When last year’s AV Festival presented Test Dept‘s film installation, DS30, it involved a Heart of Darkness-style boat trip up the River Tyne to Dunston Staiths, a monumental piece of industrial architecture built in 1893. Now Grade II listed, at its peak over 5.5m tonnes of coal from the nearby Durham coalfields passed through Dunston Staiths every year, to be shipped around the world.
It was, then, a powerfully poignant setting for a work that explores the 1984-85 miners’ strike and the politically-engineered collapse of an industry – and with it, the demise of the working-class communities and trade union activism that had grown up around it.
“As you see in the film, a lot of that history was just eradicated, erased,” says Graham Cunnington, a founding member of the 1980s industrial music group. “We’ve tried to show that sense of history, community and connection with people and the industry, and reveal what was lost.”
With the film now embarking on a tour of venues in the north of England and Scotland, community and a sense of place is once again at the forefront: all the cities in the tour – Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and finally Durham – are sites of former coalfields.
And although it’s 30 years since the end of the strike, you don’t have to look too far in these areas to find the wounds inflicted by this Thatcher-era dispute.
“What happened still resonates in terms of the political agenda that Thatcher had and which still exists now,” believes Cunnington. “The defeat of the strike also opened the door to the new neoliberal society we currently have, another reason why it’s important to remember it.”
Visually, DS30 is a mash-up of archive footage that ranges from early colour film of smiling miners and their families on celebratory trade union parades, to running battles between strikers and the police during the 1984-85 dispute – including the infamous Battle of Orgreave, as reconstructed by Jeremy Deller for his 2001 Artangel project. Much of the footage during the strike itself stem’s from the group’s own archive.
“We had a lot of material that related to Test Dept’s Fuel to Fight tour of 1984 in support of the miners,” explains Paul Jamrozy, another original member of the group. “We also had loads and loads of tapes from our archive that Brett Turnbull, who did a lot of our early visuals, had been keeping in his father’s attic.”
“We filmed a lot during the strike,” adds Cunnington, “the colliery bands and interviews at the time with miners and miners’ support groups, miners’ wives – so there’s unique documentary footage from that period.”
While it’s clear that the filmmakers were – and still are – on the side of the miners in the dispute, in making the 30-minute film they’ve worked hard to avoid falling into the trap of romanticising a way of life that is now gone.
“It’s a fine line between being nostalgic – creating a romantic eulogy – and engaging with the feelings of the time and showing through that what was going on,” says Cunnington. “But to nostalgicise the past is political act in itself – it nullifies and homogenises it.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly given Test Dept’s history (documented in new book, Total State Machine) the soundtrack to the film – full of harsh metal-on-metal industrial music and staccato rhythms – plays a big part in ensuring DS30 doesn’t slip into a rose-tinted view of the past.
“The music we wrote for the piece and the Test Dept music we sampled from that period was very much relevant to the story,” says Jamrozy. “It was like a soundtrack to the time in the way that a lot of music wasn’t.”
Visceral, sharply-focused and at times disturbing, DS30 shows a very different side to Britain in the 1980s than we’re used to seeing. And, believes Cunnington, in this age of austerity with a majority Conservative government for the first time in nearly 20 years, this is history with a clear contemporary relevance. “It was in the past,” he says, “but it’s also quite present.”
DS30 screens tonight (9 June) at the Sheffield Doc Fest before touring to HOME Manchester; Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds; Bluecoat Liverpool, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle; CCA and GFT, Glasgow; and Durham Miners’ Gala.
Screenings are accompanied by short films from Test Dept’s archive and Q&A sessions with founding members Graham Cunnington, Angus Farquhar and Paul Jamrozy, plus special guests. testdept.org.uk
