All of which meant that my life at that point revolved around minimum-wage shift work and disconsolate drinking with work colleagues, many of whom were also musicians, artists, actors, playwrights, poets — people who, thirty or forty years earlier, might have been able to subsist on the dole and/or living in squats with the time, space, and energy to work creatively; or who, in the 2010s, with more middle-class backgrounds and better connections, might have become one of the (fairly insufferable) cultural workers and self-facilitating media nodes that Dalston was full of. I mention this because, ten years later, there’s now a general recognition of how neoliberalism has materially reshaped the cultural industries and the opportunities available to working-class creatives, but there was certainly an incompletely articulated recognition of this at the time — a sense that former options and alternatives had been closed off. Occasionally, since this was so rarely acknowledged openly, you began to wonder if these options and alternatives had ever existed at all, if the cultural networks and political possibilities of the 1970s were merely some desperate fever dream you’d made up on the bus back to your bedsit.
someone called rhiann jones, who i now realize i read quite a lot of at the time
