Thread by @willjennings80

Thirty years ago this week London experienced a unique, spectacular and unusual concert.

medium.com/@willjennings8…

This is an edited extract of my chapter "Jean Michel Jarman: The Last of Docklands" in "Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London", out now on @RepeaterBooks

repeaterbooks.com/product/regene…

London Docklands Development Corporation wanted to kickstart development in vast tracts of lands around London's Royal Docks in 1988. Canary Wharf was growing, but they wanted to promote the opportunity area across the world for new service, finance and tech companies.

So in came this man, @jeanmicheljarre, who had recently transformed Houston into a stageset for a massive public concert to put it on the world-city map in a time of depression.

He teamed up with Mark Fisher (@StufishStudio) to design a spectactular transformation of the docks, with a floating stage, searchlights, £250k of fireworks and using vast buildings as canvases for glass lantern projections.

This did mean Millennium Mills needed to be painted white, no mean feat, but when spectacle demands...

It was due to happen in September 1988, but the safety licence was turned down. Jarre spent a weekend flying by helicopter to other towns seeing if one of them wanted it, including the Garden Festival site in Liverpool and the Glasgow Docks ahead of their 1990 City of Culture.

Then he flew back to London to @NewhamLondon for a council hearing on the safety licence. Which he won, but the date had now had to be pushed back to October 8th / 9th.

This is just one year after the huge storms of 1987, and the weather was only a bit better 12 months on. But they continued preparing the site and the vast constructions needed for the projections.

There were some slips though, such as when one of the huge mirror balls fell off the back of a lorry and was left by the road, causing some concerned motorists to phone the police reporting a UFO landing.

And the weather continued to get worse...

Inside from the rain, artists were making all the analogue slides to be projected against the Co-Op and Millennium Mills, as well as the 90x100m scaffold-frame construction.

Costs were spiralling, but the show must go on. And the queues started forming. Touts were doing a mean business, selling £30 tickets for nearly double, some making £2,000 in an afternoon.

On the subject of money, it was heavily supported by the Carroll Foundation Trust, a "charity" set up by Gerald Carroll who would later go bankrupt in extraordinary circumstances
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_G…

Like all things in the 80s, it was all about money, image and property development. Carroll put up a marquee where he entertained all the great 1980s figures: politicians, Lady Diana, Robert Maxwell, Jeremy Beadle.

The story of the Carroll Trust is a whole book in itself, so I will leave Gerald Carroll here and we will go back to the concert.

The site began to fill up with excited people in thick coats, carrying umbrellas.

The sun began to set.

And in the rain, a cold wind, the concert started.

Sadly, the sheer weight of the spectacle, equipment, performers, instruments meant that the stage, made of 10 lashed together barges floated down from Newcastle, was too heavy to float up & down the docks. So it remained static.

What's so great about Destination Docklands is that it was pre-digital recording and pre mobile phone sharing. It really seems like something you just had to be at to get, because all footage of it loses the spectacular magic in a damp, disposable camera squib.

This was a total spectacle in a Debordian sense. The romanticising of empire and industry and the simplification of the area’s history into a neat narrative to further the LDDC agenda, fits his notion that “spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form”.

"No-one seems to have moved in almost two hours. They’re standing rock still, loving the fireworks and now seeing “Newham” projected in large letters on the two buildings opposite the stage", said @SimonBatesUK in his live @BBCR1 commentary.

The concert was hinged around three acts:
1: Industrial Revolution
2: Cultural Revolution
3: Electronic Revolution

The music @jeanmicheljarre made was site-specific and for this concert, a concept album of the changing arc of industry.

Part 1 had projections like this:

Part 2, the Cultural Revolution, featured Hitchcock, Quant, Twiggy, the Avengers and @themichaelcaine.

While in part 3, @jeanmicheljarre considered the future of Docklands and industry.

Coincidentally, this narrative structure was repeated in 2012 for the Olympic opening ceremony spectacle, for which Mark Fisher (@StufishStudio) was exec producer of before his sad and untimely death in 2013.

telegraph.co.uk/news/obituarie…

The weather was abysmal, and there is an official concert video made by Mike Mansfield but it is a curious cobbled together mix of edits which made it through the rain. But some still images do get across the scope, scale and spectacle.

Over two nights the official crowd was 200,000 (heavily reduced under the terms of the safety licence) but was seen by millions around Newham and the wider city.

One week after the concert the site was intended to be used for one of the (illegal) Apocolypse Now raves organised by @GuidoFawkes & Tony Colston-Hayter, but I think this was one which was postponed due to the famous ITV news feature on rave culture which led to heavier policing

But the real legacy of Destination Docklands was the conjoining of cultural spectacle and property development to present an image of place to a wider audience. In 1992 One Canada Square topped out with a Jarre-esque laser and light show.

The site was used for the brief London Pleasure Gardens meanwhile use, while the latest developers prepared their plans. But when Bloc Weekend closed in chaos it brought an early, debt-laden end to the project, as @danhancox covers: theguardian.com/music/2012/jul….

Anyway. Jarre's concerts got bigger, playing to 2.5million Parisians in 1990 and then 3.5million Moscovites in 1997. But none quite had the audacity of using architecture & place as both setting and conceptual device as in Destination Docklands.

The site is now transforming again, this time by @SilvertownLDN who are using culture, spectacle and event throughout their brand identity, commercial venture and marketing position.

There's so, so much more to the history, event and fallout of Destination Docklands and how it interplays with neoliberal politics, cultural spectacle, property development, and modern history. But this was just a snapshot.

You can listen to the (heavily post-produced) @jeanmicheljarre album here. Close your eyes and imagine being in a cold, windswept, loud Royal Docks with constant fireworks, lasers, searchlights and spectacle.

open.spotify.com/album/09ou9QyF…

If you liked this then maybe get "Regeneration Songs" about the interrelation of culture & development with a brilliant array of writers inc. @AnnaMinton, @danhancox, @Mookron, @gilliancswan, @JoyWhite2< @owenhatherley, @TomCordell6, @entschwindet & more.

repeaterbooks.com/product/regene…