Author Archives: John Kerridge

About John Kerridge

I have a camera, drink tea and trip on untied shoe laces.

Tom Waits: The Earth Died Screaming

“The Earth Died Screaming” opens Bone Machine (1992), an album that marked a new rawness in Waits’ career. While his earlier work balanced Beat-poet jazz swagger with blues and balladry, Bone Machine plunged fully into the apocalyptic and the grotesque. Recorded with clattering percussion, improvised junkyard instruments, and distorted vocals, it created a sonic world of rust, bone, and ruin.

This track sets the tone immediately: a macabre march that fuses Biblical doom, carnival grotesquerie, and the sense of a post-industrial wasteland. Released at the end of the Cold War, in a world still haunted by nuclear fears, environmental collapse, and the Gulf War, the song channels late 20th-century anxieties into a surreal end-times vision.

The lyrics string together a vision of humanity’s end in grotesque tableaux: kings and beggars alike swallowed up, lovers separated, death rendered as both terrifying and absurd. Waits doesn’t deliver this as solemn prophecy but as a dark carnival barker, laughing at the futility of human ambition.

What makes it powerful is how it refuses redemption. Unlike apocalyptic art that points to renewal or salvation, this track leaves us in the rubble. The earth doesn’t fade or fall silent — it screams, suggesting not peace but pain, rage, and unfinished business.

At its core, “The Earth Died Screaming” is a parable about the inevitability of decay. Waits sketches a vision of the apocalypse where all hierarchies collapse: presidents, beggars, thieves, lovers, and clowns all meet the same fate. It’s a leveller’s song, where death refuses to discriminate.

But there’s also satire here. The grotesque imagery suggests that humanity’s self-destruction is a carnival act, a spectacle. In other words, we’ve turned the end of the world into theatre. The grotesque laughter in the song mirrors our own absurdity in ignoring environmental collapse, endless war, and greed while we march toward ruin.

Spiritually, the track feels Old Testament — fire-and-brimstone, prophetic wrath. Yet it never gives us the consolation of a divine order behind it. Instead, it’s chaos. Waits replaces religious hope with a grim acceptance of entropy and absurdity.

caught in a lift with A nostalgic playlist on loop

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The Moco Museum in London assembles an enviable roster of late-20th-century cultural heavyweights: Banksy, Warhol, Emin, Basquiat, Haring, etc.

On paper, such a line-up ought to radiate urgency, wit, and the frisson of artistic risk. In situ, however, the experience is oddly inert — less a gathering of vital provocateurs than a tableau of hustlers, lingering on a street corner long after their work has been codified, packaged, and sold.

This inertia is not rooted in the intrinsic quality of the works, or indeed the artist themselves, but within Moco’s tightly curated, boutique-style environment, the edge is blunted. Warhol’s prints, originally a calculated affront to distinctions between art and commerce, now appear as well-worn brand assets, their iconography as familiar — and as unthreatening — as the consumer products they once critiqued.

Similarly, Tracey Emin’s confessional works, initially brimming with the intensity of public vulnerability in this setting feel as a predictable as a drunk uncle retelling stories at a family gathering. Basquiat’s canvases, infused with graffiti influences and a sense of urban immediacy, are diminished to mere high-value décor, their socio-political significance overshadowed by the mitigating effects of wall text and carefully orchestrated lighting.

Banksy’s inclusion underscores the paradox. His practice depends upon context — the unmediated encounter on a city street, the intervention into public space — to function as political commentary. Here they are divorced from site and circumstance, the work shifts register: from subversive gesture to collectible commodity. The transaction becomes aestheticised rebellion, stripped of consequence.

The result is a museum experience that frames radicalism within a safe, consumable format. It invites visitors to encounter these figures not as insurgents within the cultural field, but as fixed points in a canon that has already been stabilised for mass circulation. The presentation favours recognisability over confrontation, producing an environment in which dissent has been fully domesticated.

What emerges is a broader institutional question: can works born of defiance retain their potency within the commercial and museological apparatus that ultimately validates them? Moco’s exhibition suggests that, once integrated into the art-market economy, even the most oppositional practices risk becoming part of the very system they once sought to disrupt.

If Moco’s upper floors feel like a nostalgic playlist on shuffle, the basement is a live wire. Go for that head to the basement for the Marina Abramović collection. Abramović’s work resists embalming because it was never about static images or neat objects. It is about endurance, presence, and the unmediated exchange between artist and audience. Even when translated into photographs, videos, and documentation, her performances retain a charge — the sense that something visceral, uncomfortable, and unpredictable once took place. The gaze still meets you. The tension still hums in the air. You can’t domesticate the feeling of holding another person’s gaze for minutes at a time. There is no easy reproduction, no endlessly shareable clip that captures the weight of the moment.

Standard tickets £25 with concessions for students, over 65s, etc.

George Short

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In my early political days, I had the good fortune to cross paths with people of remarkable conviction—individuals whose beliefs weren’t just ideas they carried, but the very compass that guided their lives. Among them was one man who left a lasting impression on me: George Short. He was more than just a politician; he was a living example of what it meant to stand firm in the face of hardship, to believe in something so deeply that no setback could shake it.

George had a way of cutting through noise and doubt, speaking with a clarity that came from both experience and an unshakable moral core. He lived his politics, not as a hobby or a passing phase, but as a lifelong commitment. I often think about how much I learned from him—not just about politics, but about courage, endurance, and the importance of staying true to one’s principles. People like George Short deserve to be remembered—not simply for what they did, but for the integrity and fire they carried into everything they fought for.

George Short was born in 1900 in the tough mining village of High Spen, County Durham. At just 14, he went down the pit, joining the ranks of thousands who worked the coal seams. But he was never content simply to endure harsh conditions — by the time of the great miners’ strikes of 1921 and 1926, Short was an active organiser. His role in those struggles cost him dearly: blacklisted from the coal industry, he would never work underground again.

Determined to keep fighting for workers’ rights, he served as a delegate to the Labour Representation Committee before joining the Communist Party in 1926 — a commitment that would define the rest of his life. By 1929, he was elected to the Party’s Central Committee, and years later he would serve on its Appeals Committee.

In 1930, Short travelled to Moscow, spending a year at the Lenin School and another working for the Comintern, even becoming a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When he returned to Britain, he threw himself into building the Communist Party and leading the unemployed workers’ movement. His activism came at a cost: three months in prison, after insisting on the right to hold meetings at Stockton Cross.

The 1930s also saw him at the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle. After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, he was instrumental in blocking the Haruma Mara from leaving Middlesbrough dock with scrap metal bound for Japan’s war effort. He helped stop the Blackshirts from marching through Stockton-on-Tees and took on the vital task of organising recruitment for the International Brigade in Spain.

After the war, Short remained committed to the cause of peace, supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, in later years, joining the re-established Communist Party of Britain. As President of the Teesside Pensioners Association, he launched a successful campaign for free concessionary travel for retirees — a victory felt by thousands.

George Short lived to the age of 94, passing away in 1994. His life was one of unbroken dedication to the struggles of working people, from the pit villages of County Durham to the global fight against fascism.

We need more Georges in our world today—voices of courage, hearts of steel, and a belief that change is worth fighting for.

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Being Here: Barbara Walker, The Arnolfini, Bristol until 25 May 2025.

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Barbara Walker’s new exhibition at Arnolfini is a sustained, courageous interrogation of memory, belonging and the politics of refusal. Across drawing, painting and large-scale installations, Walker refuses easy reconciliation — instead staging encounters that demand attention. Her mark-making is urgent and precise; her visual language reinventive, at once poetic and forensic. The works trace personal and communal histories, showing how identity is made and unmade by social forces.

Seen through the prism of the Windrush scandal, Walker’s exhibition acquires an added urgency. The show does not only document injustice; it amplifies the voices and experiences that policies have tried to erase. Walker’s art testifies to the human consequences of bureaucratic neglect and racialized exclusion, yet it is never merely documentary. It is also a celebration of resilience, a repository of memory, and a space for imagining reparative futures.

Visitors will find themselves moved by the emotional honesty of the pieces, provoked by the political questions they raise, and held by an aesthetic intelligence that balances grief with profound hope. This is essential work for our times — an exhibition that asks us to see more clearly, to remember more faithfully, and to act more justly.