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Conversation

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ND
Welcome back. I really enjoy the outro to the work. That's really one of my favourite parts. To start things off Chris, this work is quite multifaceted, and we only hear the audio, but perhaps you could contextualise the sound work within the installation of the work as a whole. 

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CM
Yeah, I suppose I sort of loosely described it before we heard it, but it was part of an installation of projection and sculpture. And in the installation, you had these two sort of dioramas, which were these kind of floating islands of cracked pavement, cracked tarmac, and sat on them with these quite precisely laser cut cardboard warehouses. And within the warehouses there would be a kind of flickering glow coming. And the whole work followed this day-to-night cycle. 

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In the day, the sun would come up, and the foundry lights from one of the warehouses would start to flicker. And then there was a projection of this graffitied face, and that would speak to you, that would be the sort of narrator. And then the sun would go down, and that warehouse would go into darkness, and then the other warehouse would split in half and open up like a door. And there was a little screen in there with the Don Engine, which is this steam engine, which would play that song at the end. And then another projection would show this hand drawn animation of this old man dancing very gracefully to this song across one wall and then out of sight, and then it and then the sun would come back up and it would go round again. 

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The cartoon face was based on this thing that I used to see as a kid on this specific road, this specific part of a specific road in Brightside in Sheffield, where you have these two warehouses that are very close together, the Forge Masters warehouses. And at the time, when I was a kid, they were completely empty. And though, on one side, I'm basically just repeating the work now, but on one side, there was like a part where the panels from the warehouse had fallen away, and you could see up inside. You could see all the, like machinery and stuff, and it was just dark in there. But the one thing you could see was this yellow cowling of one of the…I think it was one of the motor gantries for the lifting hooks to lift the ladles to pour out the steel. And somebody, some kid, had obviously got up there and spray painted this grinning face. 

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And it was, like, really eerie, because you would see it as you were driving through here with these, like two warehouses, kind of towering above you. You could see it from one side of the road looking down at you, and it was really sort of sinister on so many levels, and kind of mysterious and in this incredibly inaccessible place. And the image that is projected in the work is taken from me trying to… I went through this whole phase of like asking on history blogs on Sheffield, and getting in touch with Forge Masters who own those foundry buildings, to try and find somebody who also remembered this thing. 

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And I ended up getting really close where I realised that when I was a kid, for whatever reason, Sheffield was one of the first places where they trialed Google Street View. I don't know why. So it went all the way back to, like, 2008 I think it was, which is when it would have been there, because I remembered when I was like, maybe 19, still seeing it. And I went…you can actually go back in time on Google Street View, and see the same thing all the way back in as far as they've got records for. 

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So I went all the way back. But unfortunately, the Google Street View car at that point in time went down the other side of the road, and you could only see it from one angle, so I had to, sort of, it is a still from Google Street View of that kind of hole in the warehouse. But I had to sort of make it work.

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ND
Right, so you had to, yeah, you had to put it in. My sort of next question in that is the face that you saw in this space; Is it there anymore? Or is it not there anymore? 

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CM
I’ve got no idea. 

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ND
Okay. Oh okay. 

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CM
They've since, like, I think they're using some of the foundry buildings again. I'm not sure what for, but I think since that Forge Masters site has always been very contested, because that area was where all the big foundries were, which were kind of the ones that went under and laid loads of people off in the 70s during the recessions.

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But then they were also kind of caught up in the nationalisation, then the privatisation and the renationalisation of steel works to try and keep jobs going there. And so it's kind of had this up and down constantly, and I think they've now since, was it Tata, Tata Steel, or whatever came up - although I think they've now gone under again - they repaired the warehouses, and so that bit is all closed off, and they really won't let anybody in there to… I've been trying to get a tour there for ages. Shout out Forge Masters

 

RE
Yeah, it feels very privatised now it's got the look of almost like a new build housing development, even though it's not.

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CM
It's not just that it's privatised. It's that, to keep Sheffield steel industry going, they've really, they've specialised more than they were already specialising. I think a lot of the stuff they're making now is military or military adjacent, which is kind of what they were making before the Don Engine was for rolling armour plate for battleships.

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RE
I mean, to bring it back to this idea of the New Weird, and we'll probably talk a little bit about this idea later of miniatures and model making. And you mentioned just there about trying to replicate a life size thing very small, and playing with scale is quite inherently weird to me.

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But I wonder about this industrial past of northern cities, because you grew up in Sheffield, even though you spent part of your time in the US. But I wonder if you could talk us through a little bit about how this work came to be, and how this industrial past kind of plays into it. 

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You know, what did it mean growing up for you in a post industrial northern city? What do you think it means for future generations growing up there, or for older generations? You know, just talk us through a little bit of that, of that psyche of growing up there. 

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CM
I think it means really different things to different generations of people. I think it's very different now, obviously I left Sheffield, I moved to Glasgow, and now I'm in London. So I can only speak to sort of quite a specific slice of time, which was kind of the time up to and following the housing market crash. I can only sort of really talk about it as a post industrial place, post industrial city. I never experienced the industry. Yeah, I never saw the bit where the industry was. Which I think is why it sort of sticks to you, in a way, because you're kind of brought up in… 

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Sheffield's very kind of like everywhere it's sort of “steel this”, “steel that”. And you kind of know that it's like the heritage museums always talk about the steel industry and all of this stuff. And so your whole sense of self is based around the fact something that doesn't really exist anymore. So it's quite strange, which is sort of how I got on to Mark Fisher and that, and the sort of hauntology thing, and why that kind of resonated with me as as something that was very kind of seemed to sort of sum up a lot of what being in a place like Sheffield at that time.

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ND
It kind of captures the feeling of it? 

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CM 
Yeah, he kind of talks about this thing, and I think it was in relation to a film, actually, that is set in some post industrial city. I forget what film and which post industrial city, but he was talking about this like being kind of surrounded by an abundance of like, failed futures more than the past. The sort of Hauntology concept helped to add a way of, like a formal definition or or a way of kind of speaking about that kind of thing that I had grown up with, of all of these, of everything around you being kind of past tense and lost and like, but still kind of hanging around, like haunting, like ghostly.  And then at the same time that being a kind of really… a space of creative possibility. 

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And because my childhood in Sheffield was a lot of tagging and skateboarding, and when I was a bit older, going to raves and stuff, which, as much as they're all vaguely sort of criminal, they're really creative, and they're they're the kind of things that you can only build from these sort of sites of the post-something- or-other. They're like kind of a pile of something else.

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I think, in places where there's a lot of development going on, like London, it's very different, where every space is sort of an asset and things are maybe a bit more guarded. And Sheffield was, or I don't remember it being like that at the time. I remember it being like nothing was an asset. So you could kind of get away with doing whatever you wanted in a space. You could find all of these spaces where nobody cared what you did.

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RE
Because, like, the future of that space was not somewhere that was going to be developed. 

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CM
It wasn't worth any money to anybody at the time, I don't think, so you could do whatever you want.

 

ND
Not to go off track too much, but I do have a question. What are these spaces now? Are they being redeveloped? 

 

RE
Yeah. I mean, I can't speak for Sheffield, but I can definitely speak for Derby and Nottingham, and other post-industrial northern cities. But yeah. I mean, I think it's the same as what happened in London, like these spaces get used for artistic, creative purposes, and then landlords get wind that these are the cool spaces that people hang out in, and it's gentrification, I would say. But Chris, maybe you have a different idea, because you go back to Sheffield quite a lot, and maybe you've noticed something different. Maybe these spaces do still exist somewhere,

 

CM
I wouldn't know (laughs)

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ND
Does that sort of, like, eerie, haunted feeling still exist for you in spaces when they're redeveloped, or is it really… does it really belong to a very particular point in that timeline.

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CM  
It's weird, actually, because Sheffield has sort of undergone this, I don't know. I think you can look at it two ways. You can look at it like one way of it being gentrification. I haven't lived in Sheffield for more than 15 years. I go back all the time to visit my parents and stuff, but I don't have that kind of relationship with it. So I'm always kind of looking at it from the outside these days, but it's certainly undergone a process of either gentrification or “getting better”, depending on your point of view. 

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And like, certain areas that were quite sketchy, and [spaces that] you would definitely sort of be keeping an eye out when you were passing through, or you wouldn't sort of just like hover about in are now… there's, like, artisan bakeries and stuff there and things, and it's quite weird for me to walk through those places and kind of have the sort of heckles up on the back of my neck. And that being like a completely incongruous feeling to the fact that you're, you know, walking with your mum to, like, get a salt beef bagel from a bakery. 

And so it sort of, they kind of exist in memory in that way, and I think stories and stuff like that. But then I think the thing that always drew me to that particular part of Brightside is that it's something that is like exists in my mind in a way that is so strong, and I feel like it has never lost that feeling of being kind of a… and I think this is for all kinds of reasons. I think it's partly because it still is like a very… it's not quite ghostly, but it's not…

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These buildings are not designed for humans. They're not, they're not at human scale. Like the doors of these warehouses the foundry buildings are huge. They're, like, nearly the size of one of these blocks of flats. They're absolutely massive. Like, everything is completely out of proportion, and where you pass between them is on this road where it is so tight, it's just a two track road and a really thin bit of pavement with these massive sides of these warehouses, and you can see in the side, and there's just these giant doors, and you have this kind of, I don’t know, the scale is just completely not built around like people. It's built around something way bigger.

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RE
But I think this also kind of links to this idea of entropy and of efficiency as well, like trying to make efficient use of space.

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ND
Yeah, maybe this brings us on to the next question, actually. So in the passage, the voiceover recounts the engineers' struggle to make the steam engine more efficient, ultimately leading to a meditation on the finite energy of the universe. hris, how does this idea connect to the perception of the foundries and on human limitations of labour? 

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CM
I don't know if I was really thinking that much about labour at the time, although I am always sort of thinking a bit about that. But I think basically that whole kind of thing came from me thinking about lots of different things that didn't really relate to each other. But I was reading this book by the physicist Ilya Prigogine -  I think I'm pronouncing that right -  and Isabel Stengers the, I guess she's a philosopher. I'm actually not too sure. 

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There's just this particular passage in that where they're talking about this kind of point of where, what's his name, something Thomas -  this scientist that I'm talking about that I still can't remember the name of - kind of makes this, like, unintentional leap, like, it's almost like in a cartoon when they kind of stumble through a door and end up in a different dimension. It's got this really, like… the way it was phrased, was really kind of trippy or something. 

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And I thought that was so sort of, I don't know, interesting and kind of telling, of, like a hubris and naivety, but also just a kind of human sort of innocence as well, or something. I don't know. It just had like such a sort of poetic and tragic thing. I've got the quote here because the quote sort of encapsulates it really nicely. I could read you the whole thing, but basically it's sort of saying that, like in thinking about these heat engines, which is kind of what a steam engine is, he's realising that every time the heat engine is kind of cycled, the difference between the hot and cold kind of gets closer and closer together, which is what produces the energy that makes it go and that this process will continue until you get to this point of thermal equilibrium, which is heat death. And it says “Thomas, thus made a dizzy cosmological leap from engine technology to cosmology.” 

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And I just, I really loved the idea of this kind of, like, vaguely uptight and somewhat anal sort of engineer type bloke, just sort of suddenly experiencing the full scale of the universe and time just stretching out in front of him and having this weirdly kind of like acid trip vision, almost. 

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ND
Would you describe it as spiritual? Or? 

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CM
Yeah, it is kind of spiritual. I think it's just like…  it's like those moments that you have sort of once, I don't know, a lifetime, a decade, or something, where you suddenly sort of feel how old and big everything is in comparison to you. And it's sort of like exhilarating and frightening, and you often kind of come upon it in these, like, accidental sort of ways and it's really...

 

RE
It feels a lot like… what's the word that astronauts use? Or what is the word to describe when astronauts look down on the earth? There’s a particular word for it? 

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CM
The, the..

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ND
Yeah, I know, exactly what you mean...

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RE
But anyways, it makes me feel like he had that kind of epiphany, or like the Confused Math Lady meme, you know, like this kind of, like, you're just so overwhelmed by all of this… all of these connections that you're now making. But he was a real guy, right? Like, he was a real person?

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CM 
Yeah, yeah. 

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ND
Well, maybe actually this kind of, this position that you're talking about with this engineer, kind of having this moment of reflection, or looking at the world in a sort of different way. I guess it kind of brings me back to your work, and the narrator in the work who seems to kind of exist in a particular time, harkening back to the beginning of the Anthropocene, yet there's a ghostly presence. Do you feel like the narrator exists in a different epoch? And if so, is it of the future, or is it now? 

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CM
Well, I think this kind of comes back a little bit to the hauntology thing, and also to maybe the way I was thinking about time at that time, um, yeah, the time when I was making it what I was thinking about time, like, as a concept.

And because I was thinking about… I've been reading DeLanda’s non linear history and he's kind of in this book, he's sort of making this argument for how history is kind of not this straight line. It's sort of multi scalar, and things that happen in the past create futures. And like ideas about futures create present conditions. And everything kind of has this sort of push and pull. And like small things happen, and big things happen, and they kind of interact in these feedback loops, and it's this kind of dynamic system. 

He's really into sort of thermodynamics and chaos theory, so he kind of uses this in his thinking a lot, and this kind of, I guess I was just reading all these things at the right time, and they sort of mesh together in this way where I could sort of see that in Mark Fisher's hauntology concept, and I could also see it in Stengers and Prigogine’s writings on the kind of cultural impact of science and technology in the late 19th century. 

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And then, you know, it just so happened that I was also thinking, Well, I know where there's a steam engine, because - the Don engine, you can go and see it running in a Heritage Museum in Sheffield, and you should, it's the best free day out ever - and also, you know, I'd grown up in this place where this thing that DeLanda and Fisher and Stengers and Prigogine were talking about kind of existed as a thing that I could just see and so it sort of all meshed together. This idea that sort of everything was out of time, anachronistic, was sort of self evident in my experience, in Sheffield, and especially in this face in the warehouse. 

Also in kind of other places in Sheffield where, like, up on the edges, you're out in the countryside, which is out in the peak District, which is just nearby Sheffield, and I've had some very sort of trippy experiences there, where I've kind of seen the depth of time through the kind of rocks and stuff. And it's because much of what is the countryside was actually industrial. 

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But then also the kind of industrial quarrying of these beautiful countryside sites reveals all of this geological time. And it's kind of everything… and the like shapes you walk through are actually, like built up, but then grown for the carts going up and down, but then are grown over with grass, and you're walking through woodland and you find a, like, winding house or something just in the middle of nowhere with a security camera watching it. And everything's like, really out of place and out of time and kind of overlapping. 

And I think you're asking about this, like ghostliness or out of timeness. And I think it's, it's the, it's not really that things are sort of ghostly, not in a sinister way anyway

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ND
I guess I was sort of thinking in the Anthropocene as sort of like the epoch where like human activity is making an impact on the world. And I guess it's sort of the…  Sheffield is a place where, like that sort of human activity, that very specific sort of human activity, isn't happening anymore. It's sort of like, is this place a marker of the end of the Anthropocene? Or…

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CM
I don't know if it's like the end of the Anthropocene. I think it's certainly one of the kind of sites of industrial intensification where it it enters its mechanistic phase, like, because some people argue that, like, agriculture is the start of the Anthropocene, and that's much, much older, but I don't think it's got anything to do with the end of it. Certainly, the Anthropocene, in that form, has just moved elsewhere. 

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ND
But I guess maybe thinking about the Anthropocene as existing in different timescales for different places in the world.

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CM
To put it one way, it's like it is a place where at one point, several people saw in the distance what the end point of the Anthropocene would be, which is sort of planetary ruination and heat death. Which I don't know. 

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I think now shaping or influencing the world's climate is going to end up being necessary now that so much damage has been done. And then maybe we'll sort of use the word Anthropocene to be like,”Oh, good, Anthropocene, great, ee sorted that out.” 

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Right now, it means something worse, and that's got more to do with industrial capitalism and so on and so forth than it has really to do with the Anthropocene. 

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RE
Yeah, you touch on nature in the narration of the work. And you're drawing this really interesting comparison between the bright orange haze from the foundries that come up in the models in the work, but also the haze from forest fires. And I think you're in Sonoma County in the US, and you know, you're linking these two powerful forces of transformation, or, yeah, these powerful natural forces. Does this connect memories of industrial technology to a broader, almost melancholic view of change and impermanence? Or… I mean, for me, I know why you put the Sonoma County reference in there, because your family are there. But I'm wondering if this, like, this idea of like non linear time, or this out-of-time thing had something to do with this as well. 

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CM
That's kind of like a sort of easter egg that I put in there where without knowing me or my family history or anything, you wouldn't really know what to do with that, and it would just seem a bit weird and like pointless. But I think that was kind of why I wanted to put it in, because it's kind of getting at that multiscalar thing. 

And you can sort of argue as well that one is a consequence of the other in this really indirect way, where industrialisation leads to a lot of emigration to the US, and then that leads to places like California being settled, and then that leads to a great housing demand there, which then leads to people building houses and towns in fire country, which then leads to them suppressing the fires, which then leads to these really serious forest fires. 

But that's not really the reason I put it in. The reason I put it in was because, well…  alongside all of this thinking about this work and so on and so forth, when I was making it, my dad's mate from work is really into genealogy as a hobby. 

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ND
What is genealogy? 

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CM
It's where you… it's like the study of somebody's family tree. 

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ND
Oh, okay, so yeah.

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CM
This guy, I think, is retired, so he needs something, and  this is what he does. So my dad kind of, like, set him off on our family tree, on my dad's side, and he kind of traced it. I mean, I knew that I was, like, my, I don't know heritage was Scottish, but he traced it all the way back through America and Canada to Scotland and what was interesting about that was, at the same time as I'm reading this stuff, I'm sort of realising that actually my family history was sort of shaped by  very point of industrial intensification that I was talking about in Sheffield. 

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And that was kind of the reason that my, I don't know, great, great, great or great, great grandpa, ended up moving to America, working, setting up petrol stations - lived a lot of his life outside, camping and doing, setting up these petrol stations out in the middle of nowhere -  and eventually that led to my family settling in California, which is where my dad was born, and I spent a lot of my childhood. 

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And around 2017 I was reading the news, and there was a photo of the Hilton next to the home my granddad was in at the time, and it was just on fire.

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ND
Oh, wow.

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CM
I don't know it was, it was like a, I don't know, a nod to the kind of, like this small, like, person in the world, how, how we'd kind of followed that same current, this big current, and how it kind of like folds in again to the like, multiple scales of these, of these things in the world.

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ND
It's almost like, what made your family move at some point in history, like that force kind of followed them, basically, like, it like in trying to escape it kind of caught up.

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CM
Yeah, and I was trying to, sort of…  the whole work was about trying to connect these two things of like something so big, like the entire scale of the universe, and something so small, like just me in Sheffield with a skateboard or at a rave, and trying to pull those things together, because they are connected.,t's just really hard to see the connection sometimes. 

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RE
Well, in the work, you call it a horizon effect, or the idea of something that hasn't quite arrived yet, like an omen, because you're you're looking at this orange haze from these fires, but you're also talking about a time in Sheffield's history where it was perpetually fogged with a bright orange soot from the foundry works. And I found that quite interesting, the way that you're describing it as a horizon effect.

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CM
Yeah, well, I think, I think this was…  that whole thing, and that whole way that sort of capitalist labour works and stuff is always like, “we're just going to worry about it later”. Like, you know, the Teflon factory, and they knew they were poisoning people, and they're just like, “well, we’ll just worry about it later”. And the pharmaceutical industry in America that's like, giving people sort of incredibly strong opiates, and they know people are getting addicted, but they're like, “we're making money now, so we'll worry about it later”. Andthe effect that, like labour has on people's bodies, you're always like, kicking the can down the road, but the signs are always there. And people sort of, you know it's, it's making somebody rich. So…

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RE
I mean, to maybe bring it back more to British culture, towards the end of the script there's, there's an old man dancing. He's naked, and you describe him really well in the work. But would you say that there's a link to this stiff upper lip sort of attitude that's often associated with Northern men around the 70s and 80s, around this time of peak industrialisation, with the old man dancing at the end or or does this work maybe instead question masculinity, or maybe our misconceptions about it and the north. So like Northern masculinity, the fragility of that. 

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CM
What, am I critiquing? 

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RE
Yeah. I mean, it feels like, especially with this description of this old man dancing at the end, it feels like there's something that you're trying to get at there with that. 

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CM
I don't know if I'm really like, passing judgement on this old man or really sort of, I don't know masculinity in general, in that way, but I am, you know, I've in my in my life, I have known, had so many sort of male figures, older male figures, who have that sort of stoicism to them. And I've also been kind of close enough to them to see points like once in a blue moon, where that kind of breaks and cracks, and you kind of get this tiny little look into how much they're holding back. 

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And I wanted to sort of bring that kind of vulnerability and fragility that's almost, that's not pretty, it's like pathetic and actually, like profoundly uncomfortable. But I wanted to kind of set it in a way that was both sort of like ugly and pathetic, but beautiful and sort of and something to kind of like stay with.

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RE
The work in itself is very… It feels very emotional, but it also, the fact that you're also using slang as well adds to that vulnerability to me. That you're not saying “something”, you’re saying “sommat”. You know, like you're bringing in this northern dialect that perhaps you would maybe see in Kez, like the novel Kez… 

 

CM
Oh, A Kestrel For a Knave

 

RE
Sorry, that's the film, the film is Kez, sorry.

 

CM
That's alright. Yeah, I guess so, I think I was conscious of the fact that the, like, the sort of stereotype of the Northern man as this kind of like, you know, “it'll be reet” sort of character.

 

RE
Like a lad?

 

CM
No, not like a lad but a..

 

RE
Like a bloke?

 

CM
I guess, if you like, I kind of hate all these words. They're sort of a bit dumb because they don't really mean anything. But like, yeah, like somebody who sort of just carries on and doesn't complain and doesn't make a big deal about it, and is just, you know, he's always kind of just like, you know, “be reet”. In some ways there's a truth to that. But, like, it's important to remember that that is a product of deliberate psychological conditioning, which started well, really intensified during the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. That's the reason people in the North are like that, is because there was this, like, fetishisation of steam power, and how like, mechanically efficient it was, and how it would just keep going, and how it would…  it never got drunk, and it never needed to sleep.

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RE
It was a machine.

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CM
Yeah, and that would be directly compared to workers as, like, why can't you be like this? And very much like steam power and other forms of technology like that was seen as a way of, like, keeping a worker in line, because you just have to keep up with that engine, otherwise you're going to be in trouble. 

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So it was more that I wanted to push back against that, because in places like Sheffield, where it really leans on its industrial heritage, those things that kind of like, basically, that trauma becomes this thing that people kind of almost aim to cultivate. And I think it's good to be sort of proud and stuff, but then at the same time you're kind of reproducing this psychological conditioning, which is basically just there to make sure that even if you can't go anymore, you still keep working, you still go to work, you're still productive, and your whole sense of self is tied to your output.

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RE
Yeah, I mean the sort of mediaeval choral bit at the end really reminds me of that in some ways, it's like you've put that idea into music.

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[music plays]

I'm wondering if you could maybe talk just briefly about where the idea of that came from. I remember you talking to me once about it coming from a scene at the end of the game Portal.

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CM
[laughs] Yeah, yeah. It's basically nicked from Portal. 

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ND
The actual music, or?

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CM
No, the music I composed. But at the end of Portal two, you kind of get in this lift, and you're going up from this underground laboratory all the way through these levels. And throughout the game you've been dealing with, it's like a puzzle game and one of the obstacles in the puzzle are these kind of, like gun turrets.

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And as you're going on through the lift, you get to a floor and the lift opens and there's a gun turret, and you go, “Oh no, here we go again.” And then it opens up and and then, instead of like, kind of revealing some guns, it kind of opens up and sort of plays itself like an accordion, and then it starts singing the song. And then you go to the next floor, and there's and then there's suddenly loads of them, and there's like a chorus of them. And I just, I don't know, I just really like it. 

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[music plays]

 

ND
There's something that you were just kind of saying before about this, which I kind of wanted to go back to, about this kind of mashing up, or like mixture of someone's identity with the machines that they operate. And I think there's something… I don't know. I just wanted to kind of talk about that a bit more, because I think there's something really… you're talking about, I guess, a very specific time in a specific kind of workforce working with very specific machinery. But I wonder whether going forward and with sort of our relationship to different forms of technology, whether that's kind of something that's going to become more prevalent, like whether that was kind of the beginning of… and it's just interesting gendered as well.

 

CM
You could definitely look at it that way as well, like I think the way many people function now is their sense of self is tied even more to forms of value production where, you know the people are, like consciously branding themselves as a personality,  it's even more explicit and more focused and intense. 

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I didn't really have any sort of kind of direct experience of being like a content creator or anything like that. So I didn't really know about that bit. What I know about is being a technician who’s worked with with tools in my hands all my life, and that was like a that kind of thing of it's a… you form a relationship with the things you work with because they're always a bit idiosyncratic, but also you have this other relationship where clients and the kind of managerial class often mistake you for the tools you're using, and can kind of treat you in this way where you're no longer… you're just a part that's either working or it's not, and if it's not working, it's no good. And you get rid of it and get a new one. It’s interchangeability, which is, again, something that's really sort of fundamental to the way capitalism works, is that one thing is interchangeable for the other, that value can be sort of transposed across goods and and that labour can be easily swapped in and out, therefore making it incredibly cheap.

​

And,you know, to make that sort of socially palatable there, is a whole kind of culture and process of sort of social conditioning that has to happen to make people okay with that. And in the case of the north of England, I think it not only worked well, it worked brilliantly in the fact that it became so deeply ingrained that it's now something that sort of celebrated, something romanticised, and kind of just like taken as read that this is only something to be proud of. I think it's kind of both. I think it's bittersweet. 

ND
It doesn't have to be one or the like one or the other. 

​

CM
Yeah, which is why I say I'm not really passing judgement in that way. Because not really saying it's even bad. I'm just saying that, you know, it comes from a… it's not something that was like, chosen or, uh, kind of arose organically or is like, you know, because there's something in the water, it's  because this was quite deliberately done and culturally enforced in order to keep the labour population in line in conditions of unfair and unsafe work.

​

RE
I think we might have to bring that to a close, just there, but quickly, before we go. Is there anything, I mean, where can we find more of your work? Have you got anything coming up, or anything you want to shout out?

 

CM
I've got some stuff coming up. I'm doing a little kind of gig performance chemist on the 15th of November. 

 

ND
Oh, this will actually, this will come out. 

 

CM
Okay, so if you saw that, then I hope you liked it.

​

[laughing]

 

CM
I have nothing else coming up. I'm open for bookings, so email me.

 

RE
Cool, and maybe we can put some links to some of the books and references you made on the show notes on our website as well. 

 

CM
No problem. 

 

RE
Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a really interesting chat. 

 

ND
Yeah. Thank you so much. And Happy holidays, everyone, and we'll see you in the New Year. 

 

RE
Bye

 

CM
Bye