Castles In Space

(First published in Electronic Sound magazine #113, May 2024)

CARE IN THE COMMUNITY

Over the course of five albums, Gordon Chapman-Fox has explored the utopian dreams of 1970s town planning under the unwieldy moniker Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. His new record Your Community Hub completes his transformation from wry hauntologist to strident political commentator

Words: Bob Fischer

“I’m not sure if I’m still classed as hauntology – or even what hauntology is!” smiles Gordon Chapman-Fox. “I love a lot of people who make music that’s purely nostalgic in that way, and it sounds fantastic. But I’m not interested in just looking backwards. I want to look at today and tomorrow as well as yesterday. So it’s about creating a dialogue between the past and the present.”

The rise of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan has been one of the most bizarre but heartwarming musical success stories of recent years. 2021 debut album Interim Report, March 1979 felt like the most niche hauntological project imaginable: a woozy synth exploration of a half-remembered Cheshire town planning project, complete with tongue-in-cheek nods to a halcyon age of dandruff-laden councillors sporting kipper ties and plastic shoes.

But it touched an entirely unexpected nerve. Repress after repress sold out, and four subsequent albums have done similarly impressive hot cake impersonations, with the Warrington-Runcorn fanbase now large enough to populate a sizeable Brutalist New Town in its own right. 2023 album The Nation’s Most Central Location was Electronic Sound’s Album Of The Year. New collection Your Community Hub completes a transformation of the project’s ethos, an evolution that has been growing steadily over the course of five immaculate records. Gordon Chapman-Fox, by his own admission, has become less wry nostalgist and more political agitator.

Joined by his adorable terrier, Scamp, he swigs from a mug of tea and shrugs modestly.

“As I’ve looked more and more into the history of New Towns,” he begins, “I’ve thought ‘Hang on – all the problems these towns were meant to solve fifty years ago are now even bigger problems’. I suppose, for the first couple of albums, I hadn’t done as much research as I have now. But the more I learn about urban planning, the more I realise it’s not the dry subject that it sounds like. It’s about people. And about treating people with respect. As opposed to our current way of life, which just treats people as bags of cash to be milked”.

The new album, as the title suggests, uses warm, modular sounds to epitomise the distinctly 1970s concept of the “community hub”.

“At one of my London gigs, I was approached by a guy called Richard Garvin,” explains Gordon. “He said ‘I really like your music – and by the way, my dad Peter helped design Runcorn New Town! He’d brought a big book of photographs and drawings that his dad had left him, and it was fascinating. So the idea for this album very much came from him, and from discovering that Runcorn was designed to be a town where you wouldn’t need a car. Everyone would be able to walk to a community hub.”

Hang on though, Gordon! Isn’t this the basically the Fifteen Minute City? Surely that’s a modern instrument of Woke Totalitarianism designed to make it illegal to take your car to Sainsburys? I’ve seen that stated as FACT by angry people on Twitter. Or whatever the hell it’s called these days.

“Yes, it does play a lot into the Fifteen Minute City idea,” he nods. “Something that’s now making a lot of right-wing people very agitated. Apparently they don’t want all the things they need in close proximity to where they live.

“But the Castlefields Centre – the community hub designed by Peter Garvin – had a doctor’s surgery, a Post Office, a launderette, a pub, a supermarket and a community hall you could hire out. And, just outside, a primary school and a faith centre. The idea was very much for these places to be like a village in their own right, with nobody’s house more than five minutes’ walk away. It really does seem quite idyllic. Why would you not want that?”

The album’s press release, tellingly, quotes one of the more notorious political statements of the late 20th century. In 1987, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher granted an exclusive interview to noted Westminster journal Woman’s Own. The most infamous extract? “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it’. And so they are casting their problems on society – and who is society? There is no such thing.”

Does “there is no such thing as society”, I wonder, feel like a watershed in British political attitudes towards that collective spirit? And the end of the government’s desire to build hubs and facilities deliberately designed to engender it?

“It totally does,” says Gordon. “It feels very much like a point where we stopped having shared, communal experiences. I hate to take this back to lockdown, but I thought that every time we clapped for NHS workers on our doorsteps, it showed that people were coming together again as a community. We were all sharing that experience, seeing our neighbours in the street and saluting the people who were doing all the hard work. But it felt like that almost frightened the government. Post-Barnard Castle, it seemed they went out of their way to undermine any idea of us actually co-operating and working together. The one thing they don’t want is everyone uniting. Which is ironic, because now everyone is united in hating the bastards.

“So no, you don’t have to look much beyond ‘There’s no such thing as society’ to find the starting point for the awful way we’re now forced to live our lives. Sorry, I’m on my high horse here.”

I’ve been looking at my 1984 diary recently, I tell him. I was eleven, and there was a day when I was hobbling around with a nasty blister on my foot. My dad was at work and my mum didn’t drive, so we called the doctor’s surgery and our GP actually came round to the house with a tube of ointment for me! It’s a tiny moment, but one that feels unthinkable in 2024. And it does seem emblematic of an era when we arguably felt more cared for by the powers-that-be.

“Yeah,” he nods. “You had the post-war consensus, the Labour legacy of 1945 onwards. They created the NHS and the New Town movement. And the whole crux of that movement was ‘People have suffered – let’s make things better for them’. I was talking to someone the other day at a gig in Liverpool who said he’d been moved to a house in Runcorn in the 1970s because he was living in a tiny, two-up-two-down terrace with his mum, his dad, his wife and his infant son. The housing corporation came to him and said ‘We’ll give you a house in Runcorn’. Not ‘You can lease a house,’ but ‘We will give you a house’. And it was so spacious compared to the tiny terrace he’d lived in before – he was amazed that he could walk around in the kitchen.”

So has this move away from community living and what privileged twonks refer to as the “nanny state” actually changed us as a people? He pauses for a long time.

“That’s a good question,” he sighs. “I think we’ve all become far more cynical and jaded as a population. On the left wing as well as the right. Going back to clapping in the streets – some people on the left sneered at it, but I thought it was a wonderful thing. Whether that cynicism is down to MPs being dodgy and on the take, or whether it’s just the ‘fending for ourselves’ nature of modern life, I wouldn’t like to say. But we’re definitely more predisposed to be negative. That collaborative, community atmosphere seems to have gone now. It’s just little things like knocking on your neighbours’ door to make sure they’re alright. So many people don’t even know their neighbours’ names. It’s affected us all.”

This is all getting quite heavy. Even poor Scamp has done a bunk. Should we talk about music instead? For all our grumbles about jaded negativity, Your Community Hub is a warm and fuzzy-sounding album. The wobbly electronic sweeps of ‘Summer All Year Round’ are a heartfelt tribute to the optimistic 1970s advertising slogan of Runcorn Shopping City (“It was one of the first covered shopping centres in the UK!” beams Gordon) and ‘Pedestrian Shopping Deck’ is an expansive synth evocation of the Castlefields Centre’s futuristic split-level design. The album might be intended as a swipe at the abandonment of these utopian ideals, but it’s also still a gladdening evocation of more optimistic times. Even though the Castlefields itself was demolished in 2004.

“To me, it’s an album very much about culture and community,” nods Gordon. “Some of the tracks are a bit more optimistic than on recent Warrington-Runcorn albums, and it’s more focused on trying to celebrate rather than criticise.”

There’s something that has always interested me, I tell him. The fact that the whole Warrington-Runcorn Newtown project is an affectionate salute to the idealistic town planning projects of the 1970s is something that absolutely comes over in the music – it’s there in every beat, in every pulse of every queasy synth. But how? How does that happen? How does Gordon Chapman-Fox infuse instrumental electronica with distilled essence of Woolworths and the chlorinated pong of municipal swimming baths?

“I don’t know!” he protests. “I’m the worst person to describe how I make my music. It’s just what comes out of me. What I would say is that I’m less interested in creating experimental synth tones and I’m more interested in song structure. It’s not about the technique of synthesis for me, or about creating weird noises that I haven’t heard before. I just find a nice sound, then I create whatever song that sound asks me to make. And I often create long pieces, then cut them down. There’s a lot of editing goes on to make it musically interesting. Lots of tracks begin life as a long jam, then become condensed and a bit more poppy.”

He continues to be amazed by the success of a project that was originally intended as the cocking of a very niche musical snook. His previous musical ventures, he happily admits, rarely sold more than thirty copies to assorted friends and family. But, less than four years since this life-changing rebirth, he can now boast of an actual Synth God joining the Warrington-Runcorn planning committee. Providing an exclusive remix of the album’s lead single, ‘A Shared Sense Of Purpose’? The mighty Vince Clarke.

“It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and that never stops being surprising,” he says, with a shake of the head. “It was astonishing to sell 300 copies of the first album. I was absolutely gobsmacked by that. So getting a remix from Vince Clarke is just ‘Aaargh! How is this happening to me?’ I’ve emailed him three times now, each time with trembling fingers and bated breath. I still remember watching Depeche Mode on Top of the Pops as a six-year-old and thinking ‘I love this’.

“And I’ve got lots of ideas and concepts for future records. Occasionally I want to do a palate cleanser, which is why the Building A New Town acoustic EP came out last year. It was just about taking this unwieldy thing that is Warrington-Runcorn in a new direction, really. It can be difficult to keep things fresh, but I’ve got new ideas percolating that I’d like to explore.”

So a sixth Warrington-Runcorn album is very much in the offing?

“I’ve more or less finished it,” he smiles. “And I’ve been playing parts of it in my live set. In the past, I suppose I’ve been based in the late 1970s musical arena, but this one is probably a bit more 1981. Think OMD and Cabaret Voltaire.”

And early Depeche Mode, by any chance? You can tell he’s been hanging around with Vince Clarke.

“Well, he’s from Basildon!” grins Gordon. “He’s the original New Town synthesist, isn’t he?”

And with that, it’s time to go. Scamp has returned, and is apparently desperate for a bracing afternoon walk. So the dialogue between past and present can continue another day – for now, it’s simply time for Gordon Chapman-Fox to wash up his mug, slip on a big coat and explore whatever is left of the North-west’s remaining communal spaces.

Your Community Hub is available here:
https://warrington-runcorn-cis.bandcamp.com/album/your-community-hub

Electronic Sound – “the house magazine for plugged in people everywhere” – is published monthly, and available here:
https://electronicsound.co.uk/