art’s sake.

Which brings us back to the Clash, a song from the London Calling album entitled Death or Glory, and a golden Joe Strummer couplet: “Every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock’n'roll / Grabs the mike to tell us he’ll die before he’s sold.” His contention, aimed at himself as much as anyone, was that principles soon dissolve into mere poses, and the fast buck is always grabbed, sooner or later. But Adam Yauch proved otherwise. “I might stick around or I might be a fad / But I won’t sell my songs for no TV ad,” went a Beastie Boys song titled Putting Shame in Your Game. As it turns out, he meant it. And how great is that?

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