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A couple of years ago, I bought a copy of Phil Oakley’s Electric Dreams from a charity shop somewhere in East Anglia. It’s a pretty good record, full of yearning vocals and whooshing, upbeat synthesisers – the kind of thing that sounds great when you’re getting ready for a big night out in a nowhere town. But somewhere along the line, its original owner had stopped spinning Oakely’s disc. Maybe its flimsy glamour had worn thin and they’d resigned themselves to a life of comforting suburban tedium. Or perhaps they’d moved to the big city and become a superstar, escaped to a place that didn’t require a hopeful, bridge-and-tunnel soundtrack. Either way, now their destiny was settled, they no longer dreamed Electric Dreams.

Billed as an exploration of nightlife’s artificial paradise, the Barbican’s Electric Dreams was a frustrating show, an uncomfortable compilation of great samples and bad cover versions. Riffing on a waning fashion moment (2000’s brief fling with early eighties New York glamour), it sometimes seemed a little too eager to wow you with its outmoded hipness. The inclusion of art-fashion-music-whatever collective Fischerspooner’s Sweetness (2002) was a case in point. A dullish pop video, Sweetness was awash with glitter and geisha girls, shattering glass, and transvestites prancing about in an unfurnished New York loft. As an exercise in slick, familiar camp it was just about adequate, but it’s hard to imagine Fischerspooner getting under the skin of even the most wide-eyed teenage fantasist.





Glowing dumbly on the Curve Gallery’s darkened walls, Jack Pierson’s ‘found’ neon signs were similarly lightweight. Promising various pleasures for a fistful of cash – Adult Video, Rooms, and Chinese Food (all 1997) – they attempted to say something about the blank eroticism of the night-time economy. But the problem with exploring blankness, of course, is that your work risks becoming as bland as the things it represents. Jay McInerney and Andy Warhol avoid this trap with style – Pierson’s signs just look like something you’d find gracing the bedroom wall of a mildly ironical yuppie.

Like Phil Oakley’s record, the better work in Electric Dreams evoked the Cinderella feeling you get when you’re pulling on your sparkliest clothes and a taxi’s waiting to whisk you into town. Jim Lambie’s Perm and Blow Dry (2001), a dense cluster of mirrors, was a dust-flecked travesty of some pop star’s dressing room. With its odd tilts and skewed optics, it only offered a partial image of anyone who stood before it. Perhaps that’s why it seemed like the perfect start to a reckless evening: when we join nightlife’s fantasy whirl, we always like to leave a little of ourselves back home. Just as Lambie’s glittery turntable, Soft Cell (2001), played on the ritualistic aspects of dance culture and Eva Rothschild’s Hunters and Wreckers (2000) probed the shonky spirituality of sleepless adolescent dreamers, Kirsten Glass’s Stroke my Bone (2002) dealt with sexual fantasies – or rather what happens to our libidinal imaginations when MTV aesthetics creep in. A bizarre funerary vehicle driven by glammed-up midnight mannequins, it seemed to run on pure consumer desire – one ‘natural’ resource we’re in no danger of squandering.

As performance collective Donatella’s wonderful video LonDonAtella (2002) made clear, feeling invincible is the most delicious part of a good night out. The action starts with some light-hearted arsing about, as a dandyish Malcolm McDowell clone leaps across London’s rooftops to a cheerful housey soundtrack. He’s soon calling lightning from the sky to destroy Big Ben as William Blake’s Satan looks on approvingly. It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen, but somehow it felt oddly truthful and effortlessly cool, a hugely original work which made me happy to be alive – isn’t that what we all want from our electric dreams?

Tom Morton

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