Blu Tack
It’s an improbable association but the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says “phone booth” is “Blu Tack”. Wait, let me rephrase that: the first thing that comes to my mind is “girls”, followed by “flyers”, then “chewing gum”, and finally “Blu Tack”.
I became aware of the girls1 and the flyers when I first visited the UK as a tourist, in 1994. The girls were advertising sexual services and the flyers — stuck on phone booth windows — were the medium through which they’d attempt to reach a clientele. These flyers were a monochrome on coloured paper affair. And, even if they’d display alluring images of assorted body parts, they were too lo-fi to hold too much my seventeen-year old attention. True that a seventeen-year old is perpetually in heat but I’m of a generation that demands its smut at least be colourised, and not just some oversize pixels on tinted paper. So I didn’t make much of the flyers then — perhaps I just marvelled at this shrewd form of guerrilla marketing, this line of desire connecting public phone booths with private bedrooms. That’s all.
It was only when I ended up as a self-exile in London several years later that I rounded up the association with the missing elements: chewing gum and Blu Tack. By now, in the early naughties, the flyers had experienced a radical transformation. The once monochrome messages were now delivered in full colours, on shiny quasi-photographic paper, deploying much more enticing imagery, that I assume involved (and still involves) a lot of false advertising. By now the flyers were interesting enough as cultural artefacts, so I guess I must have taken one home for further study. And this is the point when I realised they were glued to the phone booth with chewing gum, a ruse that I found both ingenious and unhygienic.
Until one day, a year or so later, I saw a lad putting up one such a flyer in a phone booth down Tottenham Court Road. To my surprise he wasn’t the custodian of an overdeveloped jaw, product of thousands of hours of gum mastication; he was instead affixing the flyers with little balls made of some mysterious adhesive he pinched away from a rectangular-shaped, flat package. I moved quickly towards the phone booth and distinguished the words “Blu” and “Tack” on the package. This is long before we carried the internet in a pocket, so I had no choice but to open the door and question him.
“What’s that?” I asked, excitedly.
“This?” he stuttered, if it’s even possible to stutter with a monosyllabic word — he was waving a flyer.
“Not that! That other thing you are using to glue the flyers!” I said, pointing at his other hand.
Here his surprised expression turned to total confusion.
“Blu Tack?”
“Yes!”
“It’s just… Blu Tack…” he offered, tautologically.
“Where did you get it from?”
“From the hardware shop,” he explained.
“Thanks,” I replied and walked away, feeling that my life had changed, as I often do when I discover something new, regardless of how useful (or not) it might end up being.
In hindsight my life has remained more or less the same since my discovery of Blu Tack. Or perhaps I’m being unfair here. Because at least now I know that it wasn’t chewing gum that was keeping those flyers in place. And in a country obsessed with pub quizzes, that kind of knowledge has to count for something.
Superheroes
All of this detour to avoid writing that most telephone booths — those picturesque London landmarks every tourist likes to photograph — now act as de facto shallow latrines. Since not everyone owes a mobile phone in 2023 I won’t be the one campaigning for their removal on health grounds, but at least the powers that be should install toilet seats in the booths, kill two birds with one shot2.
I’m aware that Superman lives in Metropolis, a place that even being imaginary couldn’t escape American cultural hegemony, and I believe Metropolis to be very far away. But should he ever drop by these necks of the woods I can’t imagine his superpowers being enough to keep him healthy, if he were ever to get changed in one of our miasmatic booths. On the other hand, I can totally see Superman getting changed in a public toilet. Wouldn’t this make much more sense? Who the hell gets changed in a phone booth? And how the hell did Superman manage to keep the Clark Kent identity secret when he was getting into his fancy dress in a hardly-private box surrounded by glass? I have suspended disbelief many times in my life, and I can totally go with the fantasy of a man — who wears his underwear over his pants like it’s a normal thing to do — flying and squirting laser beams out of his eyes, but I can’t accept that anyone can get changed in a phone booth without being seen by the whole darn world3. Thankfully our paramilitary heroes have no business with telephone booths, because I don’t fancy the exhibitionist spectacle of a violent person getting changed in public like that.
The closest the British have been able to appropriate phone booths for vigilante fantasy has been Doctor Who and the TARDIS. A TARDIS — an acronym for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space” — is a time machine and spacecraft, which in its external appearance resembles a British police box, a design that was meant to camouflage it when it first appeared on Earth in the 1960s. The interesting thing about a TARDIS is that it is much larger on the inside, containing various rooms and advanced technology.
I can’t help thinking they’d make great toilets.
Standing outside a stinking phone booth with money in my hand
“La nuit tombe. Au premier étage de l'hôtel Printania deux fenêtres viennent de s’éclairer. Le chantier de la Nouvelle Gare sent fortement le bois humide: demain il pleuvra sur Bouville.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée
You are probably too young to remember them, but there was a band in the long 1990s called Primitive Radio Gods. Wait, let me rephrase that: there’s still a band called Primate Radio Gods. I hadn’t heard about them for ages but apparently they are still going. Good for them.
Primitive Radio Gods had a hit in 1996. Their exuberantly-titled “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” made it to the top of the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. I don’t know how many days or weeks it stayed there, or if the song was held up there with Blu Tack. I don’t really care that it was on the charts either. What’s more, I had never heard about the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, until I started writing about phone booths some hours ago. In any case, it’s a good song, one of those minimalist tracks that nail down the melancholy of that drab decade4.
If you search for the song on the contemporary equivalent of the Encyclopædia Britannica — Wikipedia, that is — you will learn that “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” is “a modern rock song whose lyrics, which are seemingly nonsensical, describe the relationship between a man and his partner, who are unable to connect emotionally.” I whole-heartedly disagree with this description. “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” has nothing to do with a romantic relationship gone sour — it’s about much more than that, something more interesting and urgent, something visceral. This is a song about a person standing in the middle of life, feeling confused and at times helpless, and yet marvelled by the complexity of it all, observing existence tingle all over the place. The first thing that comes to my mind when anyone says “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. This song, much like Sartre’s often misunderstood novel, accurately capture the overwhelming beauty and paralysing angst of existence. The older I get the more both song and novel resonate with me.
I won’t reproduce the full lyrics here, due to the hideous anti-cultural virus known as copyright laws, which tends to hit quite hard when it comes to songs, but you can easily find them online. I would also dispute that these lyrics are “seemingly nonsensical”. Yes, they don’t mention the phone booth of the title; the title, yes, might be one of those unlikely associations, like my Blu Tack when anyone mentions a phone booth. But then, what’s the point of going through life making only sensible connections? Isn’t it better to just grab whatever you can to then force the pieces together? Isn’t it better to just ride the waves, without asking where they go?
I’m aware that the term “girl” is charged in 2023 but it wasn’t in 1994, especially since then I was a “boy”.
Attempts to turn some unused booths into impromptu libraries have followed the same lavatorial fate as booths left unattended. People need culture but when they need a toilet there’s nothing they need more urgently. More importantly, the near-disappearance of public toilets from cities is a testament to the slow but sure privatisation of urban space and associated loss of the “right to the city” (Henri Lefebvre).
I wrote this line in an American accent.
My perception of the 1990s is of course influenced by my enduring this decade in Argentina.
Here for the footnotes. 😂
Possibly apocraphyl, but Blu Tack legend has it that originally it was white but there was concern that children would think it was chewing gum and start eating it, so they made it blue instead. Clearly those kids just weren't using their imagination enough.