Permanent Transience

London, 1979. At the end of the Winter of Discontent, just prior to Thatcher coming to power, two young men form a band and a record label. They are musically inept and have no idea how to run a business. But they have an urge to make a noise, so they record what becomes their first single, and then they contemplate their first rehearsal….

Stewart Lee writes:

"Writing in 1775, in his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Samuel Johnson regretted that he felt he had missed the real highlands, and their ancient way of life that had disappeared only years before he arrived.

I arrived in London to pursue my own adolescent fantasy of being an artist a decade after Bendle, in 1989, but his description of the immediate post-punk demi-monde makes me yearn for the years I never had, when dreamers could make just enough to get by without having to make their madness economically viable, and a more efficient state machine wasn’t in place to crush the hope out of them.

In a state of permanent transience Bendle navigates a slipstream of cheap housing, utilitarian temporary employment, and analogue face-to-face pre-internet social networking, to pioneer a lo-fi aesthetic that he was just too ahead of the curve to capitalise on, a Zelig-like figure floating amongst future legends, future stars, and some great talents who never got their due.

In partnership with Nag, their lives a succession of private and hilarious situationist pranks, the duo’s Door And The Window group become the semi-official sacred clowns of the nascent London Musicians’ Collective, in a love hate relationship with the more serious free improvised music movement, undercutting its ideological anxieties with satirical performance art gestures and punk rock autodidact mischief.

Bendle doesn’t seek to understand the implications of the era he lived through, merely to document it faithfully. He is the Samuel Pepys of messthetics, and Permanent Transience will make you painfully and romantically nostalgic, perhaps for a world you never even knew."