Music

The whole enterprise is a mess, and one which will provide a field day for the ever-popular right-wing sport of firing potshots at government-funded arts projects. When conservative commentators lay into the state-funded arts institutions, they trot out old cliches – ‘tokenism’, ‘quotas’, ‘political correctness gone mad’ – which all miss the point, which is rather more subtle and insidious. State funding of the arts has two functions. The first is a conservative one, to maintain expensive art forms like opera and expensive institutions like art galleries, which might otherwise disappear. The second is a more radical one, which is to encourage ‘innovation’. Feature continues

Most people who work in the public arts sector agree that more money has been sloshing around since the election of a Labour government in 1997, but this cash injection has come tied to the second remit. Look through an Arts Council application form and you’ll see how funding is accorded on a project-by-project basis. Promoters are asked how they might improve ‘productivity’, ‘access’ and ‘diversity’; how they might entice young, low-income and ethnically diverse crowds. Formal innovation is encouraged, as are projects that blur the boundaries between various genres. And there is a desire to stir controversy and garner column inches. These are all entirely laudable aims, but you can see how ‘Gaddafi: A Living Myth’ would have fulfilled every remit on that checklist long before any aesthetic criteria had been considered.

Asian Dub Foundation have a complex relationship with the world of government funding. They emerged from the ‘Community Music’ schemes of free-form jazz drummer John Stevens, who would assemble trained and untrained musicians to work together in inventive ways, taking projects to youth clubs, prisons and mental health institutions. This experience has influenced many of ADF’s own worthy projects, including their educational wing ADFED. But, whereas John Stevens had an anarchist’s suspicion of being in hock to government funding, ADF are more than happy to take the Arts Council shilling. They seem to appear exclusively at venues like the Barbican and the South Bank, swinging from one publicly funded project to another – collaborations with drumming Bengali fisherman, live soundtracks to the movies ‘La Haine’ and ‘The Battle Of Algiers’, British Council-funded tours of Brazil and Cuba, the score for Channel 4 docu-drama ‘The Bradford Riots’, and so on.

They join names like Tortoise, DJ Spooky, Scanner, Bill Laswell and Nitin Sawhney, who all seem to have left the brutal, stand-on-your-own-two-feet world of the pop marketplace, and have become addicted to government-funded pop projects. And, as any sociologist will tell you, state funding can be an addictive and emasculating drug. None of this would matter if ‘Gaddafi: A Living Myth’ was a great work of art, but most of its failings can be traced to the collaborative process that formed it. When you see Ferdy from ‘This Life’ striding around the stage dressed as Colonel Gaddafi, dressed as Michael Jackson, dressed as a Third World dictator, it conjurs up the spector of David Essex’s grouchy Ché Guevara in ‘Evita’. The difference is that Andrew Lloyd Webber never relied on the taxpayer to fund his wretched musicals.‘