Products that don't care if you buy them

I don't watch much telly, but I just spent a very enjoyable evening watching a cracking BBC documentary about Factory Records.

I love the Factory story. Not only did they produce some of my all-time favourite music, but I also find their anarchic approach really inspiring. It's a great example of a particular kind of story: the "we didn't care, and that's why it worked" story. There's something very empowering about people who don't have a clue, working exclusively to their own agenda, and mystifyingly making a success of it anyway. It gives hope to the rest of us, plodding around in the wings, wishing people would listen to us too.

Factory emerged (escaped?) from the punk era of the late seventies, when I was barely a foot long. Watching the old footage though reminded me just how reassuringly shoddy things were back then: bands lip-synching hopelessly on Top of the Pops, TV presenters with rubbish hair and cheap suits (gawd bless Tony Wilson). It's a long way away from the slick production values we're used to on TV today. But take a look through YouTube and you'll see the same DIY spirit poking through again. I suppose it was only a matter of time, writing about doing things badly, that I'd mention the famous Sniffin' Glue poster. But I think we should make modern equivalents for YouTube, hip hop, Scroobius Pip and reality TV. In fact, here's one I made earlier...

http://dylan.sonybmgmusic.co.uk/messages/2QSQ-ZA5O-57VK-W51U-2963

Factory graphic designer Peter Saville summed up the DIY approach for me when he said (and apologies if I'm misquoting): "No-one knew how to do things properly, so we'd find our own way of doing it." They ran a record label, managed bands, ran a nightclub, produced records, all without a proper template or roadmap for doing so. And so, they did it differently. Most people thought they were mad, and they probably were. But by doing things badly, they created something new.

After the Factory doc, Comics Britannia interviewed the creators of Viz, which emerged at a similar time. They said that they put things in Viz that no-one would ever have put in a mainstream comic, because they only wrote it for their mates. Peter Saville said that no-one in the early days of Factory talked about sales, because no-one ever thought anyone would buy the records. As a product, a Factory record "quite blatantly didn't care whether you bought it or not." And because they only made things for their own circle of friends, they made art that genuinely connected with the people who bought it.

Of course, punk and Viz aren't to everyone's taste, and anarchy isn't exactly popular in mainstream party politics. But Alan Moore said tonight that anarchy means taking complete responsibility for your political choices, rather than following the collective will. When looked at in this light, aren't punk, Viz, Factory, YouTube and the rest actually just about taking responsibility for our own entertainment?

Just because we're not as good at it as the professionals, that shouldn't rob us of the right to do it. After all, if we're rubbish, no-one's forcing people to watch. We can just make stuff for our mates. And shouldn't that be enough?

It's a small world

I just got back from the Shambala Festival, a small but perfectly-formed event near Market Harborough. Massive congratulations to Sid and the rest of the organisers for creating such a wonderful playground for us all. I was particularly struck by the warm, sociable atmosphere all around the event. It felt like being in a small village for a few days.

I think this feeling had a lot to do with the strong emphasis on participation and interaction. Everyone was encouraged to have a go, through workshops, singalongs, discussions, games, whatever. The usual divisions between entertainers and consumers didn't seem to apply. Everywhere you went there were people doing things they'd never done before, and the community seemed much closer for that. I was very impressed by the attitude to education too: encouraging learning because it's a fun, sociable thing to do. I've improved my wicker weaving skills, and now have a nice wicker snail adorning my window box. (No doing things badly there though: it's a f***ing good snail.)

But it's the sense of smallness that has stayed with me since I've returned to London. Doing things badly is hard to do in our vast, multinational, ever-expanding world. After all, on the world stage what right do I have write about business and education? But in a small world, doing things badly is much more acceptable. In fact, lots of things seem to work better in a small community.

For a start, it's pretty easy to meet nice people there. I had a lovely conversation with the guys at Fairy Love about the need to make money - for the organisers, the stall-holders, the acts, everyone involved to make a profit, so that the festival could keep happening. Hearing a giant fairy talk about business is quite a mind-altering experience, and his words affected the whole way I saw the weekend. Everywhere I went at Shambala, I saw money, marketing, branding, enterprise, hard work - all the essential ingredients of hardened capitalism, and yet it all felt resolutely uncommercial.

I had a quick chat with very personable hip-hop guy Clayton Blizzard about "work". His CD's amazing (I paid him a fiver for a copy in an act of flagrant capitalism), and he'd clearly put loads of "work" into it, but he said he didn't think of music as work because he loved doing it. It seems to be the default association these days: "work" means doing something you don't enjoy. Strange how these words get distorted over time. Lots of people were working very hard at Shambala, but I didn't see many unhappy people.

I also had a very nice conversation with Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler, who was giving a talk about medieval values like neighbourliness, playfulness and community. I was particularly struck by his use of the word "trade", which seemed to carry with it all the humanity of commerce without implying the damaging excesses of modern enterprise. Tom's a marvellous advocate for the importance of idleness, which I've never been very good at myself. But I'm a firm believer in doing things for fun, and for spending more time socialising, which some may see as idleness. I'm starting to see Tom's point. He also played the ukulele quite badly and led us all in a most enjoyable singalong, so perhaps sociablism is close to idleness after all.

Festivals are well-known as bastions of "alternative culture", but what I experienced at Shambala wasn't all that different from the mainstream, just a lot more sociable. I've heard a lot of talk from anarchists over the years about the need to smash the capitalist system, to destroy money and stop work, but the system seemed to be "working" very nicely here. I gave my money to people I liked, for things I enjoyed, and I understood the consequences for my community and my environment. Suddenly capitalism didn't seem so bad after all. Perhaps in a smaller community, and properly balanced by sociablism, the old systems of money, work and commerce might actually start to work properly again.

I don't think I'd be happy to go back to living in villages though. I like the possibilities a larger world can offer. But we spend so much energy these days on making our world larger, maybe we could all benefit from being in a small world now and then.