Written for Culture Wars
Next to Hurley on the stage, Johnny Whoop is playing just such a succession of repetitive beats, so any performance of Beats with an audience of more than six (alongside Hurley and his team) is illegal. Mind you, less than six and it’s criminal.
Hurley’s refined, technicolour storytelling riffs on the idea of repetitive beats. It’s 1994 and Channel 4 are hyping a new American sitcom called Friends. In Livingstone, 15 year-old Johnno McCreaddie is downing his SNES controller and sneaking off to a rave for the first time.
Meanwhile, Robert, a 41 year-old policeman, is standing by for a raid. His father was a steelworker who joined picket lines at the now-defunct Ravenscraig Steelworks and always viewed Robert’s choice of career as a betrayal.
As the clock tick-tocks past his curfew, Johnno’s mother sits awake at home, wondering what’s become of him. Later, when she picks him up from a police station, bruised and disorientated, she has an urge to make him feel the way his absence made her feel.
Hurley’s picture is one of incessant cycles: conformity growing out of rebellion and vice versa. Just as every baton strike spawns a sub-culture, he suggests, every picket line tilts a child towards the establishment. The values of one generation are taken down by the next.
It’s fascinating then to see Hurley not taking sides. Yes, you suspect his allegiances lie with the scattered ravers rather than the battering raiders, but both ultimately both come in for criticism. With surreptitious references to the student protests at Millbank Tower, he extends in into the present, so that politics seems as transient as musical trends. He asks us, without being explicit, to imagine an alternative.
Yet, Beats works just as well without all this. Hurley is such a genial, captivating storyteller: gentle with his words and caring of his characters. The story itself might fall out as expect: you know from the moment Robert and Johnno are introduced that they’re destined to cross swords. However, there are some delicate moments, in particular his paralleling of the mutual blood-pumping hysteria of ecstasy and aggression, and some choice phrases.
There’s also the beautiful gesture of juxtaposing the quiet act of storytelling with the noise and light of rave culture. Johnny Whoop’s thumping music and Jamie Wardrop’s throbbing video projections fill the room and Hurley, sat quietly at a wooden desk with a glass of water and a house lamp, looks like a storyteller in the eye of an electric storm.
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