Mr Man-Chest-Hair: A Chat with TWH's Austin Collings
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| photograph - Ben Jackson |
If culture is collective experience, bleakness pervades English culture. The boring mundanity, the aching expanse of shattered bus shelters and patchwork pavements. The grit under your nails and the man loping his way into a Betfred. These are things rarely expressed in the pretty paraphernalia of your local art gallery, or indeed the glossy rubbish on Netflix. They are, however, the sort you’ll find in the work of Austin Collings.
Collings ain’t shy of the bleak. Many will know he as Artistic Director of the North’s best nightclub, The White Hotel, but he’s a back catalogue of written work ranging from the blackest black flash fiction of his debut anthology, The Myth of Brilliant Summers, to a more recent excursion into screenwriting with London-based and coke-fuelled thriller, ODYSSEY. Collings also co-wrote the memoirs of Mark E. Smith, a character who pops up again in a photobook collaboration with Prestwich publisher Pariah Press in God’s Fox.
I hadn’t known any of this prior to meeting the fella. It’s not surprising really, given the notoriety of his resident nightclub for its impermeable online presence and industrial estate location – a humble haven for outsiders and experimenters, for those willing to push beyond the precipice and into a barren wasteland of freaky literature.
The bluntness of The White Hotel, its crucifix-doused, unfinished interiors serves up an uncompromising and darkly humorous artistic vision, the architectural equivalent of Collings’ written work. Collings himself, by contrast, comes armed with a smartness I wasn’t expecting of the club’s drivers: slicked back hair, thick-rimmed glasses and tan trench coat, he gives a firm handshake. He’s from Radcliffe, near Bury, a place I instinctively and problematically associate with the likes of Guy Garvey, but an area Collings frequently refers to as “Dogshit Valley”. I maintain he shares the soft-but-firm regional demeanour one associates with this region of Lancashire as he grips my shoulder, checking I’m alright after a few too many pints.
Collings’ Myths were first published back in 2014, just prior the dawn of our beloved White Hotel. Since then of course we’ve seen another TWH venue appear in the form of the frequently re-named, Ad England – now P3 Annihilation Eve – and it’s now a decade or so since all this kicked off from a diddy Salford car garage, a decade in Man-chest-hair, as Mr. Collings refers to it himself. We spoke to him in an effort to soak up what hairy wisdom he’s gathered over the years.
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HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY, RIGHT NOW? – WHAT WAS THE LAST MEAL YOU ATE?
Bacon butty + ketchup. Is there any finer breakfast? Did Francis Bacon smell of bacon?
WHEN A STRANGER ASKS “WHAT DO YOU DO?”, WHAT DO YOU TELL THEM?
You’ve got to lie to stay interested in that question, I think.
WHAT DOES AN AVERAGE DAY LOOK LIKE IN THE LIFE OF AUSTIN COLLINGS? HONESTLY.
I’m a practising insomniac – a one-hour kip man – so the day is hard to define. For me an average day is centred around staying alert. Alert versus inert: that’s my average day. The duel between those two -erts.
YOUR WORK OFTEN FINDS FOCUS IN THE SUBURBS. NOW YOU’RE BASED PRIMARILY IN THE CITY CENTRE IN MANCHESTER, DO YOU FIND YOUR FOCUS HAS SHIFTED? DOES THE BUSTLE OF AN URBAN CENTRE HOLD THE SAME INTRIGUE, AND HAS THIS CHANGED OVER TIME, Y’KNOW AS THOSE HIGHRISES POP UP?
I’m not based in the city centre. I can’t afford the rent. My focus has always remained the same. I tend not to write about the big issues but the overburnt toast, the single kids’ shoe in the street, the half-eaten food in the restaurant – how did all those things come to be?
HAVE YOU SUCCUMBED TO MANCHESTER’S BOOSTERIST CULTURE BEHEMOTH OR DO YOU YEARN FOR MANCHESTER’S SATELLITE TOWNS – BURY, STOCKPORT, PRESTWICH AND THE LIKE? IS MANCHESTER FUNDAMENTALLY GOOD OR BAD, OR IS THAT BESIDES THE POINT?
Manchester is wrapped in delusions, confusions and illusions. Welcome to the burnout society where choice has become a disease. This is what happens when humour is forsaken and replaced with the violence of positivity. It saturates. You don’t know who is speaking because everybody sounds the same.
But there are still corners of Manchester where the dead star is still shining somehow.
TWH ITSELF IS SOMETHING OF A SATELLITE TO THE CITY CENTRE. IT’S ALSO THE ARCHITECTURAL EMBODIMENT OF THE DARK HUMOUR AND BARE BONES OF YOUR WRITTEN WORK. WHAT AND WHO IS TWH FOR IN YOUR EYES? HAS THAT CHANGED AS IT’S GAINED POPULARITY?
TWH will always be for everybody. The torrent of accelerated time without narrative is disorienting our society and fragmenting community. We live in a post-narrative time picking through bits of information like we do our different coloured bin waste: which bin does this go in, is that for the green bin or the black bin? Blame the bins. I’m sure we were more orientated when we only had one bin to fill.
Herein, TWH can help put the pieces back together. See TWH as the WHITE BIN. The WHITE BINE for all and everything.
IF TWH WERE COMPARED TO THE HAÇIENDA WOULD YOU BE FLATTERED OR INSULTED?
It’s been made before, that comparison. But neither flattered nor insulted. Nobody who actually works at TWH ever went there. I think I may have lied to somebody in my late teens that I had been there. One of those lovely lies that will never come back to haunt you.
WHAT SHOULD A CREATIVE DIRECTOR DO IN THE EYES OF AUSTIN COLLINGS?
Catch the bus instead of getting an Uber. You learn a lot more on buses. It’s never not theatrical. You need to know things that others don’t know. Be the double agent to the double agent.
FILM IS YOUR LATEST FOCUS. WHY AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING FILMS ABOUT? HOW DOES THIS DIFFER FROM THE WRITTEN WORD?
I have a feature film out this year called ODYSSEY which is demonic and demonically funny – an assault on the borders of perception – in my eyes anyway. I wrote that with the director Gerard Johnson. It was written in a sort-of exalted state. Gerard’s superb – truly superb – like John Cassavetes with an Oyster card.
I have another feature that I’ve written which will hopefully go into production at the end of the year. And then there are other film and TV things floating around like shapes at the end of your bed at night. But I don’t want to hex these things. It’s so easy to talk things out of existence. Also, you don’t want these things to sound sorry and cheap, so now I wait until they’re actually finished.
I guess the thread with all these scripts and ideas is sly humour and that feeling of spending an entire morning trying to outlive a dream and why hasn’t anybody based a religion on coincidence?
DOES DOING THE THINGS YOU DO MAKE YOU MONEY?
You know the answer to that. But then I’m unemployable out there in the real world. I doubt I’d even hire myself out there in the real world.
WHAT SHOULD AUSTIN COLLINGS DO IN THE EYES OF AUSTIN COLLINGS?
Try and sleep.