It’s now 40 years since the last steam locomotive engine pulled a British Rail passenger train. But for some, steam power is not just a thing of the past.
Will Smith and Kevin Kline in Wild Wild West, one of the Steampunk classics
It's been used in everything from music videos and films to high street fashion. It’s all around us, in shop windows and on TV screens, and once you know about it, the hazy influence of steampunk comes more sharply into focus.
Richard Dawson and Janine Forster are 'steampunks', recent converts to a subculture which takes modern technology and places it in a Victorian/steam powered setting. If you’ve seen Wild Wild West (1999) with Will Smith or Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), take another look and you’ll notice the phenomenon.
Richard, an animated and bespectacled 26-year-old, sits on the bed in the guest room of his Nottingham flat, the floor covered in magazines, books and plastic bags stuffed with unpacked possessions. He explains that he and girlfriend Janine met while he was working as a teaching assistant at a college in Billingham, a small town in between Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.
"I was glad to get the hell out of Billingham,” says the architectural draftsman, his face lighting up. “You just couldn’t walk down the street without getting hassle off someone all the time.”
Janine, a breezy and matter of fact 22-year-old furniture design graduate, adds: “You either go to uni or you never leave.” She opted for the former and was joined in Nottingham in January last year by Richard. “Steampunk was a general progression for me, I already liked that style of fashion before I discovered steampunk.”
The term steampunk was coined in the late 1980s by American science fiction author K.W. Jeter in an attempt to find a category for works by Tim Powers, James Blaylock and himself. The works usually took place in a 19th century Victorian setting and imitated the style of genuine Victorian speculative fiction, such as HG Wells’ The Time Machine.
Steampunk is not, however, just a genre of fiction. For many it’s a way of life. Enthusiasts wear Victorian garb such as corsets, gowns, top hats and waistcoats accompanied by accessories such as the goggles used by steam-engineers or brass eye pieces and even i-pods, which have been modified to give them a Victorian look.
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| Steamboy, the 2004 anime film directed and co-written by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame |
Jake von Slatt, an IT professional and part-time designer, has made a name for himself giving computers and musical instruments this retro look, while some musicians also define themselves as steampunk although no-one is entirely sure how the trend manifests itself in music.
Daniel C, bassist with Seattle-based Abney Park - a band with goth roots who discovered steampunk and declared themselves airship pirates says you can’t really pigeonhole all steampunk as a music genre. The band might do a Victorian (acoustic) set or a live (electric) set, and though these are two completely different sounds, the focus is considered steampunk.
Richard says the steampunk look is easily recognisable but isn’t sure whether it would be wise for someone to sport this look as they go about their everyday business.
“If you lived in New York or Tokyo you could do it without turning heads,” says Janine. But this may not be the case here in Nottingham.
“You’d be asking for it,” says Richard. “It must have been really hard for people when there were only five goths in the whole of their city. It’ll be easier if it gets bigger.”
Richard’s caution is understandable. Last March, 20-year-old student Sophie Lancaster was kicked to death in a park in Lancashire while trying to prevent an attack on her boyfriend by a group of teenage boys. The onslaught appeared to have been motivated by the couple’s goth style of dress. If it’s this hard for the average person to express an alternative style of dress it makes you wonder how those leading the trend manage.
Dr Steel, a steampunk hip-hop artist who frequently performs in a white lab coat, black goggles and elbow length black rubber gloves said: “I do not find it very difficult to don my custom ensembles. This is the advantage of being both reclusive and completely out of my mind. As my time spent in the public is limited to personal appearances, performances or through various forms of media I enjoy spending a great deal of time in my laboratory wearing whatever I wish.”
Now we can’t, as Janine who presently works in admin points out, all be artists and walk around in top hats clutching canes but it is possible to be steampunk at the office, it’s just a matter of toning it down a little. Richard explains: “It’s basically just a suit. If you’re a steampunk and wear a pocket watch all day long, that’s your individuality around the office.”
After all this fretting about getting shouted at in the street or putting the boss’s nose out of joint, you would think that a steampunk would be accepted straight away at a fetish club, but Richard tells me that he and Janine were almost refused entry at the Torture Gardens in London, where the motto is “turn heads or you don’t get in.”
“If you think about it, I’m just basically wearing a suit,” says Richard “but luckily the girl in the cloak-room said she loved steampunk and told the doorman to let us in.” For Richard and Janine though, steampunk is not a full-time occupation. As Richard says: “It’s a bit of dress-up fun. It’s not very serious.”
From Janine’s point of view, steampunk is more a fashion choice than a way of life. As she explains: “I’ve always been a sucker for well tailored and cut outfits on men and women. Seeing the lines of the body is very appealing to me. I might be weird, I might be a fetish, I don’t know!”
Steampunk on Wikipedia
Steampunk Magazine
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