On Scenius
Celebrating Andy Wright and the people who create the conditions for talent to emerge
When we think of genius we often imagine an heroic individual towering above their age. This is wrong, says Brian Eno, genius emerges from what he calls scenius: “the creative intelligence of a community.” Great figures may well have a spark, but that spark fades to nothing if it isn’t “fed and supported by a vigorous and diffuse cultural scene.”1
Some examples of scenius include the Bloomsbury Group, Budapest between 1890-1920,2 Dada in Paris, Silicon Valley in the seventies,3 Goldsmiths in the eighties, and the Glasgow Miracle artists in the nineties, etc.4 In each case, once you get past the main players, there is a huge supporting cast of patrons, curators, publishers, thinkers, journalists, and ambitious hangers-on who create the energy for talent to channel.
Growing up in a suburb of Leicester there wasn't much exposure to scenius, genius or anything remotely resembling it. On Saturday mornings I sat on the sofa to watch Going Live!, then switched over to ITV for The Chart Show, a music video programme that would occasionally show songs that gave you a sense that there was a world beyond suburbia. I was inspired to form bands, write songs, head into the city to practice, before plucking up the courage to play a gig. And there was only one venue we wanted to play: The Charlotte.
The Charlotte was a pub with a small back room venue that gave readers of the NME their first glimpse of the hot, new indie bands. They all played there: Blur, Radiohead, Elastica, Pulp, Oasis, Placebo, The Arctic Monkeys, The Libertines and Kasabian, who are from Leicester and played one of their first gigs there, as did my own band, Rouser.
Everyone needs opportunities and Andy Wright, who ran the Charlotte between 1989 and 2009 and who died on Monday, would always give young bands a chance. There was a new band showcase run with the Leicester Mercury, which would even get you a review in the paper and Rouser played our second ever gig there. It was a bit early to be exposed to the world, but we were grateful. The Charlotte became my local—I met two long-term girlfriends there—and was the place to go in Leicester if you wanted to be part of the Britpop scene.
My school friend, Kav Sandhu, got on well with Andy. Andy liked Kav’s band, Weave, and gave them slots supporting some of the bigger touring bands.5 Kav subsequently went on to have success as a musician and promoter, joining the Happy Mondays and setting up Get Loaded in the Park. As Kav says on this podcast, a lot of this was possible because Andy enouraged him.
I had been thinking about Brian Eno’s idea of scenius for a while but it always felt a bit abstract— it was only with Andy’s death that I saw how it could work in practice. Whilst Leicester never defined the zeitgeist like, say, the Seattle in the early nineties, if it had it would have been down to people like Andy Wright: humble, dedicated, passionate people with good taste and eye for talent. As he said in an interview: “getting people together in one room for a common cause always had a revolutionary feel about it.”
RIP Andy Wright. Thank you for all you did for Leicester.
On Sunday, I went to the annual Zine Fair at the CCA. Zines are self-produced magazines that allow people to express themselves without any concern for commercial appeal. They are often intimate, illustrated stories that allow people to process their experience.
Walking around a zine fair is intense. There are about 40 different stalls and behind each one is the creator of the zine you're browsing. They are friendly, not just as a way of making a sale, but because this is probably the first time they have been amongst 'their people' in months. It is a delight to be in such a scene, however I didn't get any sense of scenius at the zine fair. The way it is set up leads to everyone competing against each other.6
After I emerged from the zine fair, my wallet a little lighter, I was stopped in the street a young woman handing out fliers for Just Stop Oil, she had a passionate intensity in her eyes, as if to say “this catastrophe is happening now. We need to fix this.” It didn’t seem like a cause that just attracts egotists. There is no place for careerism when there is a chance that there will be no civilization left to remember you. The idea of scenius points to the idea of embracing something beyond yourself.
As Simone Weil wrote:
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
The creations that resonate down the years weren't built to adorn our personality, they were part of a collective spirit.
At Techmeetup on Thursday night, I got speaking to Alisdair Gunn, director of the Glasgow City Innovation District, who is trying to create a Shoreditch-style hub in Glasgow. He told me that the spark to make things happen comes from “people who are doing things for others, not just themselves.” The idea of scenius certainly seems to suggest this is true.
George Eliot, in Middlemarch (1872), describes the situation thus: “Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.”
For example, Scott Alexander points out that “half the brainpower behind 20th century physics” came from Budapest between 1890 and 1920:
Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, legendary polymath John von Neumann.
Also emerging from the same time and place was:
brilliant chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, economists Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor (of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency fame), Peter Lax, multizillionaire George Soros, Intel founder Andrew Grove, BASIC inventor John Kemeny, leading cancer biologist George Klein, great mathematician George Polya, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Dennis Gabor.
This explosion of intelligence is jokingly explained as the result of superintelligent aliens impregnating the local women or, more seriously, as the creative peak of Austro-Hungarian prosperity.
A 12 year old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard asking him for computer parts after finding his name in the phone book.
Another, more ambiguous, example is the literary world of Amis, Barnes, McEwan, and Rushdie as depicted in John Walsh’s memoir Circus of Dreams, which mainly seems to have benefited from a high turnover of established figures. Indeed, a 23-year old Martin Amis could be Assistant literary editor of the New Statesman.
When I was in Weave, for instance, we supported Silver Sun, who were for a very brief period the hottest band in the Melody Maker.
Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, writes about agon (ie combat or competition) as being what brings out the greatness in a poet. Artists wrestle with their influences, copying them and then finding a way to differentiate themselves. In scenes there is always lots of bitchiness! But agon alone is not scenius, for that you need the structures, the institutions, the support, and the opportunities.
Another great article! The COVID definitely hasn't resulted in brain fog!
I hadn’t heard of Andy Wright, but it sounds like he was a fine chap. A pity about him.
There’s a lot to be said for Eno’s Scenius theory (thank you for introducing me to it!).
I think about many of the leading lights of the 60s and 70s (Godard, Bowie etc) who struggled to rise above mediocrity in the 80s. The counterculture they’d thrived in had by then dissipated, along with the somewhat mysterious energies that’d animated that culture.
Also Mark Fisher. The dissolution of what I call the Fishersphere (the British left-wing blogging milieu of the 2000s, of which he was the central figure) seems to have taken its toll on his creative energies. After Capitalist Realism all of his books, while certainly offering writing of very high calibre, were merely rehashes of K-Punk posts he’d made in the 2000s. And I think the intellectual collapse of the wider Left in the 2010s was another blow for Fisher.