Craig Schuftan - The Culture Club: Modern Art, Rock and Roll, and Other Things Your Parents Warned You About

In July 2004 I was producing a live broadcast from the Bowling Club in Byron Bay to coincide with the annual Australian Rock festival Splendour in the Grass. At some point during the show there was a call for volunteers from the audience to participate, and those interested were asked to make themselves known to Craig Schuftan over there in the red T-shirt put your hand up, Schuf!. At that time, Id worked as a producer on the show for a couple of years, and listeners would have become used to hearing my name on the radio from time to time, or speaking to me if they called the show with a story. Id also been presenting a segment called Schufs Mixed Tape, a sort of giant, theoretically never-ending compilation of songs found in the triple j vinyl library.

So, maybe a few people in the audience thought: oh, that guy who plays weird music on a Wednesday or oh, that guy who still hasnt sent me the prize I won three months ago for embarrassing myself on live radio. But for at least one person in the crowd that day, my name was more closely associated with a segment that could be heard on a Monday morning: The Culture Club . As I took advantage of the hourly news bulletin to make a mad dash for the crowded bar at the other end of the venue, I heard, in the unmistakable cheery, beery tones of the twenty-something Australian festival-goer: Schuf! Existentialism! Whooooooooooo-yeaaaaah!. I turned around to see a dude in a T-shirt and baseball cap, schooner in one hand, the other arm proudly raised in an air-punching salute to his new favourite philosophical construct.

For the last few weeks, Id been talking in The Culture Club about twentieth-century French Existentialist writers, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and unearthing fragments of their ideas in various unlikely Pop-cultural places in Zach Braffs Garden State , in The Dust Brothers soundtrack to Fight Club , and in the Bee Gees 1977 floor-filler Staying Alive . As usual, I felt as though Id just got away with it. When the composer John Cage asked his friend David Tudor how he thought the former should behave when speaking at universities, Tudor replied, As a hit-and-run driver, which is more or less the way I approach The Culture Club every Monday morning. I happen to find art history interesting and exciting, but have never for a moment assumed that anybody listening could care less about it.

So, it was tremendously exciting to me to find that, here, at the Byron Bay Bowling Club, was evidence that The Culture Club actually had a fan , and that he and, potentially, others like him was prepared to cheer for the history of ideas in the same way that we would all be cheering for Interpol and Mercury Rev the next day at the festival. And why not? If The Culture Club had taught me anything over the last four years, it was that most of the great isms of twentieth-century art were connected usually by far less than the standard six degrees of separation with the music, movies and magazines that litter our bedroom floors as well as to our memories in the twenty-first century. Not only that, but having made the link, it became clear that one could enrich our understanding of the other, and vice versa. This, to me, is whats most satisfying about The Culture Club : Its one thing to realise that listening to The Hives can help us understand Antonin Artauds Theatre of Cruelty but whats really amazing is that, having read Artaud, screaming along with The Hives into a hairbrush is even more fun than it used to be. Its these connections the dimly lit passageways that link oddball composer Erik Satie with The Stooges, the silvery thread that runs from the Marquis de Sade to The Pixies via Salvador Dali and David Lynch, and the wormhole in space-time that begins in Marcel Duchamps readymade bathroom fixture and comes out of a drainpipe in Abbey Road studios that Ive attempted to map in greater detail in The Culture Club .

In setting down the ideas and stories that have appeared in the radio show for this book, Ive tried to preserve the curious logic of the segment as its gone to air, which is to say, it leaps wildly around the last one hundred years of art, music, TV and literature with scant regard for chronology. So, our story starts with media guru and slightly unreliable techno-prophet Marshall McLuhan, jumps forty years back in time to the publication of James Joyces Finnegans Wake , makes a quick detour via the late eighties for a slice of cherry pie in Twin Peaks , before dropping us off outside Sigmund Freuds house sixty years before that, where a nervous-looking Andre Breton is working up the courage to knock at his heros door. This might seem confusing at first, but, being a live-radio segment, The Culture Club is driven by conversation, and thats how conversations work. You and your friend start talking about a song, the song reminds you of another song, that song reminds your friend of a book she read once, which gets you thinking about this weird movie you saw one night Youre not always sure how you got there, but you always seem to end up somewhere interesting. This, to me, is whats fun about art those manic, two-in-the-morning raves where history seems to come alive, when youre explaining the Futurist manifesto to someone and suddenly Tom Jones and the Art of Noises Kiss lights up the video jukebox in the pub youre about to get kicked out of. At moments like that, art is a million miles away from the stuffy language of academic writing and exhibition catalogues its real, youre listening to it, yelling about it and maybe even doing it.